Vaughn Stewart
ENGL 373
Ten-page Draft
28 October 2005
Introduction
What’s Guy About?
Guy of Warwick is a medieval romance about nearly everything. It piques varied themes of religion, achievement, love, and adventure. By the final line, Guy has been both sinner and saint, jouster and pilgrim. He kills a total of two giants, one dragon, and countless Saracens. He fights for his love, his life, his land, and his God.
Plot Summary
Since Guy is relatively unknown today, it seems only fitting to give a bit of a plot summary. The story basically divides into two halves: one where Guy seeks to win love and one where Guy seeks to win glory for God. As a youth in Warwick, Guy falls in love with the earl’s daughter, Felice. However, Felice knows that she can have any man she wants and refuses to marry Guy unless he proves himself to be the best knight in Europe. Smitten, Guy sets off for the continent to prove himself as a knight. After winning countless jousting tournaments, Guy embarks on a crusade. After slaughtering many Saracens, Guy returns to England to slay a dragon. After all these exploits, Felice finally agrees to marry Guy. But their marital bliss is brief.
A fortnight after getting married, Guy looks upon the night sky and has an epiphany. He realizes that he has caused much war and woe, but has done nothing for God. With a guilty conscience, he puts on a pilgrim’s cloak and leaves Felice on a quest to glorify God. While on his pilgrimage, Guy conquers a Saracen giant and defends an abused friend. Returning to an England, Guy finds the nation under the threat of a Danish invasion. Guy hides his identity and the king of England unknowingly enlists the world’s greatest knight to slay the Danes’ giant. After a victory over the Danish menace, Guy retires to an abbey where he spends his final days. As he is on his death bed, Felice comes to his side. Two weeks after his death, Felice dies as well. They are buried together, and a church is later erected on the site.
Manuscript Tradition
Guy of Warwick is originally an insular Anglo-Norman production. The first manuscript containing the work dates from between 1232 and 1242[1]. The popular legend was eventually translated into English around the turn of the century. Our earliest English manuscripts suggest that there was a lost archetype in English[2]. There are two extant manuscripts basted on this lost archetype: the Auchinleck manuscript and the Caius manuscript[3]. Of these, the former is the oldest extant English manuscript containing Guy of Warwick.
The Auchinleck MS is important for more than simply the having the oldest copy of Guy. It is actually one of the earliest collections of medieval English romance, produced between 1331 and 1340 in London. But the questions remain of how it was made and for whom. Recent research has concluded that the Auchinleck MS was produced by professional lay scribes at a time of declining monastic scriptoria[4]. As far as its eventual audience, one thing is certain: s/he was fairly wealthy[5]. The most likely consumer was an increasingly “wealthy bourgeois public”[6]. Essentially, the Auchinleck MS was produced for non-nobility. Because of its position in an early romance canon and its intent for an audience outside nobility, Guy actually gives us one of the best insights not only into fourteenth-century romance but also into very beginnings of English popular literature.
Guy in the Auchinleck MS
Guy holds a special place in the Auchinleck MS. Derek Pearsall, renowned medieval scholar and editor of the Scolar Auchinleck MS facsimile, contends that Guy could have been considered “the great prestige item of the collection”[7]. But it is the verse-form of the Auchinleck Guy that makes it particularly anomalous.
As could be seen above, Guy of Warwick essentially has a bipartite structure in the Auchinleck redaction. The main shift in plot comes when Guy leaves Felice to journey forth as a pilgrim. Up until that point, the Auchinleck Guy uses the standard rhyming couplets to recount Guy’s secular achievements. At the point where he marries Felice and then departs on his religious pilgrimage, the poem changes into twelve-line tail-rhyme stanzas[8]. Naturally, this stylistic shift has caught the eye of many critics who have made much of such a change.
