ABSTRACT
Modern accounts of Guy of Warwick identify him as an English champion, and the legend’s success owes much to patriotic appeal. But Guy began as an Anglo-Norman hero whose adventures take him across Europe and to Constantinople and the Holy Land; many episodes in the original romance are unrelated to England. By the early thirteenth century, when Gui de Warewic was written, there was a decline of such confidence and high sentiment Henry II’s creation of an Angevin empire, including a stable state in England, had been quickly decimated. King John formally lost Normandy in 1204 and with the signing of Magna Carta in 1216 both defined feudal obligations precisely and admitted limitations of the king’s power. Imaginative literature offered more to emulate than recent history, and the Gui poet drew upon rich and diverse antecedents.
