King Horn,
Amis and Amiloun, and
Havelok (discussed in the next section) are all translated from earlier Anglo-Norman or continental French works, but the changes they make to their sources and antecedents indicate a particular interest in social status upon the part of the Middle English redactors. The precise connections between the Middle English and Anglo-Norman versions of the Horn and Amis stories are uncertain: Judith Weiss suggests that both
King Horn and
Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild ‘appear ultimately to depend on the
Romance of Horn, though in ways impossible to unravel totally’,
1 Judith Weiss, ‘Introduction’, in The Birth of Romance in England: The ‘Romance of Horn’, The ‘Folie Tristan’, The ‘Lai of Haveloc’, and ‘Amis and Amilun’, ed. & trans. by Weiss, FRETS, 4 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2009), pp. 1–43 (p. 5). Joseph Hall’s approach to the relationships between these texts is now outdated: ‘The Story’, in King Horn, ed. by Hall, pp. li–lvi. while Susan Dannenbaum argues that despite the similarities between the Anglo-Norman and Middle English
Amis narratives, they ‘cannot be considered strictly as source and descendant’.
2 Susan Dannenbaum [Crane], ‘Insular Tradition in the Story of Amis and Amiloun’, Neophilologus, 67.4 (1983), 611–22 (p. 621). See further Françoise Le Saux, ‘From Ami to Amys: Translation and Adaptation in the Middle English Amys and Amylion’, in The Formation of Culture in Medieval Britain: Celtic, Latin, and Norman Influences on English Music, Literature, History, and Art, ed. by Françoise Le Saux (Lewiston: Mellen, 1995), pp. 111–27 (p. 111). John Ford has subsequently suggested that the redactor of the Middle English
Amis may have used an Anglo-Norman manuscript similar to Karlsruhe and connected to the other Anglo-Norman manuscripts, as well as drawing upon remembered knowledge of the Old French
Ami et Amile in a version close to that of Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, français 860 (MS Colbert 658).
3 John Ford, ‘From Poésie to Poetry: Remaniement and Mediaeval Techniques of French-to-English Translation of Verse Romance’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2000), pp. 57, 286–7 <http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2690/> [accessed 20 January 2021]. The manuscript has been given a new call number since Ford’s thesis was written, which I use here. The textual relationships between the Anglo-Norman (and Old French) and Middle English versions are complex, but the Middle English works typically emphasise issues of status more than their antecedents.
In Thomas’s
Roman de Horn, Rigmel’s father, King Hunlaf, is well aware that Horn is of royal blood: when Horn washes ashore in Brittany, he tells the King and Herland the steward that he is ‘fiz Aälof, al bon rei coruné, / Ki out a justisier Suddene, le regné’ [‘Aalof’s son, the good crowned king, ruler of the realm of Suddene’].
4 Thomas, The Romance of Horn, ed. by Mildred K. Pope, Anglo-Norman Texts, 9–10, 2 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 1955), i, lines 169–70; Thomas, ‘The Romance of Horn’, in The Birth of Romance in England, trans. by Judith Weiss, pp. 45–137 (p. 48). Hunlaf then agrees to protect Horn and ‘vus aïderai purchacer voz regnez’ (336) [‘help you acquire your kingdom’, p. 51]. Thomas thus indicates that Hunlaf knows Horn’s status throughout his wardship and intends Horn to regain his kingdom when he is of age. In contrast, Horn’s identity is much vaguer in the Middle English versions. In Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.4.27.2, an early manuscript of
King Horn,
5 MS Gg.4.27.2 was previously thought to be the oldest manuscript, dated to c. 1250–60, but Allen notes that the more recent estimate of c. 1300 for the Cambridge manuscript would postdate Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108 (dated to c. 1290). Nonetheless, she describes the Cambridge manuscript as ‘the most accurate MS of KH (though neither the earliest nor the most complete)’: Allen, ‘The Date and Provenance of King Horn’, pp. 103, 116. Horn tells King Aylmar
We beoþ of Suddenne,
Icome of gode kenne,
Of Cristene blode
& kynges suþe gode. (175–8)
Horn alludes to his status, being of ‘kynges suþe gode’, but provides no further information, and Aylmar does not offer to help restore Horn’s kingdom as Hunlaf did. More significantly, in the other manuscripts of King Horn (London, British Library, MS Harley 2253 and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108), Horn does not allude to his royal lineage. Instead, the line referring to kingly descent is replaced with the more general ‘of cunne swyþe gode’ (Harley, 186) and ‘of swiþe gode’ (Laud, 188), suggesting that Aylmar remains unaware of Horn’s royal lineage in these versions. This opens up greater possibilities for exploring the challenges and opportunities differing status can pose to love.
In both the Anglo-Norman and Middle English versions, Horn tries to reject Rigmel/Rymenhild’s affection because he deems himself unworthy. In the Anglo-Norman Roman, he declares
ne sui si vaillant
Ke me devez offrir de vus chose taunt grant.
Povre sui orphanin, n’ai de terre plein gant.
6 The Romance of Horn, I, lines 1110–12. ‘I am not worthy of so great an offer. I am a poor orphan, I haven’t a scrap of land’: trans. by Weiss, p. 65.In the Middle English, he insists ‘ihc am ibore to lowe’, ‘ihc am icome of þralle’ (417, 419). Even these claims indicate a slightly different approach to Horn’s status, as in the Roman Horn correctly says that he is a ‘povre […] orphanin’, implying that his lack of land results from his orphaned status, while in King Horn he falsely declares he is ‘ibore to lowe’, ‘icome of þralle’ – which, as the rightful ruler of Suddenne, he is not. More significantly, in the Roman Rigmel refutes Horn’s claim, saying
Ke me voillez amer dreiz est que vus requere:
Del parage estes bien, kar reis fu vostre pere
E de real lignage fud néé vostre mere,
E vostre aol si fud d’Alemagne enperere.
7 The Romance of Horn, I, lines 1122–5. ‘It is only right that I should ask you to love me: you are of noble birth, for a king was your father, your mother was of royal stock and your grandfather the emperor of Germany’: trans. by Weiss, p. 65.In contrast, in
King Horn Rymenhild ‘gan […] mis lyke / & sore gan to sike’ (425–6), indicating the Middle English author’s differing approach to Horn’s status: here, Rymenhild cannot refute Horn’s claim because in this version Horn’s true status is unknown in her father’s court, meaning he may indeed be ‘ibore to lowe’. The ‘essentially hypothetical’ obstacle of different status in the
Roman becomes more significant in the Middle English redaction, offering opportunities to reflect on how status might impact resistance to love.
8 John H. Perry, ‘Opening the Secret: Marriage, Narration, and Nascent Subjectivity in Middle English Romance’, Philological Quarterly, 76.2 (1997), 133–57 (p. 146). That this is an innovation of the Middle English redactor
is further supported by the absence of this focus on status in the later Middle English
Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild, which is thought to be an independent adaptation from the
Roman; their differing representations of status in turn support this.
