TWO battling bishops – one real and one imaginary, one East Anglian and one not – feature in this paper. The former is the somewhat bellicose Henry Despenser, bishop of Norwich 1370–1406, whilst the latter is Bishop Turpin, the epitome of muscular Christianity and the hero of the Sege off Melayne, a latefourteenth- century Middle English verse romance. The aims of this paper are two-fold – to consider Despenser's portrayal in the chronicles in the light of Turpin's characterisation in the romance, and to explore the possibility that the Sege off Melayne could have served a purpose as propaganda for Despenser's ill-fated Flanders crusade of 1383.

One of thirteen texts usually classified as Middle English Charlemagne romances, the Sege off Melayne opens with the Saracens overrunning Rome and Lombardy, destroying Christian images and replacing them with their own idols, before capturing the city of Milan. The Lord of Milan is advised in a dream to seek help from Charlemagne and, at the same time, an angel appears in a dream to Charlemagne urging him to revenge this attack on Christendom. The knight Roland is sent to the relief of the city with a French force but is defeated. Dismayed by Charlemagne's failure to respond to the Saracen threat, Bishop Turpin excommunicates him and raises an army of clerics to march on Paris, thereby forcing the king to take action. Turpin is a fiery and unflinchingly aggressive member of the clergy who seems to be more comfortable wielding a sword than holding a crozier. An unswerving defender of the faith, he demands the same commitment from those around him and is in the vanguard of the Christian forces which subsequently engage the Saracens. Defeated, the infidels retreat into Milan. Although the narrative is incomplete, breaking off at the point where Charlemagne's forces are massing before the walls of the city in a second attempt to retake it, the dynamics of the poem's structure are such that a Christian victory, prompted by the example of a truly heroic, and Christ-like, Turpin, is inevitable.

The single extant version of the Sege off Melayne is found in one of two manuscripts compiled by Robert Thornton during the first half of the fifteenth century. Melayne's first editor ascribed its date of composition to the end of the fourteenth century, but added the caveat that the work was difficult to date or locate accurately.