The Squire of Low Degree is a romance preserved only in sixteenth-century print. Probably written around 1500, it survives complete in a 1560 printing by William Copland; two fragments of an earlier edition by Wynkyn de Worde, from around 1520, appear under the alternative title Undo your door. Besides this evidence of multiple editions, references to the tale crop up with some frequency over the next decades, indicating a notable degree of popularity and memorability. Finally, and importantly for present purposes, a much shorter version of the tale (170 lines to the complete version's 1,132) appears in the Percy Folio, a famous collection of medieval and later verse compiled in the 1640s.

As a self-conscious participant in the romance tradition – the Squire who is the work's hero wishes that he were ‘so bolde in chyvalry/As Syr Gawayne, or Syr Guy’ (lines 79–80) – the text has been regarded as something of a parody, even a pastiche, of the genre. On the surface it is a highly conventional exercise – a squire loves a princess; he is betrayed by a jealous steward; he is sent into exile to prove himself with deeds of chivalry for seven years and, on his triumphant return, is rewarded with marriage to his lady. But, as Nicola McDonald pointed out in a 2012 article, such a summary misses the most memorable and disturbing aspect of the text. The pivotal episode in the narrative is the Squire's attempt to say farewell to his lady the night before his departure: he comes to the door of her chamber and begs to be let in. She refuses, citing her chastity and devoted love. He is set upon by the treacherous steward with more than thirty men, and in the melée the steward is killed. His fellows disguise the steward's body as that of the Squire, disfiguring his face, and leave the corpse outside the door, while hustling the Squire off to prison. The princess rises naked from her bed to open the door; believing the corpse to be her lover, she embalms it and keeps it in her chamber, praying for him, kissing and clasping the remains, for seven ensuing years of mourning.