9 Judith Weiss, ‘Introduction’, in The Birth of Romance in England, p. 5. Matthew Holford provides a good overview of and argument for the significantly different emphases of Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild: ‘History and Politics in Horn Child and Maiden Rimnild’, Review of English Studies, 57.229 (2006), 149–68. Horn Childe makes social status even less of an issue than the
Roman, as Horn is not only presented to King Houlac as Haþeolf’s son, but he makes no attempt to reject a relationship with Rimnild on the basis of differing status, accepting her love as soon as she offers it.
10 ‘Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild’, in King Horn, ed. by Hall, pp. 179–92 (lines 253–71, 409–14). The differing representation of Horn and Rymenhild’s relationship in terms of social status can be attributed to the redactor of
King Horn, then, and can perhaps be related to the different audience and social context of this redaction, as I will explore later.
The Middle English
Amis and Amiloun, written within a century of
King Horn, focuses on the relationship between the eponymous heroes. The pursuit of Amis by the Duke’s daughter, Belisaunt, is important to the plot because when Amis is challenged by the jealous steward to accept a fight in which he is guilty rather than innocent of engaging in a sexual relationship with Belisaunt, Amiloun is required to take up the trial by combat for his sake. This romance survives in four different manuscripts: Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates’ MS 19.2.1 (the Auchinleck manuscript); London, British Library, MS Egerton 2862; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 326 (Bodleian 21900); London, British Library, MS Harley 2386. The Auchinleck manuscript is closest to the original redaction, which (like
King Horn) differs from its Anglo-Norman antecedent in its representation of resistance to
mésalliance.
11 See the discussion in Ford, ‘From Poésie to Poetry’, pp. 56–8.In Amys e Amillyoun, Amys does not reject Florie (as Belisaunt is known here) outright. Instead, we are told
Quideit que ele fuit devee
Qe ele pout pur hounte descoverir
Sa volunté e son desir.
12 Amys e Amillyoun, ed. by Hideka Fukui, Plain Texts Series, 7 (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1990), lines 266–8. ‘He thought she was out of her mind’, ‘that she could shamefully reveal her will and her desire’: ‘Amis and Amilun’, in The Birth of Romance in England, trans. by Judith Weiss, pp. 171–88 (p. 175 and 175 n. 23).Amys seems shocked because Florie is so open about her desires – not, in this version, because of their differing status (although other versions of
Amys e Amillyoun are less clear about this: neither Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 50 nor Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, MS 345 include the line about Florie’s desire, meaning that in these texts Amys’s shock perhaps could be interpreted as relating to social status).
13 See Weiss, ‘Amis and Amilun’, p. 175; Anglo-Norman ‘Amys e Amilioun’: The Text of Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, MS 345 (olim Codex Durlac 38) in parallel with London, British Library, MS Royal 12 C. XII, ed. by John Ford, Medium Ævum Monographs, 27 (Oxford: Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 2011), Karlsruhe MS, lines 446–9. Florie does not wait for Amys to respond before she upbraids him, and the most we hear of Amys’s reluctance is that he ‘talent ne aveit / Q’il mesprist vers son seignur’ (270–1) [‘did not want to harm his lord’, p. 175] and refuses to
Vers vous ne mesprendroie mye
Par quei vous en averez vilenye
Ne de vostre corps hontage.
14 Amys e Amillyoun, lines 297–9. ‘Do you wrong, to bring you discourtesy or bodily shame’: trans. by Weiss, p. 176.Although a concern with status is indicated by Florie’s outrage that Amys will not ‘me dedeignez avere amye! / Tant gentils hommes m’ount prié’ (280–1) [‘deign to have me as your mistress: so many noble men have begged me’, p. 175], this is not developed. Likewise, after they marry it is clear Florie was of higher status, since
est mout en astage,
Car cru li est par mariage
Grant seignurie e grant honur.
15 Amys e Amillyoun, lines 771–3. ‘He had risen to a high rank, for through marriage he accrued great power and great estates’: trans. by Weiss, p. 182.But while Amys ascends socially by marrying Florie, the exact disparity between them is unclear. Amys and Amillyoun are identified as ‘fiz […] de barons’ (11) [barons’ sons]; when Amillyoun marries ‘une gentile femme […] / Qe fille d’un counte’ (172–3) [‘a high-born lady, a count’s daughter’, p. 174], we are told that
Bien furent entre eux couplés
De parage e de beautez.
16 Amys e Amillyoun, lines 179–80. ‘They were well matched in beauty and rank’: trans. by Weiss, p. 174.As Florie’s father is also a count, this suggests a similarity in rank between Florie and Amys. Florie’s father, after his initial anger, does not seem reluctant to allow Florie to marry Amys because of Amys’s social status, as when he sees Amillyoun (pretending to be Amys) arrive to fight the steward,
li dist suef en son oraille
Qe, s’il pout deffendre la bataille,
Sa fille a femme ly dorreyt
E de tote sa terre heir li freit.
17 Amys e Amillyoun, lines 581–4. ‘He whispered in his ear that if he could win the fight, he would give him his daughter to wife and make him heir to all his land’: trans. by Weiss, p. 179.In Amys e Amillyoun, then, there is some disparity between Amys and Florie, but its extent is unclear and it is not highlighted in Amys’s attempt to reject Florie, which focuses instead on his position as her father’s retainer and his fear of slander.
In contrast, the Middle English Amis and Amiloun makes social status central to Amis’s resistance. Although Amis and Amiloun remain barons’ sons in this version, the romance reduces the suggestions of equality between Amis and Belisaunt, for example by telling us only that Amiloun marries ‘a leuedy briȝt in bour’ (334), not that he marries a count’s daughter with whom he is well matched. Moreover, here Amis explicitly rejects Belisaunt because of their social inequality, saying
Kinges sones & emperour
Nar non to gode to þe;
Certes, þan were it michel vnriȝt,
Þi loue to lain opon a kniȝt
Þat naþ noiþer lond no fe. (596–600)
Amis does also protest against doing ‘mi lord þis deshonour’ (607), but the disparity between his status and Belisaunt’s is more central to his rejection of her. In this focus upon social class, the Middle English
Amis seems to develop an emphasis of the Old French
Ami et Amile that is not carried over into the Anglo-Norman
Amys. As Ford notes, Amis’s focus on class recalls the Old French Amile’s rejection of Belissant (the roles of Ami and Amile are swapped between the Old French and Anglo-Norman redactions, with the Middle English adhering to the Anglo-Norman pattern), which also focuses on their differing status.
18 Ford, ‘From Poésie to Poetry’, p. 118; Ami et Amile: Chanson de Geste, ed. by Peter F. Dembowski, Classiques français du moyen âge, 97 (Paris: Champion, 1969), lines 631–42; trans. in Ami and Amile: A Medieval Tale of Friendship, trans. by Samuel N. Rosenberg and Samuel Danon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996; first publ. York, SC: French Literature Publications Company, 1981), p. 50. In addition, the Old French
Ami also focuses on class in the episode where Belissant overcomes Amile’s resistance by climbing into his bed and allowing him to think that she is a servant (with whom he is willing to have sex). This episode is not recounted in the Middle English
Amis, whether because the author did not know of it, did not remember it, or did not approve of it. However, the Middle English
Amis and the Old French
Ami both explore issues of status, albeit in rather different ways: the Old French poet’s inclusion of Amile’s willingness to have sex with a lower-class girl seems to go against the Middle English poet’s focus on conveying morally and socially appropriate behaviour through Amis’s initial rejection of Belisaunt.
