Chapter 3: Love's Relations: The Seduction of Gawain

3.iii. The Law and its Limits

To [wynne] hym to wo3e ( 1550), where the verb wynne / wonnen obliquely but surely suggests her commercial strategy, Bertilak's Lady manipulates Gawain until he insists on private value exclusively. She convinces Gawain that everything has its price, including his life and lewté, and in doing so, she reduces him to a consumer. In all this she resembles certain other women whom the poem mentions:


(2414-24; emphasis added)

Others have remarked the unexpected vehemence of this interlude of typical medieval misogyny (e.g., Burrow 1965: 147-48; Spearing 1970:220; 223-24). And I am no surer than they why its tone is so vehement. But I would suggest that part of the motive for the passage is Gawain's use of commercial discourse--wonen and wynne--to communicate his feelings. This is not the first time, of course, that he has used such discourse. But it is the first time that he uses it in such a way as to demonstrate that he understands the importance of relativity and relationships to his own condition. He, like all these others, was {46/47} without trusting them. Though his misogyny may be distasteful, Gawain's awareness of the commerce of human affairs is vastly improved. Gawain knows now that people do not exist as isolated integers of pure value but as complicated entities in a web of relations largely commercial and therefore liable to sudden fluctuation. He knows now that people can be bought and sold and can buy and sell and still be very good people or, at least, very human. He has, in short, grown up a little in the sor3e to which the Lady won him.

But she was not alone in working this change in Gawain. Joining her in the assay (2362 as well as 2457) of Gawain's surquidré is Bertilak. He completes the gomen that exposes Gawain to relativity and relationship by maneuvering him constantly into merchandising--into becoming a merchant. Forced into consumerism, on the one hand, and into merchandising, on the other, Gawain is so immersed in commercial reality that he can finally experience, at the Green Chapel, that he is, like all men--Adam included--incomplete and therefore in need of relation. Despite wounded pride, misogyny, and the fitful desire to justify himself, Gawain learns--he is, after all, a good man-- that no one is an isolated integer of pure value.

Until his test has transpired, however, Gawain misunderstands the commerce of human affairs, and therefore he fails to appreciate the necessity of relativity and relationships in the generation of values. Crucial to an explanation of his misunderstanding and of his failure is the poem's emphasis on covenants and legality. It is principally by means of covenants that Bertilak succeeds in forcing Gawain into merchandising; therefore, we need to survey now the role of covenants in the poem.

Of the many other commercial words in the poem after prys and cost(es), couenaunt is arguably the most pervasive in its influence.5 In the first place, the couenaunt between Gawain and the Green Knight envelops the whole action of the poem and is always more or less in the reader's field of vision. This idea dominates, in part, because the word enjoys commercial and sacred connotations equally. This balance is properly in keeping with the Hebrew word of the Old Testament which it translates: berith (OED C:1101) means `contract' or `bargain' and refers to the agreements between Jahweh and his chosen people. There is obviously something commercial about those agreements since there are numerous stipulated exchanges between Jahweh and his people. But there is no sharp line between the commercial and the sacred: debts can be of love or of money (tithes, for {47/48} should be introduced between the commercial and the sacred or between them and any other feature in the couenaunts of Sir Gawain, either. Though kisses are trivial wares (1945-47, for example), there is something undoubtedly commercial and sacred about a man's head: it can be numbered for buying and for sacrificing. The definition of couenaunt then should not be so rigorous as to falsify its scope. Gawain and the Green Knight enter into a couenaunt at once commercial and sacred: it involves the most material sorts of things--kisses and carcasses--and the most immaterial, too--a man's lewté and trawþe.

