Percivale Resists the Devil’s Temptations

Percivale Resists the Devil’s Temptations is a sequence of ordeals in which apparent assistance repeatedly conceals spiritual danger. A lost horse, a perilous journey, isolation, hunger, and a beautiful woman’s offer of help test Percivale’s judgment; his decisive defense is to remember his service to God and the vows of his knighthood. The episode ends with a holy man explaining that the tempter was the fallen angel, and Percivale departing by ship after learning how narrowly he had escaped.

Distress and the first bargain

A yeoman pursues Percivale to ask whether he has seen a knight riding away on a black steed. The knight has taken the yeoman’s horse by force, and the yeoman fears his lord will punish him when he is found. Percivale is on foot, but the yeoman offers him his own hackney and agrees to follow on foot while Percivale tries to recover the stolen animal.

Percivale catches up with the knight and calls on him to turn and fight. The knight instead drives his spear into the hackney’s breast, killing it and throwing Percivale to the ground, then rides on without answering Percivale’s challenge to fight on foot. Left without a mount, Percivale casts aside his helmet and sword and calls himself wretched and more unfortunate than other knights. He remains in sorrow until nightfall, falls asleep from exhaustion, and wakes at midnight to find a woman asking what he is doing there.

The woman offers him her own horse if he will promise to fulfil her wishes when she summons him. Glad of the offer, Percivale agrees. She returns with a large, well-equipped black horse, and he rides away without taking heed. In less than an hour, the horse carries him four days’ journey to a roaring, turbulent water and tries to bear him into it. Percivale makes the sign of the cross; the fiend throws him off, plunges into the water, and disappears amid cries and a strange appearance of burning water. Percivale recognizes the threat as an attempt to bring him to perdition, commends himself to God, and prays through the night.

Wilderness and apparent aid

By morning Percivale is on a wild mountain, nearly surrounded by the sea and without sight of land that might offer refuge. In a valley he sees a young serpent carrying a young lion by the neck, pursued by a larger lion. He chooses to help the lion, which he judges the more natural beast, and wounds the serpent with his sword. The lion does not attack him; instead it shows him affection. Percivale strokes the animal and thanks God for its companionship. At noon the lion carries its cub away, leaving Percivale alone.

The narrative describes Percivale as among the people of his time who believed most firmly in Christ, when few, it says, believed perfectly. He asks God to keep temptation from turning him away from divine service and to let him endure as a true champion. The lion later returns and lies at his feet; they sleep together through the night. Percivale dreams of two ladies, one riding a lion and the other a serpent—a vision whose significance the holy man later explains.

At midday a ship, driven across the sea, comes beneath the rock. It is covered with black silk, like a bier, and carries a richly dressed woman of great beauty. She warns Percivale that he is stranded and will die there of hunger and hardship. He answers that he serves the best of men and trusts that his Lord will not abandon him, invoking the assurance that whoever seeks will not be hidden from him. The woman knows his name; Percivale, in turn, says he knows more about her than she supposes.

She says she has seen the red knight with the white shield pursuing two knights to the Water of Mortaise. The two crossed, but the red knight’s horse was drowned and he escaped to land through his own strength. Percivale is delighted by the report because he longs to meet that knight. The woman offers to take him to him, but first asks him to promise, on the faith of his knighthood, to do her will whenever she summons him. Percivale agrees.

The devil’s appeal and Percivale’s resistance

The woman claims to be a gentlewoman dispossessed of her inheritance. She says that she was once the richest woman in the world, and that a powerful lord made her exceptionally beautiful. Her pride and a word that displeased him, she alleges, caused him to drive her from his company and inheritance without pity for her or her household. She says she has since taken many of his men and made them her own, rewarding those who ask her for anything. She and her followers, she claims, wage war against him day and night. Appealing to Percivale as a good knight and a fellow of the Round Table, she asks him not to fail a dispossessed gentlewoman seeking help. Percivale promises to assist her as far as he can.

In the heat of the day she has a pavilion brought and set up on the gravel, removes Percivale’s helmet and shield, and lets him rest. When he wakes and asks for food, she provides a plentiful table with every kind of meat he can imagine and the strongest wine he has tasted. After drinking, he becomes heated and sees her as the fairest creature he has ever beheld. He asks her for love. She initially refuses, but continues to encourage his desire, then makes her favor conditional: he must swear to become her true servant and do nothing except what she commands. Percivale gives his word by the faith of his body.

As he approaches her, he happens to see his naked sword lying on the ground. Its pommel bears a red cross and the sign of the crucifix. The sight recalls his knighthood and the promise he had made earlier to the good man. Percivale makes the sign of the cross on his forehead. The pavilion turns upside down and changes into smoke and a black cloud. He calls on Jesus Christ not to let him be shamed, recognizing that divine grace has saved him when he was close to being lost.

The woman enters a ship and accuses Percivale of betraying her; it departs amid noise that makes the water seem to burn. Percivale grieves at how close he came to sin and fears that he nearly lost his virginity, which he believes, once lost, can never be recovered. As penance, he wounds himself in the thigh and asks the Lord to accept the act in recompense. He covers the wound with a piece of his shirt. The account presents this as his own severe response to the temptation, not as the means by which he recognized it: that recognition came when the cross on his sword recalled the promises he had made.

Recognition and departure

The ship that had carried the good man appears from the east. Ashamed, Percivale falls into a swoon; when he wakes, he approaches the man weakly, greets him, and recounts what has happened. Asked whether he recognized the woman, Percivale says he did not, though he knows the fiend sent her to shame him.

The good man explains that she was the chief fiend of hell, with power above all devils, and the old woman whom Percivale had seen in his vision riding the serpent. He identifies her as the brightest angel in heaven before Christ cast her out for her sin, and connects her fall and loss of inheritance to the story she had told Percivale. He also explains that she was the adversary Percivale had encountered in the form of the serpent, and says that Percivale would have been overcome without God’s grace. The revelation joins the temptations: the woman’s tale of dispossession and rebellion repeats the fiend’s own fall, while the dream’s serpent and lion had anticipated the conflict between the devil and Percivale’s fidelity.

The good man urges Percivale to take the encounter as a warning, then vanishes. Percivale takes his arms, enters the ship, and departs. Across the episode, material need and the promise of help first invite him to bind himself to unknown powers; the cross, remembered vows, prayer, and counsel restore his direction. His resistance is therefore not portrayed as freedom from danger, but as a narrow escape made possible by divine grace and sustained by his commitment to God’s service.