[1][2] It exercised enough influence on Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur to have, in the words of one recent scholar, "played a decisive though largely unacknowledged role in the way succeeding generations have read the Arthurian legend".
[7][8] It survives in one manuscript only, British Museum Harley 2252, a collection of texts compiled in the early 16th century by a London bookseller called John Colyns.
[10] The manuscript was studied by Humfrey Wanley, keeper of the Harleian Library, who in 1759 catalogued it with the notation, "This I take to be translated from the French Romance of K. Arthur"; also "I know not who this Poet was, but guess that he lived about the time of K. Henry VII, and that he might have been a Northern man.
[14][15] In Observations on the Three First Volumes of The History of English Poetry (1782), and again in Ancient Engleish Metrical Romanceës (1802), the antiquary Joseph Ritson ridiculed Warton's and Percy's views of the poem's date, and asserted that Wanley was correct in assigning it to the reign of Henry VII.
[13][16] A lengthy but rather facetious synopsis of the Morte, with quotations, figured in the Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances (1805) by George Ellis.
Several key moments in these final stories, such as the poignant scene of renunciation between Lancelot and Guinevere at Amesbury, and the tragic incident where a knight inadvertently breaks the truce between Arthur and Mordred by killing an adder, are notably influenced by the Stanzaic Morte.
According to Jennifer Goodman, "Malory owes to the stanzaic Morte Arthur an important share of the drama of the closing books of his work.
"[20][21] Brian Stone thought that "with its swiftly moving narrative and realistic clash of character" it is more like an extended tragic ballad than a romance.
[22] Dieter Mehl referred to "The by no means simple, but skilfully handled metrical form"; to "a rare balance in the structure of the plot, a strict subordination of details to the theme of the poem, and a notable lack of digressions which could slow down the tempo of the narration"; and to a "conscious simplicity and detachment that distinguish Le Morte Arthur from most other romances and make it so particularly attractive and appealing to modern taste.
Jennifer Goodman wrote that "The verse is workmanlike: an acute sense of character and action allow the poet to focus in on the essential elements of fate and personality that combine to create Arthur's tragedy.
"[21] Lucy Allen Paton complained of the Morte's poet that "his supply of rhyme-words is extraordinarily limited", and that "he lacks the vigour of imagination, the intensity of feeling and the originality in description that the poet of the [Alliterative] Morte Arthure possessed", but went on "he manifests real power as an easy and agreeable story-teller…Perhaps his most noticeable characteristic is his facility in bringing before us by a few direct dramatic words the human interest of the scenes that he is describing.
"[25] Robert W. Ackerman judged that "Though marred by faults typical of the minstrel style, it tells a moving story vividly and swiftly.
"[26] George Kane's opinion was that "Never once in its four thousand lines does it attain to brilliance, yet its effect is so unmistakably one of fulfillment and of harmony between intention and result that it must be regarded as a success.