Sir Gawain the Green Knight

The Medieval poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” survived from a single manuscript which has three other poems, probably all by the same author. Scholars have long attempted to guess at who this writer might have been, but his written work certainly far surpassed the childlike illustrations in British Library Cotton Nero A x. Here you see a rendering from “Pearl”, one of the poems in the “Gawain” manuscript, in which a grieving man is comforted by a vision from a deceased female relative (probably his daughter).

One of the most convincing arguments (put forward by scholar Andrew Breeze) is that a late 14th-century aristocrat called Sir John Stanley wrote the poems around 1387. There are several reasons Breeze makes this claim, and I like them because they highlight so many different trends of the time.

For one, Breeze suggests that the female character in “Pearl,” refers to a daughter lost to Stanley from the bubonic plague: the signature event of the century. Stanley had been charged in his youth with the murder of a cousin and attempting to raid a manor house. However, he was pardoned on condition that he fight for the English in France, which he did: his involvement in Aquitaine paralleled the lives of many English aristocrats who fought in the Hundred Years War.

Stanley rose high in rank after this time. He made it into the prestigious “Order of the Garter,” begun by English kings to highlight chivalry, and “Gawain” ends with the Order’s motto “honi soit qui mal y pense” (“shame upon whoever thinks bad of it”), and Stanley was by 1405 the only member of the Order who would have spoken in the West Midlands dialect that the poems were written in.

There are other arguments Breeze uses to advance his claim, but even if the poet’s identity cannot be ultimately established, the intersection of actual history with the literary themes of these poems makes for a good story in and of itself.