ABSTRACT
As we have already noted, we find in Middle English quite a large number of short narrative poems; indeed they seem to be a typically English variety of romance. An average of about one thousand lines must have been a particularly suitable size for a tale to be read in one sitting. Apart from the shorter romances, many of the longer poems are subdivided into smaller units, as the fitts in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (490, 635, 872, 533 ll., most of them alliterative long-lines).1 The books in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde are of a similar size, and something like these fitts or books can be found in many of the longer poems. The popularity of collections of stories or ‘framed’ tales, like The Seven Sages of Rome, An Alphabet of Tales, Gower’s Confessio Amantis and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, too, is evidence of the fact that the shorter forms of narrative enjoyed particular favour with the English. Most of the shorter romances, however, are preserved in far fewer versions than the longer novels in verse;2 many of them have only come down in one single manuscript. This can partly be explained by the fact that many of the novels are compilations of particularly famous stories, like Guy of Warwick or Kyng Alisaunder, whereas the shorter romances often treat less well known subjects and were possibly written sometimes for particular occasions.