However, the recent work of Alison Wiggins, has shed new light on an old assumption. That old assumption was that the Auchinleck redaction of Guy of Warwick, with its verse change, was an innovation of the poet-scribes who produced. But dialect evidence pointed out by Wiggins suggests that the stanzaic Guy of Warwick—a unique copy in English—and the couplet Guy actually come from two different sources. The couplet Guy seemingly comes from an archetype that was used for other manuscripts as well[9]. This archetype was produced in London sometime in the beginning of the fourteenth-century[10]. The source for the stanzaic Guy comes from the East Midlands, possibly around Cambridgeshire[11]. This conclusive evidence shattered many of the commonly held assumptions that the verse change signified some great and obvious thematic significance[12]. It also cemented Shonk’s findings about the Auchinleck MS, which informed the discussion above. And it further showed that the key to unlocking the Auchinleck MS is Guy.
Historical Context
Guy was a very popular work for quite sometime. It’s literary transformations and traditions have taken it from insular romance to chapbook standard to children’s story[13]. However, it is not these later metamorphoses that reveal how impressive it was during the medieval period. Although there is no specific criticism of the Auchinleck MS coming from that time, one can easily tell that Guy was popular based on his cultural reception.
His popularity manifested itself in other literature and in secular relics. Perhaps the most telling sign that Guy was popular is the existence of a homiletic sermon on Guy, Speculum Gy de Warewyke, which was often copied and shared[14]. The chapel at Guy’s Cliffe was a popular tourist destination during the fifteenth century and demonstrates that Guy’s popularity as a secular religious figure grew increasingly with time. This chapel constructed during the fifteenth-century is supposedly built on the hermitage where Guy spent his final days. A nine-foot-tall carving of Guy is etched into a cave wall that forms one of the chapel’s walls[15]. However, the most obvious place for Guy relics is Warwick Castle itself. By 1509, a special office was set up just for the keeping of Guy’s sword. Warwick Castle even constructed a “Guy’s Tower” in the late fourteenth century to be the supposed place where Guy had his epiphany[16]. To this day, even, Guy’s porridge pot supposedly rests in the Great Hall of the castle.
But not everybody liked Guy. William of Nassington famously condemned Guy and other English heroes by calling them “veyn carpyng” (vain carping)[17]. For Nassington, Guy could not be edifying and thus wrote “Ne of syre Gy of Werewyke, / Alle Зif hit myЗte some men lyke” (Nor of sir Guy of Warwick, / Although it might please some men)[18]. Other priests would complain that their parishioners would fall asleep while listening to the gospel but would bolt upright at the very mention of King Arthur or Sir Guy[19]. These critiques reveal that even the religious quest of Guy could not save it from its branding as secular literature. Much like certain scorned popular genres today, “real” literary authorities didn’t much like Guy (Chaucer included)[20].
Placing Guy in a historical context quickly becomes more difficult that it would seem to be. After all, Guy has been many things to many people. As an Anglo-Norman production, it was clearly intended for a baronial audience. In her book Insular Romance, Susan Crane argues that insular romances (and Guy is a member of this group), essentially express baronial concerns in the wake of the Angevin accession to the throne of England[21]. By the time that Guy was translated into English, the work came to reflect more of the anxieties of the time: questions of national identity. According to Crane, national feeling, but not a strong baronial attachment, affects Guy’s sympathies in the Auchinleck redaction[22].
Of primal importance for understanding the first part of Guy is the context of the Crusades. As mentioned above, Guy does indeed crusade in the holy land (and comes close to fighting against the Crusaders). Although there is an enormous corpus of literature on the Crusades themselves, the historical facts of the Crusades do not matter much for this present argument. Rather, the cultural perception of the Crusades during the early fourteenth-century is of utmost importance. Although people did not know all the details of the Crusades, they had begun to hear horror stories—especially the horrendous failure that was the Fourth Crusade—about reckless knights and less-than-holy deeds:
The Crusades proved difficult for the medieval West to accept fully,
particularly as success became more elusive and tales of the horrors
wrought on Christians and non-Christians alike began to filter back to the
homelands and enter popular knowledge.[23]
The Crusades did not evoke images of a wholly beneficent England. The very mention of them in Guy has lead Rebecca Wilcox to theorize that one of the primary aims of Guy is to reshape the prevailing beliefs about the Crusades[24]. For this paper, Guy’s correspondence to historical fact does matter as much as the fact that the Crusades would be problematic for Guy’s audience.
