The late medieval Scottish romance of
Eger and Grime follows a model of the proud lady similar to the Fere in
Ipomadon, but Winglayne, heiress to Earl Bragas/Diges (depending on the redaction), makes a vow that holds more subversive implications for the construction of chivalric masculinity. At the beginning of
Eger and Grime,
we are told that she has pledged to marry only a knight who is undefeated in battle. While this seems to accord with chivalric priorities, the repercussions of sticking to this vow push chivalric masculinity to its limits. When Eger attracts Winglayne’s attention, they are apparently engaged to be married, until Eger returns home from fighting the mysterious knight Gray-steele, sorely wounded, his little finger and his weapons missing. Winglayne repudiates him and Eger’s companion Grime takes up the challenge of fighting Gray-steele while pretending to be Eger, in an attempt to restore his friend’s lost reputation and regain his bride. Grime is successful, Eger and Winglayne are married, and Grime marries Loosepaine, the heiress of lands that border on Gray-steele’s. Yet this is not the ending – or at least not the only one.
Eger and Grime survives in two different versions: an anglicised version in the Percy Folio (London, British Library, MS Additional 27879) and a Scottish version represented by three prints from 1669, 1687, and 1711, known as the Huntington-Laing redaction (HL). While the Percy Folio text concludes with the conventional ending described above, Huntington-Laing has a further twist: Grahame (Grime) dies, Eger confesses that it was Grahame who defeated Gray-steele, Winliane (Winglayne) repudiates Eger, enters a nunnery, and dies, and Eger eventually remarries Lilias (Loosepaine). The differences of these two redactions hold important implications for considering the representation of the proud lady and the extent to which each questions or upholds chivalric masculinity as a source of celebration. The two versions also offer different reading contexts, a snapshot of the wide range of audiences amongst which this story apparently circulated. While the early audience for the Percy Folio is uncertain, Aisling Byrne and Victoria Flood’s work on its ‘Stanleyite’ connections aligns with Michael Johnston’s assessment of
Eger and Grime as a gentry romance; the printed texts point to wider circulation, while the earliest recorded reference to the story is a performance of ‘Graysteil’ before King James IV of Scotland in 1497.
1 Aisling Byrne and Victoria Flood, ‘The Romance of the Stanleys: Regional and National Imaginings in the Percy Folio’, Viator, 46.1 (2015), 327–51; Johnston, Romance and the Gentry, pp. 82, 84; James Ralston Caldwell, ‘Introduction’, in Eger and Grime: A parallel-text edition of the Percy and the Huntington-Laing Versions of the Romance, ed. by Caldwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), pp. 3–176 (pp. 6, 10–12). This varied readership is another factor that needs to be taken into account when considering the particular portrayal of the proud lady and the implications she holds for chivalric masculinity in this romance.
Winglayne is characterised more negatively than any of the women discussed so far. She is shown to be fickle and scornful, speaking ‘words […] both strange & drye’ to Eger when she eventually visits him on his sickbed.
2 Eger and Grime, ed. by Caldwell, Percy, line 672; HL, lines 715–16; Percy, line 450. Her scorn is contrasted with Loosepine’s care for Eger’s injured body and ‘Loosepine serves as Winglaine’s foil’ more generally in the romance, as Tison Pugh notes.
3 Tison Pugh, Sexuality and its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 136. Intradiegetic responses, similarly to those in
Ipomadon and
Blanchardyn and Eglantine,
encourage the reader to share this critical view of Winglayne: ‘all that euer stoode her by, / did Marueill her answer was soe dry’ (Percy, 639–40), while Grime, arguably the romance’s real hero, laments that
thy great pride of thy daughter free
made him in this great perill to bee;
alas that euer shee was borne! (Percy, 1319–21)
Winglayne does have some redeeming features: we are granted a rare insight into her feelings for Eger when we are told that she only overhears the conversation about Eger’s defeat because
of Sir Egar shee soe sore thought
that shee lay wakened, & sleeped nought. (Percy, 367–8, phrased similarly in HL, 457–8)
However, this more neutral or positive description is extremely rare. We are repeatedly confronted with a negative view of Winglayne, which ensures that the demands she makes are positioned as unreasonable. Whereas military strength is desirable and necessary for ruling women’s husbands in Guy of Warwick, Ipomadon, and Blanchardyn and Eglantine, Winglayne is perceived as taking this condition too far, demanding too much for any knight to fulfil. This is made to reflect upon her character rather than upon the failure of chivalric masculinity.
