Reading La3amon's Brut: Approaches and Explorations 9401209529, 9789401209526

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The Severn Basin. © Barry Trinder.

Reading La amon’s Brut

52 DQR

STUDIES IN LITERATURE

Series Editors C.C. Barfoot - A.J. Hoenselaars W.M. Verhoeven

Reading La amon’s Brut Approaches and Explorations

Edited by

Rosamund ALLEN, Jane ROBERTS and Carole WEINBERG

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013

Cover image: Norman window, Areley Kings Parish Church (photograph Gillian Huang-Tiller): 1898 glass inspired by initial in London, British Library, Cotton MS Caligula A. ix. Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence’. ISBN: 978-90-420-3694-9 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0952-6 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013 Printed in The Netherlands

CONTENTS

Ackowledgements Abbreviations List of figures ROSAMUND ALLEN, JANE ROBERTS and CAROLE WEINBERG Introduction

1

I Approaching the B rut ROSAMUND ALLEN Did Lawman Nod, or Is It We that Yawn?

21

HARUKO MOMMA The Brut as Saxon Literature: The New Philologists Read Lawman

53

SIMON MEECHAM-JONES “þe tiden of þisse londe” – Finding and Losing Wales in Laȝamon’s Brut

69

ANDREW WEHNER The Severn: Barrier or Highway?

107

II Behaviour and Customs ERIC STANLEY The Political Notion of Kingship in Laȝamon’s Brut

123

JOHN BRENNAN Queer Masculinity in Lawman’s Brut

137

KENNETH J. TILLER Laȝamon’s Leir: Language, Succession, and History

155

JOSEPH D. PARRY Losing the Past: Cezar’s Moment of Time in Lawman’s Brut

179

DANIEL DONOGHUE Lawman, Bede, and the Context of Slavery

197

ANDREW BREEZE Drinking of Blood, Burning of Women

215

CHARLOTTE A.T. WULF The Coronation of Arthur and Guenevere in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, Wace’s Roman de Brut, and Lawman’s Brut

229

BARRY WINDEATT Laȝamon’s Gestures: Body Language in the Brut

253

III Words and Meanings HANNAH MCKENDRICK BAILEY Conquest by Word: The Meeting of Languages in Laȝamon’s Brut

269

IAN KIRBY A Tale of Two Cities: London and Winchester in Laȝamon’s Brut

287

MARGARET LAMONT When Are Saxons “Ænglisc”?: Language and Readerly Identity in Laȝamon’s Brut

295

JOANNA BELLIS Mapping the National Narrative: Place-name Etymology in Laȝamon’s Brut and Its Sources

321

CHRISTINE ELSWEILER The Lexical Field “Warrior” in Laȝamon’s Brut – A Comparative Analysis of the Two Versions

343

†DEBORAH MARCUM The Language of Law: lond and hond in Laȝamon’s Brut

367

SCOTT KLEINMAN Frið and Grið: Laȝamon and the Legal Language of Wulfstan

391

ERIK KOOPER Laȝamon’s Prosody: Caligula and Otho – Metres Apart

419

JANE ROBERTS Getting Laȝamon’s Brut into Sharper Focus

443

IV Sources and Explorations CAROLE WEINBERG Julius Caesar and the Language of History in Laȝamon’s Brut

473

NEIL CARTLIDGE Laȝamon’s Ursula and the Influence of Roman Epic

499

GAIL IVY BERLIN Constructing Tonwenne: A Gesture and Its History

523

JUDITH WEISS Wace to Laȝamon via Waldef

541

SARAH BACCIANTI Translating England in Medieval Iceland: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britannie and Breta sǫgur

561

JENNIFER MILLER Laȝamon’s Welsh

589

M. LEIGH HARRISON The Wisdom of Hindsight in Laȝamon and Some Contemporaries

623

GARETH GRIFFITH Reading the Landscapes of Laȝamon’s Arthur: Place, Meaning and Intertextuality

643

ELIZABETH J. BRYAN Laȝamon’s Brut and the Vernacular Text: Widening the Context

661

Bibliography

691

Notes on Contributors

731

Index

739

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors are grateful variously for encouragement, help and advice from Stewart Brookes, Erik Kooper, Gale Owen-Crocker, Jon Millington, Lucy Perry, Brian Schneider, Eric Stanley, Barry Trinder and Paul Vetch. We especially thank Jennifer Lo for all the work she has done with us in getting this book to press. We should also like to thank Esther Roth and Masja Horn from Rodopi, Cedric Barfoot, one of the DQR series editors, and the organizers of two conferences, where some of these articles had their origins: Beth Bryan (Brown University 2004); Ros Allen, Lucy Perry and Raluca Radulescu (Gregynog 2008 – with the help of Bangor University). For their kind permission to reproduce pages from the manuscripts illustrated in this volume we thank the following libraries: Trinity College Cambridge; the British Library; Biblioteca Nacional de España; and Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de El Escorial.

ABBREVIATIONS

DOE

Dictionary of Old English, eds A.F. Cameron, A.C. Amos, A. diP. Healey, Sharon Butler, Joan Holland, David McDougall and Ian McDougall (Toronto: PIMS, 1986-); The Dictionary of Old English: A to G online, eds Angus Cameron, Ashley Crandell Amos, Antonette diPaolo Healey (Toronto: Dictionary of Old English Project, 2007). For electronic resources, see .

EETS

Early English Text Society

MED

The Middle English Dictionary, eds Hans Kurath, Sherman Kuhn and Robert Lewis et al. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952-2001); for online version see .

ODNB

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eds H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, 60 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press in Association with the British Academy, 2004). For electronic resource, see .

OED

The Oxford English Dictionary, 10 vols, eds Sir James A. H. Murray, Henry Bradley, Sir William A. Craigie, and Charles T. Onions (1884-1933); Supplement, 4 vols, ed. Robert W. Burchfield (1972-1986); 2nd edn, eds John A. Simpson and Edmund S.C. Weiner (1989); Additions Series, eds John A. Simpson, Edmund S.C. Weiner, and

Michael Proffitt (1993-7); 3rd edn (in progress). For OED Online, ed. John A. Simpson, see . n.s.

New Series

o.s.

Original Series

PL

Patrologia cursus completus: series latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, 221 vols (Paris, 1844-64).

PMLA

Publications of the Modern Language Association of America

s.s.

Special Series

s.v.

sub verbo, “under the heading of”

LIST OF FIGURES

Frontispiece. The Severn Basin. © Barry Trinder. Figure 1. © London, British Library, Cotton MS Caligula A. ix, fol. 1r. 685 Figure 2. © Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.16.2, fol. 2r. The Trinity Apocalypse. 686 Figure 3. © Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, MS 816, fol. 1r. General estoria by Alfonso X. 687 Figure 4. © Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, MS 3065, fol. 9v. Libro complido en los judizios de las estrellas by Alfonso X. 688 Figure 5. Estoria de España by Alfonso X. By permission of Patrimonio Nacional. © Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de El Escorial, MS Y.I.2, fol. 124v. 689

INTRODUCTION ROSAMUND ALLEN, JANE ROBERTS AND CAROLE WEINBERG

In the closing lines (ll. 16085-95) of his hystoria Brutonum Laȝamon reminds us that in his day the kings of his own country were no longer Britons. By then the Britons had been long relegated to the “Walisce londe” (“Welsh country”), where they live, he tells us, according to their own laws and customs. He does not choose to play with the etymologizing that his sources gave him, by which Wales gets its name from a Duke Gualo or a Queen Galaes, or with the view that the Welsh had fallen away from the noblesce of the Britons, their forefathers. Instead he states the current position from the point of view of a man living at Areley Kings on the River Severn c. 1200. Then, almost as with a shrug of the shoulders, he resorts to proverbial wisdom. The final day of the Lord is, after all, still to come and, until then, come what may, it will be according to God’s will: “i-wurðe þet iwurðe i-wurðe Godes wille. Amen.” Unlike Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace, Laȝamon does not obtrude himself as author at the end of his Brut, but leaves his audience to realize how, ultimately, the issues of race and territory that have filled his narrative are transitory. The essentials of his narrative are from Wace’s Roman de Brut but, imagined anew in English, have transmuted into an open-ended story of Britain and its peoples that continues to command a wide readership. As editors of this volume we have drawn together detailed and varied explorations of a poem that has begun to attract an increasing amount of critical attention. Individual essays offer detailed discussions and reassessments of Laȝamon’s Brut, intersecting with each other, at times chiming and at others putting a differing viewpoint. They fall into four

2

Introduction

by no means self-contained groups: first, four articles each in their own way introductory; second, a section on customs and behaviour in Laȝamon’s Brut; then, discussions focused particularly on aspects of language; and finally explorations of traditions and parallels that reflect on how the text is to be understood. I Approaching the B rut The opening section introduces the reader to Laȝamon – or Lawman. Both forms of the name are widely used, but the spelling Layamon, general in earlier generations, has mostly dropped out of use. The first two articles examine changing responses to the poem’s content. Rosamund Allen’s forthright question “Did Lawman Nod, or Is It We that Yawn?” confronts those critics who think the poem overlong, arguing that any disengagement we may experience as readers is probably the fault of our changed cultural expectations. She argues for the oral presentation of the poem, demonstrating how its many opportunities for changes of voice and pace can by turns excite and amuse and how the long lists of descendants and of the rapid turnover of kings (the “boring bits”) provoke thoughts about the randomness of fate. Her Lawman knows “how people tick” and wrote “a text which inspired, entertained, amused, and instructed”. Whereas Allen considers the problems experienced by today’s readers, Haruko Momma, in her “The Brut as Saxon Literature: The New Philologists Read Lawman”, examines the reception of Lawman’s Brut in the 1830s and 1840s, a time when the ideas of Old, Middle, and Modern English we now take for granted were evolving. Both Kemble and Thorpe, reading the Brut in the 1830s, associated it with pre-Conquest literature rather than later medieval literature. Two essays on context complete the first section. In a wide-ranging article written from a Welsh perspective Simon Meecham-Jones reviews the political context for Laȝamon’s poem. His “‘þe tiden of þisse londe’ – Finding and Losing Wales in Laȝamon’s Brut” takes on three major issues that have loomed large in recent critical writings on the poem, the issues of language, law and land. Describing a society where Welsh was routinely spoken alongside English (Areley Kings is “just to the east of

Reading Laȝamon’s Brut: Approaches and Explorations

3

the baronial liberties of the Welsh March”) and where ethnic identities must often have seemed as blurred as political boundaries, he finds in Laȝamon’s narrative “a new and distinctive model of the border relationship”. For Meecham-Jones, Laȝamon is less dismissive of the Britons than contemporary English historiographers. He sees distinctions as made not on grounds of language or ethnicity but of jurisdiction and allegiance, and he reads the Brut as a political text that “makes its point discreetly, almost apologetically” for assimilation rather than conflict. Complementing this examination of the political context for Laȝamon’s Brut, Andrew Wehner depicts the geographical setting of Areley Kings in “The Severn: Barrier or Highway?”. If for Meecham-Jones Areley Kings was “less than an hour’s ride from what had been the Welsh border in Anglo-Saxon times”, Wehner adjudges the Welsh border “a two days’ journey away” – a contrast that brings home the shifting permeability and blurring of borders between England and Wales. The Severn’s importance as a waterway is emphasized and its role within the trade and industry of the area made clear. From the arrival of the Danes until the coming of the railroads the Severn was a major commercial highway, especially for wine, salt, and iron, and, as the map makes plain (see Frontispiece), in Laȝamon’s day the Welsh and English must have traded along and across it. Laȝamon could well have heard Welsh spoken around the Areley Kings area. II Behaviour and Customs This section brings together eight articles that reflect on customary procedure, behaviour, and attitudes illustrated within the poem. Of widest import here is Eric Stanley’s “The Political Notion of Kingship in Laȝamon’s Brut”. Good rule, based on the biblical ideals of the strong but merciful king, is shown to be central to the poem. Laȝamon, contrasting good governance with evil kingship, assesses kingship individually rather than theoretically. With governance established under the rule of wise laws there comes peace together with wisdom and royal strength more generally: the king is seen as a good family man, and in response his people, the governed, love him. Good kings are founders of cities that often bear the king’s name in their name. In good kingship

4

Introduction

legal severity is tempered by mercy: evil kingship leads to aggressive warlikeness, illicit royal love adventures, the repudiation of a rightful queen. A traitorous king and a homosexual king are to be seen as what kings should not be. Stanley demonstrates convincingly how such standards prevail. Yet, a homosexual king was not necessarily a bad king. Comparing the homoerotically-inclined kings Membriz and Malgus, John Brennan, in “Queer Masculinity in Lawman’s Brut”, teases out an instructive insight into ideas of gender, masculinity, and kingship implicit in the Brut. Brennan points out that although both these rulers receive the poet’s pro forma condemnation, there is a world of difference between them – unlike Geoffrey and Wace, Laȝamon contrasts Membriz’s “evil” with Malgus’s “sin”. And Laȝamon, in condemning the sodomy of both kings evenhandedly, bears out the growing climate of intensified hostility toward homosexuality evident in European culture from the twelfthcentury.1 Nevertheless, Brennan builds a convincing case for Laȝamon’s nuanced and pointed assessment of the two kings, suggesting that a ruler’s “queerness” was not disqualifying, or necessarily un-masculine. Effective kingship, he observes, is not crucially dependent upon (usually masculine) gender or (usually straight) sexuality, but is based on virtues of lordship that are found in the “unlikeliest” of persons: a good king is to be judged primarily on how he “performs kingship”. Laȝamon’s conception of good and bad kingship is the focus also of Kenneth Tiller’s “Laȝamon’s Leir: Language, Succession, and History”. Tiller suggests that critics have not taken fully into account the importance of the speeches and letters Laȝamon introduces into this episode. Pointing out that in Laȝamon, more than Wace or Geoffrey or any other writer until Shakespeare, the Leir story is a story of language, he shows how its speeches, private conversations and letters are amplified from Wace, dictating events in the narrative. Tiller argues that Leir’s failure is one of language: he is unsuccessful in his attempts to

1

John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe

from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, Chicago, 1980.

Reading Laȝamon’s Brut: Approaches and Explorations

5

control the succession through discourse and he is unable to interpret the words of others correctly. Moreover, Leir’s linguistic failures are not the only signs of the erosion of his royal identity: in reiterated use of the word soþ “truth” Laȝamon conditions the reader to be aware of misinterpretation. For Joseph Parry, Laȝamon is a lively and active participant in his project of writing Britain’s history, particularly in his response to key moments of British failure and cultural change. In “Losing the Past: Cezar’s Moment of Time in Lawman’s Brut” Parry presents a close examination of those parts of the poem concerned with the passage of power from the Briton Cassibellaunus to the Roman Julius Cezar, arguing that for Laȝamon these episodes are a concentrated abstraction of the principles of time that inform British history and, by extension, the history of human action. Cezar, he suggests, comes to Laȝamon from his sources positioned not only in a conspicuously in-between place in the narrative of British history, but also, and more importantly, in a place caught between the paradoxes of how we make sense of time. Cezar appears in the poem at the point when Brutus’s descendants are losing control of Britain, and leaves it just before Christ’s coming, and in Laȝamon’s hands, Cezar attains a significance in history by reflecting key problems of worldly success and of assigning praise or blame. Paradoxically, Laȝamon’s Cezar will act in ways that recall Christian structures and practices, in conspicuous contrast to the treachery and tragedy that mark the actions of the British at this point in their history. In “Lawman, Bede, and the Context of Slavery” Dan Donoghue casts new light on the well-known story of Pope Gregory and the AngloSaxon boy slaves, approaching it through two contexts. He begins by considering the broader historical context of what the institution of slavery might have meant to Lawman and his audience. Then, in the second part of his essay, he turns to the immediate narrative context into which Lawman inserts the story of Gregory and the slaves. In the larger narrative of the Brut the episode comes shortly after the Anglo-Saxons, through the agency of Gurmond, take the land of England from British control. What should be a narrative moment of triumph for the AngloSaxons yields quickly to a scene of abjection, where representative

6

Introduction

Anglo-Saxons appear before Gregory deprived of their freedom – objects of mercantile exchange and the target of Gregory’s wit. The sudden reversal from conquest to abjection signal to the reader a change in narrative emphasis. For Laȝamon reduction to slavery echoes the theological theme of sudden reversals. Among other things, the anecdote also allows Laȝamon to introduce Christianity to the English in a particular way. From this moment the history participates in the grand narrative of the ascendancy of the Christian church in England in a way that recalls the trajectory of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum. Two lurid practices are discussed in Andrew Breeze’s exploratory “Drinking of Blood, Burning of Women”. First, Breeze finds grim undertones of a less than metaphoric kind in the prophecy of Arthur’s fame, observing that whereas in Geoffrey of Monmouth the rivers of blood that pour from the mouth of a boar assuage thirst, in Laȝamon warriors become drunk on Arthur’s blood (ll. 9410-12). Although noting that the drinking of human blood is not found in Welsh poetry (a view apparently held by C.S. Lewis), Breeze establishes that it was an archaic, perhaps pagan, custom in early Ireland and that records survive up to the eighteenth century of bereaved mothers and lovers drinking the blood of the dead. The 1169 Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland, he suggests, had stimulated English interest in such practices among the Irish. Secondly, pointing to the threatened burning of Arthur’s queen as punishment for her adultery and treason in the last part of the Brut, Breeze adduces analogues from a wide range of sources, both Welsh as well as English, and concludes that burning as a form of punishment for women was a Norman innovation. Ceremonial behaviour comes under observation in Charlotte Wulf’s “The Coronation of Arthur and Guenevere in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, Wace’s Roman de Brut, and Lawman’s Brut”. The theatrical opulence of the plenary court held in Caerleon is, Wulf points out, the apex of Arthur’s power and glory, and leaves no doubt that Arthur is the pre-eminent king of his time. Assessing how the ceremonial details of this court have developed by comparison with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia and Wace’s Roman de Brut, Wulf speculates as to whether Laȝamon presents the scene as in effect a second coronation. Yet, the wearing of the crown in state at

Reading Laȝamon’s Brut: Approaches and Explorations

7

plenary courts is a practice mentioned frequently in medieval French Arthurian romances, just as on ceremonial occasions even today. Last in this section, B.A. Windeatt’s essay, “Laȝamon’s Gestures: Body Language in the Brut”, addresses Laȝamon’s use of gesture. Windeatt shows how very much more alert Laȝamon is than either Geoffrey of Monmouth or Wace to the bodily comportment, gestural rhetoric and expressiveness of the figures in his narrative (see also Berlin’s article in section IV). Crucially, body language reveals Laȝamon’s concern with control and self-possession and with how gestures register the directions in which power and influence flow and shift. Examples of body language Windeatt considers include laughter, standing, sitting still, keeping silent, particular hand gestures, pallor and flushing, looks and gazes, weeping, swooning, lamentation. Windeatt’s principal centre of attention is the Arthurian section, and he shows how Arthur’s power is demonstrated in his calm dignity, a marked contrast to Uther’s emotionalism. Through the consideration of supposedly heroic, martial and savage behaviour in the contemporary context of Laȝamon’s distinctive representation of bodily conduct and demeanour and alongside modern interpretations, Windeatt’s focus on body language points towards the reassessment of broader critical considerations about the nature of the Brut. III Words and meanings In all, nine articles in the collection are centred mainly on aspects of language. Section III begins with four discussions of how language constructs a people and defines their opponents. Hannah McKendrick Bailey, in “Conquest by Word: The Meeting of Languages in Laȝamon’s Brut”, explores Laȝamon’s handling of moments when communication fails, and of etymologies that reveal conflict, as she reflects on the many cultural, legal, and administrative implications of the replacement of one language by another. The two episodes in which Rouwenne (Rowena) offers a cup to Vortigern and Vortimer respectively (discussed also by Lamont in the third of these articles) are taken as key representations of Laȝamon’s ideas about the clash of languages. Such scenes are seen as moments of deliberate miscommunication in which the use of one

8

Introduction

language and its associated cultural system brings about the destruction of the other. McKendrick Bailey also examines contexts in which, significantly, language barriers do not receive emphasis but are ignored. Finally, as in the three essays that follow, she touches on the difficulty of pinning down the terms Saxon and Angle. For McKendrick Bailey, it is the language itself which is the conqueror – Brut-lond becomes Anglelond gradually through the renaming of cities, and British names are stripped away. With the replacement of a language comes the replacement of a culture. How far the names used for the English in Laȝamon’s Brut carry with them the meanings they hold in Wace and Geoffrey of Monmouth continues to fascinate the poem’s readers. It is more than forty years since Ian Kirby published his seminal article “Angles and Saxons in Laȝamon’s Brut”, arguing that the poet makes a major distinction between diabolical Saxons and Angles who, if not quite angelic, are the virtual antithesis of Laȝamon’s villains. His conclusions were questioned by Neil Wright at the first Laȝamon conference,2 but still arouse heated discussion. Kirby himself re-enters the lists with “A Tale of Two Cities: London and Winchester in Laȝamon’s Brut”, reasserting the distinction, and now advancing in its support Laȝamon’s attitude to these two cities, the former in Mercia, where Laȝamon lived, the latter in Wessex. He analyses Laȝamon’s treatment of Winchester and London in the course of the Brut, putting forward reasons to account for what may be significant departures from the sources. Margaret Lamont’s “When Are Saxons ‘Ænglisc’? Language and Readerly Identity in Laȝamon’s Brut” again pays particular attention to the selective use of Ænglisc and Saxisc (Englisse or Saxisse in the Otho manuscript) to describe the Saxon people and language, and, like McKendrick Bailey, she examines the effects of Laȝamon’s innovative addition of a second wassail scene, here drawing a distinction between the “Ænglisse” of thirteenth-century England and the treachery of the

2

“Angles and Saxons in Laȝamon’s Brut: A Reassessment”, in The Text and Tradition of

Laȝamon’s Brut, ed. Françoise H.M. Le Saux Cambridge, 1994, 161-70.

Reading Laȝamon’s Brut: Approaches and Explorations

9

Saxons. She aligns Wace with Bede and twelfth-century historiographers for their focus on the Saxons’ pagan religion, contrasting Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae and the Brut tradition more generally, where language is, for her, the focal point. The Anglo-Saxon language intrudes twice only into the Latin language of Geoffrey’s text and is therefore strongly marked as the only language other than Latin to enter the text as speech and to require an interpreter. In Laȝamon’s English-language Brut, however, the very sign of Saxon difference in Geoffrey’s text has the potential to become a sign of connection between its readers in late twelfth-and thirteenth-century England and the Saxons in the history. Lamont examines how the two manuscripts of Laȝamon’s Brut negotiate and even exploit this potential connection through a strategy of partial identification while distancing readers from more problematic moments of Saxon treachery. Distance from the Saxons is achieved by calling their language “Saxisc”, identification by using the term “Ænglisc”; this identification is “mobile”, positive and pejorative in extremes: the first “wassail” invitation is the “first spoken in England” but Rouwenne in the treacherous second occurrence speaks “Saxisc”. The term “English”, increasingly uncoupled from “Saxon” in later Brut histories, ultimately opens up the “us” of medieval English historiography to include Saxons, Britons, Danes, Normans, and others. This opening-up, Lamont suggests, may already be taking place in Laȝamon’s Brut, which she sees as forging selective connections between the poem’s readers and its Saxons, and enabling readers who were ethnically Welsh or Norman to share in these connections. The openingout of the term “English” may be traced to the influence of a wider Anglo-Norman political, literary, and social agenda of cultural amalgamation. In Laȝamon’s immediate source, Wace’s Roman de Brut, the names for the island of Britain and its towns and cities come from Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Laȝamon in his turn responds by adding further comments on the capriciousness of changes in toponomy. Joanna Bellis, in her essay “Mapping the National Narrative: Place-name Etymology and Laȝamon’s Brut and Its Sources”, fully aware of an innate tension between the glory of the Brut tradition and its veracity, seeks to show

10

Introduction

how Geoffrey authenticates his narrative by appealing to the landscape of Britain itself as a source text, using place names to connect readers to their legendary past through familiar places. Place-name etymologies are, however, a point of hermeneutic conflict between text and source, both for Geoffrey of Monmouth and for his followers Wace and Laȝamon, who approach the glory and veracity of the myth from different sides of colonial Britain. Whereas Wace had an allegiance to the conquerors, Laȝamon construes them as yet another party of invaders whose language threatens literally to overwrite the illustrious history vestigially alive in the landscape’s names. Renaming is configured as an act of conquest: for Laȝamon name change is discontinuity that mirrors invasion itself, whereas for Wace it represents historical continuity. The essay is therefore an exploration not only of the specific past context for Laȝamon, but also of his response to the hermeneutic truth-claim embedded in his Anglo-Norman source and of his interpretation of it in his present political context. Christine Elsweiler, in “The Lexical Field ‘Warrior’ in Laȝamon’s Brut – a Comparative Analysis of the Two Versions”, points to the markedly heterogeneous group of “warrior” terms used by Laȝamon, explains both their differing origins and registers, and sets Brut in the context of the marked twelfth-century interest in Anglo-Saxon England. She divides the word field into four categories. First, there are several poetic terms such as hæleð “hero”, inherited from formal registers (mostly poetic). Her second category covers three lexemes that seem to shed at least one of their meanings during the course of the thirteenth century. Thirdly, she examines three words thought to have come in from Old Norse. The other “warrior” terms are seen as falling under the label “Laȝamon’s everyday words” used by Roberts in her discussion of the “weapons” field.3 Elsweiler shows that the words in her first three groups are either entirely omitted or considerably reduced in number in the Otho text. In addition, certain lexemes display a semantic shift.

3

Jane Roberts, “Laȝamon’s Plain Words”, in Middle English Miscellany, ed. J. Fisiak,

Poznań, 1996, 107-22.

