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Did Sir John Stanley write Sir Gawain and the Green 
Knight? 

Andrew Breeze 
University of Navarre 

The Gawain Poet was the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , a 
fourteenth-century Arthurian romance, and perhaps the greatest poem ever 
written in Northern England. Its anonymous creator ranks with Marvell, 
Wordsworth, and the Brontës as amongst the North's supreme literary artists. 
The question naturally arises as to who he was. In 2004 the present writer gave 
an answer, publishing (in the US journal Arthuriana) an analysis of the poem 
and its associated works Pearl , Cleanness, and Patience. He there proposed 
that the unknown poet was Sir John Stanley (c. 1350-1414), the evidence 
including dialect, topography, and verbal parallels between the four texts and 
Stanley's correspondence. What follows offers a revised survey of publications 
before and after 2004, examining whether they strengthen the case for Stanley 
as the Gawain Poet, weaken it, or demolish it completely. 

Keywords: The Gawain Poet; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ; Pearl ; Sir John 
Stanley (d. 1414); Robert de Vere (1362-92), Earl of Oxford 

Questions of authorship aside, John Stanley is well known. The son of 
a minor landowner, he rose in a spectacular way through his own skills 
and marriage to an heiress. He became a provincial magnate, a courtier 
to Richard II, and the founder of the Stanley dynasty, with the present 
Earls of Derby as his descendants. He ended his days as Knight of the 
Garter, Lieutenant of Ireland, and King of the Isle of Man. He was also 
an expert hunter, responsible for the royal forests of Macclesfield, de la 
Mere, and Wirral. If, in addition, this remarkable man wrote some of the 
finest poems in the English language, it will draw further attention to 

Andrew Breeze, Selim27 (2022): 81–113. 
ISSN 1132-631X / ISSN-L 2792-3878 / https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.27.2022.81-113 



82 Andrew Breeze 

 

him and to the Lancashire and Cheshire of his time, where his estates 
were located and (it appears) his poems of love, adventure, chivalry, 
and religion were composed. It will be proof of the sophisticated 
literary, courtly, and religious civilization which Northern England 
possessed in the later Middle Ages. 

It is true that, despite its far-reaching implications, the Arthuriana 
paper has not been much noticed. Hence this paper, with its material 
in two sections. In the first we survey comments on who the Gawain 
Poet was; in the second, we look at at what is known of Sir John Stanley, 
particularly as regards his language. We start with some facts on Sir 
Gawain and the Green Knight and its related poems. It appears solely 
in London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x, in a hand of about 1400. 
The manuscript, with some inferior illustrations, is undistinguished. But 
the four poems in it are the very opposite. The most important of them 
tells this story. 

It begins at the court of Arthur, where a New Year's feast is 
interrupted by a green horseman with an axe, who challenges the 
guests to a beheading contest. Gawain accepts the offer and 
decapitates the stranger. What follows is unexpected. The trunk runs 
forward and snatches up its head, which opens its eyes and commands 
Gawain to meet him in a year's time for a return blow at the “Green 
Chapel”. Head in hand, the body gets back in the saddle: horse and 
rider hasten off through the door. The months pass. Gawain begins his 
journey and, after various adventures (including bedroom ones, where 
he politely evades an attractive chatelaine's attempts to seduce him), 
arrives at the Green Chapel for a second encounter with the Green 
Knight (and the axe). He survives with no more than a nick on his neck, 
and to his amazement and chagrin discovers that the challenger is none 
other than his host, whose young wife tested his chastity. (Had he 
succumbed to her, he would surely have lost his head.) Gawain returns 
mortally discomfited to Camelot, where the other knights regard his 
trials as a huge joke. In the same dialect and manuscript as Sir Gawain 
and the Green Knight are Pearl, Patience, and Cleanness. The first is an 
allegory wherein the speaker tells of losing a precious pearl (interpreted 
as a deceased infant daughter); he thereafter falls asleep to find himself 
in a garden of exotic beauty, there meeting a mysterious girl in white, 
who from beyond an uncrossable river speaks to him words of religious 
consolation. Pearl is accompanied by the Scriptural poems Patience 



Did Sir John Stanley write Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? 83 

 

and Cleanness, setting out respectively the stories of Jonah and those 
of Noah's Flood, the Destruction of Sodom, and Belshazzar's Feast. 
These texts were effectively unknown until modern times, with an 
edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in 1839 and of all four 
poems in 1864 (Wells 1916: 54-57, 578-85, 770). 

In commentary since then one hears diverse opinions. Some show 
sense on what they say of the poet; others, less so; but critical fashion 
and personal impulse are frequent. Kenneth Sisam observed on the 
romance of Gawain that the “descriptions of nature, of armour and 
dresses, the hunting scenes, and the love-making, are all excellently 
done”, while the author has “a quiet humour that recalls Chaucer”. 
Pearl, on the other hand, is “almost overwrought”, with a richness and 
luxuriance that at first “seem scarcely English”, and alliteration and 
rhyme of such intricacy that one wonders how the author sustained “his 
marvellous technique without completely sacrificing poetry to metrical 
gymnastics” (Sisam 1921: 45, 58-59). Another writer maintained that 
the castle where Gawain stayed was based on Clitheroe Castle, 
belonging to John of Gaunt (Oakden 1930: 257-61). But no-one accepts 
that. Better was his later praise of the author, whose “remarkable 
attitude to nature” reveals “rare gifts” for literary creation, as do his 
powers of description, whether of the arming of a knight, the pinnacles 
of a fortress, the hunting of hart, boar, or fox, or “the cutting up of a 
beast” (Oakden 1935: 47). He rightly stressed the poet's pride in 
hunting and butchery (routinely ignored by critics), which does not 
flinch from details of a slaughtered deer's windpipe and guts (line 
1336). Yet Oakden was modestly silent on the fur coat (trimmed “ful 
fyne with felles” or pelts) worn next to the skin of Gawain's chatelaine, 
who (her throat “all naked” and “brest bare before”) enters the knight's 
bedroom (closing the door behind her) early in the morning, while her 
husband is away hunting on the moors (lines 1733-49). Whether 
presenting an animal's innards or the blandishments of a femme fatale, 
the poet demonstrates remarkable powers of observation, as well as 
easy familiarity with the life of lords and ladies. 

Sir Israel Gollancz (1863-1930) made unconvincing proposals on the 
Gawain poem as written for an audience in North Wales, and a better 
one for the Green Chapel as in the rugged country of north-west 
Staffordshire (Gollancz 1940: xviii-xx). This area of the Peak District was 
in the Forest of Macclesfield. We shall use this as a clue to authorship. 



84 Andrew Breeze 

 

Gervase Mathew (1905-76) had careful remarks on the manuscript. It 
belonged to Henry Bank (1568-1617) of Bank, near Halifax in West 
Yorkshire, indicating a northern provenance; two annotations in 
fifteenth-century hands suggest that its previous ownership was 
secular, not monastic. On authorship, Mathew took similarities between 
the four poems as pointing to “a single author or a single redactor, 
perhaps a clerk or esquire in some household” (later critics would reject 
“redactor”, with its implications of multiple authorship). The manuscript 
itself is a professional but clumsy effort, the dialect forms perhaps 
indicating a scribe from Chester (later dialectologists would modify this 
to “south-east Cheshire or north-west Staffordshire”), whose copy-text 
had de luxe illustrations and was probably “commissioned by a 
magnate of wealth not much before 1390”, with his household possibly 
at “the Earl of Arundel's castle of Holt” near Wrexham, Wales. Mathew 
also provided analysis of the knightly virtues implicit in the text, the 
supreme ones being “prowess and loyalty” (Mathew 1948: 354-62). 
There are two points here. Mathew's study of the poet's chivalric values 
is now little read, but deserves attention. Mathew was a Dominican friar, 
and so knew much about the religious life. He did not think that Gawain 
was the work of a cleric, his preference being for a layman in a great 
household. 

Despite concentrating on poem rather than poet, George Kane 
referred to the latter's eye for “gold and silver and the filigree of both, 
and precious stones, against backgrounds of rich Eastern stuffs”; they 
contrast with “the driving sleet on Gawain's journey, the fatigue of his 
charger, the misery of sleeping out in armour, the brightness of blood 
on snow”; with the last being at Gawain's ordeal by axe (Kane 1951: 76). 
The writer had a genius for detail. E. V. Gordon had comments of a 
different kind. The author was “a man of education”, yet made less 
parade of learning than did Chaucer, Gower, or Langland. He had “less 
interest in philosophy” than they did, and more in “the arts and the 
aristocratic activities of his day”. He may “have had a monastic 
education” but was hardly “himself a monk”. He might have been “a 
chaplain in an aristocratic household”. (Given his tenderness for a lost 
daughter, zest for killing animals, and awareness of sexual attraction in 
near-adultery, “chaplain” here makes little sense.) Gordon yet admitted 
that the poet's interest in theology might be that of a “pious layman” 
(Gordon 1953: xlii). 



