Arthurian Literature XXVII [27] 1843842580, 9781843842583

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spine 21.5mm A 9 Sep 10

Archibald and Johnson (eds)

Contributors: Aisling Byrne, Emma Campbell, P. J. C. Field, Kenneth Hodges, Megan Leitch, Andrew Lynch, Sue Niebrzydowski, Karen Robinson.

Cover: King Arthur’s vision of Fortune’s wheel, from La Mort le Roi Artus, c.1316, BL MS Add. 10294, f. 89 †(© British Library Board).

ARTHURIAN LITERATURE 27

The influence and significance of the legend of Arthur is fully demonstrated by the subject matter and time-span of articles here: topics range from early Celtic sources and analogues of Arthurian plots to popular interest in King Arthur in sixteenth-century London, from the thirteenth-century French prose Mort Artu to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Also included are discussion of shapeshifters and loathly ladies, attitudes to treason, royal deaths and funerals in the fifteenth century and the nineteenth, late medieval Scottish politics, and early modern chivalry.

Arthurian literature 27

BOYDELL & BREWER Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com

Edited by Elizabeth Archibald and David F. Johnson

ARTHURIAN LITERATURE XXVII

ARTHURIAN LITERATURE Incorporating Arthurian Yearbook ISSN  0261–9946 Editors Elizabeth Archibald, University of Bristol David F. Johnson, Florida State University, Tallahassee Editorial Board James Carley, York University Julia Crick, University of Exeter Tony Hunt, University of Oxford Marianne Kalinke, Illinois University Norris Lacy, Pennsylvania State University Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, Cardiff University Andrew Lynch, University of Western Australia Ad Putter, University of Bristol Felicity Riddy, University of York Alison Stones, University of Pittsburgh Toshiyuki Takamiya, University of Keio Raymond H. Thompson, Acadia University Michael Twomey, Ithaca College Arthurian Literature is an interdisciplinary publication devoted to the scholarly and critical study of all aspects of Arthurian legend in Europe in the medieval and early modern periods. Articles on writings from later periods are included if they relate very directly to medieval and early modern sources, although the editors welcome bibliographical studies of all periods. Articles may be up to 20,000 words in length; short items, of under 5,000 words, are published as Notes. Updates on earlier articles are also welcomed. Material for consideration should be sent to Boydell & Brewer: contributors should follow the style sheet printed at the end of XII of the series. The contents of previous volumes are listed at the back of this book.

Arthurian Literature XXVII Edited by ELIZABETH ARCHIBALD DAVID F. JOHNSON

D. S. BREWER

©  Contributors 2010 All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2010 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN  978–1–84384–258–3

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc, 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents General Editors’ Foreword

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List of contributors

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I

Commemoration in La Mort le roi Artu Emma Campbell

II

‘… “if indeed I go”’: Arthur’s Uncertain End in Malory and Tennyson Andrew Lynch

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III The Intruder at the Feast: Negotiating Boundaries in Medieval 33 Insular Romance Aisling Byrne IV What Women Really Want: The Genesis of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale P. J. C. Field V

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Monstrous Appetite and Belly Laughs: A Reconsideration of 87 the Humour in The Weddyng of Syr Gawen and Dame Ragnell Sue Niebrzydowski

VI Speaking (of) Treason in Malory’s Morte Darthur Megan G. Leitch

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VII Lancelot of the Laik: A Scottish Mirror for Princes Karen D. Robinson

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VIII Prince Arthur’s Archers: Innovative Nostalgia in Early Modern Popular Chivalry Kenneth Hodges

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General Editors’ Foreword

Volume 27 of Arthurian Literature ranges from early Celtic sources and analogues of Arthurian plots to popular interest in King Arthur and chivalry in sixteenth-century London, from the Vulgate Cycle Mort Artu to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and includes discussion of shape-shifters, loathly ladies, attitudes to death and funerals, treason and Scottish politics. In the first essay Emma Campbell discusses commemoration in the Vulgate Cycle Mort Artu, arguing that the funerary epitaphs described there can only be partial representations of their subjects, just as the Mort itself cannot offer full closure to the Arthurian legend. Andrew Lynch also deals with death and endings in his comparison of the scene of Arthur’s death in Malory’s Morte Darthur and in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King; he shows how unconventional these bleak descriptions are in comparison with contemporary rituals of royal deaths and funerals. The next three essays concentrate on Middle English texts about shapeshifters and loathly ladies, many featuring Gawain. Aisling Byrne considers the sources and functions of the well-known motif of the intruder at the feast which also appears in Irish tales such as the Ulster Cycle; her main focus is on Middle English Gawain romances, but she notes that this motif raises ‘some of the most characteristic concerns’ of the romance genre. P. J. C. Field looks at some of the same Gawain romances in his wideranging analysis of the sources and analogues of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale, which is often (though not always) linked to the Arthurian world. Sue Niebrzydowski’s contribution focuses on one of these analogues, the fifteenth-century Weddyng of Syr Gawen and Dame Ragnell, paying special attention to its use of humour and its emphasis on food and table manners. The two essays that follow are concerned with the political and social context of two late medieval Arthurian narratives which show striking divergences from their French sources. Megan Leitch argues that Malory’s well-documented interest in fellowship and loyalty is matched by a very strong interest in treason, which is ‘resonant both for Malory and for the fifteenth-century English cultural imaginary’. Karen Robinson’s essay deals with the fragmentary Lancelot of the Laik, a little-known Scottish adaptation of part of the thirteenth-century French Lancelot do Lac. Robinson argues that the ways in which the French text is expanded into a mirror for princes can be explained by contemporary politics and by attitudes to two Scottish kings, James III and James IV. In the final essay, Kenneth Hodges discusses the urban militia company of Prince Arthur’s vii

Archers and the associated writings on Arthurian chivalry by Richard Robinson, and demonstrates that interest in Arthur and his knights was alive and well in late-sixteenth-century London. Elizabeth Archibald Bristol David F. Johnson Tallahassee, Florida

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Contributors Aisling Byrne received her BA in English from University College, Dublin. She has an MPhil in Medieval and Renaissance Literature from the University of Cambridge. She is currently completing a PhD at Cambridge on ‘Otherworlds in the Medieval Literatures of Britain and Ireland’. Her research interests include medieval romance, the Arthurian tradition, depictions of the ‘Celtic fringe’ from medieval England and cultural transfer between medieval Britain and Ireland. Emma Campbell is Associate Professor of French Studies at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Medieval Saints’ Lives: The Gift, Kinship and Community in Old French Hagiography (Boydell and Brewer, 2008), and co-editor with Robert Mills of Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality and Sight in Medieval Text and Image (Palgrave, 2004). She is currently working on a monograph on translation and the untranslatable in Old French literature, and an edited volume on the ethics of medieval translation. P. J. C. Field is Emeritus Professor of English at Bangor University, and immediate past president of the International Arthurian Society. His research interests centre on Malory, but he has written on Arthurian topics from Nennius to David Jones. His most recent book is an edition of the seventh and eighth tales of Malory’s Morte Darthur, his last essay before this one a reassessment of the date of composition of the alliterative Morte Arthure. Kenneth Hodges is an associate professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Forging Chivalric Communities in Malory’s Morte Darthur (Palgrave, 2005). His current book project focuses on the ways late medieval and early modern romance imagine regions, nations, and sovereignty. Megan G. Leitch is currently completing a PhD in English Literature at St John’s College, University of Cambridge; her doctoral thesis is a study entitled ‘Wars of the Roses Literature: Romancing Treason in England, c.1435–c.1495’. Her research interests include Arthurian literature, the fifteenth century and popular romance. Andrew Lynch is a Professor in English and Cultural Studies at The University of Western Australia, and Director of the UWA Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. He has published widely on medieval and medievalist literature, with a special interest in war and peace ix

writing. He is currently working on the Australian Research Council joint project ‘Medievalism in Australian Cultural Memory’. Sue Niebrzydowski currently teaches in the School of English at Bangor University and is a project leader for the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Bangor and Aberystwyth Universities. Her research focuses on late medieval English literature in relation to gender, ageing and devotion; her recent work includes a monograph, Bonoure and Buxum: Wives in Late Medieval Literature (Peter Lang, 2006), and a study of the impact of age on Margery Kempe’s pilgrimages. Karen D. Robinson is an English Faculty Fellow at Ivy Tech Community College in Lafayette, Indiana. Her research interests include Arthurian literature, kingship and the connections between medieval literature and history. She is currently working on a monograph about Arthurian romances and the mirrors for princes tradition entitled Reflections of Royalty in Arthurian Romance.

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Commemoration in La Mort le roi Artu* Emma Campbell Commemoration – insofar as it is a conduit for private remembrance and public mourning – is situated between individual and communal fields of memory and marks their point of overlap. Commemoration is also situated at the intersection of individual and communal in another sense: it incorporates individual life – and death – into the public sphere and provides the means of celebrating it as exemplary. Yet, because of this peculiar status, commemoration poses the problem of what – or whom – one picks out as worthy of memory. As Judith Butler has pointed out, one of the primary functions of commemorative discourse is to designate individuals and behaviours that are considered worthy of public remembrance and thereby to identify what she terms ‘publicly grievable life’.1 It is precisely because it determines what kind of life qualifies for collective forms of remembrance that such discourse is instrumental in nation- or community-building. In this respect, what is excluded from the arena of public grief is at least as important as that which is included, this exclusion being a necessary condition for gestures of remembrance that help to constitute the public sphere. One reason for re-examining commemoration in La Mort le roi Artu is that the representation of remembrance in that romance seems both to draw upon and to complicate the pattern just described in ways that comment on the text’s own participation in the work of memory. Memory is represented as both an imperative and a problem in the Mort, a dynamic that manifests itself perhaps most clearly in the various monuments commemorating the dead. The romance seems repeatedly to highlight the interpretative, mutable nature of funerary text even as it asserts the relationship between historical events and the public discourse that guarantees their permanence. What is offered for commemoration within the * 1

I should like to thank Simon Gaunt, Miranda Griffin and the anonymous reader for Arthurian Literature for their generous comments on this article. J. Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York, 2004), esp. pp. 34–40.

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text thus continually shifts, as what is included or excluded from memorial discourse is revisited or revised. As I shall argue, this depiction of commemoration is, in turn, connected to the Mort’s awareness of its own investment in such a process, as a text that writes the final chapter of Arthurian history. The Mort’s complex attitude to memory is at least partially related to its position within a particular textual tradition. The Mort appears in a number of manuscripts as the concluding part of a cycle of narratives: the Estoire del Saint Graal, the Estoire de Merlin, the Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal and La Mort le roi Artu.2 These five texts are commonly known as the ‘Vulgate Cycle’ or ‘Lancelot–Grail Cycle’.3 Though it is generally thought to have been composed before the first two texts in the Vulgate Cycle grouping (i.e. the Estoire and the Merlin), the Mort self-consciously situates itself both as the continuation of the Queste and the story of Lancelot in general and also presents itself as the end of that narrative sequence. This much is apparent from the opening lines of the Mort, which apocryphally attribute the composition of the concluding part of the story (‘ceste derrienne partie’) to King Henry’s desire to hear about how the accomplished knights of the Aventures del Seint Graal met their end (1, 1–16).4 Yet, at the same time, the text seems reluctant to fix its subject and faces the problem of how to deal with the representational legacy of the text it follows.5 Though the end of the Mort asserts that this is the conclusion to the Estoire de Lancelot, the opening lines make no mention of Lancelot, focusing instead on the death of Arthur as that which 2 3

4

5

The complete cycle is transmitted in nine manuscripts. However, it is likely that many other manuscripts were originally full cyclic transmissions or were conceived as such. The genesis of the cycle is controversial. The Lancelot may have been composed independently then added to; alternatively, the Lancelot, Queste and Mort may represent a group of texts that were conceived as an ensemble from the outset. Similarly, though it is highly unlikely that the same author wrote all three texts, some critics have argued for an ‘architect’ who conceived of this ensemble as such and oversaw its production. E. Kennedy, Lancelot and the Grail: A Study of the Prose Lancelot (Oxford, 1986) and ‘The Making of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle’, in A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, ed. C. Dover (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 13–22; J. Frappier, Étude sur La Mort le roi Artu (Geneva, 1961), pp. 122–46; F. Lot, Étude sur le ‘Lancelot en prose’ (Paris, 1918), pp. 65–107. For a summary of critical views on this subject, see E. Kennedy, M. Szkilnik, R. T. Pickens, K. Pratt and A. M. L. Williams, eds., ‘Lancelot with and without the Grail: Lancelot do Lac and the Vulgate Cycle’, in The Arthur of the French: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval French and Occitan Literature, ed. G. S. Burgess and K. Pratt (Cardiff, 2006), pp. 274–324 (pp. 274–7). All references to the Mort Artu are taken from J. Frappier, ed., La Mort le roi Artu. Roman du XIIIe siècle, 3rd edn (Geneva, 1964, repr. 1996). Translations are my own. The king in question is supposed to be Henry II of England, though this attribution is fictional. See the introduction to Frappier’s edition, p. viii and, at greater length, his Étude sur La Mort le roi Artu, pp. 21–4. On authorship and dating see M. B. Fox, La Mort le roi Artus: Étude sur les manuscrits, les sources et la composition de l’œuvre (Paris, 1933), pp. 39–43 and Kennedy et al., ‘Lancelot with and without the Grail’, pp. 274–77 and 311. On this, see Kennedy et al., ‘Lancelot with and without the Grail’, pp. 314–15.

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gives the text its title.6 As we shall see, what might be seen as equivocation over whom the text is about is part of a broader dilemma in the Mort regarding what can be commemorated – a problem exemplified by Lancelot, though by no means confined to him. As others have indicated, the romance makes a sustained effort to reorientate the more negative depiction of Lancelot in the Queste and to redeem him as the best knight in the Arthurian world.7 At the same time, the Mort cannot altogether ignore what has come before and must therefore wrestle with what might, after Butler, be described as Lancelot’s problematically ‘grievable’ status as both the best knight in the world and one of the most seriously flawed. Just how the Mort addresses what can be commemorated is also potentially affected by questions of narrative authority. The Vulgate Cycle as a whole draws on the historiographic models of writers such as Wace and Geoffrey of Monmouth, while combining these with elements more clearly derived from romance traditions (most notably Chrétien de Troyes).8 The choice of prose rather than verse is significant in this regard: in the thirteenth century verse was preferred for self-consciously fictional narrative, whereas prose was more commonly used for historiographical, legal and religious works. The use of prose for the writing of fiction thus implies a claim on the part of the authors of such texts to the kind of authority associated with more supposedly serious, ‘truthful’ genres of writing.9 However, if the Mort asserts its own authority as a true account of the last phase of Arthurian history, the evidence it cites seems more open to question than that in the Queste. As in the chronicle tradition, the Mort reports inscriptions of various kinds as a guarantee of its own authenticity, yet these inscriptions – in contrast to those of the 6

7

8

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This may be partly because of the fusion that occurs in this text of the romance tradition of adultery (inherited from Chrétien and the earlier branches of the Vulgate Cycle) with the pseudochronicle narrative of Arthur’s death (exemplified by Geoffrey, Wace and the Didot Perceval): Kennedy et al., ‘Lancelot with and without the Grail’, pp. 311–12. On the organization of material around the character of Lancelot in the Vulgate Cycle as a whole, see E. Kennedy, ‘The Figure of Lancelot in the Lancelot-Graal’, in Lancelot and Guenevere: A Casebook, ed. L. J. Walters (New York, 1996), pp. 79–104. Kennedy, ‘The Figure of Lancelot in the Lancelot-Graal’; S. Gaunt, Retelling the Tale: An Introduction to Medieval French Literature (London, 2001), pp. 81–92. On the revision of the meaning of Lancelot’s adventures more generally, see Kennedy, ‘The Re-writing and Re-reading of a Text: The Evolution of the Prose Lancelot’, in The Changing Face of Arthurian Romance: Essays on Arthurian Prose Romances in Memory of Cedric E. Pickford, ed. A. Adams, A. H. Diverres et al., Arthurian Studies 16 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 1–9. R. Traschler, ‘A Question of Time: Romance and History’, in A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, ed. C. Dover (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 23–32; Kennedy, ‘The Narrative Techniques Used to Give Arthurian Romance a “Historical” Flavour’, in Conjunctures: Medieval Studies in Honor of Douglas Kelly, ed. K. Busby and N. J. Lacy (Amsterdam, 1994), pp. 219–33. J. Kittay and W. Godzich, The Emergence of Prose: An Essay in Prosaics (Minneapolis, 1987). On the Vulgate Cycle’s implication in this, see M. Griffin, The Object and the Cause in the Vulgate Cycle (London, 2005), pp. 5–7.

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text that precedes it in the cycle – cannot be relied upon as prophecy. In the world of the Mort inscriptions are, more often than not, the work of human agents and consequently lack the unquestionable authority of prophetic discourse. Indeed, the resurfacing of prophetic inscription in the Mort’s conclusion, as Helen Solterer has argued, both underlines the fallibility of other inscriptions and reaffirms prophecy as the sole valid documentary instrument.10 What we are confronted with in the Mort is thus a supposedly authoritative account citing documentary evidence that – especially when seen in comparison with the Queste – is neither definitive nor unassailable. As this would suggest, related to the issue of textual authority in the Mort is the more general matter of meaning and the problematic relationship between signifier and signified in this romance. Elizabeth Edwards has shown how this view of signification is something that distinguishes the Mort from earlier texts in the cycle: whereas cyclic romance tends to hold signs and marvels as reliable bases for judgment and action, the Mort repeatedly demonstrates the unreliability of signs, which have no revelatory power beyond what interested parties make of them.11 This crisis of signification operates within a complex time-frame, not only complicating the way in which interpretation and action are underwritten by signs, but also disrupting characters’ ability to know and remember the past. Miranda Griffin’s elegant analysis of funerary inscription in the Vulgate Cycle has further revealed how such questions of signification are intimately connected to temporality and causation as these are implicated in memorial discourse, showing how the mutability of Lancelot’s tomb, in particular, unsettles the appearance of permanence and authority that masks the contingency of the symbolic.12 Commemoration and its discontents in the Mort are thus part of a much broader set of problems which are, in important respects, specific to this romance. Such problems often crystallize in the establishment of commemorative discourse in the Mort as a process that attempts authoritatively to interpret the relationship between the individual and the public sphere. On a diegetic level, decisions over what can or should be considered worthy of memory in the Mort are made largely through the various epitaphs in the text. However, contrary to what one might expect, memorial text in the Mort is, in many cases, self-consciously interventionist and non-celebratory: as Régine Colliot observes, the funerary inscriptions that appear in this work do not serve the traditional function of laying the 10 11

12

H. Solterer, ‘Conter le terme de cest brief: L’Inscription dans la Mort le roi Artu’, in Actes du 14e Congrès international arthurien, Rennes 16–21 août, 1984 (Rennes, 1985), pp. 558–66. E. Edwards, The Genesis of Narrative in Malory’s Morte Darthur, Arthurian Studies, 43 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 118–42. Cf. E. J. Burns, Arthurian Fictions: Rereading the Vulgate Cycle (Columbus, 1985), pp. 151–67. Griffin, The Object and the Cause, pp. 19–29.

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dead to rest.13 While medieval epitaphs conventionally serve as a basis for moral reflections that are largely non-specific and unchanging, their Arthurian equivalents are personalized and, in many cases, actively intervene in the world of the living. Partly as a result of this dynamic relationship with the world of the living, the permanence and authority of commemorative discourse as it is represented in the Mort is continually undermined. Two examples can be briefly used to illustrate this point: the episode of the poisoned fruit and Gauvain’s epitaph. In the poisoned fruit episode, a knight called Avarlan attempts to murder Gauvain by passing him poisoned fruit via the queen, but she instead gives it to Gaheris – with fatal consequences – and is subsequently accused of the latter’s murder. The Round Table, by common assent, places an inscription on the dead knight’s tomb that reads: ‘Ici gist Gaheriz li Blans de Karaheu, li freres Mador de la Porte, que la reine fist morir par venim’ (‘Here lies Gaheris le Blanc de Karaheu, brother of Mador de la Porte, whom the queen caused to die by poison’; 63, 11–13). When Mador, the dead man’s brother, arrives, he is convinced of Guenevere’s guilt by the tomb itself. In a way that leaves unresolved the question of the queen’s culpability, the Scottish knight whom Mador asks for information simply refers to the funerary inscription that bears witness to what has occurred (‘il est einsi comme li escriz le tesmoigne’; 67, 39).14 Thus, in this example, the epitaph interprets events while also acting as a narrative catalyst. At the same time, the inscription that emerges from this process is partial and problematic. What is suppressed in the writing on Gaheris’ tomb is the issue of intentionality in the action that has been witnessed: though, on the one hand, this is an accurate record of what has happened, on the other, it conceals a more complicated reality in which the queen unintentionally murders a man who is not even the intended target of the poisoning.15 Moreover, as well as providing a record of what has been seen, the tomb stands as an ambiguous accusation of murder that selectively glosses what we, as readers, know to be a more complex reality; as such, the epitaph not only offers an account of recent events but also acts as a spur to future revenge. Instead of consigning the memory of characters and events to the past, funerary text here operates dynamically within the present and future of the romance, and this accompanies a slip13

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R. Colliot, ‘Les épitaphes arthuriennes’, in La Mort le roi Artu, ed. E. Baumgartner (Langres, 1994), pp.148–62.On the dynamism of epitaphs in the Mort see also Solterer, ‘Conter le terme de cest brief’, p. 561. This is mentioned by Griffin: The Object and the Cause, p. 40. See Karen Pratt’s discussion in her La Mort le roi Artu (London, 2004), pp. 72–3, and R. H. Bloch, ‘From Grail Quest to Inquest: The Death of King Arthur and the Birth of France’, Modern Language Review 69 (1974), 40–55. Sarah Kay points out that the text never really illuminates distinctions between intention, outcome and responsibility: ‘Adultery and Killing in La Mort le roi Artu’, in Scarlet Letters: Fictions of Adultery from Antiquity to the 1990s, ed. N. White and N. Segal (Basingstoke, 1997), pp. 34–44.

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periness in the meaning of written memorial that relies on an awareness of that which it excludes as well as includes. Gauvain’s epitaph provides a complementary example insofar as it demonstrates the close relationship between commemorative discourse and the events that give rise to it, while also revealing how the perceived permanence and authority of such discourse may be undermined by the establishment of memorial text. As he is dying Gauvain requests to be buried with his brother Gaheriet and gives instructions for the inscription that is to be written on their tomb. Whereas Gaheriet’s epitaph named Lancelot as Gaheriet’s killer, Gauvain’s modification of the inscription reflects a changed situation in which Gauvain repents of his conduct towards Lancelot and indicates his forgiveness of his former enemy (172, 24–32). Gauvain’s instructions thus mark publicly a shift in private attitudes that have had and continue to have significance for the Arthurian kingdom. The original inscription, which reads ‘Ci gist Gaheriet, li niés le roi Artu, que Lancelos del Lac ocist’ (‘Here lies Gaheriet, nephew of King Arthur, whom Lancelot du Lac killed’; 102, 20–21) becomes in Gauvain’s reformulation ‘Ci gist Gaheriet et Gauvains que Lancelos ocist par l’outrage Gauvain’ (‘Here lies Gaheriet and Gauvain, whom Lancelot du Lac killed through Gauvain’s excess [also: sin/transgression]’; 172, 29–30). Hence, a text that initially stands as an accusation of murder ultimately performs the work of repentance. Gauvain’s instructions expose the interpretative, mutable nature of funerary text even as they re-establish the relationship between historical circumstance and public memorial. Though on one level this is a demonstration of the importance of the epitaph as an authoritative comment on the events of the story, on another level Gauvain’s modification of the previous inscription points to the potential gap between the realities of changing personal and historical circumstances and the memorial texts those circumstances generate. Two significant features of epitaphs in the Mort are worth underlining. The first is the subjective nature of the meaning of epitaphs in the romance – a fact that undermines their permanence as the last word and that sits in tension with more public, historical modes of signification. The second is the fact that the epitaph participates in constructing a causality that is either suspect or subject to revision (or both). What interests me here is how this relates to the constitution of historical – or pseudo-historical – narrative in the Mort. For, as Griffin’s work suggests, the epitaph may be ambiguously situated between subjective and historical, logical and chronological modes. This is perhaps even more the case for the epitaphs of the Mort, which so consciously dwell upon questions of causality and responsibility in accounting for an individual’s death as well as providing a memorial for a particular character. Even when funerary inscription is subject to revision, it claims an authority that relies upon an illusion of historical permanence and fixity. What this article will explore is how the Mort presents the process of commemoration for interpretation as part 6



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of its attempt to produce a definitive account of the end of the Arthurian world and to impose a paradoxical – even impossible – closure on the cycle it concludes.

Sex, Sin and the Public Sphere In the first half of the Mort, epitaphs comment on what can or cannot be disclosed in a public setting. Often focusing on questions of guilt and responsibility for the killing of certain individuals, funerary texts also point indirectly to sexual misdemeanours that are not openly acknowledged and for which characters are often not held publicly accountable. Though by no means confined to the lovers, this most obviously concerns Lancelot and Guenevere, whose adulterous relationship is privately tolerated until their imprudent conduct makes it impossible to ignore. Agravain’s pursuit of evidence of their crime is the result not only of Lancelot’s relapse into sin after the quest but, more importantly, of his uncharacteristic folly in the way he conducts himself with regard to the queen (4, 1–18; 5, 1–4); this pattern is reproduced following the Demoiselle d’Escalot’s death and Lancelot’s rescue of Guenevere, when the lovers’ reckless behaviour is noticed by Gauvain and his brothers (85, 32–9).16 The repeated failure to acknowledge the fact of the couple’s adultery is partly attributable to the lack of verifiable evidence from a third party. Whereas other supposed crimes in the Mort are witnessed publicly, Lancelot’s and Guenevere’s passion initially lacks such empirical proof.17 As Arthur indicates after seeing Lancelot’s depiction of his love affair with the queen in Morgane’s castle, this proof is required if he is to admit their adultery as a certainty rather than a possibility: the lovers must be caught together before he will accept he has been treasonously shamed (53, 53–63).18 It is worth noting in this regard the implicit distinction here between different types of written record. Lancelot’s paintings and the text they accompany reveal his adultery in a form that lacks the public authority of the epitaph. Whereas funerary inscriptions act as public records of acts of third-party witness, Lancelot’s graffiti have the status of independently unsubstantiated testimony. As such, Lancelot’s paintings do not follow the model established through other documentary evidence in the Mort whereby acts of witness are translated into written form or, in the case of 16

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A. D. Zuurdeeg suggests that Lancelot’s sin is indiscretion rather than adulterous love per se: Narrative Techniques and their Effects in ‘La Mort le Roi Artu’ (York, South Carolina, 1981), p. 66. On the importance of visible action over intent in the system of feudal justice that seems to operate in the Mort see Bloch, ‘From Grail Quest to Inquest’. It is on the basis that Guenevere has not been caught in the act that the pope insists that Arthur take her back (117, 6–16).

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the Demoiselle d’Escalot’s epitaph, whereby text is confirmed by other evidence that can be verified independently. This is perhaps why Arthur speaks of the need to confirm what appears to be self-evident from the text and images he sees. The problem here is not that text and reality fail to correspond (this possibility is in fact never ruled out by Arthur); rather, what Arthur points out is that if the images do represent true events, those events have not been independently witnessed.19 The paintings in Morgane’s castle thus do not amount to a public revelation of the lovers’ adultery; they therefore require third-party verification before the truth they potentially contain can be openly admitted. What this signals is the fact that, unlike the epitaphs of the Mort, Lancelot’s paintings cannot directly intervene in narrative events because they do not have the same relationship with the public sphere. In order to be prosecuted, the lovers’ adultery must be dragged into the public domain; though they might accurately record events, the paintings in Morgane’s castle have the status of private testimony and cannot therefore do this independently. Lancelot’s and Guenevere’s adultery – like numerous other affairs in medieval romance – is therefore a crime that can only be acknowledged as such if it enters the public sphere through a combination of imprudent publicity on the part of the lovers themselves and third-party witness. Indeed, there seems to be an assumption on the part of characters in the Mort that disclosure of this kind would necessarily entail the condemnation of the lovers, though the principle of judging on the basis of ocular proof alone is challenged elsewhere in the romance’s depiction of legal dispute.20 Either way, for much of the first half of the Mort, the lovers’ adultery remains unspeakable in a public setting, hovering dangerously on the threshold of the public sphere until it eventually – catastrophically – oversteps the mark.21 The fact that Lancelot and Guenevere’s affair is publicly inadmissible results in a displacement reflected in funerary inscriptions. As Sarah Kay has observed, Lancelot and Guenevere are never openly tried for the crime of adultery in the Mort, but are instead subject to legal challenges that accuse them of wrongful killing. According to Kay, the accidental killings of Gaheris (by Guenevere) and Gaheriet (by Lancelot) function as a displacement and metaphor for adultery; as such, they also share impor-

19

20 21

Though this would not contradict the argument that Arthur is often deluded and weak in the Mort, it would qualify the view that Arthur is simply refusing to see what should be self-evident in this episode. An example of this view can be found in D. MacRae, ‘Appearances and Reality in La Mort le Roi Artu’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 18 (1982), 266–77 (esp. pp. 268–70). See, for example, the poisoned fruit episode mentioned earlier. E. Jane Burns comments that it is the revelation of adultery rather than adultery itself that is decisive: it is the lovers’ inability to conceal deviant actions with deviant speech that is eventually their undoing. Burns, Arthurian Fictions, pp. 151–4.

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tant features with the couple’s adulterous passion, notably the fact that these are deaths that occur outside social norms, as phenomena that are censured yet nonetheless widespread.22 The inscriptions that mark each of these deaths are remarkably similar in form, naming initially the dead individual, then their kin (and presumed injured party), and concluding with the name of the killer: Ici gist Gaheriz li Blans de Karaheu, li freres Mador de la Porte, que la reine fist morir par venim (63, 11–13) (Here lies Gaheris le Blanc de Karaheu, brother of Mador de la Porte, whom the queen caused to die by poison) Ci gist Gaheriet, li niés le roi Artu, que Lancelos del Lac ocist (102, 20–21) (Here lies Gaheriet, nephew of King Arthur, whom Lancelot du Lac killed)

Both of these epitaphs thus attribute homicidal responsibility to the lovers, recording in a public setting events which have been witnessed publicly and which can therefore – unlike their adultery – be openly stated as fact. Though the attribution of responsibility for unlawful killings to each of the lovers negatively frames the crime for which they cannot (yet) be publicly accused, they are by no means the only characters for whom accidental death is a metaphor for other kinds of sin. The connection between sin and manslaughter is in fact present from the very beginning of the romance in Gauvain’s account of his misfortunes during the Grail quest, where he openly admits before Arthur and the court that he has killed eighteen other knights for his sins (‘par mon pechié’; 3, 16–25). Arthur’s final moments also involve the tragic accident where he unwittingly crushes Lucan to death in his embrace – a moment preserved for posterity in Lucan’s epitaph (192, 1–24; 194, 20–21). The fact that this episode follows the revelations concerning Mordred’s true parentage and his association with the snake in Arthur’s dream (164, 5–15) suggests that, in a similar way to the displacement of the lovers’ adultery by unlawful killing, Lucan’s death figures indirectly the publicly unspeakable sexual misconduct of the king. The way funerary inscriptions reflect implicit connections between sin and guilt thus points to a more general ethical problem in the post-quest world regarding how sin can be acknowledged in a public forum and integrated into historical record. If death by misadventure is a figure for other kinds of error, this seems to be the case because there is a language to express it publicly; by contrast, sexual misdemeanour must remain publicly unspeakable for as long as possible, being perceived only indirectly, through the omissions and obfuscations of written public discourse.

22

Kay, ‘Adultery and Killing’, pp. 34–41.

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This is a matter with a bearing on one of the most significant epitaphs in the Mort, namely that of the Demoiselle d’Escalot, whose death is also attributed to Lancelot in this section of the story. Though revenge is not the motivation for identifying love of Lancelot as the cause of death on the Demoiselle d’Escalot’s tomb, her epitaph brings about a significant shift in perspective that removes much of the doubt surrounding Lancelot’s adulterous love of Guenevere. The letter found with the Demoiselle d’Escalot’s body makes clear that she wishes not to right the wrong that caused her death, but instead to name and shame Lancelot, who she claims is both the best and the worst of men for failing to acknowledge and reciprocate her love (71, 8–23). Her epitaph – ‘Ici gist la damoisele d’Escalot qui por l’amor de Lancelot morut’ (‘Here lies the Demoiselle d’Escalot who died for the love of Lancelot’; 73, 8–9) – reflects this desire, while also leaving tantalizingly unclear whether she has died for her love of Lancelot or his love of Guenevere, the latter being something that cannot be openly admitted even if it is secretly known to many. In the event, the Demoiselle d’Escalot’s death reveals for those who care to look for it precisely that which her epitaph stops short of declaring, as her demise removes the suspicion – on the part of Guenevere as well as Arthur’s followers – concerning Lancelot’s love of the queen. The equivocal epitaph of the Demoiselle d’Escalot thus stops short of naming the reason for Lancelot’s indifference, while also hinting at it for those already in the know. This tomb connects more explicitly than the other funerary inscriptions an accusation of killing with love and dereliction of duty. Moreover, unlike Gaheris’ and Gaheriet’s epitaphs, it does this without nominating an avenger of the injured party, allowing it to stand alone as a statement that cannot be altered by the course of time. Whereas other epitaphs provide categorical, yet morally neutral, records of events that leave a margin of doubt when it comes to the guilt of the named offender, the semantic ambiguity of the reference to ‘l’amor de Lancelot’ on the Demoiselle d’Escalot’s tomb points instead to a shocking fact that is known but not yet definitively proven. In this reference to the open secret of Lancelot’s love for the queen, the Demoiselle d’Escalot’s epitaph condenses what other characters have already stated: that Lancelot’s adultery can only be tolerated if it is kept under wraps and that the open acknowledgement of his adultery will result in disaster because it will entail admitting something that is publicly unspeakable. Unlike the epitaphs of Gaheris and Gaheriet, that of the Demoiselle d’Escalot goes further in pointing to the adultery of Lancelot and the queen while never openly declaring it. As such, the Demoiselle d’Escalot’s tomb marks the limit of that which can be publicly avowed at this point in the text, while also anticipating – and furthering – the future breaching of that limit.

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Sin and Posterity Even though Lancelot’s relationship with the queen is discovered in the second half of the romance, the Demoiselle d’Escalot’s epitaph is possibly the closest one gets to a declaration of their adultery in funerary inscriptions. This is perhaps because the focus on this crime is not maintained in the latter part of the text. After Guenevere’s return to Arthur – which is taken as proof that Lancelot does not love her adulterously despite any previous evidence to the contrary – the war between Lancelot and Arthur is prosecuted on the basis of revenge for the killing of Gauvain’s brothers. Lancelot’s illicit relations with Guenevere are then rapidly overshadowed by Mordred’s passion for the queen and treasonous overthrow of the king. Yet the persistence of the silence in written memorial regarding Lancelot’s adulterous passion even after its public revelation is also part of a more general problem in the Mort. If, in the first part of the romance, the omissions of Arthurian epitaphs mark the limits of what can be admitted publicly, in the second half they concern how such limits have an impact on that which can – or should – be commemorated. What the silences, modifications and juxtapositions of funerary inscription in the final sections of the Mort point towards is an issue with which the romance – as the last text in the Vulgate Cycle – is forced to wrestle: the question of the extent to which the lives of its flawed, sinning characters can be publicly mourned and, if so, how they are to be remembered. It is perhaps unsurprising that, in this respect, Lancelot poses a particular problem. As others have indicated, partly because of its position in the cycle, the Mort treads a fine line between the celebration of Arthurian values and the questioning of those values.23 With regard to Lancelot, the Queste presents the Mort with a fundamental difficulty: given the fact that Lancelot’s prowess as well as his failings as a knight can be attributed to his adulterous passion for Guenevere, to what extent does he represent a chivalric ideal that can be celebrated publicly? It is as if the Mort attempts to dodge this question even on the level of form, by postponing Lancelot’s death for as long as possible and, in the prologue, by singling out Arthur’s demise, rather than Lancelot’s, as the focus for the narrative to come.24 The essential problem is that what is to be celebrated of Lancelot’s life is largely the result of that for which he must 23 24

See, for example, Pratt, La Mort le roi Artu, esp. pp. 67–85. According to Frappier there are six variants of this title. There is even more variety in the incipits and explicits of the manuscripts, yet, in those examined by Virginia Greene in her study of the Mort, Lancelot’s death is never singled out alongside that of Arthur (though the end of the cycle about Lancelot may sometimes be mentioned). V. Greene, Le Sujet et la mort dans la Mort Artu (Saint-Genouph, 2002), pp. 61–2. Typical variants include: ‘Ici fenist la mort du roy artu et des autres’ or ‘Ici fenist la mort du roy artu et des autres, et tout li romans de Lancelot’.

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be criticized. As the Demoiselle d’Escalot’s letter indicates, Lancelot’s adulterous passion directly informs his reputation as both the best and the worst of men. Lancelot’s love – as that which makes him both great and flawed – is that which, even as it cannot be publicly spoken and celebrated, makes his life worthy of remembrance and celebration. The issue of whether or not Lancelot’s love can be incorporated into memorial text is thus connected to the extent to which his life can be regarded as what Butler terms ‘publicly grievable life’: a life that can be considered worthy of remembrance in a public setting. His adulterous passion marks the boundary of public discourse while, at the same time, guaranteeing him a place in the sphere of public commemoration as that which underwrites his exceptional qualities as a knight. This uncertainty over Lancelot’s exemplary status is echoed in his epitaph, which is unable unequivocally to confirm him as the best knight in the world, even as it insists on his exceptional qualities: Ci gist li cors Galeholt, le segnor des Lointaignes Illes, et avec lui repose Lancelos del Lac qui fu li mieudres chevaliers qui onques entrast el roiaume de Logres, fors seulement Galaad son fill. (203, 14–19) (Here lies the body of Galeholt, lord of the Distant Iles, and with him rests Lancelot du Lac, who was the best knight who ever entered the kingdom of Logres, with the sole exception of Galahad his son.)

Lancelot’s epitaph thus reinstates him as the best knight in the world, while also ranking him beneath his son Galahad. The reason why Lancelot’s status as best knight must be qualified is of course his adulterous affair, which is implicitly evoked here while never being openly declared.25 Indeed, even as this adulterous relationship is traced between the lines of the inscription, the love between Galeholt and Lancelot is reaffirmed, possibly as an alternative to its less acceptable heterosexual correlative. As an individual who has died for love of Lancelot, Galeholt’s inclusion in Lancelot’s epitaph nonetheless stands as a reminder of the Demoiselle d’Escalot’s similarly fatal attachment to Lancelot and, as such, potentially underlines the exclusion this tomb performs. Not only is Lancelot’s adulterous love a regrettable (if publicly unmournable) failing that undermines his status as the best knight in the world, but it is also something that has indirectly caused others’ deaths – though not, significantly, his own. As Simon Gaunt has argued, Lancelot’s failure to die for love can be seen as part of a more general tendency in the Prose Lancelot not to

25

On the place of Lancelot’s desire in the interplay of difference and similarity between him and his son Galahad, see P. V. Rockwell, Rewriting Resemblance in Medieval French Romance: Ceci n’est pas un graal (New York, 1995), pp. 162–70. See also Griffin, The Object and the Cause, pp. 120–22.

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idealize his adulterous affair.26 This may provide a further explanation for the omission of any explicit mention of Lancelot’s love on his tomb. Lancelot’s epitaph in fact suggests he is doubly outdone: on the one hand, he is surpassed as a knight by Galahad because of his adulterous love for the queen while, on the other hand, he is trumped as a true lover by Galeholt – not to mention the Demoiselle d’Escalot – who is more plausible as a true martyr to love. Although Lancelot is an obvious focus for the difficulties of commemoration in the Mort, this is nonetheless part of a larger problem concerning how and what to remember of the figures who inhabit the now terminally declining Arthurian world. Arthur’s death, unlike those of many other principal characters, occurs outside the main narrative frame of the text and his anonymously authored epitaph in many respects reflects this absence: Il [Girflet] trouva devant l’autel deus tombes moult beles et moult riches, mes l’une estoit assez plus bele et plus riche que l’autre. Desus la meins bele avoit letres qui disoient: ‘Ci gist Lucans li Bouteilliers que li rois Artus esteinst desouz lui.’ Desus la tombe qui tant estoit merveilleuse et riche avoit letres qui disoient: ‘Ci gist li rois Artus qui par sa valeur mist en sa subjection .xii. roiaumes.’ (194, 16–25) (He [Girflet] found in front of the altar two tombs, both of which were very beautiful and rich, though one of them was much more beautiful and more rich than the other. On the less beautiful one there was writing that said: ‘Here lies Lucan the Wine Steward, whom King Arthur crushed beneath him’. On the tomb that was so very marvellous and rich there was writing that said: ‘Here lies King Arthur, who by his valour conquered twelve kingdoms.’)

Arthur’s epitaph thus seems to break with the custom of indicating the manner and cause of death on other tombs in the Mort. In this respect, it conforms more closely to what we might think of as the more conventional funerary inscription, which serves both to honour and to remember the deceased. This is underlined by the fact that Arthur’s tomb is seen by Girflet alongside that of Lucan, whose death and its causes are explicitly mentioned. Yet, despite the fact that Arthur’s tomb seems more able to commemorate its occupant than some of the others in the romance, Arthur’s epitaph is implicitly qualified by that which sits beside it. Lucan’s tomb is less impressive than Arthur’s: this not only reflects Lucan’s inferior social status but also establishes a hierarchical relationship between the tombs that determines which epitaph’s information about Arthur appears the 26

Simon Gaunt discusses Lancelot’s curious immunity to dying for love in a chapter on Tristan, Lancelot and Cligès. See S. Gaunt, Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly Literature (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 104–37. See also his discussion of Galeholt on pp. 168–204.

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more significant. Nevertheless, Lucan’s tomb provides a glimpse of a less impressive side of the king’s legacy and, as mentioned earlier, potentially connotes the unspeakable sin that leads to Mordred’s conception. The comparatively minor incident is here memorialized next to the major achievement, pointing to the less than glorious, potentially sinful aspects of Arthur’s reign that we are enjoined to overlook if we wish to remember him simply as a powerful and successful king. This episode thus suggests that an unqualified celebration of the dead in this final chapter of Arthurian history is only a partial possibility. The tragic glossing of Arthur’s epitaph, like the qualification of Lancelot’s funerary inscription, implies that the remembrance of greatness is only achieved at the expense of what one is prepared to forget. Yet, whereas public memorial usually enables such a process of forgetting to take place, this is not the case here. Though what is truly unspeakable in public discourse remains largely excluded from Lancelot’s and Arthur’s funerary inscriptions, its traces are nonetheless perceptible in the way such inscriptions are disrupted or framed in the text. Remembrance as it is associated with monuments such as these is thus constantly overshadowed by what it seeks to exclude. Gauvain’s tomb is a partial exception to this rule in that it openly mentions the flaw that brings about his own demise as well as that of numerous others. As mentioned earlier, Gauvain’s epitaph is grafted onto that of his brother and substantially alters the inscription to which it is attached. Gaheriet’s epitaph initially identifies Lancelot as his murderer, immortalizing Lancelot’s guilt in a way that has implications for the narrative that follows: Gaheriet’s death and Lancelot’s responsibility for that death will later be used as a rationale for an ultimately catastrophic war by Gauvain in his desire to avenge his brother’s murder. Yet Gauvain’s death causes the original inscription to be altered. Knowing that he is mortally wounded after the battle with the Roman army (from an old wound received from Lancelot), Gauvain repents of his behaviour and gives instructions for his burial in which he requests that the inscription be changed (172, 24–32). Although Lancelot is still named as the knight who has slain the brothers, both deaths – and especially that of Gauvain – are attributed to Gauvain’s outrage: the excess that has led him mercilessly to pursue Lancelot and to have a hand in endangering the kingdom.27 The uniqueness of Gauvain’s epitaph comes more clearly into focus when its similarities to other funerary monuments are examined. Gauvain’s tomb, like those of Arthur and Lancelot, commemorates him alongside other men and uses this juxtaposition to create a text with complex significance. Like Lancelot, Gauvain is one of the few characters to give explicit instructions as to how he is to be buried and, perhaps, more importantly, is 27

As indicated earlier, outrage can also mean ‘sin’ or ‘transgression’.

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able to determine what is written on his tombstone. Interestingly, both men use their say in how they are buried and commemorated to reaffirm homosocial connections over the more problematic relations with women that have impeded their progress in the Queste. This is further underlined by the fact that each of these knights are intimately associated with a woman whose epitaph goes unrecorded: Guenevere’s tomb is never mentioned and the Dame de Beloé – who dies for love of Gauvain – fades from the picture shortly after her partially misheard request for burial alongside him (174, 22–41). Yet, if both Gauvain’s and Lancelot’s epitaphs gloss over their sexual misdemeanours, Gauvain’s is nonetheless able publicly to acknowledge sin as a part of how he is remembered on his tomb. This, indeed, seems to follow a pattern established at the very beginning of the work, where Gauvain tells Arthur that he has killed several of the king’s knights on account of his pechié rather than through any chivalric superiority (3, 18–25).28 In contrast to Gauvain’s shameful admission, Lancelot’s sin – which is mentioned immediately after this passage – remains undeclared (if not unperceived) until he is finally caught in the queen’s chamber. As argued earlier, the publicly unspeakable nature of Lancelot’s crime at the outset of the Mort translates into the way it haunts funerary texts. In parallel to this, the humility that Gauvain is able to demonstrate in the opening lines of the romance and the sin that he must acknowledge as something that qualifies his reputation are similarly implicit in the funerary inscription that marks his final resting place. Thus, Lancelot, Arthur and Gauvain are all buried in tombs that exhibit the exclusions of commemorative discourse to varying degrees. Gauvain’s epitaph, though it does not openly acknowledge the sin that has resulted in his failure on the quest, nonetheless contains an explicit acknowledgement of the failings that contributed to his downfall (and to that of others). In this respect, it is worth noting that if the Dame de Beloé’s tomb – which is never described in the Mort – were executed according to the lady’s wishes, it would stand in the cathedral as a further qualification of Gauvain’s funerary inscription. Lancelot’s epitaph similarly glosses over his sexual misdemeanour while more indirectly hinting at that which qualifies his standing as the best knight in the world. Though not physically adjacent to Lancelot’s final resting place in the Joyeuse Garde, the Demoiselle d’Escalot’s memorial stands as an ambiguous reminder of the reasons for the hierarchy established by Lancelot’s epitaph – though one that comes rather closer than Lancelot’s to stating the truth that lies behind this hierarchy. Finally, Arthur’s tomb – though it bears one of the most unequivocally celebratory epitaphs of the romance – is nonetheless 28

Griffin mentions the fact that it is difficult to separate sin and misfortune (pechié and mescheance) in this passage: The Object and the Cause, p. 45. See also Zuurdeeg, Narrative Techniques and their Effects, pp. 63–75, and K. Pratt, ‘Aristotle, Augustine or Boethius? La Mort le Roi Artu as Tragedy’, Nottingham French Studies 30 (1991), 81–109 (p. 98).

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juxtaposed with another, less impressive funerary monument that implicitly qualifies its commemoration of his achievements. Thus, the tombstone inscriptions in the Mort can offer only unstable foundations for memory. The layering of text in the Mort – through the partial glossing of events within written memorial, or the juxtapositions of later funerary inscriptions – means that commemoration is never quite able selectively to remember and conveniently to forget. The work of constitutive exclusion in funerary inscriptions is frequently undermined by the fact that the obfuscations or omissions of memorial texts are available for interpretation alongside that which is supposedly offered to posterity. The Mort thus represents the impossibility of establishing an unequivocal public discourse of mourning even as it lays bare the process of attempting to construct such a discourse. In this regard, the writing of memorial text in the Mort leaves open the possibility of a form of commemoration that remains haunted by its limitations and suppressions, leaving the work of memory at least partially open-ended. This said, if epitaphs are involved on a diegetic level in setting the limits of that which can be publicly avowed, celebrated or mourned, it should be remembered that those limits are also established by what the book that reproduces them recounts in its turn. The illusion of totality associated with the Mort as the final text of the cycle and the last word on the characters whose demise it recounts is shored up by the fact that what is excluded from written public discourse is preserved by the work we are reading.29 It is precisely the representation of the process of selection and omission which informs memorial text in the romance that gives this account of the Arthurian kingdom a ring of truth for readers who can therefore be reassured that they – unlike the characters in the work itself – have heard it all. The invitation that the Mort’s depiction of funerary inscription implicitly makes to its readers to participate in the reconstitution of an Arthurian past that seems unable – or unwilling – to speak with a single, unified voice might thus be seen as an attempt to construct precisely such a voice for the text that contains those inscriptions. If the epitaphs of the romance are only ever partial representations of what we know as readers of the text, the final line of the Mort suggests that it is considerably surer of its inclusiveness, confidently asserting that ‘[Gautiers Map] fenist ci son livre si outreement que aprés ce n’en porroit nus riens conter qui n’en mentist de toutes choses’ (‘Gautier Map here ends his book so absolutely that afterwards no one may recount anything that is not in every respect a lie’; 204, 10–13). The confidence of this statement is nonetheless troubled by the fact that the Mort is a text predicated on the undermining of 29

This might be seen as part of a more general attitude to textual authority in the cycle. Paul Vincent Rockwell argues that in the Grail Cycle the conte adjudicates between conflicting versions of the past in a way that generates suspicion of existing historical accounts, thereby enabling it to supplant the authority of these sources. Rockwell, Rewriting Resemblance, pp. 187–228.

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notions of narrative completion. As the continuation of the Queste, the Mort adds what might be considered a superfluous last word to something that has already been finished, suggesting that the story of the Grail quest which sought to conclude Arthurian history did not (and could not) do so. As a result, despite the Mort’s anxious claims to totality, the closure it offers is by no means assured. The adverb outreement neatly encapsulates this in that it translates as both ‘excessively’ and ‘absolutely’.30 The act of completing is thus also a moment of excess; it is both an arrival and a movement beyond something else. It is fitting that, in this respect at least, the Mort ultimately seems to agree with the logic of commemoration it represents for its readers; for, if the funerary inscriptions of the Mort teach us anything, it is that there is always something more to say.

30

This suggestion of excessive movement is also present in the verb outreer (to surpass). See Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialectes du IXe au XVe siècle, ed. F. Godefroy, 10 vols. (Paris, 1880–1902), V.2, 670–71.

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II

‘… “if indeed I go”’: Arthur’s Uncertain End in Malory and Tennyson Andrew Lynch From early on, King Arthur’s ending presented a problem for Arthurian writers of the Middle Ages. Arthur’s warfare abroad, whether in his chronicle march on Rome or romance campaign against Lancelot, is halted by Mordred’s rebellion. Thrown from Fortune’s wheel, he never fully regains ascendancy and his actual ending in (or after) battle is uncertain, a gap in the record. Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote confusingly that Arthur was ‘mortally wounded’ in his last battle, yet that he was taken to Avalon ‘to have his wounds healed’.1 The twelfth-century Anglo-Norman poet Wace wrote: ‘Merlin said of Arthur, rightly, that his death would be doubtful. The prophet spoke truly: ever since, people have always doubted it and always will, I think, doubt whether he is dead or alive.’2 Such lack of certainty and religious ceremonial seems to have caused some concern for later medieval authors. The Vera Historia de Morte Arthuri, which may have influenced the thirteenth-century Vulgate French Mort le roi Artu in this matter,3 seems purposely to have supplied new elements that vouched for the king’s death, despite the mystery of his actual grave, and that made it a ‘good death’ in medieval terms: Arthur thanks God and the Virgin for victory; he dies penitent in Avalon after receiving the sacraments, wearing a hair shirt and surrounded by bishops.4 1

2 3 4

Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, ed. M. D. Reeve, trans. N. Wright (Woodbridge, 2007), p. 252: ‘letaliter vulneratus’; ‘ad sananda ulnera sua’. See A. Putter, ‘The Twelfth-Century Arthur’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend, ed. E. Archibald and A. Putter (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 36–52 (p. 41). Wace’s Roman de Brut. A History of the British, ed. and trans. J. Weiss (Exeter, 1999), lines 13285–9. R. Barber, ‘The Vera Historia de Morte Arthuri and its Place in Arthurian Tradition’, Arthurian Literature 1 (1981), 62–77 (p. 74). Barber, ‘The Vera Historia’, 70: ‘This Vera Historia … offers the only account which includes a death-bed scene and account of his funeral’. See M. Lapidge, ed., Vera Historia de Morte Arthuri, Arthurian Literature 1 (1981), 84–9. For an overview of Arthur’s death in Geoffrey of Monmouth and the subsequent French Vulgate and Post-Vulgate traditions, see F. Bogdanow, ‘The Changing

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Sir Thomas Malory’s construction of the king’s last scene, in his Le Morte Darthur (1469), while much more circumstantial than in the chronicle tradition of Wace, did little to remove doubt and ambivalence. Indeed, Malory, following the Stanzaic Morte Arthure, weakens both the certainty and the religious observance of the ‘French book’, the thirteenth-century Vulgate Cycle Mort Artu, where Arthur confesses his sins to an archbishop before the battle and spends all night after it in prayers for the slain and for himself, and a hermit is quite sure it is Arthur’s body in a magnificent tomb which is already inscribed to his renown as a conqueror of twelve kingdoms.5 The Mort Artu, for all its lamenting of Fortune and predictions of disaster, normalizes the battle of Salisbury by recounting in detail the individual deeds and fates of many knights – Yon, Yvain, Aguisant, Sagremor – in its usual style, whereas Malory creates what is for him an unusually brief, blank impression of general slaughter. Given this condensed version of the battle itself, Malory’s narrative gives greater emphasis than the French book to the contrary forces and wills surrounding it: God advises Arthur not to fight, yet Destiny decrees it (1234–5).6 Arthur is angered to madness to see his good knights, on both sides, ‘slayne frome hym’ (1236.11), yet Lucan still insists he has ‘won the fylde’ (1237.1) with three men left against one. Lucan fervently invokes God to warn against the final attack on Mordred, but Bedivere counters ‘God spyede you well!’ (1236.28–1237.8). By contrast, in the Mort Artu Arthur’s fatal encounter with Mordred, motivated by the king’s sorrow at the death of Sagremor, occurs before the end of the battle and there is no such division of opinion at this point.7 More openly than in the Mort Artu, Malory’s Arthur speaks of death – ‘I am com to myne ende’ (1236.18–19) and ‘now have I my dethe’ (1238.13); he seems to assume that he cannot live much longer (1238.28–32), yet envisages going ‘into the vale of Avylyon to hele me of my grevous wounde’ (1240.32–4). The balancing act is maintained to the very end. Although Bedivere, not present at the burial, is certain the tomb is Arthur’s, the hermit archbishop is not (1241.13–21); he can only surmise – ‘“I wote nat veryly but by demynge”’ (1242.15–16) – and his lack of certainty is repeated by Malory as almost the last attributed word on the subject: ‘But yet the ermyte knew nat in sertayne that he was veryly the body of kynge Arthur’ (1242.18– 20). Bedivere has written the record, but Malory, suddenly unsure of the facts, finds no absolute authority or conclusive evidence, and the rest, as I emphasize below, is unauthorized opinion:

5 6 7

Vision of Arthur’s Death’, in Dies Illa: Death in the Middle Ages, ed. J. H. M. Taylor (Liverpool, 1984). J. Frappier, ed., La Mort le roi Artu, 3rd edn (Geneva, 1964), pp. 227, 246, 251. This and subsequent references to Malory are to page and line numbers in The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. E. Vinaver, rev. P. J. C. Field, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1990). Frappier, ed., La Mort le roi Artu, pp. 244–5.

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yet some men say in many partys of Inglonde that kynge Arthure ys nat dede, but had by the wyll of Oure Lorde Jesu into another place; and men say that he shall com agayn, and he shall wynne the Holy Crosse. Yet I woll nat say that hit shall be so, but rather I wolde sey: here in thys worlde he chaunged hys lyff. And many men say that there ys wryttyn uppon the tumbe thys vers: hic iacet arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus (1242.22–29)

Malory seems to have felt bound to incorporate a version of the inscription on Arthur’s supposed Glastonbury tomb, not mentioned in his main sources, yet still treats it as hearsay rather than history. What kind of ending is this? Arthur receives his probable mortal wound on a field of victory while honourably defeating a traitor, even if it is his own child. He maintains his right to the crown, has Excalibur returned to the lake, is received by queens, including his apparently reconciled sister Morgan, and probably finds Christian burial. His last words (which Bedivere honours) are ‘pray for my soule’. For all that, it is hardly a good death in the late medieval ars moriendi tradition, attended by good works, penitence, absolution, bodily mortification and last rites, as in Malory’s closest sources, let alone with the corporeal or visionary evidence of sanctity that follows Lancelot’s death in Malory, or Guenevere’s, or even Gawain’s. Lucan’s wish to move the wounded king to a town is to evade battlefield pillagers, not for the sake of obtaining a priest for him. Religion is scarcely mentioned, in marked difference from both the Mort Artu and the Stanzaic Morte, where the battle’s survivors pray all night in the chapel in which they have taken refuge.8 Malory’s Arthur shows no concern to be ‘howseled’ (given the eucharist) and anointed, presumably because he intends to live, not only because no priest is present. In the later Middle Ages, ‘…[o]nly those resigned to death were “howseled”, following a thorough examination by the confessor9 to ensure that the sufferer was free from sin and had reconciled with all other Christians’.10 The last rites were also limited to the certainly dying: ‘Only those resigned to death tended to seek anointing, due to the widespread belief that the anointed would be deprived of the full use of their senses should they subsequently return to health.’11 Death is a journey the king seems very

8

9 10

11

Frappier, ed., La Mort le roi Artu, p. 246: ‘Toute la nuit fu li rois Artus en proieres et en orisons’ (‘Arthur spent all the night in prayers and petitions’), L. D. Benson, ed., Stanzaic Morte Arthure, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, 1994), 3406–15. See M. Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1991), p. 99. I am grateful to Karen Cherewatuk for permission to read a draft of her essay, ‘Christian Rituals in Malory: The Evidence of Funerals’, forthcoming in D. T. Hanks, Jr. and J. Jesmok, eds., Malory and Christianity (Kalamazoo, 2010), from which this and the following quotations are taken. See also E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven, 1992), p. 315. Cherewatuk, ‘Christian Rituals’.

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unwilling to take. As Karen Cherewatuk points out, in this Arthur’s end is unlike many other significant deathbeds in the narrative, unlike Lancelot’s, for instance, who is ‘howselyd and enelyd and had al that a Crysten man ought to have’ (1257.24–25), or Gawain’s, who is carefully reconciled with his enemy Lancelot by letter and able to ‘resceyve hys sacrament’ (1232.13) before dying’.12 By contrast, although Arthur is deeply aware that he has limited time, as several comments to Bedivere indicate, he employs it on this-worldly concerns. Despite the solemn conclusiveness of Excalibur’s return to the lake, the episode still generates mundane anxiety: a reader is encouraged to think that if Bedivere had not ‘taryed’, the chances of healing Arthur’s head-wound would have been greater (1240.10–11; 23–5). Nor is Malory’s Arthur given a good funeral in fifteenth-century style, one aimed at reducing his time in purgatory, with vespers, matins, mass and month-mind, and lavish acts of charity on his behalf in the ‘dole’, such as Lancelot and others offer at Gawain’s funeral (1250.24–1251.5). Similarly, Malory’s king receives almost nothing of the lavish deathbed, funeral and commemorative arrangements which take place at Glastonbury in the Alliterative Morte Arthure.13 How different Arthur’s last scene and scanty burial are from these fifteenth-century ideals, and from the actual contemporary practices of royal death and burial.14 Even Henry VI, murdered in the Tower in May 1471, and packed off by barge to Chertsey Abbey for burial, was exhibited in St Paul’s and given a funeral at Blackfriars, with money spent on twenty-eight yards of Holland linen for his shroud, wax, spice and torches, with guards, barge masters and oarsmen hired, and friars of five orders paid to sing obsequies and masses.15 According to the Crowland Chronicle (Second Continuation), Edward IV, dying in April 1483, ordered satisfaction to be given from his goods to all men to whom he was in debt; according to Thomas More, followed by Shakespeare, he tried to reconcile quarrelling lords. Those at the deathbed testified that the famously licentious king died truly repentant, although the Crowland Chronicler remarks that it was just as well he had no further opportunities to sin. After death Edward was exhibited semi-naked for twelve hours before lying in state in a full suit of gold armour for eight days at Westminster, in an outer coffin of silver with raised ornamentation. His corpse, crowned and holding orb and sceptre, under a canopy with the arms of England and France worked in gold, was escorted by ten bishops and two abbots into the abbey, where the elaborate ceremo12 13 14

15

Cherewatuk, ‘Christian Rituals’. Alliterative Morte Arthure, ed. L. D. Benson, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, 1994), lines 4295–311. The following details are taken from K. Dockray, ed., Edward IV. A Source Book (Stroud, 1999), pp. 143–7; E. N. Simons, The Reign of Edward IV (London, 1966), pp. 296–8; C. L. Scofield, The Life and Reign of Edward the Fourth (London, 1923 (1967)), pp. 364–8. See B. Wolffe, Henry VI (New Haven, 1981), p. 347.

