For I wene wel, iwysse, Sir Wowen ye are,[lines 1226-29: for I know it well, you are Sir Gawain, whom all the world honors wherever you ride; your honor, your graciousness is courteously praised among lords and ladies, among all who are alive].1 Though Lady Bertilak may intend to flatter (and perhaps compromise) Gawain by telling him that every living soul knows and admires his reputation for knightly virtue, it is hardly an exaggeration as far as late medieval readers and listeners were concerned; most English audiences, both courtly and popular, would think of Sir Gawain as the chief ornament of "Arthures hous . . . That al the rous rennes of thurgh ryalmes so mony" [Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, lines 309-10: Arthur's household, whose extravagant fame runs through so many kingdoms]. Chaucer, always attuned to popular taste despite his extraordinary bookishness, pays an equally telling tribute to the universality of Gawain's status as the paragon of knighthood. That most sentimentally chivalric of narrators, the Squire, praises the "reverence and obeisaunce / As wel in speche as in countenaunce" of a "strange knyght" by suggesting he is like "Gawayn, with his olde curteisye . . . comen ayeyn [again] out of Fairye" (lines 89 ff.). To equal Gawain was to be a knight indeed, though it's worth noting that even the Squire links such ideal chivalry to magic and fairy tale.
That alle the worlde worchipez quereso ye ride;
Your honour, your hendelayk is hendely praysed
With lordez, wyth ladyes, with alle that lyf bere
I warne yow first at the begynnyng,Yet one manuscript of the Speculum, apparently intended for the urban bourgeoise, contains as well (together with other tales) complete copies of Octavian, Beves, and Guy, the very chivalric romances denounced in this prologue. Clerical disdain found a counterpart in the literary scorn of popular narratives of knighthood that occurs in self-consciously artistic writers like Chaucer. "Sir Thopas," Chaucer's parodic narrative "Of bataille and of chivalry, And of ladyes love-drury [passion]," takes specific aim at the further layer of contradiction that "bourgeois" or "urban" brings to the already paradoxical genre of popular chivalric romance. Thopas, the improbable "flour [flower] / Of roial chivalry" shares his pedigree with other heroes of "romances of prys [great worth]," including "Horn Child," "Ypotys," "Beves," "Sir Gy," "Sir Lybeux," and "Pleyndamour." Satires like Chaucer's did not, however, discourage collectors like Sir John Paston from acquiring copies of Guy of Warwyk, Guy and Colbronde, and Chylde Ypotis; moreover, Caxton and his successors mass-produced such romances as Beves, Eglamour, Guy, Ysumbras, and Tryamour (as well as Malory's prose chronicle of Arthur), and a century after Caxton, Captain Cox still featured these chivalric tales in his repertoire of performances.33 The scorn and satire that constitute a rejection of popular chivalric romance certainly did not end their vogue, and in themselves may be taken as a proof and tribute to their continuing power over audiences.
I wil make no vayn spekyng
Of dedis of armes ne of amours,
As done mynstrels and gestours,
That makyn spekyng in many place
Of Octavyan and Isambrace,
And of many other gestis,
And namely when thei come to festis -
Ne of the life of Bevis of Hamtoun
That was a knyght of grete renoun
Ne of Gy of Warwick . . . .32
1 All citations of medieval texts in the Introduction and in the introductions and notes to the individual poems refer to the editions listed in the Bibliography of Editions and Works Cited. I have usually provided line numbers in the text. Citations of editions or commentary specific to the poems edited in the present volume appear in the individual bibliographies preceding each poem.
2 Again, the Bibliography of Editions and Works Cited provides full information for editions of poems mentioned here but not included in the present volume (except for Renaut's Le bel inconnu, which is not relevant to the traditions discussed here).
