Literary Culture in the Medieval Welsh Marches: Networks, Places, Politics 9780192846662

Citation preview

Literary Culture in the Medieval Welsh Marches

Literary Culture in the Medieval Welsh Marches Networks, Places, Politics M AT T H EW SI Ô N L A M PI T T

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Matthew Siôn Lampitt 2025 The moral rights of the author have been asserted This is an open access publication, available online and distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), a copy of which is available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Subject to this licence, all rights are reserved.

Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of this licence should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2025935479 ISBN 9780192846662 DOI: 10.1093/9780191939150.001.0001 Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

O X F O R D S T U D I E S I N M E D I E VA L L I T E R AT U R E  A N D C U LT U R E General Editors Ardis Butterfield, Yale University, Bruce Holsinger, University of Virginia, and Shazia Jagot, University of York The monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and actively seeks to promote research that not only focuses on the array of subjects medievalists now pursue in literature, theology, and philosophy, in social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science but also that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to, manuscript and book history; languages and literatures of the global Middle Ages; race and the post-colonial; the digital humanities, media and performance; music; medicine; the history of affect and the emotions; the literature and practices of devotion; the theory and history of gender and sexuality, ecocriticism and the environment; theories of aesthetics; medievalism.

For my niece, Fiona, who has so many marches yet to explore.

Acknowledgements It is a pleasure to begin a book about networks by thanking my own. This book began as a PhD dissertation undertaken in the French Department at King’s College London, funded by AHRC–LAHP. The revisions that produced this monograph were completed partly during a Junior Research Fellowship at St John’s College, Cambridge, and partly during a Postdoctoral Research Associateship on the project Mapping the March: Medieval Wales and England, c.1282–1550. Funded by the ERC–UKRI (EP/X027880/1), the project is based at the University of Bristol in  collaboration with the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales. I would like to thank all of the above for various kinds of institutional, financial, and intellectual support. I am especially grateful to Mapping the March for funding the Open Access agreement for this publication. My greatest debts are, without doubt, owed to my PhD supervisor, Simon Gaunt (1959–2021). I could not have asked for a wiser, wittier, fiercer mentor; it will forever be a source of sadness and regret to me that he did not live to see this work published. For thoughtful and rigorous feedback, I thank my secondary supervisor, Julia Crick, and my thesis examiners, Sarah Kay and Emma Campbell. I am also grateful to Paul Russell for welcoming me into his Middle Welsh classes during my doctoral studies. Various sections of this work have benefitted greatly from the feedback of Simon Rodway, the late Morfydd  E.  Owen, Sara Elin Roberts, and, in particular, Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan. For their support in the latter stages of this project and the early stages of the next, I thank all the team at Mapping the March: Helen Fulton, Rachael Harkes, Abi Freeman, Mike Jones, Scott Lloyd, and Jon Dollery. Finally, Miranda Griffin deserves special thanks for her guidance and kindness over many years. I would like to thank the series editors, in particular Ardis Butterfield, and the team at Oxford University Press for their help and patience in bringing this project to fruition, and I am very grateful to the anonymous readers for their encouraging and attentive feedback. I would like to thank the librarians and staff at the Bodleian Libraries, British Library, Cambridge University Library, Cardiff Central Library, Trinity College Dublin Library, Hereford Cathedral, and the National Library of Wales. I am further grateful to Hereford Cathedral for permission to use an image of the mappa mundi. Thanks also go to Roger Bennett for his work on the index. Many friends and colleagues have been sources of great support while I have worked on this book: Fiona Barsoum, Giulia Boitani, Sam Cooper, Luciana Cordo Russo, Brianne Dolce, Ben Guy, Rachel Hard, Alice Hazard, Melek

x

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Karataș, Myra Laurenson, Gemma Longson, Irene and Roberta Morgan-Brown, David Murray, Emily Kate Price, Henry Ravenhall, Rebecca Shercliff, Geneviève Young, Sadie and Chris Wood, Emma Woolley, Doriane Zerka. My thanks also go to all my family, who have learned more than they ever wished to about the fascinating places we call home. Je remercie également la famille Pratlong: merci pour tout du fond du cœur. And finally, thank you, with all my love, to Stephen Turton: many helped me write this book; you gave me the confidence to finish it. Parts of the Introduction and Chapter 1 appeared in ‘The “French of Wales”? Possibilities, Approaches, Implications’, French Studies 76 (2022): 333–349, and are reproduced, with revisions, by permission of Oxford University Press.

Contents Abbreviations Author’s Note

Introduction: From Periphery to Network

xiii xv

1

1. Texts, Manuscripts, Networks

33

2. Networking Narratives

77

3. Networks and the Non-human

118

4. The Language(s) of Networks

145

Conclusion: Caerleon

175

Appendix

191

References Index

193 225

Abbreviations AN AND ASD

BHO BL BLDM BnF DMF DMLBS

eLALME

FEW GDC

GDD

GPC

LL LlGC ME MED

Anglo-Norman The Anglo-Norman Dictionary, Version 2. 2000–2006. AHRC–University of Aberystwyth, University of Swansea. http://www.anglo-norman.net Bosworth Toller’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online. 2014. Edited by Thomas Northcote Toller, Christ Sean, and Ondřej Tichy. Prague: Charles University, 2014. https://bosworthtoller.com British History Online. 2003. IHR–SOAS. https://www.british-history.ac.uk British Library British Library Digitised Manuscripts. British Library. https://www.bl.uk/ manuscripts/ Bibliothèque nationale de France Dictionnaire du Moyen Français, 1330–1500, Version 2023. ATILF–CNRS, Université de Lorraine. http://www.atilf.fr/dmf/ Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. 2018. Edited by R. K. Ashdowne, D. R. Howlett, and R. E. Latham. Oxford: British Academy. https://logeion.uchicago.edu/ An Electronic Version of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English. 2013–. Edited by Michael Benskin, Margaret Laing, Vasilis Karaiskos, and Keith Williamson. University of Edinburgh. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/elalme/ elalme.html Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch.  1928. Edited by Walther von Wartburg. Bonn: Klopp. https://apps.atilf.fr/lecteurFEW/ Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialectes du IXe au XVe siècle: Complément. 1893–1902. Edited by Frédéric Godefroy. 3 vols (8–10). Paris: Vieweg. http://micmap.org/dicfro/introduction/complement-godefroy Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialectes du IXe au XVe siècle. 1880–1902. Edited by Frédéric Godefroy. 7 vols (1–7). Paris: Vieweg. http://micmap.org/dicfro/search/dictionnaire-godefroy/ Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru. A Dictionary of the Welsh Language. 1950–2002; 2nd ed. 2003. Edited by R.  J.  Thomas, Gareth  A.  Bevan, and P.  J.  Donovan. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. http://welsh-dictionary.ac.uk/gpc/gpc.html Late Latin Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru Middle English Middle English Dictionary. 1952–2001. Edited by Robert E. Lewis, et al. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Online edition in Middle English Compendium. 2000–2018. Edited by Frances McSparran et al. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middleenglish-dictionary/dictionary

xiv

ABBREVIATIONS

MLGB3

MMOL MW NLW OE OED OF RBH RhG/WP

TCD TL TYP

Medieval Libraries of Great Britain. 2015. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Neil Ker Memorial Fund–Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. 3rd ed. http://mlgb3.bodleian.ox.ac.uk Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries. 2017–. Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, The Tolkien Trust. https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk Middle Welsh National Library of Wales Old English Oxford English Dictionary Online. 1884–. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com Old French Red Book of Hergest Rhyddiaith Gymraeg/Welsh Prose, 1300–1425. 2007–2017. Edited by Diana Luft, Peter Wynn Thomas, and D.  Mark Smith. AHRC–Cardiff University. http://www.rhyddiaithganoloesol.caerdydd.ac.uk Trinity College Dublin Tobler-Lommatzsch: Altfranzösisches Wörterbuch. 1925–2002. 11 vols. Berlin: Weidmannsche; Stuttgart: Franz Steiner. Bromwich, Rachel, ed. and trans. 2014. Trioedd Ynys Prydein. 4th ed. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

Author’s Note This book features extensive use of weblinks; I have striven, where possible, to use permalinks, and have found it more concise to omit individual dates of consultation. For reference, all links were last accessed on 1 October 2024. Individual webpages are given in footnotes; websites are cited in the References. I have retained all earlier links to British Library resources in the hope that these may eventually be restored. For each chapter of this book, I provide details in footnotes of the sources and citation formats of all quotations from primary texts, manuscripts, and published translations. Where the translations are separate works (e.g. Sioned Davies’ Mabinogion), page numbers are provided; where they are taken from parallel editions, they are omitted. Emphases in quotations throughout are original, unless otherwise stated. I have not followed traditions in English-language publications of systematically Anglicizing the names of people and places, though I use English forms where these are more culturally entrenched (e.g. William the Conqueror). For place names in Wales, I have generally retained Welsh-language forms to designate territories as known under native Welsh jurisdiction (e.g. Cydweli and Morgannwg), and have used English-language forms to refer to Marcher lordships and counties (e.g. Kidwelly and Glamorgan).

Introduction From Periphery to Network

‘Among other curiosity in this Library are an Map of ye World drawn on Vellum by a Monk kept in a frame with two doors with guilded and painted Letters and Figures’ (I, clx).1 Thus, around 1684, does the antiquary Thomas Dingley (d.1695) provide the earliest known reference to the Hereford mappa mundi (see Figure 1). Little did Dingley know that this ‘curiosity’ would be—perhaps already was—the largest mappa mundi to survive from medieval Europe.2 Measuring 1.59 by 1.34 metres, the map is an impressive artefact, and would have been even more so freshly painted and housed within its wooden framework: traces of hinge attachments indicate that the map was the central panel of a triptych depicting the Annunciation. Debra Higgs Strickland (2022) writes that: ‘encountering the work would have been a dazzling and overwhelming experience for viewers beholding anew its colourful field populated by hundreds of tiny icons and explicated by as many Latin or AngloNorman inscriptions, all shimmering beneath a monumental Christ presiding over a dramatic Last Judgement unfolding across the summit’ (20). As Naomi Reed Kline (2001) neatly puts it: ‘The Hereford map had “wall power” ’ (91). The map’s completion is generally dated to c.1300, though its origins and purpose have been a cause of much speculation and investigation. In the lower left corner of the map is a verse inscription in insular French calling for viewers to pray for one ‘Richard de Haldingam e de Lafford’ who made and marked out the map (‘ki l’at fet e compasse’). This Richard has been identified as Richard de Bello (AN de Batayle), canon prebendary of Lafford (Sleaford) by 1265 and treasurer of Lincoln Cathedral from 1267 or 1270 (Flint 1998, 25–6). Last recorded in this office in April 1278, he died later that year (Flint 1998, 26). The inscription, then, is presumably not made by Richard, who died some years prior to the map’s completion, but in memory of him. The plot thickens with the identification of a second Richard de Bello (d.1326), mentioned in a 1289–90 account roll of Richard Swinfield (d.1317), bishop of Hereford from 1282 and former chancellor of Lincoln (1278–80). This second Richard (possibly nephew of the first) went on to enjoy a prosperous career, holding benefices in four dioceses simultaneously with the support of the bishops of Hereford, Lincoln, Lichfield, and Salisbury (Flint 1998, 26–9). The 1 Quotations from Thomas Dingley are taken from Nichols (1867–1868). 2 For an edition of the map’s legends, see Westrem (2001). An online, interactive version of the map is available at: https://www.themappamundi.co.uk.

2

LITERARY CULTURE IN THE MEDIEVAL WELSH MARCHES

Figure 1 Hereford Mappa Mundi. By permission of Hereford Cathedral & The Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust

earliest origins of the map seem, then, to lie in Lincoln, where it may have first been conceived, planned, and even designed by the elder Richard de Bello. The map itself bears out its connection to Lincoln, which ‘is drawn more elaborately than any other [city] in England’ (Harvey 2010, 18). Subsequently, according to Valerie Flint (1998), the project would have been taken over by the younger Richard de Bello who, in 1278–9, began to adapt it ‘to the interests of his own potential new Hereford patrons’ (42), Richard Swinfield and Thomas de Cantilupe (d.1282). In this way, the project was transferred to Hereford, where it was finally completed after the death of Cantilupe, and acted as part of the push for his canonization (Flint 1998, 41–4).

INTRODUCTION

3

The bulk of the map’s production appears to have taken place at Hereford. Dendrochronological evidence has dated the felling of the oak for the map’s central wooden panel to 1275–1311 and has shown that the oak was grown in Herefordshire, Monmouthshire, or Gloucestershire (Bailey 2006, 80). Noting the visible compass mark at the centre of the panel, Christopher Clarkson (2006, 105, n. 7) suggests that the map was already attached to this panel when it was first drawn out. It follows that later stages of production were also based at Hereford. The drawing and colouring of the figures, birds, and animals is the work of a single artist, with another detailing the cities, and possibly two more working on the ornamental borders (Morgan 2006). The copying of the text on the map is the work of a single scribe: M. B. Parkes (2006) suggests that ‘the degree of precision’ with which the scribe locates entries for Hereford and the Wye ‘makes it seem most likely that he was working either in Hereford itself or in the vicinity’ (115). The Hereford map has been of great interest to medievalists in many disciplines. It has been read as a powerful example of colonial, racializing, and orientalizing discourses that locate othered, monstrous bodies at the peripheries of the known world in the T–O schema (e.g. Akbari 2009, 20–66; Heng 2018, 33–5). And it has also been read as part of medieval England’s valorization of its own peripherality in that same schema (see especially Lavezzo 2006). As Aisling Byrne (2016) notes, in such maps ‘western peripherality is something to be prized’ (153), either because the map traces an east-to-west (i.e. top-to-bottom) narrative of translatio imperii that ends with Britain, or because it positions Britain—with its ‘isolation and enclosed insular nature’ (Byrne 2016, 154)—as a western mirror of Eden. Byrne goes on to show how several Irish works also lay claim to this status. Similarly, commenting on Welsh perspectives, Natalia I. Petrovskaia (2015) writes: ‘The medieval Welsh view of the Orient is thus that of the man on the margins looking towards the centre’ (4–5; see also Petrovskaia 2013, 257–8). I in no way wish to deny the peripheralizing discourses in which these maps participate, that is, their marginalization of certain peoples, places, and bodies within a central–peripheral schema, and this in ways that intersect with notions of the merveilleux, translatio, nation, race, and otherness. But I wonder if there are, perhaps, additional interpretative models made available by mappae mundi such as the one in Hereford. Looked at differently, the Hereford map might be seen to undermine the very central–peripheral logic that governs it.3 Even as a given location is peripheralized, so is that peripheralization traversed and undercut by networks of rivers, seas, and roads that snake between, around, and through the 3 It should be noted that there is no single centre–periphery framework that applies to mappa mundi universally. Although most T–O maps working to a Judaeo-Christian framework place Jerusalem at their centre, Lavezzo notes that a number of maps, such as the Beatus map, instead place Rome at their centre according to secular, imperial frames of reference (2006, 2–3). Other maps show multiple frameworks to be operating simultaneously, such as the Higden map, which places Rome and Jerusalem in its central region accompanied by Mount Olympus.

4

LITERARY CULTURE IN THE MEDIEVAL WELSH MARCHES

different landmasses, tracing multidirectional lines of contact. As Emily Dolmans (2020) has recently written of the Hereford map: ‘Although it is centred on Jerusalem, it is the waterways of the map that draw the eye’, as the Mediterranean Sea ‘flows into the oceans that enclose the physical world, inviting viewers to examine the earth’s margins’ (162).4 For Dolmans, England is positioned here less as a periphery than as a borderland, a ‘global frontier’ opening onto a wider world: ‘The mappa mundi brings the world to England, reminding those who see it that they are a part of something larger, a world of diversity and wonders in which they can delight and participate’ (2020, 164).5 Once we resist the interpolation to centralize, then, maps such as the one in Hereford can be read not only as valorizing and/or demonizing peripherality but also as calling it into question, not only as showing a peripheralizing logic in action but also as charting the world as a network of interconnected sites. It is all the more important to note, then, that the Hereford map was largely produced in the Welsh Marches, in one of England’s own borderlands, itself a ‘global frontier’. The map’s process of production is an illustration of this point. As we have seen, its elaboration is enmeshed in ecclesiastical connections between Hereford and Lincoln Cathedrals, in the traffic of mobile ecclesiasts, materials, and ideas. Familial relations may also be at work, given the possible relationship between the two Richards de Bello. Equally at stake are pilgrimage networks. The map’s original placement remains the subject of debate, but—whether it hung in the cathedral’s north transept (Kline 2001, 76–8; Terkla 2004) or south choir aisle (de Wesselow 2013)—it can be understood as an integral part of what Dan Terkla (2004) has called ‘the Cantilupe pilgrimage complex, a conglomeration of items and images which was for a time one of England’s most popular pilgrimage destinations’ (131).6 The Hereford mappa mundi thus embodies a nexus of connections both in its own material contexts and in its representation of networks that criss-cross the world. The many fingertips that have worn away the image of Hereford on the map might be considered, then, less as marking out their own peripheral or frontier position than as pointing to their connected place in a decentralized, networked geography. I propose this reading of the Hereford map as a springboard for this book’s wider exploration of the multilingual literary cultures of the medieval Welsh Marches; of the writers, scribes, and patrons active in and native to those regions; and of the manuscripts and texts composed, compiled, copied, translated, and

4 See also Kline (2001), who describes how ‘Arteries of blue waterways (except for the red of the Red Sea) provide ways for viewers to navigate through the geography’ (4). 5 See also Strickland (2022), who—noting the positioning of figures such as the siren in the Mediterranean, the Tower of Babel between Jerusalem and Paradise, the Jewish idol-worship on the path of Exodus in the Red Sea—has recently argued that the map’s representation of otherness does not always conform to a central–peripheral schema. 6 On the Hereford Cantilupe cult and its wide-reaching connections, see Bass (2017).

