Syr Tryamowre,
The Erle of Tolous, and
The Franklin’s Tale all depict a woman propositioned by a knight or squire during her husband’s absence; this man claims to love her but seems more specifically to want to have sex with her. In each case, she tries to reject his unwanted advances, but for Queen Margaret in
Syr Tryamowre and Empress Beulybon in
The Erle of Toulous, this leads to them being accused of treachery and exiled or imprisoned when the knights who propositioned them turn against them. In Dorigen’s case, her imposition of an impossible condition backfires when Aurelius achieves this, though she is ultimately not forced to keep her word. These episodes hold different significance within the broader trajectory of each work. In
Syr Tryamowre, it is vital that Margaret is exiled in order for her son, Tryamowre (the romance’s hero), to grow up away from his father’s influence and prove his merit in his own right – though the extreme violence planned by the steward, Marrok, who propositions Margaret, exceeds the plot’s necessities and prompts reflection on the coercive structures it exposes. In
The Erle of Toulous, Beulybon’s rejection of adultery with the two knights who proposition her is complicated though not contradicted by her subsequent relationship with the Earl, offering a different perspective on desire and morality. And in
The Franklin’s Tale, Dorigen’s condition initiates a debate about
gentillesse and its role in romance, while also
inviting comparison with other kinds of resistance to love. In their focus on attempts to reject adultery, these romances draw attention to the possibility for romances to function as ‘a form of courtesy text’ for married people as well as the unmarried, but the effects of rejection in each case also highlight and ultimately question medieval rape culture.
1 Felicity Riddy, ‘Middle English romance: family, marriage, intimacy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. by Roberta L. Krueger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 235–52 (p. 242). The moral valence of rejecting adultery combines with the portrayal of coercion to create particularly empathetic portrayals of how difficult and dangerous it can be to reject a man’s advances as a woman living in a heteropatriarchal society.
2 ‘Heteropatriarchy refers to the social, political, and economic system in which heterosexual men are the dominant group in a society or culture’; in this social system, heterosexual relationships are celebrated and enforced in ways that uphold patriarchal hierarchies. I use the term here because the pressures of expected heterosexual relationships and patriarchal dominance combine to make rejecting men’s romantic advances particularly difficult. See Jacob Kelley and Andrea Arce-Trigatti, ‘Heteropatriarchy’, in Encyclopedia of Queer Studies in Education, ed. by Kamden K. Strunk and Stephanie Anne Shelton (Leiden: Brill, 2022), pp. 256–9 (p. 256). Syr Tryamowre’s opening section presents Queen Margaret as a flawless wife. The narrative establishes a framework of transparent morality: the good and evil protagonists of the first section, Margaret and Marrok, are antonyms, she ‘trewe as stele’ and he ‘false and fekyll’.
3 ‘Syr Tryamowre’, in Of Love and Chivalry, ed. by Jennifer Fellows, pp. 147–98. ‘Trewe as stele’ is repeated twice, lines 17 and 27; ‘false and fekyll’ comes at line 20. We are warned from the start that Margaret will be ‘falsely […] broght in blame’ (18) and that Marrok will harm her ‘for scho wolde not to hym assente’ (23). This romance is clear and explicit about where the blame lies, leaving no space for doubt in the reader. In the scene where she is propositioned, including with assurances of secrecy, Margaret remains ‘stedfaste of wylle’ (73) and rejects Marrok in definite terms. She displays no temptation to assent to his advances, which further establishes her as an exemplary wife. Her exemplary role positions her as a figure with whom the reader is invited to empathise, if their morals align with those Margaret represents – those of a monogamous Christian society like medieval England.
But while there is no space for the reader to doubt Margaret’s intentions, doubt is precisely what Margaret’s husband, King Ardus, does. To lend credence to his false accusation of adultery, Marrok draws upon contemporary fears about illegitimacy, appealing to the King by claiming
hyt were not feyre
A horcop to be yowre heyre,
But he ware of yowre kynne. (223–5)
This strategy is also deployed by an accuser in another calumniated queen romance included in CUL Ff.2.38, the mother-in-law in
Octavian, who falsely laments ‘that Rome schall wrong heyred bee’.
4 Octovian, ed. by Frances McSparran, EETS, o. s., 289 (London: Oxford University Press, 1986), Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.2.38, line 107. However, Octavian does not believe her as instantly as Ardus does Marrok, perhaps suggesting the importance of gender in whose accusations are given credence. Both accusers follow similar strategies, drawing upon powerful contemporary anxieties about female adultery and the ultimate unknowability of a child’s paternity to turn the men against their wives by capitalising on their inner fears.
5 See further Caroline Dunn, Stolen Women in Medieval England: Rape, Abduction, and Adultery, 1100–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 120. The concern about female adultery was exacerbated within royal marriages, as
the queen’s conception of an illegitimate child threatens the proper succession of the throne in a way that the birth of a king’s bastard does not. The queen’s child is born into the royal family, whether or not her husband is the father.
