The Tournament of Tottenham is 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 rhyming aaaa, followed by five shorter
(roughly three-stress) lines rhyming bcccb. The
stanza form recalls that of some of the betterknown
heroic romances of the north, including
texts like The AWNTYRS OFF ARTHURE and even SIR
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 the Tournament of Tottenham
travesties many elements of the courtly romance.
But it has been suggested (see Jones) 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.
Bibliography
Jones, George F. “The Tournaments of Tottenham
and Lappenhausen,” PMLA 66 (1951): 1123–
1140.
The Tournament of Tottenham, in Middle 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 in The
Tournament of Tottenham (1400–1440),” Fifteenth-
Century Studies 23 (1997): 152–170.