3 ‘Ne feolle hit þe of cunde / To spuse beo me bunde’: Resisting Mésalliance

Four romances in particular stand out as offering especially significant portrayals of attempts to resist mésalliance: the early Middle English romances of King Horn, Amis and Amiloun, and Havelok, and the later Wife of Bath’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer.4 King Horn is usually thought to date from c. 1225–75; Rosamund Allen argues for the 1270s: ‘The Date and Provenance of King Horn: Some Interim Reassessments’, in Medieval English Studies Presented to George Kane, ed. by Edward Donald Kennedy, Ronald Waldron, and Joseph S. Wittig (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1988), pp. 99–125 (pp. 102–3, 122, 125). Amis and Amiloun dates from either the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, Havelok from the late thirteenth century, and The Wife of Bath’s Tale from the late fourteenth century. These works all devote significant attention to how and why relationships between partners of (apparently) differing status might be rejected or negotiated. In doing so, they go against the grain of the more common romance trope of social status as an external barrier to a relationship, where it may be mutually desired by the people involved but face opposition from parents or other figures. This motif occurs in works like Le Fresne and Lay le Freine, Amadas et Ydoine, Sir Eglamour of Artois, William of Palerne, The Franklin’s Tale, Sir Torrent of Portingale, The Squire of Low Degree (Undo Your Door), and William Caxton’s Paris and Vienne. This pattern is often thought to ‘serve the wishful thinking of male readers’ for whom ‘marriage provided the best way to rise in life’, as social disparity usually, although not always, takes the form of a higher-status woman being paired with a lower-status man.5 Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 225. This gender imbalance is also a feature of the romances discussed in this chapter, as all but The Wife of Bath’s Tale focus on relationships between higher-status women and (apparently) lower-status men. The frequency of this form of status imbalance suggests that there are gendered differences in who is able to ‘marry up’ in romance. But while the works explored here depict men’s status as open to improvement through marriage, they also offer a caution to any such aspiration, exposing the anxieties and coercive dynamics that might characterise such relationships. These works therefore reflect on, question, and even challenge the priorities of other romances, where the offer of improved status through marriage is more readily accepted as an emphatic good.

King Horn, Amis and Amiloun, Havelok, and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale are not the only romances that portray social status as a reason to resist a romantic or marital relationship. Several other works discussed in this book, including Sir Degrevant, Guy of Warwick, Ipomadon, Eger and Grime, and Sir Bevis of Hampton also engage with this theme, but subordinate it to another kind of resistance to love, such as romantic a(nti)pathy or resistance on the basis of race or faith. They offer, however, a useful background and complement to the romances explored in this chapter, where status emerges as a primary issue. As status was a key concern in real-life marital arrangements, it is perhaps unsurprising that the works discussed here often focus on the context of marriage, although they also frequently emphasise love within such relationships. Rymenhild tells Horn ‘þu schalt haue me to þi wif’ (408), but she also says she has ‘þe luued stronge’ (304). In Havelok, Goldeborw emphatically refuses to ‘wedde’, ‘but he were king or kinges eyr’, while Havelok asks ‘hwat sholde Ich with wif do?’; love and marriage are eventually aligned, however, as ‘so mikel loue was hem bitwene’.6 Havelok, ed. by G. V. Smithers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), lines 1114, 1116, 1138, 2968. The loathly lady of The Wife of Bath’s Tale demands that the knight ‘me take unto thy wyf’, but their relationship eventually brings them ‘parfit joye’.7 Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 116–22 (lines 1055, 1258). Belisaunt and Amis’s relationship in Amis and Amiloun is more ambiguous, as Belisaunt forces Amis into a sexual relationship with her, perhaps partly as a marital strategy. The marital qualities of their relationship are emphasised in the language of Belisaunt’s demand that Amis

The relationship between romance and real-life perspectives on social status is a complex one: while depicting an heiress desiring a subordinate man goes against the priorities of real upper-class marriages, the common desire for social advancement through the medieval marriage market also suggests that social mobility is not always transgressive. Cathy Hume notes that although ‘parity of social class was thought crucial for the maintenance of the individual’s and family’s social position’, ‘marriages between adjacent classes of society were commonplace: Rosenthal shows that only two-thirds of his sample of English peers, for example, married nobility, and similarly merchant daughters frequently married the gentry and the gentry the nobility’.10 Cathy Hume, Chaucer and the Cultures of Love and Marriage (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), pp. 16–17. See also Barbara J. Harris, English Aristocratic Women, 1450–1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 43–4. She also suggests that ‘an oldest son would probably marry a bride of equal status or financial prospects, whereas daughters and younger sons would marry into families of lower status or with less money – but ideally still make some kind of useful local alliance’.11 Hume, Chaucer and the Cultures of Love and Marriage, p. 15. The focus on increasing wealth and status; making socially advantageous alliances; the intermarriage between the nobility, gentry, and merchant classes; and the likelihood of younger sons and daughters marrying slightly lower-status partners point to the presence of social mobility within the medieval marriage market. While families sought to increase their wealth and status through marriage, logically the people who provided this increase in wealth and status were themselves marrying people of a lower status or of less wealth (while not necessarily reducing their own social standing). Of course, I am not suggesting that interclass marriages were not controversial and transgressive: that they were is clearly evidenced by the much-discussed case of Margery Paston’s clandestine marriage to her family’s bailiff, Richard Calle, which met with hostility and threats from her family.12 See Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, ed. by Norman Davis, EETS, s. s., 20, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; first publ. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), i, 541 (letter 332), 342–3 (letter 203). But attitudes to social status are more complex than one example conveys: representations of relationships between people of different status need not always be socially subversive. They replicate an important part of the medieval marriage market, albeit often in a more extreme way; similarly, the balance between resistance and negotiation in the examples I discuss may also reflect real-life behavioural expectations. The romances discussed in this chapter both shape and echo understandings of appropriate conduct, and their focus on conduct intertwines with their use of consensual and coercive forms of negotiation.