6 Peggy McCracken, The Romance of Adultery: Queenship and Sexual Transgression in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), p. 18.Marrok is further aided in his accusation by the King’s initial belief that he and his wife cannot conceive a child together, which prompts his absence as he leaves on crusade in an attempt to gain God’s favour. This lends credibility to the claim that Margaret’s pregnancy on his return is evidence of adultery, particularly if he is inclined to think himself potentially infertile. The romance does, therefore, indicate that there are some good reasons for the King to believe Marrok’s false accusation, which he adroitly manipulates. However, the gap between the reader’s certainty and Ardus’s belief also opens up a counter-narrative in which the cultural assumption of women’s fickleness and guilt can be critiqued.
7 Alcuin Blamires sets out the classical and medical foundations of this belief in women’s instability in The Case for Women, pp. 126–9. I term this a counter-narrative even though it is overt within
Syr Tryamowre because it works against the dominant cultural perception of women as unfaithful and the prominent French romance tradition of adultery. It thus aligns with the function of counter-narratives as ‘resist[ing] another narrative’, which is, or is ‘perceived as being, more powerful’, offering ‘a vital tool for contesting canonicity, and ideological dominance, in fiction’.
8 Klarissa Lueg, Ann Starbæk Bager, and Marianne Wolff Lundholt, ‘Introduction: What counter-narratives are’, in Routledge Handbook of Counter-Narratives, ed. by Klarissa Lueg and Marianne Wolff Lundholt (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), pp. 1–14 (pp. 4, 11). While Marrok draws upon precisely this dominant narrative to make his accusations more believable, the reader’s knowledge of its falsity not only highlights Margaret’s innocence but exposes misogynistic perceptions as harmful and untrue.
Indeed, Syr Tryamowre critiques assumptions of women’s fickleness overtly and implicitly. The narrator labels Ardus’s refusal to speak to Margaret before exiling her, thus providing no opportunity for her to convey her side of the story, ‘grete synne!’ (234). But Ardus’s actions may be critiqued in a more subtle and satirical light as well, through the episode involving Sir Roger’s dog. When this dog, who helped Roger defend Margaret against Marrok’s violent attack, in which Roger was killed, reappears at the King’s court and kills Marrok, Ardus asks ‘what may thys be to meene’ (558)? Without pausing, he immediately fills in the gaps:
Y trowe Syr Marrok, be Goddes payne,
Have slayne Syr Roger be some trayne,
And falsely flemyd my quene.
The hound had not Syr Marrok slayne,
Had not some treson byn,
Be dereworth God, as y wene! (559–64)
While he initially took Marrok’s word at face value, the actions of the dog are apparently sufficient to disprove Marrok’s version of events, suggesting that the dog is a more reliable witness than either Marrok or Margaret.
9 The value of dogs compared to women as witnesses is also a feature of the canis legend that circulated as part of The Seven Sages of Rome tradition. I am being slightly facetious here: this episode is necessary to convey Margaret’s innocence to Ardus in her absence and we are not supposed to read it in the light of psychological realism. And yet it builds on the gap between the reader’s and Ardus’s perceptions earlier in the romance, offering an opportunity for a resistant reader to advance the counter-narrative against his credulity. It exposes the power of voice and action in the male-dominated court of romance as a privilege at times granted to men and animals before women.
There is, however, one crucial area in which Margaret’s voice and actions do count: in her rejection of Marrok. He responds to this violently and punitively, conspiring to have her exiled and in addition
To do the quene a velanye,
Hys luste for to fulfylle. (272–3)
That is, he plots to rape her. This violent response indicates that he understands Margaret’s rejection to be absolute, as he sees no other means to preserve himself from the King’s anger or gain his will than by turning Ardus against her and in doing so creating an opportunity to rape her (this also retrospectively adds to the impression that he is seeking sex, not love, when he propositions her). Margaret’s fidelity is such that Marrok recognises the futility of persistence, and yet her exemplary response does not effect a positive outcome for her. The threat of rape in particular far exceeds the necessities of the plot at this point. It may offer a means of cementing Marrok’s negative portrayal, aligning with the romance’s self-identification as a ‘gode ensaumpull’ (10) by ensuring that adulterous desires are associated with a negative figure rather than being an understandable temptation. However, its excessive nature may also cause the reader to pause and question the violence Marrok displays here. His vindictive response to Margaret’s fidelity reflects a cultural perception of rejection as potentially dangerous for women, creating an environment in which rejection must be carefully framed in order not to cause offence. This is mentioned as a concern elsewhere in romance literature, albeit hyperbolically: in Chaitivel, Marie claims that
Tutes les dames de une tere
Vendreit il meuz d’amer requere
Quë un fol de sun pan tolir;
Kar cil volt an eire ferir.
10 Marie de France, ‘Chaitivel’, in Marie de France: Lais, ed. by Alfred Ewert (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1995), pp. 116–22 (lines 19–22). ‘It would be less dangerous for a man to court every lady in an entire land than for a lady to remove a single besotted lover from her skirts, for he will immediately attempt to strike back’: Marie de France, ‘Chaitivel’, in The Lais of Marie de France, ed. & trans. by Glyn S. Burgess and Keith Busby, 2nd edn (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 105–8 (p. 105).While this is a dramatic rather than a realistic claim, it may reflect an extreme version of reality. Punitive responses to resistance to love are relatively common in the works discussed in this book, and knowledge of the real danger of violent responses to rejection shapes women’s responses to sexual advances in the modern and – it is probably safe to assume – the medieval world.
