I initially wrote this for a graduate seminar, called Medieval Romance: Difference and Desire in May 2022.
Lytheneth and Listeneth: An Introduction
The medieval romance is fixated on themes about locality and regionality, and informed by Christian-Catholic morality. Audiences are invited to interrogate their role in the world around them through fantastical elements like the fae, realistic elements like the political and legal systems. Matters of morality get explored in stories of adultery and chivalric oath-keeping. Throughout these poems, plots involving criminals and vigilantes, law enforcement, and courtroom trials come up so often that we might consider them a necessary feature of the medieval romance or a significant subgenre. From the comedic “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” to the dramatic “Havelok the Dane,” crime and its associates – the criminal, the law enforcement, and the legal system – are consistently used to generate entertainment and catharsis. An examination of these themes in the medieval romance prime the genre for a crime drama reading to better understand the contemporary genre’s history and present function in society.
Crime dramas exist in every medium our contemporary moment has to offer, but especially in television, with countless subgenres to look at every side of the worlds of the criminal, law enforcement, and justice system. Subgenres focusing on specific aspects of the crime drama include police procedurals like Law and Order (1990-) and Criminal Minds (2005-20), to the crime thriller Hannibal (2013-15), and even the superhero-vigilante-legal dramas Daredevil (2015-18) and The Punisher (2017-19). Plots featuring the interplay between the worlds of the criminal and law enforcement question, argue, and finally determine what kinds of behaviors are (il)legal and (a/im)moral in a cathartic, entertaining way that pulls audiences into the narrative. The crime drama’s fixation on time and place through “ripped from the headlines” stories mirrors that found in medieval romance, albeit on a more local, pseudo-democratic level than the noble, upper-class ones found in the latter genre.
It cannot be ignored that the medieval period’s Christian moralism and legal framework, not to mention the largely illiterate population, is far removed from our contemporary vision of secular, humanist justice and widespread literacy. However, the fascination in narratives about crime and its associates for entertainment purposes in both time periods reveal how the genres have both been used to uphold an ultimately conservative political, social, and moral world. They represent law enforcement and the justice system as safeguards to the community’s safety and integrity, and the criminal and deviant as threats. In “The Tale of Gamelyn,” the vigilante protagonist fights against the corrupt law enforcement, clergy, and justice system of his community before eventually being incorporated into the gentry as protector of the king’s grounds; “The King of Tars” brings the courtroom drama subgenre into the story with a paternity and marriage case that criminalizes non-Christians; and the explosive final scene of “Havelok the Dane” has a graphic scene of capital punishment for the traitorius antagonist. Religious, legal, and political systems are inseparable in the medieval romance, which makes the crimes committed in that genre all the more intense and a/immoral.
The Romance and the Crime Drama: Brief Histories
The medieval romance is an incoherent genre that escapes any hard and fast definition, but one such theory positions it as a genre that is deeply concerned with matters of region, time, and place. Siân Echard proposes that we approach the medieval romance genre as an “insular,” regional one that would appeal to majorly upper-class peoples all over Britain regardless of their vernacular tongue with stories about an “interest in place, and in politics or power” (163-5). Extending this, Corinne Saunders notes that the medieval romance engages with “wish-fulfilment,” that it “both projects social ideals and reflects ‘new hopes and desires’ of the individual” in ways both “nostalgic and escapist” (162). Narratives deeply concerned with politics, power, and social ideals make a great foundation for exploring how crime and its associates will factor into a “civilized” nation, what qualities are expected of political leaders like kings, and where we differ from the “uncivilized” Other. The romance constructs this moral, social, and legal order along the lines of the period’s dominant Catholic church, who demands punishment and atonement for oft-conflated crimes and sins.