The Middle English
King Horn and
Amis and Amiloun both invite reflection upon appropriate conduct, but they draw upon different frameworks of consent or coercion in doing so. While discussions of coercion in romance have often focused on more extreme cases, mostly in relation to men’s sexual coercion of women,
19 See, for example, Amy N. Vines, ‘Invisible Woman: Rape as a Chivalric Necessity in Medieval Romance’, in Sexual Culture in the Literature of Medieval Britain, ed. by Amanda Hopkins, Robert Allen Rouse, and Cory James Rushton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), pp. 161–80; Corinne Saunders, Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001); Kathryn Gravdal, ‘The Poetics of Rape Law: Chrétien de Troyes’s Arthurian Romance’, in Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), pp. 42–71. Some critics have focused on the sexual violence experienced by men in romance, but have concentrated on the more extreme examples: Elizabeth Harper, ‘Teaching the Potiphar’s Wife Motif in Marie de France’s Lanval’, in Teaching Rape in the Medieval Literature Classroom: Approaches to Difficult Texts, ed. by Alison Gulley (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2018), pp. 128–37; David Grubbs, ‘The Knight Coerced: Two Cases of Raped Men in Chivalric Romance’, in Teaching Rape in the Medieval Literature Classroom, pp. 164–82; Catherine Batt, ‘Malory and Rape’, Arthuriana, 7.3 (1997), 78–99. the works discussed here highlight the extent to which ‘consent has to be read through power dynamics’ – and not exclusively gendered power.
20 Lucia Akard and Alice Raw, ‘Global Response: Futures of Medieval Consent’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 44 (2022), ‘Colloquium: Historicizing Consent: Bodies, Wills, Desires’, ed. by Carissa M. Harris and Fiona Somerset, 363–7 (p. 363). Horn and Amis are both wooed by the high-status daughter of their lord, a lord who has fostered them and to whom they therefore owe loyalty and gratitude. While this might seem to be a fantasy scenario, given the power and wealth the women possess, Horn’s and Amis’s resistance to this apparent fantasy brings the coercive dynamics of relationships between people of unequal status to the fore. Status disparity does seem to have been a risk factor for the rape and assault of women in the Middle Ages, according to the evidence of court cases; it also features in the literary genre of the
pastourelle, where such inequalities are more pronounced than in the romances discussed here.
21 See Katherine Harvey, The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages (London: Reakton, 2021), pp. 188, 192–3; Lucia Akard, ‘Unequal Power and Sexual Consent: The Case of Cassotte la Joye’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 44 (2022), ‘Colloquium: Historicizing Consent’, ed. by Harris and Somerset, 285–92; Sarah Baechle, Carissa M. Harris, and Elizaveta Strakhov, ‘Introduction: Recovering the Pastourelle’, in Rape Culture and Female Resistance in Late Medieval Literature, ed. by Baechle, Harris, and Strakhov (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2022), pp. 1–14; Baechle, Harris, and Strakhov, ‘Reassessing the Pastourelle: Rape Culture, #MeToo, and the Literature of Survival’, in Rape Culture and Female Resistance, pp. 17–28; Carissa M. Harris, ‘Pastourelle Encounters: Rape, Consent, and Sexual Negotiation’, in Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), pp. 103–49. Horn’s and Amis’s situations may reflect other, more specific, preoccupations with status, however: although Horn’s situation is extreme, given his dependence on Aylmar because of his exile, Noël James Menuge notes that it ‘touch[es] briefly upon wardship issues’, providing some engagement with the relatively common practice of wardship in the case of an orphaned (or fatherless) child.
22 Noël James Menuge, Medieval English Wardship in Romance and Law (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), p. 6. Amis’s situation is perhaps more akin to the wider experiences of the medieval nobility and gentry, as within these social classes many ‘children were sent to other households for their education’, as Amis and Amiloun are after the Duke volunteers to foster them in his service from the age of twelve.
23 Women of the English Nobility and Gentry, 1066–1500, ed. & trans. by Jennifer Ward (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 48. See also Ruth Mazo Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), pp. 29–30; Nicholas Orme, From Childhood to Chivalry: The Education of the English Kings and Aristocracy 1066–1530 (London: Methuen, 1984), p. 45. Horn’s and Amis’s situations therefore share some similarities with the potential experiences of the audiences for these romances (discussed later in this chapter), illuminating some of the possible difficulties and vulnerabilities associated with such experiences.
24 While each may have reached varied social audiences, some of the manuscript versions of these romances have been associated with a middle- to upper-class readership: see Derek Pearsall, ‘The Auchinleck Manuscript Forty Years On’, in The Auchinleck Manuscript: New Perspectives, ed. by Susanna Fein (York: York Medieval Press, 2016), pp. 11–25 (p. 13); Susanna Greer Fein, ‘The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, Volume 2: Introduction’, in The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, ed. by Fein, trans. by Susanna Greer Fein, David Raybin, and Jan Ziolkowski, TEAMS, 3 vols (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2014), ii, 1–13 (pp. 10–11); see also Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 13–14, 32.As young men raised by another family, Horn and Amis occupy a somewhat precarious position. Being pursued by their lord’s daughter puts them at the mercy of this high-status woman, who holds a more established position in court than they do. The men are also placed at the mercy of their lord, should he discover this relationship. Parents are often concerned about children forming attachments to foster-children or wards in other romances, such as
William of Palerne and
Sir Torrent of Portingale.
King Horn and
Amis and Amiloun pick up on this anxiety and to some extent invert it, presenting it from the protagonist’s perspective: while Amis is concerned about doing ‘mi lord […] deshonour’ (607), Horn alludes to his relationship with Rymenhild’s father by reminding her that he is ‘fundling bifalle’ (420). In both cases, the vulnerability of Horn and Amis to their lord’s revenge is later made clear by Aylmar exiling Horn and the Duke attacking Amis and wishing to have him executed. These episodes thus highlight the potentially serious consequences of relationships considered disparaging. However, it is also clear that, despite the men’s attempts to resist their lord’s daughter, she wields significant enough influence that to refuse her carries its own risk, as Amis in particular discovers. That the women hold greater social and political power in their fathers’ courts, while the young men occupy a more precarious position, separated from their family, suggests that coercive power dynamics were recognised as operating along the vector of status as well as gender.
25 For a contrasting view of this dynamic in the Anglo-Norman Roman de Horn, see Nicholas Perkins, The gift of narrative in medieval England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021), p. 35. King Horn and
Amis and Amiloun take different approaches to resolving these coercive dynamics, Horn negotiating with Rymenhild to retain control over the situation, while
Amis and Amiloun directly confronts the issue of coercion and demonstrates the potential vulnerability of men in situations akin to Horn and Amis.
