Le Morte d'Arthur influenced Monty Python and the Holy Grail

The parody needs the text to be parodying, and it is this one: Arthur assembling named knights, the sword and the claim to kingship, the vow, the quest for the Grail announced from on high, and the individual knights peeling off into their own adventures. The jokes are aimed at the romance conventions Malory fixed. The Black Knight is the chivalric refusal to yield taken literally; Galahad's chastity is treated as a problem to be solved; Lancelot's rescue is a massacre because that is what the original is if you count the bodies. Filed MEDIUM: the Pythons were working from the whole Arthurian tradition and from medieval texts generally, and Malory is its central English source rather than a book they adapted.