Place-names identify The Awntyrs off Arthure with a magnate audience which is both admonished about landed wealth and celebrated in wordplay on land tenure.

The mangled place-names in the 715 lines of The Awntyrs off Arthure are baffling in all four extant manuscripts. Surviving or recognizable place-names fall into four groups: (i) names of places in south-west Scotland claimed from Sir Gawain by the outsider, Galleron; (ii) names of places donated to Gawain in compensation when Galleron's land is restored; (iii) names of places on the larger political map of Europe; (iv) names referring to the places in Cumberland where the action of the poem is set. The locations in group (iii) would be well known to the audience from the French wars. The second group refers, it seems, to the estates of the Duke of York. The names in (i) and (iv) to refer to places in Scotland and on the western march (boundary) – the debatable lands – and range from Ayr on the west coast of Scotland to Tarn Wadling, just off the old Roman road (the modern A6), nine miles north of Penrith.

I have shown elsewhere how identifiable place-names link the poem to the political context of the mid-1420s. They allude to the deteriorating alliance of Brittany, England and Burgundy and the precariousness of relations with Scotland. The setting of the poem is the Cumberland-Westmorland border in territory strongly associated with the Neville family at this period.