11 Violent responses to rejection are associated with modern ‘incel’ ideology: see Amia Srinivasan, ‘The Right to Sex’, in The Right to Sex (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), pp. 73–91; Laura Bates, ‘Men Who Hate Women’, in Men Who Hate Women (London: Simon & Schuster, 2020), pp. 11–62. This is the operation of rape culture, forming part of the means by which it dominates women by ‘keeping all women in fear of harm’ and creates an atmosphere of fear in which ‘no’ is not safe or sufficient as a response to sexual pursuit.
12 Harris, Obscene Pedagogies, p. 10. By associating violent responses to rejection with the villainous Marrok,
Syr Tryamowre goes beyond Marie’s acknowledgement of this pattern to foreground it as a problem, opening it up to critique and protest.
An analogous pattern is followed by
The Erle of Tolous and
The Franklin’s Tale, which configure resistance, empathy, and critique along similar lines. However, while Margaret is steadfast in her faithfulness to her husband throughout, these works shift the focus on exemplarity. When the Empress Beulybon rejects the two knights who proposition her during her husband’s absence (a doubled role that heightens the link with ‘Susanna and the Elders’, as Jonathan Stavsky notes), she too behaves in an exemplary manner, her response in many ways closely echoing Margaret’s.
13 Stavsky, ‘Gode in all thynge’, p. 550. Both question adulterous desires, describe the would-be lover as presumptuous, directly reject his adulterous advances, refer to the role he plays in the service of her husband, label his advances treachery, and threaten him with punitive consequences.
14 See ‘Syr Tryamowre’, lines 76–108; ‘The Erle of Tolous’, lines 563–73, 646–57. While some of these shared features remind the knight (and the reader) of the power balance between these figures and prompt the knight’s attempt to prevent the lady revealing his advances to her husband, the women’s questioning of adulterous desires and presumption also inscribe an emotional script for the innocent rejection of adultery. Questions like ‘traytur, what ys thy thoght?’ (
Syr Tryamowre,
76), ‘ys that youre wylle? / Yf hyt were myne, then dyd y ylle!’ (
Erle of Tolous, 646–7), ‘how darste thou be so bolde?’ (
Syr Tryamowre, 84), and ‘what woman holdyst thou me?’ (
Erle of Tolous, 648) express shock and anger at the knights’ advances, emotional responses that effectively highlight the women’s innocence.
However, while Beulybon’s rejection of the two knights is exemplary, this is complicated by her relationship with Barnard, the Earl of Toulous, who falls in love with her and whom she eventually marries at the end of the romance, after her first husband’s death. This relationship does not undermine Beulybon’s resistance to adultery but enables a more nuanced portrayal of adulterous desire and exemplary conduct compared to
Syr Tryamowre. The ambiguity of Beulybon’s relationship with Barnard has been somewhat understated in critical approaches to
The Erle of Tolous: Victoria Weiss suggests that ‘the Earl of Tolouse and the Empress of Almayne […] fall in love and suffer a series of misfortunes, before they are able to marry after the evil Emperor has died’, while James Wade argues that the Empress is ‘apparently mutually smitten (she gives him a ring)’.
15 Victoria L. Weiss, ‘Blurring the Lines between the Play World and the Real World in “The Earl of Toulouse”’, Chaucer Review, 31.1 (1996), 87–98 (p. 89); James Wade, ‘Ungallant Knights’, in Heroes and Anti-Heroes in Medieval Romance, ed. by Neil Cartlidge (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), pp. 201–18 (p. 205). As Wade’s parenthetical explanation hints, the romance is quite ambiguous about Beulybon’s feelings for Barnard. Although she gives him a ring, she does so when he asks for ‘almes’ (377), which was previously connected with Beulybon’s virtue when she is described as being ‘gode in all thynge, / Of almesdede and gode berynge’ (40–1). While rings can be love-tokens in medieval romance,
16 Rings appear as love-tokens in King Horn, Guy of Warwick, Sir Isumbras, Sir Eglamour of Artois, Generydes, Sir Torrent of Portingale, and Amoryus and Cleopes. The lady tries to give Gawain a ring in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but he refuses it. Rings can also appear as recognition tokens, for example in Sir Tristrem, Lay le Freine, and Ipomadon. they can also function in other ways: in the
Lai du Cor, the Queen explains that the horn has labelled her adulterous because she once gave a ring to a boy in gratitude, although doubt may be cast on her explanation because she anticipates that the horn will shame her.
17 See Robert Biket, The Anglo-Norman Text of Le Lai du Cor, ed. by C. T. Erickson, Anglo-Norman Texts, 24 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), lines 334–62; trans. in Robert Biket, ‘Cor’, in Twenty-Four Lays from the French Middle Ages, trans. by Glyn S. Burgess and Leslie C. Brook (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), pp. 121–9 (p. 127). Operating as a dual token of apparent adultery and perhaps of innocence, this ring provides a suggestive analogy to the ring in
The Erle of Tolous.
