This project is the first book-length study of the oral traditional aspects of the fourteenth-century long-line alliterative poems the Morte Arthure and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The purpose of this project is to analyze the texts' abilities to make meaning by drawing on oral tradition, reconciling the Old English heroic influence with the Middle English romance genre exemplified by these works. By doing so, this dissertation makes two contributions to current studies of these poems and alliterative verse. First, it reconsiders the alliterative meter as a potential means of establishing heroic register, an idiomatic way of speaking determined by recurrent situations. Viewing the meter as a signal of register enhances the traditional meaning implicit in the form of the poetry. This reconsideration shifts discussion of the meter away from technical aspects to the connection between meter and content via register. Second, instead of men who fail to uphold continental modes of chivalry, my project reframes the protagonists of King Arthur and Sir Gawain as oral traditional heroic models reminiscent of Old English poetry. By coming to the poems from this previously unexamined angle, I open a new pathway of understanding these texts and their heroic content, providing a new model of how a fourteenth-century audience might have read the poems by responding to traditional cues. My project demonstrates an ongoing tradition influenced by the alliterative meter of the poems, a tradition that bridges the perceived divide in medieval English literature supposedly caused by the Norman Conquest in 1066.

Ethan Campbell argues that a central feature of the Gawain-poet's Middle English works' moral rhetoric is anticlerical critique. Written in an era when clerical corruption was a key concern for polemicists such as Richard FitzRalph and John Wyclif, as well as satirical poets such as John Gower, William Langland, and Geoffrey Chaucer, the Gawain poems feature an explicit attack on hypocritical priests in the opening lines of Cleanness as well as more subtle critiques embedded within depictions of flawed priest-like characters.

Four stresses, a line broken in two by a caesura, and a pattern of alliteration linking the two half-lines were features of the staple manner of Anglo-Saxon verse. And this tradition of writing continued into post-Conquest England, sometimes providing a distinctive alternative to rhymed or stanzaic verse, sometimes coexisting with it, occasionally a little uneasily. 'But trusteth wel, I am a Southren man; I kan nat geeste 'rum, ram, ruf', by lettre ...' says Chaucer's Parson, parodying the manner of alliterative verse and hinting at its provinciality. Much of it was, in fact, written in the west and north of England. The late efflorescence of alliterative writing in fourteenth-century and early fifteenth-century England is remarkable for its range and quality, and this is the focus of this collection of essays, five of which have not been published before. There are four essays on some of the lyrics preserved in London, British Library MS Harley 2253, two on Winner and Waster and The Parlement of the Thre Ages, both of which are preserved in London, British Library MS Additional 31042, and two on poems from London, British Library MS Cotton Nero A. x - one on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and contemporary knighthood, and one on Patience and the question of obedience to authority. One essay focuses on an incident in Piers Plowman dealing with the lawlessness of the gentry. Another looks at Pierce the Ploughman's Crede and Lollard attitudes to written texts. And another considers the clerical agenda of St Erkenwald and the writing of history. Two related texts - Richard the Redeles and Mum and the Sothsegger - are analysed, along with Gower's Cronica Tripartita, as verdicts on the reign of Richard II and as expressions of the determination of poets to comment on political affairs in contexts which sought to silence them. Finally, what may have been the last great English alliterative poem, Scotish Ffeilde, is considered in relation to other contemporary poems on the Battle of Flodden of 1513.