TOURNAMENT OF TOTTENHAM, THE

(ca. 1400–1440)

The Tournament of Tottenhamis a poem of 234 lines surviving in two manuscripts, written in the Northern dialect of MIDDLE ENGLISH, although its setting is in the south, near London. It is a rollicking burlesque of a courtly tournament as performed by country peasants competing for the hand of the local reeve’s daughter. Ultimately, it is difficult to determine whether the poet’s intent was to satirize the elaborate conventions of chivalry and ROMANCE, or to mock the churlish behavior of the country peasants trying to imitate their social betters.

Like many courtly romances, this poem begins with a feast, but the feast takes place in a tavern and concerns not knights like Sir GAWAIN or Sir LANCELOT, but rather “treue drinkers”with names like Hawkin, Gib, Hud, Dudman, Terry, and Tomkyn. The poem’s protagonist, Perkyn the Potter, announces his love for Tyb, the daughter of Randal the Reeve, but a number of the carousers express their own desire for the fair maiden. A tournament is declared at which Tyb is to be the prize, though the other prizes offered— a cow, hen, mare, and sow—undercut Tyb’s status as the courtly romance heroine. A description of the arming of the warriors follows, and includes the participants’ use of good black bowls for helmets and wicker fans for shields.When Tyb rides into the tournament, she is greeted not by a trumpet blast but by a trumpeting fart from Gyb’s horse.

Before the battle begins the chief combatants all swear ludicrous oaths, including Terry’s oath that he intends, unheroically, to sneak off with Tyb while the others are fighting. The heraldic devices used for the combatants’ coats of arms—a doughtrough and baker’s shovel for the cowardly Terry, for example, and a sieve, rake, and three pieces of cake for Hud—are equally absurd travesties of serious coats of arms. Perkyn, given the honor of the final boast, swears to defeat them all and capture the best horses among them to give to Tyb.The battle itself is a chaotic free-for-all, with Perkyn emerging as the victor, though the horses he captures are too tired to be brought to Tyb. After his victory, Perkyn and Tyb rush to bed unceremoniously, and the poem ends the next day with another feast, though this time the defeated combatants all limp to the feast with broken heads and shoulders.

The poem is made up of 26 stanzas in a very complex form, beginning with four long alliterative lines rhymingaaaa, followed by five shorter (roughly three-stress) lines rhymingbcccb. The stanza form recalls that of some of the betterknown heroic romances of the north, including texts likeThe AWNTYRS OFF ARTHUREand evenSIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT, but is here used for comic effect as the shorter “bob and wheel” stanza endings bring each individual stanza to a ludicrous conclusion.

It is clear that theTournament of Tottenhamtravesties many elements of the courtly romance. But it has been suggested (seeJones) that the poem may reflect a historical Shrovetide custom in 15thcentury Germany and Switzerland in which bourgeois actors presented a mock tournament for the amusement of the nobility. The poem may parody that kind of event.

■ Jones, George F. “The Tournaments of Tottenham and Lappenhausen,”PMLA66 (1951): 1123– 1140.

■The Tournament of Tottenham, inMiddle English Poetry: An Anthology, edited by Lewis J. Owen and Nancy H. Owen. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971, 326–335.

■ Wright, Glenn. “Parody, Satire, and Genre inThe Tournament of Tottenham(1400–1440),”Fifteenth-Century Studies23 (1997): 152–170.