This negative view of Winglayne is also built into the plot of
Eger and Grime, as the marriage between Eger and Winglayne is brought about through deception – the pretence that it was Eger, and not Grime, who finally defeated Gray-steele.
4 See the discussion in Antony J. Hasler, ‘Romance and Its Discontents in Eger and Grime’, in The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, ed. by Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert (London: Routledge, 2013; first publ. 2000), pp. 200–18 (pp. 210–13). This is the foundation upon which their marriage rests, and the romance does not hide this but openly accepts and indeed celebrates it at the end of the Percy text, applauding Grime for having ‘proued soe weele’ that ‘he gate to his brother Sir Egar / an Erles Land & a ladye faire’ (1445–8). Praising Grime’s actions implies that there is nothing wrong with deceiving Winglayne into marriage and by extension suggests that she was wrong to make such an extreme condition for her marriage in the first place, and wrong to hold to this when Eger failed to meet it. Grime’s intervention does not only serve the romance’s primary focus on the love between him and Eger,
5 Their love has often been discussed in terms of the romance prioritising friendship: see Mabel Van Duzee, A Medieval Romance of Friendship: Eger and Grime (New York: Franklin, 1963), pp. 33–4, 38–9; Deanna Delmar Evans, ‘Scott’s Redgauntlet and the Late Medieval Romance of Friendship, Eger and Grime’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 31.1 (1999), 31–45; Michael Cichon, ‘“As ye have brewd, so shal ye drink”: The Proverbial Context of Eger and Grime’, in Medieval Romance, Medieval Contexts, ed. by Rhiannon Purdie and Michael Cichon (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011), pp. 35–46 (p. 42); Hasler, ‘Romance and Its Discontents’, p. 212; and, for a queer interpretation, Pugh, Sexuality and its Queer Discontents, pp. 123–44. I refer to their relationship as one of love rather than friendship to leave open the queer resonances of this romance. then, in keeping with the pattern of works like
Ywain and Gawain or
Amis and Amiloun, but also reaffirms the negative portrayal of Winglayne by suggesting that she deserves to be tricked into marriage.
6 Yvain or Ywain and Gawain have sometimes been proposed as sources for Eger and Grime: see James Wade, Fairies in Medieval Romance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 87; Laura A. Hibbard, Mediæval Romance in England: A Study of the Sources and Analogues of the Non-Cyclic Metrical Romances (New York: Franklin, 1924; repr. 1969), pp. 314–15; David E. Faris, ‘The Art of Adventure in the Middle English Romance: Ywain and Gawain, Eger and Grime’, Studia Neophilologica, 53.1 (1981), 91–100. For comparisons with Amis and Amiloun see William Calin, The Lily and the Thistle: The French Tradition and the Older Literature of Scotland – Essays in Criticism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), p. 213; Sergi Mainer, ‘Eger and Grime and the Boundaries of Courtly Romance’, in Joyous Sweit Imaginatioun: Essays on Scottish Literature in Honour of R. D. S. Jack, ed. by Sarah Carpenter and Sarah M. Dunnigan (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 77–95 (pp. 84–6); Hasler, ‘Romance and Its Discontents’, pp. 211, 212–13; Pugh, Sexuality and its Queer Discontents, pp. 123–5; Van Duzee, A Medieval Romance of Friendship, pp. 33–4, 38–9. Indeed, Winglayne apparently merits not only deception but also a taste of her own medicine through Eger’s scorn, as Grime instructs Eger to
looke thou as strange to her bee
as shee in times past hath beene to thee;
for & thou doe not as shee hath done before,
thou shalst loose my loue for euermore. (Percy, 1305–8)
Because this instruction comes from Grime and threatens a loss of the male protagonists’ all-important love, the reader is encouraged to agree that Winglayne deserves Eger’s scorn. The idea that this is a taste of her own medicine is explicit in Huntington-Laing, where Eger exclaims ‘as ye have brewd, so shal ye drink’ (2384), this proverbial statement, as Michael Cichon argues, ‘us[ing] aspects of traditional wisdom to endorse the action of the narrative and the so-called wisdom that informs it’.