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nies were attended by knights all dressed in black mail. The royal hearse, adorned with ‘the similitude of the King in habit royal’, finally left for Windsor, with stops for incensing and veneration along the way, until, after many more ceremonies in which the soldier-king’s arms and other military symbolism featured prominently, his body was finally placed in a great marble tomb, prepared well before, in St George’s Chapel. In comparison with such a model, Arthur’s burial in Malory (if it is clearly that) is extraordinarily underplayed. It is virtually a political blank in contemporary terms, without public display that the king is actually dead, and with no staged climactic transition to a successor – ‘Le roi est vif’ – no doubt because a successor is not currently apparent, let alone the apparatus to stage such an event. It is only when Lancelot’s grief after Guenevere’s death becomes the focus of attention that Malory decides or reveals that the grave which Bedivere found is certainly Arthur’s (1256.26–1257.11). Unlike in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur (the source text at this point), where Lancelot forsakes arms and joins the hermitage directly after finding it to be the king’s burying-place,16 in Malory Lancelot has been a hermit there for over seven years before the presence of Arthur’s tomb is mentioned specifically, although it may be part of the ‘tale al hole’ Bedivere tells him when he arrives (1254.10). To Malory’s Bedivere, the little chapel has been a chantry for Arthur (717/3–4), endowed with 100 tapers and a certain amount of money by ladies who have brought his body there secretly and anonymously at midnight. For Lancelot’s family it becomes more like a little convent devoted to penitence, centred on their famous kinsman (1254.27–1255.13). Again, it is Lancelot who somehow ‘sees’ Arthur’s body lying next to Guenevere’s in the grave, though the king’s body would presumably be coffined, as hers is said to be (1256.31). The mysterious markers of Arthur’s end are subsumed within the more conventional signs of Lancelot’s and Guenevere’s exemplary penitential deaths, which retrospectively bind a ‘pereles’ king into their own decorum of repentance and sanctity. The tomb becomes more of a necessity for Lancelot’s story than for Arthur’s. A similarly belated recovery happens in the political realm. More than seven years pass before Constantine of Cornwall is chosen as Arthur’s successor, as if that event was also waiting on the holy death of Lancelot after the same seven-year interval: ‘the stated period of time between Sir Bors’ discovery of Lancelot in the hermitage (1254.27–35) and Lancelot’s death (1258) corresponds with Sir Ector de Maris’s setting out to seek Lancelot and finding the funeral in progress at Joyous Garde’ (1258.34–1259.8)’.17 Although in religious and political terms Arthur’s ending lacks public significance, his last moments in view give a unique impression of power 16 17

Benson, ed., Stanzaic Morte Arthur, 3802–17. I am gratefully indebted to private correspondence from Trish Thornber for these observations on Malory’s chronology after Arthur’s death.

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vested in him alone. He commands what little ceremony there is before his departing. It is he who arranges for the symbolic disposal of Excalibur, and the barge to Avalon is appointed to wait on his arrival. He and the mysterious ladies alone seem to understand that agenda, and if he is actually ‘had by the wyll of Oure Lorde Jesu into another place’ (1242.23–4), to be healed and come again, then he and God alone know the details of that. Arthur retains command himself, evading political supersession by his survivors; although it is indicated that Arthur’s victory over Mordred has preserved ‘this royame’ (1259.29) intact, the matter of Constantine’s succession is mainly made part of Lancelot’s story. The stark, lonely simplicity of Arthur’s end, in contrast to Lancelot’s gregarious and public conclusion, emphasizes his special character as a leader. He has been a great king to Malory principally because he shares the life and interests of his knights, as is acknowledged early on: ‘all men of worship seyde hit was myrry to be under such a chyfftayne, that wolde putte hys person in adventure as other poure knyghtis ded’ (54.18–20). At the height of Camelot’s power, Mador de la Porte can still say to Arthur ‘thoughe ye be oure kynge, in that degré ye ar but a knyght as we ar, and ye are sworne unto knyghthode als welle as we be’ (1050.18–20). If it is really Arthur in the obscure tomb that Bedivere venerates, then he has remained a great king for Malory by sharing the obscure end of a wounded ‘poor knight’ of the age, taken in haste from the battlefield and privately buried with little state, remembered by a loyal few. For all the retrospective commemoration of Arthur by Lancelot and the re-establishment of the British state, the very different effect of the earlier narrative scene holds its power, in which the king’s human, bodily, this-worldly qualities of loyalty, courage and endurance are shown off all the more clearly for the lack of political and religious ceremonial at his ending. Malory’s dominant version left the later English tradition a problem in classifying the king’s ending. It did not offer the certainty of a tomb on earth – why should one have to rely on what ‘many men say’ about an actual tomb’s inscription? It scarcely nourished the hope that the king would come again. To be healed of a ‘mortal’ wound, as in Geoffrey and Wace, is a contradiction in terms; Malory calls it ‘grevous’ only, but discourages optimism, and does not say just where Arthur has gone, body or soul. Malory is the chief (though not single) influence on Alfred Tennyson’s account of Arthur’s ending.18 Tennyson’s first ‘Morte d’Arthur’ was written in 1833–4, begun within weeks of his learning of his friend Arthur 18

Tennyson knew La3amon’s Brut in the 1847 edition by F. Madden. See C. Ricks, ed., The Poems of Tennyson, 2nd edn, 3 vols. (London, 1987), III, p. 266. For Tennyson’s use of La3amon see R. Allen, ‘“Broad spears broke, shields clashed, men fell”. How Lawman/La3amon and Tennyson deal with the Problem of Combat’, in Strange Countries: New Essays on Middle English Literature, ed. D. Matthews (Manchester, 2011), forthcoming.

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Hallam’s death, and cautiously framed around 1837–8 in ‘The Epic’. As published in ‘English Idyls’, 1842, it was represented as the eleventh of twelve books, suggesting incompleteness and dissatisfaction, perhaps making room for the modern return of Arthur dreamed of in the frame conclusion. That idea was completely discarded, and ‘Morte d’Arthur’ was re-framed by 1869 as ‘The Passing of Arthur’ to crown Idylls of the King, with an elaborate prolepsis of the new ending built into ‘Guinevere’ (1859) and ‘The Coming of Arthur’ (1869): ‘From the great deep to the great deep he goes’ (‘The Coming of Arthur, 410; ‘The Passing of Arthur, 445).19 If we include another final scene in ‘Guinevere’, where the King slowly fades into the western mist, as a lead-in to the end, or even as an alternate end, then Tennyson really left four versions, accreting and discarding modifications to the core effect of his original ‘Morte d’Arthur’. Tennyson’s Idylls are often thought to have tamed and sanitized Malory. T. S. Eliot, in other contexts a supporter, wrote that Tennyson had ‘adapted this great British epic material – in Malory’s handling hearty, outspoken and magnificent – to suitable reading for a girls’ school’.20 Even in more positive (and less sexist) assessments, the heavy critical emphasis on the Idylls as an idealist allegory rebuking secular, materialist tendencies in Victorian thought21 has suggested a strong contrast between its ‘parabolic’ mode and Malory’s quasi-historical literalism. Particularly, the reading of Tennyson’s ‘blameless’ Arthur as ‘the Ideal Soul of Man coming into contact with the warring elements of the flesh’22 contrasts with Malory’s picture of a great but imperfect human king, struggling within a real-world political situation. Tennyson made some severe moral changes to Malory: his Arthur harangues Guenevere for her infidelity, whereas in Malory the two never meet again after the king leaves for France; ‘light’ Gawain, whom Malory places in heaven for his services to distressed women, is damned in the Idylls to something like Dante’s circle of the lustful; Tennyson denies ‘stainless’ Arthur’s paternity of Mordred, or any extra-marital sexual contact on his part. Nevertheless, in relation to Tennyson’s account of the king’s actual death, Swinburne’s famous remark about ‘the Morte d’Albert, or Idylls of the Prince Consort’23 is misleading. Arthur’s is the only recorded possible ‘good death’ arising 19 20 21 22 23

All references to Tennyson’s poetry are to Ricks, Poems of Tennyson, 2nd edn, 3 vols. (1987). The Listener, 12 February, 1942, cited in C. Ricks, Tennyson (London, 1971), p. 273. See F. E. L. Priestley, ‘Tennyson’s Idylls’, University of Toronto Quarterly 19 (1949), 35–49. Ricks, Poems, III, 258–9, quoting Hallam Tennyson’s remembrance of his father’s comment in old age. ‘Tennyson and Musset’ (1881), The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Bonchurch Edition, ed. E. Gosse and T. J. Wise (London, 1925–7), XIV, 303. See also C. Poulson, The Quest for the Grail: Arthurian Legend in British Art, 1840–1920 (Manchester, 1999), p. 223 and note, p. 237. For a balanced view of Swinburne’s overall reading of Tennyson, see K. McSweeney, ‘Swinburne’s Tennyson’, Victorian Studies 22.1 (Autumn, 1978), 5–28.

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from the godless slaughter of Tennyson’s ‘last battle’, which built on and exaggerated the unidividualizing horror of Malory’s description, and also anticipated the devastation of time-honoured English deathbed and burial customs in the Great War, 1914–18.24 And yet, far from typifying the right Victorian way to die, Tennyson’s Arthur faces his end in doubt and ‘[c]­onfusion’ – he is left with just one follower, then commits himself to a group of shrieking, black-hooded women who act like hopeless mourners rather than healers or ‘friends / of Arthur ... / ... who will help him at his need’ (‘The Coming of Arthur’, 275–8; ‘The Passing of Arthur’, 452–7). Although Tennyson’s three queens – in Malory they are literal royalty – were read by some to represent Faith, Hope and Charity,25 their despairing cry might rather suggest a complete absence of theological consolation:             an agony Of lamentation, like a wind that shrills All night in a waste land, where no one comes, Or hath come, since the making of the world. (‘The Passing of Arthur’, 368–71)

Bedivere, alarmed and appalled – ‘O me’ – can hardly recognize them. Tennyson increases the sense of despairing grief he found in Malory without any of the comfort Malory might have given readers by the suggestion of family reconciliation. Morgan le Fay, Arthur’s half-sister, whom Malory brings back at the end as chief mourner (1240.23–25; 1242.6–7) has no place in the Idylls. In short, Arthur’s send-off in Tennyson largely violates Victorian customs of death and burial. How very different are the ‘Last Moments of HRH The Prince Consort’ in December 1861, as shown in an oil painting, later a popular lithograph, in which twenty-one decorous figures (family, household, equerries, the Dean of Windsor, doctors) are present in the death-bed chamber.26 How different is the customary nineteenth-century discouragement of women’s attendance at funerals, on the grounds that they could not control their emotions and would make scenes of grief that implicitly doubted Christian consolation.27 Prince Albert’s open weeping at his father’s funeral in 1844 had been considered un-English and ‘unmanly’.28 The wailing queens might have come to stand later, perhaps, 24 25 26

27 28

See P. Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford, 1996), pp. 373–81. Tennyson grudgingly condoned this as a partial reading of the three queens. See H. Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson. A Memoir, 2 vols. (London, 1897), II, 127. Printed in M. Wheeler, Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology (Cambridge, 1990), Plate 2, after p. 218. The anonymous oil painting and lithograph are also printed and described in W. Schupbach, ‘The Last Moments of H.R.H. the Prince Consort’, Medical History 26, (1982), 321–4. Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, pp. 220–22. See S. Weintraub, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ‘Albert [Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha], http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy.library.uwa.edu.au/ view/article/274?docPos=2.

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for the national and international sense of bereavement at Albert’s death.29 But Albert’s private funeral at St George’s, Windsor, much less extravagant an event than would have been the case earlier in the century,30 was an all-male affair. Victoria (rather like Malory’s Lancelot) only later took on the role of chief mourner and custodian of the mausoleum at Frogmore. Also very different is the wrecked and childless marriage Tennyson’s Arthur leaves behind, while Albert and Victoria had, as Bishop Tait wrote, ‘exhibited … the best picture of what husband and wife shd be in the highest position in the nation’,31 ‘a model of Christian family life’.32 In the addition of Arthur’s hopes to see a purified Guenevere again in heaven (‘Guinevere’ [1859] 558–564) to his 1842 anticipation of dwelling in Elysian Avilion, we might see something of the change Michael Wheeler and Pat Jalland identify in nineteenth-century conceptions of heaven, from a long Sabbath of rest to a happy reunion of family members,33 but Arthur’s last speeches in ‘The Passing of Arthur’ include no further mention of this hope. Tennyson’s strict condemnation of adultery would have made it impossible for Arthur and Guenevere eventually to be buried together, as they are in Malory. Like the Bedivere he leaves behind, this Arthur is very much on his own at the end, and perhaps even lonelier afterwards. Even in the more prayerful 1869 version, Tennyson’s Arthur seems, as in Malory, more concerned to assert himself as earthly king by the elimination of Mordred and disposal of Excalibur than to concentrate on his salvation. Prayer is now a main theme, but clergy and liturgy are absent, and normal religious symbols are further impaired or distanced. The ‘lytyll chapell nat farre from the see’ (1237.26) where Arthur is taken by Lucan and Bedivere in Malory becomes in Tennyson a ‘broken chancel with a broken cross’, and he is carried by Bedivere far beyond its consecrated ground – ‘the place of tombs’ – to meet the barge (‘The Passing of Arthur’, 175–7; 343). All the hints of dawn and daylight that the early Tennyson gives for Arthur’s resurrection or return can be understood in terms of natural and organic cycles, which Christine Poulson has linked to the contemporary interest in solar mythology rather than to overt religious symbols.34 Nature, rather than religious culture, is paramount. Malory’s medieval idea that Arthur’s body would come to be venerated inside a chapel is out of the question. Tennyson’s very English earthly paradise of Avilion35 better fits the elegiac tradition of outdoor rural burial indebted 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

J. Wolffe, Great Deaths: Grieving, Religion and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (Oxford, 2000), pp. 194–205 See Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, pp. 198–203. Wolffe, Great Deaths, pp. 198–9, quoting Archbishop Tait of London. Wolffe, Great Deaths, p. 199. Wheeler, Death and the Future Life, p. 224, with reference to Tennyson’s In Memoriam; Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, pp. 266–83. Poulson, The Quest for the Grail, pp. 227–8. Roger Simpson, Camelot Regained (Cambridge, 1990), p. 215.

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to Gray and Wordsworth, which consoles the bereaved through the beauty of natural surroundings:36 the island-valley of Avilion; Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies Deep-meadow’d, happy, fair with orchard-lawns And bowery hollows crown’d with summer sea. (‘The Passing of Arthur’, 427–32)

In Protestant England, without a doctrine of purgatory, other ideas of an ‘intermediate state’ between death and eternity had proliferated. ‘Falling asleep’ and being ‘laid to rest’ were common contemporary expressions for bodily death and burial, as in Edward Bickersteth’s The Blessed Dead (1862), so a Victorian reader might have found it hard to make a clear distinction between peaceful Avilion and the grave itself.37 Only ‘The Passing of Arthur’ (1869) finally but faintly suggests a traditional heavenly reception for the king ‘in some fair city’ (460, my italics). Otherwise, for all his communication with God and injunctions to prayer (‘The Passing of Arthur’, 9–28; 408–23), Tennyson’s hero seems still focused on his career in this world and the coming of a new earthly order, and his vision of paradise is terrestrial rather than transcendent. Tennyson adds to the impression of this-worldliness by introducing a late, elegiac tribute to Arthur’s youthful past as ‘a star of tournament’ (‘The Passing of Arthur’, 390–93), in contrast both to his physically wrecked state now and to the emphasis of previous Idylls, which have suggested Arthur does not value jousts highly or exert himself in them as in real battles: ‘For Lancelot was the first in Tournament, / But Arthur mightiest on the battle-field’ (‘Gareth and Lynette’, 485–6). The king is said not to care ‘… [f]or triumph in our mimic wars, the jousts’ (‘Lancelot and Elaine’, 310–11). Tennyson has previously consistently emphasized the moral programme in Arthur’s prowess: ‘Yet in this heathen war the fire of God / Fills him: I never saw his like: there lives / No greater leader’ (‘Lancelot and Elaine’, 311–13). The tournament has been gradually associated with a demoralized concern for mere ‘Strength of heart / And might of limb, but mainly use and skill’ (‘The Last Tournament’, 197–9). Now the unusually external and spectacular image of Arthur as tournament star, juxtaposed with the inner moral ‘confusion’ of his last battle in the ‘deathwhite mist’ of religious doubt (‘The Passing of Arthur’, 94–9), increases uncertainty about the mood and direction of his ‘passing’, countering acceptance with resistant regret. Tennyson makes 36 37

Wheeler, Death and the Future Life, pp. 47–52, esp. p. 48; also, with reference to In Memoriam, pp. 222–23. See Wheeler, Death and the Future Life, pp. 70–73, on contemporary literature about the ‘intermediate state’.

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the resignation of life and worldly honour seem particularly difficult; his own narrative strategy here, reaching back to create a glamorous past for the king, seems involved in a reluctance, like Bedivere’s, to cast the glories of Camelot away. In Victorian terms, Arthur himself is worryingly reluctant to leave this life. Tennyson was writing in a period when the visible signs of a ‘good death’ were given extreme importance in Evangelical, High Church and Catholic circles. These signs might vary: edifying last words, ‘triumph through suffering’,38 or the reception of sacraments.39 Pat Jalland has shown that until far on in the century it was usually thought essential on religious grounds that those in danger of death clearly realized their condition; no false optimism was permitted by doctors. (Prince Albert’s last illness was an exception, for various reasons: it was feared that he might be too ready to die, and that the queen could not sustain the prospect of losing him.40) But Tennyson keeps both his Arthur and his readers guessing as much as Malory had: Arthur’s state, at once expecting to die and hoping to be healed, remains unsettled, as if we were observing an actual sick-bed where death is unsure: ‘silence follows, or through death / Or deathlike swoon’ (‘The Passing of Arthur’, 119–20). The action occurs, as Roger Simpson has written, in ‘a twilit zone between sleep and waking’.41 The boundaries of syntactical governance are unclear: ‘yet I fear / My wound hath taken cold, and I shall die’ (‘The Passing of Arthur’, 333–4). Where, if anywhere, in that sentence does Arthur stop fearing and start facing his death? The near-assurance of ‘I am so deeply smitten thro’ the helm / That without help I cannot last till morn’ (‘The Passing of Arthur’, 193–4) changes to ‘I am going a long way / With these thou sëest – if indeed I go / (For all my mind is clouded with a doubt)’ (‘The Passing of Arthur’, 424–6), and a last reprise of the hope to be healed in Avilion and not to die after all, even after Arthur has already put everything in God’s hands. For most of the nineteenth century, the doctor, as Pat Jalland points out, ‘had very limited powers to cure. In the early and mid-Victorian periods the good Christian assumed that death was divinely ordained, and submission to the will of God was all-important.’42 In seeking to be healed of what looks like a mortal injury, Arthur shows a different, more earthly spirit. He testifies to the Atonement – ‘that which I have done / May He within himself make pure!’ – and the power of prayer 38 39 40 41 42

Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, p. 185. Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, p. 33; Wheeler, Death and the Future Life, pp. 28–9; Weintraub, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ‘Albert’. See Schupbach, ‘The Last Moments’; Weintraub, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ‘Albert’. Simpson, Camelot Regained, p. 211. Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, p. 6.

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(‘The Passing of Arthur’, 412–23). Yet his clinging to life and ‘clouded’, doubtful state of mind might well have both taken something from the expected moment for a religious reader or given a touch of comforting verisimilitude. The mid-century doctor Samuel Beckett had to warn that the deathbed lucidity of Evangelical tracts was unlikely to occur in real life, especially when so many died in delirium, unconsciousness or unpalliated pain.43 ‘Some die so bravely – I so stupidly’, said the Evangelical Margaret Gladstone in her puerperal fever.44 When last words disappointed ­– Sir John Gladstone’s ‘Bring me my porridge’ is one reported case (1851)45 – family could still appeal to sweetness of countenance or ‘the smile of death’,46 as Malory does with Lancelot (1258.14), or to hopeful gesture. The death of George Tennyson, the poet’s wretched father, in 1831 was treated so by his brother Charles: ‘He suffered little, and after death, his countenance, which was strikingly lofty and peaceful, was I trust an image of the condition of his soul.’47 Alfred Tennyson’s doctor would liken the poet’s ‘majestic’ deathbed figure lit by moonlight to ‘his own “Passing of Arthur”’.48 But Tennyson leaves Arthur not ‘majestic’ but stricken and immobile – ‘like a shatter’d column’ – and his bodily torment unrelieved: ‘a brow / Striped with dark blood: for all his face was white / And colourless, and like the wither’d moon’, with ‘the light and lustrous curls … parch’d with dust; / Or clotted into points and hanging loose’ (‘The Passing of Arthur’, 379–89). These Passion details from the 1842 version, together with the cry added in 1869, ‘My God, thou has forgotten me in my death’ (‘The Passing of Arthur’, 27), must suggest a Christ-likeness, but the very next line, ‘Nay – God my Christ – I pass but shall not die’, may seem as much a rejection as an endorsement of that likeness, perhaps reflecting Tennyson’s great uneasiness with fixed allegorical identifications.49 In ‘Guinevere’, Tennyson uses ‘pass’ in connection with the Queen’s actual death (‘Guinevere’, 691). Does its use by Arthur assert a faith in the Resurrection that swallows up death? Or does Arthur, unlike Christ, deny his ordinary lot, and assert what Michael Wheeler calls Tennyson’s ‘hope … for the endurance of individuality after death’,50 or even a hope for ‘a personal immortality’?51 Is Arthur’s ‘Passing’ not a death, just as his ‘Coming’ (also from 1869) is perhaps not an ordinary birth? In the end, Tennyson’s fondness for interminate verbs of transition – ‘move’, ‘pass’, ‘come’, ‘go’ – again leaves the boundaries 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, p. 36. Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, p. 48. Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, p. 35. Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, p. 37. Quoted in H. Tennyson, A Memoir, I, 63. H. Tennyson, A Memoir, II, 428–9. H. Tennyson, A Memoir, II, 127. Wheeler, Death and the Future Life, p. 263. See R. B. Martin, Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (Oxford, 1980), p. 322.

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ARTHUR’S UNCERTAIN END IN MALORY AND TENNYSON

unclear, letting Arthur’s life, like his barge, simply ‘pass on and on, and go’ until out of human sight (‘The Passing of Arthur’, 467). As in Malory, where the authorized record lapses into subjective speculation – what ‘men say’ ­– so in Tennyson, the final perspective on events is decidedly this-worldly, again, distantly, through the bereft and uncertain Bedivere, ‘who saw / Or thought he saw’ Arthur’s barge disappear westwards out of sight, and to whom ‘it seemed there came’ the sound of Arthur’s heavenly reception (‘The Passing of Arthur’, 457–68, my italics). A further layer of narrative unreliability is the 1869 framing of the whole as a story of Bedivere’s, ‘Told when the man was no more than a voice / In the white winter of his age’ (‘The Passing of Arthur’, 3–4). In its own ways, the last Idyll matches Malory’s refusal to authorize a definitive conclusion for the king. Arthur has become again the ‘phantom king’ on the hillside, the ‘voice’ of Leodogran’s dream in the Idylls’ beginning, who is real, or not, according to what ‘men say’ (‘The Coming of Arthur’, 424–45). Critics like T. S. Eliot and many others have been right to note Tennyson’s censoriousness in comparison with Malory’s tolerance of the failings of ‘earthly sinful’ characters, but a careful reading of ‘The Passing of Arthur’ shows that the later poet was far from offering a total contrast. In his narrative of Arthur’s ending Tennyson’s poem shares much with Le Morte Darthur’s corresponding scene: an apparent unwillingness to let go of this world, a strategic practice of unknowing, a reluctance to narrate the death to which events seem inexorably to have led, and a bold difference from generic and societal norms. Tennyson not only retains many of Malory’s own uncertainties, but, as happens with Malory’s subsequent account of Lancelot and Guenevere’s endings, Tennyson’s later additions to his earlier ‘Le Morte d’Arthur’ do not nullify the effect of the prior version but serve to highlight its unusual starkness. Rather than making a ‘Morte d’Albert’, Tennyson effectively recreated in the different terms of the Victorian period Le Morte Darthur’s telling resistance to medieval notions of a ‘good death’ for the king. Although Tennyson’s Arthur, like Malory’s ‘most noblest Crysten kynge’, is an intensely conventional figure of his age, the manner of his ending frees him from the letter of orthodoxy; the ‘blameless king’ becomes at last strangely singular and oppositional, moving beyond the conventions he has always upheld.

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III

The Intruder at the Feast: Negotiating Boundaries in Medieval Insular Romance* Aisling Byrne In 1299 Edward I held a great feast to celebrate his second marriage. The king took the opportunity to organize a recreation of the Round Table with selected knights taking on the roles of Arthurian heroes. When the first course had ended a page called for silence and Edward, in the role of Arthur, declared that he desired to hear news before he ate any more. A blood-spattered squire then entered and accused the court and king of cowardice, calling down a curse on them unless they avenged the treatment he had suffered at the hands of the Welsh. The king and knights pledged to do so. After the second course a bound squire rode in with a letter from the king of ‘Irelant’ for the knight playing the role of Lancelot. The letter challenged the knight to meet him on the coast of Wales. After the third course a loathly lady entered on a nag and told the knight playing Perceval to win the castle at Leicester from its lord, before challenging ‘Gawain’ to put an end to the strife in ‘Cornuaelge’.1 The episode is related by the chronicler Lodewijk van Velthem and, although the accuracy of his dating and geographical references has been questioned, it seems almost certain that an event conforming in most respects to that described above did indeed take place.2 In organizing these entertainments, Edward was drawing upon a literary motif which, I would like to thank Helen Cooper for suggesting the intruder at the feast as a topic of enquiry and for her guidance during the composition of this paper. 1 For an influential account see R. S. Loomis, ‘Edward I: Arthurian Enthusiast’, Speculum 28 (1953), 114–27. For a more recent treatment of this event see M. Biddle, ‘The Making of the Round Table’, in M. Biddle, ed. King Arthur’s Round Table: An Archaeological Investigation (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 337–92 (esp. pp. 378–86). 2 The entertainments had a very real political significance. Loomis points out that Lodewijk appears to have confused ‘Kenilworth with Cornuaelge and … Scotland with Irelant … the three messengers … would [therefore] correspond to the three outstanding wars of Edward’s time, against the Welsh, the Scots and the barons’. Furthermore, Edward is recorded as having held each of his knights to the commitments they had made in the course of these entertainments. Cf. Loomis, ‘Edward I’, p. 120 *

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even in 1299, had a long and rich tradition. The motif in question is that of the intruder at the feast, who breaks in upon the court to issue a challenge or a call to adventure. The motif pre-dates the appearance of those texts we generally classify as romance, appearing in Irish sources that may be dated as early as the ninth century,3 but achieves what can only be described as conventional status in medieval Arthurian romance. Yet despite, or perhaps because of, its widespread occurrence it has never received sustained critical analysis. In dealing with such motifs it is tempting to isolate the section of the text in which the motif appears for purposes of intertextual comparison and neglect the broader narrative context. Such a treatment has affinities with the so-called ‘anthropological approach’ popular in the first half of the twentieth century, and can certainly shed light on the original significance of the motif and its probable roots in early literature and folklore. However, this approach, though valuable, does little to illuminate the function such a motif performs within the narrative in which it is embedded. Indeed, in the case of the intruder at the feast, the very nature of the motif resists an approach that isolates it from its narrative context: it is counter-intuitive to treat an event that is so often employed as a starting point as an end in itself. The entrance of the intruder widens the focus of the narrative from the microcosm of the court to the world beyond and usually constitutes an invitation to quest and adventure. The tensions and conflicts it contains are unpacked throughout the rest of the text. On the face of it, the imaginative power of the motif appears simple to explain. The court, embodying civilization, rationality, order, peace and the known, interior world is suddenly intruded on by the forces of wildness, conflict, churlishness and the unknown, exterior world. Although the motif appears to embrace a dualistic vision where oppositions are clear cut and stable, close consideration of the various treatments of the motif in their narrative contexts suggests that the reality is considerably more complex. Focusing on examples from insular romance, this paper argues that medieval writers develop the interruption of the feast into what may be described as a dialectic framework wherein oppositional categories such as civilization and the wild or order and chaos may be interrogated and explored. Many of the most prominent uses of the motif appear to advocate an incorporative vision that renders the boundary between the court and the exterior world highly permeable to a variety of narrative, political and aesthetic ends.

3

Caith Maige Tuired: The Second Battle of Mag Tuired, ed. E. A. Gray, Irish Texts Society 52 (London, 1982).

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NEGOTIATING BOUNDARIES IN MEDIEVAL INSULAR ROMANCE

The Necessary Threat A cursory examination of the surviving corpus of medieval romance is enough to reveal the fundamental role played by the motif of the intruder at the feast. More often than not it is the catalyst for quest or adventure. Although the intruder, in many cases, poses a threat to the court’s existence, paradoxically that existence would not be possible without the presence of such threats. The intruder’s preeminent function within the narrative is to shake the court out of its complacency and offer it an opportunity to justify its existence. The idea that the threat is in some sense necessary is present in the earliest treatments of the motif. It appears to have deep roots in the narratives of the Celtic-speaking cultures, and some of the early medieval Irish texts in which it is employed bear interesting comparison to (predominantly later) texts that are products of a more ‘courtly’ culture. The necessity of the intrusion to the continued well-being and existence of the court is affirmed in the Irish texts, but the means by which such an end is brought about makes the emphasis of these texts very different to that of their courtly counterparts. The contrast between how the motif is employed in the literature of the courtly tradition and how it is employed in the earlier Celtic tradition is most clearly seen in the treatment of the relation between the individual hero and the court. The disruption of a feast is a prominent episode in some of the central narratives of Irish medieval literature. In the latetwelfth- or early-thirteenth-century Acallam na Senórach, the boy-hero Fionn MacCumhail arrives at the great feast of Tara and takes a place at table. In this story, which seems closely related to later ‘fair unknown’ narratives, the king, Conn Cédchathach, enquires about the identity of the child and is informed by Fionn that he is the son of Cumhal, Conn’s friend and ally. The boy is welcomed into the court and subsequently proves to be the only warrior capable of killing the monstrous Aillén, who has been burning Tara to the ground once a year for the previous twenty-three years.4 In Caith Maige Tuired, a later recension of a text which may date to the ninth century,5 there is a lengthy exchange between Lug and the doorkeeper at Tara. The doorkeeper insists that Lug must prove that he is the master of an art not already practised by another member of the royal retinue in order to be admitted. Lug lists his abilities and, in finding that Tara already has a practitioner of each, claims the right to enter as unique master of all arts. One of the most intricate treatments of the motif in Irish literature 4

5

Agallamh na Senórach, in Silva Gadelica, ed. S. H. O’Grady, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1892), I, 94–233. A more recent translation of this episode is available in Tales of the Elders of Ireland: A New Translation of Acallam na Senórach, ed. A. Dooley and H. Roe (Oxford, 1999), pp. 51–4. Caith Maige Tuired, ed. Gray, p. 11.

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occurs in Fled Bricrend (Bricriu’s Feast). The text – preserved in the twelfth-century Lebor na hUidhre (The Book of the Dun Cow)6 and in four later manuscripts – is frequently cited as the earliest known analogue to the beheading episode in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It has, however, received relatively little literary critical attention in its own right.7 The interruption of the feast is the last in a series of events that occur at a great banquet held by Bricriu Nemthenga. Bricriu, a sly, spiteful figure, assembles the warriors of Ulster at a feast in Emhain Macha in order to sow dissent and rivalry among them. A violent dispute breaks out over who has superior claim to the ‘Champion’s Portion’, with no single warrior emerging as the undisputed claimant. One evening a huge, ugly bachlach (churl) carrying an axe enters the hall and challenges the assembled warriors to an exchange of blows. In a move that will find numerous echoes in later texts, the challenge is represented as an opportunity for the assembled warriors to justify their collective reputation for valour: Uair roucsaid-se for n-Ulaid, or se, do slúagaib na tíri sin ule ar grain ocus greit ocus gaisced, ar airechas ocus uaill ocus ordan, ar fírinne ocus féle ocus febas, fagabar uaib óenfer chomallas frim-sa in ceist immátú.8 (‘Since you men of Ulster,’ he said, ‘have excelled the peoples of all those lands in might and deed, in dignity and nobility and rank, in truth and largess and excellence, produce from among yourselves one who will fulfil the request I have made!’)

The challenge offers a single representative of the group the opportunity to enhance its collective reputation. However, the warriors’ response to the challenge does little to bolster any sense of communal pride and responsibility. Munremar, Lóegaire and Conall Cernach successively accept the challenge and strike off the churl’s head, but when the intruder picks up his head and departs after each blow, all three fail to reappear the following night to receive the return stroke. Although the text initially proposes that collective vindication is possible, such a suggestion is complicated and largely discredited as the narrative unfolds. On the fourth night Cúchulainn takes up the challenge and strikes the churl’s head from his neck with similar results. However, unlike his peers, Cúchulainn keeps to the terms of the agreement and, in a tense and dramatic passage, stretches out his neck on a block to receive the return blow. The churl spares him, bringing his axe down harmlessly on its blunt side, before declaring Cúchulainn the undisputed Champion of 6 7

8

Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, MS 1229. The collection of essays on the narrative issued by the Irish Texts Society, Fled Bricrenn: Reassessments ed. P. Ó Riain, Irish Texts Society, Subsidiary Series (2000), is generally unconcerned with the more literary aspects of the text. Fled Bricrend: The Feast of Bricriu, ed. G. Henderson, Irish Texts Society 2 (1899), p. 118. The translations are my own.

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NEGOTIATING BOUNDARIES IN MEDIEVAL INSULAR ROMANCE

Ulster for his great courage and sense of honour. The final line of the text reveals that the monstrous churl was, in reality, the shape-shifting noble Cú Roí. As this dramatic conclusion makes clear, the relationship between the individual and the group has shifted considerably between the churl’s initial challenge and Cúchulainn’s victory. The nobility of the individual hero brings about order, but it can do little to enhance the honour of a group that has already discredited itself by the cowardice of three of its representatives. The order that emerges at the end of Fled Bricrend is founded on the subordination of the other members of the court to ­Cúchulainn’s prowess, not on the affirmation of their collective honour. Predictably, this elevation of the heroic individual at the expense of the community from which he comes finds few echoes in later courtly literature; however, Fled Bricrend’s engagement with the function and necessity of the challenge is considerably more representative. Initially, the intruder at the feast in Emhain Macha is depicted as a source of terror and disorder: Dubthach Dóeltenga declares that the churl is likely to destroy them all if he returns the next day and Cúchulainn himself displays very real fear as he awaits the return blow.9 Yet the churl ultimately functions as the upholder of order, quelling the rivalries of the assembled warriors by proving and reasserting Cúchulainn’s superiority: ‘Rige laech n-Eirenn duit on tratso 7 in curadmir gen chosnum’10 (The lordship of the warriors of Ireland is yours from now on and also the Champion’s Portion without dispute). Like the Green Knight in the tale’s later analogue, Cú Roí emerges as an authoritative interpreter of events and is presented as a figure of greater vision than any of the assembled warriors. Yet the ways in which the episode in Fled Bricrend differs from later romance accounts of intruders are as noticeable as the points of congruity. ­Bricriu’s feast, for instance, lacks the decorum of many more courtly feasts. The emphasis on internal strife among warriors may be analogous to the arguments over precedence in Layamon’s account of the Round Table’s creation in his Brut,11 yet such internal disputes are rare in later treatments of the motif, where the emphasis is on the harmony of courtly life and on the orderliness of the banquet. Moreover, the Irish narrative privileges the individual hero over the reputation of the assembled company. This resolution contrasts starkly with the manner in which the similar dispute over precedence is resolved in Layamon; after all, the creation of the Round Table in the Brut symbolizes the triumph of the communal good over individual interests. This shift in emphasis from the individual to the group is clearly discernable in adaptations of the motif in the Arthurian tradition. A promi9 10 11

Fled Bricrend, ed. Henderson, pp. 123 and 127 respectively. Fled Bricrend, ed. Henderson, p. 129. Laȝamon, Brut or Hystoria Brutonum, ed. W. R. J. Barron and S. C. Weinberg (Harlow, 1995), lines 11367–70.

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nent instance is the arrival of Lucius’s messengers at Arthur’s Pentecost feast;12 here, as in the Irish text, the necessity of the threat is affirmed but its function is to vindicate the honour of the group, rather than that of the individual hero. Accounts of Arthur’s Roman Wars from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae onwards depict Arthur responding to Lucius’s challenge by immediately seeking the counsel of his knights. In all major versions of the story the challenge is welcomed by Sir Cador, who considers war an opportunity for the Round Table to justify its existence.13 Cador suggests that taking up Lucius’s challenge is a means of purifying and justifying courtly consumption such as that of the feast: Hucusque in timore fueram ne Britones longa pace quietos ocium quod ducunt ignauos faceret … Deus igitur ne nos debilitaret segnicia Romanos in hunc affectum induxit ut in pristinum statum nostram probitatem reducerent.14 (Until now, I had been in fear that the indolent life the Britons have been conducting has made them into cowards during this long time of peace … In order to free us from this dilatoriness, God has roused the Roman’s hatred so that our honour may be restored to its former state.)

Such an interpretation of the role of the intruder at the feast is rarely so explicit in romance, but, as I will suggest below, the close relationship between the challenger and the court that Cador’s speech implies may be discerned in numerous texts.

12

13 14

By far the most common occasion for these disrupted feasts is Pentecost, and perhaps the frequent pairing of the feast-day and the motif is not coincidental: the sudden and unexpected appearance of the Holy Spirit in the upper room among the assembled apostles finds a secular echo in the romance intruder. The biblical disruption revives the disheartened apostles and gives them the impetus to go out into the world to preach the gospel. In romance, the intruder typically sets events in motion that will send the knight on a quest into the world outside the court. Discerning such an echo is often left to the reader since the connection between feast-day and motif is generally only implied. However, overt evidence for such a connection occurs in a rare religious variation on the motif: the appearance of the Grail at Arthur’s Pentecost feast in the Vulgate Cycle. The text’s author uses the Acts of the Apostles account of the divine intruder penetrating the upper room as the template for the appearance of the Grail among Arthur’s knights. The company has assembled to eat after vespers when a clap of thunder is heard and the palace is illumined ‘de la grace del saint esperit’. Everyone present is struck dumb and the Grail enters the hall carried by unseen hands. The Grail makes its way through the hall, filling each place with as much food as the occupant desires. The Grail then leaves, the power of speech is restored to them, and all present give praise to God (cf. Acts 2. 1–11). At almost every point the description of the episode mimics the biblical account. Geoffrey’s Historia, Wace’s Roman de Brut, Layamon’s Brut, the Alliterative Morte Arthur and Malory’s Morte Darthur – texts spanning over three centuries. Geoffrey of Monmouth, The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, I, ed. N. Wright (Cambridge, 1984), p. 113. The translation is my own.

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NEGOTIATING BOUNDARIES IN MEDIEVAL INSULAR ROMANCE

Of course, the difference between this response to external threat and that of the warriors in Fled Bricrend is partly a function of the differing natures of the two challenges. Cú Roí invites one warrior alone to fulfil his challenge, while Lucius declares war on the entire court. However, as noted above, the churl’s invitation in the Irish text is initially framed as an opportunity for the individual to enhance the reputation of the group; it is only the cowardice of successive representatives of the court which means that the individual hero must triumph at the others’ expense if order is to be restored. By contrast, in Geoffrey’s rendering of the Arthurian legend, Arthur employs his power in the service of communal honour. When Arthur takes counsel with his knights he immediately locates the proper response to the challenge within the ambit of the court as a community rather than as a collection of competing individuals. Although Lucius’s challenge, as related by Geoffrey, is one of the earliest and most culturally central instances of the motif, subsequent developments within the tradition render it exceptional in some respects. Cador’s contention is not entirely unarguable and his formulation of what precisely constitutes a ‘necessary threat’ is challenged from the earliest stages of the tradition. His pronouncement is refined and contested in both Wace and Layamon’s accounts. In both texts Gawain responds to Cador’s statement, asserting the desirability of peace. Wace’s version of the episode suggests that chivalric exploits can be motivated by peaceful conditions: Mult sunt bones les gaberies E bones sunt les drueries. Pur amistié e pur amies Funt chevaliers chevaleries.15 (Jokes are excellent and so are love affairs. It is for love and their beloved that knights do knightly deeds.)

Layamon’s English adaptation of Wace’s text goes further in suggesting that peace might be seen as a precondition for knightly self-justification: Cador, þu ært a riche mon! þine rædes ne beoð noht idon, for god is grið and god is frið   þe freoliche þer haldeð wið– and Godd sulf hit makede þurh his Goddcunde– for grið makeð godne mon gode workes wurchen for alle monnen bið þa bet þat lond bið þa murgre. (12454–8) (Cador, you are a mighty man! Your advice is not sound, for peace and quiet are good if one maintains them willingly – and God

15

Wace’s Roman de Brut, A History of the British: Text and Translation, ed. and trans. J. Weiss (Exeter, 1999), lines 10769–72.

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himself in his divinity created them – for peace allows a good man to do good deeds whereby all men are the better and the land the happier.)16

Gawain’s position, as articulated in Layamon’s Brut, is in many ways more representative of the later romance tradition than Cador’s. Few challenges in later texts pose a threat to the entire realm; rather, their focus is local or individual. If Arthur’s subsequent actions in various accounts of the Roman Wars suggest that Cador’s position has won the day, the later romance tradition is dominated by challenges whose import reflects the values espoused by Gawain: they provide an outlet for chivalry, but although their threat is real it is rarely directed at, or responded to by, the Arthurian body politic as a whole. Such episodes enable the articulation of a vision of valour which reconciles the fundamental importance of knightly aventure in a chivalric society with the peace and prosperity such a society should (ideally) enjoy and value.

The Margins and the Centre Of course, interpreting the function of the intruder at the feast solely as a ‘necessary threat’ risks reducing the intruder to merely another cog in the machinery of the plot. It is true that in some romances the intruder appears and disappears from view with great rapidity. He or she can be more akin to what Alfred Hitchcock memorably termed a ‘MacGuffin’ than a fully fledged character, existing solely to give impetus to the plot and to provide an opportunity for the courtly society to justify itself. However, the nature of the motif ensures that the figure of the intruder is often not so easily dismissed. It is not only the challenge typically borne by the intruder that poses problems for the court; his very existence is, in many cases, problematic. For instance, an intruder such as the Green Knight has an intractability that challenges the imaginative and ideological faculties of the court. Such figures testify to the realm of the marvellous that resists the rationalizing attempts of a courtly, Christian society. Parallel to intruders whose intractability inheres in their magical nature are those intruders who resist absorption into Arthur’s realm. Their entrance is often evidence of a world that has not yet been brought under Arthur’s control and which, in inserting itself into the very heart of the court, cannot be ignored. The politically intractable opponent is often just as problematic for Arthur’s court as the magical challenger, since both bear witness to the limitations of courtly power and to a potentially troubling multiplicity of world-views. 16

Translation from Brut, ed. Barron and Weinberg, p. 641.

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NEGOTIATING BOUNDARIES IN MEDIEVAL INSULAR ROMANCE

The group of Middle English romances sometimes dubbed the ‘Gawain romances’ consistently engages with the problem of assimilating the intruder. Although it does not make use of the intruder at the feast motif, The Knightly Tale of Golagros and Gawain provides one of the most explicit accounts of how problematic unassimilated, autonomous figures can be for Arthur’s vision of the world. Arthur simply cannot tolerate the existence of a knight like Golagros, who owes no allegiance to any lord: Than Schir Spynagrose with speche spak to the King: “Yone lord haldis of nane leid, that yone land aw,  holds [power] through    no lord; governs Bot everlesting but legiance, to his leving,  But [holds it] forever without [owing] service [to a superior lord], until his death As his eldaris has done, enduring his daw.”  elders (i.e., ancestors); to    his day “Hevinly God!” said the heynd, “how happynis this thing?  handsome [King] Herd thair ever ony sage sa selcouth ane saw.”  any wise [person] so    marvelous a saying17

Arthur goes on to vow to bring Golagros under his sway. The king’s reaction is not so much anger that Golagros is not under his lordship as outrage that the knight is not under any lordship. Golagros represents a challenge not only to Arthur’s own authority but to feudalism more generally. The fourteenth-century Gawain romance The Awntyrs off Arthur at the Terne Wathelyne contains one of the most sophisticated treatments of the politically intractable intruder. The poem falls into two halves of almost equal length: the first deals with the apparition of the ghost of Guenevere’s mother to Gawain and Guenevere, the second with the challenge of Sir Galeron and his contest with Gawain. The first part of the poem employs the conventional opening of King Arthur and his court riding out to hunt in Inglewood Forest. The second begins with the equally conventional motif of the disturbance at the feast, which here appears as a mirror image of the first opening: the court that had ridden out to meet the unknown in the forest is now penetrated by a challenger from the outside. Although the Awntyrs probably originated no further north than Cumberland, Scotland is a powerful presence in the romance. Sir Galeron identifies himself with several areas most of which (scribal corruptions notwithstanding) appear to be in Scotland:

17

The Knightly Tale of Golagros and Gawain, in Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, ed. T. Hahn, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, 1995), pp. 227–308, lines 261–6. All glosses and translations to the Gawain romances are taken from, or adapted from, Hahn’s edition.

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Mi name is Sir Galaron, withouten eny gile, guile The grettest of Galwey of greves and gyllis, greatest [knight]; thickets; ravines Of Connok, of Conyngham, and also Kyle, Of Lomond, of Losex, of Loyan hilles.18

He desires to win back his lands, claiming that Arthur ‘has wonen hem in werre with a wrange wile’ (has taken them in war with an unjust trick; 421). The manner in which the Awntyrs portrays this antagonistic Scottish knight is interesting. Medieval English authors typically depict Scotland and the other territories of the Celtic world either as areas of wildness and threat or as realms of magical and otherworldly significations. The Luttrell Psalter, produced between 1325 and 1335 for a veteran of Edward I’s Scottish campaigns, is representative of late medieval English depictions of the Scots in illustrating Scottish warriors murdering children, clubbing women to death and stabbing unarmed men in the back.19 By the time of the composition of the Awntyrs the perceived threat from Scotland had not lessened; if anything it was ‘seen as intractable, possibly permanent’.20 Yet Galeron is by no means a ‘wild knight’ nor even particularly exotic. His entrance is announced by a maiden and the poet devotes considerable attention to the courtly appearance of both. Galeron’s clothing speaks as eloquently of his courtliness as Arthur’s feast speaks of his: The knight in his colours was armed ful clene, heraldic dress; armed to perfection With his comly crest clere to beholde, handsome plume His brené and his basnet burneshed ful bene, armor; headpiece; well With a bordur abought al of brende golde. about; burnished His mayles were mylke white, enclawet ful clene. [coat of] mail; fastened (378–82)

Despite his antagonistic intent, Galeron is (literally and figuratively) cut from the same cloth as Arthur’s court. The description of the knight performs the same function as the portrayal of Arthur’s feast which precedes it in describing the outward performance of courtly identity. Just as his fine appearance answers Arthur’s elaborate display of wealth, Galeron’s valour in combat answers and enables the courtesy with which he is treated by the court. It is made abundantly clear from the outset that

18 19 20

The Awntyrs off Arthur, in Sir Gawain, ed. Hahn, pp. 178–226, lines 417–20. The Luttrell Psalter: A Facsimile, ed. M. P. Brown (London, 2006), fol. 169r. C. J. Rushton, ‘Of an uncouthe stede: The Scottish Knight in Middle English Arthurian Romances’, in The Scots and Medieval Arthurian Legend, ed. R. Purdie and N. Royan (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 109–19 (p. 110).

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this intruder’s status as an ‘outsider’ has territorial rather than ideological roots. The rationale for constructing such an atypically glowing portrait of a Scottish opponent becomes clearer at the end of the romance, where the common ground of courtliness provides the resolution to the territorial dispute. Facing defeat by Gawain, Galeron relinquishes his lands to his opponent, declaring: “I wende never wee in this world had ben half so wight. Here I make the releyse, renke, by the Rode, And, byfore thiese ryalle, resynge the my ryghte; And sithen make the monraden with a mylde mode As man of medlert makeles of might.”  (639–43) (I never imagined [there was a] knight in the world [who] was half so powerful [as you are]. And, before these royal [persons], [I] resign [to] you my right (i.e., all claims to lands and entitlements) and afterwards [shall] make homage with good will, [insofar] as [you are a] man of middle earth matchless in strength (i.e., as a man without equal in this world).)

Arthur rewards Gawain by granting him lands in Wales and various other territories in the borders of Britain while stipulating that he will repay Galeron’s valour by restoring the lands Galeron had relinquished to him. Like Golagros and Gawain, which ends with a very similar accommodation, the Awyntrs weighs the claims of territorial politics carefully before denying them absolute authority. The disturbance at the feast that opens the second part of the Awntyrs proves a particularly effective base from which to launch this complex negotiation of oppositions. If the oppositional and dialogic potentialities of the motif of the interrupted feast are drawn out over the romance as a whole, it is possible to go one step further in attempting to locate the basis on which the assimilation of the intruder is achieved. The Awntyr’s much-commented-on bipartite structure has posed problems for the poem’s critics.21 On the face of it, the chilling encounter with the ghost of Guenevere’s mother and the challenge issued by Sir Galeron appear to have little in common. It is conceivable that the text as we have it was formed by joining two originally independent works. However, the poem survives in four manuscripts – a large number for a romance – in all of which the same two-part structure is employed.22 It is difficult to account for the number of copies, and the 21

22

For a useful analysis of these problems and a reading of the poem’s structure see H. Phillips, ‘The Awyntrs off Arthure: Structure and Meaning. A Reassessment’, Arthurian Literature 12 (1993), 63–89. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 324; Lambeth Palace Library, MS 491.B (Thornton MS); Lincoln Cathedral Library, MS 91; and Ireland Blackburn MS, Robert H. Taylor Collection, Princeton, New Jersey.

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absence of any evidence that either part ever had a separate existence, if we assume the sections were originally independent. Thomas Hahn has suggested that a possible unifying theme in the romance may be the concept of the communion of saints: Awntyrs assumes, and gives vital expression to, a sense of corporate religiosity, in which the living and the dead are directly in touch with each other, so that those in heaven, on earth … [and in purgatory] … act together in securing their mutual welfare … the individual’s life can have final meaning only inside this corporate identity. The ethos of chivalry participates in a similar corporate sensibility.23

This broad thematic linking of the heavenly and the earthly is discernable on a more specific level within the poem. Symmetrical patterning is frequent in these romances, and it may be that the masses offered to allow the soul of Guenevere’s mother to cross the boundary between purgatory and heaven find a secular echo in the courtesy exercised in bringing Galeron from the status of intruder at Arthur’s court to membership of the Round Table.24 In this reading the final stanza of the poem, in which Guenevere arranges for the masses to be said for her mother, is not a mere afterthought inserted to link two originally independent romances. Rather, it carries over a secular line of thought into the spiritual realm, a process that may be read as validating courtly ideology. The final stanza broadens the poem’s scope from the temporal and local to the eternal and the universal. In implying that courtliness as embodied in Arthur’s knights is an earthly echo of heavenly order, the poet goes some way to underlining what he sees as the justice of Arthur’s rule. A. C. Spearing has proposed that the diptych provides a useful interpretative model when considering The Awntyrs off Arthur’s problematic structure. Since the form operates on a principle of juxtaposition rather than subordination, it allows for significant imaginative participation on the part of the audience, generating ‘a potentiality for meaning’ within the fixed frame of courtliness and Christianity.25 The Awntyrs is deeply concerned with negotiating oppositions, crossing boundaries and unifying territories. It mediates dualities through a principle of coordination rather than subordination. The poem makes its argument implicitly, through its rich descriptions, finely drawn noble characters and its final movement towards a position of what is, if we accept the poem on its own terms, uninhibited idealism. The audience is allowed a considerable freedom of association and interpretation and this rejection of imposed order in favour of proffered order on a structural level mirrors the means by which 23 24 25

Introduction to The Awntyrs, in Sir Gawain, ed. Hahn, p. 171. Introduction to The Awntyrs, in Sir Gawain, ed. Hahn, p. 172. A. C. Spearing, ‘The Awntyrs off Arthure’, in The Alliterative Tradition in the Fourteenth Century, ed. B. S. Levy and P. E. Szarmach (Kent, Ohio, 1981), pp. 183–202 (p. 186).

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Galeron is finally assimilated into the court. In returning his lands to him Arthur guarantees his loyalty by the exercise of courtesy rather than by force. Naturally, the Awntyrs does not propose a model of pluralist fragmentation, but it does propose a model of authority that seeks to avoid the potentially tyrannizing implications of centralized power. In this analysis of the poem, authority proposes rather than imposes, facilitating the free choice of the individual while ensuring that the supreme courtliness of Arthur’s world-view is the most compelling choice available. Hahn has suggested that a key concern of the ‘Gawain romances’ as a group is reconciliation and incorporation.26 The intruder at the feast motif, insofar as it is based on seemingly intractable oppositions, provides a natural starting point for the treatment of such concerns. The Greene Knight and The Turke and Sir Gawain both open with the motif and end with the incorporation of the intruder as Gawain brings the marvellous into the realm of the familiar. One of the most notable ways in which The Greene Knight differs from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is in its easy rationalization of its eponymous challenger. The fact that Gawain’s opponent becomes a knight of the Round Table at the ballad’s close seems natural and unproblematic. There is little attempt to mystify the figure of the Green Knight at any stage of the poem; indeed, every device the Gawain-poet uses to underscore the intruder’s intractability is rejected in the ballad. The Green Knight’s true identity and his reasons for going to Arthur’s court are announced at the beginning of the work. Unlike the Gawain-poet’s intruder, the physical appearance of the Green Knight in the later romance does not pose any interpretative problems: That was a jolly sight to seene, When horsse and armour was all greene, And weapon that hee bare.27

When he arrives at the court the Green Knight politely announces himself and, unlike his literary predecessor, he accepts Arthur’s invitation to sit and eat before the exchange of blows (170–74). The intruder’s refusal to accept Arthur’s hospitality is a recurrent feature of this motif in romance and generally serves as an indication of his hostility and ‘otherness’, but this Green Knight’s deportment at the feast is that of the courtly gentleman: Now the Greene Knight is set att meate, dinner Seemlye served in his seate, Beside the Round Table. To talke of his welfare, nothing he needs: With respect to his satisfaction Like a knight himselfe he feeds, With long time reasnable. leisurely  (175–80) 26 27

Sir Gawain, ed. Hahn, p. 25. The Greene Knight, in Sir Gawain, ed. Hahn, pp. 309–36, lines 79–81.

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As in the Awntyrs, the intruder and the court are united by a shared courtliness. While The Greene Knight allows for a courtly intruder to take his place at the Round Table, The Turke and Sir Gawain sees an uncouth intruder restored to courtliness. In The Turke and Sir Gawain, as in the Awntyrs, the assimilation of the intruder has territorial implications. The Turk’s own release from enchantment and incorporation into the Round Table is reflected in his appointment as king of the Isle of Man.28 The outlying Celtic territory which the poem had portrayed as a land of savagery and magic is absorbed into a single British identity. The romances in which the challenger is finally assimilated into the court emphasize the permeability of the boundary between intruder and court. The characteristic mode of thought of many of these romances is incorporation rather than opposition. In The Awyntrs off Arthur incorporation does not take place by the mere effacing of difference; rather, the author is at great pains to establish these reconciliations on a model of unity in difference. In this text Christianity and courtliness function as unifying principles that compel the intruder’s allegiance by attraction rather than by force. The Greene Knight and The Turke and Sir Gawain incorporate their intruders through processes that are less complex, though similarly benign. In these texts the emphasis falls on accommodation rather than subjugation. A willingness to accommodate the difference between the insider and the outsider is depicted as politically desirable in a healthy and united society. Of course, the happy outcomes of these texts are founded on a certain degree of literary subterfuge. The Turk is well-disposed to the court from the beginning, the Green Knight of the ballad is distinctly unthreatening and, while Galeron’s speech may identify him as a Scottish lord, his behaviour, manners and dress align him with the culture of Arthur’s court from the outset. The cultural difference that, in the historical world, contributed so much to Scottish intractability is played down considerably in the romance world of the Awntyrs, and it is this fictive affinity, more than any engagement with the historical and cultural issues at stake, that enables the romance’s happy ending. In this light it is, perhaps, telling to note that where an intruder who is manifestly culturally ‘other’ features in romance, the emphasis is rarely political. Those intruders who may be broadly classed as ‘uncouth’, ‘wild’ or ‘churlish’ are removed from courtly chivalric culture to a degree impossible for figures like Galeron. Nonetheless, their final incorporation into Arthur’s world is a recurrent feature of the romances in which they appear. Such assimilation of the wild into the court is not solely a characteristic of romance. The complexity of medieval attitudes to the ‘uncouth’ is perhaps most evident in the culture’s fascination with the figure of the 28

The Turke and Sir Gawain, in Sir Gawain, ed. Hahn, pp. 340–58, lines 320–31.

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wild man. He (or she in the case of the wild woman) appeared in various guises, from the pagan savage to the eremitic saint, and the relationship between the culture of the court and the world inhabited by the wild man could be an arena of considerable ambiguity and complexity. The uncivilized man has a well-developed relationship with the life of the court in both literary texts and courtly play. A French Book of Hours dating from c.1500 is illuminated by marginal scenes in which wild men mirror the activity of knights. On one folio a wild man shoots a heron while on the facing page a knight kills a stag.29 Such ‘mirroring’ could be read as casting courtly culture in an ironic light and, as Michael Camille notes, satirizing the pretensions of chivalry.30 However, while such images drag the knight down, they also elevate the wild man by association and suggest significant continuity, rather than rupture, between the civilized world and the wild. In Wynnere and Wastoure, the ‘wodwyse’ appears to be the guardian of the king,31 while the prominent position of wild men in late medieval heraldry appears to underscore their supporting rather than their threatening role. Wild men were a frequent sight at late medieval courtly entertainments. A case in point is the infamous episode in January 1393 in which Charles VI of France and five companions entered the banquet celebrating the third marriage of Catherine de Fastavarin dressed as wild men. The episode is chiefly noted by the chroniclers because the pitch used in the costumes accidentally caught fire during the performance and four of the participants died. This intrusion at the feast by courtiers masquerading as wild men draws the civilized and uncivilized worlds of the court and the wild into a single arena and a single group of individuals. Susan Crane has suggested that such a performance consolidated and enhanced the court’s reputation.32 In her analysis, Charles VI’s costume and his name are properties of his identity that are disunited in the space of the performance. The final unmasking of the king catches up the wildness of his costume into his already established courtliness,33 enabling the bodily freedom which could so easily be sacrificed to the mannerisms of courtly living to be fictively retrieved in the controlled environment of the feast.34 In romance, wild men come in as many varieties as elsewhere in medieval culture. They may be the straightforward enemy of courtly civiliza-

29 30 31 32 33 34

D. Yamamoto, The Boundaries of the Human in Medieval English Literature (Oxford, 2000), p. 175. M. Camille, Image on the Edge:The Margins of Medieval Art (London, 1992), p. 108. Wynnere and Wastoure, ed. S. Trigg, EETS OS 297 (London, 1990), lines 70–75. S. Crane, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity during the Hundred Years War (Philadelphia, 2002), p. 159. Crane, Performance, p. 162. Crane, Performance, p. 161.

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tion, like the ‘wodwos’ of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.35 The knight himself may descend into wildness through choice or by accident: Ywain, Lancelot and Orfeo become wild men as a result of traumatic experiences. The figure of Perceval in his various incarnations from the twelfth century onwards represents a less disturbing, but in many ways less easily categorizable, state of wildness. As he has been raised in the woods, his wildness is associated with innocence and simplicity rather than with madness. It could perhaps be described as a ‘comic wildness’, whereas the tormented heroes of other romances experience tragic reversal. The comic aspects of Perceval’s character are brought out in Chrétien’s text and in the closely related Welsh romance Peredur, but they are engaged with most consistently in the fourteenth-century Middle English romance Sir Percyvell of Galles. Sir Percyvell is, in many ways, a more tightly structured poem than Chrétien’s text. Various motifs and episodes from the Conte du Graal and its continuations, most notably the Grail itself, are jettisoned by the English author. The result is a more uniformly light-hearted text and one that is primarily concerned with the personal journey of the hero. Helen Cooper has characterized the poem as having been constructed ‘solely in terms of the unknown young man’s processes of self-discovery’,36 and indeed the question of identity is central to the romance. Like other ‘fair unknowns’ and various knights who go to live in the wild, Percyvell has no knowledge of his own name. Percyvell breaks in upon Arthur’s feast during the first course. His behaviour towards the king and his court is churlish – indeed, he threatens to kill Arthur if he does not knight him. The king recognizes him as the son of Sir Percyvell and Acheflour entirely on the strength of the beauty of his ‘vesage free’.37 Despite the young man’s foul clothing and his behaviour, Arthur’s attitude towards him is indulgent: The childe hadde wonnede in the wodde;  lived He knewe nother evyll ne gude; The Kynge hymselfe understode He was a wilde man.  (593–6)

Percyvell’s movement from the marginal zone of the forest to the centre of courtly authority is the first step in his self-discovery. This self-discovery takes the form of a reintegration of the two separated sides of his identity.

35 36 37

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, eds. J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, rev. N. Davis (Oxford, 1967), line 721. H. Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford, 2004), p. 333. Sir Percyvell of Galles, in Ywain and Gawain, Sir Percyvell of Gales, The Anturs of Arther, ed. M. Mills (London, 1992), lines 593–6.

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Percyvell’s upbringing renders him an intruder in the court, yet by birth he has a fair claim to membership of it. Sir Percyvell constantly negotiates the spaces of the wild margins and the civilized centre. Since both spheres converge in the figure of Percyvell, the boundaries between the court and the wild are portrayed as permeable and are frequently undermined. The reintegration of Percyvell’s identity hinges on his negotiation of the spaces of the court and the wild. In a departure from Chrétien’s story which may be read as a symbolic reconciliation of the two facets of his identity, Percyvell goes back to the woods and clothes himself once again in goatskins. He heals his mother and returns with her to his wife and castle. His return to, and acceptance of, the wild as embodied in his mother is the means by which he finally achieves contentment. Romance typically involves a quest to the margins and a return to the centre. Sir Percyvell inverts this convention by enacting a process of quest to the centre and return to the margins in order to bring about reconciliation between both. When a feast is disturbed by an intruder, the centre of sanctioned authority is occupied, if only for a moment, by a figure from the margins. In Sir Percyvell the duality of the hero’s identity is first revealed on his arrival at court. In this text the interruption of the feast reveals the division within Percyvell of which he himself is, as yet, unaware: his wildness is suddenly overlaid with the image Arthur recognizes of the handsome knight who fathered him. The episode opens up Percyvell’s character, adding a hitherto unknown dimension to it, and the remainder of the romance is concerned with the means by which Percyvell reintegrates his sense of self in the light of this new knowledge. Sir Percyvell of Galles is a text convinced of the redundancy of neat divisions and categorizations. It acknowledges the complex and dynamic processes through which individual identity is constructed and, in doing so, re-imagines the relationship between the margins and the centre in romance.

Subverting the Convention Since parody is a comment on conventions, the inversions and subversions undergone by the intruder at the feast motif in the Cambro-Latin Arthur and Gorlagon illuminate the qualities associated with the motif in a way more orthodox treatments cannot. Arthur and Gorlagon is a complex and witty production which has received less critical attention than its sophistication warrants. It is composed in two sections: a frame and an embedded story. I believe that it is possible to read its frame as an extended, and probably parodic, treatment of the intruder at the feast motif. 49



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The narrative of Arthur and Gorlagon is superficially straightforward:38 Overcome with merriment at a feast on Pentecost, Arthur impetuously embraces and kisses Guenevere at table to her great embarrassment. He cannot understand why she would find his very public display of affection upsetting and swears that he will never take food until he has fathomed what goes on in the hearts of women. He departs with Gawain and Caius and arrives at the hall of King Gargol on horseback. When he refuses to dismount and eat until his host has answered his question Gargol promises to enlighten him the next day if he joins him in feasting and Arthur agrees. However, when the next day comes Gargol admits that he knows nothing of such matters and advises Arthur to visit his brother King Toreil, where an identical sequence of events takes place. Finally Arthur is sent to King Gorlagon’s hall where he steadfastly refuses to eat or dismount until he has heard the answer to his question. After repeated entreaties that Arthur eat, and warnings that the information will be of little use to him, Gorlagon relents and begins a long tale of a king who was transformed into a werewolf by his unfaithful wife. The tale is punctuated by repetitions of Gorlagon’s warning to Arthur and his request that the visitor eat before hearing any more. Arthur refuses throughout. When the story has concluded, Arthur asks why a woman sitting opposite the king has been kissing a bloody human head in her dish each time the king kissed his wife during the telling of the tale. It transpires that Gorlagon was the enchanted husband of the tale and the woman is his former wife, who is condemned to carry the severed head of her lover as punishment for her deeds. Arthur then sits and eats before departing for his own kingdom.39

The overdetermination of particular themes and images in this text certainly has all the hallmarks of parody. Siân Echard has pointed to the overuse of the motif of eating, suggesting it satirizes the oaths with which it is connected.40 She characterizes Arthur and Gorlagon as an ‘antiromance’ concerned with a ‘comprehensive mockery of both the form and content of traditional narrative’.41 I would suggest that one of the objects of the author’s parody is the convention of the intruder at the feast. The

38 39

40 41

For the text and English translation of Arthur and Gorlagon see M. L. Day (ed. and trans.), Latin Arthurian Literature, Arthurian Archives XI (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 208–35. The appearance of a severed head at a feast is not unusual. The meaning and sources of the beheading games in Caradoc, Fled Bricrend and, most famously, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight have received much critical attention. It has been suggested that the presence of a severed head at a feast has roots in Celtic literary tradition.: see J. T. Koch, ‘Fled Bricreann’s Significance within the Broader Celtic Context’, in Fled Bricrenn: Reassessments, ed. Ó Riain, pp. 15–39 (p. 35). A severed head is present at feasts in the Irish Scéla Muicce Maic Dá Thó and the Welsh Branwen Daughter of Llŷr. Peredur describes the entrance of two women bearing a bloody head in a dish: (Peredur Son of Evrawg, in The Mabinogion, ed. J. Gantz (London, 1976), pp. 217–57 (p. 226)). The object appears to perform the role taken by the Grail in Chrétien’s Perceval. S. Echard, Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition (Cambridge, 1998), p. 210. Echard, Arthurian Narrative, pp. 213 and 204, respectively.

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story is an almost comprehensive catalogue of tropes associated with the motif, yet it employs each of them in a highly idiosyncratic manner. Whereas Arthur usually receives the intruder, here he takes on the role of the intruder himself. Where the Pentecost feast is ordinarily disturbed by an external agent, here Arthur himself supplies the disturbance through his lack of self-control. Intruders do not usually dismount and eat until they are satisfied that their objective will be achieved;42 Arthur breaks his own oath not to eat until he has heard his answer by accepting both Gargol’s and Toreil’s hospitality, inevitably evoking the king’s traditional refusal to eat before he has witnessed a marvellous event or heard a tale of adventure.43 Usually the intruder supplies the marvellous tale or spectacle; here it is King Gorlagon in his own court, and the intruder is a witness to the violent internal affairs of the court, whereas in most romances he is the catalyst for disturbance or violence. In many ways Arthur and Gorlagon turns the convention of the intruder at the feast inside out. By placing Arthur in the role of intruder its author divests the role of much of its exotic and mysterious connotations. Equally, the court Arthur enters is not the normative society we encounter in most romances, but a location of violence steeped in riddles and magic. Echard locates this parodic tendency in the text’s (probable) Welsh roots, arguing that Arthur and Gorlagon ‘is presented in a fashion which strongly suggests Welsh narrative as well as the tendency to parody those same conventions’.44 G. L. Kittredge went so far as to suggest that the work is a direct translation from a lost Welsh text, a possibility also countenanced by Echard.45 Bodleian Library Rawlinson MS B 149, the manuscript in which the work is preserved, dates from the fourteenth century, though the date of Arthur and Gorlagon’s original composition

42

43

44 45

See, for instance, the willingness of the intruders in The Greene Knight, The Turke and Gawain and The Awntyrs off Arthur to accept refreshment once they have received guarantees from Arthur that their requests for combat will be honoured. In Lybeaus Desconus, Elene’s actions in this regard can be read as an outward manifestation of her equivocal feeling about events. On the one hand she is in need of Arthur’s help, while on the other she feels the help he is offering, in the form of an untested and anonymous young man, is not sufficient. The fact that she dismounts when invited but refuses to eat underscores the fact that her satisfaction is only partial. See Lybeaus Desconus, ed. M. Mills, EETS OS 261 (London, 1969), lines 223–8. The custom evidently has deep roots in the romance tradition and is alluded to in texts separated widely by time and geography: from Chrétien’s Perceval in the twelfth century to Malory’s Sir Gareth of Orkney and from the German Daniel von dem blühenden Tal (Daniel of the Blossoming Valley) to the Occitan Jaufre. For an exploration of the narrative uses of his custom see A. Byrne, ‘Arthur’s Refusal to Eat: Ritual and Control in the Romance Feast’, Journal of Medieval History (forthcoming March 2011). Echard, Arthurian Narrative, p. 204. G. L. Kittredge, ‘Arthur and Gorlagon’, Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature 8 (1903), 149–275 (p. 199); Echard, Arthurian Narrative, p. 213. For a brief discussion of the possible Welshness of Arthur and Gorlagon see Echard, Arthurian Narrative, pp. 204–5.

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and the precise millieu for which it was intended are matters of considerable uncertainty. The facility with which the author manipulates romance conventions points to a high degree of awareness of the function of the intruder and its associated motifs. Although it is difficult to arrive at any all-encompassing reading of Arthur and Gorlagon, it is possible to view the work as a largely ludic exercise. The parodic elements would appear to undermine the status of Arthur by consistently evoking romance exemplars associated with the motif only to place the king in an absurd relation to them. In the absence of a clear historical and geographical context for the text it is difficult to discern whether the author of Arthur and Gorlagon produced this rather hapless portrait of Arthur for anything more than comic effect. Amanda Hopkins’ recent work on the text gestures towards a possible further context for the text’s over-determination of its Arthurian themes and focuses on ways in which the story’s frame impacts on its centre, rather than on the frame in its own right. She highlights the fact that Gorlagon mates with a wolf during his enchantment and suggests that the tale’s conspicuous ‘Arthurization’ is a means of situating the story in a ‘Celtic supernatural framework in order that questionable material, in this case the sexual congress between the werewolf and a pure wolf, be made acceptable’.46 Considered from this perspective, the text’s engagement with the convention of the intruder at the feast reads as part of a wider strategy to call attention to Arthurian conventions by parodying them. Overall, it is a distinctly slippery text. The narrative’s inversions of generic convention also consistently manage to wrong-foot the audience. It repeatedly withholds core details of the plot until the very end, when the true relation of Gorlagon to his story is revealed and the presence of the ghastly head at the feast is alluded to almost as an afterthought. The manipulation of romance conventions and the blind-siding of both the protagonist and the audience in Arthur and Gorlagon invite comparisons with the text in which the most famous interruption of a feast occurs: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The Gawain-poet approaches the motif of the intruder at the feast with characteristic originality, moulding tradition to his individual talent with particularly memorable results. The Green Knight is an intruder who confounds the expectations of an audience familiar with romance conventions to make an impression that is deeply unsettling. The members of Arthur’s court experience a similar sense of mystification as they too discover that their interpretative powers are inadequate to the figure of the Green Knight. As Loretta Wasserman has noted, the lines that introduce the Green Knight are open to two interpretations: ‘Anoþer noyse ful newe neȝed 46

A. Hopkins, ‘Why Arthur at all? The Dubious Arthuricity of Arthur and Gorlagon’, Arthurian Literature 26 (2009), 77–97 (p. 90).

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biliue, / Þat þe lude myȝt haf leue liflode to cach’ (Another, quite different, sound quickly followed so that the king might be free to take food; 132–3).47 ‘Liflode’ may mean both ‘food’ and a ‘means of life’.48 Arthur has earlier declared his unwillingness to eat before he encountered ‘sum auenturus þing’ (93). The Gawain-poet’s neat compression of the link between eating and chivalric self-renewal points to a heightened consciousness of the romance conventions he employs. The physical renewal feasting brings about cannot take place independently of moral renewal brought about by the willingness to accept the intruder’s challenge and all that it represents. The outer physical man and the inner moral man cannot be at odds; as so often in romance and elsewhere, the feast is the arena of self-revelation where such integrity needs to be at its most complete. Thus far the poet’s treatment of the motif is relatively conventional in substance. However, the intruder who arrives, as if in response to Arthur’s declaration, is unlike anything else in the romance tradition. Arthur’s conventional refusal to eat and his pre-emption of the intrusion are often read as an attempt to impose a degree of control (albeit fictive) on the course of events. It would be unsurprising if Arthur felt that he had got much more than he bargained for in the encounter with the Green Knight. His wish is for ‘meruayles’ of a martial kind, matters of life and death but, unlike the Green Knight’s appearance and challenge, events within the experience and comprehension of a chivalric society. Arthur’s reaction to the Green Knight underscores this difference: where he had earlier desired an invitation to adventure, he now seeks to demystify a figure whose contradictory significations have clearly become too chaotic to be manageable. In comforting a frightened Guenevere, Arthur suggests that the entire performance was an elaborate game: Wel bycommes such craft vpon Cristmasse – Laykyng of enterludez, to laȝe and to syng – Among þise kynde caroles of knyȝtez and ladyez.  (471–3) ([S]uch doings are very proper at Christmas time, playing of interludes, laughing and singing, among the seasonal pastimes of knights and ladies.)

The courtly interlude is an event where strangeness and intractability may be tolerated.49 The Green Knight’s entrance cannot be entirely rational47 48 49

All translations from this text are taken from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. and trans. W. R. J. Barron (Manchester, 1998). L. Wasserman, ‘Honor and Shame in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, in Chivalric Literature, ed. L. Benson and J. Leyerle (Kalamazoo, 1980), pp. 77–90 (p. 81). For an exploration of the Green Knight’s intrusion in the context of the tradition of the courtly interlude, see Crane, Performance, pp. 163–74.

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ized, but its chaotic significations and potentially destabilizing force can be partially contained. The Green Knight had earlier twice described his challenge as a ‘gomen’ (273, 283), but Arthur goes much further, reimagining not only the challenge but the intruder himself as a courtly interlude. In rewriting the knight’s entrance as a game, Arthur superficially divests it of its power to harm while still allowing for its marvellous and inexplicable qualities. The full importance of such an act of containment is revealed two thousand lines later, when the Green Knight tells Gawain that part of Morgan’s rationale for sending the Green Knight to the court was ‘to haf greued Gaynour and gart hir to dyȝe’ (in order to shock Guenevere and cause her to die of terror; 2460). The attempt to assimilate the Green Knight into the known world of the courtly game not only comforts Guenevere but strikes at the root of Morgan’s scheme. Even if the Green Knight cannot himself be assimilated, Arthur’s reimagining of his entrance as game robs his adversaries of some of their power over him. Paradoxically, the rejection of the unknowable is achieved by the assimilation of the threat. Arthur rewrites certain aspects of the intrusion into a narrative over which he has more control by rhetorically incorporating the Green Knight into his court. Suggesting that the Green Knight is merely an entertainment implies that he is not the agent of an exterior force but is, in fact, in Arthur’s own pay. Such an attempt at rationalization and assimilation has, of course, only limited value. Arthur does what he can, but the fact remains that reading the Green Knight’s performance as merely an interlude falls far short of a totalizing explanation for what the court has witnessed. The audience also has its interpretative abilities sorely tried in the course of the poem. If one disregards Arthur’s attempts to rationalize the intruder and takes the first fitt’s description of the Green Knight on its own terms, a highly unstable picture of the challenger emerges. The image fluctuates and changes as the passage progresses. The initial impression is of a huge and imposing creature:          … an aghlich mayster, On þe most on þe molde on mesure hyghe; Fro þe swyre to þe swange so sware and so þik, And his lyndes and his lymes so longe and so grete, Half etayn in erde I hope þat he were …  (136–40) (… an awesome figure, quite the tallest in stature on this earth; from the neck to the waist so square-cut and so thick-set, and his loins and his arms and legs so long and so massive, that I believe he actually may have been half giant …)

However, the poet goes on to dwell on the Green Knight’s fashionable clothes and elaborate accoutrements (150–202). As Cooper has noted, ‘[o]ne of the most disturbing things about the Green Knight … is the 54



NEGOTIATING BOUNDARIES IN MEDIEVAL INSULAR ROMANCE

fact that he cannot easily be classed even as “other”’.50 The Gawainpoet draws upon the opposed traditions of churlish intruder and courtly intruder, and juxtaposes them in the courtly, yet oddly fearsome, Green Knight. As the description continues, the suggestions of wild churlishness and refined courtliness fluctuate; the Gawain-poet, normally so precise in his evocation of the visual world, makes it impossible to construct a clear image of the intruder. Instead he produces a description built on an unstable series of impressions that follow one after the other, without ever being gathered into a single over-arching interpretation. Unlike similar figures in other romances the Green Knight is not assimilated into the court at the close of the poem, nor is he rationalized. Any comfort the audience may derive from finally being made privy to the workings of the plot is quickly undercut as new questions are raised and a wider perspective is opened. The Green Knight never metamorphoses back into Bertilak; in a final haunting image he rides off ‘whither-soeuer he wolde’ (478). To all the fresh questions about his relationship to Morgan this adds the question of whether ‘the Green Knight “really” is Sir Bertilak under enchantment, or whether he really is primarily the Green Knight … who is merely playing the host as a means of waylaying Gawain’.51 The point of complete disenchantment is never reached. The final impression we are left with is one of chastened perplexity as the Green Knight melts into the distance, leaving Gawain and the audience to return to the human world. The author’s intention seems to be the mystification of the audience, not their illumination, yet this intractability is, conversely, ordered on another level. The mystification at the heart of the text may be read as morally illuminating, bringing the audience, along with Gawain, to a fuller understanding of the limited nature of their own human vision. Interior moral disorder emerges as a greater threat than exterior antagonism. Where the motif of the intruder at the feast often functions to reassert the authority of the court through testing it, the Gawain-poet’s conclusion is more equivocal. The effect is more authentically chastening than the straightforward victory and vindication of the representative of the court and courtly authority. The Green Knight seems to embody the threat of the world exterior to the court, yet what his challenge serves to highlight is the interior threat of knightly pride. Arthur and Gorlagon and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight have more in common than might at first appear. Both adapt and subvert the romance convention of the intruder at the feast in order to point up the limitations of their heroes and of their audiences. In Arthur and Gorlagon, however, the effect is broadly comic

50 51

H. Cooper, ‘The Supernatural’, in A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, ed. D. Brewer and J. Gibson (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 277–91 (p. 287). Cooper, ‘The Supernatural’, p. 289.

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and satirical; the concerns of the Gawain-poet are, I think, ultimately moral. In conclusion, it seems evident that straightforwardly oppositional relationships between intruder and court are continually questioned and undercut in treatments of the intruder at the feast. The oppositions are interrogated and sometimes obliterated by the authors of romance to aesthetic, moral or political purpose. The characteristic mode of thought of many of these romances is incorporation rather than opposition. Incorporation does not take place by the mere effacing of difference; rather, many authors are at great pains to establish these reconciliations on an idealized model of unity in difference. Whatever motivations are attributed to the challenger, his primary function within the narrative is generally to provide the martial society with its raison d’être, to validate authority and reinforce arrangements of precedence. The threat of disorder that the disturbance at the feast seems to imply is, in fact, a necessary means of purifying and securing the existing order. The refined responses of the courtly society are tempered by an awareness of the martial obligations on which the authority of such a society rests. In successive accounts of Arthur’s Roman wars, Cador’s interpretation of Lucius’s challenge as a ‘necessary threat’ is given considerable prominence. Of course, the resonances of the motif are by no means exclusively martial. Its appeal to those not directly involved in soldiery is illustrated by the frequency with which it appears in accounts of courtly ceremony and entertainments. The court in romance is engaged in a constant process of adjustment, negotiating with the world outside in a manner that strengthens its authority and its moral core. Authority constantly needs to be challenged and renewed, and this ‘aesthetic of integration’ finds one of its most effective literary correlatives in the romance motif of the intruder at the feast. The interruption of the feast often serves to point up the artificiality of such oppositions as order and disorder, interior and exterior. In these texts order and disorder do not function as straightforward opposites; rather, they may often co-exist in the same figure or event. Their relation is frequently reciprocal and complementary rather than antagonistic. The ability to negotiate the boundaries between the court and the world of the intruder underlines the impression that the two spheres are not mutually exclusive. At its most fully developed, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the motif plays an integral role in demonstrating that what we are apt to characterize as an exterior threat is often far less real than the interior one. The widespread use of the motif of the intruder at the feast by romance authors throughout the Middle Ages cannot be fully accounted for by treating it as a relic of an earlier folkloric tradition or as a dramatic means to set a narrative in motion. Romance is a genre predicated on the interaction between worlds, and in exploring how the interrupted feast convenes 56



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issues of cultural diversity, reconciliation, heroism, identity and kingship, the authors of romance developed the motif into a potent dialectic framework within which some of the most characteristic concerns of the genre could be worked through.

57

IV

What Women Really Want: The Genesis of Chaucer’s Wife Of Bath’s Tale P. J. C. Field The analogues of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale (WBT) were classified at the end of the nineteenth century by Clouston and Skeat, who accepted as an analogue any story that told how someone took on a monstrous form and recovered his or her original shape.1 The subject might be male or female or young or old, and might not even be human.2 He or she might have become a dragon, a snake, a crocodile, or a frog, been made so ugly as to seem of another species, or been turned into something spine-chillingly indistinct. They even included a story from Mandeville’s Travels in which the victim is not disenchanted, because no hero can be found who dares to face the dragon-form that has been wished upon her.3 Not surprisingly, they concluded that ‘Legends similar to the tale of the Knight and the Loathly Lady seem to be of universal currency and of very ancient date.’ True though that was, it was not very useful. What are now accepted as the two major groups of analogues of WBT were identified shortly afterwards by George Maynadier.4 One group, which we may call the first-order analogues, comprises Gower’s Tale of Florent (dated, like WBT itself, 1387+), The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell (third quarter of the fifteenth century), and The Marriage of Sir Gawain (?midseventeenth century).5 All of them tell stories very like that of WBT. The

1

2 3 4 5

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Complete Works, ed. W. W. Skeat, 7 vols. (Oxford, 1894–97) III, 447–50, V, 313, following W. A. Clouston, Originals and Analogues of Some of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Chaucer Society (London, 1888). I am indebted to Bart Besamusca, Samantha Rayner, Gillian Rogers and Judy Shoaf for helpful suggestions. E.g. The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki, tr. J. L. Byock (London, 1998), pp. 21–3. Mandeville’s Travels, ed. M. C. Seymour (Oxford, 1967), pp. 16–18. G. H. Maynadier, The Wife of Bath’s Tale: Its Sources and Analogues (London, 1901). Texts in J. Withrington and P. J. C. Field, ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’, in The Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ed. R. M. Correale with M. Hamel, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 2002–5) II, 405–48. The only known copy of the Marriage is in the Percy Folio Manuscript, on whose

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hero’s life depends on his discovering what women most desire. A repulsive hag tells him that women want sovereignty. That saves his life, but he has to marry her in return. On their wedding night, she persuades him to give her sovereignty in their marriage. That breaks an enchantment, and she becomes young and beautiful. This plot-line distinguishes WBT and the first-order analogues as a group from other disenchantment stories. In almost all such stories, for instance, the transformation is triggered by a kiss, an embrace, or some other kind of physical contact. In these four tales, it is brought about by a grant of sovereignty in what sounds like a legally binding oral contract. Maynadier very reasonably concluded that the four tales must derive from an original that contained the plot-features they all share.6 Maynadier wanted to add two other two texts to this group. Both were ballads. The Knight and the Shepherd’s Daughter is known in at least fourteen versions, the earliest of them mid-seventeenth-century.7 Its opening has some striking similarities with the opening of WBT. The knight comes across the shepherd’s daughter alone, rapes her, and, when she complains to the king, is compelled to marry her, which he does reluctantly. The story ends with the discovery that the shepherd’s daughter is really of high rank, sometimes higher than the knight’s, which brings about an unlikely happy ending. Some versions exhibit other minor similarities with WBT during the wedding and its aftermath. Although there is no quest, no hag, no dilemma and no enchantment the similarities with WBT are too numerous to be coincidental. The ballad might, however, have been influenced by WBT, or even be a reworked version of it, like the early-seventeenth-century Of a Knight and a Fair Virgin.8 Maynadier also suggested that The Knight and the Shepherd’s Daughter might be related to a sixteenth-century Danish ballad called Ebbé Galt in which a prince rapes a woman of lower social rank. There is, however, no evidence that Ebbé Galt ever circulated in England, and it is not very like WBT; as the woman who is raped is married the prince cannot marry her, so he is immediately executed, and the point of the story seems to be the joke he makes as he is led to his death – that he would not mind if she had been better-looking. The other ballad, King Henry, is more promising. It is known in two versions, of which the first was recorded about 1800 by Sir Walter Scott.

6 7

8

date see G. Rogers, ‘The Percy Folio Manuscript Revisited’, in Romance in Medieval England, ed. M. Mills, J. Fellows and C. Meale (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 39–64. Maynadier, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, p. 15. Maynadier, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, pp. 7, 110–19. The earliest text is in the Percy Folio; the fullest collection of texts is in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. F. J. Child, 5 vols. (1882–98; New York, 1965), no. 110 (II, 457–77). Published in R. Johnson, A Crowne-Garland of Goulden Roses (London: J. Wright, 1612), STC 14672.

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Maynadier thought the other, published by F.  J. Child, more authentic.9 That is not surprising, because both Scott and Matthew Gregory Lewis, who supplied his text, were given to textual ‘improvement’. In both versions the hero, out hunting, finds himself alone and takes shelter in a deserted hunting lodge. A huge, grotesquely ugly hag enters, and makes him give her a travesty of a meal (his horse, hounds and hawks, which she devours raw one after another, and a huge quantity of wine, which she drinks out of the horse’s hide). She then has him make her a bed and lie down beside her.10 In the morning, he finds himself beside ‘the fairest lady that ever was seen’. In Scott’s version, she says her stepmother bewitched her into the shape she had before. In Child’s, she says the transformation came about because she had found a courteous knight who ‘gave her all her will’; nothing is said about the hag-form having been imposed on her by anyone else. The second group of analogues are Irish stories recorded from the eleventh century onwards which contain material from Irish mythology, legend and early history.11 They relate how a monstrous hag asks the sons of a king in turn to lie with her. All but one refuse; the last does what she asks, and she becomes extremely beautiful and promises him the sovereignty of Erin. Given the enormous differences between these stories and the other group, we may call these stories second-order analogues. Despite the differences and the apparent absence of any other Middle English borrowings from Irish literature, the combination of a disenchanted hag and a gift of sovereignty is so unusual that, from the time when the similarity between these stories and WBT was first pointed out,12 it has never been seriously doubted that these stories must be related to WBT. It was far from obvious, however, how the English Loathly Lady stories could have developed out of a quasi-allegorical Irish dynastic originlegend. After reviewing a wide range of stories from northern Europe, Maynadier offered an explanation.13 The story began as an allegorized Irish legend in which a magical hunt takes the hero to a remote spot where a good fairy who has transformed herself into a hag tests his fitness for kingship. When he allows her into his bed, she resumes her preternatural beauty, and grants him her favour and the sovereignty of Erin. In this 9

10

11 12 13

Maynadier, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, pp. 60–62. Cf. English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. Child no. 32 (I, 297–300). Child describes and gives variants from Scott’s version, first published in Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (Edinburgh, 1802), II, 132. At this point, Child gives a row of asterisks, as if something was missing. It is true that the poem jumps straight from the hero protesting that he does not want to lie with the hag to his waking beside her in the morning, but narrative leaps are characteristic of ballads, and this leap has counterparts in remoter analogues, such as the Gaelic Nighean Righ fo Thuinn [‘The Daughter of King Under-waves’] summarized in Child’s headnote. Maynadier, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, pp. 195–6. W. Stokes, The Academy 41 (23 April 1892), 399. For the theory, see Maynadier, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, pp. 129–46 and Plate facing p. 129.

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form, the story migrated to Britain, where the hag acquired a grotesque appetite to match her grotesque appearance. The tradition then divided. A minor branch produced King Henry, and the major branch acquired a new test. The version of the story this produced was the archetype of the four English Loathly Lady romances. Its story would have been as follows: The hero, out hunting, is captured by an enemy who forces him to try to discover what women most desire. The hag tells him the answer, but in return he has to marry her. After a wedding feast dominated by her repulsive appetite, they retire to bed. Since that happens under compulsion, it cannot constitute a test. Instead, the hero is made to choose whether to have his bride fair by day and foul by night or vice versa. His inability to make that choice makes him grant her the sovereignty in their relationship. By doing that, he passes the test. She therefore resumes her preternatural beauty and gives him her favour.

After this, the tradition then divided again. WBT and Florent replaced the entrapment of the hero in a magic hunt with new opening episodes. WBT begins with a casual rape prompted by a version of The Knight and the Shepherd’s Daughter. Its hag remains in control of her transformations, but the choice she puts to the knight is changed: to have her foul and faithful, or fair and take the chance of what beauty may bring. Florent begins with the hero falling by chance into the power of the family of a man he killed in combat, and its hag becomes a princess who has been bewitched by her stepmother, but the dilemma remains fair by day or fair by night. Maynadier, who had a low opinion of Gower’s creative abilities, thought Gower probably did not make these changes himself, but used without much alteration a story from a lost Latin collection resembling the Gesta Romanorum.14 The other branch of the tradition kept the initial entrapment during a hunt, but assimilated the story to the Arthurian legend. The simple way of doing that was to give the hero’s role to England’s favourite Arthurian knight, Sir Gawain. English audiences, however, would have found it distasteful to see Gawain captured and humiliated by an enemy. The first part of the hero’s task was therefore transferred to King Arthur, who was less of a favourite with the prospective audience. Arthur is therefore forced to discover what women most desire, but the hag reveals the answer in return not for his hand in marriage but for Gawain’s, so it is the much more desirable Gawain who faces the dilemma (fair by day or fair by night) and who gives his wife the sovereignty. These changes must have been made in a subarchetype from which the Wedding and the Marriage descended independently, because each contains features of the archetype that are not found in the other. The Wedding is clearly the more authentic

14

Maynadier, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, pp. 135–6.

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when its hero, like the heroes of WBT and Florent, finds the dilemma the hag puts to him so evenly balanced that he cannot make a decision and has to ask her to do so. In the Marriage, Gawain apprehensively (‘God grant it may be good!’) but firmly decides to have his bride fair at night, and only puts the choice in her hands when she becomes distressed at the prospect of having to hide herself away when other people are feasting. The Marriage, on the other hand, is the more authentic in beginning by setting the story in one of the places where Arthur traditionally holds court, Carlisle, whereas in the Wedding the story opens with the hunt, and we only learn that the king’s court is in Carlisle when he tells his men to return there after his first encounter with his enemy. Maynadier’s theory is lucid, judicious and argued with a very proper caution. Given the limited amount of evidence available, most of it could only be put forward as the most economical explanation of that evidence, the working hypothesis against which new evidence must be tested,15 but one part stands out as more probable than the rest. In nearly all disenchantment stories the monster is bewitched by someone else (very often a stepmother) until the spell is broken by a kiss or something like it from a third person. In the Irish stories, the hag, presumably because she was originally a goddess figure of some kind, apparently changes her appearance herself to test the hero, and changes it back when the test is over. WBT and Child’s version of King Henry agree with the Irish stories in this unusual feature, whereas in the first-order analogues, including Scott’s King Henry, the hag has been bewitched by her stepmother. Maynadier was surely right to suggest that WBT and Child’s King Henry in this respect preserve a story-element that goes back to the Irish tales. If so, this element of WBT must have been in the archetype; and the introduction of the stepmother by Gower and by the subarchetype of the Wedding and the Marriage will have been a coincidental introduction of a narrative cliché. On the other hand, the other changes that differentiate Florent from the archetype, which Maynadier thought came from a collection of Latin tales, make Gower’s tale fit particularly well into the book of which it is part, suggesting that they were introduced by Gower himself. This raises a more general point about the relationships between early texts. It is rarely possible to prove that any relationship is immediate – that is, that there was not a lost intermediary, or more than one, between any two surviving texts. If a hypothesis about relationships is to be used, however, or even stated without being buried in conditionals, it must assume that any relationship is direct until evidence to the contrary is put forward. It is on this basis that I shall speak as if Gower and Chaucer used the archetype directly, and the Wedding and the Marriage derive from a single direct descendant of the archetype. 15

Maynadier claimed no more: see The Wife of Bath’s Tale, p. 194.

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One other feature of Maynadier’s theory is worth noticing at this point: it contains no absolute dates before Chaucer and Gower. In principle, the processes it describes could have taken ten years or a thousand. For fifty years few dissented seriously from Maynadier’s findings.16 Sigmund Eisner then published a comprehensive study of medieval hagstories that challenged a number of Maynadier’s conclusions. Eisner was too confident about the ability of themes to demonstrate textual filiation in the absence of supporting circumstantial detail, but he mounted an important challenge to Maynadier’s view that the Arthurian elements in the Loathly Lady stories were late and coincidental.17 Twentieth-century scholarship, as Eisner pointed out, had provided overwhelming evidence that stories associated with the Matter of Britain typically migrated from Ireland to Wales, attached themselves there to the Arthurian legend, then travelled from Wales to Brittany, from Brittany to France, and from France to England. He argued that the Loathly Lady story had done the same. That plausible suggestion explained features of WBT and its main analogues that Maynadier had not even tried to grapple with. One might, for example, have expected that when the original tales left Ireland, the mystical and political sovereignty that is the reason for the relationship between the Irish hero and the heroine would simply have been banalized into an ordinary sexual relationship, as it is in King Henry. In WBT and its first-order analogues, however, the gift of sovereignty remains, but it has changed both its nature and its direction. Instead of the woman giving the man sovereignty over the land, he gives her sovereignty over himself.18 That prompted Eisner to three important observations.19 First, a medieval story that represents such a gift in a positive way is celebrating what modern scholars have called courtly love.20 (Given the academic controversy over courtly love since Eisner wrote, it should be said that it makes no difference to his theory whether courtly love was a religion, an upperclass parlour game, or something in between.) Second, the introduction of courtly love into this story must have been the product of a single decisive insight into the semantic possibilities of the word sovereignty. And third, that insight was most likely to have come to a clever bilingual Breton 16 17 18 19 20

See P. G. Beidler and E. M. Beibel, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale: An Annotated Bibliography 1900 to 1995 (Toronto, 1998). S. Eisner, A Tale of Wonder: A Source Study of the Wife of Bath’s Tale (Wexford, 1957), pp. 7–16, esp. 13–15. This point was first made by A. Nutt, The Academy (30 April 1892), 425. Eisner, A Tale of Wonder, p. 49 and n. The classic account is C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford, 1936), pp. 1–22 and passim. For recent responses, see H. Cooper, ‘Love before Troilus’, and C. Saunders, ‘Love and Loyalty in Middle English Romance’, in Writing on Love in the English Middle Ages, ed. H. Cooney (Gordonsville, PA, 2006), pp. 25–43 and 45–61 respectively, and K. Whetter, Understanding Genre and Medieval Romance (Aldershot, 2008), p. 266.

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conteur who had grasped what kind of sovereignty aristocratic AngloNorman and French audiences wanted to hear about in their leisure hours. These insights can be taken further. In the first place, they can provide a date, albeit a provisional and approximate date, for the creation of the archetype of the four English Loathly Lady stories. It is difficult to quarrel with Maynadier’s reconstruction of the archetype as a two-part story in which the sovereignty element has been made dependent on the outcome of a quest to discover what women most desire. A generation before Eisner wrote it had already been shown that the story of the quest to discover what women most desire began as an Irish legend, migrated to Wales, was assimilated there to the Arthurian legend, and then migrated again to mainland Europe.21 The time when the quest story and the sovereignty story were most likely to have reached mainland Europe is when European fiction was most indebted to Celtic stories, in the second half of the twelfth century. It would not have made sense for the two elements of the Loathly Lady story to be combined into the archetype until the influence of courtly love had changed the original political sovereignty into personal sovereignty. Conversely, when the two elements had been combined, the ­sovereignty story would clearly have needed to be led up to in a different way, whether by the quest for what women most desire or by something else. It is simplest (and therefore a proper part of a working hypothesis) to assume that the two elements were combined when the sovereignty was changed, and by the same person, Eisner’s Breton conteur. The combined story would have been aimed at an audience culturally dominated by high-ranking women who had a taste for tales of wonder based on Celtic legend brought up to date by a focus on courtly love. That sounds like a description of the late-twelfth-century court of Marie de Champagne, which Andreas Capellanus invokes in his tongue-in-cheek monograph on courtly love, and for which Chrétien de Troyes compounded his seminal romances of love, chivalry, and the marvellous out of disjecta membra of Celtic legend.22 Courtly romance and courtly love were of course to become European phenomena, but their very success altered them, and the archetype of the English Loathly Lady stories had features that fit best in the twelfth century at the court of Marie de Champagne or one very like it. By the early thirteenth century courtly love, at least in the world of fiction, was being integrated with other aspects of aristocratic life: the Tristan of the French Prose Tristan, for instance, spends much more of his time 21 22

R.  E. Bennett, ‘Arthur and Gorlagon, the Dutch Lancelot, and St Kentigern’, Speculum 13.1 (1938), 68–75 (p. 75). See Andreas Capellanus, On Love, ed. and trans. P.  G. Walsh (London, 1982); and D. Kelly, ‘Chrétien de Troyes’, in The Arthur of the French, ed. G. S. Burgess and K. Pratt (Cardiff, 2006), pp. 135–85.

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on knight-errantry than with his beloved Iseult. By the late fourteenth century, Chaucer’s Theseus can treat courtly love as one of the Ages of Man, and his Franklin can even try to reconcile it with marriage.23 In the twelfth century, however, courtly love was still exploring its own nature, by turns subversive, aggressive, evasive and expository. The unsanitized emotional realism involved is seen in the way in which Chrétien’s Guenevere relishes absolute power over her lover without excuse or apology.24 Similarly, in the archetype of the English Loathly Lady stories, the hag catches the hero in a trap within a trap, then shows him a way out that puts him into her absolute power, without, as far as we can tell, excuse or apology. The archetype seems to fit the ethos of twelfth-century France in other ways too. In the middle of the century in Provence, and later in the north, there was a vigorous tradition of vernacular debate on questions of love.25 Andreas’s De Amore drew on this tradition, often replacing the genuine, if rather abstract, dilemmas of the partimen and jeu parti (‘Is it better for an old man to have a young mistress or a young man a mature mistress?’, ‘Should a lady choose as her lover the friend or enemy of her husband?’) with questions that are scandalous or absurd or both, such as ‘Can love exist within marriage?’ and ‘Should a lover prefer the consolations of his lady’s upper or lower half?’ Whether a lover should prefer his lady fair by day and foul by night or vice versa is a dilemma of exactly that kind. It was usual for the vernacular debates to end without a decision, but one is on record that ends with a proposal that a noble lady should act as arbiter. Andreas’s questions, including the provocative ones, are often decided by noble ladies, who may be named; the names given include those of the Countess Marie and her mother Queen Eleanor. The judgement is not always a decision for one side against the other: Queen Eleanor, for instance, is said to have ruled that the question of whether a woman should prefer the love of a young man or one of advancing years ‘seems to demand medical investigation rather than judgement from Us’.26 Much of what Andreas says may be a matter of smoke and mirrors, designed to make it impossible to separate the truth (if any) in his anecdotes from fiction, but what matters for our purposes is that audiences in late-twelfth-century northern France accepted, whether seriously or otherwise, that high-ranking people debated issues very like the fair by day or

23

24 25 26

Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, A1812–18, F793, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson (Boston, 1987), pp. 49, 179. All references to Chaucer’s works will be taken from this edition. See J. Frappier, ‘Chrétien de Troyes’, in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, ed. R. S. Loomis (Oxford, 1959), pp. 157–91, esp. 179. On Love, ed. Walsh, pp. 10–12, 23–4, 146–57, 198–205. On Love, ed. Walsh, pp. 268–9.

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fair by night dilemma, and that if such dilemmas were resolved, they were resolved by noble ladies. Even the structure of the archetype of the four Loathly Lady stories seems to fit best in the same time and place. The most important author at the court of Marie de Champagne was Chrétien de Troyes, whose poems typically have a double plot, and who claimed that the defining characteristic of his poems was their bele conjointure. What he meant by that has been the subject of a great deal of debate,27 but it must include coherence in the way the parts of the story work together, and presumably above all the two parts of his double plots. It may also refer to his skill in combining themes from sources derived from a different (Celtic) culture. Although the archetype of the Loathly Lady stories was presumably, like its extant descendants, on a smaller scale than Chrétien’s romances, it too had a double plot created by combining elements from different sources derived from Celtic culture. That is best explained by supposing that it has been influenced, directly or indirectly, by Chrétien’s romances. If the archetype of the English Loathly Lady stories was influenced by Chrétien’s romances, that is an additional reason why it cannot have been created before his time, the second half of the twelfth century.28 It is harder to set a terminus ad quem, because Chrétien was still influencing writers as late as Froissart.29 Indeed, the most impressive example of his kind of romance plot is found not in French, but in an English poem roughly contemporary with Froissart, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, whose double plot is a tour de force in the combination of Celtic-derived themes. It may be worth noticing that the way in which, in Maynadier’s hypothesis, the quest to discover what women most desire was embedded in the sovereignty element of the archetype is very similar to the way in which the Exchange of Winnings is embedded in the Beheading Game in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Another feature of the plot of the archetype, however, suggests that it was composed long before Froissart and Gawain and the Green Knight. The four Loathly Lady romances differ most in their opening episodes: Gower’s military mishap, Chaucer’s rape, and the hunting ambush in the Wedding and Marriage. Since King Henry and many of the Irish analogues begin with a hunt, Maynadier was surely right to assume that the archetype did so too. One might add that the antagonist who ambushes Arthur in the Marriage shows signs of an origin in legend and folktale that have no equivalent in Florent or WBT. He carries ‘a great club’ – the weapon of a giant rather than a knight – and is described as Carlist, presumably for ‘carlish’, ‘churlish’, but recalling in different ways the preternaturally 27 28 29

Kelly, ‘Chrétien de Troyes’, pp. 135–85 (156–62). Kelly, ‘Chrétien de Troyes’, p. 135. See B. Schmolke-Hasselmann, The Evolution of Arthurian Romance, trans. M. and R. Middleton (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 12, 221, and passim.

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empowered giant host of Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle, the gigantic herdsman in Chrétien’s Yvain, and the terrifying giant hag of King Henry. One may guess that the archetype made the hag a very ugly old woman whose only power lay in knowledge. She could not draw on a mysterious sympathy created by the hero’s political destiny like the Irish hags, or intimidate like the hag in King Henry. The conteur therefore needed another way to compel his hero, who had to be a knight of formidable prowess, to embark on the quest for what women most desire. His solution was to have the hero ambushed by a male counterpart of the hag in King Henry, a giant whose size and behaviour hint at more than human power. That solution, however, created another problem: this male figure knew, as no man should, what women most desire. His preternatural status presumably made the solution acceptable to some, but Gower and Chaucer apparently both thought otherwise, and they may not have been alone. During the middle third of the thirteenth century, however, the standard view of the Arthurian world was changed by the appearance of three major French cycles of prose romances, which, if the number of surviving manuscripts is a guide, were far more widely read than the verse romances of Chrétien and his imitators. The prose romances give a major part to Morgan la Fee, making her a sorceress driven by a hatred of Guenevere that leads her to devise scheme after scheme to bring down Guenevere, Lancelot and Arthur, mostly through various agents.30 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is about a double scheme, both parts of which are initiated for Morgan by a male shape-shifter who (presumably by Morgan’s arts) can switch from being a genial host who enjoys spending winter evenings playing indoor football to a sinister green maybe-giant (‘half etayn in erde I hope þat he were’) with an unnerving command of courtly manners.31 I suggest that, even to an author less able than the Gawain-poet, the Morgan la Fee of the prose romances would have provided such an obvious solution to the problem of starting the action of the Loathly Lady stories that, even if we had no other indications of its date, we should assume the archetype was composed before those romances became widely known. The structure of the archetype, then, suggests a date in the late twelfth or early thirteenth centuries. The other dating factors, however, point to the late twelfth century alone. We should no doubt think of the archetype as in French and in verse, presumably in the octosyllabic couplets favoured by Chrétien. 30

31

See F. Bogdanow, ‘Morgain’s Role in the Thirteenth-Century French Prose Romances of the Arthurian Cycle’, Medium Ævum 38.2 (1969), 123–33, and more generally, L. Harf-Lancner, Les Fées au Moyen Âge (Paris, 1984), pp. 263–75. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, 2nd edn, rev. N. Davis (Oxford, 1967), lines 140, 150, 981–90.

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* Eisner also challenged Maynadier’s view of the hero of the archetype of the English Loathly Lady stories. Where Maynadier had thought that the hero was unidentifiable but not Arthurian, Eisner argued that the hero was Gawain, because the sovereignty story began as a Celtic fertility myth whose hero must have been a solar deity, and Gawain displays solar characteristics; and because, in its next phase, the solar deity became a royal heir and in early Celtic society a king’s heir was his sister’s son, which is Gawain’s relationship to Arthur.32 Both arguments are deeply suspect. Gawain is not the only Arthurian character to display putative solar characteristics, and he does so only intermittently, and often in confused forms.33 As to the king’s heir argument, the hero in all the Irish analogues, as Eisner admitted, is the king’s son.34 This section of this essay will argue, however, that Gawain should be assumed to be the hero of the archetype for a quite different reason: that assumption provides the best explanation for various similarities and differences between the extant English Loathly Lady stories. The following section will argue that Gawain was the hero of the archetype’s version of the quest for what women most desire. We cannot, however, tell who was the hero of the archetype’s version of the sovereignty story, because it would have been natural for the more famous hero to displace the less famous one when the two stories were combined, and Gawain was very famous. For Marie de Champagne’s circle Gauvain is the outstanding knight at Arthur’s court.35 He is pre-eminent in every knightly quality, especially courtesy. That, however, made his status a standing invitation to authors to show new heroes surpassing him, as Chrétien de Troyes regularly does. Some of Chrétien’s successors complained about this treatment of Gauvain, and the result was half-a-dozen French verse romances in which he is the main character.36 In these romances Gawain’s courtesy to all women led to his being called the chevalier as damoiseles, but the contrast between this role and exclusive devotion to one woman inside or, more fashionably, outside marriage opened up possibilities for portraying him as a womanizer or worse.37 This trend was continued in the French cyclic prose romances by the desirability of contrasting the older hero to his disadvantage with Lancelot, Tristan and others. By the late Middle Ages English audiences had come to think of Gawain as safe with any 32 33 34 35 36 37

Maynadier, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, p. 133; Eisner, A Tale of Wonder, pp. 49, 66–7. E.g. R. W. Ackerman, ‘Malory’s Ironsyde’, Research Studies 32 (1964), 125–33; R.  M. Lumiansky, ‘Gawain’s Miraculous Strength’, Etudes Anglaises 10 (1957), 97–108. Eisner, A Tale of Wonder, p. 68. L. Walters, ‘Manuscript Compilations of Verse Romances,’ in The Arthur of the French, pp. 461–87. Schmolke-Hasselmann, Arthurian Romance, pp. 104–8. Schmolke-Hasselmann, Arthurian Romance, pp. 108–22.

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woman who wanted him to be, and they were few.38 These changes in Gawain’s reputation explain one of the oddest features of the Wedding. At the end of the story, Gawain is said to marry the lady and live blissfully happily with her for five years. She then dies, whereupon he marries ‘oft’. The only reasonable way to explain this bathetic twist is that the author of the Wedding was working from a source in which Gawain was the hero and which said, as WBT and Florent do, that the hero and his lady lived happily together ‘unto hir lives ende’. In the fifteenth century no one well-acquainted with Arthurian romance, as the author of the Wedding seems to have been,39 would have been able to believe that Gawain lived a lifetime of contented monogamy. The author of the Wedding therefore tried to reconcile his source’s marital bliss with the ‘fact’ of philandering attested by other romances, and at the same time to raise the moral tone of his story by turning Gawain’s many casual affairs into marriages. However, although it was hardly possible to attribute a long life of happy monogamy to Gawain in the mid fifteenth century, it would have been perfectly possible to do so in the late twelfth century, when Gawain’s sexual inconstancy had not yet become an established feature of the Arthurian story. The fluidity of this aspect of the Arthurian story in the twelfth century, however, meant that other authors could develop Gawain’s sexual reputation in entirely different ways. The First Continuation of Chrétien’s Perceval, written perhaps in the 1190s, says Gauvain commits rape during a quest. This happens in one of two radically inconsistent versions of the same episode.40 In the earlier version the lady is very willing, in the later one quite the opposite. In the context of WBT and The Knight and the Shepherd’s Daughter we may note that at the end of the second episode Gauvain offers to marry the lady. For our purposes, however, what matters most is that a late-twelfth-century French audience would accept having Gauvain presented in a seriously discreditable way in a sexual context.41 It seems likely that such audiences would also not have had a problem with seeing Gauvain humiliated in the ways required by the plot of the archetype of the English Loathly Lady tales. The same conclusions are suggested by a north French romance composed early in the following century, the burlesque Vengeance Raguidel attributed to Raoul 38

39 40 41

See B.  J. Whiting, ‘Gawain’s Reputation, His Courtesy, and His Appearance in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale’, Mediaeval Studies 9 (1947), 189–234 (reprinted in Gawain: A Casebook, ed. R. H. Thompson and K. Busby (New York, 2006), pp. 45–94). See also K. Busby, Gauvain in Old French Literature (Amsterdam, 1980). R. Norris, ‘Sir Thomas Malory and The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell Reconsidered’, Arthuriana 19.2 (2009), 82–102. Eisner, A Tale of Wonder, pp. 55–6, citing The Continuations of the Old French Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes, ed. W. Roach, 5 vols. in 6 (Philadelphia, 1949–83), I, 69–74 and 267–84. On this, see most recently M. T. Bruckner, Chrétien Continued: A Study of the ‘Conte du Graal’ and its Verse Continuations (Oxford, 2009), pp. 100–112.

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de Houdenc,42 in which Gauvain is humiliated in several ways. He falls in love with a girl who makes a complete fool of him and fails to achieve the main quest for more than half the length of the romance because, when he sets out on the quest, he forgets to bring the spear without which the quest cannot be achieved.43 If Gawain were the hero of the archetype of the English Loathly Lady stories it is easy to see why the subarchetype of the Wedding and the Marriage might have split his role with Arthur, either, as Maynadier suggested, to avoid presenting English audiences with an unheroic picture of their favourite knight, or because the new role gave him an opportunity to demonstrate his courtesy to a heroic degree. Where Chaucer’s and Gower’s heroes agonize over marrying the hag, the hero of the Wedding says cheerfully that to save his uncle’s life I shalle wed her and wed her agayn, Thowghe she were a fend, Thowghe she were as foulle as Belsabub, Her shalle I wed, by the Rood …  (342–6)

Gower’s aims were very different. His Confessio Amantis, of which Florent is part, teaches moral and political lessons through exemplary stories. Very few of Gower’s protagonists are historical, perhaps because the particularity of history might distract from the lessons. The pseudohistorical Arthurian legend could have the same effect. It is therefore not surprising to find that, when set against the archetype of the Loathly Lady stories, Florent appears to have reduced the element of pseudo-history but to have increased the political verisimilitude, particularly in the wholly recast opening episode, in which the hero falls into the hands of the family of a man he killed in battle. Political verisimilitude demanded a plausible reason why the family should not kill Florent out of hand, and the narrator explains that they dared not do so because Florent is the nephew of ‘the emperor’. Instead, they offer Florent his life provided he discovers what women most desire, and requires his uncle not to take revenge for his death should he fail. Gawain might have been changed into Florent because ‘Florent’, which is a name found in many romances, had the right associations and no unwanted ones. Alternatively, the change might have been prompted by the Florent who appears as Gawain’s son in the alliterative Morte Arthure (probably written in the years 1375–85), who seems to have been invented by the alliterative poet.44 Even if the alliterative poem gave 42 43 44

Raoul de Houdenc, La Vengeance Raguidel, ed. G. Roussineau (Geneva, 2004), pp. 9, 103. On the burlesque element see Schmolke-Hasselmann, Arthurian Romance, pp. 129–41. Morte Arthure, ed. M. Hamel (New York, 1984), lines 2483–3117, esp. 2735 and n. Because this part of the poem is based on a Charlemagne romance whose hero is called ‘Florent’, Hamel suggests that when the alliterative poem’s Florent calls Gawain ‘father’, he is merely using a

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Gower his hero’s name, however, we should read that name as generic to romance rather than as a covert Arthurian allusion. Gower, after all, turned Gawain’s famous uncle into an unnamed emperor. That change could have been triggered by a readily available association of ideas. Because medieval historians knew Arthur was not named in surviving lists of Roman emperors, the climax of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s fraudulent history is that Arthur conquers the empire, but is betrayed just before he can take possession of it. The standard Arthurian texts after Geoffrey say the same. Popular opinion in late medieval England, however, was impatient with an almost-emperor, and a scattering of texts calls him emperor without qualification.45 Gower completed the process of distancing his story from the Arthurian legend in one of the Latin marginal notes in the most authoritative manuscript of the Confessio.46 That note names the emperor as Claudius. The extent to which that note identifies Florent’s uncle with the Roman emperor who died in AD 54 need not be pursued here, but it certainly identifies him as not-Arthur. Chaucer’s aims were different again. Before he wrote WBT, he gave the Wife of Bath a fabliau that showed how easily quick-witted wives could dupe their husbands even in seemingly impossible situations. It exemplified a striking part of the doctrine the Wife proclaims in her Prologue, but the Loathly Lady story impressed him so much more that he transferred the fabliau to the Shipman and set to work on the new story without even stopping to adjust phrases that imply that the Shipman is a married woman (Shipman’s Tale, lines 12–19).47 The new story, like the old one, was about sex and power, but, as a century of critical debate has shown, it had the potential to say more about those subjects than simply proclaiming the futility of idealism and the supremacy of animal nature. It did so by dealing in a kind of love that operated above as well as below the waist. During her combative fifth marriage, the Wife of Bath had stumbled into that kind of love in circumstances that supported her belief that ‘Experience, though noon auctoritee, Were in this world, is right ynouh for me’ (1–2). Raw experience seemingly at odds with all accepted rules is better expressed in narrative than encapsulated in formulas; but when the Wife looked up at the guilt-ridden husband who thought he had killed her, and said ‘“Er I be deed, yet wol I kisse thee”’ (802), she found a key to her experience. That key, as her tale makes clear, is gentilesse, a synonym for

45 46

47

title of respect for an authority-figure. It is surely more reasonable to suppose that the poet who invented this Florent chose to invent him as Gawain’s son. For the date of Morte Arthure, see P. J. C. Field, ‘Morte Arthure, the Montagus, and Milan’, Medium Ævum 78.1 (2009), 98–117. J. Withrington, ‘King Arthur as Emperor’, Notes & Queries 233 (1988), 13–15. Maynadier, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, II, 410. For a consideration of the interrelationship of the Middle English text and Latin glosses in Florent, see P. Batchelor, ‘Feigned Truth and Exemplary Method in the Confessio Amantis’, in Revisioning Gower, ed. R. F. Yeager (Asheville, NC, 1998), pp. 1–15, esp. 3–9. Shipman’s Tale, lines 12–19.

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courtesy. Courtesy would have suggested Gawain to Chaucer, who said of one of the characters in the Squire’s Tale: That Gawayn, with his olde curteisye, Though he were comen ayeyn out of Fairye, Ne koude hym nat amende with a word.  (95–7)

Late medieval English audiences, as we have seen, thought of Gawain not only as the knight of courtesy, but also as having a reputation as a womanizer. It is easy to see how, seen in the context of the chaotic mix of love, sex and violence in the Wife’s autobiographical Prologue, that reputation could have suggested to Chaucer an opening scene more thematically appropriate than an ambush by a giant. If the seduction associated with Gawain were ratcheted up to rape, the hero would then have something serious to repent, and the moral conversion of the hero is an important part of the finished tale that Chaucer gave to the Wife.48 In his English manifestations, the knight of courtesy rarely had anything serious to repent. Other changes followed from the rape described in WBT in a natural progression. Among them was the changing of the archetype’s hunting background to the associated aristocratic pastime of hawking. Hunting ideally (and often in reality) took place in partly forested landscapes that had been cleared as far as possible of human habitation. In literature, such landscapes helpfully isolated heroes and made more plausible the kind of interesting strangers and Otherworldly phenomena found in the opening scenes of the Irish sovereignty stories and King Henry. In literature at least, such a landscape might also feature an occasional ‘damsel’, an upper-class girl who had volunteered to participate in the curious customs of King Arthur’s royaume aventureux. WBT’s rape victim, however, is a mayde, and therefore not only a virgin, but probably also of the servant class, whether or not she is actually a servant. Peasant girls rarely appear in medieval hunts, in life or literature. Hawking, however, ideally takes place in wetlands frequented by waterfowl, which, particularly near to a royal court (as is the case here) would support economic activities such as the harvesting of rushes for floor-strewing and basket-weaving, which might plausibly bring a peasant girl on the scene. In three words, ‘rydynge fro river’ (884), Chaucer neatly explains why the victim cannot escape (a peasant girl will be on foot, but her attacker has a horse), and evokes a riverine landscape, perhaps for his first audience the winding meanders 48

See J. P. Roppolo, ‘The Converted Knight in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale’, College English 12 (1951), 263–9. For a recent full study of the rape episode see C. Saunders, Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 300–316. Eisner suggested (A Tale of Wonder, pp. 51–61) that Chaucer’s episode was triggered by a lost story about Gawain influenced by The Northern Metrical Life of St Cuthbert. Eisner himself, however, dates the Metrical Life to after Chaucer’s death, which suggests that any influence was in the other direction.

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of the River Thames above Westminster. In the late Middle Ages, there was open and in many places marshy countryside on both banks of the Thames near London which extended to within a few hundred yards of the Palace of Westminster.49 Beginning the story with this rape also made it desirable to change the identity of the hero. Rape can be treated lightly, as when Andreas Capellanus advises a knight who has the misfortune to find himself in love with a peasant girl to find a lonely place and use a modicum coactio.50 Chaucer envisages the same kind of scene: a peasant girl, who might not matter very much, found by the rapist in a deserted spot somewhere between the king’s court and the river where he has been hawking. His being a bacheler of the king’s court and the amount of outrage (clamour and pursuit) required to get him tried witness to at least knightly status, and his being sentenced to be beheaded rather than hanged suggests even higher status, perhaps the upper ranks of the titled nobility. For a man of that status to be a bacheler (rather than a banneret) in turn suggests youth, which might at least feature in a plea in mitigation for a red-blooded Arthurian boy with his whole life before him. The ladies of Arthur’s court feel mitigation is called for. The queen and othere ladies mo persuade the king to remit the case to her, and she offers the knight his life if he can tell her what women most desire. The tale itself, however, conspicuously refrains from endorsing that. The audience cannot share the queen’s motives, because they are not told what those motives are. The narrative emphasizes the girl’s helplessness (‘allone as she was born’),51 and calls the crime an oppressioun, the word Chaucer uses to describe the rape of the aristocratic Lucrece.52 And in contrast to the Perceval-Continuation, where Gauvain at least offers to marry his victim, nothing is said of remorse or amends. Whatever the French audience of the PercevalContinuation thought of Gauvain’s behaviour, to a late medieval English audience the rape in WBT is likely to have seemed seriously incompatible with what they thought they knew about Gawain. Chaucer could have given his hero a different Arthurian name, or a new name, like Florent. Anonymity, however, made the hero representative rather than individual, while allowing Arthurian enthusiasts in the audience who were willing to do so to speculate about whether this story showed them how the young Gawain became the knight of courtesy. * 49 50 51

52

H. Clout, London History Atlas (London, 1991), pp. 48 and 43. On Love, ed. Walsh, p. 223. modicum coactio, ‘a little force’. The best MSS read ‘alone as he was born’: see Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson, p. 1126. Benson may be right to think she is a scribal conjecture in second-rank MSS, but it is so far superior to he that the conjecturing scribes would appear to have recovered an authorial reading despite a very early and pervasive scribal corruption. Legend of Good Women, line 1868.