In
King Horn, Rymenhild is established as a powerful figure who initiates a relationship with Horn on her terms. He is brought to her bower, ensuring their encounter takes place at a time and in a location of Rymenhild’s choosing. The bower carries specific implications for understanding the power dynamics between this couple: Hollie Morgan has argued that ‘there was a cultural understanding that women had a degree of power in the chamber, which they did not have elsewhere’, suggesting that ‘male anxieties surrounding the powers allowed to women […] manifest themselves in stories in which women become powerful when they are in the chamber’, a situation that seems to be reflected in
King Horn.
26 Hollie L. S. Morgan, Beds and Chambers in Late Medieval England: Readings, Representations and Realities (York: York Medieval Press, 2017), pp. 188, 213. Rymenhild is clearly marked as the active partner determining their actions: she ‘tok him bi þe honde’, ‘sette him on pelle’, gives him wine, ‘makede him faire chere / & tok him abute þe swere’, ‘him custe’ often, and instructs Horn ‘þu schalt haue me to þi wif’ (400–8). Although Megan Leitch argues that Rimnild in
Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild exhibits more ‘strategic awareness’ of how to ‘manipulat[e] her space both to declare erotic intent and to seek to elicit a similar response’, as she ‘strategize[s] inwardly about what she will do’, Rymenhild’s actions perform a similar kind of spatial manipulation and erotic control, the lack of a thoughtful strategy perhaps indicating the reduced focus upon internal subjectivity in earlier Middle English romances rather than the absence of such a strategy altogether.
27 Megan G. Leitch, ‘Enter the Bedroom: Managing Space for the Erotic in Middle English Romance’, in Sexual Culture in the Literature of Medieval Britain, pp. 39–53 (p. 44). Indeed, Rymenhild’s agency has been developed from the
Roman, where it is not so pronounced, in part because Herland’s intermediary comments dilute the focus on Rigmel.
28 See The Romance of Horn, I, lines 1075–88; trans. by Weiss, p. 65. While the Middle English Rymenhild starts to shift the balance of power by asking Horn to ‘haue of me rewþe’ (409), aligning more with the
Roman,
where Rigmel says ‘joe vus otrei m’amur, si l’estes otreiant’ (1104) [‘I offer you my love, if you consent’, p. 65], Rymenhild’s control over the situation at this point in
King Horn remains evident, hinting at the potentially coercive dynamics of seduction by a higher-status woman.
However, King Horn ultimately diverts the potential for coercion, as Horn manoeuvres the relationship from one controlled by Rymenhild to one that benefits him. He initially rejects Rymenhild in terms that clearly indicate the problems with an apparent mésalliance, telling her
Ne feolle hit þe of cunde
To spuse beo me bunde. (421–2)
But this attempted rejection is short-lived, as he begins to change his mind barely ten lines later. Addressing Rymenhild as ‘lemman […] dere’ (433), Horn requests that she
Help me to kniȝte
Bi al þine miȝte,
To my lord þe king,
Þat he me ȝiue dubbing.
Þanne is mi þralhod
Iwent in to kniȝthod,
& ischal wexe more
& do, lemman, þi lore. (435–42)
While Horn is initially reluctant to accept Rymenhild’s love because of their (apparently) different social status, he swiftly agrees to fulfil her wishes if she persuades her father to knight him. This instant reversal may imply that Horn’s resistance ought not to be taken too seriously, but concerns about status continue to shape the relationship between Horn and Rymenhild and thus suggest that we should attend to his initial hesitancy. Horn’s counter-request to Rymenhild’s proposition exemplifies this focus. Not only does it bring his social status closer to hers (recalling the function of Felice’s conditions in
Guy of Warwick), but it provides Horn with a means of social advancement through Rymenhild’s influence over her father. According with Rosalind Field’s conception of ‘the somewhat calculating affections of the standard exile-and-return hero’, this pattern of conditions that benefit Horn continues.
29 Rosalind Field, ‘The King Over the Water: Exile-and-Return Revisited’, in Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England, ed. by Corinne Saunders (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), pp. 41–53 (p. 46). When Horn is knighted, Rymenhild demands he ‘do nu þat þu er of spake’, ‘to þi wif þume take’, ‘nu þu hast wille þine’ (535–9), but Horn again refuses, saying that first he will ‘mi kniȝthod proue, / Ar ihc þe ginne to woȝe’ (545–6). Rymenhild agrees again, this time giving him a ring that has such power that he need not be afraid of any blows in battle – or, in the
Roman and the Harley 2253
King Horn,
protects him from death. After Horn has proven himself in battle, he at last consents to love Rymenhild. The Middle English versions seem to disagree as to whether the couple remain chaste or embark on a sexual relationship at this point: in both the Laud and Harley manuscripts, Fikenhild’s accusation that Horn is sleeping with Rymenhild causes Horn to be ‘modi for þat fable’ (Harley, 716; see also Laud, 737), suggesting that the couple remain chaste. In the Cambridge manuscript, however, this line is absent, and the reference to Rymenhild as ‘his wyue’ (722) may suggest that they do not lie innocently in each other’s arms in this version. Either way, their love (and possibly their sexual relationship) is almost immediately disrupted when Fikenhild betrays Horn and Horn is exiled by Rymenhild’s father. Horn later insists on one more delay after he eventually returns to Westernesse, declining to wed Rymenhild until he has regained his rightful lands. Horn’s initial refusal of Rymenhild is thus overcome by a series of conditions he outlines for Rymenhild and himself – conditions it is often up to Horn to meet but with which Rymenhild frequently assists him, enabling him to be knighted and offering him the magical protection of the ring.
These conditions effectively rewrite the relationship between Horn and Rymenhild, from one in which Rymenhild propositions and commands Horn to love her to one where Horn must accomplish a series of feats before the couple can be united. This re-establishes Horn as the active partner, the one who will ‘woȝe’ (546) rather than being wooed, in accordance with the contemporary expectation that during courtship, ‘the man should take the lead while the woman followed’.
30 Shannon McSheffrey, Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p. 48. Horn’s conditions thus reassert normative gender roles, overturning the potentially coercive situation of Rymenhild wooing him to instead ensure that the relationship is based upon male chivalric achievement rather than female desire. More specifically, the conditions Horn sets out demonstrate his need to perform his gender and status, as he insists on proving himself as a knight despite his true identity as the rightful King of Suddenne. This accords with romance’s characteristic representation of masculinity as reliant on display, constituted by ‘highly ritualized performances’ that ‘define knights’ masculinity and espouse a specific model of maleness’ premised on action.
31 Molly Martin, Vision and Gender in Malory’s ‘Morte Darthur’ (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), p. 13. The emphasis on Horn’s abilities also serves a dynastic function, as Horn prioritises reclaiming his own family heritage rather than what he can gain through marriage to Rymenhild, suggesting ‘the hero’s unease at losing the quest to regain his own lands amid the easier acquisition of lands through marriage’.
