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Guy of Warwick is a legendary English hero of Romance popular in England and France from the 13th to the 19th century.

Plot[edit]

The Guy legend has been retold countless times through the centuries,[1] and details of the story changed over time. The basic plot, however, remains the same. This summary is based on a fifteenth-century Middle English version, preserved in University Library, Cambridge MS. Ff. 2. 38.[2]

The story begins when the lowly Guy, a cup-bearer for Sir Roholde, Earl of Warwick, falls in love with the Earl's daughter, the lady Felice, who is of much higher social standing.[3] Felice insists that before they wed he must prove his valour in chivalric adventures and become the greatest knight "that may be fownde in any londe (land)" ; only then will he be worthy of her love.[4]

Accordingly, Guy sets out, travelling widely across Europe, competing in tournaments, where he has great success and becomes well known. He returns to England to claim Felice's hand, but once more she rebuffs him, telling him that he must prove himself in true battle. Guy heads to the continent again, and gathers a loyal band of knights and followers, including Herault, who becomes his lifelong friend and companion. Guy makes his way across Europe, fighting in numerous battles. As words of Guy's feats spread, his fame grows, and several times he is offered great prizes of land and wealth after coming to the aid of kings in battle.[5] In each case he refuses and continues his questing. He makes it as far as Constantinople, where he resolves to aid the Byzantine Emperor, Ernis, in his war against the Saracen Soudan. After another successful battle, Guy kills the Soudan, and the Emperor offers Guy his daughter's hand in marriage.[6] Guy's swelling pride and vanity cause him to temporarily forget Felice, and he agrees. However, when he gets to the church, Guy is reminded of Felice and postpones the service, feigning illness.[7] He decides not to marry the Emperor's daughter, and makes several excuses to the Emperor, including that he fears the Greek barons will be jealous.[8] Instead he sets out for home, continuing to have adventures on the way and battling fantastic monsters including the Dun Cow, dragons,[6][9] and great boars.[10]

Eventually he returns to Warwick and weds Felice, who conceives a son. However, after only a few weeks of blissful happiness, Guy has a religious epiphany whilst contemplating the stars one night. Seized with remorse for the pride and vanity of his past life, and desiring to do penance, Guy leaves his wife and fortune to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, dressed in the rags of a pauper.[11] Guy continues to fight when he has to — such as against the Saracen champion Ameraunt — but he does so anonymously, for God rather than fame.[12]

After years of absence he returns in time to deliver Winchester for King Athelstan of England from the invading Danish king, Anelaph (possibly the historic Olaf I or Anlaf Cuarán),[13] by slaying in single combat their champion, the giant Colbrand. Making his way to Warwick, he becomes one of his wife's beadsmen, and presently retires to a hermitage in Arden, only revealing his identity, like Saint Alexis, at the approach of death.

Origins[edit]

Velma Bourgeois Richmond[14] has traced the career of Guy of Warwick from the legends of soldier saints to metrical romances composed for an aristiocratic audience that widened in the sixteenth century to a popular audience that included Guy among the Nine Worthies, passing into children's literature and local guidebooks before dying out in the twentieth century. The kernel of the tradition evidently lies in the fight with Colbrand, which symbolically represents some kernel of historical fact. The religious side of the legend finds parallels in the stories of St. Eustachius and Saint Alexis, and makes it probable that the Guy-legend, as we have it, has passed through monastic hands. Tradition seems to be at fault in putting Guy's adventures anachronistically in the reign of Athelstan; the Anlaf of the story is probably Olaf Tryggvason, who, with Sweyn I of Denmark, harried the southern counties of England in 993 and pitched his winter quarters in Southampton. Winchester was saved, however, not by the valour of an English champion, but by the payment of money. This Olaf was not unnaturally confused with Anlaf Cuaran or Havelok the Dane.

The Anglo-Norman warrior hero of Gui de Warewic, marked Guy's first appearance in the early thirteenth century. Topographical allusions show the popem's composer to be more familiar with the area of Wallingford, near Oxford, than with Warwickshire.[15]

Guy was transformed in the fourteenth century with a spate of metrical romances written in Middle English. The versions which we possess are adaptations from the French, and are cast in the form of a roman; the adventures open with a long recital of Guy's wars in Lombardy, Germany and Constantinople, embellished with fights with dragons and surprising feats of arms. The name Guy entered the Beauchamp family, earls of Warwick, when William de Beauchamp IV inherited the title in 1269 through his mother's brother, named his heir "Guy" in 1298. A tower added to Warwick Castle in 1394 was named "Guy's Tower", and Guy of Warwick relics began to accumulate.[16]

"Filicia", who belongs to the twelfth century, was perhaps the Norman poet's patroness, occurs in the pedigree of the Ardens, descended from Thurkill of Warwick and his son Siward. Guys Cliffe, near Warwick, where in the fourteenth century Richard de Beauchamp, 13th Earl of Warwick, erected a chantry, with a statue of the hero, does not correspond with the site of the hermitage as described in the Godfreyson (see Havelok).

The narrative detail of the legend is obvious fiction, though it may have become vaguely connected with the family history of the Ardens and the Wallingford family, but it was accepted as authentic fact in the chronicle of Pierre de Langtoft (Peter of Langtoft) written at the end of the thirteenth century.