18 On the ring in The Erle of Tolous, see further Nicholas Perkins, ‘Introduction: The Materiality of Medieval Romance and The Erle of Tolous’, in Medieval Romance and Material Culture, ed. by Perkins (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), pp. 1–22 (pp. 15–17). But
The Erle of Tolous is more emphatic about Beulybon’s innocence than
Cor, as Beulybon’s confession of her gift to the Earl effectively expresses her innocence by revealing the relatively insignificant things she deems necessary to confess. In addition to the ring, we are also told that the Empress ‘schewed opynly hur face, / For love of that knyght’ (335–6), but even if we assume that love refers to romantic love here, this is a very brief reference that is counterbalanced by the more ambivalent representation of Beulybon’s feelings for Barnard elsewhere.
19 Blamires notes that the syntax here enables the possibility that this refers to Barnard’s love of Beulybon, not hers of him: The Case for Women, p. 163. On the possibility of love meaning ‘friendship’ rather than romantic love, see definition 1a., ‘Lǒve, n.(1)’, 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/MED26245> [accessed 19 July 2023]. There is no climactic, emotionally or sexually charged reunion between them after he has fought for her, as the romance instead highlights the peace established between the Earl and the Emperor. This focus may be heightened when reading the romance in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 61, where its emphasis on friendship after a feud recalls the
exemplum that immediately precedes
The Erle of Tolous,
The Knight Who Forgave His Father’s Slayer. In addition, even Beulybon’s will in her subsequent marriage to the Earl is elided, as it is ‘be alexcion of the lordys free’ (1202) that the Earl is made emperor and ‘weddyd that lady to hys wyfe’ (1207). Beulybon and Barnard’s marriage is certainly a happy one, as they live ‘wyth yoye and myrthe’ (1208) and have fifteen children, a sign of sexual fulfilment that contrasts with the original Emperor’s lack of heirs.
20 The Galenic idea that conception required female ‘seed’ (produced through orgasm) circulated widely, which would associate Beulybon’s many pregnancies with sexual pleasure: see Corinne Saunders, Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), p. 29; Cooper, The English Romance in Time, p. 222. However, Beulybon is never actually said to want to marry the Earl. The romance ‘work[s] hard to deflect the potentially illicit nature of the contact between Barnard and Beulybon’ and in doing so takes a different approach to the relationship between rejections of adultery and exemplarity.
21 Perkins, ‘Introduction: The Materiality of Medieval Romance’, pp. 13–14. Within the generic framework of romance, resistance to adultery is more likely than other kinds of resistance to love to be separated from the influence of desire and motivated instead by moral considerations. Although rejections of love and marriage for the purpose of retaining virginity are common in saints’ lives, in romance the generic expectation is that love between two worthy, equal, and single people will eventually be fulfilled in marriage (and sex). Fidelity to one’s true love is important, but virginity is not usually preserved for its own sake. Resistance to adultery thus offers different insights into the operations of desire and morality since adulterous propositions can place them in a position of tension. The ambivalence of Beulybon’s desire for the Earl encompasses the possibility that she does desire him but remains reluctant to commit adultery because of her loyalty to her husband. This need not ‘radically revis[e] the conception of goodness underlying most narratives of righteous women on trial’, as Stavsky argues; it may make Beulybon all the more praiseworthy to contemporary readers if she upholds her fidelity to her husband despite real temptation.
22 Stavsky, ‘Gode in all thynge’, pp. 539–40. Unlike
Syr Tryamowre,
The Erle of Tolous does not necessarily condemn adulterous desire itself, but acting on
such desires.
23 See further Arlyn Diamond, ‘The Erle of Tolous: The Price of Virtue’, in Medieval Insular Romance: Translation and Innovation, ed. by Judith Weiss, Jennifer Fellows, and Morgan Dickson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 83–92 (p. 92). The difference between desire and intention indeed differentiates the Earl’s interactions with Beulybon from the knights’.
24 See also Myra Seaman’s discussion of other differences in their approaches: Objects of affection: The book and the household in late medieval England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021), pp. 103–4. Barnard’s speeches are marked by conditional and subjunctive expressions, as he wishes
Y were so worthy a knyght
That y myght be hur fere!
And that sche no husbonde hadd. (365–7)
Likewise, when he receives the ring, he reflects
Yf evyr y gete grace of the quene,
That any love betwene us bene,
Thys may be oure tokenyng. (403–5)
The knights’ speeches, on the other hand, are characterised by warnings and imperatives, instructing Beulybon to ‘graunt me youre love, / For the love of God’ (643–4) and insisting
But ye do aftur my rede,
Certenly, y am but dede. (559–60)
To a modern reader this illuminates their sense of entitlement compared to the Earl’s, but in their medieval context there is a parallel with scholastic views of sin, which held that while feelings could not be helped, intent could be controlled to avoid sin.
25 See Holly A. Crocker, The Matter of Virtue: Women’s Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), p. 10; Joan Cadden, Nothing Natural Is Shameful: Sodomy and Science in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), p. 1. This may be exactly what
The Erle of Tolous portrays: although it avoids any direct reference to adulterous desire on the part of Beulybon, its narrative trajectory may tacitly admit the real possibility of desiring someone other than your marital partner. Acknowledging this possibility while avoiding committing adultery may have offered an important model for medieval readers, and perhaps particularly for the middle and upper classes. In these social circles, marriages were more likely to have been made on the basis of a short acquaintance or for family priorities rather than individual choice, which might have made people more prone to experience adulterous desires.
26 See Sara Butler, ‘Runaway Wives: Husband Desertion in Medieval England’, Journal of Social History, 40.2 (2006), 337–59 (p. 337). In addition, as men of these classes travelled for business, diplomacy, or war, their wives would be left alone for significant periods; as Katherine Harvey notes, wives and merchants were often asked about marital fidelity in confession, suggesting an association between travel and the potential for adultery.
27 Katherine Harvey, The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages (London: Reaktion, 2021), p. 27. In addition, ‘while husbands were away, their wives were expected to keep friendship networks going for the practical advantages they could provide’, engaging with ‘respectable neighbour[s]’, and ‘cultivat[ing] […] a network of social and business contacts’.
28 Cathy Hume, Chaucer and the Cultures of Love and Marriage (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), pp. 37–8; see also Cathy Hume, ‘“The name of soveraynetee”: The Private and Public Faces of Marriage in The Franklin’s Tale’, Studies in Philology, 105.3 (2008), 284–303 (p. 292). These situations may have opened up both the potential for and anxiety about adulterous desire, a dual perspective integrated into
The Erle of Tolous. This romance seems to negotiate the line between friendship and adulterous desire carefully, ensuring that Beulybon earns the Earl’s respect and affection without giving him anything more than the chance to admire her beauty and the gift of a ring. In this respect, it may distinguish gradations of affection that are more usually glossed over in romance representations of relationships between hero and heroine, but it also draws attention to the difficulties of making such distinctions.
29 This resonates with Brown’s discussion of the relationship between Launcelot and the Maid of Astolat in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur: A. E. Brown, ‘Lancelot in the Friend Zone: Strategies for Offering and Limiting Affection in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur’, in Emotion and Medieval Textual Media, ed. by Mary C. Flannery (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), pp. 75–97. The Erle of Tolous neither denies nor affirms Beulybon’s desire for the Earl but does make clear that whatever she feels, the important thing is her actions, in which she remains innocent of adultery.
Exemplary readings of
Syr Tryamowre and
The Erle of Tolous may have been encouraged and complicated by the manuscript contexts in which they survive. CUL Ff.2.38, in which both romances appear together, includes many religious and didactic texts alongside nine romances, some of which are themselves didactic in tone, such as
Robert of Cisyle and
Le Bone Florence of Rome.
30 Syr Tryamowre is also preserved in the Percy Folio (as discussed later in this chapter), as well as in two fragments: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. d. 208 and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson fragment. Their partial survival means they do not offer many insights into reading contexts. See ‘MS. Eng. poet. d. 208’, Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries (Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 2017) <https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/manuscript_4823> [accessed 5 February 2021]; Nicola McDonald et al., ‘Sir Tryamour’, Database of Middle English Romance (University of York, 2012) <https://www.middleenglishromance.org.uk/mer/65> [accessed 14 January 2021]. I discuss the manuscript contexts of The Erle of Tolous later in this chapter. The explicitly didactic works include two texts about adultery,
The Adulterous Falmouth Squire and
How a Merchant did his Wife Betray, placed shortly before the beginning of the romance section of the codex (at folios 56r–59r; the romances start at 63r).
31 Michael Johnston gives the folio numbers: Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 120–1. The presence of
The Adulterous Falmouth Squire, an afterlife vision in which a squire explains how he is being tortured in hell for committing adultery,
seems likely to prompt the reader to attend to how
Syr Tryamowre and
The Erle of Tolous negotiate the issue of adultery. While this may draw attention to the exemplary portrayal of Margaret, the more nuanced approach of
The Erle of Tolous is in tension with the extreme moral universe of the didactic work. Similarly, an exemplary reading of
The Erle of Tolous may be both supported and questioned by its place in MS Ashmole 61. Lynne Blanchfield suggests ‘it provides a complementary tale to the subsequent two exempla (items 22 and 23)’,
The Jealous Wife and
The Incestuous Daughter, which are separated from
The Erle of Tolous by
Lybeaus Desconus and
Sir Corneus.
32 Lynne S. Blanchfield, ‘The romances in MS Ashmole 61: an idiosyncratic scribe’, in Romance in Medieval England, ed. by Maldwyn Mills, Jennifer Fellows, and Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991), pp. 65–87 (p. 66). In
The Jealous Wife,
suspicions of adultery are proven wrong, which may support Beulybon’s innocence;
The Incestuous Daughter,
too, may highlight Beulybon’s virtue in comparison with the daughter’s extreme sexual sins. Rather than necessarily ‘troubl[ing] the ethical preconditions of the other works’,
The Erle of Tolous’s moral yet nuanced approach to adultery seems to me to align precisely with Rory Critten’s argument that medieval readers ‘could conceive of good conduct as a shifting idea whose correct manifestation might change from one situation to the next’.
33 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 (pp. 132, 124). The Erle of Tolous acknowledges the possibility that desire can be in tension with morality but insists it need not triumph over willed fidelity, positioning it broadly in accord with the exemplary material that it circulated alongside.