Did Sir John Stanley write Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? 85 

 

Dorothy Everett (1894-1953) had interesting observations. The four 
poems, which she put in “the last quarter of the fourteenth century”, 
have “obvious links” with each other in vocabulary, phrasing, and (Pearl 
excepted) metre, as well as less obvious ones in “the doctrine of the 
Beatific Vision” and “the pearl as a symbol of perfection”, which point 
to a single author for all, because two or more writers would hardly 
possess “this rare and, one would think, inimitable quality”. The poet 
read widely: in French, the Roman de la Rose and some Arthurian 
romances; in English, alliterative poetry; in Italian (most unusually), 
Dante's Divine Comedy and Boccaccio's Olympia; in Latin, the Bible 
with its commentaries and interpretations, perhaps indicating “an 
ecclesiastical education. If so, his independence of mind is the more 
remarkable.” She quoted Menner's 1920 edition of Cleanness on his 
unfettered attitude to “theological doctrine and conventional 
interpretation”, while “in Pearl he employs both in a manner still more 
individual.” He was yet “sufficiently at home in courtly, or at least 
aristocratic, society to be able to depict with fidelity its manners, 
pastimes, and setting”, including details of dress, armour, architecture, 
and sport (Everett 1955: 69). For the poet, religion and the worldly met 
in unusual combination. 

Her remarks are more thoughtful and helpful than those of John 
Speirs (d. 1979), observing that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight “is of 
course a Christian poem. But it is Christian rather as some of the 
medieval Christmas carols are, as Christmas itself is; Christian in 
harmony with pre-Christian nature belief and ritual” (Speirs 1957: 221-
22). This 1950s venture into lay anthropology says much about Speirs, 
little about the poet. Preferable are comments of Laura Loomis. “Was 
he a monk, a minstrel, a learned clerk, an official in some lordly 
household, or himself a man of rank and wealth? In any case he wrote 
as one familiar with courtly life, its pleasures, luxuries, arts, and ways” 
(Loomis 1959: 528-40). Reflection on the poems will rule out most of 
these. It is the “man of rank and wealth” whose face we perceive in 
these texts: a religious man, but with the confidence and independence 
that status and income supply. Laura Loomis deserves full credit as the 
first to regard Gawain as the work of a provincial magnate. 

What she said tallies with perceptions of John H. Fisher on the social 
views of Ricardian writers. The Gawain poet “wrote about and for the 
aristocracy”, with none of the “overt questioning of the social changes 



86 Andrew Breeze 

 

that troubled Langland and Gower”; despite supposed criticism of 
kingship in his calling Arthur sumwhat child-gered (line 86) or “boyish, 
merry”, this “does not mean that the author questioned the aristocratic 
system”; his “choice of garden paradise or castle put his pieces in the 
context of the agrarian aristocracy” (unlike Langland's London settings, 
at a far lower social level). The garden of Pearl is not that of Eden, with 
“no lords or ladies” (and so a “nascent primitivism” producing “Wyclif's 
communism”), but that of love, where “everyone is a lord or lady”. 
Hence the “courtly maiden” and “humbly suppliant lover”. As for the 
parable of the vineyard, it contains “the notion of arbitrary authority in 
the familiar context of lord and laborer”; while the maiden's 
“explanation of her state in paradise evidently recognizes grades in the 
hierarchy of heaven”, together with a “heavenly state of equality 
impossible of attainment in mortal society” owing to man's sinful 
nature (Fisher 1961: 139-57). In short, the poet's attitude to aristocracy 
is unquestioning and profoundly conservative, even reactionary. 
Fisher's insights are of the first importance. They deserve notice, 
despite his strange view of the author as a “writer with predominantly 
theological interests”, glossing over what he says on feasts, jewels, furs, 
armour, horses, hunts, and illicit love. 

C. S. Lewis dealt firmly with the observations of Speirs on supposed 
pre-Christian elements in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Lewis 1962: 
219-30). Not much has been heard of them since. They led nowhere, 
unlike the enquiries of John Dodgson, place-name scholar. He cited R. 
W. V. Elliott on the landscape of the Castle and Chapel as like that 
“around Swythamley in north-east Staffordshire, near the Cheshire 
border and in the south-western hills of the Peak district”, the poet 
perhaps actually living at Swythamley, “a grange of Dielacres Abbey, 
near Leak, Staffordshire”. (Yet Elliott's belief that the poet was perhaps 
a monk on a monastic estate must be rejected. There is nothing 
monastic in the four poems attributed to him.) Together with 
Dodgson's words on the wild country of the Peak are comments on the 
“Holy Hede” from which Gawain, having travelled through North Wales, 
crosses into the “wyldrenesse of Wyrale” (lines 700-1), where the first 
can be linked with Holywell, Flintshire, and where allusion to the Wirral 
Peninsula of Cheshire indicates a region known to the poet and his 
audience (Dodgson 1963: 19-25). He made clear the poet's knowledge 
of north-east Wales, Cheshire, and the Peak. 



Did Sir John Stanley write Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? 87 

 

A different approach to the poem was made by the Polish-American 
Marxist, Margaret Schlauch. The text is a “society romance”, showing 
“an exceptional talent for descriptions of nature” and for dialogue 
betweeen the characters. Readers know no more about Gawain's 
situation or “the true relationship among the characters” than Gawain 
does himself, a technique anticipating the “unity of point of view” 
employed by Henry James and others. The text nevertheless had no 
influence on later English fiction. For historians of the modern novel, its 
interest is “largely antiquarian” (Schlauch 1963: 23-28). Her somewhat 
perfunctory comments keep the poet at a distance. Fisher had had 
compelling remarks on him as a social arch-conservative, wedded to 
the cause of aristocracy. If Schlauch had developed Fisher's ideas on 
classic Marxist lines, she would have provided a study with real insights. 

Dodgson's views on topography were treated positively by John 
Burrow. He observed how “the original audience of Sir Gawain, in 
Cheshire perhaps, or Lancashire”, would know Holywell as the shrine of 
St Gwenfrewi or Winifred, whose legend tells how a local tyrant had her 
decapitated, her head being miraculously restored (Burrow 1965: 193). 
Topographical allusions show the poem as a Cheshire one. Derek 
Brewer (1923-2008) offered reflections on the poet and courtesy, which 
he interpreted as a religious entity relating to personal integrity, 
beauty, politeness, honour, self-control, courage, and cleanliness. It did 
not include asceticism, fin amour, or (for example) almsgiving (Brewer 
1966: 54-85). Brewer again removed the quartet of poems from a 
monastic milieu. Like the analyses of Mathew and Fisher, his essay is 
now little read. 

There are acid lessons on how not to read Gawain in a paper on 
Heinrich Zimmer (1851-1910) of Berlin. Zimmer was a respected 
Celticist, advancing sound arguments on the British hero Arthur (d. 537) 
as a historical figure. But he was also a Jungian, believing in the 
“mythological archetypes” of the collective unconscious. He thus saw 
Gawain as going through a valley of death to “the aloof and lonely 
sanctuary of life renewed” where he is duly reborn, having encountered 
the Green Knight, who is Death, and his wife, who is Life, “traditionally 
Death's bride”. Even Zimmer, recognizing that the poem does not really 
bear out this interpretation, concluded that its author was unaware of 
“the meaning that inevitably emerges” (Moorman 1966: 209-35). But 
some may hold that, when what we find does not fit the theory, the 



88 Andrew Breeze 

 

latter has to go. Zimmer was neither the first nor the last to write 
absurdities on Gawain. 

