The Idea of Disinheritance

in Middle English Romances

A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities

2019

Grace A. Timperley

School of Arts, Languages and Cultures

2

Contents

Abbreviations .................................................................................................. 5

Abstract ............................................................................................................ 9

Declaration ....................................................................................................... 10

Copyright Statement ........................................................................................ 11

Notes on Referencing and Spellings ................................................................ 12

Acknowledgements .......................................................................................... 13

Introduction .................................................................................................... 14

Inheritance Culture in Late-Medieval England ............................................... 14

Inheritance in Middle English Romance Criticism .......................................... 24

Critical Position ............................................................................................... 30

Texts ................................................................................................................ 43

Chapters ........................................................................................................... 55

Chapter 1: Disinheritance ............................................................................. 59

Anticipating Disinheritance ............................................................................. 61

Re-imagining ‘Heritage’ .................................................................................. 67

Bloodshed ........................................................................................................ 78

Female Heirs .................................................................................................... 91

Chapter 2: Illegitimacy .................................................................................. 96

The Language and Meanings of Illegitimacy .................................................. 97

Imagining Illegitimacy in the Romances ......................................................... 112

The Fair Unknown and Rightful Illegitimacy .................................................. 119

Chapter 3: Recognition ................................................................................. 137

Definitions of Recognition .............................................................................. 138

Disentangling Blood, Birth and Worth ............................................................ 144

Testimony and Transformation ........................................................................ 158

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Chapter 4: Regeneration ............................................................................... 177

Sense of Unending ........................................................................................... 181

Twin Endings ................................................................................................... 187

Adopted Inheritance ......................................................................................... 195

Happy Endings ................................................................................................. 205

Conclusion ...................................................................................................... 212

An Idea of Disinheritance in Middle English Romances ................................ 212

The Eagle and Child ........................................................................................ 218

Further Work ................................................................................................... 224

Lists and Illustrations .................................................................................... 229

Bibliography ................................................................................................... 242

Word count: 72984

4

Lists and Illustrations

List of manuscripts with romances .................................................................. 229

List of romances with manuscript witnesses and key characters ..................... 230

Fig. 1: Table showing distribution of romances in manuscripts ...................... 233

Fig. 2: Genealogy of Stanleys of Lathom ........................................................ 234

Fig. 3: Stanley genealogy according to ‘The Stanley Poem’ ........................... 235

Fig. 4: Stanley genealogy according to Seacombe .......................................... 235

Fig. 5: Graphic tail-rhyme in Bevis of Hampton .............................................. 236

Fig. 6: Detail of London, British Library, MS Yates Thompson 22 ............... 237

Fig. 7: Detail of London, British Library, MS Harley 7353 ............................ 237

Fig. 8: Detail of Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, MS Douce 261 ......................... 238

Fig. 9: Detail of London, British Library, MS Additional 10292 .................... 238

Fig. 10: Detail of London, British Library, Stowe MS 17 ............................... 239

Fig. 11: Detail of London, British Library, MS Sloane 2463 .......................... 239

Fig. 12: Manchester Cathedral, misericord supporter (ape and child) ............. 240

Fig. 13: Manchester Cathedral misericord supporter (eagle and child) ........... 240

Fig. 14: Manchester Cathedral choir bench end (eagle and child) .................. 241

Fig. 15: Manchester Cathedral misericord (eagle and child) ........................... 241

5

Abbreviations

BLMS The British Library Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts

<http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts>

CIPM Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem and Other Analogous

Documents, Series I, 14 vols and Series II, 3 vols

(London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1904–55),

searchable online (TannerRitchie with the University of

St Andrews, 2010–13)

<http://www.tannerritchie.com/memso.php>

DIMEV The Digital Index of Middle English Verse, ed. Linne R.

Mooney, Daniel W. Mosser et al

<http://www.dimev.net/index.html>

DMER Database of Middle English Romances (University of York,

2012) <http://www.middleenglishromance.org.uk>

EEBO Early English Books Online <http://search.proquest.com

/eebo>

EETS, OS / ES Early English Text Society, Original Series / Extra Series

Manual (1916) A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050–1400, ed.

John Edwin Wells, vol. 1: Romances (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1916)

Manual (1967) A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500,

ed. J. Burke Severs, vol. 1: Romances (New Haven:

Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1967)

MED Middle English Dictionary, ed. Frances McSparren et al

(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library, 2000–

2018) <http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-

dictionary/>

6

METS TEAMS Middle English Texts Series Online

<http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams>

ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

<http://www.oxforddnb.com>

OED Oxford English Dictionary <http://www.oed.com>

Manuscripts

Ashmole 61 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 61

Ann Arbor 225 Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, MS 225

Auchinleck Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates 19.2.1

Cambridge 175/96 Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 175/96

Cambridge 4407 Cambridge, University Library, MS Additional 4407

Cambridge Ff.2.38 Cambridge, University Library, MS Ff.2.38

Cambridge O.2.13 Cambridge, Trinity College Library, MS O.2.13

Chetham’s 8009 Manchester, Chetham’s Library, MS 8009

Cotton Caligula A.ii London, British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A.ii

Egerton 2862 London, British Library, MS Egerton 2862

Eng. Poet. D. 208 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Poet. D. 208

Lambeth London, Lambeth Palace, MS 306

Laud Misc. 108 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108

Lincoln 91 Lincoln, Lincoln Cathedral, MS 91

Naples Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, MS XIII.B.29

Percy Folio London, British Library, MS Additional 27879

7

Editions

Athelston

Bevis (Auchinleck)

Havelok (Laud Misc. 108)

Horn

Four Romances of England: King Horn, Havelok

the Dane, Bevis of Hampton and Athelston, ed.

Ronald B. Herzman, Graham Drake, Eve

Salisbury (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute

Publications, 1997)

Bevis (Cambridge and Naples) Sir Bevis of Hampton: edited from Naples,

Biblioteca Nazionale, MS XIII.B.29 and

Cambridge, University Library, MS Ff.2.38, 2

vols, ed. Jennifer Fellows, EETS, OS 349 and

350 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)

Degare

Emare

Lay le Freine

Sir Orfeo

The Middle English Breton Lays, ed. Anne Laskaya

and Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo: Medieval

Institute Publications, 1995)

Eglamour (Cotton Caligula A.ii)

Isumbras

Northern Octavian / NO

(Lincoln 91)

Tryamour (Cambridge Ff.2.38)

Four Middle English Romances: Sir Isumbras,

Octavian, Sir Eglamour of Artois, Sir Tryamour,

ed. Harriet Hudson (Kalamazoo: Medieval

Institute Publications, 2006)

Southern Octavian / SO

(Cotton Caligula A.ii)

Octovian Imperator: edited from MS BL Cotton

Caligula A II, ed. Frances McSparren

(Heidelberg: Carl Winter, Universitätsverlag,

1979)

Lybeaus (Ashmole) Codex Ashmole 61: A Compilation of Popular

Middle English Verse, ed. George Shuffelton

(Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications,

2008)

8

Lybeaus (Naples and Lambeth) Lybeaus Desconus, ed. Eve Salisbury and James

Weldon (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute

Publications, 2013)

Torrent (Chetham’s 8009)

Sir Torrent of Portingale, ed. James Wade

(Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications,

2017)

Chaucer

All citations are from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd

edn, ed. Larry D. Benson and others (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2008)

Shakespeare

All citations are from The Norton Shakespeare, ed.

Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E.

Howard and Katherine Eisaman Maus (London

& New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997)

9

Abstract

The aim of the thesis is to examine the idea of disinheritance in six Middle English

romances, towards a better understanding of the imaginative work of the romances and

the matter of inheritance in the late-medieval imagination. The thesis revises some well-

established critical readings of inheritance in medieval romances: namely that the

inheritance narrative is fundamentally driven by a reciprocal plot structure, in which an

heir loses and then regains an inheritance; and that, as such, the texts sustain a socially

and economically conservative ideology of inheritance.

I find that disinheritance provides a conceptual framework in the romances for

re-imagining rightful heirship: in ways that resist, complicate or subvert medieval legal

orthodoxies and particularly the principles of primogeniture. The romances portray the

acquisition of heritable property by disinherited, allegedly illegitimate or “unknown”

protagonists, through feats of arms or fortuitous happenstance, rather than claims of

birthright.

While I prioritise close readings of the romances, I also draw attention to

historical evidence that suggests a late-medieval gentry readership would have been

sensitive to this idea of disinheritance in the texts: in particular, the correlation between

disinheritance and opportunity, between aristocratic dynastic instability and non-

aristocratic social advancement. The thesis concludes by offering a case study for the

political use of this idea of disinheritance, in late-medieval England, and suggesting

avenues for further research.

10

Declaration

I hereby declare that no portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted

in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other

university or institute of learning.

11

Copyright Statement

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certain copyright or related rights in it (the "Copyright") and s/he has given The

University of Manchester certain rights to use such Copyright, including for

administrative purposes.

Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts and whether in hard or electronic copy,

may be made only in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as

amended) and regulations issued under it, or, where appropriate, in accordance with

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part of any such copies made.

The ownership of certain Copyright, patents, designs, trademarks and other intellectual

property (the "Intellectual Property") and any reproductions of copyright works in the

thesis, for example graphs and tables ("Reproductions"), which may be described in this

thesis, may not be owned by the author and may be owned by third parties. Such

Intellectual Property and Reproductions cannot and must not be made available for use

without the prior written permission of the owner(s) of the relevant Intellectual Property

and/or Reproductions.

Further information on the conditions under which disclosure, publication and

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(see http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/DocuInfo.apsx?DocID=24420), in any relevant

Thesis restriction declarations deposited in the University Library, The University

Library’s regulations (see http://library.manchester.ac.uk/about/regulations/) and in The

University’s policy on Presentation of Thesis.

12

Note on Referencing

Aside from those listed under Abbreviations, texts will be given their full titles and

publication details in footnotes when first cited. Thereafter, full titles will be

abbreviated. Both the full titles and abbreviated titles for the Middle English romances,

above and elsewhere, conform to existing critical conventions. As far as possible, line

numbers for quotations from romances will be given in parenthesis in the body of the

thesis, for ease of reference. All other references will be given in footnotes, collated

where possible.

Note on Spellings

I have standardised the spelling of proper names throughout the thesis except when

quoting a source directly.

13

Acknowledgements

For their guidance and encouragement throughout the project, I am most grateful to my

supervisory panel: Professor David Matthews, Dr Anke Bernau and Dr Noelle

Dückmann Gallagher. For providing access to research materials including manuscripts,

I am grateful to staff and curators at the University of Manchester Libraries, Chetham’s

Library and Bodleian Library. I also received a great deal of helpful feedback from

participants of the conferences at which I presented my work, twice aided by a Donald

Howard Travel Scholarship from the New Chaucer Society. A special thanks must go to

Rachel Dawson, Kirsty Bolton, Dr Kate Irisarri, Aswiny Uthayakumar, Charlotte

Catling and Fiona Prichard for generously volunteering to proofread drafts of the thesis.

Remaining errors are my own.

Dedication

For my parents and for Tony, whose unconditional support made the project possible.

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Introduction

Inheritance Culture in Late-Medieval England

It should come as no surprise that a late-medieval work of literature such as Chaucer’s

Canterbury Tales, however wide-ranging in form and content, repeatedly features the

matter of inheritance. Inheritance is a perennial issue throughout medieval literature, and

the Canterbury Tales, with its Chaucerian catalogue of literary genres, is inevitably

indicative of this wider trend. Between its ‘sondry’ tellers and tale-types, heirs and

inheritance are invoked in a variety of ways: the comical aspirations of the Reeve’s parson

for a bastard ‘heir’; the Wife of Bath’s discussion of ‘heritage’ and ‘gentilesse’ as

mutually independent attributes; the Parson’s condemnation of ‘false heires’ who

‘wrongfully | Ocupien folkes heritages’.1 In the Friar’s Tale, the summoner’s ‘heritage’ is

said to be ‘in helle’; by way of retaliation, in the Summoner’s Prologue, a friar discovers

that the ‘heritage’ of his ‘kynde’ is in the ‘develes ers’.2 Inheritance surfaces in the Clerk’s

Tale as popular political concern, as a ‘peple’ petition their ‘biloved’ lord to marry and

prevent his ‘heritage’ from falling to a ‘straunge successour’.3 In the Merchant’s Tale, in

contrast, the matter of inheritance is portrayed as a personal issue, providing the poem

with its dual source of pathos and comic irony. The elderly January worries that his

‘heritage sholde falle | In straunge hand’ and decides to marry a young wife to produce an

heir; only for his wife’s subsequent infidelity to mean that his ‘heritage’ may fall to a

‘stranger’ after all, namely an illegitimate child.4

1 Chaucer, General Prologue, l. 25; The Reeve’s Tale, l. 3978; The Wife of Bath’s Tale, ll. 1117-19; The Parson’s Tale, ll. 885-88. 2 The Friar’s Tale, l. 1641; The Summoner’s Prologue, ll. 1705-06. 3 The Clerk’s Tale, ll. 69, 85, 138-39. 4 The Merchant’s Tale, ll. 1439-40; Nicole Sidhu, ‘“Famulier foo”: Wives, Male Subordinates, and Political Theory in the Merchant’s Tale’, The Chaucer Review, 54:3 (2019), 292-314 (p. 306). Inheritance is also at stake in the Man of Law’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale: ‘heritage’ is explicitly invoked at l. 366 in the former and ll. 1563 and 1584 in the latter.

15

In turn, it is unsurprising that medieval literature should be preoccupied with the

matter of inheritance, given the importance of inheritance in medieval culture. Primarily

referring to land tenures, ‘inheritance’ described the passing of property from one

generation to the next. The formation of the late-medieval English common law of

inheritance began after the Conquest.5 From the eleventh century, all land was held of the

crown, notionally in feudal lord-vassal relationships ‘marked by reciprocal duties of

protection and service’: for example, land leased from the crown to his tenants-in-chief in

return for military service, and from tenants-in-chief to labourers in return for agricultural

service. These tenures were increasingly regarded as heritable, however, and by the

thirteenth century the rules of common law inheritance were firmly established.6 Though

not the only means of acquiring wealth and status, inheritances were the foundation of

political power, and those of great land magnates were a major influence on regional

society and national politics.7 Furthermore, while the succession of such estates, second

only to the crown, are the most obvious context in which private inheritances could be a

prominent public concern, the custom of inheritance transcended class.8 Any individual’s

5 See A. W. B. Simpson, A History of the Land Law, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986; repr. 2011), pp. 1–24. The classic work on the development of English common law is Frederick Pollock and F. W. Maitland, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I, 2 vols (London: Cambridge University Press, 1898; first published 1895). However, Simpson’s Land Law, first published in 1961, is my preferred source due its focus on land law, longer historical view, and revisions after more recent scholarship. 6 See Simpson, Land Law, pp. 2, 49–50. 7 See Maurice Keen, England in the Later Middle Ages: A Political History (London and New York: Routledge, 2003; first published 1975), pp. 10–11; Michael Hicks, English Political Culture in the Fifteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 64, 68; Christine Carpenter, The Wars of the Roses: Politics and the Constitution in England, c. 1437–1509 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 26. 8 See Hicks, English Political Culture, pp. 83–84; Rosamond Jane Faith, ‘Peasant Families and Inheritance Customs in Medieval England’, The Agricultural History Review, 14:2 (1966), 77–95; Paul Hyams, ‘The Origins of a Peasant Land Market in England’, The Economic History Review, 23:1 (1970), 18–31.

16

social position was largely determined by the ‘estates’ or offices that descended to them

by ‘hereditary right’.9

Medieval writing on inheritance ranges from legal treatises and records to personal

correspondence and vernacular poetry. These written sources do not conform to a single,

coherent discourse on inheritance, nor are they entirely independent of each other. But

rather their similarities and differences demonstrate the depth and breadth of the matter of

inheritance in late-medieval thought. The legal institution of inheritance, firstly, set out to

protect the rights of heirs and the interests of lords. Tractatus de Legibus et

Consuetudinibus Regni Anglie (c. 1190), commonly known as Glanvill after its presumed

author, Ranulf de Glanvill, is the earliest treatise on English law and survives in more than

thirty manuscripts dating from the late twelfth to fourteenth centuries, subsequently being

copied and combined with other texts.10 Similarly influential was the slightly later De

Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae (c. 1220–30), attributed to Henry de Bracton (or

Bratton) and known as Bracton, surviving in more than fifty manuscripts dated between

1250 and 1350.11 The legal principles set out in these works can be distinguished from

legal practice to an extent, according to primary case evidence and historical analysis of

legal records, more of which below. For now, it is important to note the orthodox legal

9 Keen, England in the Later Middle Ages, p. 10. 10 Translated quotations are from The Treatise on the Laws and Customs of the Realm of England Commonly Called Glanvill, ed. and trans. G. D. G. Hall (Washington: John Byrne & Co., 1900). On the author and the work, see Hall, ed., Glanvill, pp. xl, lv and John Hudson, ‘Glanville [Glanvill], Ranulf de (1120s?–1190), Justiciar’, ODNB <https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-10795> [accessed 4 Dec 2019]. 11 Translated quotations are from Bracton on the Laws and Customs of England, 2 vols, vol. 2, ed. George Woodbine, trans. Samuel E. Thorne (London: Oxford University Press, 1968). On the author of Bracton, see Paul Brand, ‘Bratton [Bracton], Henry of (d. 1268), Justice and Supposed Author of the Legal Treatise known as Bracton’, ODNB <https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-3163> [accessed 4 Dec 2019]. For an overview of the Bracton manuscripts, see Sam Worby, Law and Kinship in Thirteenth-Century England (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2015), pp. 69–71.

17

definitions of inheritance expressed in these treatises, namely the system of primogeniture

for male heirs and partition for female heirs to hereditary tenures.12

According to primogeniture, the ‘eldest son is the heir to the whole inheritance’

and if there are two or more sons, ‘the proprietary right always descends to the older, since

he came forth first in the nature of things’.13 This remained legal orthodoxy throughout the

medieval period and beyond.14 Thomas Littleton’s fifteenth-century treatise on land

tenures attests to the many and various forms of tenure extant towards the end of the

medieval period, while reiterating the basic principle of primogeniture for hereditary

land.15 Littleton also sets out the customary procedure for female heirs: that a daughter

without male siblings inherits singly, while two or more sisters should share the

inheritance between them; though this ‘partition’ may be made ‘in divers manners’.16 The

legal treatises are ostensibly concerned with regulating inheritance as an economic issue,

but their effects are social and political. Occasionally, the pragmatic tone of the legal

treatise shifts to theocracy: Bracton insisting that ‘only God can make an heir’, for

instance, idealising inheritance as a ‘sacred’ right.17 Bracton’s code-switching is

characteristic of what Ernst Kantorowicz calls the ‘secular “political theology” of late-

12 Glanvill, pp. 120–28. 13 Glanvill, p. 120; Bracton, p. 189. 14 See Simpson, Land Law, p. 51; Hicks, English Political Culture, p. 8; Keen, England in the Later Middle Ages, pp. 10–11; Chris Given-Wilson, The English Nobility in the Late Middle Ages: The Fourteenth-Century Political Community (London and New York: Routledge, 1996; first published 1987), p. 10. 15 Quotations are from Thomas Littleton, Littleton’s Tenures in English, ed. Eugene Wambaugh (Washington: John Byrne & Col, 1903). Littleton’s Tenures is the earliest law book to have been printed in England, originally issued in French but also copied into manuscript form and translated into English within a few decades of publication. On the author and the influence of his work, see J. H. Baker, ‘Littleton [Lyttleton], Sir Thomas (b. before 1417, d. 1481), Justice and Legal Writer’, ODNB <https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-16787> [accessed 4 Dec 2019]; Thomas Garden Barnes, Shaping the Common Law: From Glanvill to Hale, 1188–1688, ed. Allen D. Boyer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 32–45. 16 Littleton, Tenures, p. 113. 17 Bracton, p. 184. Hicks, English Political Culture, p. 64.

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medieval England: a theocentric legal philosophy which (with regard to the crown, at

least) encompasses the doctrine of the ‘divine right’ of the sovereign to his estate.18

Other conceptions of inheritance can be found elsewhere. Christian scripture offers

an inverse account of inheritance as a ‘sacred’ right, for instance. In this context, the

‘kingdom of heaven’ is the metaphysical inheritance promised to Christians: material

wealth is the antithesis of spiritual wealth, and faith rather than lineage is the key to

rightful heirship, making Christians ‘cohaeredes’ (i.e. co-heirs) with Christ.19 The

metaphor of spiritual inheritance is picked up in vernacular literature, both to describe ‘the

regne of heuene [as] heritage to good folke’ and the ‘heritage in helle’ awaiting the

sacrilegious.20 In hagiographical contexts, ‘heritage’ describes the worldly possessions

that saints eschew, figuring their religious asceticism as spiritual heirship. St Wistan is

said to have decided, as a child, to ‘become coheir of a heavenly rather than temporal

realm’; and so he ‘neglected every earthly rule’.21 Wistan’s youthful rejection of earthly

inheritance for spiritual reward is a trope which can also be found in the legends of Ss

Francis, Katherine and Antony.22 This conceptual juxtaposition of earthly and heavenly

18 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016; first published 1957), pp. 87, 93. Elsewhere, the idea of theocratic sovereignty is particularly associated with post-Reformation England. See J. N. Figgis, The Divine Right of Kings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914) and Glenn Burgess, ‘The Divine Right of Kings Reconsidered’, The English Historical Review, 107:425 (1992), 837–61. 19 Matthew 3.2, 4.17, 5.3; Romans 8.17. 20 The Parson’s Tale, l. 884; John Gower, Confessio Amantis, 3 vols, vol. 3, ed. Russell A. Peck (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2004), 5.7006. For further examples, see MED, heritage, n., sense 2a. 21 In the original Latin: ‘Puer vero Wistanus, malens celestis regni quan temporalis fiera coheres, singula mundana neglexit imperi.’ See Art. 116, De Martirio Sancti Wistani, in The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, 3 vols, vol. 3, ed. Susanna Greer Fein and trans. David Raybin and Jan Ziolkowski (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2015), ll. 8–10. 22 The Life of St Francis, in Saints’ Lives in Middle English Collections, ed. E. Gordon Whatley, Anne B. Thompson and Robert K. Upchurch (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2004), ll. 109–28; The Martyrdom of Sancte Katherine, ed. Emily Rebeka Huber and Elizabeth Robertson, in The Katherine Group MS Bodley 34 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2016), 2.2; Athanasius: The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus, trans. Robert C. Gregg (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), pp. 69–72. St Katherine

19

estates is also portrayed effectively in the dream poem, Pearl (c. 1390).23 In the poem, the

dreamer has a vision of his lost ‘pearl’ (an infant girl who lived ‘not two yer’) in the

likeness of a queen.24 He cannot understand how she has risen to so high an estate, being

so young. But she is a queen in heaven, she explains: in death she is ‘sesed in alle

[Christ’s] herytage’; not lost, but home.25

The ethical dimensions of the concept of inheritance in religious contexts are

further complicated by debates surrounding labour, as either a fallen state or a virtue.26 For

example, we might consider how material wealth inherited by birth contrasts with the

notion of spiritual inheritance as the reward earned by ‘good folke’. But the example of

the Pearl-maiden emphasises that the ‘herytage’ of heaven can be considered a birthright

to Christian children: her heavenly elevation occurring after she has lived (or laboured)

barely two years in the world. Meanwhile, the common law concept of inheritance by

birthright, most noticeably where it inclines toward theocracy, presupposes the worth of

the heir rather than rendering it irrelevant.

No absolute distinctions can be made between the ideas of ‘divine’ and earthly

inheritances, nor between birthright and worth: although the ways in which different texts

prioritise the two are revealing of their respective ethical or political orientations.

keeps part of her inheritance, but only in order to maintain the people whom her deceased parents had employed, otherwise giving her ‘eritage’ away. On the trope more generally, see Emma Campbell, Medieval Saints’ Lives: The Gift, Kinship and Community in Old French Hagiography (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 76–77. 23 Quotations are from Pearl, ed. Sarah Stanbury (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001). Pearl appears uniquely with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x. 24 Pearl, l. 483. 25 Pearl, l. 417. ‘Sesed’ means to ‘take possession’ in a legal sense. See MED, seisen, v. Stanbury glosses the phrase as ‘endowed with inheritance’ (l. 417). 26 For discussions of this theme see Kellie Robertson, The Labourer’s Two Bodies: Literary and Legal Productions in Britain, 1350–1500 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 1–12; Nicola Masciandaro, The Voice of the Hammer: The Meaning of Work in Middle English Literature (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007); Lisa Cooper, Artisans and Narrative Craft in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

20

Inheritance is a predominantly secular issue in chronicle literature with its dynastic

preoccupations.27 The relationship between inheritance and lineage (or birthright) is

especially important in poetic political propaganda, in turn, with writers like Thomas

Hoccleve (d. 1426) imaginatively ‘fiddling [with] the facts of Lancastrian succession’ in

order to legitimate the Lancastrian inheritance of the crown.28 Although, when the

personal matter of inheritance surfaces – Hoccleve pertinently remarking, in The Regiment

of Princes, that courtly patronage is very well in one’s youth, but ‘service, I woot wel, is

noon heritage’ – 29 it is clearly as a financial concern and less about lineage.

It was common to conceive of inheritance in largely economic terms in late-

medieval England. ‘Landholding was what contemporaries meant’, Michael Hicks writes,

‘when they talked about inheritance’.30 Indeed, inheritance appears to have been a

frequent topic of discussion among members of late-medieval gentry families, given the

wealth of evidence in letter collections belonging to families such as the Pastons and

Stonors.31 The letters of Joan and Robert Armburgh are especially remarkable for detailing

a bitter and protracted inheritance dispute. Their letters not only demonstrate the complex

legal and political considerations in such a case but the correspondents’ ability to engage

27 See Sarah L. Peverley, ‘Genealogy and John Hardyng’s Verse Chronicle’, pp. 259–82 and Lister M. Matheson, ‘Genealogy and Women in the Prose Brut, Especially the Middle English Common Version and its Continuations’, pp. 221–58, both in Broken Lines: Genealogical Literature in Late Medieval Britain and France, ed. Raluca L. Radulescu and Edward Donald Kennedy (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008). 28 Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 146–47 on Hoccleve. See also Lesley Coote, ‘Prophecy, Genealogy, and History in Medieval English Political Discourse’, in Broken Lines, pp. 27–44. 29 Thomas Hoccleve, The Regiment of Princes, ed. Charles R. Blyth (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999), l. 841. 30 Hicks, English Political Culture, p. 64. 31 Raluca Radulescu and Alison Truelove, eds., ‘Introduction’, to Gentry Culture in Late Medieval England (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 1–17 (p. 7). For examples see The Paston Letters, ed. Norman Davies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 14; Kingsford’s Stonor Letters and Papers, 1290–1483, ed. Christine Carpenter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 60.

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with its intricacies.32 The high stakes in matters of inheritance – social, economic and

political – made the ability to navigate this complex legal terrain an important skill, and

not one confined only to lawyers. This was a world in which ‘everyone knew their own

claims to inherit and asserted them vigorously’.33

Imaginative literature is clearly part of the culture of inheritance in late-medieval

England, yet it is an aspect which remains relatively understudied. There is a gap in

medievalist scholarship for a series of studies of the treatment of inheritance, and the

significance of inheritance as a literary conceit, across a range of Middle English genres.

The varied use of the inheritance theme in the Canterbury Tales warrants greater attention,

for example, as does the trope of rejecting inheritance in hagiographical literature.

Studying the idea of ‘heritage’ in various literary contexts will contribute to a better

understanding of late-medieval attitudes to inheritance as well as the political nuances of

the literature of the period. This thesis sets out on this potentially wide-ranging

programme of research with a relatively limited focus, prioritising one of the most widely

circulated forms of vernacular literature in England in the fourteenth and fifteenth

centuries: Middle English romance. Not only was romance the ‘major genre of secular

fiction’ in late-medieval England, but the matter of inheritance is a remarkably prominent

theme in these texts.34

Middle English romances ‘almost obsessively return to the problems and

vicissitudes of producing and retaining viable heirs’, Angela Florschuetz writes, ‘to

continue valued bloodlines’:

32 For some explanation of the dispute, see The Armburgh Papers: The Brokeholes Inheritance in Warwickshire, Hertfordshire and Essex, c. 1417–c. 1453, ed. Christine Carpenter (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998), p. 5. 33 Hicks, English Political Culture, p. 64. 34 Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 2.

22

Sir Gowther and Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale … directly address the problems caused by the lack of an

heir; Melusine, Emaré, and Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale feature claims of unsuitable, monstrous

heirs … the King of Tars focuses on the racially hybrid production of a lump of flesh rather than a

child … in Cheuelere Assigne the seven children of the king are threatened by accusations of

adulterous and bestial conception [and] transformed into swans.35

She notes that Athelston ‘includes the violent slaying of the heir while still in his mother’s

body’ and indeed the family drama of that romance begins with the hero inheriting the

English throne from a ‘cosyn’ who ‘dyyd withouten ayr’ (ll. 26, 32).36 Many more

examples could be added to those Florschuetz lists above.

The question of recognising legitimate heirship lies just beneath the surface of

foundling romances like Sir Degare, Lai le Freine and William of Palerne, and the very

popular Arthurian Lybeaus Desconus, whose ‘bastard’ hero sets out to ‘wynne’ the lady of

Synadon, ‘eyre’ to her own ‘kyngdom’ (Ashmole Lybeaus, ll. 15, 1789–93).37 The

beginning of Ipomadon is densely packed with details about heirs and inheritances:

introducing the king of Calabria, who ‘gatte neuer chyld his eyre to be’ and who adopts

‘his newov nere … to make his eyre’; his niece, a sole ‘ayre’, who is determined ‘hyrselffe

her londys to welde’ without a husband; and finally Ipomadon, only son and heir to the

King of Apulia, determined to win her marriage by proving himself ‘the best knyghte | Of

all this world’.38

35 Angela Florschuetz, ‘Women’s Secrets: Childbirth, Pollution, and Purification in the Northern Octavian’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 30 (2008), 235–68 (p. 237 and n. 2). 36 Florschuetz, ‘Women’s Secrets’, p. 237. 37 On the ‘foundling’ romances see Arlyn Diamond, ‘Loving Beasts: The Romance of William of Palerne’, in The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, ed. Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert (Harlow: Longman, 2000), pp. 142–56 and Elizabeth Archibald, ‘Lai le Freine: The Female Foundling and the Problem of Romance Genre’, in Spirit, pp. 39–55. 38 Ipomadon, ed. Rhiannon Purdie, EETS, OS 316 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), ll. 34, 36–37, 82, 95, 118–19.

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Just as striking as the recurrence of the theme of inheritance in the Middle English

romances, however, is the frequency with which the matter of disinheritance recurs. Some

of the earliest surviving examples, in Bevis of Hampton, Havelok the Dane and King

Horn, follow heirs who are disinherited after a father’s untimely death; while Octavian,

Sir Eglamour of Artois, Sir Tryamour and Sir Torrent of Portingale portray the

disinheritance of heirs declared illegitimate. The hero of Tale of Gamelyn is deprived of

his inheritance by an elder sibling and turns to outlawry. Two disinherited princes of

Hungary are, respectively, the hero and the villain of Le Bone Florence of Rome. In Ywain

and Gawain, the titular heroes become the opposing champions of two sisters locked in an

inheritance dispute. Any number of subdivisions could be made among romances treating

the matter of inheritance, with many overlaps between them. But the significance of the

recurrent pattern of disinheritance, including its presence in some of the most widely

circulated examples, is the focus of my thesis. I will consider what disinheritance means in

the romances as a literary conceit, comparing the romances to other sources concerned

with the matters of inheritance and heirship in late-medieval England. I will also explore

the political implications of the romances’ conceptualisation of rightful inheritance and

heirship, especially from the viewpoint of their late-medieval readership.

To this end, I focus my analysis on a set of romances which share a common

narrative pattern, including protagonists disinherited in infancy, separated from their

‘heritage’ and acquiring new lands and titles during the course of their adventures. These

are Bevis of Hampton, Havelok the Dane, Sir Eglamour of Artois, Octavian, Sir Tryamour

and Sir Torrent of Portingale. The group is not intended to be definitive of the genre’s

treatment of disinheritance or inheritance, and at times I will refer to other romances, by

way of comparison and contrast. But I will argue that the portrayal of disinheritance in this

group challenges prevalent critical views about the nature of the inheritance theme in the

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romance genre at large. As such, the thesis also makes a case for further scholarship on the

theme of inheritance in medieval romances and medieval literature more generally, with

an initial contribution to this nascent field of enquiry.

Inheritance in Middle English Romance Criticism

Romance criticism has long associated medieval inheritance practices with the politics of

the romance genre. Critics generally agree on the importance of primogeniture and the

effect (and intent) of romance narratives being to provide imaginative resolutions to

threats to dynastic stability. Helen Cooper’s major study of medieval romance, The

English Romance in Time (2004), describes the genre as the ‘myth of the ideology of

primogeniture’, evoking Georges Duby’s influential thesis on the relationship between

romance and primogeniture, in The Chivalrous Society (1977).39 Duby saw romance as

emerging in response to the practice of primogeniture among the French aristocracy in the

twelfth century. Romance was a ‘literature of chivalry’, he argued, with noble heroes

acquiring land through marriage and ‘adventure’: this mirrored the experiences of the

younger sons of the aristocracy (‘juvenes’) who were ‘deprived’ of an inheritance by

primogeniture, as their elder siblings inherited the family’s estates.40 Chivalric adventure,

through which aspirational knights can gain fame, marriage and land, was the idealised

alternative to inheritance. But by idealising chivalric pursuits the romances seemed to

Duby to maintain support for primogeniture. Although Cooper’s English Romance deals

with later forms of romance, she recalls the birth of the genre ‘in the same period that

39 Cooper, English Romance, p. 326. 40 Georges Duby, The Chivalrous Society, trans. Cynthia Postan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980; first published 1977), p. 118.

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primogeniture becomes the legal norm for inheritance’, in order to elucidate the content of

the English texts.41

In Middle English romances like Bevis, Havelok and the others in my group, the

protagonists are not ‘younger sons’ but firstborns, who would ordinarily inherit according

to primogeniture. They are not ‘deprived’ by elder siblings but rather disinherited. The

‘ideology of primogeniture’ manifests here, in Cooper’s view, when the disinherited heirs

are later ‘proved rightful’ by the discovery of their ‘parentage’ and restored to their

original inheritances.42 Other critics have perceived a similar equation in the Middle

English romances, between parentage and rightful inheritance, deducing that the texts

‘endorse the upper-class belief that worth and birth are synonymous’.43 Although

consensus has grown that the readers of Middle English romances were not ‘upper

class’,44 critics have cogently argued for a change in the ‘function’ rather than the

‘ideology’ of romances, when adapted from their earliest French forms into Middle

English.45 Stephen Knight’s well-known 1986 essay on the ‘social function’ of Middle

English romances cites Duby’s theory directly, arguing that pro-aristocratic ‘values’ are

‘inherent’ in the English romances. The effect in the context of Middle English romances,

he suggests, is to reinforce support for those who hold power among those who do not.46

41 Cooper, English Romance, p. 326. 42 Cooper, English Romance, p. 326. 43 Susan Wittig, Stylistic and Narrative Structures in the Middle English Romances (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1978), p. 189. 44 Derek Pearsall, ‘The Development of Middle English Romance’, in Studies in Middle English Romances: Some New Approaches, ed. Derek Brewer (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1988; first published 1965), pp. 11–35 (p. 33). On the non-aristocratic audiences for Middle English romances, see Harriet Hudson, ‘Middle English Popular Romances: The Manuscript Evidence’, Manuscripta, 28 (1984), 67–78 and Felicity Riddy, ‘Middle English Romance: Marriage, Family, Intimacy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. Roberta L. Krueger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 235–52 (p. 248). 45 Stephen Knight, ‘The Social Function of the Middle English Romances’, in Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology & History, ed. David Aers (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986), pp. 99–122. 46 Knight, ‘Social Function’, pp. 100, 101.

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A similar logic has been applied to the adaptation of so-called ‘insular’ or ‘Anglo-

Norman’ romances, such as Boeve de Hamtoune, into Middle English. These romances are

temporally situated between the earliest French examples of the genre (twelfth century)

and the later Middle English forms (dating from the beginning of the fourteenth century).

In her study of the Anglo-Norman texts, Susan Crane argues that their treatment of

inheritance reflects the concerns of thirteenth-century baronial audiences in England, with

consolidating inheritance rights to feudal tenures.47 Raluca Radulescu more recently

characterised the texts as ‘genealogical’ romances, idealising the ‘privileges enjoyed by

the upper classes’, not least access to hereditary wealth and political status.48 But both

revise M. Dominica Legge’s earlier view, that these ‘ancestral romances’ were written for

identifiable noble family patrons and mythologised the ‘prestige’ of their ‘noble lineage’,

in suggesting that their pro-aristocratic sentiments had a broader appeal.49

This appeal is thought to extend to the readers of the later, Middle English

adaptations. Like Knight, Crane sees a change in the function but not the politics of the

inheritance theme when it is transferred from Anglo-Norman romances (like Boeve and

Haveloc) to Middle English romances (like Bevis and Havelok), and from baronial to non-

aristocratic domains of production and consumption. There is the same ‘baron[ial] concern

for landed stability’ in the Middle English romances, Crane writes, but it is expressed in

‘more universal terms’. The restoration of the noble heir is a pro-aristocratic motif but

inspires ‘the middle class’s affinity for social order’ and effects a sense of ‘social

reconciliation’.50 Radulescu likewise suggests that ‘genealogical’ romances, which attend

47 Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature (University of California Press: Berkeley and London, 1986). 48 Raluca L. Radulescu, ‘Genealogy in Insular Romance’, in Broken Lines, pp. 7–26 (p. 7). 49 M. Dominica Legge, ‘The “Ancestral” Romance’, in Anglo-Norman Literature and Its Background (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), pp. 139–75 (p. 174). 50 Crane, Insular Romance, p. 52.

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to ‘crises of succession as well as their resolution’, appealed to the common interest of the

aristocracy and ‘the middle class’ in ‘continuity’.51

The ‘middle class’ readership Radulescu imagines for the Middle English

romances is analogous to ‘the gentry’, as it has been loosely defined by historians of late-

medieval society.52 The identity of this ‘gentry’ class is necessarily fluid, because one of

its few fundamental features is permeability to both the less wealthy ranks of society and

its upper echelons. Philippa Maddern argues that the very indeterminacy of gentry status

in the late-medieval period was an advantage to those who aspired to it.53 But otherwise,

the two common denominators are landholding and a lack of hereditary aristocracy. Since

the traceable owners of extant Middle English romance manuscripts belong to this wide-

ranging social group, Michael Johnston has argued in favour of reading for a non-

aristocratic, ‘gentry’ viewpoint in the texts.54 The English romances do ‘something new’

with older romance material, Johnston writes, introducing ‘new motifs’ which reflect the

‘class identity’ of ‘the gentry’ who reproduced and read them.55

Johnston’s reading of the matter of inheritance in the romances, though, concurs

with the views of Radulescu, Crane and Knight, appearing to be the point at which

‘gentry’ aspirations and aristocratic interests converge. ‘Primogeniture plays [a] central

role’, he writes, in the Middle English Octavian, in which twin heirs are disinherited and

their family separated. The final scene of family reunion, as such ‘serves as a powerful

image to the readers that primogeniture is a stable and effective system of family

51 Radulescu, ‘Genealogy in Insular Romance’, p. 25. 52 See Radulescu and Truelove, eds, ‘Introduction’, to Gentry Culture, pp. 1–17. See also Maurice Keen, Origins of the English Gentleman: Heraldry, Chivalry and Gentility in Medieval England, c. 1300–c. 1500 (Stroud: Tempus, 2002) and Peter Coss, The Origins of the English Gentry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Further works on this topic are cited below. 53 Philippa Maddern, ‘Gentility’, in Gentry Culture, pp. 18–34. 54 Michael Johnston, Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 55 Johnston, Romance and the Gentry, pp. 88–89.

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economy’.56 Here Johnston quotes a line from Christine Carpenter, writing on the matter

of inheritance among the fifteenth-century English gentry, which, in turn, is evocative of

Duby’s thesis on inheritance customs among the twelfth-century French aristocracy:

namely, that ‘[y]ounger sons were the problem … a terrible potential drag on the heir’,

and the ‘romance’ genre (whether French or English) offered ‘resolutions to concerns

about primogeniture’.57

There is, in the criticism cited above, a general view that romances both expose

and resolve threats to dynastic stability and genealogical succession: that ‘the restoration

of the rightful heir’ is a pro-aristocratic gesture, expressing the ‘rightful passing on of land

and power’ based on ‘inborn chivalry and true parentage’; but that it also represents a

‘long-term social stability’ which is considered ‘desirable’ by a broad cross-section of

late-medieval society.58 Of course, the recurrence of disinheritance in the romances cannot

be missed, and some have expressed suspicion at the resolution of these issues in the texts.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, for example, finds the final scenes of Octavian disconcerting

because the family’s succession and the identity of the next heir are not definitively

stated.59 Gary Lim makes a similar observation about the ending of King Horn.60 In fact,

the same can be said of the endings of several of the disinheritance romances, as I will

argue in Chapter 4. Lim’s essay meanwhile indicates the potential for a critique of

56 Johnston, Romance and the Gentry, pp. 73–75. 57 Christine Carpenter, ‘The Fifteenth-Century English Gentry and Their Estates’, in Gentry and Lesser Nobility in Late Medieval Europe (New York: St Martin’s, 1986), pp. 36–60 (pp. 51–52); Johnston, Romance and the Gentry, p. 73. 58 Nicola McDonald, ed., ‘A Polemical Introduction’, to Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in Popular Romance (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 1–21 (pp. 13–14); Cooper, English Romance, p. 324; Wittig, Stylistic and Narrative Structures, p. 186. 59 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘There are Powerlines in our Bloodlines’ <http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2011/02/there-are-powerlines-in-our-bloodlines.html> [accessed 4 Dec 2019], paragraph 7. 60 Gary Lim, ‘In the Name of the (Dead) Father: Reading Fathers and Sons in Havelok the Dane, King Horn, and Bevis of Hampton’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 110:1 (2011), 22–52.

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primogeniture in the Middle English romances; as he observes that Bevis, Havelok and

Horn appear to ‘fantasize solutions to the vexed question of inheritance by modifying the

principles of patrilineal primogeniture’.61 But he concludes, ultimately, that the effect is to

reinforce primogeniture and its cultural primacy.

Romance critics have, in other contexts, noted the genre’s tendency towards

‘transgressive’ or subversive representations of late-medieval cultural norms.62 But the

inheritance narrative, in which primogeniture is supposedly always reinforced or restored,

appears an expression of the Middle English romances’ most socially and economically

conservative impulses. It is a convincing reading, given that the word ‘inheritance’ itself

seems to signify return, repetition, succession: the carrying forward of the past into the

future. Yet there is more work to be done here. The idea of inheritance in the Middle

English romances is rarely the main object of enquiry in the critical works cited above,

tending to appear in the context of overarching theses on the Middle English romance

genre or ‘romance’ as a more expansive literary field (as with Cooper’s chapter,

‘Restoring the Rightful Heir’ in English Romance).63 The works above are also united by a

largely historicist approach, which tends to situate the romances in the context of their

composition; explaining their treatment of the inheritance theme with historical evidence

that predates the surviving manuscripts by many years. There is little sense of a distinction

between the definition of inheritance found in the medieval legal record and the romances’

idea of inheritance. This thesis proposes and explores a new way of reading inheritance in

six Middle English romances, beginning with a modified critical approach to the theme.

61 Lim, ‘In the Name of the (Dead) Father’, pp. 51–52, my italics. 62 See McDonald, ‘Polemical Introduction’, pp. 15–16. 63 Cooper, English Romance, pp. 324–53. This chapter is expansive in that the literary sources range from Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal (c. 1190) to Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590) and the very many different aspects of romance inheritance narratives, throughout this range, are described necessarily briefly.

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Critical Position

In an essay on Sir Gowther, Alcuin Blamires sees the romance as expressing a ‘kind of

worst-case threat to dynastic stability’ and speculates that the story of ‘a dukedom ravaged

for a while by tyranny’ possibly ‘fit[s] the political circumstances of England at the end of

the fourteenth century’.64 He concludes, however, that:

[this] type of contextual reconstruction is bedevilled by the vagaries of dating. What is more of a

constant in the later Middle Ages, and what arguably most needs to be restored to view not only in

discussion of Sir Gowther but in discussions of many romance narratives, is the work that such

romances do on the behalf of the ideology of dynasty.65

Temporarily setting aside ‘the ideology of dynasty’, it is important to add that ‘the

vagaries of dating’ apply to the transtemporal transmission of a romance, as well as to the

production of the text and the ‘circumstances’ which may have influenced its author. If

‘contextual reconstruction’ is limited in what it can tell us about what the texts mean or

‘do’, it is partly because the texts were reproduced and read across a long period of time.

The Middle English romances enjoyed a ‘centuries-long appeal’, appearing to

possess a ‘flexible timeliness’ to speak to the ‘on-the-spot concerns’ of readers in different

historical moments.66 It is useful to consider, therefore, Rita Felski’s critique of

‘conventional modes’ of historicism: Felski argues that while wholly ‘aesthetic’

approaches to literature risk neglecting the historical circumstances that ‘shape and

sustain’ it, deferring to the ‘context’ of production as the source of meaning fails to

account for the ‘transtemporal … affective resonance’ of certain texts.67 Though I do not

64 Alcuin Blamires, ‘The Twin Demons of Aristocratic Society in Sir Gowther’, in Pulp Fictions, pp. 45–62 (p. 52). 65 Blamires, ‘Twin Demons’, p. 57. 66 Christine Chism, ‘Romance’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Literature, ed. Larry Scanlon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 57–70 (pp. 57–58). 67 Rita Felski, ‘Context Stinks!’, New Literary History, 42:4 (2011), 573-91 (p. 574).

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pursue the ‘phenomenological’ project that Felski prescribes, I similarly treat ‘context’ as

something which influences the reception of the texts rather than revealing inherent

meanings. My thesis does not aim to prove that the content of the romances reflects

particular historical circumstances surrounding their composition, but considers historical

context in so far as it indicates the frames of reference within which the gentry owners of

the extant manuscripts (mostly dated to the fifteenth century) would have read them and

their presentation of inheritance.

This is an altogether different (and later) historical setting than that in which other

romance critics have situated their discussions of ‘primogeniture’ in the genre. Lim’s

essay, for instance, places the Middle English romances in the context of the reign of

Edward I (d. 1307) and contemporary baronial ‘challenges to the monarchy’.68 In doing

so, his essay builds on Susan Crane’s analysis of the Anglo-Norman romances, described

above. In considering a late-medieval ‘gentry’ viewpoint, I build on the work of

Radulescu, Johnston and others.69 But my reading of the romances suggests a different,

politically distinct interpretation of the inheritance theme than has been recorded in

criticism thus far. In turn, I propose that this interpretation would have been especially

evident to the romances’ gentry readership, if we review our understanding of the

inheritance culture in which they were living. I do not attempt to associate individual

romances with individual readers and therefore this cultural context is necessarily rather

general, but it also supplements rather than directs my interpretation of the texts.

De-centring ‘contextual reconstruction’ from criticism of Middle English

romances is no small ask, given the status of historicist approaches in the field. The

aesthetic qualities of the texts were poorly regarded in the mid-twentieth century, Sir

68 Equally significantly, classical sources and Duby’s work (rather than medieval English legal texts) frame Lim’s discussion of ‘primogeniture’. Lim, pp. 22–24 and p. 23, n. 3. 69 See further citations above and below for scholarship identifying the romances’ gentry readership.

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Eglamour of Artois infamously described as a ‘mechanical shuffling-together of stock

incidents, whisked vigorously and poured out at a pace that aims to provide little time for

reflection on what rubbish it all is’.70 Historicist scholarship helped to revive interest in the

Middle English romances as ‘an ideal vehicle for understanding medieval culture’ and has

since taken priority.71 At the same time, however, some have argued that historicist

approaches, while treating the texts as valuable sociohistorical sources, tend to avoid

rather than reevaluate the question of the romances’ literary value.72 Robert Meyer-Lee

and Catherine Sanok likewise remark that ‘scholarship pursued under the rubric [of]

historicism or cultural studies’ has often seemed to push literature itself ‘from the center

of its attention’.73

Any reappraisal of the romances’ literary value, aside from their historical

significance, is complicated by the equivocal nature of the category of ‘literature’: it is a

‘debatable concept’, Eva von Contzen notes, and the ‘precise features that create

literariness can vary strongly from text to text’.74 Indeed many critical understandings of

literary ‘form’ originate in studies of post-medieval literature, throwing open the question

of how to describe the ‘special’ qualities that make a medieval text literary.75 A further

70 Derek Pearsall, ‘The Development of Middle English Romance’, p. 31. Pearsall retracts this view in Derek Pearsall, ‘The Pleasure of Popular Romance: A Prefatory Essay’, in Medieval Romance, Medieval Contexts, ed. Rhiannon Purdie and Michael Cichon (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011), pp. 9–18. 71 Michael Johnston, ‘Romance, Distraint, and the Gentry’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 112:4 (2013), 433–60 (pp. 433–34). See also Derek Brewer, ‘Escape from the Mimetic Fallacy’, in Studies in Medieval English Romance, ed. Derek Brewer (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1988), pp. 1–10 (p. 10); McDonald, ‘Polemical Introduction’, pp. 1–4; Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert, eds, ‘Introduction’, Spirit, pp. 1–38 (pp. 26–31); Raluca L. Radulescu and Cory James Rushton, eds, ‘Introduction’, to A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009), pp. 1–8 (pp. 2–3). 72 McDonald, ‘Polemical Introduction’, p. 4; Putter and Gilbert, ‘Preface’, Spirit, p. vii. 73 Robert J. Meyer-Lee and Catherine Sanok, eds, ‘Introduction: The Literary through – or beyond? – Form’, to The Medieval Literary Beyond Form (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), pp. 1–14 (p. 2). 74 Eva von Contzen, ‘Introduction’, to Sanctity as Literature in Late Medieval Britain, ed. von Contzen and Anke Bernau (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), pp. 1–17 (p. 10). 75 Meyer-Lee and Sanok, ‘The Literary through – or beyond? – Form’, p. 2. See also Robert J. Meyer-Lee, ‘Toward a Theory and Practice of Literary Valuing’, New Literary History, 46:2 (2015), 335–55. In this

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challenge is that the Middle English romances remain largely absent from the recent return

to ‘form’ in medieval literary scholarship, so far.76 Yet the questions raised by ‘new

formalism’ have long been latent in Middle English romance scholarship. The

introduction to the 1916 Manual of Writings in Middle English (hereafter MWME) clearly

registers a tension between the agreed ‘literary’ status of the Middle English romances and

their lack of literary value: the texts are, at once, described as the ‘most literary’ of Middle

English genres and aesthetically ‘inferior’ to their French counterparts.77

By comparison, Cooper’s English Romance in Time persuasively argues for the

historical cultural significance of the Middle English romances en masse, as she explores

the ‘transformation’ of their narrative ‘motifs’ in the changing contexts of late-medieval

and early modern politics. But the study cannot account for the ‘inexplicable’ popularity

of Eglamour in the fifteenth century.78 This passing comment is directed specifically at

Eglamour, evoking the earlier critique of the poem’s form, cited above; but it also hints

that neither conventional formalist nor historicist perspectives can fully explain the Middle

English romances’ appeal or significance to their late-medieval readers. Although the

question of Middle English romance literariness is not the object of this thesis, I wish to

reevaluate the romances’ presentation of inheritance and heirship in a manner that moves

earlier article, Meyer-Lee addresses the question of ‘literary value’, arguing that literary criticism ought to account for the subjective and historically contingent nature of ‘literary valuing’. 76 A notable exception and forerunner is Rhiannon Purdie, Anglicising Romance: Tail-Rhyme and Genre in Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2008). In addition, Catherine Sanok refers to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in ‘Afterword: Calendar Time in Balade Form’, in Sanctity as Literature, pp. 228–44 (pp. 234–35); the ‘tail-rhyme’ form of King Horn is discussed in Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Andrew W. Klein, ‘Rhymed Alliterative Verse in Mise en Page Transition: Two Case Studies in English Poetic Hybridity’, in Beyond Form, pp. 87–118. Besides the introductions to Sanctity as Literature and Beyond Form, for further explanation of the formal ‘turn’ in medieval literary criticism in the twenty-first century, the key works and critical questions, see Helen Marshall and Peter Buchanan, ‘New Formalism and the Forms of Middle English Literary Texts’, Literature Compass, 8:4 (2011), 164–72. 77 Manual (1916), p. 2. The language of the later edition of the Manual (1967) is slightly ameliorated, where the English romances are characterised as ‘less sophisticated’ than the French (p. 12). 78 Cooper, English Romance, p. 261.

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beyond either formal analyses or ‘contextual reconstruction’ as the sole interpretative

framework. To this end, I draw on Nicolette Zeeman’s ‘Imaginative Theory’, towards an

alternative understanding of the ‘special’ literary possibilities of romance narrative.79

Taking the example of a chanson d’aventure metaphor for creative invention, in

which a new song is ‘found’ in the fictional landscape, Zeeman proposes that imaginative

literature such as chanson and romance generates its own ‘imaginative’ theory of

production. It does not sit within other recognised ‘schools’ of literary theory, nor conform

to their literary standards. Instead, imaginative literature can be characterised by a

‘discursive “otherness”’, always ‘speak[ing] from a different place’ than other modes of

writing.80 In this sense, the literary value of a Middle English romance inheres in its

imaginative possibilities: rather than its ability (or otherwise) to meet with the

conventional formal expectations of ‘sophisticated’ literary texts, according to which the

romances have been regarded ‘inferior’ in the past.81 ‘Imaginative theory’ also suggests

that the meaning of romance narrative depends less on ‘contextual reconstruction’ than

might be supposed in conventional historicist readings, given that the romances always

‘speak from a different place’.