In addition to commercial and sacred connotations, the word couenaunt also possessed an explicit legal meaning in the later Middle Ages. Medieval English law recognized a writ of covenant which I pause to mention because of its technical Latin formulas, breve de conventione and placitum conventionis (Pollock and Maitland 1968:2, 216-17). The word couenaunt like `convention' derives from the Latin convenio, -ire; and the legal formulas demonstrate that the `conventionality' of couenaunts was a live property of the word in later Middle English.6 This association is of importance to Sir Gawain because of the poem's obvious concern with the uses and, one might say, the morality of conventionality. Signs, of course, are conventional, as are poems themselves. And if Gawain and the Green Knight establish a couenaunt between them, they also establish--though indirectly and latterly--a new convention for Arthur's court: the green girdle as the badge of Arthur's retainers. Making covenants and making signs are crucially related in Sir Gawain: values--linguistic, commercial, moral, and spiritual--are a function of convention, itself a force of human community and concert, and as such they depend on the vision and the power and the goodness of the community. To assay þe surquidré' of Arthur's court is to assay its right to the making of conventions and hence values, too. Only after Gawain undergoes the equivalent of the fundamentally mediatory and significatory rite of circumcision can he return to Arthur's court and make a new convention; only after Gawain and through him the surquidré of Arthur's court are humbled can a new covenant be made.

In a Christian context, the word couenaunt can hardly fail to evoke the two covenants of the Old and the New Dispensations. The poet, I think, relied on this evocation. At line 844, the poem reports that Bertilak is of hyghe eldee; the T-G-D edition glosses this phrase, rightly in my opinion, as meaning `the prime of life.' Very perplexing, therefore, is the description of Bertilak, at the end of the second fitt, just after he and Gawain have agreed to the exchange of winnings: {48/49}



If Bertilak is in `the prime of life' he can hardly be old in the sense of that word that initially occurs to us. Olde, therefore, would seem to have other than its literal meaning. I believe that the word--coming as it does just after Gawain and Bertilak have concluded another bargayn (1112) and after they have been rehearsing its terms (couenauntez)--serves to suggest Bertilak's (and thus the Green Knight's) Old Testament figural dimensions. The Green Knight administers circumcision to Gawain; he is a figure of nature shrouded in magic; as Bertilak he is the old lord of his people--all these characteristics suggest the Old Law. Hence, while Bertilak (the Green Knight) is also, unquestionably, a Christian figure under the New Dispensation, the poem still expresses in him something of the Old Dispensation. And this above all because he is a maker of laws, rules, bargains, games, rituals, and so forth. Bertilak (the Green Knight) is a figure of the Law that is a property of the Old Dispensation. I am not claiming that Bertilak is first an Old Testament figure and therefore involved with the Law; rather, I am claiming that he is involved with the Law and therefore has figural dimensions of the Old Testament. Similarly, Sir Gawain is not an Old Testament poem and therefore legalistic; rather, Sir Gawain is concerned with the Law and is thus dependent, to a certain extent, on the Old Testament.7

The Old Testament is the Old Law. From the Christian perspective, the most glaring feature of the Old Law is its incompleteness. "`Do not think that I have come to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I have not come to destroy, but to fulfill'" (Matt. 5. 17). The Old Law is incomplete because, as St. Paul discovered in his own person, the Jewish people, though given the Law as Jahweh's chosen and thus superior to all other people, still could not achieve each his own justification-- could not generate his own righteousness. In possession of the Law, then, which demanded perfection and programmed its achievement, he still could not become perfect. Rather, in the throes of such a contradiction, his heart became hard even as the Tables of Stone, and he died by the Law (see Rom. 7. 7-24). To demand of the flesh that it become the Law--so completely true to the Law that it is identical to the Law--is to demand that the flesh die. But nothing in the Old Law, as St. Paul suddenly perceived on the road to Damascus, enables the {49/50} blame"--and man cannot eliminate that residue of desire. Only God can. Hence the Mediator, the Verbum, became flesh in order that the flesh might become the Word. Without the Mediator, flesh is condemned to desire completion it can never achieve. Without the Mediator, flesh can know the Law but never obey it. Gawain knows the Law, and he is always careful to observe its rituals (see 753-58, for example); moreover, with the Green Knight he makes laws--covenants, bargains, rules, games. But Gawain is not yet humble, does not yet fathom the meaning of the rituals he observes. He does not appreciate "þe faut and þe fayntyse of /þe fesche crabbed": he must, as he does, learn its prys--"how tender hit is to entyse teches of fylþe." Without this appreciation he cannot understand the rituals for what they are: nourishment for and support of the fayntyse of the flesh. As a knight whose kynde ... [is] larges and lewté, Gawain is always involved with Law; but as a man, a creature of flesh, Gawain can never be perfectly loyal to any law--he is too weak. So it is that the poem Sir Gawain is concerned with the Law; so it is that it depends on the fundamental lesson of the Old Testament. And, finally, such precision on the point of the Law is the foundation of the poem's Christian significance.

