SOURCE: "The Lambeth Version of Havelok," Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Vol. XV, No. 1, 1900, pp. 1-16.

In the following essay, Putnam examines the version of Havelok the Dane found in the Lambeth manuscript and considers its origin, pointing out possible debts to both French and English sources, omissions of supernatural and clearly fictitious elements, and its unusual sequence.

Of the several abridgments of the Havelok story in the chronicles of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, that which is interpolated in the Lambeth MS. of Robert Mannyng of Brunne's translation of Peter de Langtoft, is the longest and in many respects the most noteworthy.¹ It has, however, not received the attention it merits. Madden attributes it to the scribe, who, he says, has made other changes in the MS. He describes it as "an abridged outline of the story itself, copied apparently from the French chronicle...