The Middle English verse romance Sir Bevis of Hampton enjoyed extraordinary popularity during the medieval and early modern periods. It is found in nine manuscripts, and in nineteen printed versions from the early sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, the earliest being that printed by Wynkyn de Worde in c.1500 (Jackson, Ferguson and Pantzer, 1976-91). Some early seventeenth-century versions include woodcut illustrations, but the story had already been finely illustrated in the second quarter of the fourteenth century in the Taymouth Hours (Brownrigg, 1989).
The source of the story is the very late twelfth-century Anglo-Norman Boeve de Haumtone (Martin 2014). This is variously described as a …
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Citation: Forest-Hill, Lynn. "Bevis of Hampton". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 18 December 2017 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=38765, accessed 27 November 2024.]