3 Two notable monographs in English on Gawain as hero both relentlessly attempt to reach back to an "original" meaning for the hero, and therefore regard the late medieval romances as without significance except insofar as they provide pieces of evidence for the archetype. See Jesse L. Weston, The Legend of Sir Gawain: Studies upon its Original Scope and Significance, The Grimm Library, 7 (London: David Nutt, 1897), and John Matthews, Gawain: Knight of the Goddess - Restoring an Archetype (Wellingborough, UK: The Aquarian Press, 1990). A brief and reliable summary of surviving evidence is given in the entry for "Gawain," New Arthurian Encyclopedia, ed. Norris J. Lacy (New York: Garland, 1991). The same volume contains helpful entries for most of the poems in the present volume, and for the characters and places they mention. The most thorough survey of Gawain's appearances in French and English narratives remains B. J. Whiting, "Gawain, His Reputation, His Courtesy and His Appearance in Chaucer's Squire's Tale," Medieval Studies 9 (1947), 189-234.
4 Richard Barber offers a concise yet reliable account of Gawain's identity and his place within larger Arthurian traditions in King Arthur: Hero and Legend (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1986).
5 This special power is described in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur, lines 2802 ff., and Malory, Works, pp. 1216-17.
6 For both medieval and modern writers, considerable ambiguity, overlap, and confusion surround Arthurian place names. Carlisle is specified as a setting for Wedding, Carlisle, Avowyng, Awntyrs, Greene Knight, Marriage, and Carle. Lancelot of the Laik, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, the Stanzaic Morte Arthur, Malory, and perhaps Libeaus Desconus - all featuring Gawain's exploits, and linked with the popular romance tradition - are the only other Middle English romances to mention Carlisle. (The Boy and the Mantle, a Percy Folio MS ballad, also locates Arthur's court at Carlisle; see Child, I.257-274.) The remarkable geographical unity of the Middle English Gawain poems is discussed further below, pp. 29-33]. In Yvain and Perceval, Chrétien places Arthur's court at "Carduel an Gales" indicating Carlisle, but in accord with ancient tradition locating this in Wales; Ywain and Gawain, the Middle English version of Yvain, casts Arthur as "Kyng of Yngland," conqueror of Wales and Scotland, and sets the romance "At Kerdyf [Cardiff] that es in Wales" (line 17). Other French romances also place Arthur's court at Carduel/Carlisle. The designation of Carlisle as the seat of Arthurian adventure in Middle English romances has sometimes been taken as a misnomer for, or corruption of, Caerleon-on-Usk, Monmouthshire (in the south of Wales, near the mouth of the Severn); Caerleon is prominently mentioned by Geoffrey of Monmouth (perhaps following Welsh oral traditions), and appears in both French romance and popular English tales, such as Sir Launfal. On the one hand, William of Malmesbury's remarks about the hero's tomb, which he places in Pembrokeshire, west of Caerleon on the coast of Wales, provide a further Welsh linkage for Gawain; yet in the same passage he identifies Gawain as the "miles" (knight) who ruled in that part of Britain hitherto called "Walweitha" (Galloway), confirming his northern, Scots affinity. (For this passage in William, see the following note.) Malory has Gawain buried "in a chapell within Dover castell . . . [where] yet all men may se the skulle of hym" (Works, 1232), and the sixteenth-century antiquary John Leland claimed to have seen Gawain's bones at Dover, and on this basis rejected the authenticity of the tomb in Pembrokeshire.
7 For the Modena archivolt, see Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, ed. R. S. Loomis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 60-62. In his remarks on Arthur and on Gawain's fourteen-foot long tomb by the seashore in Pembrokeshire in Wales, William of Malmesbury takes for granted his readers' interest in (and knowledge of) Gawain. William provocatively describes Gawain as occupying the undegenerate ("haud degener") relation to Arthur of mother's brother-sister's son, and as sharing properly in his uncle's fame, clearly indicating that by the early twelfth century the nephew was already a celebrity in his own right. See De Rebus Gestis Regum Anglorum, Book 3, section 287, ed. W. Stubbs, Rolls Series no. 90, vol. 2 (London, 1889), p. 342.