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In addition to the first-order analogues of WBT (Florent, the Wedding, and the Marriage), and the second-order analogues of the sovereignty element, there are also two neglected second-order analogues of the other element of WBT, the quest for what women most desire. They have been noticed as analogues of WBT and of one another, but they and WBT have not been considered together. It will be convenient to look first at Arthur and Gorlagon, a humorous Latin tale that survives in a single late-fourteenth-century manuscript.53 Eisner reported it as an analogue of WBT, but said very little about it.54 It is, as has been said already, an Irish story that migrated to Wales and attached itself there to the Arthurian legend. Many stories like that travelled through Brittany, France and England, and some finally returned to Wales much changed by their travels. There is nothing to suggest that Arthur and Gorlagon did that. Although told in Latin, it is a very Welsh tale, among other things a parody or pastiche of Welsh story-telling that would only have been fully appreciated by an audience familiar with traditional Welsh tales.55 The story runs as follows: At a Pentecostal feast, Arthur embraces Guenevere in public, for which she rebukes him, telling him he knows nothing about the nature or mind of women (ingenium mentemve femine). He and Kay and Gawain ride out to try to discover those things. After two failures, he comes to the court of King Gorlagon, where, by refusing to dismount and eat, he compels Gorlagon to reveal the answer, which Gorlagon does through a story.   There was a king whose wife had a lover. To get rid of her husband, she turned him by magic into a werewolf. The wolf fled to another country, where he was befriended by the king, whose wife also had a lover. The wolf discovered this and attacked the lover, so the queen hid her child and told her husband that the wolf had devoured it. The wolf, however, led the king to the child, the adultery was discovered, and the queen and her lover were executed. The wolf then led his royal friend back to his own country, where his friend forced the queen to reverse the enchantment. She refused at first, and only did so under torture.   Gorlagon reveals that he is the disenchanted werewolf, and his former wife is sitting opposite him. He has married again, and every time he kisses his present wife, his former wife has to kiss the embalmed head of her former lover, which is set before her. Arthur returns home, marvelling at what he has heard.

53

54 55

Narratio de Arthuro rege Britanniae et rege Gorlagon lycanthropo, in Latin Arthurian Literature, ed. and trans. M. L. Day, Arthurian Archives XI (Cambridge, 2005), 208–35; Arthur and Gorlagon, ed. G. L. Kittredge, Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature 8 (1903), 149–275. See also Amanda Hopkins, ‘Why Arthur at All? The Dubious Arthuricity of Arthur and Gorlagon’, Arthurian Literature 26 (2009), 77–95. Eisner, A Tale of Wonder, pp. 138–43. S. Echard, Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 193–214.

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This story is very different from the quest for what women most desire in the archetype of the English Loathly Lady stories. Here, Gawain is said to set out with the quester, but is never mentioned afterwards, although it may be worth noticing that there is a late Irish version – the earliest manuscript is dated 1517 – of the werewolf part of this story in which Gawain is the hero.56 Here, as in the English stories, the quester makes unsuccessful preliminary enquiries before he finds the person who gives him his answer, but both the enquiries and the answer are quite different from those in the English romances. The answer is not explicit, and the element of parody makes it hard to judge its seriousness, but the parallelism of the two adulterous queens implies that women are lustful in a particularly resourceful and unscrupulous way. It may be added that the fact that Gorlagon’s new wife does not apparently object to being kissed by her husband in public throws retrospective suspicion on Guenevere, which adds a further strand to the parallel. Nothing in the story, however, suggests that women want sovereignty. A few passing anti-feminist generalizations – that beauty in women is rarely combined with chastity, that women cannot keep a secret, and that wives generally hate what their husbands love – have nothing to do with sovereignty either. The Wife of Bath mentions all three of these opinions,57 but that seems to be mere coincidence. Much of her Prologue and Tale is a response to her memories of her fifth husband and his comprehensive collection of anti-feminist dicta, and there is nothing surprising about Jankin’s collection having included the three sayings that appear in Arthur and Gorlagon. The second analogue is part of the Dutch Lancelot-Compilation, a huge translation of the entire French Vulgate Cycle into Middle Dutch, made about 1320.58 The Lancelot-Compilation has several substantial interpolations, one of which, inserted immediately after the Grail-story, is an abbreviated version of the Wrake van Ragisel, an early-thirteenthcentury Dutch verse translation of the Vengeance Raguidel. The abbreviated Wrake contains interpolations of its own, one of which tells how ­Walewein (Gawain) tries to discover the thoughts of women.59 Although the abbreviated Wrake has a Dutch source, the interpolated episode says that it is taken from a French source.60 There is no reason to doubt that, 56 57 58

59 60

S. O’Grady and R. Flower, Catalogue of the Irish Manuscripts in the British Museum, 3 vols. (London, 1926), II, 271–2. WBT 1213–26, 950–80; WBProl. line 781. See The Arthur of the Germans, ed. W.  H. Jackson and S.  A. Ranawake (Cardiff, 2000), pp. 200–202, 207–8, and more fully, B. Besamusca, The Book of Lancelot: The Middle Dutch Lancelot-Compilation and the Medieval Tradition of Narrative Cycles (Cambridge, 2003), esp. pp. 93–105. Five Interpolated Romances from the ‘Lancelot Compilation’, ed. and trans. D. F. Johnson and G. H. M. Claassens, Arthurian Archives, Dutch Romances III (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 112–30. Five Interpolated Romances, ed. Johnson and Claassens, p. 118 (line 1613): ‘Dat Walsch … daer ict ut screef.’

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even though it cannot be verified from the surviving fragments of the original Dutch Wrake, which do not include this part of the story.61 The episode was recognized as an analogue of Arthur and Gorlagon early in the twentieth century, and as an analogue of WBT by a recent editor of that part of the Lancelot-Compilation.62 Its story is clearly closely related to Arthur and Gorlagon, and the existence of closely related Welsh and French versions of this story provides strong support for Eisner’s hypothesis that the story of the search for what women most desire reached England by the well-travelled path through Wales, Brittany and France. The Dutch episode is best understood if seen in its context, the adjacent part of the story of the Vengeance Raguidel. As in the French romance, Walewein finds a damsel (Ydeine) being abducted in a forest, rescues her and falls in love with her. In her castle, they go to bed together, as do Walewein’s brother and a girl Ydeine obligingly provides for him. Walewein then takes her to Arthur’s court as his amie, but a stranger promptly tricks the court by a Rash Promise into surrendering Ydeine to him. Walewein persuades the stranger to let him bring Ydeine to a neighbouring court in forty days’ time, and fight for her there. The stranger then departs, and Kay mocks the hero. In the French, the taunt is about allowing his amie to distract him from avenging Raguidel, but in Dutch: Keye says Ydeine is far too well known to far too many people. The implication of promiscuity prompts Walewein to try to find out about women. A rubric announces Hoe Walewein wilde weten vrowen gepens (How Walewein wanted to know the thoughts of women). He asks the queen what women think, and she tells him their thoughts are so various that no one can know them. He sets out notwithstanding, and comes across a huntsman who is an elf-king. The elf-king takes Walewein home and shows him his beautiful wife, who committed adultery with ‘the vilest servant in his court’, and whom he has walled up for life. He has had the table in his hall made in such a way as to extend through the wall into her chamber-prison, so she still (in one sense) shares his table. Her example, he says, shows Walewein what women think about love. Walewein says he needs to know more, and the king by magic makes him very small but handsome, takes him to Arthur’s court, and sets him to seduce Ydeine, which he does easily. He has sex with her four times that night in the queen’s bedchamber, ‘where he had often found good entertainment’. The following day he leaves, and easily persuades her to give him his own signet ring as a keepsake. When the elf-king restores him to his proper shape and sends him back to claim the ring, Ydeine says it fell off her finger as she was wringing her hands with grief at his absence, and a fish swallowed it. Walewein then produces the ring, and says he got it from a little knight who boasted that he had had 61 62

I am obliged to Bart Besamusca for confirming this for me. Bennett, ‘Arthur and Gorlagon’ (as cited in note 21, above), first sentence; D. F. Johnson, ‘Questing in the Middle Dutch Lancelot Compilation’, The Grail, the Quest, and the World of Arthur, ed. N. J. Lacy (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 92–107 (p. 95).

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sex four times with Walewein’s beloved, for which Walewein had killed him. That breaks up their affair, but Ydeine persuades Walewein to a reconciliation, and the episode ends with the narrator saying ‘he never again had cause to reproach her’.

This last remark is obviously untrue. In the next episode, the abbreviated Wrake returns to the story of the Vengeance and Walewein sets off to find the murderer of Ragidel, but almost immediately Ydeine is flirting with a passing stranger, playing him and Walewein off against each other. Within 130 lines, Walewein has escorted her to his rendezvous, defeated his opponent and presented Ydeine to him, against her will. The Dutch ‘he never again had cause to reproach her’ must have been carried over from an autonomous version of the interpolated material, presumably the French source, where it would have provided a suitable comic closure. We might guess that the author of the Lancelot-Compilation failed to notice the narrative inconsistency because he was so taken with the convenient way in which this observation rounded off his new episode and endorsed the themes he was trying to develop in the Compilation as a whole. Much of the new material interpolated in the Lancelot-Compilation seems to be designed to improve Walewein’s image.63 In this little episode, the speed with which Walewein’s relationship with Ydeine develops, and the observation that Walewein had ‘often’ found good entertainment at night in the queen’s chamber64 both suggest that his reputation as a seducer is well-deserved; but the episode also tends to excuse the seductions both by suggesting that most women do not take much seducing65 and also by showing Walewein as generous in forgiveness. Further light can be shed on the origins of this story by comparing it with Arthur and Gorlagon. That suggests that the Dutch poem inherited from its French source a double plot in which the quest for what women most desire had been combined with a story of how a husband seduces his own wife, a story we are most familiar with today from Così fan tutte.66 In its original separate state, the hero’s quest would have been complete when the huntsman-king told him that he could see from the behaviour of the adulterous queen what women really thought about love. When the part of the Dutch episode after this point has been set aside, strong parallels emerge between the earlier part of the Dutch episode and Arthur and Gorlagon. Both relate how a king with preternatural characteristics welcomes the hero to his home and tells him a story about the

63 64

65 66

Johnson, ‘Questing’, pp. 99–102. Five Interpolated Romances, ed. and trans. Johnson and Claassens, p. 125 (line 1774): notice that Walewein and Ydeine spend only a single night in Arthur’s court before he leaves on his quest for knowledge. A point made by Besamusca, Book of Lancelot, p. 104. See S. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk Literature, 6 vols. (Copenhagen, 1955–8), T235.

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king’s own wife’s adultery, and its savage and continuing punishment at meals within the king’s household. Both stories teach by implication (but not explicitly) the message that women are sexually voracious and resourceful liars, which is the truth that the hero is seeking, although in both cases it appears not to be entirely welcome to him. Although in some ways the Welsh and Dutch stories agree against WBT, in other ways the Dutch and English stories agree against the Welsh. Despite the differences between Walewein’s quest and the answer he finds on the one hand and their counterparts in WBT and its English analogues on the other, the English stories and the relevant part of the Dutch story look as if they derive from a common original. Keye’s taunt fulfils the same function as the opening episodes in WBT and its analogues, adjusted to the context into which the Dutch story is being interpolated. The observation by Arthur’s queen (Walewein goes to the queen (ter coninginnen) at lines 1475–8; as in WBT, she is not named at this point) that women’s thoughts are so various that no one can know them is a compressed equivalent of the fruitless search in WBT that prompts the Wife of Bath’s rambling account of the various things people say women want, of Florent’s consultation with the wise men of his uncle’s realm, and of the search in the Wedding that produces two books full of answers.67 The Dutch elf-king’s hunt is structurally equivalent to the elf-queen’s dance in WBT. The elf-king has repeatedly been said to be a dwarf,68 but he is not. Not only is he very beautiful, where fictional dwarves are characteristically ugly, but it is misleading to say that he ‘is’ small, because he has no fixed size. He happens to be small when he first appears, but he can and does change both his own size and Walewein’s at will. Variable size and magical powers show that he is a fairy, and one of the characteristic activities of elf-kings, seen for instance in the Middle English Sir Orfeo, is the hunt.69 It may be no accident that, as has often been observed in the case of Sir Orfeo, the Dutch elf-king’s hounds do not bring down any quarry in this world. It seems likely that, in the version of this story used by the author of the archetype of the English Loathly Lady romances, the elf-king was also found hunting, and that, as part of the process of adapting the story for an audience of aristocratic women, the archetype of the English Loathly Lady stories not only replaced sexual voraciousness with sovereignty, but also replaced the elf-king with his queen. It will then, however, have immediately taken most of the elf-queen’s role of revealing to the hero 67 68 69

WBT lines 925–82; Florent, ed. Withrington and Field, lines 97–111; Wedding, ed. Withrington and Field, lines 182–210 (physical damage has destroyed the equivalent passages in the Marriage). Bennett, p. 68 (who gives the episode the title ‘Gawain and the Dwarf’); Johnson, ‘Questing’, p. 95; Besamusca consistently calls him ‘the diminutive king’. Sir Orfeo, ed. A. J. Bliss (Oxford, 1954), pp. 26–7 = Auchinleck MS, lines 283–87, with parallel texts from two other manuscripts.

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what women really want and transferred it to the hag who was the dominant Otherworld figure in the sovereignty story. The elf-queen was thus left with a merely decorative role in a single scene, her dance, replacing the king’s hunt, existing only to set up the meeting between the hag and the hero, unless we were to read the hag as a manifestation of the elfqueen, which the extant stories do not encourage. WBT preserves the ­elf-queen’s dance; Florent improves the political verisimilitude of its story by replacing the preternatural episode with an encounter with the family of a knight whom the hero has killed; and the subarchetype of the Wedding and the Marriage cut the elf-queen’s part, probably in the interests of brevity. It may now be possible to put together a fuller reconstruction of the lost archetype of WBT and its first-order analogues than was possible for Maynadier. Before trying to do that, however, we need to take account of a recent essay on three of our four texts that challenges the assumptions that underlie this essay. Ralph Norris has pointed out forcefully that at least two passages in the Wedding are so similar to a passage in WBT that it is difficult to believe that they do not derive from it,70 and has suggested that the parallels between the Wedding, WBT, and Florent are better explained by the Wedding deriving from the other two texts than by all three deriving from a lost archetype.71 The number of points of similarity between the Wedding and the other two tales, however, means that in that case the Wedding would have had to have been produced by conflating the whole of the other two texts. That seems less likely than the alternative. The community of users of medieval vernacular romance rarely seem to have felt that the details of romances mattered enough to deserve sustained conflation. There are two important exceptions among late medieval English Arthurian romances. The alliterative Morte Arthure is based on a conflation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia, Wace’s translation of Geoffrey into French and Layamon’s translation of Wace into English; and even more significantly (since Norris argues that Malory wrote the Wedding) the last two tales of Malory’s Morte Darthur are based on a conflation of the French Mort Artu and an English translation of that romance, the stanzaic Le Morte Arthur.72 The alliterative Morte and the Morte Darthur, however, are unusually ambitious works, one arguably more of an epic poem than a romance, and perhaps the best epic poem in English apart from Beowulf 70

71 72

Cf. Wedding, ed. Withrington and Field, lines 199–204 and 405–19 with WBT 925–34. For some less clear-cut possibilities see P. J. C. Field, ‘Malory and The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell’, in Field, Malory: Texts and Sources (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 284–94, at 285n. Norris, ‘Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell Reconsidered’, n. 39. Morte Arthure, ed. Hamel, pp. 34–8; Sir Thomas Malory, Works, ed. E. Vinaver, 3 vols., rev. P. J. C. Field (Oxford, 1990), pp. 1585–663.

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and Paradise Lost, the other a complete presentation of the Arthurian legend that has achieved classic status. Both texts present important parts of the national story of the country in which they were composed. It is understandable that their authors should have made unusual efforts to get their stories right; Malory certainly implies that he consulted a variety of ‘authorized’ sources for the Morte Darthur.73 It is worth noting that with both these works sources telling different versions of the same story have generated what is clearly yet another version of that story. WBT and Florent, however, belong to less ambitious genres than Morte Arthure and the Morte Darthur, and are very different from each other. Far from telling different versions of the same story, they tell different stories that fall into different genres, although those stories happen to be structurally parallel. If an author chose to try to combine them into a third story in yet another genre – a comic folk tale in doggerel verse – it would be surprising if he took the trouble to reproduce minor details, including complete phrases, from both of them. On the other hand, if he valued his quasi-sources sufficiently to do that, it would be even more surprising if he had turned the one hero that they agreed on into two. Furthermore, the opening hunt episode in the Wedding certainly does not derive from WBT or Florent. As we have seen, the hunt and its counterparts in the Marriage and King Henry appear to descend through the archetype from the Irish hag-visiting tales. If Norris’s persuasive argument that the Wedding was written by Malory is correct, it could be argued that, since Malory was conspicuously enthusiastic about hunting, he replaced the opening scenes of WBT and Florent with something more to his own taste, and that the hunting scene in the Marriage is based on its counterpart in the Wedding, and the hunting scene in King Henry is mere coincidence. There are, however, too many similarities between the three hunting scenes for that to be plausible, and Malory’s practice in the Morte Darthur suggests that he is more likely to have expanded the hunting episode by adding hunting detail and jargon to a shorter version in a source than to have created it ex nihilo.74 There is some additional support for this last in that the hunting scene in the Wedding is proportionately about twice as long as its counterpart in the Marriage seems to have been (most of it was on a half-page

73 74

Malory, Works, p. 1260.8. Compare the hunt in the seventh tale of the Morte Darthur with the corresponding passage in the Mort Artu: Malory, Works, pp. 1103–6, La Mort le roi Artu, ed. J. Frappier, 3rd edn (Geneva, 1964), §§ 64–5. The two episodes have many common phrases, and their structure is identical, although the French Lancelot’s wound is too serious for him to attend the forthcoming tournament, which is therefore not related, whereas Malory’s Launcelot recovers quickly enough to fight, enabling Malory to describe the tournament at length. Regrettably, both Vinaver and I have repeatedly given the impression that this section of the Morte Darthur was wholly Malory’s invention. The stanzaic Morte cut the passage (it would have occurred between lines 879 and 880) as part of a process of simplifying the narration.

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that has been lost).75 I submit that the parallels between the three texts are best explained by descent from a lost archetype. It is difficult to deny, however, that where the Wedding is particularly close to WBT, the former was probably influenced by the latter. That part of Norris’s case seems to be a durable component in the history of the development of the Loathly Lady stories. As part of his case Norris provided a useful list of points on which Florent and the Wedding agree against WBT. That list is as follows: The Hero is the nephew of an emperor. The Hero is trapped by an Enemy while away from home. The Enemy proposes a riddle intending that it should cause the Hero’s death. The Hero returns home and confides in his family. The Hero collects many answers to the riddle. The Hero would rather die than break his oath to return to meet the Enemy. The Hero returns for judgement at the Enemy’s place, which is not his own home. When the Hero meets the Hag, she tells him that he must marry her in return for being given the right answer. The Hag suggests the Hero should try the other answers before he gives hers. When the Hero gives the Hag’s answer, the Enemy is furious and wants the woman who betrayed the secret to be burned. The Hag reveals she is from the noble class. The Hag reveals she has been bewitched by her stepmother.

It was of course Norris’s contention that these would (all other things being equal) be points that the author of the Wedding borrowed from Florent. If the counterargument put forward here is valid, they will (all other things being equal) be points that Florent and the Wedding inherited from the archetype, and which Chaucer chose to alter. The list may therefore provide a preliminary guide to one component of Chaucer’s originality. The preliminary nature of the guidance will be underlined if we remember that this essay has already argued that the final point, about the hag and her stepmother, is not archetypal but the product of coincidence. Any attempt to bring all the evidence considered so far together into as full a reconstruction of the archetype as possible needs to take into 75

Both texts have lost lines to physical damage. The Wedding contains 855 lines after the loss of a page containing about 67 lines; the 115 lines of the hunting scene therefore constituted 12.5% of the original poem. In the Marriage, 215 lines survive, after the loss of 6 half-pages that probably contained about 25 lines each. Nearly all the hunting scene was on the first missing half-page, but the first lines on that half-page will have concluded the introductory scene-setting, and two 4-line stanzas after the missing passage give the end of the hunting scene. If we allow for 8 lines for the lost scene-setting, the hunting scene as originally written will have been 25 lines in a poem of 365 lines, 6.8% of the original poem.

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account points on which the four texts are unanimous, points on which some of them agree against others, and all the conclusions reached in the rest of this essay. That reconstruction is attempted below. It suggests, for instance, that the archetype contained a long gleeful description of the hag’s ugliness that Chaucer reduced to a single line of general description.76 It also suggests that Chaucer chose to create suspense at two important moments in the story. It seems that in the archetype, when the hag first meets the hero she tells him her conditions for revealing the answer to the riddle, when he agrees to those conditions she tells him what the answer is, and the audience learns both things when they happen. Chaucer’s audience learns the answer to the riddle only when the hero gives it to his judge, and only learns what the hag wants after that. Other (probable) Chaucerian changes will be apparent to the reader’s scrutiny.

76

‘A fouler wight ther may no man devise’, WBT 999.

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The Archetype of the English Loathly Lady Tales Late twelfth-century, French, in octosyllabic couplets

F = Florent, G = Wedding, H = King Henry, M = Marriage, W = Wife of Bath’s Tale. No references are given for elements argued for in the body of this essay, elements on which all four texts agree, and elements in which Florent agrees with the Wedding or the Marriage or both against WBT at the same point in the narrative. The box encloses the quest to learn what women most desire. Gauvain (Gawain) is at the court of his uncle, King Arthur (GMW). He goes hunting, and is therefore unarmed. A giant with a club appears, and compels him under threat of death to try to discover what women most desire. He must return in a year’s time (G95, W909) to give his answer, and if it is wrong accept death at his adversary’s hands (F54, G454). Gauvain swears to do all this, leaves, and returns to Arthur’s court. Gauvain searches far and wide, asking everyone he meets what women most desire, and gets many very different answers. He fears the worst, but would rather die than be found false to his word (F116, G117). He therefore sets out for the place where he first met his adversary. On the way, he sees the elf-queene with hir joly compaignie dancing in a forest glade. They vanish, and he sees the hag sitting there. Her ugliness is described at length (F135, 281, G231, 547, M57). The hag greets him, and says he is going to his death unless he has her advice. He says that if what she says saves his life she can have ‘all her asking’ (F160, G278). The hag says she will tell him what he needs to know if he will marry her. He prevaricates, she insists, and he reluctantly agrees. She says that if any other answer saves him their covenant is void (F199, G285, 361, M81), but that the right answer is that women want sovereignty, because she who has that ‘hath all her will’ (F216, M170, H ad fin.). Gauvain leaves her, and goes to meet his adversary. He tries the other answers without success, then the hag’s. The adversary says that answer is correct, and the person who revealed it should be burned (FG). Gauvain is free to go. Gauvain rides off towards Arthur’s court. He finds the hag where he left her (F222, G496), and takes her to Arthur’s court, where they are married. Her manners at the wedding feast are revolting. Gauvain and his bride go to bed, and he turns away from her. She prays him to turn towards her, and he sees she is now young (F409, M179) and beautiful. He tries to embrace her, but she says he must choose to have her fair by day or fair by night. He cannot decide, and asks her to 84



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choose instead, and gives her sovereignty over himself. The lady says that from now on she will be beautiful day and night for as long as she lives. (This change comes about by her own volition or some unknown necessity, not by the failure of a spell cast by a stepmother or other enemy.) She also reveals that she is of noble birth. They live happily together until the end of their lives (FHW).

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V

Monstrous Appetite and Belly Laughs: A Reconsideration of the Humour in The Weddyng Of Syr Gawen And Dame Ragnell* Sue Niebrzydowski The Weddyng of Syr Gawen and Dame Ragnell,1 hereafter Dame Ragnell, dates from around the middle of the fifteenth century and is a text that excites divided opinion among eminent Arthurian scholars, especially in relation to its comedy. Stephen H. A. Shepherd, himself a supporter of the Dame Ragnell poet’s comedic abilities, provides an overview of this ambivalence; P. J. C. Field describes the verse as doggerel yet notes that its rhythms have a cheerful effect, while Donald B. Sands classifies the poem as a burlesque with deliberate humorous effects that is, nonetheless, the product of an indifferent artist.2 A more recent contribution to this debate is that of Rebecca A. Davis, who views the author as ‘a mischievous poet’ who works with ‘motifs of exaggeration and deliberate * My thanks are owed to Professor P. J. C. Field for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay and most particularly to Professor Helen Wilcox and Dr Kees Dekker for their advice in translating Van Velthem. Any remaining errors are entirely my own. 1 The edition used in this essay is that of D. B. Sands, The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell, in Middle English Verse Romances (Exeter, 1986), pp. 323–47, hereafter cited as Dame Ragnell. A modern-spelling edition has been edited by J. Withrington, The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell, Lancaster Modern Spelling Texts, 2 (Lancaster, 1991). Dame Ragnell is preserved uniquely in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson C. 86, a manuscript miscellany with a London provenance from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. This complex manuscript has been examined in great detail by J. Boffey and C. M. Meale, ‘Selecting the Text: Rawlinson C. 86 and Some Other Books for London Readers’, in Regionalism in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts, ed. F. Riddy (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 142–69. Sands dates the poem to c.1450 (p. 325). 2 The views of these critics are summarized by S. H. A. Shepherd, ‘No Poet has his Travesty Alone: The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell’, in Romance Reading on the Book: Essays on Medieval Narrative presented to Maldwyn Mills, ed. J. Fellows, R. Field, G. Rogers and J. Weiss (Cardiff, 1996), pp. 112–28 (pp. 112–13). P. J. C. Field’s analysis can be found in ‘Malory and The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell’, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 219 (1982), 374–81, reprinted in Field, Malory: Texts and Sources, Arthurian Studies 40 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 284–94; and that of Sands in his edition, Dame Ragnell, p. 324.

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ineptitude’.3 Shepherd detects some agreement between critics that the poem is interesting, ‘perhaps not the least reason for which is that it is an analogue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale or that it shows some interesting connections with Malory’, although not all are convinced by Field’s argument that Sir Thomas Malory is the author of Dame Ragnell.4 The eponymous heroine of Dame Ragnell is a relative of the ‘loathly lady’, the literary type of the old hag who transforms into a young and beautiful woman when given sovereignty over the knight for whom an encounter with her proves educative. Her antecedents in early Irish literature have been well established.5 The continued appeal of the ‘loathly lady’ during the later medieval period and beyond is evinced by her appearance in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale, Gower’s Tale of Florent from the Confessio Amantis, the mid-sixteenth-century ballad The Marriage of Sir Gawain and the later Sir Henry.6 Since G. H. Maynadier’s study of 1901, critics have examined the close textual links between Dame Ragnell, Chaucer and Gower, whose many correspondences have caused Davis to observe of Dame Ragnell: It is clear that the poet had prior traditions and texts in mind when he composed. He did not merely lift elements from his sources, but adapted the material to his own purposes, shaping familiar material into some form of parody.7

3 4

5

6

7

R. A. Davis, ‘More Evidence for Intertextuality and Humorous Intent in The Weddynge of Syr Gawen and Dame Ragnell’, Chaucer Review 35 (2001), 430–39 (p. 433). Shepherd, ‘No Poet has his Travesty Alone’, p. 2. Field, ‘Malory and The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell’. For a defence of Field’s view see R. Norris, ‘Sir Thomas Malory and The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell Reconsidered’, Arthuriana 19.2 (2009), 82–102. For details of the early Irish antecedents of the loathly lady see G. H. Maynadier, The Wife of Bath’s Tale: Its Sources and Analogues (London, 1901), pp. 25–42, and more recently S. Elizabeth Passmore, ‘Through the Counsel of a Lady: The Irish and English Loathly Lady Tales and the “Mirror for Princes” Genre’, in The English ‘Loathly Lady’ Tales: Boundaries, Traditions, Motifs, ed. S. E. Passmore and S. Carter (Kalamazoo, MI, 2007), pp. 3–41. See also P. J. C. Field’s contribution to the present volume, pp. 59–85. The similarities between Dame Ragnell and its cognate texts were analysed by Laura Sumner in her edition of the poem, The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell (Northampton, MA, 1924). For editions of these related texts see J. Withrington and P. J. C. Field, ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’, in Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, ed. R. M. Correale and M. Hamel, 2 vols., Chaucer Studies 28 (Cambridge, 2005), II, 405–48. All quotations from The Marriage of Sir Gawain are from the edition of T. Hahn, available online at www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/ Teams/marrifrm.htm, originally published as Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, ed. T. Hahn (Kalamazoo, MI, 1995). For an edition of the ballad ‘Sir Henry’ see The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. F. J. Child, available online at http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/ child/index.htm (accessed 20 May 2010). See Maynadier, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, pp. 25–42. Norris has investigated the correspondences between Dame Ragnell and Chaucer’s and Gower’s versions in ‘Sir Thomas Malory and The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell Reconsidered’ (note 5 above). See also Davis, ‘More Evidence’, p. 431.

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Fifteenth-century audiences had an appetite for humorous imitation of romance which was catered to by parodies such as Chaucer’s The Tale of Sir Thopas and the anonymous Tournament of Tottenham.8 The Dame Ragnell poet, responding to market forces, parodies a pre-existing narrative in which a loathly lady’s wisdom saves the life of an aristocratic hero, thereby putting new wine into an old bottle. Much of the comedy in Dame Ragnell stems from the heroine’s appearance, two aspects of which are unique to this medieval interpretation of a loathly lady narrative. Firstly, Dame Ragnell is monstrous yet retains a youthful appearance: in the early Irish versions and in Chaucer and Gower’s tales the loathly lady is a crone, and herein lies her loathliness. Chaucer describes the heroine as the knight’s ‘olde wyf’ (Wife of Bath’s Tale, 1072) and Florent weds an ‘old hag’.9 Secondly, Dame Ragnell possesses a gargantuan appetite. This aspect of the heroine’s characterization most probably appeared in the ballad The Marriage of Sir Gawain,10 a text whose relationship to Dame Ragnell is, to quote Withrington, ‘self-evidently close’.11 It is also found in the non-Arthurian ballad of Sir Henry, where the unnamed female ‘griesly ghost’ eats up the King’s ‘berry-brown steed’, ‘good gray-hounds’ and ‘gay gos-hawks’, and drinks the horse’s hide full of wine (stanzas 8, 10, 12 and 14). Child, the Victorian editor of both of these post-medieval ballads, suggests that the bride’s extraordinary appetite can be found in the Danish ballads Greve Genselin and Tord af Havsgaard (the latter based on the Þrymskviða of the elder Edda).12 Laura Sumner argues that ‘the motif of the bride’s appetite indicates that a northern influence has been brought to bear on the loathly lady story as it appears in the ballad’.13 Norris, however, advises caution in trying to establish the source of this motif, acknowledging that it may have been part of the traditional story ‘or may have been an independent addition of the author to emphasise Ragnell’s lack of appeal’.14 In this essay I consider how the particulars of Dame Ragnell’s loathliness may have been inspired by an English tradition dating back to the court of Edward I. Further, the essay examines how the hideousness of the heroine 8

9 10

11 12 13 14

All quotations from Chaucer are taken from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson (Oxford, 1987). For an edition of the Tournament of Tottenham see Sands, Middle English Verse Romances, pp. 313–22. All quotations from The Tale of Florent are taken from Withrington and Field, ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale,’ in Sources and Analogues, ed. Correale and Hamel, II, 405–48. Withrington and Field conjecture that the mid-sixteenth-century ballad The Marriage of Sir Gawain, preserved in London, British Library, MS Additional 27879 (‘The Percy Folio’), contained a description of the wedding ceremony and celebrations on a half page that is now missing; see Sources and Analogues, ed. Correale and Hamel, II, 446. Withrington, The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell, p. 16. Sumner, The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell, pp. xvii–xviii. Sumner, The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell, p. xvii, note 24. Norris, ‘Sir Thomas Malory,’ p. 91.

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of Dame Ragnell was enhanced by an author fascinated by the comic potential of female appetite. Some time ago Roger Sherman Loomis drew attention to a record of what may be the earliest English association of the loathly lady narrative with Arthur’s loyal comrade Gawain.15 This is to be found in an interlude performed before Edward I and his new Queen, Margaret of France, at Canterbury on 10 September 1299, as recorded in Lodewijk van Velthem’s 1316 continuation of Jacob van Maerlant’s Middle Dutch rhymed chronicle of the world, the Spiegel historiael (Mirror of History).16 Loomis explains that the interlude celebrated the marriage of Margaret, daughter of Marie de Brabant, to the sixty-year-old Edward I of England in 1299. It is described by the Brabançon priest, Lodewijk van Velthem, and though he mistakenly assigns it to the occasion of Edward’s first marriage to the Spanish princess, Eleanor, it is fairly clear that it consisted of a tournament and three interludes recalling Edward’s triumphs over the Welsh, the Scots and the barons.17

The description of the interlude or spel described in the Spiegel historiael contains material that resonates with Dame Ragnell. Van Velthem describes a ‘Round Table’ or games in which Edward’s knights played the roles of key Arthurian heroes: Lancelot, Gawain, Perceval, Aggravaine, Bors, Gareth, Lionel, Mordred and Kay. The games were followed by a feast at which three dramatic performances or interludes of King Arthur were performed (one of which accompanied each course of the feast); they are described in some detail in the Vijfde partie (fifth part) of Van Velthem’s account. In the third interlude a loathly lady rides up to the table on a ‘pardekijn dat was roet […] dat mager was’ [on a little red pony […] that was thin] (p. 1, 315). Van Velthem relates how Edward instructed a squire to disguise himself as the loathly lady who rides in before the third course. In this interlude the loathly lady is unmistakably young. She is described repeatedly as joncfrouwe or ‘young lady’, and her portrayal is not characteristic of female old age: Die nie was na wives figure Gemaect, want die nese van hare 15

16

17

R. S. Loomis, ‘Edward I, Arthurian Enthusiast’, Speculum 28 (1953), 114–27; and see also M. Biddle, ‘The Making of the Round Table’, in King Arthur’s Round Table: An Archaeological Investigation, ed. M. Biddle (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 337–92 (esp. pp. 378–86). Lodewijk Van Velthem’s Vijfde partie is available online at http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/velt003spie02_01/index.php (accessed 20 May 2010). The edition of the Spiegel historiael, vijfde partie is that of H. van der Linden, W. de Vreese, P. de Keyser and A. van Loey (Brussels, 1906–38); translations are my own. R. S. Loomis, ‘Arthurian Influence on Sport and Spectacle,’ in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History, ed. Loomis (Oxford, 1959), pp. 553–9 (p. 558).

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Was eens voets lanc openbare Ende meer dan ere palme breet; Die horen waren haer, godweet, Gelijc vanden esel die oren; Vlechten hadsi achter ende voren. So datsi toten gordele gingen; Si scenen so grof, daer si hingen, Als peerts vlechten of grover vele: Enen crop hadse onder die kele, Als een ganscy es groet; Den hals lanc, ende harde roet; Den mont wijt, ende ongescepen: In dene side haddi begrepen Die kinnebacken toten oren toe; Hi ginc op, in weet hoe, Ende stont slem, opward wide ontdaen. Die tande diemen daer in sach staen, Waren som sward ende som wit; Ende vinger lanc, dat qualijc sit. Rageden haer uut .ij. tande groet. (pp. 1, 313–16) [She was not made according to a woman’s body, for her nose was very clearly a foot long and more than a palm in width; God knows her ears were like those of an ass; both before and behind, she had braids reaching down as far as her girdle; Hanging there, they appeared as coarse as a horse’s braids, or a lot coarser; She had a goitre under her throat, as big as a goose’s egg; her neck was long and very red; a wide and misshapen mouth; on the one side it extended from the cheeks as far as the ears; It went up, I don’t know how and stood wry, gaping wide open. Some of the teeth that could be seen in there were black, and others white; And two big teeth protruded the length of a finger, and fitted badly.]

The lady is neither grey-haired nor wizened; her youth is signalled by her braids and her fastened girdle, which is also a symbol of her maidenhood. Her teeth are particularly unattractive, a feature also of the hag in the Dindsenchas of Carn Mail and the Exploits of the Sons of Eochaid.18 While it is possible that the Edwardian interlude may hark back to some memory of these early Irish tales, it seems more probable that the loathly lady’s representation is a hideous perversion of a young courtly heroine created by effects achieved through make-up, wig and false teeth. In explanation of the loathly lady’s youth one might offer the age of the squire playing her part and the spel creator’s familiarity with the Arthurian tradition of young damsels who appear suddenly and set tasks for the

18

R. S. Loomis, Celtic Myth and Arthurian Romance (London, 1926), pp. 297–8.

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Knights of the Round Table as did, for example, the damsel in Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain. The purpose of the interlude was to convey to Edward’s followers the wrongs that he had suffered from certain towns in order that his knights would pledge to avenge their king. The unnamed loathly lady sends ‘Perchevael’ to ‘Licester’ (Leicester) to win the castle from its lord and ‘Walewein’ (as Gawain is called in Dutch) on a quest to ‘Cornuaelge’ (Cornwall) to put an end to strife between commons and lords, after which the squire playing this lady disappeared and removed his make-up. In relation to the interlude’s content historians, whose opinions are summarized by Loomis, have observed that Van Velthem’s ‘chronological and geographical confusion is shocking’ since The capture of the town of Cornuaelge shows a confusion between the county of Cornwall and the castle of Kenilworth, a stronghold of the rebel barons, which surrendered to Edward and his father in 1266, twelve years after the prince’s [first] wedding, not before. There was no attack on the town of Leicester during the baronial wars, but the Earl of Leicester, Simon de Montfort, was of course the leader of the baronial party.19

That said, Loomis is persuasive in his view that behind the confusion and romancing lay a real acquaintance with the outstanding events of Edward’s reign – the marriage with a Spanish princess, the baron’s wars, and the many campaigns against the Welsh and the Scots. However unreliable, Lodewijk cannot be dismissed altogether.20

It is possible that Edward I’s interlude of 1299 as described by Lodewijk Van Velthem was the first English fusion of the loathly lady narrative with Arthurian tradition. Why this synthesis occurred during the reign of Edward I can be explained by Edward’s ‘strong concern with both the historic and the romantic traditions of Arthur’, in evidence of which Loomis cites Edward’s visit to Glastonbury and the opening of Arthur’s tomb in 1278, his ownership of Arthurian romances, his participation in Round Tables and his appropriation of the Crown of Arthur from the Welsh, bringing it to Westminster Abbey in 1285.21 Gawain’s obedience to the demands of the loathly lady does indeed support Sumner’s conviction that the loathly lady story was attached to Gawain originally to portray the loving relations between King Arthur and his nephew and to display the nobility of a self-sacrificing hero.22 In the light of the barons’ unrest during Edward’s reign, promotion of cordial relations between knights and monarch would have served as useful propaganda to the King. 19 20 21 22

Loomis, ‘Edward I’, p. 119. Loomis, ‘Edward I’, p. 120. Loomis, ‘Edward I’, pp. 115. Sumner, The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell, p. xxv.

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Comparison between the portrayal of the loathly lady in the Edwardian interlude and the description of the heroine in Dame Ragnell reveals interesting similarities. Dame Ragnell is described thus: She was so foulle and horrible. She had two teethe on every side As boris tuskes, I wolle not hide, Of lengthe a large handfulle; The one tusk went up and the other doun; A mouthe fulle wide and foulle y-grown. With grey heris many on. Her lippes laye lumprid on her chin; Neck forsothe on her was none y-sene.  (Dame Ragnell, 547–55)

As in the Edwardian interlude, here too Dame Ragnell is youthful. The only aspect of her portrayal that might indicate that she is a crone is the grey hairs on her lip. However, in spite of her youth, she is still as far from the stereotype of a courtly heroine as one could possible imagine. Further, and most strikingly, both loathly ladies – the joncfrouwe and Dame Ragnell – have an exceedingly unpleasant mouth that contains tusk-like, protruding teeth. It is possible that Dame Ragnell’s fifteenthcentury author was aware of the early Irish representations of the hag with hideous teeth, but it seems more plausible that he was familiar with either a record or cultural memory of the Edwardian interlude itself or some form of Van Velthem’s account. The latter should not be discounted, since Caxton suggests a pan-European awareness of Arthurian narratives when he mentions books describing Arthur’s exploits in ‘Duche [meaning both German and Dutch], Ytalyen, Spaynysshe, and Grekysshe, as in Frensshe’ in his Preface to Malory’s Le Morte Darthur.23 Deformity of the mouth and body can suggest an uncivilized appetite, and these are features that can be exploited for visual comedy. This was not the case in the Edwardian interlude: such exploitation at Queen Margaret’s wedding feast would have been completely inappropriate. In this instance the loathly lady does not participate in the feast; her raison d’être is to provide a catalyst for Arthur/Edward to air his grievances, and for his knights to prove their loyalty by taking up a challenge given by the most unappealing of damsels. The author of Dame Ragnell, however, couples a distorted mouth with a ferocious appetite, providing additional detail to the same end: Her face was red, her nose snotid withalle, Her mouithe wide, her teethe yallowe overe alle, With blerid eyen gretter than a balle; Her mouithe was not to lak; 23

Malory, Works, ed. E. Vinaver, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1971), p. xiv; all references are to this edition.

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Her teethe hing overe her lippes; Her cheekis side as wemens hippes; A lute she bare upon her back. Her neck long and therto great; Her here cloterid on an hepe; In the sholders she was a yard brode; Hanging pappis to be an hors lode; And like a barelle she was made …  (Dame Ragnell, 231–42)

Ragnell’s breasts are overly large, her stomach is stretched to its limits, rendering her barrel-like, and she exhibits a gluttonous appetite at her wedding feast. Rather than looking to Scandinavian sources for Dame Ragnell’s appetite, as suggested by Sumner (quoting Child),24 Norris is persuasive in his argument that this feature is the poet’s own invention. It is one, I would suggest, that is in some way cognisant of an English tradition going back to the time of Edward I in which Gawain encounters a loathly lady with a hideous mouth and carries out her bidding for the good of his king. In the spirit of poetic mischief and parody that Davis detects in the poem, the Dame Ragnell author devised for Ragnell an appetite and rotundity as a logical accompaniment to her over-sized teeth and mouth. It is to a consideration of the comic effects of providing Dame Ragnell with a ferocious appetite that this essay now turns. The author of Dame Ragnell is particularly concerned with a variety of forms of consumption. He is interested in material consumption: he is most keen to convey that on her wedding day, Dame Ragnell’s gown is expensive and beautiful, having a value of almost £2000.25 This interest in consumption extends to food, for he alone among his peers describes the loathly lady and hero’s wedding feast. The Dame Ragnell poet gives enough detail to his audience about the poultry, game and baked dishes that provide the basis of this nuptial feast, and the order in which they are served, to parody the menu and proceedings as set out in books of feasting etiquette, the production of which proliferated in the fifteenth century. Ragnell’s gluttony at her wedding feast permits a poet described by Davis as ‘mischievous’ to work with ‘motifs of exaggeration’ for grotesque, comedic effect. This the Dame Ragnell author does for an audience, one might posit, who had the purchasing power and desire for luxury items, including the literature of romance, along with an appetite for mockery of the aristocracy. A ferocious appetite requires an arena in which to be indulged. The Dame Ragnell poet provides this in his description of the loathly lady’s marriage feast. Throughout the Middle Ages wedding feasts could be 24 25

Sumner, The Weddynge of Sir Gawen, p. xvii. Withrington, The Wedding of Sir Gawain, p. 60, note 592.

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sumptuous affairs accompanied by music, traditionally before, during and after the serving of dishes. Love songs, obscene gestures, lewd jokes and dancing were also common features and, indeed, Gawain, Ragnell and their guests are entertained by minstrels (Dame Ragnell, 628).26 A Feste for a Bryde, which survives in a treatise dating from the close of the fifteenth or start of the sixteenth century, provides details of aristocratic nuptial banquets,27 and indicates that it was customary at the weddings of the wealthy to provide guests with a meal of many courses comprising many meats, game, fish and symbolic, decorated food sculptures – ‘subtleties’ – that conveyed messages of goodwill to the married couple and their guests. One description in A Feste recommends four courses, the first course alone comprising brawn, frumenty (hulled wheat boiled with venison), swan and pig, pheasant, a ‘great custard’ (a pie without a lid that was filled with eggs and milk) and a ‘subtlety’. Feasting is a staple of medieval, and particularly Arthurian, literature. Ralph Hanna has demonstrated the importance of feasting in Middle English alliterative poetry while Henry L. Harder recognizes the display of magnificence and its political import served by feasts in Arthurian tradition, specifically in the Alliterative Morte Arthure.28 The same ‘curlews craftily rosted’ (196) that are served at Arthur’s New Year feast at Carlisle in this poem, written around 1400, appear in the later Dame Ragnell. Harder notes the accuracy of literary portrayals of feasts, observing that ‘half of the dishes on Arthur’s menu were served at the banquet at the installation of John Stafford as bishop of Wells on 16 September 1425’.29 In Dame Ragnell, Ragnell and Sir Gawain participate in a pared-down yet recognizable form of a bridal feast as described in A Feste for a Bryde. The focus throughout is on Dame Ragnell’s appetite and lack of table manners. Ragnell devours ‘three capons and also curlues three, / And great bake metes she ete up, perdé’ (Dame Ragnell, 610–11). The implication here is that Dame Ragnell consumed the roasted capons and curlews and ‘grete bake metes’ [large meat pies] alone, although, as is suggested by the household accounts of Alice de Breyne for the year 1412–13, traditionally meals were served to diners in pairs.30 The poet comments that Ragnell ‘ete as moche as six that ther wore’ (605) and 26 27 28

29 30

J. Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chi­cago, 1987), p. 191. A Feste for a Bryde, in Ffor to serve a Lord in The Babees Book, ed. F. J. Furnivall, EETS OS 32 (London, 1868), pp. 367–77. R. Hanna, ‘Feasting in Middle English Alliterative Poetry’, in New Perspectives on Middle English Texts: A Festschrift for R. A. Waldron, ed. S. Powell and J. Smith (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 31–42; H. L. Harder, ‘Feasting in the Alliterative Morte Arthure’, in Chivalric Literature: Essays on relations between literature and life in the later Middle Ages, ed. L. D. Benson and J. Leyerle (Kalamazoo, MI, 1980), pp. 49–61. Harder, ‘Feasting’, p. 53. F. Swabey, ‘The Household Accounts of Alice de Breyne, 1412–13’, in Food and Eating in Medieval Europe, ed. M. Carlin and J. T. Rosenthal (London, 1998), pp. 133–44 (p. 136).

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further, that ‘Ther was no mete cam her before, / But she ete it up lesse and more’ (613–14). Contemporary recipes for large baked meats indicate that Ragnell’s consumption was no mean feat. The courtesy text Boke of Nurture indicates that in 1430 a baked meat pie comprised ‘Fygys, Roysonys, & Porke, & a lytel brede y-ground y-fere; take hym vppe, & put Pepir y-now þer-to, & Maceȝ, Clowys, & make þin cofyn [pastry case], & putte þin comade þer-on’.31 In addition to pork, baked meats might also contain fried birds and the yolks of herons’ eggs.32 Although medieval banquets contained many courses, each comprising a multitude of dishes, John Russell, the compiler of the Boke of Nurture, states how small portions delicately carved were considered correct for the most noble, discriminating palates.33 The Arthurian court is shocked at Ragnell’s lack of table manners, as with her three-inch nails she ‘breke her mete [here meaning ‘food’] ungoodly’ (608). Breaking bread was considered impolite, as the advice in the Boke of Nurture makes plain: ‘Kutte withe your knyf your brede, and breke yt nouht’ (140). Her courtly peers are horrified also by her gargantuan appetite: Ragnell devours whatever is put in front of her from the start of the feast until the hand-washing with which it concludes (619–21). Ragnell’s lack of table manners and her ungoverned eating, and the aristocratic discomfiture at this expressed in the poem, are amusing. The comedy works in a manner different from Chaucer’s mockery of the Prioress. Here the Prioress’s gracious dexterity is a gentle parody of the height of table manners exhibited by one who wishes to be a courtly lady: She leet no morsel from her lippes falle, Ne wette hir fyngres in hir sauce depe; Wel koude she carie a morsel and wel kepe That no drope ne fille upon hire brest. In curteisie was set ful muchel hir lest. Hir over-lippe wiped she so clene That in hir coppe ther was no ferthyng sene Of grece, whan she drunken hadde hir draughte. (General Prologue, 126–36)

Ragnell’s table manners are the polar opposite of these; she is a caricature of what it is to lack table manners, tearing her food ‘ungoodly’, that is, in indelicate fashion, holding and demolishing the capons, curlews and baked meat-pies with fingers that are more like claws. Medieval banquets were furnished with hand-washing bowls and towels to deal with the grease and stickiness of food; Ragnell’s fingernails are particularly unpleasant 31 32 33

The Boke of Nurture Folowing Englondis Gise by John Russell in Furnivall, Babees Book, pp. 117–99 (p. 145). Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books, ed. T. Austin, EETS 91 (London, 1888), p. 47. The Boke of Nurture, p. 145.

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and bestial, requiring more than finger-bowls to remedy their look and cleanliness. In her manner of eating, which foregrounds the unpleasant physicality of food, Ragnell revolts the Arthurian court, and its discomfort simultaneously amuses the poem’s audience. With her excessive size and her inability to observe etiquette (she eats too much and with too much gusto), Dame Ragnell is an embodiment of the Bakhtinian ‘grotesque’: the body that is uncontained, unruly, uncontrolled by notions of propriety and good manners, and is thus animalistic.34 As such, Ragnell is assumed by all watching to have become monstrous through ungoverned and ungovernable appetite and is reviled by an Arthurian court that considered itself emblematic of all things civilized. The court ostracises Ragnell and forces her to ‘ete alone’ (609), consigning her to a dish fit for the Devil when they wish that the Devil might ‘on hir bonis gnawe’ (617). Susan F. Weiss suggests that most feasts are ‘a locus of pleasure and plenitude, a kind of hedonism, a way of liberating the senses and deriving the enjoyment of rather a sensual nature’.35 By contrast, Dame Ragnell’s monstrous consumption renders her wedding banquet a parody of a courtly feast, at which those present can only look on with horrified fascination. It is not only Dame Ragnell’s table manners that are a source of humour. As we have seen, the poem focuses at some length on Ragnell’s mouth, relating that it was large and replete with yellow teeth, two of which, like boar’s tusks, overhung each side of her mouth (549). G. P. Biasin has remarked that the mouth is an organ of necessity (ingesting food to survive) but also one of pleasure (providing enjoyment of food via the taste-buds).36 In the Middle Ages mouths, especially those of women, were considered problematic, as it was believed that female overproduction at the mouth (garrulousness and overeating) could bespeak overproduction at that other orifice of female pleasure: the vagina. Through Alisoun of Bath’s assertion that ‘A likerous mouth moste han a likerous tayl’ (Wife of Bath’s Tale, 466) Chaucer voices this belief that female garrulity and overeating signalled over-indulgence in vaginal consumption which, in turn, could imperil both the woman’s soul and that of her lover. For this very reason the spiritual guide the Book of Vices and Virtues advised women to be ‘sobre in etyng & drynkyng, for of to moche etyng and drynkynge comeþ moche quekenyng of þe fier of lecherie’.37 Another similar guide, Dan Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwyte (1340), warned against the lecherous effect of precisely the large meat pies that Ragnell devours so voraciously: ‘Ac þe greate metes and þet stronge wyn aliȝteþ 34 35 36 37

M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN, 1984). S. F. Weiss, ‘Medieval and Renaissance Wedding Banquets and Other Feasts’, in Food and Eating in Medieval Europe, ed. Carlin and Rosenthal, p. 159. G. P. Biasin, The Flavours of Modernity: Food and the Novel (Princeton, NJ, 1993), p. 3. The Book of Vices and Virtues: A Fourteenth century English Translation of the Somme Le Roi of Lorens d’Orleans, ed. W. N. Francis, EETS OS 217 (London, 1942), fol. 95b., p. 245.

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and nourisseþ lecherie ase oyle oþer grese aliȝteþ and strengþeþ þet uer [fire].’38 Wedding feasts were indubitably associated with the sexual encounter that was to follow on the wedding night; one need only recall the ‘subtlety’ on the wedding cake as described in A Feste for a Bryde. Ragnell’s voracious appetite for food suggests that her appetite for sex will be equally unrestrained and gluttonous. Here again the audience is required to laugh, now at Ragnell’s behaviour parodying that acceptable from a courtly lady, and at the Arthurian court’s concern for Gawain’s wellbeing after his wedding night: ‘“Sirs” […] “let us go and assay / If Sir Gawain be on live”’ (Dame Ragnell, 722–3). Sadly, a leaf is missing from the manuscript that would have included around seventy lines in which the couple leave the hall and enter their bedchamber. The tale recommences when the couple are in bed, where Ragnell demonstrates sexual desire, wishing her marriage consummated, and Gawain agrees, reluctantly, to kiss her. At this point Ragnell’s story becomes that of her loathly lady analogues, and she is magically returned to her former beauty when given sovereignty over her knight. Regaining her ‘body beautiful’ is clearly perceived as an improvement from the male perspectives within the text (Gawain, Arthur, the court and the narrator). Gawain now desires his wife (they stay in bed until late into the next day) and King Arthur and the rest of the court welcome her into their feasting community of ‘game, revelle, and playe’ (757). From this point on food becomes a sociable activity for Ragnell as she no longer dines alone but ‘at every great fest the lady shold be’ (802). Most crucially, with the disappearance of her tusks Ragnell’s mouth has lost its monstrosity. As signalled by the reference to Dame Ragnell’s inclusion in the court’s feasts and Gawain’s physical enjoyment of her (654–5, 706–8, 721), her mouth has regained its potential for both the civilized ingestion of food and the fulfilment of its erotic possibilities in the acts of kissing, nibbling, licking and sucking.39 The loathly lady motif demands she be returned to her former beauty and the Dame Ragnell poet readily obliges. But this transformation comes at a price for both Dame Ragnell and, I would suggest, the audience of the tale. The tale’s perspective shifts from that of Dame Ragnell to Gawain. Dame Ragnell is reduced to the traditionally male-defined expectation of a courtly heroine: an obedient, chaste sexuality signalled by her ‘smok’, a traditional beauty with hair that fell to her knees ‘as red as gold wire’ (742–3), and a fertile womb in which ‘Gawain gat on her Gyngolyn’ (799). The result of Ragnell’s dramatic weight loss is the reduction not only of her size but also her vitality. She becomes a silent, slender and contained body. The formerly feisty and self-assured Ragnell, who consumed her 38 39

Dan Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwyt or Remorse of Conscience, ed. P. Gradon, EETS OS 23 (London, 1866), pp. 52–3. D. Lupton, Food, the Body and the Self (London, 1998), p. 18.

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bridal feast with an appetite that she threatened to transfer to her husband, changes from consumer to consumed. She becomes a private feast laid on for her husband’s literal gustatory pleasure – ‘He made mirthe in her boure’ (712, my italics) – and a dish for public consumption to be enjoyed visually by others: ‘At every gret fest that lady shold be / Of fairnesse she bare away the bewtye’ (802–3). From this point Dame Ragnell ceases to be a source of comedy in the narrative. The comedic vein continues, however, to the close of the poem, where the poet continues to toy with his audience’s expectations of romance. The hero suddenly ceases to behave as one would expect: Gawain forgoes the opportunity to display his heroic qualities and acquire glory at the joust to feast, day and night, at the banquet of Dame Ragnell’s beauty, much to Arthur’s amazement (809–10). This sudden devotion to courtly love at the expense of heroic action coupled with the poet’s comment that ‘Gawen was weddid oft in his days’ (832), may well have raised a wry smile from those acquainted with Gawain’s reputation in many French courtly romances familiar in England. In these Gawain is famed for being a ladies’ man, as is so deftly summarized by B. J. Whiting: ‘His usual role is as the casual, good-natured and well-mannered wooer of almost any available girl. If she acquiesces, good: if not, there is sure to be another pavilion or castle not far ahead.’40 The closure of a romance is also parodied. As Stephen Shepherd has shown, the poet’s promise of hasty closure, ‘Nowe for to make you a short conclusion, / I cast me to make an ende fulle sone / Of this gentile lady’ (817–19), is deferred by a second promise that is immediately broken, ‘Thus leves my talking’ (825).41 Additionally, in the account of the sudden death of Ragnell, ‘She livid with Sir Gawen but yeris five’ (820), Shepherd perceives that the audience is treated to ‘a travesty of the way in which any number of romances “finish off” their principal characters at the end’.42 Frequently the couple live happily ever after, as is the case at the close of the anonymous King Horn and Sir Orfeo, and the Middle English Lay Le Freine.43 The audience’s response to Ragnell’s hasty demise should surely be a knowing smile since ‘to feel sad or perturbed here at the death of Ragnell risks missing the joke’.44 I would suggest that the poet’s final jest may lie in the plea for relief from sorrow and danger by the author, who claims 40

41 42 43 44

Whiting cited by A. C. Spearing, The Gawain-Poet (Cambridge, 1970), p. 199. See B. J. Whiting, ‘Gawain’s Reputation, His Courtesy, and His Appearance in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale,’ Mediaeval Studies 9 (1947), 189–234, reprinted in Gawain: A Casebook, ed. R. H. Thompson and K. Busby (New York, 2006), pp. 45–94; and also K. Busby, Gauvain in Old French Literature (Amsterdam, 1980). Shepherd, ‘No Poet has his Travesty Alone’, p. 120. Shepherd, ‘No Poet has his Travesty Alone’, p. 121. Each of these romances has been edited by Sands in Middle English Verse Romances, pp. 15–54, pp. 185–200 and pp. 233–45. Shepherd, ‘No Poet has his Travesty Alone’, p. 121.

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that at the time of writing he languishes in gaol, ‘beset withe gailours many / That kepen him fulle sewerly’ (844–5). If we admit the possibility that Dame Ragnell and Malory’s Morte Darthur are contiguous, it is feasible that the Dame Ragnell author was familiar with Malory’s very similar plea that closes the Morte Darthur, ‘Praye for me whyle I am on lyve that God send me good delyveraunce. And whan I am deed, I praye you all praye for my soule’ (p. 726, lines 16–18 [XXI.13]). Assuming the same familiarity with Malory in his audience, the Dame Ragnell poet parodied Malory’s closure of his work.45 Malory’s grave and weighty epic opus would thus be the target of a joke whereby the Dame Ragnell poet brings his much shorter, lightweight offering to a close with this gesture that, in the context of Dame Ragnell, reads as overblown and funny as was Ragnell’s bewitched belly. Assigning Dame Ragnell to some point contiguous with Malory renders it possible that Malory is the author of both texts and this is certainly Field’s contention.46 I would suggest, however, that the manner in which Dame Ragnell ‘sends up’ the very genre of which the Morte Darthur is such a grave and earnest example makes Malory’s authorship of both seem stylistically less likely. Another possibility, however, presents itself. If Dame Ragnell has no connection with Malory, the prison plea still serves as a parody of an author’s request for readers’ prayers with which many medieval lyrics and other literary works conclude. In its consideration of humour in The Weddynge of Syr Gawen and Dame Ragnell this essay began by exploring the features that separate the poem from its analogues: the fusion of a Sir Gawain narrative with the loathly lady motif, Dame Ragnell’s youth and her appetite. It concludes with possibilities and probabilities. It is possible that the association of Sir Gawain with a loathly lady, and the particular periodontal deformities of that lady, may have been suggested to the Dame Ragnell poet not by ancient Irish nor medieval Scandinavian sources as hitherto argued, but by something much closer to home: the portrayal of a loathly lady in an interlude played before Edward I, an account of which was recorded some years later by Lodewijk Van Velthem. It is possible that the joncfrouwe’s hideous teeth and deformed mouth inspired the fifteenth-century author of Dame Ragnell to create his unique vision of a bride for Gawain who possessed an appetite and manners to complement her facial features. The Dame Ragnell poet exploited her characterization for its comic potential in parodying the conventions of romance, an appreciation of which relies upon the audience’s familiarity with nuptial feasting traditions, table manners and contemporaneous attitudes towards female appetite both for food and sex, and an understanding of how romances dispatched their 45 46

See Field, ‘Malory and The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell’. Shepherd, ‘No Poet has his Travesty Alone’, p. 126.

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heroines. In a final comic coup, and in keeping with the Dame Ragnell poet’s modus operandi, the plea from prison with which Dame Ragnell concludes is, like so many other aspects of the poem, a pastiche. The Dame Ragnell author had an appetite for comic parody which he indulged by marrying a hideously deformed heroine off to the knight of the Round Table most renowned for his eye for the ladies.

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Speaking (of) Treason in Malory’s Morte Darthur Megan G. Leitch ‘I reporte me to all knyghtes that ever have knowyn me, I fared never wyth no treson, nother I loved never the felyshyp of hym that fared with treson.’1 ‘Where arte thou now, thou false traytour, sir Launcelot? Why holdyst thou thyselff within holys and wallys lyke a cowarde? Loke oute, thou false traytoure knyght, and here I shall revenge uppon thy body the dethe of my three brethirne!’ And all thys langayge harde sir Launcelot every deale. Than hys kynne and hys knyghtes drew aboute hym, and all they seyde at onys unto sir Launcelot, ‘Sir, now muste you deffende you lyke a knyght, othir ellis ye be shamed for ever, for now ye be called uppon treson, hit ys tyme for you to styrre!’ (1215.11–20; emphasis mine)

The insistently articulated lexicon that surrounds the Morte Darthur’s numerous references to betrayal communicates a powerful concern with treason and its relationship to the chivalric community. Criticism assessing the Morte Darthur’s key words and concepts has attended to the rhetoric of ideals and their role in discourses of community. Jill Mann provides an inventory of crucial terms central to understanding connections between knights: ‘aventure, worship, body, departe, hole, togidir, felyship’.2 Following Elizabeth Archibald’s elucidation of Malory’s ideal of fellowship, recent scholarship has deepened our understanding of how communities within the Morte are shaped.3 These approaches have, however, focused primarily on the positive ideals themselves, without 1

2 3

The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. E. Vinaver, 3rd edn, rev. P. J. C. Field, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1990), p. 1134.16–19. All further quotations from Malory’s Morte Darthur refer to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text by page and line number. J. Mann, ‘Knightly Combat in Le Morte D’Arthur’, in The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, ed. B. Ford, 9 vols. (Harmondsworth, 1982), I, 331–9 (p. 332). E. Archibald, ‘Malory’s Ideal of Fellowship’, The Review of English Studies, n.s. 43.171 (1992), 311–28; R. Radulescu, The Gentry Context for Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge, 2003); K. Hodges, Forging Chivalric Communities in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur (New York, 2005).

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remarking upon the explicit centrality of antithetical manifestations such as treason to the definition and development of these ideals. Moreover, critics who have sought to analyze Malory’s attitudes towards treason have not devoted sustained attention to the words that express these attitudes, thereby leaving unaddressed thys langayge’s implications for understanding the values the text promotes, to whom it promotes them, and the methods by which it does so.4 The persistent, emphatic articulation of ‘treson’ and ‘traytour’ in Malory’s text, particularly in direct discourse, constitutes a distinct departure from his sources that has, to my knowledge, gone unremarked.5 This article aims to assess how treason, as a key word and concept, functions with respect to the Morte and its textual intentions; that is, how Malory’s representation of treason contributes to processes of community formation both diegetically and in fifteenth-century England. Treason is often Malory’s mode of exploring themes and of interrogating ideals. In the Morte, treasonous ideas and actions are the everpresent opposites to fellowship and community. Traitor figures are situated at, and are therefore used to test, the boundaries of community definition, of inclusion and exclusion. To evaluate how Malorian treason works, and the work it consequently performs with respect to Malory’s Arthurian world and the world of his contemporary audience, we must take into account both rhetorical effect and historical relevance. The language of treason surrounds both instances of treason and its absence in the Morte, providing a medium through which both the valorized and the devalued or subversive terms of behavioural binaries are probed. In the Morte, speech acts construe and control treason by defining, restraining and punishing traitor figures. These utterances include the speech of traitor figures, their fellow characters and narratorial interventions, as well as the rhetoric surrounding figures depicted as exemplars of proper conduct (who are often explicitly referred to as avoiding treason). Malory selects and applies a vocabulary of treason that operates as a vocalized hermeneutic system, a heuristic modelling of specific acts of interpretation and of exclusion. Moreover, Malory reimagines social organization and standards of proper conduct contentiously, producing a unique transformation of the late medieval intersections between, on the one hand, written, legal 4

5

D. Ellis, ‘Balin, Mordred, and Malory’s Idea of Treachery’, English Studies 1 (1987), 66–74; K. Harris, ‘Evidence against Lancelot and Guinevere in Malory’s Morte Darthur: Treason by Imagination’, Exemplaria 7.1 (1995), 179–208; R. Kelly, ‘Malory and the Common Law: Hasty jougement in the “Tale of the Death of King Arthur”’, Medievalia et Humanistica n.s. 22 (1995), 111–40. M. J. Rose’s unpublished doctoral dissertation, ‘Malory’s Morte Darthur and the Idea of Treason’ (University of Wales, Bangor, 1992), dissects and describes the legal and non-legal antecedents of treason available to Malory in a way that privileges categorizations at the expense of connections, accordingly neglecting to address the source alterations, lexicon and performativity of Malorian treason that both are and conduce to the findings of the present study.

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and institutional attitudes towards treason, and, on the other, oral, folklaw and personal conceptions of treason. The Morte Darthur thereby particularly resonates with, but also challenges, its contemporary audience’s concerns and world-views. Malory’s emphasis on speaking of treason and traitors exposes the dangerously uncontainable power of treason in an era rife with social unrest and political turmoil, yet also seeks to counteract it.

Performative Rhetoric The words ‘treson’ and ‘traytour’ occur in the Morte with notable frequency and discursive force. There are ninety-seven instances of the word ‘traytour’ and its variants and plurals.6 The vast majority of these occurrences, eighty-nine, appear in dialogue. Traitor is thus primarily a spoken label in Malory’s text, a form of address applied either by one character to another or between groups of characters. Malory’s use of the word ‘treson’ and its variants also exhibits a considerable preponderance of identifying and action-defining words in dialogue: of 124 instances, seventy-two are spoken by characters in direct discourse.7 In addition, of the nine occurrences of ‘traytourely’ adverb forms, eight appear in dialogue.8 While Malory habitually alters his sources to greatly increase the amount of direct speech in the narrative,9 the results are particularly powerful when the transformation produces articulations that are as inherently performative as these accusations of treason. Articulations of ‘treson’ and ‘traytour’ inform constructions of community within the Morte Darthur and within fifteenth-century England in an accretive fashion. Malory’s use of these words and their persistent inclusion in direct discourse label actions and agents as belonging to a comprehensive and consistent category of perfidy. Debates concerning the delineation and relationship of the components of Malory’s text continue; however, most scholars concur that the thematic and stylistic links between the tales, while not necessarily forming a coherent whole, do nonetheless indicate that Malory’s writings can be productively analyzed as a ‘hoole book’ (1260.16).10 The present study follows others that have stressed the impact of Malory’s work as a whole by, for instance, viewing the Morte

6

7 8 9 10

A Concordance to the Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. T. Kato (Tokyo, 1974). Other orthographic forms are: ‘tratoures’, ‘traytour’, ‘traytouras’, ‘traytoures’, ‘traytours’, ‘traytowre’ and ‘traytur’. See also ‘treason’, ‘trechery’, ‘trechory’ and ‘tresoun’ in the Concordance. Variants are ‘traytourly’, ‘traytourlyar’ and ‘trayturly’. C. LaFarge, ‘Conversation in Malory’s Morte Darthur’, Medium Aevum 56 (1987), 225–38 (p. 227). C. Meale, “‘The Hoole Book”: Editing and the Creation of Meaning in Malory’s Text’, in A Companion to Malory, ed. E. Archibald and A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 3–17.

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as ‘bound together by the sheer consistency of its discursive habits’, and recognizing that ‘the terms on which we should build our reading of Malory are those suggested by the work itself; the (deliberate, as I believe) narrowness and simplicity of his vocabulary directs our attention, by insistent repetition, to the key words and concepts of his narrative.’11 This article reads representative treatments of treason to illuminate both the systemic qualities and the internal progressions of Malory’s idea of treason. The concentration of treason discourse varies among the eight tales. It is not substantially found in Tales II and VI (which consequently do not receive much attention here); however, its presence is marked in the remainder, with a preponderance of occurrences in Tales I, V, VII and VIII. Malory’s Arthurian narrative thus demonstrates a preoccupation with treachery in the portions of the work concerned with the internal politics of the Arthurian realm, and at the points most central to the narrative’s arc: that is, at the inception and establishment of Arthur’s kingdom; in the long middle section when the kingdom and court are at their zenith but the seeds of the fall are also sown; and during the demise of the Arthurian world. To illustrate Malory’s thematic and performative emphasis on treason, I shall begin not at the beginning but in the ‘Book of Sir Tristram de Lyones’, the ‘central section from which the reader of “the hoole book” acquires a general sense of what kinds of things happen and how they happen in Malory’.12 Malory uses ‘treson’ to mediate between communal unity and fragmentation in ‘Tristram’ in a fashion that seems remarkably pointed, especially when compared to his source, the French Roman de Tristan en Prose. The French romance does use the word ‘traïson’, but employs ‘desloiauté’ with much greater frequency.13 Malory, however, has a habit of propounding the use of ‘treson’ itself, especially in direct discourse. For instance, whereas the Roman de Tristan’s Berluse, accusing Mark of a heinous crime, says ‘Vous ocheïstes en Cornuaille mon pere, assés vilainnement et desloiaument’ (‘You slew my father in Cornwall, very cowardlily and disloyally’),14 the equivalent accusation in Malory is ‘“ye slew my fader traytourly and cowardly”’ (582.27; emphasis mine). Malory also creates such discourse on his own, as when his Berluse concludes his address to Mark with ‘all that ye do is but by treson’ (582.33), a criticism that finds no parallel in the Roman de Tristan. When 11 12 13

14

A. Lynch, Malory’s Book of Arms: The Narrative of Combat in Le Morte Darthur (Cambridge, 1997), p. xviii, emphasis mine; Mann, ‘Knightly Combat’, p. 332. LaFarge, ‘Conversation’, p. 230, emphasis mine. Old French ‘desloiauté’ has diffuse implications, including ‘disloyalty’, ‘faithlessness’, ‘falseness’ and ‘marital infidelity’; ‘traïson’, on the other hand, is a more specific and narrow legal term. All translations from Old French are mine and accord with Old French–English Dictionary, ed. A. Hindley, F. W. Langley and B. J. Levy (Cambridge, 2000). Le Roman de Tristan en Prose, ed. J.-C. Faucon, 9 vols. (Genève, 1991), V, 102. Further quotations from this edition are cited parenthetically in the text.

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working from passages in the Roman de Tristan and in other sources such as the Suite du Merlin, Malory frequently selects and strengthens emphasis on treason in these ways.15 Thus, despite the capaciousness of the French romances, the Morte Darthur’s concentration on the words ‘treson’ and ‘traytour’ greatly exceeds that of its French sources.16 Malory creates a narrower lexicon of betrayal while widening its application and forceful articulation. Malory’s label of treason emphasizes that certain actions and their agents are analogously destructive, immoral and detestable by placing them in the same category. Moreover, since Malory frequently presents this interpretation of conduct in his characters’ vocative accusations (to a degree unparalleled in his sources), his text models the act of exposing deviations from commendable behaviour. In the Roman de Tristan’s version, Berlés continues his confrontation with Mark: ‘Rois March, rois March! Nous sommes hors de Cornuaille. Hui mais vous gardés bien de moi!’ (IV.103: ‘King Mark, King Mark! We are outside of Cornwall. Now defend yourself against me!’). Malory, on the other hand, writes: ‘Whan sir Berluse saw kynge Marke he cryed on hyghte: “Traytoure, kepe the from me, for wete thou well that I am sir Berluse!’” (583.8–10). Here, Malory foregoes the French text’s double articulation of the accosted character’s name (and title) in favour of his explicit categorization as a traitor, and inserts Berluse’s name in the place of a mere self-reflexive pronoun. Helen Cooper has observed that combat in the majority of the Morte Darthur entails the confrontation of ‘named knight against named knight’ in a process that confers honour on the participants.17 However, as is visible in his source manipulations, Malory sometimes decreases the articulation of names in challenges to combat throughout the Morte 15

16

17

For another example of Malory’s increased accentuation of ‘treson’, compare his ‘Arthur and Accolon’ in Tale I to the corresponding episode in his source, the Suite du Merlin (La Suite du Roman de Merlin, ed. Gilles Roussineau, 2 vols. (Genève, 1996): quotations from this edition are cited parenthetically in the text). Malory’s determined condensation of the French version does not prevent him from expanding such descriptions as ‘uns chevaliers que on apiele Domas, le plus cruel et le plus felon qui soit en tout cest pais’ (I.321: ‘a knight called Domas, the most cruel and the most felonious in all this land’) to ‘his name is sir Damas, and he is the falsyst knyght that lyvyth, and full of treson, and a very cowarde as ony lyvyth’ (138.23–5; emphasis mine), or from independently reiterating that ‘this Damas ys so false and so full of treson’ (139.12), and giving his Arthur more of a focus on telling Accolon ‘thou art a traytoure’ (146.18) than occurs in the French. While we do not know which manuscript Malory used, these distinctions would hold unless Malory’s copies of the Roman de Tristan and of his other principal French sources were very different from those extant. In ‘Malory’s Ideal of Fellowship’ Archibald notes that ‘of course Malory was steeped in the French texts, and was not always translating line for line’ (p. 317), a fact that does not detract from her persuasive demonstration that Malory does indeed seem to have placed a greater emphasis on ‘fellowship’ than his French sources – a similar trend in authorial alterations to what I hope to show here with regard to treason. H. Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford, 2004), p. 401.

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Darthur, particularly if ‘traytoure’ could take the place of a combatant’s name. Yet also, where the French version is content with a character’s name or some other descriptor, Malory sometimes has his characters connect name and judgement, as in Bleoberis’ challenge: ‘“Make redy, thou false traytoure knyght, sir Brewnys Saunze Pité!”’ (684.27–28). In both cases, the issue of naming is in fact secondary to the text’s insistence on making the character’s status as a traitor known, thereby decreasing the honour of those who do not conform to proper knightly conduct and positioning them outside the chivalric community.18 The narrator’s and characters’ interpretation of perfidious behaviour is manifested not only in challenges to combat, but also in more widespread differences between the Morte and its sources. When Brewnys seeks to displace his identity to escape detection, the Roman de Tristan has him misidentify the approaching knight straightforwardly: ‘Sire, fait Breüs, ce est Breüs sans Pitié’ (V.87: ‘“Sir,” said Breus, “that is Breus sans Pitié”’). In Malory, however, Brewnys’ abject moral and chivalric status are determinedly repeated – even, in this case, by Brewnys himself: ‘“A, fayre knyghtes!” seyde sir Brewnys, “here folowyth me the moste traytour knyght and the moste coward and moste of vylany, and his name is sir Brewnys Saunze Pité”’ (685.13–15). In Palomides’ adventures in ‘The Red City’ the regicidal brothers Helyus and Helake are frequently discussed, and are referred to as ‘thos traytoures’ and ‘thes two traytoures’ seven times within three pages of Vinaver’s edition (712–14). Their actions are interpreted in a similar fashion in the French, as when the king says ‘Il m’ont ocis en traïson’ (V.188: ‘They slew me by treason’). However, they are referred to, and vocatively accused, in a different fashion: only once as ‘les deus traitours’ (‘the two traitors’) and elsewhere repeatedly as ‘li doi serf’ (‘the two knaves’), ‘li doi frere’ (‘the two brothers’), and ‘dans cevaliers’ (‘sir knights’) (V.190 and 186–202). Another of Malory’s strategies to ensure that his audience remembers the condemnation of traitor figures is to have his characters rearticulate all the relevant information in dialogue whose comprehensiveness is sometimes unrealistic, or ritualistic. For instance, when Palomides confronts Helyus and Helake, he asks: ‘“Be ye the two brethirne, Helyus and Helake, that slew youre kynge and lorde sir Harmaunce by felony and treson, for whom that I am comyn hydir to revenge his dethe?”’ (717.31–33). Malory’s repetitive 18

While women do appear as both accusers and accused in instances of treason in the Morte, I am primarily concerned with treasonous behaviour between knights. Malory’s female traitors often conform to the anti-chivalric function of male traitors: that is, apart from matters of love, they betray knights (and knightly communities) who are pursuing worship and fellowship. Thus, in broad outline, the Morte’s women are called ‘traytouras’ when they behave in an ‘unknightly’ fashion, though they do have specific means with which to do so – notably, magic. For a discussion of Arthurian women’s use of magic and its relationship to betrayal, see C. Larrington, King Arthur’s Enchantresses: Morgan and Her Sisters in Arthurian Tradition (London, 2006), esp. pp. 33–8.

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stress on labelling actions and agents as treason and traitors – in narrative recounting, discussion and direct address – draws attention to judgment and accusation of perfidy in ways that capitalize upon but also go beyond those of his sources. The Morte’s hermeneutic articulations regarding treason furnish a systemic rhetoric that denigrates and depersonalizes the traitor figures who are to be excluded from the community; these articulations achieve particular performative emphasis because they so frequently originate in the discourse of traitor figures’ fellow characters. Thus, despite the fact that the Morte, especially in connection with the theme of treason, does ‘express a more realistic and bleaker view of the world’ in which it was produced and received than is common in earlier romances, Malory’s treason discourse is not unambiguously pessimistic.19 The treason discourse contributes to a more complex ideological commentary; that is, it performs a social function combining condemnation and instruction.20 Malory wrote for an audience familiar with romance narratives, and his text generates meaning by insisting upon its ties to romance, requiring that romance ‘horizons of expectation’21 be kept in mind when it is read, even – or especially – in connection with the particular expectations of romance that it confounds, such as that of a happy ending. ‘Prose romance’ is in some senses a faute de mieux category for the Morte Darthur, but it allows us to see the intertextual associations that the text exploits. Helen Cooper has provided an intriguing, if tantalizingly skeletal, contextualization of the Morte by placing it among other fifteenth-century English prose romances that, like the Morte, are preoccupied with treason, and that, by rejecting a happy ending or stable ordering principle, show a ‘shift in the centre of gravity away from the comforting ideologies of the verse romances, with their calamities avoided or redeemed and political and familial order restored, to narratives that precisely deny those comforts’. Kevin Whetter argues that ‘the non-romance features of Malory’s text extend well beyond the kin-killing and civil strife which are [Cooper’s] focus’ and proposes that we ought to view the Morte Darthur as ‘a tragic-romance’. Whetter bases his ‘generic hendiadys’ on the contention that the text ‘has from outset to conclusion a somber and tragic outlook which is generically out of place in romance’ – an assertion that he seems to treat as opposed to or absent from Cooper’s ‘Counter-Romance’ article. The idea of a different, darker 19

20

21

H. Cooper, ‘Counter-Romance: Civil Strife and Father-Killing in the Prose Romances’, in The Long Fifteenth Century, ed. H. Cooper and S. Mapstone (Oxford, 1997), pp. 141–62 (p. 144; emphasis mine). The notion of ‘ideology’ employed in this essay is indebted to Paul Strohm’s methodology in Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton, NJ, 1992). Like Strohm, I approach ideology ‘not as a set of inherently false and deliberately distortive beliefs, but more neutrally as the entire set of socially imagined ideas by which people explain their lives and places in a material order’ (p. 6). H. R. Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. T. Bahti (Brighton, 1982), pp. 76–109.

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outlook is in fact the premise for Cooper’s argument. Her main suggestion is that these fifteenth-century prose romances do not fit easily within our modern conceptions of medieval generic categories.22 The Morte’s lack of a ‘happy’ ending is one manifestation of its recurrent preoccupation with (disastrous or unresolved) treason; however, in its ending, as elsewhere, the text exhibits the same concerns with secular ideals and ‘human perfectibility within a social context’ that characterize ‘conventional’ romances.23 As Cooper remarks, ‘romance, as the dominant secular literary genre of the period, was at the heart of [societal] self-representation, a means by which cultural values and ideals were recorded and maintained and promulgated’;24 by engaging with these cultural values and ideals in instances of their negation, Malory employs different (and more disturbing) means, but nonetheless pursues the didactic role of a romance. At a time when England was particularly troubled by civil strife, Malory’s text re-shaped familiar romance material to both comment upon, and seek to renew, faltering social commitments.

Circumscribing Community Treason, then, often provides the language through which Malory defines and delineates community. To take a closer look at the nature of this mode of shaping the Morte’s knightly communities – by circumscribing them with visible limits; that is, by writing the language of treason around them – this section will focus on aspects of the Tale of Balyn and of Tales III and IV. The following section will assess portions of Tales V and VIII 22

23 24

Cooper, ‘Counter-Romance’, p. 145; K. S. Whetter, ‘On Misunderstanding Malory’s Balyn’, in Re-viewing Le Morte Darthur: Texts and Contexts, Characters and Themes, ed. Whetter and R. Radulescu (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 149–62 (pp. 150 and 162), and Understanding Genre and Medieval Romance (Aldershot, 2008), p. 148. Whetter’s disagreement is, perhaps, more a matter of terminology than of substance; while his work provocatively pushes the boundaries of insufficiently sophisticated critical assumptions regarding the stable and monolithic generic ethos of the Morte Darthur, seeking to categorize the Morte’s genre discretely privileges signifiers in a way that risks disregarding connections between texts and contexts. Understanding how the Morte’s generic ethos would have been understood in its own historical and literary milieu is the matter of importance for the present discussion, because this can offer us insight into the ideological traditions and values with which the Morte engages, how, and why. Further attention to the modality of exemplary narrative exhibited by prose romances such as the anonymous Siege of Thebes and Siege of Troy will nuance our understanding of the generic nature and position of Malory’s Morte Darthur. A full engagement with the problem of the Morte’s genre is, however, beyond the scope of this article; for the present, following Cooper’s gesture towards the existence of a group of other fifteenth-century English prose romances, we can profitably understand the Morte as belonging to a genre that distinguishes itself in part by its desire to respond to that from which it is distinct. Cooper, English Romance in Time, p. 10. Cooper, English Romance in Time, p. 6.

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to elucidate the historical and cultural implications of Malory’s treason rhetoric, and the final section will address the peculiarities of the Morte’s most treason-intensive sequences in Tales VII and VIII. Balyn is a controversial figure not only to Malory’s characters but also to his critics, with some claiming that Balyn becomes tainted with treason (or already is so, prior to the events of his Tale) despite his ostensible status as an exemplar of knighthood. Deborah Ellis contends that Balyn’s initial exemplar status is ‘undercut by all subsequent events’ by the ways in which his ‘good intentions are continuously violated by death and unwitting betrayal.’25 Ellis construes this as an indication that Malory’s works present treason, and Balyn, ambivalently. Kevin Whetter, however, reconciles the Morte’s ‘textual insistence on Balyn’s heroic qualities’ with the events of Balyn’s tale by reassessing the systems of value according to which Balyn’s actions can be interpreted.26 He argues that ‘judged by the complex honour system typical of epic-heroic warriors rather than the courtesy associated with romance knights, Balyn’s actions are all honourable, and also derived from the best of intentions’.27 The present discussion agrees with Whetter’s argument in recognizing Balyn as the exemplar figure he is said to be in the Morte, according to the terms the text articulates for him.28 Yet it is important to notice that even – or especially – when Balyn is viewed as a knightly paragon rather than a debased traitor, a central theme of his tale is treason nonetheless. To begin with, the text’s characterization of Balyn as without treason undermines the notion that the king, or the legal system he theoretically embodies, has espoused an acceptable definition of treason. Balyn, the narrator explains, ‘had bene presonere with hym [Arthur] half a yere for sleyng of a knyght which was cosyne unto kynge Arthure’ (62.34–36). However, this initial exclusion from the Arthurian sociopolitical community and Arthur’s subsequent sentence of exile for Balyn after the latter kills the Lady of the Lake at the royal court seem, in the light of Malory’s insistence on portraying Balyn as an exemplary non-traitor knight, to indicate a failure of institutional definitions of treason to identify what truly constitutes treacherous behaviour. This is a notion that Malory explores in greater detail in connection with Launcelot and Guenevere, as I discuss later. Furthermore, the specific language used to articulate the exemplary aspects of Balyn’s conduct reveals a pervasive admonitory fashion of representing chivalric identity construction in the Morte. When the sword 25 26 27 28

Ellis, ‘Balin, Mordred, and Malory’s Idea of Treachery’, p. 67. Whetter, ‘On Misunderstanding’, p. 152. Whetter, ‘On Misunderstanding’, p. 156. I do not, however, follow Whetter to his conclusion that, because the text is informed by a more complex honour system than is conventionally found in romance, we cannot understand the ‘The Tale of Balyn’ and the Morte Darthur as romance; see n. 22.

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damsel comes to Arthur’s court seeking a knight without treachery, the negative expression of her quest’s aims is significant.29 Balyn, as a living definition of ideal heroic knightliness, is defined by treason (or its lack) in Malory’s rhetoric: Balyn is explicitly and repeatedly characterized through permutations of the phrase ‘moste of worship withoute treson, trechory or felony’ (64.2–3). This repeated negation shows that treason provides both the tools to define even this heroic exemplar and the structure of the Tale’s exploration of its themes. This negative definition of putative or actual knightly exemplar figures contributes to the way in which the Morte’s ideals and communities are shaped by a process of prohibition and expulsion of undesirable characters and characteristics. The boundary between good and bad knights in the Morte, where even non-traitors (or leasttraitors) are surrounded by the lexicon of treason, shows that betrayal is, for Malory and the Arthurian world he offers to his audience, a present absence at best and a tragic menace at worst. The text’s traitor figures, defining what communal or chivalric identity is not, are created by the symbolic order of the society they threaten, and are dialectically both within and beyond that society. Malory’s chivalric communities, that is, are produced through the processes of Othering that intersubjective identity-fashioning entails. In applying psychoanalytic theory to the task of illuminating the role of Other figures in different medieval texts, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen discusses the Lacanian term extimité (‘external intimacy,’ or ‘intimate alterity’) as ‘a phenomenon that conjoins the intimacy of self-knowledge to a foundational alterity, an exorbitance as frightening as it is familiar.’30 As the ‘restless presence’ at the centre of everything that a constructed identity ‘abjects in order to materialize and maintain its borders’,31 the Morte’s traitor figures and instances of treason can be understood as the monstrous extimité of individual chivalric subjectivity and also of the collective corpus of a community such as the Round Table. Malory’s heightened emphasis on the intimate alterity of traitors can be seen especially clearly in the divergences between his descriptions of Balyn and those of his source. In the Suite du Merlin the sword-damsel says she seeks ‘li mieudres chevaliers de cest païs et li plus loiaus sans trecherie et sans voisdie et sans traïson’ (‘the best knight of this land and the most loyal without trickery and without guile and without treason’ (I.66)). However, the Suite’s damsel offers this construction to her audience only once, and thereafter merely recalls it indirectly, as when she speaks of the difficulty of drawing the sword: ‘nus ne la porroit deschaindre s’il n’est

29 30 31

Ellis notes this significance without venturing to suggest why this is important; ‘Balin, Mordred, and Malory’s Idea of Treachery’, p. 64. J. J. Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis, MN, 1999), p. xiii. Cohen, Of Giants, p. 4.

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teus comme je vous ai devisé’ (I.67: ‘no one can draw it if he is not exactly as I related to you’; emphasis mine). The Suite du Merlin’s Arthur also relies on referring to the previous speech act without the author feeling the need to have it rearticulated, calling the as-yet-putative paragon ‘li mieudres chevaliers de son païs et … si bien entechiés comme vous avés dit’ (I.67: ‘the best knight of his country and … so well endowed as you have said’; emphasis mine) – and, moreover, this utterance is a positive definition of the exemplar knight. Likewise, once Balyn has succeeded, the French version’s damsel says simply: ‘vous estes li mieudres chevaliers de chaiens’ (I.69: ‘you are the best knight here’) and stops short of adding a ‘without’ phrase as a negative reminder. Malory’s swordtoting damsel, however, speaks of treachery and/or treason five times in her articulation of her search for a knight who lacks it (62–4). Here, the damsel’s repeated articulation of the negative definition, both before and after Balyn is identified as the successful candidate, accentuates the Morte’s pointedly admonitory conception of chivalry. Malory’s communities are defined by acts of exclusion and abjection not only with respect to individuals, but also with respect to ideals and the communities coexistent with them. In the Round Table oath, good characters or modes of conduct are distinguished in part by how they position themselves in relation to treason: ‘than the kynge stablysshed all the knyghtes and gaff them rychesse and londys; and charged them never to do outerage nothir morthir, and allwayes to fle treson, and to gyff mercy unto hym that askith mercy’ (120.15–19; emphasis mine). Moreover, community-defining consequences for transgression are included in the oath: the knights are to follow this code ‘uppon payne of forfiture of their worship and lordship of kynge Arthure for evirmore’ (120.19–20). This code of conduct for the fellowship of the Round Table is unique to the Morte, and has been considered to encapsulate Malory’s conception of chivalry.32 Because the Round Table oath is reminiscent of the chivalric teachings of fifteenth-century courtesy books it may have acted as a reminder for contemporary readers that, in both Malory’s world and their own, personal worship is dependent upon fulfilling social obligations, and failing to fulfil them will lead to loss of community.33 Indeed, in the Round Table oath, the punishment prescribed for committing treasonous actions is to be labelled with the identity of traitor figure and then to be expelled from King Arthur’s sociopolitical sphere in a historically resonant fashion. In late medieval England exile increasingly took the place of execution as the punishment for traitors, particularly aristocrats, who were

32 33

E. Archibald, ‘Beginnings: The Tale of King Arthur and King Arthur and Emperor Lucius’, in A Companion to Malory, pp. 133–51 (p. 141); Ellis, ‘Balin’, p. 75. Radulescu, Gentry Context, pp. 84–7.

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required to abjure the realm.34 Malory’s figuration of exile as punishment for treason would probably have been highly evocative for, and therefore more effectively admonitory to, a Wars-of-the-Roses audience. Another aspect of how Malory’s chivalric communities are formed and formulated through exclusion (of actions, motivations and agents) can be recognized by expanding the idea of the Round Table oath as a moment where ‘a community forms based on shared ethical principles’35 to encompass an appreciation of the contingency of these principles. All the (Round Table) knights are vulnerable to potential exclusion, as the oath stresses: ‘So unto thys were all knyghtis sworne of the Table Rounde, both olde and younge, and every yere so were they sworne at the hyghe feste of Pentecoste’ (120.25–7). Here, the recurrence of the oath is significant. As Archibald points out, ‘the fact that the oath is repeated every year at Pentecost shows that this is no temporary warband, but a permanent society with formal rituals and rules.’36 However, the reiteration also indicates darker aspects of the nature of this community, revealing that its sociolinguistic bonds need to be continually renewed or reified. This continual danger of slipping, of breaking, expressly suggests the limitations of the Arthurian realm. Thus, in his tragic representation of a moribund chivalric world, Malory seems very aware that the breach of social contract that treason constitutes is never fully separable from idealized personal bonds – and seeks to ensure that his audience cannot forget it either. Archibald demonstrates that Malory invests the word ‘felyshyp’ with his model of the ideal knightly community, remarking upon both the ‘extraordinary frequency and consistency with which Malory uses this word to describe his ideal’ and the fact that at least two ‘senses of fellowship … are very important in his work: the powerful camaraderie and bonding of individual knights, and the organized and permanent chivalric order of the Round Table’.37 Fellowship, in the Morte, is the ideal of social cohesion; it encapsulates loyal relationships, both horizontal and hierarchical. The Morte’s tendency to explore the ideal of fellowship through its opposite behavioural mode, treason, is crystallized in the passage that begins this article. When Mellyagaunce tells Launcelot he hopes they will not work treason on each other before their legal duel, Launcelot’s self-defensive reply provides a striking picture of the relationship between treason and fellowship: ‘“So God me helpe”, seyde sir Launcelot, “ye shall ryght 34

35 36 37

W. R. Jones, ‘Sanctuary, Exile, and Law: The Fugitive and Public Authority in Medieval England and Modern America’, in Essays on English Law and the American Experience, ed. E. A. Cawthon and D. E. Narrett (Texas, 1994), pp. 19–41 (p. 30); see also J. J. Jusserand, English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages, trans. L. T. Smith (London, 1950: 1889). Hodges, Forging Chivalric Communities, p. 35. Archibald, ‘Fellowship’, p. 318. Archibald, ‘Fellowship’, pp. 311 and 327.

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well wyte that I was never of no such condysions. For I reporte me to all knyghtes that ever have knowyn me, I fared never wyth no treson, nother I loved never the felyshyp of hym that fared with treson”’ (1134.15–19). Here, treason is figured as a travelling companion or fellow, as a tangible subversive (anti-)community. The Morte not only represents treason as the destructive force capable of demolishing fellowship, but also shows that treason is the dark mirror or inverted reflection of communal and honourable identity, fundamental to the latter’s existence. Launcelot, as the mouthpiece for this definition of treason as the anathema of society, demonstrates the influential ways in which Malory’s exemplary knights deploy ‘treason’ and ‘traytoure’. Because narratorial interventions are rare in the Morte,38 they invite particular attention when they do occur. Malory’s narrator says of Launcelot that ‘he passed all other knyghtes, and at no tyme was he ovircom but yf hit were by treson other inchauntement’ (253.10–12). As an authorial intervention, this comment about treason is an exception to the more common character-voiced treason discourse, and, significantly, helps to establish Launcelot’s reputation. As a result, any injury done to Launcelot must be understood as treason, valorizing and reinforcing his interpretation whenever he articulates ‘treson’ or ‘traytour’ against his enemies. Tale III presents a Launcelot who passes systemic treason judgments throughout his peregrinations. For example, when he is informed by a damsel of ‘a knyght that dystressis all ladyes and jantylwomen, and at the leste he robbyth them other lyeth by hem’ (269.19–21), Launcelot informs her that this knight ‘doth shame unto the Order of Knyghthode, and contrary unto his oth’ (269.23–4). And, confronting this knight, Launcelot accuses him vocatively as ‘false knyght and traytoure unto knyghthode’ (269.35; emphasis mine). In another episode, Launcelot encounters a devious knight to whom he assiduously applies a similar judgement: this knight, we are informed, ‘suddeynly … swapped of the ladyes hede. And whan sir Launcelot had aspyed hym what he had done, he seyde and so called hym: “Traytoure, thou haste shamed me for evir!’” (285.12–14). Here, one of Malory’s noblest knights articulates, ‘from within’, performatively exclusionary demarcations of knightly identity and community. In Tale IV, Gareth, another of Malory’s exemplary knights, shouts his judgment at a ‘traytour’ in a case that seems comically trivial on the surface, but upon closer inspection provides further insight into Malory’s attitudes towards treason. Lyonesse’s brother Gringamour relatively peacefully appropriates Gareth’s dwarf; confronting him afterward, Gareth ‘cryed alowde that all the castell myght hyre: “Thou traytour knyght, sir Gryngamoure! delyver me my dwarff agayne, or by the fayth that I owghe to God and to the hygh Ordir of Knyghthode I shall do the 38

LaFarge, ‘Conversation’, p. 227.

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all the harme that may lye in my power!”’ (330.12–16). Emily Huber reads the dwarf as an extension of Gareth’s knighthood, fundamental to his membership in the chivalric order.39 Viewing the dwarf as a vital chivalric accoutrement may help to explain part of Gareth’s furious reaction to his loss. The heart of the matter, however, is that the thievery is conducted in an underhanded fashion: at night, knowing Gareth is asleep, Gringamour, accoutred entirely in black, ‘com stylly stalkyng behynde the dwarff and plucked hym faste undir his arme and so rode his way with hym untyll his owne castell’ (328.24–26). It is the manner in which the offence is conducted that causes Gareth to apply the label of ‘traytour’ to the perpetrator, as I explore in the following section; Gareth, like Launcelot, informs the reader when behaviour breaks the expected bonds between knights. Group accusations likewise define communities in a performative fashion. When the Five Kings sneak up on Arthur’s army camp unawares in the night, Malory’s characters collectively cry out against their underhanded assault: ‘many cryed “Treson!”’ (128.10–11). While instances of treason are often unresolved in the Morte, no one gets away with treason without at least being noticed and denounced – in fact, trying to get as many people as possible to hear their oral accusations of treason is frequently the focus of accusers.40 These utterances, and many more like them, operate as socially and ideologically didactic texts for the fifteenth-century audience. Conceptualizations of treason, and the accusation and exclusion of traitors, shape chivalry not only by giving the appropriate interpretations to actions, but also by modelling the processes of exclusion that such actions warrant. The unrelenting way in which Malory’s characters communicate accusations of treason (in a deliberately narrowed vocabulary) creates expectations of an accusation whenever a character who could exhibit ‘proper’ conduct chooses an unknightly alternative. In the process of experiencing the Morte Darthur as a ‘hoole book,’ we begin to internalize – or are at least expected to internalize – the text’s insistence regarding treason and traitor figures. The attentive reader becomes complicit in reproducing Malory’s ideologies regarding treason. This influence would be especially available to a fifteenth-century audience, who would have understood the legal traditions and political turmoil with which the text’s representations of treason engage – a historical context to which I shall now turn.

39 40

E. Huber, ‘“Delyver Me My Dwarff!”: Gareth’s Dwarf and Chivalric Identity’, Arthuriana 16.2 (2006), 49–53 (p. 49). This is especially apparent when Agravain, Mordred and their companions approach Launcelot in Guenevere’s bedchamber, as discussed in the final section.

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Historicity in Malory’s Idea(l) of Treason Gareth’s discourse on the moral turpitude of abducting another knight’s dwarf in the darkness provides a useful starting point from which to interrogate the types of actions to which Malory applies the label of treason, and why. Malory’s classification of transgressions as treason depends less on distinguishing between orders of magnitude of wicked or guileful acts than on their collective association. Yet what ‘bonds’ do these assorted activities all betray? Robert Kelly and Kay Harris, the two critics who have thus far sought to historicize Malorian treason, both focus exclusively on one instance of treason, privileging the case of Launcelot and Guenevere in the final Tale as the historically inflected episode of treason in the Morte.41 Yet critical perception has, in my view, been somewhat shortsighted in passing over the bulk of Malory’s treason rhetoric without glimpsing the historical and legal frames of reference with which it intersects. Kelly writes that he examines the treason cases of Guenevere and Launcelot ‘as if they were real-life ones, and in isolation from other textual materials that, given another critical approach, might be seen as relevant – for example … Malory’s non-technical use in other episodes of words such as traitor and treason’.42 Treason against the king is of course crucial to the Morte Darthur, especially in the cases of Launcelot, Guenevere and Mordred, as I discuss below; however, in the vast majority of the cases prior to these two, this is not the type of treason with which Malory concerns himself. Moreover, as I hope to show, Malory’s general use of the vocabulary of treason is hardly ‘non-technical’. The view that the bulk of treason instances in the Morte are not part of a cohesive system is something of a critical commonplace.43 My aim is to shift our understanding of Malorian treason away from this view, in part by demonstrating that ‘treason’ is a more precise term in Malory’s work than has hitherto been recognized and in part by suggesting that ‘precision’, in terms of restricted classification, is perhaps not as useful a standard against which to measure the Morte’s treasons as is the text’s manifest intent to create pointed associations through its deployment of the relevant signifiers.

41 42 43

For Kelly’s and Harris’s articles on the subject, see n. 4. Kelly, ‘Malory and the Common Law’, p. 112, emphasis mine. Other studies whose discussions of the legal aspects of Malorian treason espouse this view include Rose’s unpublished doctoral dissertation (see n. 5) and Christopher Cannon, ‘Malory’s Crime: Chivalric Identity and the Evil Will’, in Medieval Literature and Historical Inquiry: Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall, ed. David Aers (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 159–83. Cannon’s otherwise judicious discussion of ‘murder’ in the Morte Darthur refers to ‘treason’ as a term that Malory uses ‘with much less precision than he uses the term “murder”’ (p. 181).

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The ontology of treason in the Morte is distinctive: the text understands treason in a way that, while it is often pointedly expressed in and effective through legal terms and representations, is nonetheless more reliant upon the ways in which communal folklaw would define treason than upon the ways in which the crown and its lawyers would do so. The institutional conception of treason, as codified in the 1352 Statute of Treasons, included only offences committed against someone to whom the traitor owed subservient loyalty – that is, one’s king, master, husband or prelate. However, the folklaw’s category of treason included forms of underhanded harm such as covertly initiated armed robbery or assault that the English crown would classify only as felony or trespass.44 The Malorian label of treason is certainly not restricted to acts perpetrated against persons in authority.45 In the Morte, a knight can be a traitor to another whom he has never even met before, let alone sworn an oath of loyalty to, if the harm is done deviously – as when Gringamour absconds with Gareth’s dwarf while Gareth is asleep (328–30), or when Garlon beheads stranger knights while invisible (80–81). After Garlon slays Balyn’s two successive knight-companions (who have no chance to defend themselves because they cannot see their attacker), he is, precisely like Gringamour, called ‘traytoure knyght’ by the offended party (81.11–12). Despite the seeming disparity in terms of gravity of offence, the text treats depriving a fellow knight of a dwarf and decapitating knights as equally treasonous offences, because what is most important is the guileful nature of the (intended) injury. As Green observes, in medieval England, ‘the word traitor … meant primarily someone who had betrayed a trust, particularly the kind of trust that might be expected to exist between members of

44

45

J. G. Bellamy, The Law of Treason in England in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 90–91. According to the Statute of Treasons, ‘if percase any Man of this Realm ride armed covertly or secretly with Men of Arms against any other, to slay him, or rob him, or take him, or retain him till he hath made Fine or Ransom for to have his Deliverance, it is not the Mind of the King nor his Council, that in such Case it shall be judged Treason, but shall be judged Felony or Trespass’: Statutes of the Realm (London, 1810–28), p. 320. Richard Firth Green’s analysis of Ricardian treason, in which ‘folklaw’ is contrasted to institutional law, generously stretches its temporal boundaries to include one example from Malory that is illuminating here: R. F. Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia, PA, 1999), p. 219. Green observes the significance of ‘cases where the treason is committed against those who are demonstrably lower in the established hierarchy than the traitors themselves.… In the feudal context, we find a clear example as late as Malory, where King Mark with his “groundyn glayue” is described as a “fals traitour” to his own vassal Sir Tristram (1:562). A country in which a king could still be described as a traitor to one of his own subjects had not yet lost all memory of a time when mutual oaths of loyalty might be imagined as an effective curb on the arbitrary exercise of political authority.’ Here, Green gestures towards how Malory seeks to affirm personal conceptions of social order; however, this case of Mark and Tristram is still between members of the same political unit bound by an explicit sociolinguistic bond, and it is important to recognize that Malory also goes beyond this.

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the same family or household’.46 If we are to see the victims of treason in the Morte as figures who ‘had good reason to trust the traitor’ (as their expressed outrage and accusations certainly suggest we should), it is apparent that, in Malory’s Arthurian world, honourable conduct is expected even between people (of a certain class and, perhaps, gender) who have never previously met and whom no explicit bond binds. Gringamour and Garlon are both called traitors for their actions even though they have neither taken the Round Table oath nor entered into any specific fellowship with those whom they betray; for Malory, the chivalric societal ethos is a bond in itself. Thus, Launcelot is able to call someone ‘traytoure unto knyghthode’ (269.35), universalizing and idealizing the code of conduct offered to the audience. Thus, in the ways in which his idea of treason engages with the models of social organization available in his historical moment, Malory supports order but does so by interrogating and transcending those models. The 1352 Statute of Treasons remained in effect during the Wars of the Roses, and much of the legal scope and definition of treason was continuous between the late fourteenth and the late fifteenth centuries.47 However, the less institutional, more personal conceptions of treason (and thus of social bonds) were antiquated at the end of the fourteenth century, and while such conceptions did in some form survive, they were subject to a continuing process of erosion by the increasing centralization of royal authority.48 Therefore, these personal conceptions had even less force in the later stages of the next century, at least in practice – but not necessarily less cultural cachet or ideological influence as nostalgic standards, such as in the way Malory depicts and champions antiquated methods of understanding relationships. Malory’s repeated presentation of unresolved treason comments on the failure of the political systems and forms of relationships of his time; however, this subversive representation also supports older, more personal forms of relationships and social order, and promotes these alternatives through the mode of disastrousness in his text. That is, Malory’s pervasive condemnations of treason – defined as almost any underhanded action, to anyone – seek to inculcate an intensified, honourable form of relationships and mode of interaction among the members of his audience. Malory writes about an imagined period when folklaw or oral oath was the binding mode of law and of social relationships, and valorizes this form of societal organization, yet he also traces fifteenth-century legality onto it, bringing it closer to his own and his audience’s experience. Malory’s representations of treason can be historicized not only in terms of the specific set of deleterious actions and attitudes that call 46 47 48

Green, A Crisis of Truth, p. 214. M. Hicks, English Political Culture in the Fifteenth Century (New York, 2002), p. 134. Green, A Crisis of Truth, p. xiv.

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for the transgressor’s eviction from the community, but also in terms of the speech acts that are performed in response to these acts. The text’s emphasis on the indictment of traitor figures offers systematic accusations suggestive of the process of law after a treasonous act has been committed. After King Mark expresses his intention to murder Tristram and kills one of his attendant knights, the other, Amant, says on his own and the two accompanying squires’ behalf, ‘we woll appele you of treson afore kynge Arthure’ (578.29–30). The word ‘appele’ is central to such accusations, which occur repeatedly.49 This focus on interpellating traitors – on constituting the figures as traitors through speech acts – defines a category of otherness inhabited by transgressors in a way that resonates with the (oral) appeals of treason by which one person could be legally accused of treason by another in the Middle Ages.50 Oral appeals were, however, somewhat antiquated by Malory’s time, when the prevailing procedure consisted of written bills of indictment.51 Oral appeals are found to an extent in the French Arthurian romances; when replicated in the Morte, the appeals, like the more ‘original’ historical emphases of Malory’s treason representations, take on a resonance particular to a late medieval English milieu; they function as part of the Morte’s ideology, heightened by Malory’s unique emphasis on direct discourse used to publicize the shame of the traitor figure. In Malory’s representations of treason, therefore, his contemporary audience would recognize especially the part of their own social and legal organization that was being eroded, in another instance of the personal and honourable crumbling before the institutional. When Bellamy observes that ‘appeals of treason were still, in the fifteenth century, able to be settled by trial by battle’,52 the implication is that such trials were becoming an obsolete mode of dispute resolution. The notion of this present-butvanishing world is directly addressed when Malory’s narrator intrudes on the story to inform the audience that ‘the custom was suche tho dayes that and ony man were appealed of ony treson othir of murthure he sholde fyght body for body, other ellys to fynde another knyght for hym. And alle maner of murthers in tho dayes were called treson’ (405.2–5). Thus, Malory, in his representation of legal procedures as well as in his broad application of a personal and universal conception of what constitutes 49

50

51 52

For instance: sir Archede ‘called sir Palomydes traytoure, and appeled hym for the deth of his brother’ (658.13–14); Palomides’ brother Saphir says of the earl de la Plaunche, ‘I appeled hym afore the kynge, for he made warre uppon oure fadir and modir’ (661.11–12); and ‘opynly sir Mador appeled the quene of the deth of hys cousyn sir Patryse’ (1049.28–9). Bellamy, Law of Treason, p. 141. For an insightful discussion of Louis Althusser’s term ‘interpellation’, see Judith Butler’s Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York, 1997), where she remarks that ‘it is by being interpellated within the terms of language that a certain social existence of the body first becomes possible’ (p. 5). Bellamy, Law of Treason, pp. 138–41. Bellamy, Law of Treason, p. 145; emphasis mine.

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treason and the bonds it can breach, returns to resonant older customs. The Morte Darthur’s layers of textual utterances concerning treason – the characters’ oaths or sociolinguistic commitments, and the text’s discussions of these bonds and their breach – function as moments of condensed historicity that animate and are informed by a set of conventions, rituals and cultural discourses. By employing language invested with the ideological power of social and legal structures in its evocation and enactment of pre-existing forms of communal judgment and the mechanisms that render these judgments intelligible and operational, the text shows treachery to be culpable and correspondingly transforms the social position of guilty parties. Thus, the text’s pointed realism in the legal qualities of its secular retributive framework contributes to its ethical effectiveness by inviting the audience to read such examples of unworthy behaviour in relation to their own experience, and to thereby learn to disdain and avoid such shameful and transgressive models. The treason with which the majority of the Morte Darthur is concerned is not that of a faerie damsel divining treason or its lack (something that Malory does include, but does not as much emphasize). The ‘custom’ in ‘tho dayes’ is here represented as worthy of emulation by the contemporary audience; it is constructed as the (flawed) golden age from which their present is declining. Malory’s particular engagements with the historical in his representations of treason are, moreover, an especially effective method of emphasizing his model of proper conduct and the consequences for straying from it as a result of the distinctively performative mode through which his contemporary ‘readership’ would probably have received the text. Medieval ‘reading’ of texts was frequently an interactive oral act. Joyce Coleman has established that ‘aurality – i.e., the reading aloud of written literature to one or a group of listeners – was in fact the modality of choice for highly literate and sophisticated audiences … from (at least) the fourteenth through the late fifteenth century’ as well as for audiences composed of a group of whom perhaps only the reader voicing the text was literate.53 A group of critics has recently reappraised the Morte Darthur as a text meant for aural reception;54 such a mode of reception would heighten the effect of the text’s direct discourse, intensifying accusations of treason, challenges directed towards traitors, and other performative speech acts concerning treachery. The potency of Malory’s treason discourse would be further intensified by the social functions of a collective aural experience of literature. Coleman notes that ‘in different contexts public reading served to broadcast political messages, to create a medieval form of “public sphere,” to promote spiritual community, to 53 54

J. Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 1–2. J. Coleman, ‘Reading Malory in the Fifteenth Century: Aural Reception and Performance Dynamics’, Arthuriana 13.4 (2003), 48–70 (p. 48).

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inspire emulation, and (most often in England) to pass time in a mutually engaging and socially bonding manner’,55 indicating that literature was often experienced among a tangible community mirroring that of the addressees of collective admonitions such as Malory’s Oath of the Round Table. Moreover, the significance of the Morte’s narrowed vocabulary of treason would probably have been further enhanced by aural performance: as Coleman observes, ‘by broadcasting important words (and stock phrases) across a whole area of narration, Malory made sure that the essential message got through’.56 The prelector, or individual reading aloud to the group, ‘would have instinctively “pointed,” or emphasized, such key words, and medieval listeners would have felt the effect of this deep semantic play whether or not they were conscious of it’.57 Because the entirety of the Morte would take over thirty hours to read aloud, one or two hours of reading might occupy an evening.58 While this mode of discontinuous reception might reduce the evocative power of repeated key words somewhat, Thomas Hanks has argued that because of the difficulty of reading a text such as the Morte Darthur, the intended prelector would have been asked to read the text in advance of the social reading. As a result of this preparation, the prelector, as mediator for the author, would arguably emphasize key words even during a selective performance because of his or her familiarity with the broader text.59 Hence, when we view medieval reading as a communal and aural act we can see how the systemic rhetoric and ideological implications of treason that the Morte’s dialogue calls into being are brought to life and brought home to its audience. A consideration of the composition of Malory’s contemporary audience reveals the extent to which the Morte’s treatment of treason engages with their individual and collective concerns. The Morte was probably widely read among not only the aristocracy but also the gentry,60 a readership who aspired to become part of the knightly class and whose concerns with 55 56 57 58 59 60

Coleman, ‘Reading Malory’, pp. 49–50, emphasis mine. Coleman, ‘Reading Malory’, p. 54. Coleman, ‘Reading Malory’, p. 55. Coleman, ‘Reading Malory’, p. 57. T. Hanks Jr, ‘Epilogue: Malory’s Morte Darthur and “the Place of the Voice”’, Arthuriana 13.4 (2003), 119–33 (p. 124). Scholarship concerning Malory’s (near-)contemporary audience has been confronted with a problematic lack of evidence regarding specific readership and their responses, which nonetheless has not limited general assessments of the Morte Darthur’s probable audience and its attitudes. As Coleman observes, ‘there is no direct evidence as to Malory’s immediate intended audience, if any … but there is a great deal of collateral evidence suggesting that the Morte appealed to, and was probably meant to appeal to, the armigerous class from which Malory himself came, as well as the higher ranks of nobility and the aspiring City men of Caxton’s own ilk’; ‘the late fifteenthcentury audience for Arthurian romance and/or chronicle consisted of the wealthier middle class, the gentry, and nobility’ (‘Reading Malory’, pp. 48–9). A similar case for a mixed audience is

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self-fashioning mirrored the goals and ideals of Malory’s characters. The Morte Darthur is preoccupied with worship, friendship, fellowship and good lordship, and these four concerns were those most central to gentry circles.61 Radulescu argues that ‘[b]elonging to a particular fellowship seems to have been a constant concern for the writers of fifteenth-century gentry letters’. Of particular significance here is the fact that the consequences of being excluded from the community were equally severe, and recognized, in fifteenth-century gentry society and in the Morte.62 Because Malory treats concepts of proper chivalric social conduct and obligations in discussions of their opposites, negation, or breach, the Morte’s sections of narrative concerned with treason operate as morally didactic instruments that are often specifically pointed towards the intended audience’s conceptions of identity and community in an exemplary and/or admonitory fashion. Malory’s gentry audience, accustomed to perceiving courtesy books and romance literature as conduct manuals that could further their social aspirations,63 would presumably have been well-conditioned to attune themselves to Malory’s text. Indeed, as Caxton’s preface to his edition of the Morte Darthur informs the reader, he has produced the text to the entente that noble men may see and lerne the noble actes of chyvalrye, the jentyl and vertuous dedes that somme knyghtes used in tho dayes, by whyche they came to honour, and how they that were vycious were punysshed and ofte put to shame and rebuke […]. For herein may be seen noble chyvalrye, curtosye, humanyté, frendlynesse, hardynesse, love, frendshyp, cowardyse, murdre, hate, vertue, and synne. Doo after the good and leve the evyl, and it shal brynge you to good fame and renommee.64

I reproduce this oft-quoted passage here for its indication that Caxton recognized the Morte’s complex forms of didacticism, since he understands that the text instructs the reader about the importance of honour and ethics not only through ‘the noble actes of chyvalrye, the jentyl and vertuous dedes that somme knyghtes used in tho dayes’, but also by recounting ‘how they that were vycious were punysshed and ofte put to shame and rebuke’.

61 62 63 64

made in T. H. Crofts, Malory’s Contemporary Audience: The Social Reading of Romance in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, 2006), p. 6. Radulescu, Gentry Context, p. 84. Radulescu, Gentry Context, pp. 34 and 93. Radulescu, Gentry Context, p. 8. W. Caxton, ‘Preface’, The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, pp. cxlv–cxlvi. Despite Caxton’s important position in mediating between Malory (and his scribes) and his early audience, this article, as mentioned above, follows convention by citing Vinaver’s edition of the Winchester manuscript; Caxton’s print and the Winchester manuscript do not differ substantially in their treason rhetoric.

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The Personal and the Political While I have been discussing Malory’s valorization of an idealized universal chivalric bond primarily in a horizontal or egalitarian sense, the notion of treason as a breach of contract with the king or realm would probably have been more familiar to a fifteenth-century audience. In this section, I explore how the final sequences of the Morte nuance the text’s conceptions of hierarchical sociopolitical commitments, promoting personal aspects of loyalty to king and realm through sometimes less one-sided treatments of non-chivalric behaviour. According to the 1352 Statute of Treasons, ‘compassing or imagining’ the death of the king constituted high treason, making intent central to the crime.65 Tale VIII is concerned with the occurrence and outcome of two cases of ‘high’ treason: Launcelot’s and Guenevere’s persistence in their affair despite the loyalty they owe to King Arthur, and the rebellion of Mordred and the English people that results in the downfall of Arthur’s kingdom.66 Malory intensifies contrasts between the ostensible transgressors and accusers involved in each of these two episodes and saturates both with accusations of treason that are not found in his sources, inviting his audience to read these episodes in juxtaposition with each other and to perceive the text’s nuanced definition of betrayal of the king or realm in cases where intentions and institutionalized law codes are opposed. As argued above, Malory does not show sympathy, or want his audience to feel sympathy, towards treason and traitor figures throughout the majority of the Morte Darthur. This attitude does persist in the final movement of the Arthurian narrative, and is in some senses intensified in expression there. Yet in the shift to Tale VIII, the systemic accusations of ‘treson’ and ‘traytour’ that had been spoken by exemplar-figures instead come to be spoken to exemplar-figures. In the short textual space between the two passages quoted at the beginning of this article, Launcelot moves from being the righteous spokesperson for abstention from treason to being the recipient of the dire and shameful rhetorical labels he earlier dispensed. This transition signals the impending tragic division and downfall of the Arthurian world, but also qualifies the messages regarding treason conveyed by the earlier narrative because, significantly, the narrator continues to express support for these alleged traitors. Launcelot and Guenevere, previously two of the most exemplary characters in the Morte, do incur condemnation from their society in Tale VIII for their reprehensible adultery. However, in treating this betrayal as specifically ‘treson’ and discussing it as such within a more rigid legal 65 66

Bellamy, Law of Treason, p. 87. While ‘high’ treason is not a term that recurs in Malory’s vocabulary, it is used here to distinguish treason against the king from horizontal treason or treason against ‘knighthood’.

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framework than found in his source-texts, Malory adds a proviso clause regarding intent to his elsewhere-systemic discursive moves to direct audience sympathy away from those who are labelled as traitors. Since Launcelot’s and Guenevere’s perfidious consummation of their affair and its consequences are major components of the Arthurian story, Malory does of course treat them; however, the Morte emphasizes not their guilt but rather the ways in which they are not culpable. The ways in which Malory manipulates the relevant components of his narrative offer a better sense of how his audience would have understood his particular representation than do the bare facts of Launcelot’s and Guenevere’s culpability.67 To begin with, the text conceals the adultery as much as seemingly possible without denying its existence. When forced to address the notion of Launcelot and Guenevere alone in a bedroom, with Agravain and Mordred and their band of knights on the way to apprehend them, Malory’s narrator is defensively circuitous: ‘whether they were abed other at other maner of disportis, me lyste nat thereof make no mencion, for love that tyme was nat as love ys nowadayes’ (1165.11–13). The text here focuses on the nobility of the love between Launcelot and Guenevere. Indeed, the treatment of this ‘treson’ case is more openly and emphatically concerned with articulating the motives of both the accused and their accusers than is common elsewhere in the text. Through the ways in which, and figures by whom, Launcelot and Guenevere are accused of ‘treson’ and subsequently put on trial or punished for it, Malory questions (purely) institutional conceptions of what constitutes proper conduct towards one’s king and realm, and critiques the ill-intentioned actions that can be sanctioned by a letter-of-the-law understanding of loyalty. Malory writes that ‘the floure of chyvalry of alle the worlde was destroyed and slayne’ because of ‘two unhappy knyghtis whych were named sir Aggravayne and sir Mordred, that were brethirn unto sir Gawayne’ (1161.7–11; emphasis mine). By emphasizing Agravain’s and Mordred’s familial connections, Malory implies that they are acting in the interests of their kin, an affinity group that, when it is here and elsewhere in Tale VIII privileged above the kingdom it claims to serve, divides the community (in the process of dividing itself). For Malory’s contemporary English audience, an awareness of the Orkney clan’s Scottish nationality would, through extra-textual as well as intra-textual frames of reference, colour the clan’s actions with motives of destroying not only the individuals they attack but also the unity of the larger community. The Scots of the fifteenth century thwarted English desires for insular dominance and supremacy by dividing the kingdom from within as ‘an intractable and unabsorbable people who continually resist[ed] England’s 67

Peter Field has observed that Malory often writes as if constrained to include material he found in his sources and as if ‘his only freedom lay in proportioning his narrative’: P. J. C. Field, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory (Cambridge, 1993), p. 172.

