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When a certain cleric of Ludlow sat down with pen in hand late in the thirteenth century to recall "the adventures and prowess of our ancestors who strove to seek honor in loyalty [des aventures e pruesses nos auncestres qe se penerent pur honour en leaut quere]," he set for himself a difficult task: loyalty did not appear to be the most apt word to describe the man who was to dominate his narrative, Fouke Fitz Waryn.(1) This minor Norman noble of the Welsh March, angered by King John's refusal to grant him the town and land of Whittington, which he believed to be his own by right, killed the owner of the property, Roger de Powys, attacked the king's vassals and fled to the forest for three years, evading capture and finally receiving pardon and the land. Such behavior constituted a grave breach of feudal ethics, yet to speak of such things, the cleric determined, would be "profitable to many [a plusours purra valer]" (3.8).
Sadly, the Anglo-Norman couplet romance which our cleric composed is no longer extant. But we have his story and his solution to the problem of profitably presenting Fouke Fitz Waryn in an Anglo-Norman prose redaction in British Library MS Royal 12 C. xii, apparently transposed from the verse romance into a miscellany by the same Hereford scribe who copied the Harley Lyrics between 1325 and 1340.(2) In fact, two sections of the older poem remain in the verse prophecies which appear near the beginning and end of the romance, and other lines can be reconstructed from the prose.(3) Furthermore, the poetic version apparently still existed in the early sixteenth century when John Leland records seeing an "old English boke yn Ryme of the Gestes of Guarine, and his Sunnes" which "lakkid a Quayre or ii." For his summary of the story, he filled in the missing conclusion from "an olde French Historie yn Rime of the Actes of the Guarines," perhaps the same one used by the remanieur of the prose romance.(4) His summary follows the extant prose Fouke le Fitz Waryn so well that we may conclude that this text represents the substance of the Ludlow cleric's work if not the same form.
Recognizing the peculiar problems of...