Critical Context
Most of the criticism on the Auchinleck redaction of the Guy legend has focused on the dichotomous plot and its accompanying thematic and verse-form shifts. Around this central issue there are two bodies of criticism. The first focuses on the physical presentation of the two halves of the Auchinleck Guy. The two main critical viewpoints are that either the couplet Guy and the stanzaic Guy represent two different romances or they do not. Dieter Mehl ascribes to the first school, believing that the verse shifts are actually two different romances[25]. However, Murray J. Evans has effectively undermined this thesis, citing the fact that the stanzaic Guy does not share in the standard features. Evans therefore concludes that despite the bipartite structure of Guy, the romance as it appears in the Auchinleck MS is intended to be a single romance[26].
The other body of criticism focuses on the thematic interplay between the two halves. Carol Fewster’s early work on this dichotomy formed the basis for a formerly widely-held critical interpretation of the work. Her thesis was that the latter half of Guy—the religious quest—function as a critique of the first half[27]. Essentially, Guy functioned as a didactic piece about the perils of secular achievement and the worth of a spiritual life. However, many of her findings were based on the faulty assumption that the Auchinleck Guy was an innovation upon the original and that the verse-form changes were intentional. Velma Bourgeois Richmond claimed that the work did not present a harsh critique of secular achievement but rather was intended to be simply a fun adventure—a medieval romp[28]. Decades later, Paul Price picked up on this line of thinking, taking it to an extreme. According to Price, the function of Guy is to combine the contradictory values of range and amount in the adventure. That is, Guy becomes more experienced at the price of thematic and plot unity[29]. Price views the plot of Guy as essentially a self-serving, self-perpetuating tool. Although these three articles—particularly the last two—are not always the most commonly read in Guy criticism, they form the main schools of thought on the interpretation of Guy.
Where Do We Go From Here?
On a pilgrimage. The theorists mentioned above have worked themselves into an epistemic corner. But the text itself provides a way out. The interpretive work of Wiggins has highlighted the aspect of pilgrimage in Guy[30]. Indeed, even the first half of Guy has much to do with exile and wandering. According to Wiggins, the Guy’s pilgrimage is not merely a way to keep the adventures rolling, but it provides the literary space in which the contradictions between secular chivalry and religious duty could be explored. Even today, such conceptions as the “‘ideal knight’ and ‘ideal pilgrim’ do not necessarily reside comfortably together”[31]. However, the task of illuminating specifically how Guy actively attempts to reconcile these two ideals remains undone.
That is the goal of this present paper: to get at what Guy’s getting at. The idea that Guy is merely a silly medieval frolic is untenable. To refuse the ability to hold Guy’s decisions in accordance with his past decisions is also dubious. What rises from the ashes of these theories is the idea that Guy is actually a reconciliation of secular and religious achievement. The complex plot, the values of range and amount, the secular and religious dichotomy are all expressions of the attempt to find out how one can be both righteous and successful. The chief aim of this paper is to answer the question: How does Guy of Warwick present these problems, the conflicts between them, and the possible solutions?
In order to get at this issue, we must first examine Price’s arguments in more detail—not only because he has many good points but also because he presents a dangerous and somewhat attractive case that leads one in epistemological circles. His arguments have broader significance for the theory of reading popular medieval literature as opposed to simply being a critique of Guy. From there, we must progress into the stanzaic section of Guy of Warwick. At this point, we will illuminate problems with the character of Guy that persist throughout the narrative. We will also focus on Guy’s identity as it is presented in the second half. The main methods I will use to get at these questions will be close-reading and placing the text in its historical context.
Hopefully, we will be able to touch on many other questions and assumptions. Is there an epistemological problem with stating “theme” in medieval English popular romance? Is close-reading an anachronistic tool that would not have been “available” in the early fourteenth-century? The list of questions could go on indefinitely, for Guy is truly at the center of questions about what it means to be popular literature. I may not find answers to everything. But I will hopefully begin to find some answers on this pilgrimage through Guy of Warwick.
