Henry
of Grosmont, The First Duke of Lancaster
I. Who was
Henry of Grosmont?
PROBABLY very few of you who are here today will have heard before of
the man I am going to speak to you about. Most of you will have heard
of John of Gaunt, the second Duke of Lancaster and founder of the
second ducal house. Henry of Grosmont was John's father-in-law and the
most distinguished member of the elder House of Lancaster, who
descended from Henry III. They are of interest to genealogists as the
only enduring cadet branch of the Plantagenets before Edward III sired
his many sons and prudently married them to heiresses of his nobility.
One such heiress was Henry's daughter Blanche, who married John of
Gaunt and bore him the future King Henry IV and also a daughter,
Philippa, who married John I of Portugal. As far as I can tell, the
English royal descendants of Henry of Grosmont ended with Prince
Edward, the unfortunate son of Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou who died
in the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471. But the royal house of Portugal
and the imperial house of Brazil carry on Henry's bloodline to this day
and have imparted it to all the chief Roman Catholic royal houses of
Europe.
To historians, however, Henry is of more
interest
for his achievements as a warrior and diplomat and, in the eyes of his
contemporaries, a ‘verray parfit gentil knight'; indeed many
critics believe that the knight in The Canterbury Tales to whom Chaucer
applied those words was based on Henry. In the words of my good friend
and fellow monarchist Professor D'Arcy Jonathan Boulton,
‘More
than any other English magnate of his day except perhaps his cousin
Edward III himself, Henry tried to practise chivalry after the
Arthurian pattern'.1 Or again, in the words of E.J.F Arnould, who
edited Henry's one known writing for the Anglo-Norman Text Society,
‘it is obvious that Lancaster came as near as anyone to
achieving
the chivalrous ideal of the times'.2 Henry also played a key role, as
Prof. Boulton has shown, in the founding of the Order of the Garter. He
was both an author himself (in French) and, as Prof. Boulton and I are
persuaded, the patron of one of the greatest English authors of the
Middle Ages: the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The
Pearl. He emerges from our patchy evidence as a nobleman in the truest
sense of the word and one with a complex, interesting, appealing, and
indeed inspiring character.
II. Sketch of Henry's
Public Life 3
HE was born most likely about 1310, the son of Henry, third Earl of
Lancaster of the elder house, probably at Grosmont, which was one of
his father's castles, then in the Welsh Marches and now in Gwent, in
the valley of the river Monnow, which flows out of the Black Mountains
and joins the Wye at Monmouth. Almost nothing is known for certain of
his life until the Scottish wars of his second cousin Edward III in the
1330s, in which he first distinguished himself. In 1334 he married
Isabel, daughter of Henry, Lord Beaumont, by whom he had two children,
both daughters. On 16 March 1337 King Edward made him Earl of Derby.
That was probably rather like a modern courtesy title, since his
father, who had borne it, was still alive; but unlike modern peers by
courtesy, he was summoned to Parliament under his title. In November of
the same year he was sent with Sir Walter Mauny to attack Cadsant in
Flanders, where on landing he prompt-ly advanced so near the walls that
he was struck down and Mauny had to rescue him.4 He took a prominent
part in Edward's further French and Scottish wars, behaving with
particular gallantry in the sea battle of Sluys.5 But ‘his
campaigns in Gascony and Guienne [in 1345û6] are his greatest
title to fame as an army leader and a strategist'.6 In August 1350, at
the sea fight off Winchelsea, he saved the life of the King's eldest
son, the future Black Prince, by attacking the huge Spanish ship that
had engaged the Prince's, and so probably decided the outcome of the
battle.7 Perhaps it was chiefly as a reward for that exploit that King
Edward on 6 March 1351 made Henry's earldom of Lancaster a county
palatine and created him first Duke of Lancaster - making him only the
second duke ever created in England, after the young Prince as Duke of
Cornwall. Two days later, King Edward appointed Henry Captain and
Admiral of the Western Fleet. He served again with distinction in the
French campaign that culminated at Poitiers, but rendered his king what
was arguably even more valuable service as a diplomat and adviser; in
Arnould's words, ‘He is found as a member - and often as the
leader - of practically all the delegations appointed from time to
time, either to procure allies for England, or to seek a respite in the
vain strife which the utopian ambition of Edward III prolonged for so
many years'.8 Froissart makes clear Henry's leading role in negotiating
the Treaty of Bretigny, which at last brought peace between England and
France, ‘on much more lenient terms than Edward, in his
resentment, was inclined to impose'.9 Less than a year later, Henry
died in his house at Leicester of the Black Death, on 23 March 1361,
aged, we think, about 50. He was buried in the church he had found-ed
there in the presence of King Edward and many prelates and nobles, and
his death was deemed a national calamity.
