11 - CONCLUSION

Summary

Though aspiring to the universality of all great literature, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and other associated works eloquently attest the uniqueness of the Cheshire and Lancashire experience during the period under discussion. Their dialect, metrical form and range of allusion tie them firmly to a community of poets and patrons who hailed from the Northwest. In a similar fashion they are rooted in time. Few works and no texts can be dated before the last quarter of the fourteenth century, and both the form and content of the extant verse would argue for a ‘golden age’ roughly contemporaneous with the life of Chaucer. Obviously cultural movements cannot be rigidly compartmentalised. Despite the remarkable ‘tightness’ of their literary tradition, the Gawain-poet and his school cannot be seen in isolation from wider cultural influences, and their compositions can still be profitably read alongside their better-known contemporaries working in London and elsewhere. At the same time the alliterative style remained popular in the Northwest, despite the steady advance of Chaucerian models and metropolitan taste, throughout the fifteenth century and into Tudor times. Still, the literary evidence presents the social historian with the problems of national unity and regional variation, continuity and change in a peculiarly graphic form.

In this concluding chapter it is necessary to assess the ‘typicality’ of Cheshire and Lancashire society, and to offer some thoughts on points of comparison and contrast with patterns discernible elsewhere in late medieval England.