Reading Laȝamon’s Brut: Approaches and Explorations

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Overall, “everyday words” prevail, especially in Otho, superseding the majority of more specific heroic terms in the Caligula Brut. Caligula and Otho therefore present different readings of Laȝamon’s Brut. An Appendix summarizes the thirty-six “warrior” terms examined, of which twenty-nine survive in Otho. Two essays reflect on aspects of legal vocabulary. For †Deborah Marcum, in “The Language of Law: lond and hond in Laȝamon’s Brut”, Laȝamon creates a British history saturated with legal diction and legal events. She points out that much of the material added by Laȝamon to his sources contains legal words and phrases and shows how, overall, many parts of the poem are expanded with what might be called legal events: entire scenes are infused with legal connotations, as for example the coronation and crown-wearing scenes and the trial by battle episode. Marcum explores the legal relationship between a king and his men by examining how in the Arthurian section the legal focus is sustained through the use of words such as grið or the linked rhyming pair hond and lond found in the laws of Cnut. Like Kleinman, whose article follows, she considers the influence of Wulfstan in the recording of Cnut’s laws. Much of the legal language found throughout the Arthurian portion of Laȝamon’s Brut is shown to centre on the king’s authority and his relationship to his men, as she situates her examination within the lordman relation common to the Anglo-Saxon and the Anglo-Norman periods. In “Frið and Grið: Laȝamon and the Legal Language of Wulfstan” Scott Kleinman’s main focus is on frið, both on its own and combined with the Old Norse loanword grið. Reflecting on the use of these words and related forms in Wulfstan’s homilies and Laȝamon’s Brut, he seeks to establish a network of intertextual relationships between “Wulfstanian” legal language and legal language in the Brut. Kleinman argues for the use of Wulfstan’s legal style as a rhetorical model by later vernacular writers in Worcestershire, and he suggests that we need to add legal literature to the combination of homiletic and historiographical writing that shaped the transition from Old English to early Middle English. Erik Kooper revisits Laȝamon’s metre in his “Laȝamon’s Prosody: Caligula and Otho – Metres Apart”. Recalling his earlier concentration

12

Introduction

on the Caligula text in his analysis of how Laȝamon gradually developed his metrical style,4 he now examines a number of aspects of the poem, under three headings: punctuation, metre, and enjambment, in order to explore the impact on metre of changes made by the Otho reviser. First he demonstrates the less clear signalling of verses and lines in the Otho manuscript. Next, sampling about 10% of the total number of lines, he assesses the degree of care exercised by the Otho reviser in respect of metre, arriving at some interesting conclusions. Most strikingly, the number of lines with alliteration is comparatively speaking higher towards the end of the poem in Otho than in Caligula, while Otho increases the incidence of rhyme at an earlier point in the text than Caligula, and cuts fewer lines in the latter part of the poem. Finally he examines Laȝamon’s use of end-stopped lines, comparing some poems more or less contemporary with the Brut. Language issues crop up in articles throughout this collection. Stanley, for example, reflects on points of lexical interest where the poem’s two manuscripts show significant differences, and Allen is sensitive to the many ways in which the poem’s linguistic texture shapes audience response. In the last essay in this section Jane Roberts, in “Getting Laȝamon’s Brut into Sharper Focus”, explores why, when reading the Brut, over and over again she finds herself brought up short by unexpected speculation as to what words mean, largely because we are still dependent on Madden’s edition for editorial apparatus and his invaluable glossary. Forays out to the dictionaries help, as does consultation of the more recent translations. Yet nagging doubts often remain. Does a familiar word suddenly yield a more satisfying facet? Does an unfamiliar word slot into place? Looking at four words in particular, æðel (and related forms), boc-runen, stal, and deor, Roberts puts forward some reinterpretations and clarifications. In themselves the problems are minor, as often as not local verbal difficulties, but

4

Erik Kooper, “Laȝamon and the Development of Early Middle English Alliterative

Poetry”, in Loyal Letters: Studies in Mediaeval Alliterative Poetry and Prose, eds L.A.J.R. Houwen and A.A. MacDonald, Groningen, 1994, 113-29.

Reading Laȝamon’s Brut: Approaches and Explorations

13

confronting these uncertainties can have unexpected results for both content and texture. The paper ends by calling for the long-awaited final volume of the EETS text of Laȝamon’s Brut. IV Sources and explorations Nine essays centre on influences, traditions and parallels in Latin writings – both classical and later – and in the new vernacular literatures of Europe. Quite how far influences from classical writings may be traced is debatable, but Carole Weinberg, in “Julius Caesar and the Language of History in Laȝamon’s Brut”, argues for Laȝamon’s reliance upon such sources in his treatment of Julius Caesar, identified as the only place where Laȝamon actually comments on and emends Wace’s content. With Caesar’s invasion of Britain, she observes, historical truth enters the history of the island – or as Parry indicates (see section II) a sense of time. Weinberg’s article explores the possibility that for Julius Caesar’s conquest of the world Laȝamon had access to other Latin sources known in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries in England in addition to Wace’s Roman de Brut. Early Christian writings also contained references to Julius Caesar, as did twelfth-century Latin texts written in France and England, and the image they present of Caesar is one of ambivalence. Similarities in the presentation of Caesar between these texts and Laȝamon’s are discussed in the context of the differences between the presentation of Julius Caesar in Laȝamon and Wace. The concluding section of the article collects evidence for assuming that Laȝamon, who may have come from the same professional class of secular priests as Geoffrey and Wace, had a good knowledge of Latin and was thus able to draw on such Latin writings as an alternative language of history in the Brut. Neil Cartlidge examines some of the ways in which Laȝamon’s Brut might be thought of as an “epic” work – specifically in relation to poems such as Virgil’s Aeneid, Statius’s Thebaid, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In his “Laȝamon’s Ursula and the Influence of Roman Epic” he focuses on the story of the British princess Vrsele and her companions and the cruel fate that they meet at the hands of Scandinavian pirates, seeking to show how Laȝamon’s narrative tends to play up the “epic” possibilities of this

14

Introduction

stirring tale as presented by Geoffrey of Monmouth (in particular, the motifs of wife-shortage and female sacrifice in relation to the foundation of states or nations) and to play down the hagiographical resonances made explicit by Wace (Laȝamon’s own primary source). Cartlidge suggests that a number of details and particular emphases in Laȝamon’s reworking of this section of his Brut-narrative demonstrate a close and conscious engagement with the poetic imagination of Roman poetry. Gail Berlin, in “Constructing Tonwenne: a Gesture and Its History”, examines the presentation of a gender-specific gesture (a gesture not treated in Windeatt’s article) and its literary history. In the opening section of Laȝamon’s Brut, among a great variety of vexed kingly successions in which the competing claims of royal brothers are managed, the story of Belin and Brennes appears to represent an ideal, and fraternal strife is set aside to allow a peaceful restructuring of power. The architect of this restructuring is their mother, Tonwenne, who, dressed in torn clothing, confronts her erring son Brennes and administers a dose of motherly advice. What evokes this gesture within the narrative, asks Berlin, and how might readers have understood it? She notes that a similar gesture was in fact common in Greek literature, signalling a rupture in the social fabric: the bared breast, through its emotional shock, was meant to elicit sympathy and to bring about a change in heart, even though in Statius’s Thebaid and in the Iliad the gesture fails. In Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace the circumstances are modified: the medieval sons obey their mothers and fratricide is averted; and Wace adapts the gesture further as Tonwenne’s clothes are ripped to her waist like a virgin martyr’s. But Laȝamon’s Tonwenne in her tattered kirtle is covered; she is not distraught and may not even fully expose her breasts. Rather she is a wise and cleverly manipulative woman. Reading Laȝamon’s poem in the context of related texts in French, Spanish, Welsh, and Icelandic enhances our understanding of Laȝamon’s own achievement in producing the first Brut in English. Judith Weiss, in “Wace to Laȝamon via Waldef”, looks at the scene in Laȝamon’s Brut when Arthur receives the message of treachery at home, showing how it expands dramatically on its original in Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace. When creating it, Laȝamon possibly had in mind a striking scene in the

Reading Laȝamon’s Brut: Approaches and Explorations

15

early thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman romance of Waldef, an amalgamation of two episodes in Wace: the arrival of the Roman ambassadors, and the news of Modred’s betrayal, where the hero’s son Guiac receives similar news about the usurpation of his kingdom – a scene more overtly used in later Arthurian literature including the Morte Arthure. Like Guiac, Arthur is over-ambitious. Exceptionally however, Laȝamon does not moralize about his ambition. Sarah Baccianti offers for comparison with Laȝamon’s Brut an analysis of the Breta sǫgur, an Icelandic translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britannie preserved in the Hauksbók (1301-1314). In her “Translating England in Medieval Iceland: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britannie and Breta sǫgur” she points out that overall the Breta sǫgur has not received much scholarly attention, although the prophecies of Merlin (Merlínusspá), included in the Breta sǫgur, have been discussed extensively. Just as other articles in this volume show how Laȝamon adapted his source to the different cultural needs of his audience, Baccianti explores how Breta sǫgur is modified for an Icelandic audience. So, in his adaptation, Geoffrey’s adverse comments on Scandinavians are omitted, but the Scandinavians are connected with the Trojan origins of Britain’s kings. Although Haukr Erlendsson, the Icelandic translator, is principally concerned with historical fact and linguistic detail, there are notable omissions – often correlating with, in Allen’s terms, Laȝamon’s “boring bits” (see section I). On the other hand, Haukr Erlendsson shows an awareness of the historical resonance of Caesar’s invasion of Britain (assessed by Weinberg, also in this section), here directing his readers to an additional historical source; and he accentuates the Leir episode too, which is markedly longer than other sections. However, dialogue and the authorial interventions present in Geoffrey’s Historia are reduced, and, unlike the Historia, Haukr Erlendsson gives no moral commentary. Jennifer Miller’s “Laȝamon’s Welsh” addresses the place of Wales and the Welsh in Laȝamon’s Brut. Working from within literary and historical texts, she argues that Geoffrey’s Historia, itself a solution to the acknowledged lack of materials about the British past, reflects the discontent of contemporary baronial and Welsh insurgency, prompting the production of Welsh books in the thirteenth century. Laȝamon

16

Introduction

depicts the Britons as virtuous, Miller claims, a viewpoint that, for her, identifies him as Welsh. She suggests that his “contrived” English indicates he was a non-native speaker of English or an English-speaking Welshman who may have read Welsh books, if these were available, or acquired information about Wales orally, and not necessarily through a “Welsh informant”. Hers is an assessment of Laȝamon’s knowledge of Welsh and presentation of the politics and culture of the Welsh March that differs interestingly from the overview presented by Meecham-Jones (see section I). Two articles explore relationships between Laȝamon’s Brut and some lesser known contemporary English and French poetry. Leigh Harrison, in “The Wisdom of Hindsight in Laȝamon and Some Contemporaries”, examines Laȝamon’s use of proverbial and elegiac motifs in the long speech of introspection allotted to King Leir, finding parallels not in the literary inheritance from Anglo-Saxon England but in the newer poetry of Laȝamon’s own age. He puts forward the thirteenth-century Le Regret de Maximian as an analogue for this speech. Le Regret de Maximian was adapted from a late antique Latin elegy which, although of pagan origin, circulated with religious and moral texts and was part of the medieval curriculum. As he speaks, with hindsight Leir comes to understand his errors, and his reflections may be read more spiritually in the light of high-medieval expressions of asceticism such as are found in Le Regret de Maximian. Indeed the Brut’s noticeable reticence about its present context can itself be contextualized as a lament (like Leir’s) for humankind’s excessive focus on the present – and decidedly tragic – lack of perspective: something Laȝamon might also have expected the readers of his Brut to meditate on. In contrast, Gareth Griffith’s “Reading the Landscapes of Laȝamon’s Arthur: Place, Meaning and Intertextuality” has as its focus the presentation of landscape. Griffith points out that among the changes Laȝamon made to the materials he took from Wace, some of the most intriguing and significant are concerned with landscape. He contends that this is because Laȝamon often uses landscape descriptions and metaphors as a means of underlining the moral or ideological import of his narrative, whether by allusion, expansion, or the inclusion of elements that “Anglo-Saxonize” the

Reading Laȝamon’s Brut: Approaches and Explorations

17

French character of his source. Examining some of Laȝamon’s Arthurian landscapes in detail, Griffith considers not simply what was added or changed, but reasons also for such alterations, and he explores Laȝamon’s interaction with some of the texts and traditions current in his age. For Griffith, landscape imagery reflects Laȝamon’s concern both with the land itself and with recent political crises. The last article takes us out into the world of scribes and illuminators. Elizabeth Bryan, in “Laȝamon’s Brut and the Vernacular Text: Widening the Context”, centres her attention on the Caligula manuscript as a witness to the thirteenth-century transmission of English vernacular texts. She points out that in English studies Laȝamon’s Brut is largely absent – even avoided – in current discussion of vernacularity, which look for the most part to reassess the cultural complexities of multilingualism and the processes of vernacularization, and she seeks to bring Laȝamon’s Brut into the current debate by considering it within the context of thirteenth-century European vernacular writings. Suggesting that one material detail of Caligula A. ix, the feathery border pen-work of the manuscript’s single historiated initial, situates this manuscript in an international book-production community, Bryan looks in particular to Alfonso X “El Sabio” of Castile, and to his patronage of scriptoria which, famously, generated books in the Castilian vernacular, noting also that Eleanor of Castile, Edward I’s queen, may have been instrumental in book exchange between Spain and England before her death in 1290. The international context argued for a decorative detail thus allows consideration of possible international narratives of social functions for written early Middle English as well as for models of vernacular history writing in the thirteenth century. Bryan’s article, in bringing new perspectives to bear on Laȝamon’s Brut, reminds us how much work is still needed. Even so, this collection of essays has cast its net widely, reflecting the breadth and complexity of Laȝamon’s own vision of the island in which he lived and of its peoples during the history he relates.

I APPROACHING THE B RUT

DID LAWMAN NOD, OR IS IT WE THAT YAWN? ROSAMUND ALLEN These oft are Stratagems which Errors seem, Nor is it Homer Nods, but We that Dream.1

Until the world financial crisis, British parents were spending nearly two billion pounds a year to keep their children amused during the long summer break. Boredom apparently terrifies the young, though child psychologists commend it as a stimulant towards filling the empty hours with inventive play.2 But boredom not only inhabits the void, it also inheres in the overkill of ill-organized and unselected plenty. Before closures of high street stores re-inspired lost creativity, excess choice apparently caused lassitude: having too much merchandise to select from, too much clutter in the home, dulls minds and confuses responses. A writer who fails to select his material so as to stimulate reader response dulls with excess; an oversupply of borrowed ideas heaped together without the impress of originality or theme is tedious and confusing. Dulness, “Daughter of Chaos and eternal Night”, Pope claims, results from a mingling of genres, from overuse of inappropriate imagery and over-reliance on half-digested material from other writers. As “pensive Poets painful vigils keep, / Sleepless themselves, to give their readers sleep” they dredge out “A past, vamp’d, future, old, reviv’d 1

Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism, ll. 178-79, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John

Butt, London, 1963, 150. 2

The Observer, 18 July 2004. Nonetheless advice on keeping boredom at bay in summer

vacations abounds in the press from June onwards, for example, Cory Carson Dean in The Flint Journal, 9 June 2008.

22

Rosamund Allen

new piece”.3 The threat is ever present, as Pope warns: “Still her old Empire to restore she tries / For, born a Goddess, Dulness never dies.”4 Lawman himself produced an “old/new piece” about the past, and even the most dedicated students seem to find those “boring bits” in Lawman’s Brut which, embarrassedly, we skip or explain as a temporary lapse on Lawman’s part. Boredom is a humiliating response to admit to. But that there is a problem of reader response in Lawman’s Brut seems to have been agreed long ago. C.S. Lewis observed in 1966: The Brut is well worth our attention in its own right. The dull passages are a legacy from its known sources; its vividness, fire, and grandeur, are new.5

Critics continue in this vein, noting “extended sections of what can only be described as excruciatingly repetitious cycles of brief kingships ... unfortunately in the earliest parts of the Brut, which might dissuade a reader from proceeding to the rest of the text”,6 and affirming “unimaginative paraphrasing” of Wace in the first two thousand lines, where “the tedious genealogies in Brut testify to Layamon’s desire for completeness and accuracy”.7 Is Lawman guilty of failure to select and over reliance on borrowed material? Is this material simply “dull”? The Brut is a text we all profess to admire, and like Arthur’s breast, it even feeds many of us. If we do admit to finding some sections less than 3

Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, I, 12, 93-94, 284, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, 721, 724,

733. One such revival was Blackmore’s attempt to reclaim King Arthur with Prince Arthur: An Heroick Poem (1695), succeeded by King Arthur: An Heroick Poem (1697). But both were either too old or too new: Arthur did not become a serious popular hero again until 1816 with the reprint of Stansby’s 1634 edition of Malory’s Morte Darthur. 4

Pope, The Dunciad, I, 17-18, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, 721.

5

C.S. Lewis, “The Genesis of a Medieval Book”, in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance

Literature (1966), ed. Walter Hooper, Cambridge, 1998, 18. 6

Kelley Wickham-Crowley, Writing the Future: Laȝamon’s Prophetic History, Cardiff, 2002, 5.

7

Carolynn VanDyke Friedlander, “The Structure and Themes of Layamon’s Brut”, Ph.D.

thesis, Yale University, 1973, 12.

Did Lawman Nod?

23

stimulating, it is important to examine why this might be, and whether the blame lies with Lawman and his failure to handle his sources effectively, or with his modern readers. What the modern reader likes or rejects should prompt us to ask whether those dull passages – if they indeed are dull – would have been boring to Lawman’s contemporaries. Could modern tastes, and our inability to respond to life and art unless with excitement, be distorting our reading of the text? We need to examine what Lawman offers his implied audience, and whether he is really as fallibly derivative as some critics seem to think. If some passages are less attractive, at least to modern readers, why are they there at all? Lawman, as we know well, did not just plod his way through a translation of Wace. He adds local information, points up his characters as rational and motivated people, and more than occasionally omits inappropriate material, such as complicated battle tactics or pagan cremation rites. No author has to reproduce his source simply because it is there: abbreviatio would have been an acceptable way of dealing with mere lists of kings.8 The good historiographer, and let us at least concede that most of the time Lawman is indeed that, retells the past in relation to the contemporary audience and their own concerns. Like Robert Mannyng of Bourne a hundred years later, writing his Chronicle at Sixille Gilbertine Priory for the brothers of Sempringham,9 he was probably

8

Abbreviatio is treated in Part III, ll. 203-741, of Geoffrey de Vinsauf’s Poetria Nova. See

Edmond Faral, Les arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle, Paris, 1924; translation from Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts, ed. J.J. Murphy, Berkeley, CA, 1971. See also Ernest Gallo: “The poet ... is free to make [the traditional framework] new ... to abbreviate material not relevant to his new purpose” (“The Poetria Nova of Geoffrey de Vinsauf”, in Medieval Eloquence, ed. James J. Murphy, Berkeley, CA, 1978, 81). Lawman had precedent for using a “brief style” in the work of Ælfric, which he seems to have known well (see Ann E. Nicols, “Ælfric and the Brief Style”, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 70.1 (January 1971), 1-12; P.J. Frankis, “Laȝamon’s English Sources”, in J.R.R. Tolkien, Poet and Storyteller: Essays in Memoriam, eds Mary Salu and P.T. Farrell, Ithaca, NY and London, 1979, 64-75. 9

Robert Mannyng of Brunne, The Chronicle, ed. Idelle Sullens, Binghamton, NY, 1996.

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Rosamund Allen

addressing a particular and very local audience, almost certainly orally. He would have wasted a great deal of parchment, ink and time if he bored them so much they quite literally got up and walked out. Assuming then that Lawman knew what he was doing and how to do it, we must accept that the “less attractive” passages are not there simply because they were in the sources. They must serve some serious purpose which Lawman has identified in his source and wishes to replicate. In order to read the text aright, we need to locate the function of these passages. Part of our problem is that Lawman’s implied audience and we modern readers consume the text very differently. We know this information is not historical fact and unlike the audience Lawman assumes for his text, we are not avid recipients of a history which has formed the very land we tread and till daily. We also feel, anxiously, that a writer as good as Lawman ought to have known that some of his material did not advance the central topic of Briton history (to use Michelle Warren’s term).10 He should have recognized, we feel, that it was irrelevant to his main narrative to list Ebrauc’s twenty sons and thirty daughters, who inflate the text in a ballooning list which is quickly popped when most of them get shunted off to Italy and disappear eighteen lines later (ll. 1344-80). I shall consider a sample of these “dull” passages, especially those lists that consist of mere names with few attributes and little or no interactive role. We can examine what they do contribute to the poem, and how they operate within the larger narrative as they alternate with highly dramatized episodes, such as Brutus, Leir, Brennes and Belin, Cassibellaunus, and Constantine’s family. Critics tend to view Lawman’s Brut as a series of dramatic episodes that stand out from a morass of dully factual material, almost as if it were the function of the duller stuff to heighten by contrast the “vividness, fire, and grandeur” as Lewis calls it. This, however, is a modern reaction: an important consideration is what that first audience would have made of the “dull bits”.

10

Michelle R. Warren, History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain, 1100-1300,

Medieval Cultures 22, Minneapolis, MN, 2000, 27, et passim.

Did Lawman Nod?

25

And there is another issue. Might there have been material in Lawman’s sources which he found less attractive? I will suggest, controversially, that we could be reading the text the wrong way up: what we find enticingly antiquarian could in fact be there not because Lawman enjoyed writing “olde englisshe” but because he was not engaged by certain subjects which did appeal to his audience (and to us), so he met their requirements with the expected stereotypes while perhaps in the process compromising his own inclinations. What do we mean by “dull passages” in Lawman’s Brut? We find topics or presentations boring for a number of reasons. We may be bored by unfamiliar material, especially if it is presented too rapidly for us to adjust to before it vanishes or is quickly developed further, leaving us confused and irritated. We may, conversely, be bored if topics are too familiar, too similar to what we already know so that there is no learning process to encourage absorption of material. For example: in our novelty-craving culture a formulaic style of composition with iterative phrases and episodes that repeat previous sections of plot seems tired, as if the author lacked inspiration, a “pensive poet” keeping painful vigils to give us sleep. Even more annoying is the episode which is like, but not identical to, a preceding action. Especially if there seems to be no moral closure: the bad king Argal is exiled and returns to rule well (l. 3374), but his wicked son Enmaunus is driven out never to return (l. 3431). His cousin Cherin is a hopeless alcoholic yet lives long and the land is at peace – or so Wace modifies Geoffrey’s Historia, and Lawman seems not to find this morally contradictory (Brut, ll. 3450-60, Roman de Brut, ll. 3651-58).11 The “plot” is retrograde. Similarity creates confusion if we are attempting to take total command of the plot in our memory banks. Personally, I find the successive deaths of Constantine, Constans, Aurelius, and Uther by, in turn, a Pict, Picts, a Saxon, and Saxons by 11

Laȝamon: Brut, Edited from British Museum MS. Cotton Caligula A.ix and British Museum

MS. Cotton Otho C.xiii, eds G.L. Brook and R.F. Leslie, 2 vols,

EETS,

o.s. 250, 277 (1963,

1978). Wace’s “Roman de Brut”: A History of the British, ed. and trans. Judith Weiss, Exeter, 1999. All quotations except where indicated are from these editions.

26

Rosamund Allen

stabbing and poison very difficult to hold distinct in retrospect. Muddled, we feel inadequate, and reject the source of our confusion as a repetitious sequence of unmemorizable events. Arthur, apparently, is exempted by critics from the charge of “dull” even though his rapid conquest of northern Europe is itself repetitious and even confusing. Arthur has a biography, beginning even before his conception: he is shown thinking as well as speaking, and striking imagery is applied to the early stages of his campaign; we are won over from the beginning by the originality of his story. Yet it is so vivid, fiery, and new precisely because Arthur fulfils the continuing theme of the great leader, which began with Brutus, continued through Belinus, and even Julius Caesar, and now reaches its apogee. The early sections have played an integral part in the whole. Used to turning back and checking up, the modern reader wants to command the text, absorb and use it referentially. The medieval listener must have responded impressionistically to hint and suggestion. Without wanting or needing to remember in exact detail, what he understood was the very fact that history is a prolonged series of similar ambitions attended almost randomly by success or failure. Across the landscape of what became England countless feet have trodden, taming, cultivating, destroying, rebuilding and disappearing. Some individuals have remarkable encounters with fate, being eaten alive by a sea monster (Morpidus, ll. 3239-46), killed and eaten by wolves (Membriz, ll. 12991304) or crash-landing on a roof (Bladud, l. 1446): the cameo portraits enliven the long succession of names, even though we may not remember the name of the unfortunate concerned. What reduces the unrememberable to the level of the unmemorable in the sense of undistinguished and less than interesting is a lack of relevance to our own situation. A fictional “past” entertains if presented dramatically and in ways which engage with our own dilemmas: feminists of the world embrace Zimmer Bradley’s female slant on the Arthurian myth,12 or

12

The Mists of Avalon, New York, 1982, and Harmondsworth, 1993.

Did Lawman Nod?

27

Stephen Lawhead’s Guinevere who fights on horseback13 (and now appearing in film),14 and in the Brut these critics home in on Tonwenne and Cordeille. But figures who appear too briefly and sketchily to emerge from the page as characters seem dispensable: we do not need them, we think. Lawman clearly thought otherwise. Since the earlier sections of the Brut, before the prelude to the Arthurian section, are of less interest to modern readers, I will focus on these areas of the poem in selecting passages for discussion – they form about a third of the total text. The longer episodes here are those concerning Brutus, Leir, Belin and Brennes, and Cassibellaunus; the intervening passages are those most usually dubbed repetitious or boring. Scholars identify six further long episodes in the remaining text, but the transitions between them are seamless, without those intervening slack areas of text which modern readers find boring in the first third of Lawman’s Brut. Some “boring bits” The following is a sample of passages few would regard as gripping narrative. They provide information but do not entertain us. We are confronted by facts about languages, geography, and history, by long genealogies, regnal lists, route marches across tracts of land, and battle line-ups. a) Historical and linguistic information: The survey of Britain (ll. 967-94) includes the etymologies of Britain from Brutus, Cornwall from Corineus and the languages Troinisce, Brutunisc, and Englisc from the Angles, also including the arrival of the Saxons and Gurmund: Heora aȝene speke Troinisce ⁊ seoððen heo hit cleopeden Brutunisc. 13

Stephen Lawhead, The Pendragon Cycle, 5 vols, especially III: Arthur, n.p. [Tring], 1989.