At intervals in this remarkable career,
Henry also
found time to be a crusader. Modern historians treat with some
skepticism the claim of the later chronicler Capgrave that he went as a
young man to Prussia, Rhodes, Cyprus, and Granada, and there attained
such a reputation that the noblest youths of France and Spain were
eager to learn war under his banner.10 But we know from the
contemporary Chronicle of Alfonso XI that, while on an embassy for King
Edward in Spain in 1343, Henry and his fellow ambassador, the Earl of
Salisbury, fought valiantly against the Moors at the siege of Algeciras
(Chaucer's Algezir); and from the trustworthy English chronicler
Knighton we learn that he did go to Prussia to fight alongside the
Teutonic Knights in 1351, though only to find they had arranged a truce
with their heathen foes, and spent some time with King Casimir the
Great of Poland before returning home.
III. Jousting, Pageantry,
and Orders of Chivalry
AS one might have expected of an English magnate of his time, Henry was
equally keen on jousts, tourneys, and the accompanying lavish pageantry
and display that reached new heights under Edward III. He was present
at the jousts and festivities that the King held in 1342 for fifteen
days in honour of the Countess of Salisbury - during which, if we may
believe tradition, the King retrieved her dropped garter and spoke the
words Honi soit qui mal y pense, which later became the motto of the
order of that name. This story surfaces late, and modern historians are
disposed to dismiss it; but Henry certainly took a leading part, as
Seneschal of England, in the tournament and revels of January 1344,
where, after mass in Windsor Chapel, King Edward and he, with many
other leading English nobles, swore to refound the Round Table; and
Henry himself soon afterwards obtained the King's leave to form his own
fellowship of knights for yearly jousts at Lincoln.11
At first the Round Table project, too,
seems to have
been little more than an excuse for holding periodic tournaments and
jousts with accompanying feasts and pageantry;12 but it
ultimately took shape as the much more serious and solemn institution
of the Order of the Garter, dedicated to realizing the best ideals of
Arthurian chivalry. In the Garter records Henry appears as one of the
first founders, next in sequence only to the King and the Prince of
Wales;13 and if Prof. Boulton is right, he may have played a key role
in the transformation. For during his diplomatic and crusading mission
to Spain in 1343, Henry must have come to know about the knightly
society that supplied the true prototype for the Order of the Garter.
This was the Order of the Band, founded by Alfonso XI of Castile in
1330. Like those of the Garter, its members were known by a distinctive
common device: a band of coloured fabric, originally black but later
changed to gold, worn, like a baldric, slantwise across the chest, over
the wearer's surcoat or jupon, from the left shoulder to the right hip
and back again. Like the Garter - and quite unlike the older chivalric
orders, such as the Templars and the Teutonic Knights, whose members
were sworn to celibacy and to warring only against the enemies of the
cross - the Band was a fellowship of lay knights and squires under the
king himself as master, bound in loyalty to him and to each other, who
met regular-ly for the knightings, weddings, and funerals of their
comrades and also undertook, like any medieval guild, to pray for their
departed comrades' souls. It seems virtually certain that Edward
decided the ultimate form of his ‘Round Table' project after
hearing from Henry and Salisbury about the Order of the Band, of which
King Alfonso may have made them honorary members.14
Henry himself had a formidable
reputation in the
lists. Early in his career he challenged and vanquished Sir William
Douglas of Liddlesdale, Scotland's ‘flower of chivalry'. On
St
George's Day 1358, at Windsor, he was wounded in the thigh at jousts
‘which were pronounced to transcend everything on record
since
the days of King Arthur'.15
Henry's expedition to Prussia brought
him one
challenge, however, that did not end in the glorious victory in the
lists that he may have hoped for. On his way there, he was warned at
Cologne that Otto, son of the Duke of Brunswick, had undertaken to
waylay him and deliver him up as a prisoner to King John II of France.
