Thomas Chestre's Sources
Most of the themes and motifs in Libeaus Desconus are drawn from a common stock of medieval Arthurian material. It is difficult to assign a unique work from which this Middle English poem derives, although some have argued for a lost twelfth century romance from which both Libeaus Desconus and the much earlier, late-twelfth or early-thirteenth century Old French Le Bel Inconnu have their source. Le Bel Inconnu may have been known to the author in a manuscript copy that was not identical to the only copy which now survives, and Thomas Chestre may have had access to this 'as well as other, related, material'.
There are Old French, Middle High German and Italian versions of this tale, however, ranging in date from the late-twelfth/early thirteenth century to the fifteenth century, and the similarities, links and differences between them seem too complex simply to assume a lost twelfth-century work from which they all originate. This, despite a line in Libeaus Desconus that refers to a French source, “in Frensshe as it is j-ffounde” when describing a scene that differs from Le Bel Inconnu.
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