INTRODUCTION

5

otherwise circulated there. As I discuss further in this introduction, the Marches were regions of considerable importance to the political and cultural landscapes of medieval Britain. They were a political and military arena for the ever-shifting relations of English kings, Welsh princes, and Marcher lords. They were markedly multilingual regions: their linguistic landscapes feature Welsh, English, French, and Latin (among others), with various speakers acquiring proficiency of different levels and kinds in more than one of these. And, importantly, these regions saw considerable levels of literary activity: texts and manuscripts from the Marches, as well as processes of literary exchange and innovation taking place there, made crucial contributions to the development of insular and European culture in the Middle Ages. As we will see, several scholars have explored the history and culture of the Marches as border regions, and have developed a variety of fruitful approaches and readings (e.g. Dolmans 2020, 97–132; Henley 2024a, esp. 17–24). In this study, however, I am interested less in the Marches qua borderland than in the peripheralizing discourses that have framed that borderland status. Crucially, I am interested in the ways in which Marcher cultural artefacts belie such discourses, and in which they articulate alternative configurations of their place in the world. Both travelling and depicting travels, both connecting and representing connections, texts and manuscripts from the medieval Welsh Marches can be seen to deconstruct binaries of centre and periphery, local and global, even of reality and fiction in ways that, I argue, might be best conceptualized through contemporary theoretical work on ‘networks’, particularly as formulated in the philosophy of Bruno Latour. Resisting invitations to peripheralize and developing, instead, ‘networked’ modes of reading can return agency to regions such as the Welsh Marches as spaces that problematize normative narratives of insular cultural–political geography, narratives that have been over a century, at least, in the making.

‘Blue Remembered Hills’ In his 2004 study Premodern Places, David Wallace opens the chapter ‘Dante in Somerset’ by commenting on the apparent dissonance that the title generates for readers with perspectives shaped by twentieth-century conceptions of British cultural geography: ‘ “Somerset,” today, is also a place-name evocative of rural quietude, if not pathos; so the notion of “Dante in Somerset” strikes English readers, or readers who have spent much time in England, as incongruous and faintly comical’ (140). Wallace goes on to scrutinize the production of this misconception and, at least as far as medieval Somerset is concerned, to revise it, taking as his point of departure a now lost manuscript of Giovanni Bertoldi’s Latin parallel translation of Dante’s Commedia, whose presence in the library at Wells was recorded in the 1530s by the antiquarian John Leland. Following figures

6

LITERARY CULTURE IN THE MEDIEVAL WELSH MARCHES

such as Nicholas Bubwith, bishop of Bath and Wells, and his time at the Council of Constance, Wallace reconstructs the travels and interactions that led to the composition of such a text and its importation to Wells, with its ‘vibrant, heterogeneous, complex network of reading communities’ (Wallace 2004, 158). Analysing isolationist re-conceptualizations of regions such as Somerset following the advents of, in particular, the Reformation and transatlantic slave trade, Wallace describes ‘a landscape of secrets and lies, markers and fragments, attesting . . . to a culture that, strategically constructed as local and rural, contains the world’ (Wallace 2004, 166). Somerset, however, is by no means the only region of Britain to have suffered such a fate. The ‘Welsh Marches’ are just as ‘strategically constructed as local and rural’ and every bit as ‘evocative of rural quietude, if not pathos’. A neat illustration of this can be found in an online bulletin by British Heritage Travel marketing an itinerary through the Welsh Marches for tourists travelling by car. The article suggests beginning in Chepstow, Monmouth, or Ross-on-Wye and proceeding through Hereford, Ludlow, Shrewsbury, Llangollen, Wrexham, and Chester. One can readily imagine such a route making for a very pleasant holiday. It is all the more jarring, then, that the itinerary should be marketed thus: For serious Anglophiles who want to see the classic Britain of yore and a gentler way of life, it is hard to beat the rural, agrarian landscapes of the border counties known as the Marches, from the Wye Valley north to Cheshire. Far from the big city lights, life is still paced more moderately, and lived close to the land. (British Heritage 2024)

Such discourse smacks of a patronizing metropolitanism, romanticizing and provincializing the border regions in ways bound up with perceptions not just of the Marches’ present but also of their past. The itinerary suggests plenty of stop-offs at historical sites of interest from various periods, including Roman Wroxeter, Industrial Ironbridge, Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, and Plas Newydd, home to the Ladies of Llangollen.7 The majority of the destinations that the bulletin recommends are, however, medieval: Hereford Cathedral (to visit the mappa mundi and chained library), Offa’s Dyke, Wigmore Castle, the battlefield at Mortimer’s Cross, Ludlow Castle, Shrewsbury (to see the abbey and the town’s medieval streets), Wenlock Priory, Valle Crucis Abbey, the Pillar of Eliseg, and Chester Cathedral. Such an itinerary could easily provide a springboard for exploring the important cultural and political profile of the medieval Welsh Marches, a profile that remains so

7 Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby were upper-class Protestant Irish women who set up home together at Plas Newydd from 1780 until their deaths in 1829 and 1831, respectively. The house became a literary, cultural, and political salon, frequented by several prominent figures of the period. For a useful recent study of the Ladies and their legacies, see Brideoake (2017).

INTRODUCTION

7

visible in these very battle sites, town layouts, earthworks, buildings, and ruins. To be sure, mention is made of the ‘once-powerful Wigmore Castle’ and of the ‘strategic and political importance’ of Ludlow Castle. On the whole, though, it is as if the very medievality of the region permits its reduction to a ‘classic Britain of yore’ (whenever that is), which, most astonishingly of all, is marketed to ‘serious Anglophiles’, despite that fact that the itinerary criss-crosses the modern England– Wales border as it moves through regions that, precisely, throw into question the limits of national borders and identities. Of course, it would be unreasonable to expect a short heritage tourism bulletin to consider all the historical complexities and nuances of the regions it seeks to publicize. But the picture it paints is fairly indicative of received notions about the Welsh Marches, at least in contemporary British popular culture and public discourse. It is an image that has been cultivated by a range of literary, musical, and artistic works over several centuries. For reasons of space, I shall limit my discussion here to a few of the more influential examples from the long twentieth century: A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad and Bruce Chatwin’s On the Black Hill. Published in 1896, A Shropshire Lad was already widely read by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, and, with its evocation of doomed young men exiled from idealized rural homelands, its popularity increased during and after the First World War (Parker 2016, 281–328). As Peter Parker (2016) notes in his recent study of Housman and his works: ‘By the fiftieth anniversary of its first publication [1946], A Shropshire Lad had gone through forty-eight editions in Britain and had become embedded in the national culture’ (4). It has never been out of print. Although it has recently been read in the context of turn-of-thecentury queer writing (e.g. Alfano 2016; Parker 2016, 108–32), A Shropshire Lad is most famed for its regionalism, for its self-conscious identification with a specific area whose place names are frequently evoked throughout the collection. As such, in the entry on Housman in his 1902 Poets of the Younger Generation, William Archer (1902) declared that, although ‘Shropshire is not one of the great literary counties of England’, it ‘no longer lacks its poet’ (183). Thus, A Shropshire Lad has long shaped the ways in which many readers encounter the Welsh Marches, most famously described in ‘Into my heart an air that kills’—the fortieth poem of the collection, though the first one composed—as ‘blue remembered hills’ (40.3).8 This short poem encapsulates many of the themes and dynamics at work across the wider collection. The first-person lyric voice speaks of an ‘air’ (both literal and, perhaps, referring to the poem itself ) that blows into his heart from ‘yon far country’ (40.2), a ‘land of lost content’ (40.5) to which he cannot return. The poem follows a balladic structure of two quatrains of alternating rhyming lines of iambic tetrameter and trimeter. The restrained formal 8 Quotations from A Shropshire Lad are taken from Burnett (2010) in the format ‘poem number. line(s)’.

8

LITERARY CULTURE IN THE MEDIEVAL WELSH MARCHES

structure thus re-enacts the rusticity of the region the poem so wistfully describes, conjuring up a powerfully melancholic tone: this is not a moment of whimsical reminiscence, but an air that ‘kills’ (40.1). As Parker (2016) puts it: for Housman, ‘true nostalgia is deadly’ (168).9 It has, however, long been noted—and Housman himself admitted—that his familiarity with Shropshire was limited. As Housman wrote in correspondence dated 5 February 1933: ‘I was born in Worcestershire, not Shropshire, where I have never spent much time. . . . I had a sentimental feeling for Shropshire because its hills were our western horizon. I know Ludlow and Wenlock, but my topographical details—Hughley, Abdon under Clee—are sometimes quite wrong’ (Burnett 2007, II, 327–8). As such, Housman’s work has been not unfairly criticized for what has been seen as its faux pastoralism, its inauthentic regionalism, and its sometimes-condescending treatment of Shropshire and its inhabitants (e.g. Firchow 1980). Housman himself did not consider his approach to be especially problematic, writing in other correspondence that ‘my Shropshire, like the Cambridge of Lycidas, is not exactly a real place’ (Burnett 2007, II, 340). What kind of place is it, then? Playing on the term as a now commonplace synonym for Shropshire, Parker (2016) reads the world of A Shropshire Lad as ‘Housman Country’, which he conceptualizes as ‘a landscape that is not merely geographical, but also literary, musical, emotional, even, in the broadest sense, spiritual’ (21), one that speaks to and generates a particular notion of England and of Englishness. The geographical and ontological stakes of this distinction are worth considering more closely. Parker is right that ‘Housman Country’ has come to represent a particular construction of Englishness. However, its formulation in A Shropshire Lad largely overlooks—and requires its readers to overlook—Shropshire’s borderland position. Parker draws parallels between Shropshire’s geographic position—‘not quite at the heart of England, but it is close’ (2016, 21)—and A Shropshire Lad’s position at the heart of ‘Englishness’. Yet, many of the places referred to in the collection are mere miles away from the modern England–Wales border (which runs through the Knighton of Poem 50, for instance, with most of the town on the Welsh side of the Teme). Much of Shropshire, on an east–west axis at least, stands not at England’s heart, but at its edge. Tellingly, the only poem to acknowledge Shropshire’s entangled history with Wales is ‘The Welsh Marches’ (Poem 28), a poem replete with images of death, war, and violence, and whose speaker is even presented as the 9 Although there is, unusually for A Shropshire Lad, relatively little topographical specificity in ‘Into my heart’, Shropshire is never fully dispelled. The poem’s mode of expression remains primarily spatial (‘far country’ and ‘land’), and the evocation of hills (40.3), of spires and farms (40.4) are suggestive of rural countryside. Equally, the context of the collection cannot be ignored: Housman himself insisted on its integrality, routinely refusing permission for individual poems to be reproduced in anthologies, and, although he allowed certain poems to be set to music, he did not allow them to be printed in concert programmes (Parker 2016, 9). As such, it remains difficult to divorce ‘Into my heart’ from the textual and topographic contexts of A Shropshire Lad more widely.

INTRODUCTION

9

product of sexual assault by a ‘Saxon’ on a Welsh ‘slave’ (28.16). Long after hostilities have ceased, the speaker, representing their body as a kind of borderland, cannot reconcile this duality: ‘They cease not fighting, east and west, | On the marches of my breast’ (28.23–4). This is the most extended reference to Wales in the entirety of A Shropshire Lad, and it emerges in the most traumatic of terms. Parker is similarly right to explore the gap between, as Housman put it, ‘my Shropshire’ and Shropshire as ‘a real place’. Yet, the central conceit of A Shropshire Lad hinges just as much, if not more, on the dovetailing of these two in ways that beg the question as to what is meant by ‘a real place’ at all. ‘Housman Country’ as an idealized, nostalgic image of rural English provinciality is arguably no less ‘real’ than the ‘real place’ that is Shropshire. On the contrary, ‘Housman Country’ has acted upon countless readers, moving them, inspiring them, consoling them, irritating them, even prompting many—from the likes of Willa Cather to E.  M.  Forster to Parker himself (Parker 2016, 187–96)—to travel to the places invoked, with consequences that are emotional, intellectual, spiritual, environmental, and economic. Not for nothing does the British Heritage bulletin call upon Housman to market ‘A Shropshire Idyll’. As I explore further in this book, this ‘idyll’ may be a fiction—and a provincializing, Anglicizing fiction at that— but, as a fiction, it is no less powerful, agential, or real than the people, places, and landscapes it claims to represent. Housman is not the only influential writer to engage with the Welsh borderlands, of course: Bruce Chatwin’s 1982 novel, On the Black Hill provides a different, but no less telling vision of life in the borders. Already an established journalist and author of the travelogue In Patagonia (1977), Chatwin, when explaining the rationale behind his first novel, is reputed to have said: ‘It always irritated me to be called a travel writer. So I decided to write something about people who never went out’ (Clapp 1998, 182). On the Black Hill was published to critical acclaim: it won that year’s James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel; in 1987, it was made into a film directed by Andrew Grieve. On the Black Hill recounts the lives of two identical twins, Lewis and Benjamin, born at the turn of the twentieth century to Amos and Mary Jones. The novel follows the twins as they grow up and work on The Vision, the name of the family’s farmstead in the hills above Rhulen, an invented market town in the Welsh borders. We are told: ‘The border of Radnor and Hereford was said to run right through the middle of the staircase’ (2).10 Throughout the novel, Lewis and Benjamin represent two sides of the same coin in terms of gender roles, sexuality, and worldview. We are told, for instance, that Benjamin ‘never thought of abroad’ (88), desiring simply to live with Lewis at The Vision ‘for ever and ever’ (88). Lewis, by contrast, is consumed by wanderlust. From the opening, prologue-like

10 Quotations from On the Black Hill are taken from Chatwin ((1982) 1998).

10

LITERARY CULTURE IN THE MEDIEVAL WELSH MARCHES

chapter in which we meet the twins in their old age, Lewis’s interest in global geographies is made clear. It is an oleograph from his paternal uncle in Canada that, we are told, ‘first awoke in Lewis a yearning for far-off places’ (5), which he accesses through conversations with visitors and through colonial maps. On a childhood family holiday in St David’s, Lewis dreams of becoming a sailor (69), and he later becomes interested in zeppelins and aviation (88). Later, too, as he and his family, in response to a land feud with a neighbour, turn away from ‘the modern world’ by shunning ‘new farm machinery’ (134), Lewis allows himself one ‘extravagance’ in the form of ‘a subscription to the News of the World’ (134). Even a chance encounter at a coffee shop in Hereford sparks a highly sexualized and racialized reverie about ‘a mysterious east’ (101). That being said, the twins never travel further than Hereford and St David’s. Even if Lewis’s desire to travel goes unfulfilled, this is not the case for all the protagonists in On the Black Hill. The lives of the middle- and upper-class characters, in particular, are intertwined with the international networks (colonial, economic, religious, etc.) of their time. Notably, the twins’ mother, Mary, is the well-travelled daughter of an English missionary. She finds herself in Rhulen when her father settles ‘in this remote hill parish to be alone with his daughter and his books’ (10). It is this worldliness that both attracts Amos and unsettles him. He is, for instance, delighted when Mary regales the locals with tales of her time in the Middle East, for they (and he) are familiar with Levantine geographies from their biblical reading (28). Yet, when it comes to her experiences of colonial India, we are told that ‘India was too far, too big and too confused to appeal to the Welshmen’s imagination’ (28). And, indeed, when Mary serves Amos a curry, an eruption of xenophobic rage ensues, as he spits it out and smashes the serving dish on the floor (30). Mary’s attachment to India endures, however: on her deathbed at The Vision, she is visited by images of India (190). In a similarly colonial vein, we are told that the wealth of the Bickertons, owners of the nearby Lurkenhope estate, was made by ‘the West India trade’ (21) and later lost ‘in Russian bonds’ (135). The Bickertons’ son, Reggie—whose bedroom is bedecked in Orientalist paintings and Eton photographs, Persian carpets, and a ‘polar-bearskin rug’ (136)—abandons local girl Rosie and their illegitimate child in favour of ‘his coffee plantation in Kenya’ (141), where he is eventually consumed by alcoholism (195). Mrs Bickerton, meanwhile, spends most of her time in Grasse in the French Riviera. Nor do the lower-class locals live in isolation or immobility. Amos’s brother and, later, his daughter run away from home to emigrate to Canada (7) and the United States (134–5), respectively, though both departures are viewed by Amos as bitter betrayals. Similarly, the First World War sees characters such as Jim the Rock fighting in Ypres and at the Somme (131). Later, the Second World War brings the twins and the wider local populace into contact with African American G.I.s, Gurkha and Sikh colonial troops, Polish refugees, and German prisoners of war