8 For Geoffrey of Monmouth's portrayal of Gawain, see The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth: I: A Single Manuscript Edition from Bern, Burgerbibliothek, MS 568, ed. Neil Wright (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1984), pp. 144 ff., and The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1966), pp. 221 ff.
9 Gawain's reputation in French romance as lover and sometime rake may account for his otherwise odd appearance as the hero of an academic satire in Latin verse, "On Not Taking a Wife" (before 1250). Here Gawain, planning marriage, has the spirits of three clerks attempt to dissuade him; they draw their arguments from biblical and classical exempla and from Latin misogynist writings, though their focus is not the virtues of celibacy but the disastrous results of secular marriage. The choice of Gawain as protagonist seems therefore something of a scholar's inside joke, though his role here suggests just how extensive his reputation was, reaching even to the precincts of learning. The poem survives in more than fifty manuscripts, and there are adaptations in French and Middle English. See A. G. Rigg, Gawain on Marriage: The Textual Tradition of the "De Coniuge Non Ducenda" with Critical Edition and Translation, Texts and Studies, 79 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1986). The most comprehensive study of Gawain's role in Old French literature (with much attention to texts in other languages as well) is Keith Busby, Gauvain in Old French Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1980).
10 I here follow the division already set out in the introduction, which separates the "popular" romances (gathered here) from those with a pronounced literary character or a notable textual source - namely, Ywain and Gawain, Libeaus Desconus, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - as well as the chronicle narratives - Layamon, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, the Stanzaic Morte Arthur, and Malory. In all of these but Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain plays roles of varying but subsidiary importance.
11 On the historical development of knighthood, see the essays collected in Georges Duby, The Chivalrous Society, trans. Cynthia Postan (1977; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), and Maurice Keen's Chivalry (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984).
12 The question of precisely whose ideals or interests chivalric literature serves, whether asked openly or ignored, shadows every discussion of knightly romance, and admits no simple answer. Kings and powerful knights obviously perceived the value of romance and pageantry as a kind of "top-down" propaganda for their privileged political and economic position, as the proclamation of Edward III (see note 16, below) reveals, and one might therefore accurately claim that such tales were "popular" among this elite class because they maintained its hegemonic position. Yet the romances merit the label "popular" in the more common sense in that many (like Ragnelle and Carlisle) indisputably originate, become embellished and revised, and circulate among "the people," that is, broad and diverse audiences of various classes with overlapping and often conflicting interests. Moreover, as I suggest below (pp. 19-23), far from simply reproducing the values of the reigning culture, the romances open a space for satire or resistance in relation to elite values. Crucial questons concerning the nature of "popular" culture in the Middle Ages - about the social make-up of the audiences for medieval texts, the processes and effects of consuming romance, the overlaps of oral and literate, the determinants of taste for varying groups - have received relatively little extended historical analysis from critics and scholars. See Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson, "Introduction," in Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, ed. Mukerji and Schudson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991) for a recent and helpful overview; and on the Gawain romances in particular, see comments below, pp. 10 ff. and 27 ff.
13 It was during one of these Round Tables, while his courtiers were masquerading as Arthurian knights, that a loathly lady appeared to demand deeds of chivalry; see the Introduction to Ragnelle, and more particularly, R. S. Loomis, "Edward I, Arthurian Enthusiast," Speculum 28 (1953), 114-27.
14 For an account of the Order of the Garter, and its place within the ideals and politics of late medieval chivalry, see D'Arcy Jonathan Dacre Boulton, The Knights of the Crown: The Monarchical Orders of Knighthood in Later Medieval Europe, 1325-1520 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1987), pp. 96-166. Boulton does not mention Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with its appropriation of the Garter motto at its conclusion, though whoever added the phrase, "Hony soyt qui mal pence" (may he be shamed who evil thinks) certainly wished to associate chivalric romance with the codes and institutions of secular knighthood.
15 See Introduction to Greene Knight, together with the note at line 502 of that poem, for discussion of its connection to the Order of the Bath.