But the lower classes were not isolated from the medieval romance. Saunders argues that though the genre was chiefly written as poetry, the genre came to encompass oral performance, with romances being adapted for or written with the intent of oral performance (163). Alliterative and rhyming qualities of many medieval romances make a strong case for this, especially when we consider that some poems were reportedly very popular with non-gentry peoples (Kaeuper 52-3). Therefore, we might conclude that medieval romances could appeal to people from different classes over time, and would even be used as a cultural tool to present crime and its associates in ways that determine what behaviors are (a/im)moral and (il)legal.
Crime drama theorist Sue Turnbull credits the “beginning” of the contemporary genre with the publication of the Newgate Calendar in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which published records of those charged with criminal offenses and those set to be (publicly) executed as an educational guide to turn people away from lives of crime by depicting “true crime”-type stories (820-1). They were remarkably popular, and exist as a precursor to the fictional “penny dreadful” stories of the nineteenth century gothic romance genre that depicted similar (but much more sensational) Newgate-style stories of highwaymen, criminals, and the supernatural. In the gothic romance’s fascination with the sublime and unknown, the modern detective story is born with Edgar Allan Poe in his Dupin short story trio, which directly inspired Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock stories–which were, of course, adapted for the screen when film was invented.
But even preceding the Newgate Calendar were the early English ballads and broadsides from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which also told “true crime” stories and conflated crime with sin – a thread found in the medieval romance, where crimes committed against the state or community were contextualized as crimes against God and the church as well. A ballad from roughly 1586, notated by the English Broadside Ballad Archive as “EBBA 33717,” is a ballad about the execution of traitors against the crown that invokes God’s protection from “all thy secret foes.” These ballads and broadsides are a necessary connecting thread between the
Newgate Calendar and the medieval romances that depicted graphic crime or punishment violence as entertainment. Though the thread between the contemporary crime drama and the medieval romance appear disparate, there are specific themes and story types uniting them through public fascination with true crime stories and ultimately, stories about crime and its associates.
Justified Vigilante Violence in “The Tale of Gamelyn”
The crime drama in our contemporary moment is fond of vigilantes and the “justified” criminal character. Frank Castle of The Punisher is much like Gamelyn and his story–a turn to vigilantism to kill the gangsters who murdered his family, which was later covered up by the police–exposes the corruption, shortcomings, and flaws of the justice system and law enforcement in similar ways to “Gamelyn.” In the poem, Gamelyn, a possible bastard living in a world that values primogeniture, is stripped of his rightful inheritance by his cruel older brother John and the knights executing their late father’s will. Law enforcement are just as visible in these narratives, but they are not framed as the villains and antagonists, as part of an institution that attacks and disenfranchises. Gamelyn’s own brother becomes the sheriff that prosecutes him for being an outlaw, and Richard Kaeuper argues that the prevalence of the medieval period’s sherriffs personally benefiting from the law would not make John “a caricature” in the audience’s eyes (165). “Gamelyn” is also exceptional in how its “hatred of regular clergy and deep knowledge of the ways of the law are the underpinning instrumentalities of ‘Gamelyn’ as a poem, and resistance to wrongful authority is as fully realized here as anywhere in the turbulent literature of the period” (Knight and Ohlgren), a sign that the poem might be analogous to a show like The Wire (2002-08), which showed the corruption of law enforcement in Baltimore and humanized the criminal character.
In response to the justice system and law enforcement mistreating him, he pursues a life of crime and violence directed at the political and religious system that excludes him from society. In just under 900 lines, Gamelyn physically fights his smug brother John, wins a local wrestling match, is declared mad and subjected to humiliation by the clergy, and becomes the king of a local outlaw gang. “Gamelyn” finds its entertainment through its “melodramatic surges of action” (Knight and Ohlgren), something that echoes the crime drama’s narrative structure. Turnbull writes that the crime drama “works” in delivering entertainment and catharsis because it depends on “the portrayal of violence, the dramatic incident, and the selection of visuals with an eye to climactic moments” (821). The depiction of violence in these extended sequences, both in “Gamelyn” and in the episode of a crime drama, add a realistic aesthetic dimension to the text. Even if the description or depiction becomes sensational, it adds a layer of legitimacy to the narrative to see the crime being committed in real-time.
