THE now well-established critical consensus that the four poems of British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x, Art.3 are the work of the same person is derived in part from the recurrence in them of particular motifs and preoccupations which to that extent draws them together. We shall go further, suggesting that what we call the oeuvre of the Gawain-poet presents us with a coherent religious vision, deliberately explicated according to a particular order and within a particular social context. In order to answer the questions that the Cotton poems have raised, and to account for our various reactions to them, of pleasure, unease, shock, laughter and mystification, we must examine this ‘social context’, both in itself and in what the very idea of a social context implies. I hope to demonstrate that its implications are, finally, theological.

The Gawain-poet takes people where he finds them, which is usually in convivial gatherings. He speaks to a life in a courtly household, educated rather than royal, comfortable and civilised, within which he tells stories, sometimes about the sort of things that might happen to his audience and sometimes about situations that, although foreign to them, are familiar because they are taken from Scripture. Because the poet shows every sign of pleasure in describing the physical details of such a life, it has been assumed that his poetry uncritically endorses all the gathering and keeping of wealth that was practised by his contemporaries. This is to assume a great deal more than the poetry tells us. What the poetry does tell us is that he valued intelligent and educated conversation and offered his hearers opportunities to think creatively and analytically about questions that cropped up in the daily life of their community. The poems demonstrate that for him, daily life was a life conducted in the awareness of God's sustaining presence. This does not imply that the Gawain-poet was necessarily a person of extraordinary piety for his time, although I think his work indicates not only a genuine and energetic Christian faith but also an unusually lively intellectual grasp of it.

A theology of creation

The four poems of this collection testify that the poet had considered deeply the question of artistry, the motives behind its production and the effects of its completion.