Sir Amadace: Environments of Affect

Sir Amadace follows a knight bankrupted by largesse. Leaving home, he comes upon a stinking corpse and mourning wife in a forest chapel; he spends the last of his money to pay the dead man’s debts and bury him. Amadace next meets a White Knight in the woods, who promises to reverse his fortunes if he’ll share half of his future earnings. Amadace agrees, loots a shipwreck’s worth of bodies, and goes on to win a nearby princess’s hand in marriage via tournament. The mysterious benefactor returns when the couple have a young son, and demands half of Amadace’s wife and child. Just as the sword is about to fall, he reveals that he’s actually the buried corpse, and allows Amadace’s family to live.

Keywords: forest; coastline

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Citation

Middle English passages on this page have been quoted from:

Anonymous. 2007. Amis and Amiloun, Robert of Cisyle, and Sir Amadace, ed. Edward E. Foster. Medieval Institute Publications. Click here to access this edition.

All Modern English translations were done by the website author, with recourse to the Middle English Dictionary and glosses in the cited edition(s).

Possible Provenance:

The map of Great Britain above highlights the possible provenance(s) — that is, place(s) of composition — suggested by scholars for this romance. The numbered markers denote the areas depicted by 360-degree photos or videos I have included on this page, listed in the order that they appear in my discussions below.

In the map, click the box icon in the upper-lefthand corner to display the legend.

This map is based on information regarding provenance supplied in the cited edition(s) of this romance, along with the linguistic analysis found in: Purdie, Rhiannon. 2008. Anglicising Romance: Tail-Rhyme and Genre in Medieval English Literature D.S. Brewer.

Scene 1: Into The Woods

Quen all his men was partutte him fro,
The knyghte lafte still in all the woe,
Bi himselvun allone.
Throghe the forest his way lay righte;
Of his palfray doune he lighte,
Mournand and made grete mone.
Quen he thoghte on his londus brode,
His castels hee, his townus made,
That were away evyrichon,
That he had sette, and layd to wedde,
And was owte of the cuntray for povrté fledde.
Thenne the knyghte wexe will of wone (ll. 385-96).

…

Now thro the forest as he ferd,
He wende that no mon hade him herd,
For he seghe no mon in sighte.
So come a mon ryding him bye,
And speke on him fulle hastely,
Therof he was afryghte (433-8).

When all of his men were parted from him,
The knight was left still in all of his woe,
By himself alone.
Through the forest indeed lay his way;
He dismounted from his palfrey,
Mourned and made great moan.
When he thought of his broad lands,
His high castles, his constructed towns,
That were all gone,
That he had given over, and mortgaged,
And fled out of the country due to his poverty:
Then the knight grew bewildered [also: homeless].

…

Now as he went through the forest,
He thought that no man heard him,
For he saw no man in sight.
Then came a man riding by him,
And [who] spoke to him quite suddenly –
Thereof he was frightened.

Amadace finds himself alone for the first time in this scene. Soon, his ruminations on lost landholdings will be interrupted by the mysterious White Knight, come to offer him a dubious bargain. For now, though, the sight of the forest compels Amadace to wallow in place-based self-pity. The images below present a crossroads of sorts in areas consistently afforested since the days of Amadace’s composition.

This image shows a crossroads sign on a forest trail, near the higher waterfall at Aira Force. A stream, Aira Beck, runs behind the photographer, and a bridge over it is visible through the trees.

At Aira Force, a crossroads sign marks the streamside point where various paths converge. The forest here is close, predominately deciduous trees curving in to surround the observing lens. The bridge in the background stands in for the human-made space of the town recently left behind, while the claustrophobic curve of the woodland branches and topography serves to illustrate the isolated turn towards the self that Amadace experiences in his own lonely travel.

This photograph shows a tree growing in the middle of a crossroads in the Great Wood, on the slope of Walla Crag, in Cumbria.

The second image, from the Great Wood, Cumbria, presents a much more open woodland, the predominately coniferous trees clearing the head-level space of branches and providing dramatic framing for the tree that marks the crossing paths through the forest. I pair this image alongside the first because its openness alludes to Amadace’s own vulnerability: focusing upon himself while in unfamiliar environs, he invites surprise – which, of course, he soon receives in the form of the White Knight. Yet Amadace’s anxious fright at the sudden arrival of another person in this space illustrates how affective experience can so significantly reshape one’s impression of an environment. It also draws attention to the voyeuristic role of the audience here: what does it mean to observe not only an environmental space, but the person experiencing it?

