New online is a scholarly follow-up to a claim made for the identity of the elusive Gawain-poet. The bold claim made for Sir John Stanley was substantially revived in the journal Arthuriana in 2004. Now the author of that 2004 paper revisits his topic with his new “Did Sir John Stanley write Sir Gawain and the Green Knight?”, in SELIM : Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature, Vol. 27, No. 1 (2022).
I should stress this is not a claim I agree with. But reading the new essay closely, several times, was still enjoyable. The author here…
“offers a revised survey of publications before and after 2004, examining whether they strengthen the case for Stanley as the Gawain Poet, weaken it, or demolish it completely.”
He largely draws on literary academics who have looked for internal evidence of authorship in the texts. He either ignores or very gingerly skirts the deeper linguistic research, and he almost overlooks R.W.V. Elliott who was the key boots-on-the-ground researcher. But the new survey is still useful because so much work under discussion remains locked in paid academic databases, in out-of-print and near-unobtainable books, or in deeply obscure journals.
This new survey does not bring the reader up-to-date, however. There are many recent items missing that one would expect to find. Such as the recent major ERDF study of the supposed Norse influence on Gawain. It looks to me like this is an older paper that’s been slightly tweaked, so as to get into a current journal. Even then, also missing is key older work such as the essays in Derek Brewer’s A Companion to the Gawain-poet.
But that said, it’s still useful and is even entertaining — especially when it skewers a silly Marxist or two.
The reader will however need to be aware that there are a few unfortunate errors. For instance it is stated that…
1)
“Sir Israel Gollancz (1863-1930) made unconvincing proposals on the Gawain poem as written for an audience in North Wales, and a better one for the Green Chapel as in the rugged country of north-west Staffordshire (Gollancz 1940: xviii-xx). This area of the Peak District was in the Forest of Macclesfield. We shall use this as a clue to authorship [for Sir Stanley].”
Gollancz was dead by 1940, and in the book the introduction’s suggestion came from his student Mabel Day. She proposed Wetton Mill in North Staffordshire as a likely location for the Green Chapel, following the lead on the area given by Bertram Colgrave (1938) who had suggested the nearby Bridestones burial-chamber. But Wetton Mill was outside the medieval Forest. The ‘old forest law’ Forest of Macclesfield ended at the boundary formed by the River Dane, as the standard A History of Macclesfield states…
“The Forest of Macclesfield was bounded on the east by the rivers Goyt and Dane, from Otterspool bridge, near Romiley, in the north, to Bosley in the south. The western boundary was approximately the present London Road from the Rising Sun Inn to Prestbury, from thence along the Macclesfield township boundary to Gawsworth, where it avoided the precincts of the church and continued south to the Dane.”
The Forest did not go across the Dane and then miles further SE to also encompass Wetton Mill and the Manifold Valley area. Even a rampaging hunt in full cry and pursuit of a fast stag, and heedless of the strictly patrolled hunting rights of the time, would not have got that far. Nor, it might be further noted, did it encompass the cleft of Ludchurch.
Incidentally, later in the essay we learn that Sir Stanley did anyway not have the Forestership of Macclesfield until 1403, rather late for Gawain. Nor was he a justice until 1395, and seemingly only for a year. He is, on these and many other counts, simply too late in time.
2)
“Elliott’s belief that the poet was perhaps a monk on a monastic estate must be rejected. There is nothing monastic in the four poems attributed to him [the poet]”
This claim is unfortunately un-referenced, and Elliot’s extensive work is even more unfortunately omitted entirely from the bibliography! Did Elliot ever suggest a “monk” as the Gawain-poet? If so, where? There is some mention of monks in the initial 1958 Times newspaper article. But I recall Elliott saying very clearly in print that the poet was not monastic, and indeed it was from Elliot that I first took this important warning point when I started my research. I can only imagine that some memory of ‘Eliot suggesting the Grange at Swythamley’ has for some writers come to = ‘therefore, the Gawain-poet was a monk’. But that is not the inference to take, and would overlook important factors such as…
i) the practice of lodging and educating noble younger sons in humbler-yet-educated circumstances, in other nearby households. Also done so as to make the young lords less arrogantly cock-a-hoop, among other reasons.
ii) Dieulacres Abbey monks and estate men of the Grange effectively serviced and partly administered the hunting in the Peak. We know this because they complained bitterly to the King in the 1350s when too many nobles and their dogs and servants descended on them to enjoy the Peak hunting. Even though the religious did not hunt themselves, in circumstances such as the Grange on the Dane they would often have been cheek-by-jowl with those who did. “Canon law barred clerics from blood sports”, as the new essay states. Though one Abbot who went hawking and fishing can be found in England in the 1360s, and possibly there were others.
