Of the three major texts of late-medieval English literature, The Canterbury Tales, Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, we know the authorship of only two. Geoffrey Chaucer, probably a Londoner whose family was in the wine trade, and William Langland, perhaps a pseudonym for a cleric named William Rokele, are well known. Both are associated with London. The author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight remains unknown and enigmatic. He is the author of four poems contained in a single manuscript of c.1400: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Patience and Cleanness, written using alliteration and in the language of the Moorlands on the Cheshire/Staffordshire border.
In the poem Sir Gawain is honour-bound to seek out the Green Knight whom he has beheaded in a Christmas ‘game’ and from whom he must receive a return stroke. This is a romance set partly at the court of King Arthur and partly on a journey in the poet’s home territory in north-west England and north Wales. The poet speaks excitingly of the world of the royal court and its rituals, and of hunting and the world of lords in the countryside. It has been frequently translated into modern English and has long been attractive to contemporary poets, most recently Simon Armitage.
In this course we will read the poem and reflect on its meanings, and also try to situate the text in its precise historical context and recognise its contemporary allusions. This is the world of the court of the English king, Richard II in the 1390s. Richard was a king whose friends engaged in bedding games like those to be found in the poem: Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, left the bed on which he had seduced a lady of the queen’s household in Chester in 1387, amongst his possessions there after his death. Richard had himself visited Chester, and like Gawain, had stayed at a nearby castle in the poet’s home territory. Richard’s court also decamped to the countryside at Christmas, spending two festive seasons in Lichfield, hunting in the Bishop’s chase at nearby Cannock, like Gawain in the poem. Richard’s household included men recruited from the poet’s territory, and a number including Sir John Stanley and members of the Mascy family have been suggested as possible patrons. Gawain’s final journey in the poem from Anglesey to Chester mirrored that of the captive king in 1399. Was the poem so firmly set in this narrative?
As well as enjoying the poem and navigating some of the concerns of the secondary literature, we will try to give both a date and a place to the poem. As the poem itself asserts, ‘Þe forme to þe fynisment foldez ful selden’ (‘the beginning is very seldom like the end’).
Learning outcomes
- The ability to read literary and historical sources;
- Critical engagement with historiography and context in history;
- An appreciation of 14th-century England.