Bewar, Oldcastel, and for Crystes sake, Clymbe no more in holy writ so hie. Rede the storie of Lancelot de lake, Or Vegece of the aart of Chivalrie, The seege of Troie, or Thebes; thee applie, To thyng that may to th’ordre of knyght longe! Hoccleve’s Remonstrance against Oldcastle of 1415, which castigates the condemned Lollard knight for reading the wrong books, marks the particular interest attaching to a study of romance in the fifteenth century. At first glance, romance appears to be a profoundly ahistorical form, in many senses. It favours the fabled or the fabulous above the factual or verisimilar: a story with its roots in history or in legendary history draws closer to romance as it distances itself from the sobriety of chronicled report. Hoccleve’s own examples show exoticism to be one of the defining features of the genre, a setting far away or long ago, or preferably both, such as distances it from any immediate social comment. Furthermore, romances were extraordinarily long-lived: many that survive only in fifteenth-century or later copies were composed earlier, in historical circumstances different from those of their transmission and influence. Yet a closer look at romance at the end of the Middle Ages demonstrates that audiences and copyists valued the form more for its immediate topicality than for its escapism. Those earlier stories and long traditions are brought to bear on contemporary issues and concerns precisely because they are traditional, and with that stable and ideal. Romance in this period, as Hoccleve’s lines demonstrate, acquires a new significance in promising to preserve the old values of high chivalry and orthodox piety against the dangers of theological and political innovation. Much of the material may be old; the uses to which it is put serve the exigencies of a new and particular historical moment.
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