In it he coins the phrase ‘the Feleschepe of the Rownde table’, and further imagines a conflation of Logres and London – a distinctly civic take on chivalry. In around 1425 Henry Lovelich, citizen and member of the ‘Worshipful Fellowship of Skinners’ of London, translates Robert de Borron’s Merlin, apparently on commission from his fellow Skinners. Between them these documents chart a movement from a martial band or cohort of men, often carrying a level of threat, to a body of civic authority and sworn brotherhood. In fifteenth century documents such as the chronicles of London, and letters from the gentry and merchant families of the Pastons and Celys (themselves variously associated with the world of chivalry), a wealth of contexts emerges for the word perhaps now unfamiliar to us. The poet’s choice of the word – with its Old English connotations of fee-laying, or business partnership – has perhaps been under-examined: interestingly it frequently poses problems for modern translators. At the end of the fourteenth century, Sir Gawain in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is lauded for his ‘felaȝschyp forbe al þyng’ yet remains intrinsically alone: indeed, it is precisely a problematic relation to fellowship – to his dealings with Bertilak in (failed) hospitable reciprocation – that forces the crisis of the poem. The aim is to encourage students to see at once the similarities and changes through time in roughly a century of insular chivalric material, and to present a fresh reading of these texts which potentially charts the growth of a ‘civic’ understanding in both the production and consumption of Arthurian literature. It also provides a context for the concept of association by briefly reviewing the use of ‘fellowship’ in an array of London chronicles and gentry and merchant letters. It further introduces the students to a little-studied English text produced between Sir Gawain and Le Morte Darthur which serves to suggest a particular insular tradition and to develop the concept of fellowship in chivalric literature.

Complementing the rest of the course, this lecture provides links between key texts and introduces a bridging concept – that of fellowship – touched on but underexplored in the lectures as they stand.

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