The narrative in “Gamelyn” is pushed forward by the several sites of climactic and criminal violence that he does to protect himself from attackers or to get his revenge. The first scene of revenge violence is committed against his brother John, who boasts that he has kept Gamelyn’s inheritance for himself; in self-defense, Gamelyn “droof alle his brotheres men right sone on an hepe / And loked as a wilde lyon and leide on good wone; / […] Thus Gamelyn with his pestel made hem al agast” (“Gamelyn” 124-8). This scene of self-defense from his brother–who later becomes the sheriff–catalyzes Gamelyn’s life as a vigilante: he wants revenge against his brother and the system who seek to marginalize him. Further, Gamelyn’s later acts of vigilante violence idolize him as he attacks the clergy who bound and gagged him: “Gamelyn spreyeth holy watere with an oken spire, / That some that stode upright felle in the fire” and (“Gamelyn” 243-6, 499-500). The experience of hearing Gamelyn get his revenge against the clergy and law enforcement, which is further heightened by the fact that his older brother becomes the sheriff and arrests him when he returns to town, is the mode of entertainment.
In an extended courtroom scene–another important element of the crime drama–Gamelyn and his outlaw band storm into the justice hall, attack the justice in gorey detail, free Gamelyn’s wrongfully-convicted brother Sir Ote, and make themselves the judge and jury to prosecute the corrupt justice system (“Gamelyn” 845-50, 865-6, 874-8). When Gamelyn violently attacks the associates of the justice system, Gamelyn gets an active role in dismantling the system that wanted to marginalize him for the crime of being a youngest son. When Gamelyn’s outlaw gang gives the accused the death penalty, audience catharsis is achieved because “true” justice has been served. But in a move to justify Gamelyn’s vigilantism, the “Gamelyn” poet has the king pardon Gamelyn of his crimes and name him “cheef justice of the forest” (“Gamelyn” 884-8). But this move does nothing substantial to reform the whole system of justice in the community because it still gives the king ultimate power in deciding what is (il)legal, not the people and certainly not the law. The ending is conservative in that regard, because it reinforces the king’s power, makes Gamelyn a member of the gentry system he spent the whole narrative attacking, and offers the illusion of change to a system that was previously shown to be fundamentally corrupt.
Christianity as Rule of Law in “The King of Tars”
Another important aspect of the crime drama, the one absolutely necessary for catharsis and the ultimate decision of which behaviors are (il)legal and (a/im)moral under the law of community and state, is the courtroom and the lawyer. The courtroom/legal drama subgenre of the crime drama, from the light-hearted Ally McBeal (1997-2002) to the gritty Daredevil, finds its “justice catharsis” and entertainment in the explicit sentencing of crimes by its judge and attorney characters. In this side of the genre, the catharsis is generated in watching characters that commit crimes against the community be punished for their illegal and amoral/immoral behavior in the court by judge and jury: the final say before they get whisked away to prison or mental hospitals. I have already mentioned that “Gamelyn” features a reverse courtroom scene as its penultimate moment of justice for a marginalized man who became a vigilante; my introduction alluded to the jury in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” in which a jury of all women declare that the knight protagonist must find out what all women desire as his punishment for raping a woman.