Reading the romances as imaginative literature, in turn, revises the well-

established binary view of the genre’s relationship to history: either that romances are

especially invested in ‘history’ or, alternatively, that ‘most writers of romaunces seem

indifferent to the historicity or fictionality of their narratives’.82 On the contrary, in a

recent volume on romance, Thinking Medieval Romance (2018), Katherine Little and

79 Nicolette Zeeman, ‘Imaginative Theory’, in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 222–40. 80 Zeeman, ‘Imaginative Theory’, pp. 229–30. 81 See MWME citations above for these quotes. 82 Paul Strohm, ‘The Origin and Meaning of Middle English Romaunce,’ Genre 10 (1977), 1–28 (p. 19); Ad Putter, ‘Finding Time for Romance: Medieval Arthurian Literary History’, Medium Aevum, 63 (1994), 1–16.

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Nicola McDonald have suggested that ‘radical fictionality’ is the genre’s defining

characteristic. Romances can ‘imagine’ and ‘interrogate’ otherwise unexamined

‘foundational beliefs of medieval culture’.83 Romances do not only respond to existing

cultural concepts but, as imaginative literature, can propose new ideas. As the contributors

to Thinking Medieval Romance contend, this ‘imaginative thinking’ (to paraphrase by way

of Zeeman) is something which romance ‘both displays and invites’.84

Though the romances’ poetic form has often been regarded as unsophisticated,

Christine Chism argues that it is precisely their elliptical style and the incredibility of

some of their ‘conventional formulae’ which ‘provoke questions’ of the reader.85 In a

similar vein, James and Peggy Knapp have recently proposed that medieval romance

should be regarded as a form of ‘speculative fiction’, with an ‘aesthetic of possibility’:

romances can explore ‘philosophical questions’ and ‘invoke philosophical puzzles that

stimulate cognitive frisson’.86 Karen Sullivan argues for a turn towards the

‘epistemological issues’ that the romances raise as works of fiction: she suggests that

readers engaging with medieval romance must entertain uncertainty and ambiguity,

aligning ‘truth’ with ‘imagination’ or ‘wonder’ rather than ‘rationalism’.87 James and

Peggy Knapp exclude Middle English romances from their study, with the exception of

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, while Sullivan concentrates on Arthurian romances up

to the thirteenth century; but they share a common critical standpoint with Thinking

83 Nicola McDonald and Katherine Little, eds, ‘Introduction’, to Thinking Medieval Romance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 1–12 (pp. 4–6). 84 McDonald and Little, ‘Introduction’, p. 6. 85 Chism, ‘Romance’, p. 62. 86 James F. Knapp and Peggy A. Knapp, Medieval Romance: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), pp. 1, 20–23. 87 Karen Sullivan, The Danger of Romance: Truth, Fantasy, and Arthurian Fictions (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2018), p. 22.

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Medieval Romance, where later and non-Arthurian Middle English romances are given

more attention.

I borrow some of this thinking in my analysis of disinheritance in the Middle

English romances. Though I do not directly examine the possibility of the disinheritance

narrative as an imaginative tool for exploring ‘epistemological issues’, I find their

treatment of disinheritance to be symptomatic of an epistemology of imagination:

engendering ambiguity and uncertainty about rightful heirship and succession. In Chapter

2, in particular, I argue that the logic of common law legislation on legitimacy – how to

know a rightful heir – is displaced in the romances by an imaginative concept of

“unknowing”. Throughout the thesis, I consider the romances’ presentation of

disinheritance as an imaginative conceit liable to provoke questions, allowing readers to

examine fundamental beliefs of medieval inheritance culture, without necessarily

supplying answers.

The medieval imagination itself is not the object of my study,88 neither in terms of

the psychology or medieval theories of imagination;89 nor do I attempt to discern evidence

of the authors’ understanding of theories of imagination.90 But I will explore the romances

as an imaginative apparatus for thinking about inheritance in late-medieval England, and

intend to shed light on the idea of inheritance in the late-medieval imagination.91 In my

88 As with Jacques Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992; first published 1985). 89 As with M. W. Bundy, The Theory of the Imagination in Classical and Mediaeval Thought (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1927); Douglas Kelly, Medieval Imagination: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Courtly Love (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978); Michelle Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 90 As with Douglas Kelly, ‘The Logic of the Imagination in Chrétien de Troyes’, in The Sower and His Seed: Essays on Chrétien de Troyes, ed. Rupert T. Pickens (Lexington: French Forum, 1983), pp. 9–30. 91 In this sense the object of the thesis may be comparable to Elizabeth Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). In so far as I will be considering how the romances’ “thinking” on inheritance diverges from legal orthodoxy, the thesis might also be aligned with Sophie Page, The Unorthodox Imagination in Late Medieval Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).

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analysis, I consider the “imaginative work” of the romance as a process occurring between

the reader and the text, rather than inherent in the text or authorial intent. I deliberately do

not to refer to ‘ideology’ or ideological work (in the manner of Blamires, Cooper and

Knight) as I do not wish to suggest that the romances manifest an ‘inherent’ or coherent

‘belief system’ on the matter of inheritance.92 But I am interested in how the romances

might have been interpreted in given social and political contexts, or appropriated in the

service of a given political agenda or ideology. Where I refer to the romances’ imaginative

work (as opposed to ideological), it is to underline that the romances are liable to speak

differently from, and can be indifferent to, political ideas evident elsewhere in the

medieval record. I have found, on the contrary, that the effect of the disinheritance

narrative is not to sustain a singular doctrine or ideology of rightful inheritance.

At the same time, I wish to signal a distinction from the Marxist sense of ‘the

imaginary’ as a delusion, which is implied in historicist discussions of ideology in the

romances. As James Simpson explains in his chapter in Thinking Medieval Romance,

where Marxist critics ‘dismissed the aesthetic dismissal’ of Middle English romances,

‘they held tenaciously to the charge that romances [do] not think’ and that its imaginative

narratives kept their late-medieval audiences ‘suspended in a zone of thought-

neutralization, in which the interests of one class are made acceptable to another’.93 The

further implication here is that late-medieval readers could not see, or could not

interrogate, a covert political agenda which is clearly visible to modern academic readers.

It is my contention, by contrast, that the romances are conspicuously thought-provoking, if

not by design then certainly in effect, and that late-medieval readers would have been

92 On this definition of ‘ideology’, see Terry Eagleton, Ideology (London: Verso, 1991), p. 107. 93 Simpson, ‘Unthinking Thought: Romance’s Wisdom’, in Thinking Medieval Romance, pp. 36–54 (p. 37). The thrust of Simpson’s argument is that romances’ apparent silence on certain issues constitutes a conscious recognition that some subjects are ‘better not thought about explicitly’ and require more ‘subtle’ and indirect consideration.

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sensitive to the romances’ interrogative cues: many of which have been passed over in

academic critique in the past and which will be the subject of my analysis.

In practice, I combine close readings of the content and poetic features of the

romances, especially figurative language and imagery, with comparative reference to a

range of non-romance sources and historical scholarship. In making these comparisons, I

aim to reconstruct the connotations of certain language and imagery for readers in late-

medieval England, while prioritising the romances and their imaginative potential to

signify differently than other sources, according to the internal logic of their stories and

associations between them. I use various legal sources to help to construct late-medieval

frames of reference for reading the romances’ treatment of inheritance but bear in mind

that ‘literature’ and ‘the law’ are ‘two distinct discourses’, however mutually influenced.94

As far as possible, the legal citations will not only ‘serve an explanatory function’ but aid

my analysis of the ‘poetic’ employment of ‘legal vocabulary’ and references to legal

forms. I examine the ‘play’ between these ‘two discursive systems’, to signify something

new in the ‘fictional world’ of the poem.95

By studying inheritance in Middle English romances, I build on Noël James

Menuge’s study of wardship in the genre, wardship being an important aspect (or

‘incident’, to use the legal parlance) of inheritance. But where Menuge proposes that the

romances allow us to read ‘more nearly into the lives of medieval wards’ I will read the

romances’ presentation of inheritance as a product of imaginative discourse.96 While it

94 Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. xv (italics in the original). 95 Maura Nolan, ‘“Acquiteth yow now”: Textual Contradiction and Legal Discourse in the Man of Law’s Introduction’, in The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England, ed. Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 136–53 (pp. 137, 146–47). 96 Noël James Menuge, Medieval English Wardship in Romance and Law (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), p. 23.

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may obliquely represent the legal or social realities of inheritance in late-medieval

England, the meaning of (dis)inheritance in the romances is not circumscribed by records

of lived experience. In so far as the romances work towards their own definitions of

rightful heirship and inheritance, they work within what Andreea Boboc has elsewhere

called the ‘jurisdiction [of] the literary imagination’.97

At this point, however, I wish to draw out some features of late-medieval

inheritance culture which have not been apparent thus far, but which ought to influence

how we interpret the romances’ imaginative effects for their late-medieval readers. Firstly,

in light of historical work on inheritance practices in medieval England and France,

beyond Duby, it seems less likely that the romances should be inherently committed to

resolving concerns about primogeniture. Indeed, its notional status as the formative

cultural phenomenon of the romance genre cannot pass without question. Primogeniture

did not effectively disinherit the younger sons of the French nobility in the ‘harsh’ way

that Duby imagined, nor did ‘younger sons’ in medieval England have to ‘go a-begging’.98

Historians have revised the earlier view that ‘primogeniture [was] securely enthroned’ in

England by the end of the fourteenth century.99

While the ‘Common Law’s interpreters from Glanvill onwards preached

primogeniture in strong terms’, customarily an elder sibling would inherit the greatest

share of the patrimony – the hereditary lands – and the younger siblings the smaller shares

97 Andreea D. Boboc, ed., ‘Introduction’, to Theorising Legal Personhood in Late Medieval England (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015), pp. 1–28 (p. 2). 98 David Crouch, ‘The Historian, Lineage and Heraldry, 1050–1250’, in Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England, ed. Peter Coss and Maurice Keen (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2002), pp. 17–38 (p. 27); J. C. Holt, ‘Politics and Property in Early Medieval England’, Past & Present, 57 (1972), 3–52 (p. 12). 99 Simon Payling, ‘The Politics of Family: Late Medieval Marriage Contracts’, in The McFarlane Legacy: Studies in Late Medieval Politics and Society, ed. Richard Britnell and A. J. Pollard (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995), pp. 21–47 (p. 32).

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and secondary titles.100 Forced primogeniture only applied to hereditary titles. Lands

acquired during the holder’s lifetime, rather than lands they had inherited, could be

granted to younger offspring.101 The Tale of Gamelyn illustrates this: the hero’s father, Sir

John of Boundes insists, ‘I wil delen my londe after myn owne will’: he bequeaths ‘my

faders heritage’ to his eldest son, while the ‘myddelest sone’ receives ‘fyve plowes of

londe | That I halpe forto gete with my right honde’ and the youngest receives ‘myn other

purchace of londes and ledes’.102 From the thirteenth century onwards, in fact, legal

devices like ‘entails, jointures and enfeoffments’ had provided landholders with ways of

‘getting around [the] restrictions’ of inheritance law, allowing them to ‘designate the heirs

to an estate’ according to their will and enabling some ‘avoidance of primogeniture’.103 By

the fifteenth century, a great deal of formerly hereditary property had been ‘resettled in

more sophisticated tenures’.104

Lords and tenants alike sought to circumvent the ‘customary rules of inheritance’,

creating a complex landscape for inheritance in late-medieval England.105 In an estimated

quarter of all inheritance cases, meanwhile, primogeniture could not be implemented for

lack of a direct heir.106 Though the majority of heirs inherited without incident, inheritance

disputes arose as fifteenth-century common law failed to keep up with ‘contemporary

100 Crouch, ‘The Historian, Lineage and Heraldry’, p. 27. 101 See J. C. Holt, ‘Politics and Property’, p. 12; Glanvill, p. 118. 102 The Tale of Gamelyn, in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas H. Ohlgren (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), ll. 56–61. ‘Purchace’ means land acquired rather than inherited. See Gamelyn, note to l. 14 and MED, purchasen, v. 103 Chris Given-Wilson, The English Nobility in the Late Middle Ages, p. 138; Christine Carpenter, ‘England: The Nobility and the Gentry’, in A Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages, ed. S. H. Rigby (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 261–83 (p. 272). 104 Michael Hicks, ed., ‘Introduction’, to The Fifteenth-Century Inquisitions ‘Post Mortem’: A Companion (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2012), pp. 1–24 (pp. 8-10). 105 Bruce M. S. Campbell, ‘England: Land and People’, in Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages, pp. 3–25 (p. 18). 106 Hicks, English Political Culture, p. 176 and K. B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 175–76.

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conveyancing’, and complicated settlements created ambiguities.107 A popular fifteenth-

century instructional text, Rules for Purchasing Land, warns those acquiring land by

means other than inheritance to be aware of all those who may have a competing claim.108

But there is no reason to assume, in this complicated legal landscape, that Middle English

romances or their readers ‘fantasized’ (to borrow Lim’s word) about a simpler solution, in

the form of restored or reinforced primogeniture.

While primogeniture remained a legal orthodoxy and customary norm, it was not

necessarily the preferred scenario for landholders. Where historian Stephen Rigby sees a

resurgence of interest in primogeniture in England in the fifteenth century, he speculates

that it was driven by the fathers of daughters in particular. These men were looking for

‘assurance that their sons-in-law would not be disinherited by some future division of their

fathers’ estates’: that is, due to the increasingly common use of entails and enfeoffments to

bypass primogeniture.109 Similarly, Joel Rosenthal observes that while primogeniture was

still usual in the majority of cases, there were significant moves to reform the practice in

the fifteenth century.110

Stability in lordship and landholding was never a long-term reality in late-medieval

England, neither was it universally desirable.111 The non-noble landholders who

107 Hicks, English Political Culture, p. 64. 108 See Rules for Purchasing Land, in Codex Ashmole 61: A Compilation of Popular Middle English Verse, ed. George Shuffelton (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2008). 109 Stephen H. Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages: Class, Status and Gender (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), p. 205. 110 Rosenthal, Patriarchy and Families of Privilege in Fifteenth-Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), p. 27. Eventually, the Statute of Wills 1540 made it possible to devise a proportion of heritable property by will, before the Tenures Abolition Act 1660 reduced the amount of land held in knight’s service and therefore regarded as compulsorily heritable. Primogeniture remained the default practice for the whole property of anyone dying intestate, however, until the Administration of Estates Act 1925. The Act legislated for the rights of the spouse of a person dying intestate and determined that offspring should inherit equal shares, effectively abolishing primogeniture as the de facto law of inheritance. See Administration of Estates Act 1925 c. 23 (15 and 16 Geo. 5) <http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo5/15-16/23/contents> [accessed 4 Dec 2019]. 111 See Peter Fleming, ‘Politics’, in Gentry Culture, pp. 50–62 (esp. p. 58).

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comprised the readership for the Middle English romances had much to gain from the

mobility of ordinarily heritable land, through various forms of loss and acquisition. The

political economy commonly called ‘bastard feudalism’ created ‘something like a market

for lordship’ in England in the fifteenth century, in which lords relied upon the support of

the far more numerous local gentry and officials to maintain their holdings.112 Rivalries

between noble land magnates gave gentry supporters the opportunity for significant

political or financial reward. There are ‘two simultaneous trends at work’ in the fourteenth

and fifteenth centuries, Simon Payling writes: one is the aggregation of land by noble

families who ‘survived in the male line over several generations’ and the other is the ‘rate

of failure’ coupled with the ‘land market’, which saw the ‘conversion of non-landed

wealth into land’ and ‘upward mobility into the landed class’.113

So, where a noble romance reader may have sought (and perhaps found)

affirmation of primogeniture and ‘dynastic stability’ in the texts, the sociopolitical

situation of gentry readers suggests an alternative interpretation. It is a view which has not

yet been brought to bear on scholarship interested in inheritance in the romances, but

which is evident in the texts themselves: namely, that dynastic instability also creates

opportunity. My close readings of inheritance in Bevis, Havelok, Eglamour, Octavian,

Tryamour and Torrent will offer a counterpoint to the view that romances manifest an

‘ideology of primogeniture’ – or work ‘on behalf of an ideology of dynasty’ – and aim to

resolve ‘crises of succession’.114 In contrast, I argue that dynastic instability can be read as

112 Fleming, ‘Politics’, p. 58–60. The concept of ‘bastard feudalism’ has been revised since McFarlane’s early and influential definition, but the term is still widely used. See K. B. McFarlane, ‘Bastard Feudalism’, in England in the Fifteenth Century: Collected Essays (London: The Hambledon Press, 1981; first published 1945), pp. 23–44; P. R. Coss, ‘Bastard Feudalism Revisited’, Past and Present, 125 (1989), 27–64; Maurice Keen, England in the Later Middle Ages, pp. 12-13; Michael Hicks, ‘Bastard Feudalism’, in English Political Culture, pp. 141–63; Simpson, Land Law, p. 5. 113 Simon Payling, ‘Social Mobility, Demographic Change, and Landed Society in Late Medieval England’, Economic History Review, 45:1 (1992), 72–73 (p. 72). 114 Quoting Cooper, Blamires and Radulescu – as cited above.

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the narrative object of these romances, which is sustained rather than resolved in the

endings of the stories, and which revolves around the idea of disinheritance.

Texts

The six romances comprising the main focus of my analysis will be called disinheritance

romances, for ease of reference. But this is a heuristic, not a definitive category, intended

to aid my analysis of the imaginative effects of a recurrent pattern in the presentation of

inheritance among Middle English romances. Romance scholarship has attempted to

define the boundaries of the genre in various ways, but consensus has grown for a content-

based approach that resists establishing definitive boundaries.115 Treating the Middle

English romances, as such, as a ‘family-resemblance’ category means that romances can

be identified by their similarities to each other, rather than according to a certain hierarchy

of features.116 My ‘disinheritance romances’ are a kind of ‘family-resemblance’ group,

brought together on the basis of narrative similarities rather than fixed criteria. It can be

considered as one of the many ‘subgroups’, in romance scholarship, which indicate ‘the

mutually determining oppositions’ that constitute the genre’s ‘field of play’ rather than

anatomising it.117

115 For an overview of the debate and various approaches see Yin Liu, ‘Middle English Romance as Prototype Genre’, The Chaucer Review, 40:4 (2006), 335–53 and Melissa Furrow, Expectations of Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009), p. 57. 116 The idea of the ‘family-resemblance’ category is borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, ed. Hacker and Schulte (Wiley-Blackwell, 2004; first published as Philosophische Untersuchungen, 1953), pp. 67–66. Critics explicitly adopting this approach include Cooper, English Romance, p. 222; Putter and Gilbert, ‘Introduction’, Spirit, p. 2; Matthew Giancarlo, ‘Speculative Genealogies’, in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Middle English, pp. 352–68 (p. 353). In contrast, K. S. Whetter, Understanding Genre and Medieval Romance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008) argues for a content-based understanding of genre which is definitive: in short, romances are about, ‘love, ladies, adventure and [a] happy ending’ (p. 95). 117 Chism, ‘Romance’, p. 67.

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Describing the genre on the basis of resemblance means also that the exemplary

romances are not those that meet with certain formal standards, nor necessarily those

which are in any way extraordinary, but those which are the most typical. Bevis, for

example, is said to be the ‘quintessential’ romance of ‘the displaced youth’, if ‘not the

original’ version.118 McDonald and Little declare Torrent to be ‘exemplary’ not because it

is the ‘best’ (according to whatever evaluative measures) but because it is ‘chock full’ of

‘generic accoutrement’: that is to say, it includes all of the things that make romance

recognisable as romance.119 This is also pertinent to Eglamour, given that it is Torrent’s

nearest analogue. Yin Liu’s experimental application of ‘prototype’ theory to the Middle

English romance genre offers an evidence-based way of identifying the romances that

might have been considered ‘most typical of the genre’ by late-medieval readers. Liu

counts the number of references to romances by title, in various medieval texts, and

combines these with the number of extant manuscripts for each romance.120 The result is a

list with Bevis in first place and Octavian eighth.121 It suggests the prominence of these

texts in a late-medieval reader’s imaginative frame of reference.

My grouping of disinheritance romances sets aside some of the more conventional

critical subdivisions among them and brings together texts which are rarely in close

conversation, such as Havelok and Eglamour. Havelok and Bevis, on the other hand, have

traditionally been brought together as ‘hero-alone’, ‘legendary English hero’, and ‘matter

of England’ romances, with reference to their Anglo-Norman antecedents.122 Havelok has

118 Andrew King, ‘Romance’, in A Companion to Fifteenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), pp. 187–98 (p. 190). 119 McDonald and Little, ‘Introduction’, Thinking Medieval Romance, p. 2; Wade, ed., ‘Introduction’, to Torrent, available via METS [accessed 4 Dec 2019], paragraph 1. 120 The sources range from Cursor Mundi (c. 1300) to the Laud Troy Book (c. 1400) and their mentions of romances ‘appear in different contexts and for different reasons’. Liu, ‘Prototype Genre’, p. 340. 121 Liu, ‘Prototype Genre’, pp. 342, 343. 122 Knight, ‘Social Function’, p. 111; Harriet Hudson, ed., ‘General Introduction’, to Four Middle English Romances, available via METS [accessed 4 Dec 2019], paragraph 1; Raluca Radulescu, ‘Genre and

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often been treated singly in the past, and at greater length than many other romances,

because of its actual or perceived idiosyncrasies compared to other romances, such as the

hero’s association with British chronicle tradition and the romance’s attention to ‘non-

courtly characters, town life, labor and money’.123 Critics have debated its generic

influences;124 whether it analogises historical events or mythologises a British past;125

whether it presents a theocratic model of kingship or is essentially a romance ‘of the

law’.126 Several studies consider whether the romance’s details of lower class life suggest

a non-noble audience or whether it is a ‘mirror for princes’, telling us ‘not so much what

the lower classes thought [as] what the upper classes liked to think the lower classes

thought of them’.127

Classification’, in A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance, pp. 31–48 (p. 38). For the ‘matter of England’ category see Donald Sands, Middle English Verse Romance (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1986), pp. 4–5 and W. R. J. Barron, English Medieval Romance (London: Longman, 1987), pp. 63–88. Rosalind Field and others have criticised the ‘matter of England’ classification as an anachronistic ‘modern construct’: Field, ‘The Curious History of the Matter of England’, in Boundaries in Medieval Romance, ed. Neil Cartlidge (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 29–42; Robert Rouse, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), p. 52; Radulescu, ‘Genre and Classification’, p. 35. 123 Roy Michael Liuzza, ‘Representation and Readership in the ME Havelok’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 93 (1994), 504–19 (p. 504). The earliest appearance of the hero ‘Havelok’ in medieval literature is in Geoffrey Gaimar’s Estoire des Angleis (c. 1150). On the relationship between Havelok and other sources, see G. V. Smithers, ed., ‘Introduction’, to Havelok (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. i-lxxxiii and Scott Kleinman, ‘The Legend of Havelok the Dane in the Historiography of East Anglia’, Studies in Philology, 100:3 (2003), 245–77. 124 Nancy Mason Bradbury, ‘The Traditional Origins of Havelok the Dane’, Studies in Philology, 90 (1993), 115-42; K. S. Whetter, ‘Gest and Vita, Folktale and Romance in Havelok’, Parergon, 20:2 (2003), 21–46. 125 Christopher Stuart, ‘Havelok the Dane and Edward I in the 1290s’, Studies in Philology, 93:4 (1996), 349–64; Dominique Battles, ‘Reconquering England for the English in Havelok the Dane’, The Chaucer Review, 47:2 (2012), 187–205. 126 Sheila Delaney and Vahan Ishkanian, ‘Theocratic and Contractual Kingship in Havelok the Dane’, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 22 (1974), 290–302; Kimberly K. Bell, ‘Resituating Romance: The Dialectics of Sanctity in MS Laud Misc. 108’s Havelok the Dane and Royal Vitae’, Parergon, 25:1 (2008), 27–51; Crane, Insular Romance, p. 48. 127 J. Halverson, ‘Havelok the Dane and Society’, The Chaucer Review, 6 (1971), 142–51; David Staines, ‘Havelok the Dane: A Thirteenth-Century Handbook for Princes’, Speculum, 51 (1976), 602–23; Robert Levine, ‘Who Composed Havelok for Whom?’, Yearbook of English Studies, 22 (1992), 95–104; John C. Hirsch, ‘Havelok 2933: A Problem in Medieval Literary History’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 78 (1977), 339–49 (p. 343).

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This same depth of critical enquiry has not been afforded to many of the others I

will analyse in this thesis, but reading Havelok alongside romances like Octavian and

Eglamour is illuminating. Firstly, it reminds us that Havelok is not so different, in content,

from its fellow romances: all six of my texts possess inheritance narratives, of course, but

even the scenes of urban labour in Havelok, which have been considered unusual, are

comparable to those of mercantile apprenticeship in Octavian.128 In turn, the other

disinheritance romances have much to offer by way of answer to the critical questions

asked of Havelok, especially regarding the nature of narrative allusions to medieval

English political theory and practice.129 In Chapter 3, for instance, my analysis of witness

testimony in Octavian and others finds potential parallels with the medieval legal process

of ‘recognition’. My thesis contends that disinheritance and rightful heirship are the

central topoi of Havelok: but rather than articulating existing medieval political theories, it

shares with the other romances an unorthodox, imaginative treatment of these issues.

128 Glenn Wright and others have noted that the northern Octavian is ‘critical’ of its main mercantile figure, Clement (adoptive father to one of emperor Octavian’s estranged sons), but the southern version demonstrates ‘considerable sympathy’. See Wright, ‘The Fabliau Ethos in the French and English Octavian Romances’, Modern Philology, 102:3 (2005), 478–500 (p. 482) and Megan G. Leitch, ‘Of his ffader spak he no thing’: Family Resemblance and Anxiety of Influence in Fifteenth-Century Prose Romance’, in Medieval into Renaissance: Essays for Helen Cooper, ed. Andrew King and Matthew Woodcock (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016), pp. 55–72 (p. 61). 129 Sheila Delaney argues that the main critical debates surrounding Havelok cohere around the question of the ‘nature of kingship’. Sheila Delaney, Medieval Literary Politics: Shapes of Ideology (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 61. Other examples of Havelok criticism drawing on political and economic theoretical frameworks, both medieval and modern, are: Liam O. Purdon, ‘The Rite of Vassalage in Havelok the Dane’, Medievalia et Humanistica, 20 (1993), 25–39; Rodger I. Wilkie, ‘Re-Capitating the Body Politic: The Overthrow of Tyrants in Havelok the Dane’, Neophilologus, 94:1 (2010), 139–50; Aaron Hostetter, ‘Food, Sovereignty, and Social Order in Havelok the Dane’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 110:1 (2011), 53–77; Alexis Kellner Becker, ‘Sustainability Romance: Havelok the Dane’s Political Ecology’, in New Medieval Literatures, 16, ed. Laura Ashe, Wendy Scase and David Lawton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016), pp. 83–108. Emma O’Loughlin Bérat has recently revisited the idea of the ‘king’s body’ (citing Kantorowicz) in Havelok, focusing instead on ‘queenship’. Bérat, ‘Constructions of Queenship: Envisioning Women’s Sovereignty in Havelok’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 118:2 (2019), 234–51.

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Octavian, Eglamour, Tryamour and Torrent have been considered ‘family

romances’, a defining feature being the portrayal of families separated and reunited.130

Such romances are also associated with the ‘accused queen’ or ‘calumniated queen’ trope,

in which a queen is falsely accused and exiled; sometimes with her offspring, as is the

case in Octavian and Tryamour.131 Named for canonical literary examples, they are

classed as ‘Eustace-Constance-Florence-Griselda legends’ in MWME, and elsewhere as

‘Constance-sagas’ or ‘Eustace-sagas’.132 But the phrase ‘family romance’ can be applied

to Middle English romances far more generally, too, as Matthew Giancarlo notes.133 It

evokes the ‘family-resemblance’ method of describing the genre and the ‘domestic’

setting in which it is likely that they were read, since they survive in manuscript

130 Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 29; Florschuetz, ‘Women’s Secrets’, pp. 236–37; Pearsall, ‘A Prefatory Essay’, p. 12; Radulescu, ‘Genre’, pp. 42–45; Hudson, ‘General Introduction’, Four Middle English Romances, paragraph 1. 131 ‘Accused queen’ is also one of the searchable ‘keywords’ in DMER. For discussions of the trope in medieval romances, see A. B. Gough, The Constance Saga (Berlin: Mayer & Muller, 1902); Margaret Schlauch, Chaucer’s Constance and Accused Queens (New York: New York University Press, 1927); Peggy McCracken, The Romance of Adultery: Queenship and Sexual Transgression in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); Nancy Black, Medieval Narratives of Accused Queens (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2003). 132 Derek Pearsall, ‘A Prefatory Essay’, p. 12; Hudson, ‘General Introduction’, paragraph 2. The legend of St Eustace features family separation and Sir Isumbras is an analogous romance; Griselda is long-suffering wife and mother deprived of her children, in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale. The legend of Constance is told in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale and John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, but among the anonymous Middle English romances, Emare is its closest analogue. The story of ‘Florence’ (heroine of Le Bone Florence of Rome) similarly features a female protagonist suffering a litany of abuses, of which ‘calumnation’ is just one. See Hudson, ed., ‘Introduction’, to Sir Isumbras, available via METS [accessed 4 Dec 2019] and Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury, eds, ‘Introduction’, to Emare, available via METS [accessed 4 Dec 2019], paragraph 2. 133 Giancarlo, ‘Speculative Genealogies’, p. 359. Occasionally the phrase is used in its Freudian sense, referring to family psychodrama, as in Cheryl Colopy, ‘Sir Degaré: A Fairy Tale Oedipus’, Pacific Coast Philology, 17:1/2 (1982), 31–39. For the original use, see Sigmund Freud, ‘Family Romances’, in Collected Papers, 5 vols, vol. 5, ed. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1959), pp. 74–78. Geraldine Heng argues in favour of this definition in Empires of Magic, p. 185.

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miscellanies of the type sometimes called household books, alongside hagiography and

housekeeping or husbandry texts.134

The distinction between so-called ‘matter of England’ and ‘family’ romances

proves an arbitrary one in my group. All six romances include instances of family

separation and reunion, with narrative attention dispersed among family members in Bevis

as much as in Octavian. Likewise, while Bevis is ostensibly ‘of Hampton’, the majority of

the action of Bevis takes place anywhere other than England: as Robert Rouse observes,

Bevis is ‘strange and unsettling’ as an ‘English knight’.135 In turn, while the ‘family

romances’ have continental European and Middle Eastern settings and characters, only

Octavian has a continental literary analogue: giving Eglamour, Tryamour and Torrent a

different claim on the classification of “English romance” from that of Bevis or Havelok.

Without putting each romance’s individual distinctions aside, I treat the six romances as a

coherent group insofar as their portrayal of disinheritance goes.

Thirteen manuscripts (including some fragments), dating from c. 1300 to c. 1500,

account for all the surviving Middle English manuscript versions of Bevis, Havelok,

Eglamour, Octavian, Tryamour and Torrent collectively. I have taken the year 1500 as the

cut-off date for my study, because it represents the approximate terminus for the wide

circulation of the disinheritance romances in manuscript form and thus provides a

necessary limit on the scope of the project. It is also the case that the advent of print spells

the beginning of variations to the romances’ form and content, as they are extended or

134 Julia Boffey, ‘Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden. B. 24 and Definitions of the “Household Book”’, in The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths, ed. A. S. G. Edwards, Vincent Gillespie and Ralph Hanna (London: British Library, 2000), pp. 125–34. 135 Robert Rouse, ‘For King and Country? The Tension between National and Regional Identities in Sir Bevis of Hampton’, in Sir Bevis of Hampton in Literary Tradition, ed. Jennifer Fellows and Ivana Djordjević (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 114–26 (p. 116).

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abridged and the verse supplanted by prose,136 and they begin to circulate in a new reader

market. As such, I exclude Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 261 (1564), which

contains a copy of Eglamour, and London, British Library, MS Additional 27879

(otherwise known as the Percy Folio, c. 1650), which contains Eglamour and Tryamour,

since both postdate print versions.

The remaining manuscripts are mostly later than 1400 and concentrated towards

the middle of the fifteenth century, which is typical for all surviving Middle English

romance manuscripts.137 The thirteen witnesses include several of the most compendious

romance manuscripts to have survived to the present, as well as the earliest (Oxford,

Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108, containing Havelok) and one of the latest

(Manchester, Chetham’s Library, MS 8009, containing Bevis and Torrent).138 The

disinheritance romances are found together in manuscripts in a number of instances: most

striking is the pairing of Octavian with Eglamour, so that the former is never found

without the latter.139 This suggests a possible association between the texts in the minds of

manuscript compilers and late-medieval readers, who might have been prompted to

compare the stories.

Manuscript coincidences are not definitive in the thesis, however: hence the

exclusion of King Horn from my main group. Although it is certainly a romance about

disinheritance and appears alongside Havelok in Laud Misc. 108, its narrative diverges in

some significant ways. As Lim has also noted, the circumstances in which Horn is

136 Cooper connects the change in form to the changes in content, in Cooper, ‘The Strange History of Valentine and Orson’, in Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Romance, ed. Rosalind Field (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), pp. 163–58. See Cooper’s index to English Romance (pp. 409–31) and DMER for lists of post-medieval adaptations of the romances and early print editions. 137 See my list of manuscripts (p. 230) and DMER. 138 Auchinleck, Egerton 2862, Cambridge Ff.2.38, Lincoln 91 and Cotton Caligula A.ii are notable romance compendia. 139 See my table of romances and manuscripts (p. 234).

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disinherited ‘differ considerably’ from those in Havelok and Bevis.140 In particular, Horn

is disinherited as a teenager, where others are infants; Horn’s disinheritance is the

incidental result of the conquest of his father’s lands, where others are deliberately

disinherited in the course of intrafamilial conflicts; Horn is exiled with a group of friends

and peers, where others are more isolated and in some cases entirely disconnected from

the family and social milieu into which they were born. Horn is peripheral in my analysis,

a point of comparison rather than a main focus, as a different kind of disinheritance

narrative.

Most of the manuscripts have been associated with gentry or merchant owners in

the fifteenth century. Though the provenance of Laud Misc. 108 is uncertain, ownership

marks appear to place the manuscript in the possession of Henry Perveys, a London draper

(fl. 1434–76).141 Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates 19.2.1 (also

known as the Auchinleck manuscript) is variously thought to have been produced for an

aspirational mercantile market in London, for a noble or gentry family, or possibly with a

female reader in mind.142 A ‘family’ readership is surmised from the ‘frequent focus on

140 Lim, ‘In the Name of the (Dead) Father’, p. 40. Lim uses the word ‘dispossessed’, rather than ‘disinheritance’. 141 For provenance, see the Bodleian catalogue entry by Matthew Holford (March 2018) <https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/manuscript_6917> [accessed 4 Dec 2019]. For an analysis of the ‘Henrico Perueys’ signature and attribution to Henry Perveys, London draper (fl. 1434–76), see Christina M. Fitzgerald, ‘Miscellaneous Masculinities and a Possible Fifteenth-Century Owner of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108’, in The Texts and Contexts of Oxford, Bodlieian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108: The Shaping of English Vernacular Narrative, ed. Kimberly Bell and Julie Nelson Couch (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 87–113. 142 Laura Hibbard Loomis, ‘The Auchinleck Manuscript and a Possible London Bookshop of 1330–1340’, PMLA, 57 (1942), 595–627; Derek Pearsall and I. C. Cunningham, eds, ‘Introduction’, to The Auchinleck Manuscript (London: Scolar Press, 1977), pp. i–xxiv (p. viii); Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature and National Identity, 1290–1340 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 138; Phillipa Hardman, ‘Domestic Learning and Teaching: Investigating Evidence for the Role of “Household Miscellanies” in Late Medieval England’, in Women and Writing, c. 1340–c. 1650: The Domestication of Print Culture, ed. Anne Lawrence-Mathers and Phillipa Hardman (Woodbridge and Rochester: Boydell & Brewer, 2010), pp. 15–33 (pp. 19–20).

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family relationships and lineage’ in the romances of the manuscript as well as, more

recently, its ‘biblical’ material: this combination of literature was, Cathy Hume suggests,

meant to be morally ‘edifying’ for a family audience.143

A female readership has, at times, been inferred from the contents of Naples,

Biblioteca Nazionale, MS XIII.B.29 and Chetham’s 8009, otherwise more generally

associated with the ‘London book market’ and ‘mercantile ownership’.144 Four belong to

the nine compilations which Michael Johnston identifies as ‘gentry manuscripts’: London,

British Library, MS Egerton 2862, Cambridge, Cambridge University, MS Ff.2.38,

Lincoln, Lincoln Cathedral, MS 91 and London, British Library, MS Cotton Caligula

A.ii.145 The Egerton manuscript is thought to have been owned by a gentry family or

minor aristocracy in the fifteenth century, while Cambridge Ff.2.38 is aligned with a

‘gentry’ or ‘middle-class household’.146 Lincoln 91 is one of two surviving manuscripts

143 Linda Olson, ‘Romancing the Book: Manuscripts for “Euerich Inglische”’, in Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches, ed. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Maidie Hilmo and Linda Olson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), pp. 95–151 (pp. 101–16); Cathy Hume, ‘The Auchinleck Adam and Eve: An Exemplary Family Story’, in The Auchinleck Manuscript: New Perspectives, ed. Susanna Fein (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2016), pp. 36–51 (p. 37). 144 James Weldon, ‘The Naples Manuscript and the Case for a Female Readership’, Neophilolgus, 93:4 (2009), 703–22; Rhiannon Purdie, ‘Sexing the Manuscript: The Case for Female Ownership of MS Chetham 8009’, Neophilologus, 82:1 (1998), 139–48; Jordi Sánchez-Martí, ‘Reconstructing the Audiences of the Middle English Versions of Ipomadon’, Studies in Philology, 103:2 (2006), 153–77 (p. 168); James Wade, ‘Romance, Affect, and Ethical Thinking in a Fifteenth-Century Household Book: Chetham’s Library, MS 8009’, New Medieval Literatures, 15 (2013), 255-83; Jordi Sánchez-Martí, ‘Manchester, Chetham’s Library MS 8009 (Mun.A.6.31): A Codicological Description’, Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, 47 (2003), 129–54. 145 Johnston, Romance and the Gentry, pp. 120–21. 146 Johnston, Romance and the Gentry, pp. 110–11, 120–21. Frances McSparran and P. R. Robinson, eds, ‘Introduction’, to Cambridge University Library MS Ff.2.38 (London: Scolar Press, 1979), pp. i–xxvii (p. vii). Elsewhere, McSparran does not refer to the audience for Cambridge Ff.2.38 as a socioeconomic group but simply a ‘household’ who would have found the material both diverting and ‘didactic’ (akin to Cathy Hume’s view of Auchinleck, cited above). McSparran, ed., ‘General Introduction’, to Octovian Imperator (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1979), pp. 8–9 (p. 8).

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known to have been compiled and owned by Robert Thornton, a gentry landowner in

Yorkshire.147

All six of the romances have been edited in the last few decades, with new editions

of Torrent and Bevis in the last few years.148 Critics have called for both romances to be

treated more prominently in romance scholarship, Torrent because of its exemplary

content and Bevis because of its wide circulation in Europe and longevity throughout the

medieval period and beyond.149 There are eight extant manuscripts of the Middle English

Bevis and variations on the story remained in circulation in print in England until the early

eighteenth century, latterly in cheap ‘chapbook’ form.150 These chapbook editions had

barely passed out of circulation when the manuscript romances were rediscovered by

antiquarian scholars in the later 1700s.151 Though my own study is limited to pre-1500

147 The other is London, British Library, MS Additional 31042 (c. 1450) which contains four romances with a crusades theme: Duke Roland and Sir Otuel of Spain, Richard Coeur de Lion, Siege of Jerusalem and Siege of Milan. See Robert Thornton and His Books: Essays on the Lincoln and London Thornton Manuscripts, ed. Susanna Fein and Michael Johnston (Woodbridge and Rochester: Boydell & Brewer, 2014). See also Andrew King, ‘Romance’ p. 189. 148 Both James Wade’s edition of Torrent and Jennifer Fellows’s facing-page edition of the Cambridge and Naples Bevis were published in 2017. See my abbreviations and bibliography. 149 Jennifer Fellows and Ivana Djordjević, eds, ‘Introduction’, to Sir Bevis of Hampton in Literary Tradition, pp. 1–8. 150 I exclude Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce Fragm. E.13, although given as a manuscript in DMER, since it is actually a two-leaf fragment of an early imprint, c. 1500. See the Bodleian Library incunables catalogue <http://incunables.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/record/B-591> [accessed 4 Dec 2019]. See also Cooper, English Romance, p. 413; Jennifer Fellows, ‘The Middle English and Renaissance Bevis: A Textual Survey’, in Sir Bevis of Hampton in Literary Tradition, pp. 80–113 (p. 101). Fellows similarly excludes the incunable fragment. 151 Fellows finds that chapbook versions were in circulation until about 1780, although by 1775 the story was ‘“very little known”’ in the words of one printer (Fellows’s italics). William St Clair estimates that the story had ‘died out’ completely within a generation of 1774. Jennifer Fellows, ‘The Middle English and Renaissance Bevis’, p. 101; William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 350 and 347–49. On the rediscovery of the romances in the eighteenth century, see Arthur Johnston, Enchanted Ground: The Study of Medieval Romance in the Eighteenth Century (London: Athlone Press, 1964); David Matthews, The Making of Middle English, 1765–1910 (London & Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). For a recent return to this subject, see Monica Santini, The Impetus of Amateur Scholarship: Discussing and Editing Medieval Romances (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010).

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manuscripts, it is worth noting that evidence of later manuscripts or print editions survives

for all the disinheritance romances but Havelok, after 1500. We can infer from this a

relatively widespread familiarity with the material, and the popularity of the texts, at the

turn of the sixteenth century.

If, as Jennifer Fellows and Ivana Djordjević argue, Bevis deserves more attention

for these reasons, then Eglamour also deserves a share. While perhaps not so ‘infrequently

read’ and ‘little discussed’ as in the last decade, scholarship on Eglamour remains

disproportionate to its medieval and early modern prominence.152 There are seven

manuscript witnesses for the Middle English Eglamour, including the Percy Folio and a

sixteenth-century transcription of a print edition, of which there were at least seven.153 The

romance also inspired a 1444 play entitled ‘Eglemour and Degrebelle’.154 Like Bevis,

Eglamour’s character continues to reappear in various guises in postmedieval literature.

One ‘Sir Eglamour’ has a small but instrumental role in Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of

Verona (c. 1590–91), as a ‘gentleman’ who ‘vowed’st pure chastity’ after his own ‘true

love died’ and who befriends the heroine, Julia.155 Another ‘Sir Eglamore’ is the tragic

knight of William Wordsworth’s ‘The Somnambulist’ (1828), inadvertently causing the

death of his lover by wakening her from sleep-walking at the edge of Aira Force.156

Since the Middle English Eglamour remained in print until 1570 at least, we can

reasonably speculate that it was still known when The Two Gentlemen of Verona was

152 Nicholas Perkins, ‘Ekphrasis and Narrative in Emaré and Sir Eglamour of Artois’, in Medieval Romance, Medieval Contexts, ed. Rhiannon Purdie and Michael Cichon, pp. 47–60 (p. 48); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 71. 153 For the print editions see DMER. Eve Salisbury and James Weldon have said the same for Lybeaus Desconus, which survives in six manuscripts to Eglamour’s seven. See Salisbury and Weldon, eds, ‘Introduction’, to Lybeaus Desconus, available via METS [accessed 4 Dec 2019], paragraph 20 and note 37. 154 See Cooper’s index to English Romance in Time, pp. 416–17. 155 William Shakepeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona, IV. 3. 11, 20–21. 156 William Wordsworth, ‘The Somnambulist’, in The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, 10 vols, vol. 8, ed. Andrew J. George (Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1919), pp. 344–51.

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written and staged.157 By the late seventeenth century there was a ballad of ‘Sir Eglamore’

in circulation, and a version of this ‘song’ was reproduced in Mary Cooper’s The Child’s

New Play-Thing (1742).158 By the early nineteenth century, it is equally possible that

Wordsworth might have drawn the name ‘Eglamour’ from childhood reading, from

Shakespeare, or from encounters with the romance in Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient

Poetry (1765).159 From his own account of the poem’s composition, it seems Wordsworth

invented the story of ‘The Somnambulist’.160 But if he did, it has since passed into local

folklore.161

In Wordsworth’s poem and Shakespeare’s play, the name ‘Eglamour’ seems

intended to evoke typical romance themes of chivalry and (troubled) love. Where

Eglamour seems likely to have been one of the most recognisable Middle English

romances in the late-medieval period, there may be a similar case for the character

‘Eglamour’ in the centuries that follow, as a recognisable romance figure. It may also be

the case, for medieval readers as well as later writers, that ‘Eglamour’ represents an

157 For the probable dates, see the editorial introduction to The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in the Norton edition of the complete works (as given in my abbreviations and bibliography), pp. 83–84. 158 Courage Crowned with Conquest; or, A brief relation, how that valiant knight, and heroick champion Sir Eglamore, bravely fought with, and manfully slew, a terrible, huge, great monstrous dragon. To a pleasant new tune (London: Printed for F. Coles, T. Vere and J. Wright, 1672) available via EEBO [accessed 4 Dec 2019] and The Child’s New Play-Thing (London: Printed for T. Cooper at the Globe in Paternoster Row, 1742), pp. 114–20. See also M. O. Grenby, ‘Chapbooks, Children, and Children’s Literature’, The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 8:3 (2007), 277–303 (p. 297). 159 See Johnston, Enchanted Ground, pp. 1, 37–38, 177. 160 Wordsworth, ‘Notes on The Somnambulist’, p. 344. 161 Katherine M. Briggs includes ‘Sir Eglamore and the Lady Emma’ as an unattributed folk legend in her Dictionary of British Folk-Tales, but cites Edmund Bogg, who in turn paraphrases the legend and quotes a few stanzas of Wordsworth’s poem, though he does not make it clear that Wordsworth is the author. Katherine M. Briggs, A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the English Language, Part B: Folk Legends, 2 vols, vol. 2 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), pp. 352–53; Edmund Bogg, A Thousand Miles of Wandering Along the Roman Wall: The Old Border Region, Lakeland and Ribblesdale (Leeds: Bogg & Miles, 1898), p. 144. For a current version of the legend, see ‘Myths and Legends of Eden’ (last updated June 2018), Eden Council & Eden Tourism <http://www.visiteden.co.uk/images/pdfs/MythsandLegends.pdf> [accessed 4 Dec 2019].

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especially English conception of chivalry: while the medieval character is ‘Eglamour of

Artois’, a French knight, he is an English literary invention, for whom there is no direct

French antecedent or analogue. As Eglamour’s story is reshaped in time, we see the

imaginative work of the originary Middle English romance in action, inspiring creative

invention. Retrospectively, this evidence of Eglamour’s postmedieval afterlife might

indicate the growing popularity and influence of the Middle English romance in the

fifteenth century. Affording Eglamour an equal status with Bevis in this thesis, and

analysing aspects of its narrative at length, I hope to contribute to a better understanding

of this important but sometimes critically maligned romance.

Chapters

The thesis is organised into four chapters, each focusing on one of four narrative features

common to the group: the act of disinheritance, accusations of illegitimacy, recognition of

rightful heirship, and regeneration. Though the chapter titles describe something more

than a sequence of narrative events – and I will argue that these features are distributed

throughout the stories – they are also closely associated with certain narrative moments.

As such, the chapters are ordered roughly chronologically, and the final chapter deals

explicitly with the question of endings.

Chapter 1 attends to the beginnings of the romance narratives, where they

introduce the matter of inheritance with the idea of patrilineal primogeniture.

Subsequently, legal institutions such as wardship are exposed as faulty and bound to fail.

Always more than an opening act, disinheritance inflects the ideas of inheritance and

heirship throughout the romances, but important imaginative associations are established

here. In particular, the violent language and imagery surrounding acts of disinheritance

convey the permanent “cutting off” of the heir from his lineage, as he becomes

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figuratively fatherless. Analysing scenes of bloodshed, I consider the effects of an

imaginative association between blood and disinheritance, not least in its symbolic

allusion to rebirth. I draw on studies of medieval memory theory to show how bloody

severance becomes a ‘memory-image’ for disinheritance.162

Having drawn attention to the disinherited heirs’ expulsion from biological

lineages, Chapters 2 and 3 argue that the romances cultivate ambiguity and uncertainty

about what constitutes legitimate heirship. Chapter 2 focuses on accusations of

illegitimacy in the romances, finding that the texts exploit judicial conflicts between

medieval common law and ecclesiastical law on the matter of legitimacy. In effect, the

elliptical narration sustains the implicit illegitimacy of heroes whose bastardy the romance

narrators otherwise appear to deny. The signs of an illegitimacy trope emerge through a

comparative reading of Lybeaus Desconus, which itself demonstrates that literary

illegitimacy can mean something other than its legal definitions. This is especially true

where the idea of illegitimacy comes into contact with theological ideas about knowing

and self-knowledge, namely the notion that the ‘unknowing’ of worldly things (as in the

Cloud of Unknowing) delivers spiritual knowledge or truth. I will suggest that the

romances’ allusions to a quasi-theological, non-empiricist epistemology, through the

figure of the fair unknown, underwrites the paradoxical idea of illegitimate-yet-rightful

heirship.

In Chapter 3, I analyse forms of ‘recognition’, exploring the extents to which the

romances include or excise the legal bureaucracy associated with inheritance in late-

medieval practice, and the political implications of the law’s presence or absence.

Building on the observations made in Chapter 2, about the significance of twin births in

162 Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008; first published 1990), pp. 19, 27.

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the context of disputed legitimacy, Chapter 3 includes further examples of the ways in

which twin-heirs conspicuously challenge the idea of the one rightful heir, with reference

to medieval legal cases and wider literary contexts. As in Chapter 2, I find that the

romances sustain a distinction between lawful and rightful claims to inheritance. The texts

can be seen to express a definition of ‘recognition’ found in both medieval law and post-

medieval philosophy: one that relies on consensus and not inherent qualities. But internal

consistencies in the romances, with regard to ‘recognition’, continue to invite an

interrogative mode of engagement with the matter of rightful heirship.

In the final chapter, I draw attention to the complexity of the romances’ endings,

arguing that the endings do not provide a simple re-establishment of former order, but

represent the culmination of the stories’ movement towards uncertainty, as set out in

Chapters 1 to 3. The endings underscore the romances’ demotion of birthright in favour of

merit and luck, as an indicator of rightful inheritance, while inheritances are not just

reclaimed, but won and found and given away. With reference to the political model that

Lee Edelman calls ‘reproductive futurism’, I demonstrate how the depiction of adoption in

the romances provides a counterpoint to the privileged status that biological lineage

evidently holds elsewhere in late-medieval inheritance culture.163

While the thesis begins, in Chapter 1, by attending to the ostensibly destructive

aspects of disinheritance, by Chapter 4 it becomes clear that disinheritance is also a

productive force: both in the generation of the story and in terms of the imagined political,

economic and social outcomes for the romances’ disinherited heirs. In the conclusion, I

suggest that the findings of the thesis ought to change long-held assumptions about the

significance of romance inheritance narratives in wider medieval culture, and especially

163 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 17.

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how we interpret instances when romance material is invoked elsewhere. Taking the

‘eagle and child’ legend of the Stanley family as a case study, I demonstrate how the

romances’ idea of disinheritance, as delineated in the thesis, provides a new and coherent

interpretation of the political motives behind the family’s appropriation of a romance

motif. The conclusion ends by setting out new possibilities for further research.

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Chapter 1

Disinheritance

The disinheritance romances commonly begin with a father hoping to secure the

transference of his estates to an heir ‘of his bodi’ (his biological offspring), according

to primogeniture (Havelok, l. 110).1 The presentation varies. Octavian and

Tryamour, for example, depict landholding fathers anxious that they have not yet

produced an heir. In Tryamour, King Ardus and Queen Margaret lament that ‘no

chylde come tham betwene’, mirroring the emperor and empress in Octavian,

married ‘seven yeres’, ‘bot child togedir had thay none’ (Tryamour, l. 29; NO, ll. 1–

24). The southern Octavian adds an account of the emperor before marriage, urged

by his counsellors to choose a wife to ‘get[e] hym an eyr’ (SO, l. 34).

For Matthew Giancarlo, the narrative premise of Octavian is an example of

the Middle English romances’ preoccupation with genealogy and lineage, their

thoughts ‘always on a child’.2 That said, the ‘family romance’ classification has

perhaps led to an over-emphasis in romance criticism on the biological-familial

relationships portrayed in the texts, at the expense of the economic dimensions of

relationships defined by inheritance. Florschuetz’s essay on Octavian, for instance,

does not name disinheritance as a theme in the romance but understands the

illegitimacy allegation there as a threat to ‘valued bloodlines’.3 The economic

definition of inheritance (i.e., land) is tacitly made secondary to genealogy or

1 The phrase, ‘of his body’ is also a legal formula, used extensively in charters and wills. For an example, see ‘Roger Flore (or Flower), Esq., of London, and Oakham, Rutlandshire, 1424–5’, in Fifty Earliest English Wills in the Court of Probate, London: A. D. 1387–1439; with a priest’s of 1454, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 56–64 (esp. pp. 60–61). Also published online by the University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative (1999) <http://name.umdl.umich.edu/EEWills> [accessed 4 Dec 2019]. 2 Giancarlo, ‘Speculative Genealogies’, p. 355. 3 Florschuetz, ‘Women’s Secrets’, p. 236, n. 2.

