The Gawain Poet

Mark Leech introduces Staffordshire’s oldest and most important writer:-

The Gawain-poet is the first writer known to have evoked a Staffordshire landscape in his work – that of the Moorlands, and specifically the rocky fissure known as Lud’s Church, near Wildboarclough. In his best-known poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the hero rides on a frozen New Year’s morning to face his destiny at the hands of the mysterious, terrifying Green Knight.

Despite its supernatural inhabitant, the “chapel”, as it’s called, is the centre of everything real in the poem: the route there, and the place itself, are described in earthy detail, in contrast with the glittering vagueness of Camelot earlier in the story, and it is here that the idealistic Gawain comes face to face with his own humanity and limitations, which Arthurian chivalry cannot change.

The full plot of Sir Gawain would take too long to set out here – see one of the many translations of the poem, of which the two most recent are by Simon Armitage and Bernard O’Donoghue – but it is one of the greatest works in English. Furthermore, much of the action, involving beheading games, wild hunts across the countryside and a beautiful seductress might well be thought to take place in Staffordshire – it is likely that Sir Gawain gets a good view of the Roaches on his way to the chapel.

About the poem’s author we know very little, all from the texts of his five long poems. Four of these exist in a single late-fourteenth century manuscript written in a dialect known to have been used at that time on the Staffordshire-Derbyshire borders. The dialect could be that of the scribe, but it is quite likely that it was also that of the poet.

He was clearly a courtly man, educated and religious, but no ascetic, if the loving descriptions of eating, drinking and clothes are anything to go by. From the subject matter of the poem Pearl, some critics have inferred that he had a daughter, possibly called Margaret, who died in childhood. It is even possible that he was associated with John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, who held lands in the area, including Newcastle-under-Lyme. A nobleman’s power and prestige could have supported the poet in a number of roles, as royal patronage did for his (probable) contemporary, Chaucer – but all this is speculation. Beyond his writings, there is no record of the Gawain-poet’s existence.

The Gawain-poet’s influence did not spread like that of the metropolitan Canterbury-poet, but in the last hundred years he has been rediscovered, translated and deservedly more widely read than ever. He was the first writer to imagine Staffordshire, and one of the greatest.

Then he searched about; the place seemed savage

and not a roof nor a wall could be seen

but high steep banks on both sides

and rough knuckled crags with jagged rocks

whose stabbing tips seemed to score the sky.

Then he stopped and kept his horse still,

turning his head to hunt the place out.

He saw none such on any side, certain, he thought

but a bit of raised ground, heaped up like a grave,

a round hill by a bank built up next to water,

a small stream that swept along there;

the water bubbled up as if on the boil.