Our third poet is the presumed author of the four poems in British Library Manuscript Cotton Nero A.x. He is usually called the Gawain-poet, and his poems demonstrate clear similarities of language, style and theme: among these, the poet's treatment of the ideas of courts and kingship are consistent enough on many points to bear detailed examination and to contribute to a wider perspective of fourteenth-century literary representations of this topic. The manuscript has been dated to around 1400, and MED dates the poet's work to about 1390, which would mean that he was writing at the same time as Chaucer, Langland and Gower. The Gawain-poet works in the cultural contexts of his period; like Langland, Chaucer and Gower, he shares ‘a recognition of the hierarchical nature of social bodies’. His portrayal of society in each of his poems is based on the belief that without the secure underpinning of true values, these systems would collapse into chaos. He is a commentator who ‘prescribes individual penance for national ills’, perhaps deducing from the swiftly changing reigns of the kings of his century that the only hope for the future was through internal spiritual strength.

The Gawain-poet's work, unlike Langland's, cannot be read as being primarily informed by a satirical or political impetus, but this does not necessarily mean that he is untouched by political events or social change, or that his work, as has been suggested, ‘would seem to argue a kind of escapism or reaction’.