The Despensers and the Gawain Poet: A Gloucestershire Link to the Alliterative Master of the Northwest Midlands

Abstract

During the second half of the fourteenth century in England, four alliterative poems written in the dialect of the northwest midlands were compiled in a single manuscript known as Cotton Nero A.x, now on display at the British Museum. Most scholars believe that the poems, familiar to modern readers as Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Cleanness, and Patience, were written either by a single author or a small school of poets from Cheshire. It has been argued, as well, that the late fourteenth-century alliterative poem, St. Erkenwald, also written in the dialect of the northwest midlands, was a product of the same Cheshire poet (or poets) who produced the Cotton Nero poems. 1

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