When he got back to Cologne from the east, Henry was heard complaining
of this to the Margrave of Julich and other German nobles. Otto gave
him the lie and offered to meet him wherever King John should appoint.
Under safe-conduct Henry arrived at Paris, escort-ed by James, son of
the Duke of Bourbon, shortly before Christmas of 1352 and lodged with
his kinsman the King of Navarre. Lists were appointed, and the French
King and his nobles gathered to watch the combat. Each combatant swore
on the sacrament the truth of his cause; but once they had mounted
their chargers, Otto began to tremble so violently that he could
neither don his helmet nor wield his spear and refused to fight. After
making him take back his words, King John held a feast at which he
caused the two enemies to be reconciled.
IV. Munificence and Piety
TWO other chivalric virtues that Henry amply displayed were munificence
and piety. According to Knighton, his London house, the Savoy (later
sacked by Jack Straw's men in the Peasants' Revolt) was deemed the
richest private house in England.16 During King Edward's
French
wars, Henry's ‘retinue was more splendid than that of any
other
nobleman of his period, never being less than 800 men at arms and 2,000
archers. His daily expenditure is calculated at £100 a day,
an
immense sum at that time; and he spent 17,000 pounds sterling in the
French wars, besides his pay'.17 Further to help finance those wars, he
at one point pledged his jewels for £2100.18 When
he
travelled to the papal court at Avignon for peace negotiations toward
the end of 1354, he rode with two hundred men at arms, and everyone
marvelled at the magnificence of his retinue, his refined ways, and his
generosity.19 Yet when, after the farcical end of his quarrel with
Otto, King John wished to send him home laden with treasure, Henry
characteristically declined it all and accepted only a single thorn
from the Crown of Thorns that St Louis had procured for the
Sainte-Chapelle. He placed the thorn in the collegiate church,
dedicated to the Virgin, that he had founded at Leicester as an adjunct
to a ‘bedehouse' founded by his father. He was also a
generous
benefactor to Whalley Abbey in Lancashire and seems at least to have
used his influence to obtain a royal licence for founding Corpus
Christi College, Cambridge.20 Henry was equally noted for his mercy;
from 1346 on, the Patent Rolls are full of pardons granted, at his
behest, to soldiers who had committed crimes while serving under him in
Brittany and Gascony.21
V. Le Livre des seintes
Medicines 22
HENRY'S piety also appears plainly in his book, entitled Le
Livre
des seintes Medicines or ‘The Book of Holy Remedies'. This is
a
devotional and penitential treatise, conceived as an appeal to Christ
and the Virgin to cure his soul of its sins as a doctor and nurse might
cure his body of wounds and diseases. Arnould has confessed that it
rambles even by medieval standards, because Henry had an incorrigible
tendency to digress - a fault of which he seems to be aware when he
tells his readers ‘I am no expert writer, having learnt the
art
of writing but late and without aid'.23 But as Arnould has noted, that
fault is largely explained when we realize that the book is the product
of stolen moments in the crowded life of a general and statesman - a
distinction it shares with the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Indeed
at points it bears the clear marks of a spiritual diary or journal:
Good Friday: And this - the death of
Christ -
occurred 1320 years ago, on the same day as that on which I have
reached this point of my work, a Good Friday morning.