32 Rosalind Field, ‘Children of Anarchy: Anglo-Norman Romance in the Twelfth Century’, in Writers of the Reign of Henry II: Twelve Essays, ed. by Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 249–62 (p. 252); Field makes this point in relation to the Roman de Horn. While advancement and property acquired through marriage are usually celebrated in romance, as well as in real-life arrangements,
King Horn prioritises making Horn a ruler in his own right.
33 See van Houts, Married Life, p. 249, on real-life contexts. Dynastic preoccupations, particularly in relation to political power, are thus shown to be a concern for men when considering relationships that are socially mismatched, even though this seems surprisingly absent from the representations of men’s romantic a(nti)pathy discussed in Chapter 1.
The conditions Horn sets also reinforce traditional boundaries of status, conveying with them a critique of Rymenhild’s desires. She is criticised fairly directly in the romance for offering her love to Horn, as her father’s steward, Aþelbrus, is concerned that Rymenhild summoning Horn ‘nas for none gode’ (282):
Sore ihc me ofdrede
He wolde horn misrede. (291–2)
We might expect Aþelbrus’s concern to be with Rymenhild lowering herself to love Horn – as indeed it is in the Roman de Horn, where the equivalent character Herland is reluctant to bring Horn to Rigmel because she is the ‘fille le rei’, ‘si çoe ne fust par lui, mut sereit avilé’ (666–7) [‘daughter to the king’, ‘if this is not done through him, she will be greatly dishonoured’, pp. 57–8]. But in the Middle English redaction Aþelbrus instead suggests that Rymenhild poses a danger to Horn. Although this diverges from the issue of disparagement, it may indicate an awareness of coercive status dynamics, as Aþelbrus fears for Horn’s safety. Aþelbrus’s anxiety also censures Rymenhild’s desires, saying they are ‘for none gode’ (282) even while abstracting them from the issue of social status. However, it is Horn himself who provides the strongest disavowal of Rymenhild’s desires, telling her
Ne feolle hit þe of cunde
To spuse beo me bunde. (421–2)
This emphasis on disparaging marriages being against ‘cunde’ is repeated in Havelok, where Goldeborw is said to be sorrowful ‘þat she were yeuen unkyndelike’ (1251), while Amis insists it is
michel vnriȝt
Þi loue to lain opon a kniȝt
Þat naþ noiþer lond no fe. (598–600)
This may have carried strong moral implications, given the association between the unnatural and the immoral in medieval thinking.
34 See Victoria Blud, ‘What Comes Unnaturally: Unspeakable Acts’, in The Unspeakable, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval Literature 1000–1400 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 61–106; Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 20; Karma Lochrie, Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. xxii. These brief suggestions that
mésalliance is unnatural combine with Aþelbrus’s and Horn’s criticisms of Rymenhild to convey a moral and socially conservative warning against (the desire for) disparaging relationships, drawing upon misogynistic ideas about female desire as a disruptive force.
As Horn renegotiates his relationship with Rymenhild, however, the romance also seems to consider the circumstances in which relationships between two partners of (apparently) differing status may be acceptable and the appropriate way in which such relationships might be formed. The conditions Horn sets before he will love (and marry) Rymenhild help overcome their apparent difference in status, while also adhering to ‘the romance model of the strenuous processes involved in winning the lady’ in order to give ‘a reassuring colouring’ to the ability of socially mobile young men ‘to manage well the power they acquired through their wives’.
35 Cooper, The English Romance in Time, p. 225. While Horn’s conditions ensure that he benefits from their relationship, in a way that perhaps mitigates its inherent risks – a strategy that might not have seemed ignoble to participants in a real-life marriage market shaped by desire for social advancement – his conditions also seem to orient Rymenhild towards a different kind of desire. He effectively suggests the things she ought to seek in a partner: as Nicholas Perkins argues of the
Roman de Horn, Horn ‘ticks [Rigmel] off for apparently pricing herself too low’, modelling what she should request before granting her love.
36 Perkins, The gift of narrative, p. 34. This reassertion of appropriate desires is particularly evident in comparison with
Guy of Warwick. Although the Anglo-Norman
Gui de Warewic may have been influenced by the
Roman de Horn, the
Roman differs from the later works by having Horn set all three conditions at once, while
Gui de Warewic,
King Horn, and
Guy of Warwick include three separate episodes in which one partner sets a different and increasingly demanding condition.
37 Weiss suggests ‘Gui is indebted to its insular romance predecessors, Horn, Boeve de Haumtone, the Haveloc story’ and others: Judith Weiss, ‘Introduction’, in ‘Boeve de Haumtone’ and ‘Gui de Warewic’: Two Anglo-Norman Romances, ed. & trans. by Weiss, FRETS, 3 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2008), pp. 1–24 (p. 14). Any potential relationship between Gui, King Horn, and Guy is unclear. The texts do not appear in any of the same manuscripts, although they are relatively close chronologically. In the Guy of Warwick story, the tasks Felice sets compensate for Guy’s lower status by elevating his chivalric renown to prove him a worthy partner. The conditions Horn sets arguably serve the same function, but the imposition of these conditions by Horn and not Rymenhild reconfigures the gendered dynamics here, not positing these things as what women want but what they
should want.
King Horn thus explores how differences in status may be appropriately overcome through romance models of chivalric prowess and inner worth, while at the same time avoiding any socially subversive representation of social mobility because the reader knows throughout that Horn
is of an eminently suitable status for Rymenhild. The romance can therefore explore the possibilities for negotiating social mobility through romantic relationships while also retaining a conservative sense of social boundaries.
King Horn’s exploration of social mores, both in terms of whether class boundaries ought to be overcome and how this might be appropriately negotiated, seems particularly suitable for some of the probable reading contexts of this romance. The moral or didactic focus fits in a general sense with the contents of MS Laud Misc. 108 (late thirteenth century): as well as
King Horn and
Havelok, this codex includes one of the earliest versions of the
South English Legendary alongside other religious and didactic works, such as the
Sayings of St Bernard, the
Vision of St Paul, and the
Dispute Between the Body and the Soul (which are placed between the
South English Legendary and the romances in the manuscript).
38 See further ‘MS. Laud Misc. 108’, Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries (Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 2017) <https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/manuscript_6917> [accessed 22 January 2021]; Kimberly K. Bell and Julie Nelson Couch, ‘Introduction: Reading Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108 as a “Whole Book”’, in The Texts and Contexts of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108: The Shaping of English Vernacular Narrative, ed. by Bell and Nelson Couch (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 1–18. Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.4.27.2 (c. 1300) contains a fragment of
Floris and Blancheflour, along with the
Assumpcion de nostre Dame, but its fragmentary nature makes it difficult to advance any conclusions about reading contexts and interpretative possibilities here.
