‘Y haue leuyd on false lore – / For þy loue y wyll no more’: Faith, Status, and Isolation in Sir Bevis of Hampton
The fourteenth-century romance
Sir Bevis of Hampton describes how the hero, Bevis,
1 Sir Bevis of Hampton, ed. by Jennifer Fellows, EETS, o. s., 349, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), i, lines 1328–9. All quotations are taken from this volume, specifically from the text of Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.2.38 unless otherwise stated. is cast out by his mother and step-father as a child and grows up in the Muslim court of King Ermyne of Armenia (originally an Egyptian court in the Anglo-Norman
Boeve de Haumtone).
2 See the discussion in Amy Burge, Representing Difference in the Medieval and Modern Orientalist Romance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 50–3. The King’s daughter, Josian, falls in love with Bevis and he eventually returns her love, while grappling (at times violently) with the difficulties of life in a court of another faith. Like many of the examples discussed in this book, resistance to love forms a small part of the narrative in
Bevis, and indeed a small part of the structural delays to Bevis and Josian’s marriage, which is more considerably held up by Josian being forced to marry two other men (through which she retains her virginity), and by Bevis’s seven-year imprisonment by King Bradmond. However, despite its relatively minor role in the larger plot scheme, Bevis’s initial resistance to loving and marrying Josian, and the negotiations through which this is resolved, reveal the processes and limits of race-making in and through constructions of desire in this work.
Bevis does identify religious race as a key factor in resistance to love, according with the works discussed so far in this chapter, but this romance also foregrounds other potential issues in Bevis and Josian’s relationship, reducing the primacy of the focus on race compared to
The King of Tars and
The Man of Law’s Tale.
We are told immediately that Josian is ‘whyte and swete’ (581), according with the romance and
chanson de geste image of the white Muslim princess that erases any presumed difference of epidermal race by imposing white European perceptions of beauty.
3 See further de Weever, ‘Whitening the Saracen: The Erasure of Alterity’, in Sheba’s Daughters, pp. 3–52. This ‘strategic bleaching’, as Heng notes, ‘conduces, also, to the women’s eventual baptism and assimilation into Christian European polities’, but in
Bevis Josian’s religion is initially foregrounded as an issue.
4 Heng, The Invention of Race, p. 189. When she is introduced, we are told
Men knewe noon so feyre on lyue,
So hende nor so wele ytaght,
But of Crystes lawe cowde sche noght. (587–9)
Her positive qualities are listed first, with her lack of Christian faith positioned as a negative contrast to her beauty and nobility, once again placing non-Christians at the bottom of Christian hierarchies of desire. Similar to the pattern in
The King of Tars, Bevis as a white Christian is established as desirable, in contrast to the limiting effect Josian’s Muslim faith has on her desirability. Josian’s father admires Bevis, thinking that Muhammad would be pleased if he were to worship him; it is specifically Bevis’s whiteness that the King praises, declaring ‘a feyrer chylde neuyr y sye’, ‘nor fayrer colour had!’ (599–601). Although the King does not desire Bevis for himself here, this arguably enhances the text’s portrayal of whiteness as desirability, since the King recognises Bevis’s beauty in a more impersonal, purportedly universal way. The King’s concern for Bevis’s situation, to the extent that he offers to make Bevis his heir if he converts, opens up a moment of interfaith empathy like those described by Marcel Elias.
5 Marcel Elias, ‘Interfaith Empathy and the Formation of Romance’, in Emotion and Medieval Textual Media, ed. by Mary C. Flannery (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), pp. 99–124. However, the early scenes of encounter between Josian and Bevis establish Bevis as more desirable than Josian, aided by Josian’s active pursuit of Bevis later in the narrative (for example, lines 786–91, 820–3, 854–63), again constructing a hierarchy of desire that reflects differences of religious race.
