Suppose girls cannot inherit, but your only child is a daughter and you happen to have an enormous inheritance, what will you do? Since to try to change the law may be too hard to be a one-man task, it is much easier to dress the girl as a boy and fool everyone. With any luck, you might just get away with it.
This is precisely what Cador, Duke of Cornwell, does when he finds out his new-born heir is a girl, and King Eban of England just banned girl-inheritance not too long ago. Just in case they may not produce a male heir later, Cador and his wife Eufemie decide to bring up the girl as a son. As if to hush her identity, the girl is aptly named Silentius – Silence.
Composed in the second half of the 13th century, The Romance of Silence however has fallen into silence until 1911, when the manuscript (MS. Mi.LM.6, University of Nottingham) was discovered in a box in a manor house in England, marked ‘old papers—no value’. Little is known of the author, except at the end of the poem he identifies himself as ‘Heldris of Cornwall’, which is likely a pen name picked from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain).
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