Nobility in Middle English Romance Marianne A. Fisher A dissertation submitted for the degree of PhD Cardiff University 2013 Summary of Thesis: Postgraduate Research Degrees Student ID Number: 0542351 Title: Miss Surname: Fisher First Names: Marianne Alice School: ENCAP Title of Degree: PhD (English Literature) Full Title of Thesis Nobility in Middle English Romance Student ID Number: 0542351 Summary of Thesis Medieval nobility was a compound and fluid concept, the complexity of which is clearly reflected in the Middle English romances. This dissertation examines fourteen short verse romances, grouped by story-type into three categories. They are: type 1: romances of lost heirs (Degaré, Chevelere Assigne, Sir Perceval of Galles, Lybeaus Desconus, and Octavian); type 2: romances about winning a bride (Floris and Blancheflour, The Erle of Tolous, Sir Eglamour of Artois, Sir Degrevant, and the Amis– Belisaunt plot from Amis and Amiloun); type 3: romances of impoverished knights (Amiloun’s story from Amis and Amiloun, Sir Isumbras, Sir Amadace, Sir Cleges, and Sir Launfal). The analysis is based on contextualized close reading, drawing on the theories of Pierre Bourdieu. The results show that Middle English romance has no standard criteria for defining nobility, but draws on the full range on contemporary opinion; understandings of nobility conflict both between and within texts. Ideological consistency is seldom a priority, and the genre apparently serves neither a single socio-political agenda, nor a single socio-political group. The dominant conception of nobility in each romance is determined by the story-type. Romance type 1 presents nobility as inherent in the blood, type 2 emphasizes prowess and force of will, and type 3 concentrates on virtue. However, no romance text offers just one definition; implicitly or explicitly, there are always alternatives. This internal variety indicates that the romances imagine nobility scene- by-scene; even a text seemingly committed to one perspective is liable to abandon it temporarily if there is another better suited to the narrative moment. Ideological expression always comes second to effective story-telling. This means the texts are frequently inconsistent and sometimes illogical, but that multiplicity is of their very essence. Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1 Nobility in the Later Middle Ages 22 2 Lost Heirs: Nobility by Blood 83 3 Winning a Bride: Nobility by Prowess 136 4 Impoverished Knights: Nobility by Wealth and Virtue 187 Conclusions 240 Appendix: Summaries of the Stories 248 Bibliography 267 Acknowledgements My first thanks go to my PhD supervisors: Professor Stephen Knight, Dr Rob Gossedge, and Professor Helen Phillips. Thank you for your advice, your encouragement, and your enthusiasm; without them this project would have foundered. Rob, you deserve special thanks for going far beyond the call of duty in reading drafts and abandoned chapters (even abandoned projects), always without visible resentment. There lies true nobility, I’m sure! I also thank my many other teachers at university and at school, who all played a part in getting me to this point. I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council and to Cardiff University’s School of English, Communication, and Philosophy, who together funded the first three years of my PhD through the AHRC’s Block Grant Partnership scheme. Thanks also to my GP, Dr Claire Wunsch, and to Dr James Milne of Cheltenham General Hospital, for care during an extended period of physical ill health. Finally, I thank my parents, Jenny and David Roberts. You alone know how much you have done, and I can only hope you also know how much your support has always meant. This dissertation is dedicated to you. vii Introduction This thesis springs from the observation that Middle English romances define nobility in many different ways, and that those definitions often conflict. From this I argue that the genre serves neither a single socio-political agenda, nor a single socio-political group. The Middle Ages entertained a wide range of ideas about nobility and class, and sustained close reading shows the texts in this study contain all of them. Ideological consistency is seldom a priority. The dominant conception of nobility is usually determined simply by the kind of story being told, so romances about lost heirs present nobility as inherent in the blood, romances about winning a bride emphasize prowess and force of will, and romances about impoverished knights concentrate on virtue. However, no romance text offers just one view of nobility; implicitly or explicitly, there are always alternatives. This variety would have helped the texts appeal to the diverse audience indicated by the manuscript record, and perhaps also testifies to the number of hands and voices involved in their composition, translation, and oral and scribal transmission. Meanwhile, close reading identifies internal inconsistencies that show romances imagine nobility scene-by-scene. Even a text seemingly committed to one perspective is liable to abandon it temporarily if there is another better suited to the narrative moment. Ideological expression always comes second to effective story-telling. Defining Nobility The medieval terms ‘nobility’ and ‘noble’ conflate social description with value judgements. Isidore of Seville’s influential Etymologies (early seventh century) defines noble (nobilis) as meaning ‘not base, one whose name and family are recognized’.1 To be base (degener) is to be ‘ignoble, either because one is of an inferior lineage or because, although born of the best lineage, one lives 1 Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. Stephen A. Barney et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 224. 