14

King Arthur, directed by Antoine Fuqua, screenplay by David Franzone, released 7 July

2004.

28

Rosamund Allen ah Englisce men hit habbe[ð] awend seoððen Gurmund com in þis lond. Gurmund draf out þe Brutuns ⁊ his folc wes ihaten Sexuns. of ane ende of Alemaine Angles wes ihaten. of Angles comen Englisce men and Engle-lond heo hit clepeden. Þa Englisce ouer-comen þe Brutuns ⁊ brouhten heom þer neoðere. (ll. 987-92) [Their native speech, the Trojan tongue, they later called “Brutonish”, but English people have altered it since Gurmund came into this land: Gurmund drove out the Britons and his folk were called Saxons; from one end of Almaigne the Angles were named; from Angles came English men and “Engle-land” they called it. Then the English overcame the Britons and made them inferior there.]

This pseudo-factual history lesson is amplified twenty lines later, in ll. 1012-35, with a run-through of the history of “Troy þe Newe” through to Lundene and Lundres; both these accounts, of the country and then its capital, will be repeated later, with the story of Lud in ll. 3529-55 and of Gurmund in ll. 14426 ff. Both sets of linguistic and onomastic lessons are present in Wace, and Geoffrey inserts a mini-history of the successive invaders before he begins his narrative. Lawman obviously thought it important to retain these lessons. Etymology is a means of bringing history into the present, as Michelle Warren reminds us,15 and this blending of language study, history and geography alerts the audience to the way Britain/England is relevant to their own surroundings. It also acts as a trailer for what will follow, exciting interest and easing the absorption of complicated detail by repetition. Repetition has a deictic function here. Linking past kings with presently familiar places gives authenticity to the account. The places are still there, and their originators gain credence from the tangible artefacts which remain: towns, gates, walls and roads bring them into the listeners’ own world. In these place-name etymologies, 15

Warren, History on the Edge, 112-14.

Did Lawman Nod?

29

geography and history merge, as they do in the early medieval mappaemundi, on which the tituli record the history of the places marked on the circle of the world.16 b) Genealogy Of major interest to a medieval audience, and considerably less so to us, is ancestral lineage and the provision of heirs. It is of major importance that a leader has offspring; even daughters will do, though Lawman’s Leir is sorry that he does not have sons (ll. 1462). He has not, it would seem, fared as well as his great-great-grandfather Ebrauc with his many wives (Wace’s “twenty wives” are discreetly omitted), twenty sons, and thirty daughters. They appear, in roughly the form as in Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace, three retaining their recognizably Welsh names: Ah he hæfde moni wif þe his cun of a-wachede. he hefde on liue tuenti sunen. and alc hefde sundri moder. he wes þritti dohtren|ne fader. þeo wifmen weoren feire. Of his sunen hercne þa nomen ⁊ ich heo þe wulle nemnen. Brutus Uært Escut. Margadud Sisiluius. Regin Bladud. Moruit. Lagon. Ebedloan Ricar. Spaden. Gaul. Pardan. Ældad. Gangu. Kerin. Luor Ruc. Assarac. Buel. Hector. Þeos weoren Ebraukes sunen þes aðeles kinges. His dohter nomen hercna nu þa hæȝe weoren iborene. Þa eldeste was ihaten Gloigin Ocidas. Ourar Ignogen. Guardid Radan. Guendlian. Angarad. Guenboden Meðelan. Malure. Ecub. Zangustel. Scadud. Kambreda Methahel. Gaz. Echem. Nest. Gorgon. Wladus. Ebræn Blangru. Egron Bedra. Aballac. Eangnes Andor. Scadiald. Galoes. Efter þissere Galoes Wales wes inemned. Galoes wes feirest of alle þan oðren. leouest þone kinge of þan sustren ⁊ of þon breoð[er]en. ⁊ Anoþer wes alre best itowen hire tuhtlen weren gode 16

The Hereford Mappa Mundi (see below and n.27) is a good example of the typically

English large annotated mappaemundi produced between 1200 and 1400.

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Rosamund Allen Gloigin hehte þa alre elduste þeo wes þurh alle þing þa æðeleste. alle heo weoren wel bi-hedda. Þe king of Lumbardie Siluius he wes heora nexta cunnes-mon. richeliche he nom his sonde ⁊ sende to Ebrauke kinge of þisse londe. He bad hine senden him alle his dohtren. (ll. 1343-65) [But he had many wives who increased his descendants: he had twenty surviving sons, and each had a different mother. He fathered thirty daughters, all of them lovely women. Hear now the names of all his sons and I will name them for you: Brutus Greenshield, Margadud, Sisilvius, Regin, Bladud, Morvit, Lagon, Ebedloan, Ricar, Spaden, Gaul, Pardan, Aeldad, Gangu, Kerin, Luor, Ruc, Assarac, Buel, Hector. Those were the sons of the noble King Ebrauc. Now listen to the daughters’ names (who were of noble birth): the eldest was called Gloigin, then Ocidas, Ourar, Ignogen, Guardid, Radan, Guendlian, Angarad, Guenboden, Methelan, Malure, Ecub, Zangustel, Scadud, Kambreda, Methahel, Gaz, Echem, Nest, Gorgon, Wladus, Ebraen, Blangru, Egron, Bedra, Aballac, Eangnes, Andor, Scadiald, Galoes (it was from this Galoes that Wales took its name). Galoes was lovelier than all of the others, dearest to the king of the sisters and of the brothers, and the best educated was An[d]o[r]: she knew all about etiquette. Gloigin they called the eldest of all; in all ways she was the noblest. They were all well cared for. King Silvius of Lombardy was the closest relative they had; with great pomp he sent his messenger to King Ebrauc of this country, asking him to send him all his daughters.]

I suspect most modern readers skip down the list until they reach the declaration that Wales is named after the most beautiful daughter, the father’s favourite Galoes, fifteen lines into the account, a detail not present in Wace and Geoffrey. And then the whole lot is packed off to

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Lombardy. So why not just summarize?17 This is a passage which puzzles readers. Geoffrey presumably takes some names from Welsh legend and genealogy (Nest, Wladus, Angarad, Ivor) and supplements them with Biblical imitations (Methahel) and humorous touches (Gorgon? Stadudud?). The names mutate from the Vulgate to the Variant Version of Geoffrey’s Historia, and into Wace’s version and out again.18 But all fifty of the wretched sons and daughters are still present in the Otho manuscript, where we might have expected some abbreviation: the only excision in Otho is the anxious half-line in Caligula which tells us that they were “all well born”: in other words, not the offspring of a chevese, the mistress figure we have already met several times in the Brut. Far from finding such lists boring, for Lawman and his audience there would be an association with Biblical lists: of Abraham’s children and descendants in Genesis 25 and Jesus’s antecedents in Matthew 1 (which were quite likely Geoffrey of Monmouth’s inspiration).19 Name-lists, of offspring and of rulers, impart authority to the narrative.

17

In fact Lawman has omitted Wace’s details on Metael, Guenlode, Ourar and Innogen

(Roman de Brut, ll. 1563-66). 18

Wace has Bodloan, Kimcar and Dardan, Cangu, Kerim and Rud in place of similar

male names in Lawman, but his daughters Otulas (Geoffrey: Oudas), Guelode (= Guenboden), Tangustel, Gladus, Blangan, Edra and Angues, Anor and Stadiald (Roman de Brut, ll. 1543-60) exhibit the kind of scribal variation a long and incomprehensible list might generate. Lawman’s Gaz is Wace’s Gad and Geoffrey’s Gael, while Wladus for Wace and Geoffrey, is Gladus/Cladus: Lawman’s form looks very like a version of the Welsh Saint Gwladys, putative mother of Saint Cadoc in the Life of St Cadoc, c. 1100. See J.S.P. Tatlock, The Legendary History of Britain: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s “Historia Regum Britanniae” and Its Early Vernacular Versions, Berkeley, CA, 1950, 164. 19

Geoffrey probably based this enormous family on the thirty sons and thirty daughters

attributed to Adam and Eve by medieval biblical commentators.

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c) Regnal lists and “rapid successions” of kings20 These are the chief bugbear of modern readers. There are two notorious passages: the descendants of Cunedagius (ll. 1937-57) and the list of kings who follow the uniquely three-times-king Elidur (ll. 3416-52): Seoð[ð] her com a strong ræd þat Riwald kinge iwerð dea[d]. Riwald king hafuede anne sune. Gurgustius ihaten his lond he huld half ȝer and suððen he adun halde. Þer-efter com Sisillius he wes sone her deæd. Suð[ð]en com Lago þa æhte wike liuede. Suoðen. com king Marke. he wes þritti wiken king. Þeo com Gorbodiago he wes fif ȝere god king. (ll. 1951-57) [Then came a harsh event: King Riwald was dead. King Riwald had one son, called Gurgustius; he ruled his land for six months, and then he heeled over. Afterwards came Sisillius; he very soon died here. Then came Lago, who lived eight weeks. Then came King Mark: he was king for thirty weeks. Then came Gorbodiago: he was a good king for five years.] Seoððen her rixlede a king Rime wes ihaten. he wes Peredures bæren he wes Elidures broðer. Seoððen com Goronces sune Elidures. Seoððen wes Catulus his fæder hæhte Goroncius. Seoððen com Coillus his broðer hæhte Catulus. Seoððen com Porex king he wes of þeon kunne. Seo[ð]ðen com Cherin he wes Porexus cun Ah Cherin leouede longe. inne þisse londe (ll. 3443-50) [Then there ruled here a king called Rime, he was the offspring of Peredur; he was Elidur’s brother. Then came Goronc[iu]s, son of Elidur, 20

A heading used by Weiss, Roman de Brut, 93.

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then there was Catulus, his father was called Goroncius; then came Coillus, brother to the one called Catulus; then came King Porex, he was related to these; then came Cherin, he was related to Porex. But Cherin lived a long time in this land.] Seoððen com Redion ⁊ rædden þissen þeoden half ȝer ⁊ seouen niht þa wes he dæd forh-riht. Seoððen Redært his broðer lasse while þenne þe oðer. Seoððen com an þe leouede wel he hæhte Famul-penicel. on his liue he wes swa riche alle þon oðere vniliche. Seoððen com a king þe hæhte Pir his hæ[d] wes swulc swa beoð gold wir. Þet al folc wundreden on wheonene com swa feir mon. Æfter him com Capor þe king wes on þeode. Æfter him com Eligille þe heold þis lond ful stille. þes wes a swiðe wis mon ⁊ of alle þinge wel idon. mid blisse he luuede here fif ⁊ twenti ȝere. Seoððen wes king his sune Heli ȝeres fulle feouwerti. (ll. 3508-19) [Then came Redion, and governed this people for half a year and seven nights; then he immediately died. Then Redaert his brother, for less time than the former. Then came one who lived successfully: he was called Famul-penicel; during his life he was very powerful, quite unlike all the others. Then came a king who was called Pir: his head was just like gold wire so that all people wondered at it, at where such a beautiful man came from. After him came Capor, who was king in this land; after him came Eligille, who ruled this land very peacefully: this was a very wise man, who was excellent in all respects; in happiness he lived here for twenty-five years. Then his son Heli was king for fully forty years.]

Actually, from Redion on, Lawman and Wace both use seoððen ~ puis, e puis five times, but the disyllable seoððen is more insistent (Lawman adds one extra in ll. 3440-50), giving much greater emphasis to the anaphora, which is briefer anyway in Wace. It looks clumsy on the page but works

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well aloud and can be delivered humorously. The repetitive list has a serious function too. The nineteen hundred years and ninety-nine kings of Geoffrey’s Historia cover an enormous sweep of history, one paralleled in his text by references to the distant Biblical and Roman past. Lawman’s reproduction of the swift succession of reigns carries us forward in time, suggesting without labouring the point that life is transitory, fame and dishonour are ephemeral and arbitrary: an alcoholic king may get away with doing nothing and not bring his kingdom to harm; an evil-tempered one may actually die trying to do something useful by killing a monster. Lawman is quietly suggesting that men are not always punished for crimes, that history is far more complex than a working out of God’s predetermined plans and punishments. That these kings are unmemorable is surely the point: it takes an Arthur to achieve lasting fame. d) Lists of routes and/or conquests across Europe and Britain These we encounter from the beginning, with Brutus’s advance from Greece to “Brutain” (ll. 557-895) enlivened by the account of Diana’s prophecy on the isle of Logice and the exploits of Corineus in Brittany. But part of the journey, repeated without excision in Otho, is a mere list of countries: þritti dawes ⁊ þritti niht heo ferden efer forð-riht. Bi-fore Affrike heo ferden forð ⁊ eeuer heo drowen west ⁊ norð. ouer þen lac of Siluius ⁊ ouer þen lac of Philisteus. bi Ruscikadan heo nomen þa sæ ⁊ bi þe montaine of Azare ... Þeonene he ferden forð wel feole dawen ȝong. ouer Maluan æne flum suiðe long i Mauritane heo comen a lond ... Þa ferden heo forð heora færð wes on sæle. muchel ahte heo hæfden bi-wunnen Þa comen heo to þan bunnen. þa Hercules makede mid muchelen his strengðe ... A steores-man ham talde wil-spel þat he Spaine isæih. Heo drowen toward hauene haleðes weoren bliðe ... Heo ferden from Spaine riht toward Brutaine. Armoriche heihte þat lond þer Brutaines noma nu on stond.

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Peytou heo letten on riht hond swa heo comen a þet lond. in are swiðe feire æ þer Læire falleð i þa sæ. Seoue niht ⁊ enne dæi Brutus i þare hauene læi ... (ll. 640-703) Heo ferden ut of hauene þa heleðes weren bliðe. wind stod on willen ploȝede þe wile fisc. þet water wes swiðe god gumen weoren bliðe. Lið[d]en þa leoden þat heo on londe comen. æt Dertemuðe i Totenes wel wes Brutus þes. (ll. 891-95) [For thirty days and thirty nights they travelled ever onwards. From north Africa they travelled ahead, constantly bearing north by west, over the expanse of Silvius, and over the expanse of Philisteus, by Rusikadan they took to the sea, and by the mountain of Azare .... Beyond Malvan, a very long river, they came ashore in Mauritania .... Then they travelled on – their journey was prospering: they had gained a great deal of booty. Then they came to the boundaries which Hercules set up with his enormous strength .... A helmsman gave the welcome news that he had Spain in sight; they moved towards the harbour: the men were delighted .... They travelled from Spain straight on towards Brittany. Armorica was the name of the land which now bears the name of Brittany. They left Poitou on the starboard side as they came up ashore in a very splendid estuary where the Loire enters the sea. They travelled from the harbour: the men were happy; the wind blew as they wanted, the wild fish were gambolling, the water was very calm, the men were happy. The people journeyed on until they reached land at Totnes in the mouth of the river Dart; Brutus was content at this.]

These extracts omit the intervening dramatic scenes which enliven the route, like the contest with pirates in Mauritania, where Brutus’s men get their provisions, the dangers of mermaids, the introduction of Corineus in Spain, and the battles with Goffar in Armorica. But the journey is

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significant in itself because it shows that Lawman thought his audience was, or should be, informed about the wider world, and its exotic placenames. You notice he enlivens the account by suggesting the shout of “land ahoy” and the relief of the sailors. Lawman takes you into the action; Wace presents it as a bright, exotic tableau. Exotic as it sounds, and deriving ultimately from Orosius, this journey, via Numidia, Algeria, and Morocco, positions the Worcestershire audience at an extreme distance from Africa and Egypt; they may be on the edge of the world, but, as Brutus is soon to discover, are in far more clement surroundings. Some fifty to seventy years later the Hereford world map was to place the monstrous creation in Africa. As Mandeville was to proclaim in the mid-fourteenth century, the English climate is the best and contrasts most strongly with the lands of the torrid, and peculiar, Orient.21 The Hereford mappamundi was originally part of an altar, its variety of created forms and historical references reminding worshippers of the functioning of God’s created world throughout time and place: Julius Caesar commissions a survey of the world, Augustus Caesar creates an empire in space, Jesus is the terminator of time. In a similar way, Lawman’s interest in equatorial lands also reflects a concern with the created world as part of God’s overseeing of Brutus’s role in a historicalgeographical frame and with travelling in the Crusades, four of which

21

“[England] is not a territory to be explored and claimed by others, but a seed-bed for

generations of explorers who will set out to wander the world, to explore and exercise dominion.” Mandeville develops this view of the “special role of England” but Bartholomaeus Anglicus among earlier encyclopaedists “uses his entry on ‘Anglia’ as an opportunity to propagandise on behalf of his homeland ... the most fertile and fruitful corner of the world”, an observation expanded upon by John Trevisa in his translation of Bartolomaeus (Suzanne Conklin Akbari, “The Diversity of Mankind in The Book of John Mandeville”, in Eastward Bound: Travel and Travellers 1050-1550, ed. Rosamund Allen, Manchester, 2004, 170).

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took place in the period usually assigned to the composition of the Brut.22 e) Lists of combatants, complete with inaccurate numbers The most striking list of combatants occurs in the line-up for Arthur’s battle with Lucius. The Roman forces are described first: Þe æreste king þe þer com he wes swiðe kene. mon. Epistrod king of Grece Ethion duc of Boece. þer com mid mucle wiȝe Irtac king of Turckie. Pandras king of Egipte of Crete þe king Ipolitte. of Syrie þe king Euander of Frigie þe duc Teucer. of Babilone Mæptisas of Spaine þe kaisere Meodras. of Medie þe king Boccus of Libie þe king Sexstorius. of Bittunie Pollidices of Iturie þe king Sexes. Ofustesar king of Aufrike nes er na king his ilike. mid him com moni Aufrican of Ethiope he brohte þa bleomen. Þa seolue Romleoden liðen heom to-somne. þat weoren at nexte of Rome þa hexte. Marces Lucas and Catel. Cocta Gaius ⁊ Metel. þis weoren þa sixe þe þat senaht al biwusten. (ll. 12657-70) [The first king who arrived there, he was a very valiant man, King Epistrod of Greece; Duke Ethion of Boethia came there with a great force; King Irtac of Turkey; King Pandras of Egypt; King Ypolite of Crete; King Evander of Syria; Duke Teucer of Phrygia; Maptisas of Babylon; Emperor Meodras of Spain; King Boccus of Media; King Sextorius of Libya; Pollidices of Bithynia; King Xerxes of Ituria; King Ofustesar of Africa – there has never been a king like him – many an African came with him: he brought the black men of Ethiopia. The

22

The third crusade, 1187-92, fourth, 1202-04, fifth, 1217-21 (Children’s Crusade, 1215).

The third and ninth crusades were led by English kings: Richard I and Edward I.

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Rosamund Allen Roman people themselves came travelling together, who were the closest to the noblest of Rome: Marcus, Lucius and Catellus, Cocta, Gaius and Metellus: these were the six who commanded all the Senate.]

And then Arthur’s men: …raðe a-ȝæin comen cnihtes to hireden. mid wepnen wel idihten þurh allen heore mihte. of Scotlond of Irlond of Gutlond of Islond. of Noreine of Denene of Orcaneie of Maneie. of an ilke londen beoð an hundred þusende ... Of Normandie of Angou of Brutaine of Peitou. of Flandres of Bulunne of Loherne of Luueine. comen an hundred þusende to þas kinges. hirede. cnihtes mid þan bezsten þurh-costned mid wepnen. Þer comen þa twalf iueren þa France sculden heren. twelf þusend cnihtes heo brohten forð-rihtes. and of þissen londe Arður nom an honde. fifti þusend cnihtes kene and ohte men to fihte. Howel of Brutaine cnihtes mid þan bezste. ten þusend la[d]de of his leod-folke. Of ganninde monnen þa heo forð wenden. þurh nanes cunnes spelle ne cuðe heom na mon telle. (ll. 12684-704) [... speedily returning, knights came to the court, well equipped with arms, with their entire force, from Scotland, from Ireland, from Gothland/Jutland, from Iceland, from Norway, from Denmark, from Orkney, from the Isle of Man: from each of those countries there are a hundred thousand .... From Normandy, from Anjou, from Brittany, from Poitou, from Flanders, from Boulogne, from Lorraine, from Louvain, there came a hundred thousand to the royal army, knights among the best, fully tried under arms. There came the Twelve Companions to whom France owed obedience: twelve thousand knights they brought immediately, and from this land Arthur took under his command fifty thousand knights, valiant and courageous in battle:

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Howel of Brittany led ten thousand knights among the best from his countrymen; of footsoldiers, as they set off, no one could count them in any form of numbering.]

Like the lists of knights in Malory, which briefly recapitulate previous episodes while also reminding us of personal allegiances among the factions of the Round Table, the lists in Lawman’s Brut have an important structural role. The list of kings and knights attending the crown-wearing at Caerleon provides a survey of Arthur’s empire, reminding us of all he has achieved and of past antipathies; at this climactic moment before engaging with Lucius, Arthur’s entire career is summarized in the names of his earlier conquests, and his hoped-for future is outlined in the opposing emirs who could become his too, giving him, like Alexander, dominion over the east as well. The two sets of combatants are contrasted, like the two leaders’ speeches before the battle: Lucius simply has vast numbers of men, Arthur’s are armed and they are brave, “ohte men to fihte” (l. 12700). Listing of men on either side of a pending confrontation would have been a familiar topos to Lawman’s audience. There is a classic instance of west-east confrontation in The Song of Roland: Li reis Marsilie out sun cunseil finét, Si.n apelat Clarin de Balaguét, Estamarin e Eudropin sun per E Priamun e Guarlan le barbét E Maciner e sun uncle Maheu E Joüner e Malbien d’ultre mer E Blancandrins ... (Song of Roland, ll. 62-8)23

23

La Chanson de Roland, ed. F. Whitehead, Oxford, 1980. The translation is from The Song

of Roland: Done into English in the Original Measure, by Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff, London, 1919, repr. Ann Arbor, MI, 1959.

40

Rosamund Allen [The council ends, and that King Marsilie / Calleth aside Clarun of Balaguee, / Estramarin and Eudropin his peer, / And Priamun and Guarlan of the beard, / And Machiner and his uncle Mahee, / With Jouner, Malbien from over sea, / And Blancandrin ... ]

Names of Arthur’s opponents, drawn from vast territories to the east, create tension and enhance Arthur’s prestige as west is poised to attack east. Arthur is in the tradition of Charlemagne and Alexander. His allies resemble – indeed include – the twelve companions in the Song of Roland (ll. 792-98). As with the strange place-names of Brutus’s and Arthur’s travels, references to worlds distant in time and place, beyond the limits of the Jerusalem pilgrimage, bring the past into the present. The list of Arthur’s followers, from his own conquered empire, blends history, Arthur’s, with the geographic range of his British empire. They also have contemporary relevance. The eastern potentates supporting Luces elide geographical distance with over a century’s history of crusades, and even threat of invasion from the east – especially if Lawman was writing after the beginning of the Mongol advance on the west from 1215 under Chingiz (Genghis) Khan, which lasted until the death of Ogedei in 1241.24 Information and instruction These lists function within the text as what Pope calls “stratagems” directed at the audience themselves. Apart from sermons and instructions issued by priests, informative material in the English vernacular must have been very limited for Lawman’s audience. Learning about the past, gaining access to material previously only available in Latin or Norman French, would have seemed a privilege to the 24

David Morgan, The Mongols, Oxford, 1986, 66, 140, 156. Matthew Paris wrote much in

his chronicle on the arrival of the Mongols from the east around 1240, and equated them with Gog and Magog who would destroy humanity after escaping from the enclosure Alexander had sealed them into; he indicated their escape on his Palestine maps (Evelyn Edson, Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed Their World (1997), London, 1999, 125).

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monolingual. Far from suffering under an information overload, Lawman’s audience probably craved knowledge of the past. Even names flashing past in little more than list form would deepen their sense of belonging within a succession of past events and people. Lawman’s writing provides instruction for his contemporaries; the so-called dull passages play a functional part in this provision of knowledge. John McGavin has directed us to think again about “long and boring speeches” in medieval drama.25 He reminds us that in previous generations hearing speeches and sermons was an entertainment in itself. Being informed was once a pleasure where information was sparse or in an incomprehensible tongue. Mannyng translated Wace and Langtoft for those who only had English and wanted to know about the past – and he was concerned to avoid “strange Inglis in ryme” (Chronicle, ll. 79-80), presumably where French loans form an elaborate rhyme scheme: “I mad ... But for the luf of symple men / Þat strange Inglis can not ken” (ll. 76-78) since if the audience did not understand, the whole project was “schente” (Chronicle, l. 82). Knowledge of the past establishes identity, enhances morale and shapes future actions and decisions, and, in a mixed-race community, encourages cohesion. How would the B rut be performed? There is a difference here in the two surviving manuscripts. Otho, rather than performative, is a readerly text: its coloured caps provide markers for referring back, checking and comparing. It contains rather shorter direct addresses than Caligula and so is less dramatic in method than Caligula. Caligula is set up for performance – perhaps it might even represent a later stage of the text, rather than an earlier one: perhaps, like Langland, Lawman revised his poem, and adapted for the benefit of a 25

John McGavin, “Long Speeches in Lindsay and Bale”, Medieval English Theatre, 12.2

(1990), 88-95 (a paper first delivered in Westfield College at the meeting of the Medieval English Theatre entitled “Excessively Long Speeches in Medieval Plays”, 24 March 1990).