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self-proclaimed manifest destiny.’68 Consequently, in Middle English romances, Scottish disruption of the unity of the realm is often depicted as treachery and guile.69 By depicting characters of Scottish nationality as treacherous, the Morte was participating in a more widespread expression of the English cultural imaginary, thereby making use of the audience’s horizons of expectation to pre-condition the interpretation of the figures who accuse and assault Launcelot and Guenevere as acting against the interests of the realm. The malevolent nature of the Orkney clan is likewise well-established within the Morte prior to Tale VIII, since several of the brothers (including both Agravain and Mordred) murder Lamorak. While this occurs early in the narrative, it is a recurring textual preoccupation. The Arthurian community’s last moment of unity in ‘The Healing of Sir Urry’ is fractured, rhetorically as well as figuratively, by the present absence of treason when the role-call of attendant honourable Round Table knights is interrupted by an ominous recapitulation: ‘there was never none so bewayled as was sir Tristram and sir Lamerok, for they were with treson slayne: sir Trystram by kynge Marke, and sir Lamorake by sir Gawayne and hys brethirn’ (1149.32–5; emphasis mine). This authorial intervention also links the Orkney clan with King Mark, who is the other egregious traitor figure in the narrative – and who, as a Cornish figure, is again a dangerous insular Other to the English. While Malory announces immediately afterwards that Mark has been slain in righteous revenge (1150.1– 2), Mark’s insidious agency seems, by association, to contribute to that of the Orkney clan as they prepare to act against the interests of the central community by publicly accusing Launcelot and Guenevere of treason for dubious motives. The narrator comments that ‘thys sir Aggravayne and sir Mordred had ever a prevy hate unto the quene, dame Gwenyver, and to sir Launcelot’ (1161.11–13; emphasis mine). Here, Malory emphasizes that while Agravain and Mordred may be on the side of the law against treason in undertaking a public denouncement, they do so out of ill-will. By contrast, Launcelot and Guenevere are portrayed as honourable, noble characters caught in difficult circumstances and a tragic conflict of loyalties; the audience is expected to support Launcelot and Guenevere even during the accusations that are spoken against them, because of the rebarbative figures against whom they are defined.70 68

69 70

C. Rushton, ‘“Of an uncouthe stede”: The Scottish Knight in Middle English Arthurian Romances’, in The Scots and Medieval Arthurian Legend, ed. R. Purdie and N. Royan (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 109–19 (p. 112). Rushton, ‘Of an uncouthe stede’, p. 110. Comparable textual transferences of blame also occur in Tale VII, when Mellyagaunce accuses Guenevere of treason for ostensibly sleeping with an unidentified member of her wounded knightly entourage after she has in fact slept with Launcelot (1131–9). In ‘The Knight of the Cart’, the text addresses Launcelot’s and Guenevere’s adultery more openly than in ‘Slander and Strife’, yet Mellyagaunce is nonetheless portrayed as the villain because of his wicked intentions

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A similar juxtaposition between the allegedly traitorous but still honourable Launcelot and a less than commendable accuser recurs later. Gawain initially refuses to join his brothers Agravain and Mordred in dividing the court by accusing Launcelot, citing Launcelot’s ‘noble dedis and kyndnes’ to king, queen and knightly community (1162.18) and the bond that consequently binds Gawain to Launcelot. However, Gawain subsequently privileges the ties of kinship over those of the Round Table by turning against Launcelot after the latter inadvertently kills Gawain’s brothers Gareth and Gaheris. Gawain furthers the division of the Round Table by inciting Arthur to declare war on Lancelot for the sake of his own private blood-vengeance (1186.5–12). Moreover, after the ensuing confrontation between Launcelot and Arthur, the text reports that kynge Arthur wolde have takyn hys quene agayne and to have bene accorded with sir Launcelot, but sir Gawayne wolde nat suffir hym by no maner of meane. And so sir Gawayne made many men to blow uppon sir Launcelot, and so all at onys they called hym ‘false recrayed knyght’. (1190.17–22)

Here, Gawain exploits collective accusations of treason against Launcelot in order to generate the public legal situation that necessitates Arthur’s continuation of the war against the ostensible traitor, despite Arthur’s desire to preserve the unity of the realm and his awareness of Launcelot’s noble character and good intentions. By emphasizing the general good intentions of the accused and the general ill intentions of the accusers, the text encourages the audience to commend or criticize Launcelot, Guenevere and the Orkney clan based on why they behave as they do, rather than on the external social or legal appearance of their actions. During these accusations of treason, the narrative continues to show Launcelot displaying honourable conduct; he is still an exemplar-figure, attempting to fulfil his now conflicting obligations to Guenevere, whom he has just rescued from the stake, and to Arthur. Indeed, Launcelot is still devoted to his king, articulating the personal bond of loyalty that he will honour even when Arthur declares war on him: ‘I woll never se that moste noble kynge that made me knyght nother slayne nor shamed’ (1192.17–19). In the final confrontation between Gawain and Launcelot, with ‘sir Gawayne evermore callyng hym “traytoure knyght”’ (1221.9–10), Launcelot is again defamed only within the diegetic world of the Morte, while Gawain is defamed in the and because he subsequently commits the unambiguously treacherous act of trapping Launcelot in a pit. This episode can therefore be read as a prelude to ‘Slander and Strife’, in which processes of textual indirection likewise qualify the culpability of the central figures by emphasizing issues of intent, but in which legal consequences are suppressed (and the text’s treatment of the lovers in bed together is correspondingly un-repressed) because Guenevere’s and Launcelot’s love is not (yet) made public.

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world of the external-to-text audience – because Launcelot acts for the right reasons (if with reprehensible results) and Gawain acts for the wrong reasons. Moreover, Launcelot is forced to finally respond to his besiegers’ attempts to induce him to leave his protective walls and fight them by the fact that he is called a traitor; as Launcelot and his kin recognize, these accusations are the one assault on his reputation that cannot be endured passively.71 Gawain’s fracturing of the Arthurian kingdom for the sake of his dead brothers is aligned with Mordred’s and Agravain’s earlier motivations by the mention of Gawain’s ‘evyll wyll’ when he is fighting against Launcelot (1220.13). Consequently, it is clear that the members of the Orkney clan, those who act out of hatred rather than loyalty even if they are ostensibly obeying the king and his law, are the real enemies of the community, although the Arthurian legal institutions do not or cannot define them as traitors. Here, that is, the strident articulations of treason (those that, throughout most of the Morte, indict the accused), when uttered over and over by the ill-willed accusers, ‘indict’ the speakers instead – at least to the Morte’s audience. The treason discourse that Agravain and company voice so clamorously through the bedroom door articulates a tension between, on the one hand, institutional notions of treason that supposedly reward loyalty and punish disloyalty, and, on the other hand, an alternative evaluation of conduct based on intent that does not find a place in the legal system. In representing these treason accusations, Malory’s Morte, unlike the Mort Artu, ‘ascribes to Agravain and company an intent to publicize both the crime of treason and the name of the traitor.’72 In Malory, the encounter is instigated when there cam sir Aggravayne and sir Mordred wyth twelve knyghtes with them of the Rounde Table, and they seyde with grete cryyng and scaryng voyce, ‘Thou traytoure, sir Launcelot, now ar thou takyn!’ And thus they cryed wyth a lowde voyce, that all the courte myght hyre hit.  (1165.14–20)

In the Mort Artu, the lovers are instead alerted by the noise of Agravain’s followers attempting to break down the door.73 In the Stanzaic Morte Arthur, which Malory sometimes privileged over the French version as his source for the culminating narrative material, Launcelot is accused of treason by his fellow characters:74 Come Agravain and Sir Mordred, With twelve knightes stiff in stour; 71 72 73 74

Ellis, ‘Balin, Mordred, and Malory’s Idea of Treachery’, p. 71. Harris, ‘Treason by Imagination’, p. 194. La Mort le Roi Artu, ed. Jean Frappier, 2nd edn (Genève, 1954), pp. 115–16. C. D. Benson, ‘The Ending of the Morte Darthur’, in A Companion to Malory, pp. 221–38 (p. 222).

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Launcelot of tresoun they begredde [accused], Calld him false and kinges traitour.75

However, in the Stanzaic poem, Agravain and Mordred do not attempt to convey their accusations to other ears than Launcelot’s and Guenevere’s; their accusations seem intended to incite their quarry. By contrast, Malory’s Agravain and company, by voicing their accusations for the ears of the court, effect a publicly witnessed appeal of treason that generates the need for a legal trial of the accused, given the laws of Malory’s Arthurian kingdom. Arthur seems to recognize that, despite the fact that Agravain, Mordred and Gawain act in accordance with the laws of their realm, they do not have the best interests of the realm at heart. While Arthur feels compelled to punish Guenevere and declare Launcelot his enemy, he nonetheless perceives a different way of interpreting the situation: ‘“alas, that ever sir Launcelot and I shulde be at debate! A, Aggravayne, Aggravayne!” seyde the kynge, “Jesu forgyff hit thy soule, for thyne evyll wyll that thou haddist and sir Mordred, thy brothir, unto sir Launcelot hath caused all this sorow”’ (1184.7–11; emphasis mine). It is not that Arthur does not recognize Lancelot’s actions as treasonous; on the contrary, he earlier supports the classification of the transgression as treason after Agravain and Mordred announce their awareness of the affair: ‘“we woll preve hit that he is a traytoure to youre person.” “Gyff hit be so,” seyde the kynge, “wyte you well, he is non othir”’ (1163.11–13). Rather, because the adultery has been publicized, Arthur seems constrained to act in accordance with the laws of his kingdom instead of following the course he would rather have done for the unity of his realm and the preservation of his personal fellowship. Therefore, it is not only the Orkney clan, who act out of ulterior and malevolent motives but cannot legally be termed ‘traitors’, but also institutionalized law itself that is revealed as the (potential) enemy of community. Both Kelly and Harris find it problematic that Malory transforms Guenevere’s charge from that of ‘adultery’, as construed by his French sources, to ‘treason’; problematic, that is, because the English common law of the period does not support such a categorization of Guenevere’s alleged crime.76 I suggest instead that this alteration of terminology 75 76

Stanzaic Morte Arthur, in King Arthur’s Death, ed. L. D. Benson (Kalamazoo, MI, 1994), lines 1810–13. Kelly and Harris both attempt to assess how a fifteenth-century audience with knowledge of laws and legal proceedings would have interpreted the rights and wrongs of this case; however, such an audience would not, as they seem to assume, approach this case of treason solely from the perspective of fifteenth-century legality, but would also probably bring with them knowledge of how treason works in the remainder of the Morte Darthur – most of which, if they were reading the ‘hoole book,’ they would already have encountered by the time they reached Guenevere’s trial. When the focus of analysis is broadened to include the entirety of the Morte, we see that

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constitutes Malory’s method of bringing the case into the internal logic of the text’s discussions of instances of treason in order to more effectively transform it. Both critics focus on Malory’s ‘creation of a law’ that sentences Guenevere to death, and emphasize Arthur’s agency, and therefore his error, in applying this law in the judgment he passes on Guene­ vere.77 However, the peculiar phrasing of the Arthurian law of treason in fact elides or circumscribes Arthur’s agency. The text places the emphasis on the influence that the law exerts on Arthur, figuring him instead as compelled to act against the best interests of his realm by the dictates of institutionalized legal practices: So than there was made grete ordynaunce in thys ire, and the quene muste nedis be jouged to the deth. And the law was such in tho dayes that whatsomever they were, of what astate or degre, if they were founden gylty of treson there shuld be none other remedy but deth, and othir the menour other the takynge wyth the dede shulde be causer of their hasty jougement. And right so was hit ordayned for quene Gwenyver: because sir Mordred was ascaped sore wounded, and the dethe of thirtene knyghtes of the Rounde Table, thes previs and experyenses caused kynge Arthure to commaunde the quene to the fyre and there to be brente. (1174.19–29; emphasis mine)

The verbs I have italicized in this passage express the actions of the law or of its evidence – or, alternatively, have no expressed agent; the articulation of this law constitutes a rhetorical bombardment of external, inhuman pressure that finally leaves Arthur no other option but to ‘commaunde the quene to the fyre’. Kelly contends that Malory ‘makes the lawfulness of Arthur’s judgment of the queen problematic’, and I would certainly concur;78 however, it is important to notice that Malory accords much of the critical agency involved here to the law itself, rather than to Arthur. In Tale VIII, then, Malory continues his tendency to engage with legal frameworks for treason in order to critique and refashion these frameworks. Harris and Kelly observe that many elements of this case of treason have fifteenth-century legal parameters: not only accusation, but also proof, procedure, legal arguments, the trial’s ‘appeals’ (in the modern sense of the word) and the associated notion of hasty or summary judgment that prevails despite Gawain’s appeals.79 By providing the audience with a particularly draconian version of the law of treason in this one case where the accused and convicted party arguably retains the

77 78 79

Malory transforms the signifiers for most disloyal and underhanded actions into ‘treson’; accordingly, we cannot privilege the one source alteration that pertains to Guenevere as the sole site of connections between Malory’s text and historical treason. Harris, ‘Treason by Imagination’, p. 180, emphasis mine. Kelly, ‘Malory and the Common Law’, p. 112. See, for instance, Harris, ‘Treason by Imagination’, pp. 186–9.

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most sympathy of any ‘traitor’ in the Morte, Malory critiques the heartless and unhelpful institutionality of codified legal systems and the illmotivated policing it fosters. The audience is encouraged to sympathize with Launcelot and Guenevere not only despite, but also because of, the rhetoric of treason through which their fellow characters and the laws of their polity condemn them. Therefore, as a result of the ways in which the accusations and judgment of Launcelot and Guenevere are circumscribed, Malory’s idea of treason productively interrogates itself. In spite of the narrative necessity of the tradition requiring that Launcelot’s and Guene­vere’s culpability be recognized, the text here desires to blame Agravain, Mordred and Gawain instead, and attempts to pass this desire on to the reader.80 Moreover, the Morte contrasts the regrettable but noble conduct of Launcelot and Guenevere not only with the collective evil will of the Orkney clan, but also with the subsequent crime committed when Mordred usurps the throne and levies war against King Arthur. In the case of Mordred’s treason, ‘ultimate’ in both gravity and plot position, intentions and institutionalized law codes are aligned: he is reprehensible on both counts. Malory invents several passages of treason rhetoric to emphasize the wickedness of such a course of action and to denounce his audience’s involvement in similar behaviour. Arthur, having left Mordred as ‘rular of all Inglonde’ while fighting against Launcelot in France, returns at once when he finds out that Mordred has ‘made a parlemente, and called the lordys togydir, and there he made them to chose hym kynge’ (1227.4–6).81 Mordred engages in high treason by usurping Arthur’s place and especially by raising troops and waging war on Arthur’s person. In England, levying war against the king had been classified as high treason since the reign of Edward I. In cases where 80

81

C. D. Benson writes of the outcome of the assault on Launcelot in Guenevere’s bedchamber that ‘Malory’s Lancelot kills all except, unfortunately, Mordred’ (‘The Ending of the Morte Darthur’, p. 230, emphasis mine); to direct a literary death-wish at Mordred is to participate in the Morte’s desire to repudiate the destroyers of the Arthurian community. Here, Malory’s alterations to his source emphasize Mordred’s sinister agency. In the Stanzaic Morte Arthur, ‘Mordred let cry a parlement; / The peple gan thider to come, / And holly through their assent / They made Mordred king with crown’ (lines 2978–81; emphasis mine). In Malory’s version, however, it is not the people’s choice but rather Mordred’s treasonous compulsion that results in his occupation of the throne. Both Vinaver’s Commentary and Peter Korrel’s study of this character in An Arthurian Triangle (Leiden, 1984) neglect the alterations Malory makes to the representation of Mordred in Tale VIII, emphasizing instead Malory’s purported faithful following of his source texts’ depiction of Mordred in the conclusion of the Morte; Ellis, on the other hand, expresses the surprising opinion that Malory ‘dilutes Mordred’s traditional faults’ (‘Balin’, p. 71, emphasis mine). While Ellis posits a ‘traditionally nefarious Mordred’ from which, in her view, Malory’s representation of the figure departs (‘Balin’, p. 71, emphasis mine), the notion of a ‘traditional’ Mordred who is more despicable than Malory’s Mordred is not tenable except by considering Arthurian narratives that post-date Malory, usually themselves drawing upon Malory’s version. Malory in fact removes ambiguity from Mordred’s actions and presents him as the dark background against which the actions of others are sympathetically defined.

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high-ranking rebels raised troops against the king, an abridged legal procedure in which the use of the monarch’s own word that the offenders were guilty could serve ‘as indictment, or appeal, and verdict all in one’.82 Appropriately, then, Arthur himself voices the text’s final pronouncement regarding Mordred before the latter’s death, in a passage that seems to act as both indictment and verdict concerning Mordred’s conduct: ‘Alas, that ever I shulde se thys doleful day! For now,’ seyde kynge Arthur, ‘I am com to myne ende. But wolde to God,’ seyde he, ‘that I wyste now where were that traytoure sir Mordred that hath caused all thys myschyff.’   Than kynge Arthur loked aboute and was ware where stood sir Mordred leanyng uppon hys swerde amonge a grete hepe of dede men.   ‘Now, gyff me my speare,’ syede kynge Arthure unto sir Lucan, ‘for yonder I have aspyed the traytoure that all thys woo hath wrought.’ (1236.17–27; emphasis mine)

Arthur’s battlefield repudiation of Mordred in such terms has no parallel in Malory’s sources. Here, the Morte definitively identifies the one act of treason that, while it does not effect the downfall of the Arthurian kingdom alone, constitutes the worst betrayal of king and community in the narrative. Mordred alone, as the incarnation of treason, momentarily embodies all culpability by assaulting and destroying King Arthur, the sacred transcendental signifier without whom the Arthurian world cannot survive. However, treason certainly does not die with Mordred; Malory represents treason as a deplorable phenomenon still present in his audience’s world, where it ought to be censured and avoided. When discussing Mordred’s recruiting of troops and thus the English people’s complicity in Mordred’s perfidy, Malory directly addresses his audience in a rare authorial intervention that is not found in any of his sources, accusing them of being guilty of the same offence: Lo ye all Englysshemen, se ye nat what a myschyff here was? For he that was the moste kynge and nobelyst knyght of the worlde, and moste loved the felyshyp of noble knyghtes, and by hym they all were upholdyn, and yet myght nat thes Englyshemen holde them contente with hym. Lo thus was the olde custom and usayges of thys londe, and men say that we of thys londe have nat yet loste that custom. Alas! thys ys a greate defaughte of us Englysshemen, for there may no thynge us please no terme. (1229.6–14)

Rebellions against the current king(s) were, of course, familiar phenomena for Malory’s Wars-of-the-Roses audience; in this passage, Malory explicitly links the civil war and subjects’ switch of allegiances in Arthurian England to the conditions in his own time, during the civil war between

82

Bellamy, Law of Treason, pp. 56–7.

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the factions of Lancaster and York.83 Deploring the continuation of ‘the olde custome and usayges of thys londe’, Malory emphasizes that it is not enough to locate and punish the one most vile manifestation of the abhorrent tendencies of which all are partially guilty. The treason discourse earlier diegetically contained in utterances between or concerning characters is here directed outwards towards Malory’s contemporary audience. On a symbolic level, Mordred is the infectious treason internal to the individual body and to the body politic; he signifies the contagion within the English people to whom Malory addresses his corrective admonitory exhortation.

Conclusion Malory’s validation of his chivalric ideals is, as I hope I have shown, articulated in a searchingly interrogative fashion. In broad outline, the Morte’s attitude towards treason consists of a repudiation of treacherous actions and traitor figures based on an invocation of an honour/shame ethos and on the threat of the loss of community. The complexities of this approach to treason lie in Malory’s pointedly current-yet-nostalgic representation of a form of social organization that urges against the erosion of personal loyalties and community-focused justice. Malory imagines and valorizes a bipartite mode of chivalric conduct that involves personal loyalty and goodwill to both knightly equals and sovereign. Malory offers his audience an idealized world that is both tantalizingly similar to and separate from their own, in a nostalgic but forbiddingly admonitory dialectic that becomes progressively more pronounced towards the end of the Morte Darthur. As has recently been observed, it is perhaps injudicious to overlook ‘just how closely much Middle English romance connects with real life’;84 this assessment of the Morte’s rhetoric of treason has emphasized some of the ways in which Malory’s romance is conditioned by history and in which the text desires to make (future) history follow romance. Malory relates life to literature perhaps most noticeably, to a Wars-of-the-Roses audience, by writing that Mordred, having usurped royal prerogative and seeking to capture Guenevere, ‘layde a myghty syge aboute the Towre and made many assautis, and threw engynnes unto them, and shotte grete gunnes’ (1227.23–5). Field terms this mention of ‘grete gunnes’ an ‘invention, and probably a conscious innovation’, since Malory may have witnessed the Yorkists besieging the Lancastrian Tower of London in 1460, the only occasion 83 84

P. J. C. Field, ‘Fifteenth Century History in Malory’s Morte Darthur’, in Field, Malory: Texts and Sources (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 47–71. H. Cooper, ‘When Romance Comes True’, in Boundaries in Medieval Romance, ed. N. Cartlidge (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 13–27 (pp. 13–14).

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on which cannons were used against the Tower prior to the completion of the Morte.85 Here and when the narrator explicitly addresses ‘ye all Englysshemen’, the boundaries of the Arthurian world disintegrate, and while the golden age of Arthur’s reign vanishes into the interstices of the text, its problems are insistently those of fifteenth-century England. The Arthurian community, when it topples, collapses in on itself, but the implications of its treason-related fashioning and fall land where they developed: in Malory’s socio-historical moment. The Morte, bombarding its contemporary readership with the correspondences between their literary and lived experiences, offers both an in-depth exploration of their problems by articulating contemporary anxieties about treason and the positive transformative potential of its reimagined configurations of chivalric community and identity. Malory’s critique of the increasingly more institutional, impersonal methods of determining one’s place and identity was perhaps especially self-reflexive because he suffered for his own choice of loyalties under such a regime. Archibald comments that ‘the emphasis on “felyshyp” in Malory’s work suggests that the word represents a personal ideal, rather than a conventional aspect of the Arthurian legend. Perhaps it has something to do not only with his experience of civil war, but also with social developments in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.’86 The Morte’s emphasis on the concomitant antithetical word ‘treson’ similarly suggests that it was resonant both for Malory and for the fifteenth-century English cultural imaginary. The Morte’s preoccupation with treason seems particularly suited to its author when we recall that, when writing, Malory was ‘in prison for treason during the worst political crisis England had known since the Norman Conquest’.87 Malory increases the presence of legal procedures in treason episodes, but also critiques that legality. The ideological commentary Malory’s text offers with respect to treason – a commentary that speaks from, to and for his cultural moment – is concerned with defining ‘real’ betrayal and admirable conduct based on personal intentions and relationships, rather than supporting the politically motivated and determined notions of treason of which Malory himself seems to have been accused. It may not be inconsequential that Balyn, the character whom the Morte most insistently proclaims to be without treason, had been incarcerated in a royal prison for ostensible ill-doing. To recognize that treason is a key word and concept in Malory’s work is in part to appreciate another way in which the colourful Sir Thomas of Newbold Revel is an appropriate author figure for the Morte Darthur.

85 86 87

Field, ‘Fifteenth-Century History’, p. 65. Archibald, ‘Fellowship’, p. 327. F. Riddy, ‘Contextualizing Le Morte Darthur: Empire and Civil War’, in A Companion to Malory, pp. 55–73 (p. 55), emphasis mine.

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VII

Lancelot of the Laik: A Scottish Mirror for Princes Karen D. Robinson Lancelot of the Laik, a fifteenth-century Scottish romance, is uniquely situated within the context of Arthurian romances and the mirrors for princes tradition.1 A passage within this poem gives direct advice to Arthur dealing with the administration of justice and the need for generosity, advice commonly found within the mirror for princes genre. These texts advised kings on proper behaviour and the governing of their realm and were especially popular from the twelfth century to the fifteenth century throughout Western Europe. Some of the texts used stories of kings from biblical and classical periods as positive or negative exempla for the proper conduct of kings. Although the advice to princes texts often contained stories as exempla, it is far less common to find a romance with an actual mirror for princes text within, making Lancelot of the Laik an unusual intersection of these two genres. Several scholars have cautioned modern readers against drawing connections too narrowly to the contemporary political scene of Lancelot of the Laik.2 It is true that the advice section is stated in general terms, as is the case in much advice to princes literature, rather than directly invoking specific contemporary circumstances. However, even though the advice provided is of a generalized nature,3 that does not preclude the possibility of it being directed at a particular king. In Fictions of

1

2

3

Lancelot of the Laik from the Cambridge University Library MS, ed. M. M. Gray, Scottish Text Society New Series 2 (Edinburgh, 1912). All references to this text will be to this edition, with line numbers cited parenthetically. The long s (ſ) used in Gray’s edition will be regularized to ‘s’ for ease of reading. For example, see Lancelot of the Laik and Sir Tristrem, ed. A. Lupack, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, MI, 1994); R. J. Lyall, ‘Politics and Poetry in Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Scotland’, Scottish Literary Journal 3.2 (1976), 5–29; and J. Martin, Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540 (Aldershot, 2007). For example, Amytans tells Arthur, ‘O kingis word shuld be o kingis bonde’ (1673), advice not uncommon for all kings.

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Advice Judith Ferster has shown that couching criticism of kings in bland, general terms was often a cover for the criticism which the author might not want to be so easily transparent.4 These indirect statements allowed the author plausible deniability in case someone took exception to the writing. Because the mirror for princes literature contained wide-ranging advice covering almost any situation, the author’s choice of which advice to include and which to exclude provides a commentary as to the specific purpose of the text. Thus the choices made by the author of Lancelot of the Laik should be more closely examined in comparison to its contemporary political situation. This article thus examines how this Arthurian poem enters into and contributes to the discussion of the kingship of James III of Scotland (reg. 1460–88). Although James III was indeed a flawed king, giving the contemporary rumours a foundation, he was not quite the inept king described in later-sixteenth-century Scottish chronicles. A major crisis had occurred in Scotland because James III had been killed after a battle with a rebellious group which included his son and heir. To help settle the doubts about the appropriateness of the murder of James III and to separate James IV from involvement in his father’s death, James III was vilified as a king who deserved his downfall because of his bad behaviour. The development of the story of this flawed king turned wicked tyrant can be traced throughout the century after his death, beginning with literary works such as Lancelot of the Laik. The only surviving copy of the poem is found as part of a miscellany, Cambridge University K.k.1.5, with the section containing Lancelot of the Laik dated to around 1490.5 The poem begins with a prologue containing a dream vision by a lover whose lady is unaware of his feelings. Entering a garden, the lover falls asleep and dreams of a visit from a bird, who is a messenger from the God of Love. During their conversation, the bird recommends that the lover reveal his love for the lady, suggesting that he write her a story of love or arms. The narrator chooses a story containing both: the beginnings of the Lancelot/Guenevere relationship and the war between Arthur and Galiot. Although the description by the narrator points toward a story of Lancelot, the actual telling of the story places much of the focus on Arthur and his role as king. Arthur has a series of terrible dreams, for which he seeks interpretation (363–404). Only one counsellor, Amytans, is able to interpret the dreams adequately and also provide Arthur with some much needed advice, especially regarding the idea of generosity, 4 5

J. Ferster, Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, PA, 1996). E. Archibald, ‘Lancelot of the Laik: Sources, Genre, Reception’, in The Scots and Medieval Arthurian Legend, ed. R. Purdie and N. Royan, Arthurian Studies 61 (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 71–82 (p. 72).

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which is a common theme in the mirrors for princes tradition. Because of Arthur’s failings as a king, Amytans warns, his land is in danger of being taken over by another; almost as soon as Arthur receives this warning, a messenger arrives from Galiot (who has been conquering the surrounding territory). Although Galiot knows he could easily conquer Arthur and his men at this moment, he does not want to do so; defeating such a weak enemy would not add to Galiot’s renown. Arthur is therefore given a year to build his forces so that their battle will be on more equal terms and Galiot’s success will be even greater. Arthur, gladdened by this reprieve, uses the time to put into practice the advice just given to him by Amytans. The year passes and in the midst of a series of battles the action halts because the only extant manuscript copy of Lancelot of the Laik has been left unfinished in the middle of line 3487. The poem itself is a translation from the French story of Lancelot in an early-thirteenth-century French prose romance, the non-cyclic Lancelot do Lac.6 This lengthy story recounts the career of Lancelot, focusing especially on his entry into the Arthurian court and the development of his relationship with Guenevere. Lancelot of the Laik uses only a small portion of the French prose source, focusing on Lancelot’s imprisonment by the lady Melyholt and the wars between Arthur and Galiot in which Lancelot participates (p. 260–326). The Lancelot of the Laik poet has also made changes and additions to the source, especially within the Amytans advice section; however, the prologue (which contains a dream vision in which the poet is instructed to write the poem) is completely original to the author. As the single manuscript of the text is incomplete, the advice scene occupies a disproportionately large percentage of the extant text.7 The critical response to the poem has dealt mainly with this section, with scholars on opposite sides of the spectrum: some critics have labelled this scene the best part of the text and the only part truly worthy of discussion, while others reject this scene as an unwarranted interruption in the adventures of Lancelot. Thus responses to the poem tend toward one of two opposing viewpoints: the value of the poem is found within the advice given to Arthur by Amytans, or the advice portion disrupts the romance, devaluing the poem.8 Early commentary tends to dismiss the poetic features of the 6 7

8

Lancelot do Lac: The Non-Cyclic Old French Prose Romance, ed. E. Kennedy, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1980). Estimates are that the finished text would have been ‘up to a third longer (about 3000 lines)’; Archibald, ‘Lancelot’, p. 73. The estimate is based upon the prologue’s explanation of what will be contained in the poem. I have found no striking differences or disagreements with Archibald’s estimate. Those who praise the advice section include B. Vogel, ‘Secular Politics and the Date of Lancelot of the Laik’, Studies in Philology 40.1 (1943), 1–13; D. Wurtele, ‘A Reappraisal of the Scottish Lancelot of the Laik’, Revue de l’Universite d’Ottawa 46 (1976), 68–82; S. Mapstone, ‘The Scots, the French, and the English: An Arthurian Episode’, in The European Sun: Proceedings of the

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text, seeing the Amytans section as the only redeeming quality of the poem: ‘Only in this respect [the contemporaneous political scene] is the romance of much interest, for otherwise it is a badly conceived rehandling of the first portion of the French Prose Lancelot.’9 Other scholars have attempted to locate positive qualities, looking beyond the pure topicality of the poem and ‘do[ing] justice to the author’s inventiveness’.10 Even so, critical treatment of the poem has been rather sparse, and the poem is often overlooked in the canon of Arthurian literature. One major question surrounding the text involves the choice of the story itself. Why tell the story of a young Lancelot, a story untold in other romances written in English? This choice needs further examination. I argue that this choice made by the poet is crucial to understanding the central place this poem should occupy in discussions of Scottish attitudes toward kingship and the mirrors for princes tradition. A comparison of this text with the French source reveals that the advice section has been greatly expanded. This expansion implies that the author found the advice portion to be a major concern. Additionally, the poet removes several scenes that would have supported the romance aspect of the text, such as Lancelot’s receiving of his sword from Guenevere’s hands. The poet’s changes from the source and decisions about which scenes to include help us see that this text is more than a love story about Lancelot and Guenevere, written to the dreamer’s lady. Were the poet, in fact, to be writing a poem critiquing the current political structure, he would not want his remarks to be transparently evident in case such remarks proved to be unpopular. Instead, he would want to camouflage them, and what better disguise than an inconsequential romance written to a lady whose love he wishes to win? The political commentary is framed by the romance of Lancelot, which is framed by the dream vision and lover’s complaint. If we clear away the frames and look at the object within, we see a flawed king who is being taught a few lessons on kingship – lessons that kings of Scotland would be wise to learn. In the case of the Scottish Lancelot poet the expansions of his French source, although similar to other advice texts, bring forward concerns directed at

9 10

Seventh International Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Language and Literature, ed. G. Caie, R. J. Lyall, S. Mapstone and K. Simpson (East Linton, 2001), pp. 129–44; W. Scheps, ‘The Thematic Unity of Lancelot of the Laik’, Studies in Scottish Literature 5.3 (1968), 167–75 (who writes that ‘Lancelot of the Laik is the work of a man who thinks more clearly than he writes’ [p. 175], which is faint praise). Those who criticize it include G. Kane, Middle English Literature: A Critical Study of the Romances, the Religious Lyrics, Piers Plowman (London, 1951), p. 17; R. W. Ackerman, ‘English Rimed and Prose Romances’, in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History, ed. R. S. Loomis (Oxford, 1959), pp. 480–519; and H. Newstead, ‘Arthurian Legends’, in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, ed. J. B. Severs and A. E. Hartung, 11 vols. (New Haven, 1967), I, 38–79. Ackerman, ‘English Rimed’, p. 491. Wurtele, ‘A Reappraisal’, pp. 68–82.

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the Scottish throne. What reason would this poet, supposedly writing for his lady, have for making the Amytans section at least twice as long as the original? For the stated purpose of attracting his lover, the topics in the expansion (mostly dealing with justice and flattery) make no sense. Either the poet truly was a bumbling author, or the actual purpose of the poem differed from the stated purpose. I argue that by using Arthur as an exemplar and commenting on issues of interest while James III was on the throne, the poem was directed toward the young James IV, who in 1488 had inherited a kingdom in need of having order quickly reestablished. This technique of using the previous king to provide an example for the new king can be found in Bower’s chronicle, the Scotichronicon, which ends in 1437 with the death of James  I: ‘The last portion of the text is an extensive eulogy on “our lawgiver king,” explicitly designed to underline the contrast with the disorders of the minority which followed his death, and to encourage the young James II to emulate what Bower represents as the virtues of his father.’11 James IV also provides us with a more likely audience for the poem as he was far more interested in matters of chivalry (the framework of the poem) than his father.12 In fact, James IV named his first son Arthur, showing his interest in the Arthurian stories.13 James IV also frequently held tournaments of the wild knight and the black lady, and his ‘interest in chivalric spectacle helped to shape the tastes of his “age”’.14 And in actual battles, ‘in contrast with his father’s lack of enthusiasm for campaigning, James conduct[ed] his battles in person and [was] the first in danger because it [was] just to do so’.15 And yet the poem seems to take a step further than being a mirror for James IV. Through my exploration of the poem below, I have found that the vices which Arthur and James III share do not fully fit the factual portrayal of this Stewart king; instead the poem aligns itself with the budding discourse that leads to the development of a legend of James III as a bad king in the sixteenth century. Norman Macdougall’s work on tracing the process by which this legend grew has been instrumental to my thoughts on this poem.16 I will return to this legendary status of 11 12 13

14 15 16

B. Webster, Medieval Scotland: The Making of an Identity (New York, 1997), p. 106. L. O. Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (Madison, WI, 1991), p. 161. N. Royan, ‘“Na Les Vailyeant Than Ony Uthir Princis of Britane”: Representations of Arthur in Scotland 1480–1540’, Scottish Studies Review 3.1 (2002), 9–20 (p. 9). Royan suggests that James IV may have chosen the name also as a ‘particularly sharp dig’ at Henry VII of England, who also had a son named Arthur, to ‘indicat[e] exactly how close James’ children stood to inheriting the English throne’, as his wife was Margaret Tudor. Fradenburg, City, p. 171. Fradenburg, City, p. 167. N. A. T. Macdougall, ‘The Sources: A Reappraisal of the Legend’, in Scottish Society in the Fifteenth Century, ed. J. M. Brown (New York, 1977), pp. 10–32.

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James III to show the important place that Lancelot of the Laik occupies in Scottish literary and historical writing. Thus, far from being a poem whose ‘primary defect seems rather to lie in the endeavour to combine love and politics’,17 this combination strengthens the romance, bringing an episode from Lancelot’s youth into the realm of political commentary. As such, it fits well with other Scottish romances, which are often ‘clearly concerned in different ways with issues of kingship and the proper conduct of the nobility’.18 Additionally, as Sally Mapstone has noted, ‘This subjection in emphasis of the amatory to the political or ethical in texts involving both is a continuing aspect of late medieval Scottish writing.’19 Thus, placing Lancelot of the Laik within the context of other Scottish texts (e.g., Golagros and Gawain, Hary’s Wallace, The Thre Prestis of Peblis, The Quare of Jelusy [Porteous of Noblenes]), including a Scottish translation of the Secretum Secretorum by Sir Gilbert Hay (The Buke of the Governaunce of Princis), reveals that this political subtext is not an isolated incident.20 A closer examination of the French source of Lancelot of the Laik also highlights those areas of importance to the Scottish poet. As my analysis reveals, the poet’s preoccupation with political matters is strong and pervades the entire poem, rather than only the Amytans portion of the story, which is the portion upon which most other scholars have focused previously. Finally, the manuscript compilation provides strong evidence for the reception of the poem, as it is included within a series of texts offering ‘ethical advice about good government’,21 as well as an English translation of Christine de Pisan’s Livre du corps de policie (a text in the mirror for princes tradition). Other texts in the compilation include various extracts of laws and some Scottish parliamentary proceedings under James III. Although the poet probably did not have any input in the creation of the miscellany, the contents of the manuscript argue that at least one reader of the poem agreed with those critics who find the advice portion to be the most important aspect of the romance. Although this manuscript compilation is the only evidence that we have extant regarding how this poem was read, its placement within a series of legal proceedings and extracts of laws reinforces the political nature of the romance.

17 18

19 20 21

Ackerman, ‘English Rimed’, p. 493. A. S. G. Edwards, ‘Contextualising Middle Scots Romance’, in A Palace in the Wild: Essays on Vernacular Culture and Humanism in Late-Medieval and Renaissance Scotland, ed. L. A. J. R. Houwen, A. A. MacDonald and S. L. Mapstone (Leuven, 2000), pp. 61–72 (p. 72). S. Mapstone, ‘Kingship and the Kingis Quair’, in The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, ed. H. Cooper and S. Mapstone (Oxford, 1997), pp. 52–69 (p. 62). Mapstone briefly comments on some connections between Hay’s text and Lancelot of the Laik; ‘The Scots’, pp. 136–7. Archibald, ‘Lancelot’, p. 80.

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Scottish Kingship To understand this poem better within the context of fifteenth-century Scotland, we first need to go back a century and explore the dynastic crisis between Robert Bruce and John Balliol after the death of Alexander III (1286), who had left no direct male heir. This conflict has direct consequences for Scottish attitudes toward kingship, which will be examined at length below. Both Bruce and Balliol were connected to the throne on the distaff side, through the two daughters of David, Earl of Huntingdon, who was the grandson of David I (1124–53). The metrical Scottish chronicle of Boece explains these connections: Balliol was descended from the elder daughter and Bruce from the younger.22 The decision about who would become king was granted to Edward I of England, whose arbitration was meant to be both fair and beyond contest.23 In May 1291, a parliament was called at Norham ‘to resolve the problem of the Scottish succession’; thirteen contenders surfaced, most without a serious claim.24 Boece’s chronicle states that because of Edward’s great desire to rule Scotland, he did not listen to the advice of the wise men he had called in (who pronounced that Robert Bruce had the rightful claim), and chose John Balliol as king based on his agreement to hold Scotland under the subjection of England.25 The Scottish people crowned Balliol at Scone but were unhappy with the agreement he had made with England ‘incontrair than of all his lordis will’.26 In 1294, Edward I demanded military service from the Scots for his wars with France. Although Balliol appeared to be ready to provide Edward with what he asked, he ‘was confronted by a baronial revolt’; the council made an alliance with Philip IV of France, 22

23

24 25

26

David’s elder daughter, Margaret, had two daughters. Margaret’s elder daughter, Deworgill, married John Balliol, and their son was the John Balliol who laid claim to the throne. David’s younger daughter, Isobel, married Robert Bruce and had a son also named Robert. This son married and also had a son, named Robert, who laid claim to the throne. Because in the previous generation Isobel had a son while Margaret had a daughter, Robert Bruce was considered to be the first of a male line. Indeed, because Robert had ‘come of the first maill [male]’, the chronicle of Boece gives the rightful claim to Robert rather than Balliol. See The Buik of the Croniclis of Scotland; or A Metrical Version of the History of Hector Boece; by William Stewart, ed. W. B. Turnbull, 3 vols. (London, 1858), III, 140–41. The bishop of St Andrews, William Fraser, had written to Edward I asking him ‘to come at least to the Borders in order to prevent the outbreak of civil war which might threaten’; Webster, Medieval Scotland, p. 73. Webster, Medieval Scotland, p. 74. Boece includes a scene between Robert and Edward where Edward asks Robert if he will ‘wnder him leif in subjectioun’. Robert immediately scoffs at this idea, wanting to keep Scotland free as it had remained free for so long. Edward then asks John Balliol the same question, getting the opposite response as ‘Balliole that had so greit desyre / To be ane king and clyme on to sic hicht, / He luikit neuir to ressoun nor richt’; Buik of the Croniclis of Scotland, pp. 143–4. Buik of the Croniclis of Scotland, p. 145.

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effectively seizing control from Balliol.27 Edward, displeased with the Scottish disobedience, invaded Scotland in 1296, taking Balliol prisoner and forcing him to resign as king. Scotland was led by a council for the next decade until Robert Bruce was crowned at Scone in 1306.28 Bruce faced opposition, especially from the Comyn family, who had supported Balliol. In 1309, Bruce therefore gathered the Scottish church leaders at St Andrews ‘to elaborate a justification for his kingship as a defense against English threats’.29 Another key document written under Bruce was the Declaration of Arbroath, written to Pope John XXII in 1320, establishing Scottish independence from England. This struggle between Bruce and Balliol continued into the next generation: Bruce’s son became David II, but Balliol’s son Edward also made a claim to the throne. During the reign of the next king, Robert II, of the Stewart line, the line of succession was firmly laid out so as to avoid these conflicts.30 Once this succession was established, the line of male heirs remained unbroken from Robert II (1371) to James V (1542). Although there were occasional challenges to the throne, the Scottish people seemed reluctant to cause any sustained resistance to the kings during these years, even when the kings proved less than satisfactory. Norman Macdougall explains: ‘There were frequent rebellions by isolated families wishing to make a particular grievance public, but these hardly constituted a major threat to the Crown.’31 This firm adherence to this line of succession did cause problems, especially in the form of the long minorities experienced by several kings (such as James III) or absences of the kings (such as during James I’s imprisonment in England). However, as Mapstone has stated, ‘the stability of Stewart rule was never seriously threatened by a viable long-term alternative’.32 Why would the Scottish people be unlikely to resist long minorities and unsatisfactory kings? In his 1987 article, Roger Mason explores this phenomenon of the Scottish lack of resistance in the fifteenth century, concluding that the ‘political ideology’ of Scotland was ‘as conservative as it was patriotic and one in which the idea of resisting the crown – far less deposing a king – was stated (if at all) in only the most hesitant and ambiguous of terms’.33 The major reasoning, according to Mason, behind the seemingly united front of Scotland was connected with the 27 28 29 30

31 32 33

Webster, Medieval Scotland, p. 79. The council was made up of the leading landowners. Webster, Medieval Scotland, p. 87. This did not completely silence conflicts as there was additional tension between the children of Robert II’s two wives due to the questionable status of his sons by his first wife, who had been born before the marriage. N. Macdougall, James III: A Political Study (Edinburgh, 1982), p. 7. Mapstone, ‘Kingship’, p. 63. R. Mason, ‘Kingship, Tyranny and the Right to Resist in Fifteenth Century Scotland’, Scottish Historical Review 66.2 (1987), 125–51 (p. 126).

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civil war during the Bruce–Balliol conflict, when England came near to claiming overlordship of Scotland. Mason cites writers such as Fordun, whose chronicle emphasized ‘the safety of the kingship and hence of the kingdom’ so that ‘there were to be no disputed successions, no civil wars and no excuse for English intervention’.34 Thus, Scotland, ‘while it may not have thought much of the Stewarts, thought even less of the prospect of a return to civil war and the possible loss of independence which might thereby ensue’.35 Additionally, the examples provided by England with its own series of depositions, notably of Edward II and Richard II, could have shown the Scottish people the negative effects of replacing one king with another. Mason uses John Ireland’s Meroure of Wyssdome, specifically the seventh book, as an example of the muted criticism found in many fifteenth-century Scottish texts. This text was, according to Ireland, begun at the request of James III, even though it was not finished until after his death and thus was dedicated to James IV in 1490. By examining the ‘very selectivity of [Ireland’s] plagiarism’ – the choices that Ireland made when putting together his seemingly general advice to princes – Mason finds numerous insights into the ‘political mentality of fifteenth century Scots’.36 This same strategy is similar to my proposal in viewing Lancelot of the Laik, a text I am suggesting was written during the same time-frame as Ireland’s Meroure. Because direct criticism of any particular Scottish king endangered the stability of the line of kings (thus leading to the possibility of the loss of independence from England), criticism would need to be more clandestine.

James Iii and the Crisis at Lauder In 1482 James III faced the major crisis of his reign. His brother, the disinherited duke of Albany, joined forces with Edward IV of England and marched on Scotland. But this attack was not the true crisis. James III’s half-uncles, the earl of Atholl, the earl of Buchan and the bishopelect of Moray, used the opportunity to seize the adult king at Lauder and take over control of the government. Macdougall explains the importance of this seizure: The seizure of James III at Lauder in July 1482 was an event without parallel in fifteenth century Scottish political history. An adult king was seized by a group of magnates and his arrest was immediately followed by a remarkable revolution in governmental personnel and a period of intense, 34 35 36

Mason, ‘Kingship’, p. 146. Mason, ‘Kingship’, p. 146. Mason, ‘Kingship’, p. 131.

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complex negotiations, during which various power groups struggled to take advantage of the abnormal situation and further their own interests in acquiring lands and offices.37

Why did these men take control of the king? The sixteenth-century chroniclers proposed reasons such as the ‘black money’38 or James III’s supposed tendency to take advice from low-born favourites, but those reasons seem to be afterthoughts rather than the actual causes. The leaders of the conspiracy were relatives of James III – his half-uncles. As relatives, and ambitious men, they had hoped that their connection to the king would result in rewards, but those rewards were not forthcoming.39 Macdougall suggests that they actually feared James III and his actions, especially as he had not let family ties stand in his way in the past, as evidenced by his treatment of his brothers: ‘For Lauder can surely be explained satisfactorily neither in terms of black money nor favourites, but only as a political coup engineered by men who feared James III, were thoroughly alarmed by the military situation in 1482, and reckoned that their best chance of survival, and perhaps advancement, was to coerce the king.’40 With the capture of the king as well as the royal seals, the Stewart half-uncles were able to protect themselves (whether or not there was an actual threat) and to control the government. Their power did not last long, as James III was able to wrest control back by January 1483.41 The effects of this crisis were numerous. Most importantly, it began the process of focusing on the faults of James III rather than his successes.42 By taking control of an adult king, the half-uncles showed that the sanctity of the king was not completely inviolable. The instability of the Crown, which had caused major issues for Scottish independence in the Bruce–Balliol years, was not a side of the king that Scotland wanted to show, especially to an Edward IV who showed every indication of being eager to claim Scotland. Therefore, something had to be done to restore the balance. Excuses were made to explain what had happened, with the building-up of the idea of ‘low-born favourites’ who would take the blame rather than the king himself. 37 38

39 40 41

42

Macdougall, James III, p. 158. The ‘black money’ crisis involved a devaluation of the coin of the realm to help finance various efforts of James III. This devaluation resulted in a crying down of the coin, as it caused great hardship to the Scottish people. Details are provided below. One of the uncles, the bishop of Moray, had wanted to replace William Scheves and become archbishop of St Andrews. Macdougall, James III, p. 165. Strangely, it was with Albany’s help that James III was able to regain control. Albany, perhaps urged by the queen, made agreements with the half-uncles and ‘rescued’ James III. Macdougall suggests that Albany was trying to gain favour with James III yet at the same time secretly harbour his schemes with the English. Although unpopular, his desire to secure peace with England was laudable, as were his foreign policies.

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The crisis also produced some changes within James III himself: ‘The dramatic challenge to his authority in 1482 seems to have produced in James III a determination to ensure that such an event could never occur again.’43 He worked with England for a renewal of the alliance between the two countries, an effort that was made harder with the death of Edward IV, as James now had to deal with Richard III, who had led the army to Scotland in 1482. Richard III was vague in his answers to James’ efforts at making peace so, by February 1484, James III ‘reverted to making warlike noises, and in particular to planning the siege of Dunbar’.44 Along with abandoning his plans for peace, James III started to revert back to his pre-1482 self: ‘But the lessons which the king might have learned from these events – that he should conciliate as well as punish, that he should see to the proper administration of criminal justice, that he must reward his friends – seem to have been totally ignored; and the internal policies of the ‘80s bear a striking resemblance to those of the ‘70s.’45 James III’s failure to change led to the rebellion in 1488, which brought about his death, as will be explained below.

Clues Hidden Within the Prologue Careful examination of the prologue of Lancelot of the Laik, which is original with the poet, reveals clues sprinkled throughout for the more discerning reader, clues that indicate that the poem is more than just a romance written by a lover for his lady. One pair of lines stands out: ‘In metir, quhich that no man haith susspek, / Set oft tyme thai contenyng gret effece’ (139–40; In meter, which no man holds suspect, but often it contains important matter). This advice, given to the dreamer/poet by the bird in his dream, brings forth the possibility of using the romance genre to explore a topic of larger importance. Earlier in the prologue the narrator enters into a garden, a convention of dream poetry, in which he finds himself enclosed on all sides with green leaves, so that no one on the outside can look in to see what he is doing: ‘And al about enweronyt and Iclosit / One sich o wyss, that none within supposit / Fore to be senn with ony vicht thare owt. / So dide the levis clos it all about’ (53–6). The image of the dreamer hidden within the leaves of a garden, with a play on the word levis, also brings forth the image of the core of the poem (the meaning) being hidden within the leaves of the book. The story surrounding the inner political commentary – the leaves of the book – functions in the same way as the leaves in the

43 44 45

Macdougall, James III, p. 201. Macdougall, James III, p. 209. Dunbar had been taken by the English in 1482. Macdougall, James III, p. 201.

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garden, preventing any outsiders from seeing what is really happening at the centre. The very next line of the poem introduces Queen Alceste (‘Thar was the flour, thar was the quenn alphest’ [57]), which connects what is hidden by the leaves with royalty. The poet provides clues for those with the knowledge to find them, clues that carefully blend in with the garden of words. The prologue thus provides a treasure trove of clues for the reader to discover, setting up the romance as a political text rather than simply a love story. The dialogue between the bird and the dreamer provides the greatest source of subtext. The bird informs the dreamer that he has been sent by the God of Love, who is unhappy with the dreamer’s service in his court: he passively cries all day and does nothing to find a cure for his lovesickness. Basically, the narrator has not confessed his love to his lady; with reference to Ovid, the bird says it is much better to show love than to hide it. Thus the God of Love has commanded the dreamer to share his love. The lover despairs at this command because, although he fears to go against it, he does not know how to bring forth his love to the lady. The bird provides the narrator with instructions to write ‘Of love, ore armys, or of sum othir thing’ (147) so that he will cause his lady to remember him with ‘gladness and to lusteness’ (150). Upon waking, the narrator casts about in his mind for a subject to fulfil his command and settles upon the story of young Lancelot. If we look beyond the surface of this dialogue, we find clues that lead toward a deeper meaning beyond that of a lovesick dreamer. As Lynn Staley explains in her study on languages of power, ‘the highly coded language of ritualized love was used to examine the intertwined political relationships upon which both court and city rested’.46 In her work on Gower, Chaucer and Usk, Staley cites various examples of writers who ‘have demonstrated the language of love […] was the common tongue in which political relationships were celebrated’.47 For example, in her examination of Usk’s Testament of Love, Staley describes Usk’s lament of the loss of his Margarite: ‘The favor of Margarite is what he lacks – favor described in the language of love but meant as the political favor he has lost and now seeks’; she continues by claiming that ‘what sounds like a description of lovers’ allegiances is meant to be extended to political alliances’.48 Therefore, if we read the Lancelot of the Laik prologue in keeping with the tradition described by Staley and replace love with politics and the lady with the king, a different interpretation can be found in this dream dialogue. This substitution is not out of place, especially within the context of Scottish poetry. Mapstone has explored this connection of 46 47 48

L. Staley, Languages of Power in the Age of Richard II (University Park, PA, 2005), p. 41. Staley, Languages of Power, p. 55. Staley, Languages of Power, pp. 42 and 45.

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love and politics more specifically in the Kingis Quair, a poem traditionally held to be written by James I, which deals with James’ sighting of a beautiful young lady in a garden and the dream vision which follows and explores the ideas of love. Mapstone suggests that ‘the poem certainly presumes an aristocratic audience who would pick up its allusions to James I and its play on the ideas of kingship’ and ‘blends the images of the King of Love and the King of Scots’.49 If one popular Scottish poem connects the King of Love and the King of Scotland, it does not seem off the mark for another Scottish poem to use a similar pairing, as I am suggesting for the prologue to Lancelot of the Laik. Also, other medieval poems conflate love and politics: examples include Gower’s Confessio Amantis, with the seventh book containing a text in the mirrors for princes tradition,50 and Chaucer’s Prologue to The Legend of Good Women, with its connection of the God of Love to Richard II. Indeed, the mention of Queen Alceste in the Prologue to Lancelot of the Laik might have been influenced by Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women. If this is indeed true, the case for conflating love and politics is strengthened.51 In the Scottish Lancelot, this connection is made clear by the narrator in his choice of story – he is told to tell a tale of either love or arms and he chooses both. The ‘arms’ portion of the tale is directly related to the aspect of kingship as Arthur is threatened by war because of his inability to rule properly (a point emphasized by Amytans: ‘For oft it makith vther kingis by / To wer on them In trast of victory’ [1534–5]). Love and politics are thus not irreconcilable topics and have a much stronger connection to one another, especially in Scottish literature, than one might at first suspect. Furthermore, an examination of the theory of the king’s two bodies, as described by Ernst H. Kantorowicz, helps to clarify the substitution of politics for love in the Lancelot poem.52 The idea of kingship divides into two distinct but connected concepts: the body politic (which will be denoted here as King with an upper-case K) and the body natural (king with a lower-case k). The body politic is the office of the King, the head 49 50

51

52

Mapstone, ‘Kingship’, pp. 66 and 68. J. Martin’s 2002 dissertation examines how Scottish poetry was influenced by Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Her study of Lancelot of the Laik is rooted in comparing it with Gower’s work. J. Martin, ‘Readings of John Gower’s Confession Amantis in Fifteenth- and Early Sixteenth-Century Scotland’ (unpublished DPhil dissertation, Oxford, 2002). Wurtele (‘A Reappraisal’) also uses Gower in a comparison with the Scottish text. Other parts of the Lancelot poem similarly seem to reflect works of Chaucer, indicating the poet’s potential familiarity with Chaucer’s texts. For example, in one of the short prologues within the poem, the Lancelot poet writes ‘Into the Rame and haith his courss bygown’ (2487), which sounds remarkably similar to one of the lines in the opening to the General Prologue of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (‘Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne’). E. H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ, 1957).

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of the country as appointed by God.53 This King never dies; the kingship is continual and passes along to the next king. The body natural is the physical body of the king, his existence as a human being, which will die. Thus by serving the king, a person is serving the King. Bringing this idea back into the context of the Lancelot of the Laik prologue, the God of Love would thus represent the King (the continual idea of kingship) while the lady would represent the king (the human currently seated on the throne). Although it might seem strange to find the king represented as a female, especially a lady to be won, other Scottish texts testify to this phenomenon. Martin refers to one of William Dunbar’s beast fables, ‘This hinder nycht in Dumfermeling’, which describes a fox’s seduction of a lamb. In the Bannatyne manuscript, the introduction to this poem states, ‘“Follows the wowing of the king quhen he wes in Dumfermeling.”’ As Martin explains, this poem ‘draws our attention to a strongly discernable body of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth century Scots poetry concerned with the wooing of kings’.54 Thus the connection of the Lancelot poet’s portrayal of a lady being wooed by the narrator to the king being wooed by a courtier is not such a far stretch. The dreamer himself would represent a counsellor of the king – in this case, someone who needs to tell the king something but has kept quiet instead. The King is unhappy with the dreamer’s performance: the dreamer is miserable within the court but sits back and cries to himself rather than seek a remedy for his affliction. Instead, the dreamer has confessed his miseries to ‘the erbis and the flouris’ (92), which are unable to provide any succour. He has not kept completely quiet about his concerns, but he has not been informing the ‘correct’ people, those with power to effect change. The object of his love ‘heris not thi wo, nore ʒhit sche seis’ (100). For the dreamer adequately to serve the King (in other words, his country), he needs to share his thoughts with the king, the man on the throne. Just as the lady is unaware of the lover’s feelings, the king is unaware of the problems being whispered about behind his back. Unaware of the problems, the king does not know he needs to find a solution, whereby the realm (the King) is both ill served and angry at the members of his court (just as the God of Love appears to be angry with the dreamer). As the bird further explains, if no one speaks, the loved one (or rather, the king) is not to blame for this lack of knowledge: ‘For none may know the dirkness of thi thocht, / Ne blamyth her, thi wo sche knowith nocht’ (101–2). The suggestion that occurs here is that the king cannot be seen as blameworthy if no one ever presents his faults before him to allow the opportunity of making amends, much as a doctor cannot cure a wound he has not been allowed to examine (105–6). Again and again, the bird 53 54

In Lancelot of the Laik, Amytans (Arthur’s counsellor) stresses again and again the concept that Arthur has been made king by the hand of God and not through his own prowess. J. Martin, Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540 (Aldershot, 2007), p. 1.

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emphasizes the need for the dreamer actually to bring forth his hidden feelings, rather than hold them back, and to find a remedy. This emphasis, when seen in the light of politics, corresponds to a common theme in Scottish writing of the willingness to ‘cure’ a king of his ills rather than resorting to violent measures, as the English people had done several times with the deposition of kings. As Mapstone explains, ‘the more usual advisory posture is to address particular sets of recurrent issues and to do so in a way […] which is largely supportive and constructive toward the institution of Scottish kingship’.55 Although the Scottish throne was not untroubled, the line of kings (hence, the King) was extremely secure and supported by the people, as explained above. Looking ahead in this romance, one sees that these ideas are found within the Amytans section: rather than being a simple critique of all that is wrong with Arthur, the king begs Amytans to teach him how to redeem himself and solve the problems in his reign. Through the remainder of the extant text we see Arthur putting this advice into practice and becoming a better king. But Arthur would not have found a cure for his ills had Amytans remained silent. Returning to the dialogue between dreamer and bird, the dreamer is given a chance to respond to the bird’s command from the God of Love for him to reveal his secrets. He says that he has heard that ‘It ganyth not […] / The seruand for to disput with ye lord’ (121–2), a line containing a double meaning. On the surface, the dreamer means that he does not wish to go against what the God of Love has told him, but he does not know how to actually bring forth his suit to the lady, or rather to his king. But also within this line is the worry of the dreamer, as servant to his king, that informing the king of his critique will be seen as disputing with his lord. The dreamer says, ‘to hir hienes dare I not complane’ (126), with the feminine pronoun ‘hir’ pointing to the lady as the one to whom he dares not complain, rather than the God of Love. The use of ‘hienes’, however, draws us back to the idea of royalty, suggesting it is the king whom the dreamer fears to confront. It is at this point that the bird suggests poetry as a means of both hiding and revealing the inner thoughts of the dreamer. Reassuring the dreamer that no lady is of such high estate (129–30) as not to recognize the service shown to her by a worthy petitioner (133–4), the bird again commands the dreamer to reveal his love. With his writing, he will please the lady and let her know that he is truly in her service, gaining her thanks. The suggestion here again is for the edification and building-up of the king by his servants rather than simply criticism and tearing him down – an attitude that fits well with the Scottish attitudes toward kingship.

55

Mapstone, ‘The Scots’, p. 137.