Race, religion, and desirability remain in correlation as the theme of religious conversion is swiftly introduced. Josian’s father suggests to Bevis
And þou wolde þy lorde forsake
And Apolyn to þy lorde take,
Hur wyll y geue þe to wyfe,
And all my londe aftur my lyfe. (622–5)
While this may appear a tempting offer of land, riches, and a wife, especially to a young boy who has been disinherited, the King’s proposition is quickly rejected by Bevis:
That y nolde
For all thy syluyr and þy golde;
Ne for all þe gode vndur Heuyn lyght,
Nodur for þy doghtur, þat ys so bryght.
I wolde not forsake, on no manere,
God þat boght me so dere.
All be they brente to dethe
That on odur false goddys beleuyth! (626–33)
His unwillingness to convert is explicitly the reason Bevis rejects the King’s offer, violently refuting non-Christian beliefs. He acknowledges the appeal of the King’s wealth and the beauty of Josian, ensuring that she, unlike the two sultans discussed above, is not described as undesirable (though she is perhaps less desirable than Bevis). However, he affirms his commitment to his faith above all, making it clear that he will not convert for Josian. The focus on religion is further emphasised in the scenes where Josian starts to offer Bevis her love. She declares ‘y haue leuyd on false lore – / For þy loue y wyll no more’ (1328–9) and insists
y schall, as y am mayde –
My false goddys all forsake
And Crystendome for þy loue take. (1335–7)
It is only after she has made these promises that Bevis agrees to love her, specifically saying ‘on that maner […] / I the graunt, my swete wyght!’ (1338–9). Bevis engages clearly and directly with religious race as an issue in Christian men’s relationships, as Bevis refuses to love Josian until she agrees to convert.
However,
Bevis also complicates the fantasy trope of the converted Muslim princess through the context of Bevis and Josian’s relationship. Compared to other similar romances, Bevis is in a particularly vulnerable position as he is the only Christian in Josian’s father’s court. While crusading romances, including the
Ferumbras narratives discussed in the final section of this chapter, depict isolation in terms of war and imprisonment,
Bevis is unusual in portraying the hero as the only Christian in a Muslim court. In some ways, Bevis’s vulnerability and isolation position him similarly to Horn and Amis, according with the
Roman de Horn’s influence on the Anglo-Norman
Boeve.
6 On Boeve and the Roman de Horn, see 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. 5). Like
King Horn and
Amis and Amiloun,
Bevis suggests that a young man living at another king’s court was in a precarious position, depicting Bevis’s vulnerability to accusations made by members of this court (lines 1347–79) and making Josian the active partner who pursues Bevis, although she does not coerce him into a relationship with her. However, the added issue of being a Christian in a Muslim court extends the isolation Bevis experiences, perhaps opening up anxiety about the potential for Bevis to be persuaded or coerced into converting to Islam himself – as the King initially suggests. As Bly Calkin notes, the romance ‘conveys a fear of Christian assimilation into a non-Christian world’, dramatising ‘one of the historical anxieties prompted by crusade and settlement in the East […] the fear that western Christians involved in these activities might lose their sense of proper mores and become too similar to their Muslim opponents’.
7 Siobhain Bly Calkin, ‘The Anxieties of Encounter and Exchange: Saracens and Christian Heroism in Sir Beves of Hamtoun’, Florilegium, 21 (2004), 135–58 (pp. 136–7). While
Bevis does suggest that there were concerns about Christian men marrying Muslim women (even those who offer to convert), this may reflect the unusual situation within this narrative rather than a broader concern with Christian men marrying converts from Islam.
Indeed, while religion is a prominent concern in the conversation between Bevis and the King and when Bevis subsequently accepts Josian’s love, the romance overall reduces the importance of religious race in comparison with
The King of Tars and
The Man of Law’s Tale by adding a secondary issue to Bevis and Josian’s negotiation of their relationship: that of social status. This appears most prominently in an intermediary episode between the conversation with Josian’s father and the couple’s agreement to love each other, and it is emphasised more strongly in the Naples manuscript (Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, MS XIII.B.29), which is closer to the Anglo-Norman
Boeve at this point.
