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15 - Middle English Romance and Malory’s Morte Darthur

from Part II - Literary Texts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2019

By
Corinne Saunders
Edited by
Candace Barrington  and
Sebastian Sobecki
Candace Barrington
Affiliation:
Central Connecticut State University
Sebastian Sobecki
Affiliation:
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands
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Summary

It was a king bi are dawes [former days]

That in his time were gode lawes

He dede maken and ful wel holden.

(Havelok the Dane, 27–9)
Romance has most often been viewed as an escapist mode, comparable to contemporary fantasy and romantic fiction. Northrop Frye characterises romance as ‘secular scripture’, built on universal human desires and archetypal patterns – a genre, one might suppose, with little space for the law. Yet medieval romance is fluid and various: writing in ‘romanz’, the vernacular, only gradually came to have generic associations. Subjects range from classical to historical to legendary, linked most of all by recurring motifs: love, adventure, the supernatural. Often exotic and fantastical, romance is also profoundly concerned with social contexts, and this balance between mimetic and non-mimetic is acutely evident in its engagement with law. Middle English romances reflect a growing ‘legal consciousness’ that shapes ‘values, beliefs and aspirations’ and ‘provid[es] a reserve of knowledge, memory and reflective thought’. Their treatment of legal concepts and processes can be remarkably specific, while the idea of ‘good laws’ also informs their deep structures, founded on notions of order, honour and right. Romances repeatedly dramatise issues of inheritance and outlawry, accusations of felony and treason, trials by combat and ordeal, oaths and contracts, and debates over property and marriage. In Malory’s Morte Darthur, these motifs are woven into a tragic disquisition on the need for social order founded on good laws.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature , pp. 188 - 201
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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References

Further Reading

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