Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Middle English: "Sir Gawayn and þe Grene Knyȝt") is a late 14th-century Middle English chivalric romance. It is one of the best known Arthurian stories, with its plot combining two types of folklore motifs, the beheading game and the exchange of winnings. Written in stanzas of alliterative verse, each of which ends in a rhyming bob and wheel, it draws on Welsh, Irish, and English stories, as well as the French chivalric tradition. It is an important example of a chivalric romance, which typically involves a hero who
Treason in Arthurian legend of true nobility and manhood. Therefore, knights who committed treasonous crimes threatened to undermine the sanctity of the order as a whole, and all that it stood for. Thus, punishments for knights and nobles deemed traitors typically involved some kind of process in which their identities as both knights, and men, were stripped away. Executions of treasonous knights included a process of removing the physical representations of their titles, such as “breaking of the traitor’s sword and striking of his spurs, removing his sword belt, and publicly stripping him of the rich clothing that visually communicated his status.” Punishments could