The two verse works discussed in this chapter, the Speculum Guy de Warwick and Lydgate's Guy of Warwick, have in common their radical realignment of the Guy of Warwick narrative. In both the figure of Guy is moved from the world of romance into the orbit of devotional literature and reconstituted in ways that provide testimony to the associative adaptability of the legendary knight. Such new formulations have an intrinsic interest that is heightened by the demonstrable extent of their appeal to medieval audiences. The factors that led to them achieving such a degree of popularity invite examination both of the intrinsic qualities of the works themselves and of the surviving forms in which they were transmitted.

The poem now generally known as the Speculum Guy de Warwick, which in its fullest form runs to 1034 lines, in couplets, recounts the desire of an ‘erle of gode fame, / Gy of Warwyk’ (29–30), to seek Christian guidance from ‘a god man […] / þat liued al in godes lawe / Alquin was his rihte name’ (37–39). Several of the manuscript titles of the poem draw attention to this association with Alcuin (c. 740–804), the English poet, scholar, and exegete, and advisor to Charlemagne. In British Library, Additional MS 36983, the poem is simply titled ‘Alquyne’ in both title and colophon (fols 268rb and 275ra); in Cambridge University Library MS Dd.11.89 it is described as ‘þe sermon þat a clerk made þat was cleput Alquyn to Gwy of Warwyk how ich Cristen man owe for to hafe a remembraunce of þe passion of our lord Ihesu Criste’ (fol. 162v); and in British Library, Harley MS 525 it is called ‘Speculum Gydonis de Warewyke secundum Alquinam heremitam’ (fol. 44); this is also the only manuscript title to incorporate a form of words (‘Speculum Gydonis’), that corresponds to its modern one.

Although the figure of Alcuin is given considerable prominence in the manuscript titles, as it is in the narrative itself, where his is the dominant expository voice, none of these titles indicate the specific work of his with which the Middle English poem is associated.