KING ARTHUR AND KING CORNWALL: FOOTNOTES

1 Would come back from the dead just to lay eyes on her

KING ARTHUR AND KING CORNWALL: NOTES

Abbreviations: P = Percy Folio MS; BP = Bishop Percy's marginal glosses in the MS; C = Child's edition; M = Madden's edition; HF = Hales' and Furnivall's edition. See Select Bibliography for these editions.

1 Saies. The first line of the surviving copy was cut off when Percy sent the manuscript to the binder; Percy restored this line to the text from memory. The opening section of the poem has been lost through the mutilation of the Percy Folio.

3 one of the fairest Round Tables. Arthur's founding of a round table in order to prevent squabbling among his knights about rank, about who "bygan the highe dese" (Ragnelle, line 601), is mentioned first in Geoffrey of Monmouth's His-tory. Guenevere's demur from Arthur's claim to Gawain here is peculiarly ironic, since it initiates the plot of Cornwall by starting a squabble over the ranking of round tables themselves.

18 sayd. HF, C: says. The scribal form is unclear; I agree with M in reading it as an oddly formed d.

26 Sir Marramiles. A knight apparently otherwise unknown in Arthurian legend. Sir Tristan, one of the most prominent of Arthurian knights, is the nephew of Mark, King of Cornwall.

29 Five palmers. Gawain and Bredbeddle make up the full complement of five knights.

32 they rived. P: thé. I emend this scribal spelling of they here and at lines 114, 122, and 284.

34 tranckled. BP: travelled with an asterisk in the margin.

51 The. P: they; I follow M's emendation.

66 A une ghesting of. M: A bue ghesting.

68 A une ghesting of. M reads as in line 66, emending of to and; C remarks "the first two words are hard to make out," and reads them as A une, but emends to modernized Of one. I leave the MS reading, since its meaning appears sufficiently plain.

69 borne. HF: boirne.

72 has. P: his; M, C emend to is; I follow the reading of HF.

79-80 I have made two lines of what is written as a single long line in P.

81 Cornwall. So C, HF; M reads Cornewall, but the MS is too faint to confirm this spelling.

92 Litle Brittaine. This is the usual English designation for Brittany (French Bretagne, the Roman territory of Armorica), across the English Channel from Cornwall. The Bretons preserved many Celtic traditions associated with Arthur; an English prose romance, Arthur of Little Britain (translated in the early sixteenth century from a fourteenth-century French source by John Bourchier, Lord Berners), sets Arthur's adventures in Brittany.

95 cockward. One of the problems that haunts Arthur's reign in romance and chronicle is that he produces no legitimate heir; the question of succession to the throne therefore produces open strife, usually involving Mordred, Arthur's son by his sister. In his novel The Lyre of Orpheus (New York: Viking, 1988), Robertson Davies describes the production of an opera, Arthur the Cuckold, whose Arthurian themes of sexual anxiety and rivalry are reproduced in the novel's central plot.

124 thrub chadler. P's reading here has become faint; though the spelling at line 173 - trubchandler - is more distinct, the meaning of this word is not at all clear in either case. M reads as a single word, and emends to thrubchandler, without comment; HF conjecture, "a kind of tub?" C emends to rub-chadler, commenting that he is "unable to make anything of thrub, thub"; he goes on to give elaborate philological arguments for the meaning "rubbish barrel" (p. 279). bunge (line 173) confirms that this is some sort of stoppered container; I assume from the context of the poem that this is used as a stand next to Arthur's bed, on which a candle is placed. Burlow Beanie has been enclosed within by Cornwall's men (lines 123 ff.) in order to spy upon Arthur's company.

147 ff. The Third Part. The division is noted in the left margin, apparently by the scribe rather than BP. Whatever other rubrics there may have been have been lost in the torn-out pages.

155 homly. M: hourly; C adopts this apparent misreading by M as an emendation.

165 the. P: they.

201 waken. M: watch (apparently misled by the descender from the line above that touches n).

206 ff. It is not clear whether Bredbeddle conveys to Arthur words of magical power (perhaps even the sprite's name), or, as seems more likely, somehow shows him an image of what the sprite looked like before its metamorphosis. In the lines that follow, Burlow Beanie upon request transforms back into its monstrous form, only to be domesticated for a final time by Bredbeddle.

214 the Greene Knight. The reference to Sir Bredbeddle by this title suggests that the composer and his audience were familiar with The Greene Knight, which makes Bredbeddle its hero.

228 towards. M: towarde.

237 Burlow Beanie: This alliterative title apparently names a combination monster-genie who serves Cornwall. The source and meaning of the name are obscure. It recalls formulaic phrases like "burlokest blonke" (applied to Gawain's horse, Grissell, in Awntyrs, line 548), "borelych bole" (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, line 766), or especially "borly berne" (stout, burly warrior), which occurs in several alliterative poems. Child connects Burlow Beanie to the Billie Blin, a household demon who appears in several surviving ballads (see p. 279, and discussion at p. 67). As a figure of the comic grotesque, Burlow Beanie might be compared to a character in the repertoire of Victorian street players, "Billy Barlow"; Henry Mayhew records the carnivalesque dress and the semi-improvisatory performance of this figure in his lengthy conversation with a Billy Barlow impersonator from the "street business" (London Labour and the London Poor [1861; rpt. New York: Dover, 1968], vol. 3, pp. 138-39). The pageants, narratives, and performances Mayhew records in this section would seem to be the direct descendants of the popular recitations offered by Captain Cox and his troupe at Kenilworth (see General Introduction).

256 thorrow me. The scribe has abbreviated the form before me as a p with a stroke over it, usually indicating Latin pro ("for") or per ("through"). M expands to for; HF give pro me; C expands to for, following M. "Through" seems the most appropriate expansion, and I have followed scribal spelling from elsewhere in P.

295 King Arthur. As usual, King is abbreviated as K in P; in this case, Arthur is also abbreviated as a (standing apart from the end of the line). M omits Arthur.

302 The motif of impaling an opponent's head on a spear or sword occurs in Chrétien de Troyes' Erec, Le Bel Inconnu, and elsewhere; see Loomis' Arthurian Literature, p. 358.