Reterritorialized Ritual: Classist Violence in Yvain and Ywain and Gawain

Among his alterations to Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain, ou Le chevalier au lion, the poet of the Middle English Ywain and Gawain inserts a profoundly superficial suit of armor.¹ In the funerary procession commemorating the lord whom Ywain slew after fatefully calling at Lady Alundyne’s fountain, there now appears a mounted “knyght” in “armurs” [armor] riding before the “cors” [corpse] (828–32). Editors have seen this intervention as of limited significance—as an adjustment of Chrétien’s narrative for an English audience who expected the ceremonial display of a deceased knight’s horse and armor.² Such a modest motivation conforms with many scholars’ views of the Ywain-poet as a competent but derivative translator, concerned primarily with condensing Chrétien’s courtly masterpiece for a sterner, less sophisticated audience.³

Neither the Ywain-poet nor historical precedent clarifies whether an actual body inhabited this ritual armor. Fourteenth-century English funerals sometimes included theatrical displays of the knight’s equipment,⁴ while the burials of Edward III and the Black Prince featured both effigies and actual riders donning the dead man’s arms.⁵ The social class of any living arms-bearers was ritually irrelevant. That riders were simply bodies staging knighthood’s surface is suggested by Sir Brian Stapleton’s 1394 will, which stipulates that ceremonial riders may be of any “condicion” [class].⁶ If the “knyght” shadowing Salados the Rouse’s corpse in Ywain and Gawain was not an effigy, then he certainly was not an actual knight. The Ywain-poet follows Chrétien in stressing that no nobleman was available to defend the fountain left vulnerable to outside attack by the only local warrior-aristocrat—Salados’s hidden killer, Ywain.

The Ywain-poet’s addition of either an empty suit of armor or a disguised commoner adds far more than local color. This ceremonial knight participates in the romance’s systematic maintenance of an anxious fourteenth-century aristocracy’s exceptionalism.⁷ As Rachel Ann Dressler shows through analysis of the uniquely belligerent posture and dress of English funerary effigies, late-medieval English chivalry’s “social anxiety” spilled over even into images of postmortem existence.⁸ Even as the spectral double inserted into Ywain and Gawain instantiates such militaristic visions of the afterlife, it also ritually sustains the chivalric class’s exclusive claim to lordship. Like the imperial effigy in Roman funerary rites, or the aery second body of Western medieval kings, Salados’s ghostly image mobilizes death itself in the endorsement of aristocratic territorialism.⁹ This artificial lord embodies a central aspect of feudal Western politics—the ongoing replacement of male aristocratic warriors who wield what Antonio Negri calls “constituent” power, that necessarily arbitrary violence that maintains the “constituted” power of legitimate, sovereign authorities.¹⁰ Even with one lord dead, a ritual suit signifying the knightly enforcer passes in procession before the spouse whose title grounds his power.

Whereas Erich Auerbach insists that Yvain, as the quintessential chivalric romance, so idealizes class concerns as to eradicate all traces of socioeconomic reality,¹¹ I will show that Chrétien’s work illuminates a practically functioning political theology of knighthood, and that the Ywain-poet’s retooled version is aimed at a socioeconomically unstable, acutely militarized fourteenth-century English North.¹² I will throughout this essay draw both on Chrétien’s Yvain and on the anonymous Ywain and Gawain: I assume that Chrétien conducts a ritual consolidation of feudal privilege that is carried on by the Ywain-poet, who imagines an aristocracy all the more anxious due to Northern English militarism and a more acutely capitalized Western economic world. The Ywain-poet often closely follows Chrétien’s story of a knight who wins the love and lands of a lady whose lord he slays, and who goes wild and befriends a lion after his public abasement for failing to return to his lady on time, and who, after a series of violent exploits, regains his position as lord of the fountain lands. The very closeness of the translation allows us both to situate the Ywain...