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lineage. In her influential essay, ‘Marriage, Family, Intimacy’, Felicity Riddy notes

the medieval economic definition of family as a ‘household’, as encompassing non-

blood relations; but the essay focuses on the depiction of ‘fathers, sons and

husbands’. Riddy argues that the texts favour the idea of ‘family as lineage’.4

The idea that lineage and inheritance (paralleled with genealogy and property

rights) are coterminous is drawn from the law of primogeniture; but it is important to

recall that, for late-medieval readers, mentions of ‘heritage’ and ‘heirs’ referred to

land ownership before anything else. In Octavian and Tryamour, the narrators clearly

qualify children in terms of heirship:

A child to gete betwene them two

That ther heyre myght bee. (Tryamour, ll. 35–36)

In the northern Octavian, the longed-for child is, more precisely, someone: ‘[t]hat

after tham thair land moghte welde’ (NO, l. 34). In these examples, the child and heir

are one and the same, but the emphasis is on heirship: the subsequent narrative is not

simply one of familial separation or lost children, but of disinheritance and lost heirs.

Nor are these opening scenarios indicative of the romances’ final position on the

issue, since disinheritance raises the question of whether lineage and inheritance are

truly equivalent. To revise Giancarlo’s statement on the romances’ thematic

preoccupations: we might say that their thoughts are always on an heir.

This is not to dispense with the child as a literary figure, altogether. Allan

Mitchell has persuasively argued that the child in medieval literature is a figure

4 Riddy, p. 248; p. 235, my italics. On the ‘household’ definition of family see David Herlihy, ‘The Making of the Medieval Family: Symmetry, Structure, and Sentiment’, in Medieval Families: Perspectives on Marriage, Household & Children, ed. Carol Neel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), pp. 192–213 and Barbara Hanawalt, The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 4 and p. 156.

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capable of articulating complex philosophical ideas: ‘medieval writers showed great

interest in the infirmities [of] infants’ in particular, Mitchell suggests, ‘because [these

qualities] speak to something … about the human condition’.5 In the romances under

study here, disinheritance occurs during the hero’s infancy, so at various points I will

consider the significance of the disinherited heir as a child: for example, in my

discussion of memory in Chapter 3. But this thesis argues for reading disinheritance,

as opposed to childhood (or family), as the overarching narrative and conceptual

framework in Bevis, Havelok, Eglamour, Octavian, Tryamour and Torrent. The

portrayal of childhood in these romances is both an instrument of, and incidental to

the disinheritance narrative, rather than the other way around. As such, my analysis

only attends to the question of childhood where it is relevant to the portrayal of

disinheritance, heirship and the acquisition of heritable property.

Anticipating Disinheritance

To introduce the matter of inheritance in the shape of the longed-for child, as in

Octavian and Tryamour, is to present the idea of primogeniture together with an

intimation of its risks as an inheritance model: that there may be a lack of biological

offspring who ‘ther heyre myght bee’ (Tryamour, l. 36). As the stories unfold, it

becomes clear that the undoing of patrilineal succession is, ironically, this initial

patriarchal preoccupation with it. In both romances, antagonistic characters

successfully exploit the fathers’ anxieties about their procreative capabilities, with

the result that they disinherit their own heirs. Eglamour and Torrent similarly present

5 J. Allan Mitchell, Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), pp. 33 and 35. The significance of ‘the child’ as a medieval literary figure warrants further research but for a discussion of some of the issues and possibilities see Phyllis Gaffney, Constructions of Childhood and Youth in Old French Literature (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011).

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the paternal desire to preserve lineage as ironically self-defeating. There, fathers of

daughters (the demographic Stephen Rigby regards as especially invested in

primogeniture) are tyrannical in their pursuit of suitable sons-in-law:6 they

inadvertently encourage clandestine unions between their daughters and the titular

heroes, and subsequently condemn their own grandchildren as illegitimate. In Bevis

and Havelok, which will be the main focus of this chapter, patriarchal concerns

centre on minor heirs, too young to inherit at the time of their fathers’ deaths, and

whose interests their fathers cannot protect.

Noël James Menuge rightly identifies ‘wardship’ as a significant issue in both

romances.7 In medieval England, when a landholder died, an Inquisition Post

Mortem (hereafter IPM) determined the nature of tenure and the identity and age of

the heir.8 The age at which heirs could legally inherit (called ‘majority’) varied

according to tenure and gender: notionally twenty-one years for male heirs to lands

held in knight-service and fourteen or sixteen years for female heirs depending upon

marital status; although court records show further variation to the ages at which

women could inherit property.9 If the heir was underage, the lord of the lands would

have custody of both the property and the person of the heir, as a ward. When the

ward reached the age to inherit, a writ de etate probanda (hereafter ‘proof of age’)

would confirm that they had legal attained majority. Guardians were not allowed to

take profits from the lands of wards, but wardships were still the ‘most lucrative of

6 Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages, p. 205. 7 Menuge, Wardship, as cited in the introduction. 8 Hicks, ‘Introduction’, Fifteenth-Century Inquisitions Post Mortem, pp. 1 and 3. 9 Simpson, Land Law, p. 18; Kim. M. Phillips, Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England, c. 1270–c. 1540 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 33.

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all the incidents of tenure’, since they could be sold on, and with them the right to

sell the marriage of the ward (providing to a person of equal social rank).10

In Havelok, the minors in question are Goldeboru, daughter of King

Athelwold of England, his ‘rithe eyr’ (rightful heir) and Havelok, ‘that was the eir’ to

King Birkabeyn in Denmark (ll. 289, 410). Their ailing fathers arrange wardships for

their children before they die, but the guardians (named Godard and Godrich)

promptly betray their wards for personal profit. In Bevis, the hero’s father dies during

his minority and his de facto legal guardian, the king of England, is conspicuously

absent. His inheritance is promptly usurped by the German emperor, his soon-to-be

stepfather (later named ‘Devoun’, l. 2913). Wardship thus fails in both romances.

But while the stories take aim at corrupt guardians, legal minority itself is also

presented in a critical light.

Minority is the specific issue concerning the two kings in Havelok, when

Athelwold worries that his daughter is ‘so yung that sho ne couthee | Gon on fote ne

speke with mouthe’ and when Birkabeyn similarly laments that his ‘children yunge’

are yet unable to ‘speken wit tunge’ (ll. 112–13; ll. 368–70). These brief descriptions

evoke the sentiments of childhood ‘vulnerability’ and parental affection;11 but they

are also quite clearly related to the heirs’ ability to inherit. The children’s perceived,

youthful incapacities are contrasted with the requisite skills for landholding and

rulership. Goldeboru ‘ne can speke ne sho kan go’, laments Athelwold, but he would

worry less:

Yif scho couthe on horse ride

And a thousande men bi hire syde

10 Hicks, ‘Introduction’, Fifteenth-Century Inquisitions Post Mortem, p. 6; Simpson, Land Law, p. 18. 11 See Julie Nelson Couch, ‘The Vulnerable Hero: Havelok and the Revision of Romance’, The Chaucer Review, 42:3 (2008), 330–53.

64

And sho were comen intil helde

And Engelond sho couthe welde. (ll. 125–33)

Birkabeyn likewise longs for his children to be able to ‘speken and gangen, on horse

riden | Knictes and sweynes by here siden’ (ll. 371–72).

As it happens, Birkabeyn underestimates his exceptional heir, who proves

astute despite his young age, offering ‘manrede’ (homage) to Godard in exchange for

his life (ll. 483–95). In Bevis, the hero’s legal minority, which assumes him

incapable of fulfilling the role of a feudal tenant, is at odds with his preternatural

physical strength and understanding. Said to be only ‘seve winter olde’, Bevis

nonetheless guesses his mother’s conspiracy with Devoun and denounces her as a

‘vile houre’ (ll. 302–10). He subsequently attacks a porter for dismissing him from

his home, hitting the man so hard he cleaves his head in two (l. 418). The problem

for these underage heirs in Bevis and Havelok is not so much their youthful

vulnerability or incapacity, but the prescriptive nature of legal minority and their lack

of authority as minors.

Even Bevis’s closest ally, his uncle and mentor, Saber, makes his offer of

support conditional on Bevis coming ‘of age’ and ‘of elde’. He says:

And whan thow ert of swich elde

That thow might the self wilde

And ert of age

Thanne scheltow come in te Ingelonde

With werre winne in to thin honde

Thin eritage.

I schel thee helpe with alle me might

With dent of swerd to gete thee right

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Be thow of elde. (ll. 367–75)

There is an implicit distinction between coming ‘of age’ and being ‘of elde’ here,

based on their rhymes: the former is associated with claiming ‘heritage’ and the latter

with being able to ‘wilde’, to govern an earldom or, perhaps, to govern oneself. The

former points to legal majority, an arbitrarily defined coming of age, while the latter

implies physical and/or intellectual maturity. Both Bevis and Havelok juxtapose the

constraints of legal minority – making the heir vulnerable to exploitation – with their

demonstrable physical strength and intellectual astuteness. The romances thereby

intimate some discrepancy between the personal qualities required of an heir, and the

demands of the law.

The sense of systemic failure extends to the presentation of the fathers’

succession planning. They are arguably the first critical target in Bevis and Havelok,

as dynastic ambitions are made to appear inevitably flawed, by the portents of

disinheritance at the outset of the stories. In the opening lines of Havelok, the

narrator promises a ‘tale [of] Havelok’ who ‘[w]hile he was litel, he yede ful naked’,

prefiguring the reader’s understanding of Havelok’s character with a description of

his youthful poverty (ll. 5–6). This first mention of Havelok as ‘the eir’ – where

previously he was Birkabeyn’s unnamed ‘sone’ (l. 350) – heralds the romance’s

dramatic disinheritance scene, which will be given close attention below.

Meanwhile, the reader’s foreknowledge of Havelok’s poverty, and therefore

disinheritance, exposes the futility of Birkabeyn’s attempts to ensure dynastic

stability. He chooses a guardian, in Godard, who swiftly betrays him for personal

gain. Birkabeyn personifies a patriarchal commitment to primogeniture which is

fraught with anxiety, and in attempting to secure his heirs’ inheritance he puts them

in the way of a harm he fails to perceive.

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The opening sequence in Bevis likewise presents the expectation of patrilineal

succession in anticipation of its failure. The earl of Hampton, Sir Gii, is said to be a

‘strong’ man, but ‘ever he levede withouten wive | Al to late and long’; he does not

marry until ‘he was fallen in to elde’ and his strength is gone, ‘[t]hat he ne mighte

himself welde’ (ll. 17–20). Sir Gii’s belated attempt to beget an heir, like Chaucer’s

January in the Merchant’s Tale, has similarly ironic but far more severe

consequences.12 Gii’s young bride is said to have ‘loved’ the emperor of Germany

‘[w]el thar beforen’, and she conspires with him to murder her husband (and later

Bevis, ll. 27–36). Betrayed by an unfaithful wife to his death, Sir Gii leaves his

young heir an orphan. A late-medieval reader, especially one familiar with Havelok,

would recognise the danger for Bevis as sole heir, ‘boute seve winter olde | Whan his

fader was ded’; and sure enough, his inheritance is promptly seized by Devoun, in

the absence of a guardian (ll. 53–54). The implication in Havelok is similarly that

Athelwold and Birkabeyn have left it late to beget heirs, since their children are still

minors when they (their fathers) approach the end of their lives.13 But the narrator of

the Auchinleck Bevis is quite clear about Gii’s culpability, waiting ‘al to late and

long’ to marry. He falls victim to his own belated desire to produce a biological heir,

‘his lif a les’ in the process (l. 29).

Just as each of the disinheritance romances begins with a father hoping to

secure the transference of his estate according to primogeniture, it proves an ill-fated

aspiration in all cases. Plans for patrilineal succession collapse and the romance

adventure begins. A significant element of Saber’s promise to his disinherited

nephew, quoted above, is its shift into the conditional mood. He says:

12 As cited in the introduction. 13 The same motif surfaces in Gamelyn and in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale: in the latter case the problem is averted, but only because Walter’s people encourage him to marry (as mentioned in my introduction).

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I schel thee helpe with alle me might

With dent of swerd to gete thee right

Be thow of elde. (ll. 373–75)

The meaning of these lines could be, as the romance’s editors have suggested, that

Saber shall defend Bevis’s right, while he is in exile, until he comes of age.14 This

reading may be supported by the much later revelation that Saber has been leading a

‘baronage’ to Devoun each year to claim Bevis’s ‘heritage’ (ll. 1341–44). The more

immediate reading of these lines, however, where Bevis’s life is in danger, is that

Saber will help the disinherited heir to win his right, with ‘dent of swerd’, when or if

he comes of age.15 There is a brutal pragmatism in the conditional tone, but it is also

a grammatical marker of the uncertainty effected by Bevis’s disinheritance. This new

state of uncertainty initiates the romance’s adventure and inflects its treatment of

inheritance and heirship throughout.

Re-imagining ‘Heritage’

While Bevis is an extraordinarily rich and diverse romance, the matter of inheritance

is never far from its surface, with references to landed property occurring once every

few hundred lines.16 Disinheritance is occasionally named as such in the romances

– ‘desereteth’ appears in Bevis and ‘deserite’ in Havelok – but is otherwise an

‘objectification’, ‘produced by and through’ the narrative (Bevis, l. 4265; Havelok, l.

2547).17 Rather than euphemising the issue, the relative absence of the word

14 See Bevis, note to l. 375. 15 Further analysis of ll. 1341–44, below, supports my suggested interpretation of ll. 367–75. 16 There are references to ‘my / his / their londes’ at ll. 428, 1438, 2914, 3096, 3342, 4284; ‘seinori of Hamtoun’ at l. 3092; ‘his erldom’ at l. 4575; ‘eritage’ at ll. 372, 1343, 1439, 2940, 2966, 3002, 3502, 4300; and ‘eir’ at ll. 556, 3580, 3768, 4265. 17 I borrow this approach from Neil Kenny’s study of curiosity: presented with the problem of whether to identify curiosity as a ‘concept’, or ‘a set of words’, or an ‘extra-conceptual and extra-linguistic

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‘disinheritance’ or cognates in the romances has an important imaginative effect: the

romances’ discursive construction of disinheritance is more generative because it is

disconnected from the common legal and vernacular senses of ‘disinheritance’ (to

mean ‘deprivation or loss of possessions or privileges’).18 I provisionally identify

disinheritance in the romances according to the dictionary definition, as the point at

which an heir is deprived of the ability to succeed to the inheritance to which they

have a right by birth. My analysis will reveal, however, that the romances’ own

concept of disinheritance is not monolithic, or reducible to a singular act or event: it

is not a ‘single objectification’ but ‘always in the process of being constructed or

undone’.19

The romances’ idea of disinheritance can be ‘reconstructed’ in part by

analysing the adjacent ‘terminology of the texts’, of which ‘heritage’ and ‘land’ are

the most prominent examples in Bevis.20 The instances of ‘heritage’, in particular,

warrant close attention. The METS edition of the Auchinleck Bevis (1997) simply

glosses the Middle English ‘eritage’ as ‘heritage’ in all but one instance, where it is

given the alternative gloss of ‘inheritance’ (l. 2996). There is no additional editiorial

note here, but the shift from ‘heritage’ to ‘inheritance’ raises a number of questions

about how we read ‘heritage’ in the romances. The modern English ‘heritage’,

meaning ‘that which has been or may be inherited’, has increasingly come to refer to

common rather than personal property and to intangible cultural traditions as well as

to objects and the built environment. By contrast, ‘inheritance’ is used more

reality’, Kenny proposes to analyse curiosity as an ‘objectification’ produced through ‘discourse’. Neil Kenny, Curiosity in Early Modern Europe: Word Histories (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998), pp. 17 and 190. 18 See MED, disheritesoun, n. The dictionary does not specify ‘heritable’ in its definition, though the citations show this is the word’s usual application. 19 Kenny, Word Histories, p. 190. 20 Kenny, Word Histories, p. 17.

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narrowly in modern English to refer to personal property: ‘hereditary succession to

property, a title, office’.21

The divergence between ‘heritage’ and ‘inheritance’ witnessed in modern

English is less evident in Middle English, where both ‘heritage’ and ‘enheritaunce’

primarily mean ‘something legally inherited or inheritable’: ‘legally’ being the

operative word, referring to the kind of tangible property arbitrated by law and, as

the MED citations show, frequently landed property.22 Arguably then, modern

English ‘inheritance’ would be the more appropriate gloss for all instances of

‘heritage’ throughout Bevis. Some of the economic specificity of ‘inheritance’ in the

romances is lost by the conflation of modern English and Middle English definitions

of ‘heritage’, since the modern English word performs differently, as a catch-all term

for property, lineage and class. Here, I read ‘heritage’ (Middle English) in the

romances as an economic matter – heritable landed property – and will refer to it as

inheritance (modern English) in my discussion unless quoting from one of the texts.

In turn, my analysis demonstrates how the disinheritance narrative works to extricate

the economic matter of inheritance from the issue of lineage.

This being said, we should acknowledge that the Middle English writers’ use

of the word ‘heritage’ is a deliberate choice, over the alternative, ‘enheritaunce’. The

terms appear to share the same meaning, but ‘heritage’, according to the MED, has a

21 See OED, heritage, n., and inheritance, n. The entry for ‘heritage’ was first published in 1898 and only the draft additions for 1993 and 2005 indicate the increasing use of the word to describe things of historical significance or cultural interest. Examples of this usage include the UNESCO World Heritage Sites programme, established in 1972, and its Intangible Cultural Heritage List; the government agency (now registered charity) English Heritage, established in 1983; and the UK National Lottery Heritage Fund (formerly Heritage Lottery Fund), which defines ‘intangible heritage’ as ‘traditions, customs, skills’ or other aspects of ‘living culture’. See <https://ich.unesco.org/en/lists> [accessed 4 Dec 2019]; <http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/about-us/> [accessed 4 Dec 2019]; ‘Culture and Memories’ <http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/our-work/cultures-and-memories> [accessed 4 Dec 2019]. 22 See MED, heritage, n. and enheritaunce, n.

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longer and more wide-ranging history of usage in English than ‘enheritaunce’, which

is used less frequently and more formally. The use of ‘heritage’ in Bevis, then, may

be a marker of its vernacular language as well as intimating the cultivation of a

literary, extra-legal discourse on the matter of inheritance. Another reason for the use

of ‘heritage’ over ‘enheritaunce’ in the verse romances may be its propensity for

rhyming with certain other words. The words ‘age’, ‘outrage’, ‘parage’, ‘marriage’

and ‘baronage’ recur as rhyme words with ‘heritage’ in Bevis, and there are

comparable examples in Havelok and Horn.23 These rhyming collocations give

‘heritage’ a certain ‘associative value’:24 alluding to the issues of minority and

majority (‘age’), disinheritance (‘outrage’), social status (‘parage’ and ‘marriage’),

class and armed conflict (‘barnage’ meaning both the barony and an army), they are

metonyms of the disinheritance narrative.25

The frequency with which ‘heritage’ is rhymed in the romance, as above, is

symptomatic of the tendency for the word to appear at the end of a line, as the

subject of the phrase: thereby underlining the importance of ‘heritage’ in the story.

This effect is heightened in manuscripts where the verse is subject to what Rhiannon

Purdie calls ‘graphic tail-rhyme’, as illustrated in the version of Bevis in Egerton

2862 (see Fig. 5, p. 237).26 Every third line is removed from the main, left-hand

23 Examples include: ‘of age … heritage’ (Bevis, ll. 369–72, 2995–96); ‘baronage … heritage’ (Bevis, ll. 1343–44, 3001–02, 3501–02, 4299–300 and King Horn, ll. 1293–94); ‘eritage … parage’ (Bevis, ll. 1439–40); ‘eritage … utrage’ (Havelok, ll. 2836–37). 24 Roger Dalrymple, Language and Piety in Middle English Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), p. 26. Where Derek Pearsall describes Middle English romances’ formulaic verbal style as ‘a form of descriptive shorthand’, Dalrymple argues for the ‘associative value of formulaic language … how the recurrence of a fixed phrase across a tradition of writing makes for incremental meaning, each appearance evoking contiguous usages and associations gleaned from context’ (p. 26, italics in the original). Derek Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1977), p. 149. 25 Bevis, see note above. See also MED, barnage, n.(1). 26 Rhiannon Purdie, Anglicising Romance, pp. 66–79; also see Rhiannon Purdie, ‘The Implications of Manuscript Layout in Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas, Modern Language Studies, 1:3 (2005), 263–74.

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column into a second right-hand column, which is not pushed to the margins so

much as it runs down the vertical centre of the page. Kathyrn Kerby-Fulton and

Andrew Klein argue that ‘a scribe attuned to the potential of mise-en-page’ could use

‘specific formal arrangements on the page to ask readers to begin understanding a

text prior to any close engagement with its language’.27 As a reader begins to engage

with the language, the ‘graphic tail-rhyme’ layout means that the bracketed lines

attract attention first, as though an index to the fuller content of the verse. Kerby-

Fulton and Klein note the ‘temptation’ to read bracketed lines consecutively, while

Jessica Brantley argues that multi-column layouts in medieval manuscripts invite

multiple approaches to reading line order and effectively produce more than one

poem.28 Wherever Bevis was rendered in graphic tail-rhyme, as in the Egerton

manuscript, ‘heritage’ would be the recurrent subject of the resulting poems-within-

a-poem.29

The first characters to mention Bevis’s ‘heritage’ are his uncles: firstly Saber

of Wight (as quoted above) and later Saber Florentin, who advises Bevis:

‘thin em is in Wight

And everi yer on a dai certaine

upon th’emperur of Almaine

He ginneth gret bataile take

Beves, al for thine sake

27 Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Andrew W. Klein, ‘Rhymed Alliterative Verse in Mise en page Transition: Two Case Studies in English Poetic Hybridity’, in The Medieval Literary Beyond Form, pp. 87–118 (p. 89). 28 Kerby-Fulton and Klein, ‘Rhymed Alliterative Verse’, p. 110; Jessica Brantley, ‘Reading the Forms of Sir Thopas’, The Chaucer Review, 47:4 (2013), 416–38 (p. 427). 29 Besides Egerton 2862, Bevis is rendered in graphic tail-rhyme in Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 175/96. The first 475 lines of the Auchinleck Bevis are tail-rhyme, but written in a single column without brackets. For descriptions of the layout of each extant manuscript, see Jennifer Fellows, ‘The Middle English and Renaissance Bevis’, pp. 104–08.

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He weneth wel, that thowe be ded

Tharfore, kosin, be me red

An hondred men ich yeve thee wighte

...

And thow schelt wende te Saber

Sai, ich grette him wel ilome!

Yif ye han nede, sendeth to me,

Ich wile yow helpe with al me might

Aghen th’emperur to fight’. (ll. 2916–30)

Interactions such as these are a reminder that there are people other than Bevis with

interests in contesting the usurpation of his inheritance. They invoke ‘heritage’

before he does, and though they ostensibly offer to support their nephew, the two

Sabers are also the collateral heirs of the late Sir Gii’s estate in Bevis’s absence.

That Saber in Wight ‘weneth wel’ that Bevis ‘be ded’ is a pertinent detail, in

the passage above. In fact, it repeats and reinforces an earlier mention of this

misapprehension. The first time the reader hears of Saber of Wight’s annual

campaign is after he receives the (false) report that Bevis has been ‘hangyd’. Saber

‘wep and made dreme’, the narrator says:

For he was the childes em

And ech yer on a dai certaine

Upon th’emperur of Almaine

With a wel gret baronage

A cleimede his eritage. (ll. 1331–44)

The juxtaposition is effective, associating Saber’s annual campaign to claim ‘his

eritage’ with his belief in the reports of Bevis’s death. This phrase, ‘his eritage’,

becomes ambiguous: does Saber claim Hampton in Bevis’s right, or his own? It is

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Saber Florentin who assures Bevis that Saber of Wight ‘ginneth grete bataile take |

Beves al for thine sake’, although ‘[h]e weneth wel that thow be ded’ (ll. 2919–21,

my italics). Telling Bevis that he ought to return to Hampton himself, in these terms,

offers both an encouragement and a latent threat.

Where the romance begins by establishing the idea of inheritance in the form

of a notionally monolineal relationship between a father or parental couple and their

heir, disinheritance exposes the complexity of lateral relationships and competing

claims. This multi-dimensional view of inheritance extends to the portrayal of the

usurpers in the romances. When Devoun seizes Hampton and disinherits Bevis, for

example, he also establishes a new heir in the shape of his own son.30 In Havelok,

Godard and Godrich each vocalise concerns for their own heirs as they plot to

disinherit Havelok and Goldeboru. Godard imagines how, with Havelok gone, his

offspring could become, ‘“Louerdings after me | Of al Denemark”’ (ll. 514–16).

Likewise, Godrich questions his oath to protect Goldeboru as he considers that he

has ‘“a sone, a ful fayr knave”’: ‘“He shal Engelond al have! | He shal ben king, he

shal ben sire’” (ll. 308–10). The usurpers’ concerns ironically mirror those of

Birkabeyn and Athelwold, whom they plan to betray, and it remains for the reader to

decide whether this mitigates or underscores their treacherous self-interest. But these

allusions to a second generation also help to complicate the matter of rightful

inheritance in the romance, providing examples of heirs whose inheritance from their

own parents could be contested legally. Yet, having made themselves sovereigns,

Godard and Godrich are respectively in a position to legitimate their own tenures

and, in turn, their own heirs’ lawful accession to the throne thereafter.

30 Bevis, ll. 3098–116: this episode relates how Devoun accidentally kills his son (presumably Bevis’s half-brother, though the narrator does not say) when he throws a knife, poorly aimed, at Bevis. Sharing this news with his supporters in Wight, ‘Beves lough and hadde gode game’ (l. 3116).

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The simple idea that inheritance is a birthright gives way, in the

disinheritance romances, to an ongoing interrogation of legitimate and illegitimate

means of inheriting. Returning to Bevis, one of the later mentions of his ‘heritage’

asks that we consider the possibility of treating an inheritance as a commodity.

Devoun is providing a deceitful account of how he came to be the lord of Hampton,

and says that the young Bevis, a ‘proude wreche’, ‘solde me his eritage’ when he

was ‘of age’ (ll. 2989, 2995–96). There would be complex nuances here for late-

medieval gentry readers with a passing familiarity with the business of buying and

selling formerly heritable land. The Middle English instructional text, Rules for

Purchasing Land alerted potential buyers to the ‘dangers’ of ‘the dark corners of the

legal system’ where ‘rival claimants might emerge years after the transfer of the

land’.31 Devoun’s claim that Bevis was ‘of age’ at the time of the purchase is an

accurate technical detail, consistent with the advice of the Rules, that the seller must

be ‘of age’.32 The popularity of the Rules is attested by its survival in fifteen

manuscripts, including the romance compilation, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS

Ashmole 61. It is important to note this proximity between the romances and the

Rules, because when Bevis returns unexpectedly to Hampton in the guise of the

‘rival claimant’, it is possible that the romance’s readers would recognise there the

adverse situation that the Rules warns against, more readily than they could identify

with the romance’s hero. The object of outrage, then, is not so much Bevis’s

dispossession but Devoun’s debasement of the lawful acquisition of land by

purchase, citing the legitimate process of selling as a decoy for stealing.

31 See George Shuffelton, ed., ‘Introduction’, to Rules for Purchasing Land, available via METS [accessed 4 Dec 2019], paragraph 5. Quotations are from this edition. 32 Rules, l. 9.

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The possibility of trading an inheritance is presented in a more positive light

elsewhere in Bevis, with the provocative suggestion that even spiritual ‘heritage’ can

be exchanged. Since King Ermin has only one daughter, he offers Bevis her marriage

with the promise of his kingdom after his death. Although Bevis has arrived at

Ermin’s court a dispossessed exile with no one to vouch for his identity, Ermin

makes this offer upon the single condition that Bevis converts from Christianity to

Islam:

‘And thow wile thee god forsake

And to Apolyn, me lord, take

Hire [Josian] I schel thee yeve to wive

And al me lond after me live!’ (ll. 557–60)

The structure of Ermin’s offer demonstrates the place of religion in the romance,

secondary to landholding and, potentially, a means of acquiring new land. Ermin’s

offer does, however, test the idea of Christian heirship: converting to Islam will

secure the hero an inheritance on earth but, implicitly, rejecting Christianity will lose

him his inheritance in heaven. That Bevis declines seems to preserve his status as a

Christian hero (if not an especially pious one), but it may also be inferred that

maintaining his Christianity, just as it loses him the Armenian inheritance, has the

effect of maintaining his right to the English lands. Crucially, though, the romance

offers no definitive position on the relationship between religion and land rights.

More revealing is the ease with which spiritual inheritance is invoked in the context

of land transfer, as a political and economic exchange, suggesting that neither

spiritual nor secular inheritances are innate and inalienable.

In contrast, the phrase ‘kende heritage’, uttered later by Bevis himself, at first

appears to imply that his inheritance is ‘natural’ to him (l. 2940): editors have

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glossed this phrase as ‘my natural heritage’, and ‘kende’ can mean ‘natural’ or ‘in

accordance with the ordinary course of nature’ in Middle English. The MED

citations collate instances that appear to refer simply to ‘birthright’.33 But the context

of the usage in Bevis unsettles the assumptions underlying this interpretation. Bevis

plans to return to Hampton, to see:

‘Yif ich mighte with eni ginne

Me kende eritage to winne!’ (ll. 2939–40)

The conditional ‘yif’ and the intent to resort to ‘eni ginne’ (ingenuity, trick) at his

disposal to ‘winne’ his inheritance are noteworthy: these terms unsettle the idea of

inheritance as an inevitable and natural destiny. The word ‘kende’, in turn, can have

the more general meaning of ‘gentle’ or ‘noble’.34 As such, it may be read as

qualifying Bevis’s rightful ‘heritage’ as ‘noble’, rather than intensifying the idea that

he has an innate right to a particular estate. To compare, in the romance Le Bone

Florence of Rome, a character is declared to be the ‘kyndyst heyre’ to the throne: a

designation which indicates that ‘kende’ is a quality of scale rather than a binary

category; one can be the ‘most rightful’, rather than the only rightful heir.35 Rather

than pre-empting Bevis’s lordship of Hampton, the phrase, ‘[m]e kende heritage’

poses a question: it remains uncertain what Bevis will be able to win, what and

where his ‘kende heritage’ will turn out to be.

A definition of ‘heritage’ with Bevis as the primary source might describe it

as something which has essentially been lost and which a rightful heir has to ‘winne’:

33 See MED, kende, adj., senses 1 and 3. This line from Bevis is given as one of the examples. 34 It is used in this way elsewhere in Bevis, for example at l. 1398 and l. 3052. See MED, kende, adj, sense 6. 35 Le Bone Florence of Rome: A Critical Edition and Facing Page Translation, ed. and trans. Jonathan Stavsky (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2017), l. 1257.

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‘With werre to winne in to thin honde

Thin heritage’ (ll. 371–72)

‘Me kende eritage to winne’ (l. 2940)

‘for to winne is londe aghen’. (l. 3342)

Nearly all instances of the word ‘heritage’ in the Auchinleck Bevis, in fact, refer

directly to dispossession.36 Disinheritance propels the narrative forward, even when

Bevis’s own lands are not at issue: the hero is driven back to England for the final

time, after being crowned king of Mombraunt, by the news that King Edgar has

disinherited his cousin, Robaunt (ll. 4253–73). But as much as disinheritance inflects

the meaning of ‘heritage’ in the romance, it also forms the figure of the heir.

Bevis only emerges into the story as such, by virtue of the disinheritance.

Before this, there is no mention of Bevis’s ‘heritage’ and nor is Bevis explicitly

nominated as Gii’s ‘heir’. He is simply called ‘knave child’ when born; then ‘[your]

sone’ by Devoun, when threatening Sir Gii; ‘me … child’ and ‘me yonge sone Bef’

by Sir Gii; and ‘me yonge sone Bef’ by his mother, ordering his execution (ll. 50,

220, 226, 268, 338). Bevis only recognises himself as an heir when confronted with a

vision of his disinheritance. Disguised as a shepherd in order to evade capture, he

looks ‘homward to the toun | That scholde ben his’. Standing on a ‘doun’, he

exclaims, ‘Ne was ich ones an erles sone | And now am herde!’ (ll. 380–87).

Literally and figuratively, he can only see his inheritance when he is removed from

it. The resulting idea, in the romance, that the event of disinheritance forms the heir,

is an inversion of the tenet of medieval law that an heir cannot be legally identified

36 The one, possible exception does still refer to Bevis’s disinheritance indirectly: King Ermin pretends, for his daughter’s benefit, that Bevis has left them in order to return to Hampton ‘in to his owene eritage’ (l. 1439).

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until after the death of the tenant.37 The inversion suggests, paradoxically, that the

rightful heir can only be identified after disinheritance.

Bloodshed

The violence with which disinheritance occurs is one of the most striking common

features among the romances, involving scenes of bloodshed in Bevis, Havelok, and

Octavian. The bloody imagery is rich in symbolic potential in the context of

disinheritance and ruptured families, which can be best appreciated through a close

reading of Havelok, in the first instance. The relevant passage is quoted at length

below. The recently orphaned Havelok, Swanborw and Helfled have been

imprisoned by their guardian, Godard. He is said to plot a ‘trechery’ against the

children and goes to visit them in prison (l. 443). A starving Havelok begs him for

food, but:

Ther-offe yaf he [Godard] nouth a stra

But tok the maydnes bothe samen

Al so it were up on hiis gamen

Al so he wolde with hem leyke

That weren for hunger grene and bleike.

Of bothen he karf on two here throtes

And sithen hem al to grotes.

Ther was sorwe, wo-so it sawe,

Hwan the children by the wawe

Leyen and sprawleden in the blod.

Havelok it saw and therbi stod. (ll. 466–76)

37 Simpson, Land Law, p. 52.

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While the romance’s narrative style is typically brief, this sequence of events is

noticeably abrupt, with the murder taking up only two lines. Spoken aloud, this

couplet delivers percussive and plosive consonants, contrasting with the sibilance of

the next line and its repeated ‘o’, conveying wide-eyed, open-mouthed horror: ‘Ther

was sorwe, wo-so it sawe’.

Violence is commonplace in Middle English romances and graphic violence

involving children not uncommon to late-medieval vernacular literature at large, with

religious matter providing various examples: from the child martyrs of popular

hagiography, emulated in Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, to biblical narratives like

Herod’s massacre of the innocents (imitated in Arthurian legend in the ‘May Day

massacre’) and the near-infanticide portrayed in ‘Abraham and Isaac’ mystery

plays.38 It is impossible to know whether late-medieval readers would have thought

the scene in Havelok shocking, although Havelok’s own stunned silence is implied in

the line, ‘Havelok it saw and therbi stod’, evocative of the proverbial, ‘stode as a

stone’.39 That they are royal deaths might have added to the impression of surprise.

38 The murder and martyrdom of the child-king St Kenelm is one of the stories in a hagiographical collection known as the ‘South English Legendary’, a version of which is preserved in the same manuscript as Havelok (Laud Misc. 108). For an overview and study of medieval child-martyr cults, see Peter Healy Wasywliw, Martyrdom, Murder, and Magic: Child Saints and Their Cults in Medieval Europe (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), esp. pp. 73–90. Chaucer’s story of a boy martyred at the hands of Jews alludes to ‘yonge Hugh of Lyncoln’ and has parallels with the legend of William of Norwich. Chaucer, The Prioress’s Tale, l. 684. See E. M. Rose, The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015) and Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Medieval Jews (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999). For Malory’s account of Merlin’s plan (with Arthur) to destroy ‘all the children that were borne in May Day’, see Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur, ed. Stephen H. A. Shepherd (London and New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Ltd, 2004), pp. 39–40. The relevant biblical passage is Matthew 2.16–18. For ‘Abraham and Isaac’, see English Mystery Plays, ed. Peter Happé (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 133–51 and pp. 152–71. 39 See the uses of ‘stonayde … stode as a stone’ and ‘stondis stonstille’ in Awntyrs off Arthur, in Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, ed. Thomas Hahn (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995), ll. 109 and 580. See also the MED, stonen, v.(2), sense 2: ‘To be astonished or amazed … be bewildered, be stupefied; be held motionless from mental shock’.

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In other ways, too, a sense of the unexpected is ‘scripted’ in the preceding

narrative.40

The structure of the story is especially revealing. Up to this point, the account

of Havelok and his sisters in Denmark closely resembles that of Goldeboru in

England, encouraging the impression that they will continue in parallel. When

Goldeboru is imprisoned by her treacherous guardian, Godrich, the narrator calls him

‘Judas’; Godard is similarly called ‘Judas’, having imprisoned Havelok and his

sisters (l. 319; l. 482). In the face of Goldeboru’s suffering, Godrich is said to give

‘nouth a stra’, and the same phrase later describes Godard’s response to Havelok’s

plea for food (l. 315; l. 466). Before the narrator turns to Havelok’s story in

Denmark, Goldeboru is left in a state of imprisonment, this being the culmination of

Godrich’s betrayal and decision to usurp her inheritance. When we subsequently read

that Godard is planning a ‘trechery’ against the heirs in Denmark, they appear

destined for the same fate. The unprecedented killing of Havelok’s sisters is an

aberration, disrupting the narrative symmetry.

Furthermore, this incident is unique to the Middle English Havelok. There is

no evidence that other medieval versions of the story, including the Anglo-Norman

romance, give Havelok two sisters.41 Nor are there any analogous characters named

‘Swanborw’ and ‘Helfled’ elsewhere in medieval romance.42 The names contribute to

the impression that these characters will be protagonists in the romance, not least

40 I use the word ‘script’ here with allusion to the concept of ‘emotion scripts’: that is, a series of circumstances eliciting a particular emotional reaction. See Barbara Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 8 and n. 26. 41 See Smithers, Havelok, pp. xix–lvi. 42 See Scott Kleinman, ‘The Legend of Havelok the Dane and the Historiography of East Anglia’, Studies in Philology 100:3 (2007), 245–77 (pp. 265–66). Kleinman notes that there is a ‘Swanburc’ in the Anglo-Norman Horn, but her character bears no relation to the Swanborw in the Middle English Havelok.

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because it is common for romances to leave marginal characters unnamed. The

sisters’ importance in the story is also implied by their repeated inclusion among

Birkabeyn’s ‘thre’ children, and where they are named alongside the title character

(l. 410). But just as they emerge as individually identifiable characters, they are

killed off. Whether or not this elicits spontaneous surprise from the reader, there are

clear signs that this is intended to read as an unexpected event. As such, it also

invites a degree of readerly suspicion about narrative patterns, warning against the

expectation of narrative conformity and continuity. At the same time, the finality of

the murder intimates that disinheritance cannot be reversed: in some respects, at

least, it will be a permanent transformation.

Kimberly Bell and Julie Nelson Couch have concentrated on this scene in

studies of Havelok which consider the romance’s thematic relationship to the

hagiographical South English Legendary, contained in the same manuscript (Laud

Misc. 108).43 In this context, applying an ‘affective’ critical approach, Bell and

Couch read the child-murder scene in Havelok in a Christian interpretative

framework. Havelok is thus characterised as the ‘vulnerable child’, whose ‘suffering’

evokes the suffering of Christ and elicits ‘affective piety’ from the reader, an

interactive experience of pious devotion.44 Emotional words and phrases like ‘sorwe’

and ‘mikel dred’ might be read as affective cues, while the pretence of play (‘leyke’)

43 Couch and Bell have also jointly edited a volume on the manuscript: Texts and Contexts of Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108 (Leiden: Brill, 2010). 44 Kimberly K. Bell, ‘Resituating Romance: The Dialectics of Sanctity in MS Laud Misc. 108’s Havelok the Dane and Royal Vitae’, Parergon, 25:1 (2008), 27–51; Julie Nelson Couch, ‘Defiant Devotion in MS Laud Misc. 108: The Narrator of Havelok the Dane and Affective Piety’, Parergon, 25:1 (2008), 53–79. For an overview of the idea of ‘affective piety’ and ‘devotional’ reading practices in medievalist scholarship see Nicole R. Rice, ed., ‘Introduction’, to Middle English Religious Writing in Practice: Texts, Readers, and Transformations (Turnout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 1–16; see also Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and The Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) and Dalrymple, Language and Piety, esp. references on pp. 58 and 124.

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might elicit horror or revulsion, contrasting grotesquely with Godard’s true intention,

not least because of the word’s sexual connotations in Middle English (ll. 473, 478,

469).45

The religious allusions in the poem, however, appear in the service of a

predominantly secular story: romance being the ‘dominant non-devotional genre of

Middle English literature’.46 Havelok is not a saint-king, like others in the South

English Legendary.47 Nor are Havelok’s murdered sisters characterised as martyrs or

otherwise depicted in religious terms: they do not become queens in heaven like the

Pearl-maiden; they are not miraculously resurrected like the sacrificed children of

the romance Amis and Amiloun or its hagiographical analogues; they are described in

terms visceral, not spiritual.48 Therefore, while I agree that the murder scene

constitutes a ‘nucleus of affectivity’ in Havelok, I read its effects differently.49

45 See MED, leiken, v. 46 Chism, ‘Romance’, p. 57. 47 See my note above on St Kenelm. 48 See my introduction for Pearl and further explanation of Amis and Amiloun is below. There is not a great deal of work on the presentation of child-related violence in medieval literature in secular terms, but for an overview of the trope see Daniel T. Kline’s chapter, ‘“That child may doon to fadres reverence”: Children and Childhood in Middle English Literature’, in The Child in British Literature: Literary Constructions of Childhood, Medieval to Contemporary ed. Adrienne E. Gann (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) pp. 21–37. It may be that an aversion to this topic stems from medievalists’ efforts to repudiate mid-twentieth-century histories that characterised medieval childhood (and the Middle Ages) as hard or harsh. Philippe Ariès is often credited with fomenting misconceptions about neglected medieval children, by historians arguing to the contrary: notably Shulamith Shahar, Barbara Hanawalt and Nicholas Orme. See Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage, 1962; first published as L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime by Plon in Paris 1960); Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London and New York: Routledge, 1990); Barbara Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001). In contrast, a volume of essays published in 2011 aimed to reappraise the ‘dark sides’ of premodern childhood experience: The Dark Side of Childhood in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ed. Katariina Mustakallio and Christian Laes (Oxford and Oakville: Oxbow Books, 2011). For an overview of the historiography of medieval childhood, see Barbara Hanawalt, ‘Medievalists and the Study of Childhood’, Speculum, 77:2 (2002), 440–60. 49 Couch, ‘Defiant Devotion’, p. 68.

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‘Affect’ is not just how texts provoke ‘feeling’ but, as Sarah McNamer has

argued, how they ‘make meaning’.50 More than it serves a devotional purpose, I

suggest, the affective density of the murder scene exploits a connection between

emotion and cognition, which is acknowledged in medieval theories of memory, in

order to establish this moment as the interpretative key to the romance.51 It can be

regarded as the affective nexus of the poem in this sense, being recalled repeatedly in

the romance – at least five times in the second half – giving Havelok the motivation

and justification to reclaim Denmark and thereby propelling the narrative action.52

What the emotional language attendant on the murder memorialises is not only

Havelok’s suffering but more precisely his disinheritance.

The scene is highly visual as well as emotive: the discoloured flesh (‘green

and bleike’), the mutilated bodies ‘sprawleden’ (‘convulsing’) in blood (ll. 470, 475).

The graphic nature of the description is important because visualisation is the most

common feature of classical and medieval theories of memory, not least in the sense

50 This idea originates in the reader-response school of literary criticism with Stanley Fish, whom McNamer cites. See Stanley Fish, ‘Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics’, New Literary History, 2:1 (1970), 123–62. Sarah McNamer, ‘Feeling’, in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Middle English Literature, ed. Paul Strohm (London: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 241–57 (p. 248). Also see MED, felen, v. As McNamer notes, this word means to think as well as to feel. 51 Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, p. 7; Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008; first published 1990), p. 85. Carruthers argues that memory is the principal expression of cognition in medieval theory, so that memory is more closely connected to all forms of thought, including creative invention, than is usually the case in modern parlance. For studies of emotion and memory in medieval literature, see Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature: Body, Mind, Voice, ed. Frank Brandsma, Carolyne Larrington and Corrine Saunders (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015); particularly Corinne Saunders, ‘Mind, Body and Affect in Medieval English Arthurian Romance’, pp. 31–46, and Carolyne Larrington, ‘Mourning Gawain: Cognition and Affect in Diu Crône and Some French Gauvain-Texts’, pp. 123–42. 52 See ll. 1366–68, 1408–15, 2222–25, 2393–95, 2482–84. These lines and the effect of the repetition are described more fully in Chapter 3.

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of reading as a ‘visual act’.53 The references to sight – ‘Havelok it sawe’, for

example – intimate that the hero will later be able to provide eyewitness testimony:

saying, ‘ich saw biforn min eyne [Godard] slo | Mine sistres with a knife’ (ll. 1365–

66, my italics).54 But the very concept of eyewitness testimony relies on the

connection between visualisation and remembering. The reader, too, is encouraged to

visualise the scene – as the implied onlooker in the phrase ‘wo-so it sawe’ – and

therefore to commit the event to memory, to be able to recall it.

The sight of blood is particularly prominent, not only with the striking image

of the sisters’ bodies ‘sprawleden in the blod’ but later the ‘knif’ still ‘lewe | Of the

seli children blod’ (ll. 498–99). This is significant, firstly, because the sight of blood

also has a special place in medieval memory theory: the image of ‘bloodied bodies’

is the original ‘memory-image’ for ‘the art of mnemotechnics’, as set out in Cicero’s

De Oratore, illustrated by the legend of Simonides.55 According to the legend,

Simonides survives the collapse of a building which has killed many others

assembled there. Though the corpses are mutilated, Simonides can identify them by

recollecting where each person had been seated. Thus, while Simonides is said to

realise that memory is aided by the ‘orderly arrangement’ of ‘mental images’, the

illustrative mnemonic for the art of memory is, itself, an image of disorder and

53 Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. 19. Carruthers translates the idea of the ‘memory-image’ from Aristotle. See Aristotle, De Memoria et Reminscentia, trans. R.Sorabji (Providence: Brown University Press, 1972), 450b 11–20. For a study of memory in Middle English romance see Jamie McKinstry, Middle English Romance and the Craft of Memory (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015). Carruthers has written extensively on the subject, including The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; first published 1998) and The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, ed. Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004; first published 2002). 54 There is further discussion of the ways in which the romances allude to legal testimony in my third chapter. 55 See Cicero, De Oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 465–69. Carruthers explains the story in The Craft of Thought, pp. 27–28. My quotations are from Mitchell’s discussion of the legend, in Becoming Human, p. 164.

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bloodshed.56 This visual juxtaposition is evident in Havelok, too: though the scene is

one of unexpected and bloody destruction, the prepositional description of the girls’

bodies ‘by the wawe’ is also a ‘locational memory’ device, of the kind found in

classical and medieval memory schemes: involving the ‘mental picturing’ of

architectural spaces, to aid the orderly arrangement of memory-images in the mind.57

As a memory-image for disinheritance, the scene of bloodshed speaks to the

violence of the act: not only the literal physical injury but the figurative, intrafamilial

violence of Godard’s betrayal. Invoking the image of ‘blod’ in the context of familial

betrayal subverts a common proverbial use of ‘blood’ to refer to family bonds; but

this is not unique to Havelok. In her study of blood in medieval vernacular literature,

Bettina Bildhauer finds that the ‘concept of relatives as united by a common blood is

invoked precisely when the ties that bind are violated’.58 In this light, the bloodshed

in Havelok both implies family relationships and exemplifies the vernacular literary

association between so-called blood relations and disunity (bloodshed). In the

context of disinheritance, such a graphic reminder that there is latent violence in the

very idea of blood relations seems to point up, once again, the inevitability of

dynastic disruption. Indeed, it might allude to the intergenerational opposition

inherent in inheritance itself: while lineage can be imagined as continuity, succession

means replacement.

There is also an economic dimension to the bloody imagery. The language of

the poem, in fact, invites an economic reading of the bloodied bodies themselves.

The girls’ bodies are said to be carved to ‘grotes’: the name of a small coin, as well

56 Mitchell, Becoming Human, p. 164. 57 Mary Carruthers, ‘The Poet as Master Builder: Composition and Locational Memory in the Middle Ages’, New Literary History, 24 (1993), 881–904 (p. 898). 58 Bettina Bildhauer, Medieval Blood (Cardiff: Cardiff University Press, 2006), p. 135.

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as meaning ‘pieces’.59 While it could be said of any medieval family that they were

‘expected to stand together [and] certainly never shed the blood of their own’,

Barbara Hanawalt’s study of peasant families suggests that economic

interdependency partly accounts for low instances of intrafamilial violence among

them.60 Havelok suggests that, on the contrary, for an aristocratic guardian, the value

of a royal wardship is not incentive enough to prevent them from killing and

usurping their ward’s inheritance. Cutting the corpses to ‘grotes’ initially suggests

devaluation, as formerly valuable living bodies (wardships) are reduced to a low-

value coinage; but, for Godard, it is a profitable liquidation of assets. From another

perspective, Aaron Hostetter speculates that when Godard ‘carves’ Swanborw and

Helfled to ‘grotes’ (pieces of flesh) it is ‘a terrifyingly literal response’ to Havelok’s

earlier plea for food.61 This offer of cannibalism remains a latent horror, yet the

memory of the murder will later provide Havelok with the ‘affective’ fuel he requires

to challenge Godard for the Danish throne. Though the murder cannot be reversed,

the spilled blood remains in circulation, figuratively, as converted currency.

Spilled blood is similarly made a memory-image for acts of disinheritance in

Bevis and Octavian, where the sight of bloodshed is emphasised. In Bevis, the reader

is presented with the image of the ‘childes clothes’:

Al a bisprengde with that blode

In many stede

Ase yif the child were to-hewe. (ll. 349–52)

59 MED, grot, n.(3) and grot, n.(1). 60 Bildhauer, Medieval Blood, p. 135; Barbara Hanawalt, ‘Violence in the Domestic Milieu of Late Medieval England’, in Violence in Medieval Society, ed. Richard W. Kaeuper (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2000), pp. 197–214 (pp. 200–01). See also Barbara Hanawalt, The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 61 Aaron Hostetter, ‘Food, Sovereignty, and Social Order’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 110:1 (2011), 53–77 (p. 58).

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In this case, the bloodied clothes are a decoy, sprinkled with pig’s blood and

intended to be ‘schewe’ to Bevis’s mother as proof that he is ‘dede’ (ll. 353–54).

Though Bevis remains physically unharmed, the narrator nonetheless offers the

image of the child’s body cut to pieces, akin to that in Havelok, ‘as if’ the child ‘were

to-hewe’. This language is especially gruesome: more than it denotes ‘killed’ or

‘cut’, the Middle English verb ‘heuen’ specifies the kind of cutting that is done with

the strike of an axe, best translated as ‘chopped’.62

Since the word is commonly used in relation to felling trees and chopping

wood, it effectively associates the violence of Bevis’s disinheritance with branch-

cutting, calling up the imagery of family trees. This metaphor is well established in

late-medieval culture. It is present in the Old Testament, where the ancestry of Christ

is likened to a ‘branch’ growing from ‘stem’ and ‘root’, and the ‘Jesse tree’ is

depicted in medieval art from the eleventh century onwards. Genealogical

manuscripts from the later medieval period show family relationships in tree form.63

The combined imagery of spilled blood and hewn branches, used in Bevis, can also

be found in Shakespeare’s Richard II, in the context of intrafamilial violence and

usurped inheritance. The Duchess of Gloucester rebukes John of Gaunt for his

alleged role in his brother’s murder:

DUCHESS OF GLOUCESTER Edward’s seven sons …

Were as seven vials of his sacred blood

Or seven fair branches springing from one root

…

One vial full of Edward’s sacred blood

One flourishing branch of his most royal root

62 See MED, heuen, v.(1) and citations. 63 See Isaiah 11.1; Figs 6–7 (p. 238).

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Is crack’d, and all the precious liquor spilt,

Is hack’d down, and his summer leaves all faded,

By envy’s hand and murder’s bloody axe.

Ah, Gaunt, his blood was thine! … 64

The metaphors are elucidated at length here, whereas in Bevis they remain implicit,

affecting the story in a different way. What is sometimes taken to be the simplistic

brevity of Middle English romance narrative entails a bold resistance to explicating

symbolism and metaphor: it is the resulting sensation that something is being

withheld – that there are ‘gaps’ – that provokes the imagination here.65 The image of

the child ‘to-hewe’ in Bevis expresses that the disinherited heir is severed from his

lineage. Inheritance and lineage are not the same thing – nor recoverable in the same

way – but both are lost in the event of disinheritance.

Octavian is more explicit about the loss of paternal lineage in its bloody

disinheritance scene. Here, the disinheritance of the emperor Octavian’s newborn

twin sons is confirmed when he judges them to be illegitimate: a judgement

conveyed in his silent execution of a kitchen servant, whom he believes to have

fathered the children. ‘Alle was byblede with blode’, the narrator says, ‘the clothes al

byblede’ (ll. 159, 179). The bloody imagery is especially poignant as a symbol of

refuted paternity here, because the ‘clothes’ which are ‘al byblede’ are the bedsheets

of the empress’s birthing chamber. Maternal, postpartum bloodshed is displaced by

the blood spilled in this paternal act of violence, by which the heirs are figuratively

64 Shakespeare, Richard II, I. 2. 11–22. 65 On ‘gaps’, see Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London and New York: Methuen, 1983), p. 45. Although romance narratives work differently from later forms (more of which in Chapter 4), I have found Rimmon-Kenan’s description of suspenseful and thought-provoking elliptical storytelling useful for reading the romances: corroborating Christine Chism’s observations of the genre, quoted in my introduction.

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severed from their paternal lineage and reborn: as fatherless, illegitimate and

disinherited. As in Havelok, the gruesome imagery is extended: the servant’s

disembodied head is held aloft ‘by the hare’, to display its ‘lowryng chere’ and, in

the southern Octavian, is hurled at the empress with the grotesque invitation to ‘pley

þe wyth þat ball!’ (NO, l. 177; SO, l. 211). Visualisation is stressed by reference to

sight as well as the absence of language: the emperor ‘saw that syghte’ and ‘no

worde speke he ne myghte’; the empress ‘saw the clothes’ and ‘bygan to skyrke and

crye’; and ‘[w]ordis of this were spoken no mo’ (ll. 154–184).

It is important to note that bloodshed is something to which the infant

Havelok, Bevis and the twins in Octavian are party but not personally subjected.

