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Romance, Distraint, and the Gentry

Scholarship of the previous century adopted an ambivalent approach to Middle English romance. On the one hand, efforts to edit so many romances implicitly recognize this genre’s central place within medieval English literary culture. Editions of romances, for example, have been a staple of the Early English Text Society since its inception, as well as, more recently, composing a large proportion of TEAMS editions. Yet in spite of the proliferation of editions and thus ready access to such texts, literary critics throughout the twentieth century consistently registered unease with most romances, objecting to their lack of psychological depth, oversimplified characters, cultural chauvinism, and seemingly naive recourse to magic and supernatural prowess. L. F. Casson, the editor of Sir Degrevant for EETS, remarked in his edition that “the ending is unduly hurried, as though the author had tired of puppetry,” while George Kane, in an attempt to justify the study of a select group of romances on aesthetic grounds, commented that “[m]ore than twenty of the surviving romances must be called artistic failures.”1 As a result, in 1986 Stephen Knight could justifiably quip that the verse romances were “the ugly ducklings of medieval English studies.”2 Yet the last twenty years witnessed a renewed interest in the verse romances qua literature. As formalism gave way to historicism, Middle English romance offered itself as an ideal vehicle for understanding medieval literary culture as practiced outside the exclusive circles of court and nobility. As such scholarship recognized, romance is a wide, diverse genre—in terms