16 Rolls of Parliament 18 Edward III, p. 1, m. 44; I quote here the translation published in Boulton, Knights of the Crown (note 14, above), p. 110.
17 One other exception - besides Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - to the non-aristocratic context in which Gawain's legend prospers occurs in a heraldic roll with royal associations, which shows a figure labeled, "Sire Gawyn Mautrevers," connecting this hero with the Maltravers family, whose leading members were prominently connected to Edward II and Edward III. See Gerard J. Brault, Early Blazon: Heraldic Terminology in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries with Special Reference to Arthurian Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 43. See also the coats of arms attributed to Gawain in a fifteenth-century armorial album, referenced below in note 21.
18 Sir John Paston of Norfolk (1442-1479) is best known through the numerous letters he and other members of his family wrote. These have mainly to do with retaining and increasing the family holdings, and are usually considered as having little to do with, or as being diametrically opposed to, the world of chivalric romance. See, for example, the remarks of Larry D. Benson, Malory's "Morte Darthur" (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 137-201. For the inventory of books discussed here, see Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, ed. Norman Davis, Part I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 516-18. Madden, with his usual encyclopedic knowledge, makes a passing reference to this inventory in his note to the Greene Knight (p. 352). G. A. Lester has discussed the inventory, and provided valuable commentary and background, in "The Books of a Fifteenth-Century English Gentleman, Sir John Paston," Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 88 (1987), 200-17.
19 The most notable of these heraldic miscellanies has been described in great detail by G. A. Lester, Sir John Paston's "Grete Boke": A Descriptive Catalogue, with an Introduction, of British Library MS Lansdowne 285 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1984). It contains, among many other items, a formulary (pp. 80-3) for creating Knights of the Bath (mentioned at the end of Greene Knight), descriptions of armor, accounts of particular battles (historical and fictional), passages from Geoffrey of Monmouth's History, proclamations for tournaments, and so on. For a more fanciful armorial album, recording two coats of arms associated with Sir Gawain, see note 21 below.
20 This is the title Caxton gives in his colophon, Works, p. 1260. The notation that Paston's Dethe off Arthur has its "begynyng at Cassab . . ." suggests that he owned some English version of the Arthurian story ultimately derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, which began with the conflicts between Julius Caesar and Cassivelaunus or Cassibellaunus, King of the Britons - Shakespeare's Cymbeline - (section fifty three of the Latin text). See The Historia Regum Britanniae, pp. 46-58, and The History of the Kings of Britain, pp. 106-119 (full citations in note 8, above). Among the English translations that Paston might have owned was that made at the end of the twelfth century by Layamon, though there is otherwise little evidence that Layamon influenced other Arthurian writers, or even found occasional readers, after his own time. For Layamon's account of the struggle see Layamon: Brut, ed. G. L. Brook and R. F. Leslie, EETS o.s. 250, 277 (London: 1963, 1978), vol. 1, pp. 214 ff. G. A. Lester has pointed out that the truncated spelling of Paston's inventory would also fit the Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, that of Robert Mannyng, or the prose version of the Brut; see "The Books . . .," note 18, above, p. 203.
21 The link between armorial bearings as the guarantor of identity, status, and entitlement to landed wealth and the celebration of arms in chivalric romance is apparent to some degree in Paston's own "Grete Boke" (see note 19, above). The mix of chivalric reality and fiction is much more striking and suggestive in the somewhat informal collection of "Aunciant Coates" that occurs in British Library MS Harley 2169; here alongside recognizably historical and ceremonial bearings appear the arms of the Nine Worthy, the Three Kings of Cologne, and other chivalric celebrities. Of greatest interest in the present context are the arms attributed to "Uter Pendragon," King Arthur, "Sir Lawncelot de Lake," and the two devices given to Gawain. The first of Gawain's arms consists of a green field with three golden griffins passant (number 29); the second, in an azure field with three golden lions' heads (number 39). The first device corresponds closely to descriptions in various of the Gawain romances; see for example Carle, lines 55 ff. A description of the arms in Harley 2169, together with rough facsimiles, is provided in The Ancestor 3 (1902), 185-213; see especially numbers 27-49.