Holy Saturday: I have sore need of your
help, gentle
lady; vouchsafe to pray your beloved Son for me, poor beggar that I am.
May he grant that the grief which was yours at this time - on the Holy
Saturday after the dolorous Friday - be compensation for my sins.
Easter Sunday: And now, gentle Lord, are
we come to the day of your Resurrection.24
and again:
Good Lord, one may see by my day's work
that I am
proceeding slowly; and one may know that these days are so short that I
cannot work much, especially in things that concern you, gentle Sire.
That character is what gives the book
its chief
value for historians and students of literature. For instead of
repeating the jejune and hackneyed exempla that the student can trace,
all too easily, from one medieval devotional treatise to another to
another, Henry draws his examples and similes from his own daily life,
and so produces a portrait both of his times and of his very soul. The
man we meet in his book is without question the same one as we see in
the record of his public life, but one who is troubled, as perhaps only
a devout medieval Christian could be, by the very qualities others
admire in him, but which he, with his end approaching, has come to view
as terrible shorcomings. To quote Arnould:
He tells us of his vanity: "When I was
young and
strong and agile, I prided myself on my good looks, my figure, my
gentle blood and all the qualities and gifts that you, O Lord, had
given me for the salvation of my soul." He also took pride, among other
things, in the fine rings on his hands, the elegance of his foot in the
stirrup, his shoes, his armour, his ability as a dancer, or the garters
which, he thought, befitted him so well - though his opinion was
worthless -; and if he heard anyone praise his accomplishments, his joy
knew no bounds. Sloth seems to have been his great failing, chiefly
preventing him from rising in time to hear mass (fol. 12v.). But he
also sinned through overindulgence in food and drink (fol. 11). Even
the sense of smell was a frequent occasion of sin to him, as when he
delighted in the sweet scent of the ladies or of anything appertaining
to them, or again when he took an inordinate pleasure in smelling the
fine scarlet cloth. His sensuality showed itself in many other ways,
but he recalls with particular bitterness his depraved taste for the
‘lecherous kisses' of common wenches - or worse - whom he
liked
all the better because, unlike good women, they would not think the
worse of him for his conduct.25
Probably the longest single comparison
Henry
develops in his book is that of his soul to a fox's den, his sins to
foxes lurking and breeding there, and the various methods used to flush
the foxes out and destroy them to those his confessor might use to deal
with his sins. Not the least value of this passage is the insight it
gives us into how medieval English landlords dealt with foxes (very
much as their successors do now) and into Henry's knowledge and love of
the English countryside, where he probably felt he had spent far less
time than he could have wished. But it also shows us a man with
humility, an almost over-tender conscience, self-knowledge, and the
ability to laugh at himself: qualities that seem to have been fairly
rare among English magnates of the late Middle Ages. It also helps to
strengthen the case Prof. Boulton and I have made for Henry's
importance as a literary patron.
VI. Henry and the Gawain
Poet
FROM Henry, then, let us turn to the gifted but unnamed author of Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight, The Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience: four
poems all preserved in the same unique manuscript in the British
Library. We know far less about him than we could wish. His language
and his landscapes make it virtually certain that he came from the Peak
Country of the northwest English Midlands, somewhat broadly
defined.26 That same language, coupled with the highly
eccentric
spelling-habits of the scribe of the manuscript, is what has doomed him
to undeserved obscurity in our own day, when his contemporary Chaucer,
who wrote in a kind of English from which our own much more directly
stems, is at least known by name to all truly educated people, even if
they do not read him. From the kind of armour and costume that the
Gawain poet describes, I have shown, at least to my own satisfaction,
that he flourished in the middle of the fourteenth century, like Henry,
not towards the end as literary historians have mostly thought for the
last half century.27 His thorough knowledge of the Bible and standard
commentaries argues that he had more learning than Henry and acquired
it earlier in life; but his poems testify to his interest in and
knowledge of architecture, gemstones, seafaring, warfare, and life in a
court or at least a noble household, which suggests that he lived in
the secular world and served some great lord, while The Pearl is an
account of a dream vision that is most naturally explained as evoked by
the death of his own infant daughter. We should not likely go far wrong
in supposing that, after a good education, he took only minor church
orders, if any, and then spent at least his active years as some kind
of steward or agent for a great lord.