7 Cichon, ‘The Proverbial Context of Eger and Grime’, pp. 43–4. The Percy Folio text may indicate more discomfort with Eger’s feigned scorn, as here the Earl offers Grime ‘40
li of Land, / of florences that were fayre & round’ (1349–50) to reconcile Eger with Winglayne, the narrator commenting ‘I hope that was ethe to doe’ (1352). That Grime profits from a problem that he has created may question the motivation for Eger’s scorn, but given the acquisitive focus of this romance overall (the ending of the Percy Folio text openly celebrates the protagonists’ material acquisitions, 1445–52), it is possible that Grime’s easily won reward is supposed to be applauded and Eger’s scorn viewed as a just rebuke for Winglayne’s earlier pride. The romance drive towards a happy ending is able to silence any reservations about deception or monetary motives. Indeed,
Eger and Grime suggests that these are part of romance fulfilment: acquisitive and economic fantasies are included within the desires that ‘are, or rather
can be, satisfied’ within this genre.
8 Nicola McDonald, ‘Desire Out of Order and Undo Your Door’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 34 (2012), 247–75 (p. 255). Emphasis in original. The only person to question the means by which Eger and Winglayne’s marriage is brought about is Winliane herself, at the end of Huntington-Laing, where she considers it a serious enough issue to merit their separation:
Now may I live in lasting pain:
I should never have made you band,
Ye should never have had mine hand,
And ye should never have been mine,
Had I kend it had been sir Grahame. (HL, 2822–6)
Although the condition Winliane argues was invalid (Eger’s false claim to have defeated every knight he has fought) is a hyperbolic demand typical of romance literature, her reasoning seems to draw on medieval legal precedents for divorce. Her complaint recalls the law of divorce
a vinculo, which constituted ‘a release from the bond of marriage, granted on the grounds that the marriage had never been valid’: ‘ye should never have been mine’, she states.
9 Conor McCarthy, Marriage in Medieval England: Law, Literature and Practice (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004), p. 140. Although McCarthy focuses upon an English context, Karras notes that ‘the canon law rules about the formation and dissolution of marriage were well established and uniform across Europe’: Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 79. However, while this may endow Winliane’s complaint with a quasi-legal status, the romance is quick to refute her claim of injustice, asserting
Thus she was so set all to ill,
As wanton women that gets their will:
Amongst thousands there is not one
Can govern them but wit of none. (HL, 2827–30)
Rather than the wrong Eger has done to Winliane, this passage focuses on the wrong Winliane does to Eger by separating from him, discrediting her complaint of deception. This drive to demerit Winliane suggestively aligns with Huntington-Laing’s concluding marriage between Eger and Lilias, a marriage that implies that Winliane does not deserve a happy ending because of her proud adherence to her vow at all costs, while Eger does. Winliane’s exclusion provides a definitive final condemnation, which positions her as the problem rather than as a figure who reveals the problems inherent within chivalric masculinity.
Unlike the Fere and Eglantine, Winglayne is not the sole ruler of her lands, as her father is still alive, suggesting that her negative depiction is not prompted by her threatening autonomy. Instead, Winglayne’s negative portrayal seems to be motivated by the difficult questions the condition she sets for her marriage poses, questions that reflect upon the failure of chivalric masculinity. The Fere’s conditions are primarily aspirational, seeking to marry
the best knyghte
Of all this world in armus bryghte
Assayde vnder his shelde. (118–20)
In contrast, Winglayne issues a prohibition: she will not take a husband
without he would with swords dent
win euery battell where he went. (Percy, 13–14)
She adheres strictly to this prohibition by rejecting Eger after his defeat and, in the Huntington-Laing version, separating from him on discovering his deception. While romance often focuses on exceptional knights capable of the most demanding deeds,
Eger and Grime raises a question the genre rarely addresses: what happens when a romance hero is defeated?
10 There is some acknowledgement of this possibility elsewhere, including in Malory’s Morte Darthur, when Palomydes unhorses Tristram and Lamerok: see Le Morte Darthur, ed. by P. J. C. Field, 2 vols (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), i, 379. The difficulties posed by this question seem to be what motivates the negative representation of Winglayne, ensuring that masculinity can be questioned but that challenges to it are refracted through Winglayne and thus dissociated from the author and reader.
Eger and Grime, as many critics have suggested, is preoccupied with masculinity above all else, with frequent references to ‘manhood’ (Percy, 68, 81, 84, 90, 668), a prioritisation of love between men, and the unsubtle symbolic castration figured by Gray-steele cutting off defeated knights’ little fingers.
11 On this symbolic castration, see Wade, Fairies in Medieval Romance, p. 88; Pugh, Sexuality and its Queer Discontents, pp. 123–44; Cooper, The English Romance in Time, p. 82; Calin, The Lily and the Thistle, p. 218; Mainer, ‘The Boundaries of Courtly Romance’, p. 82. Yet the romance provides no convincing answers to the questions that Winglayne’s vow raises about defeat and knightly identity.
