In addition, he was willing to “endow words with new or at least strained meanings, and introduce notions that are either quite at odds with the immediate context of the rhyme-word embodying them, or conflict with statements made a very short time earlier.” All three of these romances show this idiosyncrasy and produce narrative that is both “terse in its statements and disjointed in its continuity. In both Sir Launfal and Libeaus Desconus, story elements from more than one romance have been stitched together to make the tale as a whole, and some allusions to his sources are very condensed.” Like many Middle English poets working with older material, he shows a preference to reduce moral ambiguity and to avoid any great agonising over love. Chestre's subject matter and inspiration Nothing is known of Thomas Chester outside of the one verse romance he is known to have penned and the two that lie either side of it in British Museum MS Cotton Caligula A.ii. Octavian is a tale of a young prince who is taken as a baby by an animal and reared as the son of a merchant, before displaying his noble qualities, fighting with a giant, winning great martial acclaim and finally being reunited with his real family again. It has many of the traits of folk-tale or Breton lai. Following this in the manuscript, Sir Launfal is an Arthurian tale in which King Arthur's steward is reduced to dire poverty, meets with an Otherworld fay in a woodland whom he falls in love with and is magically restored to great wealth again. It is based ultimately upon one of the 12th-century Breton lais recorded by Marie de France, the lay Lanval, via a Middle English romance Sir Landevale, an Old French lay of Graelent and a lost romance that might have included a giant named Sir Valentyne. Following this, Libeaus Desconus is another Arthurian tale., in which a young man who does not know his own name journeys from King Arthur's court to a city in which a lady is kept prisoner. She is finally rescued by him with a kiss, upon which she changes from a snake into a beautiful maiden. On the way to her city, the hero has already encountered another lady of enchantments, an elf-queen, and defeated a giant who was guarding her. The ultimate sources for this tale might be a lost