When No One Steps Up

It's easy to distinguish the hero from the rest of the crowd when he's the only one brave enough to step forward to accept a high-stakes one-on-one challenge.

But how to characterize the crowd's silence, when no one accepts OR declines outright?  Here are some tentative initial thoughts on examples in a few versions of the story of Guy of Warwick and in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

(The earliest Anglo-Norman lay, Gui de Warewic, apparently was written shortly before 1204.  I haven't found the actual text yet, so I'm not sure what if anything it says about the incident.)

In Guy of Warwick (stanzas) in the Auchinleck Manuscript (est. between c. 1331 - 1340), we get a simile -- the nobles are as silent as men who shaved their crowns (i.e. as silent as monks):

[S]til seten erls & barouns          9801
As men hadde schauen her crounes;Nouȝt on answere nold.

Likewise, in the "first or 14th-century version" of the Romance of Guy of Warwick, on a summer's day, when the king asks for a champion to fight the Danes' giant in single combat:

They stode all styll, and lokyd down,
As a man had shavyn ther crown.      10395

Here, although the king recognizes this silence as cowardice, I'm not sure the narrator says so in his own voice.

From Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (probably mid-to-late 14th C and perhaps as early as 1348), during Arthur's Christmas revels:

Þerfore to answare watz arȝe mony aþel freke,
And al stouned at his steuen and stonstil seten
In a swoghe sylence þurȝ þe sale riche;
As al were slypped vpon slepe so slaked hor lotez
in hyȝe--
I deme hit not al for doute,
Bot sum for cortaysye--
Bot let hym þat al schulde loute
Cast vnto þat wyȝe.

So the Gawain poet uses a different simile - they are as silent as if they were asleep!  And the narrator pretty much calls them out on being too afraid to speak up, though it's slyly couched as if he were speaking in their defense.  But the narrator deems 'not al' of them were afraid; some may have been being courteously deferential.

In the "second or 15th-century version" of the Romance of Guy of Warwick:

All they sate stone stylle:
A worde þey spake nodur gode nor ylle.      10028
Nodur erle nor knyȝt, þat was þere,
Durste speke a worde for pewre fere.

Here, they were still as stones (the simile is apparently already fossilized into a conventional phrase, it would seem).  If I understand correctly, the narrator doesn't mince words: it's pure fear that keeps them silent.