The Truth in Guy’s Confession
Paul Price sees the two halves of Guy as an effort to encompass the contradictory values of range and amount within the spectrum of a single work, creating an encyclopedic hero. But such a conclusion comes at a price: sacrificing any form of genuineness in Guy’s decision. His thesis hinges on the idea that the values of range and amount naturally end up in contradiction with each other. Specifically in Guy, the necessity to sustain a secular Romance narrative conflicts with the eventual necessity to sustain a religious Romance narrative. For Price, Guy’s confession and penitence is merely “a structural truth”:
The fact that Guy’s spiritual re-orientation is a means to return the hero to
action, and lacks any profound thematic significance, only adds to the
impression that the confession scene, which brings this return about,
functions to produce effects which are difficult for a critical reading to
value or even to reconcile with the earlier part of the romance. This
impression is informative.[32]
The information actually contained in this impression is that Guy uses plot devices to perpetuate the plot. Granted, Price actually does state that denying the ability to critically read a work is problematic as “a gauge of its priorities”[33]. But he still maintains that the confession scene “is chiefly concerned with augmenting the hero and extending his adventures, and that theses effects are more important than a coherence which would stand up to a critical reading”[34]. Despite its inbuilt caveats and exceptions, close reading shows Price’s arguments to be fundamentally flawed and are ultimately untenable. The events that would engender Guy’s repentance are either stated or implied; the active effort to reconcile these problematic episodes with Guy’s righteousness give the story the cohesiveness that Price finds so elusive.
Before one dismisses Price for rejecting critical reading, this issue of the sincerity of Guy’s confession must be examined in further detail. To Price’s credit, it is entirely likely that the readers or hearers of Guy would not remember every detail from the intricate plot. For most of the first half, Guy is a righteous knight who fights with honor and does good deeds. In light of this persistent image of excellence, Price believes that Guy invents reasons to condemn his past life before deciding to go on his religious quest:
“Seþþen y þe seyЗe first wiþ ayn -
Allas þe while y may sayn -
Þi loue me haþ so ybounde
Þat neuer seþþen no dede y gode
Bot in wer schadde mannes blode
Wiþ mani a griseli wounde.
[.....................]
Ac Зif ich hadde don half þe dede
For him þat on rode gan blede
Wiþ grimly woundes sare,
In heuene he wald haue quit mi mede
In joie to won wiþ angels wede
Euer more wiþouten care.
Ac for þi loue ich haue al wrouЗt,
For his loue dede y neuer nouЗt;”
[.....................]
“For mani a bern & kniЗt hardi
Ich haue ysleyn sikerly
& strued cites fale
& for ich haue destrued mankin
Y schal walk for mi sinne
Barfot bi doun & dale.” (ll. 7203-7208, 7212-7219; 7263-7268)
[ll. 24.4-9, 25.1-8, 29.4-9]
(“Since I first saw you with my eyes—Alas the while! I say—Your love has so bound me that I have never since done any good deeds. But in war I have shed man’s blood with many grisly wounds.” [...] “But if I had done half my deeds for him that bled on that cross with painful, grim wounds, He would have given my reward of joy in heaven—to live in angel’s clothing forevermore without care.” [...] “For I have surely slain many men and hardy knights, and destroyed many cities. Because I have destroyed many people, I will walk barefoot, by hill and valley, for my sin.”)
The poem does not characterize Guy as a wanton killer, nor does he destroy cities. However, he finds himself guilty of both. Apparently, Guy has lost his wits and thrown narrative cohesiveness to the wind. Price correctly points out that Guy needs this type of confession before a subsequent religious romance can occur. Without the confession of past wrongdoing, Guy’s departure from his wife and home would seem mercenary at best. Price digs no deeper than this: that the confession scene is a piece of necessary plot machinery. But a more careful reading of Guy reveals quite a different understanding.
For Price, Guy’s condemnation of killing seems surprising, as if they were completely new material. But the woeful lamentations of Guy’s actions are not a new plot invention. After being ambushed by Lombards in an early scene, Guy suspects that his mentor, Herhaud, and his friends, Torold and Urri, have been slain. Guy ponders the consequences of his questing for Felice:
Now haþ Gij miche sorwe made
For his felawes he is vnglade.