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listening audience a version originally more similar to Otho. Additional or extended speeches in Caligula act demonstratively; they show how English may be deployed in formal communications in hall, in council, at hustings and for rousing support before battle. The performative nature of Caligula brings us to the nub of the “dullness” issue. We learn best, apparently, by receiving information in a context of pleasurable emotion. How could the “long and tedious” passages be performed to provide amusement with instruction? Let’s try. Æfter him com Capor þe king wes on þeode. Æfter him com Eligille þe heold þis lond ful stille. þes wes a swiðe wis mon ⁊ of alle þinge wel idon. mid blisse he luuede here fif ⁊ twenti ȝere ... (ll. 3515-11) [After him came Capor who was king in the country; after him came Eligille who ruled this land in great peace: this was a very wise man, and well qualified in all matters; he lived here contentedly for twenty-five years ...]

At last, the jinx is broken; this line of premature royal demises seemed to stretching out to the crack of doom, and then: Seoððen wes king his sune Heli ȝeres fulle feouwerti ... (l. 3519) [Afterwards his son Heli was king for fully forty years ...]

To perform this with rhetorical impact, breaking the mould of the repetitions by pausing before the high scores in the regnal succession will alert audience expectation to comic effect. With the instructional tone lightened, the audience is ready to launch into the long narrative of Heli’s son Lud, the reprise of his building of London, and his burial at Ludgate (which Eilert Ekwall tells us is really the Anglo-Saxon ludgeat,

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the gate the vertically overdeveloped have to stoop to enter).26 And thus indeed we reach another dramatic interlude with the twice-repelled Roman invasion under Caesar and yet another family disloyalty as Androgeus the turncoat betrays his uncle Cassibellaunus. In fact, many of these pseudo-factual historical and onomastic lessons occur just before dramatized episodes: Brutus’s journey precedes the exploits of Corineus, Leir’s extended narrative follows the brief dismissal of the kings with truncated reigns, between Brennes and Belin and Leir we have three short narratives of family feud and civil war, and a settlement account and swift changes of ruler separate the two long narratives of Leir and Cassibellaunus, while the developed plots of Constantine’s descendants follow the one thousand line (ll. 4520-5528) dash of the Roman occupation. All the same, we are wrong to regard the “lessons” as the rough string on which the jewels are threaded. They have their own function in connecting the movement through time with the movement through space which the dramatic episodes of human interaction demonstrate. Like a mappamundi, they help to show how places are changed by human intervention over time and how time and place merge beneath the figure of Christ in Judgement at Doomsday sitting atop the Hereford mappamundi.27 This dual encyclopaedia and detailed map reference of

26

Eilert Ekwall, Street-Names of the City of London, Oxford, 1954, 91: “OE ludgeat ‘a back

door, postern’ ... the first element might be a derivation of OE lutan ‘to bow, incline’.” 27

The mapping of space in relation to history as a means of instruction was of major

interest from the early thirteenth century and the English seem to have been at the forefront of the movement (P.D.A. Harvey, Medieval Maps, Toronto and Buffalo, NY, 1991, 25). The Hereford map was made about 1290, by Richard of Haldingham (Holdingham) and Lafford (modern Sleaford), a Lincolnshire priest, and taken to Hereford soon after. It has images of real and supposed regional creatures and past and present inhabitants, especially biblical, with captions (reproduced whole and in selective detail in Harvey, Medieval Maps, 29-33, and also reproduced in toto in Peter Whitfield, The Image of the World (1994), San Francisco, CA, 1997, 20-21; for an exhaustive study of the map, see Scott D. Westrem, The Hereford Map: A Transcription of the Legends with Translation

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Rosamund Allen

Europe is very similar to the way Lawman’s Brut operates in providing its audience with the kind of information which would sit comfortably in a household book of reference. How has Lawman helped his audience engage with the matter? Lawman in his Brut domesticates the text he inherited from Wace. His narrator tells us, several times, that a daughter who in Wace is simply given by her father in a dynastic marriage was actually his beloved daughter. He is concerned about Assaracus’s mother who was only a mistress and undervalued, about Brutus’s unmarried mother – “it often happens”. He tells us about Brutus’s anguish at killing his father, his delight in landing at Totnes, and at surveying his lands. He creates idiosyncratic figures, like Corineus who runs about talking to himself and tells the Breton Numbert he is daft (sot), using the same word later to Locrin (l. 1136) in his fury that his dear child “mi bearn deore” (l. 1138) is insulted. Corineus grieves about the degeneracy of the son of his beloved friend Brutus (“mi deore wine”, l. 1145). In Lawman’s narrative

and Notes, The History of the Representation of Space in Text and Image I, gen. ed. Patrick Gautier Dalché, Turnhout, Belgium, 2001). Like the tiny psalter maps (about 10 cm across) which became popular in the thirteenth century (Whitfield, Image, 18), the larger (1.3 metres wide) Hereford map has Christ Pantocrator at the top (east), and in the lower left corner has the figure of Augustus Caesar, and a caption above it recording that Julius Caesar commissioned the first world survey with a titulus giving his instruction to go “into the whole world and report to the Senate on all its parts”. It is only one-seventh the size of the now lost Ebstorf world map, c. 1230. Large mappaemundi were commissioned by Henry III in 1236 to be painted on the walls of Westminster palace and Winchester Great Hall (Whitfield, Image, 18); a third was painted in the monastery at Waltham, the latter copied, with further information from Robert de Melkeley, by Matthew Paris (c. 1250), part of whose small map survives in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 26, 284 (Catherine Delano Smith and Roger J.P. Kain, English Maps: A History, Toronto and Buffalo, NY, 1999, 15). Matthew Paris’s maps of Britain, “the most detailed regional cartography to be found in the Europe of his day”, were probably based on a coastal outline derived from a mappamundi (Edson, Mapping Time and Space, 122-25).

Did Lawman Nod?

45

people address each other, often formally, but with marked emotional engagement, as Joseph Parry has shown.28 Wace so often simply reports a speech act, inviting admiration for the way a procession of great figures from the past manipulates those around them, but paying less attention to the underlying network of communication with the lesser folk who make leaders’ decisions happen. What is most significant about Lawman’s text is that he shows people’s feelings for each other and has ordinary people speaking, in significant roles such as messengers I admit, because this is a history not simply made by the famous or infamous great: each contributes according to his or her role. His references to places, as lists of their etymons, as conquests or as route markers, are matched by his concern with locating characters within the narrative action: Brutus gets up on to a high point to make a declaration (l. 428), Corineus’s axe crashes down perilously close to Locrin (ll. 1156-57), the earth cave Astrild is hidden in for seven years is thoughtfully furnished for her by Lawman (1182-88). None of these details is in Wace. Such little additions by Lawman give the characters a third dimension. This is more than the decorative effect advocated for good historical writing by Gervaise of Canterbury.29 Lawman’s plotting of the action advances his narrative into romance mode and reminds us of the techniques of the novel. The modern reader is attracted, for example, by the dramatic realism of Arthur changing colour at the news of his father’s death, and of Merlin writhing in “serpentine” contortions in prophetic trance. But this misleads us into expecting the whole text to operate on this level, to the detriment of the earlier sections where such touches are transitory. Our own low boredom threshold results from the vast choices available to us: one click of the zapper and the programme is changed from documentary to soap. It seems that the past is popular

28

Joseph Parry, “Narrators, Messengers, and Lawman’s Brut”, Arthuriana, 8.3 (Fall 1998),

46-61. 29

Cited in Richard J. Moll, Before Arthur: Reading Malory in later Medieval England, Toronto

and London, 2003, 93-94.

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Rosamund Allen

again as historical and archaeological programmes, but it arrives packaged in dramatized form (to the despair of academic historians). Lawman’s dramatic episodes provide a similar means of familiarizing history, with theme (usually treachery), full closure in the death of the central participant in each episode, and motivation of the action. If Lawman’s text was divided into sections for performance, with alternating factual and dramatic passages forming one day’s portion of recitation, this would approximate quite closely to the television history programme, where presenters delivering facts and statistics cut to clips of costumed actors demonstrating the producers’ ideas of how it all might have happened.30 This mix of costume drama and historical fact is an invitation to visit the past by allowing it to replay itself through images in our living rooms, just as the intermingling in the Brut of lists and dramatized episodes must have brought the past alive through voices resounding in the medieval hall. A successful merging of past and present offers the ancient Other in terms of the recipients’ mindset. If we want a modern parallel to Lawman’s Brut it is the TV documentary rather than the modern novel, and we should allow this to govern our response. We read a work like Lawman’s Brut as if it were literature with lapses. Its carefully wrought verse makes us regard it as literature rather than non-fiction. Like Wace’s Brut, and like the thirteenth-century German world chronicles in rhyming couplets, it was composed to be performed, possibly by singing, to be listened to or read as a form of instructive entertainment.31 Reviewing a recent edition of the German rhyming chronicles, however, Rasma Lazda-Cazers points out that the common

30

In an earlier article I attempted to identify performance sections for the Brut:

“Counting Time and Time for Re-counting: Narrative Sections in Laȝamon’s Brut”, in Orality and Literacy in Early Middle English, ed. Herbert Pilch, ScriptOralia 83, Tübingen, 1996, 71-91. 31

R. Graeme Dunphy, History as Literature: German World Chronicles of the Thirteenth Century

in Rhyming Couplets, Medieval German Texts in Bilingual Editions 3, Kalamazoo, MI, 2003.

Did Lawman Nod?

47

distinction between fictional (higher quality) and non-fictional (lesser quality) literature is artificial. She continues: The modern distinction between historiography and literature is questionable when it comes to literature and writing in the Middle Ages, when writing was generally not divided along the lines of nonfictional and fictional, but rather as a representation of a possible (Christian) truth and impossible (unchristian) lies. This distinction is visually represented in the christo-centric mappamundi with Jerusalem as the center of the world and as such illustrates the perception of reality and truth in the Middle Ages ...32

In other words, verse, music perhaps, characterization, all give pleasurable effects, but the pleasure has an instructional aim. When we say the Caligula Brut is a performative text it is because characters enact their instructive stories for us. Lawman is teaching by illustration; this is a history book with the equivalent of hypertext links to courtesy book, mirror for magistrates, confession manual, saint’s life and chivalry. It shows how to use English in formal contexts usually occupied by Norman French. Its runes, its “written advice, its characters’ speech” supply advice for living. Could Lawman have been bored by parts other poets reached instead? Although Lawman is often dubbed fierce and retributive, he actually shortens some of Wace’s more gruesome passages. Take this for instance (Brennes and Belinus in battle): Quant les dous oz s’encontrerent Par grant fierté s’entremellerent; De darz i out grant lanceïz

32

The Medieval Review, Ann Arbor, 2004, review of Dunphy, History as Literature:

http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.baj9928.0401.017.

48

Rosamund Allen E de pieres grant geteïz E de lances grant boteïz E d’espees grant chapeleïz. Gettent, lancent, fierent e botent, Cheent, jambetent, almes rotent. (Roman de Brut, ll. 2543-50) [When the two armies met, they fiercely joined battle; there was much throwing of spears, casting of stones, thrusting of lances and slaughter with swords. They threw, struck, hit and thrust; they fell, kicked helplessly and belched out their souls (trans. Weiss).]

Wace’s rhetorical patterning makes a battle more like a ballet dance. Lawman, painfully aware that this is civil war, and not defensive warfare, reduces Wace to: þer heo heom imetten ⁊ vuele hem igretten. To-gædere heo comen heo graneden sone. feondliche heo feohten bi þeosende heo fellen. (ll. 2364-66) [There they encountered and savagely challenged; together they came: instantly they prepared for attack, as with fury they were fighting, in thousands they were falling]

Even in the culminating moments of Arthur’s contest with Lucius, Lawman merely summarizes: Æfne þan worden þa bleou men þa bemen. fiftene þusend anan þraste to blauwen. hornes and bemen þa eorðe gon beouien. for þan vnimete blase for þan mucle ibeote. Romleoden wenden rug to þan feohten. feollen here-marken heȝe men swulten. fluȝen þa þe mihten þa ueie þær feollen.

Did Lawman Nod?

49

Muchel mon-slæht wes þere ne mihte hit na man tellen. hu feole hundred monnen to-heouwen þer weoren. i þan mucle þrunge i þan mon-slæhte. (ll. 13882-91) [After those words [of Arthur] then men blew the trumpets, fifteen thousand men at once thronged to sound horns and trumpets: the earth began to shake at the tremendous blast, at the great din. The Romans turned their backs to the fight: banners sank down, their noblemen died, those who could took flight, the doomed fell there. There was great slaughter – no one could estimate how many hundreds of men were hacked to pieces there in the huge throng, in the battle slaughter.]

But for Wace there is a fierce onslaught in which Arthur breaks hawberks, cuts off heads, arms and fists, brandishes a blood-coated Caliburn and kills his opponents like a hunger-crazed lion. In a moment of black comedy Wace has Arthur address Polidetes’ headless trunk which stays upright to listen. We are invited to relish this horror in Wace’s familiar phrase “Tost en veïssiez murir mil” (“You could soon see a thousand die”, l. 12933). In stark contrast, Lawman starts the battle but is unable to count the corpses; it is as if he found the slaughter too unchristian or perhaps too much like the slaughter of eastern Christians in Constantinople by Christian Crusaders on the fourth crusade in 1204. Françoise Le Saux notes Lawman’s abbreviation of the Roman war and suggests that Lawman is more interested in Arthur’s conquest of the pagan Saxon invaders than in the colonial conquests.33 But perhaps, as a priest presenting a narrative to an audience of local people, he is simply not engaged by fighting at all, though they might well have been. Where fighting is justifiable, in the elimination of pagan aliens who have burned down churches and drowned suckling babes (ll. 10464-65), he admits it, but focuses more closely on Arthur’s arming before the battle of Bath (ll.

33

Françoise H.M. Le Saux, Laȝamon’s Brut: The Poem and Its Sources, Arthurian Studies 19,

Cambridge, 1989, 32, 34, 37, 42.

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10543-57) and his battle oration (“these forsworn heathen hounds killed our forefathers”) than on the battle itself, where Lawman deflects activities of the human agents with similes: Arthur is like the wild boar encountering domestic swine, he lays into Childric like a lion, and his foe is compared to a goat attacked by a wolf, the shattered enemy corpses are steel fish in the Avon, and Childric runs like a hunter from the deer. Battle is epitomized in the three Saxon knights Arthur despatches to encourage his men to follow suit (ll. 10669-73), and two lines (reduced to one in Otho) describing how spears and swords attack the Saxons. There follows a headcount of the slain Saxons (ll. 10677-79), and Arthur’s swift despatch of Colgrim and Baldulf with his mocking threnody over their corpses (ll. 10687-706). Wace, unsurprisingly, has the British striking and demolishing Saxons, while Arthur, fighting “with great harshness, power and valour”, is “smashing through the throng, killing to right and left”34 and personally killing over four hundred, more than the rest of his army (Roman de Brut, ll. 9349-57). Lawman, the priest who notes when his characters rejoice, and sees family quarrels as personal as well as political tragedy, does not like warfare. His focus is not the fighting but the aftermath: the dead souls lying spilled among the fields and streams. Archaic formulae for battle, which seem to show Lawman’s engagement with ancient poetry, may actually operate as a cypher to conceal his own distaste for warfare while providing for his audience’s interest in battle by recalling to them the phrases they would recognize from others’ narratives: feollen þa fæie falewede nebbes. Weoren al þa feldes ifayed mid blode (ll. 2077-78): Dunwal feondliche heo fuhten feollen þa fæie (l. 7005): Vortigern and Picts [The doomed fell, their faces grew pale, all the fields were stained with blood. They fought furiously; the doomed fell.]

34

Roman de Brut, trans. Weiss.

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Conclusion I have tried to show how Lawman humanizes his text and lets the reader see how people – speaking among themselves, thinking to themselves – determine action which may even shape nations. His theme is that as man proposes, so man is responsible for his actions. Men, not God or fate, shape history. This non-deterministic treatment of the past was Geoffrey of Monmouth’s contribution to historiography, but Geoffrey’s largely narratorial text gives an overview of the past in which the narrator replaces the divinity as the director of events. We are told why a character behaved as he/she did, but in the narrator’s voice. Rarely in Geoffrey’s Historia do we enter people’s own perception of their situation through direct speech or thought acts. When Wace adds speech, he does not show messengers delivering momentous news, or couples talking in bed like Gonorille or Uther. Lawman, if we read him attentively, is the confidant of his characters; is used to listening to people’s concerns, to their confessions if the poem was written post Lateran IV; he knows how people tick. He knew how his audience thought and what interested them, and so invites his listeners into the text, helping them both understand and learn. What the implied audience got from the Brut, in both the Caligula and Otho versions, was a text which inspired, entertained, amused, and also instructed. And, to adapt Rudyard Kipling, another great communicator and populist historian, we must particularly remember the instruction. These passages are indeed “stratagems which errors seem” and Lawman’s “new piece” is not simply “reviv’d” unthinkingly. He has responded to the repetitions of his source with full understanding of their function as deictic markers, and has tuned them to provide moral and even comic overtones. This is not Dulness but enlightened pedagogy.

THE B R UT AS SAXON LITERATURE: THE NEW PHILOLOGISTS READ LAWMAN HARUKO MOMMA

Editing vernacular literature in the nineteenth century In 1847 the Society of Antiquaries issued Frederic Madden’s threevolume edition of the Brut.1 This massive project had begun some sixteen years earlier – 17 March 1831 to be precise – when the Society passed a resolution to launch a publication series for editions of the literature of “Anglo-Saxon and early English writers”. In the resolution the Society mentions three titles for “immediate publication”: “Cædmon’s Paraphrase”, to be edited by Benjamin Thorpe; the “Metrical Chronicle of Britain, by Layamon”, to be edited by “F. Madden, Esq[uire] ... and Assistant Keeper of M[anuscripts] in the British Museum” (and shortly to become Sir Frederic, Keeper of Manuscripts); and the Ormulum, to be edited by Richard Price, the “Editor of Warton’s History of English Poetry”.2 Benjamin Thorpe’s Cædmon’s Metrical Paraphrase (that is, the Old English biblical poems of Junius 11) was duly issued in the following year,3 but the Ormulum, a 1

Laȝamons Brut, or Chronicle of Britain; a Poetical Semi-Saxon paraphrase of the Brut of Wace, 3

vols, ed. and trans. Frederic Madden, London, 1847. 2

Society of Antiquaries, “Antiquarian Researches”, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 101 (1831),

254. 3

Benjamin Thorpe, Caedmon’s Metrical Paraphrase of Parts of the Holy Scriptures: With an

English Translation, Notes, and a Verbal Index, London, 1832. At the time, the biblical poems in the Junius Manuscript were believed to have been composed by Caedmon, whom the

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twelfth-century homiliary penned by an Augustinian canon named Orm, was never published by the Society because of Price’s untimely death in 1833.4 The resolution of 1831 mentions several additional titles that were planned to follow these initial three: Beowulf, the Exeter Book, the Old English “Romance of Apollonius of Tyre”, “Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary”, and Gospel glosses and translations.5 Of these, the first complete English edition of Beowulf was produced by John Mitchell Kemble and issued independently of the Society in 1833.6 Apollonius of Tyre, an Old English prose romance, was edited by Thorpe and printed by a different publisher in 1834.7 Thorpe also edited the Exeter Book (one of the four major Old English poetic codices along with Junius 11, the Beowulf manuscript, and the Vercelli Book) and published it through the Society in 1842.8 Even though the Society ultimately published fewer titles than had initially been intended, there is little doubt that this wellestablished institution played a role in promoting editions of early medieval English literature in the mid-nineteenth century. The Society of Antiquaries’ enterprise was a response to the philological movement that had begun on the Continent in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. In the resolution of 1831 the Society acknowledged that much had been done of late for the cultivation of

Society’s resolution calls “the Milton of our Saxon forefathers” (Society of Antiquaries, “Antiquarian Researches”, 253). 4

The Oxford University Press issued the first complete edition of this Early Middle English

poem: The Ormulum, 2 vols, ed. R.M. White, Oxford, 1852. 5

Society of Antiquaries, “Antiquarian Researches”, 254.

6

John Mitchell Kemble, The Anglo-Saxon Poems of Beowulf: The Travellers Song and the Battle of

Finnesburh, London, William Pickering, 1833; (2nd ed., 1835). 7

The Anglo-Saxon Version of the Story of Apollonius of Tyre upon which is founded the Play of

Pericles, attributed to Shakespeare; from a MS. in the Library of C.C.C. Cambridge, ed. and trans. Benjamin Thorpe, London, 1834. 8

Codex Exoniensis: A Collection of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, from a Manuscript in the Library of the

Dean and Chapter of Exeter, ed. Benjamin Thorpe, London, 1842.

The Brut as Saxon Literature

55

ancient native literature in France, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden and that the achievement of scholars in these countries was indeed so impressive that: it has been a source of mortification to the English antiquary and philologist, that in this country few have been the steps taken, during the last century, towards communicating to the world the literary treasures preserved among us, from the times of our Saxon and Anglo-Norman forefathers.9

What interests us here in relation to Lawman studies is the parameters set by the Society for its publication series: by the “ancient native literature” of England it clearly meant vernacular composition in both Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman periods. The Brut and other postConquest texts were therefore grouped together with Anglo-Saxon compositions under the rubric of the originary literature of England. The Society of Antiquaries’ treatment of the early medieval vernacular was in line with the traditional view that English did not come into existence until the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, when the native Saxon tongue had presumably become intermixed with enough French elements to give rise to a new language. According to this century-old notion of English as an amalgam of “Gothic” and Romance languages, the period immediately following the Norman Conquest comprised a transition from late Saxon to the earliest phase of English. In his edition of the Brut, Madden adopted this framework and underlined the importance of the transitional vernacular in the study of linguistic and literary history:

9

Society of Antiquaries, “Antiquarian Researches”, 253. For the rivalry between the

British antiquaries and the Danish philologist N.F.S. Grundtvig over editing early medieval English manuscripts, see, for example, Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780-1860, Princeton, NJ, 1967, 185-89, and Arthur G. Kennedy, “Odium Philologicum, or, a Century of Progress in English Philology”, Stanford Studies in Language and Literature, ed. Hardin Craig, Stanford, 1941, 11-27.

56

Haruko Momma It will be readily admitted by those who have investigated the history of the English language, that the most obscure, and yet in many respects, the most interesting period of its progress, is that during which the Anglo-Saxon language, already from the time of Edward the Confessor predisposed to change, was at length broken up, and clothed with those new characteristics, in which the germs of our modern tongue are found.10

Although Madden believed it “impracticable” to “fix the exact date of the commencement of ‘English’”, he nonetheless assigned the earliest phase of “our modern tongue” to the period spanning roughly 1230 and 1330, and reserved the years 1100 through 1230 for the transitional vernacular called Semi-Saxon.11 At the time, the Brut was customarily dated “to the reign of Henry the Second, or the close of the twelfth century”, but Madden used linguistic and historical evidence to surmise that the poem “was written or completed at the beginning of the thirteenth century”. In so doing he presented Lawman as a late SemiSaxon author whose writing anticipated the “sta[r]t of our language”. As such the poet deserves to be called “our English Ennius”, even though this title had earlier been applied to Robert of Gloucester.12 As far as I am aware, “Semi-Saxon” was first applied to the transitional vernacular of post-Conquest England by George Hickes and adopted by subsequent generations of scholars until at least the 1870s, when Henry Sweet introduced the three-part division of Old, Middle,

10

Madden, Laȝamons Brut, I, iii.

11

Ibid., I, iv-vi. Madden acknowledged that some scholars “object[ed] to the term Semi-

Saxon” and treated it as part of Early English. He insisted nonetheless that there was “good reason for distinguishing between the language of Laȝamon and the poems of the end of Edward the First’s reign” (Laȝamons Brut, I, vi, n.1). 12

Ibid., I, vii, xviii, xx, vi-vii. The phrase “English Ennius” was initially used by John

Dryden to describe Chaucer (“Postscript to the Reader”, in The Works of John Dryden, gen. ed. Alan Roper; textual editor Vinton A. Dearing, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1987, 5, 807.

The Brut as Saxon Literature

57

and Modern English.13 The wide usage of the term Semi-Saxon meant that the Brut and other post-Conquest compositions were customarily grouped with “Saxon” rather than with “English” by both eighteenthcentury antiquaries and the first generation of the new philologists such as Madden, Thorpe, and Kemble. It is therefore, I believe, worth revisiting the ramifications of “Semi-Saxon” in the work of English vernacularists prior to the late nineteenth century. Before Sweet, the vernacular of medieval England was virtually divided into an early phase (that is, “Saxon”) and a late phase (that is, “English”) with the shift from one to the other lasting at least for two centuries following the Conquest. After Sweet, it was divided into “Old” and “Middle” with the transition taking place in a relatively short time, namely, in the late eleventh century and the early twelfth century at the latest. In other words, the more recent system of periodization features the Norman Conquest almost as a Rubicon that divides the language and literature of medieval England into two separate territories, whereas the earlier method of periodization took less heed of 1066, a political event that inevitably generates a narrative about either the triumph of one ethnic group or the tragic defeat of another. The criterion for periodization employed by vernacularists in the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century was primarily psychological: the language of a given medieval text was considered “English” if it seemed familiar enough to be placed on the side of “our modern tongue”, and Saxon if it looked too foreign to be called “our language”. Such a cognition-based method of periodization may seem unscientific to historical linguists today, but this kind of practice was probably not uncommon even among medieval readers themselves. For example, judging from some of the marginal notes and added drawings,

13

George Hickes, Linguarum Vett. Septentrionalium Thesauri Grammatico-Critici et Archæologici

Pars Prima: seu Institutiones Grammaticæ Anglo-Saxonicæ, & Mœso-Gothicæ (Oxoniæ: e Theatro Sheldoniano, 1703); reprinted Hildesheim and New York, 1970, 88, 134, 222; Henry Sweet, “The History of English Sounds”, Transactions of the Philological Society (1873-74), 61721.