8 For the text of Boeve, see Der Anglonormannische Boeve de Haumtone, ed. by Albert Stimming, Bibliotheca Normannica, 7 (Halle: Niemeyer, 1899), lines 670–708; trans. in ‘Boeve de Haumtone’, in ‘Boeve de Haumtone’ and ‘Gui de Warewic’, ed. & trans. by Weiss, pp. 25–95 (p. 37). The relationships between the Middle English texts, and theirs to the Anglo-Norman version, are complicated, but Fellows describes the Naples manuscript as ‘perhaps the most conservative version’: Jennifer Fellows, ‘Introduction’, in Sir Bevis of Hampton, i, pp. xv–lxxviii (pp. lxi–lxii, lxix). When Josian reveals her love to Bevis, Bevis replies
For God […] þat do I nelle!
In alle this worlde is no suche man –
King, prince ne soudan –
That [t]he to wife hab nolde
And he the onys had biholde.
And I am a knyȝt of vnkouth lond
And haue no more good þan I in stond. (Naples, 1231–7)
Rather than their differing faiths, Bevis here pinpoints the disparity in their social status – Josian a princess desired by many royal suitors and Bevis a disinherited knight being fostered by the foreign king whose daughter now woos him – as the reason for his resistance to Josian’s advances, again recalling the scenario in King Horn and Amis and Amiloun. The focus upon social status is retained throughout this scene: after Bevis’s rebuff, Josian insists that
I haue the leuer to my leman,
Al on thi shirt nakid,
Than al the good that euer was makid. (Naples, 1241–3)
When Bevis still refuses her, she weeps and calls him a ‘chorle’ (1252), an insult predicated upon social status.
9 See ‘Chē̆rl n.’, 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/MED7461> [accessed 22 June 2023]. Josian then agrees with Bevis’s argument that no king or knight would refuse her, and Bevis himself undergoes a similarly humorous reversal as he grows angry at her description of him as a churl, saying ‘my fadir was bothe erle and knyȝt’ (Naples, 1261). The sudden shifts in the protagonists’ claims about social status in this scene may provide humour, indicating their quick tempers, but they also foreground the issue of social status.
10 On this humour, see Corinne Saunders, ‘Gender, Virtue and Wisdom in Sir Bevis of Hampton’, in ‘Sir Bevis of Hampton’ in Literary Tradition, ed. by Jennifer Fellows and Ivana Djordjević (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 161–75 (p. 169). While Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.2.38 does not include Bevis’s first speech insisting that he is too low-status to accept Josian’s love, social status is still the primary focus of the scene in this manuscript, as Josian upbraids Bevis for rejecting her when kings and princes desire her and Bevis similarly takes offence at her description of him as a churl. In contrast, Josian’s religion is not explicitly mentioned by Bevis in either version of this scene, even though she angrily curses ‘Mahound yeue the tene and wrake!’ (Naples, 1253; the line is almost identical in CUL Ff.2.38). This intermediary scene focuses consistently on social status, highlighting an issue that was not addressed in the works focused upon a woman involved in an interracial relationship but which potentially held much greater relevance for
Bevis’s medieval readers. This dilution of the focus upon religious race suggests that there may be less concern about relationships involving Christian men and Muslim women than relationships involving Muslim men and Christian women, despite the focus on religion elsewhere in
Bevis.
Bevis’s initial resistance creates a space in which religious difference can be outlined and its undesirability conveyed, but also a space in which negotiation of religious and status difference can occur, as Bevis and Josian ultimately agree to a relationship on condition of Josian’s conversion. This leaves intact the hierarchy of desire that privileges white Christians, as Josian is first described as white or white-passing, and then (perhaps with that causal implication) converts to Christianity, which enables Bevis to accept her offer of love. Bevis aligns with the use of resistance to love as a means of race-making in the other romances discussed so far, but also breaks with them by introducing the secondary issue of social status and thus making religious race of less central importance. The final two narratives discussed in this chapter, involving Christian men’s relationships with (formerly) Muslim women, deprioritise religious race even further.