Of the English romances there is perhaps none in which secrecy, spying, storytelling, and the relationship among them are of such importance as in The Squyr of Lowe Degre. This anonymous late romance, surviving in its complete form only in a sixteenth-century printed edition, and probably not composed before the early Tudor period, has rightly been seen by its few modern commentators as consciously looking back to a long tradition of preceding Middle English romances. It contains, for example, two passages (lines 77–86 and 614–32) referring explicitly to fourteenth-century romances with well-known stories – Libeaus Desconus and Guy of Warwick – and taking these as possible models for its hero's career. It would be wrong, though, to suppose either that The Squyr of Lowe Degre is a merely derivative work or that its relationship to the tradition of Middle English romance is one of parody or satire. It is much concerned with social mobility and the contribution of wealth to social status, rather than with the transcendent concepts of knighthood and nobility that tend to govern earlier romances, but that is no more a sign of parody than are the similar features of Sir Launfal. The Squyr of Lowe Degre is engaged, and at a far higher level of literary skill and imaginative intensity than Chestre's poem, with the real interests of the period in which it was written.