INTRODUCTION

11

(195–8, 214). In fact, Manfred Kluge, a German prisoner of war assigned to the twins, becomes fully embedded at The Vision and in the wider community. Over the course of the novel, the Jones twins meet with numerous well-travelled characters, from the Cambridge-educated Reverend Thomas Tuke (51–3) and his artist sister Miss Catharine, with whom the family stays in St David’s, to the seafaring lobsterman the twins befriend there (68–9), to Joy and Nigel Lambert, the louche artistic couple from London (182–8), to the Austrian psychotherapist Lotte Zons (199). In 1973, the Black Hill becomes the site of a Buddhist community established by the American couple Johnny and Leila (226), attracting characters ranging from a Tibetan Rinpoche to the Afrikaner, Theo ‘the Tent’ (240–1), who befriends the twins and Meg the Rock. All the while, however, the novel works hard to present a rustic vision of isolated border life. While various cosmopolitan figures arrive and leave, the two main protagonists live essentially sedentary lives, and, given that they serve to focalize the narrative perspective, the reader also seldom travels beyond The Vision itself.11 For example, despite the travels and contacts that World War II generates in the novel, we are told: ‘The war washed over them [Lewis and Benjamin] without disturbing their solitude’ (192). Throughout, the twins actively resist the technological advances of the twentieth century: it is not until 1952 that Lewis purchases a tractor, followed by a second, more impressive one in 1957, when instructed to do so by the twins’ accountant (211–12). Tellingly, however, it is an accident in this tractor that tragically causes Lewis’s death (260). We are, in a sense, returned to Housman’s ‘blue remembered hills’. Although Chatwin’s novel is much more attentive to the ambivalence of national identity in the borders, and although it situates those regions in contact with mobile protagonists and within broader global contexts, there remains a lingering sense of nostalgia for simple, provincial living. As Jonathan Chatwin (2015) remarks: ‘The uncertain national status of the border dwellers was certainly a key attraction of the area for Chatwin, who was always interested in those who felt—like himself— that they did not quite belong. However, perhaps the central appeal of border life for Chatwin can be located in its impression of timelessness, of having been unaffected by the impositions of the modern age’ (108). It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that, although Chatwin’s familiarity with the area was more intimate than was Housman’s, his experiences of it were no less bound up with idealism and nostalgia. Jonathan Chatwin (2015) notes how a letter by the author during 11 This sedentariness is partially due to the interventions of the twins’ father. When the twins are young, Amos opposes Mary’s encouragement of their education: ‘Education as such, he did not mind. What annoyed him was the thought of his sons growing up with educated accents and wanting to leave the farm’ (63). Later, too, in opposition to Mary’s belief in the Allied cause, Amos goes to considerable lengths to prevent the twins from joining the First World War: ‘It was a matter of pride, both as a man and as a Welshman, to stop his sons from fighting for the English’ (95). It perhaps speaks to the wider biases and assumptions of the novel, however, that the twins’ cosmopolitanism is encouraged by their middle-class English mother and resisted by their working-class Welsh father.

12

LITERARY CULTURE IN THE MEDIEVAL WELSH MARCHES

a school trip to Capel-y-Ffin and Hay-on-Wye recounts ‘Blytonesque bike rides and camping adventures’ (103), while also noting the influence of the author’s ‘bucolic youth’ (105) in Warwickshire. Bruce Chatwin himself described On the Black Hill as the ‘result’ of a spontaneous childhood road trip with his father in a new car: ‘We slept the night in the car, in Radnorshire, to the sound of a mountain stream. At sunrise there was a heavy dew, and the sheep were all around us’ (cited in Chatwin 2015, 103). Chatwin would go on to spend much time in the region getting over breakups, staying with friends, and meeting local people, some of whom inspired characters in the novel (see Chatwin 2015, 106–11). In both Housman and Chatwin, then, the Welsh Marches emerge as rustic, provincial regions suffused, to varying degrees, with romanticism, idealism, and nostalgia, as spaces isolated from the wider world and set apart from the present moment. This is not to say that these regions are flatly utopic constructions: there is plenty of tragedy and ‘trouble’ in A Shropshire Lad and On the Black Hill, both of which sit at the intersection of ‘rural quietude’ and ‘pathos’ to which Wallace refers. In Housman, the ‘land of lost content’ can never be recovered, and if local lads leave, then it is never to return; in Chatwin, the principal characters live within the smallness of their bounds and means, and never leave at all.

Approaching the ‘Peripheral’ The works of Housman and Chatwin provide useful insights into the ways in which the Welsh borders have been perceived, particularly from English perspectives, over the course of the twentieth century, into the provincializing, peripheralizing discourses with which such perceptions have often been bound up. As with the Somerset of Wallace’s analysis, this image of ‘rural quietude, if not pathos’ is a strategic construction, one ripe for critical scrutiny and revision. Medievalist scholarship, however, has not always been innocent of these kinds of assumptions. For example, in Susan Crane’s pioneering study of insular Francophone literary culture, we find a description of the poet Hue de Rotelande (active in late twelfth-century Credenhill, Herefordshire) as writing in conditions of ‘social detachment’ in his ‘thoroughly provincial setting on the Welsh border’ (Crane 1986, 143). Crane (1986) considers Hue’s works as symptomatic of his distance from the cultural centre: ‘Hue’s evident devotion to Credenhill and Herefordshire establishes his isolation from even the English royal court, to a degree consonant with his poetry’s unconventionality’ (144). Of course, in Crane’s defence, there is a broader scholarly context to consider here, one that, in the later decades of the twentieth century, was interested in centrifugal models of medieval European social, economic, and cultural development, such as the ‘Roman–Germanic

INTRODUCTION

13

Core’ (Hechter and Brustein 1980)12 or the ‘Europeanization of Europe’ (Bartlett (1993) 1994; also Bartlett 2007) as centred on the heartlands of France, Germany, northern Italy, and England, with emphasis on Paris and Rome as intellectual and religious centres, respectively.13 Nor is this to say that peripheralizing discourses do not circulate in the literatures of the ‘medieval North Atlantic archipelago’.14 Since the turn of the twentyfirst century, scholars working within postcolonial and critical race approaches to medieval literature have very successfully explored the ways in which Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall, and even certain regions of England find themselves depicted as barbarous and/or marvellous peripheries in order to support colonial ambitions at the ‘centre’, and they have attended to the various kinds of hybridity, acculturation, anxiety, and resistance generated by conquest and contact.15 Such peripheralizing moves in relation to Wales and the Welsh are, as we will see, not lacking in the work of writers in and from the Marches themselves, whether we frame such writers as Norman, Anglo-Norman, Cambro-Norman, or English. Similarly, as we have already seen in relation to the Hereford mappa mundi, discourses of self-peripheralization were also operative in cartographic and literary works across Britain and Ireland (Lavezzo 2006; Byrne 2016). Nor are the two moves mutually exclusive: Kassandra Conley (2014), for instance, has explored how various Welsh texts participate in peripheralizing, orientalist discourses about the East while also reflecting them back onto Wales itself. Conley reads this selfexoticization as a resistant move in the face of the growing loss of political autonomy after the conquest of Wales by Edward I (1282) and the Laws in Wales Acts (1535 and 1542), sometimes referred to as the ‘Acts of Union’. Comparably, Helen Fulton (2022) has recently considered Welsh participation in the pan-insular development of tropes of a ‘romantic Wales’, though she considers this trend (in Welsh works, at least) to end rather than begin in 1282. One of the cumulative effects of these strands of scholarship has been to make clear that whenever

12 In this model, a core axis of urbanization and commerce runs through southern Germany, northern Italy, Flanders, and the Low Countries, filtering out into the feudal regions of France, England, and central Iberia. Describing and endorsing this model, Hohenberg and Lees ((1985) 1995, 72–3) write of the outer concentric circle that ‘the Celtic Fringe of western Europe was touched only lightly by the productive energies of long-distance trade and commercial agriculture. It remained pastoral, weakly urbanized, and virtually tribal in socio-political terms. These peripheral regions became dominated by external states and in later centuries lagged behind in the development of commercial agriculture and industrial capitalism’. 13 For an adaptation of this paradigm to medieval Wales specifically, see Pryce (2007). 14 On this term and its useful problematization of ‘medieval Britain’ as a monolithic or isolated unit, see Goldie and Sobecki (2016). 15 The literature here is vast, but in relation to the Welsh context see work by, among others, Faletra (2000, 2007, 2014), Ingham (2000), Knight (2000), Aronstein (2005), Over (2005), Cohen (2006, 77–108), Evans (2006), Kinoshita (2006, 105–32), Fulton (2008), and Lumbley (2019). See also Davies’ ground-breaking 1974 article ‘Colonial Wales’, which was an early and influential argument for understanding medieval Wales in colonial terms, as well as his later study, The First English Empire (Davies 2000a).

14

LITERARY CULTURE IN THE MEDIEVAL WELSH MARCHES

spaces are figured (or figure themselves) as peripheral or marginal, this figuration must be understood, interpreted, and critiqued as a move of specific texts, maps, or other cultural artefacts in the context of specific, often asymmetrical relations of power, and should not operate as a presupposition of literary or literary– historical analysis. We must not, in short, take any ascription of peripherality at its word. A useful complement to such studies can be found in recent research exploring the richness of so-called ‘peripheral’ or ‘provincial’ literary cultures. In keeping with the primary aim of the present study, this work foregrounds the capacity of such cultures to challenge the critical paradigms that cast them as ‘peripheral’ or ‘provincial’ in the first place. Robert W. Barrett, Jr (2009), for instance, opens his fascinating study of the identity and culture of Cheshire from the late twelfth to mid-seventeenth centuries with the assertion that ‘provincial texts . . . complicate persistent academic binaries of metropole and margin, center and periphery, and nation and region’ (1). Similarly, in his work on the literature of fourteenth-century London, Ralph Hanna (2005) calls for ‘customary critical practice’ to ‘notice the polyvocal and individuated voices of discrete local/regional literary cultures’ (3). Meanwhile, Hanna’s own work on London literature turns the traditional model on its head, arguing that ‘before Chaucer, London may truly have been “provincial”, among England’s vernacular literary backwaters, just another locality’ (2005, 2–3). Accepting the image of the peripheral, provincial Welsh Marches poses problems that are not merely methodological but also political, ideological, and ethical. As Wallace suggests of Somerset, and as recent studies in modern literature have argued (e.g. Fowler 2020), such images often operate as part of racializing discourses that construct rural, pastoral regions as white spaces, somehow set apart from the world and disconnected from the global, colonial histories in which they are, and always have been, enmeshed. For medievalists, moreover, such moves resonate troublingly with right-wing instrumentalizations of aspects of premodern European culture. Indeed, driven primarily by the professional and personal labour of medievalist colleagues of colour, the field of medieval studies has been increasingly grappling with white-supremacist usage of medieval symbols, texts, terms, and images, as well as with the racist, nationalist, colonialist histories of our disciplines and with ongoing discriminatory practices within the field. As such, medievalists across disciplines, often drawing on postcolonial and critical race theory, have interrogated the ways in which medieval European texts and cultures themselves construct notions of race and nation, exploring how these shape and reshape modern categories.16 Much work has been done, equally, to

16 Key bibliographic starting points include Heng (2018), the introductions to special issues of postmedieval edited by Whitaker (2015) and Rambaran-Olm et al. (2020), and the introduction to the 2019 Literature Compass special cluster edited by Kim (2019). Invaluable bibliographic resources are

INTRODUCTION

15

uncover histories of exchanges, connections, and identities that cross national, cultural, linguistic, and racial boundaries both within European contexts and from global perspectives that seek to disrupt Eurocentric geographies, temporalities, and disciplines.17 Bearing these considerations in mind, it is all the more necessary to revise, and to formulate conceptual alternatives to, any residual notion that regions such as the medieval Welsh Marches were peripheral or provincial, that they were in any way monolithic in terms of language, culture, race, religion, or political identity, or, equally, that they did not participate in the wider discourses (religious, intellectual, cultural, colonial, racializing, etc.) of medieval Europe. Revisions of this kind are already under way in studies of Wales and the March (see above, n. 15), and it is to such efforts that this book hopes, in turn, to contribute. Before it can do so, however, it will be necessary to set out more clearly the historical and geographical contours of its object of study: what, exactly, are the medieval Welsh Marches?

The Medieval March of Wales In the seventh and eighth centuries, the early English kingdoms that bordered on Welsh territories were those of the Wreocensætan (to the north) and of the Magonsætan (to the south), with Wenlock Edge possibly acting as the boundary between the two (on issues of nomenclature see Sims-Williams 1990, 39–43).18 To the south-west, the Wye formed a rough boundary between the territories of the Magonsætan and the Welsh kingdom of Ergyng and, from Monmouth to the Severn, that of Gwent (Sims-Williams 1990, 45–7). Life in these borderlands was marked not only by conflict but also by contact, interaction, and co-existence, as Lindy Brady (2017) has expertly demonstrated. It is not, however, until after the events of 1066 that a ‘March of Wales’ begins to emerge in such terms. The earliest form of the phrase is found in Domesday Book of 1086, where it refers not to a separate or single lordship but to a stretch of

provided in the crowd-sourced ‘Race and Medieval Studies: A Partial Bibliography’ now partially published in open-access form by Hsy and Orlemanski (2017). 17 I refer here especially to the development of the field of the Global Middle Ages. Numerous research projects, research networks, and exhibitions could be cited here, but see in particular the pioneering Global Middle Ages Project (G-MAP) at the Universities of Texas and Minnesota (http:// globalmiddleages.org). For useful discussions and critiques of the methodological and political stakes of a ‘Global Middle Ages’ and of ‘early globalities’, see, among others, Heng (2009, 2014), Heng and Ramey (2014), Holmes and Standen (2018), Lomuto (2020), and de Souza (2024). 18 In relation to the material discussed in this section, there are useful maps in Sims-Williams (1990, xiv), Davies (2000b, 5, 22, 38), Lieberman (2010), Stephenson (2019, xvi–xxii), and throughout Hume (2021) and Fleming (2023), with helpful discussion of the trajectories of individual lordships. The Mapping the March research project is currently producing a new series of revised digital maps of all the Marcher lordships at roughly fifty-year intervals for the period 1282–1550 (https://blog. mowlit.ac.uk).

16

LITERARY CULTURE IN THE MEDIEVAL WELSH MARCHES

land traversing Offa’s Dyke on the Herefordshire border, in which nine hides held by Ralph de Mortimer are reported as lying waste ‘in marcha de Wales’ (506; fol.  183v) and eleven manors held by Osbern FitzRichard are also described as ‘in marcha de Walis’ (515; fol. 186v).19 As David Stephenson (2019) notes, it is ‘entirely possible that other areas were considered to lie in such a marchland, but the Domesday clerks did not trouble to make the point’ (10). References to a ‘March’ are sparse, until, in the mid-1160s, the Pipe Rolls begin to refer to Marchia Wallie with greater frequency, primarily in relation to the borderland between Shropshire and Powys (Lieberman 2010, 6–8). However, as Stephenson (2019) notes, by the 1180s the term had expanded to include regions further south, often relating to territories involved in conflict: ‘In terms of the thinking of the English royal administration it begins to appear as though the twelfth-century concept of the March of Wales was closely associated with military tension or crisis’ (11). In this period of its history, then, the March was primarily conceptualized as a zone of containment or military buffer zone. The closing decade of the eleventh century had seen considerable initial gains for the (Anglo-)Normans throughout Wales (Davies (1987) 2000b, 34–5). By the early years of the twelfth century, however, many territories had been retaken by the Welsh, particularly in the north and west. Thus, the geopolitical map of native Wales was largely to resolve itself, over the course of the twelfth century, into the three polities of Gwynedd, Powys, and Deheubarth. In certain areas, however, Norman control had proven more resilient. Alongside the shifting shapes and ascendancies of the native Welsh polities, a complex tapestry was also forming of territories subject to Anglo-Norman control and colonization. In the middle March, families such as the Mortimers and Braoses had pushed into Rhwng Gwy a Hafren, securing footholds—tentative and contested though they were—in the districts of Maelienydd, Elfael, and Buellt. Further south, the Usk valley in Brycheiniog proved more easily colonizable, as did the coastal and lowland regions of Gwent, Gwynllŵg, Morgannwg, and Gwŷr. Similarly, excepting occasional raids and temporary occupations, Carmarthen provided a relatively secure base in the Ystrad Tywi region, and, in southern Dyfed, Anglo-Norman control was robustly consolidated in the districts of Rhos and Penfro with centres at Haverford, Wiston, and Pembroke. Within many of these lordships, Anglo-Norman control was partial and contested. Mastery over the zone from Brecon to Montgomery would remain especially fragile: the land was less easily colonizable, and the native dynasties were often bolstered by support from Deheubarth and Gwynedd, for whom the area stood as a useful buffer zone for their own lands. Even in the south-east and south-west,

19 Quotations from Domesday Book are taken from Williams and Martin ((1992) 2003). See Open Domesday: https://opendomesday.org/media/images/hef/10.png and https://opendomesday.org/ media/images/hef/16.png.

