Bevis of Hampton

Bevis of Hampton is one of the most widely read English romances of the Middle Ages — translated into a dozen European languages, adapted into chapbooks, and still being printed as a popular tale well into the eighteenth century. The hero is a Southampton knight whose father is murdered by his mother and her lover; sold into slavery in the East, he rises by strength and courage, wins the horse Arundel and the sword Morglay, falls in love with the Saracen princess Josian, and undertakes a lifetime of adventures before returning to claim his inheritance.

The geography is specific and local in a way that marks the romance as rooted in real landscape: Arundel Castle, Southampton Water, the figure of Ascapart carved on the Bargate, the tradition of Bevis's bones in Arundel. The poem uses English place names with the same confidence it uses exotic Eastern settings, anchoring an improbable romance in recognisable southern England.

Bevis is arguably the founding figure of Hampshire and Sussex popular legend — his name given to Bevis's Tower in Winchester and to streets in Southampton. Where Arthur is the mythic king and Robin Hood the outlaw, Bevis is the exile who fights his way home: a knight whose glory is inseparable from the particular stretch of English coast he calls his own.