Sir Eglamour of Artois

Sir Eglamour of Artois is a Middle English verse romance that was written sometime around 1350. It is a narrative poem of about 1300 lines, a tail-rhyme romance that was quite popular in its day, judging from the number of copies that have survived – four manuscripts from the 15th century or earlier and a manuscript and five printed editions from the 16th century. The poem tells a story that is constructed from a large number of elements found in other medieval romances and modern scholarly opinion has been critical of it because of this, describing it as unimaginative and of poor quality. Medieval romance as a genre, however, concerns the reworking of "the archetypal images of romance" and if this poem is viewed from a 15th-century perspective as well as from a modern standpoint – and it was obviously once very popular, even being adapted into a play in 1444 – one might find a "romance [that] is carefully structured, the action highly unified, the narration lively."

The action of the story involves the hero fighting with a giant who is fifty feet tall, a ferocious boar and a dragon. His son is carried off as a baby by a griffin. The mother of his son, like Emaré and Geoffrey Chaucer's heroine Constance, is carried in an open boat to a distant land. There are scenes of non-recognition between the principal characters and a threat of incest; but after all these vicissitudes, father, son and mother are reunited at the end.

The story of Sir Eglamour of Artois was written in around 1350 and is found in six manuscript versions, four of them dating to the 15th century or earlier, one to the 16th century and one, the Percy Folio, to the seventeenth. It is also found in five 16th century printed versions. In one of the manuscripts, British Museum Egerton 2862 (c. 1400), only a fragment of the story survives:

A complete or nearly complete version of Sir Eglamour of Artois is found in these manuscripts:

Lincoln Cathedral MS 91, produced by Robert Thornton, preserves the Arthurian romance Sir Perceval of Galles and the popular romance Sir Isumbras. In Cotton Caligula A.ii is found the tale of Emaré. Like many other medieval English romances,Sir Eglamour of Artois is written in tail-rhyme verse; although it is somewhat irregular, written mostly in stanzas of the traditional twelve lines, rhyming aabccbddbeeb, although sometimes a stanza occurs of six or nine lines, sometimes of fifteen or more.

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