Narrative Artistry in St. Erkenwald and the Gawain-Group: The Case for Common Authorship Reconsidered

Narrative Artistry in St. Erkenwald and the Gawain-Group: The Case for Common Authorship Reconsidered Marie Borroff Yale University Did the Gawain-poet also write St. Erkenwald? The question is important, bearing as it does on the creative legacy of a major poet of the late Middle English period, the author of the acknowledged masterpieces Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl. And the saint’s legend stands up well under comparative scrutiny, for its author was both a superb storyteller and a master of the craft of alliterative verse. Beginning almost immediately after St. Erkenwald was published for the first time in the late nineteenth century,1 a series of scholars propounded the view that it should be added to the Gawain-group2 —that I am indebted to Frank Grady for his closely attentive editing; my essay in its present form has benefited greatly from his labors. 1 ‘‘De Erkenwalde,’’ in Altenglische Legenden: Neue Folge, mit Einleitung und Anmerkungen (Heilbronn, 1881), pp. 265–74. Since then, the following editions have appeared : Israel Gollancz, St. Erkenwald (Bishop of London 675–693), An Alliterative poem, written about 1386 . . . (London: Oxford University Press, 1922); Henry L. Savage, St. Erkenwald: A Middle English Poem (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1926); Ruth Morse, St. Erkenwald (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1975); Clifford Peterson, Saint Erkenwald (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977); Thorlac Turville-Petre, in Alliterative Poetry of the Later Middle Ages (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1989; originally published by Routledge [London, 1989]), pp. 101–19; and J. A. Burrow and Thorlac Turville-Petre, A Book of Middle English (Oxford: Blackwell , 1992), pp. 199–212. Throughout this essay, I quote St. Erkenwald from Peterson’s edition. 2 Moritz Trautmann, in Anglia 5 (1882): 21–25, stated that the authorship of St. Erkenwald could be assigned with great exactitude (‘‘mit grosser bestimmtheit’’) to the poet who wrote Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience (p. 23). In the Introduction to his edition, Savage, a proponent of common authorship, gave a history of the controversy to 1926, with full documentation and a detailed account of the supporting evidence presented by previous scholars. Peterson continued the historical account: ‘‘A general acceptance of the attribution, or at least the possibility of attribution, of Erkenwald to the Pearlpoet has been the situation until fairly recently. . . . But there have long been dissenters 41 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER is, to the four poems modern editors call Pearl, Cleanness or Purity, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, found, in that order, in the late fourteenth-century MS. Cotton Nero A. X., and only there.3 But though the single manuscript containing St. Erkenwald, Ms. Harley 2250, is now thought to be virtually the same in geographical provenance, the poem was copied about seventy-five years later.4 The presumption of shared authorship established by contiguity for the Gawain-group is lacking for the fifth poem, and the case for attribution must be made on internal evidence. What kind of evidence can these poems be expected to yield? As readers of late Middle English alliterative verse know, the ‘‘long alliterative line’’ in which four of them are written5 is the vehicle of a wholly conventional narrative style inherited by the poets from their predecessors and used by all alike. Moreover, the alliterative school flourished at a time when authors for the most part remained anonymous and the verbal originality we so prize today was not thought important. One from the consensus’’ (p. 16). As one of the dissenters, he names Larry Benson, whose essay arguing against common authorship I discuss on pp. 44–45 below. Peterson then presents a body of external evidence connecting the manuscripts of St. Erkenwald and the Gawain-group with the name Massey, which ‘‘was a common one in Cheshire and southern Lancashire from at least the twelfth century’’ (p. 20). A poem by Thomas Hoccleve praises a man skilled in rhetoric whom he calls ‘‘maister Massey’’; it is reasonably certain that a version of this poem was sent by Hoccleve to John of Lancaster, that is, John of Gaunt, before 1414. A John Massey of Cotton meets the ‘‘limiting criteria’’ for authorship...