Taken as a whole, the Middle English verse romances associate themselves with instrumental music at a fundamental level, and information about instruments can extend our understanding of romance by delineating how music could have interacted with a text. The Middle English romances confirm traditional associations of plucked and bowed stringed instruments with narrative performance, suggesting strongest support for the harp and the fiddle, and to a lesser degree the lute. Remarkably detailed information on the medieval fiddle survives, and from a careful consideration of fiddle construction and tuning, we may derive principles of narrative accompaniment that can reasonably extend to other instruments, taking into account differences in sound production.

The fiddle is well adapted to playing the extant narrative melodies, which are generally syllabic and repetitive. Though most commonly confined to a narrow range, these melodies sometimes exhibit interval leaps, which are easily accommodated by the tuning structure of the fiddle; and sometimes shift to a different tonal centre, which can again be addressed by a documented adjustment in tuning. More important, fiddle tuning provides an answer to how medieval aesthetics of variation would have been applied to fiddle accompaniment of narrative by prescribing a structure of pitches that automatically creates a continually shifting framework of ancillary sound when a melody is played. Furthermore, the instrument offers numerous options for simple variation, either melodic or non-melodic, which can be carried out without distracting a performer's attention from the text. Fiddle accompaniment thus adds complexity to a text by interacting with it in fluid permutations of sonic background, never so abrupt as to distract, with transitions not necessarily coinciding with metrical structures.