22 Benson (note 18, above) provides a stimulating and informative discussion of the contexts of late medieval chivalric romance in Malory's "Morte Darthur," pp. 137-201.
23 Robert Laneham, A Letter: Whearin part of the entertainment untoo the Queens Maiesty . . . [1575], ed. R. C. Alston (Menston, UK: Scolar, 1968). The description of the festivities and Captain Cox occurs on pp. 34-36 of this facsimile edition; I have imposed modern conventions of orthography, capitalization, and word division in my quotations of the Letter. The Captain's reputation as a performer was sufficiently extensive for Ben Jonson to mention him and "his Hobbyhorse" in his Masque of Owls (1624); in his novel Kenilworth (1821), Sir Walter Scott gives an account of the festivities. Madden also notes Laneham's mention of Gawain in his Letter, and takes this as a reference to Jeaste (p. 349).
24 Laneham's descriptive phrase was surely proverbial. Though B. J. Whiting, Proverbs and Proverbial Sentences . . . (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1968) gives no instances, passing references to Gawain's reputation for hardihood occur in "The Thrush and the Nightingale," Sir Degrevant, The Squire of Low Degree, and Squire Meldrum. See also the list of some one hundred thirty-five Arthurian allusions in non-Arthurian texts compiled by Christopher Dean, Arthur of England (full citation, below, note 26), pp. 130-56. The number and character of these allusions suggest that Gawain's proverbial stature may have been greater outside the literate tradition, within popular oral discourse.
25 One striking title in the Captain's repertoire was "The Knight of Courtesy and the Lady Faguell" - not a version of Gawain and Ragnelle, but a sentimental romance that surivives in an Elizabethan print; see The Knight of Curtesy and the Fair Lady of Faguell, ed. Elizabeth McCansland, Smith College Studies in Modern Languages (Northampton, Massachusetts: Smith College, n.d. [?1922]).
26 J. C. Holt, Robin Hood (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), p. 140 and note 12. Madden (p. 349) also noted this reference, concluding "It is no doubt this romance [the Jeaste of Syr Gawayne, edited below, and not Sir Gawain and the Green Knight] which is alluded to. . . ." Christopher Dean, Arthur of England: English Attitudes to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), who mentions Cox, also assumes this is the Jeaste. For further bibliographical information on Jeaste, see the introduction to that romance.
27 William Matthews some time ago pointed out the features of orality - archaic diction, formulaic phrasing, alliterative linking, and so on - in the "sollem song" of an "auncient minstrell" of Islington, whose performance during the royal entertainment at Kenilworth in 1575, like that of Captain Cox, was described in Laneham's Letter (pp. 46-56; see above, note 23, for citation). His recital of "King Arthurz acts" was apparently based upon the published text of Malory's Morte Darthur, though whether he had read it for himself or heard it read is unspecified. His performance in any case unmistakably involved improvisation, and Matthews shrewdly adduced this as evidence that traditional techniques and materials (which may or may not have been written down) remained vital through the end of the sixteenth century. What is striking above all is the mixed character of the event - at once literate and oral, modern and traditional, reflecting French verse forms and native poetic practice, a popular improvisation yet part of a royal command performance. The avid interest - Laneham was a London merchant and courtier - attracted by Arthurian narrative in this mixed form perhaps offers a model for the kinds of responses medieval chivalric romances excited; in particular, it points to the diversity of audiences and occasions, and the range of feelings, from unselfconscious glee to patronizing smugness, that listeners might experience. See Matthews, "Alliterative Song of an Elizabethan Minstrel," Research Studies 32 (1964), 134-46.