‘Allas’ quod Gij ‘felawes dere,
So wele doand kniЗtes Зe were.
Al to iuel it fel to me
Felice þo y was sent to serue þe;
For þi loue Felice, þe feir may,
Þe flour of kniЗtes is sleyn þis day. (ll. 1357-1364)
[ll. 1553-1560]
(Now Guy has greatly wept; he is sorrowful on account of his fellow knights. “Alas” cries Guy, “dear fellows, you were such hardy knights. It has all turned to evil for me, even though I went out to serve you, Felice. For your love, Felice, you fair maiden, the flower of knights is slain this day.”)
The sorrow here foreshadows the sorrow Guy feels in his later confession. Particularly interesting, Guy discovers for the first time that his good intentions do not necessarily lead to good outcomes. His chivalric goal of winning the heart of Felice turns into a bloody tragedy. As such, Guy does not maintain a monolithic ideal of chivalry but finds cracks at the foundation of this ideal. Guy continues this speech for more than thirty lines, considering who to blame for this supposed tragedy (Herhaud is not actually dead). Although Guy never directly blames himself, he shifts blame from his love to his attackers to his lord (ll. 1363-1398 [ll. 1559-1595]). Such a sweeping condemnation of his quest is hard to forget, even if one concedes Price’s assumption that medieval readers did not read critically. Furthermore, this scene is not the only incidence of Guy questioning his secular quest.
When Guy travels to the East on a Crusade, he finds himself in the service of Ernis, emperor of Constantinople. At Ernis’s behest, Guy pledges to guard the Byzantine capital. However, the emperor’s steward, Morgadour decides to undermine the newfound friendship with a series of clever lies. After Morgadour turns the two against each other, Guy ponders joining the side of the Saracen infidels. But Ernis stops him short of sacking Constantinople, and Guy explains himself to the emperor:
“Hou schuld ich euer siker be
Of ani bihest men hotes me?
For þemperour me seyd þo,
& trewelich me bihete þerto,
Þat he me wold gret worþschipe,
& now he me wil sle wiþ schenschipe
For þe speche of a losanger
& of a feloun pautener.” (ll. 2936-2943)
[ll. 3289-3296]
(“How should I ever remain true to any promise that men promise me? For the emperor told me then—and furthermore promised me truly—that he would greatly honor me. And now he will slay me with disgrace because of the talk of a liar and of a treasonous scoundrel.”)
For such a knight as Guy, fighting against the Christians is deeply unsettling. Indeed, fleeing would probably have been more noble than fighting alongside Saracens. But Guy’s allegiance relies more on the fidelity of a ruler than on Guy’s fidelity to God. Hopkins strongly believes that “[t]his speech itself betrays Guy’s intrinsic lack of true honor”[35]. This may be a bit harsh for a knight who has done many good deeds, but the truth remains that Guy’s character is called into question.
The text of Guy’s Crusade provides a wealth of moral dilemmas for hero, but the cultural context of the Crusades provides even more problems. Modern readers know the historical fact that the Crusaders were not always concerned with fighting for God, but were often more concerned with pillaging. However, the fourteenth-century English populace heard similar stories. Cultural conceptions pressing in on Guy make his Crusade increasingly morally ambiguous. Although the poem never explicitly mentions Guy sacking a Christian city, he is implicated in a larger movement that led to such destruction. The very mention of Crusades opens the door to a morally troubled arena of cultural connotations.
The question then remains as to the effect of joining together these two seemingly contradictory ideals. If one begins to piece together the secular Guy, she will find that his character and actions begin to call into question the societal foundations for chivalric ideals. By combining a problematic secular success with an attempt to right those wrongs, Guy gets at fundamental problems in both chivalry and the society that produces it. The struggle between navigating a religious life in secular world—to be in the world but not of it—is a question that needed to be dealt with for fourteenth-century England. By adding episodes to nuance such a delicate and difficult question, Guy engages in this dialectic even if it does not offer a singular answer.
