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Chapter 1 - ‘Not Knowing Their Parents’: Reading Chivalric Romance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2012

Alex Davis
Alex Davis
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews
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Summary

IT IS WELL known that chivalric fictions often display plots that revolve around the discovery of noble birth. This chapter examines the social uses of such fictions. Early on in Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur, we read that, at the time of Arthur's marriage, ‘ther cam a poure man into the courte, and broughte with hym a fayre yonge man of XVIII yere of age rydynge upon a lene mare’. The old man has a request to make of the king:

Syr, it was told me that at this tyme of your maryage ye wolde yeve any man the yefte that he wold aske oute, excepte that were unresonable. That is trouth, said the kynge, suche cryes I lete make, and that will I holde, so it apayre not my realme nor myne estate. Ye say wel and graciously, said the pour man. Syre, I aske nothyng els but that ye wil make my sone here a knyghte.

‘It is a grete thynge thow askest of me,’ Arthur comments, on hearing this. The poor man, Aryes the Cowherd, goes on to explain that his request is at his son's desire, not his own:

For I shal telle yow, I have XIII sones, and alle they will falle to what laboure I put them and wille be ryght glad to doo labour, but this child wylle not laboure for me for onythyng that my wyf or I may doo, but alweyes he wille be shotynge or castynge dartes, and glad for to see batailles and to behold knyghtes, and alweyes day and nyghte he desyreth of me to be made a knyght.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance , pp. 40 - 72
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2003

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