INTRODUCTION

17

Anglo-Norman control was centred on lowland areas and was organized around castle fortifications, moated residences, and urban boroughs. Outside of these centres, native dynasties remained active, frequently raiding lands claimed by Anglo-Norman lords to whom they owed little service and whose authority they often challenged. By the end of the twelfth century, then, the broad contours of the March were stabilizing into an extensive frontier zone running on an east–west axis, along southern coastal and lowland regions, and a north–south axis, reaching into eastern Welsh lands and, in places, drawing in the westernmost territories of English shires (Davies (1987) 2000b, 272–4). It is important to remember that, partly because of the contested and piecemeal nature of its formation, the March of Wales consisted, and would only ever consist, of numerous separate lordships varying in size, wealth, material resources, and strategic value, and that it never constituted a territorially or politically united totality. To be sure, micro-alliances might be established between lords whose interests temporarily converged, or through marriage and kinship ties, but the Marches never formed a cohesive bloc. Rather, as R. R. Davies ((1987) 2000b) puts it: ‘The history of the March is, in this respect, the sum of the history of its major families; around their fortunes and misfortunes, their marriages and minorities, their political successes and failures, turned much of the history of the March’ (276). In the thirteenth century, the political map of the March continued to mutate, as territories were won, lost, confiscated, inherited, escheated, etc. This period saw the decline of major Marcher families (e.g. Braose, Lacy, Marshal, FitzBaderon, and Clifford) and the arrival of prominent new dynasties (e.g. Clare, Bohun, Cantilupe, Verdun, Geneville, Bigod, and Giffard) (Davies (1987) 2000b, 280). Generally, however, the thirteenth century (prior to 1277, at least) is held to represent a  period of growing accommodation, acculturation, and, to borrow Davies’ term, ‘consolidation’, particularly in terms of Marcher seignorial, judicial, and military authority (Davies (1987) 2000b, 213–15). The period bears witness to  increased levels of encastellation and stone refortification across Marcher territories, as their lords began to focus less on conquest and more on defensive strategies for entrenching their positions (Davies (1987) 2000b, 280–2; Lieberman 2010, 138–72). Marcher lords also sought to assert their authority over the native rulers and communities that persisted within the nominal bounds of their lordships, as well as over religious foundations within their territories in order to establish more secure and profitable seignorial systems. They established more comprehensive systems of administration and governance, transforming the March from ad hoc military frontier into ‘a collection of lordships where seignorial power enjoyed a measure of authority unsurpassed elsewhere in the king’s dominions’ (Davies (1987) 2000b, 283). Indeed, during this period the Marcher lords began to consolidate the independence that they enjoyed from the English Crown. The origins of the so-called ‘Marcher liberties’ have been the subject of

18

LITERARY CULTURE IN THE MEDIEVAL WELSH MARCHES

debate,20 but it is clear that Marcher lordship was marked by a level of seignorial and judicial omnicompetence that was exceptional in medieval Britain.21 For instance, Marcher lords claimed the right to go to war on the Welsh (and each other) without seeking royal permission, to tax their lands in their own name, to be exempt from fiscal and military obligations arising from feudal tenure, to adjudicate on cases in their own law courts, and even to enforce the death penalty on their own gallows. Disputes in the March were, moreover, to be settled, as Magna Carta (1215) itself ratified, ‘according to the law of the March’ (Holt 2015, 394: secundum legem Marchiae) in contradistinction to the laws of England and Wales.22 As Davies ((1987) 2000b) notes, this law is nowhere properly defined and was, in practice, little more than a ‘loose assemblage, varying from one lordship to another and composed in unequal and changing proportions of native Welsh law, local custom, feudal conventions, and English common law’ (285).23 Nevertheless, such a declaration confers upon the March a distinctive legal identity and status, setting it, as Max Lieberman (2010) puts it, ‘on a par with England and Wales’ (14). It is hardly surprising, then, that, given the seignorial, judicial, and financial benefits of Marcher lordship, many Marcher lords attempted to draw their territories in English border counties into the March, as was the case, for example, at Caus, Clun, Oswestry, and Wigmore (see Davies (1987) 2000b, 276; Lieberman 2008; 2010, 56–101). A similar pattern of consolidation can be discerned in native Wales, which was, in the thirteenth century, largely dominated (albeit with interruptions) by the hegemony of Gwynedd under Llywelyn ab Iorwerth (d.1240) (‘Llywelyn Fawr’) and, later, his grandson, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (d.1282). For all the kingdombuilding skill of figures such as Madog ap Maredudd in Powys and Rhys ap Gruffydd (the ‘Lord Rhys’) in Deheubarth, Welsh polities always remained signally vulnerable to the Welsh custom of partibility. After these rulers’ deaths in 1160 and 1197, respectively, their kingdoms, to varying degrees, dissolved into intra-dynastic conflicts. Deheubarth and Powys never fully recovered from such conflicts; Gwynedd was similarly marked by them in the decades following the deaths of Owain Gwynedd in 1170 and of Llywelyn ab Iorwerth in 1240. In 1255, however, Llywelyn’s grandson, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, defeated his brothers to claim mastery of Gwynedd and, having reasserted authority over the lords of 20 Edwards (1956) argued that Marcher claims to regal authority were inherited from the Welsh princes that they had supplanted; this thesis was revised by Davies (1978, 217–22, 249–57), who argued that their independence stemmed primarily from their militarized, frontier nature, with Marcher lords later consolidating certain immunities from royal jurisdiction (see also Davies 1979). 21 On Marcher liberties and the extent of royal government, see further Davies (1978, 217–28; 1979), Frame (2007), Holden (2008, 46–87, 137–65), and Lieberman (2008; 2010, 218–45). 22 See also clause 44 of The Articles of the Barons (Holt 2015, 368) on which Magna Carta clause 56 is based. 23 For useful overviews of the legal landscapes of the Marches, see Roberts (2021, 2023); Roberts (2022) is also attentive to the Marcher contexts of several legal manuscripts and texts (see discussion at 4–9, 116–20, 122–5, 127, 187–208).

INTRODUCTION

19

Powys and Deheubarth, wrested back control of much of Wales. Though riddled with holes and ambiguities, the Treaty of Montgomery (1267) acknowledged Llywelyn’s possession of various key territories and recognized his feudal overlordship as prince of Wales (Davies (1987) 2000b, 314–22). Given the entrenchment of both Marcher and native Welsh territorial authority, it is perhaps tempting to assume that an ever more polarized opposition was developing between pura Wallia and the Marchie Wallie, but such an assumption would be misleading. Over the course of the thirteenth century, vectors of contact and interconnection between Welsh and Marcher territories proliferated and diversified, to the benefit both of Marcher lords and, as Stephenson (2019) has recently highlighted, of Welsh leaders, officials, and tenants, who increasingly sought opportunities for advancement in the Marcher lordships. Welshmen in the Marches can be found witnessing charters, fulfilling official positions as castellans, bailiffs, constables, etc., sometimes moving into royal service and climbing to great heights, holding their own lands and fortified residences, even serving in Marcher forces mobilized against native Welsh rulers (Stephenson 2019, 79–82). A prime vector of interconnection was intermarriage. Examples of prominent Welsh–Marcher marriages can already be found in the twelfth century (e.g. Cadwgan ap Bleddyn and a daughter of Picot de Sai, lord of Clun; the marriage between Gerald of Windsor and Nest ferch Rhys). The practice expanded throughout the thirteenth century at noble, gentry, and professional levels alike.24 In Gwynedd in 1204/5, Llywelyn ab Iorwerth married Joan, a daughter of King John who was not legitimized until 1226, and had many of his children married into pre-eminent Marcher dynasties.25 Llywelyn ap Gruffudd also married into the highest ranks of English nobility when he undertook to marry Eleanor de Montfort (d.1282), daughter of Simon de Montfort (d.1265), in a match that proved inflammatory for Llywelyn’s relations with the English Crown (Davies (1987) 2000b, 327). The lords of Powys, meanwhile, forged marriage links with border Marcher families such as the Corbets, Lestranges, Turbervilles, and Audleys, while the dynasty of Deheubarth married into the Clares, Braoses, and Marshals (Stephenson 2019, 73). Inevitably, such marriages led to relations and conflicts that cut across any neat cultural or ‘national’ categories in a world where identities, heritages, and allegiances were becoming increasingly multiple and complex. It is against this backdrop that the conquest of Wales by Edward I between 1277 and 1282 has increasingly come to be viewed. Its first phase began when  Llywelyn was officially declared a rebel on 12 November 1276; a year 24 On intermarriage, see Cavell (2007, 2014), Holden (2008, 88–136), Lieberman (2010, 84–99), and Stephenson (2019, 72–6). 25 Llywelyn’s heir, Dafydd was married to Isabella de Braose; Gwladus Ddu to Reginald de Braose and, after his death, Ralph de Mortimer; Margaret to John de Braose and, after his death, Walter de Clifford; Gwellian to William de Lacy; and Elen to John of Scotland, future earl of Chester, see Davies ((1987) 2000b, 248–9).

20

LITERARY CULTURE IN THE MEDIEVAL WELSH MARCHES

later, in November 1277, the Treaty of Aberconwy was signed, compounding the diminution of Llywelyn’s authority and the expansion of royal control across much of Wales (Davies (1987) 2000b, 333–7). Although cordial relations between Edward and Llywelyn resumed, the years following 1277 saw aggressive assertion of royal power in both military and jurisdictional terms (Davies (1987) 2000b, 335–41). The resultant native discontent was undoubtedly a factor behind the large-scale revolts of 1282. On 11 December that year, while attempting to open up a new battlefront in the Wye valley, Llywelyn was killed a few miles outside of Builth, possibly as the result of a trap set by the sons of Roger Mortimer (d.1282) (Davies (1987) 2000b, 353) or, alternatively, through the involvement of a network of disaffected Welsh notables (Stephenson 2019, 117). The Edwardian Conquest had a profound impact on the shape and nature of the March. Marcher territories now covered all but the Principality (formed out of the five new shires of Carmarthen, Cardigan, Merioneth, Caernarvon, and Anglesey), Flint (which Edward I placed under a single sheriff ), border territories that were part of the English shire-system, and the royal lordships that were not part of the Principality (e.g. Montgomery, Builth, Newcastle, Emlyn, and Haverford) (see Davies 1978, 16–17). Although the existing lordships fought to retain their liberties, those newly formed from territories seized in 1282–3 were settled on a more regular feudal basis. Even so, the status of many border territories (e.g. Radnor, Glasbury, and Archenfield) remained the subject of much uncertainty and disagreement. The campaigns of 1277 and 1282 were, to be sure, traumatic moments for the leaders and inhabitants of native Wales, and they instigated a period of intense colonization and oppression. Nor did 1282 signal the end of Welsh resistance: Welsh rebellions would continue to break out for over a century, notably in 1294–5, in 1316 under the leadership of Llywelyn ‘Bren’, in the 1370s when Owain ‘Lawgoch’ (d.1378) made a bid for rulership of Wales with backing from France (in 1372) and Castile (in 1377), and ultimately in 1400–15 under the leadership of Owain Glyndŵr (see Davies (1987) 2000b, 381–8, 438, 443–59). It is important to recognize, however, that many Welsh notables had come to profit from their relationships with and positions within Marcher and royal administrations to the extent that many pushed back against the rule of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd after 1267 and supported Marcher and royal efforts in 1277 and 1282 (Stephenson 2019, 79–81, 113–18). Indeed, in 1282, there was little support for Llywelyn in the south-east or south-west, and Edward found support from some native leaders (e.g. of Powys, Ystrad Tywi), as well as from disillusioned Gwynedd families (Davies (1987) 2000b, 349). In the immediate aftermath of the Conquest, many Welsh lords were appointed to important positions and had their lands and rights restored to them, provided that they came into the king’s peace (Davies (1987) 2000b, 370). By the early decades of the fourteenth century, Welshmen, many of them from families of the ministerial elite under the native princes, can be seen holding the offices of

INTRODUCTION

21

sheriff, as deputies of justiciars, chamberlains, and receivers at the administrative centres of Caernarfon and Carmarthen, even as members of the household of Edward I’s son, Prince Edward ‘of Caernarfon’ (Davies (1987) 2000b, 386–7; Stephenson 2019, 126–7). Welsh people also sometimes established themselves in newly founded or expanded boroughs (e.g. Ruthin, Welshpool, Llanidloes, and Machynlleth), leading, in some cases, to a degree of assimilation (see Stevens 2010; Stephenson 2019, 125–37). As Stephenson (2019, 130–6) has further highlighted, in the post-Conquest period Marcher lords can be seen granting charters—albeit reluctantly and at great cost to the applicants—confirming the rights of Welsh communities within their bounds; English kings also received petitions from such communities, to which they often responded constructively. Such ambiguities and paradoxes illustrate how, as Helen Fulton (2015a) has written, ‘elements of geography and social class work to undermine a simple binary opposition between ruling English and subjugated Welsh in the medieval March’ (326).

Approaching the March An account as necessarily brief as the foregoing cannot hope to do justice to all the intricacies and complexities of Marcher history. It should be emphasized, moreover, that any triangulation of Wales, the March, and England inevitably spins out into connections with other peoples and places. North Wales and northern border centres such as Chester must be considered not only in terms of their relation to England but also in terms of their position in the Irish Sea Zone (see Davies 1990; Thomas 2020). Wales and other insular spaces are being viewed increasingly in terms of their connections to the wider world (e.g. Carr 2004; Charles-Edwards and Evans 2010; Skinner 2018; on Cornwall, see Drake 2019). Much research in historical and literary disciplines has demonstrated that medieval England itself can hardly be treated as a fixed, monolithic totality (e.g. Lavezzo 2004; Dolmans 2020), and must be situated in the context of cross-Channel interactions and identities in dialogue with northern France (e.g. Butterfield 2009; Bates 2013), Flanders (e.g. Oksanen 2012) and, on the eastern seaboard, as part of the North Sea Zone (e.g. Bates and Liddiard 2013). As noted above (n. 18), much work is being done to trace the fluctuating shapes and statuses of Welsh-, Marcher-, and Crown-controlled territories. Recent work, however, has demonstrated the benefits of considering the Marches as a broader space of conflict, colonization, and cultural–linguistic contact; one populated by mobile individuals, communities, and cultural artefacts; and one that does not map easily onto medieval territorial boundaries or, even less, post-medieval national ones. For instance, in his work on Welsh contact influence on Middle English, Simon Meecham-Jones (2017) writes that ‘all of medieval Wales and the Marcher lordships, and perhaps even some distance beyond that, should be

22

LITERARY CULTURE IN THE MEDIEVAL WELSH MARCHES

considered the “Welsh Penumbra”—that is, an area where the English and Welsh languages were in daily and intimate contact—in this case over a period of several hundred years’ (102). Similarly, analysing texts and documents such as the Dunsœte Agreement, Lindy Brady (2017) conceptualizes the pre-Norman ‘Welsh borderlands’ as a ‘zone of mutual influence’ (10), a ‘singular nexus of Anglo-Welsh culture’ where peoples and languages met, interacted, and co-existed (12). In her important recent study, Georgia Henley (2024a) emphasizes that the medieval March represents less a biform hybrid between England and Wales than ‘a separate, third category, in terms of identity and law’, where ‘more than two cultures and languages were at play’ (12). Henley makes a compelling case for a distinctively Marcher culture: Within the March of Wales, baronial literature comes into focus as a coherent archive defined by several central concerns: a fierce defence and justification of ownership of marcher lands; a focus on family inheritance and succession, incidentally often through a female line; an intimate but often fraught relationship with Wales, Welsh princes, culture, and customs; and an unprecedented degree of access to Welsh texts, including genealogies, chronicles, and prophecies, that allowed for condensed articulations of marcher identity. Expressions of marcher identity in this archive made concerted use of Geoffrey’s De gestis Britonum (Historia regum Britanniae) as a framework, with its attendant themes of conquest, divine right to rule, prophecy, cyclical loss, and renewal. (228–9)

Thus, Henley’s analysis conceives of Marcher identity ‘as a third category of identity that was both/and/neither English nor Welsh, with fluid boundaries and multiple opportunities for “code-switching” as part of identity performance’ (154–5). This book continues to deploy the terminology of the ‘(Welsh) Marches’ or ‘March of Wales’. This is partly because, as we have seen, it is in keeping with the terminology that emerges in the period and, indeed, is itself an apt illustration of language contact.26 It is also because, as a term still in use today (in relation to the Anglo-Welsh border region), it provides a strategic ground for problematizing national categories (England/Wales), Anglocentric designations (West Midlands), and the peripheralizing, provincializing discourses that have framed the border regions in the post-medieval period. However, my use of the term ‘Marches’ is, like Meecham-Jones’s ‘penumbra’ and Brady’s ‘borderlands’, intended to designate a perceived space of cultural contact that is not necessarily coterminous with the boundaries of medieval Marcher lordships and, even less, modern nation-states.

