The audience for Patience must have been similar to the audience of the Pistel and other poems in this book: high-class, lay, steeped in romance literature. Since Patience appears alongside Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in British Library MS Cotton Nero A X, it is the best known of the poems I have discussed so far, and more scholarly attention has been given to its author and original reading context, despite the frustrating absence of evidence. We know that the manuscript, which also includes Pearl and Cleanness, was copied around 1400, and that since Cleanness is indebted to Mandeville’s Travels, it cannot have been composed before c. 1360. The language of the poems is that of the north-west Midlands, probably Cheshire. Most scholars have assumed that the same poet wrote all four poems in the manuscript, which share a common alliterative metre, dialect and stylistic similarities, and an apparently similar controlling intelligence, and I share this assumption. The fact that the poems appear together in Cotton Nero, copied together by a single scribe, implies that the manuscript was made for a single audience. Of course, this scribe’s intended audience was not necessarily the same as the poet’s. Indeed, it has sometimes been argued that Patience was written for clerics. But I will assume that the four poems were also composed for a single, lay audience. There seems to me to be a significant continuity between the way the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight depends on his audience’s deep knowledge of romance, making witty in-jokes about Gawain’s literary reputation and knightly convention before wrong-footing them at the poem’s climax, and what he does in Patience. I will argue that for Patience, too, an audience steeped in romance is necessary for the poet to achieve his desired effects.

As Putter and Stokes show, Patience was written for reading aloud to a group of listeners. This is the context conjured up by the poet’s invitation ‘Wil ye tary a little tyne and tent [pay attention to] me a while?’ (59), but more persuasive evidence is offered by the poem’s division into two instalments, which indicates a stable audience who would hear it as entertainment over a couple of days: most plausibly, a household group. The first instalment ends with a quatrain of summary and anticipation: