How, and in what forms, did Chaucer’s poems reach medieval readers in the manuscript age? How was Chaucer’s writing (both process and actual content) affected by the manuscript culture within which he wrote? And for the modern reader of Chaucer, what insights are to be gained from a heightened awareness of the manuscript context from which his poetry emerged? The sheer difficulty of obtaining texts in the age of manuscript is difficult to imagine from a world with print, never mind one with instant internet access. A medieval reader keen to acquire a copy of Chaucer needed money, connections, and above all patience. A modern reader in search of Chaucer, meanwhile, needs to understand something of the vast, shifting manuscript matrix from which all modern editors have, like so many hopeful Dr Frankensteins, tried to re-create his texts. A better understanding of this manuscript culture, which robbed authors of control over their texts and could even remove their name, can also illuminate aspects of Chaucer’s process of composition, and may even help to explain his infamous use of an alter-ego narrator-figure, often explicitly named ‘Geffrey’, into his major poems.

Many historians and literary critics – for Barbour’s Bruce is one of those rare texts that really is of equal interest to both – have puzzled over the generic classification of The Bruce. Or to be more accurate, literary critics have puzzled over which literary genre to assign it to, while historians have argued about the extent to which it can be treated as a historical source. It is essentially the same question, approached from different disciplinary angles. What is it about this text that prompts these questions to resurface with every generation of scholars that studies it? The question of why an awareness of literary genre is necessary in the first place needs little expansion now: Jauss’s description of how genre shapes a reader’s ‘horizon of expectations’ has become the industry standard in literary scholarship. For Barbour’s Bruce, matters such as the level of factual accuracy expected (or the amount of exaggeration and identifiable departure from fact tolerated); the value-system by which actions are to be judged; assumed attitudes to social status; and more nebulous qualities such as the relative levels of emotional engagement and rational analysis encouraged in the audience are all affected by what type of text we perceive The Bruce to be. The recognition of a text’s genre also encourages readers to compare it to, and read it against, other known members of that genre. The attempt to identify the most appropriate generic context for a text of a different historical period does, however, risk misleading the modern reader, since literary genres are in a constant state of evolution. Not only have generic labels themselves – ‘romance’, ‘story’, ‘chronicle’ – changed in what they designate, but medieval writers and scribes could be shockingly careless in their use of them in the first place, indifferent to the difficulties this would create for literary pedants of later centuries. Nevertheless, neither medieval nor modern readers can read a text without groping for a context in which to interpret it, and picking up clues as to genre remains a vital part of identifying (or reconstructing) that context. The problem with Barbour’s Bruce is that it gives mixed generic signals.

No literature exists in a vacuum. Meaning is generated through context, or rather contexts, since there will always be several that apply at any one point and these will change and multiply over time. This is no less true of medieval romance than of any other genre of literature, and no single study is likely to address all of the relevant contexts for a genre as widespread and popular – in sheer numbers and variety of readers – as medieval romance. The aim of the present collection of essays is to take a selection of English and Scottish romances from the medieval period and explore some medieval contexts that might deepen our understanding of them. The contexts explored here include more traditional literary concerns with questions of genre and rhetorical technique or literary-cultural questions of authorship, transmission and readership, but they also extend to such broader intellectual and social contexts as medieval understandings of geography, or the physiology of swooning, or the efficacy of baptism. This is a two-way process: the romances studied here are illuminated by the various contexts in which the volume's contributors set them, but so too are those contexts enriched and altered by romance's interaction with them. The medieval audience for romance was relatively broad and varied: old and young, women and men, clerical and lay, nobility, gentry, merchants and those who could not afford – perhaps could not read – their own manuscript or print copy of a Middle English romance.

Introduction

The aim of this Appendix is to set out, in accessible and convenient form, the available evidence for the date and provenance of each of the thirty-six known tail-rhyme romances. In most cases this is provided by a combination of the dates of the extant manuscripts and the linguistic features of the text, the latter mainly drawn from an analysis of the rhymes. Assessing the authorial dialect of a poem from its rhymes is not without its problems, although it is the most traditional method. Crook, in his preface to Jordan's Handbook, states categorically: ‘In determining the dialectal provenance of any given poem only the rhyming words should be studied in view of their Old English origins.’ This statement was published in 1974, before the publication of LALME with its vast amounts of data on scribal linguistic usage, including details such as local spelling variants which are not dealt with by studies of historical phonology. This tremendous resource allows for the much better detection of ‘relict’ forms and spellings in individual manuscript copies, but it does not in itself reveal whether these relicts are authorial or from some interim copying layer. To gauge whether or not a relict form may be authorial, one needs to have some sense of what that authorial dialect is likely to have been and this brings us back to rhyme-evidence. Although rhyme-evidence rarely allows for the precise localisation of a tail-rhyme romance (for reasons which will be outlined below), in cases where linguistic evidence for provenance is the only kind available, it remains the basis on which the significance of all other linguistic features must be judged.