These are not exactly cases of bloodshed ‘averted’, a hagiographical trope in which

‘bodily integrity [is] restored’ by the avoidance of bloodshed.66 But religious ideas

about the generative properties of blood might have influenced the way in which

readers interpreted the symbolic significance of bloodshed in the romances. The

romance Amis and Amiloun, for example, imagines blood to be a cure for disease: the

romance draws on the legend of St Sylvester and the idea fundamental to the

Christian Eucharistic communion that blood sacrifice can be restorative and reinforce

(figurative) family bonds.67 The blood of Amis’s sacrificed children (later restored to

life) is used to cure his friend Amiloun of leprosy: it also reinforces their fraternal

bonds and, as Peggy McCracken argues, establishes a ‘symbolic lineage’ between

them.68 The curative properties of blood are not apparent in Havelok, Bevis and

66 Bildhauer, Medieval Blood, p. 60. 67 Peggy McCracken, The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero: Blood, Gender, and Medieval Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), pp. 92–93; Bildhauer, Medieval Blood, pp. 60–61. 68 McCracken, The Curse of Eve, p. 50. See Amis and Amiloun, in Amis and Amiloun, Robert of Cisyle, and Sir Amadace, ed. Edward E. Foster (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), ll. 2197–424.

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Octavian, but the idea that bloodshed might prefigure a new, symbolic lineage is

compelling with respect to the disinherited heir, cut off from his original lineage. In

Bevis, where animal’s blood is sacrificed to save the hero from execution but signals

his transition from ‘erles sone’ to ‘herde’, bloodshed effects a kind of ‘symbolic

death’: an anthropological term for a youthful ‘rite of passage’, which begins with

violent initiation and results in ‘rebirth’.69 Spilled blood as a memory-image for

disinheritance, then, intimates its dually destructive and generative potential,

recreating the romance’s nascent heir-character as disinherited-heir protagonist.

Indeed, the violence implicit in ‘heuen’ (hew) may also be the precursor to

re-growth or the formation of something new. The word can be applied to the

working of wood or stone, as in ‘[he] fellith tymbir and gene to hewe | And fourty

sheppis he ded make newe’.70 The image of ‘the child al to-hewe’ in Bevis finally

appears to convey a double metaphorical meaning: the idea of the heir cut off, like

the branch of a tree, from his lineage; then, in turn, the heir ‘hewe’ into something

‘newe’. In her book on the idea and ethics of ‘the new’ in medieval culture, Patricia

Ingham proposes that ‘childhood’ itself figures in imaginative literature as a brand of

‘newness’, one that has the potential to mitigate threatening forms of innovation.71

The figure of the heir perhaps embodies the concurrence of these two ideas of the

new: the heir is product of their parents’ desire for continuity and yet promises

novelty, even threatening death and displacement. The disinherited heir is potentially

more radical, however, as the fatherless offspring of disrupted succession. If the

69 Miri Rubin, ‘Introduction’, to Rites of Passage: Cultures of Transition in the Fourteenth Century, ed. Nicola McDonald and W. M. Ormrod (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2004), pp. 1–12 (p. 2). Rubin cites Arnold van Gennep’s influential study, Les Rites de Passage (Paris: É. Nourry, 1909). 70 The Seege or Batayle of Troye, ed. M. E. Barnicle, EETS, OS 172 (London: Oxford University Press, 1927), ll. 429–30. 71 Patricia Clare Ingham, The Medieval New: Ambivalence in an Age of Innovation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), pp. 75–111 (esp. on Floris and Blancheflour, pp. 82–92).

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disinherited heir is to be read as a posterchild for primogeniture, then he is inevitably

a troubling one: embodying discontinuity and thwarted parental reproduction.

Female Heirs

As stated at the beginning of this chapter, a common feature of the disinheritance

romances is that the story originates in paternal interests in stable dynastic

succession. Fathers in Bevis, Havelok, Tryamour and Octavian alternatively worry

about producing heirs and about protecting the rights of minor heirs. A key

distinction in Eglamour and Torrent is that the fathers’ dynastic aspirations are

expressed in their pursuit of an appropriate marriage for their (female) heirs, rather

than the heirs’ protection, per se. This does not necessarily represent a secure,

gendered differentiation. Although Athelwold alludes to Goldeboru’s future marriage

at ll. 198–200 in Havelok, his primary concern is that she succeed him as his ‘eyr’,

‘Engelond [to] welde’: ‘Yure levedi after me’, he says to his councillors, Goldeboru

should ‘yemen and welde’ (l. 110; l. 129; ll. 170–75). Inarguably, female inheritance

plays a secondary role in the disinheritance romances and therefore much of my

analysis inevitably focuses on male protagonists, as disinherited heirs. Female heirs

are nonetheless a significant presence in each romance and the perennial question of

legitimacy, with which the next chapter is concerned, frequently originates in the

matter of female heirship (which itself deviates from the paradigm of male-

preference primogeniture). To conclude this chapter then, and as a preface to the next

chapter, I reflect briefly on the presentation of female heirship in the romances,

beyond the (usually male) disinherited protagonists.

There is a common syntactical formula used to introduce female heirs in the

disinheritance romances, the basis of which is ‘no heir, but a daughter’:

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Of his bodi ne havede he eyr

Bute a mayden swithe fayr (Havelok, ll. 110–11)

‘I nave non eir after me dai

Boute Josian, this faire mai’ (Bevis, ll. 555–56)

nevry child but on

That was a dowghtir …

His ryche eyr shulde be (Eglamour, ll. 25–27)

He has no heyre hys londys to welde

But a doghtyr of seven yeres elde. (Tryamour, ll. 625–26)

The phrasing allows some ambiguity about whether the daughter-heir is fortuitous or

unfortunate. In three of the four examples, the words ‘he had no heir’ (to paraphrase)

are isolated from the mention of the daughter, as if a standalone statement. The

syntax alternately implies that having a daughter is next to having no heir at all, or

that no one but she can be considered an heir. On one hand, then, the formula

appears to support claims about the ‘insistence of romance [on] such a thing as a true

heir … that one person, and one person only, carried the right to the crown’, as per

the fundamental principle of primogeniture.72 But on the other hand, it insinuates a

certain precarity.

That precarity could reside in the very singularity of the heir, upon whom the

fate of the succession rests. Yet the phrase is used of two daughters in Ywain and

Gawain, describing a ‘grete lord of the land’ who had ‘none other ayre | Bot two

doghters that war ful fayre’.73 The problem here is not singularity but quite the

72 Cooper, English Romance, p. 326. 73 Ywain and Gawain, in Sir Perceval of Galles and Ywain and Gawain, ed. Mary Flowers Braswell (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995), ll. 2746–48, my italics.

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opposite: there being two daughters and no sons, the estate would customarily

descend according to partition and be divided, and in this romance the situation

spells conflict.74 In Ipomadon, meanwhile, the formula is used to introduce a male

heir:

... he gatte neuer chyld his eyre to be

But a brother son had hee

That was he newov nere. (ll. 33-36)

Again, the formula serves to highlight the precarity of patrilineal succession, but here

the issue is neither singular female heirship nor co-heirship (partition), but that the

king has no offspring of his own. It remains that the formula is particularly

associated with daughters in the disinheritance romances. But since it is not reserved

exclusively for female heirs, or singular heirs, according to the evidence of

Ipomadon and Ywain, I suggest that its ambiguous implication of precarity is best

understood in other terms: not referring to the problem of singularity or gender per

se, but in light of the economics of female heirship in late-medieval England.

Primogeniture was in some senses an advantage for female heirs, because a

daughter with no brothers would have a better claim to her father’s estate than any

uncles or male cousins. Historians have speculated that this resulted in the

aggregation of lands in aristocratic hands in the medieval period, as families with

sole female heirs sought marriages that elevated their own economic and political

standing. Simon Payling argues, however, that this theory does not hold for later

medieval England, a time of ‘crisis in male succession’, as Felicity Riddy also notes,

due to high mortality rates for male heirs.75 At this time, Payling writes, female heirs

74 This is discussed further in Chapter 4. 75 See Payling, ‘Social Mobility, Demographic Change, and Landed Society in Late Medieval England’ (as cited in the introduction) and Payling, ‘The Economics of Marriage in Late Medieval

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were increasingly the cause of the ‘dispersal of estates’, rather than land aggregation:

this was part of a trend towards the ‘permeability of aristocratic society to non-

landed wealth through the land market’, in fact.76 These two alternate possibilities for

female heirs (aggregation or dispersal of aristocratic estates) are, perhaps,

represented in the ambiguity of the formula, ‘no heir but a daughter’. Moreover, I

suggest, the ambiguity of that phrase foreshadows the subsequent conflict between

fathers, who intend their female heirs to consolidate their (aristocratic) wealth, and

the aspirational knight heroes for whom sole female heirs are key to social

advancement.

Of the disinheritance romances, Eglamour and Torrent most clearly play on

the possibility that ‘succession through the female line’ creates ‘opportunities for

men of lesser social status to advance themselves’.77 Eglamour is a ‘knyght’ but

seeks to marry Cristabell, the daughter of the ‘erle’ he serves; the feudal relationship

making the contrast in their socioeconomic standings quite plain (ll. 7–24). In

Torrent, the eponymous protagonist is the son of an earl, but he similarly seeks to

marry upwards, in his pursuit of the princess, Desonell. Both women reciprocate the

affections of their respective suitors and, as sole heirs to the fathers’ estates, their

marriages clearly represent an opportunity for social advancement. But both matches

are scorned by the women’s fathers, who regard the knights as unsuitable and seek

sons-in-law of equal or higher social standing. The sole female heir is thus an

England: The Marriage of Heiresses’, The Economic History Review, 54:3 (2001), 413–29. Riddy, ‘Family, Marriage, Intimacy’, p. 245. 76 Payling notes that this trend is also evident in landholders’ ‘subversion of male primogeniture’ in order to provide for other offspring. Payling, ‘Economics of Marriage’, p. 413. 77 Joanne Charbonneau, ‘Trangressive Fathers in Sir Eglamour of Artois and Torrent of Portyngale’, in Discourses on Love, Marriage, and Transgression in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Albrecht Classen (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2004), pp. 243–65 (p. 247); also Eglamour, note to ll. 64–84.

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ambiguous figure, at once a threat to aristocratic dynastic integrity and a boon to the

aspirational knight. As such, the recurrent presence of the female heir in the

disinheritance romances is provocative, one of the ways in which the romances resist

and undermine patrilineal primogeniture. But the issue is not necessarily one of

gender. Rather, female heirs raise the question of legitimate succession as a social

issue. It is with this in mind, finally, that the next chapter turns to the presentation of

allegations of illegitimacy in the romances, and the political implications of

illegitimate or legitimate heirship.

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Chapter 2

Illegitimacy

Little has been written about the recurrence of illegitimacy allegations or other

illegitimacy motifs in the Middle English romances. Some have noted that the

genre’s archetypal adulterous relationship, between Guinevere and Lancelot, remains

unproductive and therefore avoids producing bastard offspring. Elsewhere, Georges

Duby declares that ‘bastardy was too serious a matter to be treated lightly’ and, he

implies, ‘too serious’ a topic for romance.1 But the topic of bastardy is more

prominent in the Middle English romances than this suggests. The repeated

allegations of illegitimacy in the disinheritance romances – ‘houre sone’, ‘bastard’,

‘horcop’ – are only the most conspicuous sign of an illegitimacy trope.2 The idea of

illegitimacy is – like disinheritance, and as an aspect of it – inextricably and

paradoxically linked with the construction of heirship in the romances. Where the

previous chapter argued that disinheritance delineates the romances’ concept of

‘heritage’, and the heir is metaphorically reborn through disinheritance, here I will

show how the romances work towards the imaginative concept of illegitimate-yet-

rightful heirship; in part, by exploiting real judicial conflicts between medieval

common law and ecclesiastical laws on the matter of legitimacy.

The allegations of illegitimacy, to begin with, are explicit and direct. In

Eglamour, Princeamor exiles his daughter, Cristabell, decrying her child as a

‘bastard’, ‘that ys thee dere’ (l. 787). In Torrent, King Calamond exiles his pregnant

1 McCracken, Romance of Adultery, p. 119; Georges Duby, The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France, trans. Barbara Bray (London: Allen Lane, 1984; originally published as Le Chevalier, la Femme et le Prêtre in Paris by Librarie Hachette, 1981), p. 222. 2 Bevis, l. 398; others given below.

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daughter, Desonell and ‘that bastard within thee’ (l. 1765). In Tryamour, Sir Marrock

insists that the unborn Tryamour is a ‘horcop’ (bastard) and in Octavian the

emperor’s twin sons are alleged to be the ‘mysbegeten chyldren’ of adultery. Their

accuser is their paternal grandmother, the dowager empress of Rome, who tells her

son that, through these twins, ‘Rome sall wrange ayerede bee | And in uncouthe

hande’ (Tryamour, l. 224; SO, l. 259; NO, l. 107–08). The use of the word ‘heir’

here, as a verb and part of a compound adjective, is unusual: indeed, it is the singular

example in the MED.3 The effect is to conceive of the illegitimate heirs as active

agents of Rome’s future destruction: seemingly the opposite of rightful heirs, the

illegitimates are wrongful heirs, embodying problematic productivity, liable to

regenerate the “wrongness” of their conception in the land they inherit. The romance

will go on to challenge this notion, but the language of illegitimacy proves

performative in both Octavian and Tryamour, where it is enough to persuade

formerly devoted husbands to condemn their wives and offspring. Emperor

Octavian’s speechlessness at l. 155 (mentioned in Chapter 1) marks the absence of a

rhetoric adequate to counteract that of illegitimacy. It also raises a question about the

definition of illegitimacy and its boundaries, which is where the next section begins.

The Language and Meanings of Illegitimacy

The apparent finality of the word ‘bastard’ conceals its complexity in Middle

English. Glanvill at first seems straightforward on the fact that lawful heirs must be

born of lawful marriages, and bastards cannot be lawful heirs. Glanvill states that,

no-one who is a bastard or not born of a lawful marriage may be a lawful heir;4

3 See MED, wrong(e, adv., sense 1b: ‘~heired ?passed down as a heritage to illegitimate heirs?’. 4 Glanvill, p. 87.

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or, in the original Latin,

heres autem legitimus nullus Bastardus nec aliquis qui ex legitimo matrimonio non est

procreatus esses potest.5

But to say ‘not born of lawful marriage’ is not necessarily equivalent to ‘bastard’.

Furthermore, what constitutes a ‘lawful marriage’ depends on the ‘law’ to which one

defers. Bracton indicates the potential for conflict between different jurisdictions,

when stating that:

a legitimate heir is a son whom the marriage proves to be legitimate, as he who was born in

lawful wedlock, or one recognized in the face of the church though in truth there has been

no marriage.6

Bracton indicates that the church might recognise the legitimacy of heirs who are

born in circumstances which would not constitute ‘marriage’ according to common

law. Though it would be inaccurate to posit two opposing ‘models of marriage’ in

late-medieval England, it is true that there were two ‘very different’ and even

‘contradictory notions’ of the ‘purpose of marriage’, between common law and

canon law.7 These contradictions create the possibility of ‘clashes’ on the question

of legitimate heirship.8

5 London, British Library, Additional MS 24066, f. 42v (transcription my own). A digital facsimile is available from the Early English Laws project website <http://www.earlyenglishlaws.ac.uk/laws/manuscripts/> [accessed 4 Dec 2019]. Early English Laws is a collaborative project between the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London and the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, begun in 2006 and AHRC-funded 2009–11. 6 Bracton, p. 185, my italics. 7 See Conor McCarthy, Marriage in Medieval England: Law, Literature and Practice (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2004), p. 5. McCarthy refers to Georges Duby’s argument (in The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest) for two competing models of marriage in twelfth-century France and David Herlihy’s counterargument, while admitting that there were jurisdictional conflicts on certain matters, such as the legitimacy of children. David Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 86. 8 McCarthy, Marriage in Medieval England, p. 6.

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After marriage was made a sacrament by the church in the twelfth century,

the legitimacy of marriage increasingly came within the purview of ecclesiastical law

courts. The object of sacramental marriage was not to clarify legitimate heirship,

however, but to eradicate or convert ‘concubinal’ relationships.9 This desire partly

manifested in a ‘reluctant willingness to recognize clandestine marriage’, which

could be as informal as promises made privately between a couple.10 Thus while the

church was more concerned with policing ‘illicit sex’ than the property rights of

illegitimate progeny, recognising clandestine marriages consequently recognised

children born from such unions as potentially legitimate, even though not born

‘within wedlock’ (after a formal wedding ceremony).11 Theoretically, any bastardy

dispute ought to have been tried according to ecclesiastical law first, and then

common law; although in the absence of any parish registers, the issue ‘was usually

determined by a sworn inquisition of neighbours’.12 At the same time, ecclesiastical

authorities were reluctant to litigate on the matter of legitimate heirship. Far from

being a neutral position, however, this constituted a refusal to use ecclesiastical

courts to ‘deny inheritance’ to anyone who may be illegitimate in the eyes of the

common law but who was ‘canonically legitimate’.13

In both Eglamour and Torrent, the children in question – called ‘bastard’ by

their grandfathers – are born before their parents are formally married, but after the

pairs have privately committed themselves to one another. In Torrent, the

9 Michael M. Sheehan, ‘The European Family and Canon Law’, Continuity and Change, 6:3 (1991), 347–60 (p. 354). 10 Sheehan, ‘The European Family and Canon Law’, p. 354. 11 Sara McDougall, Royal Bastards: The Birth of Illegitimacy, 800–1230 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 10. 12 R. H. Helmholz, ‘Bastardy Litigation in Medieval England’, The American Journal of Legal History, 13:4 (1969), 360–83 (p. 361). 13 Michael M. Sheehan, Marriage, Family, and Law in Medieval Europe: Collected Studies, ed. James K. Farge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), p. 257.

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eponymous hero is sent on various quests, by Desonell’s father, to prove his worth as

a marriage suitor. Before his first departure, he meets privately with Desonell in ‘a

chambyr’ and promises to ‘come ageyn’ (ll. 858, 862). Later, hearing that her father

has arranged Desonell’s marriage to the prince of Aragon, Torrent publicly declares

himself wronged and rightfully entitled to ‘wed her to my wyfe’ (l. 1208). When he

returns, though he and Desonell are still unmarried, and without her father’s consent,

they spend a night together. In ‘her chamber’, the narrator says, she ‘set hym on her

bed syde’ and such ‘gestenyng she a-right’ (hospitality she made) that ‘there he

dwellid all nyght’. Before departing again, Torrent gives Desonell a ring; after this

point, he refers to her as the one to whom he has ‘trouth to plight’ (ll. 1361–98,

1706). This is a significant phrase because ‘trothplight’ can refer to either betrothal

or marriage vows.14 To compare, in Eglamour: Eglamour tells Cristabell ‘with the

grace of God I shall you wedde’ and, in the words of the narrator, ‘thereto here

trowthes they plyght’ (ll. 668–69).

The church’s stance on clandestine unions allowed the possibility of

retroactively legitimising prenuptial offspring, after the formalisation of the parents’

marriage (assuming that no adultery had been committed). There is evidence of

resistance to such allowances, in the thirteenth century, among the lay aristocracy.15

However, in 1397, Richard II retrospectively legitimised the prenuptial children of

14 See MED, treuth-plight, n. 15 Robert Grosseteste petitioned the royal judge William Raleigh, a possible originator for Bracton, to recognise the legitimacy of prenuptial offspring in the secular courts but his efforts were ‘turned back’ by the secular aristocracy at the Council of Merton in 1236. Helmholz, ‘Bastardy Litigation’, p. 365. Pollock and Maitland consider William Raleigh to be ‘Bracton’s master’, while Sam Worby suggests with Paul Brand that Raleigh himself ‘is a “plausible author”’. Pollock and Maitland, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I, vol 2, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 107; Worby, Law and Kinship, p. 62; Paul Brand, ‘The Age of Bracton’, in The History of English Law: Centenary Essays on “Pollock and Maitland”, ed. John Hudson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 65–89 (pp. 78–79).

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John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford (who took the name ‘Beaufort’), with the

assent of parliament.16 The legitimation had far-reaching implications in fifteenth-

century politics, since Edward IV, Richard III and Henry VII were all direct

descendants of the Beaufort line through their mothers, Cecily Neville and Margaret

Beaufort. It arguably provided Henry VII with a claim to the throne (by descent from

Edward III) superior to that of Richard III.17 Given these political contexts, late-

medieval readers were likely to be sensitive to the possibilities of illegitimacy and

legitimation in the romances, noting that neither Degrebell (in Eglamour) nor Antony

and Leobertus (in Torrent) qualify for retroactive legitimation, according to canon

law, until the very end of the romances when their biological parents are finally

married. Until then, from either canon or common law standpoints, they are

‘bastards’ as accused.

There is also another dimension to the bastardy of the disinherited heirs in

these romances, an extra-judicial, social meaning. Sara McDougall’s recent book on

the history of bastardy in medieval Europe demonstrates that, in the early Middle

16 See Calendar of Patent Rolls, Richard II, 1396–1399 (London: Mackie & Co., 1909), p. 86 (9 Feb 1397) and ‘Richard II, January 1397’, in The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, 1275–1504, gen. ed. Chris Given-Wilson (Leicester: National Archives and Scholarly Digital Editions, 2005), p. iii.343 (Membrane 2; Items 28 & 29) also available at <www.sd-editions.com/PROME> [accessed 4 Dec 2019]. An exemplification (certified copy) of the legitimation was issued in 1407 by Henry IV, at the request of his half-brother, John Beaufort. See Calendar of Patent Rolls, Henry IV, 1405–1408 (London: Mackie & Co., 1907), p. 284 (10 Feb 1407). Chris Given-Wilson notes that the wording of the original patent was revised at this time to exclude the Beauforts from the royal succession, with the phrase ‘excepta dignitate regali’. Chris Given-Wilson, Henry IV (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016), p. 306, n. 14. 17 Henry VII could claim descent by agnatic primogeniture from the third of Edward III’s sons (John of Gaunt), whereas Richard III (and his elder brother, Edward IV) could only claim descent from the fourth of Edward III’s sons (Edmund, Duke of York) by agnatic succession and from the second (Lionel, Duke of Clarence) by a female line (Lionel’s daughter and only heir, Philippa). Edward III’s entailment of 1376 had settled the succession on male heirs. Ultimately, however, it was victory in battle that gave credence to Henry VII’s claim. See Michael Bennett, ‘Edward III’s Entail and the Succession to the Crown, 1376–1471’, The English Historical Review, 63:452 (1998), 580–609. S. B. Chrimes, Henry VII (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 50.

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Ages, bastardy was alleged according to the social status of the child’s parents and

not the legitimacy of their marriage, or even their marital status. In aristocratic

society, having:

the right ancestry … the best genealogy, the most prestigious maternal and paternal lineage,

mattered most in ideas of what made someone a legitimate heir or successor. It mattered far

more than whether the parents had married legally or not.18

McDougall’s study ends in 1230, but the three entries for ‘bastarde’ in the

Promptorium Parvulorum (c. 1440), a Middle English-to-Latin glossary, show that

this socially determined sense of bastardy persists into the mid-fifteenth century, at

least.19 The first entry is translated into Latin as ‘nothus’, with no further gloss. But

the two additional entries for the word, given as ‘spurius/a’ and ‘nothus/a’, are

respectively glossed as: ‘comyn of [ungentyl] fader and moder genteylle’ and

‘[comyn] of fadyr gentylle and modyr ungentylle’.20 The latter accords with the

description in John Trevisa’s translation of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon: ‘Nothus

is a bastard, or he þat is i-gete of a worþy fader and i-bore of an vnworþy moder’.21

Crucially, none of these definitions refers to marriage or ‘wedlock’ but all define a

‘bastard’ as the offspring of a socially mixed union, differentiated according to the

18 McDougall, Royal Bastards, p. 15. 19 Promptorium Parvulorum Sive Clericorum: Dictionarius Anglo-Latinus Princeps, ed. A. Way (London: Camden Society, 1865), p. 26. Way’s edition is based on London, British Library, Harley MS 221 (c. 1440). All references to the Promptorium are to this edition unless otherwise stated. 20 A. L. Mayhew’s edition for the Early English Text Society, from the Winchester Cathedral Chapter Library manuscript (c. 1440), shows the two definitions conflated so that there is no longer a distinct entry for a child born to a ‘gentle’ mother and ‘ungentle’ father. See The Promptorium Parvulorum: The First English-Latin Dictionary, ed. A. L. Mayhew, EETS, ES 102 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd., 1908), col. 25–26. 21 John Trevisa, Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden Monachi Cestrensis, 8 vols, ed. C. Babington and J. Rawson (London: Longman & Co., 1865–86), vol. 2, ed. Babington (1869), p. 269. Ranulf Higden was an English chronicler, c. 1280–1364, his Polychronicon translated from Latin into Middle English by John Trevisa (fl. 1342–1402). The earliest of the Trevisa Polychronicon manuscripts is dated to 1387.

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sex of the ‘gentylle’ or ‘worþy’ parent.22 Though the MED records the proper noun,

‘Bastard’ as the ‘epithet of a noble’ (my italics), it is not confined to the nobility: a

letter to Thomas Stonor, for instance, dated to around 1463, mentions one ‘Johannes

Bastard de Modbury, baker’.23

In this light, the class aspects of the bastardy allegations in the Middle

English romances are inescapable. The couplings in Eglamour and Torrent are

mixed-class unions: Eglamour a ‘knyght’, who has ‘wan degré with jurnay clere’

(won his status through valiant deeds), in service to an earl, proposing to marry

Cristabell, daughter of the said earl and Torrent, the son of an earl, wishing to marry

Desonell, a princess.24 When Eglamour confides his admiration of Cristabell to a

squire of her father’s household, the squire advises him:

‘Ye ar a knyght of lytyll lond

Take not to evyll, I undirstond

For mykyll wolde have more.

Yif I went to that lady and told her so

Peraunter on skorn take it wold scho

And lyghtly lett me fare.

Syr, a mon that hewyth ovyr hye

Lyghtly the chyppus fallen in his eye’. (ll. 64–71)

The squire assumes that Eglamour is interested in augmenting his ‘lytyll londe’ and

that Cristabell will ‘skorn’ the suggestion of marriage to such a man. His advice is

edged with warning. ‘[M]ykyll wolde have more’ might be read as an allusion to

22 ‘Worþy’ (or ‘worthi’) can refer to a social rank, as well as to monetary wealth. See MED, worthi, adj. 23 See MED, ‘bastard’, n., sense 1b; Stonor Letters and Papers, p. 151. 24 Eglamour, l. 11.

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greed, when coupled with the proverbial warning against overreaching oneself: that

is, getting ‘chyppus’ in one’s eye for attempting to cut too high a branch. A similar

metaphor is used in a popular Middle English political verse, which cautions against

‘hacking’ over one’s head and points to the example of William Walace: ‘It falles in

his eghe | That hackes ovre heghe | Wit at Walays’.25

But Eglamour’s squire also begins his warning apologetically and

empathetically: ‘Take not to evyll’ and ‘I undirstond’, he says, articulating the

romance’s ambiguous position on the ‘permeability’ of aristocratic wealth (to borrow

Payling’s term). Eglamour’s aspiration is socially subversive and potentially

dangerous, but also understandable. He is, after all, the romance’s principle hero and

he will marry Cristabell before the end. The proverbial image is also noteworthy for

its resonance with the ‘family tree’ metaphor discussed in Chapter 1. In this light, it

seems that the squire’s lesson is not only against setting one’s sights too high, but

that Cristabell’s union with Eglamour will see her cut off from her noble lineage, like

a branch from a tree. This would be Eglamour’s loss – the ‘chyppus’ in his eye – if

Cristabell’s noble wealth is his object.

In Octavian and Tryamour, the false claims of adultery also involve mixed-

class unions. The claim that the empress has taken a ‘kokys knave’ as her lover in

Octavian is the most exaggerated, but the social disparity between Queen Margaret

and the unnamed ‘knyght’ alleged to be her lover, in Tryamour, is emphasised by the

use of the word ‘horcop’ to describe the offspring. The Promptorium approximates

‘horcop’ in Latin as ‘manzer, spurius, spuria, pelignus, peligna’, where the term

25 The verse is inserted into Peter Langtoft’s Chronicle and that of Robert Mannyng of Brunne (see DIMEV 545). The quotation above is from The Chronicle of Pierre de Langtoft: in French Verse, from the Earliest Period to the Death of King Edward I, ed. T. Wright, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1866–68), vol. 2 (1868), p. 364.

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‘spurius/a’ is elsewhere defined as a child ‘born of a gentle mother and ungentle

father’.26 The accuser in Tryamour is Sir Marrok, steward to the king, whose primary

motive is to cast doubt on the queen’s revelation that he had attempted to seduce her

in the king’s absence. But his accusation of adultery against the queen quickly

becomes an accusation of illegitimacy against her offspring. He advises the king:

Hyt were not feyre,

A horcop to be yowre heyre,

But he ware of yowre kynne. (ll. 223–25)

The caveat, ‘but he ware of yowre kynne’ pertinently disassociates bastardy from

illegitimate heirship, allowing that the king’s bastard child could be considered a

‘feyre’ successor. But it also suggests that the issue is one of gender: that the

illegitimate child of a ‘gentle’ woman with an ‘ungentle’ man is lower in status than

the illegitimate child of a ‘gentle’ man with an ‘ungentle’ woman.

Where ‘bastard’ can refer to offspring of either sex and any combination of

noble and non-noble parentage, the use of ‘horcop’ in Tryamour specifies that the

child is the progeny of the queen’s extramarital sexual activity, rather than that of the

king. The word is also suggestive of the gendered term, ‘whore’.27 But the gendering

of bastardy should be read in light of inheritance customs, rather than other social or

religious ethics. While ‘theologians maintained that extramarital sex was as sinful for

26 NO, l. 116; Tryamour, ll. 172 and 224; Promptorium, p. 246. 27 The etymology of the word ‘horcop’ is uncertain but the MED compilers speculate that it is probably from ‘hore’ and ‘cop’, modeled after ‘atter-cop’. The MED gives hor(e, n., sense 1 as ‘physical filth’ or ‘moral foulness’. Cop, n., sense 2(a) means ‘head’. Thus ‘horcop’ would mean ‘foul-head’. (‘Atter-cop’ means ‘spider’, but literally ‘poison-head’). But given the MED entry for hor(e, n., sense 2, meaning ‘whore’ – ‘a woman who prostitutes herself for money’ – it seems inevitable that the word ‘horcop’ would connote prostitution, for late-medieval readers of Tryamour. Among the compounds for hor(e, n., sense 2 is ‘horsone’ (whore’s son). The word ‘horcop’ always means ‘bastard’ (the MED gives no evidence of its use in any other context).

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a man as for a woman’, the belief that adultery was primarily a ‘female offense’ was

sustained by ‘laypeople’;28 because it was seen to threaten the ‘legitimate production

of progeny and proper descent of property’.29 The gendering of bastardy, then, was

symptomatic of legitimacy as a social institution, aimed at maintaining property and

power divisions along class lines, policed by patriarchal authorities. Legitimacy itself

was neither a matter of gender nor spiritual morality but, as an essentially aristocratic

and patriarchal instrument of social order, it was vulnerable to challenges from either

the church’s recognition of clandestine marriage or autonomous female sexuality:

each liable to be characterised as illegitimate.

Indeed, the clandestine pregnancies in Eglamour and Torrent are an affront to

the romances’ aristocratic patriarchs because they are born of unions that cross class

lines and daughters who have ignored their fathers’ prerogative to choose a suitable

husband. Patriarchal authority is thus destablised by the coincidental interests of

disobedient daughters and upwardly mobile suitors, in these romances. It is

significant that the sympathies of Desonell’s mother, in Torrent, are also with the

young ‘erlis sonne’: she begs her husband to give Desonell ‘[r]ight of lond’ at least

‘[t]ill she delyvered be’, reasoning that Torrent is a ‘[r]iche man inough’ even though

he is not their social equal (ll. 1804–08).30 These entreaties represent a challenge to

28 James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 27. See also James A. Brundage, ‘Sex and Canon Law’, in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern. L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 33–50. For a useful overview of marriage in medieval law, see the introduction to The Trials and Joys of Marriage, ed. Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2002). 29 Caroline Dunne, Stolen Women in Medieval England: Rape, Abduction and Adultery, 1100–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 120. 30 This appears to be an example of ‘pleading the belly’, whereby a woman was granted clemency for the duration of her pregnancy in order to avoid condemning an unborn child. See James C. Oldham, ‘On Pleading the Belly: A History of the Jury of Matrons’, Criminal Justice History, 6 (1985), 1–64.

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what Carolyn Dinshaw elsewhere identifies as the patriarchal instrument of the law.31

The alignment of gentry and female interests may have felt familiar to the romance’s

late-medieval readers and, if so, these scenes would have been provocative: they

emphasise the idea of illegitimacy as an aristocratic social construct and present the

authority policing legitimacy as hostile and unjust.

This critical view of patriarchal legal authority is also present in Octavian and

Tryamour, where the emperor and king, respectively, are so easily duped by false

evidence that they pass legal judgements that perversely de-legitimate their own

offspring. In contrast to Maura Nolan’s observation of Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale,

where she finds the poet employing the ‘language of the law’ in order to provide ‘an

essential vocabulary of legitimacy’ – ‘the legitimating force of legal discourse’ – at

these crucial points in the disinheritance romances, the law is a source of injustice

and illegitimacy.32 In Octavian and Tryamour, the failure of the law to arbitrate

legitimacy successfully is comparable to the failure of wardship in Havelok and

Bevis. In Eglamour and Torrent, the heirs are illegitimate but their exile is presented

as an outrage, marking the romances’ distinction between legal legitimacy and an

extra-judicial sense of justice, or rightful heirship.

The accusations of illegitimacy in the romances are intensely political, not

just because they explicitly deal with the transmission and tenure of power but

because they implicitly deal with the legitimacy of mixed social parentage and social

mobility. The mirroring of two rhyming couplets in Tryamour and Torrent is

poignant:

31 Carolyn Dinshaw, ‘The Law of Man and Its ‘Abhomynacions’, Exemplaria, 1:1 (1989), 117–48. 32 Nolan, ‘“Acquiteth yow now”’, p. 152.

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Middle English romance is a genre that ‘rewards memory’, as McKinstry says,33 and

the alternative rhymes for ‘heir’ above, between Torrent and Tryamour, produce an

extra-textual collocation of the term ‘horcop’ with the disparaging use of ‘erlls sone’.

The tacit equivalence here indicates how profoundly insulting the latter usage of

‘erlls sone’ might have sounded to the romances’ medieval readers. Close inspection

of the bastardy accusations in the romances, in this example and the others above,

shows that they are coincidental with disdain for mixed social matches and

particularly the upwardly mobile knights.

To understand how negative (or otherwise) the idea of bastardy would have

seemed to late-medieval readers of the romances, in general, we might look to other

historical evidence. Historians of childhood offer different views on the status of

illegitimate offspring in late-medieval cultures, attesting to the complexity of the

issue as well as the varying definitions of illegitimacy according to different laws

and among distinct social classes. There are also some gaps in the scholarship,

particularly on the distinction between extramarital and prenuptial children. A

significant degree of variation can be found in a single volume, as with the essays

collected in A Cultural History of Childhood and Family in the Middle Ages (2010).

Valerie Garver notes that church reformers in the High Middle Ages ‘emphasized

how a parent’s sin might taint the child’, referring to children born of adultery, rather

33 Jamie McKinstry, Middle English Romance and the Craft of Memory, p. 2.

‘Hyt were not feyre

A horcop to be yowre heyre’

(Tryamour, ll. 223–24)

‘Madame, were that feyer,

To make as erlls sone myn eyer?’

(Torrent, ll. 786–87)

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than prenuptial children.34 Richard Huscroft finds that illegitimate children ‘were

looked on with disfavor’, referring to ‘the children of prostitutes, [illegitimate

children of] servants, and other unmarried women’ and socially isolated parents who

might resort to ‘giving up, abandoning, or even killing their unwanted children’.35

Louise Wilkinson alludes to a relationship between illegitimacy and infanticide in

German and Italian medieval legal records.36

By contrast, Jennifer Ward and P. J. P. Goldberg respectively describe the

care of illegitimate and orphaned children as a ‘community’ responsibility and find

examples of some parents who adopted illegitimate offspring and other non-

biological children into their families.37 Barbara Hanawalt finds that the ‘stigma of

an illegitimate birth for either the mother or the child [in peasant society] need not

have been very strong’. She cites one jury decision in the fifteenth century which

shows that, occasionally, ‘[e]ven a child produced from an adulterous union [could

be] deemed legitimate’.38 As Goldberg briefly notes, however, ‘[t]hese phenomena’,

the care and adoption of illegitimate offspring, ‘have received little scholarly

attention’.39

Though the word ‘bastard’ is invariably derogatory when used in the

disinheritance romances, it is not inherently insulting. The sources cited in the MED

record an array of uses which are pejorative, but not necessarily abusive. The use of

the word in personal names, for example, appears more neutral, even if it carries

34 Valerie L. Garver, ‘Faith and Religion’, in A Cultural History of Childhood and Family in the Middle Ages, ed. Louise J. Wilkinson (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2010), pp. 145–60 (p. 152). 35 Richard Huscroft, ‘The State’, in Childhood and Family in the Middle Ages, pp. 127–44 (p. 140). 36 Louise J. Wilkinson, ‘Introduction’, to Childhood and Family in the Middle Ages, 1–21 (p. 6). 37 Jennifer C. Ward, ‘Community’, in Childhood and Family in the Middle Ages, pp. 41–55 (p. 52); P. J. P. Goldberg, ‘Family Relationships’, in Childhood and Family in the Middle Ages, pp. 21–39 (p. 33). 38 Barbara Hanawalt, The Ties that Bound, pp. 73, 196. 39 Goldberg, ‘Family Relationships’, p. 33.

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some of the negative connotations of other usages. The best known bearer of the

name ‘bastard’ is William I of England: ‘William bastard þat þis lond wan’.40 But

there is also Jean Dunois (d. 1468), son of the duke of Orléans, known as ‘the

Bastard of Orliaunce’ and immortalised in Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI (c. 1591).41

There is a passing reference to ‘my lord the Bastard’ in a letter from John Paston III

to his mother, dated 1468 (probably referring to the Count de la Roche);42 and Robert

Armburgh, in a letter dated 1450, twice mentions a feoffee of Joan Armburgh’s

estate by the name ‘Bastard’ (otherwise unidentified).43 The honours afforded to

Henry Fitzroy (d. 1536), the illegitimate offspring of Henry VIII, and the brief

consideration given to his viability as an heir to his father, demonstrates that

restrictions placed on illegitimate heirs could be circumstantial.44

Although medieval inheritance law appears straightforward on the non-status

of illegitimate offspring as heirs, the blunt statement that ‘bastards [had] no rights of

inheritance and no next of kin’ refers narrowly to de facto inheritance rights.45 It

does not mean that illegitimate offspring were entirely prevented from inheriting

40 An Anonymous Short English Metrical Chronicle, ed. Ewald Zettl, EETS, OS 196 (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), l. 1977. The chronicle is included in the Auchinleck manuscript. 41 For more on the life of Jean Dunois, see Anthony Emery, Seats of Power in Europe during the Hundred Years War (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2016). A comparable example of this epithet is Anthony of Burgundy (d. 1504), known as the bastard of Burgundy. See Richard Vaughan, Philip the Good: The Apogee of Burgundy (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2002), p. 129. The Middle English spelling of the ‘Bastard of Orliaunce’ above is from ‘Copy of a Paper Rolle, temp. H. 6. [c. 1422–71], containing charges against the Duke of Suffolk’, in Third Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1872), p. 280. See Shakespeare, 1 Henry VI, I. 1. 93 for the first mention of the ‘Bastard of Orléans’ and I. 3. 25 for his first line. For a recent reappraisal of illegitimacy in Shakespeare’s works, see Katie Pritchard, ‘Legitimacy, Illegitimacy and Sovereignty in Shakespeare’s British Plays’ (doctoral thesis, University of Manchester, 2011). 42 Paston Letters, p. 165. 43 Armburgh Papers, pp. 176–77. 44 See Beverley A. Murphy, ‘Fitzroy, Henry, Duke of Richmond and Somerset (1519–1536)’, ODNB <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/46706> [accessed 4 Dec 2019]. 45 Hicks, ‘Introduction’, Fifteenth-Century Inquisitions ‘Post Mortem’, p. 8.

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property, particularly as ‘testamentary freedom’ increased in the fourteenth and

fifteenth centuries.46 Though it does not concern the inheritance of land, Margaret

Paston’s bequest of ‘ten marks’ to the bastard daughter of John Paston, in her will of

1482, demonstrates both a willingness to consider illegitimate offspring as heirs and

the expectation that the law will act accordingly.47 In short, alleged illegitimacy did

not always present an insurmountable obstacle to social integration and accrual of

wealth and power: the connotations of illegitimacy in the romances are not,

therefore, inevitably and irrevocably negative.

The various non-romance sources help to illuminate the mentions of bastardy

in the Middle English romances, if it is only to expose their essential ambivalence.

Clearly bastardy can be defined in more than one way: the social and ethical

implications of bastardy vary according to context, as well as to the character of

individuals, as much as the form of bastardy itself. Not all offspring born of illicit

sex are called ‘bastards’, in fact: Sir Gowther, for example, born half-human and

half-demon is never called a ‘bastard’ in the romance bearing his name. A further

study might reveal whether various medieval terms for, and definitions of, bastardy

can be categorised with distinct social or ethical implications. It might also answer

whether these categories would correspond to beliefs (religious or social) about the

extent of transgression committed by different types of illicit sex. But the evidence

gathered here so far suggests not; especially because the idea of bastardy is entangled

with sexual ethics as well as economics, according to certain social agendas, and

46 McCarthy, Marriage in Medieval England, p. 63. 47 This will is cited in Kim M. Philipps, Medieval Maidens, p. 33.

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there ‘was not one universal and hegemonic point of view’ on sexual ethics any more

than on matters of social class.48

An important point is that the differing definitions of bastardy allow for more

than one interpretation of whether the accused heirs in the romances are illegitimate

or not. As such, the next section begins by addressing some of the ways in which the

romances construct the possibility of their heirs’ illegitimacy, other than through the

explicit allegations made by their antagonists. But then, increasingly, the meaning of

bastardy in the disinheritance romances demands to be understood on its own terms.

Just as there are conflicting definitions of bastardy according to different medieval

legal jurisdictions, it is possible that the jurisdiction of the ‘literary imagination’

sustains its own, distinct conception of bastardy.49 I will argue that the disinheritance

romances extend their illegitimacy theme through the presentation of infertility and

ambiguities about infidelity and conception; the birth of twins; naming patterns; and,

finally, by allusions to the genre’s most prominent bastard hero, Lybeaus Desconus.

Imagining Illegitimacy in the Romances

In Octavian and Tryamour, ambiguities about the heirs’ legitimacy begin with the

presentation of childlessness. Peggy McCracken and Karen Cherewatuk have noted

the imaginative connections between barrenness, adultery and illegitimacy in Old

French romances and Le Morte Darthur, respectively.50 There is no work of

comparable depth for the Middle English romances, but the same observations bear

out here: in Octavian, infertility is plainly cited as a reason to disbelieve the

48 Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), p. 26; also pp. 124–25 on the ethical neutrality of illegitimate offspring. 49 Boboc, ‘Introduction’, Theorising Legal Personhood, p. 2. 50 See McCracken, Romance of Adultery and Cherewatuk, Marriage, Adultery and Inheritance, as cited above.

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legitimacy of the heirs. When Octavian asks his mother, ‘Haffe I noghte knave-

childir two?’ she tells him, ‘Nay certis’:

For thou myghte no childir have,

Scho hase takyn thy kokes knave’. (ll. 110–16)

What was earlier presented as a private concern shared between husband and wife (at

ll. 37–81) is here announced by a third party as a fact: the dowager affects to

condescend to her son’s ignorance as well as implying that a marital confidence has

been broken. Invoking his infertility makes the emperor susceptible to the subsequent

accusation of spousal infidelity. The same can be said of Sir Marrok’s deceit of King

Ardus in Tryamour and in both cases the years of marriage without children are

framed as a portent of illegitimacy.

Neither the empress nor Queen Margaret attempt to mount a defence, and

though this might be viewed in terms of the so-called ‘patient Griselda’ trope, it also

reflects the performative nature of the illegitimacy accusations.51 Once the children

in question have been denounced as illegitimate, firstly by third-party accusers and

then by their fathers, they are illegitimate. Subsequent exile only confirms their

illegal status, putting them physically beyond the reach of the law’s redress. It is an

idea common to medieval Christian philosophy that sin inheres in the intent as well

as the act and, for instance, that the very thought of infidelity could constitute a

transgression.52 As such, there are infidelities in Octavian and Tryamour and they are

51 This derives from a medieval European story adapted by Chaucer into the Clerk’s Tale, in which a woman suffers abuse without complaint. Chaucer’s Griselda is a poor man’s daughter, married to a marquis, who later deceives her that their children are despised, due to Griselda’s low birth, and they must be killed. See The Riverside Chaucer, p. 880 (notes to the Clerk’s Tale). 52 The idea of sinning ‘in the heart’ is summarised in Matthew 5.28, but it permeates medieval philosophy. See Jean Porter, ‘Action and Intention’, in Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, ed. Robert Pasnau and Christina van Dyke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 506–16.

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committed by the husbands, not their wives: in their lack of faith in their spouses and

misplaced faith in malign others. This infidelity and specifically the thought of

adultery effectively de-legitimises their offspring.

There are further symbolic gestures towards illegitimacy that work against

the narrator’s more explicit denials. It should be noted, for example, that the sight of

bloodied bedsheets in Octavian (NO, l. 179) is likely to have been familiar to late-

medieval readers, from other romances, as a sign of illicit sexual relations.53 This is

pertinent imagery to associate with the scene of de-legitimation and disinheritance in

Octavian: speaking of adultery and illegitimacy, even as the narrator says otherwise.

The tacit notion of illegitimacy is compounded further by the birth of twins: ‘knave

childire two’ (SO, l. 83, repeated at l. 89; l. 359). Initially, the twin birth might be

taken as a vindication of the emperor’s fertility. But the recurrence of twins in the

romances – they appear in Bevis, Octavian, Torrent and possibly Tryamour – is also

an aspect of the romances’ illegitimacy trope.

The idea that twins are a token of illegitimacy has its origins in both popular

folklore and pseudo-medical philosophy. In the Middle English Lai Le Freine (c.

1330, an adaptation of Marie de France’s late twelfth-century Le Fresne) a ‘proude

dame and an envieous’ hears that her neighbour has delivered ‘tuay sones’ and

publicly claims that a twin birth can only occur if ‘tuay men hir han hadde in bour’.54

That the twin birth inspires her jealousy presupposes that twins ought to be an

occasion for celebration, and her slander is refuted and punished in the story. But

while this episode, clearly, does not represent a widely held belief in medieval

53 See McCracken, Romance of Adultery, pp. 75 and 141; Cherewatuk, Marriage, Adultery and Inheritance, p. 15; McCracken, ‘Bloody Sheets’, in The Curse of Eve, pp. 10–17. 54 Lai le Freine, ll. 54–71. For an English translation of Marie de France’s Le Fresne see The Lais of Marie de France, ed. and trans. Glyn S. Burgess and Keith Busby (London: Penguin, 2003).

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society, it does, however, evidence a widely known superstition, which was

grounded in classical and medieval philosophy. The basic premise of Aristotle’s

theory of twins, for instance, is that the mother has been impregnated twice.

Although Aristotle concedes that this could be induced by one partner, by way of

illustration he refers to the legend of Hercules and Iphicles: twins born to one mother

and two different fathers (Zeus and Amphitryon).55 He adds to this the case of a

‘certain woman’ who, ‘having committed adultery’, ‘brought forth the one child

resembling her husband and the other resembling the adulterous lover’.56 Not only

does the association between adultery and twins in the romances gain traction in the

context of this traditional superstition, but the romances differentiate between twins

in ways that evoke the Aristotelian binary of paternal and non-paternal resemblance.

The discriminatory treatment of the twins in the romances is compelling in a

number of ways, and will be explored further in later chapters, but here I wish to

draw attention to naming patterns. The twins born to Bevis are a second generation

of displaced (and consequently disinherited) heirs in that romance. Bevis names one

of his twins ‘“Gii … ase me fader het”’ but leaves the other unnamed. This child’s

foster father, a fisherman, takes the child to church ‘himself’ and ‘let nevene’ the

child ‘Mile’ (l. 3742; l. 3752). Thus Gii is named after his grandfather, while his

brother’s name is more anonymous, being the medieval Latin word for ‘soldier’ and

‘knight’.57 In another context, this would be an uncontroversial name choice, but

55 Quotations are from The Works of Aristotle, 12 vols, vol. 4 [Historia Animalium], trans. D’arcy Wentworth Thompson, ed. J. A. Smith and W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910). 56 Aristotle, Works, 7.585a.14; 7.585a.15–17. For an explanation of theories of twins in the works of Aristotle and Albertus Magnus (c. 1200–80), see J. M. Thijssen, ‘Twins as Monsters: Albertus Magnus’s Theory of the Generation of Twins and Its Philosophical Context’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 61:2 (1987), 237–46. 57 See ‘miles’ in Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, ed. Richard Ashdowne, David Howlett and Ronald Latham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018; originally published in 17 parts

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compared to the familial prestige attached to the name ‘Gii’, in Bevis, the lesser

status of ‘Mile’ is more stark. In the later Cambridge and Naples versions of Bevis,

the fisherman is named ‘Mile’, reinforcing the discrepancy between the twin with the

paternal name and the twin without.58 It also recalls the Aristotelian idea of twins

born of adultery, where only one resembles the lawful father.

Furthermore, there is another character with the same name in Bevis: the ‘erl,

that highte Mile’, who earlier ‘wedde’ Josian ‘aghenes [her] wille’, attempted to

‘make hire dronke a bedde’, and whom she killed (ll. 3122, 3169 and 3190). The

manner of the murder stresses Miles’s physical proximity to Josian and the threat of

rape.59 Josian’s virginity and chastity is a recurrent preoccupation in the romance:

prior to her marriage to Bevis and besides the forced marriage to Miles, there is

another to Bevis’s enemy, King Yvor. This marriage lasts for ‘seve yere’, ‘[b]oth to

bord and to bedde’, though Josian claims to have maintained her virginity (ll. 2006–

12, 2203–06). The romance’s narrator casts no aspersions on her honesty but re-

using the name ‘Mile’ for one of her offspring inevitably recollects the earlier forced

marriage and invites an imaginative connection between the multiple birth and the

multiple marriages. In effect, the name choice characterises one twin as potentially

illegitimate.

A comparable naming pattern can be found in Octavian, where one twin is

named ‘Octavian’ and the other ‘Florent’. In the northern version of the romance, the

between 1975 and 2013), available online at <http://logeion.uchicago.edu/lexidium> [accessed 4 Dec 2019]. 58 The fisherman is anonymous in the Auchinleck Bevis. 59 She winds the bed-curtain around his neck and ‘let him so ride al the night’, the sexual connotations of ‘ride’ punning with the ‘knotte riding’ (noose) by which he hangs (ll. 3121–24). See MED, riden, sense 9. A pun on the same word appears in Torrent, the King of Portugal telling his daughter, Desonell: ‘There fore thou shalt in to the see | And that Bastard within thee | To lerne you ffor to ride’; the latter phrase meaning to ride the waves of the sea or to work as a prostitute (ll. 1792–94).

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name ‘Florent’ recalls the ‘Florence’ (Florins) used to purchase the child from a band

of outlaws and alludes to the mercantile family into which he is fostered (NO, l. 579).

Unlike ‘Octavian’, the name ‘Florent’ does not bear any resemblance to the name of

the twins’ biological father (NO, l. 545). Other than a passing similarity to the name

of his adopted father (Clement), it does not indicate paternity at all. Only in the

southern version does it recall his mother’s name, ‘Florence’ (SO, l. 39). Yet in the

context of medieval folklore surrounding twin births and illegitimacy, the maternal

name seems a pertinent allusion to fatherlessness.

In Torrent, neither twin is named for a biological parent and the names are

suggestive in other ways. Indeed, even the most unassuming element of the name

‘Antony Fice Greffoun’ is significant. The prepositional ‘Fice’, derived from the

French ‘fiz’, literally means ‘son (of)’; but its usage is far from neutral.60 One of its

most frequent collocations in English texts, according to citations in the MED dating

from c. 1330 to c. 1450, is in the pejorative phrase, ‘fitz a putain’: a French

borrowing meaning ‘son of a whore’.61 Uses of the term in the nomenclature of royal

offspring are ameliorative by association, but nevertheless compound its connection

with bastardy. Besides Henry Fitzroy, mentioned above, there was Richard of

Chilham (d. 1246), an illegitimate son of King John, but ‘the only one to gain an

honorific title’ in the form of ‘Richard fitz Regis’, or Richard ‘fiz le Roy’.62 In

assessing the rarity (or otherwise) of a name such as ‘Fice Greffoun’ in medieval

romance, I have been able to find one ‘Kymbelyn le fitȝ Gryffith’, who appears the

60 See ‘fiz’ in Anglo-Norman Dictionary <http://www.anglo-norman.net> [accessed 4 Dec 2019]. 61 See MED, fitz, n., sense 1c, ‘~ a putain’ and also MED, putain, n., sense 1: ‘A whore, prostitute; fitz a ~, fitz dei ~, whoreson’. 62 Simon Lloyd, ‘Chilham, Sir Richard of (d. 1246)’, ODNB <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/46706> [accessed 4 Dec 2019].

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fifteenth-century poem, Arthur.63 Though nothing more is said about Kymbelyn, he

is the penultimate in a long list of attendees at Arthur’s Round Table, who belong to

a group described as ‘other … gentyls grete’, apart from the ‘kynges & erles’ already

introduced. Each of its members bears the moniker ‘fitȝ’: namely, ‘Reyneȝ fitȝ

Colys’, ‘Tadeus fitȝ Reis’ and ‘Delyn fitȝ David’ (ll. 165–77). This assemblage of

characters named ‘fitȝ’, separated from the main cohort, implies some shared social

status, which might be illegitimacy.