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the biblical poems of Junius 11 continued to be read after the Conquest and up until the end of the twelfth century.14 If Anglo-Saxon literature was part of the production and consumption of post-Conquest literature, we may postulate a common literary culture for Old and Early Middle English at least in certain genres and registers. In the next section, I will examine the scholarship of Thorpe and Kemble, two of Madden’s contemporaries, to explore what issues were at stake in their reading of the Brut. Thorpe and Kemble While Madden spent sixteen years completing his edition of the Brut, Thorpe and Kemble studied the poem and used it in their work as early as the mid-1830s.15 Thorpe included Lawman in his Analecta AngloSaxonica: A Selection, in Prose and Verse, from Anglo-Saxon Authors of Various Ages (1834), the first reader of its kind that had a significant influence on the formation of a taste for Anglo-Saxon literature in the mid-nineteenth century. The Analecta consists largely of Old English prose ranging from homilies to gospel translations to Alfredian renditions of Latin treatises, whereas Old English poetry is limited to a few texts such as Judith and The Battle of Maldon.16 Thorpe nonetheless included in his anthology three

14

Barbara C. Raw, “The Construction of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11”, Anglo-

Saxon England, 13 (1984), 204. Raw further points out that Old English texts in Insular script were no longer valued in the thirteenth century. A mid-thirteenth century catalogue calls some Old English manuscripts “old and useless” (ibid.). 15

For Madden’s other philological work, see, for example, Daniel Donoghue, “Lawman,

Frederic Madden and Literary History”, in Laȝamon: Contexts, Language, and Interpretation, eds Rosamund Allen, Lucy Perry and Jane Roberts, King’s College London Medieval Studies 19, 2002, 25-38. For the complex relationship between Madden and Kemble, see Gretchen P. Ackerman, “J. M. Kemble and Sir Frederic Madden: ‘Conceit and Too Much Germanism’?”, in Anglo-Saxon Scholarship: The First Three Centuries, eds Carl T. Berkhout and Milton McC. Gatch, Boston, 1982, 167-81. 16

Benjamin Thorpe, Analecta Anglo-Saxonica: A Selection, in Prose and Verse, from Anglo-

Saxon Authors of Various Ages, London, 1834; a new edition with corrections and

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59

post-Conquest verse texts, The Grave, the Ormulum, and the Brut. From the viewpoint of literary history, it makes much sense to read the first two poems side by side with Anglo-Saxon religious texts. The Grave is a short alliterative poem that uses the topos of body and soul. Described by Thorpe as a “singularly impressive and almost appalling fragment”, this Early Middle English composition is reminiscent of such Old English poems as Soul and Body I and II.17 The Ormulum, though a syllabic poem with no regular alliteration, nonetheless draws on the Old English homiletic tradition to provide a paraphrase of the gospel story interspersed with exegetical remarks. The situation is somewhat more complex with Lawman, because the Brut is based largely on Wace’s French Roman de Brut and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin Historia Regum Britanniæ. In the Analecta Thorpe does not provide an explanation for the overall construction of the Brut or mention the role of King Arthur in the poem. Instead he just prints the well known “History of King Leir and his Daughters”.18 Thorpe’s justification for the inclusion of Lawman in his anthology of “Anglo-Saxon authors” seems to rest on periodization, as he identifies the language of the Brut (and also of the Ormulum) as “Semi-Saxon, in which the vocabulary is still free from foreign terms, but the grammatical construction nearly subverted”.19 The Brut is also used in Kemble’s twenty-page pamphlet that outlines his plan for a lecture series on “the Anglo-Saxon period” of the history of the English language. In this little-known publication of 1834,

improvements, London, 1846, 131-52. The anthology also includes an excerpt from the Exeter Book Riming Poem, which Thorpe calls “A Paraphrase of Job, XXIX. XXX., alliterative with final rime” (ibid., 152-53). 17

Ibid., xi. For the topos of body and soul, see The Soul’s Address to the Body: The Worcester

Fragments, ed. Douglas Moffat, East Lansing, MI, 1987, 39-51. 18

Thorpe, Analecta Anglo-Saxonica, 154-81. Thorpe’s excerpt of the Leir episode

corresponds with lines 1450-1887 of Laȝamon: Brut, eds G.L. Brook and R.F. Leslie, 2 vols.,

EETS,

o.s. 250, 277, 1963, 1978, 74-99. All references to the Brut in this essay are

from this edition unless otherwise noted. 19

Thorpe, Analecta Anglo-Saxonica, xi, n.

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Kemble undertakes the historical study of the language to enhance the understanding of “the nature and character of the people”. Hence his lectures, twenty in total, would concentrate on “some of the poems, the only real representation of the Saxon mind”.20 As the lecture plan unfolds, however, it becomes clear that Kemble had a very particular idea about the “Saxon mind”. The first poem mentioned in the pamphlet is, not surprisingly, Beowulf, a composition that he believed provided historical information about the forefathers of the Angles living on the Continent during the heroic age. Kemble planned to dedicate six lectures to Beowulf, but these would cover only the first twenty-three “cantos” or fitts of the poem, in which the young hero’s fights with Grendel and Grendel’s mother are narrated. As long as the lectures should deal with “the first and most interesting portion of Beowulf”, Kemble did not find it necessary to examine the rest of the poem or any other Old English poem for that matter. The Exeter Book, even when it “resembles Beowulf”, is still “less important” than that superior poem. Kemble excused himself from considering the biblical poems of Junius 11 on the ground that they had already been “furnished with an excellent translation”, by which he apparently meant the one provided by Thorpe in his Cædmon’s Metrical Paraphrase.21 Interestingly, the only other poem discussed in the plan for Kemble’s projected lecture series on Anglo-Saxon is a post-Conquest text, the Brut. In the plan Kemble, like Thorpe, never mentions the outline of the Brut and uses a non-Arthurian passage from the poem. Which episode, then, did Kemble choose from the Brut to illustrate what he deemed “the

20

John Mitchell Kemble, History of the English Language, First, or Anglo-Saxon Period,

Cambridge, 1834, 3. For the outcome of Kemble’s ambitious lecture series, see: Raymond A. Wiley, “Anglo-Saxon Kemble: The Life and Works of John Mitchell Kemble, 1807-1857: Philologist, Historian, Archaeologist”, in Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History I, eds Sonia Chadwick Hawkes, David Brown and James Campbell, BAR British Series 72 (1979), 197; see also Raymond A. Wiley, John Mitchell Kemble and Jacob Grimm, a Correspondence 1832-1852, Leiden, 1971, 57. 21

Kemble, History of the English Language, 11.

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Saxon mind”? He may well have considered passages involving Hengest, a legendary chieftain of the migratory Anglo-Saxons whom he described as a “cousin” to Beowulf’s uncle Hygelac.22 If Kemble had examined the Hengest passages in the Brut, however, he would have realized that none of them would be suitable for his purpose. As exemplified by the writing of Geoffrey and Wace, the Anglo-Saxons are generally not depicted in a positive light in post-Conquest histories written from a British perspective. Though composed in the English vernacular, the Brut is no exception. Lawman’s Hengest is as deceptive as his counterpart in Geoffrey or Wace, being a Virgilian figure who builds a fortified city by acquiring land through the trick of an animal hide. His daughter Rouwenne is an unambiguously negative character who not only seduces the British king Vortigern but also poisons her stepson.23 Kemble’s History, like Thorpe’s Analecta, avoids the history of Saxon Britain altogether and takes its material from the pre-Roman part of the poem. The episode chosen by Kemble, the story of Locrin, may not be as widely known as the story of Leir (his direct descendant removed by eight generations), but it is the subject of an apocryphal Shakespearean play entitled “The Lamentable Tragedie of Locrine”.24 It also found its way into John Milton’s poetry and prose. 25 Kemble planned to dedicate

22

Kemble, History, 6. Elsewhere, Kemble claimed that Beowulf “records the exploits of one

of our own forefathers, not far removed in point of time from the coming of Hengest and Hors[a] into Britain” (Kemble, Beowulf, 2nd edn, xix). 23

Brut, ll. 6879-7533; The Historia Regum Britanniæ of Geoffrey of Monmouth together with a

literal translation of the Welsh Manuscript No LXI of Jesus College, Oxford, ed. Acton Griscom, manuscript trans. Robert Ellis Jones, London, 1929; rep., Geneva, 1977, vi.10-14; Wace’s “Roman de Brut”: A History of the British, ed. and trans. Judith Weiss, Exeter, 1999, ll. 67047186. 24

The Shakespeare Apocrypha: Being a Collection of Fourteen Plays which Have Been Ascribed to

Shakespeare, ed. C.F. Tucker Brooke, Oxford, 1918, 37-65. The 1595 edition of the play is said to have been “Newly set foorth, ouerseene and corrected, By VV. S” (ibid., 37). 25

Milton paraphrases the Locrin legend in his History of Britain (The History of Britain, That

Part especially now call’d England; Continu’d to the Norman Conquest, in The Works of John

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two lectures to discuss Lawman’s Locrin as “a specimen of the language, and the power of the poet”. The outline of Kemble’s first planned lecture on Locrin begins with a synopsis of the legend: “ARGUMENT. – ‘Brutus, the first Trojan King of Britain, dying leaves three sons, Locrin, Camber, and Albanac, who divide his kingdom between them. Albanac having received the portion to the north of the Humber (Albany) reigns there peaceably seventeen years’”. This brief summary is followed by an excerpt from the poem in which Lawman narrates Albanac’s battle against the invading forces led by a king of the Huns named Humber.26 The second synopsis states that “Albanac and all his army are destroyed, but his brothers having attacked and defeated Humber, drive him and his flying forces into the river, the ‘Humber loud that keeps the Scythian’s name’”. This synopsis is followed by a long quotation, the first portion of which Kemble prints as: Humber wid swidhe mulcle an here in Alemaine hefde iherjed, and hefde that lond swidhe awest, and that folc swidhe awemmed; he nom of than mon-kunne threo swidhe feire maidene: theo ane wes ihaten Astrild anes hahjes kinges dohter; the alre-feireste wifmon the tha wunede on folke. [Humber with a very large army / had ravaged Germany / and laid waste that land terribly, / and raided the people severely; / he took from that

Milton, New York, 1932, 10, 14-16). In Comus, the Lady is freed by a nymph who was formerly the “daughter of Locrine, / Sprung of old Anchises’ line” (ll. 921-22), in John Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, rev. 2nd edn, ed. John Carey, Harlow, London and New York, 2007, 222-28). 26

Kemble, History, pp. 11-12.

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people / three very beautiful girls:/ one of them was called Astrild / a high king’s daughter; / the most beautiful of all women / who lived among the populace.]27

This quotation goes on to describe how Locrin fell in love with “Astrild” while rescuing the three girls from Humber’s ship, and how his vow to make Æstrild his queen was frustrated by his earlier pledge to marry Guendoleine, the daughter of the Duke of Cornwall named Corineus. In the outline of his second planned lecture on the Brut, Kemble rehearses the rest of the Locrin legend by alternating synopses with quotations. The first synopsis reads: The violent action of Corineus causes the great chieftains and courtiers to interpose, and they decide, that “oaths must have their course”. Locrin is compelled to marry Guendoleine, and Æstrild is ordered to be sent about her business; to which Locrin pretends to consent.28

Kemble’s explanation here seems to foreground the role of councillors in the governance of a kingdom, a political system generally associated with Anglo-Saxon England. The next quotation narrates how Locrin secretly kept Æstrild in an elaborate underground chamber and regularly visited her under the pretence of worshipping a god in seclusion. In the second synopsis Kemble explains:

27

Kemble, History of the English Language, 12. The passage corresponds with lines 1105-9

of Laȝamon: Brut. In Kemble’s excerpts from the Brut, the digraph dh stands for the letter “eth” , the digraph th for the letter “thorn” , and the letter j for the letter yogh . In line 1 above, mulcle should reads mucle; maiden in line 6, mæiden; ane in line 7, an; and the in line 9, tha. The translation is my own. In arranging alliterative verse by the halflines rather than pairing half-lines into long lines, Kemble was following the convention of his time (for the debate on the question of lineation that Kemble had with the German philologist Jacob Grimm, see Wiley, John Mitchell Kemble and Jacob Grimm, a Correspondence 1832-1852, 200-201). 28

Kemble, History of the English Language, 15.

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Haruko Momma

So matters continue till Guendoleine bears the king a son, and Æstrild a daughter, who after “the Heathen fashion of those days” are respectively christened Madan and Abren. Madan is sent to be brought up by his grandfather Corineus. After the death of Corineus, however, Locrin puts away his queen, and publicly displays his passion for the beautiful Teuton. Guendoleine, naturally, would not acquiesce in this state of affairs.

The second and final quotation describes how Guendoleine raised an army, killed Locrin, and had Æstrild and her daughter Abren drowned in a river. The outline of Kemble’s second planned lecture on Lawman ends with a quotation from Milton: “Or Severn swift guilty of maiden’s death.”29 It is not difficult to conjecture why Kemble chose the Locrin legend for his projected lecture series on the history of the Anglo-Saxon language. Locrin is the eponymous founder of Logres, a kingdom whose territory roughly coincided with that of England. As Kemble himself points out, Lawman elaborated on certain parts of the Locrin story compared to the one in Geoffrey.30 Furthermore, the legend presents Germanic characters in a positive light. The story of the tragic love of a British king and a German princess, with their daughter put to death by her British stepmother, comprises in some respect a mirror image of the Rowena story. The ravaging of Germany by the Huns prefigures the legend of Attila narrated in such Germanic texts as the Poetic Edda and

29

Ibid., 16-18; Milton, “At a Vacation Exercise in the College”, l. 96 (Complete Shorter

Poems, 83). The river, the Avon, is said to have been named after Abren. In Geoffrey’s Historia, the river is Severn, and the daughter’s name, originally Habren, is said to have later become Sabrina through corruption (per coruptionem) (ii.5; cf. Milton, History of Britain, 15-16). 30

Kemble, History of the English Language, 18. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia, ii 1-6.

Lawman’s version of the Locrin story also departs from Wace’s version (ll. 1251-1440) in several places.

The Brut as Saxon Literature

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the Nibelungenlied. This last point may be supported by the fact that Kemble printed only from the Caligula text without mentioning the Otho version of the Locrin story, in which Astrild’s German or foreign origin is consistently suppressed. For example, the Otho text makes no mention of geography or ethnicity in the passage corresponding with the one on Astrild’s abduction cited above: H(u)m(bert bro) … mid him þreo faire maȝden. þe on was ihote Estrild one eȝe kinges doþter. þe alre fairest wimman þat þo wonede on folke. [H(u)m(bert bro) … with him three beautiful girls. / One of them was called Astrild, a high king’s daughter, / the most beautiful of all women, who lived among the populace then.]31

Kemble’s strategy not to use the Otho text may not strike us as anything exceptional, since Lawman scholarship in the twentieth century tended to privilege the Caligula text. But it was worthy of notice in the 1830s, when Madden was hard at work with a parallel-column edition of both manuscripts. Even Thorpe printed both versions of the Leir story in the Analecta, despite the fact that he called the Otho manuscript “a bundle of scorched and shrivelled fragments” that was “much less valuable than the other (Calig. A. ix), being of later date, and in many instances extremely corrupt”.32 The mandate of the first generation of the new

31

Laȝamon: Brut, 57. The translation is my own. In line 1151 of the Caligula text, Astrild

is referred to as a foreign girl (al-þeodisc meiden), whereas she is called an elfin woman (one aluis maide) in the corresponding part of the Otho text. See further Cyril Edwards, “Laȝamon’s Elves”, in Laȝamon: Contexts, Language, and Interpretation, eds Allen, Perry, and Roberts, 79-80. The Otho text has no passage corresponding to line 1152 of the Caligula text (Þu nast of whulche londe heo com heder liðen [“you do not know which land she has come from”]). 32

Thorpe, Analecta Anglo-Saxonia, xi, n.

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Haruko Momma

philologists was to study medieval literature in its manuscript form, and Kemble claimed himself to be the foremost scholar in that school.33 Lawman in the study of medieval language and literature I would like to spend the concluding section of this essay considering briefly the place of Lawman in Kemble’s History of the English Language, as I believe there is more to his reference to the Brut than his at times somewhat strained Teutonization of the Locrin legend. Unlike Thorpe, Kemble did not see Lawman’s writing as Semi-Saxon but assigned it to “Old English”, that is, a language that has crossed the threshold of “English” in the older sense.34 This classification is consonant with his recently discovered handwritten note on the periodization of English, a transcription of which reads:35 3. Periods. 1. A.S. period. 5th to XIth centy. 2. Anglo Norman Period. XII. XIV. centy. 3. Classical period. XV. – XIX. centy. ____________________________________

Kemble’s periodization in this memo is a variation on the traditional division of the medieval English vernacular into early and late phases.36 This diagram indicates that Kemble virtually equated the Anglo-Saxon

33

See, for example, Wiley, John Mitchell Kemble and Gacob Grimm, a Correspondence 1832-

1852, 43, 49-50, 56-57. 34

Kemble, History of the English Language, 11.

35

The date of this single-leaf note is unknown. I would like to thank Simon Keynes and

Jonathan Smith for their generosity in, among other things, letting me use this archival document. 36

For different models of periodization proposed in the mid-nineteenth century, see

Donoghue, “Lawman, Frederic Madden and Literary History”, 34-36. For more recent issues of periodization, see Christopher Cannon, “Between the Old and the Middle of English”, New Medieval Literatures 7 (2005), 206-13.

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period with the pre-Conquest era. Strictly speaking, therefore, he placed the Brut in the “Anglo Norman Period”, which covers the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. Kemble’s system of periodization makes us wonder all the more why Kemble gave Lawman such a prominent place in his projected lecture series on the Anglo-Saxon period of the history of the English language. The key to understanding this riddle lies in the fact that the Locrin story is not the only reference to Lawman in the plan. Kemble intended to dedicate one of the last lectures to examining Cædmon, Lawman, and Piers Plowman to consider “metre in Saxon”. Kemble’s choice of these texts implies that he hoped to extract “laws” of Saxon metre from alliterative poetry throughout the Middle Ages.37 Kemble’s lecture series was organized on the principle that forms and thoughts are interconnected. Hence he set the “great aim” of the historical investigation of language in the recognition of common patterns in formal features so that “similarity of thoughts” would be revealed among those who used them.38 Having been convinced that the “mechanism” of any given historical language was a key to understanding how the mind of its speaker operated, Kemble hoped to convince his audience that even something as mechanical as grammatical declension was “not arbitrary but a necessary consequence of our own reasoning power”.39 His ultimate goal was to find a unity in the variety of historical English and in its cognate languages so that he might compile “a true Dictionary, in which the Conceptions of the Understanding and the roots of words [are] taken to represent one another”. Such a universal lexicon would be made possible only by negotiating the “empirical observation of the meanings of words” against the “higher observation of the nature of things”.40 From our vantage point, Kemble’s approach to the history of the English language may be categorized as a diachronic variation on the so-called Sapir-Whorf

37

Kemble, History, 19.

38

Ibid., 20.

39

Ibid., 8.

40

Ibid., 4.

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hypothesis combined with an aspiration for explicating linguistic universality at least within the same language family.41 While all of these components – historical linguistics, linguistic relativism, and empirically oriented universality of language – were explored in the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, we must remember that Kemble conjured up the image of such complex language studies at the threshold of medieval English philology. Even his attempt to discuss Beowulf, Cædmon, Lawman, and Piers Plowman in one lecture series, while meditating on the relationship between “Articulate Language” and “Human Understanding”, is probably more than what many of his successors would have been willing to undertake.42 The first generation of the new philologists like Kemble, Thorpe, and Madden saw early medieval English literature as a rich and rewarding object of inquiry. It might be equally rewarding for us to revisit from time to time the future of the field as it was envisioned by these and other pioneers of vernacular studies.

41

The so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is “the notion, currently associated in the

English-speaking world with work by the American scholar B.L. Whorf and programmatic statements by Sapir, that the semantic structure of the language which a person speaks either determines or limits the ways in which they are able to form conceptions of the world in which they live” (P.H. Matthews, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics, Oxford, 1997, s.v.) 42

Kemble, History of the English Language, 4.

“ÞE TIDEN OF ÞISSE LONDE” – FINDING AND LOSING WALES IN LAȜAMON’S B RUT SIMON MEECHAM-JONES

“Legend and literary afterlife”, Galloway observes, “are gifts that even a king cannot give but that a poet and historian can”.1 But the powers of a poet can stretch far beyond the functions of commemoration and celebration. Conversely, at times the gift of rendering people or places obscured, or of masking the shadows cast by their absence, may prove as significant a consequence of the poet’s art in directing the collective memory of events – whether or not the act of concealment was foreseeable or consciously intended. Much recent research on Laȝamon’s Brut has identified the genesis of the text, and the character of its performance, as having been shaped by the political tensions and geographical transfers of dominion which marked the reign of King John.2 But, in its initial design, as much as in Laȝamon’s achieving of his intention, the text is marked not merely by

1

Andrew Galloway, “Laȝamon’s Gift”, PMLA, 121.3 (May 2006), 724.

2

For example, R.S. Allen, ‘“Where are you, my brave knights!’: Authority and Allegiance

in Laȝamon’s Brut”, in Lexis and Texts in Early English: Studies Presented to Jane Roberts, eds Christian J. Kay and Louise M. Sylvester, Amsterdam, 2000, 1-12; Françoise H.M. Le Saux, Laȝamon’s Brut: The Poem and Its Sources, Arthurian Studies 19, Cambridge, 1989, 413. Frankis makes the case for not dismissing the possibility of a later date; John Frankis, “Laȝamon or the Lawman? A question of names, a poet and an unacknowledged legislator”, Leeds Studies in English, n.s. 34 (2003), 109-32.

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the political particularities of the author’s time, but also those of his location: Hit com him on mode and on his mern þonke þet he wolde of Engle þa æðelæn tellen, wat heo ihoten weoren and wonene heo comen þa Englene londe ærest ahten æfter þan flode þe from Drihtene com.3 (ll. 6-10) [It came into his mind, an excellent thought of his, that he would relate the noble origins of the English, what they were called and whence they came who first possessed the land of England after the flood sent by God.]

That its place of composition was in itself significant seems to have been of some concern to the poet, judging by the prominence with which he establishes a proposed place of origins, which takes its place, alongside the attribution of his sources, right at the start of the narrative: He wonede at Ernleȝe, at æðelen are chirechen vppen Seuarne staþe – sel þar him þuhte – onfest Radestone; þer he bock radde.4 (ll. 3-5)

3

Laȝamon: Brut or Hystoria Brutonum, eds W.R.J. Barron and S.C. Weinberg, Harlow, 1995;

all quotations from Laȝamon’s Brut will be taken from this edition, and translations, except where noted, are from the same edition. 4

An alternative view is offered by Cannon, for whom “Laȝamon, Leouenaðes sone” is

“merely a peg on which readers have hung their reactions: since ... his very existence is a textual effect”; but Cannon admits that, however accurate or fictional Laȝamon’s account of himself might be, “the power Laȝamon has exerted over commentary on this Brut” should be recognized as “one of his most important functions”; see Christopher Cannon, “Laȝamon and the Laws of Men”, English Literary History, 67.2 (Summer 2000), 338.

“þe tiden of þisse londe”

71

[He lived at Areley, by a noble church on the bank of the Severn, close to Redstone – he thought it pleasant there; there he read books.]

The location at Areley has been suggested as providing an explanation for Laȝamon’s (apparently surprising) decision to write in English5 and perhaps offering some support for the suggestion that he might have been in contact with a “regional community ... in which there was a continuity of interest in the use of English, and in which English as a linguistic medium crossed both ecclesiastical and lay audiences”.6 But residence in Worcestershire would have offered Laȝamon the possibility of familiarity with other traditions besides the “antiquarianism” and

5

Laȝamon’s choice of language cannot be separated from considerations of his probable

audience. Thus Allen notes, “English would be the obvious language for a mixed audience …” (Rosamund Allen, “The Implied Audience of Laȝamon’s Brut”, in The Text and Tradition of Layamon’s Brut, ed. Françoise H.M. Le Saux, Cambridge, 1994, 121-39). In the same volume, Weinberg suggests a link to the cultural milieu centred on Worcester: see Carole Weinberg, “The Latin marginal Glosses in the Caligula manuscript of Laȝamon’s Brut”, in Text and Tradition, 103-20. 6

Carole Weinberg, “‘By a noble church on the bank of the Severn’: A Regional View of

Laȝamon’s Brut”, Leeds Studies in English, n.s. 26 (1995), 57. Collier raises the possibility of Laȝamon’s first-hand acquaintance with the Cathedral library in Worcester, and with the scribe, noted for his interest in English texts, who has become known as the “tremulous hand” of Worcester; Wendy Collier, “Englishness and the Worcester Tremulous Hand”, Leeds Studies in English, n.s. 26 (1995), 35-47. Frankis makes a case for the influence of Herefordshire literature on Laȝamon: see John Frankis, “Towards a Regional Context for Lawman’s Brut: Literary Activity in the Dioceses of Worcester and Hereford in the Twelfth Century”, in Laȝamon: Contexts, Language and Interpretation, eds Rosamund Allen, Lucy Perry and Jane Roberts, King’s College London Medieval Studies 19, London, 2002, 53-78.