39 See A Catalogue of the Manuscripts Preserved in the Library of the University of Cambridge, ed. by C. Hardwick et al., 5 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1858), iii, 174; Joseph Hall, ‘Introduction’, in King Horn, ed. by Hall, pp. vii–xv (p. x). However, MS Harley 2253 (late thirteenth to early fourteenth century) offers a more fruitful context for
King Horn’s exemplary potential. Susanna Fein argues that
If an externally directed pattern is perceptible here, it runs toward edification and instruction. It would seem likely that the Ludlow scribe had some responsibility in the inculcation of manners and learning for a male heir or heirs in a well-bred, perhaps aristocratic setting.
40 Fein, ‘Introduction’, ii, 10. See further Daniel Birkholz, Harley manuscript geographies: Literary history and the medieval miscellany (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), p. 3.As Fein suggests, ‘the inclusion of the adventure stor[y] of
King Horn […] seems well explained as directed toward an audience of boys whose morals were to be shaped by a clerical tutor or schoolmaster’,
41 Fein, ‘Introduction’, ii, 10. while
The Harley lyrics’ recurrent interest in exploring male/female love relationships is realized narratively in the romance. One can readily imagine how
Horn would have appealed viscerally to adolescent boys in a well-to-do household, where such entertainment would have helped to inculcate social skills and good morals in prospective heirs.
42 Fein, ‘Explanatory Notes’, in The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, ii, 371–454 (p. 449). See further Susanna Fein, ‘Compilation and Purpose in MS Harley 2253’, in Essays in Manuscript Geography: Vernacular Manuscripts of the English West Midlands from the Conquest to the Sixteenth Century, ed. by Wendy Scase (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 67–94 (p. 73). However, Carter Revard also points out that the manuscript seems to include women in its imagined audience, while Daniel Birkholz suggests it may have had ‘a strong female patron’, making
King Horn’s redirection of Rymenhild’s desires perhaps of more direct relevance to its audience.
43 Revard, ‘Oppositional Thematics and Metanarrative in MS Harley 2253, Quires 1–6’, in Essays in Manuscript Geography, pp. 95–112 (p. 104); Birkholz, Harley manuscript geographies, p. 9. King Horn carefully depicts a relationship between two people of (apparently) different status, exploring how this social difference might be overcome and the kinds of negotiations and conditions that might make this permissible. This offers suitable material for an audience of young upper-class readers developing a sense of social mores, correct conduct, and courtship patterns. Moreover, the way Horn and Rymenhild negotiate their changing relationship indicates the capacity of romance to ‘conceive of good conduct as a shifting idea whose correct manifestation might change from one situation to the next’.
44 Rory G. Critten, ‘Bourgeois Ethics Again: The Conduct Texts and the Romances in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61’, Chaucer Review, 50.1–2 (2015), 108–33 (p. 124). The reading contexts offered by the Harley and Laud manuscripts suggest that
King Horn may have been read in environments where its exploration of nuanced models of behaviour for negotiating social status and romantic relationships, and its reinforcement of gender (and, to some extent, class) boundaries, would have found a receptive audience.
Amis and Amiloun goes further than
King Horn in exploring how status could enable coercion but does so primarily to emphasise Amis’s chastity – uncomfortably for the modern reader. Belisaunt’s agency is more extreme than Rymenhild’s, as she effectively blackmails Amis into a relationship with her.
45 See also Le Saux, ‘From Ami to Amys’, p. 119. Pugh sees this as a ‘coercive seduction’: Tison Pugh, Sexuality and its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 110. She declares:
Mi loue schal be ful dere abouȝt
Wiþ pines hard & strong;
Mi kerchef & mi cloþes anon
Y schal torende doun ichon
& say wiþ michel wrong,
Wiþ strengþe þou hast me todrawe;
Ytake þou schalt be þurch londes lawe
& dempt heiȝe to hong! (629–36)
Belisaunt’s proposition turns into a ‘Potiphar’s wife’ motif as she threatens to falsely accuse Amis of rape.
46 See the discussion of this motif in Amy N. Vines, ‘The Many Wives of Potiphar: Rape Culture in Medieval Romance’, in Rape Culture and Female Resistance, pp. 97–113; Harper, ‘Teaching the Potiphar’s Wife Motif’. The
Middle English Dictionary includes Belisaunt’s use of ‘todrawe’ under the meaning ‘to cause affliction […] injure (sb.), harm; […] oppress’,
47 d)., ‘tọ̄̆drauen v.’, Middle English Dictionary, ed. by Frances McSparran et al., Middle English Compendium (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library, 2000–18) <https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED46122> [accessed 11 February 2021]. apparently a euphemism for sexual violation, which is supported by Belisaunt’s mention of the ‘londes lawe’ and its ‘legal emphasis [that] […] is unusual in its historical accuracy’.
48 Saunders, Rape and Ravishment, p. 197. The Middle English
Amis is more explicit than the Anglo-Norman, where Florie more ambiguously says she will
A mon pere le conteray
Qe vers li estes e moy forfet,
E serrés des chivals destret.
49 Amys e Amillyoun, lines 286–8. ‘Tell my father you have wronged both me and him, and you will be torn to pieces by horses’: trans. by Weiss, p. 175.Other considerations of this scene and the Potiphar’s wife motif more broadly have focused on how it presents a ‘mirror image’ of rape, obscuring the greater prevalence of violence against women.
50 Harper, ‘Teaching the Potiphar’s Wife Motif’, p. 132; Vines, ‘The Many Wives of Potiphar’. While this is a vital line of inquiry, I want to take seriously the threat of women’s violence against men and draw attention to this less common but even less frequently acknowledged possibility. Amis tries to resist Belisaunt’s advances, but her threatening behaviour overcomes his resistance, clearly indicating the coercive force that could characterise relationships with a status imbalance between people of any gender. In contrast to perspectives that emphasise men’s sexual aggression, here male vulnerability is clearly and sympathetically portrayed.
Indeed, there seems to be some moral condemnation of Belisaunt’s behaviour at the start of their relationship, even if the later happy nature of their marriage (in contrast to Amiloun’s) suggests that ‘the end justifies the means’.
51 Judith Weiss, ‘The wooing woman in Anglo-Norman romance’, in Romance in Medieval England, ed. by Maldwyn Mills, Jennifer Fellows, and Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991), pp. 149–61 (p. 159). Not only do Belisaunt’s own words, declaring she will ‘say wiþ michel wrong’ (633), hover ambiguously between a reference to her false accusation being itself ‘michel wrong’ and her accusing Amis of behaving with ‘michel wrong’, but the Potiphar’s wife motif would have had strong negative connotations for medieval – and, indeed, modern – readers. It would have readily recalled its namesake in the Bible, but it is also associated with negative characters who are usually unsuccessful in their sexual pursuit elsewhere in romance literature, in
Lanval,
Protheselaus, and
Generydes, for example. Readers of
Amis and Amiloun in the Auchinleck manuscript had an even more immediate point of comparison:
The Seven Sages of Rome, which Nicole Clifton argues occupies a midpoint in Auchinleck that ‘may encourage readers to reflect on both earlier and later items in the book’, also includes a Potiphar’s wife motif.