Meaning and significance are not innate to verse form: they can only be acquired through habitual usage. There is nothing inherently funny in the metrical structure of a limerick, for example, although the built-in anticipation of its final rhyme-word happens to lend itself well to comic effect. The limerick stanza could, in theory, be used for serious material, but any previous experience of the form will lead people to expect comedy as soon as they recognise its familiar rhythm, so the likely result would be confusion. It is a rather more complex business to establish what expectations might have been invoked in medieval audiences by the use of tail-rhyme stanzas, partly because such expectations will have changed over time. Nevertheless, the eagerness of many medieval scribes to indicate the exact verse form of the texts they were copying – via lineation, brackets, and other aspects of layout – suggests the importance they attached to recognising verse form.1 In a world where texts could only be transmitted by manuscript or by mouth, verse form plays a role analogous to that of the modern book cover: it can provide its audience with a strong initial indication of what to expect from the text.

There is no known Middle English equivalent to such commentaries on vernacular poetic practice as Dante's De vulgari eloquentia. In their absence, the only way of determining what literary associations the Middle English romance poets hoped to exploit by adopting the tail-rhyme stanza is to trace the stanza's origins and its usage up to that point.

Chapter one investigated the origins of the tail-rhyme stanza itself – where it might have come from, and what kinds of texts used it initially – while chapter two surveyed the tail-rhyme poetry of Anglo-Norman and earlier Middle English literature in order to get a sense of the immediate literary context for the birth of tail-rhyme romance. This chapter focuses on a different aspect of the history of the tail-rhyme romance: the role of scribes and scribal practices in shaping the tail-rhyme romance. The study of ‘transmission’ has often been caught up with the traditional (if misleading) dichotomy between oral and written modes of transmission. Although this chapter will consider the influence that oral transmission and performance might have had on the development of the tail-rhyme romance, its main focus is on some little-studied features of the mise en page of tail-rhyme poems in their manuscripts. An examination of the use of a graphic layout for tail-rhyme poetry in some medieval manuscripts helps to clarify some aspects of the origins of tail-rhyme romance as well as explaining some features of versification and stanza-division which continue to trouble modern editors of such texts.

Graphic Tail-Rhyme

Many medieval scribes highlighted the verse form of the texts they copied through punctuation, bracketing, page layout, or a combination of these elements. The relatively common practice of bracketing rhyming lines together works well for couplets, but in more complex stanzas the brackets can overlap to the point where they obscure the pattern they are trying to illustrate.

Latin Victorine sequences may have been influential in developing the tail-rhyme stanza, but it is a tremendous leap from Latin hymnody to secular romance, even for a poet familiar with both traditions. A more immediate context for the genesis of the Middle English tail-rhyme romance was the much more varied and flexible tradition of tail-rhyme poetry that developed in Anglo-Norman and earlier Middle English literature. A better understanding of this may help to solve the mystery of why the authors of the first Middle English tail-rhyme romances decided to reject the metrical forms previously employed for romance or chanson de geste in favour of the tail-rhyme stanza. This chapter surveys as comprehensively as possible the vernacular tradition of tail-rhyme composition in England from its beginnings in the twelfth century – when the texts concerned are Anglo-Norman – to roughly the first quarter of the fourteenth century, by which time Middle English is beginning to overtake Anglo-Norman as the vernacular of choice for composition and the tail-rhyme romance has come into existence. I cite the precise stanza form for each poem discussed in this chapter not because it the most interesting thing about that poem, but because it will enable readers to see more clearly the development towards the kinds of tail-rhyme stanza that become standard in Middle English poetry generally, and the tail-rhyme romance tradition in particular.

The fact that emerges most strongly from this survey of the earlier tail-rhyme poetry of England is that this type of stanza seems to have been associated, as in continental French poetry, with material that is spiritually or morally instructive, whether directly so or obliquely through satire.