But what, you may ask, is my evidence
that that lord
was Henry? First, as I have already stated, I believe they were
contemporaries. Second, as inheritor of the old Ferrers holdings making
up the Earldom of Derby, Henry was lord or lord paramount of most of
the region where the poet clearly lived. But to present the most cogent
evidence, I must first provide a summary, for those of you who do not
know it, of the work that is nowadays usually considered the poet's
masterpiece, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
On New Year's Day at Camelot, as King
Arthur and his
court are celebrating their Christmas revels, there comes riding right
into the castle hall a monstrous green knight. He is not just a knight
in green arms or armour, as in conventional romance; he is green from
head to foot, including his bushy beard and long braided hair; and so
is his horse. He carries a holly bough in one hand and in the other a
razor-sharp green ax. He challenges the king, or one of his knights, to
what he calls a Christmas game: he offers his own head for one of them
to cut off with the ax, but the one who accepts must seek him out and
abide a return blow in a year's time. Sir Gawain, the king's nephew,
takes up the challenge and neatly severs the Green Knight's head at one
blow; but to everyone's horror, the headless knight stands up and
retrieves his head, holds it up by the hair while it bids Gawain meet
him in a year's time at ‘the Green Chapel', then rides out of
the
hall again.
Ten months pass, and on All Saints' Day
Gawain sets
out to keep his tryst amid the lamentations of the court. The poet
pauses to describe his arming in loving detail and explain the device
of the five-pointed star or pentangle that he bears on his shield and
jupon, as signifying his unsullied purity in his five senses; his
prowess in the five fingers of his sword hand; his trust in the five
wounds of Christ; his devotion to the five joys of Mary, whose image is
painted on the other side of his shield to inspire him in combat; and
his practice of the five virtues of munificence, benevolence, purity,
courtesy, and mercy.
After many hardships and adventures,
Gawain finds
himself alone in wild country somewhere in the northwest Midlands on
the morning of Christmas Eve. As he is praying to Mary to direct him to
some shelter where he can attend his Christmas mass, suddenly through
the bare branches of the forest he sights a magnificent castle. He
approaches, sounds his horn, and is welcomed by a noble, generous, and
mirthful lord, his very beautiful wife, and his henchmen and guests.
When his host assures him that the Green Chapel is less than two miles
away, Gawain thankfully agrees to stay over Christmas and ride there on
New Year's morning.
Most of the other guests leave by
December 28, the
Feast of the Holy Innocents. To keep his remaining guest amused, the
lord of the castle proposes a bargain. Gawain can lie late in bed to
rest up for his ordeal each of the next three days, while his host goes
hunting. Each evening, they will exchange whatever they gained during
the day. Gawain agrees; and for three days his host successively hunts
deer, a great wild boar, and a fox, while back in the castle Gawain has
to fend off the attempts of his host's wife to seduce him. The poet
details with obvious relish the conversations in which Gawain manages
to refuse anything more than kisses without seeming rude. The knight
passes the test of his chastity with flying colours and shows himself
so scrupulous in keeping the compact that he even passes the kisses on
to his host as his own gains for the day. But the lady does persuade
him to accept her green silk girdle, which, she claims, will protect
him against any enemy's blow. That, and that alone, he conceals from
her husband.
At the crack of dawn on New Year's
morning Gawain
sets out for the Green Chapel. The weather is gloomy, the landscape
sinister; and the man his host has sent with him as a guide urges him
to turn back, telling him the Green Knight is savage and merciless. But
Gawain keeps his promise and reaches the Green Chapel, which proves to
be
nought but an old cavern,
or a cleft in an old crag;
he could not it name aright.