The conversion romance “The King of Tars” uses elements of the legal drama in the penultimate scene: the Muslim sultan and the Christian princess’ trial to determine whose god is real. Especially when we remember that in the most traditional legal drama storylines, the verdict at the end of the crime drama upholds societal ideas of what is right and wrong, legal and illegal, normative and deviant, the princess’ request to “go to trial” and determine which faith is the right one emphasizes the poem’s conversion narrative. The “Tars” poet becomes the judge over the trial in the composition of this romance, and we the reading audience are the jury as we witness the nonexistence of Allah and the power of God when the “verdict” is made clear: only the Christian god can make lump baby a fully-formed human. The extended scenes in which the sultan and the princess each pray to their god (“Tars” 621-81, 787-98) function like a cross-examination where the defendant and plaintiff must set their story straight and the two deities are put to trial. When the princess’ prayer makes lump baby whole again, and she proudly exclaims, “Mahoun no Apolin / Is nought worth the brostle of a swin / Ogain mi Lordes grace!” (“Tars” 794-8), the audience has no choice but to believe in the power and existence of God. The quasi-courtroom setting makes it even more apparent that the courts can be used to reveal the lies of non-Christian beliefs and people. However, the most major difference between the contemporary crime drama and “Tars” is that a lawyer or judge doesn’t flip the legal script or go against precedence to make a decision; it is the princess transcends the legal and invokes the highest court, God’s, to make a wholly divine ruling and prove his existence before non-believers in such a way that they are compelled to believe.
The legal drama subgenre delights in watching attorneys and plaintiffs do rhetorical battle before judge and jury. The lawyer character is almost always depicted as witty, intelligent, and knowledgeable, and enjoyment is found in watching them construct and deliver their arguments. Lawyer characters will do anything to expose the truth and prove their client’s innocence. In Season 14, Episode 3 of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU), District Attorney Rafael Barba actually allows himself to be choked with a leather belt by the defendant to prove that he nonconsensually forced a woman into having kinky sex. Barba’s display of determination to prove his client is telling the truth about being raped demonstrates his passion and abilities as a lawyer. When the princess in “Tars” agrees to marry the Muslim sultan in the hopes of eventually bringing Christianity to his land (“Tars” 259-61), she exhibits a similar kind of passion in her desire to prove the existence of God and the validity of Christianity. And though the nature of the trial in “The King of Tars” could not be more different than the one from SVU, the princess’ claim that she will only believe in Allah if her husband’s god can make lump baby “fourmed after a man / With liif and limes aright” (“Tars” 610-5) effectively puts Islam and Muslims on trial for the crime of being false doctrine.
The paternity case in the legal drama is also remarkably popular, which “Tars” invokes with the lurid, sensational birth of lump baby, himself the product of an interfaith marriage between the princess and the sultan. If we choose to approach lump baby’s monstrous birth from an Aristotleian lens, which positions the mother as the child’s flesh provider and the father as the form and essence giver (Gilbert 333-4), then the conflict over which parent (and their corresponding faith) made lump baby be born as a “as a rond of flesche yschore / […] Withouten blod and bon” (“Tars” 575-9) makes “Tars” a wonderful example of a paternity case. The lurid existence of lump baby challenges the normative and Christian, and thus the princess and sultan bring each other to trial to determine where fault lies–making belief in the Christian god not just a matter of morality, but legality.
The princess takes this a step further after the “trial,” by declaring to her husband that even though her god made lump baby a real boy: “Thou no hast no part theron ywis, / Noither of the child ne of me. /And bot thou wilt Mahoun forsake / And to Jhesu mi Lord thee tak / […] [But] if thou were a Cristen man Bothe weren thine” (“Tars” 809-22). She uses a clever, lawyerly argument in order to make the case for paternity a strictly Christian one (as opposed to a purely biological one) by arguing that the sultan will not be the true father or her true husband until he officially converts to Christianity. She directs everything back to God and Christianity, further emphasizing how her husband’s beliefs are illegitimate. The trial setting lends the Christian faith a greater sense of legitimacy and truth, and offers the princess’ in-narrative conversion efforts legal weight since it provides a space to argue God’s truth and power–ultimately positioning non-Christian faiths and peoples as guilty for their lack of faith in the one, true God.