52 Nicole Clifton, ‘The Seven Sages of Rome, Children’s Literature, and the Auchinleck Manuscript’, in Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. by Albrecht Classen (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005), pp. 185–201 (p. 187). This highlights the negative impression a reader of Auchinleck may gain of Belisaunt, as the Empress in this version of the
Seven Sages is presented as a thoroughly negative character who falsely accuses her stepson of rape as part of a plot to have him killed and thereby secure her own dynastic interests.
Amis and Amiloun seems to raise more challenging questions than the
Seven Sages in its use of the Potiphar’s wife motif, in that Belisaunt’s threat to falsely accuse Amis of raping her may draw attention to her successful sexual coercion of him. Amis’s experience probably would not have been directly considered as rape by medieval readers, because
raptus was a gendered crime, as discussed in the Introduction. However, the mirroring between the Potiphar’s wife motif and Belisaunt’s coercion of Amis suggests an awareness of sexual violence as an issue that could affect men as well as women, regardless of whether this could be punished in law. This adds to the implicit condemnation of Belisaunt’s behaviour.
This condemnation, and Belisaunt’s coercion of Amis, serves an important moral and social function in the romance: carefully monitoring and to some extent warning against pursuing a relationship with a partner of different status. While Weiss notes that Amis is a rare ‘sexually unchaste’ hero, it is because Belisaunt coerces him into a relationship with her that he is allowed to be sexually unchaste and socially mobile without condemnation.
53 Weiss, ‘The wooing woman’, p. 158. This use of sexual coercion as a mitigating moral factor is deeply uncomfortable for the modern reader but appears to align with contemporary moral perspectives. In the Old French
Ami, Amile’s complicity is also effectively mitigated by Bellisant’s deception of him, but there Amile is acknowledged to have sexual desires, although he considers it acceptable to act on them only with a lower-class woman. In contrast, the Middle English Amis remains apparently undesiring because he is coerced into a sexual relationship: Amis’s chastity, not his sexual agency or (lack of) consent, is the concern here. While this is unusual amongst romance representations of resistance, it accords with the hagiographical interests of this particular work, discussed further below.
While
King Horn mitigates the potentially subversive nature of an apparent
mésalliance by aligning it with the romance focus on chivalric prowess, and above all by ensuring that Horn is actually of an appropriate status to marry Rymenhild, the Potiphar’s wife motif
ensures that Amis is not implicated in a desire for social mobility, and that Belisaunt is to some extent portrayed negatively for her desires. However, here
Amis and Amiloun very much has it both ways: while Belisaunt is implicitly compared to the negative characters associated with the Potiphar’s wife motif, the poet simultaneously praises her, introducing her as ‘fair & bold’ (422), ‘gentil & auenaunt’ (427), and characterising her as a ‘bird briȝt’ (661) even during her coercion of Amis. Belisaunt is also portrayed positively in the remainder of the narrative, in contrast to Amiloun’s wife. Rather than the ‘ironic sarcasm’ that Jean Jost perceives in such descriptions, the two approaches – criticising Belisaunt by associating her with negative narrative patterns, while also overtly praising her – seem to accord with the ways in which
Amis and Amiloun uses resistance to
mésalliance.
54 Jean E. Jost, ‘Hearing the Female Voice: Transgression in Amis and Amiloun’, Medieval Perspectives, 10 (1995), 116–32 (p. 119). Belisaunt is both praised and criticised; the romance both permits social mobility for a deserving protagonist and simultaneously warns against pursuing this by focusing on the potential for coercion and danger. To this extent,
Amis and Amiloun does seem to offer the ‘educational material relating to spiritual, family or political matters, or […] social order’ that Raluca Radulescu suggests it eschews.
55 Raluca L. Radulescu, ‘Genre and Classification’, in A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance, ed. by Raluca L. Radulescu and Cory James Rushton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009), pp. 31–48 (p. 43).Like
King Horn, the socially moralising aspects of
Amis and Amiloun resonate with and may have been amplified by the manuscript contexts in which it survives, while the differing genre of
Amis, with its hybrid interests in romance and hagiography, may also have influenced its didactic aspects and presentation of sexual coercion.
56 For further discussion of Amis and Amiloun’s relationship to hagiography, see Sheila Delany, ‘A, A and B: Coding same-sex union in Amis and Amiloun’, in Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in Popular Romance, ed. by Nicola McDonald (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 63–81 (pp. 65–7); Crane, Insular Romance, pp. 117–18, 122–5, 127–8; Diana T. Childress, ‘Between Romance and Legend: “Secular Hagiography” in Middle English Literature’, Philological Quarterly, 57.3 (1978), 311–22 (pp. 318–19); Ojars Kratins, ‘The Middle English Amis and Amiloun: Chivalric Romance or Secular Hagiography?’, PMLA, 81.5 (1966), 347–54. Versions of this story survive in hagiographical form, such as the Latin
Vita Amici et Amelii, where elements such as the Lombard campaign in which Amici and Amelii die a martyred death, or the miracle of their tombs appearing together when they had previously been buried in separate churches, are added to (or exaggerated from) the romance versions.
57 See Kathryn Hume, ‘Structure and Perspective: Romance and Hagiographic Features in the Amicus and Amelius Story’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 69.1 (1970), 89–107. The Middle English
Amis and Amiloun is not a hagiographical version: it emphasises the traditional romance aspects such as the fight with the steward and the companions’ loyalty above the miracle of the children’s resurrection and the voice that speaks to Amiloun before the trial by combat.
58 Ibid. While mentioned, their theological import is not elaborated and their role does not surmount what we would expect in a pious romance. However, given the emphasis on virginity and threats to virginity in hagiography,
Amis and Amiloun’s more direct confrontation of sexual coercion is perhaps facilitated or encouraged by its hagiographical affinities.
59 On the threat of sexual violence in hagiography, see Suzanne M. Edwards, ‘Medieval Saints and Misogynist Times: Transhistorical Perspectives on Sexual Violence in the Undergraduate Classroom’, in Teaching Rape in the Medieval Literature Classroom, pp. 12–28; Saunders, ‘The Threat of Rape: Saintly Women’, in Rape and Ravishment, pp. 120–51; Simon Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 197–8; Gravdal, ‘Plotting Rape in the Female Saints’ Lives’, in Ravishing Maidens, pp. 21–41. See also Pugh’s discussion of how the affinities with hagiography at the end of Amis and Amiloun erase the protagonists’ potential queerness: Sexuality and its Queer Discontents, pp. 116–21. Indeed, hagiographical romances such as
The Man of Law’s Tale may offer a helpful parallel: while fulfilling romance expectations of marriage and the continuation of the family line, neither Custance nor Amis seems to enjoy sexual encounters or romantic attention.
60 See further Chapter 4. Ambivalence about sexuality seeps into romances that are aligned with or influenced by hagiography, demonstrating the fundamental impact genre has upon the valuation of love, sexuality, and desire.
