A reappraisal of the tail-rhyme form so strongly associated with medieval English romance, and how it became so appropriated. Tail-rhyme romance unites a French genre with a continental stanza form, so why was it developed only in Middle English literature? For English audiences, tail-rhyme becomes inextricably linked with the romance genre in a way thatno other verse form does. The first examples are recorded near the beginning of the fourteenth...