The discussion of several of the texts central to our understanding of insular romance habitually employs the familiar term ‘Matter of England’. The familiarity has encouraged a comfortable sense of the meaning and value of the term; this paper aims to investigate whether such confidence is well-founded and to trace the development and use of the term, and its effect on the perception of the romances associated with it.

The term ‘Matter’ is modelled on Bodel's famous classification of the subjects of narrative into the three Matters of France, Rome and Britain, a genuine, and rare, glimpse into the medieval sense of narrative. However, Bodel's twelfth-century classification is itself not as straightforward as it is often assumed. The recent study of the origins of romance by D.H. Green draws attention to Bodel's assessment of the differing status of the three Matters: that of France is voir (true), that of Rome is sage (wise, knowledgable), while the Matter of Britain is vain et plaisant (frivolous or false entertainment). It is in Bodel's interest thus to privilege the Matter of France, to which he is contributing, but this also provides a gesture of support for the political hegemony of France in competition with the Anglo-Norman exploitation of Arthurian material, and that of the Matter of Rome by the German Empire.3 In terms of modern romance criticism we can also see that Bodel's perceptions have as much to do with modality as with matter – that in his hierarchy of truth Arthurian romance is more quintessentially faithful to the fictionality of the genre as it has developed, a finding with which most modern readers would concur.

But how does this give rise to the ‘Matter of England’? This is not, of course, a medieval term used by Bodel or anyone else, and there was neither the literary material nor the contemporary political interest to support it. Nor does the term come from the nineteenth-century ‘inventors’ of Middle English. Although there was plenty of interest in the origins and nature of English romance amongst English and continental scholars in the nineteenth century, their concerns are more with the perceived Germanic origins of that romance. For early scholars such as Ritson and Ellis and the early editors, Madden, Furnivall and Skeat, as John Ganim has shown, romance was a central genre, as important to understanding the development of Middle English literature as Chaucer and Langland.