Capital Punishment in “Havelok the Dane”
Most of “Havelok the Dane” is full of intense political drama, more akin to television shows like Designated Survivor (2016-19 ) which follow a political figure in the fallout of some national tragedy. The male of the two protagonists, Havelok, is born with a “kynemark” in the shape of a cross that makes his “body marked by divine authority” (Herzman, Drake, and Salisbury), and designates him the “king, strong and stark; / […] [of] Al Denemark and Engeland” (“Havelok” 609-11). The story goes that Havelok’s father died when Havelok was only a baby–and that of the female English protagonist, Goldeboru–and he was denied his kingship by the evil Godard, who sent him away to be drowned by a fisherman. Eventually, Havelok’s parentage and divine marking are discovered after his marriage to the Princess Goldeboru and the pair go to war to claim their rightful place as the rulers of Denmark and England. Their fated, divinely ordained rule over the two nations–and narrative framing as benevolent, victimized heroes taking back what is rightfully theirs–gives their actions legitimacy and suggests that their behavior as rulers fits in with God’s word. In Havelok’s body, politics, the law, and Christianity/God’s will become wholly inseparable. In theory, a story like “Havelok” is a great propaganda tool to justify the legitimacy of kingship and lineage to the gentry who might get ideas about a coup.
How capital punishment fits into this analysis of “Havelok” becomes apparent when the two protagonists take the throne and begin to punish those who placed obstacles in their way to power, namely Godard. The “Havelok” poet writes that Havelok’s “erles and hise barouns alle, / Dreng and thein, burgeis and knith, / […] Riche and pouere, heye and lowe” were present when Godard was brought before the king for judgment of the crime of treason (“Havelok” 264-72). By having all of the people in the court and the land present for Godard’s trial and execution, Havelok is cementing his power as king and making a statement about his vision of justice and criminality. The execution is a display of strength and power, and since everyone knows of his kynmerk, it is also a message that Havelok’s decision to have Godard “be al quic flawen / And sithen to the galwes drawe / At this foule mere tayl, / Thoru his fet a ful strong nayl, / And thore ben henged wit two feteres” (“Havelok” 2476-80) is justified by God–and potentially even necessary, given that Godard interfered with the divine right of kings by preventing Goldeboru and Havelok from ascending the throne.
This is all to say that of the three poems I analyze in this essay, “Havelok” is, to invoke the popular election time term, “tough on crime.” Godard’s crimes against God and state are entwined, which makes him worthy of the most dehumanizing, brutal death: flaying alive. Robert Mills writes that Godard’s punishment “situates the traitor between the human and nonhuman” and his “gruesome fate is filtered through a dense web of associations between beastliness, filth, falsity, and flayed skin” (60-1). For Godard to be punished and die in a way that robs him of all humanity and decency is representative of divine punishment and justice that he might also receive in Hell for daring to interfere with the flow of divine right. By nature, a traitor threatens the stability of the state, and must needs be punished to the full extent of the law, which is only magnified by the fact that Havelok rules with divine right. When we remember that the divine right of kings and body politic meant that a king is “obligated by divine law to govern his subjects ethically” lest he become a tyrant (Herzman, Drake, and Salisbury), the chilling implications of Havelok’s decision to give Godard the death penalty become apparent. Havelok’s decision to give Godard the death penalty for the crime of treason against the state and his divinely-ordained rule provides a moral, Christian argument for capital punishment. To not give the death penalty in this situation, then, means the monarch allows sin and crime to fester in the nation; enacting capital punishment as justice becomes a matter of morality. We might even choose to read Godard’s brutal execution as a reflection of what kind of punishment he will receive in Hell, further strengthening the argument that Havelok rules and enacts divine right when he passes sentencing on traitors.. “Havelok” uses this explosive scene of capital punishment juxtaposed with a benevolent, divinely-chosen king to legitimize the punishment of criminals who act against God and the state.
