The Hystorye of Olyuer of Castylle is a late prose romance known only from a single copy now in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. The title is editorial, and it is derived from the colophon of that copy, since the title-page is missing. The romance was printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1518; and it is a close translation by Henry Watson of a French original written by Philippe Camus in the court of Philip the Good of Burgundy some time in the 1450s. Nothing else seems to be known about Camus, and not much about Watson, except that he was one of de Worde's regular translators and was also responsible for the English text of Valentine and Orson. The court of Philip the Good, however, was right at the cultural heart of northern Europe in the fifteenth century; and at his death his library probably comprised the best part of a thousand volumes. Two of those volumes were manuscripts of the French Olivier de Castille, of which four other manuscripts are known from the fifteenth century; and by 1521 it had also been printed in French, Spanish, Flemish and German, as well as English. It would seem to have been popular.

The French text is generally referred to in full as L’Histoire d’Olivier de Castille et Artus d’Algarbe, reflecting the fact that it actually has two heroes. The plot is an intricate combination of traditional motifs and a kind of pseudo-history, moving between Spain, England and Ireland in a double-stranded narrative that is generally well controlled, although the historical and local allusions do little more than provide a familiar setting for events that belong to the more universal world of traditional tale and romance. The realistic colouring would, however, have been appreciated by Burgundian readers – for whom verisimilitude was of great importance, with Froissart often being taken as a model even for works that are a long way from true history in the modern sense. The identification of the narrative as a ‘history’ acknowledges this preference from the start.

As this text is not well known, the first part of this essay comprises a selective plot-analysis which aims to draw out the way in which the author deploys his heroes’ fictional adventures on an apparently factual European map.