The Sege of Melanyne is distinguished among the fourteenth-century Middle English Charlemagne romances by its lack of any known French source and by its unusual focus on the character of Bishop Turpin rather than on Roland and the Twelve Peers.  After Milan is captured by Saracens early in the Romance, Bishop Turpin emerges as an example of a Christian warrior when he excommunicates an ineffectual Charlemagne and leads the army against the Saracens himself.  The bishop later performs miracles, receives Christ-like wounds, and oddly turns Marian devotion to a marital cause.  Turpin’s own passion for battle is complemented by the romance’s simultaneously horrific and sublime descriptions of battlefield violence. 

            In this paper, I will argue that the violent battles in this romance serve not solely to bring about the defeat of the Saracen enemy, but also to define and solidify the collective identity of the English Christian audience.  Turpin’s repeated wounding and self-sacrificing refusal to be healed recall the sacrifices of Christ, and the copious blood flowing on the battlefield becomes part of a perverse Eucharistic ceremony, with the warrior bishop as celebrant.  The cannibalistic ingestion of fallen comrade’s blood in the war-camp’s water supply can be seen to fulfill the same community-strengthening function as the Christian communion that partakes of Christ’s body and blood.  This sharing of blood literalizes the shared ethnic and political identity of the late fourteenth-century English, whose collective identity was frequently under scrutiny in the face of internal and external political strife.