26 Germanic *marka > OE mearc and OF marche. OF marche > AN marche > ME march(e. Either ME march(e or AN marche > MW mars, mers. See ASD s.v. ‘mearc’, n. f.; FEW s.v. *marka; GDD s.v. ‘marchie’, s. f.; GDC s.v. ‘marche’, s. f., 1; TL s.v. ‘marche’, s. f.; DMF s.v. ‘marche’, n. 2; AND s.v. ‘marche’, s. 1 and 2; MED s.v. ‘march(e’, n. 2; OED s.v. ‘march’, n. 3; GPC s.v. ‘mars, mers1’, e.g.

INTRODUCTION

23

It also embraces Henley’s valuable contention that that contact operates on multiple axes and with more than two cultures or languages at stake. Yet, while Henley’s useful development of the fluid ‘third category’ is certainly to be welcomed, the present study is interested less in conceptualizing a specifically Marcher identity than in exploring the Marches as a ground for multiple, diverse literary cultures that, whatever their identities, operate at variance with provincializing discourses and paradigms, be they medieval or modern. In this, moreover, it is interested not only in the literary texts produced in the Marches for Marcher audiences (Henley’s Marcher-baronial ‘archive’) but also in works from elsewhere in Wales, England, and beyond that can be read anew in light of their circulation in Marcher contexts. Therefore, in order to avoid essentializing or totalizing its heterogenous objects of study, this book does not offer a synthetic account of Marcher literary culture(s) in the longue durée; rather, it proposes to map out a sequence of geotemporal case studies to be analysed comparatively within each chapter’s thematic and methodological purview. These are Hereford, c.1170–c.1210, Ludlow, c.1310–c.1350, and Ynysforgan, c.1380–c.1410. It is worth setting out the broad historical contours of each of these. Late twelfth-century Hereford does not fall within the Marches in the narrower sense of the Marcher lordships.27 At most, the earls and bishops of Hereford were often also Marcher lords, due to their concurrent holding of border or conquest lordships. Herefordshire and Shropshire otherwise operated ‘[l]egally and administratively . . . as did the neighbouring shires to the east’ (Barrow 2003, 41).28 Hereford and its region were, nevertheless, marked by their borderland nature. This status is reflected, for example, in exchequer records, where it is formulated as ‘in Walia’; we also encounter such collocations in borough charters from 1189 to 1215 (Ballard 1913, 222: Hereford in Wallia) and in the work of English chroniclers such as Henry of Huntingdon.29 Although the phrase may have been used ‘for administrative convenience, to ensure it was not confused with Hertfordshire’ (Barrow 2003, 41, n. 29), it nonetheless represents and reproduces an intimate association, positioning Hereford(shire) in relation to, even as part of, the cultural, political, and linguistic geographies of Wallia. Southern and western Herefordshire saw Cambrophone presence throughout the period (e.g. in Archenfield, Ewyas), while evidence from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries indicates Welsh resettlement and seasonal migration elsewhere in the shire (Smith 1997, 17–19). By 27 For introductions to the history of Hereford, see the volumes edited by Whitehead (1995), Aylmer and Tiller (2000), and Johnson and Shoesmith (2016). 28 The earldom of Hereford had been in abeyance since the death of Roger FitzMiles in 1155 until it was created for the sixth time for Henry de Bohun in 1199. 29 See, for instance, the account in Henry’s Historia Anglorum (composed c.1129, revised until c.1154) of Geoffrey Talbot holding Hereford castle against King Stephen in 1138: ‘Quidam namque proditorum nomine Talebot tenuit contra regem castellum Herefordie in Wales’ (X.7, 712; for a certain traitor, Talbot by name, held castle of Hereford in Wales against the king). Quotations and translations from the Historia Anglorum are taken from Greenway (1996).

24

LITERARY CULTURE IN THE MEDIEVAL WELSH MARCHES

this time, Welsh culture was also being supported at centres such as Brilley, Longtown, and Hergest, all in the shire’s western reaches (Smith 1997, 20–1). As such, Daniel Birkholz (2013) has argued that, within peripheralizing national and theological imaginaries, Hereford occupied ‘a key intermediary place in a centre– periphery system’ (230). As he phrases it in his discussion of Gerald de Barri’s topographical works: ‘for both Norman England and ecclesiastical Rome, Hereford serves as cultural outpost, material way station and administrative staging-point’ (230) on the frontier of an ‘unsettlingly marvellous, barbaric, spiritually monstrous Celtic fringe’ (231).30 A younger settlement than Hereford, Ludlow seems, in the main, to have grown up around the Norman castle, construction of which was probably begun by Walter de Lacy (d.1085) in the mid-1070s.31 Situated in close proximity to the lordships of Wigmore, Clun, and Richard’s Castle, the rule of Ludlow passed between English kings and Marcher baronial families, namely the Lacys, Genevilles, and Mortimers.32 In the early fourteenth century, it was held by Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March, after his marriage to Joan de Geneville in 1301. Although not a lordship proper, it soon became ‘the capital of the Mortimer empire’ (Davies 1978, 54). Roger Mortimer was a prominent noble and Marcher lord who had a tumultuous career: he led a widespread rebellion against Edward II, became the lover of Queen Isabella, deposed the king at the Parliament of 1327, installed Edward III, and was himself executed in 1330 (for biography, see Mortimer (2003) 2010). Ludlow Castle would eventually become one of the seats of the Council of Wales and the Marches, (re-)established by Edward IV in 1472 and abolished in 1689. Late fourteenth-century Ynysforgan, meanwhile, lies within a so-called ‘conquest’ lordship (i.e. a lordship formed out of previously Welsh-controlled territory), in this case, Gower.33 On the borders of Morgannwg and Deheubarth, the lordship of Gower was originally a Welsh territory by the name of Gŵyr. In 1106, the lordship of Gower was formed when Henry I split the cantref of Eginawc, granting Gower to Henry de Beaumont (d.1119), who in 1107 began construction of Swansea Castle as the caput of the lordship. Thus, like many conquest lordships, the lowland and coastal regions of Gower were colonized, manorialized, 30 As will be discussed further, Gerald’s identities and affiliations are, as for many Marcher figures, multiple, hybrid, mobile, conflicting, and strategic. However, I follow Birkholz and others in preferring the designation ‘Gerald de Barri’ to ‘Gerald of Wales’ since it ‘foregrounds the writer’s affiliations with a Norman marcher aristocracy committed to the domination and conquest of vernacular Welsh and Irish territories and populations’ (Birkholz 2013, 228). 31 On the development of Ludlow, see Faraday (1991), Shoesmith and Johnson (2006), and an overview in Hines (2004, 83–8). 32 On the history of the lordships of the central March, see work by, among others, Holden (2008), Lieberman (2010), and Hume (2021). 33 For useful recent work on medieval Swansea (Abertawe), five or so miles downstream at the mouth of the Tawe river, see the City Witness Project (http://www.medievalswansea.ac.uk/en/) and the essays collected in Clarke (2017).

INTRODUCTION

25

and urbanized, while the northern, upland reaches remained more Welsh in character and population. Beaumont rule of Gower was forfeited as part of the settlement of the debts of Henry’s grandson Waleran (d.1204), and in 1203 the lordship was transferred to William III de Braose (d.1211). Braose inheritance of Gower was disrupted when in 1321 William de Braose (d.1326) attempted, in the absence of male heirs, to sell off the lordship. In the ensuing dispute, the intervention of the Crown in favour of the younger Despenser led to conflict; this was a contributing factor in the exile of the Despensers and, ultimately, the Mortimer rebellion itself (Davies 1978, 287–8). By the late fourteenth century, Gower was the subject of dispute between Thomas de Beauchamp, 12th Earl of Warwick, and Thomas de Mowbray, 1st Earl of Nottingham, who won the lawsuit for the lordship in 1397 (Davies 1978, 51–2). Of greater importance to the political landscape of late fourteenth-century Ynysforgan are, however, the build-up and outbreak of the Glyndŵr rebellion (c.1400–15). A vast and complex tapestry of events, the revolt saw widespread rebellion across the Principality and the Marcher lordships, with many Marcher lords and implanted communities left defeated by or making terms with Welsh rebels. They even sometimes joined forces with the rebels—as, for example, in the high-profile case of Edmund Mortimer IV (d.1409) (descendant of Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March), who in 1402 married Glyndŵr’s own daughter, Catrin. Although the rebellion was eventually to founder in the early 1410s, its influence on the cultural, political, and economic landscapes of Wales and the March was profound and enduring (see Davies (1995) 2001). A number of alternative places and moments may have proven equally fruitful for the present study; I make some further suggestions in the conclusion to this book. Nonetheless, the case studies proposed here represent a usefully diverse set, whose linguistic, political, and cultural landscapes vary considerably. Late twelfth-century Hereford and the western regions of its shire were imbricated in the developing border region; early fourteenth-century Ludlow looms large among the post-Conquest border lordships under a powerful magnate; and late fourteenth-century Ynysforgan provides a view from a ‘conquest’ lordship on the brink of native rebellion. As a group, these case studies also encompass moments and locations where literary activity takes place in different linguistic configurations: insular French and Latin in late twelfth-century Hereford; French, Latin, and English in early fourteenth-century Ludlow; and Welsh in late fourteenthcentury Ynysforgan. These case studies also, importantly, participate in very different kinds of power relations with English royal authority. I do not, therefore, seek in any way to dissimulate difference, nor to impose continuity where there is none. Yet, by bringing these case studies into relation through an analysis that is translocal and transtemporal, we will be better placed to see not only crucial differences but also unexpected parallels and connections that reach across modern national, linguistic, and disciplinary divides. In so doing, an all the more convincing

26

LITERARY CULTURE IN THE MEDIEVAL WELSH MARCHES

argument can be formulated against the peripheralizing discourses by which these regions have been framed.

Bruno Latour As discussed above, this study is concerned less with the March qua frontier than with the ways in which its literary cultures resist the ascriptions of peripherality and provinciality with which that frontier status has traditionally been framed. For this reason, I have been interested in research methodologies and theoretical models that move beyond notions of centre and periphery, turning, in particular, to the paradigms and vocabularies of networks. As an image popularized by the technological developments of the twenty-first century, ‘network’ is a term frequently deployed in contemporary critical idiom. Increasingly, network models derived from mathematical, computer science, and sociological disciplines (e.g. small world, social network analysis, and temporal networks) are being used as productive methodological bases for studies of premodern societies, literary cultures, and languages.34 This book takes a slightly different, though complementary, approach. It explores possibilities for theorizing networks more broadly as a way of thinking about agency, power, and space, as a way, that is, of conceptualizing and articulating decentralized topologies (political, cultural, textual, narrative, etc.) that allow for alternative distributions of agency and ontology. In doing so, it investigates whether bringing such an approach to bear on ‘provincial’ literary cultures might enable us to push further with efforts to deconstruct binaries of centre and periphery, local and global, even reality and fiction. One of the theorists best placed to help us in this task is, I contend, Bruno Latour (1947–2022). Although oft maligned by social network theorists, Latour’s work deploys the figure of the network to think in compelling ways about agency, politics, and ontology.35 As I discuss in later chapters of this book, medievalists (primarily literary specialists) have been increasingly engaging with Latour as a critical interlocutor, though his work is not yet widely studied or taught in the 34 In medieval studies, different modes of network analysis have been adapted for, and brought to bear on, manuscript transmission (Fernández Riva 2019), language development (Conde-Silvestre and Pérez-Raja 2011), global history (Shepard 2018), lyric contrafacta distribution (Milonia and Mazzamurro 2023), etc. Though relating to an earlier period, see also Malkin (2011) for an interesting use of ‘small world’ network theory in approaching the development of the ancient Greek islands. More generally, see the work of research groups and platforms such as Historical Network Research (http://historicalnetworkresearch.org), Réseaux et Histoire (https://reshist.hypotheses.org), and Social Network Analysis Researchers of the Middle Ages (https://medievalsna.com). 35 In his introduction to social network theory, Kadushin endnotes his single reference to ANT as ‘neither about networks nor theory’ (2012, 218, n. 2). Latour himself often expresses ambivalence about the term and its acronym, ‘a name that is so awkward, so confusing, so meaningless that it deserves to be kept’ (2005, 9).

INTRODUCTION

27

field. As such, a brief introduction to Latourian thought is in order here with the proviso that these threads will be taken up in the chapters that follow and woven into more detailed discussions. Although Latour was often considered, early in his career, as working within the field of the ‘sociology of science’ or ‘science studies’, it soon became clear that his intellectual programme exceeded the bounds of any single discipline.36 From his contributions to Actor-Network Theory (ANT) in the 1980s and 1990s to his more recent work elaborating an Enquête sur les modes d’existence or An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME), Latour’s work challenges Western philosophical traditions, deconstructing post-Enlightenment dualisms of subject/object, epistemology/ontology, materialism/idealism, and nature/culture. Latour, as Jane Gilbert (2020) neatly puts it, ‘sends us back to metaphysical basics in order to reboot our world’ (28). As it is formulated by Latour in Reassembling the Social (2005), ANT responds to—or, as he puts it, ‘feeds off ’ (16)—what it sees as ‘sources of uncertainty’ in mainstream sociology, that which Latour calls the ‘sociology of the social’ (2005, 8–12) in place of which he formulates ANT as a ‘sociology of associations’. The first source of uncertainty is the supposed fixity of groups (of entities, actants, etc.). In ANT, groups are never static, but always mobile; they form and reform through their translations, that is, the mutually transformative, co-constitutive connections they make with others. The second source is the notion of sovereign agency. For ANT, agency is inter-subjective and inter-objective, which is why ‘actors’ are only ever ‘actants’ and why ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ are only ever ‘quasisubjects’ and ‘quasi-objects’. Action is always, as Latour often puts it, ‘overtaken’: actants are always being moved to act by, and are always acting upon, other actants in chains of translations. The third source of uncertainty is the restriction of agency to the human: one of ANT’s most fundamental tenets is that humans and non-humans must be approached symmetrically, that is, as co-producers of knowledge and of reality. The fourth source of uncertainty lies in what Latour calls ‘matters of fact’, which he reframes as ‘matters of concern’, whereby the contingent modes of production and stabilizing mechanisms of any given ‘fact’ must always be made clearly visible. The move from matters of fact to matters of concern foregrounds the work of non-humans and processes so often concealed in the production of knowledge; as María Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) writes, such an approach ‘stresses the troubled and unsettled ways, the more or less subtle ethical, political, and affective tremors by which a gathering/thing/issue is constructed and holds together’ (35). The fifth and final source of uncertainty is the ANT 36 De Vries (2016, 68–81) traces Latour’s divergence from mainstream sociology of scientific knowledge, which he locates in Latour’s turn from epistemology to ontology. For Latour, it was no longer sufficient ‘to explain science in terms of social processes and interests’; rather, it was necessary to recognize how ‘in science, knowledge and reality are “co-produced” ’ (78). That Latour should be regarded ‘as a key figure in metaphysics’ (5) was influentially argued by Harman (2009).

