New Perspectives on the Reception and Revision of Guy of Warwick in the Fifteenth Century

Engineered to be a bestseller romance with a little bit of everything,¹ the Anglo-Norman Gui de Warewic, composed anonymously in the Warwickshire area in the early thirteenth century,² was widely popular: a remarkable number of extant manuscripts testify to at least two versions in verse;³ it was then translated into Middle English at least five times,⁴ as well as adapted into an Anglo-French prose romance of the fifteenth century.⁵ The story’s popularity was not limited to romance: a variety of versions of the Guy legend exist from the medieval period and onward, from numerous Latin chronicles and didactic texts in the fourteenth century, to Lydgate’s Guy of Warwick, the Rous Rolls, and the Beauchamp Pageants in the fifteenth century, and various printed editions and chapbooks of the Early Modern period.⁶ The variety and number of responses to the story of Guy provide us a unique opportunity to gather evidence about the reception and uses of the romance by medieval audiences, particularly the Beauchamp family in Warwickshire, earls of Warwick from the late thirteenth to the late fifteenth century, who consciously adopted the Guy story as part of their family history and identity.⁷

Dated to the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century,⁸ the Cambridge University Library MS Ff.2.38 (CUL) version of Guy of Warwick has primarily been found interesting and remarkable by scholars precisely for the evidence it has been seen to provide on later medieval romance reception, specifically in a fifteenth-century, Warwickshire context. Together with the Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 107/176 (Caius) witness of Guy, CUL preserves the latest redaction of the Middle English Guy of Warwick, both manuscript versions descending from a common translation of Gui de Warewic into Middle English, the latest of at least five individual identifiable translation events.⁹ In her recent study of the Middle English manuscript witnesses of Guy of Warwick, Alison Wiggins provides a concise assessment of the unique character of these two fifteenth-century versions:¹⁰

These texts are indicative of the direct impact that the figure of Richard Beauchamp and the cult of Guy of Warwick had upon the romance; the revival and reconceptualization of Guy as a chivalric hero in these later manuscripts represents a distinctive phase in its reception.¹¹

I have, however, found evidence in a nearly complete, late thirteenth-/early fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman manuscript of Gui that places a number of the CUL text’s important “fifteenth-century” innovations over a hundred years earlier, in an Anglo-Norman literary context. This manuscript, Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Cod. Aug. 87. 4, known by its manuscript siglum “G” [hereafter G],¹² was identified by Alfred Ewert, Gui de Warewic’s only editor, as belonging to the later β redaction of the Anglo-Norman verse romance and as such neither formed the basis of his edition nor featured prominently in his notes and variants.¹³ The evidence both troubles Wiggins’s model of a “distinctive phase in reception” as well as many of the observations made by other scholars in earlier studies, which I discuss in detail below. At the same time, the manuscript sheds some new light on the possibly genuine innovations in the CUL text. What I want to demonstrate in the course of this article is the heretofore unacknowledged closeness of kinship between G and CUL, particularly in the sections that describe Gui/y’s return to Warwick at the end of his life, his retiring to a hermitage, and his eventual death and burial. The most significant of these corrections has to do with the interpretation of the presence of the Gibbeclyf place name of Guy’s hermitage—previously thought to exist exclusively in the CUL manuscript—and what John Frankis has succinctly called the “cult of Guy’s hermitage.”¹⁴

Studies investigating the CUL and Caius texts of Guy as evidence of late medieval reception of the romance and use of the Guy legend primarily consist of close comparisons of...