ABSTRACT
The Middle English romance William of Palerne exists in a unique manuscript, King's College Cambridge 13. The witnesses, like the cowherd and his wife who adopt William Langland, are an integral part of the poem's imagined social world. As the English poet adds or expands playful depictions of everyday life, familiar sentiments and scenes of affection between friends, lovers and family, patron and audience, nobles and commoners are linked in a celebration of happiness and right rule rooted in kindness and love. Ambition, inheritance, dynastic instability and aristocratic warfare, the normal practices by which a hereditary aristocracy maintained, enlarged its power, constitute the narrative's motive power. The scenes depicting William's life outside the courtly world to which he naturally belongs are among the most appealing and original of the poem, expanding its social horizons in a way remarkable in the romance as a genre.
