The Avowyng of Arthur is a materially and economically minded poem. Its monstrous boar of Carlisle, for instance, is a very material creature. ‘Masly made’ and exuding overpowering ‘smelle other smekis’, the boar is almost too much matter for Arthur to manage. Tusks ‘of thre fote’ (191) and armour-like hide break apart flesh, vegetation and spearshaft until the king matches matter with matter. He drives his sword ‘inne atte the throte’ (249) and butchers the boar into more manageable body parts. Later and less violently, we see ‘mete’ and feeding help Baldwin to win contests at home and abroad. The materiality and economic potential of human bodies is foregrounded. A man puts himself in a barrel like a comestible and has his head blown off by artillery (1021–32) and women murder one another prosaically and trade sex for survival. Yet the economics of the Avowyng refuse to be dominated by materiality. Sir Kay might think instinctively of naked competition for material profit and loss, as when he taunts Sir Menealfe about the loss of his prisoner (‘If thou have oghte on hur coste [spent], / I telle it for tente [count it lost]’ (431–2)), but Sir Gawain and Sir Baldwin exhibit a much more supple economic mentality. By the time Arthur has come to admire Baldwin's seemingly reckless vows as ‘profetabull’ (1130), the poem has unpacked numerous complex exchange situations, in which the potential of material capital is only fully realized in combination with symbolic capital.

As the Avowyng thinks economically, what it thinks about is cooperation. It can be read as a discussion of exchanges, reflecting on situations and strategies that promote conflict or cooperation. An economic imagination which addresses the problem of cooperation (understood at the level of the particular exchange, as giving a benefit to another at a cost to oneself) is one of the poem's chief, and most fascinating, sources of coherence.