But Sir Thopas he bereth the flour
Of royal chivalry.
In this summary, the name of Pleyndamour is still a difficulty for historians; it is not known to what book Chaucer was referring. Ypotis is curiously placed, for the poem of Ypotis is not what is usually reckoned a romance. ‘Ypotis’ is Epictetus the Stoic philosopher, and the poem is derived from the old moralizing dialogue literature; it is related to the Anglo-Saxon dialogue of Solomon and Saturn. The other four are well known. Horn Childe is a later version, in stanzas, of the story of King Horn. Bevis of Southampton and Guy of Warwick are among the most renowned, and most popular, of all the chivalrous heroes. In later prose adaptations they were current down to modern times; they were part of the favourite reading of Bunyan, and gave him ideas for the Pilgrim’s Progress. Guy of Warwick was rewritten many times—Chaucer’s pupil, Lydgate, took it up and made a new version of it. There was a moral and religious strain in it, which appealed to the tastes of many; the remarkable didactic prose romance of Tirant the White, written in Spain in the fifteenth century, is connected with Guy of Warwick. Sir Bevis is more ordinary and has no particular moral; it is worth reading, if any one wishes to know what was regularly expected in romances by the people who read, or rather who listened to them. The disinherited hero, the beautiful Paynim princess, the good horse Arundel, the giant Ascapart—these and many other incidents may be paralleled in other stories; the history of Sir Bevis has brought them all together, and all the popular novelist’s machinery might be fairly catalogued out of this work alone.
Sir Libeaus—Le Beau Desconnu, the Fair Knight unknown—is a different thing. This also belongs to the School of Sir Thopas—it is minstrels’ work, and does not pretend to be anything else. But it is well done. The verse, which is in short measure like that of Sir Tristrem, but not in so ambitious a stanza, is well managed—
That maide knelde in halle
Before the knightes alle
And seide: My lord Arthour!
A cas ther is befalle
Worse withinne walle
Was never non of dolour.