Romance, Distraint, and the Gentry

Scholarship of the previous century adopted an ambivalent approach to Middle English romance. On the one hand, efforts to edit so many romances implicitly recognize this genre’s central place within medieval English literary culture. Editions of romances, for example, have been a staple of the Early English Text Society since its inception, as well as, more recently, composing a large proportion of TEAMS editions. Yet in spite of the proliferation of editions and thus ready access to such texts, literary critics throughout the twentieth century consistently registered unease with most romances, objecting to their lack of psychological depth, oversimplified characters, cultural chauvinism, and seemingly naïve recourse to magic and supernatural prowess. L. F. Casson, the editor of Sir Degrevant for EETS, remarked in his edition that “the ending is unduly hurried, as though the author had tired of puppetry,” while George Kane, in an attempt to justify the study of a select group of romances on aesthetic grounds, commented that “[m]ore than twenty of the surviving romances must be called artistic failures.”¹ As a result, in 1986 Stephen Knight could justifiably quip that the verse romances were “the ugly ducklings of medieval English studies.”²

Yet the last twenty years witnessed a renewed interest in the verse romances qua literature. As formalism gave way to historicism, Middle English romance offered itself as an ideal vehicle for understanding medieval literary culture as practiced outside the exclusive circles of court and nobility. As such scholarship recognized, romance is a wide, diverse genre—in terms of subject matter, narrative form, and readership—offering insight into a host of alternative, noncourtly ideologies. This salutary turn to romance enabled a number of nuanced analyses of how such texts engaged with the concerns of England’s noncourtly readers.³ This recent trend resulted in three collections of essays that subtly explore the relationship between Middle English romance and “popular culture.”⁴ Yet in spite of the renewed scholarly interest in these romances, insight into the actual audiences, and their relationship to the popular romances they read, has remained elusive and rarely addressed in these collections. Recent studies, broadly speaking, suggest that Middle English romance—when compared to earlier French models and to courtly products like Troilus and Criseyde and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—moved out of the courtly realm and thus descended down the social ladder, arguing that such a move is reflected in the more popular, less élite narrative forms that romance came to embody.⁵ But in arguing that romance made such a move, we have failed to account for the specific audiences who read such romances. The surviving manuscripts—at least those from the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which I will address here—belie the notion of romance serving a “popular” or “nonaristocratic” audience, for by and large those manuscripts from the later Middle English period whose provenance can be traced were owned by the gentry and, on occasion, urban élites.⁶ And, as historians have demonstrated, the gentry were firmly enmeshed as the governing class of rural England—the lower rungs of the aristocracy, but definitely part of late medieval England’s provincial élite.⁷ English urban spaces, moreover, were markedly oligarchical, with the wealthier merchants adopting aristocratic titles and acquiring rural property—the sine qua non of gentility in late medieval England.⁸ Thus, attention to the audiences of late Middle English romance ought to problematize our association of this genre with “popular culture”—at least, as that term is taken to mean wider access to texts and a markedly more diverse audience.

My contention that many Middle English romances retained their élite associations does not rely merely on a positivistic acceptance of provenance evidence, however, for the literary motifs of many late Middle English romances mediated the ideological concerns of the landowning gentry. This was a class that “crystallized,” as Peter Coss puts it, in the early fourteenth century, just a generation or two before the composition of the romances I will address here.⁹ Thus, I propose that we view the “popular romances” of the late...