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preservation of an English historiographical tradition which may have been favoured or fostered at Worcester Cathedral.7 The location Laȝamon depicts at the opening of the poem might be described as on the borders of a border-land – not quite part of the “the frontierland of armies” and “frontierland of peoples” of the Welsh March,8 though close enough to the March not merely to observe the problems and paradoxes of that place, but also to be affected politically and culturally by what happened there. Areley was just to the east of the baronial liberties of the Welsh March, a series of discrete lordships which “straddled” (in Rees Davies’ term) the geographical, political and linguistic divides between what might now be termed “England” and “Wales”.9 It seems likely that the Brut was composed less than an hour’s ride from what had been the Welsh border in Anglo-Saxon times. At many points along this “frontier” there was no unmistakable and accepted geographical or political marker to delineate the passage from one political circumstance to another, so it is hard to overstate how uncertain and contested – even in its simplest geographical expression – the nature of this “border” was in Laȝamon’s time. Since Wales had never enjoyed an existence as a unified state or nation, and since its various constituent domains had rarely, if ever, enjoyed unambiguous recognition by their neighbours within and beyond, it is scarcely surprising that Wales had no long-established or widely accepted physical boundary. All along the “frontier” there were districts, for example in Radnorshire, Monmouthshire, Flintshire and the lands around Oswestry, the national (to use an anachronistic term) affiliation of which remained uncertain until 1536. Throughout the Middle Ages some of these

7

E.G. Stanley, “Laȝamon’s Antiquarian Sentiments”, Medium Ævum, 38.1 (March 1969),

23-37. 8

R.R. Davies, Lordship and Society in the March of Wales 1282-1400, Oxford, 1978, 2.

9

“For historical purposes the March is the area defined by the military enterprise and

seignorial power of the Anglo-Norman lords in the two centuries or so between 1066 and 1284. The historian’s March is coterminous with the extent of Marcher lordships” (ibid.,16 and 302).

“þe tiden of þisse londe”

73

districts found themselves vulnerable to a change of status, usually through military intervention, and usually, but not quite always, involving the attrition of “Welsh” territory. While the district of Ergyng in West Herefordshire, with its significant Welsh-speaking population, found itself firmly bound into English structures of administration well before the Norman Conquest,10 the commote of Maelor Saesneg, though to the east of Offa’s Dyke, and despite being part of the Marcher lordship of Chester in the late eleventh century, was “reclaimed” by the Welsh kingdom of Powys in the twelfth century, and remained under Welsh control until the Edwardian Conquest, after which time it was absorbed not into the English administrative system, but rather into the “Welsh” county of Flintshire, retained by Edward as a possession of the English Crown, and granted by him to his wife Eleanor. Laȝamon’s location at Areley was particularly well-placed to have allowed him to act as an observer of these shifts of fortune, and to gain insight into the idiosyncratic constitutional practices of the March. His church at Areley may have been under the jurisdiction of the church at Martley, itself under the rule of the Benedictine abbey of Cormeilles in Normandy, which had been founded by William FitzOsbern, the first Norman Earl of Hereford.11 Even if this connection remains unproven, his parish was too close to the major centres of power in the March for him to be unaware of the distinct society of the Welsh March.12 The

10

William Marx provides an extensive bibliography of materials about Ergyng (William

Marx, “Middle English Texts and Welsh Contexts”, in Authority and Subjugation in Writing Medieval Wales, eds Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones, New York, 2008, 24, n.13). 11

Weinberg, “‘By a noble church’”, 52.

12

The close links between ecclesiastical sites in Wales and Worcestershire have been

noted by Griffiths: see Ralph A. Griffiths, “Medieval Severnside: The Welsh Connection”, in Welsh Society and Nationhood: Historical Essays Presented to Glanmor Williams, eds R.R. Davies, R.A. Griffiths, Ieuan Gwynedd Jones and Kenneth O. Morgan, Cardiff, 1984, 70-89. In a response to Le Saux’s recontextualization of Laȝamon’s work in

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concentration of military and economic might in the March not infrequently led to its holders exerting an influence, as regional magnates, beyond their own lands, – a phenomenon seen, for example, in 1327 when Roger Mortimer was granted “chief keeper of the peace in Herefordshire, Worcestershire, and Shropshire”.13 Nor was Mortimer the first Marcher Lord to find that the particular conditions of the March were an ideal launching pad for the exercise of power nationally.14 In that sense, Severnside15 was culturally, if not constitutionally, scarcely less of a “frontier society”16 than the lands included in the demesnes of the March. Many critics have ascribed a concern with English history and literature to the cultural milieu of Worcester in this period, and perhaps that, too, should be understood as evidence of a perception of living at a frontier. Furthermore, Areley was on the margins of the Welsh penumbra, those parts of the “border” lands in which both English and Welsh were routinely spoken, by pockets of Welsh speakers surviving in areas conquered in Saxon times,17 by Welsh labourers working on farms

Laȝamon’s Brut: the Poem and Its Sources, Johnson praises Le Saux’s “emphasis on the extent of Welsh/English/Norman political and cultural contacts” as a corrective to “some of the provincial, rustic, and altogether out-of-the-way” interpretations of Laȝamon’s cultural “milieu”; Lesley Johnson, “Tracking Laȝamon’s Brut”, Leeds Studies in English, n.s. 22 (1991), 139-65. 13

Calendar of Patent Rolls 1327-30, quoted in Davies, Lordship and Society, 281.

14

Allen, for example, reminds us that: “Areley was on the Welsh March, whose southern

administrator was William Marshal, Lord of Striguil (Chepstow), Earl of Pembroke and, from 1216, Regent of England” (see Allen, “‘Where are you, my brave knights!’”, 10-11). 15

In the Domesday book, Areley appears with Staffordshire; Domesday Book, text and

trans. by John Morris, Vol. 24 Staffordshire, Chichester, 1976. 16

Davies, Lordship and Society, 302.

17

The Domesday record for Staffordshire includes, in Pirehill hundred, “1 hide and its

dependencies” which had been held by a landowner with the clearly Welsh name of Gruffydd (Domesday Book, Vol. 24 Staffordshire, 246d).

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in England,18 by the drovers herding cattle to London and, no doubt, by other itinerants – beggars, monks, servants, poets, harpers. The unpredictable fate of Maelor Saesneg is a reminder that much of the history of the March was determined by chance and the opportunistic blurring both of borders and of categories – cultural, constitutional and historical. In contrast, the narrative development of the Brut seems characterized by a clarity and certainty of direction, as the retelling of history reveals the workings of a coherent (and, apparently, unanswerable) plan – even if critics disagree on the meaning of that plan. The great achievement of Laȝamon’s text was to draw together some of the ideological obfuscations inherent in the political operation of the medieval March to construct a new and distinctive model of the border relationship. The success of Laȝamon’s text in doing so, discreetly alleviating some of the ever-present contradictions and uncertainties of his own time with a lightness of ideological touch, has paradoxically distracted attention from the skill of the balancing and layering with which Laȝamon achieved a historical model which, in interpreting the past, purported to predict a convincing and inevitable model of future development. Laȝamon’s text takes its place within a vigorous tradition of adaptation and imitation of Galfridian material from Latin, through Wace’s French, into both the English Brut tradition and the Welsh Brutiau – a tradition which Warren has suggested was written “as a form of border writing ... most often and most emphatically in relation to boundary pressures”.19 But whose interests were served by this type of writing has been contested ever since Geoffrey’s Historia first appeared.

18

A later perspective on Welsh labourers employed across the border is provided in the

Chester Shepherds’ Play: see Robert W. Barrett, Jr, “Leeks for Livery: Consuming Welsh Difference in the Chester Shepherds’ Play”, in Mapping the Medieval City: Space, Place and Identity in Chester c. 1200-1600, ed. Catherine A.M. Clarke, Cardiff, 2011, 194-220. 19

Michelle R. Warren, History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain 1100-1300,

Medieval Cultures 22, Minneapolis, 2000, xi-xii.

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The complexity, or obscurity, of Geoffrey’s ideological concerns has long puzzled scholars,20 and it may be that the impossibility of disentangling Geoffrey’s conflicted motives has discouraged the recognition of the ideological subtlety and clearer priorities of Laȝamon’s text. That Geoffrey, whatever his intentions, was immediately drawn into service as a highly significant source for the medieval Welsh tradition,21 has encouraged the suggestion of a parallel reading of Laȝamon as “ambivalent”,22 potentially raising questions about Laȝamon’s attitudes

20

Gillingham notes, a touch dryly, that “it is unlikely, to say the least, that there could

ever be a single satisfying explanation of a book as extraordinary and influential as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History”: John Gillingham, “The Context and Purposes of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain”, Anglo-Norman Studies, 13, 1990, 83. To mention a few other recent interpretations of Geoffrey’s practice, one might add:

John Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century, Woodbridge, 2000;

Michelle R. Warren, History on the Edge; Julia Crick, The Reception of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britannie; The Evidence of Manuscripts and Textual History, Cambridge, 1989; Julia Crick, The Historia Regum Britannie IV: Dissemination and Reception in the later Middle Ages, Cambridge, 1991. 21

The potential awkwardness of Welsh chroniclers drawing on an English source is

noted by John Davies: see John Davies, Hanes Cymru: A History of Wales in Welsh, London, 1990; Davies subsequently issued an English translation of the work: John Davies, A History of Wales, London, 1993. 22

The term was popularized by Donoghue: see Daniel Donoghue, “Laȝamon’s

Ambivalence”, Speculum, 65.3 (July 1990), 537-63. His reading was criticized by Lesley Johnson, “Reading the Past in Laȝamon’s Brut”, in Text and Tradition, 141-60. Kirby suggested an implied distinction between the laudable Angles and the perfidious Saxons, a reading which has been reconsidered by Wright and Noble: see I.J. Kirby, “Angles and Saxons in Laȝamon’s Brut”, Studia Neophilologica, 36.1 (January 1964), 51-62; Neil Wright, “Angles and Saxons in Laȝamon’s Brut: A Reassessment”, in Text and Tradition, 161-70; James Noble, “Laȝamon’s Ambivalence Reconsidered”, in Text and Tradition, 171-82. Kleinman suggests the role of the Norse settlers (and Laȝamon’s possible descent from them) as providing another explanation for Laȝamon’s ambivalence towards the Saxons:

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to the English kingdom23 (under “Norman” rule).24 Laȝamon has even been accused, like Geoffrey of Monmouth before him, of Welsh sympathies. It is a charge hard to sustain, not least because Laȝamon shows scant interest in the Welsh once, while still Britons, they lose control of Britain. The powerful and dominant Britons before the coming of the Saxons are interesting to Laȝamon in a way that their defeated successors are not,25 and his notice of the Britons after the loss of England is cursory. The regional and dynastic rivalries within Wales, the variety of kingdoms and forms of political expression which developed, and the unpredictable patterns of resistance to English incursion into “þe Walsce londen” (l. 14632) do not concern Laȝamon, or at the very least find no place within the shape of his narrative model. Nonetheless, the myth of Laȝamon’s “ambivalence” dies hard, albeit

Scott Kleinman, “The Æðelæn of Engle: Constructing Ethnic and Regional Identities in Laȝamon’s Brut”, Exemplaria, 16.1 (Spring 2004), 95-127. 23

So, Pearsall raises the question whether we should consider Laȝamon to be “at odds

with himself” and “confused to know where to place his sympathies”; see Derek Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry, London, 1977, 110. 24

The question whether, by the mid or late twelfth century, English people differentiated

between the “Norman” élite and the English people has been much discussed: see John Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century, Woodbridge, 2000; Ian Short, “Tam Angli quam Franci: Self-Definition in Anglo-Norman England”, Anglo-Norman Studies, 18 (1995), 153-75; Hugh M. Thomas, The English and the Normans, Oxford, 2003; Marjorie Chibnall, The Normans, Oxford, 2000; Elaine Treharne, “Periodization and Categorization: The Silence of (the) English in the Twelfth Century”, in New Medieval Literatures 8, eds Rita Copeland, Wendy Scase and David Wallace, Turnhout, 2007. 25

Le Saux notes the same phenomenon in Laȝamon’s account of Arthur’s exploits: “...

there is a significant discrepancy in the way Laȝamon chose to treat the early part of Arthur’s reign and its end, the campaign against Rome. The English poet devotes almost twice as many lines to Arthur’s youthful exploits than does Wace, while the second part of Arthur’s reign is cut down by over a third”: see Françoise H.M. Le Saux, “Narrative Rhythm and Narrative Content in Laȝamon’s Brut”, Parergon, 10.1 (1992), 65.

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sometimes refracted into the topos of Laȝamon’s presumed (but unproven) use of Welsh sources – whether written or oral – to supplement Geoffrey and Wace.26 But, if Laȝamon is less overtly dismissive of the Britons and the Welsh than had become customary in an “English” historiographical tradition which, from Bede to William of Malmesbury, had rained scorn on them27 (and which would continue to do so for several centuries more, as evidenced in the chronicles of Trevisa and beyond),28 nonetheless the myth of his ambivalence rests on a misreading of the text. First, though it might seem ideologically adventurous, Laȝamon’s decision to write an account of the (often glorious) past of the Britons is not in itself prima facie proof of an “ambivalence”. The decision to make available, in English, material already widely disseminated in Latin and French need not even seem surprising. Certainly, Laȝamon’s choice of this material would not have seemed as radical or challenging as had the emergence of this tradition in an English context in the twelfth century, achieved by Geoffrey’s unprecedented Historia Regum Britanniae, and witnessed in the hostility with which William of Newburgh, Gerald of Wales and others castigated Geoffrey’s text, impugning its accuracy,

26

The argument is effectively summarized by Le Saux in Laȝamon’s Brut: The Poem and Its

Sources, 118–54. Her generally cautious conclusion has been criticized by Johnson for being insufficiently sceptical: Johnson, “Tracking Laȝamon’s Brut”, 139-65. 27

Gillingham suggests that the denunciation of the Welsh is a trope extensively

developed and popularized by William of Malmesbury: see Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century, 9-11. 28

Ronald Waldron has prepared a new edition of the section of Higden’s Polychronicon,

which deals with Wales (from Oxford, New College Library MS 152 (Ox)), together with Trevisa’s translation (from British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius D. vii (C)); see Ronald Waldron, “Trevisa’s Translation of Higden’s Polychronicon, Book I, Chapter 38, De Wallia: An Edition”, in Authority and Subjugation, 99-135.

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honesty and, particularly in William of Newburgh’s attacks, Geoffrey’s presumed intentions.29 There are no surviving contemporary attacks on the “ambivalence” of the Brut which, though in part this may evidence the more restricted circulation of the text and perhaps the lesser importance attached to a text in English, nonetheless also demonstrates the subtlety and care of Laȝamon’s selection of the correct ideological colourings to offer at the very least the illusion that he has provided a means of resolving how to present irreconcilable values and destinies. It is hard to over-emphasize the confusion of narratives, philosophies and histories from which Laȝamon (and, before him Wace and Geoffrey of Monmouth) had been both compelled and able to shape their vision of the past and, whether consciously or not, this selection of interpretations of the past inevitably framed a judgement on the contemporary political landscape. The very choice of subject meant that it was impossible for Laȝamon’s text to evade voicing such a judgement on the relationships between England and Wales which characterized and constituted Britain. It might be argued that this confusion of past narratives was expressed, as if mimetically, in the political state of early thirteenth century “Wales”, with its constantly altering array of small dominions, shifting borders and lack of any central or “national” institutions – despite which, “Wales” was a term which expressed some (however unclear) political idea, rather than just being a term of geography. At first glance, the highly centralized power structures of England might seem more secure and less subject to change, but even that security was to prove subject to qualification. In the reign of Henry II, the kingdom of England seemed firmly in control of the territories of what has become known as the “Angevin Empire”, an assortment of lands held by varied and discrete dynastic ties, which was to be augmented by the invasion of Ireland in 1169. Yet, within a generation, the colonial initiative in Ireland

29

William of Newburgh, Historia rerum Anglicarum, the History of English Affairs, Book 1, ed.

with trans. and commentary by P.G. Walsh and M.J. Kennedy, Warminster, 1988.

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had stalled, the lands across the Channel had largely been lost to the French crown, and England’s role at the hub of an expanding empire had been disturbed, perhaps fuelling the cultural pressures for re-selfdefinition which might explain the appearance of the Brut at this time. If the term “Wales” is clearly problematic in a late twelfth-century context, and the term England far less clear than might have been expected (as will be discussed later), the difficulties of definition were greatly magnified by the presence between them of the “Welsh March”, an ad hoc and essentially sui generis development of quasi-autonomous territories governed from England. The anomalous constitutional position of these lordships, with their extensive array of privileged “Marcher Liberties”, left them, at least potentially, and often in practice, “of” but not quite “within” the English realm.30 After his swift victory in subduing England, William the Conqueror turned his attention to the western flank, investing three of his warlike and (supposedly) most loyal followers, Hugh D’Avranches, Roger de Montgomerie, and William FitzOsbern, with the newly created Earldoms of Chester, Shrewsbury and Hereford respectively.31 William’s reasons for doing so have generally been described as being defensive,32 a claim which perhaps deserves to be treated with a hint of scepticism. The subjugation of England having been effected by William and his followers (for the most part) without major upset,33 there was little reason to suppose that the

30

Thus Lieberman, commenting on the highly centralized English state, notes that “the

tenacity and success of the Marcher lords in eluding its grasp meant that even the English kingdom did not quite achieve entirely clear-cut borders”: see Max Lieberman, The March of Wales, 1067-1300: A Borderland of Medieval Britain, Cardiff, 2008. 31

There is some uncertainty as to the precise dates for the three creations, which all

appear to have been established between 1067-71. 32

This idea has recently been re-stated, for example, by Golding and Campbell: Brian

Golding, Conquest and Colonisation: The Normans in Britain 1066-1100, Basingstoke, 2001, 49-51; James Campbell, The Anglo-Saxon State, London, 2000, 187. 33

Stenton and Campbell both note the difficulties and delays in establishing full control

of what Campbell calls the “frontier lordships” of Northumberland, Cumberland and

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Welsh kingdoms, riven by internal rivalries and having been ravaged with considerable brutality by Harold Godwinson in the final years of Edward the Confessor’s reign, were in any position to offer any significant threat to the formidable Norman war machine. Rather, William’s reasons were pragmatic: he sought a means by which the desire for wealth and prestige of three of his most formidable subjects, and their numerous followers, could be satisfied at no immediate cost or inconvenience to himself. The three “marcher lordships” of Chester, Shrewsbury and Hereford were set up on the understanding that any land to the west could be snatched for the enjoyment of their seigneurs, a promise swiftly seized, as within two generations many of the most fertile farmlands of Wales were annexed into Marcher territories.34 By convenient chance, the most defensible parts of Wales were also the less attractive economically so that, by the reign of Henry II, the relentless Norman push into Wales had left the country divided into two regions: those lands governed by the Marcher Lords; and those regions subject to Welsh rulers, which were collectively described as pura Wallia. However convenient this solution might have seemed to William and his successors, it was to create many severe and longstanding problems. Even at the outset, the disloyalty of the Montgomery family provided an early warning of the dangers of piling up wealth and private militias on England’s western flank. Throughout the Middle Ages, the ability of magnates in the March to accumulate territory, income and armed followers made the western territories a recurring site for unrest, to the point of civil war, and for that reason, the site of decisive battles of national control, from Evesham in the thirteenth century to Mortimer’s

Westmorland: F.M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd edn, Oxford, 1971, 610-15; Campbell, Anglo-Saxon State, 47-50. 34

The Norman capture of Wales was actually a much slower and more piecemeal process

than the sudden seizure of England, taking more than 200 years to achieve. The early stages are described by Rees Davies: see R.R. Davies, The Age of Conquest: Wales 10631415, Oxford, 1987, 25-55.

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Cross and Tewkesbury in the fifteenth. But the structures of the March were undermined, also, by the unspoken fear that they rested on a constitutional nullity. When William assumed the English throne, there had been no clearly stated or widely understood legal doctrine governing the relationship of the English crown with any, far less all, of the many disparate princedoms, territories and districts which now came to constitute pura Wallia and the Marcher lordships. When William granted himself the right to dispose of the land of those living in Powys or the Vale of Usk, no one asked him by what authority he derived the power to do so.35 Certainly he could have argued the right of conquest, but in England he had taken great care to propagate the story of Harold’s broken vow to justify his legitimacy.36 In “Walsce londen” there was no equivalent or comparable narrative to offer proof of his legitimacy, and the doctrine of sword-land was hard to use to justify the dispossession of a Christian people, however faulty their observance might be deemed. Maybe the weakness and the inevitable evasions of William’s position communicated itself to the major players; both the Montgomery family and William FitzOsbern’s son Roger of Breteuil were accused of treason and stripped of their lands. It was as if the experience of playing in the dangerously unconstrained world of the myriad power structures of the March had left them wondering whether they could not also experience the freedom of going beyond feudal dues to rule in their own minor princedoms, claiming these by conquest, as William had claimed England. But this anxiety about the legitimacy of English rule in Wales ran deep. Even Edward I, in the Statute of Rhuddlan, the act which formally annexed Wales to the English throne and organized the lands of the defeated

35

This crucial question of authority, and its inherent contradictions, is elegantly side-

stepped, for example, by Chibnall: “Initially this may have stopped short of a licence to conquer; but certainly campaigns into the Welsh territories were encouraged” (Chibnall, The Normans, 66-67). 36

The plausibility of this most convenient story is discussed by Stenton: see F.M.

Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 577-78.

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Kingdom of Gwynedd into the shire counties of the newly created principality of Wales, felt obliged to insist that his authority derived not from present conquest but from prior right, even if neither memory nor record of that prior right could be substantiated.37 Davies notes the contradiction that “even Edward I, who had not a moment’s doubt about the propriety of his actions in Wales and Scotland, felt that his title in both countries could be put beyond any cavil by referring to the total and unconditional surrender of the peoples of both countries”.38 But in Wales, certainly, this was not enough: surrender did not provide the justification of pre-existing obligation. This was an anxiety which could not be stilled by military means, but which required the myth-making, re-interpretation and invention of the cultural warriors – particularly the historians and chroniclers. It is perhaps ironic that while, as Stein notes, “in the writing of history in the twelfth century, the Norman conquest of the English marks a crisis of cultural identity, of the principles of legitimate sovereignty, and of historical explanation”,39 it was a crisis which had an unacknowledged shadow in the more intractable historiographical problem of “justifying” the English presence in Wales. Whereas the first crisis was apparently solved within a very few generations, the second was not, and both dilemmas left their mark on the literature of the age. The (at this time uncompleted) military conquest was accompanied by a second attempted conquest of Welsh independence – by language, by ideas and by the artful shaping of the

37

The terms of the Statute of Rhuddlan are discussed in Simon Meecham-Jones, “Where

Was Wales? The Erasure of Wales in Medieval English Culture”, in Authority and Subjugation, 48. 38

R.R. Davies, Domination and Conquest: The Experience of Ireland, Scotland and Wales,

Cambridge, 1990, 110. 39

Robert M. Stein, “Making History English: Cultural Identity and Historical

Explanation in William of Malmesbury and Laȝamon’s Brut”, in Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, eds Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles, Philadelphia, 1998, 97.

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past. The purpose of this cultural onslaught was to justify the warfare of the first conquest, as being not a sequence of acts of aggression but rather the redressing of the natural balance, the restoration of the just order. Some of its champions were overt in their belligerence. William of Newburgh calls as a witness the testimony of Gildas: Nec veretur, ut verum non taceat, Brito de Britonibus scribere quod nec in bello fortes fuerint nec in pace fideles.40 [So that a truth may not remain unstated, he does not hesitate to write as a Briton about Britons that they were neither brave in war nor trustworthy in peace.]

But even Geoffrey of Monmouth, accused by William, if not being motivated by an “uncontrolled passion for lying”, then of attempting to please the Welsh – “... sive etiam gratia placendi Britonibus”41 (“... or secondly a desire to please the Britons”) – was to prove a doughty general in the cultural campaigns to secure the conquest of medieval Wales. In choosing his subject – “of Engle þe æðelæn tellen” (l. 7) – Laȝamon enlists himself in this cause, and his re-visioning of the past was to prove a weapon of particular potency. Viewed with hindsight, the cultural contestation to justify the English presence in Wales can be seen to be constructed around four heads of argument: the discourse of peripherality, the discourse of Britishness, the discourse of authority and the discourse of racial inferiority.42 The first

40

William of Newburgh, Historia rerum Anglicarum, the History of English Affairs, Book 1,

28-29. 41

Ibid., 32-33.

42

“The cultural justification for the seizure of Wales was swiftly refined into four key

concepts: the discourse of peripherality, the discourse of Britishness, the discourse of authority, and discourse of racial inferiority. The discourse of peripherality drew attention to Wales’ perceived status at the geographical margins of European civilization. The discourse of Britishness proclaimed the “natural” unity of the island(s) of Britain,

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plays a very limited role in Laȝamon’s account, though it appears at the end, in his account of the (self)-exile of the Welsh: Ga we nu to Yuni aȝan and to Iuore his wedde-broðere. Heo somneden ferde wide ȝeond þan ærde. Forð heo gunnen fusen mid fif hundred scipenen; nes hit nawit longe þat heo ne comen to Walisce londe. Al þas Bruttes weoren todriuen ȝeond cludes and ȝeond cliuenen, ȝeond chirchen and ȝeond muneccliuen ȝeond wudes and ȝeond liðen. Sone me heom saiden þat isiȝen weoren to londe mid Iuore and Yuni ten siðen fifti scipen bradefulle of Brutten swiðe balde. Þaes Bruttes on ælc ende foren to Walisce londe, and heore laȝen leofeden and heore leodene þæuwen; And ȝet wunieð þære, swa heo doð, aueremære. (ll. 16079-90) [Let us turn once more to Yuni and to Ivor his sworn brother. They assembled an army from far and wide throughout the country. They set forth with five hundred ships; it was not long before they reached the land of Wales. The Britons had all been scattered among the cliffs and crags, in churches and in monasteries, among the hills and woods. They quickly learnt that there had arrived in the country with Ivor and Yuni ten times fifty ships full of most valiant Britons. The Britons flocked from every region to Wales, and lived according to their laws and

inferring from physical continuity an inevitable political unity. The discourse of authority asserted the right of England to rule Wales, by virtue of tradition, God’s favour, and England’s greater civilization. Allied to this was the myth of the racial inferiority of the Welsh (and Irish)”: see Simon Meecham-Jones, Introduction, in Authority and Subjugation, 2; Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century, xxv.

