[2][3] The name Thomas Chestre occurs only once in medieval writings, in the single manuscript copy that remains of the late-14th-century Middle English verse romance Sir Launfal.
The difficulty in assigning a more precise indication of the region of England that Thomas Chestre may have hailed from lies in the readiness of all three works to borrow lines and phrases directly from other Middle English romances.
[14] In both Sir Launfal and Libeaus Desconus, story elements from more than one romance have been stitched together to make the tale as a whole,[15] and some allusions to his sources are very condensed.”[16] Like many Middle English poets working with older material, he shows a preference to reduce moral ambiguity and to avoid any great agonising over love.
Octavian is a tale of a young prince who is taken as a baby by an animal and reared as the son of a merchant, before displaying his noble qualities, fighting with a giant, winning great martial acclaim and finally being reunited with his real family again.
[18] Following this in the manuscript, Sir Launfal is an Arthurian tale in which King Arthur's steward is reduced to dire poverty, meets with an Otherworld fay in a woodland whom he falls in love with and is magically restored to great wealth again.