28 See Derek Pearsall, "Middle English Romance and its Audiences," Historical and Editorial Studies in Medieval and Early Modern English for Johan Gerritsen, ed. Mary-Jo Arn and Hanneke Wirtjes with Hans Jansen (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, n.d. [?1985]), pp. 37-47, whose summary remarks on oral and literate preservation, on "re-composition" and improvisation in performance, and the "range of possible audiences" complement the presentation I offer here. In "The Myth of the Minstrel Manuscript," Speculum 66 (1991), 43-73, Andrew Taylor offers a careful review of surviving manuscript evidence for popular performance, emphasizing the interdependence of oral and written, official and unofficial cultural elements. Taylor does not consider the mixed nature of the Islington minstrel's performance of Arthurian romance (see Matthews' essay cited in the previous note), or the odd example of such mixed literate-oral material printed by Rossell Hope Robbins, "A Gawain Epigone," Modern Language Notes 58 (1943), 361-66; this comprises a fifty-three line fragment in garbled alliterative verse, apparently composed by Humphrey Newton. The formulaic phrasing seems repeatedly to imitate lines in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (with parallels as well in Awntyrs and Gologras not noted by Robbins); it is not clear whether this is a purely literary excursion or a feeble record of some performance, but the deployment of alliterative linking is so mechanical and haphazard that the fragment seems completely incoherent.
29 While I emphasize in this account the performance tradition that gave continuing life to the medieval chivalric romances, the sixteenth century also produced a significant number of printed romances that circulated among readers. Beginning with the materials produced by Caxton and his successors noted above, a string of knightly narratives issued from the presses, though relatively few were Arthurian. The two surviving fragments of the Jeaste, together with a license to issue another edition of the poem (dating from about 1529 to 1559), seem to be the only publication of verse romances; see the introduction to Jeaste in this volume for a full account. Malory's prose Morte Darthur was issued a number of times during the century, and a prose History of . . . Arthur of lytell Brytayne, translated by Lord Berners, appeared sometime before 1566. See Ronald S. Crane, The Vogue of Medieval Chivalric Romance During the English Renaissance (Menasha, Wisconsin: George Banta, 1919), who lists all editions chronologically; Dean, Arthur of England (note 24, above), offers a selective overview.
30 The preservation and lively performance of chivalric romances among urban working people - Captain Cox was "by profession a Mason, and that right skilfull" - recalls Shakespeare's cast of performers in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Coventry and Kenilworth are not far distant from Stratford-upon-Avon, and Cox was likely only one of the more notable of workers who could perform even classical stories, like "Virgils Life" or "Lucres and Eurialus."
31 The Story of England by Robert Mannyng, ed. F. J. Furnivall, Rolls Series 34 (London: 1887), lines 101-02. Mannyng wrote his Chronicle in 1338.
32 See Cambridge University Library Manuscript Ff. 2.38, ed. Frances McSparran and P. R. Robinson (London: Scolar Press, 1979). For discussion of the context of the shared and conflicted interests of popular religion and popular romance, see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400-c. 1580 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 69-71.
33 Among all the verse romances printed by Caxton and his immediate successors for English readers, none are Arthurian. (Malory's Morte Darthur, though it appropriates at least two English verse romances - the alliterative and stanzaic poems on the death of Arthur - is in prose.) Likewise, none of the poems satirized by Chaucer or dismissed in the Speculum vitae has Arthurian connections. The Gawain romances, and other popular Arthurian tales, seem therefore to have held sway mainly outside the world of print, and beyond the notice of literate and official culture (whether because more admired or beneath contempt seems unclear). Except for the print of Gologras and Gawain, and the two surviving fragments of Jeaste, all of the Gawain romances - including those in multiple copies and multiple versions - survive in manuscript copies only.
34 For histories of medieval romance, and the place of chivalric romance in that larger context, see the individual books listed in the "Bibliography of Editions and Works Cited" by Barron, Mehl, Ramsey, Richmond, and Wittig.
35 Questions surrounding romance as a literary genre, the nature of popular writing, and its relation to the reigning values of a society have been considered in a number of publications, none of which directly address medieval chivalric romance. These include Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Colin MacCabe, "Defining Popular Culture," High Theory / Low Culture: Analysing Popular Television and Film, ed. MacCabe (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), pp. 1-10; and Bob Ashley, The Study of Popular Fiction: A Source Book (London and Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), which contains a number of classic analytical essays, with introductions and bibliographies.
