Ipomadon

The Anglo-Norman romance Ipomedon by Hue de Rotelande, composed near Hereford around 1180, survives in three separate Middle English versions, a long poem Ipomadon composed in tail-rhyme verse, possibly in the last decade of the fourteenth century, a shorter poem The Lyfe of Ipomydon, dating to the fifteenth century and a prose version, Ipomedon, also of the fifteenth century. In each case, the story is taken independently from the Anglo-Norman romance Ipomedon, written in Old French by Hue de Rotelande "not long after 1180", possibly in Herefordshire, England. It is included in a list of the popular English romances by Richard Hyrde in the 1520s.

The earliest Middle English version is found uniquely in MS Chetham 8009 (Manchester), probably composed in West Yorkshire in the north of England. The tale of Ipomadon is "packed with elaborate description and detail" and follows the adventures of a young knight, Ipomadon, who has a passion for hunting and who chooses to hide his identity from the lady he loves for much of the romance, culminating at the end of the tale in a scene where the hero, having defeated a knight in battle, then claims for a while to be the very knight he has defeated.

Ipomedon in Middle English is found in three versions, all of them probably deriving independently from the late-twelfth century Anglo-Norman original.

The earliest of these surviving versions in Middle English is Ipomadon and occurs in the manuscript Chetham 8009 (Manchester), which contains a unique copy of an 8,891-line tail-rhyme romance, dating in composition to "anywhere between the last decade of the fourteenth century and the middle of the fifteenth century" This version of the tale follows Hue de Rotelande's story quite closely, although abridging it somewhat by cutting battle details and most of Hue's rather coarse or prosaic narrative intrusions. Composed in a dialect that suggests that it was originally written by a West Yorkshireman in his native West Yorkshire, in the north of England, the manuscript copy itself dates to the late-fifteenth century, is from a London Scriptorium and contains clues that the work from which this copy was taken had itself been re-copied, somewhere down the line, in the southwest of England.

...
Wikipedia