“The Medieval Town Imagined: Urbanization and Knighthood in Medieval Literature”
Helen Fulton

This paper forms part of a larger project which addresses two questions: how are towns and urban culture embedded as imaginary constructions in medieval literary texts, and what do these representations tell us about attitudes and ideologies relating to urban life during a period of rapid growth?

The specific aims of the paper are to look at the ways in which feudal knights in literary texts are positioned in relation to towns and cities, and to argue that the institution of knighthood became increasingly urbanized during the central middle ages.

While chivalric literatures of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries typically locate knights in an oppositional relationship to towns—as invaders and conquerors—other texts, such as Marie de France’s Lai de Laüstic, show knights living in towns as their normative choice of residence between military campaigns. Some knights, such as Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain, ‘marry’ towns, while Yvain’s Welsh counterpart, Owain, coming from a non-urbanized region, responds to the city as an exotically ‘other’ place.

In the insular romance tradition, knights are routinely identified by their ownership of towns (Bevis of Hampton, Guy of Warwick), confirming their noble status and their right to urban rule.

This normalizing of the relationship between knights and towns in literary texts cuts across the historical evidence for increasing burgess independence in French and English towns from the twelfth century onwards. The paper will argue that the urbanization of knighthood in literary texts both appeals to bourgeois audiences and reminds them of their dependence on knightly leadership.