Story line and story shape in Sir Percyvell of Gales and Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal

Abstract

The romance of Sir Percyvell of Gales (henceforth Percyvell) was probably composed in the north of England early in the fourteenth century but obviously enjoyed widespread popularity in medieval England. Geoffrey Chaucer, who quoted two lines of it in his parody of popular romance Sir Thopas, evidently knew it well, and the anonymous poet of the Laud Troy Book (c. 1400) included Percyvell in a catalogue of famous heroes celebrated by ‘gestoures ... at mangeres and grete festes’; the other heroes in his list – Bevis, Guy, Tristrem – suggest that the poet was thinking of the English Perceval story rather than Chrétien’s Conte du Graal (c. 1180), on which it is loosely based. 3 But while (according to the Laud Troy Book) the romance was once popularised by professional entertainers, it has come down to us only in a single manuscript, Lincoln Cathedral, MS 91, copied around the middle of the fifteenth century by the Yorkshire gentleman Robert Thornton. In 2288 lines of extended tail-rhyme, Percyvell tells the following story: