Guy Of Warwick

Guy Of Warwick, English hero of romance. Guy, son of Siward or Seguard of Wallingford, by his prowess in foreign wars wins in marriage Félice (the Phyllis of the well-known ballad), daughter and heiress of Roalt, earl of Warwick. Soon after his marriage he is seized with remorse for the violence of his past life, and, by way of penance, leaves his wife and fortune to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. After years of absence he returns in time to deliver Winchester for King Æthelstan from the invading northern kings, Anelaph (Anlaf or Olaf) and Gonelaph, by slaying in single fight their champion the giant Colbrand. Local tradition fixes the duel at Hyde Mead near Winchester. Making his way to Warwick he becomes one of his wife’s bedesmen, and presently retires to a hermitage in Arden, only revealing his identity at the approach of death. The versions of the Middle English romance of Guy which we possess are adaptations from the French, and are cast in the form of a roman d’aventures, opening with a long recital of Guy’s wars in Lombardy, Germany and Constantinople, and embellished with fights with dragons and surprising feats of arms. The kernel of the tradition evidently lies in the fight with Colbrand, which represents, or at least is symbolic1 of an historical fact. The religious side of the legend finds parallels in the stories of St Eustachius and St Alexius,2 and makes it probable that the Guy-legend, as we have it, has passed through monastic hands. Tradition seems to be at fault in putting Guy’s adventures under Æthelstan. The Anlaf of the story is probably Olaf Tryggvason, who, with Sweyn of Denmark, harried the southern counties of England in 993 and pitched his winter quarters in Southampton. Winchester was saved, however, not by the valour of an English champion, but by the payment of money. This Olaf was not unnaturally confused with Anlaf Cuaran or Havelok (i.e.).

The name Guy (perhaps a Norman form of A. S. wig = war) may be fairly connected with the family of Wigod, lord of Wallingford under Edward the Confessor, and a Filicia, who belongs to the 12th century and was perhaps the Norman poet’s patroness, occurs in the pedigree of the Ardens, descended from Thurkill of Warwick and his son Siward. Guy’s Cliffe, near Warwick, where in the 14th century Richard de Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, erected a chantry, with a statue of the hero, does not correspond with the site of the hermitage as described in the romance. The bulk of the legend is obviously fiction, even though it may be vaguely connected with the family history of the Ardens and the Wallingford family, but it was accepted as authentic fact in the chronicle of Pierre de Langtoft (Peter of Langtoft) written at the end of the 13th century. The adventures of Reynbrun, son of Guy, and his tutor Heraud of Arden, who had also educated Guy, have much in common with his father’s history, and form an interpolation sometimes treated as a separate romance. There is a certain connexion between Guy and Count Guido of Tours (fl. 800), and Alcuin’s advice to the count is transferred to the English hero in the Speculum Gy of Warewyke (c. 1327), edited for the Early English Text Society by G. L. Morrill, 1898.