Scene 2: Beachwrecked

Now als Sir Amadace welke bi the se sonde,
The broken schippus he ther fonde —
Hit were mervayl to say.
He fond wrekun amung the stones
Knyghtes in menevere for the nones,
Stedes quite and gray,
With all kynne maner of richas
That any mon myghte devise
Castun uppe with waturs lay;
Kistes and cofurs bothe ther stode,
Was fulle of gold precius and gode,
No mon bare noghte away (ll. 517-28).

Now as Sir Amadace walked by the sea sand,
The broken ships he found there –
It would be a marvel to relate.
He found wrecked among the stones
Knights in rich robes at that time,
[With] white and grey steeds,
With all kinds and manners of riches
[More] than any man might devise:
[All] lay cast up by the water;
Chests and coffers both stood there,
[Which] were full of precious and good gold;
No man had borne any away.

This passage finds Amadace once again alone, having just parted from the mysterious White Knight he met in the woods. That stranger had offered Amadace generous support, and a backstory of having lost his followers in a sea storm to cover his wealth. Yet Amadace has, as of yet, received no bounty. Instead, he comes upon it in the form of well-equipped corpses spread across this beach, the spilled contents of a ship wrecked upon the stones. He will pick these pieces up to remake his own social position, and obscure the real reasons for his solitary state by attributing his dearth of companions to the sea. The shoreline, then, offers a special opportunity for the knight to remake himself into a more idealistic social avatar. In so doing, he benefits from the suffering and death of others – even if the corpses have been in some way conjured by Amadace’s mysterious benefactor, they remain corpses – bodies that he will strip to equip his own.

The images paired with this striking scene of course are themselves (thankfully) bereft of shipwreck. Taken on the western beach of Grune Point on the northern Cumbrian coast, these photographs depict: in one, scattered pieces of trash washed up by the sea; in the second, driftwood and netting tangled with the posts of a coastal fence; in the third, a collapsing concrete foundation, undermined and spread across the sand by the water’s steady erosion.

This image shows scattered pieces of trash on washed up along a sandy stretch of Grune Point’s western beach.

The small cross in one piece of trash for me is especially evocative: how do Amadace’s actions mesh with the ethics of his faith? Where before he buried the body he came across, here he instead uses them for his own gain, and then apparently leaves them behind. Indeed, their continuing presence might indeed benefit his cover story. As with the washed-up garbage on the modern-day beach, their bodies become discarded waste, their immediate status mapped onto the mechanical workings of the sea in such a way as to momentarily obscure their ultimate origins in human (or perhaps superhuman) action. The garbage also acts as a center in this 360-degree image; its placement in the foreground undercutting the anthropocentric edifice of human building evident on the far Scottish shore. It is also, however, dwarfed by the expanse of beach, sky, and sea: these material remains rendered so small.

This photograph shows detritus washed up on a Grune Point’s western rocky beach.

The driftwood of the second shot nicely illustrates a literal entanglement: the ocean’s industry disrupting and slowly replacing that found on shore, even as it “remixes” the shoreline ecotone using the materials of maritime human industry to do so. The many small stones provide a diminutive reminder of the rocks that Amadace finds bodies and treasure (and shipwreck) strewn across, while along the Eastern skyline an artifact of a wind-whipped lens provides a brief doubling of the horizon – reminding the viewer of the artificial, constructed nature of the entire scene.

This image shows the remains of a concrete structure on a rocky stretch of Grune Point’s westward-facing beach.

The collapsing concrete, meanwhile, conveys a sense of ruin, human industry wearing away in the face of ecological persistence – indeed, of water that rises in accord with the global consequences of continued human industry. While this ruin finds its origin in the land instead of the romance’s ship dashed ashore by the sea, it nevertheless speaks to the shore’s status as the place where environmental forces can become most apparent: the ecotonal edge wherein human attempts to extract or establish value betray explicit costs. Human actions remain embedded in the material world, and in time. For Amadace must move on before the beach changes once more, and his story with it.