Since we have seen that fatherlessness might be a euphemism for bastardy, it

is significant that the twins’ names in Torrent evoke neither mother or father but

identify them with the animals who stole them away: Leobertus after a leopard and

Antony after a griffin. In light of the discussion of symbolic rebirth after

disinheritance, in Chapter 1, it is significant that the twins’ animal names

disassociate them from their (human) origins. The name ‘Antony Fice Greffoun’

literally reads as ‘Antony, [bastard] son of the griffin’.64 The name rewrites the

disinherited heir’s genealogy, with the animal abduction as the rite of passage

leading to his symbolic rebirth: borne away by a griffin and reborn as ‘Fice

Greffoun’. Octavian includes a more literal expression of an animal’s surrogate

63 Arthur [Longleat, Marquess of Bath, MS 55 (c. 1412–1430)], ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, EETS, OS 2 (London: Trübner & Co, 1864), ll. 165–77. On the manuscript and its date, see Erik Kooper, ‘Longleat House MS 55: An Unacknowledged Brut Manuscript?’, in The Prose Brut and Other Late Medieval Chronicles, ed. Jaclyn Rajsic, Erik Kooper and Dominique Hoche (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2016), pp. 75–93. The ‘Kymbelyn le fitȝ Gryffith’ in Arthur is unrelated to the ancient king Cymbeline, best known from Shakespeare’s play of the same name; the two are mentioned, separately, in John Hardyng’s Chronicle (c. 1457). See John Hardyng, Chronicle, ed. James Simpson and Sarah Peverley (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2015): Kymbelyn/Cymbeline, son of Tenvancyus at 2.2459, 2.2459, 2.2473, 2.2478; ‘Kymbelyne’, knight of the Round Table, at 3.2469. As a surname, as it appears in medieval records, ‘Griffin’ may derive from the common Welsh ‘Griffith’ (or Gruffudd). 64 In comparison, the name ‘Richard Coer de Lyon’ (Richard I) features an animal in the suffix, alluding to a supposedly animalistic personal quality, but does not suggest that Richard is born of a lion.

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parenting, where the young Octavian ‘sowkyde the lyones’ along with her ‘whelps’

(NO, ll. 370–75).

Both the lion and the griffin are common heraldic devices, but the latter

seems a pertinent choice of avatar for an (allegedly) illegitimate character, not least

because it is a hybrid creature.65 Described in the Book of John Mandeville as having

‘the body byfore as an egle and byhynde as a lyon’, it is a suitable figurative

representation of the mixed-parentage definition of bastardy.66 Furthermore, in the

particular context of Middle English romances, the griffin is significant as the

heraldic device of the genre’s most prominent bastard hero: ‘a ryche scheld overgylte

| with a gryffyn gay’ is borne by Lybeaus Desconus, otherwise called the fair

unknown.67

The Fair Unknown and Rightful Illegitimacy

The fair unknown has become something of a critical archetype in romance

scholarship, often mentioned in relation to Malory’s Gareth in Le More Darthur, but

for late-medieval readers, the name would be synonymous with Lybeaus Desconus.68

‘Lybeaus Desconus’ is an Anglicised rendering of ‘Li Biaus Desconneus’, as the

character is called in the only surviving French version of his romance (dated to the

65 See Bernard Burke, The General Armory of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales (London: Harrison, 1884) and A Heraldic Miscellany: Fifteenth-Century Treatises on Blazon and the Office of Arms in English and Scots, ed. Richard J. Moll (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018). See also Maurice Keen, ‘Heraldry and Heralds’, in Chivalry (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 125–42. 66 The Book of John Mandeville, ed. Tamarah Kohanski and C. David Benson (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), l. 2386. This edition is based on London, British Library, Royal MS 17 C xxxviii (c. 1410). 67 Ashmole Lybeaus, ll. 92–93. 68 See James Weldon, ‘The Fair Unknown’, in The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain, 4 vols, vol. 2, ed. Sian Echard and Robert Rouse (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), pp. 783–86. See also Weldon’s entry for ‘Lybeaus Desconus’, pp. 1212–16.

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thirteenth century), meaning ‘the fair unknown’.69 There are six surviving Middle

English versions of Lybeaus Desconus, making it a close rival (alongside Eglamour)

to Bevis and Guy of Warwick for the place of the best attested and possibly the most

widely circulated of all the Middle English romances. Certainly, there are more

surviving manuscripts of Lybeaus than any other, single Middle English Arthurian

romance.70 The romance itself and the presence of fair unknown typology in other

romances remain understudied.71 But its proliferation and co-existence with other

romances in their manuscripts suggest that Lybeaus might have exerted some

influence over their reception, and thus it warrants careful attention here.72

69 Renaut de Bâgé, Le Bel Inconnu (Li Biaus Decouneüs; The Fair Unknown), ed. Karen Fresco, trans. Colleen P. Donagher, music ed. Margaret P. Hasselman (New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1992), l. 6249. The French manuscript is Chantilly, Musée Condé, Chantilly MS 472. The English manuscripts are: Cotton Caligula A.ii (which also features Eglamour and Octavian); Lambeth 306; Lincoln’s Inn 250; Naples; Ashmole 61; and the Percy Folio. Jane Bliss notes that the co-existence of two different characters, in Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle, named ‘Syr Lebys Dyskoniis’ and ‘Syr Ferr Unkowthe’, ‘raises the question: is a French name in an English text going to be heard or understood differently [by] an anglophone audience?’ although she concedes it is probably ‘vain to speculate’, because of the differing ‘linguistic skill, literary knowledge, and cultural experience’ of individual readers and audiences. Bliss, Naming and Namelessness in Medieval Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), p. 108. Possible reasons for not translating the meaning of the hero’s name into English in the Middle English Lybeaus include that the character was already known and recognisable by the French name, as well as a desire to evoke the French origins of the romance, as P. J. C. Field and Margaret A. Muir suggest of the Morte Darthur. See Field and Muir, ‘French Words and Phrases in Sir Thomas Malory’s, “Le Morte Darthur”’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 72:3 (1971), 483–500. 70 Tony Hunt, ‘Editing Arthuriana’, in A History of Arthurian Scholarship, ed. Norris J. Lacy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 37–48 (p. 45). There are four surviving manuscripts of Awntyrs off Arthure, two each of Sir Cleges, Sir Degrevant and Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle, and only one manuscript for each of the remaining examples: Stanzaic Morte; Alliterative Morte; Sir Tristrem; Sir Percyvelle of Gales; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Marriage of Sir Gawain; Greene Knight; Arthur; Avowyng of King Arthur; Arthour and Merlin; Ywain and Gawain; Wedding of Gawain; Turke and Sir Gawain. See DMER. 71 Carolyne Larrington remarked on the necessity of Salisbury and Weldon’s 2015 edition of Lybeaus and hoped it would ‘breathe new life into the study of the “Fair Unknown” motif’. Carolyne Larrington, ‘Review, Lybeaus Desconus, ed. Eve Salisbury and James Weldon (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2013)’, Medium Aevum 84:2 (2015), 356. 72 Lybeaus is also placed inside the top fifteen results of Yin Liu’s ‘prototype’ test (as cited in the introduction).

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Other critics have tended to play down any correlation between Lybeaus and

other, non-Arthurian Middle English romance heroes: often because the fair

unknown is regarded as a plot-type as much as a character. By contrast, Malory’s Sir

Gareth, in the Morte Darthur, occupies a somewhat misleading position in criticism

as a prominent example of the fair unknown type. Gareth is quite unlike Lybeaus,

neither ‘unknowing’ or a bastard, but deliberately disguising himself in order to

conceal his parentage and perform the part of an unknown newcomer to Arthur’s

court. Gareth is recognised as a fair unknown in criticism because of parallels with

the plot of Lybeaus, regardless of dissimilarities between the characters (particularly

their motivations).73 Elsewhere, Helen Phillips recognises Florent (of Octavian) as a

type of fair unknown character, but for Tara Williams Octavian is ‘not a fair

unknown narrative’.74 George R. Keiser refutes the comparison, remarking that ‘the

Fair Unknown is different from the more conventional chivalric heroes [as in]

Octavian’.75 In fact, all of the disinherited heirs in the romances discussed here

appear, at least once in their stories, like Lybeaus Desconus, as the unknown and

exceptional youth. Rather than plot, I suggest that “unknownness” is the fair

unknown’s defining feature, and the one shared with the disinherited heirs, separated

from their families and raised in obscurity.

73 See R. H. Wilson, ‘The “Fair Unknown” in Malory’, PMLA, 58:1 (1943), 1–21; Arnold Sanders, ‘Sir Gareth and the “Unfair Unknown”: Malory’s Use of the Gawain Romances’, Arthuriana, 16:1 (2006), 34–46; Ralph Norris, ‘The Sources of “The Tale of Sir Gareth”, in Malory’s Library: The Sources of the Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 81–94; P. J. C. Field, ‘The Source of Malory’s “Tale of Sir Gareth”’, in Malory: Texts and Sources (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 246–60. 74 Helen Phillips, ‘Rites of Passage in French and English Romances’, in Rites of Passage, pp. 83–108 (p. 92); Tara Williams, ‘Revealing Spectacles: Virtue and Identity in Fair Unknowns’, in Middle English Marvels: Magic, Spectacle, and Morality in the Fourteenth Century (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2018), pp. 37–63 (p. 59). 75 George R. Keiser, ‘Robert Thornton: Gentleman, Reader and Scribe’, in Robert Thornton and his Books: Essays on the Lincoln and London Thornton Manuscripts, ed. Susanna Fein and Michael Johnston (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, York Medieval Press, 2014), pp. 67–108 (p. 89).

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Unknownness, in Lybeaus, is definitively linked with bastardy, mentioned

early and unequivocally in the English versions of his story. The incipit to London,

Lambeth Palace, MS 306 reads:

A tretys of one Gyngelayne othir wyse namyd by Kyng Arthure Lybeus Dysconeus that was

bastard son to Sir Gawayne. (l. i)

Ashmole 61 introduces its hero similarly:

Hys name was callyd Gyngeleyn

Getyn he was of Sir Gawayne

By a forest syde.

…

Gyngeleyn was feyr and bryght,

Gentyll of face and body ryght,

Basterd thoff he were. (ll. 5–14)

Unlike their French counterpart, the English versions of the romance immediately

divulge the hero’s biological parentage, his bastardy and the alternative name

‘Gyngeleyn’ (as yet unknown to him). They thus dispense with the idea that the

unknownness of the fair unknown denotes illegibility. Instead, when Arthur dubs the

precocious youngster ‘Lybeaus Desconus’, unknownness appears as a euphemism

for his evident illegitimacy: the child who cannot tell the king the identity of his

father nor his paternal name. He knows himself only by the affectionate name given

by his mother, ‘bewfiz’ (meaning ‘fair son’; Lambeth Lybeaus, l. 26). Matronymic

names were common in England until at least the fourteenth century, especially if the

mother was an heiress to substantial lands. But – as Eve Salisbury also suggests – the

maternal pet-name in Lybeaus might be read as a euphemistic allusion to

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illegitimacy, in that it identifies the child as his ‘mother’s son’, insinuating a lack of

legitimate paternity.76

Illegitimacy is no impediment to chivalric success in Lybeaus, however. In

fact, as the Lambeth narrator insists, a ‘better knyght was never prophitable | With

Arthur at the Roun Table’ (ll. 10–11). The word ‘prophitable’ is interesting one,

possibly meaning ‘honorable’ (as per Salisbury and Weldon’s editorial gloss) but

also ‘profitable’, as in financially lucrative.77 In terms of the socioeconomic

definition of bastardy, it associates degraded or lowly lineage with a capacity for

accruing wealth. Likewise, the phrase ‘basterd thoff he were’ simultaneously admits

that bastardy is potentially degrading and confirms that it can be overcome (Ashmole

Lybeaus, l. 14). The same phrase is used of Richard of Chilham in the chronicle of

Robert of Gloucester (fl. 1260–1300): ‘Richard fitz le rei … Gentil man was inou,

þei he were abast ibore’.78 It is an apology for bastardy that nonetheless indicates a

preference for including rather than erasing the fact.

A brief detour into the Morte Darthur is useful here, since it features a

comparable admission of potential bastardy which is clearly unsettling to, but also

proximate to the construction of rightful heirship. A crucial element of the medieval

Arthurian legend is the extraordinary circumstance of Arthur’s conception, aided by

Merlin, which also introduces the threat of illegitimacy. Merlin disguises the king,

Uther Pendragon as Gorlois, duke of Cornwall, in order that he can gain admittance

to the chamber of Gorlois’s wife, Igrayne. She conceives Arthur with Uther, thinking

76 See Conor McCarthy, Marriage in Medieval England, p. 131; Hanawalt, Ties that Bound, p. 82; Eve Salisbury, ‘Lybeaus Desconus: Transformation, Adaptation, and the Monstrous-Feminine’, Arthuriana 24:1 (2014), 66–85 (p. 78 and notes 42–44). 77 See MED, profitable, adj. 78 The Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, ed. William Aldis Wright (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1887), l. 10629.

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him to be her husband, who is meanwhile killed in battle. In the Morte, the narrator’s

subsequent insistence that Arthur’s conception occurred ‘after the deth of duke’

indicates a squeamishness about potential bastardy and a desire to define the terms of

his legitimacy clearly:

after the deth of the duke, Kyng Uther lay with Igrayne more than thre houres after his deth,

and begat on her that nyght Arthur.79

Yet the dubious legitimacy of Arthur’s conception is clearly an essential part of

legend for Malory, which he does not seek to abridge or erase.80

When the kings of Britain refuse to recognise Arthur’s right to the throne,

denouncing him as a ‘berdles boye that was come of lowe blood’, Merlin initially

tells them that Arthur is ‘“Kynge Uther Pendragons sone … goten on Igrayne, the

Dukes wyf of Tyntigail”’. The report plainly depicts Arthur as the product of

adultery, to which the kings conclude: ‘“Thenne is he a bastard”’. Merlin rebukes

them, saying:

‘Nay! After the deth of the duke more than thre houres was Arthur begoten, and thirtene

days after kyng Uther wedded Igrayne, and therfor I preve hym he is no bastard’.81

When Igrayne is called upon to testify, she says that, ‘“Merlion knoweth … Kynge

Uther com to me [when my lord] was dede three owres tofore”’.82 The reiteration of

the ‘thre houres’ eventually reads as a well-rehearsed piece of witness testimony. But

while it is said to ‘preve’ Arthur’s legitimacy, the dramatic proximity of illegitimacy

is inevitably and even wilfully recalled.

79 Morte Darthur, p. 5, my italics. 80 The tradition of the dubious circumstances of Arthur’s conception begins with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1136). See Rosemary Morris, ‘Conception and Birth’, in The Character of King Arthur in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982), pp. 24–35. 81 Morte Darthur, p. 12, my italics. 82 Morte Darthur, p. 33, my italics.

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Karen Cherewatuk suggests that bastardy is neutral in many of Malory’s

characters, and that ‘Mordred stands apart in his malevolence’: the ‘“trouble” [he]

will wreak [has] its roots not so much in his illegitimate status as his incestuous

conception’.83 Yet illegitimacy remains the issue here, in so far as Mordred’s

illegitimacy is constituted in his incestuous conception.84 On the other hand, Jessica

Watson has argued that bastardy is presented as a ‘gifted status’ in the Morte by

reason of association with a number of powerful knights.85 ‘Sir Gylberd the

Bastarde’, for example, is said to be ‘one of the best knyghtes of the worlde’.86 No

further explanation of his bastardy is given but the simultaneous use of the epithet

with the description of his character tacitly links bastardy to chivalric

exceptionalism. Catherine Emerson speculates that ‘a bastard, upon whom the

inheritance of the duchy could not rest’ might have been regarded as ‘the ideal figure

to undertake the inherently risky occupation’ of chivalric combat.87 This may be the

case with ‘Sir Gylberd’, and various historical examples, but it does not account for

the way in which bastardy is incorporated into the Arthurian legend in direct relation

to the construction of Arthur’s rightful heirship, nor comparable examples of dubious

legitimacy in the disinheritance romances. In order to better understand the

imaginative connection between bastardy and (rightful) heirship in these texts, I

return to the figure of the fair unknown in Lybeaus.

83 Cherewatuk, Marriage, Adultery and Inheritance, pp. 109–10. 84 In other literary traditions, such as Scottish chronicles, Arthur is deemed illegitimate and Mordred is characterised as the ‘rightful heir to the British crown’. See Megan Leitch, Romancing Treason: The Literature of the Wards of the Roses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 119. 85 Jessica Watson, Bastardy as a Gifted Status in Chaucer and Malory (Lewiston: Mellen, 1996). 86 Morte, p. 170. An editorial gloss for the epithet simply states, ‘son of unwed, but noble, parents’. 87 Catherine Emerson, Olivier de La Marche and the Rhetoric of 15th-Century Historiography (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2004), p. 160.

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When Arthur knights the unnamed youth as ‘Sir Lybeaus Desconus’,

previously known only by his mother’s pet name, he provides the hero with an alias

which formally mimics the patronymic system.88 But in substance, the name

consolidates Lybeaus’s unknownness. It does not provide a provisional paternal

name in place of his maternal pet name. Rather, the ‘fair son’ becomes the ‘fair

unknown’. If the maternal origin of the first name might imply fatherlessness (and

thus bastardy), then the new name renders Lybeaus nobody’s child: ‘filius nullius’, to

borrow the legal phrase sometimes used for bastard offspring.89 Even when Gawain

later recognises Lybeaus as ‘hys son’ and ‘comand[s]’ everyone to ‘call hym

Gyngelayn’, the hero continues to be called ‘Libeus Disconeus’ to the end of the

romance (Ashmole, ll. 2225–26; l. 2242).90 Though the plot has been described as an

‘identity romance’, the story of a young man who ‘matures into’ his ‘proper name’,

having previously lacked any ‘“real” identity’, the romance does not polarise

unknownness and identity.91 In fact, contrary to the idea that ‘Gyngelayn’ is the

hero’s ‘real’ or ‘true’ name, it cannot be overstated that his unknownness is his

identifying mark.92 Lybeaus Desconus is the name by which the hero is known both

within the interior world of the romances and beyond. The Old French manuscript is

alone in bestowing the romance with the title, ‘De Guinglain’.93 In the English

88 Eve Salisbury, ‘Transformation, Adaptation, and the Monstrous-Feminine’, p. 66. 89 Paul Brand, ‘Family and Inheritance, Women and Children’, in An Illustrated History of Late Medieval England, ed. Chris Given-Wilson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 58–81 (p. 73). 90 The Naples Lybeaus ends in the same way; the Lambeth and Cotton versions omit any mention of Lybeaus’s reunion with his mother or Gawain after his wedding. 91 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 121; Salisbury and Weldon, eds, ‘Introduction’, Lybeaus Desconus, available via METS, paragraph 1. 92 Alistair Fowler, Literary Names: Personal Names in English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 143. 93 Karen Fresco, ‘Introduction’, to Le Bel Inconnu (Li Biaus Decouneüs; The Fair Unknown), pp. i–xxxii (p. xxii).

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tradition, ‘Lybeaus Desconus’ is the hero’s definitive moniker: he is name-checked

as ‘Sir Lybeux’ in Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas and included among the early

modern inscriptions on the Winchester Round Table, as ‘S[ir] lybyus dysconu[s]’.94

Unknownness and unknowing are synonymous with Lybeaus’s heroic

identity and his heroic deeds, one effect of which is a link between illegitimacy and

merit. When he fights for the Lady of Synadon, he says that he does so although he

‘ne wote wherfor ne whye | Ne who dothe hyr that tormentrye’ (Ashmole, ll. 1716–

17). When she obliquely reveals the identity of his father, Lybeaus does not reply.

She subsequently thanks him for saving her from her curse, by performing a

restorative kiss; but in fact it is she who kisses him, ‘ere that Lybeous wiste’

(Ashmole, l. 2082, my italics). Lybeaus’s unknowing is contrasted, here, with the

wicked cunning of the ‘two clerkys kowthe’ who had issued the curse on the Lady:

to borrow from Patricia Ingham’s study of the ‘ethics of the medieval new’, we

might read the clever clerks’ ‘nygrymauncye’ as the dangerous intellectual

‘innovation’ for which Lybeaus’s non-threatening brand of novelty, his youthful

unknownness, is the remedy (Lambeth, ll. 1752–56).95 His unknowing is something

of a virtue. In fact, when he is first asked his name, Lybeaus admits that he is ‘a child

uncouthe’, or ‘a child unknown’ (Ashmole and Lambeth, l. 49; Naples, l. 49). It is a

‘knowing’ declaration, in his self-consciousness about his very lack of knowledge.

Early in the Ashmole 61 version of the romance, Lybeaus is even described as

‘wytty’ and ‘wyse’, adjectives connotative of ‘knowing’, suggesting that Lybeaus’s

unknowing is a kind of knowledge (l. 5 and l. 25).

94 Chaucer, Tale of Sir Thopas, l. 2091. For an image of the Winchester Round Table see Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, online exhibition, ‘The Romance of the Middle Ages’ <http://medievalromance.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/romance-home> [accessed 4 Dec 2019]. The table has been dated to the reign of Edward I (1272–1307) but was repainted in the early sixteenth century. 95 Ingham, The Medieval New, p. 82.

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As Karen Sullivan observes in medieval ‘Merlin’ literature, admitting to

one’s ‘unknowing’ constitutes a ‘realization’ of the limits of human knowledge:

realising ‘that one cannot place trust in human understanding … itself constitutes a

kind of understanding’.96 This idea has its basis in Christian theology, best expressed

by the late fourteenth-century mystical text, the Cloud of Unknowing, which explains

that humans cannot know God: therefore to contemplate the divine, the reader ought

to work towards a conscious un-knowing, divesting the mind of all things in order to

reach spiritual enlightenment.97 Un-knowing oneself, as Lybeaus professes to do, is

an advanced stage of the Cloud’s meditation, where the reader is taught ‘in this werk

[to] forgete bothe thiself and also thi dedes’ for God (ll. 1522–23). In fact, the name

‘Lybeaus Desconus’ possibly expresses the Cloud’s central idea that (divine) truth is

contingent on unknowing. Among its various usages, the Middle English ‘fair’ can

mean ‘accordant with truth’, so that the phrase ‘fair unknown’ might be closer in

sentiment to ‘unknown truth’ than ‘beautiful stranger’.98

If this comparison seems unlikely, it is worth noting some of the ‘theocentric’

language in Lybeaus. The romance’s recent editors have noted the ‘pious’ language

and ‘implicit sanctification’ of the poem’s hero, watched over by ‘hevens quene’

(Naples, l. 840); while its hymn-like, tail-rhyme form can be found in religious

96 Karen Sullivan, ‘On Recognizing the Limits of Our Understanding: Medieval Debates about Merlin and Marvels’, in Uncertain Knowledge: Scepticism, Relativism, and Doubt in the Middle Ages, ed. Dallas George Denery, Kantik Ghosh, and Nicolette Zeeman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), pp. 162–84 (p. 181). 97 Quotations are from Cloud of Unknowing, ed. Patrick Gallacher (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997). There are 17 extant Cloud manuscripts, suggesting that it was relatively popular in the late-medieval period. 98 See MED, fair, adj., sense 10. Wendy Matlock has similarly argued for this sense of the word ‘fair’ (i.e. truthfulness) in her reading of Isumbras. Wendy Matlock, ‘Reading the Family in Rate Manuscript’s Saint Eustace and Sir Isumbras’, Chaucer Review, 53:3 (2018), 350–73.

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material dating from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries.99 The fair unknown also

makes at least one appearance in vernacular religious literature: a mid-thirteenth-

century French poem by a Cistercian abbot named Gérard of Liége includes a

characterisation of Christ as ‘li biaus descouneüs’.100 If an allusion to the romance

hero, it seems a risky one, given his bastardy, but the analogy might also refer to the

fair unknown’s exceptionality and virtuous brand of unknownness.101 The conceit of

the fair unknown, with or without its pious colouring, increasingly appears to speak

of righteous unknowing or, to extend the romance’s own metaphor, rightful

illegitimacy. When the disinheritance romances characterise their disinherited heirs

as fair unknowns, they invoke this concept.102

Lybeaus has been described as a romance which shows how ‘kinship

relations [can be] legitimated’ through the reunion of ‘estranged parents’,103 and

readers may feel that ‘knowledge of [his] father gives [Lybeaus] a heritage that

99 Rhiannon Purdie, Anglicising Romance, p. 6; Salisbury and Weldon, eds, ‘Introduction’, to Lybeaus, available online via METS, paragraph 17. 100 The poem is a tract on the love of God, combining Latin devotional writing and vernacular lyric. See Barbara Newman, Gods and Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), p. 153. 101 The implication of Christ’s illegitimacy contradicts the fundamental doctrine of the Virgin birth (the belief that Christ is an incarnation of God and has no natural father) established in the early Christian church between the second and fifth centuries. C. H. Moehlman, ‘The Origin of the Apostles’ Creed’, The Journal of Religion, 13:3 (1933), 301–19; Charles Joseph Hefele, A History of the Councils of the Church, from the Original Documents to the Close of the Council of Nicaea, A.D. 325, ed. William R. Clark (New York: AMS Press, 1972; first published Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1883–96), p. 275. Alison Findlay notes some comparable allusions to Christ’s bastardy in early modern literature, in Illegitimate Power: Bastards in Renaissance Drama (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 174–76. 102 My comparison of the theological notion of conscious unknowing in the Cloud to the secular presentation (and political implications) of conscious unknowing in Lybeaus is different from, but could help to extend, James Simpson’s examination of ‘romance (un)thinking’. Simpson describes romances’ tendency to approach certain subjects only indirectly as a conscious recognition that certain issues are ‘better not thought about explicitly’, fostering a ‘subtle form of thought’. Simpson, ‘Unthinking Thought: Romance’s Wisdom’, p. 37. 103 Salisbury and Weldon, ‘Introduction’ to Lybeaus, paragraph 2.

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makes him worthy to marry the Lady of Synadowne’.104 Yet the order of events in

the romance suggests otherwise. Lybeaus has already married before his parentage is

revealed. When Gawain does claim Lybeaus as his son, his proclamation of the name

‘Gyngelayne’ is ignored. In some versions of Lybeaus, there is no family reunion at

all.105 The relevance of paternal identity and legitimacy appear diminished: the

question posed at the beginning of the story ceases to matter by the end.

Likewise in Tryamour, although the hero asks about his father’s identity

elsewhere in the romance, his marriage to the queen of Hungary (Helen) is arranged

before any knowledge of his father’s identity comes to light. There is even a

pertinent moment of unknowing at the beginning of Tryamour: the hero’s conception

occurs on the night before his father’s pilgrimage, ‘as Gode wolde’ though the

couple ‘wyste noght’ (ll. 39–42). The timing of Tryamour’s conception and birth,

unknown to his parents or others, gives credence to Sir Marrok’s subsequent

accusations of adultery and illegitimacy, but it is divinely ordained: thereby

juxtaposing God’s omniscience and the fallibility of human judgement, while

implying a divine endorsement of unknowing and even the allegation of illegitimacy

that follows. These romances seem less invested in legitimating bastards than

demonstrating how allegedly illegitimate offspring can operate within, and exceed,

normal social expectations.

Parallels between Lybeaus and the unknown heirs of the disinheritance

romances are mostly situational, but certain details especially invite the comparison.

One compelling, recurrent presence is the griffin: the animal featured in Lybeaus’s

insignia and who, in both versions of Octavian as well as in Eglamour and Torrent,

104 Rachel Moss, Fatherhood and its Representations in Middle English Texts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), p. 105. 105 This is the case in the Lambeth version and Cotton Caligula A.ii.

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captures and separates the (allegedly) illegitimate heirs from their mothers and

carries them to places ‘unkende’ (unknown). In the northern Octavian:

There come a fewle full faire of flyghte

A gryffone, sayse the buke, he hyghte

…

The lyones with the childe tuke he

And intill ane ile of the see

The gryffone bothe tham bare.106

In the southern version, similarly, ‘þe chyld & þe lyoun | Vp yn hys clawys bar þe

gryffoun (ll. 447–53). In Eglamour, ‘a grype come’ and the ‘yong chylde away he

bare’ to ‘a countre unkende’ and likewise in Torrent, a ‘grype’ carries Desonell’s

‘yong son’ over ‘a water flod’ and ‘into a wyldernes’ (Eglamour, ll. 817–19; Torrent,

ll. 1872–74). The cumulative effect of these appearances, and the griffin’s

association with Lybeaus, is to figure the griffin as a spectre of (heroic) illegitimacy.

It is probably not coincidental, in this light, that a minor figure who features in

Lybeaus as ‘Sir Griffayn’ has a more extended role in the Morte as ‘Gryfflet le Fyȝ

de Dieu’: a knight whose epithet suggests half-supernatural genealogy as well as

bastardy. Poignantly, it is one of King Arthur’s first acts in the Morte, after learning

of his own dubious conception, to make the young ‘Gryfflet’ a knight.107

106 NO, ll. 352–60. The ‘buke’ is probably a fictional source. At least, in the earlier French version of the romance it is a dragon, and not a griffin, that comes to steal the empress’s child. See Hudson’s note to line 353. It is still a ‘dragon’ that haunts the empress’s premonitory dream, in the northern English Octavian (l. 167). The griffin may be a typically English intervention, since there is no source for Lybeaus’s griffin heraldry in its Old French counterpart either. 107 See Morte, p. 3, for Arthur knighting Gryfflet and p. 352 for the longer version of his name. See Naples Lybeaus, l. 254 for ‘Sir Griffayn’. The spelling of the name varies in the Lybeaus manuscripts, but Salisbury and Weldon, with Christopher Bruce, identify the character with Gryfflet, as he is better known. See Salisbury and Weldon, eds, Lybeaus, note to Lambeth, l. 231; Christopher W. Bruce, The Arthurian Name Dictionary (New York and London: Garland, 1999), pp. 220–21. Sir Griffayn’s

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Like Lybeaus, Degrebell adopts the griffin as a heraldic device and, as with

Antony Fice Greffoun in Torrent, the griffin stands in for Degrebell’s unknown

genealogy. The Eglamour-narrator demands that readers pay special attention to this

detail:

Lestenes lordynges, both lefe and dere,

What armes the chyld bare ye schal here

And ye wyll undyrstond.

He bare in armere a grype of gold

Rycheley betyn in the molde. (ll. 1003–07)

A sixteenth-century copy of Eglamour dutifully includes an illustration of the griffin

holding its swaddled infant, in a style which clearly emulates the design of heraldic

badges (see Fig. 8, p. 238).108 The narrator appeals to the reader to ‘undyrstond’ the

griffin heraldry, not only at this moment but also later, when Degrebell attends a

tournament and an onlooker asks, ‘What manere of man, sykurly | That berys a grype

full bryghte?’ (ll. 1088–89). Readers are invited to recognise the significance of the

‘grype of gold’ as an emblem of Degrebell’s fair-unknownness and as the heraldic

device of the best-known bastard hero of medieval romance.

There are also allusions to the fair unknown in the naming of some of the

disinheritance heroes. The name ‘Degrebell’, with a meaning approximate to lost

beauty, is evocative of the fair unknown and a matronym, in that it follows the

pattern of his mother’s name, ‘Cristabell’.109 Most strikingly, the name ‘Bevis’ bears

epithet in the French Li Biaus is ‘li fius Do’, comparable to Malory’s ‘fyse de dieu’ and possibly associating him with the Welsh mythic figure, Dôn (see Bruce, p. 220). 108 See the conclusion and Figs 13–15 (pp. 241–42) to compare to the Stanley family’s ‘eagle and child’ heraldry. 109 Editors and critics have proposed the same French root for ‘Degare’ (Sir Degare) and ‘Egare’ (Emare). See Eglamour, note to l. 842; Degare, note to l. 254; Emare, note to l. 23. See also Jane Bliss, Naming and Namelessness, pp. 166–67.

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an orthographical resemblance to, if not a common etymology with ‘Bewfiz’, the

maternal pet name that nods towards Lybeaus’s suspect legitimacy.110 In fact, the

Ashmole 61 scribe (who signs himself ‘Rate’) renders Lybeaus’s pet name ‘Beuys’,

identical to spellings of ‘Bevis’ in the Cambridge and Naples manuscripts (Ashmole,

l. 26).111 Such evidence suggests that late-medieval readers of the romances might

have read ‘Bevis’ interchangeably with Lybeaus’s pet name.

Further investigation of the use of the term ‘bew-fiz’ in late-medieval English

texts might reveal the extent of its coincidence with stories of troubled inheritance,

illegitimacy or troubling maternal authority (as is the case in Bevis). One chronicler,

for example, records Isabelle of France appealing to Edward III as ‘beal fitz’, at the

moment he comes into his inheritance: ‘beal fitz, eiez pitie’, she is imagined to say,

as her regency with Roger Mortimer is overthrown.112 In Bevis, the problem of

maternal infidelity is imaginatively associated with the potential illegitimacy of the

hero, whether according to the logic of common law or in the romance’s figurative

sense. When he is dismissed from his former home by the porter who fails to

recognise him, calling him ‘scherewe houre sone’, Bevis’s reply is affirmative:

110 Lybeaus’s pet name is spelt variously in Lambeth and Naples as ‘Bewfiz’, ‘Bewfice’ and ‘Beaufits’, but may be a pun on ‘Bewvisage’, given that the hero is said to be ‘feire of vis’ (Naples, l. 72). 111 See Lambeth Lybeaus, note to l. 26. Various spellings of ‘Bevis’ include ‘Befyse’, ‘Beuys’ and ‘Beuon’ (Cambridge Bevis, ll. 5 and 57; Naples Bevis, l. 4). See also Shuffelton’s note to the Ashmole Lybeaus, l. 26, where he speculates that Rate ‘may be evoking’ Bevis deliberately. 112 Chronicon Galfridi le Baker de Swynebroke, ed. E. M. Thompson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889), p. 46. There are some loose parallels between Edward’s position and that of the romance hero, Bevis: not only had Mortimer played a part in the death of Edward’s father, but it was widely believed that Isabelle had conducted an illicit affair with him. There were even rumours, before Edward III’s coup in 1330, that Mortimer had begotten a child with Isabelle and was intent on ‘overturn[ing] the royal bloodline’. Caroline Shenton, ‘Edward III and the Coup of 1330’, in The Age of Edward III, ed. J. S. Bothwell (York: York Medieval Press, 2001), pp. 13–34 (p. 14).

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‘An houre sone for sothe ich wes

Wel ich wot!’ (ll. 410–11)

A ‘houre sone’ by his own admission, Bevis’s attack on his mother’s fidelity invites

some speculation as to the extent of her premarital affair with Devoun and raises the

possibility of Bevis’s illegitimate status in both ecclesiastical and common law

senses.

Indeed, when Bevis is reintroduced to the story after the episode relating

Gii’s death, the narrator calls him ‘Beves, that was Guis sone’: curiously suggesting

that Bevis ‘was’ but is no longer Gii’s son, underlining his fatherlessness. The

legitimacy of Bevis’s birthright is further troubled by the fact that his father’s dying

act was to ‘graunte’ all his lands to Devoun, in a bid to save his life (l. 263). Then,

when Bevis conspires to falsify evidence of his own death, he sacrifices his legal

identity altogether. Saber’s advice to Bevis, to return to Hampton in future to claim

the lands ‘with werre’, takes on a new legal specificity in this light, meaning to claim

by right of conquest, rather than by birth.

A key question for criticism dealing with illegitimacy in medieval literature,

so far, has been whether it is presented as bad, neutral, or potentially positive. On the

treatment of illegitimacy in Old French romances, Peggy McCracken quotes a

maxim from Partonopeu de Blois, that ‘meix vaut bons fix en pechié nes | Que

mauvais d’espouse engenrés’ (a good son born in sin is better than a bad son

engendered in a spouse) and cites Caradoc as evidence that ‘illegitimacy need not

represent a threat to succession and political stability’.113 Bastardy is not an

inherently bad thing, the maxim advises; it can be managed. Cooper similarly notes,

in reference to Lybeaus, that the romance genre is sometimes ‘prepared to allow such

113 McCracken, Romance of Adultery, p. 137 (McCracken’s translation) and p. 142.

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children [illegitimate offspring] within its remit’, despite its ‘insistent concern with

noble blood lines’.114 But Lybeaus is no minor admission to the romance canon and

the trope of illegitimacy now seems more widespread. Even in the romances where

accusations of illegitimacy do not prefigure the disinheritance, as in Havelok, the

hero’s ability to reclaim original patrimonies on the basis of birthright is called into

question. The legitimacy of Havelok’s birth and parentage is never explicitly

contested, but he does renounce his own lineage in order to save his life: ‘Sweren I

wole that Bircabein | Nevere yete me gat’, he promises to Godard (ll. 494–95).

Making such a promise means that Havelok commits to presenting himself,

hereafter, as the natural son of his adopted father, Grim, or otherwise fatherless:

making himself an illegitimate heir to Denmark.

But the romances do not subscribe to absolute definitions of illegitimacy nor,

even, to the idea of legitimacy as a binary category. In the forum of the ‘literary

imagination’, illegitimacy is both problematic and positively productive.

Illegitimacy, actual or alleged, is presented as a threat to political stability; but its

destabilising effect on patriarchies corrupted by malign influences (Octavian,

Tryamour) or which are hostile to social climbers (Eglamour, Torrent) is a welcome

one. The patriarchal figures in Eglamour and Torrent, and the accusers in Octavian

and Tryamour, find themselves on the wrong side of the story: punished for their

cruelty while the aspirant gentry knights and their illegitimate, disinherited, socially

mixed offspring, are richly rewarded.

In the last chapter I emphasised the romances’ portrayal of genealogical ties

broken, with the possibility of the initiation of new, symbolic lineages, expressed

through the figurative imagery of bloodshed. I propose here that this new, symbolic

114 Cooper, English Romance, p. 328.

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lineage can be found in a metatextual family of ‘unknown’ heirs, traceable through

shared naming patterns, animal origins and heraldry. Characterised according to this

common typology, the disinherited heirs are thus inducted into the fictive genealogy

of the illegitimate heir, which displaces noble ‘blood lines’ as the source of rightful

heirship. Significantly, the connections between illegitimacy and heirship,

culminating in social and economic success (discussed further in Chapter 4),

delineate an imaginary heir whose ability to inherit property is not, necessarily,

contingent on birthright or even lawfulness. The next chapter will continue to

explore this discrepancy between lawfulness and rightfulness by analysing how

rightful heirship is recognised, examining the forms and meaning of recognition.

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Chapter 3

Recognition

Through the previous two chapters, the romances’ disinherited and illegitimate heirs,

cut off from their genealogies, have increasingly appeared to figure a literary concept

of heirship that contrasts with medieval legal paradigms. The most obvious

counterargument to this reading, according to existing romance criticism, is that the

romances eventually end and resolve their heroes’ disinheritance. In this view, the

romances ultimately adhere to a legally orthodox, socially and economically

conservative model of rightful heirship: in short, they close the gap between lawful

heirship and rightfulness measured in other ways. Having given their heroes the

opportunity to prove their worth in feats of arms, for example, during a period of

disinheritance, the stories finally reaffirm birthright as the ideal marker of rightful

succession: showing that ‘worth and birth are synonymous’, as Susan Wittig writes.1

Wittig sees ‘recognition’ as the prerequisite to ‘restoration’, saying that, in

the ‘episode linking pattern recognition-restoration-marriage’, recognition ‘plays a

part necessarily previous to the concluding two type-episodes’.2 Rosalind Field

describes Havelok as a ‘returning heir’, of the ‘exile-and-return’ type, and suggests

that ‘the key is his resemblance to his father … helped by some marvellous pointers

to his true identity’. She describes Gaimar’s ‘Haveloc’ episode in the same terms,

describing the point at which Haveloc is ‘dramatically recognise[d] [as] his father’s

son’ as the ‘recognition of the true heir’, ‘backed up’ by ‘marvellous proofs’. 3 Thus

1 Wittig, Stylistic and Narrative Structures, p. 189. 2 Wittig, Stylistic and Narrative Structures, p. 173 (italics in original). 3 Rosalind Field, ‘The King Over the Water: Exile-and-Return Revisited’, in Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England, ed. Corrine Saunders (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), pp. 41–54 (p. 51; p. 44).

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the ‘restoration’ of the rightful heir is predicated on a recognition of their ‘true

identity’, usually equated with biological paternity.4

However, this reading of the ‘matter’ of inheritance in the romances is partly

based on an assumption that the endings provide the ‘sense’ of their stories.5 In the

next and final chapter, I will question this end-focused reading of the romances, as

well as providing an alternative view of the endings: namely that they do not

constitute a ‘restoration’ of some former order. Here, I focus on the question of

‘recognition’. The idea that the heir’s ‘true identity’ is biologically determined also

suggests that ‘recognition’ means the discovery of lineage, thereby bringing about

the restoration of patrilineal succession. Yet close analysis of instances of

recognition in the romances – focusing on the places where a formerly disinherited

youth is nominated as an heir or determined to be a rightful successor to an

inheritance – shows otherwise.

Definitions of Recognition

Since the word ‘recognition’ is often used in romance scholarship, but also has a

long philosophical tradition attached to it, I begin by considering the possibilities of

‘recognition’ as a critical term. ‘Recognition’ appears as a literary-critical term as

4 Helen Cooper, ‘When Romance Comes True’, Boundaries in Medieval, pp. 13–28 (pp. 24–25); further examples given below and where discussed at greater length in Chapter 4. 5 I paraphrase the well-known terminology of ‘matiere et san’ from Chrétien de Troyes’s prologue to Le Chevalier de la Charette (Lancelot) for its useful (if contested) distinction between content and meaning (where ‘san’ does not simply mean ‘knowledge’, referring to the ‘faculty of the author’, but means ‘an interpretation of the matière’ engendered by the creative arrangement of the text). See Chrétien de Troyes, Le Chevalier de la Charette, ed. Mario Roques (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1958), l. 26; Marie-Louise Ollier, ‘The Author in the Text: The Prologues of Chrétien de Troyes’, Yale French Studies, 51 (1974), 26–41 (pp. 31–32); also Douglas Kelly, ‘Narrative Poetics: Rhetoric, Orality and Performance’, in A Companion to Chrétien de Troyes, ed. Norris J. Lacy and Joan Tasker Grimbert (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 52–63 (esp. p. 56).

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early as Aristotle’s Poetics, where anagnorisis (translated as ‘recognition’) is

identified as a fundamental element of plot. Aristotle describes anagnorisis as:

a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined

by the poet for good or bad fortune.6

There is an alternative definition of ‘recognition’ in political theory, ultimately

deriving from Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit (Phänomenologie des Geistes,

1807). Hegel argues that individual subjectivity emerges through interaction with

others, in a process of a ‘mutual recognition’ which also establishes the terms of the

relationship between respective parties.7 Recognition has since become a critical

touchstone in philosophical discussions of issues such as identity, multiculturalism,

capitalist ideology and constitutional rights.8 Although these topics seem somewhat

removed from Aristotle’s literary definition of anagnorisis, they share the

Aristotelian belief that recognition is something that occurs ‘between persons’.9

Where Aristotle describes recognition as the acquisition of ‘knowledge’, eliciting an

6 The Poetics of Aristotle, ed. and trans. S. H. Butcher, 3rd edn (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd, 1902), p. 41. Further quotations from the Poetics will be from this edition. 7 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 273. 8 On the prominence of ‘recognition’ in modern political theory and its debt to Hegelian philosophy, see Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (London: Verso, 2001), pp. 1–2. See also Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, trans. G. M. Goshgarian, ed. Jacques Bidet (London: Verso, 2014; first published as ‘Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’État’, La Pensée, 151 (1970), 3-38)), esp. pp. 190–97; Charles Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 25–74; Jürgen Habermas, ‘Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State’, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson, in Multiculturalism, pp. 107–48. Louis Althusser directly refers to the Hegelian idea of ‘mutual recognition’ in Ideology, p. 197. 9 For the influences of both Aristotle and Hegel on later recognition theory in general, see Teresa G. Russo, ed., ‘Introduction’, to Recognition and Modes of Knowledge: Anagnorisis from Antiquity to Contemporary Theory (Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 2013), pp. xiii–xxix (esp. pp. xviii–xx). The volume sets out to examine ‘Aristotelian … post-Aristotelian … Hegelian, and post-Hegelian models of recognition in critical theory’ (p. xiii).

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emotional response (‘love or hate’), Hegel’s recognition produces a psychological

effect. But the action is similarly social: recognition is not something that happens in

the mind of one individual, but ‘between persons’.10 This broadly sociopolitical

definition of recognition, a transformative process ongoing between two or more

people, provides one alternative standpoint from which to view the recognition of

rightful heirship in the Middle English romances, as something other than the

exposure of a pre-existing identity.

But it is the more Aristotelian idea of recognition as a basic plot feature

which predominates in romance criticism, after the influential folkloristic scholarship

of the twentieth century, where recognition is identified as a widespread literary

‘motif’.11 The omission of the medieval period from Terence Cave’s otherwise

expansive study of ‘recognitions’ in literature might indicate this gap between

medievalist scholarship and the post-medieval recognition theory.12 Meanwhile, the

‘recognition scene’, along with the ‘token of recognition’, is a widely acknowledged

feature of romance narrative.13 In this context, ‘recognition’ is invoked in its

10 For brief commentaries on the relevant passage in Phenomenology, see Robert Stern, ‘The Dialectic of the Subject’, in Hegel and the Phenomenology of the Spirit (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 71–96 (especially pp. 74–75) and Terry Pinkard, ed., ‘Introduction’, to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of the Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. ix–xxxvi (p. xxiii). 11 See Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 2nd edn, trans. and ed. Louis A. Wagner (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968; originally published as Morfologiya Skazki [Морфология сказки] in Leningrad by Academia, 1928), p. 62; Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Medieaval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books and Local Legends, 6 vols, vol. 1 (Bloomington & London: Indiana University Press, 1966; first published 1932). Thompson’s Motif-Index builds on the work of Antii Aarne, which also predates that of Propp: Antti Aarne, Verzeichnis der Märchentypen [The Types of the Folk-Tale] (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Tiedeakatemian Toimituksia, 1910). 12 Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 13 Key examples are Northrop Frye, Secular Scripture: A Study of The Structure of Romance (London: Harvard University Press, 1976), especially pp. 136, 141 and 145; Wittig, Stylistic and Narrative Structures, pp. 173–76; Cooper, English Romance, pp. 327–29. Incidental references to ‘recognition scenes’ or ‘token of recognition’ are common in romance criticism, so it would be impossible to enumerate all, but for an indicative sample from my bibliography, see: Barron, English Medieval

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common vernacular sense, to mean ‘the action or an act of identifying a person or

thing from a previous encounter or knowledge’.14 Though this definition of

‘recognition’ is more prosaic than that of political theory, it also alludes to a

relationship with memory, which will be explored further below.

Generally speaking, references to ‘recognition scenes’ in romance criticism

are more often incidental than symptomatic of sustained analysis of the semantics of

recognition, or the cognitive process. Lewis J. Owen’s 1971 essay, ‘The Recognition

Scene in Sir Orfeo’, for example – cited for its ‘commentary’ on a certain

‘recognition scene’ in the widely accessible METS edition of Sir Orfeo – is, rather,

an editorial inquiry, not concerned with the presentation or meaning of ‘recognition’

(Owen only uses the phrase, ‘recognition scene’ to name the passage in question).15

More recent work, particularly that of James Simpson and Elizabeth Archibald,

shows a greater range of possibilities for analysis of romance ‘recognition scenes’ by

engaging directly with both the means and the meaning of ‘recognition’.16 But this

approach has not yet turned to the question of recognising rightful heirship.

Romance, p. 65; Maldwyn Mills and Gillian Rogers, ‘The Manuscripts of Popular Romance’, in A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance, pp. 49–66 (p. 61); Archibald, ‘Lai le Freine: The Female Foundling and the Problem of Romance Genre’, in Spirit, pp. 39–55 (p. 47); Elizabeth Fowler, ‘The Romance Hypothetical: Lordship and the Saracens in Sir Isumbras’, in Spirit, pp. 97–121 (p. 118); Bliss, Naming and Namelessness, pp. 40–41; Monika Otter, ‘Music by Tristan: The Two Lais of Chèvrefeuille’, in Thinking Medieval Romance, pp. 170–86 (p. 176). Also see DMER, where one of the searchable ‘keywords’ is ‘tokens of recognition’. 14 OED, recognition, n., sense 1. 15 Lewis J. Owen, ‘The Recognition Scene in Sir Orfeo’, Medium Aevum, 40 (1971), 249–53. See Sir Orfeo, note to ll. 319–30. In this passage, Orfeo and Heurodis see each other but ‘noither to other a word no speke’ (l. 324). 16 James Simpson revists the ‘recognition scenes’ in Sir Orfeo, in Simpson, ‘Cognition is Recognition: Literary Knowledge and Textual “Face”’, New Literary History, 44:1 (2013), 25–44. See also James Simpson, ‘Sir Degaré: The Story’, in Thinking Medieval Romance, pp. 36–54; Elizabeth Archibald, ‘Non-recognition in Sir Triamour: The Reversal of Romance Expectations’, in Recognition: The Poetics of Narrative; Interdisciplinary Studies on Anagnorisis, ed. Philip F. Kennedy and Marilyn Lawrence (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), pp. 62–80; Marilyn Lawrence, ‘Recognition and Identity in Medieval Narrative: The Saracen Woman in the Anglo-Norman Epic Boeve de Haumtone’, in the

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The most crucial omission from studies of recognition in romance thus far,

which is especially important to our understanding of late-medieval inheritance

narratives, is the particular medieval legal sense of the word. The earliest explanation

of the legal process of ‘recognition’ appears in Glanvill, but references can be found

into the fifteenth century.17 Summarised in the OED as a ‘form of inquiry or inquest

by jury … [or] recognition of assize’, it is specifically an inquest into land disputes.18

Jurors would be self-informing, Glanvill says:

acquainted with the merits of the cause, either from what they have personally seen and

heard, or from the declarations of their fathers, and from other sources equally entitled to

credit.

The ‘testimony of many credible witnesses’ is more equitable an institution ‘than that

of the duel’, Glanvill remarks, advocating the recognition process as a means of

avoiding death or injury in trial by combat.19 Other have noted that trials by combat,

effectively ended in England and France by the early fourteenth century, retain some

cultural currency in romances.20 But this is not to the exclusion of contemporary

legal practices. In Chrétien’s twelfth-century Yvain, for example, trial by combat is

proved ineffective in an inheritance dispute between two sisters, and the matter is

same volume, pp. 81–96. Worth noting, though not directly relevant, is Lee Patterson, Acts of Recognition: Essays on Medieval Culture (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010). Patterson does not analyse literary presentations of recognition but rather describes the volume’s unifying theme as readerly acts of recognition between ‘the past and the present’ and ‘between the individual and the social’ (p. vii). Romance features in the volume in the shape of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. 17 Glanvill, pp. 31–36, 46 and 53–54. See also MED, recognicion, n. 2: particularly quotations from The Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, 1124–1707, 11 vols, ed. T. Thompson and C. Innes (Great Britain Record Commission, 1814–1875), I. 357/2 (c. 1430) and the Godstow Register (c. 1470), in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson B.408, 598/9 and 638/12. 18 OED, recognition, n., sense 1. The entry was last updated in 2009 and this sense of the word is listed as ‘historical’. 19 Glanvill, p. 54; p. 46. 20 See Green, Crisis of Truth, pp. 78–80.

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settled by the king, to prevent further harm to their evenly matched champions

(Yvain and Gauvain).21 The English version of this romance, Ywain and Gawain,

repeats the scenario, but unlike the French version describes the legal resolution as

the first example of partition in England.22 Significantly, the English narrator thus

associates legal arbitration (as opposed to trial by combat), and the resolution of

inheritance disputes, with the most prominent form of inheritance which is other than

the rule of primogeniture.23

21 Chrétien de Troyes, Le Chevalier au Lion, ed. Mario Roques (Paris: Champion, 1960), ll. 4703-6526. For an English translation of the relevant episode see Arthurian Romances, ed. and trans. William Kibler (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 375. 22 The romance is preserved in a single fifteenth-century manuscript (London, British Library, MS Cotton Galba E. ix) and is thought to have been composed c. 1300–50. See DMER. For the relevant passage, see Ywain, ll. 3731–72. The passage concludes: ‘This land was first, I understand | That ever was parted in Ingland … Al sisters that sold efter bene | Solde part the landes tham bitwene’ (ll. 3767–72). An interesting point of comparison is the late thirteenth-century Roman de Silence, another French-language romance, although it seems its manuscript was in England at least by the fifteenth century (due to the marginal signature of ‘John Bertrem’, dated to 1471). In Silence, a duel to settle an inheritance dispute between twin sisters results, disastrously, in the deaths of both combatants and the outlawing of female succession in England. See Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance, ed. and trans. Sarah Roche-Mahdi (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1992), ll. 278–318; Sharon Kinoshita, ‘Heldris de Cornuälle’s Roman de Silence and the Feudal Politics of Lineage’, PMLA, 110:3 (1995), 397–409; Ralph Hanna and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds, ‘The History of a Family Collection’, in The Wollaton Medieval Manuscripts: Texts, Owners and Readers (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2010), pp. 3–19 (p. 12). 23 Chrétien probably would have regarded his legal resolution as closer to primogeniture than partition, since French law emphasises the distinction between absolute partition, creating two tenants-in-chief to the crown, and partition where one sibling holds their share of the lands in vassalage to the other (as in Yvain and Ywain). Chrétien’s audience, also, would likely have been cognizant of these different forms of partition, since they only gave way to primogeniture, in Champagne, during the twelfth century (though there were ongoing regional variations, as in England). In fifteenth-century England, primogeniture and the latter model of partition (vassalage) had long been established as the legal norms, to the extent that both were increasingly subverted. Thus, what for Chrétien is a strong endorsement of one particular model of partition (parage avec hommage), in contrast to an alternative model of partition, for the Ywain-narrator is a reference to the (ancient) institution of partition, in contrast to primogeniture. See A. H. Diverres, ‘Chivalry and Fin Amor in Le Chevalier au Lion’, in Studies in Medieval Literature and Languages in Memory of Frederick Whitehead, ed. William Rothwell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), pp. 91–116 (p. 109); Kibler, ed., ‘Notes’, to Arthurian Romances, p. 516, n. 17.