Patricia Kean was here as cautious as Zimmer was not. Although her 
study of Pearl has much of interest (as on the poet's apparent 
knowledge of Dante), she describes the “old controversy” on whether 
the text is “biographical or allegorical” as hardly “relevant to the real 
purpose of the poem”. Her conclusion is that the author was 
“essentially, a Christian” (Kean 1967: 241-42). This does not help us 
much. The standard Oxford edition of Gawain has more perceptive 
comments, on the poet's consistent “theological concern” and “moral 
seriousness” (despite this poem's “surface lightheartedness”). He knew 
much of “the life and etiquette of noble households”; possessed “a 
detailed, even technical, knowledge of hunting, of castle architecture, 
and of the armour and gear of a knight. In Patience he uses with an air 
of assurance the right terms for the parts of a ship.” He was deeply read 
in the Vulgate Bible; Pearl implies some knowledge of patristic 
theology. He had read widely in French romance. His language, though 
“strongly provincial”, is yet sophisticated, courtly, and elegant. He had 
interest in neither “astrology and its associated sciences” nor the 
“Boethian problems of foreknowledge and free will”, unlike Chaucer. 
On date and provenance, the editors are cautious; more so than 
Dorothy Everett, whom they quote. The text “cannot be dated 
precisely”, but must be earlier than the manuscript, itself hardly later 
than 1400. Emphasis on display may “imply a date towards the end of 
the century”, while dialect and allusions to North Wales and the Wirral 
suggest that the poet “was writing not far” from them (Tolkien and 
Gordon 1967: xxiv-xxvii). So the poet was familiar with courts, hunting, 
horses, castles, arms and armour, ships, French romance, the Bible, and 
theology. He had no interest in philosophy, science, astrology, or 
astronomy. He did not read the Latin classics, unlike Chaucer. He did, 
however, know French and perhaps even Italian literature of his time. 
He was not university-trained and lacked Chaucer's wide intellectual 
interests, but had practical experience of foreign travel and military life. 
His confidence on such matters (as also, we recall from Fisher, the 
administration of justice) points less to Laura Loomis's “official in some 
lordly household” than to her “man of rank and wealth”; a devout man, 
at ease in the court, on the bench, and on campaign, but not an urban 
intellectual. 



Did Sir John Stanley write Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? 89 

 

With this, contrast views offered by Larry Benson. He regarded Sir 
Gawain as proof of “the scrutiny that older values were undergoing as 
the Middle Ages came to an end”. It was a century when “crusades” had 
“nothing but the name in common” with previous ones; when the 
“examples of chivalric conduct” admired by Froissart are “glaring 
exceptions in his chronicles of a cruel and greedy era”; when “peasants 
were asserting themselves in a way that showed clearly that the old 
feudal order was dying”; when “the Great Schism and the rise of heresy 
showed that even the Church was not as secure” as supposed; and 
when “plague and famine threatened the existence even of society 
itself” (Benson 1968: 23-34). True, of course. The Gawain poet certainly 
knew about atrocities, peasant revolts, schism, and epidemics, 
especially the last, one of which perhaps killed his daughter (as argued 
below). Yet Gawain is no polemic on obsolete institutions and beliefs. 
While Benson saw the poet as a doubter, Fisher and Brewer regarded 
him as subscribing to the values of medieval chivalry and Christianity, 
even to the point of reaction. The point is fundamental. 

In a studious account, Ian Bishop (1927-90) of Bristol favoured an 
autobiographical approach to Pearl (while dismissing the 
extravagances of some critics), quoting Norman Davis on the line “In 
Crystes dere blessyng and myne” near its close as “an epistolary 
formula” then “used almost exclusively by parents addressing their 
children” (Bishop 1968: 8, 131). The phrase expresses tender love. With 
it, a father might bid everlasting farewell to an infant daughter. A mere 
allegorist would feel no such emotion, one imagines. In the same year 
Gervase Mathew published a book which abounds in insights on the 
English nobility at the time when Sir Gawain was written. He thus 
mentioned Henry of Grosmont (1299?-1361), whose daughter married 
John of Gaunt. Henry, Duke of Lancaster, was an unexpected 
combination of soldier, magnate, and author; his Livre de Seyntz 
Medecines of 1354 is a volume of frank confessions. From this and 
other sources we find in him a man of piety, chivalry, courage, and 
sexual frailty, who craved honour but also had an “itch to possess more 
lands”. He was not alone as a devout warrior-nobleman who valued 
books. Thomas of Woodstock (1355-97), Duke of Gloucester, showed 
“rash courage in the French wars”, but also founded a college of priests 
at Pleshy (his seat in Essex) and possessed a magnificent library (with 
an English Bible still extant). Mathew showed how military courage, 



90 Andrew Breeze 

 

wealth, religious fervour, and a love of books might at this date co-exist 
in one man. He made a further comment of far-reaching importance. It 
is this. “I have a theory that Sir John Stanley was the patron of the 
Gawain poet. The poem ends 'Hony Soyt qui mal pence', and this 
suggests that it was written for a knight of the Garter; the dialect 
suggests that it was written in south-west Lancashire, and at this period 
Sir John Stanley was the only knight of the Garter in south-west 
Lancashire. It is also possibly relevant that he was hereditary forester of 
Wirral and had links with the North” (Mathew 1968: 109-10, 166). 
Another aspect of the poet was investigated by James Oakden, tracing 
the influence of the liturgy on Pearl (Oakden 1968: 337-53). 

There is an insight (its context unexpected) from Rosemary Woolf. 
She distinguished between “naturally anonymous and accidentally 
anonymous” texts. Most medieval English lyrics, romances, and mystery 
plays have a “self-effacing style”. Even if we knew who wrote them, it 
would be “unimportant”, arousing neither “curiosity or excitement”. But 
Pearl and Gawain gain from being read in conjunction, “so that here 
knowledge of authorship would be very valuable”. She cites an instance 
in lines 345-6 of the former, where the maiden tells the narrator how, 
even if he should writhe like a doe (daunce as any do), or struggle and 
bray (braundysch and bray) out his agonies, he is trapped and must 
endure what happens. The image is of a deer at bay, exhausted and at 
the mercy of hounds (Woolf 1968: 5, 262). It is not the only hunting 
metaphor in Pearl. When the narrator first encounters the Maiden, he 
takes her (line 185) as a spiritual porpose, which has been understood 
as “quarry, object of a pursuit”. An exquisite sensibility notwithstanding, 
the poet referred naturally to the ungentle business of tearing animals 
to bits. He rejoiced in hunting. 

In his edition of Patience, John Anderson noted the “sixteen lines of 
narrative” where the poet described “in generous detail” the 
preparation of a ship for sea. He gave its date as perhaps after 1357 
and before 1390, and possibly before the completion in about 1379 of 
the B-text of Langland's Piers Plowman, which apparently alludes to 
Patience. On provenance he cited a famous 1963 paper by Angus 
McIntosh of Edinburgh, which allocated the dialect of the MS Cotton 
Nero A.x scribe (not that of the poet) to “south-east Cheshire or north-
east Staffordshire” (Anderson 1969: 11, 20-23). If there are references 



Did Sir John Stanley write Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? 91 

 

to hunting in Cheshire forests or on Staffordshire moor, others point to 
experience of shipping on the Dee or Mersey. 

Although Basil Cottle (1917-94) is another scholar now little read, he 
had illuminating remarks on the poet. He gave a picture of a “well-off 
provincial society, with its classes happily dovetailed and bestowing 
service and patronage”, which possessed “a noble court of great luxury 
and taste”, where “due order was observed but nobody groused”. The 
ritual arming of a knight engaged his attention; so, too, did heraldry (in 
nearly fifty lines). He said much on courtesy, and not merely of “refined 
and privileged equals”: the porter is polite to Gawain and is “thanked 
for his services”; grooms are “thanked for stabling Gawain's horse”; the 
boorish intruder at Camelot is addressed as if he had been invited; 
Gawain and his host dispute whose presence grants more honour; 
there are no hard words from the temptress, “even when the seduction 
fails”; and Cottle then analyses at length the poet's scrupulous use of 
familiar “thee” and formal “you” in the dialogues (Cottle 1969: 279-80). 
So the poet was an expert observer, who saw society from above and 
not from below. He could be affable, but in no way questioned 
established order. The point on heraldry is underlined by the Scrope-
Grosvenor case of 1386, routinely cited in biographies of Chaucer. 
Scrope and Grosvenor took to law their quarrel about a certain coat of 
arms. Chaucer, despite giving testimony in court, in his verse gave no 
space to blazon. The subject did not interest him (just as it interests 
hardly any modern critic). But it very much interested the Gawain poet. 
It is yet more evidence for him as a provincial grandee. 