The adventures of Reynbrun, son of Guy, and his tutor Heraud of Arden, who had also educated Guy, have much in common with his father's history, and form an interpolation sometimes treated as a separate romance. A connection between Guy and Count Guido of Tours (flourished about 800) was made when Alcuin's advice to the count was transferred to the English hero in the Speculum Gy de Warewyke (c. 1327), edited for the Early English Text Society by G. L. Morrill, 1898.

Manuscript tradition[edit]

The Anglo-Norman romance[17] has not been printed, but is described by Emile Littré in Histoire littéraire de la France (xxii., 841-851, 1852). A French prose version was printed in Paris, 1525, and subsequently (see G. Brunet, Manuel du libraire sub "Guy de Warvich"); the English metrical romance exists in four versions dating from the early fourteenth century; the text was edited by J. Zupitza (187.51876) for the Early English Texts Society from Cambridge University Library, Paper MS. Ff. 2, 38, and again (pts. 1883-1891, extra series, Nos. 42, 49, 59), from the Auchinleck and Caius College MSS.

The popularity of the legend is shown by the numerous versions in English: Guy of Warwick, translated from the Latin of Giraldus Cambrensis (fl. 1350) into English verse by John Lydgate between 1442 and 1468; Guy of Warwick, a poem (written in I617 and licensed, but not printed) by John Lane, the manuscript of which (British Library) contains a sonnet by John Milton, father of the poet; The Famous Historie of Guy, Earl of Warwick (c. 1607) by Samuel Rowlands; The Booke of the moste Victoryous Prince Guy of Warwicke (William Copland, no date); other editions by J. Cawood and C. Bates; chapbooks and ballads of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: The Tragical History, Admirable Atchievements and Curious Events of Guy, Earl of Warwick, a tragedy (1661) which may possibly be identical with a play on the subject written by John Day and Thomas Dekker, and entered at Stationers' Hall on the 15th of January 1618/19; three verse fragments are printed by Hales and F. J. Furnivall in their edition of the Percy Folio MS. vol. ii.; an early French MS. is described by J. A. Herbert (An Early MS. of Gui de Warwick, London, 1905).

Popularity through the Ages[edit]

[edit]

Today Guy of Warwick's Sword can still be seen at Warwick Castle.

Assimilation into History[edit]

Already by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the belief that Guy was an historical figure was widespread. Guy's story became part of local traditions; in the sixteenth century, for example, John Leland fixed the place of Guy's battle at Denemarche, a meadow near Hyde Mead.[18]

Themes[edit]

Chivalry[edit]

Crusades & Travel[edit]

Penitence[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ The fictive narratives of Guy were taken as history in chronicles of Thomas Rudborne and John Hardyng (Richmond 1996:ch 4.5), and Guy appears in the Dictionary of National Biography along with Arthur and Robin Hood, and so is not simply a figure in fiction but a character of legend.
  2. ^ Published in J. Zupitza, The Romance of Guy of Warwick: The Second or 15th-century Version, Early English Text Society 25 & 26 (London 1875-6)
  3. ^ Zupitza, p. 7
  4. ^ Zupitza, p.24
  5. ^ Zupitza, p.48
  6. ^ a b Zupitza, p.110
  7. ^ Zupitza, p.114
  8. ^ Zupitza, p.120
  9. ^ Zupitza, p.197
  10. ^ Zupitza, p.185
  11. ^ Zupitza, p.205
  12. ^ Zupitza, p.223
  13. ^ D. Gray, "Guy of Warwick", Oxford dictionary of National Biography
  14. ^ Richmond, The Legend of Guy of Warwick. (New York and London: Garland) 1996.
  15. ^ The Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911 suggested a historic connection through etymology: "The name Guy (perhaps a Norman form of Early English wig, "war") may be fairly connected with the family of Wigod, lord of Wallingford under Edward the Confessor."
  16. ^ Richmond 1996: 37.
  17. ^ British Library, Han MS. 3775
  18. ^ R. Allen Rouse, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance, (D.S. Brewer, Cambridge 2005) pp.139

References[edit]

  • Public Domain This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  • Crane, Ronald S. “The Vogue of Guy of Warwick from the Close of the Middle Ages to the Romantic. Revival,” PMLA 30 (1915):125-194. The first modern comparative study.
  • Richmond, Velma Bourgeois The Legend of Guy of Warwick. (New York and London: Garland) 1996.
  • See also M. Weyrauch, Die mittelengl. Fassungen der Sage von Guy (2 pts., Breslau, 1899 and 1901); J. Zupitza in Sitzungsber. d. phil.hist. KI. d. kgl. Akad. d. Wiss. (vol. lxxiv., Vienna, 1874), and Zur Literaturgeschichte des Guy von Warwick (Vienna, 1873); a learned discussion of the whole subject by H. L. Ward, Catalogue of Romances (i. 47 1-501, 1883); and an article by S. L. Lee in the Dictionary of National Biography.
  • Wiggins, Alison and Rosalind Field, eds. Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor. Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 2007, Pp. xxi, 223 (Studies in Medieval Romance, 4).
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