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Ordinarily, when the identification of rightful heirs was not disputatious,

‘recognition’ would not be necessary: when a landholder died, an Inquisition Post

Mortem (IPM) would establish the lands and titles held of the crown, and the next

heir. A proof of age would follow if necessary. But by the fifteenth century these

processes had become somewhat arbitrary and bureaucratic, the evidence

documented being formulaic and, it seems in some cases, falsified in order to satisfy

the requirements of the record.24 Similarly, private charters of land ownership were

rarely produced in court to prove property rights, more often being used to ‘justify

the summons of the witnesses it listed’.25 The absence of such administrative

procedures and documents in the romances does not indicate a lack of interest in

legal forms altogether but it does underline that the romances are concerned with

what IPMs and proofs of age are not: namely, how to recognise rightful heirship

when lineage has become obscure.

Disentangling Blood, Birth and Worth

There are various forms of recognition in the romances, but ‘recognition by a token

is the category which is most often noted’, as Wittig observes, listing a number of

examples in the romances:

24 See Matthew Holford, ‘Testimony (To Some Extent Fictitious): Proofs of Age in the First Half of the Fifteenth Century’, Historical Research, 82:218 (2009), 635–54; William S. Deller, ‘Proofs of Age 1246 to 1430: Their Nature Veracity and Use as Sources’, in The Later Medieval Inquisitions Post Mortem: Mapping the Medieval Countryside, ed. Michael Hicks (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2016), pp. 136–60. Joel Rosenthal argues in favour of the proofs of age as a historical resource for social detail, despite the formulaic nature of some of the ‘memories’ they contain. See Rosenthal, Telling Tales: Sources and Narration in Late Medieval England (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003) and Rosenthal, Social Memory in Late Medieval England: Village Life and Proofs of Age (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 25 Paul Hyams, ‘Orality and Literacy in the Age of the Angevin Law Reforms’, in Law, Governance, and Justice: New Views of Medieval Constitutionalism, ed. Richard Kaeuper (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 27–72 (p. 50).

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[the] lost hero (or heroine) may be identified by a robe (Freine, Isumbras), by a pair of

gloves (Degare), a ring (Perceval, Horn, Freine), a cup (Amis), a broken weapon (Degare), a

horse (Bevis), a heavenly light and a birthmark (Havelok), or armor (Torrent, Eglamour).

It is a relatively minor point for Wittig that ‘[c]ategorizing the episodes in this way

does not allow us to see the various manipulations which may occur in the scenes’.26

But this is an important acknowledgement that the value of such objects varies in

each case, not just according to type (a cup as opposed to a sword, for instance) but

also according to use. McKinstry identifies the ‘rings, gloves, swords, cups, armour’,

exchanged between characters as ‘memorial objects’, intended to ‘recall the last time

when they were seen or encountered’.27 Furthermore, the ‘rhetorical force’ of

ekphrastic descriptions of such objects, as Nicholas Perkins suggests, works to

‘heighten a romance’s claim on the audience’s attention and memory’.28 But what

they memorialise and what they can recall for characters in the story is necessarily

subjective, depending on where and when they appear, and to whom.

Cooper notes that in Degare, the ‘recognition token[s]’ in the hero’s

possession are personalised: the gloves that will fit no one but his mother and the

sword belonging to his father bearing distinguishing features of damage.29 But

comparable objects in the disinheritance romances are not so specific, or personal.

Torrent gives two ‘gold ryngs’ to Desonell, to ‘kepe … Yf God a child us send’, and

26 Wittig, Stylistic and Narrative Structures, pp. 173–74. 27 McKinstry, Middle English Romance and the Craft of Memory, p. 106. 28 Perkins, ‘Ekphrasis and Narrative in Emaré and Sir Eglamour of Artois’, pp. 59–60. There are many alternative theoretical approaches to ‘objects’ in medieval literature, for an overview of which see Jessica Brantley, ‘Material Culture’, in A Handbook of Middle English Studies, ed. Marion Turner (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 187–205 (esp. p. 188). For a recent reappraisal of the ‘gift’ as a theoretical concept in romance see Walter Wadiak, Savage Economy: The Returns of Middle English Romance (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), especially Chapter 2, ‘The Gift and Its Returns’, pp. 30–62. The idea of the object as a memory device is the most relevant to my discussion of recognition. 29 Cooper, English Romance, pp. 328–29.

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when Desonell is banished, she tears a ‘cloth of silke’ with her mother and each of

her twin sons is ‘wonde’ in a piece (ll. 1398–1400). Retrospectively, the narrator

adds that Desonell also gave each twin one of Torrent’s gold rings (ll. 1827–29,

1906).30 When the separated twins are later found by strangers, however, the rich

‘swathing band’ and ‘gold ryng’ do not attest to a particular parentage (nor to

legitimacy) but only signify that the unknown child is ‘come of gentill teme’ or

‘gentill blood’ (ll. 1919–24, 1985).

Likewise in Eglamour, when Degrebell is found in ‘a skarlet mantell

wounden’, with ‘a gyrdyll of golde fast bounden’ and ‘yen [eyes] clere as cristall’,

the finders can only speculate that that he is ‘comen of gentyll blode | Where evur he

was tane’ (ll. 835–40). It is significant that their certainty about the child’s ‘gentyll

blode’ is coupled with their uncertainty about his origins. At the same time, the

question of his lineage appears to be of no immediate importance: to say that he is

‘of gentyll blode | Where evur he was tane’ does not suggest any urgency to discover

the child’s family, but rather that his gentility is self-evident regardless of his origins.

To describe the objects above as ‘tokens of recognition’ (my italics) may be a

little misleading, since it invites comparison with ‘foundling tokens’: the name given

to the objects intended to identify mothers of children who were taken into the care

of foundling hospitals, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.31 Fundamentally

not objects of any monetary value, foundling tokens commonly took the form of

swatches of homespun or customised fabric. These were designed to prove a certain

mother-child relationship: the mother kept one part and the child the other, so that

30 The cloth is not shared between Desonell and her mother, as suggested in the note to line 1398 of Wade’s edition. 31 Wade makes this comparison in an editorial note to Torrent, l. 1398; Cooper also, in English Romance, p. 327.

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they could be put back together at a later date. There is at least one documented

example from the eighteenth century of a reunion successfully brought about in this

way.32 But this possibility is never realised in Torrent. The separate pieces of the

‘cloth of silke’ torn between Desonell and her mother, then used to swaddle the

infant twins, are never brought back together.33 The romance’s ‘tokens of

recognition’ are, rather, more like those objects which Katherine French finds

associated with childbirth among fifteenth-century urban Englishwomen, and gifted

or bequeathed by mothers to children. Neither heirlooms nor necessarily inscribed

with personal, identifying marks, these gifts were chosen to communicate an

aspirational socioeconomic milieu, reflecting ‘hopes for the future’ as well as ‘real or

imagined’ ideas of the family’s past.34 In the romances, objects of recognition

frequently represent ‘hopes for the future’, or future promise, as gentility is inferred

and perhaps lineage ‘imagined’ but uncertain.

32 John Styles, Threads of Feeling: The London Foundling Hospital’s Textile Tokens, 1740–1770 (Reading: Lamport Gilbert Ltd, 2010; repr. 2013 and 2016), pp. 15–16, 70. See also Maria Zytaruk, ‘Artifacts of Elegy: The Foundling Hospital Tokens’, Journal of British Studies, 54:2 (2015), 320–48. 33 For medieval readers, the cloth torn in two might have been suggestive of chirographs or indentured legal agreements. By this method, two copies of an agreement were made on a single piece of parchment, cut apart by a wavy line, sometimes with the word ‘chyrographum’ written beneath. In theory, as J. M. Kaye explains, ‘a copy [of a grant] made by chirograph had the advantage that if a dispute were to arise as to the terms of a grant, the two parts could be fitted together along the line of severance. If they corresponded exactly, the text would have to be accepted by both parties.’ But there appears to be little evidence of chirographs or indentures being used in this way in late-medieval England; at least, I have not come across conclusive evidence in my reading on the subject thus far. Hyams suggests that the contrary is the case, where he finds evidence of charters being used to supply the names of appropriate witnesses for hearings, rather than functioning as documentary proof in their own right. J. M. Kaye, Medieval English Conveyances (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 11; Hyams, ‘Orality and Literacy’, p. 50. 34 Katherine L. French, ‘The Material Culture of Childbirth in Late Medieval London and Its Suburbs’, Journal of Women’s History, 28:2 (2016), 126–48 (pp. 128–29, 140).

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In Torrent, the recognition of gentle blood, though it reveals nothing of the

child’s actual lineage, constitutes a recognition of rightful heirship. This happens

twice, once for each twin:

Whan the lady saw the ryng

She said, without lettyng

‘This child is com of gentill teme

Thou hast none heyre, thy lond to take

For Jesu love thou sholdist hym make

Prynce of Jerusalem’ (ll. 1935–40)

‘A knave child found I have

…

Frome a grefon he was reste

Of what lond that is left

Of gentill blode was he.

Thou hast none heyre, thy lond to take

For Jesu love thy sonne hym make’. (ll. 1981–87)

In both cases, the kings agree to this advice and promptly make the unknown

children their heirs. ‘Gentil’ in Middle English can apply to those of noble rank as

well as the gentry;35 and Philippa Maddern has demonstrated the indeterminacy of

the term in late-medieval England.36 The overlap between the senses of the two terms

in the romances can be detected by comparing the very close Cambridge and Naples

versions of Bevis, where a noble assembly is respectively described as ‘gentyll

knight and bold baron’ or ‘king and nobil baron’ (both, l. 4836). I confine my

35 See MED, gentil, adj. 36 As cited in the introduction: Maddern, ‘Gentility’, in Gentry Culture, pp. 18–34.

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observations on the meaning of gentility to such examples in the romances,

interpreting these according to contextual usage. In the extracts above, ‘gentill blode’

can be recognised in children of unknown lineage, not least to be taken as evidence

of their worthiness to inherit. This unsettles what Lee Patterson perceives elsewhere

to be a ‘growing insistence upon the priority of lineage as a definition of nobility’ in

the culture of the later Middle Ages.37

In particular, the romances invite their readers to question the priority of

birth, as the de facto source of rightful heirship. References to ‘gentill blode’ are

conspicuously associated with superficial, aesthetic features, rather than the inborn

gentility that the phrase itself implies. The mantle, the girdle of ‘golde’ and even

Degrebell’s eyes, compared to ‘cristall’, indicate that ‘gentill blode’ means the

appearance of wealth. In Octavian, the perception of Florent’s ‘gentill blode’ by an

outlaw gang comes with an estimation of his market value in ‘golde and silver’, of

‘fourty pound’ (ll. 580–87).38 If wealth is synonymous with pedigree, in these

examples, they also suggest that the appearance of pedigree – a mantle, a gold ring –

can be purchased or traded. Gentility is a valuable economic asset, engendering

social status.

The romances modify the better-known Chaucerian model of gentility in this

respect: Chaucer’s ‘gentilesse’ is an ethical attitude, and not heritable; ‘richesse’ is a

separate matter, and is heritable through lineage.39 In the romances, the heritability of

‘richesse’ according to lineage is contested, as patrimonial inheritances are lost and

wealth must be acquired through other means. ‘Gentill blode’ and ‘richesse’ are,

37 Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 193. 38 This also recalls the pun on ‘grotes’ in Havelok, noted in Chapter 1. 39 See the Wife of Bath’s Tale, ll. 1117–24 and editorial note to l. 1109; also Gentilesse (a short poem), ll. 12–17.

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however, closely aligned, in that the former is conceived as a wealthy aesthetic. The

acquisition of an inheritance is aided by the possession of ‘gentill blode’, but this can

be manifest in either physical features, like ‘cristall’ eyes, or in accoutrements like a

‘skarlet mantell’, which can be acquired by purchase. ‘Gentill blode’ in the romances

thus has an economic value, rather than an ethical one; and, importantly, it can be

identified independently of parentage.

The possibility of recognising rightful heirs by their physical likeness to

fathers is muted or absent in the disinheritance romances. Bevis’s lack of physical

resemblance to Gii is implied by Saber Florentin’s failure to recognise him on sight.

Then, before Bevis has the opportunity to return to Hampton, he is bitten by a snake

and ‘negh a les ther contenaunse’ (l. 1562). When he returns to Josian in the guise of

a ‘palmare’, she does not believe it is him, because of his facial disfigurement, even

though she sees a likeness in his bearing:

‘Ner this mannes browe to-tore

Me wolde thenke be his fasoun

That hit were Beves of Hamtoun’. (l. 2134; ll. 2154–56)

She is reassured only when Arondel, Bevis’s horse, recognises his ‘lordes stevene’:

‘Tho the hors him knew and segh’ and ‘[t]harbi that maide him wel knew’ (ll. 2158–

80).40

40 There is literary trope, in Middle English romances and beyond, that animals are capable of recognising nobility or other qualities in humans. For example, Josian in Bevis is protected from lions as a ‘kynges doughter, that maide is’. The METS editors note that ‘virginity could confer invulnerability’ according to ‘medieval lore’; but the fact that Josian is a princess is also emphasised. The poet states, ‘A kynges doughter, that maide is, | Kinges doughter, quene and maide both | The lyouns myght do hur noo wroth’ (ll. 2392–94 and note to l. 2394). Likewise, the lioness in Octavian decides not to make a meal of her human captive, because she sees that he is a ‘kynge sone’ (NO, l. 349).

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Eglamour and Tryamour include ironic meetings between fathers and sons

who do not know the extent of their relationship, which rely upon the assumption

that the child cannot be recognised by any likeness he bears to his father. In the same

way, the unwittingly incestuous marriage between Cristabell and Degrebell

(comparable to that in Degare) relies on Cristabell seeing no familial resemblance in

her son. No one recognises that Degrebell ‘[h]ys owen modyr has wed’ (l. 1109).

Indeed, even when she sees the armour he bears, depicting a child carried by a

griffin, Cristabell does not recognise Degrebell, but rather recalls the manner in

which her son was lost:

Hys armes they bare hym beforn –

Sche thynkes how hyre chyld away was born.

Therfore sorow sche hade.

Sche grette therfore and sorow gan make

And all was for hyr sones sake

…

‘Lord, in thyn armes a fowle I se

That sumtyme raft a chyld fro me’. (ll. 1111–21)

Degrebell makes no reply to this, leaving the king to make the connection that

constitutes recognition:

‘Be Crystus myght!

In my forest hon he lyght

A grype to lond gym browghte’. (ll. 1123–25)

In the northern Octavian, the empress claims to ‘knowe [Florent] by his faire face’

though the emperor perceives no likeness in his son and had earlier asked him if

Clement was his father (NO, l. 1793; l. 1262). Octavian deduces that Florent is

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‘comen of gentill blode’, since he is ‘curtayse’ and ‘bold’, yet he ‘ne wiste what he

was’ (NO, ll. 1238–43). As in Eglamour, we find that the confident identification of

‘gentill blode’ is coupled with uncertainty about its origins. In the southern Octavian,

the emperor observes that mother and son are ‘ilyk of semblaunt’, though pointedly

‘wiþouten oþ’ (SO, ll. 1891–92).

Only in Havelok is the hero is said to resemble his father and be recognised

as his heir for this reason:

‘it was nevere yet a brother

In al Denemark so lich another

So this man, that is so fayr

Als Birkabeyn; he is hise eyr’. (ll. 2154–57)

But this is an exceptional example. Elsewhere in the romance, characters fail to

recognise the significance of Havelok’s physical appearance. Godrich is blind to the

connection between Havelok’s physical stature and his rightful social standing, as

‘hexte’ (tallest/highest) in the land, and Goldeboru also believes herself disparaged

by her marriage to Havelok, married ‘unkyndelike’ (ll. 1076, 1251).41 Havelok is

alone among the disinherited-heir heroes for possessing supernatural physical marks:

the ‘kynmerk’ on his body and the ‘sunnebem’ that shines from his mouth when he

sleeps (ll. 593, 605). But while these mark him out as extraordinary, they do not

identify his lineage or a birthright. When Goldeboru sees them, she takes them only

as signs that Havelok is a ‘heyman’ (a noble), until an angelic voice explains

Havelok’s destiny to be king (ll. 1261, 1265–75). The wide variety of forms of

recognition in Havelok, more of which below, attest to an idea common to all the

41 King Athelwold stipulates, to Godrich, that Goldeboru’s husband must be ‘the hexte’, ‘the best, the fairest, the strangest’ (ll. 1076, 1080–81).

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disinheritance romances: that genealogy is not easily discerned or proved, and is an

unreliable indicator of rightful heirship as such.

The twin heirs of the romances present the most obvious challenge to rightful

heirship as defined by birth. Twin births are remarkably frequent among Middle

English romances: twins are the title characters in Lai le Freine and the late prose

romance, Valentine and Orson; they are born to the title characters in Bevis,

Octavian, Torrent and possibly Tryamour. In Octavian, they are foremost among the

romance’s protagonists, while in Bevis and Torrent they occupy leading, if not

principal roles. The frequency of the recurrence has not been readily acknowledged,

though it raises an interesting question about the significance of twins in medieval

literature at large.42 This cannot be addressed fully here, but in the context of the

disinheritance romances it is important to note that these texts repeatedly and

specifically depict firstborn male twins. The importance of this specificity is its

challenge to the model of primogeniture.

The common law solution to firstborn male twin heirs is to adhere to the

convention of preferring the eldest, and to identify one twin as the elder of the two.

The eldest twin could then inherit the patrimony and the younger twin a smaller

share.43 But this solution is not without its tensions. Mentions of twins in the legal

42 Erik Kooper’s study of twins in medieval European literature surveys twenty plots, among which Middle English romances are not prominent. Erik Kooper, ‘Multiple Births and Multiple Disaster: Twins in Medieval Literature’, in Conjunctures: Medieval Studies in Honour of Douglas Kelly, ed. Keith Busby and Norris J. Lacy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), pp. 253–68. Carolyne Larrington remarks that twins are ‘surprisingly rare in medieval European romance’, mentioning Valentine and Orson and the Middle English Lai le Freine; but the scope of Larrington’s study of siblings in medieval literature is far broader than the Middle English romances, or twins, and thus demonstrates the potential for further, focused work in these areas. Carolyne Larrington, Brothers and Sisters in Medieval European Literature (York: Boydell & Brewer, 2015), p. 60. 43 Female heirs without brothers were already likely to be subject to partible inheritance – thereby sharing the patrimony as co-heirs – whether or not twins. If twins had elder siblings, the difference between them in the hierarchy is diminished. For mixed-sex twins, without elder siblings, the male heir would take priority as per usual practice. Such a case occurred in Europe as recently as 2014,

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record (where inheritance is not at issue) describe them as ‘insimul nes’, or ‘born at

the same time’, showing that the legal insistence elsewhere that twins are like any

other siblings, one the ‘older’ and one the ‘younger’, competes with a common

assumption that they are the same age.44 The well-documented case of the Beaumont

twins in the twelfth century demonstrates how careful a negotiation might be

required for twin heirs. The twins’ father, Count Robert of Meulan (d. 1118) had a

will confirmed by Henry I, around 1107, which provided for both his sons. But the

provision still hinged on identifying one of the twins as the elder. As such, the

‘firstborn’ twin (Waleran) succeeded to the lands that had belonged to his paternal

grandfather, while the ‘younger’ twin (Robert) mainly inherited lands won during his

father’s lifetime.45 But the young Robert’s inheritance also included some areas that

had been part of Count Robert’s patrimony. Historian David Crouch suggests that the

several English estates that, otherwise unaccountably, went to Waleran along with an

when mixed-sex twins were born to the Princess of Monaco: although the female twin was born first, her brother is first in line to inherit according to the constitution. Around the same time, in anticipation of the birth of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s first child, a new Act of Succession was passed in the UK to remove this gender bias. See La Constitution de la Principauté de Monaco 17 Décembre 1962 (modifiée par la loi no 1.249 du 2 Avril 2002), Chapter II, Article 10, available online at <https://www.gouv.mc/Gouvernement-et-Institutions/Les-Institutions/La-Constitution-de-la-Principaute> [accessed 4 Dec 2019]; Succession to the Crown Act 2013, available online at <http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2013/20/contents/enacted> [accessed 4 Dec 2019]. 44 See Seipp 1486.052 (Traverse of Office) in the online database of Year Books; Or Reports in the Following Reigns, with Notes to Brook and Fitzherbert’s Abridgements; Originally published in London by George Sawbridge, 1687, 1679-80, 11 vols, with new introductory notes and tables by David J. Seipp and Carol F. Lee (Clark, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 2007 and 2013), hosted by the Boston University School of Law <http://www.bu.edu/law/faculty-scholarship/legal-history-the-year-books/> [accessed 4 Dec 2018]. See also Seipp 1372.119ass (Writ of Assize) and Seipp 1327.030 (Writ of Assize). A 1372 proof of age for one Henry Soumpter records the testimony of John Baker, ‘godfather to John, [twin] brother of the said Henry, who was born of the same mother at the same time’; and a writ of 1369 records ‘Beatrice and Maud [… both] 46 years of age, being twins’. See File 231 (16), CIPM, Series I, vol. 13, p. 212; File 209 (8), CIPM, vol. 12, p. 339. 45 See Holt, ‘Politics and Property’, p. 50.

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income of £140 per year from Sturminster Marshall, were ‘compensation’ for the

lands given to Robert, ‘which Waleran could have claimed ought to have been his’.46

Not all such arrangements went uncontested. When Laurence de Pavily

succeeded as sole heir to the lands of his father around 1288, it aroused a complaint

from Phillip de Pavily, Laurence’s twin brother. This dispute resulted in Philip being

forced to concede, formally in court, that Laurence was held to be the elder twin and

that he, Philip, must therefore forgo his right to object to Laurence’s inheritance.47

Philip’s complaint shows that there could be some uncertainty as to which brother

was held to be the elder twin, though the primary witness in the de Pavily case was

the twins’ mother. A comparable fifteenth-century case indicates that the

appointment of the eldest twin could be discretionary. In 1447, the Countess of

Douglas made a legal statement claiming that her son, James was the primary heir to

her late husband’s estate, to the detriment of his twin brother, Archibald. But

documents predating this statement indicate that Archibald Douglas had been

regarded as the elder of the two during their father’s lifetime, leading Douglas

historian William Fraser to speculate that favour had shifted from one twin to the

other.48

Though legal records for inheritance disputes between twins are infrequent,

this does not indicate a lack of conflict: besides the fact that many disputes could

have been settled without recourse to the courts, other reasons for the scarcity of

documented cases include the relative rarity of same-sex firstborn twins and high

infant mortality rates (with the possibility of one twin dying in minority). It is true,

46 David Crouch, The Beaumont Twins: The Roots and Branches of Power in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 9. 47 See File 51 (61), CIPM, Series I, vol. 2, p. 418. 48 See William Fraser, The Douglas Book, 4 vols (Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, 1885), vol. 1, pp. 447, 477–78 and vol. 3, pp. 379–80.

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for example, that twin heirs never caused problems to the succession of the crown in

medieval or early modern England, but this is because firstborn twins among the

royal families were vanishingly rare. In the one recorded case, twin sons were born

to James I of Scotland, but only one survived infancy: thus, James II (b. 1430; r.

1437–60) succeeded to the throne, despite having been born the “younger” twin.49

While the Douglas case shows that, in practice, the recognition of the rightful heir,

between twins, could be rather more subjective than legal treatises suggest, the

singular royal example demonstrates that rightful inheritance is sometimes more a

matter of unexpected circumstance.

The Middle English romances are more open to sustaining these ambiguities

in the popular imagination than has previously been credited. Bevis and Octavian

differentiate between their twin heirs in unorthodox ways, but the differentiation

itself, according to an implicit hierarchy, initially appears to follow the logic of

medieval inheritance laws. The contrast between the names of the twins was noted in

Chapter 2, but there is also a clear disparity between their respective upbringings. In

Bevis, one son is entrusted to a ‘forster’ (forester), whom Bevis promises to reward

well, if the forester will ‘tech him [the child] bere spere and schelde’; the other is

given to a ‘fischere’ with an upfront payment of ‘ten mark’ and no instructions as to

his tuition (ll. 3732–52). Likewise in Octavian, the hierarchy implied by the twins’

names is borne out in their upbringings: young Octavian is raised at court and young

Florent is raised by a merchant (or a butcher, in SO).50 However, there is no evidence

in the romance that the hierarchal organisation of the twins is anything other than

49 See Alan R. Borthwick, ‘James II (1430–1460), King of Scots’, ODNB <http://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/14588> [accessed 4 Dec 2019]. 50 In the northern Octavian, Clement is described as a ‘burgesse’ and apprentices Florent to a butcher (ll. 473, 648). His natural son he sends to a ‘chawndelere’ (‘candlemaker’, l. 645).

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‘arbitrary’, as Carolyne Larrington says of Bevis: nowhere is it stated which of the

twins is the ‘eldest’, in order to confirm that the discrimination between them

conforms to common law.51

The capriciousness of Bevis’s decision-making is underlined by the fact that

the forester and fisher are the first two people he ‘mette [in] the wode’: it is a chance

encounter not unlike those with the ape and lioness in Octavian, in the mysterious

‘herbere’ within ‘a wode [that] was ferly thykke’ (Bevis, l. 3725; Octavian, ll. 307–

12). Only in Torrent does a narrator mention the respective ages of the twins, where

they unwittingly encounter each other in combat, the narrator remarking that:

Though Antony fy Gryffon yonger were

His brother Leobertus he can down bere. (ll. 2478–79)

It is ironic that in the only instance in which one twin heir is identified as the

younger, it is to point out that he is the stronger of the two. Yet Torrent is also the

only romance, of those discussed here, to treat its twins equally in all other respects,

as both are made heirs to kings.52

In Bevis, differences of nurture have little impact on the twins’ chivalric

capabilities: both twins return to Bevis from their respective foster fathers as fully-

fledged knights. This possibly indicates the superiority of nature over nurture: the

idea that nobility is inherent. Yet, if worth and birth are supposed to be coterminous,

it is unsettling that the firstborns are unable to prove themselves superior to their

younger siblings. The ‘ideology of primogeniture’, or what Larrington terms the

‘unassailable cultural importance of the first-born’, is not demonstrated here.53

51 Larrington, Brothers and Sisters, p. 62. 52 The eventual inheritances of twin characters in the romances will be given closer attention, in the wider context of the endings, in the next and final chapter. 53 Larrington, Brothers and Sisters, p. 62.

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Introducing twins to the romance presents two narrative possibilities: either to

demonstrate that, when put to the test, the superiority of the firstborn, as per the ideal

of primogeniture, is borne out in the figure of the rightful heir in all respects; or,

alternatively, that it is not. These romances convey the latter possibility.

Testimony and Transformation

Given the romances’ deviation from legal definitions of inheritance, it may be

tempting to read their non-textual, recognitional objects in the context of what

historians have characterised as a paradigm shift in late-medieval law: from

‘communal memory’ to ‘the judicially enforced written contract’.54 That is to say, the

presentation of a ‘goldyn gyrdull’ in Eglamour, as a memory aid to identify

Degrebell as Cristabell’s son, is a nostalgic counterpoint to the documentary records

(IPMs, proofs of age, charters) that are theoretically used to ratify inheritance claims

in late-medieval law (l. 1130). Michael Clanchy sees Edward I’s quo warranto

investigations into land titles as an example of the demise of ‘unwritten customary

law’ in favour of written charters, and cites a fourteenth-century account of the

proceedings as evidence of popular resistance to the change.55 According to this

legend, the Earl Warenne responds to the royal inquisition by producing an ‘ancient

and rusty sword’ and declaring, ‘this is my warrant!’56 In Clanchy’s view, the earl in

54 Green, Crisis of Truth, p. xiv. Green revises Michael Clanchy’s theory on the topic, in Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307, 3rd edn (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013; first published Harvard University Press, 1979). In expressing a widespread cultural shift, Clanchy’s title evokes H. J. Chaytor, From Script to Print (Cambridge: University Press, 1945). 55 Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, p. 3. 56 Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, p. 36. See also The Chronicle of Walter of Guisborough: previously edited as the chronicle of Walter of Hemingford or Hemingburgh, ed. Harry Rothwell (London: Royal Historical Society, 1957). My quotation is from Clanchy’s paraphrase of the legend. For an explanation of the quo warranto proceedings of Edward I’s reign see Michael

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the legend is reacting to the legal paradigm shift by providing an object that

memorialises his family’s tenure, rather than documentary proof.

In Eglamour, rather than producing a document to attest to Degrebell’s

identity, there is an object that provokes ‘communal memory’, as Cristabell, the king

and his squire share their recollections of the object and its relation to Degrebell. But

this is not essentially contradictory to legal process; rather it intimates the process of

witness testimony. The distinction between memory and document (or ‘contract’) is

not sustainable: as Richard Green observes, these ‘[t]wo modes of evidence …

permeated the conceptual system of medieval society as a whole’.57 Paul Hyams

argues that documents functioned largely in the same way as non-textual objects in

medieval law, namely to ‘assist the memory of witnesses’ rather than as proof in

their own right. Michael Prestwich suggests that the quo warranto legend actually

expresses that ‘franchises … had been acquired by conquest, not by royal grant’,

while Green observes that swords are ‘instruments of legal tenure’. The non-textual

‘recognitional objects’ found in the Middle English romances are, in this light,

essentially ‘legal tokens’.58

Yet Green implies a nostalgic view of the law in the romance genre, when he

writes that ‘romance’s mistrust of the ease with which writing may disguise true

intentions’ can be seen in the negative portrayal of forged letters in Bevis and

Athelston.59 In fact, non-textual objects can be just as misleading. We might recall

the presentation of bloodied clothing in Bevis, as false evidence of the hero’s death:

Prestwich, Edward I (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997; first published by Methuen in 1988), pp. 258–59. 57 Green, Crisis of Truth, p. 43. 58 Hyams, ‘Orality and Literacy’, p. 53; Prestwich, Edward I, p. 259; Green, Crisis of Truth, pp. 267 and 264. 59 The relevant passage in Bevis is ll. 3137–54. Green, Crisis of Truth, pp. 264 and 279.

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not only proving that object evidence can be counterfeited, but poignantly that the

evidence of ‘blood’ is not necessarily trustworthy. Moreover, any absolute

distinction between word and object in romance fails at the level of romance’s

textual form: all of the objects portrayed in the stories are to a degree textual, or at

least ‘rhetorical’ devices.60

The sword in the stone, of Arthurian tradition, is probably the best-known

example (and among those Green cites) of an object aiding the recognition of a

rightful heir in medieval romance. Significantly, when Arthur draws the sword from

the stone, it identifies him as rightful king but reveals nothing about his parentage.

Nor does the sword speak for itself: its significance is inscribed upon the stone

(sometimes illustrated as such in medieval manuscripts – see Fig. 9, p. 239) and

explained by Merlin, who was party to the plot of Arthur’s conception. Similarly, the

‘gyrdyll of golde’ in Eglamour only works as evidence of Degrebell’s parentage

when it is eventually presented to Cristabell, who can publicly identify it as hers (l.

831). Furthermore, her claim is not taken at face value but prompts further

interrogation: she is asked, ‘how long sythen’ she lost the child with the girdle, and

she testifies that it was ‘fyftene yere’ ago (ll. 1135–36). Likewise in Torrent, when

the disparate members of the family are brought together again, Desonell’s mention

of the ‘ryngs two’, ‘[e]verich of [her children] has one of thoo’, effects recognition of

the twins as Torrent’s sons (ll. 2550–51). But the rings remain unseen: it is not a

physical object but rather the memory-image, produced through Desonell’s vocal

recollection, which aids recognition. Finally, objects are not separable from memory

60 Perkins, ‘Ekphrasis and Narrative’, p. 59. In a study of Sir Degare, Sir Degrevant and Emare, Tom White points up the relationships between ‘text’ and ‘textiles’: the use of fabrics to memorialise family relationships in the romances and the use of textile metaphor in literary criticism to express abstract or immaterial connections. See Tom White, ‘Textile Logics of Late Medieval Romance’, Exemplaria, 28:4 (2016), 297–318.

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in the romances and nor can they provide ‘objective’ proof, because they are subject

to the interpretation of witnesses.

The importance of witness testimony to the recognition of heirs in the

romances cannot be overstated. In Eglamour and Torrent, the public testimonies of

estranged mothers and adopted parents combine to effect the recognition of young

foundlings of unknown origins (in the eyes of their adoptive parents) as disinherited

heirs. In Eglamour, Cristabell explains how she lost her child, the king of Israel

recalls ‘how he fond Syr Degrebell’, and ‘knytes lystend thanne’ as if in the role of a

jury (ll. 1264–65). In Torrent similarly, Desonell tells an assembly of kings and

knights that her two children were ‘revid’ from her, a ‘gryffon bare the one away’

and a ‘liberd the other’, prompting others to offer their accounts:

Than said the kyng of Jerusalem:

‘I found one by a water streme

He levith yet with blood and bone!’

The Kyng of Grece said, ‘My brother,

Antony, my son, brought me another!’ (ll. 2547–60)

What is striking about this imaginative presentation of recognition is that it involves

several speakers contributing partial accounts in order to provide a full picture, in the

manner of witnesses called before jurors or, indeed, in the manner of the self-

informing juries of late-medieval English courts described in Glanvill.

The southern Octavian provides the fullest rendition of witness-testimony

recognition, and in doing so reveals its limitations as a form of proof. Finally

reunited with her estranged husband, the empress of Rome delivers fifty-five lines of

testimony, explaining how her children were stolen by wild animals, how she was

reunited with the child with the lioness, and how they were carried by ship to

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Jerusalem, where the young Octavian was made a knight (SO, ll. 1817–72). She still

does not refute the allegations of adultery and illegitimacy at this point, instead

referring obliquely to a ‘greet destaunce’ (a great discord), concluding with reference

to the emperor’s ‘modyr tresoun’ (ll. 1821–22, 1871). Her testimony brings about a

reconciliation between the emperor Octavian and his young namesake, and the three

sit ‘yn same’ (l. 1885). Of the second child, Florence says, ‘þat oþer becam y nyst

never whar … Þis day us fyfe & twenty yere | Þat y sawe hym last’ (ll. 1827–30).

Her admission that she ‘nyst never’ is significant, but empirical knowledge is not the

only form of knowing that the romances permit, as argued in Chapter 2.

Overhearing ‘Florentynes name’, the empress instantly believes, and swears

‘be Seynt Iame’, that it is her son (ll. 1886–89). This abrupt proclamation initially

stands in contrast to the detailed testimony provided for young Octavian, but it

prompts further evidence-gathering. The emperor, with a committee of ‘kynges þre’,

enquires of Clement how he came to be Florent’s guardian (SO, ll. 1891–92, 1897–

1904).61 Clement testifies that he came across four outlaws and bought the child from

them, telling no one but his wife, and raised him as his own son for twenty-four years

(ll. 1905–18). Hearing this, an ‘old knyȝt’ testifies that it is ‘fyf & twenty yer’ since

he rescued a child from an ape, before losing the child to a band of outlaws; he also

remembers ‘þat tyme byfyll me þys destresse | Þat fayre Florence … Was ydryve …

Out of Rome’ (ll. 1921–43). This mention of Florence’s banishment not only locates

the old knight’s encounter with the child and the ape in the correct timeline, but is

corroborative proof of the kind found in proof-of-age statements, where witnesses

61 In the intervening lines, the emperor says ‘But be colour of har cloþ | Nys noon oþer inne | Þat schold hem knowe certeyne for soþ | Be syeȝt atweyne’ (ll. 1893–96). The lines are a little ambiguous but appear to state that no one present could certainly distinguish between them by sight, but for the colour of their clothes – though whether it refers to Clement and Florent, Florence and Florent, or perhaps Florent and young Octavian, is unclear.

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were often said to remember the birth of a child because it coincided with some other

memorable event.62 In this case, the memory is aided by the ‘destresse’ the knight

recalls having felt.

The age ‘fyf & twenty’ is also significant, because twenty-five is the age

commonly used in IPMs to confirm that an heir had reached majority.63 The

representation of witness evidence and references to ‘fyf & twenty yer’ invite

comparisons between the characters’ testimonies and the information ordinarily

presented in proofs of age, pertaining to birth. The knight’s evidence is not a

conventional proof, since it recalls disinheritance, not birth. Becky Lee finds that

proofs of age often relied on the testimony of witnesses who had attended

purification rituals (or ‘churching’ feasts) and these occasions were made

deliberately memorable for that reason. In Octavian, however, as Angela Florschuetz

notes, in the public ‘moment’ that ought to be a churching feast, ‘Octavian chooses

to reveal his wife’s “infidelity”’. Where memorable churching feasts were intended

to ‘create a communally accepted fact or history of the heir’s arrival and legitimacy’,

in Octavian the memorable incident is the opposite, the renunciation of the twins’

legitimacy.64 The conspicuous reticence of the romance’s characters on this detail –

obliquely mentioned as ‘destaunce’ and ‘destresse’ – work as cues for the reader to

recall it.

62 On ‘memories of coincidence’ in proofs of age, see Joel Rosenthal, Social Memory in Late Medieval England, pp. 32, 42 and 56; Rosenthal, Telling Tales, pp. 10–13. 63 The actual age of majority is usually twenty-one, but to say that an heir is ‘aged twenty-five years or more’ indicates that the heir is comfortably past the age of twenty-one. For examples, see the IPMs for Maud de Baddeby, Edward Botiller, Joan de Ferrers, and Baldwin de Frevill, CIPM, vol. 14, pp. 4, 95, 128, 129. 64 Becky Lee, ‘Men’s Recollections of a Women’s Rite: Medieval English Men’s Recollections regarding the Rite of the Purification of Women after Childbirth’, Gender & History, 14:2 (2002), 224–41 (p. 224); Florschuetz, ‘Women’s Secrets’, p. 260.

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Equally significant are the discrepancies in the evidence. The old knight and

the empress each say it is ‘fyf & twenty’ years since they have seen the infant whom

they lost, while Clement describes the time elapsed as ‘four and twenty yer & more’.

This need not contradict the knight’s account, but the differing expressions of the

time elapsed hint at the subjectivity, and potential unreliability, of the memories on

which the testimonial evidence is based. The time lapse also intimates the gap in

Florent’s history. The absent witnesses, who could provide the missing link between

the old knight and Clement, are the outlaws. Florent’s brief time with the outlaws

may earlier have read as an expression of his de-legitimised status, but the extent to

which it puts him beyond the reach of the law now becomes clear: the outlaws’

testimony is inevitably absent.

Florent is with the outlaws for an unspecified length of time, meaning that the

ability to corroborate either witness’s testimony is put beyond even the omniscience

of the narrator or reader (NO, ll. 544–76 and SO, ll. 381–96). The romance’s

narrative structure, which alternates between the child with the lioness (young

Octavian) and the child with the ape (Florent), renders Florent’s biography

discontinuous. Thus the reader is invited to share in the sense of uncertainty about

Florent’s identity, portrayed in the recognition scene. But within the jurisdiction of

the romance, imperfect evidence is permitted. Having effectively conveyed the

testimony as partial and incomplete, the episode ends with the emperor claiming

Florent as his own and kissing both of ‘hys sones’ (SO, l. 1943).

The disinherited heirs are notably silent during these witness-testimony

recognitions. In Eglamour, Degrebell’s silence signals a lapse in the accounts

provided by his mother and adoptive father, during which time he was captive to the

griffin (comparable to Florent’s time with the outlaws). Degrebell cannot provide an

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account of this period because he was too young to have been able to remember it. In

contrast, the possibly of testifying to one’s own identity can be found in Bevis, where

the hero is old enough at the time of his disinheritance to recall it: he can introduce

himself to his estranged uncle – telling him ‘what he was’ – when they meet for the

first time (l. 2575). Later, insisting that King Edgar should ‘graunt’ him the

‘heritage’ of Hampton, he declares, ‘Ichatte Beves of Hamtoun | Me fader was ther

th’erl Gii’ (ll. 3495–504). Bevis is similar in this instance to the eponymous hero of

Horn, who repeatedly declares his name and his birthplace.65 But the disinherited

heirs in Eglamour, Octavian, Tryamour and Torrent cannot declare themselves as

their fathers’ sons because this memory is beyond recall.

In comparison, it is one of the earliest admissions of Augustine’s Confessions

that he cannot remember his own origins, and therefore his self-knowledge is

incomplete. The limitation of childhood memory poses an ethical question for

Augustine: ‘who reminds me of the sin of my infancy?’, he asks, as he considers his

‘responsibility’ for a ‘time of which I recall not a single trace’.66 It is a ‘startling

admission’, Allan Mitchell writes, ‘in a work that will go on to hymn the power of

memory’ as ‘the guarantor of personal identity’, and an ironic beginning to a work

which Gillian Clarke finds to be dedicated to the ‘memory of [his] parents’.67

Significantly, even Bevis’s confident declaration of his father’s identity is

65 Like Bevis, Horn’s disguises render him physically unrecognisable, even to his closest friends: ‘Ne canstu me knoght knowe?’, he asks Rymenhild. But he is able to explain, ‘Ich am Horn thin oghe … Ich am Horn of Westernesse | In armes thu me cusse’ (ll. 1217–20). The father of Horn’s comrade, Athulf, cannot recognise him out of disguise, either, until the hero prompts him, ‘Horn … ben here’ (ll. 1363–64). He refers to himself as ‘Horn of Westernesse’ also at l. 954; elsewhere he says, ‘Horn ich am ihote | Icomen ut of the bote | Frame the se side’ (ll. 205–07). 66 Augustine, Confessions, ed. and trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008; originally published 1991), pp. 9–10. 67 Mitchell, Becoming Human, p. xi; Gillian Clarke, Augustine: The Confessions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 34.

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inauthentic in this Augustinian sense, since he cannot recall his own beginnings. This

has political, rather than ethical, implications in the romances. For the estranged heir,

an inability to recall their own origins exposes the absence of any ‘innate’ knowledge

of their original birthright.68

For his part, Augustine concedes to a reliance on third-party witnesses: ‘I

have believed what others have told me’, he says, of a time of life otherwise ‘lost in

the darkness of my forgetfulness’.69 Although it does not involve the memory of

birth, recognition of rightful heirship is similarly collaborative in the romances:

relying on the testimony and affirmation of third-party witnesses. Havelok offers a

poignant demonstration of both. The hero appears to forget his own origins during

the course of the romance, unable to interpret the meaning of a dream in which he

embraces a miniaturised kingdom of Denmark in his arms; despite having displayed

an acute awareness of his status earlier, lamenting that he ‘evere was … kinges bern’,

for the trouble it has brought him (ll. 1286–1313; l. 572). Indeed, in the intervening

period, Havelok is never said to contemplate his disinheritance or take action

towards reparation. But once he is prompted by Goldeboru to remember the death of

his sisters, this memory is repeated several times: a pattern suggestive of traumatic

repetition, following the suppression of a memory, rather than a simple case of

forgetting and remembering.70

68 That is, in the Cartesian sense of knowledge that is inborn or instinctive. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy: with Selections from the Objections and Replies, ed. and trans. Michael Moriarty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 28; Kurt Brandhorst, ‘Innate Ideas’, in Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), pp. 103–05. 69 Confessions, p. 10. 70 Anthony Hasler pursues a psychoanalytical reading of the late romance, Eger and Grime, drawing on the work of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, in which he argues for a similar interpretation of that romance’s portrayal of bodily trauma, remembered and enacted repeatedly. See Hasler, ‘Romance and Its Discontents in Eger and Grime’, in Spirit, pp. 200–18. A passing reference in McKinstry’s Middle English Romance and the Craft of Memory to instances of romance heroes ‘forgetting’ the object of

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The repetitious remembering is also a communal effort: the bloody memory-

image of Havelok’s disinheritance is shared among other characters and vocalised by

three or more speakers, each time with a similar form of words, presenting the

memory in the manner of corroborative testimony. The cumulative effect is striking.

Initially, Havelok remembers aloud:

‘ich saw biforn min eyne slo

Mine sistres with a knif’. (ll. 1365–68)

Then Havelok shares the memory with his foster-brothers:

‘I saw that fule fend

Mine sistres slo with hise hend:

First he shar a two here throtes,

And sithen hem al to grotes.’ (ll. 1412–15)

Consequently, the Danish earl, Ubbe testifies:

‘For the maydnes here lif

Refte he bothen with a knif,

And [Havelok] shulde ok have slawen -

The knif was at his herte drawen.’ (ll. 2222–25)

Havelok’s foster-brother, Robert confronts Godard with the memory:

‘thenke what thou him dedes

Whan thu reftes with a knif

Hise sistres here lif.’ (ll. 2393–95)

Finally, the memory is inscribed on the gallows where Godard is hung:

their missions, or becoming ‘distracted’, indicates the potential for further study in this area (see McKinstry, Craft of Memory, p. 89, n. 61).

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‘This is the swike that wende wel

The king have reft the lond ilk del,

And hise sistres with a knif

Bothe refte here lif.’ (ll. 2482–84)

There are some missing lines in the manuscript, from the beginning of the Ubbe

episode, but from what remains we can reasonably assume that there is at least one

further instance (a sixth) in which someone shares the memory with Ubbe. The

repetition of this memory unifies Havelok’s supporters in his campaign to seize

Denmark and, thus, in recognising him as the rightful heir to Denmark. Though it is

not the only form of recognition in the romance, it is the most frequently invoked.

Significantly, as in the other romances, the memories associated with the recognition

of rightful heirship are not memories of paternity or birth, but rather the scene of

Havelok’s disinheritance and symbolic rebirth.

In fact, recognition is always more than remembering the past. While

recognition may draw on memory, it is not simply recall but ‘re-cognition’. In

modern recognition theory, as in Aristotle’s Poetics, an important aspect of

recognition is ‘change’; the ‘force of recognition’, in James Simpson’s words, is

‘reformist’.71 Reading recognition as reformist, or transformative, helps to make

sense of what might otherwise appear to be narrative lacunae in the romances. We

can read the process of recognition in Octavian, for example, as more important than

the memory testimonies given: rather than expecting the process to reveal or prove

71 James Simpson, ‘Cognition is Recognition: Literary Knowledge and Textual “Face”’, New Literary History 44:1 (2013), 25–44 (pp. 25–26). Simpson is describing ‘reading practice’ here, though he goes on to adapt the theory to the analysis of ‘represented recognitions’ in literary texts. He initially follows Rita Felski’s ‘phenomenological’ definition of recognition, as a mode of ‘textual engagement’. She similarly emphasises that ‘recognition is not repetition’. Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 14 and 25.

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Florent’s paternity, the result is his transformation from unknown youth into son of

the emperor. Writing on the romance Sir Isumbras, Matthew Giancarlo describes a

‘token-recognition scene and a touching reunion’, after which ‘Isumbras is – without

any explanation – “crowned kynge … of many ryche londes thare”’.72 In light of

recognition theory, however, the otherwise inexplicable coronation can be

understood as an expression of the ‘reformist’ force of recognition. The act of

recognition does not simply reinstate a former order but can transform its subject: in

this case, Isumbras made king.

In Havelok, the only person to interpret the supernatural signs on the hero’s

body correctly is Grim, who recognises that Havelok will be king of Denmark and of

England, a place with which he has no existing connection (ll. 590–615). This is a

transformative re-cognition: not a recollection or revelation of Havelok’s pre-

existing birthright, but the apprehension of something yet-to-come. Grim’s change of

attitude towards Havelok is so complete that Kimberly Bell considers it akin to

religious ‘conversion’; but Havelok is also transformed by this recognition, from

Birkabeyn’s heir into the rightful heir of a new, as-yet unformed Anglo-Danish

kingdom.73 There is evidence, elsewhere in medieval sources, of the idea that an heir

transforms upon inheritance of the throne.74 But in Havelok, transformation occurs

with the recognition of rightful heirship, and it extends to the inheritance, which is

augmented beyond the hero’s original birthright. The ‘dramatic potential’ of

‘recognition scenes’ is not only the ‘oscillation between the loss and the recovery of

72 Giancarlo, ‘Speculative Genealogies’, p. 363. 73 Bell, ‘Resituating Romance’, pp. 49–50. 74 See Prestwich, Edward I, p. 3. The genealogy of English kings preserved in London, British Library, MS Royal 14 B vi (c. 1300–07) shows each king twice: as an heir and as the crowned monarch.

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identity’ then, but the possibility of forming something new: 75 not just ‘identity’,

moreover, but a new claim on a heritable property.

Tryamour provides differentiated examples of remembering birth, recognition

from previous encounters, and recognition as a transformative act. During the course

of the romance, Tryamour and King Ardus (his biological father) become

acquainted, but do not know their familial relationship. Neither can recognise the

other as family, because Tryamour was born after his mother was sent into exile. But

when Queen Margaret is reunited with her husband, in Tryamour’s presence, she

tells their story in the public forum of Ardus’s hall (ll. 1656–80).76 She begins by

gesturing to Tryamour and saying to Ardus:

‘Here ys yowre sone

Knowe hym yf ye konne.’ (ll. 1654–55)

Since he cannot draw on memory, Ardus is asked to ‘knowe’ (recognise) Tryamour

in the very particular sense of ‘re-cognition’: to revise his understanding of his

relationship to the young knight, to see him as his son for the first time. Recognition

is generative, as opposed to simply restorative.

This recognition is not certain, however, and hinges upon the conditional ‘yf’.

Especially given that Ardus earlier denounced Tryamour as illegitimate, there is

something of Roland le Huenan’s description of recognition here, as ‘a disquieting

questioning of the self’.77 No new evidence of Tryamour’s legitimacy is presented

but, as in Octavian, the process of recognition is effective. Though Ardus cannot

75 Ad Putter, ‘Story Line and Story Shape in Sir Percyvell of Gales and Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal’, in Pulp Fictions, pp. 172–96 (p. 187). 76 In summary, she explains how Sir Marrok tried to seduce her, her exile and how Sir Roger was killed, how she gave birth in a forest, and how Sir Bernard took them in. 77 Roland le Huenan, ‘Preface’, to Recognition and Modes of Knowledge, pp. ix–x (p. x).

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‘remember’ Tryamour’s birth, he is said to ‘chese’ Tryamour as ‘hys sone’, just as

the emperor Octavian is said to ‘chese’ his young namesake (Tryamour, ll. 1681,

1685; NO, l. 1776). The legal connotations of ‘chese’ recall, again, the idea of

recognition as the legal process used to settle disputatious inheritance claims.78 But

the word also emphasises the agency of the person doing the “choosing” and, in turn,

the mutuality of recognition.

Importantly, Ardus’s recognition of Tryamour as his rightful heir takes place

elsewhere, long before Ardus is said to ‘chese’ Tryamour as his ‘sone’. Ardus

encounters Tryamour at a tournament, where the latter triumphs but is forced to

abandon the field suddenly, after killing a rival who ambushes him. Ardus

subsequently comes under attack and sends for Tryamour to defend him:

When Tryamowre come into the halle

He haylesed the kyng and sythen all

He [Tryamour] knew hym [Ardus] at that syght.

The kyng toke hym be the hande

…

And asked hym what he hyght.

‘Syr,’ he seyde, “Y hyght Tryamowre’

…

The kyng wyste wele that hyt was he. (ll. 1138–50)

Perhaps because this interaction does not involve the discovery of parentage, it has

not been regarded a ‘recognition scene’ in criticism – Elizabeth Archibald sees it as

one of the romance’s many ironic non-recognitions – but in terms of the inheritance

narrative, this is a critical moment.79 When the day of the battle comes, Ardus makes

78 See MED, chesen, v., sense 2. 79 Archibald, ‘Non-recognition in Sir Triamour’, pp. 67–68.

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Tryamour a knight and then announces, ‘“Tryamowre, Y make the myn heyre | And

for me thou schalt fyght!”’ (ll. 1193–94). There can be no doubt about the meaning

of this offer. Nor can it be an erroneous sequencing of events on the part of the

author/copyist, since Ardus repeats the offer at l. 1268 and again at ll. 1285–87. The

scene above therefore constitutes a ‘recognition’ in another, more modern sense of

the word: the ‘acknowledgement’ of ‘worth’ or ‘achievement’.80 That is, Ardus

recognises Tryamour as his rightful heir according to worth, not birth.

For Cooper, when unknown heirs perform feats of arms in the romances, it is

an opportunity to demonstrate ‘the inherent superiority of noble blood’: ‘the point’ of

a ‘foundling’ hero is ‘that their high birth will be revealed’, thereby reaffirming a

preexisting ‘social hierarchy’.81 Lee Ramsey likewise argues that romances about

inheritance ‘insist on birth as a prerequisite for good and stable rule’.82 But the

discovery of Tryamour’s ‘high birth’ is not coterminous with his recognition as

Ardus’s rightful heir. The insistence on high birth and noble blood perceived

elsewhere is not true in the internal world of the romance. Namely, the reader knows

that Tryamour is Ardus’s natural son, but Ardus does not. The romance is politically

duplicitous, in fact. While one reader might see Tryamour earning the inheritance of

Ardus as merely emphasising his birthright, which is the prerequisite, another can see

the eventual revelation of Tryamour’s ‘high birth’ as surplus to requirement. It

satisfies Tryamour’s curiosity, as to ‘who [his] fader were’ – since the inheritance

narrative is combined with the family-separation story – but it is not essential to

justify Tryamour’s inheritance from Ardus, which has already been confirmed (l.

1040).

80 OED, recognition, n., senses 3a. and 7. 81 Cooper, English Romance, p. 329. 82 Lee Ramsey, Chivalric Romances (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), p. 29.

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Of the two alternative readings set out above, the first is well documented in

criticism already, and the second is the one I wish to draw out. That rightful heirship

might be ‘recognised’ in the sense of worth, in spite of birth, deviates from the

principle of primogeniture. But the heirs’ acquisition of land and titles in the

romances, through feats of arms, while unknown or illegitimate, is proof of the idea

in action: even when the land in question is the estate to which they originally had a

claim by birth (now lost). In Bevis, for example, the hero is eventually recognised by

the king of England as rightful heir to Hampton, but only after he has taken it by

force and not because the king knows him for his father’s son: his failure to see the

family connection is clear when he ‘askede [Bevis] what he were’ (ll. 3491–504).