Tony Spearing in 1970 provided a book-length study of the poet, 
following Gordon in dating him to 1360-95, and Angus McIntosh on 
the dialect of MS Cotton Nero A.x as that of a scribe from south-east 
Cheshire or north-east Staffordshire, differing little from the poet's own 
dialect. Yet Spearing, despite copious remarks on the author's attitude 
to feasting, hunting, court life, the Bible, French and Latin poetry, and 
the mystical theology of his day, shied away from defining his identity 
or social status (Spearing 1970: 2-18). Despite its title, his book says 
almost nothing about the poet. His face or image is left blurred or 
indistinct. In the same year D. J. Williams published an able (if 
conservative) account. Stating that there is “no proof that these four 
poems were written by one man” (which he yet thought probable), he 
offered no proposals on what kind of person he was. All the same, he 



92 Andrew Breeze 

 

had interesting remarks on Gawain and Chaucer's tale of the Knight, 
especially their contrasts. Both narratives are serious and sophisticated, 
but are “informed by a different spirit”. The former is closer to the 
twelfth-century romances of Chrétien de Troyes and is “a more highly 
developed work”. It was “written to entertain an aristocratic circle”; it 
embodies “courtly ideals” similar to Chrétien's, but “under a closer 
critical scrutiny”, although they are not “under fire”. The ambivalence 
here is paralleled by that of Jonah's “escapade in the whale” in Patience 
(Williams 1970: 107-58). 

John Burrow pointed out the accidents of time. If Chester and not 
London had been England's capital, the Gawain poet would 
“immediately have been acknowledged a national classic, and a north-
western Caxton would have rushed his work into print”. Instead, he was 
forgotten for three centuries. His work influenced later alliterative 
writers (including the author of The Awntyrs off Arthure, composed in 
1425 or so at Carlisle or thereabouts) and was still read in the Cheshire-
Lancashire region into the sixteenth century. After that, oblivion, until 
Thomas Warton (1728-90) showed interest in the texts, to be followed 
by Madden in 1839 and Richard Morris in 1864. Burrow deals more with 
the poems than the poet, but quotes a 1966 essay by Spearing on how 
all four of them set out “a confrontation between a human being and 
some more than human power”, the protagonist in each case emerging 
“humbled by the confrontation” (Burrow 1971: 4-5, 102-3). The texts all 
possessed the hand and voice of one author. It is good to be certain of 
this when reading interpretations of Pearl, with the pearl identified as 
a eucharistic symbol, a believer's soul, the Blessed Virgin, and so on 
(Gradon 1971: 192-211). 

Such plurality is welcomely absent from a paper with thorough and 
decisive views on authorship. While the poet's “analogous phrases, 
paraphrases for God, methods of introducing a story, stating that 
something is difficult to describe, and endings that echo beginnings” 
are elements found in other medieval poems, their frequency in these 
four poems makes the statistical case for common authorship 
“overwhelming”. Still more important than these five categories are 
imagery and diction. Identical words, often “in special senses that are 
uniquely the same”, are used to describe the same scenes. Above all is 
the thematic unity of the poems. Patience, humility, and purity are the 
subject of the two homiletic texts: they dominate the two others. “The 



Did Sir John Stanley write Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? 93 

 

pearl-maiden, a symbol of purity, teaches the dreamer the lesson of 
resignation. Gawain, the 'perle of prys', is not perfect” and returns to 
Arthur's court a humbler knight, having failed the test of loyalty 
(Vantuono 1971). 

Awareness of the above puts into context comments by Charles 
Muscatine on the author as “a surprisingly uncomplicated moralist, and 
a conservative one as well”; although he surely noticed the troubles of 
his time, his response is “oblique”, any crisis being “completely 
absorbed in his art”, itself perhaps “a defense against crisis” (Muscatine 
1972: 37, 69). 

Spearing likewise comments on the poet's belief in breeding and 
cortaysye, the values of an aristocratic elite (Spearing 1972: 28-50). 
They are yet supplemented by other remarks on how in Gawain the 
courtly world of France or “heraldry and books of romance” or 
pinnacled castles is combined with that “of a countryman from the 
borders of Staffordshire and Cheshire, speaking a rough dialect and 
accustomed to listening to heroic stories” (Medcalf 1973: 643-96). The 
word “countryman” is too hard. Nor was the dialect “rough” to those 
who spoke it. Better to say that the poet was “widely read in the most 
sophisticated literature of the age”, whether religious, secular, English, 
French, Latin, or even Italian. He was a provincial with “an intimate 
knowledge of aristocratic life, architecture, etiquette, hunting, feasting, 
dress and armour, and the terms of courtly conversation” (as also 
heraldry). He may have been a “secretary or chaplain” in one of John of 
Gaunt's castles in Lancashire, Staffordshire, or Derbyshire. He was in 
any case most certainly “a writer of genius” (Barron 1974: 3, 4). 

Here correct observations have an illogical conclusion. A chaplain 
would not know much about flirting or the chase. The poet's familiarity 
with all the above, including expensive literature in modern languages, 
indicates an aristocrat with the appropriate income. Compare again 
remarks on the poet as “a man of learning, a superb craftsman with a 
delight in the world of the senses, and a man with a keen and subtle 
sense of humour” (A. C. and J. E. Spearing 1974: 81). All of this is true, 
but still (to labour the point) neglects his social conservatism, 
adherence to chivalric values, profound Christian faith, and zeal for 
hunting. 

Gawain was surely known (despite the doubts of some) to the author 
of The Awntyrs off Arthure, perhaps by a Carlisle cleric writing in 1425 



94 Andrew Breeze 

 

or 1426 (Hanna 1974: 38). At the other end of England was Chaucer, 
whose Prologue to The Legend of Good Women implies (in Tony 
Spearing's opinion) that he had read Pearl, and the opening to The 
Squire's Tale that he had read Gawain (Spearing 1976: 111). This is half 
right. Pearl is surely influenced by Chaucer, not vice versa. Evidence in 
any case that its author possessed exalted rank and social connections 
in London. Yet Anderson would not go beyond the view that the MS 
Cotton Nero A.x texts were probably by the same man, who 
presumably lived in the north-west and read Mandeville's Travels, 
written about 1357. Anderson thought that any attempt to narrow the 
dating within the limits of 1357 to 1400 “must be speculative” 
(Anderson 1977: 1). Derek Pearsall, making no reference to Vantuomo's 
paper of 1971, similarly asserted that we know nothing of the four 
poems' authorship, “though it has become habitual to attribute them 
to the same poet” (Pearsall 1977: 186). Elsewhere is the comment that 
the audience for alliterative poetry tended to include gentry, knights, 
franklins, and the clergy rather than “members of the higher nobility” 
(Turville-Petre 1977: 35, 47). The critic has not realized that we hear 
more of the latter (such as the fifteenth-century Yorkshire squire Robert 
Thornton, who owned a copy of The Awntyrs off Arthure and other 
romances) because they outnumbered the nobles, especially in the 
North. Yet the MS Cotton Nero A.x's illustrations reproduce those of a 
de luxe original entirely beyond the means of any local landowner or 
country parson. 

Although the editors of a standard edition comment on the 
“subjective element” in “judgements of similarity of thought and 
attitude”, they come down all the same for common authorship, seeing 
the poet's art as combining “orthodox medieval Christianity” with the 
“chivalric social morality of the High Middle Ages” (Andrew and 
Waldron 1978: 16). That is surely right. Even in Davenport's study it is 
not, however, stressed as it should be. Despite admission of how the 
Gawain poet's works possess “a range and quality comparable to those 
of Chaucer”, when Davenport comments on the northern writer as not 
“particularly intellectual”, but having “a liking for 'university wit'" in 
word-play and metrical numerology, he diminishes his subject 
(Davenport 1978: 2, 216). The poet was no mere wordsmith; and 
“university” is here irrelevant. His education was not scholastic. 



Did Sir John Stanley write Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? 95 

 

New attitudes to Gawain were noted and mocked by Derek Brewer. 
He ridiculed the view that the poet treated Christmas at Camelot with 
“ironically sarcastic criticism of its childishness and irresponsibility”, and 
how Arthur should instead “be at his desk getting on governing the 
country” (Brewer 1980: 73). In his opinion, the author says what he 
means. His realism was genuine, and his social and religious values 
were conservative ones (like those of Derek Brewer himself). 