28

LITERARY CULTURE IN THE MEDIEVAL WELSH MARCHES

account itself, which always intervenes in, reassembles, and transforms the networks it purports to describe. Although the ontological translations that form and reform Latour’s actornetworks do not operate exclusively through the spatial, they do open up useful avenues for (re)conceptualizing space. As Gerard de Vries (2020) explains: ‘When a network is connected to another network, the latter is enlarged, but it neither turns into something else, nor jumps to another level; it remains a network’ (383). This what Latour means when he calls networks ‘isomorphic’; they are simply networks extending networks in which ‘everything is and remains on the same plane’ (de Vries 2020, 382). Thus, the ANT analyst cannot ‘zoom from the global to the local and back’, since the social is ‘always flat and folded’ (Latour 1999, 18). There is, in other words, no recourse to transcendental frames of reference (over-) determined by hierarchizing binaries of local/global, centre/periphery. Any such illusion must be understood as a product of the actors, and should not be a presupposition of the analysis itself. Thus, in order to ‘keep the social flat’, the ANT analyst must perform the critical moves of ‘localizing the global’ (2005, 173–90) and ‘redistributing the local’ (2005, 191–218). I discuss these moves in greater detail later in this book (see Chapter 2), but, for my purposes here, the key point is that both the ‘local’ and ‘global’ must be ‘flattened out’ into networks of interconnected actants that transversally cut across these frames. With this in mind, it must be emphasized that ANT is less a theory of networks than it is a method with networks. De Vries (2016) provides useful clarification on this point: In ANT ‘network’ is a concept introduced to emphasize the role of chains of translations in making up the social. It is a tool for description, not something outthere to be described. An ‘actor-network’ is not a network of actors, but an assembly of actants who (by way of the translations they are involved in) are ‘networked’ and defined by the other actants. (92)

As Latour puts it in the Enquête, networks are not just a result, but a process (2012, 43–5; 2013, 31–3). Reassembling the Social is, as Latour (2005), puts it, a ‘how-to guide’ (17) for ‘following the actors themselves’, that is, for tracing their associations, their translations, their ‘actor-networks’. This is why Latour (2005) suggests that the ‘network’ of ‘actor-network’ might be better termed a ‘work-net’ since this ‘could allow one to see the labour that goes on in laying down net-works’ (132). Crucially, being ‘networked’, for Latour, is not a state into which a being enters; rather, it is through those networks that it comes into being. What Latour is proposing, in other words, is a relationist ontology in which ‘[w]hat an entity is depends on its relations with other entities, the web of connections in which it has been established, the translations it has performed and the translations performed on it’ (de Vries 2016, 65–6). Further, depending on the kinds of networks

INTRODUCTION

29

in which a being becomes ‘networked’, on the translations in which it is involved, a being can be understood ‘to exist in different ways, in different “modes of existence” ’ (de Vries 2016, 162). This point is developed in AIME, a project to which, although it is sometimes demarcated from or even contrasted with Latour’s earlier work, the procedures and principles of ANT remain fundamental (see further Edward 2016; Tummons 2021).37 Put simply: if ANT is a theory of being and reality, then AIME is an attempt, on that basis, to theorize different kinds of being, different zones of reality. Here, Latour develops a protocol for identifying ‘modes of existence’, each of which is irreducible to the others and functions according to its own criteria for success (‘felicity conditions’). In this way, Latour aims to move ‘pluralism from the level of cultures to ontology, to the plurality not of how we may see the world, but to the world itself ’ (de Vries 2016, 197). This approach allows Latour, whose work has always emphasized the agency of beings beyond the human, to redistribute what he often calls ‘ontological dignity’ to beings usually considered too immaterial to count as ‘real’ actors (e.g. psychological life and works of art). It would be naïve—and ironically un-Latourian—to put forward ANT, AIME, or the heterogeneous body of Latourian thought more widely as ‘some new “master theory” or approach that will redeem us’ (Felski 2019), to claim for it the very transcendent, hegemonic status with which it is conceptually incompatible. Yet, Latour’s work resonates with the objectives of this book insofar as it offers conceptual alternatives to traditional binaries of centre and periphery, local and global, reality and fiction. Indeed, my hope, ultimately, is that this project—bringing Latour’s decentred, relationist, networked thinking to bear on the literary cultures of the provincialized Welsh Marches—can be of service to the wider critical objectives of global and postcolonial medieval studies, to the vision of a Middle Ages which, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (2000) puts it, ‘has no frontiers, only heterogeneous borderlands with multiple centres’ (7), and, in particular, to the claim that ‘[t]he supposed margins of Europe must also be rethought, so that “peripheral” geographies like Wales, Ireland, Brittany, the Midi, Catalonia become their own centers’ (7). Although articulated over twenty years ago, that vision is no less compelling and no less urgent today.

This Book Due to the nature of its objects of study, this book is fundamentally interdisciplinary. As such, I hope it will be of use to a wide variety of readers, whether their primary interest lies in literary history and criticism (in French, Welsh, English,

37 The AIME project is ongoing via its collaborative website: http://modesofexistence.org.

30

LITERARY CULTURE IN THE MEDIEVAL WELSH MARCHES

or Latin), in historical studies (local, (trans)national, or European), or simply in gaining new perspectives on a place to which they have a personal connection—a place, indeed, which they may well have visited on the recommendation of British Heritage. A personal connection was, after all, the catalyst for this project, written as it is by an author born and bred in the borders. Addressing such a wide audience carries with it opportunities for sharing knowledge and fostering dialogue across disciplines in conversations that are all the more valuable at a time when our individual fields and departments are put under increasing institutional threat. It also, of course, carries certain risks: I wish neither to take for granted the disciplinary knowledge that each reader brings to this book nor to be uneven in the distribution of my explanations from one field to another. Therefore, having set out the study’s historical and theoretical parameters in this introduction, my aim, moving forwards, will be to explain key concepts and contexts, as well as scholarly debates and developments, insofar as they pertain to the arguments formulated in each chapter, while providing full references to facilitate further reading, to create further connections. Taking its cue from Latour’s imperative to ‘follow the actors’, the first chapter of this book, ‘Texts, Manuscripts, Networks’, opens my enquiry by tracing the travels and trajectories of the literary actors of my three case studies; the patrons, poets, and scribes active in them; and the texts and manuscripts that were produced, translated, copied, and circulated. Paying particular attention to the supralocal Latinate and Francophone cultures in which these literary centres were participating, the chapter also serves to introduce the textual and manuscript corpus of the following three chapters. Specifically, this corpus features, for Hereford, the works of Hue de Rotelande, Ipomedon and its sequel Protheselaus, as well as Walter Map’s narrative compendium, De nugis curialium (Of Courtiers’ Trifles). In Ludlow, my focus shifts to the manuscripts associated with the ‘Ludlow’ or ‘Harley’ scribe (after his work on the important Harley 2253) and the texts they preserve, with particular focus on Royal 12.C.xii’s Fouke le Fitz Waryn. Finally, in Ynysforgan, we encounter a noble family of literary patrons (Hopcyn and Rhys ap Tomas), the scribes in their employ, and a host of manuscripts (including the compendious Red Book of Hergest) containing a vast array of texts from Welsh tradition alongside recent translations from Latin and French. Chapters 2–4 go on to explore the possibilities afforded by Latour’s thinking in a literary-critical register. Pulling together Latour’s thinking both on networks (i.e. actor-networks, work-nets, and [NET]) and on art and literature (i.e. [FIC]), Chapter 2, ‘Networking Narratives’, analyses the ways in which texts and manuscripts from the Welsh Marches can be read as participating in Latourian deconstructions of local–global, central–peripheral binaries, and it considers the political dimensions of those dynamics. In the Hereford corpus, we encounter the interconnected Euro-Mediterranean worlds of Ipomedon and Protheselaus alongside references to the market stalls of Hereford, to Cathedral dignitaries, to Welsh

INTRODUCTION

31

leaders, and to the mendacious Walter Map. Walter’s own work, meanwhile, interweaves narratives from near and far, a number of them relating connected histories of the North Atlantic archipelago, as in De Herla rege, the tale of an ancient British king and his fateful encounter with a fairy-like visitor. In the manuscripts associated with the Ludlow scribe, we follow the travels of the outlawed Fouke le fitz Waryn from the Shropshire March to Scandinavia, Iberia, and North Africa. A similar level of mobility is echoed in Harley 2253’s Kyng Horn. In Ynysforgan, meanwhile, the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, copied in the Red Book, represent traditional Welsh narratives invested not only in the geographies and topographies of Wales but also in wider connections, particularly in relation to the Irish Sea Zone. Further modes of Welsh engagement with global geographies are represented by Culhwch ac Olwen, in its relation of the many conquests of King Arthur, and Ffordd y Brawd Odrig, an Ynysforgan-based translation of Odorico da Pordenone’s narrative of his travels across Asia. The subsequent chapters of the book develop my enquiry with an analysis of the ways in which the networking outlined in Chapter 2 is contingent upon the agency of non-human actants (Chapter 3) and on the mediatory work of language(s) (Chapter 4). Thus, in ‘Networks and the Non-human’, we encounter Mediterranean sea-storms that (re)direct the narratives of Ipomedon and Protheselaus, as well as the animalistic fairy whose actions leave the British king haunting his former lands as revenant and river. In the Ludlow corpus, I consider the greenwood song of the Trailbaston outlaw, before turning to Fouke’s rebellion and its entanglements with the desolate mountains and treacherous passes of the March, the dense forests of England, Mediterranean crosswinds, and the icy waters of the North Sea. In texts circulating in Ynysforgan, meanwhile, we encounter an array of protagonists whose bodies align them with, and shift between, the animal, the vegetal, and the environmental. In Culhwch ac Olwen, in particular, following the animal— whether in the form of literally following the anifeiliaid hynaf (ancient animals) or of hunting the great boar, the Twrch Trwyth—becomes central to the hero’s erotic and political quests. Ultimately, I read these texts as elaborating political ecologies that not only incorporate the non-human but also destabilize any easy human/non-human binary. Finally, ‘Networks and Language’ follows up Latour’s emphasis on mediation: taking as its point of departure Latour’s notion of ‘translation’ and his suspicion of ‘straight talk’, this chapter thinks through the role of language(s) in the networking discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. In the Hereford corpus, I consider Walter Map’s metalinguistic comments on the relationship between Latin and the vernacular, placing these alongside Hue de Rotelande’s claim to be translating from Latin to French in the Ipomedon prologue, the role of Francophone supralocalism in his texts’ Euro-Mediterranean world, and the curious figure in Protheselaus of a warden named Latin. My discussion of the Ludlow works opens with an encounter between the King of England and a tricksy jongleur as depicted in

32

LITERARY CULTURE IN THE MEDIEVAL WELSH MARCHES

Harley 2253’s Le Jongleur d’Ely et le roi d’A ngleterre, before turning to the macaronic lyric Against the King’s Taxes, the different usages of ‘latyn corupt’ in Fouke le Fitz Waryn, and the lai sung by Horn as he strikes off his arch-enemy’s head. The Ynysforgan section of the chapter opens with a consideration, through the writings of Gerald de Barri, of Welsh as a networked language, before turning to the omnilingual figure of Gwrhyr Gwalstawd Ieithoedd in Culhwch ac Olwen, counterpoised with the ‘Coraniaid’ of Lludd a Llefelys; these I read against the early generations of Anglo-Norman historiographers and their appropriations of British historical sources. In this way, the progression of chapters is designed increasingly to approach the complexity of Latour’s networks themselves. By way of conclusion, I turn to a final case study: Caerleon. Indexing at once an Iron Age hillfort, a colonial Roman outpost, a metropole of Arthurian empire, and a contested Marcher district, Caerleon allows for an exploration of the status of the Welsh Marches in wider medieval imaginaries, as well as for a useful final interrogation of the binaries of centre and periphery, local and global, reality and fiction that are the central concern of this book. Literary Culture in the Medieval Welsh Marches: Networks, Places, Politics. Matthew Siôn Lampitt, Oxford University Press. © Matthew Siôn Lampitt 2025. DOI: 10.1093/9780191939150.003.0001

1 Texts, Manuscripts, Networks The bases of Latour’s philosophy have always been empirical, ethnographic, and ethnomethodological (de Vries 2016, 11–20). For Latour, any enquiry must lay the groundwork, must trace the relations, must—to use one of his favourite phrases— ‘follow the actors’. This chapter takes Latour at his word. Structured by my three case-study locales, it attempts to follow the travels and trajectories, the relations and reticulations of the various literary actors of the Welsh Marches; the patrons, poets, and scribes active there; and the texts and manuscripts that were being produced, circulated, and translated in those regions.1 In keeping with Latour’s encouragement not to delimit any enquiry with a priori assumptions and categories, my analysis here attempts to embrace any and all of the texts that appear in connection with my case-study locales, regardless of language, genre, or form. Such an approach is especially important in relation to the Welsh Marches. These were some of the most linguistically diverse regions in medieval Europe, aptly described by Julia Crick (2011) as ‘a linguistic clearinghouse’ (233), featuring speakers of French, Norse, Irish, Welsh, and English, as well as, for certain periods and areas, Flemish and Breton. Nor should we forget that Wales had long been home to flourishing Latinate literary cultures.2 This chapter hopes never to lose sight of this rich linguistic diversity; however, this book’s objective of tracing the connections of the Welsh Marches to broader geographies (textual, cultural, imaginative, etc.) will be best served by a focus on participation in the supralocal textual cultures constructed through Latin and French.3 Medievalists have long recognized Latin’s use across medieval Europe as both a spoken and written lingua franca in a wide variety of textual forms and social contexts, both secular and religious. Indeed, as I explore more fully in Chapter 4, 1 Many of the manuscripts discussed in this chapter have been digitized, transcribed, and published as full or partial facsimiles. I have provided hyper- and permalinks to online resources in footnotes throughout, and a list of key manuscripts can also be found in the References. 2 Useful overviews include Henley (2016) and Russell (2017). For helpful analyses of the linguistic landscapes of medieval Wales, see Putter (2010), Fulton (2011a, 2011b, 2023), and Russell (2013, 2019a). 3 I borrow the neologism ‘supralocal(ism)’ from Gaunt (2015), who in turn coins the term by analogy with Alberto Vàrvaro’s usage: ‘occorre dunque riconoscere che le identità che, del medioevo fino ad oggi, si riconoscono e definiscono attraverso lingue letterarie sono sempre sovralocali’ (Vàrvaro 1996, 532; it is now necessary to recognise that the identities that, from the Middle Ages through to today, are discernible in and defined by literary languages are always supralocal) (trans. by Gaunt 2015, 26, n. 1).

34

LITERARY CULTURE IN THE MEDIEVAL WELSH MARCHES

recent work in this field has usefully explored Latin’s own plurality and heterogeneity, as well as its contact and cross-pollinations with European vernaculars. In recent decades, much work has been done to explore French in a similar way, that is, as a supralocal language co-assuming many of the functions of Latin, and supporting pan-European, even global networks of literary culture. Various forms of French from the twelfth century onwards have been located and studied, for example, in different regions of Outremer, across the Italian and Iberian peninsulas, and in the Low Countries.4 Medieval England has provided particularly rich pickings, given the significance of the language(s) known as ‘Anglo-Norman’, ‘AngloFrench’, ‘insular French’, and, perhaps most influentially in recent years, the ‘French of England’ (see below).5 For other regions of the North Atlantic archipelago, French literary culture has been considered in relation to Scotland (e.g. Calin 2014), and recent work has also explored French in Irish contexts, particularly in centres such as Kilkenny, Waterford, and Dublin (Busby 2017, 2020). The result of this research has been to formulate an understanding of Old French as, in Sharon Kinoshita’s words, ‘extra-territorial avant la lettre’ (2010, 6). Crucially, it has stressed that the development and dynamics of this supralocalism do not conform to a centrifugal model of ‘French’ language and culture emanating outwards from ‘France’, and certainly not in the limited sense of the territory under royal jurisdiction. Rather, literary texts in French (including many retroactively nationalized as part of the French literary canon) were produced outside of France in locations and contexts connected to networks (mercantile, aristocratic, religious, etc.) in which French was, for various reasons (the Norman diaspora, the Champagne trade fairs, the Plantagenet empire, etc.), one of the operative languages (see Gilbert et al. 2020, 1–20). Once produced, these texts and manuscripts travelled across medieval Europe to be copied and consumed elsewhere (including France itself ), to be translated into other languages, and to be adapted for different socio-cultural contexts and literary forms. While scholars of medieval Welsh literature have long explored Francophone influences on Welsh literary culture, relatively little of the recent work on extraterritorial francophonies has focussed on Wales and the Marches. Meanwhile, texts and manuscripts from borderland regions (such as Hereford and Ludlow) have been subsumed within the remit of ‘Anglo-Norman Studies’ and the ‘French of England’ in ways that risk reproducing post-medieval national boundaries and vocabularies (see discussion in Wogan-Browne 2009, 9–10; Lampitt 2022, 348–9). 4 Key recent volumes include Kleinhenz and Busby (2010), Babbi and Concina (2016), Glessgen and Trotter (2016), Morato and Schoenaers (2018), Morreale and Paul (2018), Gilbert et al. (2020), Zinelli and Lefèvre (2021), and O’Donnell et al. (2024). See also work on ‘worlding’ (Kinoshita 2007, 2010, 2013) and ‘globalizing’ (Amer 2015) medieval French and Francophone literatures. 5 See, in particular, the volumes edited by Wogan-Browne et al. (2009), Tyler (2011), and Fenster and Collette (2017). For useful overviews, see Ailes and Putter (2014) and Gilbert et al. (2020, 32–45). See also the online resources produced by the Fordham project: https://frenchofengland.ace. fordham.edu.