The Bevis-narrator is clear about this means of land acquisition from the outset, when

Saber tells the young Bevis that he will have to ‘winne in to [his] honde’ his

inheritance ‘with werre’. The first phrase is glossed as ‘win back’ in the METS

edition of Auchinleck (my italics), though that emphasis on return is not present in

the Middle English: to ‘winne’ simply means to ‘to take into one’s control’ or ‘to

gain territory by military action’ (ll. 371–72 and note to l. 371).83 If recognition is a

‘form of action that dramatizes the cardinal values’ of the society it represents, then

it is significant that the recognition of rightful heirship by feats of arms, in the

romances, provides a model of rightful heirship that contradicts the medieval legal

ideal of de facto inheritance by descent.84

One might still argue that these are ‘meritocratic’ recognitions in the properly

satirical sense of the word, namely that the relationships between merit, success and

83 See MED, winnen, v., senses 2 and 6a. Bevis says again that he will ‘winne’ his ‘heritage’, at l. 2940. 84 Sheila Murnaghan, Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey, 2nd edn (Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011), p. ix.

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privilege by birth are circular.85 Tryamour, the young Octavian and Bevis benefit

from access to the accoutrements of a chivalric upbringing, which are arguably

granted on the basis of their birth: in the first two cases, their mothers are recognised

as queens, and Bevis is able to present himself to King Ermin as an earl’s son.

Antony, Leobertus and Degrebell appear to have ‘gentill blode’, an outward display

of wealth that gives them access to aristocratic worlds. Among the disinherited heirs,

only Florent could be said to possess an inborn aptitude for chivalric pursuits,

because of his isolation from noble society.86 (Havelok is similarly isolated, raised in

a peasant family, but unlike Florent he excels as a labourer.) More importantly,

however, there is a subtle distinction to be made between the ideas of ‘high birth’ or

‘noble blood’ and the more specific idea of birthright: a legitimate claim on a

particular property according to the law of descent. The romances expose these

distinctions, wherever rightful heirship is recognised separately from birth.

The recognition scenes in these romances continue the imaginative work

begun with the incident of disinheritance. The variety of objects and signs involved

in recognition – trinkets that indicate ‘gentill blode’, feats of arms, supernatural

signs, witness testimony – do not provide a definitive answer to the question of what,

exactly, constitutes ‘rightful’ heirship, except that it is not simply the revelation of

paternity. In fact, the compelling consequence of the ‘distributed’ nature of

recognition, noted by Wittig, is that rightfulness cannot be located in any one object,

85 Michael Young coined the word in a satire intended to demonstrate how success leading to wealth breeds privilege, though the adjective has since passed into non-ironic usage. See OED, meritocratic, adj, and Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy: 1870–2033 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1958). 86 This is a common reading of Florent’s ‘enfance’ in the romance. For a recent example see Ryan Naughton, ‘The Primacy of Natural Nobility in the Cambridge Octavian’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 117:3 (2018), 343–59.

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attribute or moment.87 Rather, rightful heirship emerges in the process of recognition

itself, an action that occurs ‘between people’ and which, therefore, cannot be innate

to the heir.

The extended portrayal of testimonial evidence in the southern Octavian is

described by the narrator as exemplary and begins with a request for the reader’s

attention: ‘may ye here yn romaunce ryȝt | Well kende acord’ (SO, ll. 1811–12). The

choice of words is suggestive here: ‘romaunce ryȝt’ implies both ‘rightful romance’

and ‘romance law’, where ‘ryȝt’ is defined contextually rather than entailing any

particular law.88 It is a pertinent description of the fundamentally self-referential and

circular determination of rightful heirship in the romances, ultimately hanging upon

‘acord’. Consensus is emphasised in Tryamour also, where the hero is ‘chosyn wyth

comyns assent’ to marry Helen and to ascend to a royal estate, in spite of his

unknown lineage at that point (l. 848). To compare with the Morte Darthur, the

‘comyns’ similarly approve of Arthur as king. When he pulls the sword from the

stone:

all the lordes and comyns [were] there – wherefore alle the comyns cryed at ones, ‘We will

have Arthur unto our kyng’.

Pertinently for a non-noble readership, Malory is clear about the comparatively low

social status of the ‘comyns’, whose well-judged approval contrasts with the

disparaging views of the barony: the ‘lordes’, who ‘saide it was grete shame unto

87 Wittig observes that in some tales recognition scenes are distributed within the plot structure rather than collected in one episode (p. 175; italics in original). 88 Middle English ‘ryȝt’ is as flexible in its meaning as the modern English ‘right’ and the MED provides a sample of common collocations: ‘of God’, ‘of nature’, of ‘law’. The adjective ‘rightful’ similarly varies in meaning, from ‘accordance with justice’ or ‘accordance with law’ to ‘accordance with reason’. See MED, right, n. and rightful, adj; and OED, right, n.

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them all [to] be over-governyd with a boye of no hyghe blood borne’.89 Legitimate

heirship is subjective here and recognised along class lines.

The variety, along with the lack of uniformity or obvious hierarchy among

the forms of recognition of rightful heirship presented in the romances, indicates the

new disorder instigated by disinheritance. That recognition is a communal process,

rather than something inherent in the heir, is particularly significant. The romances’

recognition of ‘worth’ aside from ‘birth’, as well as their references to common

assent, imply a popular, late-medieval conception of rightful heirship which is at

odds with the orthodoxies of pro-aristocratic inheritance laws: in particular, this

alternative view permits and even promotes the admittance of those persons believed

to be of ‘no hyghe blood borne’. As we will see in the next chapter, it is still possible

to read the treatment of recognition in the romances as foreshadowing their endings,

as suggested elsewhere in romance criticism; but not because the recognition scenes

represent the beginning of the romances’ restoration of order, or specifically the

order of primogeniture – quite the opposite.

89 Malory, Morte Darthur, pp. 10–11.

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Chapter 4

Regeneration

This final chapter demonstrates the complexity of the endings of the disinheritance

romances, arguing that they do not provide a simple re-establishment of former

order, confirming a future that is certain and secure, but instead represent the

culmination of a narrative movement towards uncertainty. In particular, the endings

resist reproducing the ‘myth of primogeniture’ in a number of ways. They witness a

redistribution of lands, more than a restoration of former tenures. Firstborn twins in

Bevis, Octavian, Torrent and possibly Tryamour conspicuously challenge the idea of

the one rightful heir, yet the texts remain indirect and inconclusive in their responses.

In Eglamour and Torrent, adoption displaces reproduction as the means of attaining

a rightful heir. A series of false endings in Bevis suggests that disinheritance cannot

be resolved. As we have seen in previous chapters and continue to see here, the

significance of birth wanes in comparison to merit and luck, as inheritances are not

just reclaimed but won and found and given away.

Some semblance of order is the minimum expectation of Middle English

romances’ endings, according to existing critical consensus, to a degree maintaining

a Structuralist view of the romances’ deeply embedded, reciprocal narrative patterns.

In relation to the disinheritance romances, the narrative pattern frequently cited is

that of ‘exile-return’, ‘expulsion and return’, or ‘separation-restoration’, where the

language of ‘restoration’ and ‘return’ harks back to influential narratological work on

plot.1 Laura Ashe offers the most complete interpretation of the ‘exile-and-return’

pattern in such stories, seeing it as a continuity myth, a version of what Rosalind

1 See for example the concepts of ‘return’ and ‘recovery’ in Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, esp. pp. 100–110. See also Crane, Insular Romance, pp. 24–25.

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Field calls the ‘king over the water’ trope.2 For Susan Wittig, ‘separation-restoration’

is one of two ‘basic double patterns’ (the other being ‘love-marriage’) that between

them describe the structure of all Middle English romances.3 ‘Righting wrongs and

re-establishing proper social order’ is counted an essential feature of the genre.4

Indeed it is one of few unifying features, Ad Putter remarks, that romances ‘usually

end happily with the restoration of an order that was disrupted at the beginning of the

story’.5 The ‘restoration of order’ is closely associated with the ‘happy ending’,

though I defer further examination of the latter phrase until the end of this chapter,

for reasons that will become plain there.

The basic critical expectation of romance endings, namely that there will be

some ‘order’, may be partly based on postmedieval literary theory and the

conventions of the novel.6 The ‘restoration of order’ and ‘righting [of] wrongs’, as

described above, aligns with Peter Brooks’s description of the ‘definitive’ story

ending: one which comprises a ‘distribution of awards and punishments’ and the ‘tie-

up, through marriages and deaths, of all the characters’ lives’.7 The ‘spectacular

denouement’ which characterises the ‘definitive’ story ending for Brooks is, in John

Mullan’s analysis of the structure of novels, borne of the ‘hidden design’ of plot.8

But plot is not a ‘hidden design’ in the Middle English romances: as Putter argues

2 Laura Ashe, ‘“Exile-and-return” and English Law: The Anglo-Saxon Inheritance of Insular Romance’, Literature Compass 3:3 (2006), 300–17; Field, ‘The King Over the Water: Exile-and-Return Revisited’, pp. 41–53. See also Lee Ramsey, ‘The Child Exile’, in Chivalric Romances (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), pp. 26–44. 3 Wittig, Stylistic and Narrative Structures, p. 179. 4 Joanne Charbonneau and Désirée Cromwell, ‘Gender and Identity in the Popular Romance’, in A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance, pp. 96–110 (pp. 96–97). 5 Ad Putter, ed., ‘A Historical Introduction’, Spirit, pp. 1–15 (p. 1). 6 Helen Cooper looks to the ‘happy endings’ of Dickensian novels for a comparison with Middle English romances, in English Romance, p. 329. 7 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1992; first published 1984), p. 314. 8 John Mullan, How Novels Work (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 169.

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elsewhere, in fact, romance narrative follows a ‘proairetic code’ making the

connections between its actions and consequences plain.9 The romances are not

‘plot-driven’ in this sense: the associated notion of the ‘spoiler’, for example, is

anachronistic for Middle English romances, which were read and reproduced over a

period of two centuries.10 Yet categorising a romance as an ‘exile-return plot’

implies that this structure, especially the manner of the ending, is the essential

interpretative key to its content.

I argue, on the contrary, that the value of the disinheritance theme in these

romances should not be defined by the ways in which the stories end, because to

consider the ending as anything approaching a ‘denouement’ is inappropriate to the

form. In this case, if the disinheritance romance ends with noble heirs inheriting

noble property, it does not follow that this defines the meaning of the romance. More

specifically, it does not follow that the story ultimately expresses a socially

conservative and legally orthodox ideology of inheritance. At the same time, I

suggest that the endings warrant closer analysis, something which their perceived

predictability and formulaic nature might otherwise preclude. It is not possible to

know whether medieval readers found the romance endings predictable, but it is

certainly not the case that the absence of a ‘hidden design’ entails a lack of depth of

9 See Putter, ‘Story Line and Story Shape’, pp. 172–96 (see pp. 173, 192). This is in contrast to the ‘hermeneutic’ code, which Putter sees in the Conte, and which involves asking questions of the narrative to uncover answers. Putter borrows the ‘codes’ from Roland Barthes’s S/Z, first published in 1970. For the English translation see Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974). 10 See OED, spoiler, n., draft additions 2007. Though this sense of the word ‘spoiler’ is more recent, John Mullan credits Wilkie Collins with being the first writer to ‘plead with reviewers not to give away the plots of his novels’ in the nineteenth century (while contemporary Anthony Trollope scorned Collins for encouraging readers to read only for the plot). John Mullan, ‘Whatever Next? How Plot Grips Us, From Dickens to Line of Duty’, Guardian, 14 May 2016 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/14/whatever-next-pleasures-plot-dickens-line-of-duty> [accessed 4 Dec 2019], paragraph 14. See also John Sutherland, ‘Two Emergencies in the Writing of “The Woman in White”’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 7 (1977), 148–56.

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meaning. In turn, acknowledging that the endings do not attempt any explication of

the plot should alert us to the fact that any ambiguities present in the preceding

narrative remain unexplained at its close.

Alongside the critical consensus concerning the restorative ordering of

romance endings, there is the observation that romance narrative is a ‘continued

deferral of closure’: for Patricia Parker a ‘strategy of delay’ and for Andrew King a

‘resistance to closure’.11 Deferral culminates, Nicola McDonald writes, in the

‘gratification’ of a predictably ‘happy ending’ in which, for instance, ‘the rightful

heir will inherit unjustly lost property’ (italics in original).12 Yet the disinheritance

romances provide several examples to the contrary. Bevis fails to end in this way: the

desire expressed at the outset of the adventure – as imagined by Saber, that Bevis

returns to England and wins back his ‘eritage’ – is a false ending, as it happens (ll.

370–72). The idea of Bevis mending the patrilineal order broken after the story’s

initial act of disinheritance, assuming his late father’s position and thereby restoring

dynastic stability to Hampton is the deferred closure that never comes. As something

of a prototype for Middle English romances in the late-medieval imagination,13 the

ending of Bevis indicates some of the expectations that late-medieval readers may

have held, regarding the endings of other romances. Significantly, the expectations

that Bevis establishes are quite different to those evident in criticism, as the section

below aims to show.

11 Rosalind Field, ‘From Gui to Guy: The Fashioning of a Popular Romance’, in Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007), pp. 44–70 (p. 54); Andrew King, ‘Romance’, p. 187; Patricia Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 5. 12 McDonald, ‘Polemical Introduction’, pp. 11, 14, 15. McDonald cites Roland Barthes’s notion of ‘jouissance’ (p. 16) from Le Plaisir du Texte (1973). 13 See my discussion of Bevis and the growing critical consensus about its place in late-medieval literary culture, in the introduction, particularly references to Yin Liu’s work on a ‘prototype theory’ of the romance genre.

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A Sense of Unending

The Auchinleck Bevis stretches to more than 4600 lines, its recursive storytelling

perpetuated by a series of incidents that occur just as resolution seems imminent.

Two of these false endings involve Bevis winning his late father’s earldom of

Hampton. Bevis does return from exile to England, as Saber predicted, determined to

seize Hampton and avenge his father’s murder (see ll. 3467–74) but the romance is

far from over at this point. Bevis soon finds himself at odds with King Edgar and

expelled from England. When Bevis is reconciled with the king, some 1000 lines

later in the Auchinleck version, he is in a position to claim Hampton once again. As

Edgar offers his daughter in marriage to Bevis’s son, Miles, the rest of his family are

reunited in England. It seems the original order of the romance can be restored:

Bevis as lord of Hampton (like his father, Gii) and two sons (one also named Gii)

who could succeed him. But still the romance is not ended. The narrator reports

briefly how:

Beves tok leve, hom to wende

...

And his erldom in Hamteschire

A yaf to his em Sabere

And schipede at Hamtoun hastely (ll. 4570–77).

‘Hom’ – or ‘homeward’ in the Cambridge and Naples manuscripts – is no longer

Hampton but Mombraunt, a land Bevis has won during the course of his adventures,

‘ther he was king’ (ll. 4574).14 Bevis’s ‘haste’ is a curious detail, suggesting little

attachment to his paternal lands. The word ‘yaf’ is even more significant. The verb

14 Cambridge and Naples, l. 4802 in both. It contrasts with the early scene in which Bevis comprehends his disinheritance, looking ‘homward to the toun [Hampton] | That scholde ben his’ (ll. 380–81).

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‘yeven’ is frequently used in medieval wills to bequeath property. It is the same term

used earlier in Bevis where King Ermin, on his deathbed, ‘yaf’ his kingdom to young

Gii, his grandson (ll. 4006–16). But ‘yeve’ is also the appropriate term when

heritable property is alienated from heirs.15 By conveying Hampton to Saber in this

way, Bevis removes his own biological sons from contention. Far from restoring

patrilineal succession at the end of the romance, Bevis exchanges his patrimony for

lands won through feats of arms. There is now a pathetic irony about the manner of

his father’s death: he was murdered by the lover of the wife he married in order to

produce an heir, only for that heir (Bevis) to eventually cede his ‘heritage’ to an

uncle (Saber), who would have inherited the land if Sir Gii had never had a child at

all. Sir Gii’s faith in primogeniture and the sacrifice he made to the ideal proves

futile.

Hampton is no longer the only heritable property at stake in Bevis by the end.

The romance’s various adventures draw many other kingdoms and heirs into its

remit. Reviewing the distribution of these, at the end of the story, reveals the extent

to which patrimonial inheritance is eclipsed by new acquisitions through feats of

arms, and how questions of succession are left in a state of suspense. The son whom

Bevis names ‘Gii’, as if in anticipation of his eventual succession to his grandfather’s

place, actually inherits the kingdom of Armenia from his maternal grandfather.

Meanwhile, like Bevis himself, other characters settle in lands acquired through

marriage or battle. Miles is set to become king of England by marriage (‘throwe the

eritage of þat wedding’, as the Naples version has it, l. 4796). Terry, formerly known

as ‘Saberes son of Wight’, becomes king of a land called Aumberforce by marriage

15 See MED, yeven, v., especially sense 1a (e). For examples of this usage in wills, see Fifty Earliest English Wills, pp. 82, 87, 98, 105.

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to the ‘riche levedy [of] that londe’ (Auchinleck, ll. 3786, 3957–58). Saber becomes

lord of Hampton as a reward for loyalty to his nephew.

Some lines of succession are discontinued altogether, most obviously that of

Devoun, Bevis’s stepfather and the emperor of Germany, since both he and his heir

are killed during the course of the story. Their deaths are retribution for the

usurpation of Hampton, but it is significant that their lands are also left heirless, the

succession unresolved, in a romance so preoccupied by inheritance and the

acquisition of property. Further questions remain over the succession of Hampton,

Wight and Mombraunt: the lateral distribution of property among members of

Bevis’s family gives everyone an estate of their own but leaves no obvious heirs next

in line. The question of which of Bevis’s twin sons will ultimately succeed him, if

either, remains a moot point.

The relationship between Bevis’s twin sons may be the most compelling

question left unanswered by the end of Bevis. When Josian is dying, she summons

her family to her side:

Gii, hire sone, she gan ofsende

And Terry, the riche king

For to ben at here parting. (ll. 4592–94)

Bevis is there, but the family gathering conspicuously lacks the other twin, Miles.

Gii’s presence here, and his subsequent management of his parents’ memorials, may

reinforce inferences drawn elsewhere in the romance that he is considered the eldest.

Yet his presence at his parents’ death, while his brother is abroad managing his own

estates, also puts Gii in the role of the ‘fireside child’: the youngest sibling who is at

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home when his parents die.16 The ambiguity about the possibility or validity of

differentiating the twins according to a conventional legal hierarchy is sustained

here.

Miles’s absence from this scene would be less noticeable, perhaps, if Josian

had not included Terry in her summons (her husband’s cousin). Terry’s epithet here,

‘the riche king’ suggests the honour of being attended on by someone of such

status.17 But his presence is more intriguing given the narrator’s silence on the future

succession of Hampton and because Terry now qualifies (through his father, Saber)

as the de facto heir to Hampton, in spite of Bevis’s own sons. The deathbed vignette

raises a number of pertinent questions, none of which are answered. The final lines

of verse, bringing the text of Bevis to its physical end, are a brief prayer:

Thus endeth Beves of Hamtoun.

God yeve us all Is benesoun!

Amen. (ll. 4619–21)

The non-narrative nature of these final lines points up the strictly structural function

of the ending. Indeed, one effect of the ‘continued deferral of closure’ in Bevis is that

it encourages suspicion of any sense of an ending.18 The final prayer is a structural

container: the text ends in a manner that satisfies the need for closure at a formal

level, but the (dis)inheritance narrative remains in a state of suspension.

16 Pollock and Maitland argue that the idea of the ‘fireside child’ helps to explain the custom of ultimogeniture, where the youngest child inherits from his or her father (the best known example being ‘gavelkind’ in Kent). Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, pp. 261, 272 and 280. See also Simpson, History of Land Law, p. 21. Menuge suggests that Gamelyn is a ‘fireside’ child, in Wardship, p. 51. 17 Gii is only called ‘hire son’ at this point in the Auchinleck Bevis, although in the later Naples and Cambridge versions he, too, is described as ‘the king’ (Naples, l. 4822; Cambridge, l. 4822). 18 Field, ‘From Gui to Guy’, p. 54.

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Romance criticism which has focused on ‘structure’ or ‘plot’ has tended to

stress patterns of reunion and return in the endings, without necessarily being

troubled by the inconsistency of the narrative content. For Northrop Frye, even if a

romance ending seems ‘faked, manipulated, or thrown in’ it still ‘fits’.19 Not

dissimilarly, in his 2008 study of genre, K. S. Whetter points to a ‘happy ending’

which seems rather ‘forced’, in Ywain and Gawain, as evidence that the happy

ending is an essential feature of romance.20 But Frye’s and Whetter’s observations

reveal an essential conflict between the form and the content of the romances. As Jill

Mann writes, in her analysis of Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’, the ‘happy ending as a

narrative convention’ is the ‘choice of a point to satisfy the human hunger for

closure, rather than an assurance that the alternating sequence of joy and woe has

been brought to an end’.21 The ‘understanding’ that endings are ‘artificial, arbitrary

… casual and textual’ is an attribute Peter Brooks associates with the ‘most

sophisticated literature’ of the twentieth century, but some of these same

observations have been made of the conspicuous artificiality of endings in Middle

English romances.22 Nicola McDonald, for instance, has identified the ‘gap that

exists’ between the ‘conventions’ of romance form and ‘the transgressions’ the

stories involve: the ‘happy ending’ of Middle English romance is an ‘inviolable’

19 Frye, Secular Scripture, p. 135. 20 Whetter, Undersanding Genre, p. 67. 21 Jill Mann, ‘Beginning with the Ending: Narrative Techniques and their Significance in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale’, in Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance, ed. Elizabeth Archibald, Megan G. Leitch and Corinne Saunders (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), pp. 85–102 (p. 101). Mann’s reference to the ‘alternating sequence of joy and woe’ recalls the opening lines of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where the alternating sequence of ‘werre and wrake and wonder’ that characterises the ancient past perpetuates into the present: ‘And oft boþe blysse and blunder | Ful skete hatȝ skyfted synne’. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. and trans. W. J. R. Barron (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), ll. 16–19. 22 Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p. 314.

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convention, she argues, but cannot resolve the ‘transgressions [from] social and

cultural norms that its narrative produces’.23

In fact, the endings of the disinheritance romances do not only fail to resolve

the ambiguities of the narrative, but they also generate more uncertainty. Where

McDonald associates readerly enjoyment with the dissonance that exists between the

‘blatant artifice’ of the ‘happy ending’ and the ‘transgressions’ it fails to contain, I

suggest this dissonance also invites readerly critique. Whetter has suggested, on the

contrary, that the ‘credulity of the ending is less important than its presence’ and that

medieval readers of the romances would have ‘viewed [their endings] less

sceptically’ than readers with ‘modern sentiments’.24 Yet while it may be true that

‘suspicious reading’ is a typical of a ‘ubiquitous academic ethos’, as Rita Felski has

argued,25 the artificiality of the romance’s ‘conventions’ are too conspicuous for

critical reading to be confined to critics. The ‘happy ending’ is only one example of

the ‘conventional formulae’ liable to ‘provoke questions’: inspiring ‘incredulity’

rather than ‘complicity’ in the reader.26

In this light, we might reverse Putter’s thesis, reading the Middle English

romance endings with the ‘hermeneutic code’ and consider the potential of the ‘gaps’

that remain as cues to ‘form a hypothesis’.27 The ‘gaps’ in the ending of Bevis, for

example, raise pertinent questions about inheritance and succession – why does the

hero abandon his paternal inheritance and who will succeed to Wight, Hampton,

Mombraunt? – that sustain the disinheritance narrative beyond the ‘inescapably

23 McDonald, ‘Polemical Introduction’, pp. 15–16. 24 Whetter, Understanding Genre, p. 67. 25 Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 574. 26 Chism, ‘Romance’, pp. 61–63. 27 Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction, p. 45; pp. 125–29.

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linear’ time and space of the textual form.28 The point is not to discover an answer –

there is no ‘spectacular denouement’ here – but to discover questions. Medieval

readers may not have ‘question[ed] the satisfactoriness’ of an ‘abrupt’ ending in the

way that a modern reader would, but because there is a ‘reward’ in recognising its

very artifice.29 The effect of that conspicuous artifice is to expose ‘gaps’ and provoke

questions, and to convey the impossibility of absolutely resolving the problems

raised by the narrative. For late-medieval readers likely to have a heightened

awareness of the matter of inheritance, compared to their modern counterparts, the

artificiality of the ending of the disinheritance narratives conspicuously signals the

impossibility of resolving the issue of succession, entirely or permanently. The

recursive narrative style of Bevis gestures towards endless regeneration: the unending

‘alternating sequence’ in this case being one of disinheritance and inheritance, loss

and redistribution.

Twin Endings

As with the final portrait of family relations in Bevis, the final scene in Octavian fails

to address the romance’s opening question, namely the succession of Rome:

To Rome than wente the Emperoure,

His lady by his syde

And his two sonnes also

And with tham many one mo

Home than gan thay ryde.

28 Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction, p. 45. 29 Whetter, Understanding Genre, p. 67 (my italics); Chism, ‘Romance’, p. 61.

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And thus endis Octovean,

That in his tym was a doghety man.30

The preceding seventy-five lines see the reunion of the estranged emperor and

empress of Rome, with the twins who were disinherited and separated shortly after

birth: the children alleged to be the illegitimate offspring of the empress of Rome are

finally recognised as the emperor’s sons. Neither is said to inherit Rome, however.

Furthermore, this ending in which the two brothers return ‘home’ to Rome with their

parents is anachronistic, because it overlooks Florent’s recent marriage to Marsabell,

strangely absent here. Indeed, the symmetry of the family portrait is a pointed

contrast to the asymmetrical treatment of the twins throughout the romance.

Twins have been a recurring theme in this thesis, just as they are a recurring

feature of the romances, since they present a clear challenge to the idea that

romances mythologise ‘the ideology of primogeniture’. It is significant that Middle

English romances tend not to show direct conflict between male twin heirs, an

omission made more noticeable by comparison to the presentation of female twins

and co-heirs. In the Roman de Silence (c. 1280), a bitter feud between firstborn twin

sisters culminates in the deaths of both their champions and, as a result, the

prohibition of female inheritance. Sisters are locked in a dispute over their

inheritance in Ywain and Gawain. Lai le Freine, while it stops short of portraying

any personal antipathy between the twin sisters separated at birth, makes their love-

rivalry for Gurun central to the story. Le Freine is eventually married to Gurun and

her sister is ‘spousyd’ to an anonymous ‘gentle knight of that countré’: a potentially

30 NO, ll. 1838–47. These are the final narrative lines of Octavian, before the text closes with a four-line prayer: With the grace of Mary free, | Now, Jhesu lorde, of heven kynge, | Thou gyffe us alle thi dere blyssynge. | Amen, amen, par charyté! Amen (ll. 1845–48).

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unsettling ending, where disequilibrium masquerades as even-handedness and

universal joy (ll. 405–06).31

The portrayal of direct competition between female heirs may be an analogy

for the division of an estate, according to partition; but division is not an exclusively

female-gendered trait of twins in the romances. While male twins in the romances

are not overtly antagonistic (only in Torrent do twins fight each other, unwittingly)

division nonetheless defines their relationship. In all cases, the male twins are

separated from each other shortly after birth and differentiated by the consequences

of that separation. Given the ample evidence of fraternal hostility elsewhere in

medieval literature, the apparent absence of conflict between male twin-heirs in the

romances may be taken as a cue, by the reader, to interpret this conviviality with

some scepticism.32 The repeated separation of the male twins in the romances, I

suggest, effectively functions as a metaphorical expression of the latent competition

between them: their potential opposition as heirs. While a single heir risks the

extinction of the line (if that heir dies), more than one risks rivalry: the ‘problem of

the spare’, as Jonathan Spangler puts it.33

Any contrary notion that twins represent dynastic stability is undermined in

romances where the birth of twins leads to the exposure of anxieties about infertility

31 On the lacunae and dissonances of this ending, see Archibald, ‘Lai le Freine: The Female Foundling and the Problem of the Romance Genre’, pp. 39–55 (esp. pp. 46, 50 and 52). In contrast, editors Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury describe the ending as ‘like the conclusion of many Breton lays, reunit[ing] the protagonist with the family unit and affirm[ing], in its fairytale ending, the triumph of the good’. Laskaya and Salisbury, eds, ‘Introduction’, to Lay le Freine, available online via METS [accessed 4 Dec 2019], paragraph 2. 32 See Larrington, Brothers and Sisters, pp. 104–28. The paradigmatic biblical example of Cain and Abel (Genesis 4.1–16) would have been familiar to many fifteenth-century romance readers through mystery plays, being present in Chester, Towneley, York, and N-Town cycles. See for example ‘Cain and Abel’, in The N-Town Plays, ed. Douglas Sugano (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007) and ‘The Killing of Abel’ [Townley 2], in English Mystery Plays, ed. Patter Happé (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984). 33 Jonathan Spangler, ‘The Problem of the Spare’, The Court Historian, 19:2 (2014), 119–28.

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and immediately precedes dynastic instability, in the form of de-legitimation, family

separation and disinheritance. The general sense of the problematic nature of twins,

in medieval literature, may derive from obstetrics: the fifteenth-century medical

treatise known as the Trotula (London, British Library, MS Sloane 2463), for

example, describes twins as an ‘unkyndely’ occurrence and the birth is considered

especially hazardous.34 The Trotula’s illustrations show twins linking arms in the

womb (see Fig. 11, p. 240). The images are somewhat reminiscent of the biblical

account of the birth of twins Jacob and Esau: Jacob emerges clinging to his brother’s

ankle; a tangle which portends a later conflict and, specifically,

conflict over birthright.35 Indeed, while Erik Kooper’s survey of twenty European

stories about twins finds that ‘multiple births’ lead ‘to numerous kinds of disaster’,

that ‘disaster’ frequently centres on the disruption of patrilineal primogeniture in the

Middle English romances.36 The arrival of firstborn twin heirs complicates the

paradigm of primogeniture, the ‘insistence [that] there [is] such a thing as a true heir’

and (at least in Octavian and Torrent, where kingdoms are at stake) that ‘one person,

and one person only carrie[s] the right to the crown’.37

The ending of Tryamour is remarkable in this respect, since it features the

birth of two sons, whose introduction to the romance implies that they may also be

twins. ‘Man chylder had they twoo’, the Tryamour-narrator says, recalling the form

of words that describes twin births in other romances: ‘knave children tweie’, ‘knave

childire two’, ‘men children two’; and, in fifteenth-century versions of Bevis, ‘man

34 Medieval Woman’s Guide to Health: The First Gynecological Handbook, ed. Beryl Rowland (Croom Helm: London, 1981), p. 133. 35 Genesis 25.24–26. 36 Erik Kooper, ‘Multiple Births and Multiple Disaster’, p. 260. 37 Cooper, English Romance, p. 326.

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chyldur had sche two’ or ‘knaue childer tuay’.38 The following stanza in Tryamour

describes the hero’s reaction:

Kyng Tryamowre and hys quene

Mekyll joye was them betwene;

Man chylder had they twoo.

Aftur that hys fader was dedd

Then he cowde no nothur redd,

Ywys he was full woo! (ll. 1705–10)

In a neat illustration of how romance endings can convey a perpetuating sequence of

‘joy and woe’, the ‘joye’ of what seems to be a twin birth is juxtaposed with

Tryamour’s ‘woo’ at his father’s death. This stanza’s penultimate line, describing

Tryamour at a loss for what to do, reads coherently as a reference to the inheritance

crisis precipitated by the coincidence of these two events.

The question concerns the appropriate distribution of titles. There is

Tryamour’s paternal inheritance – his father’s kingdom – and Tryamour’s kingdom

of Hungary (Helen’s patrimony), won by right of his marriage. Both lands are

hereditary, but according to the principles of patrilineal primogeniture, the elder of

Tryamour’s sons would rightfully inherit his grandfather’s land and the maternal

38 Tryamour, l. 1707; Bevis, l. 3640; NO, l. 83; Torrent, l. 1811; Cambridge Bevis, l. 4136; Naples Bevis, l. 4136. The later Percy Folio version of the romance, Sir Triamore (c. 1650) follows William Copland’s 1561 print edition in omitting Tryamour’s sons from its ending, with other details of the Cambridge manuscript: such as Ardus’s formal recognition of Tryamour (‘for his sone he hym chese’, l. 1685) and Ardus’s death. Neither the Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson fragment of Tryamour nor that of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Poet. D 208 include the relevant lines. The Rawlinson fragment is now lost but an edition can be found in Early English Poetry, Ballads, and Popular Literature of the Middle Ages, vol. 16, ed. James Orchard Halliwell (London: T. Richards, 1846), pp. 61–63. For the relevant lines of the Percy version, see The Percy Folio of Old English Ballads and Romances, vol. 2, ed. F. J. Furnivall and J. W. Hales (London: De La More Press, 1906), p. 190. A reproduction of the British Library’s copy of William Copland’s Syr Tryamoure (London: [Thames St], 1561) is available via EEBO [accessed 4 Dec 2019].

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lands (Helen’s) would go to the younger sibling.39 However, Tryamour reverses this

convention:

Hys yongyst sone then ordeygned hee

Aftur hys fadur kynge to bee,

God grawnt hym wele to rejoyse! (ll. 1711–14)

Significantly, these lines pass over Tryamour’s own succession to his father’s

kingdom, which is implied but not stated. Nothing is said of the elder son or the

inheritance of Hungary: leaving the reader to assume, with a degree of uncertainty,

that the two converge. This briefly narrated final sequence is remarkable for its

introduction of a new dilemma, that Tryamour ‘cowde no nother redd’, at the very

end of the text. If the point of the romance is to re-establish the patrilineal succession

of both kingdoms (Aragon and Hungary), then this ending delivers little sense of

resolution. But if the value of the romance is to be found in its uncertainty on the

matter of inheritance – a provocative case study for a readership of whom it can be

said that ‘everyone knew their own claims to inheritance’ – then the allusive

reference to twin birth and inheritance at the ending of Tryamour is highly

effective.40 Thus, twins prefigure a resistance to narrative closure as well as

providing a challenge to the primogeniture model.

Carolyne Larrington writes that the ‘topos of twinship’, in medieval

romances, ‘opens up, but does not closely interrogate, the important question: how

fair is primogeniture?’.41 I would modify this, to say that the romances invite their

readers to closely interrogate this question, but do not provide a conclusive answer.

But if the romances do not explicitly take up an anti-primogeniture position, they

39 See Crouch, The Beaumont Twins, p. 9. 40 Hicks, English Political Culture, p. 64. 41 Larrington, Brothers and Sisters, p. 61.

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certainly do much to unsettle its basic principles. I noted in Chapter 3 that where the

romances initially appear to establish a primary-secondary hierarchy between twin

brothers, as per the legal solution for organising twins according to primogeniture,

this implicit order is later undermined or made redundant. In Octavian and Torrent,

the ‘younger’ twin emerges as the more dominant or stronger of the two, and in Bevis

the twins are evenly matched. In this chapter, I would add that the romances also

resist bringing the implied hierarchy (elder twin and younger twin) to completion by

confirming the succession of the putative elder twin to his father’s land.

I have already suggested this may be the case in Tryamour, above. Likewise

in Bevis, the pattern deviates from legal norms when young Gii fails to inherit his

paternal grandfather’s land (inheriting from his mother’s line instead) and neither

twin inherits Hampton. Miles’s inheritance is unconnected to either parents’

patrimony but is the by-product of a political reconciliation between Bevis and King

Edgar. Arguably, Octavian subtly adheres to a conventional hierarchy between its

twins: the moment in which Octavian ‘chese[s]’ his young namesake suggests that

young Octavian is nominated as his successor, while Florent achieves other lands

through marriage (NO, l. 1776). But this is the result of fortuitous circumstances

rather than deliberate provisions: Florent’s marriage negates both the potential

rivalry and hierarchal distinction between the brothers. As with Bevis, it seems that

Octavian contrives to avoid demonstrative statements on the appropriate treatment of

twins within the strictures of primogeniture. But it is worth revisiting the

circumstantial manner in which the twins are managed in the romances. This is most

vividly portrayed in the animal abductions.

It is only when one of the unnamed infants becomes the child with the lioness

and his brother becomes ‘the other childe … That the ape away bare’ that the twins

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can be distinguished in Octavian: one effectively becomes the ‘first’ twin and his

brother the ‘other’ (ll. 530–31). The symbolic significance of the animals, with

regard to the characteristics of the heirs and their upbringings, has been noted

elsewhere in criticism. David Salter writes that the connection of ‘young Octavian to

the lioness’ is of ‘symbolic importance in the construction of the child’s identity as a

royal hero’ because of the animal’s regal associations in medieval culture.42 The

lioness is also a symbolic portent of young Octavian’s subsequent upbringing with

his royal mother. Meanwhile, Florent’s abduction by an ape may be a cruel satire on

the ‘humble, bourgeois, and occasionally comic environment’ in which Clement

raises his adopted son, since the medieval ape is thought to represent ‘the absurdity,

futility, and arrogance of an irrational beast attempting to imitate (ape) the behaviour

of rational men and women’.43

Apes frequently appear as parodic figures in medieval ‘marginal’ art, such as

manuscript marginalia and church misericords. They are shown imitating human

behaviour, including carrying human babies (see Figs 10 and 12, pp. 240–41).44

Comparatively, Octavian’s Clement has been read as a ‘figure of fun’ whose

bourgeois pretensions ‘contrast very poorly with the grandeur and splendour of the

court’.45 From this perspective, the ape with its characteristic tendency to imitate

42 David Salter, Holy and Noble Beasts: Encounters with Animals in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), p. 90. 43 Salter, Holy and Noble Beasts, p. 90. 44 The most comprehensive study of medieval ape symbolism is H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1952). For more recent analysis of apes in medieval ‘marginal’ art, see Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 1993), pp. 12–14; Alixe Bovey, Monsters and Grotesques in Medieval Manuscripts (Toronto: Unversity of Toronto Press, 2002) pp. 52–53; Paul Hardwick, English Medieval Misericords: The Margins of Meaning (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2011), pp. 60, 123–24. 45 John Simons, ‘Northern Octavian and the Question of Class’, in Romance in Medieval England, ed. Maldwyn Mills, Jennifer Fellows and Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991), pp. 105–11 (p. 110).

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human behaviour might appear to allude to Clement’s own comic aping of

aristocratic behaviour and specifically aristocratic parenthood. But there is at least

one alternative reading to be gleaned here.

William Fahrenbach argues that for the ‘increasingly diverse, vernacular

audience’ of the Middle English romances, ‘merchants’ and ‘lesser gentry’ not

necessarily ‘ideologically compliant’ with aristocratic perspectives, Clement is a

more ‘ambivalent’ figure.46 Therefore, the ape may express something else for this

audience. The object of the parody may be the narrative device itself: namely the

animal abductions that effect the separation and consequently the differentiation and

implicit hierarchy between the twin heirs. Where the birth of twins confounds the

monolineal model of succession that is primogeniture, the ape abduction

metaphorically speaks to the absurdly arbitrary manner in which the twins are

subsequently designated as first- and second-born heirs, in attempt to make them

conform. The parodic ape is, in this light, an emblem of the romance’s critique of

primogeniture.

Adopted Inheritance

This next section shows how the romances present adoption as an alternative model

of heirship and succession, no longer contingent on genealogy. The penultimate

events in Torrent are the reunion of the dispersed, biological family (Torrent,

Desonell, and twins Antony and Leobertus), and their return to Portugal together,

where Torrent and Desonell are finally married. As with Octavian, however, this

image of family reunion does not accurately summarise the outcomes of the

46 William Fahrenbach, ‘Rereading Clement in Thomas Chestre’s Octavian and in BL Cotton Caligula A.II’, Essays in Medieval Studies, 26 (2010), 85–99 (p. 86).

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disinheritance narrative. The separation and the reunion of the biological family

gives the illusion of a ‘reciprocal’ macro-structure, but it is deceptive: not only in

terms of the story as a disinheritance narrative but also if we read it as a ‘family

romance’, since family relationships have been reconstituted along non-biological

lines by this point in the story.47 Indeed, this re-assembly of the fractured biological

family (Torrent, Desonell, the twins) is only a temporary reunion, albeit a celebratory

one. The episode is not presented as the recovery of foundling children from foster

parents, but the formalisation of adoption: each twin is confirmed to be the son and

heir of his adoptive father.

The king of Jerusalem explains how he found his adopted child ‘lying in a

liberts mouth’, before asking if Torrent will permit Leobertus, ‘thy sonne’, to live

with him (the king) until he dies and ‘sith rejoyse my lond’ (ll. 2635–42). There is

some ambiguity in the phrase, ‘sith rejoyse my lond’ – the stanza is truncated (nine

lines rather than the usual twelve), so there may be some further explication missing

– but given the prior reference to the king of Jerusalem’s death, it almost certainly

means that he intends for Leobertus to inherit after him.48 In the presence of ‘lordys

of gret renown’, Torrent agrees and, the narrator says, ‘Torent gave hym his son’ (ll.

2643–44). The king of Greece makes a similar offer to his adopted son and there is

no ambiguity here: ‘I yef thy son all my right | To the Grekys flood’, he tells Torrent,

similarly asking if Antony will be permitted to ‘dwell with me’ (ll. 2645–48). Once

again, Torrent agrees. As in Bevis, the word ‘yef’ is invoked to underline the transfer

47 Wittig describes the binary narrative structures she perceives (e.g. ‘separation-return’) as ‘reciprocating patterns’ (Stylistic and Narrative Structures, p. 179). 48 The word ‘sith’ has various uses as a noun in Middle English, to refer to points in time (‘that time’) or relationships to time (‘repeatedly’), but in this case in Torrent it appears to be an adverb qualifying ‘rejoice’ and therefore means ‘afterwards’. It seems more likely that it means ‘after my death’, than the ‘then’ of a more immediate future in which the land simply rejoices at Leobertus’s return. See MED, sith, n. sense 4 and sitheli, adv.

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of land rights. The same verb describes how Torrent ‘gives’ his son to the king of

Jerusalem, and the proximity of the two instances of the word suggests an

equivalence of meaning: the act of adoption and the transfer of heritable land rights

are simultaneous and described in the same terms. Having relinquished his paternal

claim on the twins, Torrent becomes emperor of Rome: an unexpected outcome but

not unaccountable, given the findings of Chapter 3 on the transformative nature of

recognition in the romances. Here, recognition formalises adoptive relationships,

supplanting biological ties.

The adoptions in Torrent affect the portrayal of inheritance in several ways.

Firstly, the adoption of their biological children re-positions Torrent and Desonell,

by the end of the romance, as the heirless emperor and empress of Rome: a situation

which bears an uncanny resemblance to that of the emperor and empress at the

beginning of Octavian. The subsequent reference to the titular hero building

‘chirchus and abbeys [for] hym and his to praye’ contributes to this effect, as follows

(ll. 2661–62). The provision of prayers for oneself and one’s family is common in

late-medieval wills and thus the phrase, ‘for hym and his’ could refer, in this sense,

to Torrent and his existing offspring. But since the prayer is nameless, the possessive

‘his’ remains non-specific. In turn, such non-specificity was an important feature of

testamentary legal formulae when heirs were mentioned, because the legal heir could

not be confirmed until after the testator’s death.49 From this viewpoint, Torrent’s

prayer reads as an allusion to nameless future heirs, inviting comparison with the

opening succession crisis in Octavian: where the emperor builds ‘a ryche abbaye’ to

pray that the childless couple be blessed with an heir (NO, l. 76). But by the end of

Torrent, heirlessness no longer seems cause for alarm. It gives way to a sense of

49 Simpson, Land Law, p. 52.

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hopeful acquiescence to future uncertainty, in the typical form of a prayer: ‘Jesu

Cryst, that all hath wrought ... He graunt us blis to be | Oute of this world whan we

shall wend’ (ll. 2666–71).

A secondary effect of the adoptions in Torrent is that they effectively render

the question of the twins’ illegitimacy redundant, since their adoptive inheritances

have displaced whatever they were due as the il/legitimate offspring of Torrent and

Desonell. They are not, finally, made the legitimate heirs to their biological parents;

nor is Degrebell in Eglamour. Here, too, the title character (Eglamour) and his wife

(Cristabell) are left heirless by the adoption of their biological son. The diminished

relevance of the illegitimacy accusations for the twins in Torrent and Degrebell in

Eglamour is therefore symptomatic of a broader shift in the romances, away from the

priority of biological lineage. The familial language used between adoptive fathers

and heirs demonstrates the extent to which the adoptive relationship supplants the

biological connection. The king of Israel is said to consider Degrebell his own child

from the moment he finds him: telling his wife, ‘“Thys chyld God has me sent”’ (l.

847). He subsequently makes Degrebell a ‘knyght | And prynce’ (ll. 1001–02).

Degrebell refers to the king as ‘fadur’ and is called ‘my sone’ in return (ll. 1144,

1272). The matter of his birth, within or out of wedlock, is neither raised nor

contested; because he is not a son and heir by birth any longer, but by adoption.

Familial terms of address are used at critical narrative moments in Eglamour,

blurring the distinction between biological and adoptive parentage, demonstrating

how smoothly one overtakes the other. When Cristabell recognises Degrebell as her

offspring, halting their incestuous marriage, Degrebell asks the king’s advice, calling

him ‘fadur’ and then Cristabell ‘modyr’ (ll. 1144–45). After Eglamour learns that he

is Degrebell’s biological father and kneels before the king of Israel to thank him for

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raising Degrebell, the king responds by naming Degrebell his heir and calling him

his son:

The kyng of Israell gon hym telle

How he fond Syr Degrebell;

Knytes lystend thanne.

Syr Eglamour kneled on hys kne,

‘And, lord, Gode yelde hyt the;

Ye have made hym a manne.’

The kyng sayde ‘I schall hym geve

Half my londes whyle I leve,

My sone as whyte as swanne.’ (ll. 1264–72)50

Immediately thereafter, Degrebell is offered the marriage of the princess Organate, in

recognition of the fact that ‘his fadure’ (in this case, Eglamour) was earlier awarded

this prize:

The kyng of Sydon sayd also,

‘And my dowghtyr Organate to -

Me mynnes his fadure hyr wan’. (ll. 1273–75)51

In this respect, the revelation that Eglamour is Degrebell’s biological father does

change things for him, but it does not lead to his claiming an inheritance by birth,

through either of his biological parents.

50 The Thornton version has ‘half my kyngdome’ rather than ‘half my londes’ and instead of ‘his fadur hyr wan’ it is ‘my londys hys fadur wan’. Otherwise this passage is almost identical in the Cotton and Thornton manuscripts. See The Thornton Romances: The Early English Metrical Romances of Perceval, Isumbras, Eglamour, and Degrevant, ed. James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps (London: J. B. Nicholas and Son, 1844), p. 173 (ll. 1292 and 1296). 51 Eglamour was earlier offered the marriage of the princess (and with it the ‘crowne’) in return for service to the king of Sydon. See ll. 505–624 (l. 595).

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Adoption by contract was possible in medieval English law, and although it

was not equivalent to bestowing de facto inheritance rights on the children in

question, there is evidence of adoptions taking place in conjunction with transfers of

land, to achieve that effect.52 Such adoptions can be situated within a wider social

context, in which children could move between families in order to be raised in

another home (if aristocratic) or to serve or be apprenticed (if not), with the various

aims of consolidating unions between households of similar or differing social

standing, or providing opportunities to the child for learning, earning or social

advancement.53 In the romances, adoption is a means for the allegedly illegitimate

offspring of mixed-social marriages to attain princely inheritances. It is a further

example of the ways in which incidents relating to inheritance in the romances bear

resemblance to contemporary legal practices other than de facto primogeniture.

Moreover, it is another instance in which disinheritance appears as a precursor to

social advancement. The adoptions consolidate the idea that inheritance is something

to be won, or even to be found, but never simply something to which one is born.

Prestige is attached to winning inheritance, more than inheriting according to

birthright.

As a point of contrast to the adoptions in Eglamour and Torrent, Florent in

Octavian is adopted by Clement – an affectionate parent who suffers ‘mych pyn’ for

52 For an early adoption record, see Year Books of Edward II, vol. 1, ed. F. W. Maitland (London, 1904), pp. 186–87. See also Cicely Howell, Land, Family and Inheritance in Transition, Kinsworth Harcourt, 1280–1700 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), esp. p. 347. I found a useful source in Kristin Elizabeth Gager, Blood Ties and Fictive Ties: Adoption and Family Life in Early Modern France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), which cites both Howell and the early adoption record above. 53 See Barbara Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London, pp. 129–54 and Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children, pp. 55–56 and 309–13. For a study of a slightly later period, which looks retrospectively at late-medieval England, see Grant McCracken, ‘The Exchange of Children in Tudor England: An Anthropological Phenomenon in Historical Context’, Journal of Family History, 8 (1983), 303–13.

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his ‘loue’, calls him ‘sone’ and is called ‘fadyr myn’ in return – but does not inherit

from him (SO, ll. 1895, l. 1801). He does not inherit from his biological father either,

however, meaning that the romance undermines the legal notion of the father as a

monolithic figure who produces, raises and eventually bequeaths an inheritance to

his son and heir. Adoption is not directly advantageous to Florent in the way that it is

to the disinherited heirs in Eglamour and Torrent. Arguably, Florent’s ineptitude as a

mercantile apprentice and affection for aristocratic pursuits such as hawking and

horse-riding can be taken as an expression of his innate nobility and the romance’s

fundamentally aristocratic perspective. At the same time, however, Clement’s

support for his adopted son figures prominently enough in the romance (especially in

the southern version) to be credited with some of Florent’s subsequent martial and

marital success. Quite unlike the absurd ape of the medieval imagination, whose

attempts to imitate human behaviour inevitably fail to convince, Clement is a model

of successful, aspirational bourgeois parenting.

Adoptive heirship is a conceit typical of the disinheritance romances, both re-

investing in the idea of inheritance and the prestige of heritable titles and land, while

undercutting the legal orthodoxies associated with inheritance, namely de facto

patrilineal succession and birthright. The eschewal of biological reproduction as the

means of generational succession for adoptive fathers in Eglamour and Torrent

invites some consideration of Lee Edelman’s influential critique of ‘the Child’ in

political discourse. The ‘organising principle’ of political governance and

‘communal relations’, Edelman writes, is the idea of ‘the Child’ as the self-evidently

rightful future beneficiary of all present efforts and sacrifices: a political orientation

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that Edelman calls ‘reproductive futurism’.54 The ‘son and heir’ of medieval legal

theory may be the paradigmatic ‘Child’: biological reproduction and generational

succession are coterminous in this figure, the offspring who inherits the parent’s

wealth. But the adoptions in the disinheritance romances make clear that the ‘son’

and the ‘heir’ can be distinguished from one another. The child is not always an

emblem of generational succession, nor is one’s rightful heir necessarily one’s child.

While Edelman’s ‘Child’ is antithetical to what he terms ‘queer

oppositionality’, elsewhere literary critics have sought to examine the possibility of

‘queer children’, whose ‘subversive strategies’ complicate otherwise ‘heterosexually

straightforward storylines’.55 The foundling heir of the Middle English romance,

recovered from the clutches of a mythical creature, whose permanent adoption into a

non-biological family renders his biological parents without either child or heir,

might be considered one such ‘subversive’ figure. Without wishing to argue that the

adoptions imagined in the romances are a model of queer futurity (indeed LGBTQ+

adoption is a specific target for criticism in Edelman’s book, on the basis that it is

conformist rather than resistant) the texts nonetheless pull away from the strictures of

reproductive futurity, with the figure of the heir transformed from offspring to

foundling.

54 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 2–3. 55 Edelman, No Future, p. 4; Jennifer Higginbotham and Mark Albert Johnston, eds, ‘Introduction’, to Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 1–30 (p. 4). The contributors to this volume deploy a flexible, theoretical use of the term ‘queer’, in the sense articulated by Carolyn Dinshaw in her introduction to How Soon is Now? (2012): that is, not turning away from the politics and lived experiences of queer sexuality but recognising what Edelman call ‘queer oppositionality’ in broader contexts. See Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), pp. 1–40 (esp. p. 4). This queer-theoretical criticism of the literary child, drawing on (and questioning) ‘queer theory’s formation [of] the Child’, ought to be distinguished from the study of ‘queer childhood’ or ‘(queer) children’s literature’, for which see Kenneth Kidd, ‘Queer Theory’s Child and Children’s Literature Studies’, PMLA, 126:1 (2011), 182–88 (p. 127).

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Taking up Edelman’s charge to ‘consider … how political futurity becomes

tangled up in the figure of the child’, Joseph Campana has written about the spectral

children in Shakespeare’s Macbeth as ‘apparitions of [a] fraught phenomenon,

sovereignty by generation’. Campana argues that these children signal that the ‘time

of succession had passed’ or, in other words, that political futurity could no longer be

imagined as a child.56 Campana is thinking of early modern political contexts in his

reading of Macbeth,57 but there are parallels with the periods of dynastic instability

and civil war during the fifteenth century. The childless and heirless state in which

Eglamour and Torrent leave their titular heroes, whose productivity is no longer the

romance’s concern, accords with what Urvashi Chakravarty describes, elsewhere in

Shakespeare’s plays, as the imagined ‘barren future [that] fundamentally queers the

presumption of straight … futurity’.58 For fifteenth-century readers, the child-heirs of

the disinheritance romances might have figured in the imagination as harbingers of

crises in succession, rather than champions of dynastic stability. But unlike

Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the romances do not operate in the tragic mode: the

outcomes are positive for the offspring of disrupted succession, their parents and

allies.

Adoption evades the problem that twin heirs pose to primogeniture. Taken

out of context, it might seem a resolution that returns to endorse primogeniture: in

Torrent, for example, it allows each twin to assume the position of a firstborn heir.