34 See further Seaman’s discussion of the ethical slippage of The Erle of Tolous: Objects of affection, pp. 106–8.However, as with Syr Tryamowre, Beulybon’s actions in The Erle of Tolous do not preserve her from danger, and it is all the more striking that this should be so in her interactions with the knights but not the Earl, given her potentially more morally dubious feelings for him (from the perspective of medieval Christian readers). While reasons of plot and characterisation underlie this, since Barnard as the romance hero is required to rescue the Empress rather than place her in danger for rejecting adultery, it also notably apportions blame for coercion to the men. That is, the romance indicates that it is not in any sense a victim’s behaviour that provokes coercion or retribution but the violence and entitlement of those who coerce them. The Erle of Tolous thus approaches an acknowledgement of violence as a structural rather than personal issue. The knights seek to preserve their own lives and prevent Beulybon revealing their attempts at seduction, but they frame this as a vow to ‘qwyte hur hur mede’ (690), later admitting that they ‘thoght hur to spylle / For sche wolde not do oure wylle’ (1126–7). They had also previously plotted for one of them to coerce Beulybon into sex by catching her in the act with the other, again indicating the extent to which their pleas for love are actually sexual propositions – though this plan of course backfires. The knights then plot revenge for Beulybon’s rejection, contributing to a cultural perception of rejection as dangerous and thus again making evident the dynamics of rape culture. The negative characterisation of these knights, who are ultimately punished for their treason by being burnt to death (again recalling ‘Susanna and the Elders’), opens medieval rape culture up to critique.
The nuances of exemplary conduct and the dangers of rejecting men’s advances in
The Erle of Tolous offer models through which we might fruitfully reconsider
The Franklin’s Tale. Like Beulybon, we could understand Dorigen to inhabit an ambiguous moral position in her conduct towards Aurelius. While Susan Crane has pointed to the way Dorigen’s ‘impossible condition’ introduces ambiguity into her rejection yet has suggested that this reflects the impossibility of saying no itself in romance,
Syr Tryamowre and
The Erle of Tolous illustrate that it is possible to say no and for that no to be taken seriously in romance literature – at least when what is being rejected is adulterous sex.
35 Susan Crane, Gender and Romance in Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 62–3, 65. Dorigen does clearly reject Aurelius, but her addition of the ‘impossible condition’ means he does not entirely give up on obtaining her love – although he does at first despair, indicating that he recognises an element of outright rejection in Dorigen’s speech. The impossible condition is presented specifically as an addition through the structure of her response. She uses the vocabulary of outright rejection up to her affirmation of her ‘fynal answere’ (987), which marks out the point at which her response, if it is to accord with the accused queens’ refusal of adultery, should, but does not, end. The intervening narratorial comment, ‘but after that in pley thus seyde she’ (988), also brackets off her shift to conditionality as a new and different direction. While some scholars have argued that what comes after Dorigen’s ‘fynal answere’ should not be considered a true part of her response, I suggest instead that these speech markers indicate Dorigen’s combination of different kinds of romance vocabulary.
36 For example, see John A. Pitcher, Chaucer’s Feminine Subjects: Figures of Desire in the ‘Canterbury Tales’ (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 68; Alison Ganze, ‘“My Trouth for to Holde – Allas, Allas!”: Dorigen and Honor in the Franklin’s Tale’, Chaucer Review, 42.3 (2008), 312–29 (pp. 317–18); Carol A. Pulham, ‘Promises, Promises: Dorigen’s Dilemma Revisited’, Chaucer Review, 31.1 (1996), 76–86 (p. 83). For a discussion of this and a rebuttal of the idea that a promise made ‘in pley’ compromises the legal validity of Dorigen’s vow, see Neil Cartlidge, ‘“Nat that I chalange any thyng of right”: Love, Loyalty, and Legality in the Franklin’s Tale’, in Writings on Love in the English Middle Ages, ed. by Helen Cooney (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 115–30 (p. 121). The start and end of her answer align with the unambiguous rejections of adultery in accused queen romances, while the middle section diverts to the conditional vocabulary used by single characters like Felice or Horn when rejecting love. I am not suggesting that Dorigen should be blamed by the reader for this: although Aurelius’s injunction ‘every wyf be war of hire biheeste!’ (1541) may attribute blame to Dorigen, the Franklin’s earlier reflection on the ease of misspeaking (779–84) seems to pre-emptively absolve her. She could be read as turning to a condition in an attempt to avoid the dangers of rejection, which Beulybon’s and Margaret’s experiences make evident.
37 In this respect, Dorigen may also offer a parallel with Margery in Dame Sirith, who Alice Raw has recently argued may attempt to ‘convey non-consent less directly in a situation where she is under threat’: Alice Raw, ‘Readers Then and Now: Coerced Consent in Dame Sirith’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 44 (2022), ‘Colloquium: Historicizing Consent: Bodies, Wills, Desires’, ed. by Carissa M. Harris and Fiona Somerset, 307–14 (p. 311). That Dorigen instead finds herself in a different kind of danger – in danger of committing adultery – testifies to the difficulty of finding a safe way to reject sexual advances within heteropatriarchal societies.