Gawain and Bertilak (the Green Knight) enter into two couenaunts in the poem: one, the more embracing though not necessarily the more important one, is the beheading agreement; the other, slighter and less dramatic though not a jot less important, is the exchange of winnings agreement at Hautdesert. Gawain's failure in the latter couenaunt is intelligible as a moral letdown after the strenuous effort of honoring the former. Because he has kept the terms of an agreement that to all appearances must cost him his life, Gawain is all the more prone to rationalize the tiny slip of retaining a wisp of cloth which he owes to his host. Because his trawþe is so great in the one case, it shows a slight (quite human) chink in the other.

When the Green Knight bursts upon Arthur's Christmas feast, he proposes his gomen (273), the first of the two couenaunts, in very legalistic terms, even to quit-claymyng his ax (293). Just how legalistic his terms are may possibly be measurable by the role of the festucca in medieval English contract law (Pollock and Maitland 1968:2,187; emphasis added):{50/51}



The cases are not the same, of course: the free miner is swearing that a debt is owed to him; the Green Knight is rather proposing a gomen which will result in a debt owed to him. Nevertheless, there is enough similarity to see in the Green Knight's stick of holly (holyn bobbe, 206) not only a symbol of peace but also a symbol of formal contract. Moreover, the use that Pollock and Maitland mention of the rod, or festucca, in actions of "quit-claim" is possibly quite pertinent. Elsewhere (1968:2, 91, and 187) they note that

Hence, the Green Knight may bear the stick of holly as, doubtless among other things, a legal token of his faith in the contract he proposes to make.

Be that as it may, there is no denying his legalism, just as there is no denying Gawain's equally legalistic response:

The Green Knight acknowledges Gawain's legal formality and goes on to emphasize the economics of the contract:{51/52}



Gawain will go to the Green Chapel to fetch his wages; and there indeed the Green Knight will pay him his wages: "`Haf þy helme of þy hede, and haf here þy pay'" (2247; emphasis added; cf. 2341). The terms of the contract are exact; the law is ironclad, so much so that when Gawain cannot take any more, the Green Knight continues his legalistic precision with a formal release (relaxatio; Pollock and Maitland 1968:2, 91): "`I relece þe of þe remnaunt of ry3tes alle oþer'" (2342). When Gawain cannot fulfill the law, he is legally released from his obligation.

Now this formal release deserves closer scrutiny. Gawain and the Green Knight obviously engage in a business transaction at the Green Chapel: "`If any wy3e o3t wyl, wynne hider fast, / Oþer now oþer neuer, his nedez tospede'" (2215-16; emphasis added), exclaims Gawain when he first arrives at the chapel. In this transaction, the text is unambiguous, Gawain is to receive wages and the Green Knight is to pay him. Not only the earlier passage recounting the Green Knight's terms to Gawain in Arthur's court but also two others make this very clear:


At the same time, the text is, as we have seen, equally unambiguous that Gawain owes the Green Knight a debt from which he is released. Hence Gawain is receiving wages when he is paying a debt. Gawain's wages are paradoxically his debt. The Green Knight pays Gawain (though only partially, with a nick in the neck) what Gawain owes him {52/53} liability, a gain that is a loss.

