Home > The Works of the Gawain Poet

The Works of the Gawain Poet
Author: Unknown

 


Introduction


THE POEMS AND THE POET


The four poems included in this edition are the sole contents of London, British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x.1 This small manuscript was copied around 1400, and the poems cannot be very much earlier, since one of them, Cleanness, is demonstrably indebted to Mandeville’s Travels,2 written in 1356 or 1367.3 The manuscript makes up in fidelity to the texts what it lacks in finish and fashion; it is certainly not a de luxe production, and may have been competently home-made especially for these poems, rather than produced in a professional scriptorium. It was written by only one scribe, with a few corrections (and hypercorrections4) by a second hand. The scribe was careful, not prone to errors, though his script is not a standard one for the time and has been described as having ‘a very individualistic, small, sharp, angular character’.5 Rubrication is non-ornate and functional, consisting simply of enlarged capitals to mark structural divisions (and, in Cleanness and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, smaller ones to mark significant narrative moments within those larger sections). Twelve accompanying illustrations (eleven full-page, one half-page) were added shortly after the text was written. English books of this period were rarely illustrated, and full-page pictures are completely without precedent.6 In style, too, the illustrations are unusual. Relatively independent from iconographic traditions, they are more remarkable for their attempts to reflect the particular ‘texts and significant moments within them’7 than for their technique (which is limited) or beauty. The poems themselves are extant only in this manuscript and do not appear to have attracted much notice at the time.

All four texts are almost certainly the work of the same poet. They share, linguistically, the same dialect (North-West Midland) and date (late fourteenth century), for there is not much sign of the layering or inconsistency that would suggest that the poet’s language was not substantially the same as that of the scribe(s) who copied his poems.8 The poems also have pronounced similarities in style, alliterative collocations, procedure (for instance, Patience and Cleanness are both homilies based on a text drawn from the New Testament Beatitudes and exemplified by Old Testament narratives), themes and preoccupations (the pervasive interest in ‘courtesy’ in general, and the rituals of the feast in particular, being the most obvious example9). Nothing is known of this poet except what can be deduced from the poems. The dialect indicates that he came from south-east Cheshire, a provenance confirmed by the topographical features and associated terminology of the often precisely depicted landscapes in Sir Gawain.10 Though some critics have surmised an association with the royal court in London,11 there is no evidence that the poems circulated outside this dialect area.

Cheshire was a thriving world of its own at this period. Partly because of its status as a County Palatine (which conferred upon its earls semi-royal privileges), it regarded itself as separate from the rest of England (Cheshire men spoke of ‘going into England’12), and had a sturdy sense of its own political and cultural identity.13 It provided the well-known Cheshire archers who formed Richard II’s bodyguard, and John Gower knew it as home to gentes bellatrices [warlike folk], fiercely loyal to the king.14 Its people could be as rough as its weather and its landscape, which could provide shelter for the lawless,15 especially in the Wirral.16 But it had also a lively cultural life, and was markedly active in a number of arts and crafts. Chester possessed a major mint, and was a centre for moneyers and goldsmiths; the whole surrounding area specialized in the production of fine metalwork.17 An important seaport into which came furs, wines and other goods, it was a centre ‘for luxury goods and specialized services’.18 The production of cloth and clothing played an important part in the local economy. The upper ranks of society had an architectural presence, not only in Chester castle and various monasteries and abbeys, but also in a number of ‘elegant mansions, many of them set apart in parkland’, with which the Cheshire–Lancashire area was ‘bejewelled’;19 and in this connection it may be noted that The Boke of Curtesye is among a number of significant texts to have been copied in Cheshire.20

For, most importantly, Cheshire lay at the centre of an area that had a strong and distinctive literary culture, and a diverse selection of some of the most important works of the period was composed in the county. Ranulph Higden, author of the Polychronicon, an influential and encyclopaedic world history in Latin, was a monk of St Werburgh’s Abbey (now Chester Cathedral), and brothers from this monastery and from others in the area copied not only Latin texts but also English poems.21 The Stanzaic Life of Christ is also a Cheshire work, and John Barton, author of one of the oldest French grammars, Donait françois (early fifteenth century), was proud, not only of his Paris education, but also of his Cheshire birth and upbringing, which he mentions in the prologue to his book. The town also had its own cycle of mystery plays, though these may be post-fourteenth century. The Cheshire gentry, furthermore, seem (from somewhat later evidence) to have included reading and writing men who took an active interest in literature,22 as testified by the poems of his own which Humfrey Newton of Pownell (1466–1536) copied into his commonplace book23 and by the Stanley poems, a group of poems celebrating the Stanley family, who were Cheshire magnates.24 Most crucially, the county was situated at the heart of that area that had pioneered the so-called ‘Alliterative Revival’: that is, the use in new and substantial poems of a modified form of the unrhymed alliterative metre in which Anglo-Saxon verse had been written – the metre of Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain. This literary movement was associated especially with the west and the north, and Cheshire was thus pre-eminently exposed to its influence and made important contributions to it: the poet of one of the best of its products, St Erkenwald, second only to Sir Gawain in literary merit,25 was a Cheshire man,26 as probably were the poets both of one of the earliest extant exercises in the metre, Winner and Waster from c.1352,27 and of one of the last, Scotish Ffeilde, whose subject is the battle of Flodden (1513) and which was written by someone who proclaims himself to have been a gentleman of Baguley in Cheshire (lines 416–19). Likewise associated with the west and the north were related experiments in highly florid stanzaic and rhyming forms of alliterating verse. Some of these poems are in eight-line stanzas, such as ‘Marie Mayden, Moder Mylde’ and ‘Ilk a wys wiht scholde wake’,28 both from Cheshire;29 others, such as Awntyrs off Arthure, Summer Sunday, Pistel of Susan and Three Dead Kings, were written in the newly fashionable thirteen-line bob-and-wheel stanza. This is relevant both to the elaborate stanzas of Pearl (written in alliterating lines of rhyming verse) and to the novel use in Sir Gawain of a rhyming bob-and-wheel (see Foreword to Sir Gawain, p. 244) to round off varying numbers of unrhymed alliterative lines, and so group them into ‘stanzas’. Cheshire thus forms a background pertinent, not only to the assured handling of the colourful metres used in the Cotton Nero poems, but also to their equally colourful alternation between stormy energies (hunts, cataclysms, snowstorms) and the closely described intricacies of cultural constructs and rituals, mealtime etiquette, courtly manners and courtesies, castle with hunting park, nautical tackle and manoeuvres, fabrics, furnishings, costumes and, especially, jewels and metalwork. Such topics were popular in alliterative verse, but are developed by this poet with unrivalled vigour, texture and wealth of specific detail.

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