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Simon Meecham-Jones according to the customs of that nation; and what is more, will live there, as they now do, for evermore.]

Most striking by its absence from the Brut is the discourse of racial inferiority, encountered so often, for example, in William of Newburgh’s description of the Welsh as bruti and barbari. It is this absence which explains modern notions of Laȝamon’s ambivalence but, in all honesty, Laȝamon did not require an assertion of racial inferiority to make his case. In the Brut, as in Geoffrey’s Historia, the past history of the Britons across a conjoined England and Wales promotes powerfully the discourse of Britishness – that the two nations are naturally and inevitably one land. It is a concept which works against the apparent separation between Welsh and English that Laȝamon appears to have accepted, making the dominance of English kings announced at the end a discreet but unambiguous statement of the discourse of authority – that is, of English authority across Britain: And Ænglisce kinges walden þas londes, And Bruttes hit loseden, þis lond and þas leoden, þat næuere seoððen mære kinges neoren here. Þa ȝet com þæs ilke dæi, beo heonneuorð alse hit mæi; iwurðe þet iwurðe, iwurðe Godes wille. (ll. 16091-95)

[And English kings gained sovereignty over these lands, and the Britons lost it, lost this land and the sovereignty of this nation, so that never since that time have they been kings here. Such a day has not yet come, whatever may come to pass hereafter; come what may, let God’s will be done.]

It is in the reconciling of these apparently incompatible positions that Laȝamon marks out his own distinctive vision of the future relationship of medieval Wales and England. To do so he is obliged to execute elegant, but persuasive, acts of obscuration in dealing with the three

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dilemmas that threaten his vision of accommodation and assimilation – the issues of language, law and land. The scant notice Laȝamon allows the linguistic gap between England and Wales is very striking, and provides the first reminder of the potential difficulties of interpreting the text as a demonstration of “the tensions between ethnic and national identity present in the Brut”.43 Fittingly, perhaps, as one whose name may mark out his status as a “lawman”, Laȝamon differentiates not on “ethnic” or linguistic grounds, but on grounds of allegiance and jurisdiction. This perhaps explains, also, the absence of the discourse of racial inferiority in the text. But the absence of any concern with language difference points out the way in which the Welsh of Laȝamon’s own day are not represented independently in the text, serving only to figure their “British” past, rather than establish any continuing existence. Only once is the issue of pre-English languages made prominent in the text, and Laȝamon’s treatment of it shows many curious or awkward features. The mention follows the granting of Cornwall to Brutus’s follower Corineus, and there appears to be some presumed implicit link between the granting of names (Brutus’s kingdom is called Britain after him, Corineus’s Corinee after him) and the expression of languages, which are similarly determined by the ruler (whether Brutus or Gurmund). The presumed deterioration of language which allows Corinee to become corrupted to Cornwall prompts Laȝamon to predict the coming of the Saxons with its effects on the language – “ah Englisce men hit habbeð awend” (l. 988): Þis lond was ihaten Albion þa Brutus cum heron; þa nolde Brutus namare þat hit swa ihaten weore, ah scupte him nome æfter himseluan. He wes ihaten Brutus, þis lond he clepede Brutaine; and þa Troinisce men þa temden hine to hærre

43

Kleinman, “The Æðelæn of Engle”, 95.

88

Simon Meecham-Jones æfter Brutone Brutuns heom cleopede; and ȝed þe nome læsteð and a summe stude cleouieð faste. Brutus ȝef Corineum, þe wes his kempa deora, ana dala of his londa and sette him an honda. Þe lauerd hehte Corineus and þat lond Corinee. Seoððen, þurh þa leoden þe i þon londa weoren, heo clepeden hit Cornwaile þurh heora sotliche cure. Heora aȝene speke Troinisce and seoððen heo hit cleopeden Brutunisc; ah Englisce men hit habbeð awend seoððen Gurmund com in þis lond. Gurmund draf out þe Brutuns; and his folc wes ihaten Sexuns, of ane ende of Alemaine, Angles wes ihaten. Of Angles comen Englisce men, and Englelond heo hit clepeden. Þa Englisce ouercomen þe Brutuns and brouhten heom þer neoðere þat neofer seoððen heo ne arisen ne her raeden funden. Brutaine hefde Brutus and Cornwaile Corineus. (ll. 975-994) [This land was called Albion when Brutus arrived here; Brutus then did not wish that it should any longer be called that, but he devised a name for it in keeping with his own. He was called Brutus, this land he called Britain; and the Trojans who deferred to him as leader called themselves Britons after Brutus; and the name endures still and persists unchanged in some places. Brutus gave Corineus, who was his valued comrade in arms, a part of his land and placed it in his control. The ruler was called Corineus and the land Corinee. Subsequently, because of the inhabitants, because of their foolish preference, it was called Cornwall. Their own Trojan language they later called British; but the English have changed it since Gurmund drove out the Britons; and his people were called Saxons, from a region of Germany which was called Angles. The English came from Angles, and they called the land England. The English overcame

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the Britons and brought them into subjection so that they never rose again nor prospered here. Brutus held Britain and Corineus Cornwall.]

It is a mistaken (or invented) dilemma, since the name change occurs not at the whim of the Cornish people, but rather when they (or some of them) and their neighbours become English-speaking – there is scarcely a significant gap between Corinee and the Cornish Kernow. But the decision to follow a reference to the “British” language with the statement that “but the English have changed it” remains unsettling. It seems inconceivable that Laȝamon could not have known that the “British” language had not been changed (or replaced) even (more or less) on his own doorstep. The decision to include these remarks after the division of the kingdom raises the (unlikely) possibility that Laȝamon might have thought that the “British” language had been superseded in Cornwall, though in fact the Cornish language was in rude health and would remain so for several hundred years. But the most logical interpretation is to read this passage as a future projection. Just as the British language had been changed (and replaced) across England following the Saxon invasion, so it would, in time replace Welsh in the Marcher Lordships (and Cornish in no longer independent Cornwall). It was a prediction that might well have seemed plausible at the time. The presumption of inevitable language change is a telling indicator of the extent to which Laȝamon’s text gestures towards an ideological reading of the future from its selective evocation of the past. The understanding of this ideology requires caution, in part because many of the available terms to describe it are to some degree anachronistic. Lerer’s suggestion that “the metrics and the matter of the Brut share in that blend of prosodical experimentation and nationalist sentiment” imports a term which misleads more than it clarifies.44 Mustanoja’s contrary claim, that Laȝamon creates “neither a nationalist nor a racist

44

Seth Lerer, “Old English and its Afterlife”, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English

Literature, ed. David Wallace, Cambridge, 1999, 7-34.

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history”45 risks disguising the extent to which “an account of the construction of England by the ancestors” (“Þa Englene-londe ærest ahten”, l. 9) could not (and should not) expect to escape being read, after the event, as an exercise in nation-building. Although language change is, in Laȝamon’s view, a very minor constituent of this process of construction, it proves a most revealing one, demonstrating the techniques which Laȝamon applies to the major themes of his text. Many recent readings have focused on the role of the law as perhaps the most important idea sustaining Laȝamon’s vision – from those who read Laȝamon’s name as a professional soubriquet, to Cannon’s development of Allen’s judgment that: The most concrete, most nearly “real” construct in this text is not the priest-author, nor the “I” within the text, nor the reified manuscript within the text, nor the audience, either narratee or assumed reader, but the hero, þis lond.46

In Cannon’s reading, the centrality of the land in Laȝamon’s vision is fused with the centrality of the law, as the physical properties of the land and the intellectual properties of the law become inextricably identified, in the process supplying a justification for the social order of medieval Britain: Laȝamon’s ... most original and foundational chorographic idea ... depends upon the connections thirteenth-century jurisprudence made between the land and the law. What Laȝamon thought he knew was that the law was really the land’s idea, a form of thought which took shape according to the structure of that thing from which it emerged, a set of principles which arose from such a stable and unchanging shape that they were themselves capable of stabilizing all the random and violence

45

Tauno F. Mustanoja, “Some Reflections on Lawman’s Poetical Syntax”, in So meny

people, longages and tonges: Philosophical Essays in Scots and Medieval English presented to Angus McIntosh, eds Michael Benskin and M.L. Samuels, Edinburgh, 1981, 336. 46

Allen, “Implied Audience”, 126.

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which comprised human action. In this large and important sense, Laȝamon saw the law as immanent, a set of principles which were not so much laid down by kings and peoples as discovered by them. Describing the form of Laȝamon’s Brut is, therefore, a question of saying how it describes and relies upon the principles of such a law.47

Having proposed an equivalence between English law and þis lond, Cannon uses this metaphor to support the “continuity in change” which, in his view, characterizes this period: The fundamental principle of such history is, however, what Geoffrey, Wace, and Laȝamon also believe: that the ancient law is the modern law because neither successive kings nor foreign conquest have ever altered a timeless custom.48

Cannon projects back into Laȝamon’s text a theory he dubs “constitutionalism”: ... that the law of England – by its lights, the “English constitution” – is “immemorial” because neither successive kings nor foreign conquest has ever had appreciable effect on a timeless “custom”.49

Such a theory would seem to promote the continuity and inevitability of each historical upheaval, binding historical accident into the pattern of “continuous flux” that, for Stein, characterizes Laȝamon’s account.50 But, despite putting the “English constitution” in inverted commas, Cannon’s account underestimates the complexities of

47

Christopher Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature, Oxford, 2004, 55.

48

Ibid., 71.

49

Cannon, “Laȝamon and the Laws of Men”, 341.

50

Robert M. Stein, “Making History English: Cultural Identity and Historical

Explanation in William of Malmesbury and Laȝamon’s Brut”, in Text and Territory, 109.

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“constitutionalism” in a country that has never had a written constitution. He notes “the necessity of legal continuity” during “the final demise of the British kingdom” without registering the wholly fictional nature of this continuity between British and English law. For while it is possible to trace “the continuities of the law” in England, such continuities did not exist across Britain before, or for several centuries after, Laȝamon’s lifetime, a point that cannot have been lost on Laȝamon. So readers in the twenty-first century, as in the thirteenth, must question the good faith of “Laȝamon’s jurisprudence”, in so far as it seems to suggest that the process of conquest is somehow incidental to the continuity of the legal system. The truth was quite other, and was demonstrated as such in the complex operations of justice in Wales, and in the March. Despite the political fragmentation of Wales, one of the most significant symbols of a shared Welsh identity lay in the sophisticated and highly developed Welsh law codes which in medieval Wales became identified as the laws of Hywel Dda (a tenth century Welsh king of Deheubarth in South West Wales, though Hywel was able to extend his rule across much of Wales). The laws of Hywel Dda were recognized across Wales, despite the frequent political conflict between Welsh kingdoms, and continued to develop new precepts and theorisations, necessitating the emergence of a class of trained lawyers to interpret and administer the law. Laȝamon, following Geoffrey of Monmouth, depicts a convergence of “British” and Anglo-Saxon law in Mercia: Þa makede heo ane læȝe and læide ȝeon þat leode [Þa] þeos laȝe wes al iworhte Bruttes nemneden þa laȝen æfter þare lafuedi; to soðen, wihuten wene, þe laȝe hehte Marciane. Seoððen þeræfter monie hundred wintre com Alfred þe king, Englelondes deorling, and wrat þa laȝen on Englis ase heo wes ær on Bruttisc, And whærfde hire nome on his dæȝe and cleopede heo Mærcene laȝe. (ll. 3143-50)

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[Then she [Marcie] made a law and established it throughout that country. This law was all set out and the Britons named that law after the lady; in truth, without doubt the law was called “Marcian”. Then, after many hundred winters, King Alfred, England’s darling, came and translated the law into English, although it had previously been in British, and he changed its name in his day and called it “Marcian Law” (author’s translation).]

But such a convergence was not merely a literary invention without any basis in fact, it was also inconceivable. Laȝamon appears to be attempting to assert the primacy of the Saxon legal tradition of his area over that of Wessex, a task made easier by the fact that “the recorded points of difference between Mercian and West Saxon law are few and technical”.51 Such was not the case between English and Brythonic law, however, a fact clearly evidenced by the survival of distinct and more or less incompatible systems of Welsh law and English law, which derived their practices from very different jurisprudential principles.52 The Common Law’s reliance on the binding power of precedent had no parallel in Welsh law, while the principles of land law and inheritance in Welsh law were not merely irreconcilably different from those in

51

Stenton, Anglo Saxon England, 506.

52

The nature and characteristics of Welsh law are dealt with in The Law of Hywel Dda:

Law Texts from Medieval Wales, ed. and trans. Dafydd Jenkins, The Welsh Classics 2, Llandysul, 2000; Huw Pryce, Native Law and the Church in Medieval Wales, Oxford, 1993, 71-72; Ancient Laws and Institutes of Wales, Comprising Laws Supposed to Be Enacted by Howel the Good, etc., 2 vols, ed. Aneurin Owen, London, 1841; T.M. Charles-Edwards, The Welsh Laws, Writers of Wales, Cardiff, 1989, 17-21; Llyfr Colan: y gyfraith Gymreig yn ôl hanner cyntaf Llawysgrif Peniarth 30, ed. Dafydd Jenkins, History and Law Series 19, Cardiff Law Series 22, Cardiff, 1967, 53; The Welsh King and His Court, eds Thomas Charles-Edwards, Morfydd E. Owen, and Paul Russell, Cardiff, 2000; Sara Elin Roberts, “‘By the Authority of the Devil’: The Law of Medieval Wales”, in Authority and Subjugation, 85-97.

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England but also, in their recognition of the inheritance rights of illegitimate children, irreconcilable with Canon Law. At the time Laȝamon was writing, the differences between English and Welsh law had been increasing. The twelfth century was an important period of development and change in the Common Law, but many of those changes were in the opposite direction to the principles of Welsh law. One celebrated difference between the two legal codes concerned the punishment for murder. The Common Law treated murder as requiring revenge, so murder was a capital crime. In Welsh law, murder was treated as the cause of economic hardship for the bereaved, so the punishment demanded the payment of set fines in compensation, partly determined by social class – to spouse, children, parents and kinsmen. Such a system of compensation seems to have been not unknown in Saxon courts, but Hudson notes that: Even if any formal compensation system of fixed monetary payments, enforced in court for serious crimes, had functioned in the late AngloSaxon period, it seems likely that it was disappearing fast during Henry I’s reign at the latest.53

Throughout the Middle Ages, the operation of justice in England and Wales was complicated by the existence of a “Conflict of Laws” situation. In the March, this conflict was still more complex. The English subjects of the lordships were not governed by Common Law, but by Marcher Law, which was a cut down version of the Common Law, allowing the Lord far greater discretion in his exercise of justice. But Marcher law did not apply to everyone living in the lordships. One might expect that, in conquered parts of Wales, the operation of Welsh law would have been abolished, but this was not the case. Sometimes it was opportune for the Marcher Lords to invoke Welsh law in a particular

53

John Hudson, The Formation of the English Common Law, Harlow, 1996, 81.

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case,54 while maintaining recognition of Welsh law enabled the English rulers to avoid having to abandon the distinction between the English and the Welsh which prevented the integration of the Welsh into the English kingdom, even when their homes had been absorbed into English-governed land. In operation it provided a tool for maintaining dominion but, in theory, it was not based on a racial distinction. Rather, subjects were distinguished by jurisdiction, which generally and conveniently mapped on to race.55 It was a chaotic system, operated for four hundred and fifty years to maintain economic and social advantage. Frame notes how “Even after 1284 the Marcher courts preserved profitable features of Welsh law that were defunct in the Principality of Wales and not always attractive to the Welsh themselves”.56 Inevitably such an unpredictable system proved itself highly malleable to lordly interference while the hierarchy of jurisdiction created deep tensions in the operation of the feudal system. If we think of the feudal hierarchy, in its “ideal form”, as a single social pyramid, from the king down to the serfs, in the March there were two parallel and separate pyramids, operating under three distinct jurisdictions, introducing tremendous uncertainty.57 Even those at the

54

So, Davies notes that “The most unlikely litigants appealed to Welsh law when it suited

them – including Adam of Montgomery, Roger Mortimer, Bogo de Knovill”: see R.R. Davies, The King of England and the Prince of Wales, 1277-84: Law, Politics and Power, Cambridge, 2003, 10. 55

One might, perhaps, note Davies’ wry remark that “Jurisdiction was the instrument par

excellence for the intensification of power and control throughout thirteenth century Europe” (ibid., 17). 56

Robin Frame, “Lordship and Liberties in Ireland and Wales”, in Power and Identity in the

Middle Ages: Essays in Memory of Rees Davies, eds Huw Pryce and John Watts, Oxford, 2007, 125-38. 57

The applicability of feudalism as a concept in early thirteenth-century England has

been questioned by Susan Reynolds and Hugh Thomas (the debate is summarized by D.A. Carpenter). See Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L.A. Manyon, London, 1965;

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apex of Welsh society were, with regard to certain legal rights and remedies, below those at the lower levels of the “English” pyramid – a situation guaranteed to create deeply felt and lasting grievances. It is only by ignoring the legal status of the Welsh in the March (and after the Edwardian Conquest in the principality) that it becomes possible to conclude, as does Hudson, that: “However, the Conquest did not result in any lasting strict and general division between laws for the conquerors and the conquered, as would later occur for example in Ireland.”58 But that failure to notice the irreconcilability of English and Brythonic/Welsh law is crucial to Cannon’s confidence in “the ability of the law to mitigate conquest” which leads him to argue that the Brut “not only proposes but demonstrates that no conquest can interrupt this stability”.59 In the circumstances of the thirteenth century, Laȝamon’s image of legal unity and uniformity may almost seem ironic. Pride in the Welsh legal system was a key element in the developing “nationalism” that supported and inspired the kingdom of Gwynedd’s resistance to the English crown in the thirteenth century, fuelled in part by resentment caused by the conflict of laws.60 Davies has characterized the entire contestation between Edward I and Llywelyn ap Gruffudd as being in form, if not in its deepest causes, a dispute over conflict of laws,61 and the immediate pretext of Edward’s decisive invasion was the Arwystli case, a land dispute which turned on the question of which law – English or Welsh – should be applied in determining the title to land in the north-west of Wales. In this case, Edward’s lawyers did not dispute the

Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted, Oxford, 1994; Hugh M. Thomas, Vassals, Heiresses, Crusaders and Thugs: The Gentry of Angevin Yorkshire 11541216, Philadelphia, 1993; D.A. Carpenter, “The Second Century of English Feudalism”, Past and Present, 168.1 (August 2000), 30-71. 58

Hudson, English Common Law, 17.

59

Cannon, “Laȝamon and Laws of Men”, 357.

60

R.R. Davies, “Law and National Identity in Thirteenth Century Wales”, in Welsh Society

and Nationhood, 51-69. 61

Davies, The King of England, 22.

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legal status of Welsh law,62 but argued that only Edward, as feudal lord of Britain, was in a position to determine which legal system should be applied, a proposition which it was impossible for Llywelyn to accept. If it is clear that Cannon’s notion of constitutionalism cannot be stretched to include the relationship of medieval England and Wales, the question remains whether Laȝamon might plausibly have held “the tenacious belief that conquest itself necessarily confirms the implacable power of the law to preserve”.63 It may be possible that Laȝamon was wholly ignorant of the existence of Welsh and Marcher law, though the proximity of Worcestershire to the March makes this harder to believe. Similarly, if we accept that the self-identification as Laȝamon/Lawman demonstrates the author’s interest in, or even professional involvement in, the legal system, then such ignorance becomes incredible, or unforgivable, in the work of a poet whose “poetic agenda is the fluctuating state of social law and order in British history”.64 In searching for precedents in the Midlands for a professional class of “Lawmen”, Frankis draws attention to the regulations for such a class of lawmen preserved in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 383. The regulations relate to “... a class of lawmen established in the late Anglo-Saxon period to mediate in legal disputes between the Welsh and English (six from each community) in the territory of the Dunsæte (between the lower Severn and Gwent, approximately the modern Forest of Dean)”.65 It is interesting, if no more, that the few surviving records of early medieval lawmen in England should include a category of lawmen whose function was to preside in situations where a conflict of laws had arisen:

62

The English Crown’s formal recognition of the validity of Welsh law took place in the

reign of King John: see R.R. Davies, The Age of Conquest: Wales 1063-1415, Oxford, 1991, 294. 63

Cannon, “Laȝamon and Laws of Men”, 360.

64

Allen, “‘Where are you’”, 3.

65

Frankis, “Laȝamon or the Lawman?”, 109-10.

98

Simon Meecham-Jones XII lahmen scylon riht tæcean Wealan ond Ænglan: VI Englisce ond VI Wylisce [... twelve lawmen, six English and six Welsh, shall interpret the law for the Welsh and English.]66

So, faced with Laȝamon’s avoidance of the problems created by the differences between English and Welsh/Brythonic law, we could resign ourselves to accepting the stupidity of our poet, but the example of how he executes an ideological flip to evade the issue of pre-English languages should perhaps compel us to pause. It is not difficult to see his representation of a unity of laws, where in practice a conflict existed, as a similar flip, achieved partly through the myth of Marcie unifying the law. But his technique is more clearly seen in the account of Athelstan given to Cadwalader: Me dude him to understonde of al þisse londe hu Aðelstan her com liðen ut of Sexlonden, and hu he al Anglelond sette on his aȝere hond; and hu he sette moting, and hu he sette husting, and hu he sette sciren and makede frið of deoren, and hu he sette halimot, and hu he sette hundred, and þa nomen of þan tunen on Sexisce runen; and ȝilden he gon rere mucle and swiðe mære, And þa chirchen he gon dihten after Sexisce irihten, And Sexis he gan kennen þa nomen of þan monnen. (ll. 15968-77) [Men from all over this land made known to him [Cadwalader] how Athelstan had come here from Saxony; and how he took all of England into his own hand; and how he established courts; and how he set up assemblies; and how he established shire courts and made territories for

66

Ibid., 110.

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hunting; and how he set up courts in manors; and how he established the hundreds, and changed the names of the towns in the Saxon language; and how he set up very many and very important guilds, and then reconstructed the churches according to the Saxon custom; and he gave the men Saxon names. (author’s translation)]

In amongst the renaming of towns and subjects, the establishment of courts and assemblies, using the Saxon terms moting and husting can pass unnoticed, suggesting a continuity that is in fact illusory. The Saxon moting and husting may succeed institutions which fulfilled the same purpose, but nonetheless the process is one of replacement rather than continuation, revealing an important difference in emphasis from Wace’s account of the same process.67 It is in such careful manipulation of detail that the nature and scale of Laȝamon’s ideological investment in the Brut is expressed. Cartlidge underestimates the poet in suggesting that Laȝamon’s engagement with the politics of the past and present is for purely artistic reasons: Yet Laȝamon chose to foster this didactic quality in his text not only because he wanted to communicate the facts of history as he understood them, but also because, through his emphasis upon the depth of time and the complexity of events, he could invest his narrative with a certain grandeur and prestige. In the same way, the Brut’s suggestion of national

67

The difference of emphasis is noted by Johnson: “Whereas Wace notes the replacement

of British customs and law by English ones, and particularly the replacement of British nomenclature by English terms, Cadwalader in the Brut hears about the establishment of the moting, husting, halimot etc. by Athelston [sic] (15969-78). In so far as Athelstan’s action fulfils the model of ideal kingship as manifested in the best kings of the British past (as one who promotes the political and spiritual welfare of his realm), the Brut suggests an element of political continuity at the end of its narrative history, even as the narrator describes the restriction of British dominion to ‘Walisce lond’ (16098)”; Lesley Johnson, “Reading the Past in Laȝamon’s Brut”, in Text and Tradition, 156.

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The Brut is a political text, and a didactic text, albeit one which makes its case discreetly, almost apologetically. For Laȝamon’s purpose is not merely the “enscribing [of an] already recorded tradition”69 but the proposal of a new tradition, which might be described as an assimilationist tradition. The image through which Laȝamon seeks to redeem this vision is that of “the land”. The centrality of this image has been noted, by Allen, Cannon and others but there is still work to be done in interpreting precisely what þis lond signifies in Laȝamon’s text. For Cannon: “The real hero of Laȝamon’s Brut (c.1200) is no particular person or peoples but the island now generally referred to as Britain, a place Laȝamon characteristically refers to as ‘þis lond’.”70 It is a bold expansion of Allen’s highlighting of the centrality of the land at the heart of the text, but there is a crucial difference between these two readings. For Allen, the importance of the land lies in its physical substance, which somehow seems to root the text, and its protagonists, into a tangible (and hence reassuring) certainty: Laȝamon presents this concept of place, in the concretized form of the common ground (literally) on which the text operates: civilisations, ruling races, names of places all change, but the perspective of “hereness, underour-feetness” is the point of reference for meaning in the text.71

68

Neil Cartlidge, “The Composition and Social Context of Oxford, Jesus College, MS 29 (II)

and British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A. ix”, Medium Ævum, 66.2 (September 1997), 260. 69Allen,

“Implied Audience”, 124.

70

Cannon, Grounds, 50.

71

Allen, “Implied Audience”, 126.

