Like many folkoric legends, the importance of the story of Sir Gowther is not its actual content, but the light that it sheds on the preoccupations of the day. There were two distinct battles facing Christianity as a whole and Catholicism in particular at the time; one, the perceived threat of the existing pagan beliefs that still permeated areas of Britain, particularly in the country, and the threat of the Ottoman Empire and the Crusades. Because of this, an old traditional folk tale, Robert the Devil, is altered slightly to make the key threat to the spiritual well-being of the nation the invading Arabs, and the belief in mystical figures whose intentions were generally evil and mystical.
The monarchy did not want the Pagan beliefs held by its people to continue to supersede Catholicism and one of the ways in which this can be seen in the text is with the introduction of the nuns as the victims of a murderous young Sir Gowther. At the start of the story, a man influenced by paganism is brutal and murderous towards the nuns, the symbols of their Catholic beliefs, but at the end of the story he treats them with reverence, and is seen to have finally attained absolution. Simply interpreted, good people are nice to nuns but bad people are not. This quickly becomes an association between good and Catholicism.
Similarly, the honorable Knights are fighting valiantly alongside the Emperor of Germany against the hordes and the rabble representing the Sultan. The Sultan is the invader, and the pillager who comes into another nation and demands the hand of its ruler in marriage. The Sultan is seen to have no respect for lands, boundaries or people, and as such takes whatever he wants without regret or repentance This shows the way in which the Arab nations, and non-Catholic nations, were looked at at the time of writing the text.
