S ir Bevis of Hampton presents an astonishing instance of persistence and later influence. Translated from the Anglo-Norman c. 1300, the poem was printed, in its essentially medieval text and as part of a continuous tradition of non-scholarly reading, from the incunable period until 1711. It was also read in manuscript during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the marks and annotations of readers attest. Bevis is therefore clearly part of the historical depth of the literary culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Understanding how the text was received – and, in the context of its assimilation into new works, transformed – entails an important sense of the complex continuities between the medieval and Renaissance periods. Norfolk's wry observation in Shakespeare's Henry VIII, that the exaggerated feats of chivalry at the Field of Cloth of Gold ‘got credit / That Bevis was believed’, indicates only one possible response to the legend: bemused, possibly scornful, recognition of its appealing but essentially puerile fantasies. Roger Ascham and Thomas Nashe are the figures quoted most often as representative of the Humanist and Protestant objection to a work (and its romance tradition in general) that was seen to originate in ‘monkish’ culture. John Selden, in providing a historian's commentary on Michael Drayton’s verse ‘Songs’ celebrating the British landscape and its legends in PolyOlbion, writes: ‘And it is wished that the poeticall Monkes in celebration of him [Bevis], Arthur, and other such Worthies had containd themselves within bounds of likelyness.’ Many more instances of the disparaging reactions of Humanist and Protestant readers could be cited.

But Bevis continued to be read. These comments deserve to be seen as testimonies to that fact rather than indications of waning popularity. What Selden's comment above really alerts us to is two major concerns preoccupying early modern authors (and by implication readers) who sought to make a more positive response to the insistent presence of Bevis than, say, Nashe, with his airy dismissal of ‘worne out absurdities’. One problem for writers and readers in a post-Reformation context was how to validate ‘monkish’ literature. This was part of a larger project extending well beyond romance.