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There are pressing difficulties in interpreting this idea of “common ground”. If we accept the importance of some concept of “common ground” to Laȝamon’s vision, it must be accepted, also, that such a concept is possible only through the presumption of a shared sense of commonality which obscures the uncomfortable and unwilling position of Wales within the presumed unity of “this island”. But the idea can also provide a means through which the reluctance of some of Britain’s inhabitants to be assimilated, and the jurisdictional separation which debars them from being reckoned as equal members of this land, can be side-stepped. In Allen’s reading, the importance of þis lond is physical in its essence, but abstract in its geography, being in no way dependent on any imputed special qualities of English or British land. Allen’s formulation shares with Laȝamon’s own practice a suggestive imprecision – þis lond may refer to Britain, England or any combination of parts of either. In contrast, for Cannon, Laȝamon’s image of the centrality of þis lond is imbued with geographical (and hence political) particularity. In consequence, Cannon’s reading is over-specific, and perhaps over-ambitious, in identifying Laȝamon’s cautiously unspecific use of the term þis lond with the island of Britain – that is, not just “Englelond”, but also Wales and Cornwall, and perhaps also Scotland, if not Ireland. It is an identification which Laȝamon’s text does not encourage. Though he describes the name of Britain having been changed to England, Laȝamon evades the true implications of what such an act of control would have meant, a process made easier under the veil of the undelineated term þis lond. In his attitude to the land Laȝamon is supremely pragmatic – there is no special bond between race and place, of the sort rhapsodized by later Romantic nationalists. The land belongs to those who control it, whether Britons, Angles, Normans, or any combination of the successors of these peoples. With that possession passes the right to their history – even to King Arthur himself: But while wes an witeȝe Mærlin ihate; he bodede mid worde – his quiðes weoren soðe –

102

Simon Meecham-Jones þat an Arður sculde ȝete cum Anglen to fulste. (ll. 14295-97) [But there was once a seer called Merlin who prophesied – his sayings were true – that an Arthur should come again to aid the people of England.]

In drawing this conclusion, Laȝamon is true to the fundamental principle of Norman land law – that all land is held from the crown – whereas Welsh land law theorized a bond between family and land which made it all but impossible to alienate land beyond the family circle. The Brut’s cycle of changing possession seems to support this identification of authority with possession, though this conclusion rests on a characteristic process of implication and evasion. It seems that each later assumption of control follows the originary pattern of Brutus, even though that first transaction was of a unique nature. When Brutus is promised a “wunsum lond” (l. 618), it is a land without population, a luxury not afforded any of his successors: Albion hatte þat lond, ah leode ne beoð þar nane. (l. 624) [That land is called Albion, but there are no people there.]

In the text, Albion becomes Britain, Britain becomes England, but the term “England” needs to be read in non-anachronistic terms. Weinberg may be right that Laȝamon’s choice of “the vernacular for his poem rather than Latin or French may well have been influenced by a lively and learned interest in the English past”,72 but it is important always to remember that what he writes about is not “the English past” but a British past which, perhaps, becomes an English past, and certainly an English future. “England” is a term in the text that refers back to the

72

Weinberg, “The Latin marginal Glosses”, 115.

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usurping of British history by Germanic migration, but it also serves a highly imaginative purpose as a future projection. In contrast, the categories “Wales” and “the Welsh”, perhaps also “the Britons” had a meaning in the past which was not expected to be sustained in the future. Central to any understanding of the Brut is the question, “How should we read ‘England’”? The apparently strange reference to Arthur’s future care for the English shows with some clarity the ways in which Laȝamon reflects, perpetuates and, in subtly influential ways, re-points the paradoxes of the English in Wales. In doing so, he offers an assimilationist vision in which the Welsh will cease to be distinguished from the English, but will find their place within a greater “Englelond”, since to be English is a matter of jurisdiction, not race or glory. At the time Laȝamon was (probably) writing, it must have seemed plausible that, at the very least, the lands of the Marcher lordships would become Anglicized – by migration, contact and governance – to the point where they could assume their place within England in the same way as Ergyng. Indeed, in areas of Monmouthshire or Radnorshire, for example, a process of dis-identification with Wales was under way which would continue for many centuries – the constitutional position of Monmouthshire was a subject of confusion (and heated debate) until the Local Government Reform Act of 1974. Laȝamon’s depiction of the Welsh at the end of the poem suggests that he recognized that the boundaries of England need not, or would not soon, enclose all of Wales, as he admits the probability of the persistence of an unassimilated Pura Wallia in “þe Walsce londen” beyond þis lond. Laȝamon’s text reflects not an uncertainty about “the tensions between ethnic and national identity present in the Brut”,73 but rather a respectful and visionary formulation of future integration which, in the event, was not to happen. Having, it appears, little emotional investment in the differentiation of race and jurisdiction himself, Laȝamon could not

73

Kleinman, “The Æðelæn of Engle”, 97.

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recognize the strength of feeling it aroused in others – in excluding the Welsh from full participation in the English realm. Similarly his model of the future underestimated the attachment of the Welsh to their distinctive national traditions, and their self-description in their private, as well as public, roles. In undergoing a process of Anglicization, Welsh families in the March did not always come to believe that such Anglicization required them to discard their Cymric past, many continuing, for example, in their role as patrons of Welsh bards, while also carrying out duties for the English crown. Ironically, perhaps, even as he wrote, the forces that would derail Laȝamon’s model of peaceful and gradual integration were gathering speed. Davies has noted how, perhaps in reaction to his losses in France, King John developed a belligerent interest in Wales: The reign of King John was a formative period in Anglo-Welsh relations ... during his reign all the major issues of Anglo-Welsh relations had been brought clearly into focus and he himself, in his campaigns of 1211-12, had laid the ground-plans of a military conquest and settlement of the country which it only remained for Edward I to copy and put fully into operation.74

In John’s plans to conquer Pura Wallia, we see the attitudes against which Laȝamon was writing – an absolute resistance to the integration of the Welsh into English structures and an impatience with the Welsh that after more than a century and a half they still hadn’t conceded defeat to England’s superior forces. Within two generations, Edward I’s fierce and sustained extinction of Welsh independence had left Laȝamon’s text redundant as prophecy – a history which, in drawing a pattern from the past to predict and counsel the future, found itself overtaken by the present. But, if Edward’s military campaign was an unqualified success, its success at a cultural and political level was less certain. In his vision of a patient assimilation, Laȝamon had discreetly outlined a vision of

74

Davies, The Age of Conquest, 292-93.

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reconciliation and respect which might have rendered the “Welsh problem” less severe, but which England’s medieval rulers were not yet ready to recognize.

THE SEVERN: BARRIER OR HIGHWAY? ANDREW WEHNER

How much of a barrier was the river Severn? Tracing its role from prehistory, we know that the territory of the Iron Age Dobunni corresponded roughly with modern Gloucestershire and southern Worcestershire. In other words it extended on both sides of the Severn and the river was neither a boundary nor a barrier at that time.1 In AD 43 the Romans landed on the east coast, bent on conquest. Three or four years later they reached the Severn at Bristol and Gloucester.2 There they seem to have paused for two or three years. For the Romans, it seems, the river represented not so much a barrier as a convenient place at which to stop, a convenient frontier marker while they gained time to pacify the tribes they had already overcome. The Fosse Way, primarily intended for the rapid movement of troops, was constructed on a south-west/north-east line, coming at one point some thirty miles or so east of Gloucester. This suggests the consolidation of what may have been intended to be a permanent frontier. However the continued defiance of the British leader Caractacus perhaps provoked the invaders into renewed offensive action. He had been driven out of his power base on the east coast, and, having made a fighting retreat across the island, had withdrawn over the Severn into the

1

John Peddie, Conquest: The Roman Invasion of Britain, 2nd edn, Stroud, Glos, 2005, 21. For

a map of the Severn Basin, see the Frontispiece to this volume. 2

Ibid., 128-29.

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territory of the Silures in South Wales.3 Here he continued to inspire armed resistance, and it was perhaps a succession of raids across the Bristol Channel that tried Roman patience too far. Perhaps too the realization that there was gold in Wales aroused their cupidity. One of the main centres of Silurian power was near present-day Chepstow.4 So an amphibious assault below Gloucester would have been a better option than fording the river at or above Gloucester and having a twoday march through thick forest.5 The invading army may have included a contingent of Batavians who were specialists in river crossings.6 Just where they effected the crossing is still a matter of conjecture. But cross the Severn they did, and eventually captured Caractacus after a battle which is currently thought to have been fought at Caersws, just a few miles from Gregynog,7 where the 2008 Laȝamon Conference was held. Roman domination of the island lasted roughly three hundred-andfifty years. Then, with the withdrawal of the army, Anglo-Saxon immigrants, who were already established on the east and south coasts were able to move inland and occupy more territory.8 They were supported by fresh arrivals from across the North Sea, whose movements were now unrestricted by a Roman navy.9 But the takeover was not organized under a unified command as the Roman invasion had been. A hundred-and-eighty-odd years elapsed between the Roman withdrawal and the battle at Dyrham, north of Bristol, which gave the newcomers control of the eastern bank of the Severn. It is not known if, or for how long, they paused before crossing the river. There is a settlement some five miles west of Areley Kings, and thus west of the river, named Pensax, a Celtic name indicating The Hill of

3

Ibid., 126-28.

4

Ibid., 164.

5

Ibid., 165-66.

6

J.N.L. Myers, The English Settlements, Oxford, 1986, 75.

7

Peddie, Conquest, 167-69.

8

Myers, The English Settlements, 80-87.

9

Ibid., 105-10.

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the Saxons.10 Does this indicate a Saxon penetration across the river sufficiently unique to warrant a special identification before the inexorable tide of Saxon invasion engulfed another slab of British territory west of the river? For some time the various groups of Anglo-Saxons fought each other with as much enthusiasm as they fought the natives.11 Slowly, recognized territories of tribes and kingdoms became established, though the habit of in-fighting did not die out.12 Again the River Severn did not figure as a boundary, let alone a barrier. The territory of Wiccia, a sub-kingdom of Mercia, extended on both sides of the river.13 When, in AD 784, King Offa of Mercia ordered the construction of the earthen dyke and ditch which bears his name, to mark his boundary with Wales, for the greater part of its length it was two days’ journey west of the middle Severn. In the ninth century the Anglo-Saxons, who had once been invaders, were themselves invaded by Danes. For these marauders the Severn was not so much a barrier as a highway along which they could penetrate the interior. They sacked the abbeys at Deerhurst and Worcester, though there is no record of them going further upstream.14 Apart from these casual raids there was a concerted attempt to conquer the entire country. Settlements were established and land wars waged. For these the Severn does seem to have been, if not an actual barrier, at least a point at which invasion efforts ran out of steam. In AD 877 the Saxon King Alfred of Wessex foiled a Danish attempt to conquer the West Country, and the invading army retired to Gloucester for the winter. In the following spring they tried again, but were defeated so disastrously that they had to

10

Eilert Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place Names, 4th edn, Oxford, 1960,

362. 11

Myers, The English Settlements, 165 and Appendix II.

12

A.E.E. Jones, Anglo-Saxon Worcester, Worcester, 1958, 36.

13

Ibid., 43.

14

Ibid., 83.

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accept peace terms which restricted them to the eastern part of the island.15 Fifteen years later another Danish army, which had been ravaging France, decided to invade England. Eventually they reached the Severn at Quatford, a mile or two south of where Bridgnorth is today. There they built themselves a fort and settled down for the winter. By then they had spent three years in England, and had been consistently defeated in everything they had attempted. When the spring came again they gave up and agreed to go back from where they had come, having accomplished nothing.16 With the Danes defeated, in the ninth century Edgar, who claimed to be king of all England, established the system of counties which largely survives to the present day. Again the Severn was not seen as a boundary. The counties of Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and Shropshire all extend on both sides of the river. In the opening years of the eleventh century a Danish dynasty obtained the throne, and many Danes achieved by stealth properties which their ancestors had been unable to seize by force. Danes were appointed Sheriffs of counties. If a manor failed to pay its taxes promptly any Dane was able to deposit the required amount with the Sheriff and obtain immediate possession, with the Saxon owners being unceremoniously thrown out.17 The Doomsday survey of 1086 records a dozen or so manors west of the Severn which had been held by Danes before they, in their turn, were dispossessed by triumphant Normans. To find the Severn acting as a real barrier we must look ahead to the opening years of the fifteenth century. In 1405 Owen Glendower raised a rebellion in Wales. Leading his army into England he sacked the transSevern suburbs of Worcester. Unable to cross the river there he moved upstream, looking for a crossing point which was not guarded or at least watched. My own guess is that it was at the Redstone crossing that he

15

P.J. Helm, Alfred the Great, London, 1963, 88-103.

16

Ibid., 149-56.

17

Jones, Anglo-Saxon Worcester, 137.

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gave up, and took the road which conveniently led back to Wales. Local tradition has it that he established a camp in the Iron Age fort on top of Woodbury Hill, a few miles west of Areley Kings. King Henry IV arrived with his own army and camped on a neighbouring hill top. For about a week individuals fought personal duels in the intervening valley, and then Glendower and his men simply faded away. Just for once an invader had been stopped at the Severn. An effective barrier the river may not have been, but it was certainly an important highway until the coming of the railroads in the nineteenth century. It had one of the highest tidal ranges in the world with the effects of this being felt as far as Worcester. Even above this the high tide would have had the effect of damming up the flow downstream and reducing its speed. So a bit of careful timing would have allowed journeys to be made in favourable conditions. With its tributaries the Wye and the Teme to the west and the Avon to the east the Severn was the central spine of a ready-made communications network. And there were numerous smaller streams which today we would consider unusable, but which were an excellent means of getting about in small boats. During dry periods there would have been periods when the water level was too low to allow passage, but in Britain the rain was never too long in coming, and the situation would soon be restored. There is archaeological evidence of heavy settlement on the river from prehistoric times. One would expect that people who lived on river banks would quickly learn to construct canoes or coracles in which they could travel about. Boats capable of making short sea crossings were developed in the Bronze Age, and commodities would have been traded in them. There was certainly trade in the Iron Age: iron currency bars have been found on the Malvern Hills. In these days of concrete roads and fast vehicles with comparatively small fuel tanks we tend to forget the value of inland waterways. Even a Roman road was not able to support heavy wheeled traffic without deep and troublesome ruts developing on their surfaces. Pack animals and oxcarts could lift or pull only fairly small loads at never more than a walking pace, and with oxen somewhat less, and they all needed feeding

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and resting. But on a river craft the load was supported for nothing. Going downstream at least the speed was more of a running than a walking pace, and the boat itself needed neither food nor rest. It could keep moving all daylight hours, and accomplish a day’s journey far in excess of any animal on legs. Perhaps a foray into mathematics will make this clear. A legion of five thousand men at Gloucester or Wroxeter would have needed about fifteen thousand pounds of grain every day just for the men. There would be several horses as well even if there was no cavalry unit attached. To deliver a day’s ration would have required ninety-four pack animals together with thirty-two drivers. All these would require feeding themselves, meaning another eight or nine animals and three drivers for each day of the journey.18 On the other hand a barge twenty feet long, five feet wide and floating comfortably in three feet of water, with a crew of three men or less, could carry the entire day’s supply quite easily, and going downstream it would travel much faster and go much further in a day. Even going upstream there were ways of making progress, albeit more slowly. If the wind was suitable a sail was the best option. Failing that, the barge could be poled, rowed or even man-hauled along. Extra men would be required for these methods, but nothing like the thirty-two required for a pack train. Apart from the legionary bases there were small towns at Welshpool and Worcester. There were also numerous riverside settlements; apparently archaeological evidence reveals Roman farms at one Roman mile distance apart; this is borne out by the sites of Roman farms in and around Areley Kings. There must have been trade between all these settlements. There was a Roman iron smelting industry in Worcester to which iron ore and fuel must have been imported and iron artefacts exported.19 There were certainly Roman vineyards in the area, which implies a wine trade. Under the influence of Roman ideas, pottery, some

18 19

Peddie, Conquest, 42. J.D. Hurst, Savouring the Past: The Droitwich Salt Industry, Worcester: Archaeology

Section, Hereford and Worcester County Council, 1992, 13.

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of it probably from Malvern, was increasingly used by the native population for cooking and storing food. All these items of trade were heavy, or bulky or fragile, sometimes all three, and more suitably carried by boat where this was possible. Wine, for instance could be transported in wineskins, on pack animals a few at a time. But for bulk transport the earthenware amphora, big, heavy and fragile, had a long pointed base which seems to have been designed to be jammed into the sand ballast of boats. There it could travel upright and perfectly safely. Another important commodity was building stone. The Romans did build stone houses in their riverside towns, and the necessary stone would have been transported much more easily by water than by road. Following the Roman withdrawal civil society seems to have suffered declining standards.20 We may assume that trade in the less essential items of everyday living tailed off. Even so food had to be delivered to the towns and manufactured goods sold or bartered to pay for it. But as the Anglo-Saxons took over and settled down trade would have revived and there is documentary evidence of it by the eighth century. In a charter dated AD 743 Æthelbald, the king of Mercia, granted that the dues payable on two ships which were in London at the time should be remitted to the church of St Peter in Worcester.21 There are some interesting implications to this grant. We can speculate as to why two ships in London were specified, but we can infer some basic facts. First, sea-going ships were available. So, planks, ropes and sails were being manufactured on a commercial scale using tools which also had to be made somewhere. There was certainly trade in all these items. Secondly, taxes were evidently routinely levied on sea-borne trade by a functioning bureaucracy, and, with coins of the period known to exist, these taxes would have been paid in cash. Trade was evidently flourishing and the Severn river system would have been a hive of activity.

20

Hurst, Savouring the Past, 13.

21

Jones, Anglo-Saxon Worcester, 67.

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An important commodity was the salt which had been produced from brine springs at Droitwich since the Iron Age.22 Before the invention of refrigeration salt was absolutely essential for human survival, being necessary to preserve meat, fish and vegetables. To produce salt, brine had to be boiled in pans: six pounds of firewood were required to evaporate one pound of salt, creating an insatiable demand for fuel from an ever-increasing radius of deforestation. Much of this salt came by road, and there was a network of “saltways” radiating from Droitwich along which pack trains carried the processed salt to various markets.23 The Salwarpe stream, which flowed past the springs was neither wide nor deep. But it is likely that some firewood and salt was transported by this means too. Lead was also required for the manufacture of the evaporating pans. In AD 836 a charter of King Wiglaf of Mercia excused the monastery at Hanbury, a few miles from Droitwich, from paying taxes on all its land, the animals on it, and the salt pans and lead works which it owned.24 One source of lead may have been round the head waters of the Severn, in Wales, a journey by river of roughly a hundred miles.25 The same distance in the other direction were the Mendip Hills, which had been a source of lead in Roman times. From either direction water transport would seem to have been the obvious means of moving the ingots of the heavy metal. It is reasonable to suppose that the lead foundry, though owned by the out-of-town monastery, was located in Droitwich itself, on the banks of the Salwarpe stream and conveniently near the brine springs and the salt houses. There was a pottery industry round the Malvern area, possibly dating from the Iron Age, and certainly in existence, as noted above, during the Roman period and for several centuries later. Perhaps it was not fine china, the Meissen of its day, but the rough, earthenware pieces were for

22

Hurst, Savouring the Past, 5.

23

Ibid., 18.

24

Jones, Anglo-Saxon Worcester, 78.

25

Barrie Trinder, Barges and Bargemen, Chichester, 2005, 87.

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everyday use and remains of this pottery have been found all over the West Midlands. One twelfth-century shard has even been found in Areley Kings. By the thirteenth century the potters had begun to make the decorated floor tiles which were then coming into fashion. These goods would have travelled by water: the village of Hanley Swan, one of the centres of this tile industry, still has a road called Quay Lane leading to the river Severn, though the quay itself has now disappeared. At the end of the eighth century Viking raids would have caused some interruption of trade. Though the raids may have been devastating when they occurred, they were not all that frequent. After a period of acute distress normal life and normal trade would recover. They were turbulent times, and it seems more likely that merchants travelling on the river were liable to be attacked by commercial rivals from the settlements they passed rather than by a Viking marauder. In 1016 the Danish King Canute became king of all England. From the Saxon point of view this may have been a political disaster, but commercially it ushered in a period of prosperity. Canute ruled an empire which included Ireland, Scotland and parts of the Baltic, which were now opened to English merchants.26 We may be sure that those who lived in the Severn basin had their share of the burgeoning good times. There was, however, political interference in restraint of trade. In the first flush of enthusiasm at becoming a Christian the king ordered that no-one should presume to go either to markets or to law-courts on Saturday afternoon or the whole of Sunday; instead they were to go to church and beg forgiveness for their sins.27 There was another commodity traded in the eleventh century, and possibly in the twelfth and even thirteenth: slaves. At the beginning of the eleventh century Bishop Wulfstan II had campaigned against the trade in Saxon child slaves being shipped to Ireland. However slavery remained lawful under the Saxon kings. It was the “cruel” Normans who

26

Jones, Anglo-Saxon Worcester, 135.

27

Ibid., 134-35.

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actually suppressed the practice. Daniel Donoghue suggests that even after its official suppression the trade may well have continued clandestinely for several decades or even centuries.28 For transporting these unfortunates a boat had at least two advantages over a land journey. The faster pace and shorter journey time would mean fewer feeding requirements, and a boat was that much more difficult to escape from. The Saxons occasionally built stone cathedrals, Worcester being one such. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Normans built many more, together with numerous stone castles. Nearly all of these edifices were, by necessity, built close to rivers. It was the only practical solution to the problem of transporting the huge quantities of stone which were required. Stone used for building Worcester Cathedral, some of it from the Saxon period, has been identified as coming from quarries up to thirty miles away, and this must have come by water. In the second half of the twelfth century Laȝamon’s Henry, the “great” or heȝ king, that is Henry II, ruled over England and a large part of France as well. At that time there appears to have been an episode of global cooling, which meant that the English climate became less suitable for viniculture; at the same time, because sheep farming was developing, within Henry’s empire English wool was traded for French wine, in quantities which were ever increasing over the following centuries. With better soil, and hence richer grass, the wool produced in the Severn basin was of better quality than that of the more famous Cotswold hills. And, because there was a convenient river, boats were much the best vehicles for transporting the bulky bales of wool. Gloucester and, even more importantly, Bristol, were the ports where wool from the Midlands was collected for export to Europe. Ships which went to France brought back wine, in barrels of a particular size known as tuns. The terms gross tons and nett tons are still in use today to indicate the size of ships, and puzzle the uninitiated. In this context the word tons, or more accurately register tons, has nothing to do with weight. It was initially a measure of

28

See this volume, 197-213.

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the number of tuns of wine which a ship could carry. Effectively it was the volume of the ship. Gross tons indicated the total internal volume of the ship, while nett tons was the volume of the money-earning cargo space on which taxes could be levied. In later times the register ton was standardized at one hundred cubic feet. With the growing volume of trade, commercial law began to develop to deal with the inevitable disputes. Either Henry II’s queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, or her son Richard I, is credited with overseeing the drawing up of The Laws of Oleron. These, re-hashing the ancient laws of Rhodes, codified the rights and responsibilities of the ships’ masters, their mariners and the merchants who owned the cargoes they carried.29 As a one-time ship-master myself I was interested to find that, though simple assault was not allowed, if a mariner got uppity the Master was entitled to strike him a single blow in the interests of preserving discipline.30 As well as a highway for trade the river was also a source of fish, and for the Severn particularly eels. “Fish Weirs” were wattle hedges built on a framework of timber uprights and cross pieces and supporting walkways. These gave access to the fish traps built into the wattle hedge. They did not obstruct the flow of water, but they did obstruct the passage of boats, and seem to have been a bone of contention.31 One of the matters dealt with in Magna Carta in 1215 was the requirement to remove all fish weirs from every river in the land.32 To what extent the requirement was enforced we can only guess. The fishery at Areley Kings was owned by Bordesley Abbey at the time. One would imagine that the abbot would have protested strongly at the destruction of one of the sources of supply for feeding his monks. Whatever was demolished

29

David Hebden, An Extract of the Ancient Laws of Oleron, London, 1990.

30

Hebden, Ancient Laws, Article XII.

31

Trinder, Barges and Bargemen, 16-17.

32

For a translation of Magna Carta, see The British Library website:

http://www.bl.uk/treasures/magnacarta/index.html; Article 33: demolition of fish weirs.

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in the thirteenth century, many weirs were still in existence some threeand-a-half centuries later. How would Laȝamon have fitted into this situation? The question has been asked how a poor country priest could afford to buy enough parchment to write a whole book, let alone buy three expensive books for his research. He seems to have been well educated. He might also have been quite well off. In 1588, admittedly a long time after him, one of his successors was recorded as having no less than eighteen acres in the common fields, as well as another four-and-a-half acres of his own glebe farm. That same priest also had pasturage for one cow and thirty sheep.33 Laȝamon himself may not have had all of the eighteen acres mentioned in 1588, but we can infer that he would have had his share of strips in the common fields. As rector he also had his glebe farm. And in addition to what he could produce himself on his own land he also had his tithe, that is one tenth of what everybody else produced. Every tenth egg, sheaf of grain and bale of wool was his by right, and was ruthlessly claimed. Out of the tithes he did have to maintain the chancel of the church, but we can guess that there was sometimes something substantial left over for his own use. In his time the export of wool was becoming the foundation of the national economy, and if he had any commercial acumen at all he would have been into sheep in as big a way as he could manage. The raw material for all the parchment he wanted was walking about on his share of the pasturage. Furthermore, if, as his name suggests, he did have some local reputation as a fount of knowledge, this would surely have earned him a certain amount of money. It would also probably have brought him into contact with a circle of literate intelligentsia, who would have encouraged him to write, and been interested in reading, his book. These contacts might well have come and gone by water. With boats going up and down the river Laȝamon would have been familiar with the techniques of sailing sideways on to the wind. To do this the cross yard from which the sail hung would be braced round so

33

Undated document in the Glebe Land file of Areley Kings parish archives.

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as to catch the wind on its back surface, and so propel the boat forward. In this situation the windward edge of the sail tended to flap, and catch the wind on its wrong side, which was undesirable. From at least the ninth century the practice was to jam a long pole into the windward edge of the sail and fit the butt end into a hole in a wooden block attached to the hull. This pole was known as a betas (