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Upon waking, the narrator makes a commitment to himself to do his duty because the only concern within his heart is to be of service to his lady (or rather, his king). The concept of using a lady in reference to a lord, once again, is not unique, as it was used in the French troubadour poetry, which often used the word midons (lord) to describe a lady: ‘Perhaps, as the sexual ambiguity of midons suggests, and despite the seeming adoration of the lady, the troubadours were really “courting” women to reach their men. The lady would thus be the mediator in a symbolic transference of status between two men of different social classes.’56 Because Scottish literature was often influenced by French literature (they were often connected with alliances against the common enemy of England), it might be possible that the Scottish author was familiar with the French troubadours and was following their use of the lady as a representative of the lord.57 The narrator then takes a moment to ask the God of Love that he might gain good results with his work and not have wasted labour. The next section (177–89) contains a rather revealing humility topos. This portion returns to the idea that poetry is nothing of importance, with the narrator claiming that his feeble verses, which are ‘empit’ and ‘bare of eloquens’ (180), will only ‘be bot hurting to my namme’ (178). Instead, he urges those who are ‘discret & wyss’ (185) and in the service of Love (or rather, of politics) to make ‘correccioune’ (184). A further connection to the political context occurs here with David Lawton’s suggestion that ‘frankness about personal deficiencies goes hand in hand with political truthtelling’.58 Emphasizing his own weaknesses, the poet is able to remove himself somewhat from taking full responsibility for his work, as he can blame any faults on his lack of ability. And yet, to underscore the actual serious nature of the task he is about to undertake, the narrator will follow these commands even if they result in ‘deith or defamm’ (189), an oddly severe penalty for simply revealing his love. This shift from a seemingly lighthearted matter to one with such harsh consequences once more reveals the serious matter hidden within the trivial confines of verse.59

56 57 58

59

M. Bogin, The Women Troubadours (New York, 1980), p. 56. For more information on the influence of French literature on Scotland, see J. M. Smith, The French Background of Middle Scots Literature (London, 1934). D. Lawton, ‘Dullness and the Fifteenth Century’, English Literary History 54.4 (1987), pp. 761–99 (p. 764). Lawton’s example is Hoccleve, who showed personal weakness most often at points where he was also criticizing events such as the Badby situation. Although it is true that unrequited love can lead to death and defame can come through writing bad verse, it is striking that the poet links death and defamation to his text in this manner. It seems that in his earlier descriptions it is the holding back of his love that has caused him pain, so now that he seeks to openly share that love, even if it is not returned, he should experience some relief in this area. On the other hand, keeping secret the comments to the king does not bring about the

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Joanna Martin, in her recent study of the relationship between kingship and love in Scottish poetry, has also noted the connection of themes within the prologue to themes found in the rest of the poem: ‘it seems most likely that this section [the prologue] was carefully designed to prepare us for the concerns of the following narrative’.60 Her conclusions about these themes, however, differ from my own. For Martin, ‘the prologue is therefore a lesson in self-determination that provides a foil to the experiences of both Lancelot and Arthur’.61 She dismisses the connections to the contemporary political situation in Scotland, reading the poem solely as a literary exercise. Referring to an article by R. J. Lyall, Martin writes that ‘the view of the poem as critical of James III has been conclusively rebutted’.62 Although Lyall does give credit to the Scottish poet for adding new material to the French source, he argues that this new material is all found within mirrors for princes such as the Secretum Secretorum and should thus not be seen as specific to a particular reign owing to its general nature.63 Here I must disagree with both Lyall and Martin. Simply dismissing the additions to the poem because these additions can be found in other sources is not an adequate argument. I have already discussed briefly the works by Ferster and Lawton, who examine the seeming ‘dullness’ of fifteenth-century literature, a ‘dullness’ that Lyall sees within Lancelot of the Laik. Ferster contends: ‘The mirrors for princes are not only more topical than they appear to be but also more critical of the powerful than we might expect’.64 By hiding this critique in the ‘safer territory of the advice manuals’, the writers would be safe from the ‘risks of contemporary politics’.65 Ferster has one caveat: ‘if the critique is disguised well enough to “fool” the government, there is no guarantee that it can be understood correctly by a wider audience, including us’.66 The clues are there, as I have suggested above, but some might be too subtle for us to find, leading to the conclusions of Lyall and Martin that there are no connections after all. Instead, my own conclusions reverse Martin’s statement of Lyall’s conclusive rebuttal and return the poem to its contemporary context, as a poem deeply rooted in the political struggles of the kings of Scotland in the fifteenth century. Therefore, although Lyall and Martin feel that the case should be closed on the connection between Arthur and James III, my own research reveals that this case

60 61 62 63 64 65 66

same possibility of pain as would sharing those comments openly and accepting the penalty that might come from doing so. Martin, Kingship and Love, p. 42. Martin, Kingship and Love, p. 44. Martin, Kingship and Love, p. 56. R. J. Lyall, ‘Politics and Poetry in Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Scotland’, Scottish Literary Journal 3.2 (1976), 5–29 (p. 16). Ferster, Fictions of Advice, p. 3. Ferster, Fictions of Advice, p. 3. Ferster, Fictions of Advice, p. 4.

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should be reopened and further examined. As a result, this much maligned Scottish poem can be seen as a strong addition to Middle English Arthurian literature, taking its place in conversation with those works to further the cultural discussion of kingship in the fifteenth century.

The Legend of James III Was James III a horrible king? Scanty evidence exists for his actions during his kingship. Only two contemporary chronicle fragments cover the years from 1437 to 1482, with none from 1482 to 1488. A short chronicle in the Asloan manuscript ends with James II.67 Thus the only contemporary chronicle covering any part of the reign of James III is a brief appendage to Andrew Wyntoun’s Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland, which only goes up to 1482.68 In the absence of contemporary chronicle records much of our information about James III comes from sixteenthcentury chronicles. This late evidence is highly problematic, as Macdougall’s research makes clear. By the end of the sixteenth century James III was portrayed as a recluse, alienated from his nobility and dominated by young or baseborn counsellors, in particular Cochrane the stonemason, who had turned him against his brothers and caused the murder of the younger of the two, John, earl of Mar. In addition the king, according to legend, was no leader in war, was guilty of amassing great wealth for himself at the expense of his subjects, and was negligent in carrying out his duties, particularly in the field of criminal justice.69 This description sounds remarkably like that of Arthur in Lancelot of the Laik, as will become apparent in the following section. And yet, as Macdougall contends, this description is not an accurate rendering of James III; in fact, he sees this imagining of James III in the sixteenth century as akin to the Tudor myth of Richard III.70 In tracing the origins of the James III legend Macdougall begins with Hary’s poem, the Wallace, dated 1476–8, which ‘is largely composed of bitter invective against the English, and may be taken to be a violent condemnation of James III’s

67 68

69 70

Fifteen folios contain ‘ane schort memoriale of the scottis corniklis for addicoune’; two entries are provided: one for 1428–60 and the other for 1420–55. Macdougall, ‘The Sources’, p. 11. This text, ‘Heir is assignt the cause quhy our natioun was callyt fyrst the Scottys’, found on ten folios appended to several manuscripts of Wyntoun, briefly traces the history of Scotland from the beginnings to 1482, with only two folios covering the fifteenth century (Macdougall, ‘The Sources’, p. 12). One of the manuscripts is BM Royal MS 17 DXX. Macdougall, ‘The Sources’, p. 17. This myth was designed to promote the Tudor line of kings, who were usurpers of the crown of England. Ultimately, it painted Richard III in a bad light, claiming him as a hunchback and a murderer. He may have been a murderer, killing or ordering the deaths of his nephews, but he was not a hunchback. (Shakespeare follows in the line of this myth in his history plays.)

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pro-English attitude after the alliance of 1474’.71 Although the actions of James III in trying to secure a peace with England may have actually benefited Scotland, not everyone agreed with him. A most notable early opponent was his own brother, the duke of Albany. For the Wallace Hary used Sir James Liddale, the steward to the duke of Albany, as one of his sources. Macdougall explains: ‘It seems likely that Hary was one of his [Albany’s] supporters, and that the Wallace provided Albany with useful propaganda to justify and magnify the importance of his opposition to James III a few years later’.72 Hary’s poem thus set the legend of James III into motion by pitting him against his brother, who was given the status of hero. Macdougall continues with another literary text, The Thre Prestis of Peblis, which was written between 1482 and 1488. The text revolves around three stories told by three priests, which contains ‘direct rather than implied criticism of the monarch’.73 In the first two tales, the king is chastised for listening to his youthful counsellors rather than the nobility and for accepting bribes and granting remissions, thus corrupting justice. These complaints, especially about listening to youthful or lowborn counsel, could have been influenced by the behaviour of the kings in England and France, such as Edward IV’s relationship with the Woodvilles and Louis XI’s relationship with his barber, Oliver le Dain, rather than specific references to James III.74 Macdougall next examines the chronicle appended to Andrew Wyntoun’s chronicle and deduces that the writer may have been a supporter of Albany.75 In the description of the death of John, earl of Mar, James and Albany’s brother, the curious details of John’s dealings with ‘weches and warlois’ (witches and warlocks) are strikingly similar to those describing the death of another king’s younger brother, George, duke of Clarence, younger brother of Edward IV, who was charged with conspiring with sorcerers.76 Another parallel between Mar and Clarence is the supposed manner of their deaths. In two sources, Bellenden (who expanded Boece’s chronicle) and Pitscottie (the least reliable), Mar is said to have been slain in a bath vat. Clarence, too, was said 71 72 73 74

75 76

Macdougall, ‘The Sources’, p. 18. Macdougall, ‘The Sources’, p. 18. Macdougall, ‘The Sources’, p. 18. The Woodvilles were a lower-born family who were raised to prominence when Edward IV married Elizabeth Woodville (keeping their marriage a secret at first). Elizabeth’s brother, Anthony, Earl Rivers, became especially prominent among Edward IV’s men and his influence on the king was not regarded positively by other men around the king. The most important effect of Edward’s relationship with the Woodvilles was the falling-out that it caused between him and Warwick, who had helped him become king, but who switched allegiance to the Lancastrians. Macdougall, ‘The Sources’, p. 20. In the Rolls of Parliament ‘the stories of the duke’s conspiracy with necromancers and witches [are] described at such length as to obscure the real charges of treason and projected rebellion’ (Macdougall, James III, p. 132).

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to have been drowned in a vat (of malmsey wine), a detail contained in several London chronicles.77 Macdougall’s theory is that the writers made up details about James III’s reign, influenced by the actions of contemporary English kings, in order to vilify him. As Macdougall continues to trace the development of the legend of James III, more and more negative details are added, details that cannot be confirmed in any other sources. These made-up details became the focus of much of the discussion of this king after his death, which, as Macdougall suggests, needed to be justified.78 Because James III was killed during a rebellion of his own men, including his son, his murderers would need to be punished for killing the rightful monarch if he were seen as a good king. However, if James III was shown to have been a bad king, then his murder could be seen as a necessary evil for the good of the realm. Since Scotland needed to keep its line of kings secure, so as not to open itself to invasion from England, all blame needed to be removed from James IV; he needed above all to be exonerated of any wrongdoing in the death of his father. Additionally, the commentary on the issues of James III’s rule, real or imagined, could be used as a warning to the new king to keep him in line with good rulership. Writing about The Thre Prestis of Peblis, R. D. S. Jack compares that poem to ‘early humanist satires’, which ‘were written as warnings to new monarchs to avoid the errors of their predecessors. Predominately such work would satirize the weaknesses of the old regime while including a more general attack on the errors of inexperience and the most likely vulnerabilities of the new ruler.’79 He adds, ‘To this in each case is joined a more sympathetic, general, and educationally intended warning to the new monarch, based on his or her most likely failings.’80 If this method was used in The Thre Prestis of Peblis, it is not out of place to consider the method in a contemporary poem, Lancelot of the Laik. James IV was, after all, the son of James III, and it was likely that any transgressions committed by the father might be repeated by the son. Thus the Scottish poet could align and exaggerate the failings of James III while at the same time portraying a sympathetic king in Arthur, who is seen learning the lessons of kingship and how to improve upon his faults. Lyall is right that the details in Lancelot of the Laik do not precisely line up with James III, but his reasoning for this misalignment is off. The 77

78 79 80

‘It is probable that the Clarence story, which was later well known in England and abroad, was simply copied by Bellenden when he mentioned the death of Mar, and that this bizarre tale obscures the fact that Mar, like Clarence, was executed for treason’; Macdougall, James III, p. 132. Macdougall, ‘The Sources’, p. 21. R. D. S. Jack, ‘The Thre Prestis of Peblis and the Growth of Humanism in Scotland’, Review of English Studies n.s. 26 (1975), 257–70 (p. 257). Jack, ‘The Thre Prestis’, p. 267.

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poet uses generalized details found in other mirrors to participate in the growing discourse which vilified James III, in order to take a decent king and portray him as a rather terrible ruler. The details which the poet adds to the poem – the need for a king to be generous rather than take money from his people, not to spend time with the lowborn, and so on – sound remarkably like those details which recur in sixteenth-century chronicles which set out to show James III as a bad king. In his analysis of the growth of the legend of James III, Macdougall begins with two literary sources, Wallace and The Thre Prestis of Peblis, which were written around the same time as Lancelot of the Laik. If we place this story of Arthur, especially with the additions provided by the Scottish poet, beside these two texts and Macdougall’s discussion, one more literary piece is added as participating in this discourse of the beginning of the legend of James III, a legend used to justify James IV’s possible involvement in his father’s death. Additionally, the poem allows the Scottish reader to look ahead to a brighter reign in the future with the optimism found in Arthur’s changing kingship as it is depicted in Lancelot of the Laik.

The Death of James III The death of James III in 1488, brought about by the rebellion nominally led by his own son, created a situation that did not fit with the Scottish ideals of kingship. Justification was necessary for the king’s death, especially to separate James IV from any involvement in the killing. We have several sources for the events of the battle near Bannockburn, most ‘notably the parliamentary debate in October 1488 which attempted to fix responsibility for the crisis’.81 Many events led up to this crisis. One was the elections to the priories of Dunkeld and Coldingham, where James III defied both the pope and parliament. Although the details are complex, the conflict involved the pope’s support of George Browne as bishop of Dunkeld and James III’s support of Alexander Inglis.82 Inglis had been a loyal supporter of James III and had been sent on a number of missions 81 82

Macdougall, James III, p. 235. Macdougall, James III, pp. 223–4. These events occurred between 1483 and 1485. When Bishop Livingston died on 28 August 1483 James III nominated Alexander Inglis, Dean of Dunkeld and Archdeacon of St Andrews, to the bishopric of Dunkeld. Macdougall writes that ‘Inglis was the obvious choice for the king to make to place Dunkeld in charge of a loyal and experienced ecclesiastic. He had had a long career as an envoy to settle disputes with the English, acting in this capacity at Alnwick in 1473, as a commissioner in 1476, and as the recipient of the fourth installment of the Princess Cecilia’s dowry in 1478. He had been a frequent attender at parliaments, and had sat on the Lords of Council.’ But the pope (Sixtus IV) promoted George Browne as bishop of Dunkeld. Browne had been in Rome and had built up the support of the pope to elect him to this seat. In 1485, after Innocent VIII became pope, James III appealed Browne’s election, but he was denied and James was forced to accept Browne as bishop of Dunkeld.

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to England to settle disputes, so it was obvious that James III would want to reward him. George Browne had been sent to Rome to arbitrate in another dispute, and Macdougall suggests that Browne used the opportunity to convince the pope to appoint him to Dunkeld. James III was bitterly opposed to the pope’s choice, causing tension in parliament, which supported the papal decision. The Coldingham election was even more important because it brought James III up against the Hume faction. John Hume had desired the revenue of the Coldingham priory earlier in 1473 and was denied it by James III, who supported another Hume, Patrick, who died in 1478. After Patrick’s death, John Hume went back ‘to his original position of calling himself prior, taking the fruits, and defying the king’.83 John went behind James III’s back to the pope and was granted the rights to the Coldingham revenues, which greatly angered James III. After appealing to the pope, James III was able to get his ruling reversed; John, however, refused to give up Coldingham. The other Humes supported John and turned against the king, who had suppressed the priory and annexed ‘half its revenues to the chapel royal’.84 In addition to the above situations, James III once again proposed peace with England, this time dealing with Henry VII and asking the English to return Berwick to Scotland. Once again, the southern members of parliament were not happy with this idea: ‘already faced with James’ interference at Coldingham and the plight of the Humes, the prospect of permanent peace with England based on the recovery of Berwick must have been alarming in the extreme’.85 Some of these men gathered with the Humes and prepared to stand against the king; they managed to get the king’s eldest son to stand with them. Why would the future James IV stand against his father? Evidence suggests that James III may have been growing distrustful of his eldest son (for reasons not known) and that he began to support his second son.86 The eldest son might have been protecting himself, therefore, when he joined with those who were against his father. In 1487 James III had proposed a marriage for his second son (also named James), aged ten, which would cement the alliance between Scotland and England; he was to marry Edward IV’s daughter, Katherine. Why James III had chosen his second son rather than the eldest James, who at the age of thirteen and as heir to the throne was a much better prospect, is unclear. Although marriage proposals were shortly afterward made for the elder James as well as for James III himself, those proposals 83 84 85 86

Macdougall, James III, pp. 223–4. Macdougall, James III, pp. 227 and 235. Macdougall, James III, p. 236. In 1482, when Albany supported the king briefly, he spent some time at Stirling with the young prince James (N. Macdougall, James IV [East Linton, 1997], p. 3); perhaps James III thought that his eldest son had been ‘tainted’ by his brother’s treason.

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were conditional on the English return of Berwick. The proposal between the second son and Katherine, however, was not conditional on the return of Berwick; Macdougall suggests that this was ‘the match in which James III appears to have been most interested’.87 Additionally, on 29 January 1488, James III elevated his second son, who was the marquis of Ormonde, to the position of duke of Ross. The elder son left Stirling Castle on 2 February 1488 – just a few days after his brother’s elevation – and joined with the Humes and other rebels.88 The acquisition of the heir was exactly what this faction needed, as they realized from the situation in 1482 that a different tactic needed to be taken against James III. Macdougall explains, ‘The solution adopted by the rebels of 1488 was twofold – to disguise the fact of rebellion by making the class complaint against evil counsellors misguiding the king, and – much more constructively – to acquire control of the heir to the throne as an alternative head of state.’89 The rebels were not large in number, however, and the king retained support of most of the influential men.90 Settlements were proposed but nothing could satisfy both parties. Macdougall explains that the confrontation ‘could only be resolved if James III fell into the hands of the prince’s party, if Prince James were reunited with his father, or if one or other of them was eliminated’.91 Articles were written up at Aberdeen (where the king had taken up residence), which ‘affect[ed] the welfare of the king, of his son, and of the rival factions of the nobility’.92 The king did not comply with all the articles, but he was able to gather more support for himself and return to Edinburgh. By June the king was ready to put an end to the rebels. He left Edinburgh with an army and advanced to Stirling, with the objective of regaining control of his son and heir. James III was successful in retaking Stirling, but his son and the rebels were able to flee. The two forces met up near Bannockburn and fought the battle that came to be known as Sauchieburn. It is important to note that the king’s elder son ordered his men not to kill James III; the rebels were more interested in getting James III to agree to their terms than to supplant the king completely. Even so, either 87 88

89

90 91 92

Macdougall, James III, p. 238. One of the men was George Browne, whom James III had not supported as bishop of Dunkeld. For more information on the identities and reasons of the other rebels, see Macdougall, James III, pp. 242–5. Macdougall, James III, p. 239. Control of the heir guaranteed that the government would not be unstable if James III were to be removed. There would be no need for English interference. The accusation of bad counsel was the line taken up as the official explanation in the parliament of October 1488. These supporters included the Chancellor, William Elphinstone, bishop of Aberdeen, as well as the half-uncles who had previously stood against him (Buchan and the bishop of Moray). Macdougall, James III, p. 248. Macdougall, James III, p. 248. For details of these articles, see Macdougall, James III, pp. 248–9.

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during the battle or directly afterward, James III ‘“happinit to be slane”’.93 Although the records are not clear, the evidence points to the slaying of the king by unknown men who were most probably low-born (and thus not the ones who had pledged to the prince not to kill the king). Although James IV had obviously not wanted his father to be killed, rumours of his involvement in the death surfaced. In order to squash these rumours and assert his own strength in ruling, James IV had to be separated from any connection to James III’s death. The accusation of James III being ruled by low-born favourites was therefore brought forward as a reason for those rebelling against him to show that they were not rebels, but were actually acting in Scotland’s best interest, and it was an accident that James III had been killed when the rebels really only wanted him to agree to their terms. No stain was to mar the rule of James IV. This was thus the major reason, as Macdougall explains, for the development of the legend of James III: ‘In order to justify itself, the new government had to suppress any virtues which the dead king might have had, and to illustrate that, far from being rebels, they had acted for the good of the realm.’94 Thus, although James III undeniably had faults, these faults were exaggerated to show that he had been a very bad king and that Scotland was now better off without him. And the poet of Lancelot of the Laik has taken the seeds of these faults and scattered them throughout his poem, seeds that would grow in the sixteenth century to create an image of a James III who was full of faults.

Changes from the Source Material Although the poet of Lancelot of the Laik drew greatly upon his source, the French Prose Lancelot, he also made numerous changes throughout the text, especially the addition of material. These changes, rather than the direct translations, are more indicative of the Scottish author’s political commentary. An examination of these places in the text, which has not previously been methodologically pursued, provides us with the larger picture of the purpose and audience for this poem. At the beginning of the three extant books the poet has added a short prologue describing various aspects of nature. These sections are not found in the French text, but the prologues do reflect a similar style and content in comparison with other contemporary Scottish or English poems, such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or descriptions of nature in Hary’s Wallace.95 In the prologue to Book I, the poet uses astronomical

93 94 95

Macdougall, James III, p. 259. Macdougall, ‘The Sources’, p. 21. As attested by Scheps, ‘The Thematic Unity’, p. 169.

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references to provide the reader with a dating for the events in the poem – ‘Quhen tytan, withe his lusty heit, / Twenty dais In to the aryeit / Haith maid his courss’ (335–7) – which provides a date of around 1 April.96 Continuing with the prologue, birds sing and ‘Welcum the lusty sessone of the ȝere’ (342), leading directly to the introduction of Arthur, ‘wich had of al this worlde the floure / Of cheuelry’ (344–5). This springtime opening, although conventional, introduces Arthur with the promise of renewal in the air, a rather appropriate element as Arthur’s own renewal is to come over the course of the year. The opening to the second book removes the promise of spring and renewal. The timing is now ‘the clowdy nyght’, which is ‘obscure’ (1274). Arthur’s dreams have been interpreted by his counsellors, whose advice has left him with a heavy heart. Additionally, Arthur has been fighting against Galiot, whose men greatly outnumber Arthur’s own. Arthur, in a state of despair, remembers his previous dreams and ‘In to his bed he turnyth to and fro’ (1282). When the sun comes up, Arthur has not slept at all and goes into the day ‘distrublit in his hart’ (1291). With the arrival of the sun comes Amytans, who will provide Arthur with hope once more and a firm plan to renew his kingdom, in the form of the advice given throughout the remainder of this book. The third book opens with a section reminiscent of the first book, again using astronomy and descriptions of nature to mark the passing of time: The long dirk pasag of the vinter, & the lycht Of phebus comprochit with his mycht; The which, ascending In his altitud, Awodith saturnn with his stormys Rude; […] This was the tyme that phebus gan hym dress In to the rame, and haith his courss bygown Or that the trewis and the ȝher vas Rown. (2469–72 and 2484–6)

A year has passed for Arthur, during which he has taken the advice from Amytans into account and made changes within his realm. This passage uses the passing of time to show that Arthur is coming out of the winter, the time of darkness, and once more into springtime, with hope and renewal. Immediately following these lines the poet sets up the second meeting of Arthur and Galiot’s men, a meeting which should now have a much better outcome for Arthur than the first. These prologues, from springtime to darkness to springtime, set up the basic arc that Arthur experiences in the growth of his kingship throughout 96

Lancelot of the Laik, ed. A. Lupack, pp. 117–18 (note to lines 335–42): ‘In this astrological reckoning of time, Titan (the sun) is twenty days into Aries. Since the sun enters Aries on March 12, the time is the very beginning of April.’

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the poem. By adding them to the poem, the author is able to emphasize these aspects of Arthur’s growth in each of the books, also drawing the reader’s attention to Arthur’s plight and away from Lancelot. This focus provides yet another piece of evidence that it is Arthur and the ideas regarding kingship around which the poem revolves, rather than the love story, which is written ostensibly for the poet’s lady (as set up by the dreamer in the prologue). After the short prologue in the first book the poem opens with Arthur at Carlill (Carlisle), where he has been for some time. His knights (with Kay as the spokesman) complain to Arthur that there are no adventures in this land and ask Arthur to return to Camelot ‘whare that thei / Ware wont to heryng of armys day be day’ (357–8). Arthur agrees, but that night he has a rather disturbing dream: his hair falls from his head, leaving him completely bald. He delays the journey and has another dream two nights later. This series of dreams is taken directly from the French Lancelot; however, the Scottish author makes one major change. In the French text, Arthur’s second dream involves watching his fingers fall off his hands.97 The Scottish text, however, changes this second dream to Arthur seeing ‘His vombe [stomach] out fallith vith his hoil syde’ (375). Why make the change from loss of an extremity to that of an internal organ? Mapstone suggests that ‘the dream images of physical decay and decomposition are indicative of something being badly wrong in the body politic, of which Arthur as king is the key member’,98 but she does not comment beyond this statement. If we look closer at the loss of the stomach, the change made by the Scottish author, exciting new possibilities of interpretation begin to emerge that have previously been overlooked by readers. Thus, my examination of this relatively obscure poem brings to light the poem’s important place within Scottish literature, the Arthurian corpus and the advice to princes tradition. The concept ‘that the political system can be analyzed in detail as an organism or living body whose parts are mutually devoted to and dependent upon one another’ is detailed in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, a work dated to 1159.99 John of Salisbury claims the source of these ideas to 97

98 99

Arthur also has a third dream during which his toes fall off; the Scottish text does not include a third dream. ‘A la tierce nuit aprés li ravint que il sonja que tuit li doi li chaoient des mains sanz les poces. Et lors fu mout plus esbaïs que devant. Et en l’autre tierce nuit resonja que tuit li doit des piez li chaoient sanz les poces.’ All references are taken from Lancelot do Lac: The Non-Cyclic Old French Prose Romance, ed. E. Kennedy, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1980), I, 260.35–8. ‘The third night after that it again befell him that he dreamed that all the fingers fell off his hands, except the thumbs. Then he was much more troubled than before. And the third night from then, he dreamed that all the toes fell off his feet, except the big toes.’ Lancelot of the Lake, trans. C. Corley (Oxford, 1989), p. 208. All translations are taken from this edition. Mapstone, ‘The Scots’, p. 139. John of Salisbury, Policraticus: Of the Frivolities of Courtiers and the Footprints of Philosophers, ed. and trans. C. J. Nederman (Cambridge, 1990), pp. xxi and xix.

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be from the ‘Instruction of Trajan’ by Plutarch; however, no evidence has been discovered for the existence of this text, leading to the belief that these ideas may have originated with John himself, whose work was incredibly influential in political theory in the later Middle Ages.100 In the second chapter of Book V, John describes this bodily system: The position of the head in the republic is occupied, however, by a prince subject only to God and to those who act in His place on earth, inasmuch as in the human body the head is stimulated and ruled by the soul. The place of the heart is occupied by the senate, from which proceeds the beginning of good and bad works. The duties of the ears, eyes and mouth are claimed by the judges and governors of provinces. The hands coincide with officials and soldiers. Those who always assist the prince are comparable to the flanks. Treasurers and record keepers (I speak not of those who supervise prisoners, but of the counts of the Exchequer) resemble the shape of the stomach and intestines; these, if they accumulate with great avidity and tenaciously preserve their accumulation, engender innumerable and incurable diseases so that their infection threatens to ruin the whole body. Furthermore, the feet coincide with peasants perpetually bound to the soil, for whom it is all the more necessary that the head take precautions, in that they more often meet with accidents while they walk on the earth in bodily subservience; and those who erect, sustain and move forward the mass of the whole body are justly owed shelter and support.101

The loss of the stomach in Arthur’s dream, when placed into this wellknown political bodily system, alerts the reader to the source of the problems in Arthur’s realm – the treasury – and, as John states, these problems can infect the entire body. Why would the Scottish poet want to alert the reader to this particular issue by changing Arthur’s dream from the source material? As we will see a little later in the text, one of the major issues in the advice portion deals with the generosity of the king, with Arthur being accused of holding back from his people and not sharing out gifts. In Scotland, this financial issue was one of the major criticisms brought about during the reign of James III, especially in the early 1480s with the crisis over the ‘black money’ and the devaluation of the coin of the realm. Although the Scottish crown was never wealthy, especially compared to England, it was not until the late 1470s that matters causing a financial crisis really came into play. James III had been trying to find a good marriage for his sister, Margaret, in England. After several propositions, he made an agreement with Anthony, Earl Rivers (Edward IV’s brotherin-law), including a dowry of 4000 marks of English money (8000 pounds Scots).102 In the parliament of March 1479, 20,000 marks were 100 101 102

John of Salisbury, Policraticus, p. xxvi. For more information about John of Salisbury, see The World of John of Salisbury, ed. M. Wilks (Oxford, 1984). John of Salisbury, Policraticus, p. 67. Emphasis added. Macdougall, James III, p. 141.

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voted upon to pay for the expense of sending Margaret to England and the wedding itself; 8000 marks were to come from the church, 8000 from the barons, and the final 4000 from the burghs. Scotland simply did not have the requested funds. To put it into perspective, ‘twenty thousand marks was, after all, more than double what the king had asked for to equip an army of six thousand to invade Brittany in 1472’.103 Nor was it realistic that the funds could be collected: ‘As the total value of the lands of the entire sheriffdom [Edinburgh] (including royal lands, which would not be taxed) amounted to £928 13/4 d., the king would be lucky if the tax yield was as much as £80 or £90 from Edinburgh.’104 But it was not just the limited funds that made it difficult to collect the money. Macdougall suggests ‘a growing suspicion amongst members of the estates’, who worried that James III planned to use the money for a purpose other than the marriage; throughout the late 1470s, James III had had a ‘renewal of his interest in foreign travel’.105 Two years later parliament voted another tax (700 marks), this time for the ‘victualling of Berwick for forty days’, when hostilities with England began again.106 Once again, the Scots were not forthcoming with the money. Although records are scarce, it appears that during this time James III ‘had introduced a drastic debasement of the coinage, presumably to make a quick profit, and that the effects on Scots currency were disastrous’.107 The short chronicle included with Wyntoun’s history contains a reference to ‘black money’: Thir was ane gret hungyr and deid in Scotland for the boll of meill was for four pundis, for thir was blak cunyhe in the realme strikkin And ordinyt be king James the thred half pennys and three penny pennys Innumerabill of coppir And thai yeid twa zere and mair […] And that sammyn zere in the monetht of Julij the king of scotland purposyt till haif passyt in Ingland with the power of scotland and passyt on gaitwart to lawdyr and thar the lordis of Scotland held thair consaill in the kirk of lauder and cryit downe the blak silver.108

It is not entirely clear which coins ‘black money’ refers to; both Macdougall and Joan Murray have tried to trace the history of this money as well as its physical make-up (copper, silver, etc.).109 In a signet letter 103 104 105 106 107 108

109

Macdougall, James III, p. 142. Macdougall, James III, p. 142. Macdougall, James III, p. 142. Macdougall, James III, p. 147. Macdougall, James III, p. 158. Although the short chronicle is included in J. Pinkerton, The History of Scotland (London, 1797), two sections dealing with James III were omitted. Macdougall includes the entire portion of the short chronicle dealing with the reign of James III in an Appendix at the back of his book, James III. I have therefore quoted from this appendix (p. 312). Macdougall, James III, pp. 158–61; J. E. L. Murray, ‘The Black Money of James III’, in Coinage

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(23 July 1483), James III ‘authorised a payment of £180 16/- “to the werkmen that wrocht the blac money of oure commande”’.110 Thus it is clear that James III initiated this coinage, and Macdougall’s conclusion is that ‘over a period from about 1480 until 1482’ James III ‘produc[ed] very base bullon coins and a large quantity of copper ones’.111 Rather than making a profit,112 James III’s plan backfired as the black money ‘must have had a very brief life as legal tender’ when it went through a ‘total demonetisation’.113 Payments which were made in this coinage were refused, with evidence found in the Exchequer Rolls for this refusal.114 As the short chronicle quoted above states, the Scots ‘cryit downe’ the black money, which it claims may have been one of the main reasons for the crisis at Lauder in 1482.115 Therefore, when the Scottish poet changed Arthur’s dream to refer to the falling out of the stomach – the treasurers in the body politic framework – it is not a far stretch to make the connection to the financial crises of James III. As this dream occurs at the beginning of the poem the reader is clued into the contemporary connections at once, readying the reader to make connections through the rest of the poem between Arthur’s faults and that of James III. One method of showing Arthur’s faults in the poem is to compare him to his enemy, Galiot, who is described as being a good leader and exceedingly generous. Although the French source makes a point of showing that Galiot has been a good leader to his people, the Scottish text further drives this point home with an additional couplet not found in the source: ‘He vith his men so louit is, y gess, / That hyme to pless is al ther besynes’ (612–13). This small addition to the poem has a great impact when comparing Galiot to Arthur. Just before this couplet one of Arthur’s knights (Galygantynis of Walys) has answered Arthur’s question of whether anyone has ever heard of Galiot. Galygantynis, following the French source,116 praises Galiot rather highly as the ‘farest knycht’ (602), who is ‘ful of larges and humylytee’ (607). These attributes, espe-

110 111 112

113 114 115 116

in Medieval Scotland (1100–1600), ed. D. M. Metcalf, BAR Brit. Ser. 45 (Oxford, 1977), pp. 115–30. Macdougall, James III, p.159. Macdougall, James III, p. 161. W. C. Dickinson suggests that James III actually did profit from the coinage by using it ‘to settle his foreign debts, possibly with debased coins, before the effects of debasement could work through to lower the exchange rate’; Scotland from the Earliest Times to 1603, 3rd edn, rev. and ed. A. A. M. Duncan (Oxford, 1977), p. 247. Macdougall, James III, p. 160. See Murray, ‘The Black Money’, for more details. See below for further details of this crisis. Lancelot do Lac, p. 264.30–34: ‘Il est bien plus granz demi pié que chevalier que l’an saiche, si est li hom del monde plus amez de sa gent et cil qui plus a conquis de son aage, car il est juenes bachelors. Et dient cil qui l’ont a aconite que c’est li plus larges.’ Lancelot of the Lake, p. 213 : ‘He is at least six inches taller than any knight known, and of all the men in the world, he is the most loved by his people, and the one who has conquered most, for his age, for he is

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cially generosity, are those which have not been Arthur’s strong points. Arthur may have his faithful followers (Gawain most notably), but the poem clearly emphasizes his lack of men compared to Galiot, especially when Galiot declines to fight Arthur at first because, with so few men, Arthur would easily be defeated. Galiot, on the other hand, has numerous followers, with ‘Ten kingis at his command’ (611). Galiot, as the Scottish text emphasizes, has been doing everything correctly and would be a good role model for Arthur to follow – a circumstance that is rather ironic, considering Galiot’s plans to conquer Arthur. Arthur’s knights do not show support for him as clearly as do Galiot’s knights. After Galiot has entered into Arthur’s lands, Arthur insists on charging straight to battle even though he is aware that his numbers are depleted. His men counsel him to wait until he can call upon his other men to join them and augment their numbers. Again, this situation has been set up by the French source; however, the Scottish poet adds an additional couplet as further commentary on Arthur’s decision, voiced by Arthur’s men: ‘That lyk a king and lyk a weriour / Ye may susten in armys your honoure’ (662–3). These additional lines emphasize Arthur’s lack of knowledge as to how a king and warrior should conduct himself, showing his need for schooling by his own men as to correct kingly behaviour. The Scottish poet gives the reader a much clearer picture of an Arthur who makes mistakes and is ready for the arrival of Amytans and his advice, again emphasizing the political aspect of this text. What has caused Arthur’s lack of proper kingly behaviour? When Amytans arrives, he does not return Arthur’s cheerful greeting. In asking why Amytans does not greet him, Arthur discovers that he has not been a good king up to this point. As in the French source, Amytans explains to Arthur that he ‘art so far myswent / Of wykitness’ (1319–20) that he will soon feel the wrath of God.117 Reminding Arthur that he has received his position through the power of God, Amytans says that God can take away this power as easily as he gave it. Not only does Arthur ‘knawith not hyme’ (1327), but he also has not been faithful to his people because he has not been adequately punishing the ‘wykit men’ (1345). This lack of justice has caused his people to become oppressed. All of the above comes from the source, but in the French no motivation is given for Arthur’s

117

a young knight. And those who know him say that he is the most noble and gracious knight in the world, and the most generous.’ Lancelot do Lac, p. 283.21–4 and 33–5: ‘Si doiz savoir que nus hom mortex ne te baillast a garder la seignorie que tu tiens, mais Dex solement la te bailla por ce que tu l’an feïsses bone garde, et tu li as faite si mauvaisse que tu la destruiz qui garder la deüsses. […] Adonc destruira il toi, car tu ies li plus vis pechierres de toz les autres pecheors.’ Lancelot of the Lake, pp. 237–8: ‘And you should know that no mortal man gave you the dominion you hold to take care of, but God alone gave it to you so that you should take good care of it, and you have taken such bad care of it for Him that you, who should take care of it, are destroying it. […] Therefore He will destroy you, for you are the vilest of sinners.’

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blind eye to justice. The Scottish text, however, does add a reason for Arthur’s injustice in an additional couplet in this section: ‘Yow haith non Ey bot one thyne awn delyt, / Or quhat that plesing shall thyne appetyt’ (1348–9). Arthur has been selfish; in wanting to sate his own appetites, he has forsaken his people and does not care for them as he should. One of the grievances against James III was that he also turned a blind eye to justice; he often sold remissions and respites for crimes (including such serious crimes as murder) in order to collect funds to support his various plans, such as foreign invasions. In several parliaments (1473 and 1478, for example), he ‘was exhorted to cease granting remissions and respites for crime’.118 James III did not stop selling these releases from punishment, however; the immediate advantage of gaining funds seemed more important to him than the justice for which a king should be responsible. In case this couplet has not been enough to prove his point, the Scottish poet adds more results of Arthur’s misgovernance. Amytans tells Arthur that ‘al thi puple the hartis ben ylost’ (1519) because of Arthur’s ‘auerice’ and ‘errogans’ (1521). Here we are reminded of the description of Galiot (discussed above), who is loved by his people. Once again these two leaders are placed side by side, with Arthur clearly lacking in regard to his governing, and, again, the poet makes it clear that Arthur’s lack of generosity (an attribute for which Galiot is praised) is his biggest downfall. Amytans chastises Arthur even more strongly a few lines later when describing a king who, like Arthur, has been selfish ‘In serwyng of his wrechit appetit / Of awerice and of his awn delyt, / And hald his men, wncherist, in thraldome’ (1528–30). James III also seems to have not understood the need for generosity, especially towards those who supported him. As Macdougall explains, ‘James III was beginning to display that most dangerous of characteristics amongst medieval rulers, failure to recognize and reward service.’119 He also had a habit of overlooking a deserving subject and rewarding someone else. One such example of this activity occurred in 1471, when James III gave the liferent of the earldom of Lennox to Andrew Steward, Lord Avandale, when there were three other claimants and the liferent was not James III’s to give.120 This early example was followed up a few years later in a situation involving two feuding families, Murray and Drummond, and the stewardship of Strathearn. In this instance, James III 118 119 120

Dickinson, Scotland from the Earliest Times, p. 238. Macdougall, James III, p. 123. Macdougall, James III, p. 101. Macdougall refers to this grant as ‘the most scandalous of the reign’. Under Scots law, liferent involved the legal ownership of land for the life of the landholder. During his lifetime, he could not give or sell this land to someone else (basically he was borrowing or renting it). Once he died, the land became available again and could be dispersed by either the king (if it had been his land to begin with) or another party. In this instance, the land was not held by the king.

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issued the office to two men, John Drummond of Cargill and Sir William Murray of Tullibardine, at the same time; he revoked Drummond (who had the superior claim), making him an enemy. These occurrences also had a hand in leading up to the crisis at Lauder, which began with an attack from the English army. A couplet added by the Scottish poet in the same section of the poem (as above, dealing with generosity) has Amytans telling Arthur: ‘For oft it makith vther kingis by / To wer on them In trast of victory’ (1534–5). These lines pertain both to Arthur’s situation with Galiot and to James III’s situation in 1482, when James had to fight against English forces. After James III’s brother, the duke of Albany, had been condemned for treason and fled to England, he made an alliance with Edward IV of England. Edward IV had grown weary of the ‘invasion and harrying of the English north-east’ in 1480,121 and the alliance with Albany worked to his advantage in allowing him to attack Scotland. Their agreement included having Albany declare himself king of Scotland and deferring to Edward as his overlord once he had taken the country with the help of Edward IV’s soldiers. In July 1482 the English soldiers, led by Richard, duke of Gloucester, along with Albany, marched on Scotland. Like Arthur in the poem, the Scots under James III were greatly outnumbered: 20,000 Englishmen to the ‘small Berwick garrison of five hundred’ and the Scots ‘pitiful six hundred men scattered throughout the Marches in penny numbers’.122 James III’s failure of generosity to his brother (among others) and his weakness in gathering money for funding an army created a situation too appealing for Edward IV to turn down, even though the two countries were supposed to be at peace. Amytans’ words to Arthur about causing other kings to want to make war (‘For oft it makith vther kingis by / To wer on them In trast of victory’ [1534–5]) aptly apply to James III’s situation with Edward IV. And yet there is still hope for Arthur. He has asked Amytans to instruct him in the right attributes of kingship and agrees to do as Amytans tells him. Although this is not different from the French source, the Scottish poet once again provides an additional couplet to place more emphasis on Arthur’s ability to make amends for himself: ‘and ȝhit yow may In tym, / If yow lykith to amend the cryme’ (1394–5). Two hundred lines later, the Scottish author again adds this idea to the text when Amytans tells Arthur that God has given him a second chance ‘To se if that the lykith to amend, / And to prouid thi cuntre to defend’ (1594–5). In fact, the Scottish poet has adjusted his source at this point. In the French text Galiot’s messenger arrives after Amytans has finished speaking with Arthur,123 121 122 123

Macdougall, James III, p. 129. Macdougall, James III, p. 154. In the French text the counsellor has finished speaking to Arthur, who declares that he will follow the guidelines that he has been given (Lancelot do Lac, p. 292.34–6): ‘“Et ge lo creant,

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telling Arthur that Galiot is giving him one year to gather his men and become a more formidable adversary. Instead of waiting for the end of Amytans’ speech, the Scottish poet places the messenger’s arrival in the middle of the advice conversation. Amytans has shown Arthur his faults and Arthur asks how he can make amends. The messenger arrives with the announcement of a year’s truce. Amytans then continues his advice to Arthur, explaining what he must do. Although the French source could be seen to show a connection between Arthur’s willingness to change and his year’s grace, the Scottish poet’s changes to the placement of this scene in the text brings this connection to the forefront. This added emphasis also corresponds with the Scottish attitude toward amendment rather than destruction (deposition or death) of the king. In the context of the shift from the reign of James III to James IV, this ability to change can be seen to support the idea that the new regime need not repeat the mistakes of the old. James IV should not follow in his father’s footsteps and should make up for the selfishness that characterized his father. But Arthur (as well as James IV) cannot make these amends alone; he needs the help of his knights and counsellors, and he needs to listen to what they tell him, because he has not been doing that before Amytans’ arrival. For example, in the passage (above) when Arthur’s men advise him to delay to wait for reinforcement before fighting Galiot, Arthur ignores this advice and moves into the battle straight away. The text reinforces this idea as Arthur ‘by his awn conseil and entent’ (678) goes straight to the battle with only 7000 men (685) against Galiot’s reported 100,000 (650). To be a successful king, Arthur cannot ignore the advice of those around him, and he cannot make his decisions alone. Once again, the Scottish poet chooses to highlight this concept with an addition to the source. This time King Solomon is cited as an authority with the following proverb: ‘“Wo be to hyme that is byleft alone, / He haith no help”’ (1378–9). Because he has not accepted help from those around him, he will be left alone – a state symbolized in the dreams he has had earlier. His clerks have interpreted the dreams to mean that Arthur will be betrayed by ‘them the wich ye most affy in tyll’ (499; those in which you most put faith). The Scottish poet is quite adept at tying these strands together to show how Arthur’s faults will be the cause of his betrayal. By following Amytans’ advice, Arthur can turn the situation around, accepting help from those around him and no longer being alone.124

124

selonc Deu que ge lo ferai ensin comme vos m’avez comandé, se Dex a honor me done an ma terre retorner.”’ Lancelot of the Lake, p. 250: ‘“And I give my word by God that I shall do as you have bidden me, if God grants that I return to my land with honour.”’ Immediately after Arthur says these lines, the messengers arrive. By ‘alone’, I do not mean physical solitude but a more figurative isolation as Arthur continues to distance himself from those around him and take actions based on his own pleasures rather

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Amytans moves from highlighting Arthur’s faults to advising Arthur about what he should be doing as king. His first advice (in a section added by the Scottish poet) corresponds with the idea of Arthur needing help from those around him as Amytans shares with Arthur the qualities needed by administrators. Arthur is advised not to be blind in making his choice, as he will be blamed for any wrongs and ‘of Ignorans shalt yow nocht be excusit’ (1608). The qualities Amytans lists for the administrators include having discretion (1612), understanding both law and the land (1613), being ‘of mycht and ek Autoritee’ (1614), because people will offer contempt to those of low degree, and loving truth (1616–18). Arthur should beware of those who have avarice (1620), ‘of hyme full of hastyness and fyre’ (1621) and of those who ‘lowith no medyre’ (1623; moderation), because these men ‘subuertith all the low [law], / And makith It wnIustly to procede’ (1627–8). Amytans urges Arthur to watch over his administrators to make sure they are upholding the law and to punish those who do not, ‘So that yow be not in thar gilt accusit, / And frome the froit of blissit folk refusit’ (1642–3). One of the most important added passages is found shortly after this advice about administrators. In fact, this section of the manuscript begins with a rubricated initial, emphasizing its importance. In this passage, the poet mentions young kings and what should occur when they enter their majority: But kingis when thei ben of tender ag, Y wil not say I trast thei ben excusit, Bot schortly thei sall be sar accusit, When so thei cum to yheris of Resone, If thei tak not full contrisioune And pwnyss them that hath ther low mysgyit. That this is trouth it may not be denyit.  (1657–63)

This important passage is referenced in almost every article regarding this poem, generally in order to connect this passage to the minority of James III and the actions taken when he reached his majority;125 however, it seems a strange addition to the advice from Amytans to Arthur. Arthur is well past the point of his majority in this text and would not appear to need to be told of the action which should be taken upon reaching his majority. Why then would Amytans give this advice to Arthur? Arthur himself is not in need of this advice, but another king would be: James IV. The Scottish throne up to this point had had a string of kings who were crowned while still in their youth. James I was aged eleven when he was

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than the good of his people. A good king should not be isolated in this way from his people, especially those who counsel him. For example, Vogel, ‘Secular Politics’, pp. 6–7; Alexander, ‘Late Medieval Scottish Attitudes’, p. 26; Wurtele, ‘A Reappraisal’, p. 69.

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crowned (although he had the additional complication of imprisonment in England), James II was six years old, and James III was aged eight. During the minorities of these kings various family factions tried to take control of king and government; most notable were the Livingstons and Black Douglases during the reign of James II. In the 1440s the Livingston family rose to advancement, aligning themselves with the Black Douglases.126 Although their motives were not set out, it can be inferred that the Livingstons were ‘greedy for power’; by controlling the king, the family was able to direct both money and land to its members.127 On 16 October 1444, at the age of fourteen, James II was declared by the Livingstons to have reached his majority, even though they actually retained control over the king; this move on their part allowed them to hold the king in custody and gain power over other families.128 The fortune of the Livingstons changed drastically in 1449 when James II reached his actual majority; their fall occurred in September of that year, when two of the Livingstons were executed.129 The fall of the Black Douglases was soon to follow. In 1451, James II moved against the Black Douglases and was a party to the murder of Earl William at Stirling in February 1452.130 Although some were outraged at this murder, the king was not officially reprimanded. As Macdougall explains, ‘translating outrage into positive action against the Crown would take time, was an extremely perilous business, and was unlikely to attract a great deal of support’.131 In June, parliament was called and James II was cleared of murder. Instead, the parliament laid charges against the earl to justify his death: ‘he had made leagues and conspiracies with certain magnates against the crown and together with his brothers was the frequent author of rebellion’.132 By 1455, the Black Douglases had fallen. James II thus practised what Amytans advises here: he was swift of action to punish those who had overstepped their bounds during the period when he had not been able to control the government himself owing to his age. 126

127 128

129

130

131 132

The Black Douglases were an influential family with ‘extensive lands in the southwest’ and holdings in Moray and Ormond in the north. J. M. Brown, ‘The Exercise of Power’, in Scottish Society in the Fifteenth Century, ed. J. M. Brown (New York, 1977), pp. 33–65 (p. 48). Dickinson, Scotland from the Earliest Times, pp. 227–8. Scottish kings usually came into their majority anywhere from the age of seventeen to twentyone, so this declaration was premature on the part of the Livingstons, although it allowed them to gain more control. Macdougall suggests that the attack on the Livingstons was connected to the king’s marriage to Mary of Guildres, which caused a financial burden on the king. To help relieve that financial burden, the king was able to regain some of the lands held by the Livingstons, as well as to have a large debt released with the execution of one of them. Ostensibly, the murder occurred because Douglas refused ‘to break his bond with Alexander, earl of Crawford and John, Lord of the Isles’, but it was most probably an action based upon the king’s rage at this refusal; Brown, ‘The Exercise of Power’, p. 48. Dickinson, Scotland from the Earliest Times, p. 23. Dickinson, Scotland from the Earliest Times, p. 24.

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When James II was killed when the cannon he was standing beside exploded, another minority was set in place, since James III was only eight years old. During his minority, the Boyds of Kilmarock, ‘an old but modest family’, rose to power with the abduction of the young king on 9 July 1466, ending a ‘struggle between the Kennedy and Boyd factions at court for possession of the person of the king’.133 As a result, ‘Robert, Lord Boyd, was made governor of the king’s person and keeper of the fortresses of the kingdom until the king should reach the age of twentyone.’134 Lord Boyd’s power did not last even that long, as James III took power at the age of seventeen.135 While Thomas Boyd, Lord Boyd’s son, the earl of Arran, was sent to fetch James III’s bride, the king turned against the Boyds. Thomas and his wife fled to Denmark, and in November 1469 the Boyds were found guilty of treason and forfeited life, lands and goods. Shortly afterward, Charles the Bold of Burgundy asked for a pardon for Robert and Thomas Boyd, which James III refused, calling the Boyds traitors. In a letter written to Charles around 1471, James III described his abduction by the Boyds and wrote ‘that Robert and Thomas Boyd governed corruptly, consulting neither monarch nor estates’.136 Robert Boyd’s brother, Sir Alexander Boyd of Drumcoll, who had been a party to the king’s abduction, was beheaded for his treason, while Robert and Thomas Boyd managed to flee and never returned to Scotland. James III had certainly managed to follow Amytans’ injunction to ‘pwnyss them that hath ther low mysgyit’. Thus this piece of advice given to Arthur does not truly apply to Arthur’s circumstances in the poem, but is quite appropriate to the Scottish situation, especially when James IV came to the throne at the age of fifteen.137 Although his minority would not be as long as his father’s or grandfather’s, the injunction to gain firm control of those who might have been in power during the minority would have been an appropriate lesson for James IV. Indeed, those rebels who had supported him in 1488 ‘soon fell out among themselves, and the new king firmly nipped a new rebellion in the bud. He may have come to the throne as their creature but James IV was soon their master.’138 One fault referred to by many of the sixteenth-century chronicles is James III’s overfamiliarity with low-born favourites. Curiously, a line added to the Scottish poem connected to this topic stands out. In both the 133 134 135

136 137

138

Macdougall, James III, p. 70. Dickinson, Scotland from the Earliest Times, p. 236. One use of Lord Boyd’s position was to arrange a marriage between his son, Thomas, and Mary, sister of James III, thus denying the crown the ability to provide Mary with an advantageous marriage outside Scotland. Macdougall, James III, p. 79. Although the advice could have pertained to Arthur when he was gathering power after Uther’s death (in the longer version of the Arthurian story), this Arthur is more mature and no longer truly needs this advice. Dickinson, Scotland from the Earliest Times, p. 249.

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French and Scottish versions, Amytans tells Arthur to receive all men, rich and poor, and give them good cheer; however, the Scottish poet adds a line regarding the poor:139 ‘I say not to be our fameliar’ (1697). Flora Alexander notices this line, stating that the alteration ‘makes it highly relevant to James’ relationships with low-born favourites’.140 Here, we have a prime example of how this poem helps to develop the legend of James III. Alexander refers to sixteenth-century chronicles (Pitscottie and Leslie) for her assessment of James’ relationship with low-born men. In doing so, she has taken the exaggeration for truth. But tracing the actual relationships of James III through other evidence shows that he was not as inclined to favour the low-born as Pitscottie and Leslie (and Alexander) would have us believe. Although there is no doubt that James III had favourites among his men, the details from the sixteenth-century chronicles are out of alignment with other records. Macdougall examines several of those who were claimed by sixteenth-century chroniclers to be low-born favourites. He begins with David Guthrie, supposedly James III’s ‘familiar squire’, who was granted the barony of Guthrie in Forfarshire in 1471 and was made captain of the royal guard in 1473.141 Macdougall concludes that Guthrie’s well-known career was ‘certainly not that of a royal favourite pushed into undue prominence by the king’.142 William Scheves, originally a doctor interested in astrology who was labelled by chronicles as the ‘principal royal favorite of the ’70s’, was appointed as archbishop of St Andrews in 1478.143 Here, Macdougall finds that Scheves does fit the descriptions of a royal favourite in all but one particular: he was much too old to be the youthful, low-born favourite described by the chroniclers. Most importantly, when describing what happened at Lauder in 1482, the chronicles write that several of James’ supposed low-born favourites were hanged at that time. Three names are given – Thomas Preston, Thomas Cochrane and William Roger – and these men, especially Cochrane, were given ‘a notoriety which was probably wholly undeserved; and in fact, remarkably little is known about all three’.144 Tracing the scant evidence, Macdougall determines that ‘The truth would seem to be that Cochrane, Preston, and Roger had little or no influence on the king’s actions; that they may have been, respectively, an usher, a merchant burgess, and a 139

140 141 142 143 144

Lancelot do Lac, p. 287.19–22: ‘[S]i garde que te n’aies mie si chiere la conpaignie do haut home que tu ne t’en lieves et ailles seoir delez lo povre home et li anquier de son estre, si t’acointe de lui, et il de toi.’ Lancelot of the Lake, p. 243: ‘[B]e sure that the company of the noblemen is not so dear to you that you do not get up from among them and go and sit beside the poor man and inquire about his situation, and get to know him, and he you.’ Alexander, ‘Late Medieval Scottish Attitudes’, p. 27. Macdougall, James III, p. 99. Macdougall, James III, p. 100. Macdougall, James III, p. 102. Macdougall, James III, p. 163.

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musician’, and that they ‘were hanged at Lauder because they had the misfortune to be there, and in the king’s entourage’.145 Along with having low-born favourites, the sixteenth-century chronicles accuse James III of taking bad counsel from these familiars; for example, Abell writes that Mar was slain on the advice of Cochrane.146 The goal of these chronicles was to explain the Lauder crisis ‘as a conspiracy of a great multitude of lords with the single, and laudable, object of freeing the king from bad counsel and improving the governing of the realm’.147 In this way, the embarrassment of having an adult king kidnapped by his own people could be rewritten in more honourable terms. But, to make this set-up work, James III had to be shown as surrounded by these low-born favourites, when in reality there might not have been any. Thus, when the Lancelot of the Laik poet adds the line about not being overly familiar, he could have been reacting to the murmurings already being set up to explain what had happened at Lauder in a way that would not make the Scottish seem too dishonourable. The Scottish poem also adds commentary on the necessity for generosity: ‘And if he, wich shal eftir the succed, / By larges spend, of quhich that yhow had dreid, / He of the world comendit is and prisit, / And yow stant furth of euery thing dispisit’ (1801–4). Although the ideal of generosity is found within the French source, the above lines bring in a rather intriguing clue as to the contemporary reading of the poem. They mention the one who will succeed Arthur, saying that, if his successor is generous, Arthur (who has not been generous) will be despised while his successor will be praised. This situation ties directly into that of James III and IV. Because James III has not been generous with his wealth he has become despised by his people. James IV, the successor, can choose to go against the example of his father and be commended and praised for his generosity in the distributing of treasure. Following along with the theme of generosity is an added section advising Arthur not to take from his people: ‘The blessit tokyne of wysdom and prudens / Iss, in o king, for to restren his honde / Frome his pupleis Riches & ther lond’ (1904–6). This again appears to be a direct comment on James III, as he gathered wealth to himself rather than distributing it among his people. The best evidence for his hoarding of wealth is the treasure boxes found after his death. One black box ‘contained 4,340 gold “demis” – Scottish half-crowns – 428 golden Louis, and 566 French crowns’; another contained ‘3,988 angel nobles’.148 More recovered wealth include totals of 1,336 rose nobles, 500 half rose nobles, 1,307 angel nobles, 357 half-crowns and 1,084 Henry nobles, as well as 145 146 147 148

Macdougall, James Macdougall, James Macdougall, James Macdougall, James

III, III, III, III,

p. p. p. p.

165. 130. 162. 254.

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other ‘French gold coins in large numbers’.149 On the field of the battle of Sauchieburn, one box that held £4,000 in gold coins was found. The royal treasury was found to hold £24,517 and 10 shillings, much more money than James III’s constant appeals to parliament would have us believe the Crown retained. James III had obviously been able to amass quite a sum of money over the years (presumably by the selling of remissions), holding onto it rather than distributing it among his people as he should have done to show his generosity. An even more important addition made by the Scottish poet is an exemplum of Alexander. In this short description Alexander emerges as a flower of chivalry who won the world through his generosity – in many cases, he did not even have to fight to conquer a town: Wharfor of hyme so passith the Renown, That many o cetee, and many o strang town, Of his worschip that herith the Recorde, Dissirith so to haveing sich o lorde, And offerith them with-outen strok of spere, Suppos that thei war manly men of were, But only for his gentilless that thei Have hard; and so he louit was al-way. (1839–46)

One of the reprimands Arthur has received is that he has lost the love of his people through his avarice. Here in Alexander we find a king who gains the love of his people through the opposite, his generosity. Galiot, too, has been a successful conquerer, as well as one praised for his generosity. The obvious lesson here is that generosity results in success and the love of one’s people. The poet continues to drive the point that a generous king will be successful at conquering new lands, while an ungenerous king will be ‘broght doun from ful hie estat’ (1859) with his lands ‘maid ful desolat & barre’ (1858). Another additional section discusses flattery, of which a king should beware. Amytans claims that flattery is a natural development of life at court, but that ‘the vertuouss man no thing thar-of resauith’ (1921) because the flatterers deceive the king and cover over his vices and faults so that he cannot make amends (1923–6). Through his work, a flatterer ‘the law and puple boith distroyith’ (1930). Amytans tells Arthur to watch out for three reasons flattery comes to a king: the king’s ignorance, the king’s own evil or the king’s silence. First, the king needs to be able to recognize flattery and realize that when he hears something that is ‘best to his plesans’ (1937) he should not automatically trust it. The king who himself is evil wants to be surrounded by those like himself so that his vices can go unchecked. Amytans seems to place the worst censure on the 149

Macdougall, James III, p. 254.

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third type of king, the one who knows what is going on but does nothing to stop it. Amytans asks: ‘Whi schuld he spare, or quhom of schuld he dred / To say the treuth, as he of Right is hold?’ (1952–3). Here we return to the heart of the matter given to us in the prologue – telling the truth if it is unpalatable can be dangerous in a court where flattery abounds. In the prologue, the narrator is told to tell the truth and is chastised for keeping quiet. But in order to tell the truth he needs to be in a court which is receptive of that truth. By retaining flatterers the king prevents this type of court, keeping away those who would tell him the truth and not doing his duty as king. Instead, Amytans advises, the king needs to punish those who dissemble so ‘that no trespass, that cummyth in his way, / Shuld pass his hond wne-pwnist away’ (1963–4). In addition, the king should see that ‘no good deid in to the samyn degree, / Nore no wertew suld wn-Reuardid bee’ (1965–6). Although flattery might not at first seem relevant to James III, a closer examination of events near the beginning of his reign illuminates the connection. In the early 1470s he made continual plans to travel to the continent and acquire land such as the duchy of Gueldres (which he believed was owed to Scotland by rights of his mother, Mary of Gueldres) for Scotland. Again and again parliament had to squash his plans. To counteract his continental schemes parliament diverted his attention by suggesting that he acquire the desired lands by means other than war, notably by winning the goodwill of Louis XI and Charles of Burgundy by acting as a mediator between the two. An additional suggestion was provided for James III to travel throughout Scotland on justice ayres, which would bring his fame to other countries.150 The estates used this means because it flattered James that ‘through following the estates’ advice [he] “mycht be grace of God be callit to gretare thingis than is yit expremit”’, even possibly to the point of being elected emperor.151 This strategy, which relied on building up James III’s imperial aspirations, was successful in keeping him from fighting on the continent. These aspirations were apparent beginning with an act in 1469, when James III began his majority, in which he ‘claimed “ful jurisdictioune and fre impire within his realme,” including the right to create notaries public, formerly appointed only by the pope or the emperor’.152 Three years later, in 1472, another act decreed that ‘the royal arms of Scotland were no longer to bear the fleurs de lys which might suggest, in heraldic terms, a subordinate relationship to the Crown of France’.153 These earlier ambitions 150 151 152 153

Justice ayres were used for an official of the realm (or the king himself) to travel throughout the country, hear complaints and dispense a verdict in each case. Macdougall, James III, p. 254. In 1449, James III’s aunt, Eleanor, had married Duke Sigismund, who later became Archduke of Austria and then emperor. Macdougall, James III, p. 98. Macdougall, James III, p. 98.

