The enigma that is Boeve de Haumtone is summed up in M. Dominica Legge's seminal study of Anglo-Norman literature, where she discusses the text under the chapter heading ‘Ancestral Romance’, and describes it as belonging to ‘the class labelled romance … cast in the form of a chanson de geste’. As form is a major generic marker, her ambivalence over the nature of the text invites examination. In this chapter, I shall examine the way the poet presents Boeve as a chanson de geste, and the use of both chanson de geste discourse, based on the laisse, and more scholarly rhetoric, such as chiasmus and annominatio, as a way of approaching this question of genre. Legge's term ‘ancestral romance’ has not gone unquestioned. Susan Crane, in her examination of Insular literature, debunks the theory of ‘ancestral romance’ linked to individual patrons but continues to classify Boeve and the other texts that have English heroes as ‘romances’. The catalogue of Anglo- Norman texts and manuscripts compiled by Ruth J. Dean and Maureen B. M. Boulton does not endorse the concept of ancestral romance, though the texts usually listed under this category are there grouped together. The authors describe Boeve as a romance, but add that ‘there are also three continental versions usually considered chansons de geste’. François Suard describes Boeve as a ‘chanson d’errance’, but he is concerned more with the later, Continental versions of the tale. My concern is with the Anglo-Norman text, generally considered the oldest extant version; I am accepting Dean and Boulton's description of this as thirteenth-century.

We can certainly recognize generic similarities between the romances of Horn, Haveloc, Gui de Warewic, Fouke le Fitz Waryn, Waldef and Boeve – particularly in terms of narrative pattern, one Crane characterizes as ‘a pattern of dispossession and reinstatement, the hero regaining through his admixture of courage and legal knowledge a rightful inheritance wrongly seized from him’. A pattern of dispossession and reinstatement is not unique to the Insular texts, but in the Continental chanson de geste the regaining of a rightful inheritance would more probably be achieved by physical reconquest.

The difficulty in attempting to classify Boeve in relation to chanson de geste is brought out by Crane, who considers that all these stories of English heroes, dealing with external, political forces, ‘may seem close to epic’.