Turning from the vocabulary of rejecting adultery to that of a single person deferring love opens up a productive space of ambiguity within romance writing. While the accused queen romances tend to portray adultery in a negative light, other romances (particularly works written in or translated from French) use adultery to indicate desirability, deploying it to celebrate chivalric prowess and romantic love outside of marriage.
The Franklin’s Tale seems poised between these two traditions, its place highlighting the significance of Cooper’s question: ‘romances in part feed their audiences’ appetite for fantasy; but that statement invites the question, whose fantasy?’.
38 Cooper, The English Romance in Time, p. 225. Rather than focusing on the audience’s relation to fantasy, I want to explore this question with regard to the fantasies associated with particular characters.
39 Pitcher explores the fantasy elements for Aurelius: Chaucer’s Feminine Subjects, p. 65. The Franklin’s Tale incorporates elements that, in different circumstances, could provide a fantasy for Dorigen, with an attentive extra-marital lover who highlights her desirability and fulfils an impossible challenge for her love. But instead, what might seem like a fantasy is exposed as ‘a trappe’ (1341), a cause of ‘feere’ (1347) and ‘compleynt’ (1354). The Franklin does not seem to direct us to this reading of the tale, instead urging his audience to consider the
gentillesse of Arveragus, Aurelius, and the Clerk in his concluding question. I therefore attribute this focus to Chaucer: in turning the adulterous fantasies of other romances into a nightmare, Chaucer seems to probe the moral lacunae of romance, exposing the limits of its exemplary functions. Aurelius behaves as if he is in a romance of adultery, while Dorigen adopts the wrong model of behaviour from romance, suggesting the misunderstandings that can occur when the genre is taken as exemplary. Chaucer seems to have felt some ambivalence towards romance as a genre:
Chaucer uses the word ‘romaunz’ only rarely, and never to describe any of his own works. The sole occurrence of the term in the
Canterbury Tales, although they certainly include works that we would consider romances, is in the tale of
Sir Thopas, which […] satirizes the popular romance tradition.
40 Corinne Saunders, ‘Chaucer’s Romances’, in A Companion to Romance from Classical to Contemporary, ed. by Corinne Saunders (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 85–103 (p. 85). While
Syr Tryamowre and
The Erle of Tolous hold firm to the notion that romance can offer a ‘gode ensaumpull’ (10),
The Franklin’s Tale undermines this, instead pointing to the ways in which romance intersects with fabliaux in its portrayal of adulterous sex and emphasis on exchange.
41 See further Ben Parsons, ‘No Laughing Matter: Fraud, the Fabliau and Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale’, Neophilologus, 96.1 (2012), 121–36; and the broader discussion in Louise M. Sylvester, ‘Romance Debased’, in Medieval Romance and the Construction of Heterosexuality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 129–60. Overlaps between romance and fabliaux portrayals of desire or lust are also presented in Chaucer’s
Merchant’s Tale, perhaps again indicating a focus on deconstructing whose interests romance and its claims of exemplarity serves.
Like the accused queen romances, The Franklin’s Tale also incorporates issues of coercion, which it seems to portray negatively. Dorigen is clearly unwilling to commit adultery with Aurelius: she is ‘astoned’ (1339) when he meets her condition, her bloodless face recalling that of Custance in scenes of her distress, where her paleness seems to function as an affective marker inviting empathy with her situation. Dorigen further displays her sorrow and confusion when she is sent to Aurelius by Arveragus, appearing ‘half as she were mad’ (1511) and crying ‘allas, allas’ (1513). This, and the Franklin’s pre-emptive assertion that we should not judge Arveragus before we have heard the tale’s end (1493–8), suggests that Dorigen being sent to Aurelius against her will is supposed to make us uncomfortable. Both Aurelius’s attempt to hold Dorigen to her word and Arveragus sending her to Aurelius seem to be framed negatively, recalling the association of coercion and violence with the much more extremely negative characters in Syr Tryamowre and The Erle of Tolous. But I have also suggested that The Franklin’s Tale opens up connections with other kinds of romances, including through Dorigen’s use of the type of vocabulary the proud ladies might deploy to defer love. How might the portrayal of coercion in romances where adultery is rejected relate to the operation of coercion as a means of enforcing normative desire in the other romances discussed in this book?
In the context of resisting adultery, coercion and violence function as strategies of the desperate and vengeful – or in Aurelius’s case, the desperately mistaken – not as an acceptable means to begin a romantic relationship. Might reading these romances therefore change the way we understand works in which those who are apathetic or hostile to love are punished? Addressing the diversity of gendered roles in medieval popular romance, Joanne Charbonneau and Désirée Cromwell argue that
Even in the absence of a direct juxtaposition between good and evil archetypes, the distinctive construction of female identity depicted in any given romance stands in stark contrast to their opposing roles in other romance texts. The good daughter or faithful wife thus acts as antidote to the unfaithful and adulterous wife of other romances.
42 Joanne Charbonneau and Désirée Cromwell, ‘Gender and Identity in the Popular Romance’, in A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance, ed. by Raluca L. Radulescu and Cory James Rushton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009), pp. 96–110 (p. 101).Wade also reminds us that fruitful comparisons can be made not only in a broad generic context but on a smaller level between works that appear in the same manuscript. He suggests
the manuscript contexts of these romances can have a significant effect on how they might have been read for the moral, or rather on how early audiences might have used these miscellaneous combinations of texts to calibrate their understanding of the moral implications of particular romance heroes.