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were clearly not only a product of James III’s youth as, in 1485, when new silver coinage was minted, ‘James III’s portrait would show him to be wearing an imperial crown rather than a coronet.’154 Although the flattery about these imperial aspirations led to a temporary success each time parliament used them, ultimately parliament should not have built up James III’s ego and aspirations, as they had a great effect on his decisions. Perhaps if the estates had deflated these ambitions early on rather than inflating them, the king would have reacted differently. Amytans is therefore quite right in criticizing the king who embraces flattery (as James III did) rather than turning away from it. Additionally, flattery ties into the accusation of James III taking advice from low-born favourites, who were said to gain their favours by flattering the king. Although, as explained above, this idea of low-born favourites does not appear to have actually been a part of James III’s faults, the Scottish poet could be using the advice regarding flattery here to provoke these accusations, which was later the most attested fault of James III. Doing so again brings this poem into the context of participating in the start of creating the legend of James III. With all of this advice in mind, Arthur promises Amytans that he will change. And although he does show signs of change in the French source, the Scottish poet makes these changes even more apparent by adding some additional lines to his poem. One couplet focuses on Arthur’s gaining of the love of his people: ‘So discretly his puple he haith cherit, / That he thar hartis holy haith conquerit’ (2155–6). The love of his people, which he had lost through his avarice, has returned, and Arthur starts to find success. An even more solid demonstration of Arthur’s change is another section which starts off with Arthur keeping ‘the lore of maister amytans / In ryghtwysnes, In festing and larges’ (2444–5). Arthur now gives out rewards and holds feasts throughout the year (2447–9), and his reputation spreads throughout the land. He has earned the love, support and loyalty of his people and cares only for these qualities: ‘Thus hath the king non vthir besynes / Bot cherising of knychtis and largess’ (2465–6). This added section, right at the end of Book II, allows the reader to see how quickly Arthur is able to gain the trust of his people merely by following the advice of Amytans. Thus, if the king were to follow Arthur’s example, his results could also be realized just as quickly. Unfortunately James III was killed before he could put any of this advice into practice, but his son had the time to do so. For example, shortly after his coronation James IV rode on a justice ayre, which he continued to do frequently throughout his reign. He would practice justice and not grant remissions as his father had done. He was also in a better position to negotiate for peace with England, as he did not 154

Macdougall, James III, p. 98.

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allow himself to follow in his father’s footsteps of ‘pressing for peace at almost any price’.155 Macdougall writes: ‘In sharp contrast to his father, [James IV] knew how to distribute patronage with an even hand, he found ways of raising large sums of money for the Crown without unduly alienating his lieges, and – most important of all – he understood the need to travel regularly from end to end of his kingdom’.156 In the remainder of the extant poem Arthur prepares once more to fight against Galiot. Although the poem ends before the conflict is resolved, Arthur will be successful, as he is in the French source. Arthur’s success is a result of Lancelot choosing to be on his side and convincing Galiot to make peace with Arthur. Although Lancelot has a connection to Arthur (because Arthur knighted him), he also feels drawn toward Galiot.157 The Scottish poet makes it clear that Arthur needs Lancelot to be successful; in another added passage, the poet says that without the Red Knight (Lancelot), Arthur’s men would be ‘in perell and in dreid’ (1113). But Arthur is not guaranteed Lancelot’s support, and he worries that this knight will choose to go to Galiot’s side. The Scottish poet again and again emphasizes Arthur’s despair that this knight might decide to fight with Galiot instead. Galiot has boasted that he will win the knight to his side, and a worried Arthur begs Amytans to tell him if Galiot will be successful (2133–8). Arthur sends Gawain along with forty knights to seek out the Red Knight (2212–13). When Lancelot does clearly choose Arthur (which comes after the passage where the Scottish poet makes it clear that Arthur has started to follow the advice of Amytans), the reader is given one more piece of evidence to show how Arthur has changed and become successful by following the advice of his mentor. There is hope for Arthur and thus for Scotland. Viewing Lancelot of the Laik in light of the development of the James III legend allows us to have a better understanding of this often neglected Scottish poem. The first obstacle this view overcomes is that of the dating of the poem. By offering some of the early evidence for the development of the James III legend, a date of 1488–90 makes the most sense. As the new king James IV came to the throne, questions surrounding his father’s death were circulating. Although a king had been killed before, it was not an experience relished by the Scottish people and an explanation was needed. By focusing on James III’s faults, and even exaggerating them, the people could reconcile a situation similar to a deposition with their own views on kingship, which precluded depositions. Arthur is thus used in two ways in this poem. First, his faults are enumerated in such a way that close comparison to James III reveals 155 156 157

Macdougall, James IV, p. 57. Macdougall, James IV, p. 310. In the French version, Lancelot and Galiot become good friends and spend much time together after the fighting has been settled.

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the negative commentary on that king. Additionally, James III is seen as more of a villain than his actual actions support. Second, hope is renewed through Arthur’s change, hope that is transferred to James IV as the continuation of his father’s line. When the new king is compared with the exaggerated negative example of Arthur, James IV’s reign is able to look brighter, even if he actually had turned out to be a poor king. James IV’s reign was indeed bright – a time when chivalry and literature thrived – although it was somewhat overshadowed by his death in the fields of Flodden.158 As the sixteenth century progressed the legend of James III as a bad king spread from hints found in literary texts to outright condemnation in chronicles at the end of the century. Based upon the discussion in this essay, Lancelot of the Laik should be considered within this developing myth, allowing us to appreciate this poet who took a simple romance about Lancelot and created an entirely appropriate political commentary. As such, it is a perfect example of how the figure of Arthur could be and was used in the Middle Ages for specific political commentary. Because of the section featuring Amytans, this text can also be placed directly into the mirrors for princes genre. The combination of these elements provides us with a clearer focus by which to examine other Arthurian texts that are not as obviously used as mirrors for princes or political commentary.

158

Although Scotland and England had formed another alliance, supported in part by James IV’s marriage to Margaret Tudor, that marriage produced a great deal of tension as James IV put forward his own children by Margaret as potential successors to the English throne against Henry VIII. Henry VIII demanded that he be made overlord of Scotland. James also desired to gain honour by becoming part of a crusade, which he needed the support of the French king to do. He therefore planned to invade England in support of France. In September 1513, in the field of Flodden, with evenly matched armies, James IV did not take the advice of his men, nor did he offer strong direction to his troops (he tried to use strategies that would not work for the terrain). He took to the field and when the battle was finished his body was discovered ‘struck by an arrow and gashed by a halberd’ (Macdougall, James IV, p. 275).

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Prince Arthur’s Archers: Innovative Nostalgia in Early Modern Popular Chivalry Kenneth Hodges The popular reception of King Arthur in the early modern period did not depend solely on texts. While Edmund Spenser ensured that King Arthur would play a role in early modern England’s literary high culture even as historians debated his historicity, there is evidence that Arthur remained important more popularly, not just as entertainment but as a way of expressing the martial and social aspirations of a broad class of society. Prince Arthur’s Archers, a group of London archers who assumed Arthurian identities, flourished. The ease with which they adapted Arthurian materials for their own use shows the continued vitality of chivalry outside its traditional social class. The participation of non-aristocratic townsmen in military culture, their roles mediated by ideas of the Round Table, shows that urban audiences could approach the Arthurian legend not as appreciative outsiders but as people with a stake in chivalric tradition. Yet Prince Arthur’s Archers are largely forgotten. If Shakespeare’s Justice Shallow had not referred to them in Henry IV Part 2 (III.ii.257), and if Spenser’s schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster had not been a member, their obscurity might be even more complete. In 1930, when Charles Millican wrote an intriguing paper on the possible influence that Mulcaster and Prince Arthur’s Archers might have had on the young Spenser, he had no ready way to account for their enthusiastic engagement with the tradition: ‘the Elizabethan interest in the Arthurian legend is part of a primitivistic movement which does have its ludicrous side, nevertheless this ludicrousness comes not from the fact that there was a revival of interest in the Arthurian legend. The ludicrousness comes … from the interests of the tradespeople.’1 But the interest of the tradesmen may not be ludicrous after all; instead, it may signal changes to chivalry that have been overlooked or misunderstood. Chivalry was moving beyond the 1

C. B. Millican, ‘Spenser and the Arthurian Legend’, The Review of English Studies 6.22 (1930), 167–74 (p. 173).

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strictly aristocratic. Prince Arthur’s Archers provide evidence of the way in which non-aristocratic men adapted chivalric values to understand their own roles in martial culture and to express their ambitions. In turn, this suggests that early modern reception of Arthurian literature may have been shaped by audience identification with knightly characters. Modern scholars may not be as openly dismissive of the tradesmen as Millican, but the assumption that chivalry rightly belongs to the aristocrats remains. Yet this medieval assumption may not fit early modern practice: as militaries changed and expanded the roles of commoners, chivalry as a military code changed with it. Londoners participated in this expanded martial culture. Some of it was in play, as in the ‘jousting’ on the river, in boats during the Easter holidays, on skates in the winter.2 Some of it was serious, since Elizabeth regularly levied men from the parishes and the livery companies.3 Some of it was mixed. Archery was considered, at least by conservatives, as necessary for the defence of the realm, and possession of bows and regular practice was required. London archers organized themselves into companies, some with playful names. In addition to Prince Arthur’s Archers, there was the duke of Shoreditch and his men; the name came originally from a joke of Henry VIII, who named the winner of an archery contest, a man from Shoreditch named Barlo, the duke of Shoreditch, a title passed down to the best archer for several generations.4 Richard Robinson, scribe, translator and pikeman in the Farrington Without regiment of London, was interested in Prince Arthur’s Archers.5 In 1582 he published an English translation of John Leland’s 1544 Assertio Inclytissimi Arturii Regis Britanniae, a response to Polydore Vergil’s doubts about Arthur’s historicity. Robinson’s Learned and True Assertion of the Original, Life, Actes, and Death of the Most Noble, Valiant, and Renoumed Prince Arthure, King of Greate Brittaine was dedicated not only to Lord Grey and Sir Henry Sidney but also to the Londoner Thomas Smith and the company of Prince Arthur’s Archers (in whose ranks Smith played King Arthur). Thomas Smith (or Smythe) was a respected figure in London, close to William Cecil and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and he marched as captain of three hundred armed men in the funeral procession of Sir Philip Sydney.6 The inclusion of the archers is a reminder that Polydore Vergil’s challenge to King Arthur’s 2 3 4

5 6

J. Stow, Survey of London (London, 1965), p. 85. L. Picard, Elizabeth’s London: Everyday Life in Elizabethan London (London, 2003), p. 238. H. Wheatley, London Past and Present: Its History, Associations, and Traditions (London and New York, 1891), p. 244. Digitized by Google (http://books.google.com/), accessed 27 February 2010. R. C. L. Sgroi, ‘Robinson, Richard (1544/5–1603)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/23866 (accessed 27 Feb 2010).

Brian Dietz, ‘Smythe, Thomas (1522–1591)’, rev. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/

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historicity threatened not only wishful English historiography but also broader popular habits of self-imagining. Arthur could provide both a model of empire for English ambitions in Ireland (as Spenser’s Faerie Queene does) and a structure for urban ceremony. Robinson’s yoking of the two shows that he did not perceive these uses as fundamentally unlike. The next year, Robinson published another work especially for Smith and Prince Arthur’s Archers entitled The Auncient Order, Societie, and Unitie Laudable, of Prince Arthure, and his Knightly Armory of the Round Table. This work is split between a discussion of Arthurian heraldry, with little verse descriptions of 58 knights’ arms, and three histories of archery, one biblical, one classical, one English. This latter work in particular offers insight into the extent to which older chivalric forms had been adapted by urban early modern Englishmen as ways of understanding themselves in their changing world. This could happen because, as technology changed, more and more men were fighting and thus becoming involved in potentially chivalric situations. Chivalry’s fundamental starting point was not class but valour. Peter Coss writes: Although chivalry’s essential social role was to validate an élite, the ultimate raison d’être of the chivalric knight was to fight. The consequences of the ideology that underpinned their privileged station in the world were inescapable … [and] affected not only the knights but society as a whole.… [Mercenaries] were able to draw upon the ideology of and around chivalry to validate their actions.… But the problem was wider even than that. ‘We poor soldiers’, wrote Jean de Bueil, ‘are for the most part noble by birth, and those who are not are noble by the exercise of arms, for the métier of arms is noble in itself.’ This apparently prevalent idea was to cause consternation in England in the years after the great victory at Agincourt when ignobly born men-at-arms were claiming the right to coats of arms as a consequence of their participation in Henry V’s war. Here the chivalric ideology of the nobility was being used against itself.7

The archers who, after Agincourt, considered themselves to have chivalric status helped create the later social understanding of the Londoners who participated in Prince Arthur’s Archers. They considered themselves as part of a larger martial, chivalric enterprise. For the English, archery in particular provided common ground. Giovanni Michiel reported to the Venetian Senate in 1557 that archery was favoured ‘by all sorts of persons without distinction of grade, age, or profession, that it exceeds all belief’.8

7 8

article/37986, accessed 7 Aug 2010] and Thomas Lant, Seguitur celebritas & pompa funeris (London, 1588), 24 (STC 15224).

P. Coss, The Knight in Medieval England 1000–1400 (Conshohocken, PA, 1996, originally printed Stroud, 1993), pp. 111–12. Quoted in Col. H. Walrond, ‘The Decadence of Archery’, in Longman and Walrond’s Archery (London, 1894), p. 156.

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This popular participation in martial culture affects our assumptions about the audience not just for tournaments but also literary traditions, including the Arthurian legend. William Caxton certainly appreciated that, by the end of the fifteenth century, the market for chivalric texts extended beyond the aristocratic. His prologue to the Morte Darthur directs it ‘vnto alle noble prynces, lordes and ladyes, gentylmen or gentylwymmen’.9 In the epilogue to his translation of Christine de Pizan’s Book of Fayttes of Armes and of Chyvalrye, he reports that King Henry VII asked him ‘to put it in emprynte to thende that euery gentylman born to armes & all manere men of werre captains / souldiours / vytayllers & all other shold haue knowledge how they ought to behaue theym in the fayttes of warre’.10 Printing a book of chivalry so that even the victuallers can read it gives a sense of how broad the martial community was becoming: chivalry was ceasing to be the exclusive code of the military and political elite. The expansion of interest does not mean, perversely, that chivalry was dying. Although changes in the practice of warfare and military/political organization are clear, tournaments, romances and other forms of martial display continued without significant interruption well into the early modern period. The continuation, however, is usually understood as empty nostalgia. James Bulman’s dismissal is typical: Nostalgia for chivalric ideals led paradoxically to a cult of medievalism in Elizabeth’s court, though the chivalry practised there was more political and symbolic than real: tournaments and pageants appropriated only the forms of a bygone culture, not its ethos.11

This sets the ‘real’ in opposition to the ‘political and symbolic,’ raising the question of why this is less real than older forms of chivalry. Chivalry was always political and symbolic as well as military. Assuming that chivalry was the nostalgic cult of a bygone age is not a mistake Johan Huizinga made. Dismissive though he was of the realities of medieval chivalry, he saw in its ideals the roots of the Renaissance: the knight’s quest for individual honour and enduring renown morphed into early modern’s humanist’s desire for fame, and the habit of imitating great men of the past easily extended into the adopting of classical models.12 By recognizing the similarity between chivalric and humanist imitation, he 9 10 11 12

Sir Thomas Malory, Caxton’s Malory, ed. J. Spisak and W. Matthews, 2 vols. (Berkeley, CA, 1983), p. 3. Christine de Pizan, The Book of Fayttes of Armes and of Chyvalrye, ed. A. T. P. Byles, EETS OS 189 (London, 1932; rpr. New York, 1971), p. 291. J. Bulman, ‘Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays, ed. M. Hattaway (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 158–76 (p. 159). J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, trans. F. Hopman (New York, 1989; originally printed New York, 1949), pp. 69–77.

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shows how ‘nostalgia’ did not need to be empty or conservative, but was a potent force for establishing ideals new to a society and encouraging transformation. Michael Nerlich likewise shows how the language of chivalry could be co-opted to support new economic structures, as capitalism adapted romances to celebrate the exploits of merchant-adventurers.13 Richard McCoy tracks politically powerful invocations of chivalric conventions by powerful individuals under Elizabeth,14 but his analysis can be extended beyond the charmed circle of the court. Helen Cooper and others have shown the continuing power of romance (and its models of chivalry) in the early modern period.15 Chivalry, in short, remained socially potent through the sixteenth century. To appreciate fully how chivalry worked in the rapidly altering society of early modern England it is necessary to offer a more flexible definition of chivalry, one that can recognize that an institution endures even as it changes. One important function of chivalry – I am tempted to say the primary function – was to assign social meaning to the performance of violence. It interprets what is done into categories such as glorious, or necessary, or shameful. The familiar medieval chivalric definition (the code of elite European horsemen emphasizing principles of loyalty, courtesy, bravery and prowess) is one way of interpreting physical action, for these principles were in a reciprocal relation to violence – successful violence (such as winning a trial by combat) was interpreted as evidence of nobility and righteousness, and when violence was done by noblemen the presumption was that it was in a good cause unless there were strong reasons for interpreting it otherwise. The familiar definition of chivalry, however, is static, listing unchanging principles and characteristics. It is certainly useful for synchronic work in the high Middle Ages. However, chivalry did evolve as social structures changed. Class should not be considered an essential and unvarying aspect of chivalry, but as something that could change as ways of assigning social meaning to violence changed. In the early modern period archery and guns altered forms of violence, and the changes in society made people rethink the balance between loyalties to individuals and the state, between common military service and the aristocracy. These changes, however, made a system for interpreting violent action into social terms more necessary rather than less. It 13 14 15

M. Nerlich, Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, 1100–1750, trans. R. Crowley with an introduction by W. Godzich, 2 vols. (Minneapolis, MN, 1987). R. McCoy, Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley, CA, 1989). See, for instance, H. Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford, 2004); A. Davis, Chivalry and Romance (Cambridge, 2003); L. H. Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (New York, 2002); Early Modern Prose Fiction: the Cultural Politics of Reading, ed. N. C. Liebler (New York, 2007).

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should not be surprising that the Tudors sponsored so many tournaments, or that fencers and archers tried to claim parts of the chivalric tradition for themselves, trying to maintain the connection between martial action and social status even while trying to ease the restrictiveness that had made chivalry in common practice the realm of the aristocracy. Recognizing that chivalry evolved to the point where commoners perceived themselves as members of the larger chivalric enterprise means that we should adjust our assumption about the relation of popular audiences to chivalric texts and performances. Too often, their separation from the material is what is emphasized. For instance, Louise Olga Fradenburg’s generally insightful analysis of tournaments argues that a passive, feminine or feminized audience was meant to mirror back to the knight his own superiority and noble masculinity through their difference.16 Sir Philip Sidney, however, suggests that the mirroring often went the other way. In sonnet 41 of Astrophil and Stella he describes spectators as seeking to identify with him by finding in his performance those virtues they believe themselves to possess: Horsemen my skill in horsemanship advance; Town-folks my strength; a daintier judge applies His praise to sleight, which from good use doth rise; Some lucky wits impute it but to chance.17

While the audience is ultimately wrong, not knowing his inspiration comes from Stella, he serves as a mirror in which the audience can find evidence of their own worth, with the ‘Town-folks’, Londoners who regularly fought on foot, praising his strength instead of his horsemanship. Instead of tournaments being a theatre of difference, in which knights are everything the commoners are not, they celebrate similarity, in which the knights exemplify audience ideals. The popular response is not the fantasy of idle identification, nor the allegory of abstract, general virtues such as discipline or bravery. Instead, it is the appreciation of those who consider themselves participants in martial culture for a performance of what they value. Tournaments were part of a spectrum of martial performance, including the prize fights of the urban Masters of Defence, wrestling contests and archery competitions, that was part of a broad martial culture. Looked at in this way, chivalry is far more dynamic than we have tended to assume: as societies and values changed, chivalry naturally changed too to keep its interpretive function. The dynamism of chivalry tends to be overlooked, however, because chivalry itself regularly looked 16 17

See L. O. Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (Madison, WI, 1991), pp. 206–24. Sir Philip Sidney: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. K. Duncan-Jones (Oxford, 1989), lines 5–8.

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to the past to justify itself. Precedents and histories taught the ways to interpret martial action. Of course, the earlier stories did not need to be real, and early chivalric authors from Geoffrey of Monmouth (with his long-vanished King Arthur) to Chrétien de Troyes deployed a thoroughly artificial nostalgia to teach new codes of behaviour. Later authors, from Ramon Lull to Geoffroi de Charny and Sir Thomas Malory, maintained the same nostalgic tone while cheerfully incorporating innovations in knightly practice. Finding the same nostalgic tone in the early modern period is no surprise. Suddenly taking it seriously, however, as evidence that chivalry did die, and using it to postulate a great discontinuity in the tradition, is an invitation to misread the period. As Alex Davis writes, ‘Drawn in by romances’ assertions of their own antiquity, we may be too ready to attribute to them a genuine obsolescence.’18 The distinction between strategic nostalgia and genuine obsolescence is clear in Robinson’s work. The Auncient Order, Societie, and Unitie Laudable, of Prince Arthur, and his Knightly Armory of the Round Table celebrates the London society of Prince Arthur’s Archers, making clear the extent to which chivalry was not just the stuff of fiction but contemporary practice. After the dedicatory epistle, the opening poem (a commendation by Thomas Churchyard) is not about King Arthur or about heraldry. It is about the competition between bows and guns in the English army. The nostalgic tone is familiar from other chivalric laments, but the concerns are modern: For murthering shot came in of late, when Bovv in honor stood, In elders daies when manhode shone, as bright as blasing starre, And christian hart and noble mind, disdaind this turkish warre. The Bow was vsed as force of m[an], & str[en]gth of arms might draw To glad the frend and daunt the foe, and hold the world in awe. But wh[en] that str[en]gth and courage fail’d, and c[un]ning crept in place The shot and roring Canon came, stout people to deface.19

The nostalgia, of course, is particularly appropriate for Arthurian material. Instead of Arthur being merely the historical figure evoked to give credit to modern practices, archery and Arthur share an uncomfortable tinge of the past. But archery too may come again. Churchyard hopes The Bow shall come againe in fame, and win his wonted grace: … til then come Bow in place, And take thine Ancient, rowme & vse, as Arthures Knights thee gaue, Thou art a fearfull foe in field, and yet a pastime braue.

18 19

Davis, Chivalry and Romance, p. 3. The Avncient Order, Societie, and Unitie Laudable, of Prince Arthure, and his Knightly Armory of the Round Table (London, 1583), unnumbered prefatory material.

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The recent innovations that allowed archery and archers to claim to be a part of the chivalric enterprise are easily transmuted into the kind of admonitory nostalgia familiar from Chrétien de Troyes onward. While the anxiety in the face of firearms’ growing efficacy may have been genuine, it suggests that chivalry itself could prove fairly robust in the face of change, with its nostalgic conventions adapting easily to a succession of circumstances. The ‘Arthur’ invoked as the authority for archery is both King Arthur and Prince Arthur, Henry VII’s son. Henry VII was a supporter of archery, and both his sons were very good at it. Prince Arthur’s Archers, the group that Robinson would later write his works for, started as companions of Henry VIII’s brother Arthur, and, after his brother died, Henry gave Londoners the right to continue the tradition, choosing an ‘Arthur’ for themselves and giving a demonstration once a year. Henry VIII mixed archery with grand chivalric affairs such as the Field of Cloth of Gold, was an excellent archer himself and had several court entertainments including Robin Hood. Indeed, the first surviving Robin Hood materials come from the reign of Henry VII, and they played a crucial role in rewriting chivalric conventions to include yeoman archers. The English longbow had restructured English armies and helped expand the military class, letting yeomen consort with knights to the extent that they began to take on chivalric customs and a few became knights; English knights also began to be archers. It was also an iconic weapon for Englishness, differentiating English armies from continental ones. It was in many ways an opening-up of the chivalric world to those who were not knights. Tudor interest helped the new dynasty celebrate new heroes in old frameworks. As archery adopted chivalric motifs, and as English knights adapted to the importance of the bow, the social status of archery rose. Instead of being a popular challenge to chivalric hierarchy, there were efforts to incorporate it into the chivalric class.20 The Robin Hood legends in the sixteenth century reflect this, with Robin being granted increasing status, from yeoman to the Earl of Huntington. Archery’s social status was elevated in other ways, too. Roger Ascham, more concerned with humanist than chivalric status, carefully gives the bow a learned pedigree in his work Toxophilus. When Toxophilus’ interlocutor makes a reference to Robin Hood, he replies testily: Yet this I marvuell not a litle at, that ye thinke a man with a bowe on hys backe is more like Robin Hoode seruaunt, than Apollose, seing that Apollo him selfe in Alcestis of Euripides … in a maner glorieth saying this verse.

20

M. Strickland and R. Hardy, The Great Warbow: From Hastings to the Mary Rose (Stroud, 2005), pp. 391–3. Although cautious about the social respectability of archery, Jim Bradbury provides evidence of it in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period in The Medieval Archer (Woodbridge, 1985), esp. pp. 168–79.

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It is my wont always my bowe with me to beare. Therefore a learned man ought not to much to be ashamed to beare that some tyme, which Apollo god of lerning him selfe was not ashamed always to beare.21

Yet, while defending the dignity of the bow, he also celebrated the openness of shooting to people from all walks of life in Toxophilus. Ascham is no friend to chivalric romance, which he tended to consider tyrannical and papist,22 and he is using archery to counter it: a martial practice which is more democratic, distinctively English, and, he is at pains to argue, reassuringly classical. Robin Hood, a more medieval and less classical hero, offers a less humanist vision of English archery who must be pertly dismissed. Ascham, of course, was not successful in claiming archery away from Robin Hood, and as time went on Robin Hood stories began inventing more aristocratic backgrounds for the hero, showing that archery was successfully claiming part of the chivalric legacy.For Robinson, Arthur was a way to root archery in the medieval past of chivalric romance without the problematic lower-class associations of Robin Hood, the yeoman outlaw. Robinson admits he knew Ascham’s Toxophilus,23 and his works show he made use of it, but in his translation of Leland and then in his treatise for Prince Arthur’s Archers, he associates archery directly with Arthurian tradition. After praising Henry VIII as guardian and expert exemplar of chivalry, he argues that Henry’s patent for Prince Arthur’s archers grows out of the deepest and highest respect for the history of English chivalry: Bycause his elder brother being named Arthure, he him selfe a most christian King for all heroicall vertues commendable, the rather seemed to fauour and further the aduancement of the fame of his most renoumed auncester this same our ancient Arthure and the knightly traine of his rounde table. Hereupon by patent of his princely perogatiue ordained, graunted, and confirmed hee vnto this honorable Citie of London, free electi[on] of a Chieftaine and of Citizens representing the memory of that magnificent Kinge Arthure, and the Knightes of the same order, which should for the maintenance of shootinge onely, meete together once a yeare, with solemne and friendly celebration thereof. So much in his noble minde preuayled all prouident care of princely prowesse, valiancie, cheualrie, and activitie, that he not onely herein imitated the exemplars of godly K. Dauid for his Israelites as before, and that noble Emperour Leo in overthrowing idolatrie, and exalting archerie maugre the malice of that Romane Antichrist, and all

21 22 23

Toxophilus, ed. P. Medine (Tempe, AZ, 2002), p. 59. The Schoolmaster, ed. L. Ryan (Ithaca, NY, 1967), pp. 68–9. John Leland, A Learned and True Assertion of the Original, Life, Actes, and Death of the Most Noble, Valiant, and Renoumed Prince Arthure, King of Greate Britaine, ed. and trans. R. Robinson (London, 1582), A3v.

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his members: but also inuincible maintained the praiseworthie practize of this shooting in peace & wars by the examples of his princely progenitors.24

Thus old English tradition, religious purity, Tudor authority, Arthur’s majesty and archery all combine to represent a chivalry authorized and celebrated by King Henry VIII himself. The invocation of the ‘Romane Antichrist’ is a reminder of what is at stake: he perceived archery as vital to the defence of the realm. The longbow’s distinctive Englishness was a secular marker of England’s difference from continental Catholic powers. By Elizabeth’s time, of course, archery was not a new part of the army’s repertoire or of the social hierarchy of arms – it was an old staple, and threatened itself by a new rising star, the firearm. A trained archer was arguably far better than a trained gunner – he could shoot substantially faster, further and more accurately, although he had to expose himself to enemy fire to shoot and the supply of arrows could be difficult. But good archers were hard to find and expensive to maintain, and Elizabeth, who knew very well wars are fought with money, appreciated the potential of guns.25 Archery, therefore, was in danger on the modern front even as it tried to penetrate the older traditions of chivalry. The nostalgic tone in Elizabethan archery was in response to a very real threat, and it fitted in easily with the tone of the perpetual laments over the decline of knighthood. The debate continued into the 1590s. Sir John Smythe wrote a defence of archery in 1590, praising loyalty to old traditions of military science, especially archery (showing that support of archery was not simply the province of the non-knightly); but other soldiers, such as Humfrey Barwick and Barnabe Rich, effectively countered him.26 Since the issue at hand was military, and since armies were centralizing, one important difference between early modern urban martial texts and some earlier forms of chivalric rhetoric was the emphasis on service to the state rather than simply the advancement of the individual. The oath of the Masters of Defence, the company that taught fencing, has masters swear loyalty first to the Christian church and then to Queen Elizabeth, and this supersedes other familiar chivalric duties. For instance, ‘you shalbe Mercifull, And Whearas you happen to have the vpper hande of your enimye … you shall not kill him … Excepte it be in the service of 24 25

26

Leland, A Learned and True Assertion, A4v. K. Chase, Firearms: A Global History to 1700 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 73–6; R. Hardy, Longbow: A Social and Military History (London, 1992), pp. 131–42; Strickland and Hardy, The Great Warbow, pp. 391–407. Smythe’s Certaine Discourses, Written by Sir John Smythe, Knight, Concerning the Forms and Effects of Diuers Sorts of Weapons (London, 1590) and Humfrey Barwick’s A Breefe Discourse Concerning the Force and Effect of All Manual Weapons of Fire (London, 1594) are reprinted in Bow versus Gun, ed. E. G. Heath (Wakefield, 1973) and available in Early English Books Online (EEBO), which also includes Barnabe Rich’s A Martial Conference Pleasantly Discoursed between Two Souldiers (London, 1598).

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the prince’.27 Robinson in his dedication praises classical leaders who instituted martial games in peace time to keep their people prepared for war. For Prince Arthur’s Archers, the emphasis was on collective service. Robinson’s title celebrates the ‘Unitie Laudable’ of the Round Table, and the title page has a verse excerpt from Psalms on the worth of amity. This may have been part of the institutional character of Prince Arthur’s Archers, for Mulcaster too praises them for their friendly fellowship in 1581.28 The first reason Robinson gives for King Arthur founding the Round Table is defence of the land, not individual honour (J2v). Of course, individual honour is not completely erased. The armorial section makes this visually plain: the arms of dozens of Arthurian knights are given, with their names underneath; the shields are bracketed by the initials of the Londoner who assumes each knight’s role, giving more prominence to the Arthurian persona. The exception, of course, is the dedicatee Thomas Smith, whose arms, underneath Elizabeth’s and beside King Arthur’s, lead off the section on armory (B1r). Mulcaster imagines the indignation of his fellows if he failed to give due honour to the fellowship.29 Apparently, too, archers could change personae. Mulcaster (1581) and Robinson (1583) identify Smith as King Arthur and Mulcaster says Sherriff Hugh Offly is Sir Launcelot, but by 1616 Richard Niccolls identifies him as King Arthur.30 Thus the static hierarchy of the Arthurian knights could track changes of status among the archers who personated them. Robinson’s book begins with a dedicatory letter to Thomas Smith (who played Prince Arthur) mixing classical and biblical references to prove the wisdom and holiness of martial exercise and games in peace time, seeking scripture to find praise for indissoluble bands of amity and finding the model for the Round Table in the Old Testament, before giving a brief history of the order, which he begins with Mortimer organizing a Round Table at Kenilworth for Edward I. That he sees Prince Arthur’s Archers as an outgrowth of Round Table tournaments may seem surprising to scholars used to strictly separating tournaments and archery displays, but it underscores that early modern chivalric conceptions were broadening so that organized martial sport with a tinge of fantasy could be seen as one genre. Robinson mixes English history with biblical and classical injunctions to practise arms in peace time. The goal is to establish the worthiness of the annual archery display for London, apparently, and he does 27 28 29 30

H. Berry, The Noble Science: A Study and Transcription of Sloane Ms. 2530, Paper of the Masters of Defence of London, Temp. Henry VIII to 1590 (Newark, 1991), pp. 89. Richard Mulcaster, Positions in the Training Up of Children, ed. W. Barker (Toronto, 1994), p. 108. Mulcaster, Positions in the Training Up of Children, pp. 108–9. Richard Niccolls, Londons Artillery, Briefly Containing the Noble Practise of that Wothie [sic] Societie (London, 1616), p. 88; Mulcaster, Positions in the Training Up of Children p. 108; Millican, ‘Spenser and the Arthurian Legend’, p. 170 n6.

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so by weaving together three strands of history: the biblical, the classical and the English. This historical mixture shows how crucial new ideas of chivalry were to developing ideas of nationalism: in the rehearsal of the bow’s pedigree, Robinson conjures up England as a Christian nation, heir to classical knowledge and product of its own long and fabulous history. Then there is a sudden shift away from archery to heraldry, based on La Deuise des armes des cheualiers de la table ronde.31 It begins with a brief history of heraldry, ascribing it to Alexander and seconded by Julius Caesar, who, desirous of knowing and praising the valour of their subjects, ordered devices to be painted on their shields that then became hereditary (A1v). It is a fairly common story, but the claim that Alexander and Caesar generally assigned the men in the army arms, and that the inheriting of arms followed, is convenient for Robinson because it helps him insist on the primacy of valour, with inherited rank following as a secondary consequence. Hereditary arms, moreover, are designed to encourage men to remember the past and imitate it. Thus inheritance is instituted ‘To the end, that in Remembring the foresaide valiancies, they should be the more enclined, and encouraged to ensew and Imitate the Noble exploites of their Auncetors, which haue gone before them’ (A1v). Imitating past glories is something that not only descendents can do, of course, and there is the sense that the brief heraldic primer is initiating its readers into a way of accessing heraldic records so they can know what deeds they might follow. This becomes explicit at the end of the brief primer, when Robinson says ‘Now, To the Armorie of Prince ARTHVRE and the KNIGHTS of his Round Table flourishing by the fame of Englishe Archery, at this daye. Ao 1583’ (A4v). The relation to the past is thus mutual: the archers profit from fuller knowledge of the deeds of Arthur and his knights, but also keep alive the fame of the knights. Furthermore, by inserting the date, Robinson suggests that the archers are taking their place in history to inspire those that come later. Publishing a book on the heraldry of Arthur’s knights would have made economic sense. Books on heraldry were popular in sixteenth-century England. The most successful, Gerard Legh’s Accedens of Armory, was printed in 1562, 1568, 1572, 1591 and 1597. Some small part of the audience may have been armigerous gentleman lax in their heraldry now called upon by heralds, who in their visitations were regularizing arms, making official genealogies and weeding out casual claims,32 but the larger part almost certainly was interested in the conventions of heraldry without having arms of their own. Other works drew on the interests in arms for related purposes, using blazons for allegorical or other purposes. Robin-

31 32

Millican, ‘Spenser and the Arthurian Legend’, p. 170. See, for instance, Davis, Chivalry and Romance, pp. 50 ff.

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son’s book, however, is targeted at a very specific audience of London archers, and the material surrounding the heraldry is more concerned with the ongoing debate over the value of archery in relation to guns than with knighthood. The heraldry is to help the archers understand the roles they are claiming for themselves. After a very short and basic introduction to heraldry terms, the text proceeds to a list of fifty-eight Knights of the Round Table, each on his own page. The shields are elaborately outlined but blank, ready to be filled in by hand. (As Robinson acknowledged in his Assertion when he announced he was thinking of translating a tract on Arthurian heraldry, ‘the engrauing of their armes was very chargeable’ [B3v]). Most shields are between the initials of the Londoner who played that knight’s role, and underneath is a brief verse describing the arms and a little about the knight. As a sample, Sir Launcelot’s verses are: In Silver Shield, Three Bandes of Blew He bare, full valiant hee, And ventrous was, one of the Cheefest Approved in Chevalry: Of knights which did the Table Rounde Adorne with condign praise: His faictes and fame in books compiled Are founde in these our dayes. (B2v)

This description is typical in suppressing stories of division or unrest to create an image of ‘unitie’. (This is an obvious contrast to Malory, who emphasized the divisions, and whose work, according to David Carlson, remained politically troublesome well into the seventeenth century.)33 Robinson’s description of Lancelot never mentions adultery or rebellion against Arthur. Instead, the continuity of history gets his attention. Books continue his fame to ‘our dayes,’ creating a vital tradition. This is typical of the verses. They talk about fame, friendship and service: individual details and hints of division or personal concerns are not included. This pattern is particularly evident with the converted Saracen knights Sir Palamides and Sir Pryamus. In neither poem does Robinson refer to them as Saracens or hint at religious or cultural difference. Instead, he places both in the classical tradition. Sir Palamides is praised for imitating the past: ‘It seemes he was by valyancy / An Imitator trew / Of that Noble Palamydes / from Troy, wich did issew’ (H2v). Sir Priamus’ imitation is so great he almost becomes indistinguishable from his classical name-

33

D. Carlson, ‘Arthur Before and After the Revolution: The Blome-Stansby Edition of Malory (1634) and Brittains Glory (1684)’, in Culture and the King: The Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend, ed. M. Shichtman and J. Carley (Albany, NY, 1994), pp. 234–53.

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sake: ‘As whether hee were S. Pryam of Troy / Or els from whence hee haue his name, / Great was his force, his foes to anoy, / Defending his frends from harme & blame’ (I2r). Identifying the classical origin of the names provides another opportunity of constructing a history uniting classical and medieval elements. It may be worth noting that the names come from French romance, not from the English tradition: thus there are Sir Boort (B2r) and Keux le seneschall (C2r) instead of Sir Bors and Sir Kay. When the verses send readers to written sources for fuller information, they are to the Vulgate Cycle Prose Lancelot (B2r) and the Prose Tristan (B3r) rather than to Malory’s Morte Darthur. Robinson, who says in his opening notes to A Learned and True Assertion … of … Prince Arthure that he consulted with John Stow to get the correct British place names (B4v), evidently felt no pressure to translate the names into their English forms. This is a reminder that there was more to the sixteenth-century Arthurian tradition than Geoffrey of Monmouth and Sir Thomas Malory. If Prince Arthur’s Archers based their roles on French sources, then the French tradition remained visible in London popular culture late into the sixteenth century. After the armory there is a brief account of the Round Table, which emphasizes the defence of England and the annual meeting – that is, those points most similar to Prince Arthur’s Archers. Then, abruptly, it switches back to bows, giving three versified histories of archery, one biblical, one classical and one English, going through the major reigns from Arthur to Henry VIII. Reminiscent of Ascham’s Toxophilus, these three ‘assertions’, ‘sacred historical’, ‘profane historical’ and ‘English historical’, weave a common history for English archery. Robin Hood is mentioned for the first time, briefly, under the reign of Richard I. The connection to the earlier section is the firm conviction that the London archers are firmly connected to and justified by martial histories. Theirs is not a petty imitation but a natural development of the past. This involves educating the archers in Arthurian history and the basics of heraldry, and educating the doubters on the value of archery. There certainly were doubters, both of the value of archery and of the aspirations of Prince Arthur’s Archers. But even when they were mocked, the mockery is not a simple defence of the class-based exclusivity of chivalry. Barnabe Rich, a soldier and writer, supported firearms and professional captains, and he attacks the pretensions of archers in A MARTIAL Conference, Pleasantly discoursed betweene two Souldiers, the one captaine Skil, trained vp in the French and Low country seruices, the other Captaine Pill, only practised in Finsburie fields in the moderne warres of the renowmed Duke of Shordich, and mightie Prince Arthur, printed in 1598. His argument, however, rested not on class privilege but on the distinction between amateur and professional soldiers. The readiness of London’s citizens to serve in wars was a vexed issue: they preferred to serve under their own captains, and there were grave doubts 192



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about their effectiveness.34 Rich uses Prince Arthur and the Duke of Shoreditch, two leaders of London archers, as symbols of the problem of urban archers who think their practice makes them as knowledgeable as experienced professionals who have fought in gunpowder wars. To advance the cause of firearms, Captain Skill argues for the precedence of experience over authority, deriding those who favour tradition and book-learning at the expense of lessons learned on modern battlefields. The debate moves slowly toward the ultimate argument in favour of guns, starting on the criteria for picking captains, choosing troops and gradually moving into the subject of bows versus firearms. The mockery of Prince Arthur’s Archers, therefore, is not class-based, nor does it condemn them for novelty. Instead, it accepts their claims to be part of an old tradition and derides them for that. Rich’s touchstone of true military proficiency is not the knights whose names the archers use but the modern professional soldiers who had fought in the Low Countries. When Captain Pill, in the mode of Ascham and Robinson, protests the noble history of archery, with examples from the classics, followed by citations of English chronicle (H3v–H4r), Captain Skill is dismissive. The bow, he suggests, had prominence only because firearms had not been developed yet, and now that guns had come into their own, bows were fit only ‘for the service in Finsburie fields, to the wonted Regiments of Prince Arthur and the Duke of Shordich’ (F2v). Captain Pill, lacking direct experience, must depend on book-learning, and he paints a picture in which common Londoners were obsessed with military action and tradition: [The first means of learning to be a captain without military experience is] when almost euerie ordinarie about London may be sayde to be an Academie of martiall skill, where many times those captaines that are of our Regiment shall spende you the whole mealetide, be it dinner or supper, with nothing but martiall discourses, dilating of offices, or orders, of laws, of disciplines, of strategems, of watching, of warding, of charging, of retyring, of off[en]ding, of defending, of winning, of loosing, of approaching, of surprising, and you shall neuere heare them but they will still conclude with victories, and therein consisteth their skill, that they will euermore be conquerors. [E2r–E2v]

On the next page, he goes on to emphasize the importance of reading military books to learn military science. Skill, as usual, emphasized the importance of responding to innovation, using physicians as an example: they know their Galen, but make use of modern advances. While Skill is allowed to best Pill in argument, and while modern history is on his side as well, the picture of everyday Londoners reading military texts, debating military issues and considering themselves part of the military 34

Picard, Elizabeth’s London, p. 238.

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community goes a long way to explaining why men like Robinson felt themselves to be a legitimate part of the chivalric tradition, one broadened to include more and more of the nation as more and more men were brought into England’s wars and took pride in fighting for the land, faith and queen. William Shakespeare, too, plays with these issues. In 1599, a year after Rich’s Martial Conference was printed, Shakespeare’s Henry V mixes the high chivalry of kings with Fluellen, well read in the techniques of ancient wars, judging Henry’s conduct of the war against the ancient law of arms (IV.vii.1–3),35 just like the lunch-time generals Captain Pill speaks of, if a little more gently treated. Henry IV Part 2, which came out the same year as the Martial Conference, shares the same concern with picking captains and selecting soldiers: Pill’s pressed soldiers, including Thomas Tatter, Slim Slatter, Nicholas Needie and Gilbert Greedie (B4v–C1v) are close kin to Falstaff’s Ralph Mouldy, Simon Shadow, Thomas Wart, Francis Feeble and Peter Bullcalf (III.ii.89–175).36 And, like Rich, Shakespeare glances at Prince Arthur’s Archers in the midst of his satire against modern military abuses. Justice Shallow, corrupt companion of Falstaff, recalls being Sir Dagonet in his youth. The tone of this remark is hard to pin down. Well before this mention of Prince Arthur’s Archers, Shallow’s opening scene establishes a nostalgic tone, partly for the madcap days of his own youth, but also more generally for perceived valour and nobility, including archery. He laments the news of Double by praising his skill with the bow: Jesu, Jesu, dead! A drew a good bow; and dead! A shot a fine shoot. John o’Gaunt loved him well, and better much money on his head. Dead! A would have clapped i’th’ clout at twelve score, and carried you a forehand shaft a fourteen and fourteen and a half, that it would have done a man’s heart good to see. (III.ii.40–45)

The lament for the decline of archery is familiar. His sorrow at the fading of military skill and honour shows later. When he witnesses the drill of one of Falstaff’s wretched, unskilled pressed soldiers, he grieves over the lack of training: He is not his craft’s master; he doth not do it right. I remember at Mile-End Green, when I lay at Clement’s Inn – I was then Sir Dagonet in Arthur’s show – there was a little quiver fellow, and a would manage you his piece thus, and a would about and about, and come you in and come you in. 35 36

All Shakespeare references are to The Norton Shakespeare, gen. ed. S. Greenblatt (New York, 1997). Shallow clearly and rightly sees a significant difference in status between a trained archer and the riff-raff being inducted into the army, whose plight William Leahy documents in ‘Thy HungerStarved Men: Shakespeare’s Henry Plays and the Contemporary Lot of the Common Soldier’, Parergon 20.2 (2003), 119–34.

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‘Ra-ta-ta!’ would a say; ‘Bounce!’ would a say; and away again would a go; and would a come. I shall ne’er see such a fellow. (III.ii.255–62)

It is not a blatantly comic speech; the soldier Wart’s drill is presumably horrible, and some criticism is warranted, even if Mile-End Green did not provide the highest standards of military excellence for comparison. The connection to Prince Arthur’s Archers, although not evidence of great skill, provides at least some contrast to the modern abuses, anachronistic though it may be. The problem, of course, is Justice Shallow’s hypocrisy and pretence. He is actively helping Falstaff’s project of pressing the poor, and his nostalgia is largely fictitious. Falstaff lays bare the lies: This same starved justice hath done nothing but prate to me of the wildness of his youth and the feats he hath done about Turnbull Street; and every third word a lie.… And now this Vice’s dagger become a squire, and talks as familiarly of John o’Gaunt as if he had been sworn brother to him, and I’ll be sworn a ne’er saw him but once, in the Tilt-yard, and then he burst his head for crowding among the marshal’s men. (III.ii.277–9, 286–90)

Instead of a happy mingling of martial excellence from all classes, where John of Gaunt rewarded city archers handsomely, Falstaff recalls a separation, where the tournament grounds divided aristocrat from commoner, and commoners who pushed too close to the knights got their heads broken. Shallow’s invocations of a martial past are to support and naturalize the social rank he feels he has achieved late in life. Even his invocation of Sir Dagonet is problematic. Sir Dagonet is Arthur’s fool, and (unsurprisingly) he is not one of the knights mentioned in Robinson’s armory. Sir Thomas Malory mentions Sir Dagonet only in recounting two similar practical jokes, in which he is dressed in armour and sent to fight a knight who does not recognize him: La Cote Mal Tayle is said to be shamed because he agreed to fight with Dagonet, and King Mark is even more greatly shamed because, fearing him to be Launcelot, he flees him.37 Both jokes hinge on the shame of misrecognizing a knight, treating a fool as if he were worthy. Shallow seems to be the victim of the same joke, treating the role of Sir Dagonet as if he were genuinely a valiant knight. Whether this joke is at his expense only, hinting by his inept choice of knights that he was not really a member of Prince Arthur’s Archers, or whether it extends to their expense as well, willingly assuming that they are acting as knights instead of fools, is harder to say. Shallow’s pretensions may not connect him as securely as he desires to the noble chivalric past, but that does not mean the nostalgia is empty: his invocations of the past may ground the play if not himself. Nicholas Grene argues that Shallow’s nostalgia is crucial to creating a hybrid history, in 37

Caxton’s Malory, pp. 245–6, 306–7 (Caxton Book IX, chapter 3 and Book 10, chapters 12–13).

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which non-historical comedy works with more securely attested political history.38 John of Gaunt, a connection to a mythologized noble medieval past before the shadow of usurpation, preserves the memory of the older generation in Richard II; by 2 Henry IV, the generation that was young when he was old are now themselves the old men, witnesses to the change of time. Since most of the Henriad deals with the historical problems of usurpation, in which the desire to look back for historical justification and precedent must be balanced with new ways and new dynasties, almost every significant character has to construct narratives that allow present events to be grounded in traditions, real or imagined. The comedy of the low characters is not so easily untangled from the historical manipulations of the high ones. Thus, while Shallow certainly reveals the pretensions of Londoners who try to connect themselves to the chivalric heights, whether by invoking Arthur or John of Gaunt, it is not so obvious that the revelation automatically discredits those pretensions for those who are not as shallow as he. He may be condemned for his hypocrisy in not living up to the ideals that have found urban expression, not for daring to adopt those ideals. Shakespeare and Rich both make their jokes at the archers’ aspirations to military prowess and esteem, but – unlike Millican – neither seems to think that the aspiration of common Londoners to be part of the chivalric community is inherently ludicrous. Shakespeare may laugh at how readily they accept an imaginary past and take modest skills for military greatness; Rich may mock their antique weapons and ignorance of military progress, but both accept that chivalric culture is changing and that the gap between past and present practices needs to be bridged somehow. Queen Elizabeth certainly appreciated her London archers. In 1587 Hugh Offley organized ‘at his own expence, a costly show of Prince Arthur, with his Knights of the Round Table’, which involved 300 archers and a procession.39 When by coincidence Elizabeth came by (not all displays were for her), she praised their stateliness. This is a truer measure of their worth than Shakespeare’s complex ironies and Rich’s interested invective. Robinson’s enthusiasm for Arthurian history, and his earnest conviction that Prince Arthur’s Archers keep that history alive, thus has something important to say about early modern audience response to chivalric material generally and Arthurian history in particular. Chivalry did not die when it crossed class lines, nor did it politely expire when it crossed the boundary between the medieval and the early modern. Instead, it proved capable of adapting to new circumstances, and it helped frame the debate between bows and firearms. As a system for assigning social meaning to violent action, chivalry remained robust and socially vital. Early modern 38 39

N. Greene, Shakespeare’s Serial History Plays (Cambridge, 2002), p. 213. J. Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols. (New York, 1964; first printed London, 1823) II, 529.

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urban readers approaching the King Arthur legend did not necessarily do so as outsiders, seeking escapist entertainment from ideals beyond their class and time. They found in the Arthurian tradition powerful ways of understanding their own lives.

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CONTENTS OF PREVIOUS VOLUMES

Details of earlier titles are available from the publishers XVII   (1999) Bart Besamusca and Erik Kooper Walter Haug Douglas Kelly Norris J. Lacy Matthias Meyer Ad Putter Felicity Riddy Thea Summerfield Jane H. M. Taylor Bart Veldhoen Norbert Voorwinden Lori J. Walters

The Study of the Roman van Walewein The Roman van Walewein as a Postclassical Literary Experiment The Pledge Motif in the Roman van Walewein: Original Variant and Rewritten Quest Convention and Innovation in the Middle Dutch Roman van Walewein It’s Hard to Be Me, or Walewein/Gawan as Hero Walewein in the Otherworld and the Land of Prester John Giving and Receiving: Exchange in the Roman van Walewein and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Reading a Motion Picture: Why Steven Spielberg Should Read the Roman van Walewein The Roman van Walewein: Man into Fox, Fox into Man The Roman van Walewein Laced with Castles Fight Description in the Roman van Walewein and in Two Middle High German Romances. A Comparison Making Bread from Stone: The Roman van Walewein and the Transformation of Old French Romance

XVIII   (2001) † Richard N. Illingworth Jane H. M. Taylor Carleton W. Carroll and Maria Colombo Timelli Raluca Radulescu Julia Marvin Norris J. Lacy and Raymond H. Thompson

The Composition of the Tristran of Beroul The Lure of the Hybrid: Tristan de Nanteuil, chanson de Geste Arthurien? L’Extrait du Roman d’Erec et Enide de La Curne de SaintePalaye ‘Talkyng of cronycles of kinges and of other polycyez’: Fifteenth-Century Miscellanies, the Brut and the Readership of Le Morte Darthur Albine and Isabelle: Regicidal Queens and the Historical Imagination of the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut Chronicles Arthurian Literature, Art, and Film, 1995–1999

XIX   (2002) Elizabeth Archibald Christine Ferlampin-Acher Angelica Rieger Norris J. Lacy Peter S. Noble Karen Pratt Bénédicte Milland-Bove Frank Brandsma Marilyn Lawrence

Comedy and Tragedy in Some Arthurian Recognition Scenes Merveilleux et comique dans les romans arthuriens français (XIIe–Xve siècles) La bande dessinée virtuelle du lion d’Yvain: sur le sens de l’humour de Chrétien de Troyes Convention, Comedy and the Form of La Vengeance Raguideli Le comique dans Les Merveilles de Rigomer et Hunbaut Humour in the Roman de Silence La pratique de la ‘disconvenance’ comique dans le Lancelot en prose: les mésaventures amoureuses de Guerrehet Lancelot Part 3 Comic Functions of the Parrot as Minstrel in Le Chevalier du Papegau

Francesco Zambon Marjolein Hogenbirk Donald L. Hoffman Elizabeth S. Sklar Linda Gowans

Dinadan en Italie A Comical Villain: Arthur’s Seneschal in a Section of the Middle Dutch Lancelot Compilation Malory and the English Comic Tradition ‘Laughyng and Smylyng’: Comic Modalities in Malory’s Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake The Eachtra an Amadáin Mhóir as a Response to the Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes

XX   (2003) Gerald Seaman Monica L. Wright Jane Dewhurst Richard Barber and Cyril Edwards Krista Sue-Lo Twu Dinah Hazell Edward Donald Kennedy Tamar Drukker Janina P. Traxler

Reassessing Chrétien’s Elusive Vanz Their Clothing Becomes Them: the Narrative Function of Clothing in Chrétien de Troyes Generic Hybridity in Hartmann von Aue’s Der arme Heinrich The Grail Temple in Der jüngere Titurel The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyne: Reliquary for Romance The Blinding of Gwennere: Thomas Chestre as Social Critic Malory’s Morte Darthur: A Politically Neutral English Adaptation of the Arthurian Story King, Crusader, Knight: the Composite Arthur of the Middle English Prose Brut Pendragon, Merlin and Logos: the Undoing of Babel in That Hideous Strength

XXI   (2004) Ann Dooley Sioned Davies Helen A. Roberts Erich Poppe Mary-Ann Constantine Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan

Arthur of the Irish: A Viable Concept? Performing Culwch ac Olwen Court and Cyuoeth: Chrétien de Troyes’ Erec et Enide and the Middle Welsh Gereint Owein, Ystorya Bown, and the Problem of ‘Relative Distance’. Some Methodological Considerations and Speculations Neith Flesh nor Fowl: Merlin as Bird-man in Breton Folk Tradition Narratices and Non-narratives: Aspects of Welsh Arthurian Tradition

XXII   (2005) Benn Ramm

Annette Völfing Helen Fulton Julia Marvin Norris J. Lacy and Raymond H. Thompson

Locating Narrative Authority in Perlesvaus : Le Haut Livre du Graal Micheau Gonnot’s Arthuriad Preserved in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fr. 112 and its Place in the Evolution of Arthurian Romance Albricht’s Jüngerer Titurel: Translating the Grail Arthurian Prophecy and the Deposition of Richard II Arthur Authorized: The Prophecies of the Prose Brut Chronicle The Arthurian Legend in Literature, Popular Culture and the Performing Arts, 1999–2004

Andrew Lynch P. J. C. Field

Beyond Shame: Chivalric Cowardice and Arthurian Narrative Malory’s Forty Knights

Fanni Bogdanow

XXIII   (2006)

Joyce Coleman D. Thomas Hanks Jr Raluca L. Radulescu Margaret Robson Martin Connolly Norris J. Lacy Fanni Bogdanow Tony Grand Robert Gossedge

Fooling with Language: Sir Dinadan in Malory’s Morte Darthur William Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde and the Editing of Malory’s Morte Darthur Ballad and Popular Romance in the Percy Folio Local Hero: Gawain and the Politics of Arthurianism Promise-postponement Device in The Awntyrs off Arthure: a Possible Narrative Model L’Atre perilleux and the Erasure of Identity The Theme of the Handsome Coward in the Post-Vulgate Queste del Saint Graal A Time of Gifts? Jean de Nesle, William A. Nitze and the Perlesvaus Thomas Love Peacock’s The Misfortunes of Elphin and the Romantic Arthur

XXIV   (2007) Norris J. Lacy Lori J. Walters Cora Dietl Stefano Mula Marjolein Hogenbirk Sarah Gordon Linda Gowans Joseph M. Sullivan Frank Brandsma Susanne Kramarz-Bein Martine Meuwese

Perceval on the Margins: a Pan-European Perspective More Bread from Stone: Gauvain as a Figure of Plenitude in the French, Dutch and English Traditions Artus – ein Fremdkörper in der Tristantradition? Dinadan Abroad: Tradition and Innovation for a Counter-Hero Gringalet as an Epic Character Consumption and the Construction of Identity in Medieval European Arthurian Romance Lamenting or just Grumbling? Arthur’s Nephew Expresses his Discontent Youth and Older Age in the Dire Adventure of Chrétien’s Yvain, the Old Swedish Hærra Ivan, Hartmann’s Iwein and the Middle English Ywain and Gawain Degrees of Perceptibility: the Narrator in the French Prose Lancelot, and in its German and Dutch Translations Die altnorwegische Parcevals saga im Spannungsfeld ihrer Quelle und der mittelhochdeutschen und mittelenglischen Parzival-überlieferung Crossing Borders: Text and Image in Arthurian Manuscripts

XXV   (2009) Nikolai Tolstoy Carolyne Larrington Michael twomey Ralica L. Radulescu Martine Meuwese Stewart Mottram

Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Merlin Legend The Enchantress, the Knight and the Cleric: Authorial Surrogate in Arthurian Romance ‘Morgan le Fay, Empress of the Wilderness’: A Newly Recovered Arthurian Text in London, BL Royal 12.C.ix Malory’s Lancelot and the Key to Salvation Chrétien in Ivory ‘An Empire of Itself’: Arthur as Icon of an English Empire, 1509–1547

XXVI   (2009) Derek S. Brewer Jonathan Passaro Amanda Hopkins

Introduction to the Morte Darthur, Parts 7 and 8 Malory’s Text of the Suite du Merlin Why Arthur at all? The Dubious Arthuricity of Arthur and Gorlagon

Thomas Hinton Siân Echard Norris J. Lacy Ronald Hutton Raymond Thompson and Norris J. Lacy

The Aesthetics of Communication: Sterility and Fertility in the Conte del Graal Cycle ‘Whyche thyng semeth not to agree with other histories …’: Rome in Geoffrey of Monmouth and his early modern readers Arthurian Texts in their Historical and Social Context The Post-Christian Arthur Supplement: The Arthurian Legend in Literature, Popular Culture, and the Performing Arts, 2004-2008

spine 21.5mm A 9 Sep 10

Archibald and Johnson (eds)

Hodges, Megan Leitch, Andrew Lynch, Sue Niebrzydowski, Karen Robinson.

Cover: King Arthur’s vision of Fortune’s wheel, from La Mort le Roi Artus, c.1316, BL MS Add. 10294, f. 89 †(© British Library Board).

ARTHURIAN LITERATURE 27

The influence and significance of the legend of Arthur is fully demonstrated by the subject matter and time-span of articles here: topics range from early Celtic sources and analogues of Arthurian plots to popular interest in King Arthur in sixteenth-century London, from the thirteenth-century French prose Mort Artu to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Also included are discussion of shapeshifters and loathly ladies, attitudes to treason, royal deaths and funerals in the fifteenth century and the nineteenth, late medieval Scottish politics, and early modern chivalry. Contributors: Aisling Byrne, Emma Campbell, P. J. C. Field, Kenneth

Arthurian literature 27

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Edited by Elizabeth Archibald and David F. Johnson