But this would be to ignore their adoptive status and the adjacent re-positioning of

56 Joseph Campana, ‘The Child’s Two Bodies: Shakespeare, Sovereignty and the End of Succession’, ELH, 81:3 (2014), 811–39 (pp. 811–12, 823). 57 Campana views the spectral children of Macbeth in light of the crises in succession in Tudor England, writing that ‘too many wives and therefore children of Henry VIII … [were] as problematic a precedent for monarchical continuity [as] the childlessness of Elizabeth’ (p. 833). 58 Urvashi Chakravarty, ‘“I Had Peopled Else”: Shakespeare’s Queer Natalities and the Reproduction of Race’, in Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture, pp. 57–78 (p. 73).

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the biological father. What might seem to be conventional patrilineal transmissions

of inheritance in the endings of Torrent and Eglamour, at first glance, are actually

contingent on lateral affiliations between non-blood relatives and involve

generational levelling. Once separated, the twins who ought to be in the respective

positions of senior and junior offspring, according to medieval law, are made equal.

Once separated, fathers and their offspring assume equivalent social degrees as

unmarried men without any personal wealth. This equivalence is underlined in

Eglamour where it is the premise for a narrowly avoided incestuous marriage,

Degrebell trading places with his father as his mother’s suitor; later marrying

Organate in his father’s stead. A similar observation can be made of Tryamour, in

which the protagonist and his father become peers, ruling their respective kingdoms

concurrently.

Finally, adoption allows a redistribution of heritable property regardless of

lineage. In Havelok, most strikingly, the hero’s adoptive sisters and others are

elevated from the peasantry to the nobility by virtue of their loyalty to their adopted

brother. To Bertram ‘that was the erles kok’, Havelok gives the earldom of Cornwall:

‘for wissing and thi god dede | That tu me dides in ful gret nede’ (ll. 2902–03). One

of Grim’s daughters, Levive is married to him (ll. 2911–27). The other, Gunnild, is

married to the earl of Chester (ll. 2859–87). In view of hagiographical readings of

this romance, this flattening of the social hierarchy among adoptive siblings and

comrades might be compared to the notion of ‘universal siblinghood’ among

Christians, enacted by a common co-heirship to the kingdom of heaven.59 But in the

59 I borrow this phrase from Marc Shell, The End of Kinship: “Measure for Measure”, Incest, and the Ideal of Universal Siblinghood (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).

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romance’s ultimately secular narrative context, it effects radical social reorganisation

and redistribution of worldly property.

At the same time, however, the elevation of Havelok’s adoptive sisters recalls

the biological sisters whom he lost: the casualties of disinheritance who cannot be

restored. The distribution of land according to merit is not a perfect resolution to the

injustices committed earlier, for which the reader is now served with a poignant

reminder. Far from presenting a new, secure form of order, in fact, the ending of

Havelok offers little resolution to the question of succession with which it began.

Among Havelok and Goldeboru’s own offspring – ‘sones and doughtres rith

fivetene’ – none is named as their successor (l. 2979). The ‘sones were kinges alle’

and ‘the douhtres alle quenes’, but to which lands the narrator does not say (ll. 2980,

2982).60 The vision of family as a vertical structure, inherent in the idea of family ‘as

lineage’ (Riddy), is displaced here by a lateral vision of the family’s future, in which

offspring disperse to claim equal estates elsewhere. After disinheritance, the romance

does not suggest the reinstatement of a predictable succession of future heirs, but

rather provides a tentatively peaceful state of equilibrium and uncertainty.

Happy Endings

The main aim of this chapter has been to show that the endings of the disinheritance

romances are more generative than has previously been acknowledged and in

particular that they do not necessarily present ‘correct patriarchal order re-established

and re-affirmed’ and ‘the rightful heir, the first-born son, again in his proper place’.61

60 See also Lim, ‘In the Name of the (Dead) Father’, as cited in the introduction. 61 Menuge, Wardship, p. 80; the same view is echoed by Peter Fleming, ‘Politics’, Gentry Culture, p. 59.

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Finally, I return to the question of ‘happy endings’. The ‘happy ending’ is generally

perceived to be a characteristic feature of romance. Mentioned in passing as ‘the

requisite happy ending’ or ‘predictably happy resolution’, it is sometimes mandated

as an essential feature of the genre: as in Whetter’s definition of medieval romance

as stories about ‘love, ladies and adventure, culminating in a happy ending’.62

Some regard the Middle English (and especially non-Arthurian) romances as

more drawn to ‘happy endings’ than their French (or Arthurian) counterparts.

Corinne Saunders contrasts the happy ending of some Middle English romances,

where she sees a folkloric influence, with the ‘understated’ tone and ‘realist’ mode of

Malory’s Morte Darthur.63 A. C. Spearing and Cheryl Colopy point to the happy

endings of Middle English romances in contrast with classical sources,64 while the

Middle English Sir Perceval of Galles (c. 1440) and Chrètien de Troyes’s Conte du

Graal (c. 1190) are more than once juxtaposed in this way. John Finlayson writes of

Sir Perceval of Galles that it is ‘clearly the result of the reductive capacity of a far

from sophisticated mind’, citing its ‘primitive suspense’ and ‘happy ending’ as

features that distinguish it from Chrètien’s Conte du Graal.65 More generously, Ad

Putter proposes that the Middle English Perceval-author has exchanged the

‘enigmatic’ deferral of the French romance for a ‘fulfilling ... happy ending’.66

62 Arlyn Diamond, ‘Meeting Grounds’, in The Exploitations of Medieval Romance, ed. Laura Ashe, Ivana Djordjević and Judith Weiss (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), pp. 125–38 (p. 132); Roberta L. Krueger, ‘Introduction’, to Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, p. 8; Whetter, Understanding Genre, p. 7. 63 Corinne Saunders, ‘“Greater love hath no man”: Friendship in Medieval English Romance’, in Traditions and Innovations in the Study of Medieval English Literature, ed. Charlotte Brewer and Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), pp. 128–43 (p. 134). 64 A. C. Spearing, ‘Interpreting a Medieval Romance’, in Readings in Medieval Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 56–82 (p. 58); Cheryl Colopy, ‘Sir Degaré: A Fairy Tale Oedipus’, Pacific Coast Philology 17 (1982), 31–39 (p. 32). 65 John Finlayson, ‘Definitions of Middle English Romance’, The Chaucer Review 15:2 (1980), 168–81 (p. 174). 66 Putter, ‘Story Line and Story Shape’, pp. 174; 180.

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It ought to be noted, however, that the Conte is far from a typical example of

romance narrative (either French or English) and the omission of a conclusion, which

is partly what preserves a sense of enigmatic suspense in the text, is accidental, not

stylistic. It is generally accepted that the poem remains unfinished due to the death of

either poet or patron.67 Likewise, it should be noted that the prose form of Malory’s

Morte Darthur distinguishes it from the verse of the Middle English romances; the

potential connection between prose and tragic modes something Helen Cooper has

explored in relation to the late, prose romance Valentine and Orson.68

Elsewhere critics have questioned whether the convention is as secure in the

Middle English texts as it is in the criticism. Donna Crawford, for instance, offers a

counterpoint to the views of Spearing and Colopy, observing that the sustained

violence of many Middle English romance narratives is continuous into their

endings.69 Arlyn Diamond and Elizabeth Archibald have noted certain dissonances in

the endings of individual romances, such as Lai le Freine.70 Melissa Furrow finds

that the ‘happy ending is more often claimed as a characteristic of the trans-historical

mode of romance’ (as with Northrop Frye’s reference to the genre’s ‘conventional

happy ending’, in the Secular Scripture) than of medieval romance in particular (as

Whetter insists), or with regards to particular texts.71 In a similar vein, Helen Cooper

67 See Jean Frappier, Chrétien de Troyes et le Mythe du Graal: Étude sur Perceval ou le Conte du Graal (Paris: Société d’Édition d’Enseignement Supérieur, 1972), pp. 252–53 and Kibler, Arthurian Romances, pp. 2–3. 68 Helen Cooper, ‘The Strange History of Valentine and Orson’, in Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Romance, ed. Rosalind Field (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), pp. 153–68 (esp. p. 163). 69 Donna Crawford, “‘Gronyng wyth grysly wounde”: Injury in Five Middle English Breton Lays’, in Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 35–52 (p. 38). 70 See Arlyn Diamond, ‘Unhappy Endings: Failed Love / Failed Faith in Late Romances’, in Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 65–82; Archibald, ‘Lai le Freine: The Female Foundling’, as cited above. 71 Furrow, Expectations of Romance, p. 56; Frye, Secular Scripture, p. 135.

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identifies the happy ending as ‘the characteristic most widely considered definitive

of the [romance] genre’, in her introduction to English Romance, while also devoting

a chapter to the possibility of ‘Unhappy Endings’.72

The adjective ‘happy’ is rarely defined: according to the works cited above it

can imply an ending that is either ‘reductive’ or ‘fulfilling’, but more than anything

else it is ‘conventional’ and aligned with ‘order’. The ending of Bevis is not joyous,

relating Bevis’s death and eliciting ‘pité’, but Cooper argues that the ‘simultaneous

natural deaths of Bevis … Josian … and his horse Arundel’ are depicted as ‘the

culminating marvel of [the] story’ (Bevis, l. 4616). It is not an unhappy ending,

furthermore, because ‘unhappy’ has the stronger meaning of ‘misery’ in Middle

English. An unhappy ending is one that ‘challenges faith more radically’ by depicting

an ‘unprovidential world’, a feature associated with later, prose romances.73

Yet where Cooper argues that a lack of joy does not make the ending of Bevis

unhappy, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen finds, on the other hand, that the presence of joy in

the ending of Octavian fails provide a satisfactory conclusion. The ending is

‘unsatisfactory’, he writes, because it raises more questions than it answers: ‘The

family return to Rome together ... but to what future? With what promise? The book

does not say’.74 The Octavian-narrator insists that the ending is a joyful one,

repeating ‘joye’ three times in the penultimate, twelve-line stanza, but Cohen

suggests that a certain ‘affective dissonance’ stems from a lack of accompanying

order: failing to resolve its inheritance question and confirm the order of succession

(NO, ll. 1832, 1836, 1837).75

72 Cooper, English Romance, p. 9; pp. 361–408. 73 See Cooper, English Romance, p. 361. See also Leitch, Romancing Treason, p. 184. 74 Cohen, ‘There are Powerlines in our Bloodlines’, paragraph 7. 75 McNamer, ‘Feelings’, p. 248.

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What the endings of the disinheritance romances fail to support, I suggest, is

the critical alignment of ‘happy endings’ with ‘providential ordering’ and ‘unhappy

endings’ with ‘the bleakness of a world’ without such order, where ‘malevolence [is]

inherent in the scheme of things’.76 As I have argued in this chapter, the endings of

the disinheritance romances resist restoring order in the form of primogeniture, the

order with which the stories began. Yet they convey ‘joy’ more than ‘malevolence’.

These apparently contrary positions can be reconciled if we redefine the meaning of

‘happy’ in this context. Just as the Middle English ‘unhappy’ is distinct from its

modern English equivalent, so with the Middle English word ‘happy’: it does not

simply denote joy, as in the modern English vernacular, nor does it mean order, in

the particular sense that can be inferred from its usage in romance criticism. The

word stems from ‘hap’, meaning chance, luck, or (one’s) lot, and ‘happi’ bears these

associations in Middle English: meaning good fortune.77

I propose that the disinheritance romances do provide ‘happy’ endings, in the

specific sense that they represent the culmination of a series of chance incidents: the

luck of ‘happi chance’.78 In Octavian, when the infant Florent is stolen from his

mother by an ape, it is only the first in a series of exchanges, each one like a roll of

the dice: the forest of medieval romance being just as likely to yield up a mythical

creature as a questing knight or a band of outlaws or a royal hunting party.79 Each is

a possible outcome, according to other medieval romances: Tryamour is fostered by

a knight who finds him by chance in the woods; Gamelyn joins a community of

76 Cooper, English Romance, pp. 261, 361. 77 See OED, hap, n. 1 and MED, happy, adj. & adv. 78 Gower, Confessio Amantis, vol. 2, ed. Russell Peck (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2013), 4.367. 79 On the forests of medieval romance as the site of ‘chance encounters’ see Corrine Saunders, The Forest of Medieval Romance: Avernus, Broceliande, Arden (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), esp. p. 50 and pp. 171–72.

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outlaws (Gamelyn); Orson is raised by a bear and his brother by a king (Valentine

and Orson). Each time Florent changes hands, his possible future changes. Settling

with Clement does not deliver Florent into his original birthright but sets him on a

different and uncertain path, the endpoint of which is still somewhat obscure when

the romance draws to its close.

Rather than ‘providential ordering’ there is fortuitious disordering:

disinheritance enables a redistribution of fortunes. The romances are generally clear

about which characters are worthy and which characters are wicked and the

‘distribution of awards and punishments’ follows accordingly, with rightful heirs

gaining and their antagonists punished. But it is not always so apparent, as with the

treatment of twin heirs in Octavian and Bevis. Whether or not the romances’ endings

demonstrate good fortune in any objective sense, and for whom, remains open to

debate. Furthermore, the romances do not work towards an objective redefinition of

rightful heirship, as they unsettle its orthodox legal definition (birthright), but rather

rightful heirship emerges in processes of recognition whose underlying logic remains

largely implicit. So it follows that the romances’ endings do not define the terms of

their good fortune. Instead the reader is asked to acknowledge the ‘joye’ of ‘happi

chance’ and the uncertainty that comes with it.

Adjusting our understanding of the romances’ ‘happy’ endings in this way, to

appreciate the emphasis on chance rather than predestination, is politically

significant: shifting away from the idea of a conservative return to order and, more

specifically, the idea of the endings as a restoration of pro-aristocratic primogeniture.

Chance is a common factor in socioeconomic developments in the world beyond the

romances, if one that is under-appreciated in historical analysis, as Payling and other

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historians have argued.80 But where presented in the romances as a means of

acquiring heritable land, it is the fortuitous consequence of disinheritance and an

economically productive alternative to dynastic stability. For readers prepared to see

it, the romances offer a radical re-imagining of medieval legal orthodoxies of rightful

inheritance.

80 In addition to Payling’s work cited above see Bridget Wells-Furby, ‘Marriage and Inheritance: The Element of Chance in the Development of Lay Estates in the Fourteenth Century’, in Fourteenth Century England, vol. 10, ed. Gwilym Dodd (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2018), pp. 113–32 and Kate Kelsey Staples, Daughters of London: Inheriting Opportunity in the Late Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2011).

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Conclusion

An Idea of Disinheritance in Middle English Romances

The question with which this project began was the significance of the recurrent

presentation of disinheritance in Middle English romances, and particularly in a

subset of six romances. I have concentrated on the imaginative effects of their

portrayals of disinheritance and illegitimacy, considering the perspective of a late-

medieval gentry readership. The prevailing critical view, I argued in the introduction,

has been that disinheritance is plot incident expressing the anxiety of a land-owning

class: that the romances work to assuage anxieties about dispossession and dynastic

instability by resolving disinheritance in ways that reinforce the fundamental

principles of primogeniture. According to this reading, the romances eventually insist

that their ascendant “unknown” heroes are revealed to be lawful heirs by birth to the

lands they inherit. But, as I have argued throughout the thesis, this is not always the

case. The disinheritance narrative does not, necessarily, serve to sustain a pro-

primogeniture ideology but provides a conceptual framework for re-imagining

rightful heirship in other terms.

The romances’ heirs are conceived within the narrative framework of

disinheritance. The stories begin by presenting a paternal desire for patrilineal

succession and primogeniture; which can be understood as a legal orthodoxy rather

than, necessarily, the preferred practice in late-medieval England. In the romances,

these aspirations are shown to be precarious at best, and even doomed to failure from

their inception. Just as the matter of inheritance is introduced, disinheritance proves

to be the operative concept. Where the romances present disinheritance as a violent

event, it first appears to be a destructive or degenerative act, but it proves productive

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in metaphorical and metatextual senses: generating the story and forming the

protagonist in the shape of the disinherited heir.

This paradoxical relationship between disinheritance and heirship is the

starting point for a narrative which subverts the tenets of medieval inheritance law.

Recognition of rightful heirship, after disinheritance, can no longer be a question of

lineage alone. The disinherited heroes re-emerge as unknown heirs, whose worth is

recognised in spite of their dubious origins. The recurrence of twin heirs works to

expose the flaws and arbitrary principles of primogeniture. The comparative clarity

of legal treatises is displaced, in the romances, by something more diffuse. The

romances’ relationship to medieval law remains complex. Rather than rejecting

medieval legal frames of reference altogether, the romances frequently show

patriarchal legal authorities to be flawed. Allusions to legal actions (testimony,

recognition) and linguistic cues (‘chesen’) manifest in ways that contribute to the

overall sense of a shift, from the beginnings of the romances to their endings, away

from the theocratic certainty of legal treatises and towards the evolving process of

legal practice and beyond, to popular extra-judicial notions of rightful heirship.

Rightful heirship in the romances is not absolute but relative.

The endings of the romances do not enact restoration or reproduction, neither

in the sense of a return to the order disrupted at the outset of the romances nor in the

sense that biological offspring reinstate dynastic stability. This contradicts the well-

established Structuralist explanation of romance narratives, as reciprocal or binary

plots that begin with a crisis and end with a return to order. Reading the details of

inheritance in the contexts of individual romances, rather than according to large-

scale structural patterns thought to be the common basis of many or all romances,

provides an alternative understanding of how the stories work. I have emphasised

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that while the disinherited heroes do finally acquire hereditary titles, they do so

through a combination of luck, reward and communal recognition: in turn, some of

the lands won are those to which they lost their original birthright and some are

estates to which they had no prior claim by birth. Most importantly, all win greater

wealth than they would have inherited from their parents before disinheritance.

Disinheritance figures, perhaps, as a felix culpa: suffering the violent loss of a

nascent ideal ultimately leads to redemption. In the title of my final chapter, I offer

‘regeneration’ as an alternative description of endings which suggest renewal, not in

the form of restoration but rather the redistribution of property. This redistribution

even extends beyond the disinherited heirs, in several cases, to include their allies.

Finally, regeneration intimates an ongoing process: the un-ending of dynastic

insecurity, since the possibility of further disruption is also regenerated in the

elliptical endings of the romances.

In all six of the romances studied here, disinheritance allows an upward

social mobility more usually aligned with ‘chivalry’ in romance criticism. It is the

performance of ‘chivalry’ in medieval romances, writes Christine Chism, which can

‘erode aristocratical exclusivity and enact a notional social mobility’.1 According to

Duby’s thesis, the chivalric hero of medieval romance is a reflection of aristocratic

society’s juvenes, the younger sons whose socioeconomic position is defined in

contrast to firstborn heirs. Duby recognises chivalric enterprise as a means of

acquiring or securing wealth and social status, enacting a covert social mobility,

where otherwise there is inheritance. But my reading of disinheritance in Middle

English romances suggests that this critical distinction between the heir heroes and

chivalric heroes of medieval literary imagination, between pro-aristocratic ideology

1 Chism, ‘Romance’, p. 61.

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and imagined social mobility, the established wealth and the parvenu, cannot be

sustained. Or, at least, the Middle English romances’ disinherited-heir heroes can no

longer be safely situated on the conservative side of the dividing line, with an

exemplar such as Bevis ultimately eschewing patrilineal inheritance in favour of

earned wealth.

This is an idea of disinheritance, aligning dynastic instability with social

advancement, which might have been familiar to late-medieval gentry audiences (as I

suggested in my introduction), and perhaps likely to appeal. But this way of reading

the romances effects something other than social ‘wish fulfilment’. Fredric

Jameson’s distinction between ‘social’ comedy and ‘metaphysical’ romance is useful

here, in the way that it modifies Northrop Frye’s earlier and influential description of

romance as ‘a wish-fulfilment dream’.2 Menuge’s Wardship considers the potential

function of the texts as ‘wish-fulfilment’ in Frye’s ‘social’ sense, arguing that their

‘wish-fulfilment’ endings indicate the desire of readers to see the injustices

experienced by real medieval wards corrected in fictional literature.3 On the other

hand, I suggest that the result of engaging with the imaginative work of the texts is

not an idealised vision (or revision) of ‘social order’ but a more ‘metaphysical’

transformation: a re-imagining of rightful heirship so that it no longer appears as a

singular figure or set of attributes but as an open question.4

The romances engage with legal ideas regarding inheritance, explicitly

referring to issues such as land purchase and illegitimacy, and indirectly alluding to

2 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 186. Frye and Jameson are cited as contrasting examples of critical attitudes towards romance in the introduction to Knapp and Knapp, Aesthetics of Possibility, p. 4. 3 Menuge, Wardship, p. 23. 4 Fredric Jameson, ‘Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre’, New Literary History, 7:1 (1975), 135–63 (p. 153). The essay later appears as a chapter in Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981).

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recognition by witness testimony and common assent. For readers likely to be well

versed in inheritance laws and their own rights (and ‘prepared to assert them

vigorously’), the romances are a rich source with which to hypothesise and debate.5

Yet they need not serve a didactic purpose. As imaginative texts, the romances

constitute a separate, extra-judicial discourse on inheritance. While they are valuable

for what they may reflect of popular late-medieval views on contemporary

inheritance laws and practice, the texts also have the capacity to shape those ideas.

Likewise, while the stories may satisfy one reader’s anxieties or another’s

aspirations, they also provide imaginative material for thinking differently about

rightful heirship: beyond the confines of what is possible in the society and economy

of late-medieval England.

Ultimately, the romances call into question the ability of the law to determine

rightful succession. The stories cast doubt on figures of legal authority: kings

disinherit their own heirs and outlaws intuit gentle blood. In place of a conclusive

solution to the question of recognising rightful heirship, there is the indirect

implication that uncertainty is the only tenable position. Evidence of ‘gentyll blode’

is insistently connected to unknownness: Degrebell’s wealthy appearance and

Florent’s chivalric bearing imply ‘gentyll blode’ yet cannot reveal ‘what he was’ or

‘[w]here evur he was tane’ (Eglamour, ll. 839–40; NO, ll. 1238–43). This connection

between knowing and unknowing gains traction, as I argued in Chapter 2, when

considered in parallel with an epistemological stance more familiar from religious

writing; but it is applied here to secular matters, to connect unknownness

(illegitimacy) with rightfulness. Arguably, a degree of ambiguity is incidental to the

romances’ typically brief narrative style. But it remains the case that whatever the

5 Michael Hicks, as cited in intro, p. 64.

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authorial intent or lack thereof, an ambiguous and elliptical treatment of the matter of

rightful heirship effectively constitutes a provocative political position: that a rightful

heir might also be an “unknown” confounds the precepts of medieval inheritance

law, and it is an imaginative idea that can be put to political use.

The appropriation of romance material and imagery in a variety of political

contexts has been recognised in romance scholarship.6 While Legge’s theory about

the emergence of insular ‘ancestral’ romances, commissioned and patronised by

noble families, has since been disputed, it is true that medieval families sought to

associate themselves with romance heroes. The ‘great medieval aristocratic

dynasties’ identified with ‘founding English heroes’ in romances such as Guy of

Warwick, for example, associated with the earls of Warwick.7 Helen Cooper writes

of the use of ‘romance as propaganda’ in relation to inheritance, suggesting that that

there was an ‘incentive’ to refer ‘quasi-mythic romance structures’ for those with

claims not as ‘indisputable’ as they might hope.8 When, for instance, the pretender

known as Perkin Warbeck claimed to be the lost, younger son of Edward IV, he

attempted to prove it by showing birthmarks on his body, recalling the ‘kynemerk’ in

Havelok.9 Cooper argues that romances provided a legitimating discourse because

their inheritance narratives culminate in the providential revelation of the ‘true heir’:

‘the fair unknown’ always ‘turns out to be the missing claimant’, the one person

already in possession of a birthright.10

6 See Cooper, ‘When Romance Comes True’, pp. 13–28 and numerous examples throughout English Romance. 7 See Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and Its Background, as cited in introduction, and Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor, ed. Alison Wiggins and Rosalind Field (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007); Cooper, English Romance, p. 31. 8 Cooper, English Romance, p. 325. 9 Ann Wroe, Perkin: A Story of Deception (London: Jonathan Cape, 2003), pp. 119–20. 10 Cooper, ‘When Romance Comes True’, p. 17.

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But this thesis has emphasised discrepancies between birthright and

inheritance in the romances. The fair unknown Degrebell, for example, is revealed to

be a ‘missing claimant’ to an heirless estate towards the end of Eglamour, but he

does not go on to inherit it. The lands he does inherit, by contrast, he has no claim to

by birth. As such, my own reading of the inheritance theme in romances can shed

new light on the imaginative work of romance tropes when deployed in extra-literary

contexts. I suggest, alternatively to the reading above, that romances could be

invoked in medieval political contexts where legitimate succession was disputed

precisely because dubious legitimacy is permitted in the romances, as much as the

opportunistic exploitation of chance. The romance-inspired ancestral legend of the

‘eagle and child’, cultivated by the powerful Stanley family, provides a case in point.

The Eagle and Child

In 1385, an up-and-coming knight named Sir John Stanley married Isabel Lathom,

eldest surviving child of Lancashire land magnate Thomas Lathom and ‘the richest

heiress in the north-west’.11 It was a very fortuitous marriage for Stanley, one of the

younger sons of William Stanley of Storeton, who himself inherited little from his

family ‘except perhaps his status as a gentleman and his training in arms’.12 John

Stanley’s seizure of the Lathom lands upon his marriage to Isabel was to establish

the Stanleys of Lathom as one of the most powerful families in the country. Perhaps

11 Michael Bennett, ‘“Good Lords” and “King-Makers”: The Stanleys of Lathom’, History Today, 31:7 (1981), 12–17 (p. 13). 12 Michael Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism: Cheshire and Lancashire Society in the Age of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 216. This John Stanley is sometimes associated with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, either as patron or author. See Edward Wilson, ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Stanley Family of Stanley, Storeton, and Hooton’, The Review of English Studies, 30 (1979), 308–16 and Andrew Breeze, ‘Sir John Stanley (c. 1350–1411) and the “Gawain”-Poet’, Arthuriana, 14:1 (2004), 15–30.

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the most politically influential of their descendants was John Stanley’s direct great-

grandson, Thomas Stanley (1435–1504), first earl of Derby and stepfather to the

future Henry VII by his marriage to Margaret Beaufort.13 The earl’s belated support

for Henry Tudor’s dubious claim to the throne is traditionally regarded as the pivotal

moment in the latter’s triumph over Richard III in battle.14

By this time, the Stanleys were using the ‘eagle and child’ heraldic device

that is still associated with the earls of Derby today, owing to its widespread use in

places connected with the family.15 The earliest surviving written account of the

story behind the ‘eagle and child’ heraldry is given in ‘The Stanley Poem’ (1562), a

metrical history of the family’s exploits, attributed to Thomas Stanley, Bishop of

Sodor and Man.16 The poem tells of one ‘Lord Lathum’, who laments his lack of an

13 Michael Bennett, ‘Stanley, Thomas, First Earl of Derby (c. 1433–1504), Magnate’, ODNB <http://doi.org/10/1093/ref:odnb/26279> [accessed 4 Dec 2019]. 14 Shakespeare’s dramatisation of the Battle of Bosworth, after Vergil’s account, famously imagines Stanley crowning Henry Tudor on the battlefield. Shakespeare, Richard III, V. 8. 3–7. Christine Carpenter explains the difficulty in finding contemporary reports of the so-called ‘wars of the roses’, the events of which are more familiar to successive generations from fictionalised and biased accounts such as the ‘Anglica Historia’ of Italian chronicle Polydore Vergil, commissioned by Henry VII, and Thomas More’s ‘History of King Richard III’. See Carpenter, Wars of the Roses, pp. 4–5; Polydore Vergil, Three Books of Polydore Vergil’s English History: Comprising the Reigns of Henry VI, Edward IV, and Richard III from and Early Translation, Preserved among the MSS of the Old Royal Library in the British Museum, ed. H. Ellis (London: Camden Society, 1844), p. 226. 15 Besides widespread use of the imagery in churches that received Stanley patronage, a number of pubs are named for the ‘eagle and child’, particularly in the north west: in Bury, Ormskirk, Ramsbottom and Staveley, for example. There is also the ‘Eagle and Child Inn’ in Oxford, well known as the meeting place of the ‘Inklings’ literary set. In 1709 new coinage was issued for the Isle of Man, featuring the Stanley eagle and child crest. Eagle and child cap badges were given to men who volunteered for the first four City Pals battalions of the King’s (Liverpool Regiment) at the beginning of the First World War, as a gift from Lord Derby, who was heavily involved in their recruitment. See P. Hosker, ‘The Stanleys of Lathom and Ecclesiastical Patronage in the North-West of England during the Fifteenth Century’, Northern History, 18 (1982), 212–29; Philip Nelson, ‘Coinage of the Isle of Man’, The Numismatic Chronicle and Journal of the Numismatic Society (1899), 35–80; Keith Grieves, ‘Stanley, Edward George Villiers, Seventeenth Earl of Derby (1865–1948)’, ODNB <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36243> [accessed 4 Dec 2019]. 16 Andrew Taylor, The Songs and Travels of a Tudor Minstrel: Richard Sheale of Tamworth (Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2012), p. 42. Taylor’s chapter, ‘The Stanleys, The Stanley Poem and the Campaign of 1558’, pp. 40–81, notes the various depictions of the Stanley family in ballad literature.

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heir, until he hears of a mysterious child ‘cladde in a mantle of scarlette’, and sighted

in an ‘egles eyre’ in nearby Tarlesco wood.17 He orders the ‘babe down to be

fetched’ and brought to ‘Lathum Hall’ where he and his wife christen the child

‘Oskell’ and make him ‘theire heyre after them there to dwell’.18 According to the

poem, Oskell succeeds his adoptive father as lord of Lathom and has a daughter: ‘no

mo children, but that onlye was his heyre’, the poet says, recalling the romance

formula for singular female heirs.19 That daughter later becomes the wife of Sir John

Stanley (see Fig. 3, p. 236). The descendants are said to adopt an image of the eagle

and child as their crest, in commemoration of the miraculous event.20

Traditional accounts vary on whether the heraldic device or the associated

legend came first, but the visual-art record suggests the early existence of the legend.

In the choir of Manchester Cathedral, then the Collegiate Church of Ss Mary, Denys

and George, there are three separate depictions of the eagle and child legend.21 The

carvings on the south side of the choir date from the wardenship of James Stanley II

(d. 1515), whose tenure at the Collegiate Church began in the auspicious year of

For the relationship between Sir John Stanley and the putative author of ‘The Stanley Poem’, see my genealogy of the Stanley family (p. 235). 17 Thomas Stanley, ‘The Stanley Poem’, in The Palatine Anthology, ed. James Orchard Halliwell (London: C. and J. Adlard, for private circulation only, 1850), pp. 208–71 (p. 216). 18 ‘Stanley Poem’, pp. 216–17. 19 ‘Stanley Poem’, p. 218. 20 Maurice Keen notes that heraldry was not always inherited from parents but sometimes changed ‘at will’, sometimes to mark ‘the inheritance of a new fee [or] a new connection established by marriage’. Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 127. 21 Misericord carvings in medieval churches are remarkably diverse and there are various examples of romance-like imagery. As in heraldry, the eagle can signal nobility in this context, as well as a possible association with St John, according to Christian tradition. See Hardwick, English Medieval Misericords, esp. p. 56; Christa Grössinger, The World Upside-Down: English Misericords (London: Harvey Miller, 1997); Jennifer Fellows, ‘Romance Among the Choir Stalls: Middle English Romance Motifs on English Misericords’, in Profane Imagery in the Marginal Arts of the Middle Ages, ed. Elaine C. Block and Malcom Jones (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), pp. 123–41.

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1485, after his stepbrother’s accession to the throne.22 A misericord supporter shows

the same form of the eagle and child which can be found in later sources, where it is

a heraldic crest,23 and it is comparable to a sixteenth-century illustration of the griffin

and child heraldry in Eglamour.24 But the misericord itself, and a further carving on

the bench end, offer more narrative illustrations: they show the eagle’s nest in a tree,

the search party in procession, and Lathom Hall in the distance (see Figs 13–15, pp.

241–42).

Early historians of the Stanley family, such as John Seacombe, attempted to

account for the Stanley legend by insisting that it must have covered up the true story

of Oskell’s illegitimacy. Seacombe’s History of the House of Stanley (1776) reasons

that Thomas Lathom had an affair with a local woman and deceived his wife that the

bastard offspring was the miraculous eagle-child. Aiming to reconcile the legend

with the evidence of the legal record, Seacombe makes Isabel Lathom the sister of

‘Oskatel’ (see Fig. 4, p. 236). He imagines that Isabel ultimately triumphed over her

adopted brother as heir to Lathom when their father made a deathbed confession of

22 James Stanley’s uncle, of the same name, had also held the post. See F. R. Raines, The Rectors of Manchester and Wardens of the Collegiate Church of that Town, Part I, Chetham Society, New Series 5 (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1885); Clare Hartwell, Pevsner Architectural Guides: Manchester (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 45–58. 23 As in the mid-sixteenth-century manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, MS Rawlinson b.39, p. 9. An image can be found at ‘The Romance of the Middle Ages’ <http://medievalromance.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/romance-home> [accessed 4 Dec 2019]. 24 Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, MS Douce 261, f. 40r. See Fig. 8 (p. 239). The manuscript is a transcription of an early print edition of Eglamour. Curiously, there is also a carving of an ape with a swaddled infant among the Manchester misericords (see Fig. 12, p. 241). This is a recurring image in medieval manuscript marginalia, as noted in Chapter 4, but being adjacent to the eagle and child carvings it is potentially evocative of romance, specifically Octavian. A monkey with a child appears in the heraldry of at least one aristocratic family, the earls of Kildare; although the related family lore is more prosaic than that of the Stanleys. The Kildare legend involves a monkey rescuing the infant John FitzThomas from a fire and the family is said to have added a monkey to their heraldry in recognition of the animal’s noble act. Charles William Fitzgerald, The Earls of Kildare and their Ancestors: From 1057 to 1773 (Dublin: Hodges, Smith & Co., 1857), p. 20.

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his infidelity. The Stanleys of Lathom adopted the eagle-and-child crest, in

Seacombe’s view, ‘in token of their conquest’ over Isabel’s ‘spurious brother’.25

John Roby repeats Seacombe’s account in his Traditions of Lancashire (1829) and

speculates that the eagle-and-child crest is meant to depict an eagle ‘preparing to

devour’ the illegitimate child.26 Later historians regard the legend as entirely

fictitious, although one remarks on the ‘strange circumstance’ of assuming a crest

‘bearing allusion to the adoption of an illegitimate child’.27 The legend is finally

sidelined in modern histories, with Michael Bennett implying that it is an

unnecessary ‘mythical embellishment’ in the already spectacular history of the

Stanley family.28

But resituating the legend in the context of its probable romance origins

reveals a political purpose that would be otherwise forgotten. The story is both

entirely a-historical and, I argue, quite deliberately evokes the romance trope of

illegitimacy. The tentative explanation of the Stanley legend in Cooper’s English

Romance is that ‘mysteriousness of origins … promises heroism’, and thus the

Stanleys were quite happy to incorporate such a legend into their own genealogy,

despite the implications of illegitimacy, and to locate it within ‘knowable historical

time’.29 But we may now expand on this reading. Firstly, it should be noted that

Isabel Lathom was not the lawful heir to the Lathom lands. Her father, Thomas

Lathom, was not heirless as the legend suggests, but had several children, including

25 John Seacombe, History of the House of Stanley (Preston: E. Sergent, 1776), pp. 49–62 (p. 61). Seacombe uses the word ‘spurious’ to denote bastardy here, as per the Latin derivation (see also my citations from the Promptorium in Chapter 2). 26 John Roby, Traditions of Lancashire, 2 vols, vol. 2 (London: Longman, 1829), pp. 125–55 (p. 155). 27 Edward Baines, History of the County Palatine and Duchy of Lancaster, 4 vols, vol. 1 (London: Fisher & Co., 1836), note on p. 248. 28 Bennett, ‘“Good Lords” and “King-Makers”’, p. 12. 29 Cooper, English Romance, p. 339.

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two sons before Isabel and two daughters after her.30 His eldest son, also called

Thomas, succeeded him in 1382 but died in 1384. The second son, Edward, appears

to have predeceased him. But the younger Thomas Lathom (d. 1384), Isabel’s elder

brother, left a living heir: a daughter, named Ellen. When John Stanley seized the

Lathom lands in 1385, he did so ‘in the teeth of opposition from John of Gaunt’,

since Gaunt was Ellen’s legal guardian.31 An entry in the Parliament Rolls for 1385/6

records that John Stanley had wrongfully obtained the manor of Lathom, by reason

of the minority of the heir of Thomas.32 But he is subsequently granted lordship of

Lathom by right of his wife: possibly after Ellen’s death, as she slips from the

record.33

The legend of the eagle and child, which appears to emerge in the subsequent

decades, is not only located within ‘knowable historical time’ but at the precise

moment of Stanley’s unlawful usurpation of the Lathom estate. The legend entirely

erases Ellen from the Stanley family history. As later historical accounts of the

Stanleys show, by dearth of references to Ellen or Isabel’s elder brothers, the legend

proves highly effective as a distraction from the less fabulous genealogy onto which

it is transposed. But more than this, by invoking the animal-foundling children of

Middle English romances, like Degrebell or Antony Fitz Griffin, the Stanley legend

30 See Fig. 2 (p. 235). 31 Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism, p. 216. 32 Lancashire Archives, DDK/1/5a (dated 1385/6). 33 He is recorded as lord of Lathom in document dated 1407/8 and a grant of special grace in 1408 gives Isabel and John Stanley, as ‘king’s knight, steward of the king’s household’, free warren in ‘their manors of Lathom’ and elsewhere, as had been given to the first Thomas Lathom in 1339. See National Archives, DL 25/1023; Calendar of the Charter Rolls, 1341–1471, vol. 5 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1916), p. 435; Lancashire Archives, DDK/1/2. Edward Baines writes that it is ‘probable’ Stanley successfully petitioned for the Lathom lands after John of Gaunt’s initial complaint. Baines, History of the County Palatine and Duchy of Lancaster, 4 vols, vol. 1, p. 249.

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alludes to a conception of rightful inheritance that confounds the ideology of

primogeniture and the principles of the common law of descent.

Historians of medieval culture have observed that heraldic devices could

‘symbolise politics and propaganda’, sometimes conveying quite ‘subtle’ messages,

especially when their ‘purposes [were] misrepresentation or even disinformation’.34

The eagle-and child emblem, and the story it memorialises, does not simply conceal

the truth but presents a ‘truth in … the lie – in the fantasies it embodies or in the

purpose it serves’.35 That is, the legend does not entirely conceal John Stanley’s

illegitimate usurpation of the Lathom inheritance but transforms it, by reference to

romance, into an extra-lawful, rightful succession. It refutes biological genealogy as

the source of rightful inheritance and celebrates the unexpected new heir. The good

fortune of the eagle-child mirrors that of John Stanley, non-aristocratic successor to

noble hereditary property, making the eagle-child symbolic of the political

opportunism that comes to characterise the most prominent Stanley descendants.36

Further Work

The thesis has analysed the idea of disinheritance in six Middle English romances, as

a framework for re-imagining rightful heirship, aside from medieval legal

34 Adrian Ailes, ‘Heraldry in Medieval England: Symbol of Politics and Propaganda’, in Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display, pp. 83–104 (p. 83). 35 I borrow Paul Strohm’s description of a ‘romanticised’ medieval biography of Arthur, earl of Richmond, its narrative frame ‘drawn from romance’ and characterising Arthur’s mother, Joan of Navarre, as a ‘romance heroine’. Strohm, Empty Throne, p. 168. 36 When Henry Tudor joined the Stanley family by his mother’s marriage to Thomas Stanley, the eagle-and-child device perhaps gained an additional nuance, as a symbol of the “returning” Lancastrian heir. It is worth noting, in this regard, that Manchester was a focus of lady Margaret Beaufort’s patronage during the period of the Stanleys’ wardenship of the Collegiate Church, and therefore it is feasible that she might have been party to the commissioning of the choir carvings. See P. Hosker, as cited above; and M. G. Underwood, ‘Politics and Piety in the Household of Lady Margaret Beaufort’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 38 (1987), 39–52 (esp. p. 46).

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orthodoxies and practices. In the introduction, I positioned the thesis as a step

towards a more complete understanding of late-medieval inheritance culture, and

inheritance in the medieval imagination. Further stages of this project could include a

comprehensive study of the presentation of inheritance in all extant medieval

romances, as well as comparative investigations into hagiography, chronicle, and

other medieval genres. Besides painting a fuller picture of inheritance in medieval

literature, the focus on inheritance would be a new perspective from which to review

the relationships between romance and other genres. For example, the disinheritance

topos provides a thematic meeting point for the romance knight and the medieval

outlaw hero: the dispossessed noble becomes an outlaw or meets with outlaws in his

exile, in early proto-romances like Gesta Herewardi (c. 1200–1300), Anglo-Norman

‘ancestral’ romances like Fouke le Fitz Waryn (c. 1300–50), and later cross-overs

like The Tale of Gamelyn (c. 1400–1500) and A Gest of Robin Hood (c. 1500).37

Further examination of outlaws and the idea of outlawry in romances like Octavian

might help to illuminate the boundaries (or permeability of the boundaries) between

romances and outlaw literature and their audiences.38

37 Dates in brackets refer to surviving manuscripts (or print witnesses, in the case of A Gest of Robyn Hode), to indicate their closeness to the surviving Middle English romance manuscripts, in terms of circulation and possibly reception. Estimated dates of composition are earlier, as with the Middle English romances (see DMER). The Gesta Herewardii is thought to have originated in the early twelfth century, Fouke in the late thirteenth, Gamelyn in the mid-fourteenth and A Gest of Robyn Hode in the mid-fifteenth century. See Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas H. Ohlgren (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997) and especially the editorial introductions to A Gest, Gamelyn and Fouke (pp. 80–89, 184–93 and 687–92). 38 See Christine Chism’s discussion of the ‘metacritical’ appropriation of the ‘aristocratic conventions’ of Middle English romances, in Robin Hood ballads, in ‘The Romance of the Road in Athelston and Two Late Medieval Robin Hood Ballads’, in Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads, ed. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), pp. 220-48 (p. 221). See also J. C. Holt, ‘The Origins and Audiences of the Ballads of Robin Hood’, Past & Present, 18 (1960), 89–110 (p. 103) and Stephen Knight, ‘Robin Hood Versus King Arthur’, in In Strange Countries: Medieval Literature and its Afterlife, ed. David Matthews and Anke Bernau (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), pp. 9–24.

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There is also more to be said about the romances’ portrayal of female heirs,

and comparisons between English and French romances. For example, while

historians identify the ‘Salic law’ of succession – excluding women from inheriting

the crown or ‘acting as the conduit through which a royal child could become king’ –

as a main point of difference between English and French views of female

inheritance, this distinction is not necessarily borne out in medieval romances.39 A

more wide-ranging survey of female heirs in medieval romances may ascertain the

degree of convergence or divergence between popular English and French beliefs

about female succession. Such a project could also investigate traces of a shift in

attitudes towards female heirs and matrilineal succession, in the English romances,

from those of the earliest surviving manuscripts (the shadowy maternal figures of

Havelok and Horn) to the latest (the maternal protagonists in Eglamour and Torrent).

I have not attempted to argue for the development of the disinheritance theme

through time in this thesis, preferring to collapse the traditional critical division of

early-surviving ‘hero-alone’ romances from late-surviving ‘family romances’,

towards a new reading of inheritance in the texts. But this question could be asked

again now, in light of my findings here. Likewise, since I have concentrated mainly

on non-Arthurian romances, the question of whether inheritance is a different

imaginative conceit within or without that narrative context has remained on the

margins of this thesis, but could be the focus of future studies.

Exciting recent interventions in romance scholarship – Aesthetics of

Possibility (2017), Thinking Medieval Romance (2018), Dangers of Medieval

Romance (2018) – make the case for critical analyses of the imaginative work and

39 Kathryn Reyerson and Thomas Kuehn, ‘Women and Law in France and Italy’, in Women in Medieval Western European Culture, ed. Linda E. Mitchell (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 131–42 (p. 132).

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philosophical engagements of the Middle English romances. The romances’ idea of

disinheritance has more to offer to this project than I have been able to investigate

thus far. I have explored disinheritance as a conceptual framework for re-imagining

rightful heirship and inheritance, but not the metaphorical potential of disinheritance

to speak to other ideas. One possibility, mentioned in Chapter 1, is that the

disinheritance narrative in these romances becomes, in effect, an allegory for the

transition from childhood to adulthood, given the coincidence of these experiences in

the stories. Pursuing this line of enquiry could result in a valuable contribution to

scholarship on medieval theories (and perhaps experiences) of childhood, as well as

augmenting studies of the medieval child as a literary figure (as in Allan Mitchell’s

2014 book, Becoming Human). Similarly, the discussion of unknowing in Chapter 2

could be pushed further, to consider how the romances’ ideas about heirship may

intervene in medieval philosophical discussions, beyond the matter of inheritance

itself, in the manner of Aesthetics of Possibility.

The present thesis makes its principal contribution to knowledge in the field

of Middle English romance scholarship, with a new reading of the matter of

inheritance in the genre. In particular, I have found that the romances sustain an

equivocal attitude towards primogeniture and genealogical inheritance, revising

earlier critical views of the relationship between the romance genre and a

conservative, pro-aristocratic ideology. As such, the thesis also invites a

reconsideration of uses of Middle English romance motifs in other medieval

contexts, especially where potentially serving a political purpose in relation to

inheritance or succession.

With regard to its approach, the thesis demonstrates the potential for

sustained close analyses of some Middle English romances which have not always

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found favour in romance scholarship, such as Eglamour. Setting aside notions of

literary deficiency, I have approached the romances as a rich imaginative resource

and considered the ideas, or lines of thinking, that might emerge when readers

respond to the texts’ provocations to engage critically with their narrative content.

Finally, then, the thesis makes a contribution to recent developments in romance

scholarship, noted above, by exploring how the Middle English romances might have

been read in their time (and how they can be read now), beyond plot structures,

contextual reflections and ideological functions, in terms of their generative,

imaginative work.

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Lists and Illustrations

Manuscripts

Manuscripts containing ‘disinheritance romances’ are listed below, in chronological

order as far as approximate dating allows (see DMER). I have indicated which of my

six romances appears in each manuscript, as well as others mentioned in the thesis.

For full contents and folio numbers, see DIMEV.

Laud Misc. 108 (c. 1300) Havelok; also King Horn.

Auchinleck (c. 1330) Bevis; also Amis and Amiloun, Horne Child

(a unique variant of King Horn), Lay le

Freine, Degare and Sir Orfeo.

Cambridge 4407 (c. 1375–1400) Havelok (fragments).

Egerton 2862 (c. 1375–1400) Bevis, Eglamour; also Amis and Amiloun

and Degare.

Ann Arbor 225 (c. 1420) Eglamour (fragments).

Cambridge Ff.2.38 (c. 1420–50) Bevis, Octavian, Eglamour, Tryamour; nine

in total, including Degare.

Lincoln 91 (c. 1440) Eglamour and Octavian.

Naples (c. 1450–60) Bevis; also Lybeaus Desconus.

Cotton Caligula A.ii (c. 1446–60) Octavian, Eglamour; also Lybeaus

Desconus and Emare.

Cambridge 175/96 (c. 1450–75) Bevis.

Cambridge O.2.13 (c. 1450–1500) Bevis.

Eng. Poet. D. 208 (c. 1450–1500) Bevis and Tryamour.

Chetham’s 8009 (c. 1470–1500) Bevis and Torrent.

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Romances

The six ‘disinheritance romances’ are listed below, in the chronological order of their

earliest manuscript witnesses, as far as approximate dating allows (see above and

DMER). I have indicated the number of manuscript witnesses for each romance, up

to 1500, with span dates. I have also listed key characters mentioned in my analysis.

For story summaries, see DMER.

Havelok the Dane (Havelok)

Manuscripts to c. 1500: two (one fragment), c. 1300–c. 1400

Havelok, son of King Birkabeyn of Denmark

Swanborw and Hefled, Havelok’s sisters

Goldeboru, daughter of King Athelwold of England and later Havelok’s wife

Godard, steward of Denmark and Havelok’s treacherous guardian

Godrich, steward of England and Goldeboru’s treacherous guardian

Grim the fisherman, Havelok’s adoptive father

Ubbe, a Danish earl

Bevis of Hampton (Bevis)

Manuscripts to c. 1500: eight, c. 1330–c. 1500

Sir Gii, earl of Hampton

Bevis, son of Sir Gii

Bevis’s mother (otherwise unnamed)

Devoun, emperor of Germany, becomes Bevis’s stepfather after killing Sir Gii

Saber of Wight, Bevis’s uncle and tutor

Terry, Saber of Wight’s eldest son

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Saber Florentin, Bevis’s uncle and bishop of Cologne

Josian, King Ermin’s daughter and later Bevis’s wife

Young Gii and Miles, twin sons of Bevis and Josian

Sir Eglamour of Artois (Eglamour)

Manuscripts to c. 1500: five, c. 1375–c. 1460

Eglamour, an earl’s son

Princeamor, the earl of Artois

Cristabell, Princeamor’s daughter

Degrebell, son of Eglamour and Cristabell

King of Egypt, Cristabell’s uncle, with whom she finds sanctuary

King of Israel, Degrebell’s adoptive father

Octavian (both versions)

Manuscripts to c. 1500: three, c. 1420–60

Octavian, emperor of Rome

Empress of Rome (in one manuscript named ‘Florence’)

Dowager empress of Rome, Octavian’s mother

Young Octavian and Florent, twin sons of the emperor and empress of Rome

Clement, Florent’s adoptive father

King of Jerusalem, with whom the empress and young Octavian find sanctuary

King of France, ally of emperor Octavian against Saracens

Marsabell, daughter of the Sultan of Babylon and later Florent’s wife

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Sir Tryamour (Tryamour)

Manuscripts to c. 1500: two, c. 1420–15001

King Ardus of Aragon

Queen Margaret of Aragon

Tryamour, son of Ardus and Margaret

Sir Marrok, Ardus’s treacherous steward

Sir Roger, killed protecting Margaret in her exile (with newborn Tryamour)

Sir Bernard, with whom Margaret and Tryamour find sanctuary

Helen of Hungary, child heiress and future wife of Tryamour

Two unnamed sons of Tryamour and Helen

Torrent of Portingale (Torrent)

Manuscripts: one, c. 1500

Torrent, an earl’s son

Calamond, King of Portugal

Desonell, daughter of the king of Portugal

Antony Fitz Griffin and Leobertus, twin sons of Torrent and Desonell

King of Greece, Antony’s adoptive father

King of Jerusalem, Leobertus’s adoptive father

1 Two further, later manuscript witnesses are given in DIMEV: a missing fragment in an Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson manuscript; and the Percy Folio.

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Figure 1

Manuscript Date Havelok Bevis Eglamour Octavian Tryamour Torrent

Laud Misc.

108

1300

Auchinleck 1330

Cambridge

4407

1375–

1400

(fragment)

Egerton 2862 1375–

1400

Ann Arbor 225 1420

Cambridge

Ff.2.38

1420–

50

Lincoln 91 1440

Naples 1450–

60

Cotton

Caligula A.ii

1446–

60

Cambridge

175/96

1450–

75

Cambridge

O.2.13

1450–

1500

Eng. Poet. D.

208

1450–

1500

Chetham’s

8009

1470–

1500

234

Figure 2 Genealogy of Stanleys of Lathom2

2 Only showing persons mentioned in the thesis, where historical sources are also given.

235

Figure 3

Stanley genealogy according to ‘The Stanley Poem’

Figure 4 Stanley genealogy according to Seacombe

236

Figure 5

Graphic tail-rhyme in Bevis (detail of Egerton 2862, f. 48r)

The lines highlighted above read:

And whenne þu art come to ylde

þat þu may armes wylde And art of Age

Then shalt þu com to Ingelonde

Wt werre to wynne into þyn honde þyne herytage

I wyl þe help wt al my myȝt

Wt dynt of swerd to gete þy ryȝt Be þu of ylde. 3

3 Photograph and transcription are my own.

237

Figure 6

London, British

Library, MS Yates

Thompson 22 (‘The

Brantwood Bible’, c.

1260), f. 298v detail.4

Figure 7

London, British

Library, MS Harley

7353, detail.5

Genealogy of Edward

IV.

4 Available from BLMS [accessed 4 Dec 2019], copyright The British Library. 5 Detail of the upper-right hand section of the roll. Available from BLMS [accessed 4 Dec 2019], copyright The British Library.

238

Figure 8

Oxford, Bodleian

Libraries, MS

Douce 261, f. 40r

detail.6

Figure 9

London, British

Library, MS

Additional 10292,

f. 100 detail.7

6 Available from Digital Bodleian < https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/inquire/p/570e1964-9656-4c81-a856-e4ea5b635c34> [accessed 4 Dec 2019], copyright Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. 7 Available from BLMS [accessed 4 Dec 2019], copyright The British Library.

239

Figure 10

London, British

Library, Stowe MS

17, f. 189v detail.8

Figure 11

London, British Library,

MS Sloane 2463

(‘Trotula’), f. 218v

detail.9

8 A fully digitised copy of the manuscript (the ‘Maastricht Hours’) is available from British Library Digitised Manuscripts, at <http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Stowe_MS_17> [accessed 4 Dec 2019], image copyright The British Library. 9 Available from BLMS [accessed 4 Dec 2019], copyright The British Library.

240

Figure 12

Misericord supporter

(c. 1500) in

Manchester Cathedral,

depicting an ape with

a child.10

Figure 13

Misericord supporter

(c. 1500) in

Manchester Cathedral,

depicting the Stanley

eagle and child in a

form reminiscent of

the heraldic crest.

10 All photographs of the Manchester Cathedral carvings are my own.

241

Figure 14

Choir bench end (c.

1500) in Manchester

Cathedral featuring

narrative illustration of

the ‘eagle and child’

legend.

Figure 15

Misericord carving (c.

1500) in Manchester

Cathedral featuring

narrative illustration of

the ‘eagle and child’

legend.

242

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