‘Can this be the Chapel Green,
O Lord?' said the gentle knight.
‘Here the Devil might say, I
ween,
his matins about midnight.'28
First he hears the hideous whir of a
grindstone,
obviously sharpening the ax; and then the Green Knight appears in a
hail-fellow-well-met mood. Gawain tells him to get on with it, kneels
down, and presents his neck, but flinches from his adversary's first
two blows. At the third try he holds still, and the Green Knight barely
nicks his skin. Deeming the pact fulfilled, Gawain leaps to his feet,
draws his sword, readies his shield, and prepares to defend himself.
The Green Knight, however, puts down his
ax and
congratulates Gawain on passing his ordeal. He reveals himself as his
host from the castle, magically disguised by Morgan la Fée.
She
had devised the ruse out of malice for Arthur and his knights; but by
his resistance in the face of temptation Gawain has overcome the spell,
except that the Green Knight had to give him the nick for concealing
the gift of the girdle. Overcome with shame and remorse at what he sees
as his bad faith, Gawain flings the girdle away; but the Knight
persuades him to accept it back from him as a souvenir of their
encounter. Gawain wears it back to Camelot sash-wise over his jupon as
a penance; but when they hear his story, Arthur, his other knights, and
their ladies all agree to adopt similar green bands as the badge of the
Round Table. The surviving text of the poem ends with the Garter motto,
HONY SOYT QUI MAL PENCE.
The appeal of this tale of knightly
adventure and
ordeal, whose theme is the compatibility of chivalric and Christian
virtue, to a man of Henry's tastes should be obvious enough. So should
the marked resemblance of character between Henry and Gawain, extending
even to their over-scrupulous consciences and their fondness for
sleeping in. But there are further and clearer indications that the
poem may have been written especially for Henry, in the form of a
remarkable set of coincidences between features of the poem and of
Henry's life. By itself, no one of these would carry much weight; but
when taken together, they seem to Prof. Boulton and me to amount, not
to absolute proof, but to a very strong case.
The first and most obvious coincidence
is the
resemblance between the plot of the poem and Henry's encounter with
Otto of Brunswick. The Green Knight challenged Gawain to a tryst that
put his life in jeopardy, to be fulfilled at Christmastide, but in the
end did not follow through with the fatal blow. Henry was challenged by
Otto and accepted a tryst for a joust at Christmastide of 1352, but at
the last moment Otto declined to carry through with his challenge, and
Henry, like Gawain, returned unscathed to a hero's welcome at his own
king's court.
A second set of coincidences involves
the supposedly
magical girdle that Gawain accepted from his host's wife, which he
afterwards wore like a baldric, and which then became the badge of the
Round Table. This bears an obvious resemblance to the badge of the
Order of the Band, which Henry must have known and may have worn
himself. It also bears a certain resemblance to the Garter, at least if
we accept the tradition that it originated as a lady's ornament that
came into the possession of her male admirer, King Edward. And while we
should not press that in view of the lateness of the tradition, we may
note that the supposedly miraculous girdle of the poem has yet another
analogue that Henry could hardly have failed to recognise; for a belt
that had belonged to his almost-sainted uncle, Earl Thomas of
Lancaster, was kept in the family chapel of Pontefract Castle and was
supposed to assure women who wore it while lying in of a safe
delivery.29
Thirdly, it appears that Henry did know,
or at least
know of, a real-life green knight of the more conventional kind: that
is, one who made a point, at least on festive occasions, of dressing
completely in green. This was Amadeus VI, Count of Savoy, who seems to
have adopted the custom at Christmastide of 1352.30 Henry had
certainly met one vassal of Amadeus, namely Raoul de Brienne, in 1349,
when they were both involved in trying to negotiate a truce to the
Hundred Years' War. In 1351, moreover, Amadeus was seeking to marry
King Edward's daughter Isabel; and the English court would have been
sure to hear of his appearance in green at his Christmas court the
following year.31
There are further, if less striking,
coincidences.