TE XTS, MANUSCRIPTS, NET WORKS

35

As such, it is worth exploring some of the major insights afforded by this research—which has done much to illuminate the insular Francophone literary cultures in which much of the March was implicated—before considering more carefully the position of Wales and the Marches in this context. It has long been recognized that communities, institutions, and networks operative in medieval England played an early and important role in the development of Francophone literary culture. Evidence suggests that a sustained Francophone textual culture emerged earlier in England than in continental France.6 Of course, early English textual culture—itself already international, multilingual, Latinate, written—laid much of the groundwork for the flourishing of Francophone textual production in England.7 And, indeed, the production and circulation of English-language texts and manuscripts continued throughout the post-Conquest period, as scholars have convincingly shown (e.g. Da Rold et al. 2010; Treharne 2012; Faulkner 2022). Recent work in Anglo-Norman studies has, nonetheless, done much to advance our understanding of insular French and to revise certain assumptions and misconceptions. Not least among these is the notion that, from around 1230 to 1250 (i.e. in the generations following the loss of Normandy in 1204), insular French entered into a ‘period of degeneracy’, as Mildred Pope (1934, 424) puts it: ‘it gradually became (…) a sort of “Low French,” characterized by a more and more indiscriminate use of words, sounds and forms, but half-known’ (424).8 In this way, insular French earned itself a reputation as, to borrow L. E. Menger’s earlier phrase, ‘bad French as used in England’ (1904, 4). Such an account is clearly unsatisfactory, not least due to its pitching of insular French against a continental norm that did not exist (Trotter 1994, 478–9). Recent research has, furthermore, contested this assessment of insular French in terms both of the longevity of its survival (e.g. Rothwell 1978, 2001) and of the dynamics of its relationship with continental forms (e.g. Trotter 2003a, 2003b). Work by Richard Ingham (2009, 2012), in particular, has shown that, although different from continental forms in terms of its phonology and morphology, insular French developed in ‘sustained contact with CF [continental French] during the decades before and after 1300, in a form substantial enough for semantico-grammatical structures to change in line with CF developments’ (2009, 53). As such, insular French must, Ingham argues, be considered as

6 On the origins and precocity of insular French textual and manuscript production, see discussions by Legge (1965), Hasenohr (1990), Ruby (1990), Careri et al. (2011, esp. xlvii–lv), Short (2013, 38–41), O’Donnell (2017), and Gilbert et al. (2020, 32–6). For complementary work on Picard and Anglo-Norman scriptae, see Lusignan (2012). The work directed by Galderisi et al. (2011) further indicates that a high proportion of translations into French in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries took place in England, mainly from medieval Latin sources, often devotional or learned. 7 Useful discussions include Short (1992) and Tyler (2009). On continuities in script and scribal practice in England and Wales post-1066, see Crick (2020). 8 See further the work of Johan Vising (1923), whose influence on Pope is evident here. For useful critiques of these scholars’ legacies, see Rothwell (1985) and Trotter (1994, 479–80).

36

LITERARY CULTURE IN THE MEDIEVAL WELSH MARCHES

part of the French dialect continuum, evolving in parallel with continental forms until its decline later in the fourteenth century, possibly accelerated by the bubonic plague pandemic (c.1347–51), which, affecting towns and religious communities in particular, effectively wiped out its matrix of transmission (Ingham 2012, 162).9 Yet, even after this period, as Ardis Butterfield’s work has emphasized, ‘French in all these varieties, insular, continental, and hybrid, actually gained a stronger oral and written presence in England in the fourteenth century and into the fifteenth, from various directions’ (2009, 321), such as via law, diplomacy, trade, movement of military personnel, and political prisoners. Therefore, Butterfield writes: ‘we should be wary of assuming that the various linguistic worlds of French—legal, financial and courtly, insular and continental—did not bleed into each other, nor that oral and written practice in any of these areas were necessarily kept separate’ (Butterfield 2009, 322). The quantitative, data-driven approach developed by Krista A. Milne (2023) for analysing textual and manuscript production further nuances the findings of linguistic and literary research. Milne’s study indicates a ‘relatively slow increase in French literary production in the immediate post-Conquest period’ (367), followed by a flourishing of insular Francophone literary production in the thirteenth century, which reaches its ‘apex’ (367) in the fourteenth. Although a downturn is attested in the fifteenth century (perhaps due to ‘market saturation’), the continued copying of French texts suggests that this decline ‘should not be overstated’ (367). A further point of contention pertains to the extent of French–English bilingualism, which, especially for the twelfth century, has often been either overestimated (e.g. Vising 1923; Suggett 1946; Legge 1950, 1963, 1980) or else downplayed by arguments that the use of insular French as a spoken vernacular was restricted to relatively small groups of aristocratic and religious elites (e.g. Wilson 1943; Berndt 1972; Rothwell 1976, 1978; Short 1980; 2013, 32–5). Recent work has sought to nuance this question, exploring the diverse contexts in which insular French was, at various periods, to some degree operative, including the urban (Britnell 2009), rural (Trotter 2012a), conventual (Oliva 2009), maritime (Kowaleski 2009), mercantile (Trotter 2012a), and legal (Ormrod 2003; Kuskowski 2014). In painting this clearer contextual picture, scholars have also raised important questions about how best to conceptualize and differentiate notions of ‘monolingualism’, ‘bilingualism’, and ‘multilingualism’, and how best to attend to different kinds and degrees of ‘language proficiency’.10 For instance, although the number of ‘native’ or ‘fluent’ insular French speakers in England may have been proportionally low, we must, as Christopher Cannon (2013, 53) notes, take into account

9 Ingham (2009) notes that his research ‘does not disprove the position taken by some earlier scholars that French was an instructed L2, but it does set the bar somewhat higher for those who wish to make that claim’ (54). 10 For a useful discussion of these issues, see Gilbert et al. (2020, 11–19).

TE XTS, MANUSCRIPTS, NET WORKS

37

speakers who were ‘functionally’ or ‘pragmatically’ proficient in French for specific purposes (merchants in contact with the continent, officials working on Frenchspeaking nobles’ estates, etc.). In this sense, as Cannon (2013) writes, ‘French literacy not only extended over a very large span of the ladder of class distinction, but it crossed all significant class boundaries (between peasant and bourgeois clerk as well as between such clerks and the lower gentry)’ (53).11 Such issues are further complicated by extensive lexical borrowing and other processes of hybridization between insular French and English, with scholars usefully problematizing any easy notion of these languages (and, to an extent, Latin) as fully delineable totalities.12 A final misconception about insular French, and one key to my purposes here, relates to its restriction to the kingdom of England. In a groundbreaking article on insular French in medieval Wales, David Trotter (1994, 478) flags up this assumption in Menger’s formulation ‘bad French as used in England’ (emphasis added), pointing out that, already by 1904 (when Menger’s work was published), editions were available of insular French sources from Wales and Ireland.13 Trotter (1994, 480) goes on to argue that the neglect of insular French outside of England has largely been due to the field’s excessive focus on literary texts. In response, his article takes its readers on a tour of non-literary sources from Wales that demonstrate usage of insular French for administrative, legal, and diplomatic purposes.14 In particular, Trotter discusses evidence of insular French being used by implanted communities—such as the one in Conwy, primarily composed of English and Irish settlers—alongside evidence of Welsh leaders and nobles sending letters in insular French to monarchs, nobles, and bishops in England and the Marches. Similarly, a number of (mainly fourteenth-century) petitions and requests—often filed by individuals or groups further down the social scale— were sent by Welsh people or by groups including Welsh names. Trotter notes petitions from Merioneth, Anglesey, Eifionydd, and Rhos, regions where

11 This point invites speculation over the extent to which ‘pragmatic’ proficiency might have informed participation in literary culture. If scholarly insistence on the ‘prestige’ status of insular French is anything to go by (e.g. Crane 1997, 105; Campbell 2010, 128), then there is perhaps all the more reason for such ‘pragmatic’ speakers to use their proficiency in order to gain some kind of purchase on Francophone literary culture. 12 See, for instance, Rothwell (1994, 2001, 2004), Wright (1997), Trotter (2000, 2003c, 2009, 2012b, 2013), and Butterfield (2009, esp. 14–16). 13 The work of Trotter and others has helpfully emphasized the wider supralocalism of insular French, which was in use not only in Wales and Ireland but also, for instance, in Gascony (Trotter 1997, 1998). Even in England, insular French was in use by speakers from elsewhere, such as Italian merchants in London (Trotter 2011a; Tiddeman 2016), or by sailors and merchants—Spanish, Genoese, Catalan, German—seeking scriveners able to produce petitions (2011b). 14 Trotter’s sources are principally drawn from the Calendar of Ancient Correspondence Concerning Wales (Edwards 1935) and the Calendar of Ancient Petitions Relating to Wales (Rees 1975), though he also flags up a number of other valuable, lesser-known sources (1994, 470–1). On the administrative uses of French in Wales, see also discussion in Surridge (1966), Smith (1997, 28–9), and Henley (2024b, 238–43).

38

LITERARY CULTURE IN THE MEDIEVAL WELSH MARCHES

Francophone presence had hitherto been less substantial than, for instance, in the Marches (1994, 467–8). Of course, as Trotter points out, it is unlikely that the senders of these petitions composed them themselves or even understood them once written (1994, 468). Yet, their existence suggests that there was in Wales a sizeable number of clerks, notaries, and secretaries able to write in ‘un anglofrançais tout à fait normal’ (1994, 468; a perfectly normal Anglo-French) and who also, presumably, were competent in the petitioners’ own language(s). Trotter marshals these sources as evidence of the administrative, vehicular roles of insular French across Wales, further arguing that ‘le processus d’emprunt lexical n’est nullement un trafic à sens unique’ (1994, 463; the process of lexical borrowing is in no way a one-way traffic). He goes on to give examples of Welsh terms which, in his administrative sources, find themselves ‘anglo-francisés’ (1994, 475–6; AngloFrenchified), and additionally remarks that the sources from Wales provide evidence for other, non-Welsh borrowings into insular French that had, at the time of the article’s publication, not been included in the Anglo-Norman Dictionary (1994, 475–7). Trotter provides full lists in an appendix (1994, 481–7). The article concludes with the assertion that: ‘N’en déplaise aux Anglais, l’anglofrançais est un phénomène britannique, une langue non pas de l’Angleterre, mais des Iles Britanniques’ (1994, 481; whether the English like it or not, Anglo-French is a British phenomenon, a language not of England, but of the British Isles). Trotter’s critique of the de facto territorialization of insular French as English— engrained in and (re)enacted by terms such as Anglo-Norman, Anglo-French, and the French of England—is compelling, and one that merits further exploration from the literary perspective against which Trotter positions himself.15 As we will see in this chapter, Trotter’s decentring of England in terms of linguistic geography has important implications for how we might approach centres such as Ynysforgan where seemingly monolingual, Welsh-language modes of textual production conceal extensive engagements with Francophone literary culture. Trotter’s work also invites us to situate borderland centres such as Hereford and Ludlow within frames of reference that extend westward as well as eastward, to interpret their literary activities in the context of the multilingual cultures that not only existed across medieval England but also stretched across the Welsh peninsula.16 The principal aim of the present chapter is to pursue these lines of enquiry by opening up a dialogue between these regions, cultural artefacts, and fields of study. In doing so, it asks: who or what are the texts, manuscripts, scribes, authors, and 15 Although the metaphorical sense of the adjective is infelicitous, ‘insular’ French arguably avoids the problem of territorialization more successfully, and is, therefore, the term that I prefer in this book to designate a linguistic category. I continue to use ‘Anglo-Norman’ as a political–cultural designation. The ‘French of Britain’ has also been suggested as a more capacious, similarly de-territorializing term (Henley 2024b). 16 I have suggested elsewhere these texts and manuscripts might even be situated within a ‘French of Wales’: see Lampitt (2022), which draws on some of the material in this chapter. See also discussion by Henley (2024b).

TE XTS, MANUSCRIPTS, NET WORKS

39

patrons of my case-study centres? To where and from where do they travel? What are their linguistic configurations? Proceeding in this way, this chapter forms a basis for those that follow by introducing the textual corpus in its manuscript contexts and by demonstrating how the networking that we will find dramatized in the texts is already operative at the level of the texts and of the manuscripts in which they travel.

‘A Credehulle a ma meisun’: Hereford, c.1170–c.1210 Hereford in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries was a vibrant centre of intellectual activity, focussed in particular on the cathedral as a prominent centre for insular reception of Arabic learning.17 The astronomer Roger ‘Infans’ of Hereford (fl. 1176–98) was active there (Burnett 2004), while intellectuals such as Alfred of Sarashel and Daniel of Morley may also have had Hereford connections. The cathedral seems to have had a theological school well before the end of the twelfth century, featuring such theologi as the chancellor Nicholas ‘divinus’ (1187–mid-1190s), Simon of Melun (fl. 1190–1202), Peter of Abergavenny (fl. 1201–19), and one Magister Albinus (fl. 1200–17) (see Orme 2000, 567). The polymath Robert Grosseteste (d.1253) was also active in Hereford under bishops William de Vere (d.1198) and Hugh Foliot (d.1234) until around the 1220s (see Southern 2010). Today, Hereford Cathedral is famed not just for the largest surviving mappa mundi but for the largest surviving chained library, established in 1611.18 It contains some 1,500 books, of which 229 date to between the eighth and early sixteenth centuries. According to the catalogue compiled by Mynors et al. (1993, xv), 112 of these were present at Hereford in the medieval period. Of these, between thirty-seven and fifty-one were at the cathedral in the twelfth century, many produced locally, though ‘[w]e may be confident that the actual number of manuscripts at the Cathedral by c.1200 was at least double this’ (xviii). The surviving books reflect quite poorly the scientific activities of Hereford scholars in the late twelfth century, giving the impression instead of ‘a practical reference library for the canons’ (xvii). Yet, as Mynors et al. (1993, xvi) also note, no medieval inventories or catalogues survive at Hereford, where there also seems to have  been no system for ownership inscription; equally, books may well have

17 On Hereford Cathedral as cultural and intellectual centre, see further Russell (1932), Burnett (1995), Barrow (1999, 2000), Orme (2000), Firman (2016), Pullin (2016), and Lampitt (2017). On the influence of Robert the Lotharingian in particular, see Barrow (1995, 2000). On the activities and culture of Jewish communities in Hereford, see Hillaby (1984, 1985). 18 On the history of Hereford Cathedral Library, see Mynors et al. (1993) and Williams (2000). MLGB3 lists 126 items under ‘Hereford, Cathedral church of St Ethelbert’. See also the virtual presentation by Hereford Cathedral at: https://www.themappamundi.co.uk/chained-library/.

40

LITERARY CULTURE IN THE MEDIEVAL WELSH MARCHES

circulated as personal possessions without entering any institutional repository (xviii). It is possible, then, if not likely, that a number of relevant books could have been produced or circulated at Hereford relating to its wider intellectual projects, including, as Dan Terkla (2013, 167) has suggested, works relating to the mappa mundi. A number of vernacular literary texts were also composed at Hereford in this period. One Hereford canon, Simund de Freine (fl. 1190–1200), identifies himself in acrostics in two poems in insular French heptasyllabic couplets: a Vie de Saint Georges (c.1195–1200),19 and a text known as the Roman de Philosophie or Roman de Fortune (c.1190–1200), an adaptation of Boethius’s Consolatio Philosophiae.20 Robert Grosseteste’s allegorical poem on the Chasteau d’amour (c.1200–25) may, equally, be associable with, or at least read in light of, his time at Hereford (Reeve 2022). The cathedral was also an important centre for prominent twelfth-century figures such as Gerald de Barri. Although never a canon at Hereford, he was in close contact with the cathedral and its community, including Simund de Freine, and even found himself in a literary dispute with the abbot of the Cistercian Dore Abbey in the south-west of the shire.21 Little wonder then that Simund, when encouraging Gerald to settle at Hereford, should describe it as a flourishing intellectual centre where all manner of arts and studies thrive.22 As Geoff Rector (2022) notes, the poem, rich in classicizing references, ‘reimagines the bustling market town as a pastoral space of classical literary retreat, watered by the fountains of the liberal arts, recasting (with an ironic wink) the town’s clerics as classical philosophers, poets, and lovers’ (20). Further works are connectable to the wider region of the Herefordshire March in this period. Although it is not clear whether he was composing there, one Adam de Ross (now generally considered to be Ross-on-Wye) is attributed with the composition of a late twelfth-century Vision de Saint Paul, an insular French version of the apocryphal Visio Pauli.23 To Hereford’s north-west, the Augustinian

19 The text was probably commissioned by William de Vere after his return from the Holy Land and intended as propaganda for the Third Crusade (Barrow 2000). It survives in two manuscripts. 20 Arguing for the influence on Simund’s Roman of glosses originating in William of Conches’ commentary on Boethius, Fredette (2024) has recently described Simund’s text as a ‘ “reader’s digest” Consolatio for a semi-lettered laity’ (253). 21 Abbot Adam’s (now lost) poem Contra Speculum Giraldi (1216) was a response to Gerald’s Speculum Ecclesiae (1216), which had been critical of the Cistercian order. Although no record survives of any response from Gerald himself, Simund de Freine intervened, defending Gerald with his Pro Giraldo adversus Adamum (Brewer et al. 1861–1891, I, 385–7; Matzke 1909, viii–x). 22 The poem is reproduced in Matzke’s introduction (1909, vi–vii) from Brewer et al. (1861–1891, I, 328–84). 23 Russell (1936, 9–10) first identified the poet with an Irish monk at the Cistercian Abbey of Dunbrody in Leinster, active in 1279, though this date is too late for the poem’s dating to the late twelfth century. Legge (1950, 53–4; 1963, 274–5, 304) mentions the poem’s supposed Irish connection, but admits the lack of any proof. Ross-on-Wye is now the favoured location (see below, n. 28). The text was first edited by Kastner (1906); it has since been reassessed by Short (1988) and re-edited as parallel alpha and beta texts by Leonardi (1997).