Now for a digression on clothes. A rare analysis of the Green Knight's 
attire, down to his “mantle lined with ermine”, provides the conclusion 
that his tight tunic was all the rage in 1365, going out by 1370, and 
passé by 1380 (Newton 1980: 64). The implications for dating are novel. 
Taken as they stand, they torpedo the case presented here. John 
Stanley was born, it seems, in about 1350. A date of composition in the 
1360s would create insuperable obstacles. Yet there is a way round 
them. Because nothing else puts Gawain before the late 1380s, it may 
be that the author deliberately provided the Green Knight with attire 
that was good but outmoded. The parallel would be with the time lords 
or Transylvanian counts of modern entertainment. They dress well, but 
not in today's fashions, thereby acquiring a curious authority. If there is 
an equivalent for this in Gawain, we have a further glimpse of the 
writer's skill. 

Brewer's attitude to the poem would have been contested by Ray 
Barron. He found in it “a complex of interrelating ambiguities which 
challenge the reader's judgement of meaning and theme and provide 
a seedbed for ironies which expose chivalric values to his critical 
scrutiny”, as in the Exchange of Winnings, wherein Gawain fails to 
surrender the girdle won from the lady (Barron 1981: 89-105). Many 
see the author as conservative. Barron took him as a radical. The latter 
may be doubted. Comparison with the genuine article brings this out. 
The real literature of complaint brims with anti-clericalism, pacificism, 
attacks on government advisers, condemnation of a corrupt 
knighthood, and criticism of the wealthy, as is demonstrated by one 
left-wing historian. But nothing of that in Gawain, “written for a local 
magnate with a family and manor in south-west Lancashire”. We agree, 
noting her further comment on a 1978 paper by George Kane, with “an 
amusing summary of the variety of interpretations” of Gawain 
(Coleman 1981: 44, 309). Conservative and Marxian critics hence agree 
on Gawain's ambience as a lay one in England's north-west. 



96 Andrew Breeze 

 

Derek Brewer gave the poet's home as “the hills and moors of 
Derbyshire in the North Midlands” (Brewer 1983: 155). “Derbyshire” is 
a slip for “Staffordshire”. No dialectal or topographical evidence links 
the writer with Derbyshire. Nor would he have lived among those hills 
and moors, though he certainly hunted on them (see Turville-Petre's 
2008 paper on the Green Chapel and Ludchurch, in Staffordshire's 
northern tip). His residence will have been a great hall in the lowlands 
of the north-west, as indicated by Janet Coleman. As for his values, 
anachronistic attitudes to them are identified by John Burrow in an 
essay on honour and shame. He observes that, while Gawain is not 
actually about these qualities, it takes them for granted. It displays “an 
ingrained familiarity with principles which are, at best, strange to the 
modern reader, and at worst thoroughly objectionable”, making it hard 
for such readers to appreciate how Gawain's moral self-scrutiny slept 
until it was woken by a fellow knight's reproaches (Burrow 1984: 130). 
Further misunderstanding comes in a comment on the unknown 
“craftsman who produced these four remarkable texts” (Fowler 1984: 
171). Yet the poet was more than craftsman. He was a supreme artist. 
As for where he lived, Silverstein cited R. W. V. Elliott on the relation of 
“the Green Chapel to the valley of the River Dane” in north-west 
Staffordshire (Silverstein 1984: 17). 

In a chapter on the MS Cotton Nero poems which abounds with 
insights, Jack Bennett (1911-81) echoed Stephen Medcalf on the 
contrast between “rich feasts, a castle built in the latest style”, 
ornamented armour, fashionable furnishings, polite and elegant 
conversation, elaborate laws and customs of the chase, as also the 
international French “terms of art that were current at the court of 
Richard II and in the households of his nobility” and, on the other hand, 
“wild and rugged country, winter and rough weather, boisterous 
humour with some grim touches” and “plain-spoken comment”. A 
singular combination. Vantuomo's paper notwithstanding, Bennett yet 
opined that common authorship of the four poems could not “be 
conclusively proved” (Bennett 1986: 202). There are implications here. 
The familiarity with a king's household indicates a context for the 
poems altogether grander than a Cheshire or Lancashire manor-house; 
on the other hand, no evidence has ever been produced to show that 
the four poems are not by one man. 



Did Sir John Stanley write Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? 97 

 

Paul Strohm, expert on medieval literary sociology, offers more 
doubts. He followed Spearing (at a distance) on the opening of 
Chaucer's Squire's Tale as perhaps showing knowledge of Gawain. If so, 
it suggests a writer with metropolitan contacts. As for his audience, 
Strohm attempts to trash critics who locate it “with equal plausibility in 
baronial courts, among the country gentry, amongst Cheshire servants 
of Richard II, and in the monastic houses of the south-west Midlands” 
(Strohm 1986: 1-18). Yet some of these views are more equal than 
others, even if Strohm fails to notice. Hunting and attempted seduction 
are strange fare for the cloister; and the writer evidently walked not 
with mere gentry, but with magnates and kings. So “Cheshire servants 
of Richard II” may be rather near the mark. Despite their interest, further 
chapters by Tony Spearing on Gawain and Cleanness shed no light on 
their author (Spearing 1987: 173-215). 

Felicity Riddy repeats the unlikely suggestion that the poet was a 
“probably a cleric” and perhaps in the employ of a “secular household” 
(Alexander and Riddy 1989: 268. This despite the goings-on in Gawain, 
the expressions in Pearl of a father's tender love for a child, and (most 
startling) the enthusiastic praise in Cleanness (lines 703-4) of sex: 
 

Bitwene a male and his make [mate] suche mirthe should come, 
Wel neghe pure Paradise myght preve no better. 

 
The writer does not sound like a priest. He sounds like a layman, happily 
married and with children. As for where he wrote, Lee Patterson (with 
a nod to Fisher's paper of 1961) has a penetrating aside. Gawain “is 
structured by the relationship between a royal and provincial courts. It 
may even be that the representation of the 'child-gered' [having a 
child's ways] Arthur”, presiding “over an elegantly gamesome court, is 
meant to reflect Richard” (Patterson 1992: 7-41). Patterson's remark is 
casual but arresting. Because Richard II was born in 1367 and died in 
1400, this would put the poem between 1382 (when Richard married 
and attained his majority) and 1400, and no doubt early in that period, 
when Richard was still youthful. Patterson's suggestion tends to locate 
Gawain in the late 1380s. It really will be “Ricardian Poetry”. 

Derek Pearsall remarks acutely on hunting as a barrier between us 
and our ancestors even greater than rhetoric (as C. S. Lewis thought). 
When the Gawain Poet chose to “parade its language of technical 



98 Andrew Breeze 

 

expertise”, hardly any reader today can respond (Pearsall 1992: 57). This 
is well said. Because canon law barred clerics from blood sports, the 
poet's obsession with hunting indicates a lay author. His knowledge of 
it was authoritative, as shown by his delight in its rituals and protocol. 
As for what he wrote, scholars who believe in common authorship of 
the MS Cotton Nero poems are cited against splitters who believe in 
multiple authorship (Blanch and Wasserman 1995: 150). Wrangles 
continue on the integrity of his work, quite unnecessarily. 

In a paper which repays careful reading, John Bowyers follows 
Michael Bennett on political links between Cheshire and the court of 
Richard II. Despite being “agnostic” on whether the MS Cotton Nero 
texts are by one poet or not, he feels some certainty on the date of 
Pearl. He locates it within the mid-1390s, some ten years after Gawain. 
Composition about 1395 would come after Richard II's “seven quiet 
years” (in Harold Hutchison's phrase) of 1389-96, when English politics 
were relatively stable (Bowyers 1995). We shall see how a paper of 2014, 
written independently of Bowyers, suggests a date in the early 1390s 
on quite different grounds. 

As for who the poet was, this brings us to Ad Putter, who combines 
wise remarks with ones more contentious. He says this. The poet has 
long been related to “a small baronial household, hostile to King 
Richard II's absolutist tendencies and his francophile court”. Against 
this we might say that the original de luxe copy of the poems does not 
indicate a “small” household; nor are francophobia or hostility to 
absolutism at all obvious in Gawain. Putter is, nevertheless, correct is 
dismissing the negative aspects of “provincial” as applied to the writer. 
Next is his reference to Michael Bennett's speculation on how, lacking 
a patron in the north-west, the poet went south in hope of “prospects 
of patronage by the king” or a Cheshire magnate at his court. The lost 
luxury manuscript is certainly evidence for a “wealthy patron”. Against 
that is the argument that, if the poet were himself a magnate, as shown 
by his effortless allusions to the ostentation and ceremonies of court 
life, he needed no patron. He could pay for his own manuscripts. Next 
is the dubious case, after Jill Mann, for Gawain as appealing to “'an 
audience of sophisticated and wealthy merchants and knights' most 
easily found in London”. Against that are its allusions to North Wales, 
the Wirral, and Green Chapel, of faint interest to those on Cheapside or 
in Whitehall. The poem's Cheshire associations stare one in the face. 