Also, it is likely that the managed hunting grounds are a good ‘warm-up’ ride from the castle in Gawain. They do not have to a stone’s throw from the castle drawbridge, as some academics (not the one under discussion here) seem to assume. One would not want a hunt and dogs rampaging around on one’s own doorstep, and a valuable horse also needs to be ‘limbered up’ with a good ride before a strenuous mid-winter hunt.
3)
The new essay’s plague numbers and dates seem a little ‘off’, and are ‘off’ in favour of the later Sir Stanley…
“In fourteenth century England there were five great outbreaks of plague, the last two being in the late 1370s and between 1390 and 1393.” … “there was an epidemic from 1390 to 1393”.
The three main waves were in 1349 (the first), then in 1361 (especially severe in North Staffordshire, Croxden Abbey recorded “all the children died”) and 1379 (20% mortality, hardly reaching North Staffordshire). As for the others the book Biology of Plagues: Evidence from Historical Populations (Cambridge University Press, 2005) states… “In 1379-80 there was a plague [the fourth] apparently confined largely to the counties of northern England [meaning the parts adjacent to Scotland].” “The fifth plague hit in 1389-1391” [and appears to have been especially virulent in the damp eastern fenlands of England].
4)
There are also some assumptions that, while not mistakes, might have been usefully questioned. Such as…
“Nor would he [the Gawain-poet] have lived among those hills and moors, though he certainly hunted on them … His residence will have been a great hall in the lowlands of the north-west”.
Why have academics — including this author — always totally overlooked Alton Castle? It’s as though the place has an academic ‘invisibility cloak’ around it. Even Elliot, who had boots-on-the-ground in North Staffordshire for years, seems to have gone no further than ‘his bit’ of the ancient Earlsway. He never once asked where the Earlsway at Waterhouses might have led to. It was pointing to a massive medieval castle not far off, that’s where — one fitting the bill perfectly in both its period, fabric and owners, and perched right in middle of the ‘Hautdesert’ and just 14 miles from the dialect “ground-zero”.
There was a reference new to me. T. Turville-Petre, “The Green Chapel”. IN: O. J. Padel & D. N. Parsons (Eds.), A Commodity of Good Names, Shaun Tyas, 2008. Sadly the book is one of those festschrift titles which are barely publicised and which hide away good scholarly work in soon-unobtainable books. Forced open-access for all taxpayer-salaried writers of arts and humanities texts can’t come soon enough for me.
There is one review of this festschrift which helps illuminate the article…
“Torlac Turville-Petre considers “The Green Chapel”, convincingly discussing the ways in which the Gawain-poet, in his description of the Green Chapel, uses topographic imagery in line with the Peak District, where the Poet came from, thus making real for his audience the supernatural world the characters inhabit.”
Sounds like it might follow on from Elliot’s dogged fieldwork? Curiously, I find that Turville-Petre’s very un-illuminating short entry in the Oxford Handbook of Medieval English Literature decides (on no referenced evidence) to place the Green Knight’s castle in the Wirral of all places. Put both his texts together and one must wonder quite how Gawain gets so quickly all the way from a castle supposedly in the Wirral to the upland hunting / Green Chapel in the Peak / Staffordshire Moorlands. In the tale the two places are only supposed to be a few miles apart, not the 50 miles by winding horse-tracks and salt-ways that separated the Wirral from the Manifold Valley.
Anyway, in a vain search for further reviews of A Commodity of Good Names I also stumbled on a gem. An open 300-page PhD thesis from 2019 on Barrows In The Cultural Imagination of Later Medieval England. Enjoy.