Upon scrutiny of Price’s argument, one finds that Guy of Warwick does actually value both range and amount, but those values do not create the great contradictions that Price sees. The idea that the confession scene merely provides the plot machinery necessary to progress the story ultimately does violence to the intricacy of Guy in character and theme. The cohesiveness that Price believes can only be found through rejecting critical reading can actually be found elsewhere. It can be found within Guy; it can be found around Guy in early fourteenth-century England. Guy of Warwick offers a form of fairly comprehensive entertainment, but that comprehensiveness does not come through neglect of text and culture. Reconciling the dilemmas and nuances of Guy’s character poses a serious intellectual challenge to both the fourteenth-century and twenty-first century mind. The ultimate solution to this challenge lies not in an image of Guy flattened into narrative uniformity. The true answer lies in the process of reconciling the seeming contradictions in Guy’s character.
Appendix 1:
A Pretty Picture
Fig. 1: Guy of Warwick (couplets) and Guy of Warwick (stanzas)
The above image is taken from Auchinleck MS fol. 146vb. This change does not correspond with a change of scribe (Scribe 1 copies all of Guy). Notice that the scribe has not only changed verse-form but also font. Since the poem will now be told in twelve-line stanzas, paraphs—the objects that look like paragraph markers—now at the beginning of every new stanzas. The above passage (to the paraph) reads:
Wiþ þat heued he made þe king present.
Þe king was bliþe & of glad chere
For þat he seye Gij hole & fere.
At Warwik þai henge þe heued anon,
Mani man wondred þerapon.
God graunt hem heuen-blis to mede
Þat herken to mi romaunce rede
Al of a gentil kniЗt;
Þe best bodi he was at nede
Þat euer miЗt bistriden stede
& freest founde in fiЗt.
Þe word of him ful wide it ran
Ouer al þis warld þe priis he wan,
As man most of miЗt.
Balder bern was non in bi,
His name was hoten sir Gij
Of Warwike wise & wiЗt. (ll. 6918-6935)
[ll. 7302-7306, 1.1-12]
The line beginning “God graunt...” is the first line of the tail-rhyme stanza. The rhyme scheme for these tail-rhyme stanzas is aabaabccbddb for the first 624 lines and then aabccbddbeeb after that[36].
Appendix 2:
A Note on Editions
Currently, there are no complete modern editions of Guy of Warwick (that preserve the Middle English). Wiggins has recently produced an edition of the stanzaic half of Guy of Warwick[37], but no complete edition has been undertaken yet. As such, I work with the two transcriptions in accessible existence: one by Julius Zupitza[38] and one by David Burnley and Alison Wiggins[39]. The former was finished in the latter part of the nineteenth century and is still often used by critics today. The latter is a modern transcription done for the National Library of Scotland, the institution that holds the Auchinleck MS. The Burnley and Wiggins transcription is freely available online, along with facsimiles of every page of the MS. All quotes of text will be taken from the Burnely and Wiggins transcription. However, I recognize that the Zupitza edition is still widely regarded as the standard. For this reason, I have included the line numbers from the Zupitza edition. After a quote, the first set of numbers are the line numbers given by Burnley and Wiggins. The second set of line numbers (in brackets [ ]) correspond to the line numbers given by Zupitza (usually about 200 lines off). Zupitza also numbers the stanzaic Guy with stanza numbers instead of with continuous line number (resulting in things like ll. 12.4-6).
[1] Alfred Ewert, Gui de Warewic: Roman du XIII Siècle, Tome I (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Edouard Champion, 1932), vii.
[2] Alison Wiggins, “Guy of Warwick in Warwick?: Reconsidering the Dialect Evidence.” English Studies (2003): 219-230, 230.
[3] National Library of Scotland Advocates’ MS 19.2.1 and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, MS 107/176, respectively.
[4] Timothy A. Shonk, “A Study of the Auchinlck Manuscript: Bookmen and Bookmaking in the Early Fourteenth Century.” Speculum 60.1 (Jan. 1985): 71-91, 71.
[5] According to Shonk, a book like the Auchinleck MS would have cost about 10 pounds, or 800 days’ labor for the average laborer. Ibid., 71.