Did Sir John Stanley write Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? 99 

 

Also feeble are the suggestions that the poet's knowledge of Italian 
literature indicates a London base; that “the Greene Knight” in an 
inventory of the younger Sir John Paston was Gawain, so that the poet 
probably worked in London; and that, because Richard II understood 
his Cheshire archers, therefore he would have understood and relished 
the language of Gawain. (Against that, a critic cited below observed 
that Richard had no known interest in alliterative poetry.) Further 
unconvincing statements come in the propositions that, while the 
sources of the poems “suggest a clerical background” (even if their 
author “does not address his audience as a cleric”), his “ethics of 
conscientious worldliness” indicates links with merchants. Representing 
the interests of clerics, knights, and merchants, Gawain may thus be 
related to London, “where people from different backgrounds” made 
up “a textual community” with “the broad social appeal” to be found in 
Gawain (Putter 1995: 191-96). One fears that this is not compelling. 
While the poet surely knew London's sophistication and luxuries, his 
heart belonged to Cheshire and its borders. He placed there the main 
action of Gawain. As for his social views, we observe again how Fisher 
(whose 1961 paper is not mentioned by Putter) typified them as 
aristocratic to the point of reaction. Nothing to attract, one might think, 
the London merchant class. 

One finds contrasts to the poet's politics in The Awntyrs off Arthure, 
perhaps written in about 1425 by a Carlisle cleric, and associated with 
the Neville dynasty. Its author probably knew Gawain, but offered a 
picture of “the instability of power and wealth” which suits a preacher 
(Allen 1996: 129-42). The later work underlines the point that, while 
Gawain's London connections are weak, its northern ones are strong, 
like those of its surviving manuscript. They are further developed by 
Michael Bennett, taking up Gervase Mathew's 1968 proposal of a link 
between Gawain and Sir John Stanley (c. 1350-1414). His family in the 
1370s built the hall at Storeton in the Wirral, a region mentioned in the 
poem; he himself, “a successful career-soldier”, built a stronghold 
(demolished in 1819) by the quay at Liverpool. In 1389-91 he was 
Justiciar of Ireland, acting regularly thereafter as negotiator and raiser 
of troops for Richard II. So he knew the court well, and Bennett cites 
Mathew and Edward Wilson for him as perhaps the patron of the poet. 
Stanley survived political transition to become a Knight of the Garter in 



100 Andrew Breeze 

 

1405, the only one in Cheshire or south Lancashire (M. J. Bennett 1997: 
71-101). He died in 1414 as King of the Isle of Man. 

Ray Barron, observing that the “enigma of author and audience 
remains unresolved”, had comments on the latter. It is hard “to believe 
that such a sophisticated text” as Gawain “could have been produced 
for provincial gentry”, despite the rather scanty evidence for them and 
“the rising bourgeoisie” as an “audience for romance in English”. The 
poet was obviously a prodigy. He had an intimate knowledge of literary 
French, law, theology, dialectic, armour, fortification, architecture, 
fashion, textiles, and “the refined etiquette of court and hunting field” 
(Barron 1999: 164-83). Who could this provincial phenomenon be? One 
might take his references to royal luxury to show him as (in Lady 
Bracknell's phrase) evidently a man of some wealth. His social 
background was utterly unlike that of any other English romance writer. 

On the grounds of his sophistication and range of allusion, Sheila 
Fisher of Connecticut associates the Gawain poet “with one of the 
country courts of Edward III or John of Gaunt” in the north-west 
Midlands, a speculation traceable to 1930 and J. P. Oakden, who is not 
here mentioned (S. Fisher 2000: 150-64). Citing Pearsall and Hanna on 
the Scriptural poems Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience, David Lawton 
notes that, although “most recent suggestions have focused on the 
monasteries” for their social context, Patience's story of Jonah “was a 
favourite of lay and extra-regular readers well into the Reformation” 
(Lawton 2000: 454-87). In contrast is James Simpson, uttering 1990s 
critical fashions, who states that there is no reason why Gawain “should 
not have London or Westminster connections”, even though the poem 
refers to neither place. He adds that the “Stanley family in particular at 
that time constituted the dominant power in Lancashire and had close 
contacts with court”, without saying what this might mean for the MS 
Cotton Nero texts (Simpson 2000: 114-32). Readers must find 
bewildering these contrasting backgrounds of court and cloister. One 
of them must be dropped. In a lucid survey of Gawain's ambiguities, 
Derek Pearsall avoids saying whether our quartet of poems are by one 
man, but rightly declares him “one of the greatest poets of the English 
language” whose sole provinciality was his dialect, and assuredly not 
his “understanding of courtly culture or the conventions of romance” 
(Pearsall 2003: 75). 



Did Sir John Stanley write Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? 101 

 

In 2004 the present writer published a paper taking up the links with 
Sir John Stanley indicated by Mathew in 1968. He suggested that the 
Gawain Poet was not some clerk or chaplain employed by Stanley, but 
Stanley himself. Hence the confident familiarity with court life and 
luxury or the rituals of hunting and love, as also the interest in heraldry, 
armour, military architecture, French romance; the layman's point of 
view in matters of religion, the love of children (Stanley had many), the 
praise of married love; the practical understanding of shipping; the lack 
of interest in science, philosophy, or scholasticism; and the reactionary 
politics. Documents by Stanley survive, including a letter in French of 
1405 to Henry IV, using words characteristic of MS Cotton Nero poems, 
including honor, comfort, haste, gracious, joie, access, and fortune 
(Breeze 2004). 

Naturally, papers of this kind take a while to be noticed. In the 
meantime, John Anderson dealt with Noah's Flood and the Destruction 
of Sodom and Gomorrah in Cleanness. He disagreed with Muscatine's 
opinion of 1972 on the writer as “completely absorbed in his art” and 
indifferent to events in the wider world. Cleanness, like Patience, is 
about suffering, and in fourteenth-century England there was plenty of 
that. (It included plague in 1390-93.) Yet Anderson did not think this 
the end of the story. The three shorter poems indicate how “God's love 
is present” in the world, even if the writer “shows no confidence that 
people can grasp it” (Anderson 2005: 238). On another matter we find 
Tony Spearing denying proof of Italian influence, stating that “evidence 
is lacking” for the poet's knowledge of Dante (Spearing 2005: 172). 

An important paper on the dialect of the MS Cotton Nero texts casts 
doubt on the famous conclusion in Angus Macintosh's paper of 1963 
that the scribe came from “a very small area either in south-east 
Cheshire or just over the border in north-east Staffordshire”; its authors, 
for precise linguistic and metrical reasons, would put both scribe and 
poet “somewhat north of Staffordshire” (Putter and Stokes 2007). They 
thereby reinforce the Cheshire connections to be inferred from place-
names in Gawain. 

Helen Cooper is cautious and negative. Noting how Sir John Stanley 
has “increasingly been canvassed” as Gawain's patron, she yet finds 
objections. Events which might link Stanley with these texts, including 
“the foresterships in 1403” and “incorporation into the Order of the 
Garter in 1405”, occurred “after the composition of the poems” (Cooper 



102 Andrew Breeze 

 

2008: ix-xvii). Professor Cooper has not reflected that Stanley, brought 
up in the Forest of Wirral (and son of a man who in 1346 claimed its 
Forestership), knew about forests long before 1403. Nor would he have 
been granted authority over forests if he had never felled a tree or killed 
a stag. Nor has she noticed Gollancz's view that the Garter motto seems 
to be a later addition to MS Cotton Nero A.x. Her objections may be 
put aside. 

A different argument for the poet as a man of Cheshire comes from 
nautical terms. One writer refers to “the extraordinarily meticulous 
description of the ship's parts” (as also a storm) in Patience, here citing 
Robin M. Ward's 1991 Keele MA thesis on maritime passages in 
alliterative poetry, where it is taken as showing first-hand experience of 
navigation (Sobecki 2008: 124). The poet had gone to sea and knew 
much about it. He knew the gear and tackle and trim of ports and 
sailors. He did not spend his life in an inland county. 

After mariners, hunters. Thorlac Turville-Petre, after noting 
Patience's factual and specific description of a whale's innards (animal 
guts figure as well in Gawain), discusses Ludchurch, a Peak District 
ravine east of the Staffordshire-Cheshire border, and identified by R. 
W. V. Elliott as the poem's “Green Chapel” (Turville-Petre 2008: 320-29). 
The chasm is remote. Yet it lay in the royal forest of the Peak, bordering 
the royal forest of Macclesfield. Those who hunted there would know 
it. 

