The Historical Arthur and The Gawain Poet: Studies on Arthurian and Other Traditions by Andrew Breeze (review)

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• The Historical Arthur and The Gawain Poet: Studies on Arthurian and Other Traditions by Andrew Breeze
• Richard Firth Green

andrew breeze, The Historical Arthur and The Gawain Poet: Studies on Arthurian and Other Traditions. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2023. Pp. x, 153. isbn: 978–1–66692–954–6. $95.

Andrew Breeze's The Historical Arthur and the Gawain Poet is really two discrete studies in one volume, each of them amplifications of Breeze's earlier published work. In the first (pp. 3–37), he makes the case for Geoffrey of Monmouth's epithet, dux bellorum, being the equivalent of the Welsh term pentuleu, 'captain of the bodyguard, chief of the royal host,' and referring to a historical Arthur who operated in the Strathclyde area in the 530s. Since I'm not qualified to judge these claims, this review will concern itself only with the second, and longer, section (pp. 41–136), which deals mainly with the authorship and date of the Middle English poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and with three poems in the same tradition.

Many years ago, Morton W. Bloomfield wrote of the implications of the single-author theory of the poems in the MS Cotton Nero A.x that 'the mathematical probability of an hypothesis based on an hypothesis is very slight' ['Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: An Appraisal,' PMLA, 76 (1961): 9–10], and while Breeze is certainly not the first scholar of the poem lured into such hypothesizing, his central argument makes it particularly prominent. Since Breeze's dating of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight depends in part on his identification of its author, his first hypothetical claim must make his second doubly so. What, then, is the evidence for Breeze's first hypothesis: that the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was Sir John Stanley of Storeton in Cheshire?

Breeze offers us a convenient fourteen-point summary of his case (p. 62). Some of these points are evidently founded upon a rather naïve view of medieval society—'A chaplain would not know much about flirting or the chase' (p. 51); Stanley would not 'have been granted authority over forests if he had never felled a tree' (p. 58)—but far more serious are the logical flaws they display. Reduced to a syllogism, the main argument runs:

The Gawain-poet was a Cheshireman/layman/courtier/conservative/French-speaker.

Sir John Stanley was a Cheshireman/layman /courtier /conservative/French-speaker.

Therefore, Sir John Stanley was the Gawain-poet. QED.

Even those prepared to admit the validity of some, or all, of Breeze's series of major premises must concede that there are several possible alternatives to Sir John Stanley [End Page 67] in the minor ones. This is, in other words, the fallacy of the undistributed middle. Other points employ the argument from ignorance: 'There is no evidence for the poems as the work of a professional clerk or scribe,' for instance. As an instance of a succession of self-reinforcing, but unprovable, hypotheses, Point Eleven stands out: 'Pearl is most simply read as a father's elegy for a daughter who died before her second birthday. References therein to spots "rashes, blemishes" may indicate the cause as bubonic plague, of which there was an epidemic from 1390 to 1393. Marrying in 1385, the Stanleys might be expected to have had a daughter by them [sic]' (my italics). On the surface, two of Breeze's points appear somewhat more plausible, that Sir Gawain mentions the Wirral, Sir John Stanley's home territory, and that 'words characteristic of MS Cotton Nero poems,' appear in a letter of Stanley's from 1405. However, the poet's actual statement, that the Wirral was home to few 'that auther God other gome wyth goud hert lovied' (l.702), seems rather to count against Stanley's authorship than for it, and a quick check of the MED reveals that poet's supposedly distinctive vocabulary is really just a list of common Middle English words: it gives 271 examples of joie, 204 of honor, 130 of comfort, 99 of gracious, and so on.

With so problematic a first hypothesis, Bloomfield would no doubt...