Introduction

Clothing in epic is, as one might expect, mainly concerned with armour, though details about that are found in romances as well. Clothing in romance fulfils a number of functions, some conventional, some less so. One of its purposes is to define expectations associated with class and gender: we may note the costly garments offered to Gawain at Bertilak’s castle in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:

In Lay le Freine, before Le Freine’s mother leaves her by a convent, she takes

and fastens a gold ring to her arm by a silk thread in order that those who find the baby will see that she comes from a noble family (‘nee de bone gent’, 121–34, as Marie de France has it). Clothes often feature in lists of gifts signifying the wealth and generosity of the giver: Degrevant, for example,

Launfal, too,

When poverty descends on Launfal, Arthur’s nephews abandon him, saying

The importance of dress and textiles varies widely even within narratives telling all or parts of the same stories. Unlike the versions of the Constance story in the Vita Duorum Offarum, Trivet’s Anglo-Norman Chronicle, the English version of the Gesta Romanorum, Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale, and Gower’s Confessio Amantis, the narrative in Emaré is propelled by an object, an elaborately worked cloth, the gift of the king of Sicily to the emperor, Emaré’s father, and subsequently, in the form of a robe, a gift from the emperor to his daughter. Particular objects such as these appear in so many Breton lays that they are considered a defining element of the genre (Hopkins 2000: 71): when Le Freine gives up her embroidered cloth, she unknowingly prepares the way for her mother to reclaim her.