Introduction: Tail-Rhyme Romance and English Literary History

Summary

Despite the heavy dependence of Middle English romance throughout its history on the romance and chanson de geste traditions in French and Anglo-Norman literature, the tail-rhyme romance is, as far as we know, unique to Middle English. But in Middle English literature, tail-rhyme becomes inextricably linked with the romance genre itself in a way that no other verse form does. This offers some justification for the critical tradition of treating them as a coherent group in a way that couplet romances, for example, are not. The thirty-six romances written wholly or partially in tail-rhyme account for just over a third of all known Middle English verse romances. Roughly another third are in rhyming couplets of some description, and the final third comprises those in all other verse forms, including alliterative long lines and rhymed or rhymed-alliterative stanzas. The earliest witnesses to a Middle English romance tradition – King Horn, Havelok and Floris and Blauncheflur – were composed some time during the thirteenth century (or perhaps the very beginning of the fourteenth century in the case of Havelok), and all are in rhyming couplets, the most widely used form for romance in French literature. Soon, however, a new type of metrical romance was to appear on the scene. The famous compendium of c. 1330–40 known as the Auchinleck manuscript (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates 19.2.1) contains seven romances written wholly or partially in tail-rhyme stanzas. The evidence for a copying history behind some of these texts indicates that tail-rhyme romance as a narrative form was already buoyant by the time this manuscript was compiled.