The Chaucer Review: An Indexed Bibliography (Vols. 1-30)

McColly, William. "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a Romance a Clef." 23 (1988): 78-92.
Internal evidence marks Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as having been written in the last 25 years of the fourteenth century, probably in Cheshire or Staffordshire. Historical figures can be suggested to correspond with different figures in the poem on the basis of striking similarities between those figures and characters in the poem. Numerous resemblances connect Sir Robert de Vere to Sir Gawain and Sir Hugh Calveley to Bercilak, the Green Knight.