''The Seege of Troye'' or ''The Batayle of Troye'' is a

Middle English Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English p ...

poem, the earliest in English of numerous medieval retellings of the Trojan War in art and literature. Somewhat crudely it thoroughly blends its two main sources,

Dares Phrygius Dares Phrygius ( grc, Δάρης), according to Homer, was a Trojan priest of Hephaestus. He was supposed to have been the author of an account of the destruction of Troy, and to have lived before Homer. A work in Latin, purporting to be a transla ...

and

Benoît de Sainte-Maure Benoît de Sainte-Maure (; died 1173) was a 12th-century French poet, most probably from Sainte-Maure-de-Touraine near Tours, France. The Plantagenets' administrative center was located in Chinon, west of Tours. ''Le Roman de Troie'' His 40,000 ...

's , and draws upon the

Rawlinson Excidium Troie The Rawlinson ''Excidium Troie'' ("The Destruction of Troy"), discovered among the manuscripts collected by Richard Rawlinson (1690–1755) conserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, is unique in that it contains the only medieval account of the ...

for episodes of the youth of Paris.E. Bagby Atwood, "The Judgment of Paris in the ''Seege of Troye''" '' PMLA'' 57.2 (June 1942), pp. 343–353. The poem survives in four manuscripts, among the

Harleian The Harleian Library, Harley Collection, Harleian Collection and other variants ( la, Bibliotheca Harleiana) is one of the main "closed" collections (namely, historic collections to which new material is no longer added) of the British Library in ...

manuscripts (MS 525), at

Lincoln's Inn The Honourable Society of Lincoln's Inn is one of the four Inns of Court in London to which barristers of England and Wales belong and where they are called to the Bar. (The other three are Middle Temple, Inner Temple and Gray's Inn.) Lincoln ...

(MS 150), Egerton MS 2862, and

College of Arms The College of Arms, or Heralds' College, is a royal corporation consisting of professional Officer of Arms, officers of arms, with jurisdiction over England, Wales, Northern Ireland and some Commonwealth realms. The heralds are appointed by the ...

Arundel MS 22. The poem contains a lengthy and repetitive account of the

Judgement of Paris Judgement (or US spelling judgment) is also known as ''adjudication'', which means the evaluation of evidence to make a decision. Judgement is also the ability to make considered decisions. The term has at least five distinct uses. Aristotle s ...

, which is recounted by Paris to the assembled Trojans.

References

Seege of Troye, The Seege of Troye, The 14th-century poems Middle English literature Works of unknown authorship {{poetry-stub