10 - Gender, Virtue and Wisdom in Sir Bevis of Hampton

Summary

Sir Bevis of Hampton looks in two directions: it is rooted in convention and nostalgia for the past and its ideals, yet it also offers new, often original, perspectives on and treatments of romance materials. It translates and adapts the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman Boeve de Haumtone but is also firmly situated within the tradition of English romance: one of the group of celebrated romances in the Auchinleck MS, it was widely disseminated and remained popular into the eighteenth century. While Bevis reflects a growing nationalism in England, it has a more universal appeal, as is evident in its popularity on the Continent. The oppositions of Bevis are powerful ones: good and evil, Christian and Saracen, human and monster, chastity and lust, consent and force. The narrative is structured around archetypal romance motifs: the hero's exile and return, employed twice; the conflict between Christian and pagan; the challenge of love, as Bevis overcomes obstacles to his union with the pagan princess Josian, defeating a series of rivals who threaten enforced marriage; and the performance of a sequence of heroic feats, most memorably Bevis's battles against enemies of all kinds: the emperor of Almaine, Saracens, the people of London, the giant Ascopard, and a series of wild beasts – boar, lions and dragon. Bevis's identity is intimately bound up with all these chivalric achievements, as well as with regaining his lands and later protecting them from the treacherous English King Edgar for his chosen heirs, while he rules the kingdom of Mombraunt with his wife Josian.

This romance, then, seems founded on chivalric action and on the attendant gender stereotypes. Yet Bevis not only depends upon but also reinvents the conventional motifs of romance, including those intimately associated with ideas of gender – the knight-hero, the courtly lady, love, marriage and the family. Its hero is, indeed, defined by a series of colourful adventures: the narrative can seem episodic rather than sophisticated, robust rather than intellectual. Derek Brewer places Bevis as ‘folk-hero’ rather than as chivalric knight. Yet, like Guy of Warwick, Bevis is also marked by Christian didacticism and an extended engagement with the spiritual. As Susan Crane notes, the English Bevis places new emphasis on Christianity, so that ‘the hero himself gains the Christian awareness and solemnity of an ideal Crusader knight, “þe kni3t of cristene lawe” ‘.