Earl Thomas, Henry's uncle, had corresponded with the Scots under the
code name of ‘King Arthur';32 in the poem, as
always in
chivalric romance, King Arthur is Gawain's uncle. As Gawain is setting
out on his quest, Arthur's courtiers grumble that instead of letting
him keep a daft and dangerous tryst into which he has been tricked,
Arthur ought to make him a duke and give him an army to command; Henry
was one of only two dukes in England and a distinguished army
commander. On his way to the Green Chapel, Gawain encountered many rude
enemies in the Wirral district of Cheshire. Henry had lands and
interests there, and in 1353 he and the Black Prince went there to
quell disturbances. The Prince, and probably Henry with him, returned
from this foray by way of Dieulacres Abbey in northwestern
Staffordshire; and an English scholar, Ralph W.V. Elliott, has
identified the landscape round the abbey as having inspired several
scenes in the poem.33 Henry, like Gawain, had a special devotion to
Mary. Henry in his book compared fox-hunting to rooting out one's sins;
Gawain undergoes his most severe temptation, and the only one that he
even partly yields to, while his host hunts a fox.
While, as I admitted above, none of this
amounts to
proof, surely the hypothesis that best fits the facts is that the
Gawain poet wrote his romance for Henry and his court and worked in a
wealth of complimentary personal allusions that they would recognise
and appreciate. If so, we may thank Henry not only for the shining
example of his personal life and character and his largely beneficial
influence on European history, but also for inspiring the single
medieval English work that best celebrates his own ideals, and which
remains as one of the greatest literary treasures of the
English-speaking peoples.
WILLIAM COOKE
(Lecture delivered to Monarchist League of Canada, Toronto Branch, 9
March 2001)
1 Cooke & Boulton,
MÆ LXVIII (1999), p. 46.
2 Arnould, BJRL XXI (1937), 359.
3 Facts from DNB, here and
below, unless otherwise noted.
4 Froissart, I.137, 140.
5 Froissart, II.37.
6 Arnould, p. 356.
7 Froissart [NEED EXACT REF.].
8 Arnould, p. 358.
9 Ibid.
10 Capgrave, p. 161.
11 D'A.J.D. Boulton, The
Knights of the Crown, pp. 104-5 & 109-10.
12 Boulton, Knights, pp. 104-9.
13 Boulton, Knights, p. 120.
14 Boulton, Knights, pp. 46-83
& 109; also Cooke and Boulton, MÆ LXVIII, pp. 48-9.
15 Eulogium Historiarum (R.S.
IX), p. 227.
16 Knighton's Chronicle, II.118.
17 Horace Walpole, A Catalogue
of the Royal and
Noble Authors of England, Scotland and Ireland, II.54, after Knighton.
18 Rymer's Foedera, 1176.
19 Knighton's Chronicle.
20 Arnould, p. 363.
21 Arnould, p. 362.
22 This section draws on
Arnould, unless otherwise noted.
23 Arnould, p. 367.
24 Arnould, p. 367.
25 Arnould, pp. 383-4.
26 ‘Notes on
Language' in Cooke, The Gawain Group (work in progress).
27 Cooke, MÆ LVIII,
1989.
28 Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo, tr. J.R.R. Tolkien, p. 79.
29 Robert Somerville, History
of the Duchy of
Lancaster, I.46; Yorkshire Monasteries Suppression Papers, ed. J.W.
Clay, Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Record Branch XLVIII (1912), 8.
30 Boulton, Knights, pp. 251-2.
31 Cooke and Boulton,
MÆ LXVIII, p. 50 and refs.
32 The Parliamentary Writs of Military
Summons (Record Commission, London, 1834), II.ii.195-6.
33 Knighton's Chronicle, pp.
75-6; R.W.V. Elliott, The Gawain Country, pp. 34-72.
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William Cooke