1 dishonourably’.2 Nobility indicates social and moral status – high birth, and honour or goodness. That overlap carries through from Isidore’s Latin to the Middle English of the romances. Among the definitions of nobilite in the Middle English Dictionary are: 1a. ‘high birth or rank […] ancestry’; 2a. ‘honor, renown; majesty, grandeur’; 2b. ‘splendor, magnificence, glory’; 3a. dignity, degree of excellence’; 3b. ‘high or noble quality or attribute’; 3c ‘superiority of physiological status’; 3d. ‘superiority of breed or kind’. Noble as an adjective has similar meanings: 1a. ‘of high rank or birth, highborn, noble’; 2a. ‘of high rank in the hierarchy of created things […] superior’; 3a. ‘worthy of honor or respect, noble, honourable; admirable, excellent, praiseworthy’; 3b. ‘illustrious, distinguished; renowned, celebrated […] valuable, useful’. Both noun and adjective have a primary social meaning that shades off into qualitative assessment and quickly conflates aristocracy with goodness. The words also have material resonances (‘splendor, magnificence, glory’), and functional ones (‘useful’). Middle English romances draw on all these senses. Their heroes start with a firm grasp on one aspect of nobility – high birth, for instance, or military capability, or moral excellence – and over the course of the story they accumulate the others as well. By the end of his adventures the romance hero is universally recognized as a good and rich man of high social standing. He is noble in the fullest sense. In discussing this process of accumulation I draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory that an individual’s status is made up of several different kinds of what he calls ‘capital’. Capital can be economic, but comes in other forms too – for example cultural, symbolic, social, and intellectual.3 These types might be connected (as when intellectual capital from a qualification brings economic capital from employment), or they might be distinct: hedge-fund managers are 2 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, p. 217. 3 On capital and its forms, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979), trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge, 1984; rept. 2010), pp. 108–13; Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital’, in Education, Globalisation, and Social Change, ed. H. Lauder et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 241–58. See also Robert Moore, ‘Capital’, in Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts, ed. Michael Grenfell (Durham: Acumen, 2008; rept. 2010), pp. 101–17, especially pp. 103–6. 2 often wealthy, but since the 2008 financial crisis they have lacked social and symbolic capital; a war veteran might struggle to subsist on a meagre pension, but he has considerable symbolic capital. Applying this concept to medieval romances, one can say that a lost heir begins with high symbolic capital thanks to his noble blood, but that his social and economic capital are both low (such children are generally raised in humble obscurity). A knight who loses his fortune begins with high social and economic capital, then proves his symbolic credentials by suffering virtuously, and is eventually rewarded when that symbolic capital converts back into social standing and material wealth. Bourdieu’s terms provide a convenient vocabulary and framework for considering these shifts. As those two examples suggest, romances generally make symbolic capital constant, and social and economic capital variable. The hero’s challenge is to use his symbolic capital to acquire the other forms; ours, to determine the root of that symbolic capital, and to identify how he effects the conversion. Though I have adopted ‘noble’ and ‘nobility’ as my key terms, Middle English also uses gentil and its cognates. Scholars have sometimes attempted to distinguish between noble and gentil, as when Maurice Keen argues that his mid- fourteenth-century sources make gentility a matter of breeding, and nobility one of individual virtue.4 However, Arlyn Diamond follows Christopher Dyer and Kate Mertes in claiming that ‘in the late middle ages, despite an overwhelming concern with rank and birth, in cultural and ideological terms, gentle, noble and aristocratic are roughly equivalent labels’.5 That is the impression given by the Middle English Dictionary, which defines gentil as: 1a. ‘of noble rank or birth, belonging to the gentry, noble’; 2a. ‘having the character or manners prescribed 4 Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), pp.