TE XTS, MANUSCRIPTS, NET WORKS

41

abbey at Wigmore, supported by the Mortimer family, produced a number of chronicles and annals in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. These include the text known as the Anglo-Norman Chronicle of Wigmore Abbey, probably composed in around 1200 and which survives in a later Wigmore book: Chicago, University Library, 224 (c.1390s).24 Wigmore’s motherhouse was the Abbey of Saint Victor in Paris, a considerable centre of monastic learning under the theologian Hugh of Saint Victor. In 1148, Saint Victor provided Wigmore with its first abbot, Andrew of Saint Victor, referred to in the Chronicle as ‘mestre de divinité’ (430; master of divinity) (see further van Liere 1995). The region of Wigmore is of further significance to literary history as a site of anchoritic culture: Eric Dobson (1976, 312–68) argued that a canon of Wigmore, Brian of Lingen, may even have been the author of the early thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse. This hypothesis has since been revised by Bella Millett (1992), but the case for the text’s connection to Marcher milieux remains convincing (see Innes-Parker 2011).25 It is against this backdrop of vibrant literary activity that two of Herefordshire’s most notable writers of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries ought to be viewed: Hue de Rotelande and Walter Map. Little is known about Hue de Rotelande, though certain references in his works enable us to reconstruct aspects of his biography. He names himself several times over the course of his Ipomedon and its sequel, Protheselaus, both octosyllabic verse romances in insular French.26 As the texts’ most recent editor, A.  J.  Holden (1979, 8) notes, it is generally accepted that ‘Rotelande’ refers to Rhuddlan in north Wales. Rhuddlan was originally one of the commotes comprising the cantref of Tegeingl, itself one of the four cantrefi of the Perfeddwlad, roughly the area lying between the River Conwy and the River Dee. Although it had earlier been part of the Kingdom of Gwynedd, Tegeingl was conquered in the late eighth century by the Kingdom of Mercia, at which point Rhuddlan was probably first established as a Mercian burh. The region continued to be fought over, however; by the eleventh century, Rhuddlan was the site of the llys (court) of Gruffudd ap Llywelyn (d.1063). After 1066, Rhuddlan became one of the early gains of the Normans: led by Robert of 24 Quotations from the Anglo-Norman Chronicle of Wigmore Abbey are taken from Dickinson and Ricketts (1967–1969), digitized by AND at: https://anglo-norman.net/textbase-browse/wigmore. Translations are my own. Mortimer (2015) provides an overview of the different Wigmore chronicles; for more detailed discussions of Chicago 224, see Giffin (1941, 1952), Given-Wilson (2003), and Henley (2024a, 75–115). MLGB3 lists six books under Wigmore, Herefordshire, Augustinian abbey of St James, plus one Wigmore book in Hereford Cathedral (P.vi.3). 25 The text’s so-called AB language is local to north-west Herefordshire or south-west Shropshire (Tolkien 1929, 104–26). Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 402, a thirteenth-century manuscript of the text, contains an ex-libris inscription (fol. 1r) stating that it was given to Wigmore by one John Purcel at the insistence of one Walter of Ludlow. Corpus Christi 402 has been edited by Millett (2005–2006) and digitized at Parker Library on the Web: https://purl.stanford.edu/zh635rv2202. For readings of anchoritism in relation to its Marcher contexts, see Cannon (2004, 139–71) and McAvoy (2011, 147–77). 26 Quotations from Ipomedon are taken from Holden (1979); translations are my own. Quotations from Protheselaus are taken from Holden (1991–1993); translations are my own.

42

LITERARY CULTURE IN THE MEDIEVAL WELSH MARCHES

Rhuddlan (d.1093), they had, by around 1073, installed themselves in the newly erected Twthill Castle (the existing stone castle at Rhuddlan was not constructed until 1277 by Edward I) (Davies 2000b, 31, 97–8). Although the Perfeddwlad continued to be disputed, Rhuddlan seems to have remained in Anglo-Norman hands until it was taken by Owain Gwynedd in 1149. It was reclaimed by Henry II during his 1157 campaign, but lost a decade later, again to Owain. Holden suggests that we place Hue’s association with Rhuddlan (whether his birth or residence there) towards the end of the first period of Norman occupation (i.e. between 1073 and 1149) (Holden 1979, 8; 1991–1993, I, 2). Although set in the world of the ancient Mediterranean, Ipomedon and Protheselaus contain several references to the locality of their composition. These will be studied in closer detail in Chapter 2; for now, suffice it to say that some among them serve to date and localize the texts’ composition fairly securely. Hue had apparently travelled southwards from Rhuddlan by the time he had begun composing his first romance, since, in Ipomedon, he writes: ‘A Credehulle a ma meisun’ (l. 10,571), identified as Credenhill to the north-west of Hereford. Credenhill appears twice in Domesday book, once as an episcopal holding.27 In Protheselaus, Hue names his patron as ‘ly gentils de Monemwe, | Gilbert le fiutz Badeloun’ (ll. 12,700–1). This reference is to Gilbert FitzBaderon, the fourth lord of Monmouth, a man of Breton descent, whose death in 1191 provides the terminus ante quem for the composition of this poem and its prequel. A terminus post quem for Ipomedon is provided by a reference on line 5351 to the siege of Rouen, when, in 1174, the Young King rebelled against his father by joining with Philip Count of Flanders and King Louis VII of France. Holden (1979, 7) notes that the reference does not necessarily mean that the event had occurred recently. More precise date frames often depend on how critics view the relationship between Hue’s works and those of Chrétien de Troyes (see below). Ipomedon appears to have enjoyed a reasonable level of reception. It survives almost in full in two insular manuscripts. The earliest is London, British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian A VII (fols 39ra–106rb) (mid-thirteenth century).28 The

27 See Open Domesday: https://opendomesday.org/place/SO4543/credenhill/. 28 Cotton Vespasian A VII has not been digitized. The first item in Cotton Vespasian A VII is Guillaume le Clerc’s Bestiaire divin (fols 4r–33r), followed by two items in the same hand: the Vision de Saint Paul (fols 34r–38r) attributed to Adam de Ross and Ipomedon (fols 39r–106r). The final, later item is a list of nobles present at the Treaty of Calais (1360) and a list of the French lands ceded to Edward III (fols 106v–107v). The presence in this manuscript of Ipomedon (in a version containing local references) and, in the same hand, Adam de Ross’s Vision has been adduced as evidence of Adam’s association with Ross-on-Wye (as opposed to Ross, County Wexford) (see Short 1988, 187–8). The Cotton text has served as the base manuscript for the editions of Ipomedon by both Kölbing and Koschwitz (1889) and Holden (1979). As noted by Adolfo Mussafia (1890), the Ipomedon text in Vespasian A VII is divided into two sections (designated by Mussafia as X and A, by Holden as A1 and A2) by a lacuna of 302 lines between lines 1142 and 1444. The two sections are copied in the same hand. Mussafia’s suggestion, followed by Holden (1979, 19), is that the Cotton text is derived from two exemplars: the scribe was forced to resort to an inferior manuscript fragment for the first 1142 lines

TE XTS, MANUSCRIPTS, NET WORKS

43

second is London, British Library, Egerton MS 2515 (fols 3ra–70va) (early fourteenth century).29 Ipomedon is also preserved in three fragments: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawl. D. 913 (fols 91ra–vb)30; IE, TCD MS 523 (fols 3ra–30vb)31; and the now lost Livingston fragment (see below). Ipomedon was later reworked into three versions in Middle English: the earliest is Ipomadon A, a tail-rhyme romance from the 1390s; Ipomydon B is a couplet version from the second half of the fifteenth century; and the work known as Ipomedon C is a mid-fifteenth-century prose adaptation. The three versions are generally considered to be independent, though it has been suggested that Ipomydon B could derive from Ipomadon A (Sánchez-Martí 2004, 30; see also Pearsall 1965, 104). The figure of Ipomedon is further alluded to in later texts. In the Middle English Richard Coer de Lyon, we find: ‘I wole rede romaunce non | Of Partinope, ne of Ypomadon’ (ll. 6713–14; I will read no romance of Partonopeus or Ipomedon).32 This reference must, it seems, derive from Hue’s Ipomedon rather than any of its English adaptations, since Richard Coer de Lyon predates them; it was composed in the early fourteenth century, when it was probably adapted from a now lost insular French source. ‘Sir Ypomadonn de Poele’ (l. 618) and ‘The faire Fere de Calabre’ (l. 619) also appear in The Parlement of the Thre Ages, in what is probably a reference to the English Ipomadon, since both texts may have been composed in a similar geotemporal context (see below) (Purdie 2001, lix–lx).33 Protheselaus, meanwhile, is preserved alongside its prequel in Egerton 2515 (fols 70v–141), where it is followed by a section of Prose Lancelot material. Protheselaus is also preserved in Paris, BnF, Français 2169 (thirteenth century): it is the only text in the manuscript, but is incomplete at the end.34 Otherwise, only one other single-folio fragment (fourteenth century) survives alongside the Ipomedon fragment in Rawl. D. 913, a manuscript mainly composed of fragments in English, French, and Dutch, bound together in around 1861. The Protheselaus fragment is found at fols 90ra–vb and is 154 lines long (ll. 323–476 of Holden’s edition); it is followed by the Ipomedon fragment at fols 91ra–vb, which is 160

that were missing from the beginning of his primary, superior manuscript, but had no source for the intervening 302 lines. I see little reason to dispute this hypothesis. 29 Egerton 2515 has not been digitized, but see BL Detailed Record: http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/ illuminatedmanuscripts/record.asp?MSID=7640. 30 On Rawl. D.  913, see MMOL: https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/manuscript_8471. The partial digitization does not include the Ipomedon and Protheselaus fragments, but these are published in Stengel (1882, 393–6). 31 At time of writing, TCD 523 has not been digitized. 32 Quotations from Richard Coer de Lyon are taken from Larkin (2015). This list (of heroes whose deeds are inferior to those of King Richard in Jaffa) goes on to include Alexander, Charlemagne, Arthur, Gawain, Lancelot, Bevis of Hampton, Guy of Warwick, Urry, Octavian, Hector, Jason, Hercules, Eneas, and Achilles. 33 Quotations from The Parlement of the Thre Ages are taken from Ginsberg (1992). 34 For digitization, see Gallica: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b90589468.

44

LITERARY CULTURE IN THE MEDIEVAL WELSH MARCHES

lines long (ll. 10,171–330). There seem to have been no adaptations of Protheselaus into other languages. The manuscript evidence suggests that these texts travelled. The scribe of Egerton 2515 identifies himself in a colophon to Ipomedon as ‘John of Dorkingge’ (fol. 70va), probably Dorking in Surrey. John appears in the letter books of the City of London as an official and wool merchant between 1300 and 1306, which fits with the estimated period of the manuscript’s production in c.1300–25.35 Circulation of Ipomedon beyond England remains a possibility: the now lost, midfourteenth-century fragment of Ipomedon once belonging to Charles H. Livingston may represent a continental version (Livingston 1942). The English-language adaptations of Ipomedon indicate the text’s dispersal across England. Ipomadon A is now preserved only in a manuscript of London provenance: Manchester, Chetham’s Library MS 8009 (Mun. A.6.31) (see Meale 1984; Sánchez-Martí 2003). However, Rhiannon Purdie (2001, xxxviii–xlvii) notes that, based on linguistic evidence, Ipomadon A was likely first composed in the West Riding of Yorkshire. It may have been copied in other southern and western regions before reaching the Chetham scribe. Tadahiro Ikegami (1983, I, lx), meanwhile, shows that the language of Ipomydon B indicates its composition by a North-East Midlands author. Yet, that text too is preserved in a London manuscript—London, British Library MS Harley 2252—assembled by John Colyns, a London merchant operating as a bookseller by at least 1520, with an ownership inscription indicating the year 1517 (Ikegami 1983, I, xiii). The Ipomydon B quires—‘probably copied from an exemplar in a London bookshop’ (Ikegami 1983, I, xvi)—are written by two main scribes in late fifteenth-century hands (c.1460–80) (see further Meale 1982, 1984). Harley 2252 was, moreover, used as the copy-text for Wynkyn de Worde’s printed edition of Ipomydon in c.1522 (see Meale 1982; Sánchez-Martí 2009). Ipomedon C, meanwhile, appears to have been owned by the future Richard III. The manuscript—Longleat House MS 257—bears his motto and name as ‘R Gloucestre’ (fol. 98v), dating the inscription to between 1 November 1461 and 26 June 1483 (when he became king). Sánchez-Martí (2005, 79–82) suggests that the relevant part of the manuscript may have been produced in or around York sometime between 1457 and 1469, and that Richard may have acquired it while in the custody of Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, between late 1465 and 1468. Additional (though less traceable) literary networks are suggested by the constellation of sources discernible in Ipomedon and Protheselaus. Both texts are replete with motifs, plot conceits, and proper nouns that demonstrate a wide-ranging and playful engagement with contemporary literature, particularly romans d’antiquité and Tristan material (see, among others, Crane 1986, 169–74; Mora 2002, 2006; Vinot 2009, 118–33; Véran-Boussaadia 2016). The influence of Chrétien de Troyes 35 See Sharpe (1901): references are for the years of 1300 (fols xlvi, xlviii), 1302 (fol. lxix b.), and 1306 (fol. cxlix). Available online at BHO: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/london-letter-books/volc.

TE XTS, MANUSCRIPTS, NET WORKS

45

has previously been a bone of contention, though most critics now agree that Hue’s works are in dialogue with conventions that were being popularized by his Champenois contemporary (e.g. Calin 1988; Gravdal 1989; Gaunt 2000; Kocher 2008; Vinot 2009, 110–18; Véran-Boussaadia 2016).36 As such, Ipomedon and Protheselaus (composed sometime between 1174 and 1191) represent early examples of insular reception of Chrétien. In Ipomedon, during an authorial aside on truth and lies, Hue claims that he is not alone in his knack for mendacity: ‘Sul ne sai pas de mentir l’art, | Walter Map reset ben sa part’ (ll. 7185–6; I am not alone in knowing the art of lying; Walter Map knows his fair share).37 This Walter Map is perhaps best known to scholarship for having been mistakenly attributed with the authorship of the LancelotGrail cycle: the Queste refers to a ‘Mestre Gautier Map’ (654.14–15) as having compiled the Latin accounts left by Sir Bors at Salisbury, a role rapidly elaborated into one of translator and author of both the Queste and additional works in the cycle (see Smith 2017, 150–4). This misidentification notwithstanding, considerably more is known about the life and career of Walter than about those of Hue. Walter belonged to the growing cosmopolitan class of clerical Latin writers, the composers of a ‘new Latin’ Angevin court literature (see Bate 1991; Echard 1998, 14–24). After his schooling, possibly at Gloucester Abbey, Walter studied in Paris from c.1154 to 1160. In the 1160s he is recorded as being in the service of Gilbert Foliot, bishop of Hereford (1148–63), then of London (1163–87). By the early 1170s Map was in the service of Henry II. He accompanied the king to Limoges in 1173, represented him at the Third Lateran Council in Rome in 1179, and was at Saumur when the Young King died in 1183. He was also entertained at the court of Marie de Champagne, famously one of the patrons of Chrétien de Troyes (De nugis, v.5, 450).38 Over the course of his career, Walter had been canon (1183–5), chancellor (by 1186), and precentor (c.1189) of Lincoln, parson of Westbury (Gloucestershire), and archdeacon of Oxford (from 1196 to 1197), and had been a candidate for the bishoprics of Hereford (1199) and St David’s (1203). He died on 1 April 1209 or 1210.39 Walter Map is an eminently relevant figure for the interests of this chapter and, indeed, of this book. He embodies the well-travelled, cosmopolitan man of the twelfth century, a ‘member of the French-speaking English elite’, who was ‘at home in the international world of Latin Christendom’ (Smith 2017, 20). At the 36 In their 1889 edition of Ipomedon, Kölbing and Koschwitz argued in favour of the influence of the Charrette and Yvain. In 1917, however, Gay argued that, while parallels were inevitable for writers operating in a shared courtly culture, the notion that Hue had read the Charrette or Yvain prior to composing Ipomedon was ‘inconceivable’ (468). 37 See further Cartlidge (2011) on the connections between Hue and Walter (5–6) and on the implications of the allusion to lying (7–16). 38 Quotations and translations from De nugis are taken from James et al. (1983) in the format ‘distinctio.chapter, page’. 39 For a fuller account of the biography of Walter Map, see Smith (2017, 13–15).

46

LITERARY CULTURE IN THE MEDIEVAL WELSH MARCHES

same time, he remains vocal about claiming his Welsh heritage and Marcher origins, stating famously in his major work, De nugis curialium (Of Courtiers’ Trifles): ‘marchio sum Walensibus’ (ii.23, 194; I am a Marcher to the Welsh).40 Map was most likely a Herefordshire native: he refers to a number of southern border locations, sometimes showing fairly detailed local knowledge, and a number of narratives are set in southern Marcher locations.41 It is also possible that his surname, or nickname, Map (