5 - The Geography of Tail-Rhyme Romance

Summary

The main purpose of this chapter is to provide a narrative gloss for the Survey of Provenance in the Appendix, to which readers should refer for the background to any comments made here on the provenance, date or or manuscript record of a given tail-rhyme romance. One question which this survey might be expected to answer is the most literal version of the question underlying this entire volume: where did tail-rhyme romance come from? Was it, as Trounce argued, originally the product of a single, local literary community? Underlying Trounce's proposal of a geographic centre of origin is an assumption that, in this period, such strong similarities of content and diction must have arisen through the geographical proximity and even personal acquaintance of their authors, since ‘a specialized manner like that of the tail-rhyme stanza could not be successfully imitated from the written word alone’ (a curious understanding of the nature of literary influence). Recent work on the dissemination of medieval texts in England shows that texts often did spread gradually from county to neighbouring county as local families lent and borrowed manuscripts, and this is certainly the kind of situation that would have encouraged the development of local literary fashions and conventions of diction and style. On the other hand, there is plentiful evidence for the unpredictably swift and widespread dissemination of medieval texts as well: we should not assume, for example, that Chaucerian texts only reached the hands of the mid-fifteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Henryson through gradual, manuscript-born ripples towards the North.