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A decade ago, one of us reviewed the evidence for dating the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (GGK) and concluded that the older dating towards the middle of the fourteenth century was to be preferred.1 This paper refines on the dating proposed there and offers a new suggestion, consistent with the refinement, about the milieu in which the poem could have arisen - one which to us appears to provide satisfactory solutions to many of the problems that earlier attempts raised. To show this, however, it will be necessary briefly to review the more notable previous attempts to place GGK in its setting.
It was inevitable that, when introduced to such a rich and excellent work as GGK, students of literature should try to find out who wrote it and why. The attempts began with Sir Frederic Madden, the first editor, who was also the first to link the poem with Andrew of Wyntoun's notice of 'Huchon of pe Aule Reale', who `made a gret Gest of Arthure / And the Awntyr of Gawane / De Pistil als of Suet Susane'. The first two of these works, Madden argued, must be the alliterative Morte Arthure and GGK.2 This view, which enjoyed considerable vogue in Victorian and Edwardian times, ought to have been laid to rest by F. J. Amours, who argued convincingly that Wyntoun's 'Awntyr of Gawane' was more likely to be The Awntyrs off Arthure than GGK, if indeed it is any work now extant.3
However that may be, the researches of Angus McIntosh on dialect indications in ME texts have shown conclusively that GGK and Morte Arthure are not by the same author.4 Linguistic evidence establishes that only the other poems accompanying GGK in London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x - and possibly Saint Erkenwald, found in British Library, MS Harley zz5o - can reasonably be ascribed to the Gawain-poet.5 The bearing of these other works on the date of GGK is treated in Cooke's article referred to above and shown to be indecisive;6 none of them affords any direct evidence of the author's identity. Attempts to find the name 'Macy' or 'Massey' encrypted in these poems have employed doubtful methods,7 and the manuscript marginalia used to support...