[6] Shonk cites Doyle (165) for this argument. Ibid., 90.
[7] Derek Pearsall and I.C. Cunningham, The Auchinleck Manuscript: National Library of Scotland Advocates’ MS 19.2.1 (London: Scolar Press, 1977), x.
[8] See Appendix 1 for an image of this point in the text (fig. 1) along with a transcription of the words.
[9] Alison Wiggins, “Imagining the Compiler: Guy of Warwick and the Compilation of the Auchinleck Manuscript.” In J.J. Thompson and S. Kelly, eds., Imagining the Book (London: Brepols Publishers, 2005), 62-73, 71.
[10] Alison Wiggins, “Guy of Warwick in Warwick?: Reconsidering the Dialect Evidence.” English Studies 84.3 (2003): 219-230, 230.
[11] Alison Wiggins, Stanzaic Guy of Warwick (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2004), 5.
[12] First, let me state that this view is not an extreme one; there is thematic significance in the change between Guy’s secular and religious quests. Second, if you are feeling a bit unsatisfied with the above explanation, there is more evidence to corroborate this conclusion. Another manuscript (Caius MS), changes source material at the same point, signifying that there was probably a damaged archetype being used by both manuscripts. Second, the exact place where the verse shift appears is a little odd: Guy brings the head of the slain dragon back to the castle and it ends there.
[13] There are other appropriations and transformations, but these are some of the most interesting. All Guy’s metamorphosed forms can be found in her book The Legend of Guy of Warwick. Velma Bourgeois Richmond, The Legend of Guy of Warwick (New York: Garland, 1996).
[14] Wiggins, Stanzaic, 12.
[15] “The borough of Warwick: Churches.” A History of the County of Warwick: Volume 8: The City of Coventry and Borough of Warwick (1969), pp. 522-35. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=16057&strquery=guy's%20cliffe. Date accessed: 28 October 2005.
[16] “Guy’s Tower.” Warwick Castle (2003). URL: http://www.warwick-castle.co.uk/warwick2004/tc_explore_castle.htm. Date accessed: 28 October 2005.
[17] Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature (Berkeley: U of California P, 1986), 95.
[18] Ibid., 95.
[19] Ibid., 94.
[20] Chaucer mocks Guy in the tale of Sir Thopas.
[21] Crane.
[22] Ibid., 65.
[23] Rebecca Wilcox, “Romancing the East: Greeks and Saracens in Guy of Warwick.” In Nicola McDonald, ed., Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in Popular Romance (New York: Manchester UP, 2004): 217-240, 220.
[24] Ibid., 222.
[25] Murray J. Evans, Rereading Middle English Romance: Manuscript Layout, Decoration, and the Rhetoric of Composite Structure (London: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1995), 8.
[26] Ibid., 13.
[27] Carol Fewster, Traditionality and Genre in Middle English Romance (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1987).
[28] Velma Bourgeois Richmond, “Guy of Warwick: A Medieval Thriller.” South Atlantic Quarterly, 73: 554-563.
[29] Paul Price, “Confessions of a Godless Killer: Guy of Warwick and Comprehensive Entertainment.” In Judith Weiss, Jennifer Fellows, and Morgan Dickinson, eds., Medieval Insular Romance: Translation and Innovation (Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 2000): 93-110, 94.
[30] Wiggins, Stanzaic, 8-13.
[31] Ibid., 12
[32] Price 107.
[33] Ibid., 107.
[34] Ibid., 107.
[35] Andrea Hopkins, The Sinful Knights: A Study of Middle English Penitential Romance (Oxford: Claredon, 1990), 96.
[36] David Burnley and Alison Wiggins, The Auchinleck Manuscript, National Library of Scotland (2003). URL: http://www.nls.uk/auchinleck/index.html. Date accessed: 28 October 2005.
[37] Wiggins, Stanzaic.
[38] Julius Zupitza, The Romance of Guy of Warwick: Edited from the Auchinleck Manuscript in the Advocates' Library Edinburgh, and from MS 107 in Caius College, Cambridge, III vols., EETS 42, 49, 59. (London: Trübner, 1891).
[39] Burnley and Wiggins.