36 Reactions to the romances as worthless or potentially damaging to one's character or soul come mainly from those associated with literacy - church officials, "serious" writers - rather than from the secular nobility. As Sir John Paston's literary interests imply, everyone within the gentry, from local knights to the royal household, enjoyed chivalric tales, and kings (and their image-makers) continued to see the useful connections between Arthurian legend and monarchical prestige throughout the late Middle Ages. In addition to the comments on the Arthurian interests of Edward I and Edward III above, which make clear the uses of chivalric pageantry in consolidating the interests of a dominant group and in naturalizing estate or class differences as a feature of cohesive national identity, see David Carlson, "King Arthur and Court Poems for the Birth of Arthur Tudor in 1486," Humanistica Lovaniensia 36 (1987), 147-83.
37 See Valerie Krishna, Five Middle English Arthurian Romances (New York: Garland, 1991), pp. 24-26 (on Carlisle); though elsewhere in the introduction the point is made that these romances require appropriate standards for a proper appreciation, these remarks are on the whole representative. Similar assessments occur in the summary accounts of these tales in standard literary histories and in the Manual of the Writings in Middle English (see Bibliography of Editions and Works Cited).
38 The popular, or at least non-literary, character of the romances in the present volume appears strikingly in their complete lack of allusion to any other literary text. Though occasionally a poem refers to another Arthurian character or story, these narratives never demand, or even assume, that an imagined audience be prepared to make the textual associations that Chaucer, for example, assumed his readers would enjoy, and indeed would need to see any value in his writing. Even Malory's Morte Darthur, which for all its length makes no reference to a non-Arthurian text, is more literary than these romances simply because Malory created it in writing out of an encyclopedic array of French books (together with a handful of English poems).
39 Awntyrs and Gologras in many respects constitute exceptions to the general remarks made here about the popular character of the Gawain romances. As their individual introductions make clear, both seem to have been produced by a self-conscious and literate composer, working from a written source, who made the fullest use of alliteration and formulas traditionally associated with native poetic traditions. Both poems enjoyed popularity in being reproduced in multiple copies - four manuscript versions of Awntyrs survive, and Gologras was one of the first Gawain romances in print - but the exceptional artfulness of their meter, verse forms, and descriptive detail separate them from the unchecked narrative movement of the other poems in this volume.
40 Arthur is characterized as "childgered" in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (line 86), as he anticipates adventure before the great feast. The word may imply a boyish merriness or a childish recklessness, or some combination of these traits.
41 From the time of William the Conqueror, the forests were regarded as the special preserve of the king; by the time of Henry II, one third of England was subject to forest law. Hunting was at the king's prerogative only, and large game - specifically deer (the animals pursued in Ragnelle, Carlisle, Awntyrs, and Marriage), and wild boar (hunted in Avowyng, and together with deer and foxes, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Greene Knight) - were reserved solely for the king. The Dialogue of the Exchequer (late twelfth century) describes the forests as "the sanctuary and special delight of kings, where . . . away from the turmoils inherent in a court, they breathe the pleasure of natural freedom"; justice in the forest comes not from the law, but from "the will and whim of the king." Any adventure occurring in a forest would therefore inevitably constitute a fundamental confrontation with the power invested in the person and the office of the king. See Dialogus de Scaccario, revised edition, edited and translated by Charles Johnson and others (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983); I have modified the translation slightly.
42 Raymond Williams employs the term "magical resolution" (as a kind of false consciousness that entraps those without power into agreement with social relations contrary to their interests) in his discussion of the social function of literature in the Industrial Revolution; see The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), pp. 65-71. For a general discussion of some of the main issues surrounding the analysis of popular culture from a social and historical perspective, together with excerpts from classic essays, see Ashley, The Study of Popular Fiction (note 35, above).