43 Wade, ‘Ungallant Knights’, p. 203.In sketching a few possibilities for how vengeful responses to the rejection of adultery might interact with the positive or neutral depiction of punitive responses to single people who reject love, then, I begin by examining the manuscript contexts in which such works appear.
Taking
Syr Tryamowre as an example, this work
appears in CUL Ff.2.38 with
The Erle of Tolous and
Guy of Warwick, and in the Percy Folio (London, British Library, MS Additional 27879) alongside fourteen other romances, including
Eger and Grime – a romance where romantic a(nti)pathy is treated punitively. Might reading
Syr Tryamowre, which proclaims its heroine’s innocence and the wrongful nature of her accusation and punishment, affect responses to Winglayne in
Eger and Grime? While such an inquiry remains speculative, two main possibilities suggest themselves. The first is that reading
Syr Tryamowre’s narrative of an innocent woman wrongfully accused and punished might not have affected a reading of
Eger and Grime, because the difference between rejecting adulterous sex and rejecting love as a single person may have prohibited intersecting responses. This was an important distinction for medieval readers: Sara Torres notes that in
La querelle de la Belle Dame sans mercy, one of the works that defends the
belle dame, the
Dame Loyale en Amour, recasts her not as a haughty figure who rejects love but as a faithful lover who resists seduction in order to remain true to her prior lover.
44 Sara V. Torres, ‘Sans merci: Affect, Resistance, and Sociality in Courtly Lyric’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 44 (2022), ‘Colloquium: Historicizing Consent’, ed. by Harris and Somerset, 325–34 (pp. 332–3). The
Dame Loyale en Amour thus does not protest the idea that women owe men love (or sex), but indicates that fidelity to a pre-established relationship is an acceptable reason to refuse love, highlighting the extent to which these scenarios were differentiated. However, this division might not be so absolute as to prevent any transfer of meaning between the two kinds of episode. A reader who noted Margaret’s innocence and the way in which assumptions of male trustworthiness conspire to allow her to be wrongfully punished might pause to consider whether Winglayne of
Eger and Grime really merits so negative a depiction as she receives, without undermining the difference between rejecting adultery and rejecting a potential marital partner. In this case, then, these two episodes might facilitate resistant readings by those primed to respond in such a way.
The Erle of Tolous opens up different areas of inquiry: as well as Ff.2.38 and MS Ashmole 61, this romance appears in Lincoln Cathedral Library, MS 91 (the Lincoln Thornton manuscript), alongside Sir Degrevant. In Chapter 2, I argued that Sir Degrevant offers us an emotional lacuna in Melidor’s transition to loving Degrevant, attending with much greater precision and insight to Degrevant’s own emotions. This pattern is reflected in The Erle of Tolous, potentially casting a different light upon its ambivalent representation of Beulybon’s feelings for Barnard. I argued above that this ambiguity might reflect a reluctance to acknowledge adulterous desires openly, but comparison with Sir Degrevant may instead suggest that the romance is simply not that interested in Beulybon’s emotions. The important trajectory here may be the establishment of the Earl’s goodness, which eventually leads to him marrying the Empress, and the development of her love for him may not be important to this emphasis. We could also read these two narratives’ connections in the opposite direction, however: while not a romance that particularly emphasises the use of coercion, Sir Degrevant does contain the scene in which Degrevant surprises Melidor and her maid within her castle gardens. In comparison with the knights’ intrusive propositions in Beulybon’s chamber, Degrevant’s pursuit of Melidor may appear more or less threatening. The relative privacy of the garden offers an opportunity for sexual coercion, as it does in Amis and Amiloun, working in tension with its role as a locus amoenus in which love can be freely exchanged, but Degrevant behaves with more courtesy and less violence than the two knights in The Erle of Tolous.
Looking beyond the confines of individual codices, the accused queen romances and The Franklin’s Tale may act as counter-narratives to the prevailing norms of gender and sexuality elsewhere in romance literature, challenging perceptions of women as fickle, coercive assertions of love as an obligation, and the glamorisation of adultery. Adultery is perceived negatively in each of these works, endowing them with an exemplary function, although they also gesture to the limits of exemplarity by acknowledging that even a perfect response to a sexual proposition does not guarantee safety. In doing so, they implicitly recognise that the conduct of the victim is irrelevant to the perpetrator of coercion, challenging medieval (and modern) rape culture’s reliance upon victim-blaming. These romances, read in combination with works depicting romantic a(nti)pathy, may therefore encourage a reader to question the way unwilling lovers are punished or manipulated for their resistance to love. For example, comparative reading of this kind may invite us to notice that Blanchardyn forcibly kissing Eglantine reflects male chivalric entitlement rather than a reasonable response to her pride, or that the Fere does not deserve to be repeatedly abandoned by Ipomadon simply because she did not at first think he could accord with her vow. Challenging these perspectives may be seen as a modern way of looking at these works, but the different insights offered by the role of coercion in narratives where adultery is rejected reveal that medieval rape culture was not a monolith either, and some diversity of views – some counter-narratives – existed for those enabled to pursue them.