Concluding Thoughts and Implications
The medieval romance and the contemporary crime drama feature the interplay between criminals and the law as a form of entertainment, revealing that stories about crime and law enforcement have captivated audiences throughout time. To read medieval romance as crime drama is to better understand how Christian moralism at all levels of society was perpetrated and upheld by literature. Crime and its associates have been captivating audiences long before shows like Law and Order and true-crime rags like the Newgate Calendar. This investigation into the similarities of the two genres gives us not just a better origin story for our modern fascination with crime dramas, but also allows us to examine the goals and entertainment value of the medieval romance in its inclusion of these crime-adjacent elements. The contemporary crime drama’s possible roots in the medieval romance suggest something potentially sinister, though: that the crime drama has legitimate foundational origins in an explicitly nationalistic, moral genre, further implicating it as a literary project in maintaining the status quo.
The medieval romance genre as it exists lends itself to a crime drama reading because violations against church, state, and community are affronts to God’s law, making the justice dealt out both ultimate and divine. “Gamelyn” shows this in a less-overt way, by showing the collaboration between the corrupt clergy and law enforcement as something to be resisted, or at least questioned by the general public. “Tars” rules that the non-Christian are guilty and need to be reformed through its status as a conversion narrative and invocation of the legalistic. Especially in the case of “Havelok,” where capital punishment is meted out and framed as the action of a benevolent and divinely-chosen king, provides moral and legal justification for the death penalty. By reading the medieval romance as a crime drama, we gain a better understanding for how the former genre uses law enforcement, the justice system, and capital punishment in its narratives to put forward ideas about justice, legality, and morality.
SOURCES
Chandler, John. H. The King of Tars, edited by John H. Chandler. Published for TEAMS in Association with the University of Rochester by Medieval Institute Publications, Kalamazoo, MI, 2015. Web.
Deloney, Thomas. “EBBA 33717: A proper new Ballad, breefely declaring the Death / and Execution of 14. most wicked Traitors, who suffered death in Lincolnes Inne Feelde / neere London: the 20 and 21. of September. 1586.” English Broadside Ballad Archive. National Library of Scotland – Crawford. Web.
Echard, Sian. “Insular Romance.” Download “Insular Romance.” The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English, ed. Elaine Treharne and Greg Walker, 160-180. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Gilbert, Jane. “Unnatural Mothers and Monstrous Children in The King of Tars and Sir Gowther.” Medieval Women: Text and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain: Essays for Felicity Riddy, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al. Turnhout: Brepols, 2000. 329-344.
Herzman, Ronald, Graham Drake, Eve Salisbury. “Havelok the Dane.” Four Romances of England: King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Bevis of Hampton, Athelston. Published for TEAMS in Association with the University of Rochester by Medieval Institute Publications, Kalamazoo, MI, 1997. Web.
Kaeuper, Richard W., and Guyol, Christopher, editor. “An Historian’s Reading of The Tale of Gamelyn.” Kings, Knights and Bankers: the Collected Articles of Richard W. Kaeuper. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2016, pp. 157-70. Web.
Knight, Stephen and Thomas Ohlgren. “The Tale of Gamelyn: Introduction.” Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, edited by Stephen Thomas Knight and Thomas H. Ohlgren, Published for TEAMS in Association with the University of Rochester by Medieval Institute Publications, Kalamazoo, MI, 2003. Web.
Knight, Stephen and Thomas Ohlgren. “The Tale of Gamelyn.” Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, edited by Stephen Thomas Knight and Thomas H. Ohlgren, Published for TEAMS in Association with the University of Rochester by Medieval Institute Publications, Kalamazoo, MI, 2003. Web.
Mills, Robert. “Havelok’s Bare Life and the Significance of Skin.” Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture,” ed. Katie L. Walter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 57-80.
Saunders, Corinne, “The Romance Genre.” A Companion to British Literature, ed. Robert DeMaria Jr., Heesok Chang, and Samantha Zacher, 161-179. Chichester and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014.
With A Hero 