Behind this suggestion, I think, lies the authority of St. Paul: "Stipendia enim peccati, mors (For the wages of sin are death)" (Rom. 6.23). The wages of sin, or death, are a debt owed to nature. For he who sins and is not redeemed uses his flesh, which is nature's, to his own selfish pleasures, but nature eventually collects its own at death when it reclaims the flesh just as the devil collects his own when he claims the sinful soul (the devil, of course, cannot reclaim the soul).8 Because of his refusal to accept mortality (nostram humanitatem), Gawain has reaped the wages of sin, or death, that he owes to the Green Knight, who is, on one level, the figure of nature. Because Gawain is too proud to lay his life down, as every man must, he has to face the alternative of having his life forcibly taken from him. However, the Green Knight, if a figure of nature, is not, to Gawain's lasting spiritual health, nature sub lege.9 Nature sub lege can only kill in the merciless surge of generation and corruption (this surge is brilliantly suggested by the poem in lines 498-99: "A 3ere 3ernes ful 3erne, and 3eldez neuer lyke, / þe forme to þe fynisment foldez ful selden"). The Green Knight, on the contrary, is nature sub gratia, which can interrupt the surge of generation and corruption through the power of the Mediator who redeemed fallen nature, and can release a man from the wages of sin, þe remnaunt of ry3tes alle oþer. Nature sub gratia, which, in the human frame of reference, we understand to be man in his flesh redeemed, can repent, can suffer as penance, and thus lay life down in that affirmation that raises life up; and the figure of nature sub gratia, such as the Green Knight, can confess or administer the sacrament of penance. There is always in nature the possibility of change (thus the poem's repeated emphasis on the seasons); and in nature redeemed, such change can be more than mere mutability, it can be conversion. Even death can die (Hos. 13. 14 and 1 Cor. 15. 55).

Hence the Green Knight does not pay Gawain his full wages, for which Gawain is indebted to him: he does not decapitate him; he only nicks him in the neck. Whereupon, he not only releases Gawain from the remainder of the debt (ry3tez); he also absolves him of his sin--"`I halde þe polysed of þat ply3t, and pured as clene, / As þou hadez neuer forfeted syþen þou watz fyrst borne.'" The Green Knight, therefore, is of the Old Testament in that he makes laws, covenants, contracts, and rules by which he tests Gawain; he is of the Old Testament also in that he administers circumcision, the sacramentum Mediatoris, to Gawain. But he is also of the New Testament in that he has {53/54} Testament insofar as he must teach Gawain the weight of the Law in the flesh; he is of the New Testament insofar as he thereupon lifts that weight as far as it can be lifted in this life. The wages of sin are death, but they do not have to be collected, that is, paid. When Gawain reports to Arthur's court his adventure, he þe lace hondeled and lamented that "`þis is þe laþe and þe losse þat I la3t haue / Of couardise and couetyse þat I haf ca3t þare'" (2505-8; emphasis added). The green girdle is a loss-- as it were, damages. But it could have been worse. Gawain could have had to pay, that is, collect the wages of sin.

The Green Knight releases Gawain from the remnaunts of ry3tes alle oþer because Gawain literally cannot collect his wages, pay his debt: "`þa3 my hede falle on þe stonez, / I con not hit restore'" (2282-83). Because Gawain cannot re-attach his head, he flinches at the Green Knight's first blow. But although this is a failure--and the Green Knight does capitalize on it (2270-79)--it is not Gawain's most serious failure nor the one, finally, because of which he is circumcised at the Green Chapel. The Green Knight explains at length:



Gawain takes the tappe because he did not restore the green girdle to Bertilak. The phrase Trwe mon trwe restore defies translation because modern English is impoverished of the ethical vis 10 compressed in these Middle English words. A rough and ready paraphrase is probably the best that can be expected: something like `the one who is true the way truth itself is true must restore with an equal truth.' But {54/55} immersed in, bound to, time: `At þe þrid þou fayled þore.' As important as the verb `failed' is the noun `third,' for it marks Gawain's temporality-- which is to say, his humanity. Once, perhaps twice, Gawain approaches the absolute ideal of Trwe mon trwe restore, but risk increases with frequency, and if þrid tyme þrowe best (1680)--where the mysterious fullness of the number three would somehow confirm Gawain's ideality and universality--the third time, alas, proves one time too many for Gawain's mortal endurance. He cannot live up to (or into) the ideal three times in a row because time, which is mortality, claims him as its creature. Gawain, because he is human, cannot escape time any more than he can fulfill the law; he cannot live without relationships nor apart from relativity. This is the limit of the Law: Gawain cannot be trwe.