43 See John Insley, "Some Aspects of Regional Variation in Early Middle English Personal Nomenclature," Leeds Studies in English n.s. 18 (1987), 183-99, which provides evidence that surviving names exactly reflect "the heterogeneous nature of settlement patterns in this northern borderland" (p. 183).
44 On the character of late medieval border territories, see Anthony Goodman, "Religion and Warfare in the Anglo-Scottish Marches," Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. Robert Bartlett and Angus MacKay (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), pp. 245-66.
45 I borrow the term "border writing" here from D. Emily Hicks, Border Writing: The Multidimensional Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); for its usefulness in describing cultural situations of the medieval West, I am indebted to Kathleen Biddick. Border writing helps to suggest the ways in which popular chivalric romance joins discreet forms, miscellaneous subject matters, and potentially antagonistic audiences, and splits what might otherwise seem unified interests and groups. In this way, the romances define a border site of intersections and possible resistance to established regimes. Yet their crossover status consists chiefly in their openness to appropriation in different ways and in differing situations they may well have offered a cheerful reinforcement of the status quo for many, perhaps most, audiences.
46 The notable exceptions are Gologras, which sets its action on the continent, Cornwall, which takes place in Little Britain, and Jeaste.
47 For a detailed description of the place of geography and geology in the economic, political, and social life of the area of the Gawain romances, see Angus J. L. Winchester, Landscape and Society in Medieval Cumbria (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987).
48 The earliest copy of the ballad of Adam Bell is a fragment of a print from 1536; it survives in five additional versions, including one in the Percy Folio manuscript (which contains Greene Knight, Turke, Marriage, Cornwall, and other narratives). At the outset of the ballad, Adam and his companions are, like Robin Hood, "outlawed for venyson" and "swore them brethen upon a day / To Englysshe-wood for to gone"; the odd spelling preserves the original sense of an English enclave in Celtic territories. See The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. Francis James Child (1888; rpt. New York: Dover, 1965), vol. 3, pp. 22 ff. (stanza 4). In the context of such popular tales, it is worth noting that one of the Robin Hood ballads, Queen Katherine, has the knight whom Robin befriends, Sir Richard Lee, descend "from Gawiins blood"; see Child, vol. 3, p. 199 (stanza 22). This ballad also survives in the Percy Folio manuscript.
49 Robert Bartlett has recently argued that armed expansion might be taken as a defining characteristic of European identity in the high Middle Ages; see The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). The extensive documentation Bartlett provides for this earlier period provides useful contexts for understanding the romances and their historical impact during the following two centuries and beyond.
50 William Matthews, The Tragedy of Arthur: A Study of the Alliterative "Morte Arthure" (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960). Matthews' passing commentary on the language and texture of the alliterative poetry is an invaluable feature of his study.
51 Michael J. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism: Cheshire and Lancashire Society in the Age of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
52 Bennett takes Sir John Stanley as one of the central figures in his discussion of "Power, Patronage and Provincial Culture," in Community, Class and Careerism, pp. 192-235, especially 215 ff. See also Bennett's discussion of the Stanleys in "'Good Lords' and 'King Makers': The Stanleys of Lathom in English Politics, 1385-1485," History Today 31 (1981), 12-17, and the information on Sir John in The Dictionary of National Biography, entry for Thomas Stanley, Earl of Derby. The poem on the Stanleys appears in the Palatine Anthology: A collection of Ancient Poems and Ballads relating to Lancashire and Cheshire, ed. J. O. Halliwell (London, 1850), pp. 210-22.
53 From the twelfth century, knights descended from non-noble families (especially those whose positions depended upon the favor of the king) frequently were attacked as "raised from the dust" (in the words of the twelfth-century historian Orderic Vitalis). Qualification for knighthood, or at least for membership in a formal Order of Knighthood, increasingly required proof of lineal nobility stretching back for two generations; as chivalric romances became more broadly popular, therefore, the highest aristocracy consciously intensified the exclusivity governing its ranks. See Keen, Chivalry, pp. 143 ff.