The manuscript contexts of
Amis and Amiloun both support and
refine this view of hagiographical connections, indicating a more general focus upon education and conduct. The four surviving manuscripts of
Amis and Amiloun, as mentioned above, are the Auchinleck manuscript, MS Egerton 2862, MS Douce 326, and MS Harley 2386. Although Auchinleck’s focus on romance has often been emphasised, A. S. G. Edwards observes that ‘the early sections of the Auchinleck manuscript […] differ markedly in content from the later, predominantly romance sections […] compris[ing] poems on religious subjects’.
61 A. S. G. Edwards, ‘Codicology and Translation in the Early Sections of the Auchinleck Manuscript’, in The Auchinleck Manuscript: New Perspectives, pp. 26–35 (p. 26). Amis and Amiloun (as well as
The King of Tars) is included in this early, religious section, between the
Speculum Gy de Warewyke and the
Life of St Mary Magdalene. Edwards suggests that
Amis and Amiloun may have been regarded as a religious narrative here.
62 Ibid., p. 30 n. 14. However,
Amis and Amiloun’s
focus on social mores also accords with arguments that this narrative and other Auchinleck texts (as well as other Middle English romances) may have been aimed partly at an audience inclusive of children.
63 See Cathy Hume, ‘The Auchinleck Adam and Eve: An Exemplary Family Story’, in The Auchinleck Manuscript: New Perspectives, pp. 36–51; Clifton, ‘The Seven Sages of Rome’; Nicholas Orme, ‘Children and Literature in Medieval England’, Medium Ævum, 68.2 (1999), 218–46. Phillipa Hardman suggests that popular romances ‘were seen as particularly suitable texts for transmitting core parental cultural values to young readers’, noting that ‘six of Reiss’s pre-1300 child-centred romances are found in the Auchinleck MS’ (Edmund Reiss’s list includes
Amis and Amiloun), which has been identified as ‘a household, family book’.
64 Phillipa Hardman, ‘Popular Romances and Young Readers’, in A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance, pp. 150–64 (p. 154). Clifton also observes that the long list of names of the Browne family written in the Auchinleck manuscript in the late Middle Ages ‘suggests that during the 15th century, the manuscript belonged to a family – a large family, with children of varying ages to be educated and entertained’.
65 Clifton, ‘The Seven Sages of Rome’, p. 189. The Auchinleck romances engage with ‘lessons on chivalric or courtly accomplishments’, while Amis’s encounter with Belisaunt highlights correct and subversive forms of desire. The preoccupation with status may have been thrown into sharp relief in a household reading context such as that proposed by Nicholas Orme, where ‘reading aloud was a means of social entertainment’, which took place in ‘households [that] often included children: sons and daughters of the family, pages and wards being brought up and educated, and young servants’.
66 Orme, ‘Children and Literature’, p. 229. The wards and pages fostered away from their nuclear family offer a particularly immediate connection with
Amis and Amiloun’s cautious depiction of a relationship between a duke’s daughter and a young man being fostered by that duke.
MS Egerton 2862 and MS Douce 326 provide less contextual scaffolding for
Amis and Amiloun’s insights into appropriate conduct. Egerton 2862 is comprised entirely of romances: while romances can and do contain didactic material, the content of Egerton 2862 does not suggest a particularly didactic intent.
67 For discussion of this manuscript, see Michael Johnston, Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 92, 94, 103–4, 110–12. Douce 326 contains only
Amis and Amiloun and a Marian lyric, limiting its reading contexts.
68 Ford, ‘From Poésie to Poetry’, pp. 48, 49. Harley 2386, however, offers a particularly intriguing context for
Amis and Amiloun’s focus on social status: this manuscript was owned by William Cresset, ‘a household servant residing in Herefordshire’ around 1510–30.
69 Michael Johnston, ‘New Evidence for the Social Reach of “Popular Romance”: The Books of Household Servants’, Viator, 43.2 (2012), 303–31 (p. 306). Johnston establishes that Cresset was not the original owner of the manuscript, pp. 311–13. Cresset’s name appears four times in the manuscript, including once after its fragmentary copy of
Amis and Amiloun, where Cresset wrote what Michael Johnston describes as ‘the whimsical phrase “wyllyaum cresett was a lorde a lorde”’.
70 Ibid., p. 306. Of course, we cannot know why Cresset wrote this phrase or what he meant by it, but it is tempting to connect its appearance after
Amis and Amiloun to the theme of social status in this romance.
71 Wiggins comments that the ‘annotations at the end of Amis and Amiloun express his active interest in the story’, although Wiggins’s understanding of Cresset as a ‘young learner […] undergoing elementary education with other boys’ is cast in a different light by Johnston’s work: Alison Wiggins, ‘Middle English Romance and the West Midlands’, in Essays in Manuscript Geography, pp. 239–55 (p. 251). While only the first part of
Amis and Amiloun, lines 1–890 and 1013–58, is included in the manuscript, this encompasses the section with Amis and Belisaunt (but not the more religiously oriented sections).
72 Ford gives the line numbers at which Amis and Amiloun breaks off: ‘From Poésie to Poetry’, p. 49. Even without this phrase, Cresset’s status as a household servant, whose annotations indicate that he ‘served in the kitchen and pantry of some institution, be it a gentry household or a religious house’, seems to indicate his particular potential to be aware of and interested in the treatment of social class.
73 Johnston, ‘New Evidence for the Social Reach of “Popular Romance”’, p. 306. However, ‘wyllyaum cresett was a lorde a lorde’ does not seem to accord with an exemplary or cautious reading of
Amis and Amiloun, which I posited may have been invited by its place in the Auchinleck manuscript. Instead, it suggests a more subversive attitude to class, perhaps a reader viewing
Amis and Amiloun’s advancement of social status through marriage as a vehicle for their own fantasies. We can see here again the agency afforded to readers of romance, the extent to which the genre ‘educates rather than indoctrinating’.
74 Jeff Rider, ‘The Inner Life of Women in Medieval Romance Literature’, in The Inner Life of Women in Medieval Romance Literature: Grief, Guilt, and Hypocrisy, ed. by Jeff Rider and Jamie Friedman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 1–25 (p. 6). The education romance offers may be ignored; careful constructions of relationships between partners of differing status may instead be interpreted more freely as the material of wish-fulfilment and fantasy.
King Horn and Amis and Amiloun use the motif of resistance to love to probe the repercussions of socially mismatched relationships, deploying strategies to mitigate their potentially subversive representation of social advancement. The two romances diverge in their approaches to the consensual or coercive possibilities of such relationships: while Rymenhild initially controls her wooing of Horn, Horn negotiates their relationship to his own benefit and satisfaction, moving from the potential for coercion to consent. In contrast, Amis and Amiloun openly depicts Belisaunt’s sexual aggression but uses this to indicate disapproval of socially imbalanced relationships and to mitigate Amis’s involvement. While social advancement through marriage can be an acceptable and celebrated romance motif, these romances use resistance to love to set out a cautious and conservative approach to such relationships while not entirely prohibiting them. In doing so, they not only complicate ideas about consent and coercion, social fantasy and social conservatism, but also draw attention to the nuanced moral functions romance literature could serve – even if these functions were not always effective.