Rereading Clement in Thomas Chestre’s Octavian and in BL Cotton Caligula A.II

The Middle English romance Octavian survives in two versions. An anonymous northern version, composed in the mid-fourteenth century, appears in two fifteenth-century manuscripts, Lincoln, Dean and Chapter Library, MS 91 (ca. 1430–1440) and Cambridge, University Library, MS Ff.2.38 (late fifteenth or early sixteenth century), and in an early sixteenth-century edition printed by Wynkyn de Worde (San Marino, Huntington Library 14615). A southern version of Octavian, composed in the second half of the fourteenth century, appears in a single manuscript, London, BL MS Cotton Caligula A.II (ca. 1446–1460), where it is followed by Sir Launfal and Lybeaus Desconus, all three of which have been attributed to Thomas Chestre. Chestre’s southern version has been edited only once in the twentieth century, by Frances McSparran in 1979,¹ and compared to the northern version,² it has not fared very well with modern scholars, not even in the estimation of its editors. McSparran dismissed Chestre as a writer “with no respect either for the integrity of his source or of his own composition”; and then, again, “he was not concerned with giving a faithful version of his source, nor is he reshaping the story with any specific themes or perspectives in mind.”³ Throughout her commentary, McSparran echoes, with some reservations, Maldwyn Mills’s even more disparaging assessment of Chestre. Mills argues that the three romances in the Cotton manuscript can be attributed to Chestre because they are “consistently inept and careless,” so uniformly incompetent that for once we have to ascribe faults not to scribal errors but to Chestre’s “failures of memory and lack of artistic conscience.”⁴ For Mills, Chestre remained throughout his career “a literary hack who made uncritical use of any material that presented itself to him.”⁵

More recently, scholarship on Middle English romances has turned attention to them as popular literature and their audiences.⁶ Basic to this shift is Stephen Knight’s often cited article “The Social Function of the Middle English Romances” (1986). Knight reads Middle English romances as reinforcing an essentialist ideology of aristocracy for two audiences: “those who actually controlled the economic and social relations of the feudal mode of production” and those “who were not in positions of power but accepted the values of those who were,” including individuals engaged in manufacturing and trade as well as urban craftsmen.⁷ Similarly, John Simons reads the northern Octavian as an expression of social anxieties in post-plague England, represented especially in the figure of Clement, a bourgeois merchant of Paris whose pretentious behavior makes him into “a figure of fun striking attitudes which contrast very poorly with the grandeur and splendour of the court.” For Simons, this dismissive representation of Clement provided the romance’s economically and socially established audience “a clear opportunity to identify with their peers and to share their belonging to a privileged group.”⁸ Martha Fessler Krieg considers a broader audience of established as well as less secure gentry, merchants, and tradesmen who might “aspire to marrying or buying their way into the minor nobility” and would dismiss Clement with laughter “twinged with the condescending thought that of course they themselves would have known how to behave better than Clement.”⁹ So too, in astute readings of the French and Middle English versions of Octavian, Nola Jean Bamberry and Glenn Wright agree with Knight in different ways¹⁰ that these romances constitute affirmations of a chivalric, aristocratic social order for a mixed audience, that is, to paraphrase Knight, an economically and socially dominant audience made up of landlords, their families, and a less prominent audience of minor gentry, such as tradesmen and other aspiring individuals who accepted the values of the more powerful.

Two basic questions emerge from these discussions. One has to do with Chestre’s treatment of his sources, that he had no sense of “reshaping the story with any specific themes or perspectives in mind,” as McSparran put it. On the contrary, I will argue, Chestre deliberately reworks the Octavian narrative to appeal to the growing audience...