Sir Walter Fraser Oakeshott FBA (11 November 1903 – 13 October 1987)[1] was a Transvaal-born British schoolmaster and academic, who was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford.
[2] From 1936 to 1937, he took a leave of absence from teaching to serve on an inquiry into unemployment sponsored by the Pilgrim Trust, the findings of which were written up as Men without Work by William Temple (1938).
[10] The "Winchester Manuscript" is regarded as being mostly, but not always, closer to Malory's original than is Caxton's text, although both derive separately from an earlier copy.
[11] But on the basis of his initial study of the manuscript, Oakeshott concluded as early as 1935 that the copy from which Caxton printed his edition "was already subdivided into books and sections.
"[12] Based on a more exhaustive study of the manuscript alongside Caxton's edition, Vinaver reached similar conclusions, and in his 1947 edition – polemically entitled The Works of Sir Thomas Malory – Vinaver argued strongly that Malory had in fact not written a single book, but produced a series of Arthurian tales which were internally consistent and independent works.
Oakeshott published an account of his remarkable discovery, "The Finding of the Manuscript," in 1963, chronicling the initial event and his realisation that "this indeed was Malory," with "startling evidence of revision" in the Caxton edition.