As for Sir John Stanley, he continues to gain notice. A study of early 
Cheshire writing has a chapter on him and his family, together with 
another on Gawain, although at no point suggesting any connection 
between the two (Barrett 2009: 133-206). Another volume, on the 
landscape and politics of Gawain, refers to him as perhaps the work's 
patron (Hill 2009: 168 n. 53). Laura Ashe regards the author of Gawain 
as one who exploited romance in order to “betray it”; he “deconstructs 
the ideology of chivalry from within” so as “to expose the absurdity of 
its inherited ideals” (Ashe 2010: 159-72). Her reading of the work is in 
flat opposition to that of John Fisher (whom she does not mention) in 
1961. Fisher thought the poet a reactionary, Laura Ashe a subversive. 
They cannot both be right. Nor does she suggest what magnate would 
finance a work which must (on her reading) have mocked his most 
cherished beliefs, before paying a scribe to copy it into a sumptuous 
illuminated manuscript. Preferable, in returning us to reality, is Lee 



Did Sir John Stanley write Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? 103 

 

Patterson's perception (in a revised version of his 1992 article) of 
Gawain as juxtaposing “monarch and nobleman, metropolis and 
hinterland”, with Sir Bertilak's court depicted as superior to Arthur's, 
whether in love, honour, courtesy, or hunting. Bertilak “understands the 
meaning of court practices more profoundly than the royal court that 
thinks itself to be the center of fashion”. Patterson considers that such 
loyalty to the provincial, with scepticism on urban values, together fit 
well with “origins in the Cheshire-Shropshire region” (where 
“Shropshire” must be a slip), Cheshire being a county palatine that had 
“very close relations” with Richard II from 1385 onwards. Patterson, who 
cites with approval Fisher's paper of 1961, goes on to reject (on the 
grounds of the poem's “social meaning and lack of royal interest in 
alliterative poetry”) Michael Bennett's proposal of one of Richard II's 
“household clerks” as author (Patterson 2010: 71-72, 282). Everything 
in the poem points to a Cheshire patriot as its author. Despite knowing 
about life at court, he regarded Cheshire as in no way inferior to 
London, especially on courtly values. With that, the case for an audience 
of London merchants and the like presented by Jill Mann and Ad Putter 
must collapse. 

In the same year, Thorlac Turville-Petre republished his conclusions 
on the Green Chapel's whereabouts (Turville-Petre 2010: 594-608). 
Thereafter came further notice of the Stanley family's literary interests, 
and even how “Andrew Breeze goes so far as to suggest that Sir John 
Stanley, rather than being simply the patron, might have been the 
Gawain Poet himself” (Su Fang Ng and Hodges 2013). The present 
writer thereafter developed ideas of Jean-Paul Friedl (d. 2002) as set 
out by his research supervisor, Ian Kirby of Lausanne, in an IAUPE 
conference lecture of 2013 at Beijing, China. Friedl, noticing the curious 
repeated use in Pearl of the word spot “blemish”, offered a reason for 
it: that the maiden died of plague. We can go further. In fourteenth-
century England there were five great outbreaks of plague, the last two 
being in the late 1370s and between 1390 and 1393. We can also say 
that, if the maiden died (aged under two) of plague, it would have been 
the bubonic kind, which leaves marks on the skin, and not the more 
deadly pneumonic variety, which does not. Friedl's suggestion hence 
allows us to place Pearl in the early 1390s: the monument of a grieving 
father to a lost infant child, perhaps called Margaret or “pearl” (Breeze 
2014). 



104 Andrew Breeze 

 

In 2014 the “sensational claim” of the Arthuriana paper of 2004 was 
noticed again, this time by Michael Johnston of Purdue University. He 
admitted its possible truth, but did not consider the subject worth 
further attention, despite attention to a law suit involving Sir John 
Stanley (Johnston 2014: 33-34, 216-20). Johnston shines, however, in 
comparison with Kristina Pérez, who thinks that the “homosexual kisses 
between Gawain and the lord are pitted against the heterosexual 
adultery of Gawain and the Lady of Hautdesert”; this even though the 
destruction of Sodom in Cleanness shows the poet's views on 
homosexuality; and Gawain and the lady do not commit adultery (Pérez 
2014: 121). Johnston is also in advance of Putter and Myres. In a major 
edition, for all the poet's unclerical interest in armour, attempted 
seduction, fashion, fatherhood, heraldry, hunting, jewellery, married 
love, military architecture, and seafaring, they still think him perhaps “a 
cleric who could not progress beyond minor orders” (Putter and Stokes 
2014: xv). 

A century after we began with John Wells of Beloit, Wisconsin, we 
end with Walter Wadiak of Lafayette College, Pennsylvania. In a study 
citing David Aers, Georges Bataille, Pierre Bourdieu, Helen Cooper, 
Andrew Cowell, Jacques Derrida, Frederic Jameson, Stephen Knight, 
Jacques Lacan, Jill Mann, Karl Marx, Marcel Mauss, James Simpson, and 
A. C. Spearing, he agrees with Muscatine in regarding Gawain as “a 
response to chivalric decline”. But he does not follow Fisher (who is 
never mentioned) in styling the poet's social attitudes as reactionary. 
Wadiak instead offers, after P. B. Taylor, the “Marxist view that what the 
poem is really about is commerce”, as “refined by Jill Mann, who saw 
the poem's focus on the value of trewthe [troth, pledged word] as 
directed towards a mercantile audience concerned with that virtue's 
role in underwriting financial transactions”, the girdle given by the Lady 
to Gawain being “a sign of the relativity and arbitrariness that attaches 
to any kind of value in a commercial world”, like money itself (Wadiak 
2017: 90). Such opinions do Marxism no good. They ignore Fisher's 
conclusion, demonstrated by detailed citation of the texts, that the 
poet's politics were the outdated ones of a landed ruling class; they 
ignore as well Lee Patterson's view that Gawain has nothing to do with 
a London audience, courtly or bourgeois, and that its loving 
representation of life at Hautdesert exalts provincial values against 
London ones. The poet had the robust right-wing religious and social 



Did Sir John Stanley write Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? 105 

 

beliefs of a provincial magnate. For that and other reasons, the recent 
case for links with the merchant class of London (or anywhere else) 
cannot be taken seriously. Subsequent to this is David Coley, who on 
the matter of authorship quotes Derek Pearsall's somewhat disobliging 
remark that they “are based on such naive and improbable 
assumptions concerning what constitutes evidence as to bring the 
study of attribution into disrepute” (Coley 2019: 16). 

With that, we bring to a close the first part of this paper. 
Commentary over a hundred years demonstrates how some opinions 
fade, such as the author's being a monk; others replace them, such as 
his writing for the mercantile class; others again obstinately refusing to 
go, such as his being a clerk or cleric. There is not a shred of evidence 
for the last. The poet will instead have been a man of wealth and power 
with superlative social contacts, as proposed by Laura Loomis back in 
1959. One observes a further and general aspect of the above: how 
time has eroded the influence of careful studies by (for example) 
Mathew, Fisher, Brewer, or Bennett. One remembers John Burrow's 
comment on how the questions of honour or religious belief analysed 
therein now bewilder younger readers. If changes in mentality poison 
our comprehension of the past, scholarship will decay. One may see 
this already happening in much writing of the last twenty years. 

