her new-born baby and they are set adrift without food or water, at the mercy of the winds and the currents, to share a fate that is suffered also by Emaré and by Geoffrey Chaucer's heroine Constance in his Canterbury tale from the Man of Law. Soon they are driven onto a rock, and mother and baby go ashore to sit with the seagulls. A griffin appears from out of nowhere and carries the baby off. Now mother and father and son are all separated. But the reader or listener knows that they will be reunited at the end of the tale, for this is a romance; in essence a comedy, not a tragedy. The baby boy is carried to the kingdom of Israel, where the griffin is spotted landing, stork-like, with the baby. News of this is brought to the king, the child is named Degarébel and he is raised as the king's son. And his mother, in fact, suffers a curiously similar fate. Having set off again from the rock of seagulls, she is carried in the boat by wind and tide until she is washed ashore in Egypt where she is found by the king of that country. She tells him who she is and is informed by the King of Egypt that she is his niece. Quite quickly, as the tale proceeds, she becomes his daughter, in a plotting device that, although clearly inconsistent with the beginning of the tale, has similarities with a new identity, following separation, taken by Emare, and by Sir Degare, by the boy Florent in the romance Octavian and by the blacksmith Sir Isumbras. Fifteen years pass before she is made the high-ranking prize at a tournament for would-be suitors. Sir Eglamour has already recovered from the wound he received whilst slaying the dragon, returned home to Artois, been told the dreadful news about Christabel and after seizing control of Artois from the earl, has travelled to the Holy Land. But fifteen years have now passed and Sir Eglamour, at last, is making his way back home. Christabel is looking for a husband and is the prize at a tournament in Egypt. Her son Degarébel, in Israel, has just learned that a beautiful woman is available to wed. If he can prove his courage on the tournament field he can win her, so he is on his way to Egypt to