In Chapter 1, I identify the range of economic, religious, and social values attached to landscape in Middle English romances. This analysis begins by examining how romances’ descriptions of landscape often concentrate on economically significant topographical features, especially natural resources, and the laborers who manage and harvest them. For example, I examine the hilly iron mines and accompanying settlements of smiths in Sir Isumbras, the working of stone quarries in William of Palerne, and sea harvests in Havelok the Dane. The chapter then builds on these arguments to explain how descriptions of abandoned or ravaged agricultural landscapes in Sir Degrevant and the Tale of Gamelyn betray the anxieties of an increasingly “bourgeois-gentry” readership about the lack of human control over the English landscape in the wake of population decline caused by civil war, the bubonicplague, and the Little Ice Age.

Examining literary texts alongside contemporary legal and epistolary evidence regarding understandings and uses of seashores, Chapter 2 explains how a number of romances complement their larger themes with a concentration on the seaside as a simultaneously inviting and threatening space whose multifaceted nature as a geographical, political, and social boundary embodies the complex range of meanings embedded in the Middle English concept of “play” – a word that these texts often link with the seashore. Beaches, too, serve as stages upon which the romances act out their anxieties over the consequences of human economic endeavor. In Sir Amadace, Emaré, Sir Eglamour of Artois, and the Constance romances of Chaucer and Gower, shipwrecks are configured as opportunities for financial gain for scavengers and as mortal peril for sailors. Moreover, the coupling of the beach with concepts of play emerges in numerous scenes wherein beach-walking characters create – both in jest and in earnest – new identities for themselves, in order to elude past enemies or mistakes. My analysis thus explains how seaside scenes embody anxieties about human relationships with natural and divine forces.