Sir Perceval of Galles

Sir Perceval of Galles is a Middle English Arthurian verse romance whose protagonist, Sir Perceval, made his debut in medieval literature well over a hundred years before the composition of this work; in Chrétien de Troyes' final poem, the twelfth-century Old French Conte del Graal. Sir Perceval of Galles was probably written in the northeast Midlands of England, in the early-fourteenth century, and tells a markedly different story to either Chretien's tale or to Robert de Boron's early-thirteenth century Perceval. Entertaining, appealing and told with a comic liveliness, it omits any mention of a graal or a Grail.

Beginning in a similar vein to Chretien's story of a boy brought up in the forest by his mother, coming naively to King Arthur's court looking to be knighted and then wandering off again into the forest, wearing the armour of a red knight whom he has just killed with a hunting spear, the two stories then diverge. In the Middle English Sir Perceval of Galles, the hero finds no mysterious castle of a Fisher King. Instead, he travels to a Land of Maidens, defeats an entire army single-handedly and discovers near the end of the tale that, since an incident in a lady's tent when he first approached King Arthur's court, he has been wearing a magic ring that has made him incapable of being killed.

Near the beginning of this poem, the reader is informed that: "[Perceval] dranke water of the welle," and this tale, or at least this style of romance, was later parodied by Geoffrey Chaucer in his late-fourteenth century Canterbury tale about Sir Thopas, in which the knight Sir Thopas: "Him-self drank water of the wel, as did the knight Sir Percivel."

The story of Sir Perceval of Galles is found in a single manuscript of the fifteenth century: Lincoln Cathedral MS 91, the Lincoln Thornton Manuscript, which dates to around 1440. There are no known printed versions prior to nineteenth and twentieth century transcriptions of this unique manuscript text. The story is told in 2,288 lines, arranged in sixteen-line stanzas rhyming aaabcccbdddbeeeb, and was probably composed in the northeast Midlands of England, although the entire Thornton Manuscript is influenced by the North Yorkshire dialect of its copyist, the manor lord and amateur scribe Robert Thornton. The poem itself probably dates to the early fourteenth century.

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