Laura Loomis, as noted, thought the poet perhaps a man of wealth 
and power. Her comment in mind, we move to our last part, looking at 
the life and times of Sir John Stanley in the light of the above. Because 
they have been set out in the Arthuriana paper, using Barry Coward's 
study of the Stanley family and other sources, we need not go into 
detail. But we shall add references to three books not at hand in 2004. 
Stanley was born, it seems, in about 1350 (not 1340). He was brought 
up at Storeton in the Wirral; his father, William de Stanleigh (1311-60), 
had in 1346 claimed Forestership of the Wirral. He was a younger son 
with miserable prospects, as Coward makes clear. He inherited from his 
father nothing but a farm at Newton, a hamlet now swallowed up in 
Macclesfield. (It was, however, only eight miles from the gorge of 
Ludchurch, the supposed Green Chapel.) As with Malory, John Stanley's 
early life included crime. In 1369 he was convicted of having attacked 
Thurstaston Hall, Cheshire; in 1378 he was found guilty of murdering 
his second cousin, obtaining a pardon only on condition of joining the 
king's army in Aquitaine. In 1385 his fortunes improved dramatically on 



106 Andrew Breeze 

 

his marriage to Isabel Lathom, heiress to Lancashire estates at Knowsley 
and Lathom. He thereby acquired power and wealth. The next year he 
was deputy in Ireland for Robert de Vere, the beginning of a long 
association with Irish wars, politics, and financial crisis. Amongst the 
sweeteners coming from his new status was a collar of precious metal 
given to him in 1387-88 by the future Henry IV. It perhaps resembled 
another collar decorated “with scrolls and a swan in the tiret” for which 
Henry paid over 23 pounds sterling in 1391-92 (Fletcher 1997: 191-
204). John Stanley was now clearly accustomed to the favour of the 
mighty and the good things which they could grant. He became 
controller of the wardrobe and a trusted member of Richard II's 
Cheshire affinity, there perhaps being in (or addressing?) “the primary 
audience” of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Michael Bennett 1999: 
113). In 1405, after receiving many offices, he became King of the Isle 
of Man. In January 1414 he died in Ireland; his body was brought back 
for burial at Burscough Priory, near Lathom. Storeton Hall, where he 
was brought up, is now a farmhouse, having come down in the world 
(Harding 2002: 184). But the Stanleys, Earls of Derby and still in 
possession of lands acquired by him as their ancestor, have most 
certainly come up in it. 

Sir John Stanley thus figures in the documents as a housebreaker, 
murderer, soldier, colonial administrator, politician, master forester, 
justice (in 1395, of Chester), courtier, builder, magnate, ancestor, and 
king. It is an astonishing story, even if one easily recalls others in history 
who have risen from obscurity to the heights. To his varied qualities can 
we therefore add that of littérateur and poet of genius? Proof of this is, 
of course, not possible in our present state of knowledge. But a strong 
case can be made for it. Since it is already rehearsed in the Arthuriana 
paper, we need present a summary only of the factors, some of them 
linguistic or topographical, some (the more important) involving the 
point of view which the four poems display: 

 
1. The dialect found in the Cotton Nero manuscript can be accepted 
as that of Cheshire, that of the scribe differing little from that the 
author. 
2. Gawain alludes to places in North Wales, Wirral, and (as regards 
Ludchurch) Staffordshire. The viewpoint is a Cheshire one. 



Did Sir John Stanley write Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? 107 

 

3. More subtly, Hautdesert is presented to its advantage against the 
court of Arthur in south Britain. A provincial author felt in no way 
inferior in matters of personal integrity or status to those in the 
metropolis. Their social customs are indirectly criticized in the 
person of Gawain. 
4. The author had an expert confidence on matters of castle 
architecture, etiquette, hunting, luxury items, riding, seafaring, 
sophisticated flirtation, and war.     
5. His politics were resolutely conservative; he was neither a 
subversive nor anticlerical. 
6. MS Cotton Nero A.x is a copy of an original prepared at 
considerable expense. 
7. It bears the motto of the Garter, of which John Stanley (from 1405) 
was the sole north-western member at this date. 
8. The author complains (Patience, lines 34, 46, 528) of poverty. 
Stanley was a younger son, due to inherit little or nothing; a 
circumstance which must date Patience to before 1385. 
9. There are strong parallels between the vocabulary of the poems 
and that of Stanley's letter of 30 July 1405 to Henry IV. 
10. The poet knew French and French romance well. Stanley in the 
1380s did military service in Aquitaine, with opportunities to learn 
French first-hand. 
11. Pearl is most simply read as a father's elegy for a daughter who 
died before her second birthday. References therein to spottes 
“rashes, blemishes” may indicate the cause as bubonic plague, of 
which there was an epidemic from 1390 to 1393, as the cause. 
Marrying in 1385, the Stanleys might be expected to have had a 
daughter by them. 
12. The allusion to a daughter counts against identification of the 
poet as a cleric. So, too, do references (Pearl 1210, Patience 9) to 
himself not as celebrating mass, but as in the congregation. 
13. Approving remarks from the mouth of God on the delights of 
married love (Cleanness, lines 697-704) are secular in tone, not 
clerical. The same is true for the attempted seductions in Gawain. 
14. There is no evidence for the poems as the work of a professional 
clerk or scribe. 

 



108 Andrew Breeze 

 

The upshot of the above will be to make the author out as a Cheshire 
and Lancashire grandee, with important positions at court and in local 
administration, who had done military service in France; a religious 
man, happily married and with children. It also places the poems within 
a relatively short time-span. Gawain could not predate 1385; if its 
Arthur represents Richard II (1367-1400), it may be of the later 1380s. 
Pearl on this basis would be of the very early 1390s. (Since this paper 
was written, however, evidence has come to light in Ann Astell's 
argument for ver “spring” in line 866 of Gawain as alluding to the 
flamboyant Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Her case, put forward in 
1999, deserves further notice. It means that the poem must predate his 
disgrace and exile in December 1387; while the reference in line 678 to 
Gawain's being made a duk “duke” would put it after 13 October 1386, 
when Oxford was made Duke of Ireland. It was an unprecedented 
honour. All previous dukes in England were of royal blood. It suggests 
that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was written sometime in the 
period October 1386 to December 1387, when duke-making was a 
topical subject, but before the new Duke of Ireland fled into political 
exile. The poem may date from 1387, perhaps being intended as an 
entertainment for the Christmas of that year.) 

If, of course, Sir Gawain or Pearl could be shown as of before 1386, 
they could not be by Stanley. If critics could prove that they were, the 
above case would, naturally, collapse. There are other ways in which 
they could do this, besides that of dating. If Stanley could be proved as 
having anti-clerical or Wycliffite opinions, as with the “Lollard Knights” 
of the Oxford historian Bruce McFarlane (1903-66), this could not be 
reconciled with the full-blown sacramental Catholicism of Pearl. Again, 
if a document by him in English could be found, proving his dialect as 
unlike that of the poet, we must also rule him out. If family records 
indicate that he never had a daughter (called Margaret?) who died in 
infancy, it would likewise be conclusive. 

If, however, there is cogency in the above, we may look on Sir John 
Stanley as a newcomer to England's literary pantheon. He will join the 
Earl of Rochester and Lord Byron in the (small) band of English 
aristocratic poets. As the King of Man, he could even be included in a 
still smaller one of those who wore crowns, like James I (1394-1437) of 
Scotland and The Kingis Quair. If, on the other hand, critics can prove 



Did Sir John Stanley write Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? 109 

 

the case set out here to be ill-judged, baseless, or false, it will offer a 
permanent lesson on the perils of literary and historical interpretation. 
 
POSTSCRIPT: After this paper was accepted for publication, there came to hand Ann 
W. Astell, Political Allegory in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999), as a gift 
to the writer from Dr Ros Field. This book has effectively been ignored by other 
scholars. Yet it contains (Astell 1999: 124-6) two observations of epoch-making 
importance, unfortunately not fully understood by Professor Astell herself. She there 
relates line 678 of Gawain, on its protagonist as being made a duk or duke, to various 
dukes, including Robert de Vere (1362-92), ninth Earl of Oxford, created Duke of Ireland 
on 13 October 1386. She adds that ver or spring, used in line 866 of beautiful clothing 
given to Gawain, is a dig or quiet joke at the expense of de Vere, favourite of Richard 
II and notorious for flamboyant dress. Allusions to de Vere notwithstanding, she 
declares (Astell 1999: 137) that the romance “must have been written between 1397 
and 1400”, despite noting de Vere's ruin at the Battle of Radcot Bridge, 20 December 
1387 (when he fled into exile). On the contrary, the two lines will date the composition 
of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to between 13 October 1386, when de Vere (as 
England's first non-royal duke) made dukedoms a topical subject, and 20 December 
1387, when disaster at Radcot Bridge made his luxurious tastes a thing of the past. One 
may say too that the judicial murders of the Merciless Parliament (February to May 
1388) would thereafter make the theme of Sir Gawain (decapitation) a risky one. The 
poem can be dated with some confidence to 1387 (perhaps as entertainment for 
Christmas that year). The evidence also reinforces its links with John Stanley, who was 
de Vere's deputy in Ireland and must have known him well; the result being gentle 
mockery of him in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. 
 
 
 
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Author’s address 
Departamento de Filología  
Universidad de Navarra  
31009 Pamplona (España)  received: 2 September 2021 
e-mail: abreeze@unav.es revised version accepted: 19 October 2021