12 Mainer makes a similar argument, although he sees the romance as ‘a consciously self-parodic meta-romance’ because of this, which I do not: see ‘The Boundaries of Courtly Romance’, p. 94. Likewise, Hasler questions ‘how far […] Grime’s extemporized romance make[s] good Eger’s loss’, although he proposes a different reason for this, approaching the romance through psychoanalytic theories: ‘Romance and Its Discontents’, p. 216. Eger’s defeat is resolved only through deception and his masculinity is reinforced only by association with Grime. This diverges from the analogous tale of Sadius and Galo in Walter Map’s
De Nugis Curialium, where Galo turns down Sadius’s offer to fight the giant in his place.
13 For discussions of this story and its relation to Eger and Grime, see Neil Cartlidge, ‘“Vinegar upon Nitre”? Walter Map’s Romance of “Sadius and Galo”’, in Cultural Translations in Medieval Romance, pp. 117–33; Wade, Fairies in Medieval Romance, pp. 91–3. In contrast, the focus of chivalric exceptionality in
Eger and Grime passes from Eger to Grime. While this may seem to reassert masculinity, replacing Eger with Grime as the triumphant hero of the romance whose prowess is infallible, this transference draws attention to the provisional nature of masculine prowess. If Eger had formerly ‘euermore […] wan the honour’ (Percy, 31), only to be defeated in battle, might not the same thing happen to Grime? Huntington-Laing partly explores this possibility, as Eger is apparently restored as the hero of the romance after Grahame’s death. He goes crusading, where
A better man then sir Eger,
Was not counted that day to live.
14 HL, lines 2846–7. Mainer does not view this as an uncritical idealisation of Eger, however, as he argues that ‘by the end of the fifteenth century, crusades had partly or completely lost their originally idealised significance’: ‘The Boundaries of Courtly Romance’, p. 93.This secondary transferral of exceptional chivalric masculinity from Grahame back to Eger again underscores the fragility of masculine identities that are dependent on the outcome of each battle, an iterative and always incomplete performance. As Pugh suggests,
Under cultural conditions in which manhood always needs to be proved, it faces the likelihood of eventually being disproved. Masculinity must be repeatedly performed, but the performance is so complex and demanding that even the most masculine of men will eventually trip up in its enactment.
15 Sexuality and its Queer Discontents, p. 127.Eger and Grime acknowledges the possibility that chivalric masculinity may fail, but if Grime appears happy to accept the possibility of failure (Percy, 87–9), the romance itself does not seem comfortable with the idea that knights are ‘as like to loose as win’ (Percy, 354). Instead, it attempts to reassert masculine prowess first through Grime’s defeat of Gray-steele and then, in Huntington-Laing, through the attempt to rehabilitate Eger with his victories at Rhodes and his marriage to Lilias. Yet this does not seem to be successful because it draws attention to the provisional nature of chivalric masculinity.
Eger and Grime arguably occupies a place in literary history where concerns about masculinity and sexual dissidence were particularly likely to be taken seriously by readers. This romance was read (and listened to) by people from a wide range of social classes, in the context of changes in the class system such as the emergence of the gentry as a distinct and significant class, a cultural development that Johnston has argued profoundly impacted the romance genre, including works like
Eger and Grime.
16 See Romance and the Gentry. These societal changes must also have affected contemporary understandings of and performances of gender roles.
17 See Pugh, Sexuality and its Queer Discontents, p. 52. This is not to posit a ‘crisis of masculinity’ in late medieval Scotland and England: as Derek Neal has argued, ‘these crises have happened rather too often […] for the concept to have much use’.
18 Derek G. Neal, The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 6. But as a later medieval romance read by different social classes, which consciously reflects on the problematic results of class systems like primogeniture and invokes a crusading context associated with the promotion of particular kinds of masculinity,
Eger and Grime is well-placed to testify to, comment on, and either exacerbate or reassure concerns about changes in the performance and celebration of particular kinds of masculinity.
19 See Lewis, ‘Chivalry, masculinity, and crusading’, pp. 311–13. Yet
its response to Eger’s failure relies upon deception (as does
Ipomadon’s approach to chivalric masculinity): because no better resolution can be offered to the questions it raises, these questions must be contained within a character who is represented negatively, distancing these problems from the romance’s writer, though leaving them open for the reader to pursue.
Eger and Grime illustrates a shift in views and uses of the proud lady in romance literature, perhaps in response to changing understandings of chivalric masculinity. This process undertakes a further step in Malory’s portrayal of Pelleas and Ettarde.