At the opening of the Alliterative Morte Arthure, King Arthur's victory celebrations are interrupted by a demand from Rome for tribute. Furious over what he perceives to be an insulting and unjust mandate, Arthur launches his kingdom into a succession of wars. King Arthur's fury over Rome's demand, and the speed with which he moves to revenge the wrong done to his honour, is characteristic of this rendition of King Arthur. Unlike Malory's fifteenth-century prose romance, Le Morte Darthur, which draws mainly on courtly French romance for its source material, the less well-known fourteenth-century Alliterative Morte Arthure has a narrative based largely on the pseudo-historical accounts of Chronicle texts in Latin, Middle English and Anglo-Norman. Honour and vengeance are both central to the economy of masculinity in this textual tradition; when reputation comes under attack, Arthur's court responds with retaliatory violence. While the Alliterative Morte Arthure shares with other Middle English Arthurian texts a celebration of wirchipe (honour) and menske (reputation), it is less clearly allied to the romance genre than to history or epic, with more of the action taking place on the battlefield than at court. However, within these wider political conflicts, there are moments when the poem slows down to focus on more personal revenge narratives, in which an individual's private grief drives forward the military action.

This chapter focuses on the role of lament in the Alliterative Morte Arthure, examining how it fits into the poem's revenge narratives and influences the presentation of Arthur's character and his masculinity. In the first of these, Arthur is called on to end the suffering of his subjects under the cruel terror of the Giant of Mont St Michel. On his way to fight the giant, he encounters a widow, who, grieving over the body of her brutally raped and murdered ward, the Duchess of Brittany, demands that Arthur kill the giant to avenge the young woman's death. In the second example, Arthur mourns the death of Gawain, his most beloved soldier and kinsman, after he is killed in hand-to- hand combat with Mordred. Here, the lamentation is performed by Arthur himself, over Gawain's dead body.