Medieval Literature and Social Politics: Studies of Cultures and Their Contexts (Variorum Collected Studies) [1 ed.] 0367511282, 9780367511289

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Medieval Literature and Social Politics

Medieval Literature and Social Politics brings together seventeen articles by literary historian Stephen Knight. The book primarily focuses on the social and political meaning of medieval literature, in the past and the present. It provides an account of how early heroic texts relate to the issues surrounding leadership and conflict in Wales, France and England, and how the myth of the Grail and the French reworking of Celtic stories relate to contemporary society and its concerns. Further chapters examine Chaucer’s readings of his social world, the medieval reworkings of the Arthur and Merlin myths, and the popular social statements in ballads and other literary forms. The concluding chapters examine the Anglo-nationalist ‘Arctic Arthur’, and the ways in which Arthur, Merlin and Robin Hood can be treated in terms of modern studies of the history of emotions and the environment. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of medieval Europe, as well as those interested in social and political history, medieval literature and modern medievalism. Stephen Knight is Honorary Research Professor at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He has previously worked at the University of Sydney, De Montfort University and Cardiff University. He has published over twenty books.

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Medieval Literature and Social Politics

Studies of Cultures and Their Contexts Stephen Knight

VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition © 2021 Stephen Knight The right of Stephen Knight to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Knight, Stephen, 1940– author. Title: Medieval literature and social politics : studies of cultures and their contexts / Stephen Knight. Description: London ; New York : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Variorum collected studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020037460 (print) | LCCN 2020037461 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367511289 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003052548 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Literature, Medieval—History and criticism. | Civilization, Medieval, in literature. | Literature and society—Europe—History. Classification: LCC PN682.S7 K55 2021 (print) | LCC PN682.S7 (ebook) | DDC 809/.93358207—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037460 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037461 ISBN: 978-0-367-51128-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-05254-8 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES SERIES CS1099

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction

1

PART 1

Early classic texts and their contexts

5

1 ‘From Jerusalem to Camelot: King Arthur and the Crusades’, in Medieval Codicology, Iconography, Literature and Translation: Essays Presented to Keith Val Sinclair, ed. by P. R. Monks and D. D. R. Owen (Leiden: Brill, 1994)

7

2 ‘Satire in Piers Plowman’, in Piers Plowman: Critical Essays, ed. by S. S. Hussey (London: Methuen, 1969)

21

3 ‘Chaucer and the sociology of literature’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2 (1980)

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4 ‘Ideology in “The Franklin’s Tale”’, Parergon, 28 (1980)

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5 ‘The social function of the Middle English romances’, in Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology and History, ed. by David Aers (Brighton: Harvester, 1986)

88

PART 2

Mythic and popular materials and their contexts 6 ‘Arthurian authorities: ideology in the legend of King Arthur’, in Words and Worlds: Studies in the Social Role of Verbal

v

107

CONTENTS

Culture, ed. by Stephen Knight and S. N. Mukherjee (Sydney: Sydney Association for Studies in Society and Culture, 1987)

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7 ‘Why was “Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight” the most popular ballad in Europe?’, in Medieval English Poetry, ed. by Stephanie Trigg (London and New York: Longman, 1993)

122

8 ‘Rabbie Hood: the development of the English outlaw myth in Scotland’, in Bandit Territories, ed. Helen Phillips (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008)

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9 ‘Robin Hood and the royal restoration’, Critical Survey, 5.3 (1993)

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10 ‘Robin Hood and the Crusades: when and why did the longbowman of the people mount up like a lord?’, Florilegium, 23.1 (2006): 201–22

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11 ‘The Arctic Arthur: patriotic medievalism’, Arthuriana, 21.2 (2011)

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PART 3

Modern approaches to medieval materials

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12 ‘Resemblance and menace: a post-colonial reading of Peredur’, in Canhwyll Marchogyon: Cyd-destunoli Peredur (‘Candle of the Knights: Contextualising Peredur’), ed. by Sioned Davies and Peter Wynn Thomas (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000) 215 13 ‘“Love’s altar is the forest glade”: Chaucer in the light of Dafydd ap Gwilym’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 43 (1999)

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14 ‘Chaucer’s fabliaux and late medieval structures of feeling’, unpublished

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15 ‘Medievalist comic relief: trashing the medieval in the eighteenth century’, in postmedieval, 5 (2014)

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16 ‘The social integration of emotion in early Arthurian romance’, unpublished

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CONTENTS

17 ‘“Artful Thunder”: Merlin, wisdom and the environment’, unpublished

285

Bibliography of publications Index

309 313

vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks are due to the wide range of editors and publishers who in a number of cases have generously approved the reprinting of the material to which they own the rights. Strenuous efforts have been made to contact all previous editors and publishers to ascertain that if they still control the rights they will permit this reprinting. In some cases the locations and controlling bodies for original publication are no longer functioning, but requests for permission have been made wherever possible, and all responses made for the rights to reprint have been positive.

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INTRODUCTION

The essays in this collection represent research written over several decades focused on the social and political contexts of medieval literature, all dealing in detail with texts and contexts that have not been covered closely in my books on medieval literature. The essays have appeared in specialised and often hardto-find periodicals and essay-collections, and some, given as papers in the last decade, are here published for the first time. When completing a degree in English at Jesus College, Oxford, I was influenced by having as tutors two young men who would later be recognised as major international medieval scholars, the American V. A. Kolve, not long after finishing his D.Phil. on medieval drama, and John Burrow, appointed as college tutor when I was in second year and soon to publish a book that made him an authority on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. After graduating I left Britain, like many colleagues of the time – I later wrote we were refugees from Macmillan’s England. Having several Australian friends, I headed in 1963 for Sydney University’s large Department of English, being appointed to specialise in medieval literature, and met my third major influence, George Russell, New Zealand-born Professor of Early English. Under his supervision I did a PhD on Piers Plowman – Russell was then editing the C Text, and Langland was the centre of his rich knowledge of the medieval world and its contexts, especially social and religious. In addition to working on Langland I taught widely across major medieval authors and texts, and after gaining the PhD in 1967 began publishing research in that area. The essays reprinted here are divided into three sections, representing three domains of research, broadly moving through the phases of my career. The first set, ‘Early Classic Texts and their Contexts’, are rather lengthy essays coming mostly from when I was teaching and researching early medieval literature, primarily English, but also extending into French material. An interest in the sociopolitical contexts of early texts was developed among the range of medievalists at Sydney in History, English and Modern Languages, as well as politically-aware people, notably in the Philosophy department. Unlike in Oxford, these staff and their students interacted vigorously, and there was a dynamic cross-discipline Medieval Society. 1

INTRODUCTION

The PhD led directly to this collection’s Chapter 2 on ‘Satire in Piers Plowman’, but I was already very interested in Arthurian studies, largely through teaching Malory, and investigated the earlier contexts of this tradition, including in Welsh, the first language of my parents. This led to research on Chrétien de Troyes, as in Chapter 1, ‘From Jerusalem to Camelot: King Arthur and the Crusades’, published in a festschrift for the medieval French scholar at Sydney, Keith Sinclair. At this time I was also teaching Chaucer, including to the very large first year, with three repeat lectures a week, one with six hundred students – I later wrote about ‘shouting through the microphone about “the exquisite beauty of this image”’. Essays on Chaucer followed: I was now, like several Sydney colleagues, focusing on the new social criticism of literature led by Raymond Williams and the French theorists. Two products of this were the theory-emphasising Chapter 3, ‘Chaucer and the Sociology of Literature’ and the single-tale focused Chapter 4 ‘Ideology in “The Franklin’s Tale”’, which included analysis of early Welsh material: this was the text I often lectured on for a whole term to the huge first year. By now I was also teaching Middle Welsh at Sydney, to match the course in Old Irish that had been taught for some time by my influential colleague Bernard Martin, another New Zealander. Sydney had many medieval courses across its four undergraduate and one graduate years of courses (Australian degrees had been modelled, very successfully, on the Scottish system); I also taught the English romances and soon responded to a request by British colleague David Aers to participate in a book on the politics of early English literature which resulted in Chapter 5, ‘The Social Function of the Middle English Romances’. While the Part 1 essays were, for all their sociopolitical and theoretical features, basically text-focused, I had become increasingly interested in studies across periods and genres, especially popular genres, which were an increasing element in my teaching, with courses on the contents and contexts of Ballads, Lyrics and Robin Hood. Essays relating to this discursive domain are the basis of Part 2 in this collection, titled ‘Mythic, Popular Materials and Their Contexts’. Chapter 6, ‘Arthurian Authorities’, ranges across the whole of the Arthur myth, from early Welsh to modernity, seeking to identify the range and variety of ideological meanings it has borne across time. Then Chapter 7 asks ‘Why was Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight the most Popular Ballad in Europe’, and answers the question in terms of the strong gendered, female-oriented politics it realises. The interest in ballads led to an awareness of how little socio-critical work had been done on the Robin Hood myth, and I was able to develop this, with research grants and excellent research assistance, when I re-located in 1987 to be Professor at Melbourne University, in a theory-oriented department led by Ken Ruthven. The research on Robin Hood would eventually lead to three books, two textual editions and two essay-collections: three of the essays reprinted here deal with special areas of this field not covered in any depth in my books. Chapter 8 is on ‘Rabbie Hood: The Development of the English Outlaw Myth in Scotland’, examining the little-studied popularity of the myth in the north and the considerable 2

INTRODUCTION

influence the Scottish version had in the south. Also little-studied but in this case of primarily historical interest is the text examined in Chapter 9: ‘Robin Hood and the Royal Restoration’: a play produced in Nottingham on the day of Charles II’s coronation in 1661 in which Robin and his men suddenly yield, and express total loyalty to the newly revived monarchy. A more recent and less political reworking of the outlaw myth is considered in Chapter 10, ‘Robin Hood and the Crusades’, explaining how the hero only slowly became the returned Crusader that modern film and television usually represent. A stranger fictional historicism is explored in Chapter 11’, The Arctic Arthur’, dealing with the perhaps fortunately restricted imagining of King Arthur in the frozen north – even battling giant walruses: the essay won the Leader prize for the best Arthurian essay in an American publication for 2011. These wide-ranging and popularist political surveys give way in Part 3, ‘Modern Approaches to Medieval Materials’, to essays exercising various forms of recent critical sophistication on major texts and structures from the medieval period. By the mid-1990s I was working at Cardiff University in a department that was dynamically theoretical – three senior staff were Catherine Belsey, Terry Hawkes and Chris Norris. The university was, not surprisingly, also strong in early Welsh studies, led by Sioned Davies, and I combined my growing interest in post-colonialism, notably in Wales, with developing earlier studies of early Welsh materials, as in Chapter 12, ‘Resemblance and Menace: A Post-Colonial Reading of Peredur’. It also struck me that no-one had ever studied together Chaucer and his contemporary, the greatest of the Welsh poets, so I produced Chapter 13 ‘“Love’s Altar is the Forest Glade”: Chaucer in the Light of Dafydd ap Gwilym’, comparing and contrasting these two major poets in terms both of their poetic themes and also of their sociopolitical roles, Dafydd as colonised Welsh and Chaucer, of an originally French family, involved in colonised, and now also colonising, England. In a different form of modern theorisation, I produced several essays which pursue the recent interest in ‘Medievalism’, seeing links between modern approaches and medieval materials. Chapter 14 ‘Chaucer’s Fabliaux and Late Medieval Structure of Feeling’ extends Raymond Williams’ approach into the past in an essay written for a specialist medievalism conference, whose papers were not published. A different form of context is studied in Chapter 15, ‘Eighteenth-Century Comic Medievalism’, dealing with ways in which Fielding, Pope and Voltaire rework – and for dubious purposes exploit – medieval materials. Other modern approaches are indicated in the titles of the two final essays, written as unpublished papers after I retired from Cardiff in 2011, and returned to Melbourne University as Honorary Research Professor of Literature, working with lively colleagues, notably medievalist Stephanie Trigg at Melbourne and also David Matthews, a Melbourne PhD, who was by then a major medievalism scholar, at Manchester. In this context I produced Chapter 16, ‘The Social Integration of Emotion in Early Arthurian Romance’ which goes back to the writers and contexts dealt with in Part 1, but now traces the variety and structural meaning 3

INTRODUCTION

of emotion – itself a social force of some power, and now widely studied, including in Research Centres, one being at Melbourne University. Chapter 17 ‘“Artful Thunder”: Merlin, Wisdom and the Environment’ revisits the material dealt with in my book Merlin: Knowledge and Power, Through the Ages (2009), but now identifies and examines, as the book did not in any detail, the recurrent and potently meaningful environmental aspects of the power – and the problems – of the figure of knowledge, faced as it always is by the innate hostility of the authoritative people whom the figure basically, and importantly, serves. These essays have appeared in various places, contexts and editorial modes. Here they have been re-edited into a single standard style, and occasionally material has been cut when it is repetitive; cross-references have been added where topics are dealt with more fully in another essay; at times references have been inserted to later-published material, including by myself. Most of the essays are divided into sections, but only where the argument and focus changes through the essay are these titled to indicate such changes: other essays just have numbered sections to mark sequences in an overall argument. Some of the essays have endnotes, while others use in-text references and a bibliography: this difference is related both to the nature and the appropriate treatment of the materials discussed, and it would be inauthentic to alter this now for apparent consistency. References have been provided for all text which are quoted from or discussed substantially, but well-known literary texts which are mentioned in passing have merely been given an original date in the texts. Where characters’ names vary, as with Modred/ Medrawd/Mordred or Gwenhwyfar/Guenevere, the text uses a single recognised form when speaking about the character generally, but if it is using a quotation or a close reference to a text, then that text’s own version will be employed. These essays have at times included statements of thanks for the generous support of colleagues and friends in their production, and these have been retained: to those should be added a strong sense of gratitude for the assistance given in gathering and managing this collection, especially by our IT-specialist daughter Elizabeth Knight Thompson, and by Anna Kay, research assistant, in expertly scanning many pre-computer or lost-on-computer texts – a highly difficult process, which introduces many mis-readings, elusive like ‘signed’ for ‘signal, or dramatic as with ‘Grand’ for ‘Grail’. Also should be acknowledged the continuing manifold support of my wife Margaret; and Routledge’s Michael Greenwood who has been a thoughtful and generous overall editor, and Autumn Spalding who managed the production process with great care. The sources who have, when it was appropriate, granted rights to reprint essays are recognised both on the contents page and also at the start of each chapter, but they should all be thanked here, both for their acceptance and dissemination of the essays in the first place and also for their continuing academic generosity in approving the reprinting of those works in this collection.

4

Part 1 EARLY CLASSIC TEXTS AND THEIR CONTEXTS

1 FROM JERUSALEM TO CAMELOT King Arthur and the Crusades

From: Medieval Codicology, Iconography, Literature and Translation: Essays Presented to Keith Val Sinclair, ed. by P. R. Monks and D. D. R. Owen (Leiden: Brill, 1994)

1 Literary scholarship, ancient and modern, has consistently been interested in transcribing context onto text. From the antique and banal relations of zeit and geist to the modern circumnegotiations of neo-historicism, what happened in history and what occurs in story have been related, collated, intercalated. Among medievalists many such relationships have been formed: Beowulf and Sutton Hoo, Chrétien and the Champagne Court, Chaucer and Contemporary Pilgrims, Rabelais and his World. Genres themselves have been observed in their formative historicities: the transmutation from Epic to Romance is the anchor section in R. W. Southern’s book that itself helped engender the concept of The Making of the Middle Ages.1 The formation of romance has been pursued further, while drama, ballad, the early prose narrative have all been anatomised for their originary forces, social and cultural. It remains extraordinary that the most remarkable literary event of the Middle Ages has not been traced in any detail or any extent against what was recognised as the major historical occurrence of the period. I refer, on the one hand, to the Crusades, on the other to the development of Arthurian romances – two physical and psychic realisations of chivalry, two ways of dominating an idealised space. Some fruits and flowers, dress-styles and folk-lore motifs, that is about as far as medievalism has traced the cultural impact of a major series of military endeavours which occupied the thoughts and often the actions of the powerful in Europe throughout the High Middle Ages. It is possible to speculate that the crusading actuality and the fantasised travelling of romance had common origins – twelfth-century social and economic formations lie in large part behind both: homology can be traced. But in this paper 1 R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953).

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I am concerned with the development of the Grail form of romance in the quite specific context of the Crusades and the events and attitudes that gathered around the unfolding drama in the Holy Land.

2 Jerusalem fell in October 1187. The Grail entered Arthur’s world at about the same time. Against the general silence on this matter, two scholars have suggested some links between the fate of the Holy City and the rise of the Grail story. In his manuscript ‘The Figure of Arthur’ (made public by C. S. Lewis in Arthurian Torso, 1948), Charles Williams noted that the loss of Jerusalem and the rise of the Grail romances are contemporary; he also referred to the period’s engagement with the doctrine of the Real Presence. This insight was probably stimulated by Williams’ unusually functional comprehension of the Grail – he thought that its achievement was still a possibility for a properly spiritual twentieth-century Britain, and he embodied that aspiration in his sense of the high contemporaneity of the Grail myth.2 It is possible to be more detailed, and to argue that the dynamic of the original expansion – even explosion – of the Grail story was that through this mythic fiction, Western Christianity was offered a form of compensation capable of healing the tremendous trauma inflicted by the actual loss to the West of the Holy Places. Williams did not say that, though it can be read into his remark that the romances provided ‘a mythically satisfying Achievement of the Grail’.3 A nearer approach to the idea was made by Helen Adolf in Visio Pacis: Holy City and Grail (1960). She resurrected some of the older scholarship on Eastern aspects of the Grail and argued, among other things, that the object itself was a symbol of the Temple of the Lord (which she calls the Temple of the Rock), and the light of the Grail is to be associated with the services of that chapel. Adolf combines a quite close mapping of the context with pieces of freewheeling interpretation that seem less valuable, but she alone saw the development in the Grail story as involved with the stages of trauma and recognition of loss that followed 1187.4 Enmeshed as she is in the mystical symbolism and scholarship of the Grail, Adolf is not at all clear about the mechanisms of compensation at work in the developing Grail tradition. One of her stronger passages is when she considers the context for the production of Chrétien de Troyes’s initiating Grail romance, the Conte du Graal, also known, in more modern and personalised mode, as Perceval. The terminus ante quem is 1191, the death date of Philippe, Count of Flanders, to whom it is dedicated. Other associations with Chrétien’s work seem to locate 2 Charles Williams, Arthurian Torso (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), see especially pp. 245–6. 3 Ibid., p. 246. 4 Helen Adolf, Visio Pacis, Holy City and Grail (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960), especially part 1, ‘The Grail as a Fruit of the Crusaders’ Defeat’.

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the text around 1182 and it is highly unlikely to be later than 1187. As Adolf says, ‘If Chrétien was still working on his Conte du Graal when the catastrophe of 1187 occurred, he could not have avoided the wider implications’.5 The curious relationship the poem has with the development of the Grail quest proper makes it seem all the more likely that it relates to a period before the final assault by Salah ad-Din, but when affairs in the Holy Land were not going well for the Western forces. Two matters are central to the Eastern implications of Chrétien’s Conte du Graal: the representation of the Grail in this story, and the events surrounding Chrétien’s patron’s return from Jerusalem in 1178. In terms of the Grail’s representation, the mysterious article, when it first appears, is only called un graal, without definite article or definite meaning. It is a large flat dish, suitable for either a big fish or a joint of meat. It is mysteriously attended with bleeding lance, bright candles and a sword; it passes through, borne by a woman in white, to an inner room where is a man of importance, injured in some way. Mysterious and imposing though it is, this graal has no thematic pre-eminence in the scene; the key event is Perceval’s failure to ask whom the graal serves and what is the matter with that person. As a result of this failure, when Perceval awakes the land is empty (not waste), and then the hollowness of his own life is steadily revealed, as are the family links he has with the people of this castle of elusive power. This story is only Christian in terms of a generalised morality; when Perceval fails to ask what ails the king, he simply shows no merciful thought for another human being. He has overvalued the knightly advice he previously received from Gurnemant, that he should guard his tongue: what Wolfram von Eschenbach will call zuht, ‘etiquette’, represses a proper sense of Christian fellowship. Hardly a gross sin, yet it is the basis of Perceval’s failure – much as Yvain’s inattention to his honourable wife (his own substitution of chivalric practice for human ethics) is the error upon which Le Chevalier au Lion hinges its evaluative system. The graal procession, this elegantly referential and delicately symbolic plot motif, started a great deal. Scholarship has fretted about its origin, and the Middle East or the far West have become poles of possible provenance, Asian or Celtic. Few have thought like Adolf about the psycho-political context of the text’s production. She recounts briefly the circumstances under which the Count of Flanders returned home in 1179 from Jerusalem. A great lord and a single man, he had been offered the hand in marriage of the sister of Baldwin IV, King of Jerusalem, a leper who had no heir and would have none. Count Philippe refused the honour – and the title of King of Jerusalem. Adolf sees here a general resemblance to Perceval; they are both men who do not commit themselves, and so leave a land to suffer. But this is not her main thrust: she makes much of the Apostolic letter Cor Nostrum, issued in 1181, which

5 Ibid., p. 24.

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warned of dangers in the tenure of the Holy Land; Adolf titles her chapter on Chrétien ‘The Warning’, and sees his treatment as ‘the fruit of alarm’.6 This seems to claim a great deal for Chrétien. Originator as he is of the chivalric romance of fin amor, initiator of the Grail as symbol, perhaps also involved in developing the Tristan tradition, it may seem extreme to speculate he had an oracular Christian vision as well. This may be true: but it is certainly clear that the Conte du Graal is written in the broad context of the Crusades. Some details of setting seem distinctly Eastern: the Grail Castle has the attributes of a Crusader, even a Templar fortress; the name of the seneschal Engygeron seems to suit no Western language and has a distinct Arabic flavour; Beirut is mentioned; the Grail-associated food seems specifically Eastern in mode. As in later romances, the ship and its smooth mode of travel seem different from the Northern style of dangerous deep-water sailing and belong to the usually tranquil Mediterranean. The Fisher King’s nieces are descended from Godefroy de Bouillon, the great Crusader. Unlike the rustic giants and ogres endemic to Western narrative, those villainous figures the Red Knight of the Red Lands and the Haughty Knight of the Heath have a Saracen-style malice in their presentation. However, none of these details is functional in plot or theme: they merely indicate that this period included crusading references in its lexicon of narration.7 Yet such details may point to a deeper structure. Chrétien has, it seems, drawn not a simple political warning, but a symbolic narrative that displaces – and so both euphemises and reconsiders – Count Philippe’s crucial abstention. Perceval is no more than a figure for the Count’s, and indeed France’s, short-sighted negativism. Both men failed to act positively, and a land was not regenerated as a result. The Grail is no more than a token in the symbolic narrating of that shortcoming, a feature borrowed in its structure from the Welsh Peredur story (see Chapter 12 in this collection) and dressed in an even newer Eastern mode. As with the theme of love in Le Chevalier de la Charrette, the central matter of the Conte du Graal is treated with great tact, but also with an irresistible ironic questioning. What distinguished this story was that history itself became part of its receptive and productive audience. Changes in the Holy Land gave a special capacity to the fiction, dynamising a structure that already had symbolically mediated partial failure in the East, and had done so with the subtle indirectness so characteristic of Chrétien, and of a major imaginative artist. His elusive, suggestive fiction was received and reformed in a starker, more emotionally desperate context of religious trauma.

3 At Hattin in July 1187 the Crusading army was shattered; the Templars, who refused to accept Islam, were slaughtered; worst of all the True Cross was to 6 Ibid., p. 11. 7 In the translation by D. D. R. Owen in Arthurian Romance (London: Dent, 1987), see pp. 385–6 (Templar fort); p. 414 (Beirut); p. 418 (Eastern food); p. 408 (ship).

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be lost. It was a terrific shock to the West. Pope Urban IV, named for the Crusade initiator, died, it was said, of sudden, absolute grief. Jerusalem itself fell almost immediately afterwards. Distance, foreignness, confusion, the slow pace of reporting – they must have all deeply exacerbated the shock. The first Grail text that appears to respond to these events and shape a compensating mechanism is the poem by Robert de Boron often called Joseph d’Arimathie, but also known, and edited, as Le Roman de L’Éstoire dou Graal.8 It survives in only one manuscript, but its impact has been great, through its many followers. Robert was the agent of the full Christianisation of Chrétien’s rather equivocal un graal. Chrétien’s continuators had made the story more specifically Christian, and so Perceval’s confession and his return to the Grail Castle became somewhat more sacral, in the Christian sense, than his original rather banal visit. But the augmented text stills lacks the ecclesiological furnishings of a fully Christian legend. Robert de Boron does not hesitate; he takes the story back to the time of Christ. In this account, the Grail is the cup in which Joseph of Arimathea caught Christ’s blood; the chalice stays with Joseph through his tribulations; it is hermeneutically involved with the Trinity and with the grace-rich power of the Holy Spirit. Here is the central mechanism by which the Grail can act as a compensation for the loss of the Holy Places. To have actually possessed the place of Christ’s birth and death and new life is, especially in a feudal world, a real power. But when that power is overpowered, the narrative becomes readily mythicised – Christianity itself preferred spirit to letter. The Holy Presence’s blood is recreated in increasing insistence on attendance at mass: the crucial Christian place can be everywhere. As is well-known, the early thirteenth century lays great stress on this mystical validation of religion: the mass and its mystery became central to the Christian’s duty, faith and world-view. Sacralising the Grail, as Robert so firmly and seriously does, is part of this whole aura of renewed and narrativised spirituality. W. A. Nitze remarks in his edition of the Joseph: ‘La combinaison, les détails et l’ordonnance des épisodes sont imaginés dans l’ésprit théologique de l’époque’.9 This bold, indeed brilliant, manoeuvre by Robert is not only a matter of spiritually deepening the symbol of the Grail. There is a historical context to this initiative, and it images not only a Crusade lost, but also a recovery from the impact of such loss, which will happen, crucially, in the West itself. The story begins in Jerusalem, under Jewish control, where Joseph lies in a dungeon, with the Grail for enlivening company. He escapes from there when the Roman civil power, led by Vespasian, breaks into the city and defeats the infidels. That Vespasian himself has just been cured of leprosy by St Veronica suggests links back to the leper king Baldwin IV and forward to the wounded king in the Grail story; the saint’s kerchief bearing the imprint of Christ’s face is an avatar of the Grail, which is itself rescued from the city with Joseph and, most persuasively of all in this set of emotional relocations, will then come to the West. When the 8 Ed. W. A. Nitze (Paris: Champion, 1927). 9 Ibid., p. ix.

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story has purged of error a small group of Joseph’s followers, it will move to the valley of Avaron, as this text calls it, which is clearly Glastonbury, known to the Welsh as Avalon. The underlying deeply Western and Celtic nature of Chrétien’s own story is here made the focus for the ideologically crucial moment of locating this most sacred object among the people in the West, not seeing it lost to the heathens. To buttress this central moment in the story, a man potently named Petrus will first make the journey to the West; it is the establishment of the Western Church that the narrative inherently, mythically, undertakes. And it is far Western. Hebron, the Old Testament figure behind the Grail, is merged with the Celtic sacrificial saviour Bron as the actual Grail Bearer. The culturally condensed narrative enjoys both literary exoticness and an inner dynamic of consolation: the greatest of mysteries is indeed available to us in the West, in its special way. The story moves finally towards unity with Chrétien’s account as Perceval’s family becomes involved with the re-located Grail, though only a negative and tenuous link is forged with Arthur, through the vacant Siège Périlleux at the Round Table. Many of the later developments are now in place, in potency at least – including the motif of the Grail as a force for dividing the sinful from the true followers, which will flourish later in the Queste. No one doubts that Robert de Boron’s text must be dated within the period 1191–1212, as the development from Chrétien gives the prior date and the death of Gautier de Montbéliard, the patron, whose seat is mentioned in the epilogue, is a terminus ante quem. Within that period, the date is harder to assess.10 Gautier left home in 1202 to travel to Italy and then on to the Fourth Crusade, itself an important element in this literary historical narrative. Scholars feel the Joseph is early rather than late in its twenty-plus year space after 1191, and it seems that it is most probably an encouragement and validation of Gautier’s departure, setting the notion of the Crusade in a larger context. In one sense, it impels a new Vespasian to the Holy City, but also, in the light of the Third Crusade’s very moderate achievements, it shapes a spiritual programme of displaced Grail achievement, accessible in the West. The other feature of the Joseph which is of considerable importance is that it has no clear links at all with Arthurian society. The sacralisation of the Grail has moved it out of the ambience of simple Arthurian chivalry, closer to biblical time and Celtic mystery. Chrétien had posed a problem for secular knighthood, but he maintained a delicate balance between morality and chivalry; this is now overweighted in the direction of Christian ethics. One of the major features of the

10 The date of the Joseph is discussed by Nitze, pp. vii–viii; he feels it falls ‘just before 1201’, when Gautier left for the Fourth Crusade. This is accepted by recent scholars such as P. Le Gentil in ‘The Work of Robert de Boron and the Didot Perceval’, in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History, ed. by R. S. Loomis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 252–3; B. Cerquiligni in Le Roman du Graal (Paris: Bibliothèque Mediévale, 1981), p. 7; and F. Zambi, Robert de Boron e i Segreti del Graal (Florence: Olschki, 1984), p. 66.

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following and developing Grail mythos was to redress Robert de Boron’s emphasis back towards a royal, and even military, embracing of the Grail – if not of its central values.

4 This process is first seen in the text known, after a former owner of the manuscript, as the Didot Perceval, which exists in two versions and has only rarely been edited or translated.11 It is a short, rationalised and re-worked version of Chrétien’s Conte du Graal as updated by Robert, and as it is placed in sequence after the Joseph and the Merlin, which Robert also developed as a tapering of his religious Grail into the Arthurian world, it seems clearly written after them.12 Few now believe that Robert de Boron also wrote the Didot Perceval; indeed most think the prose Merlin was by another hand, inspired by his verse Merlin of which only a fragment has survived. In the Didot Perceval the Bron who brings the Grail west à la Joseph has a son Alain (a name with Breton aristocratic connections), whose own son is Perceval . . . and so the old story begins again. That linking of a Western chivalric Grail narrative to Robert’s Christian history is one form of condensation in this text; another is the affiliation with Arthur. Perceval remains the Grail achiever, but in the final stages there is something like a rapprochement with Arthur’s power: the stone that was split when Perceval came to court is reunited, and Merlin, through the medium of honour, gives Arthur a place in these mightily mystical events. The wizard says ‘Arthur, you know that in your time was fulfilled the greatest prophecy ever made; for the Fisher King is cured and the enchantments have fallen from the land of Britain’.13 To stress that the Grail mystery occurs in Arthur’s time and place, this sequence of texts ends with a Mort Artu. There is yet no moral articulation; Arthur’s death story is taken from Geoffrey of Monmouth, a tragedy of glory and fate, comradeship and treason, hovering somewhere between Seneca and Norman reality. The four linked narratives in the Didot sequence, Joseph, Merlin, Perceval and Mort Artu, fit awkwardly together, like texts in a codex more than parts of a saga, but their co-existence marks one more important movement in the development of the Grail legend within the Arthurian complex, that will lead to the massive thirteenthcentury Vulgate Arthuriad, morally driven by the vision of Christian perfection. In terms of the link between Jerusalem and Camelot, the Didot Perceval in itself marks a growing relation between the mythical sites. The Grail is now fully

11 The major edition is by W. Roach, Perceval (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1941); a widely used translation is by D. Skeels, The Romance of Perceval in Prose (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966). 12 Nitze dated the Didot Perceval ‘before 1222, presumably soon after 1200’, in ‘On the Chronology of the Grail Romances’, Modern Philology, 17 (1919–1920), 151–66 and 605–18. Roach accepts this, see his edition of Perceval, pp. 125–30. 13 Skeels, op. cit., p. 69.

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spiritualised and has the power to be a compensation for the loss of Jerusalem, but it also is now related, if awkwardly and with some strain, to the major themes of the Arthurian story, knightly achievement in honour and a royal saga of glory and final despair. That juxtapositioning reveals the inner force of history and story, the arc that is being struck between Jerusalem and Camelot, but also exposes the limitations of some of the elements in the post-Robert tetralogy. Sophistication is to come upon all of its segments, both as parts in separate texts and as a whole in the Vulgate. The element that undergoes varied and rapid development first is the Perceval itself, which appears to have been developed in parallel versions in the two crucial decades after the loss of Jerusalem.

5 The most famous of all the medieval Grail stories is Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, dated at about the same time as Robert de Boron’s Joseph. While it could be a little later, it is in no way a sequel, but rather a parallel, also descending from Chrétien – though Wolfram has various ways of obscuring that relationship, including an invented source, ‘Kyot de Provins’. The increased Eastern position of this story is indicated by Wolfram’s assertion that ‘Kyot’ has a source in one ‘Flegetanis’, a part-Jewish scholar from Toledo, learned in Arab tradition. This pseudo-source, obscuring the French original which is undoubtedly basic to the Parzival, implies that the text combines East and West in a decisive post-Hattin ideology. Wolfram, like Robert, gives Chrétien’s un graal a newly sacralised reading, and also sets it in a crusading context, but with differences both in the direction of the symbolism and most significantly in the magnificent sophistication of his language and implications. Also he augments the Crusade connections. He opens his story firmly in the East, beginning with an expansive pre-tale, or account of the false hero, as some narratologists would have it. From his Eastern successes in war and love, Gahmuret returns to North Wales. He has some resemblance to Richard I, and while that might suggest a broad crusading context, the stress falls on an Eastern connection, not Angevin possibilities. He has left a half-Arab inheritance in the East in the form of his son, Feirefiz – a mottled form, as he is pied black and white. Gahmuret has abandoned the mother, a noble Arab woman who loved him, Belakane – and by implication therefore he is a romance hero withdrawing from the land with which his marriage endowed him. Gahmuret marries into a Graillinked nobility in the ultimate Westernness of North Wales; Parzival is his son; and so the saga begins again of the clumsy innocent who slowly becomes wise. There is throughout this narrative much more Holy Land detail than existed in the Joseph or Chrétien’s Conte. The Grail is, like the True Cross, guarded by Templars, and the Grail Castle, Munsalvaesche, is like a fort in the Holy Land, surrounded by cedars and filled with a Templar ‘Grail Brotherhood’. There is a 14

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distinctly Byzantine style to the Grail court, though the flimsily-clad damsels and the dark faces that surround the hero suggest Western fancy rather than Eastern reality. Marvellous textiles, precious stones, gold inlays and objects construct the aura of the wealth of the East. Frequent references to medicines and astronomy, let alone mounted archers, set the story somewhere between West and East. That polyvalence of position is focused in the Grail itself, not here the allegedly historical chalice of Christ’s death and constant rebirth, but rather a distinctly mystical stone, fallen from heaven and bearing obscure but clearly mantic inscriptions. The poem’s final position strains to combine East and West in an evaluative whole: Feirefiz marries the Grail Bearer, Repanse de Schoie; their son will be Prester John, that super-Christian of the farther East; his half-cousin, Parzival’s son, will be the ancestor of Godefroy de Bouillon, archetypal achiever of the Crusader’s goal. As Springer summed it up, ‘Occident and Orient are united under the sway of the two half-brothers’. Adolf puts it in symbolic terms, saying that ‘Wolfram crowned Chrétien’s unfinished Conte del Graal with a lofty dome in oriental style’.14 References late in the poem seem to indicate it was written soon after the siege of Erfurt in 1203 and the fall of Constantinople in 1204.15 But though the latter event was part of the ill-fated Fourth Crusade, it seems the emergent history of that sequence of events has no impact on the poem: it is rather a full, powerful and artistically enduring projection of the Western response to 1187, even a response, through the figure of Gahmuret/Richard I, to the failed Third Crusade, which extinguished the Lionheart’s hope to regain Jerusalem. Wolfram shaped a version of the Christianised post-Hattin Grail story parallel to, and in clear ways more powerful than, that of Robert de Boron. But the strength and influence of Robert’s poem lay in its connection of the Grail to the Christian mainstream, and that was the structure which remained dynamic in the tradition – apart from the intrinsic power of Wolfram’s exotic realisation, arching as it does over centuries, whether in Wagner’s musical form or in the directly communicative power of great medieval poetry.

6 Another major text exists as a first fruit of the encounter between the Crusades and Arthur’s world. Soon after Robert de Boron developed his fertile Joseph, its sweeping historical reference and symbolic amplitude were, as is common with developing traditions, tightened (or perhaps narrowed) into what is effectively

14 O. Springer, ‘Wolfram’s Parzival’, in Arthurian Literature, ed. by R. S. Loomis, pp. 218–50, see p. 242; Adolf, pp. 110 and 150; the topic is explored more fully in P. Ponsage, Islam et le Graal, Étude sur l’ésotirisme du Parzival de Wolfram von Eschenbach (Milan: Arche, 1976). 15 Margaret F. Richey surveys the material on dating in Studies of Wolfram von Eschenbach (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1957), pp. 29–35. She believes it was written by 1205, which seems generally accepted.

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a heroic crusading epic. The text known as Perlesvaus, edited as Le Haut Livre du Graal and translated as The High History of the Holy Grail, survives in eight manuscripts, appearing to have been written by about 1210.16 Like Wolfram’s Parzival, it seems not yet cognisant of the dramas of the Fourth Crusade, 1202–04, but develops further the ideological projections of the loss of Jerusalem. Nitze calls it ‘the Cinderella of Arthurian literature’.17 This under-noticed prose text is innovative in its focus on Arthur, who acts like a king with ultimate command in a Crusade very similar to the triumphant First. Gauvain and Lancelot have joined the train of heroic knights, no longer by-standers of doubtful utility, as they are in Chrétien. In a climactic moment Perlesvaus, a warrior for God like Tancred bursting into Jerusalem, takes by storm the castle which contains the Grail. He seizes the holy article, as well as the lance and the sword, and presents the achieved relics to Arthur, as if offering his feudal due. From the start this text closes the gap between holiness and Arthur’s world much more fully than did the Didot Perceval, and without its preliminary rejection of chivalric values. The narrative basically starts after the crisis of Chrétien’s Perceval: being in the Waste Land brings suffering to Britain and Arthur in general, not just to the quarantined world of the Grail kingdom. Arthur himself is urged to seek the New Law; the problem is one for the state, not just for a knight. Christian symbolism remains the mode: the Grail has been taken by the King of Castle Mortal. The resolution is not that Perlesvaus asks the right question; military power brings the Grail back to Arthur’s control and the restitution of his whole land. The humanist simplification of John Boorman’s modern film Excalibur, where Arthur himself is the wounded king, is in a way presaged by this strong condensing of spiritual and secular chivalry. In the Perlesvaus, the position of other leading knights improves. They were either marginal or dishonourable in Chrétien, and to a degree in Wolfram – and they were effectively absent in Robert de Boron’s texts and the Didot Perceval. In the Perlesvaus, however, Gauvain is the one who fails to ask the question, leaving Perlesvaus the role of heroic Grail winner, and Lancelot is both fully courtly and without moral reprobation for that role, except that the Grail does not appear to him – a motif reminiscent of Robert’s sequence about Joseph where the Grail divides sheep from goats in Joseph’s entourage. Among such warriors and their functions, the crusading tone is strong. It includes the goals and occurrences common to Crusades, as J. N. Carman says: . . . benighted peoples are sometimes annihilated, but more frequently they are converted en masse, usually through the examples of their chief. Moreover, a great number of holy relics are introduced into the story, 16 Le Haut Livre du Graal, ed. by W. A. Nitze and T. Jenkins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932–37); the most widely available translation is by S. Evans, The High History of the Holy Grail (London: 1969). 17 W. A. Nitze, ‘Perlesvaus’, in Arthurian Literature, ed. by R. S. Loomis, pp. 263–73, see p. 263.

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so that they may be removed from the foes of Christianity. Indeed, this statement is true of the grail itself.18 Just as the knights are never worse than qualified failures, so too Perlesvaus as a whole sees no problems with worldly violence in service of a holy goal. This is the least problematised of all the Grail romances, substituting a hard-handed muscular Christianity for Chrétien’s fey interrogations and Joseph’s spiritualisations from East and West. Triumphalist and even simplistic as it is, the Perlesvaus operates in a curious shadow. Both date and patronage look to a darkening world. Its patron was Jean II, Lord of Nesle, the Castellan de Bruges. He was on the Fourth Crusade, and returned as early as 1206. Whether the poem was written to exhort him before he departed or to obfuscate failure on his return is impossible to tell; Nitze sees no reason to think it is written after 1206 and prefers an earlier date. But sometimes dismay can be overcome by propaganda (as in early Vietnam films) and this text with a ‘belligerent tone’, as Nitze calls it, seeing it as apparently the work of ‘an ardent Crusader’,19 could itself be a way of obscuring the some events of the Fourth Crusade, which were to have a greater impact, it would seem, in the development of the legend from this point on.

7 The Fourth Crusade promised a great deal: in spiritual terms, almost everything went wrong. It was planned to take ship in one great flotilla from Venice, not face the debilitating journey overland or the diminishing effect of piecemeal shipping from many ports. Unfortunately Venetian business interests intervened; as is wellknown, the Crusaders were, to pay their dues, side-tracked into the Balkans to attack the people of Zara, trading enemies of the Venetians. The ultimate attack on Constantinople also owed much to Venetian management. The Crusaders who absconded this time did not run for home: they were the relative few who bravely sailed on to fight the Saracens in the Holy Land. Disaster invites displacement, as occurred at the start of the whole tradition. The Fourth Crusade gives rise to the ultimate sophistication of the Grail tradition, which comes with the introduction of the perfect knight, the irresistible Grail Achiever, Galahad, he who is above unseemly brawling and follows an unerring path to transcendent chivalry. The figure’s perfection, it would appear, is the reflex of the failure of the Fourth Crusade, and it remains of equal significance through the difficult years of the Fifth Crusade, from 1213 onwards, when the Queste narratives were being rewritten and recopied.20 18 J. N. Carman, The Relationship of the Perlesvaus and the Queste del Saint Graal (Lawrence: University of Kansas Department of Journalism Press, 1936), see p. 2. 19 Nitze, in Arthurian Literature, ed. by R. S. Loomis, p. 270. 20 See D. Queller, The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople, 1201–04 (Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971). On the little-discussed Fifth Crusade, see J. M. Powell,

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This new figure of a literal superman, a Christ-like warrior, raises the fictional level of the Grail story to deal with the negative and acquisitive events of the Fourth Crusade warriors in and around Constantinople which, while applauded by Western chauvinists and lovers of booty, were strongly criticised by the pope and other spiritual authorities. For the first time, many clerics had been on Crusade, monks and regular clergy alike, and the Templars were also vocal critics of attitudes and events that delayed and destroyed the genuine crusading aim. The result is a new stage of idealisation. The situation can no longer be ideologised away through Christian jingoism. A break with these bad practices of an allegedly Christian chivalry is necessary, and the rapprochement of Arthur and the Grail made over the past texts must now be made to diverge. It seems no accident that in the newly developed Queste the knightly failures are much worse than before. No longer just a clumsy secularist, Gauvain is simply a murderer; so is Ector, and his brother Lancelot is now little more than an adulterer, a guilt which lies heavily on the formerly great knight’s soul. Such sin is presented as a total obstacle to that beatific vision which is the end of Galahad’s brief period on earth, and may be shared by the stumbling but pure and grace-oriented Perceval, and even by Bors, who sinned once in the flesh but has made restitution through penance and abstinence. Here, then, is the spiritualised Grail story as it has come down to us: a noble and fully Christianised text, with a dramatic rejection of earthly values, whether they simply involve fighting for the minority, as Lancelot does, or seeking earthly honour, as blundering Gauvain still attempts to do. They represent the limits of earthly chivalry, and of the Fourth Crusade. The world of the Crusades is still visible – the ships and their motions are still obviously Mediterranean, far from the storm-tossed and perilous barques that adventured more northerly seas. In this context, it seems clear that Corbenic is accessible from the sea, like Acre, a central city in the Fourth and Fifth Crusades. Other details point in the same direction. The message of the Grail is in Chaldean; the fire at Corbenic is strongly reminiscent of the ordeals of Peter the Hermit at Acre in the First Crusade; the whole structure and location of Sarras, holy place of the Grail, is Eastern. This last is especially striking. Robert de Boron brought the Grail West in those first years of Holy Land dispossession, but here, in the crisis of disaster, at the moment when the West could no longer even dream of regaining the Holy Places, not only is a new knight shaped in the image of Christ himself, not only do human knights manage to be present before the Real Presence, but by the mystical displacement of this version of the story the Grail returns with these most sacred of Anatomy of a Crusade 1213–1221 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986). The Queste is dated between 1214–1227, see A. Pauphilet, Études sur la Queste du Saint Graal attribué à Gautier Map (Paris: Champion, 1921), pp. 11–12. The classic edition of the Queste is also by Pauphilet, in the Classiques Français du Moyen Ȃge series, 1923; a well-introduced translation is by P. M. Matarasso (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969).

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Western knights to the Holy Land itself and is at last assumed into heaven, where no-one can dispute ownership. The full circle of ideological compensation is completed. Not only was the military rejection of the Crusaders contained in a fiction, but their original journey East has been made ideologically unnecessary. The disastrous failure of the Fourth Crusade even to arrive properly in the Holy Land, and also the unpromising labours of the Fifth Crusade, are themselves resolved through the elegant persuasions of a fiction now spiritual enough to console all believers. The loss of Holy territory has turned into a subsumption of all earthly terrain. One specific possibility arises from this analysis. From the comments of Pauphilet on, it has been believed that the Queste is Cistercian in spirit.21 The direct symbolism of white and black and the reviling of sinners, whether violent or sexually inclined, all seems monastic enough. Yet the point has never been proved, and it seems equally possible to argue that this text had a closer connection with crusading, and validated the men of another order which used white exclusively as its colour,22 who were in fact specifically Christian knights, sworn to the monastic principles but also bearing arms – the Order of the Knights Templar. It seems a hypothesis thoroughly worthy of investigation that the Templars, who had done so much to establish and, however, hopelessly in the end, defend the Christian control of the Holy Land, might have generated this most potent and persevering of Christian texts about the holy possibilities of a fully spiritual and now victorious chivalry. Clearly the centre of Wolfram’s Parzival, certainly a dissenting force on the Fourth Crusade, the Templars might well be the institutional focus for the development of the rigorously shaped and symbolically potent Galahad-focused account of the Grail.

8 The Queste usurped the power of other versions. It has come to English readers through Malory and Tennyson, but even the literary power that Malory brought to the story in English did not fully obscure the structural impact of the Crusades in the shaping of the Arthurian texts. Though Malory’s late-fifteenth-century version of the Queste has in itself no actual contemporary crusading relationship, the narrative in which it is the moral dynamic has its own renewed meaning with reference to the Holy Land. There had been continuing efforts around 1400 to dislodge the Moslem hold on the Near East; and in 1396 the Christians suffered at Nicopolis the massive defeat of a force including the King of Hungary, Philip the Bold of Burgundy, and contingents from France, Germany, Italy and Spain, as well as the Knights Hospitallers. 21

Pauphilet discusses at length ‘les rapprochements de la Queste avec Citeaux’, Études sur la Queste, pp. 53–83: the connection has been widely accepted since. 22 The Templar Rule stated that ‘nul autre, qui n’est pas chevalier du Christ, il n’est permis de porter le blanc manteau’, L. Dailliez, Les Templiers et les Règles du Temple (Paris: Belfond, 1972), p. 46.

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The Hungarians were defeated again at Varna in 1444 by the Turks, and in 1453 Constantinople finally fell to the growing power of these new infidels. Pope Pius II called for a new Crusade, but it remained a dream. Edward IV was keen to go, and the idea survives vigorously and climactically in Malory. Finally Launcelot dies a priest as Guinevere has died a nun, both repentant and absolved. The members of Launcelot’s ‘affinity’ have followed him into the perfect life, but not given up knighthood; at the end, with Ector as their leader, they travel on, out of the Arthuriad, back into that land from which so many of its images and obsessions sprang, and, as Malory grandly says in his very last words, ‘there they dyed upon a Good Friday for Goddes sake’.23 At last Jerusalem and Camelot coincide; in the final medieval chivalric epic Malory provides the vanishing point for this whole complex of crusading history and chivalric story. The Crusades, like knighthood, are at once a medieval context and a medieval dream. Both had reality; both stimulated a literature of extraordinary power and real compulsion. The crusading myth and the concept of chivalry were, like the Grail, aspirations to lead the best across lands that were waste of other ideals. The curiously understudied complex of ‘King Arthur and the Crusades’ is a medium of expression and self-realisation that connects so much: Chrétien and Malory, world and spirit, temple and Templar, warrior and priest, knight and ambient world. These connections were central to the energy of high medieval culture. To understand it, like Chrétien’s Perceval we must learn to ask the right question.24

23 The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. by Eugène Vinaver, 2nd edition (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 1260, lines 14–15. 24 Throughout this paper I have drawn on the advice and scholarship of my University of Melbourne colleague Dr Anne Gilmour-Bryson, expert medieval historian and co-traveller in these broad areas; her help is gratefully acknowledged.

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2 SATIRE IN PIERS PLOWMAN

From: Piers Plowman: Critical Essays, ed. by S. S. Hussey (London: Methuen, 1969)

1 The term ‘satire’ has always presented problems; almost everyone who writes on the topic begins with a bold definition but almost everyone else can find reason to question the definition and can find examples of satire which it excludes. I would understand ‘satire’ as a literary mode in which, through a fiction of some sort, an author is critical of human affairs in relation to themselves. There are three elements here; first that the mode is a fiction: I use this word in the neoAristotelian sense, to include all written, or indeed spoken, emanations which are not factual.1 Secondly, that satire is critical in its nature – this perhaps is the one thing on which definitions of satire agree, though they may argue over the variety of methods used to criticise. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, that satire deals with human affairs within their own terms: by this I mean that the satirist is concerned with a more adequate, sometimes a more nearly perfect, conducting of the world’s affairs. It is certainly true that Christian satirists almost always draw their authority from super-material sources, reflecting on human pettiness in the light of eternal rectitudes, but it seems that in Piers Plowman there is a marked difference in tone between material directed at the proper conduct of the world and material which looks forward to the next world. Consequently it is the third element of this definition which makes it into a tool of exploration of Piers Plowman, for in terms of this poem central to the satiric mode are the passages where Langland talks about pardoners, merchants, bishops, friars and the familiar topics of medieval corrective literature. I wish to exclude from the satirical mode the stretches of theological, emotional and intellectual writing where Langland explores the principles behind the Christian cosmology as he sees them. For this material I intend to use the term ‘theological’; in place 1 See Northrop Frye’s glossary under ‘Fictional’: ‘Relating to literature in which there are internal characters, apart from the author and his audience’. Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 365.

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of the terms ‘satirical’ and ‘theological’ one could perhaps use ‘tropological’ and ‘anagogical’, for these terms would show more clearly that the one mode is a different and deeper understanding of the material discussed in the other mode, but there seems little virtue in using technical and obscure terminology when familiar language is at hand. Although I have surrounded this definition with qualifications and do indeed regard it as relative to this case, I would not like to imply that it is quite worthless in other cases. Indeed, it may well be that this definition provides such a useful tool for investigating the overall literary effect of Piers Plowman that it may be useful with reference to other satires too. But such an argument would be an extension of the investigation that is made in this essay, and while I shall foreshadow such an extension, space does not permit it here. Perhaps the limitations of space are beneficial, for satire is so protean that a wider discussion of it may be dangerous, the danger lying in the fact that a search for a complex fact about many works might prevent us from apprehending an important fact about a single work. This essay sets out to explore the relation in Piers Plowman between the familiar satirical material of medieval tradition and the more adventurous material, equally familiar in other, but non-literary, medieval traditions, of theological investigation. It would be wise, however, to say at the beginning that Langland, like most great writers, is ahead of his critic in this enquiry; when we have diligently separated the modes and have, in the examiners’ jargon, compared and contrasted them, he finally shows us that they cannot be separated, that in his massive vision these literary modes stand related, as does the whole creation, and that their interrelation is the bold literary device by which the universe that is in his poem stands united. Satire is, in the sense defined above, a familiar enough thing in medieval literature. The transmission of the classical satirists certainly faltered after the disintegration of the Roman Empire, but it never failed entirely.2 Although one can never assume that a medieval writer who refers to a text, or who even quotes a text, has ever had the text in front of him, there is ample evidence that the major Roman satirists were well enough known. Juvenal and Persius are solidly in the mainstream of what Curtius characterises as the ‘curriculum’, the great tradition of ancient authors who were read in the ‘grammar’ studies of the monastic, cathedral and secular schools. Martial too was a curriculum author, though not a major one, and Horace was primarily known to the Middle Ages as a satirist: in one of those quirks of cultural history, his odes were not well-known.3 It is true that grammar, 2 Gilbert Highet’s book Juvenal the Satirist: A Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954) devotes a long section to Juvenal’s survival, which may be taken as paradigmatic for the fortunes of Roman satire in the Middle Ages; see Part 3, especially pp. 180–205. 3 E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Trask (London: Routledge, 1953), pp. 49–50.

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as the Middle Ages understood it, fell out of favour in the developing universities, but by then the satirists had been absorbed into medieval Latin culture as a whole and had been taken in, to a good degree, to the corpus of cultural material that church-related education transmitted.4 These writers were hardly a major source of literary influence, however, and there is no question, in the Middle Ages, of imitating the classical satirists, as later centuries were to do. The point is that, however tenuous the transmission, the classical satirists provided a firm basis of ‘auctoritee’ for criticism of the state and, to some extent, a model of how to go about it, though not many Christian moralists needed much suggestion in how to criticise the follies of their ages. The writers of Latin moral poetry in the early Middle Ages keep alive the traditions of public criticism and the earliest Middle English poems show that the tradition is vigorous. There is, of course, a good deal of evidence that early medieval English was relatively rich in poetry of moral criticism – Poema Morale, Ormulum and Cursor Mundi are an adequate testimony to the existence of the didactic spirit in the early Middle Ages. The extreme gravity of these poems and in particular the thinness of the fictional element in them might seem to exclude them from the satirical mode. John Peter found it easier to call poems like this ‘complaints’,5 and one can see some point in doing this. Yet, as is plain in Piers Plowman, the fictional mode that is here called satire draws its material very largely from the literature of plain moral statement: indeed at times all satirists seem to break the bonds of their fiction and to speak directly to their audience. The categories of satire and complaint are not discrete, as the reviewers of Peter’s book pointed out,6 and it is important to realise that, at least in the Christian environment, complaint and satire are closely interwoven. The increasing evidence of satire in the fourteenth century may well be partly an indication that more manuscripts were surviving, rather than that satire was growing in strength, but the increasing number of satirical lyrics in this period, both secular and religious, shows a lusty tradition,7 and the end of the century sees satire flourish, as is shown by the quantity of manuscripts of Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales. Gower is a notable exponent of the genre:

4 As Highet shows, pp. 191–203. 5 John Peter, Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956). 6 See the review by J. Kinsley and S. W. Dawson, Review of English Studies, 9 (1958), 60–3 and that by Sears Jayne, Modern Philology, 4 (1957–58), 200–2. 7 A number of the lyrics in the Vernon MS have strong satirical elements, see Carleton Brown, Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century, 2nd edition, revised by G. V. Smithers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), pp. 125–208. Many of the lyrics printed by R. H. Robbins in his edition of Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959) are satirical and there are a few satirical songs in his edition of Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952).

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apart from his satirical works in French and Latin, the Prologue to the Confessio Amantis is almost entirely satirical. In Dunbar and Henryson the Scots have the best satirists of the fifteenth century, and their work leads directly on to that of Skelton and Wyatt, who might be called the first of the English Renaissance satirists. There is no problem in seeing a general satiric tradition in this way, but when we look more closely at Piers Plowman in terms of time and place the poem seems, as it does in so many ways, rather challenging. Winner and Waster is generally thought to antedate the A-text, a moral alliterative poem which displays some fine touches of imagination as it discusses a limited topic with considerable point, but this is really all we can find in the way of a satirical tradition which the author probably knew well.8 There is a wider ambience to Piers Plowman which goes beyond literary satire, for a work like Trevisa’s translation of Richard FitzRalph’s attack on the friars9 seems in some places close to Langland’s observations on them; other evidence suggests that Langland may have had sympathies with Uthred de Boldon or even dealings with him.10 It is certainly out of this sort of thinking and writing that Piers Plowman is born, but there seem no specific references in the poem to any earlier English literary work. There are, of course poems which to a greater or lesser extent appear to be given inspiration by Langland: The Parlement of the Thre Ages, Mum and the Soothsegger, The Crowned King, Pierce the Plowman’s Crede and Death and Liffe are generally held to be examples of this.11 It is rather hard to believe, though, that Langland’s poem alone sparked off a revival of moral alliterative poetry, especially when so much alliterative poetry exists in other modes and when the Gawain group, culturally isolated though it seems to be, is so strongly moral. It is also hard to believe that ‘In a somer sesoun whanne softe was the sonne’ was the first line of poetry Langland ever wrote, but in neither case can one plead on negative evidence. Rather one must look internally in the poem and see how familiar Langland’s satirical method is in contemporary terms: this will show that it is when he extends the scope of contemporary satire that he most clearly states his position as a major poet; but before seeing just how

8 On this topic see S. S. Hussey, ‘Langland’s Reading of Alliterative Poetry’, Modern Language Review, 9 (1965), 163–70 and Elizabeth Salter, ‘Piers Plowman and The Simonie’, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 203 (1967), 241–254. 9 Defensio Curatorum in Early English Texts Society, Original Series, 167 (London: Oxford University Press, 1925). 10 See G. H. Russell, ‘The Salvation of the Heathen: The Exploration of a Theme in Piers Plowman’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 29 (1966), 101–16, especially pp. 112–116. 11 In his book Alliterative Poetry in Middle English: A Survey of the Traditions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1935), J. P. Oakden identifies these poems as being ‘The Piers Plowman Group’, though he considers Richard the Redeles and Mum and the Soothsegger to be separate poems; part 2, p. 178.

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Langland develops satire it is first necessary to establish the basic nature of the satire in the poem.

2 The Dreamer’s initial visionary experience occupies the first five passūs of the poem, and announces itself as having a worldly concern:12 Al the welthe of this worlde and the woo bothe, Wynkyng as it were, wyterly ich saw hyt. Of tryuthe and of tricherye, of tresoun and of gyle, Al ich saw slepynge as ich shal ƺow telle. I.10–13 This sounds like the opening of a formal satire on the foibles of the world, and the things that the Dreamer sees strengthen that impression. A preliminary part of this vision is one of symbolic right and wrong: Esteward ich byhulde, after the sonne, And sawe a toure, as ich trowede, truthe was therynne; Westwarde ich waitede in a whyle after, And sawe a deep dale; deth, as ich lyuede, Wonede in tho wones and wyckede spiritus. I.14–18 These lines arouse suggestions of meaning deeper than ‘the welthe of this worlde and the woo bothe’, suggestions which Langland is to follow up later, but for the moment these observations stand in the context merely as if they give authority to the implicit judgments the author is making. He goes on to reveal, in a familiar manner, the estates of medieval society. The Dreamer first sees the ploughmen who: . . . putte hem to plow and pleiden ful seylde, In settyng and in sowyng swonken ful harde, And wonne that thuse wasters with glotenye destroyeth. I.22–4

12 I quote from Skeat’s C-text for two reasons: firstly because until the new editions of B and C appear Skeat’s C-text seems textually the most reliable, and secondly because it now seems possible to accept as a premise that this text is Langland’s last word on his topic: see George Kane, Piers Plowman: The Evidence for Authorship (London: Athlone Press, 1965), and G. H. Russell, ‘Some Aspects of the Revision of Piers Plowman’, in Piers Plowman: Critical Approaches, ed. by S. S. Hussey (London: Methuen, 1969), pp. 27–49.

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The Dreamer’s eye passes over other practisers of the active life until he comes to the second estate of the medieval world, the clergy: I fonde ther frerus, alle the foure ordres, Prechynge the peple for profit of the wombe, And glosynge the godspel as hem good lykede. I.156–8 After a fierce revelation of the failings of the clerical life the satire passes on to the estate of nobility: Thanne cam ther a kyng, knyƺthod hym ladde. The muche myƺte of the men made hym to regne. I.139–40 This division into estates has to some extent been obscured by the revisions which have made the first passus a rather ragged affair in C,13 and another factor which obscures the simple satiric pattern is Langland’s discursive style, for he deals with a number of types of people under each category. The inclusion of hermits under the ploughmen section might seem to upset the estate-satire system, but it seems clear that Langland is referring to those who were not born to clerical rank (as he feels clerics should be, see VI.63–79) but who undertake to worship God by simple actions, those who: . . . for the loue of oure lorde lyueden ful harde. In hope to haue a gode ende and heuene-ryche blysse. I.28–9 In this first passus Langland asserts very strongly that he is a satirist, not only by what he states, but also by the vigour with which he states it. It is a densely packed vision of England, full of movement, of quickly changing scenes, and it comes to a fine confused climax: Kokes and here knaues crieden ‘hote pyes, hote! Good goos and grys, go we dyne, gowe!’ Tauerners – ‘a tast for nouht’ – tolden the same, ‘Whit wyn of Oseye and of Gascoyne, 13 A only barely mentions the land-owning class (line 96 in Kane’s edition), but although B and C discuss this estate at length, the other additions they make tend to obscure this potentially greater clarity; the rats’ fable has this effect, and C, which gives Conscience a good deal to say which was merely described in B, and also includes the Ophni and Fineas passage in the speech (lines 103–24), is even more formless.

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Of the Ruele and of the Rochel wyn, the roste to defye’. Al this ich sauh slepynge and seuene sythes more. I.226–31 The extra alliteration we find here and the frequent use of extra syllables, especially in the first half-line, impress the whirling vigour of the scene on the reader; Langland is talking about the world and is talking with authority because he has the poetic power to create the clamour of the London streets and the confused, fast-moving picture of medieval England in his field-full of folk. But the noise of the ending and the pace of the whole passus do not fully conceal the careful satiric structure, which represents the three estates of England. In order to suggest a microcosmic view of the country Langland uses the same satiric pattern that Gower does in the Prologue to the Confessio Amantis and the same pattern that Chaucer suggests by having three immaculate men of the three estates on his pilgrimage, men who are described ethically, with little or no physical detail – Parson, Knight and Ploughman. If Langland had continued his poem in this vein then he would have a high place among English satirists; but his plan is different. His wish is to talk less about things and more about meanings: What the montayne bymeneth and the merke dale, And the feld ful of folke, ich shal ƺow fayre shewe. II.1–2 The briefly-mentioned large symbols of the field, the tower and the dale, are brought back into the focus of the poem and, just as would happen in a morality play, a figure of authority comes ‘doun fro that castel’ and addresses the representative of humanum genus who stands puzzling, as it were in the centre of the stage.14 Lady Holy Church is a figure of great authority and she addresses the Dreamer now: the nature of her address shows very clearly the scope of Langland’s ambitions. The early part of her speech seems to provide a gloss on the first passus,15 but then she turns to a loftier topic; she closes with a message which states in ineffable simplicity the centre of the Christian mystery: Alle that worchen that wikkede ys wenden thei shulle After hure deth-day and dwelle ther wrong ys; And alle that han wel ywroght wenden they shulle Estwarde to heuene euere to abyde, Ther treuthe is, the trone that trinite ynne sitteth. 14 This is a mutation of the scene which is suggestively dream-like: it is hardly what is implied by the ‘toure on a toft’ in the first passus. 15 For a detailed exposition of this, see T. P. Dunning, Piers Plowman: An Interpretation of the A-Text (London: Longmans, 1937), especially pp. 31–51.

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Lere it thus lewede men, for lettrede hit knoweth, Than treuthe and trewe loue ys no tresour bettere. II.130–6 This is reminiscent of the opening description of the symbolic field, and in a lesser writer this would be the end of the poem; the satire of the first passus has been topped off by a suitable interpretation. But Langland is harder to satisfy than that: we have a long way to go. This speech may state truths, but it does not explain them, and the Dreamer, ‘Will’, allegorically possessed only of volition, is naturally baffled. But Holy Church is not the person to undertake his education, it seems, for in a passage of unique power Langland ends the passus with a long series of images where Holy Church almost sings in honour of love. Here, already, is some of Langland’s finest poetry, here we find images of great delicacy: Loue is the plonte of pees, and most preciouse of vertues; For heuene holde hit ne myƺte, so heuy hit semede, Til hit hadde on erthe ƺoten hymselue. Was neuere lef vpon lynde lyghter thereafter, As whanne hit hadde of the folde flesche and blod ytake; Tho was it portatyf and pershaunt as the poynt of a nelde, May non armure hit lette nother hye walles. II.149–55 And here also we find images of great bluntness: Thauh ƺe be trewe of ƺoure tonge and trewelich wynne, And be as chast as a chyld that nother chit ne fyghteth, Bote yf ƺe loue leelliche and lene the poure, Of such good as god sent goodliche parte, ƺe haue no more meryt in masse ne in houres Than Malkyn of hure maidenhod wham no man desireth. II.176–81 The passage ends in a crescendo of images: So loue ys lech of lyue and lysse of alle peyne, And the graffe of grace and graythest wey to heuene. II.200–01 The effect is more like the lyrics of the school of Rolle than anything else.16 16 Carleton Brown, in Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century, prints a number of lyrics of this sort, e.g. ‘A Lament over the Passion’ (pp. 94–5), ‘A Song of the Love of Jesus’ (pp. 102–06) and ‘A Salutation to Jesus’ (pp. 106–07).

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Rather than explain, Holy Church celebrates the mystery of love in an almost liturgical fashion, which is splendidly appropriate to her as an allegorical figure. In some sense Holy Church’s speech throughout this passus is an epigraph to the whole poem, an epigraph which we will not understand until the very end, when Holy Church appears again in a very different guise. She is the first allegorical figure the Dreamer meets and she will be the last, in passus XXII, when he finally enters the edifice of Holy Church. Her early appearance here is something of a statement of intention by Langland: he is writing satire, it is true, but he is also writing theology. The ranking of the two modes seems at this stage self-evident, but this does not mean that satire is worthless, for once Holy Church has made her speech – a formal declaration, as it were, that the allegory is wide-ranging and is to be complex – the mode of the poem comes sharply back to that of the first passus. The start of the Dreamer’s education is ‘to knowe the false’, and when Holy Church has effected the transition from her natural mode back to the mode of plain satire, she vanishes from the scene. The level of the whole discussion of Meed is material satire, and the misuse of worldly wealth is the first issue: Tomorwe worth Mede wedded to a mansed wrecche, To on Fals Faithles of the feendes kynne. III.41–3 Throughout a passage of mounting speed the bad characteristics of Meed are set out until the criticism of Theology gives rise to the remarkable scene where Langland shows how Meed and her rout go into action: Meed herself speaks: And ich myself Cyuyle and Symonye my felawe Wollen ryden vpon rectours and riche men deuoutours, And notories on persons that permuten ofte, And on poure prouysors and on apeles in the arches. Somenours and southdenes that supersedeas taketh On hem that louyeth lecherie lepeth vp and rydeth, On executores and suche men cometh softliche after. And let cople the comissarie, oure cart shal he drawe, And fecche forth oure vitailes of fornicatores. Maketh of Lyer a lang cart to lede alle these othere, As fobbes and faitours that on hure fet rennen. III.183–93 Here Langland works brilliantly at the satirical level; the abstract figures of the personified allegory who have been condemned by the lofty agency of Theology are brought home firmly into fourteenth-century reality and, as before, a wild and somewhat comic confusion suggests the frenzied activity that is typical of the 29

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corrupt world.17 This vigorous strain is maintained throughout the passus, and reaches a fine climax at the end when the rout of Meed is dispersed – Liar, characteristically, gets away and begins a long and successful business career: Lyghtliche Lyere lep awey thennes, Lorkynge thorw lanes, to-logged of menye. He was nawher welcome for hus meny tales, Oueral houted out and yhote trusse, Til pardoners hadden pitte and pullede hym to house. III.225–9 It is, of course, necessary to go outside the material world to find the standards by which to dismiss Meed and materialism; Langland shows us this skilfully by illustrating how Meed can controvert Conscience’s arguments against her when they are themselves materially based. Her answer is so effective that the King observes: . . . by Cryst, at my knowynge, Mede ys worthy, me thynketh, the maistrye to haue. IV.285–6 Conscience answers this by making in the first place a very delicate distinction between the categories of reward, but then he goes on to raise the level of discussion and outlines the proper courses of the Christian: And man ys relatif rect yf he be ryht trewe; He acordeth with Crist in kynde, uerbum caro factum est; In case, credere in ecclesia, in holy kirke to byleyue; In numbre, rotie and aryse and remyssion to haue Of oure sory synnes, asoiled and clansed, And lyue, as oure crede ous kenneth, with Crist withouten ende. IV.357–62 This deepening of the discussion does not, however, indicate a shift in the nature of this dream – it is merely an appeal to a higher authority, for the dream goes on in its satirical way. Langland maintains a sense of strict verisimilitude in the next passus, for before the case of Conscience v. Meed can ‘get on’, we hear an earlier case in the same court. The case of Peace v. Wrong deals very much with contemporary realities, for Peace here is the concept represented in ‘the King’s peace’ or ‘a breach of the 17 This is all reminiscent of some of the comic scenes in the medieval drama; the comedy of the vice in the morality plays is perhaps one example, but closer analogues come from the miracle plays: see in particular V. A. Kolve’s discussion in The Play Called Corpus Christi (London: Arnold, 1966), Chap. 7.

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peace’. Wrong has ‘rauyschede Rose, the riche wydewe’ and has indulged in a whole catalogue of lively medieval crimes. The sense of medieval England – and the struggles for power that went on in it – is very strong here, and, when Meed steps in with an offer of settlement and Peace is happy, that is peaceful, enough to accept, Langland shows with a deft stroke that this whole scene has not been one of the law’s delays, but is directly relevant to the larger issues of the dream. But, says the King, ‘for conscience’s sake’ Wrong will not get off so lightly; Meed shall not guide the course of law in any way. Throughout scenes like this there is a passionate and detailed concern with the running of the country: Langland is agitated by the way in which the exchange of money can suppress true justice, can interfere with that deep-based natural law in which every Christian inevitably believes. Never a man to do things by half, Langland includes a good deal of precise exhortation – he attacks the people who buy what passes for absolution by building fine windows in churches: Ac god to alle good folke suche grauynge defendeth, To wryten in wyndowes of eny wel dedes, Leste prude by peyntid there and pompe of the worlde. IV.68–70 The prohibition is timely, for Meed has said about lechery: ‘Hit ys synne as of seuene non soner relesed. Haue mercy’, quath Mede, ‘on men that hit haunten, And ich shal keuery ƺoure kirke and ƺoure cloistre maken, Both wyndowes and wowes ich wolle amenden and glase’. IV.62–5 In a similar vein, Langland shows a remarkable passion for minutiae when he recommends a close check on the characters of merchants, to avoid accidental deaths being caused when righteous fire visits the houses of evil men: Forthy mayres that maken free men, me thynketh that thai ouhten For to spure and aspye, for any speche of seluer, What manere mester other merchaundise he vsede, Er he were vnderfonge free and felawe in ƺoure rolles. IV.108–11 He talks on this level at the very end of the dream, for even after Meed has been dismissed Reason makes a pragmatic final speech, urging that the King should free himself of capitalistic pressures: And ich dar legge my lyf that Loue wol lene the suluer, To wage thyne, and helpe wynne that thow wilnest after, 31

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More than al thy marchauns other thy mytrede bisshopes, Other Lumbardes of Lukes that lyuen by lone as Iewes. V.191–4 It is an appropriate end for a dream which has very plainly dealt with the proper running of the Christian commonwealth, with the establishment of natural law in England. As in any Christian political writing, reference must be made to the sources of that natural law, the spiritual authorities must be referred to, but this in no way alters the tone of the dream, one of satire.

3 The interesting bridge passage between the first two dreams in the C-text provides the first suggestion that the poet is now to move away from traditional satire as he has shown it in the first dream. In this passage of waking allegory the poet appears to probe his own motives and seems to provide his own justification for being a poet: And ƺut fond ich neuere in faith, sytthen my frendes deyden, Lyf that my lyked, bote in thes longe clothes. Yf ich by laboure sholde lyue and lyflode deseruen, That labour that ich lerned best, therwith lyue ich sholde. VI.40–43 This scrutiny of his own life and the verification by Reason and Conscience that he is doing the right thing set very firmly the tone for the next dream. Satire is still, largely, the mode, but now the satire is directed towards the individual and his own needs and duties – the satire is no longer political in the widest sense. The opening sequence of the dream in passus VI is a massive sermon by Reason. This is set in the field of folk and Reason, supported by Conscience, stands before the King. One of the C-text’s revisions is to make this scene more obviously follow on from the previous dream, and the sense is strong that this is a new stage in the examination of life that the Dreamer began back in the first passus.18 Reason now speaks to all, not just to the King: Ac ich shal seye as ich seih, slepynge as it were, How Reson radde al the reame ryght for to lyuen. VI.125–6 As Conscience did before, so Reason appeals to a high authority when he says:

18 In A, Conscience preaches with a ‘crois’; in B Reason preaches with a ‘crosse’, but in C Reason preaches ‘reuested rƺyt’ as a pope and ‘Conscience his crocer’ stands before the king. C is thus more precisely referring back to the first dream.

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Ac ƺut shal come a kyng and confesse ƺow alle, And bete ƺow, as the byble telleth, for brekyng of ƺoure reule, And amende ƺow monkes, moniales and chanons, And putte ƺow to ƺoure penaunce, ad pristinum statum ire. VI.169–72 Although sixteenth-century men self-indulgently interpreted this as a foresight of their own reforming activities, it refers in fact to a defender of the faith greater than Henry VIII. The allegory is taking place in the light of heaven, yet so far that light is only used to look more clearly at earthly things. The confession of the sins which follows is a directly personal sort of satire; often comical and often biting, here Langland sets out the typical failings of the medieval Christian. There is a strong grotesque element, for satire commonly exaggerates, and some readers find this to be the most potent sequence in the whole poem, as Langland creates the vivid and often revolting world of the ordinary man: Tho Clement the cobelere cauhte hym by the mydel, For to lyfte hym on loft he leyde hym on hus knees; Ac Gloton was a gret cherl and gronyd in the liftynge, And couhed vp a caudel in Clementes lappe; Ys non so hongry hounde in Hertfordeshire That thorst lappe of that leuynge, so vnloueliche hit smauhte. With al the wo of the worlde, hus wif and hus wenche Bere hym to hus bedde and brouhte hym therynne; And after al this excesse he hadde an accidie, He slep Saterday and Sonday tyl sonne ƺede to reste. Thenne awakyde he wel wan and wolde haue ydronke; The ferst word that he spak was, ‘ho halt the bolle?’ VII.409–20 Langland is not indulging in unpleasantness just for the sake of it. To create in verse this sort of scene is to give the poet an unshakeable hold on reality; the ordinary life of ordinary people is embraced in the poem, for Langland is filled with that human interest which Johnson found lacking in Paradise Lost. This means that the satire is successfully realised in the poem, and this is of great effect, for throughout this whole dream Langland reveals a depth of understanding that seems to qualify him very strongly to talk about all levels of society. There is not only the rather mordant insight that the confession of the sins reveals: there are also passages which reveal a deep concern with ordinary people, and the finest of these deserves full quotation: The most needy aren oure neighebores, and we nyme good hede, As prisones in puttes and poure folke in cotes, Charged with children and chef lordes rente, 33

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That thei with spynnynge may spare spenen hit in hous-hyre, Bothe in mylk and in mele to make with papelotes, To aglotye with here gurles that greden after fode. Also hemselue suffren muche hunger, And wo in winter-tyme, with wakynge a nyghtes To ryse to the ruel to rocke the cradel, Bothe to karde and to kembe, to clouten and to wasche, To rubbe and to rely, russhes to pilie, That reuthe is to rede othere in ryme shewe The wo of these women that wonyeth in cotes; And of meny other men that muche wo suffren, Bothe afyngrede and afurst, to turne the fayre outwarde, And beth abasshed for to begge, and wolle nat be aknowe What hem needeth at here neihebores at non and at euen. X.71–87 In poetry like this Langland creates, rather than states, a sense of charity and of passion in his poem; and it is from this source, from the fact that he both understands and feels for the ordinary people, that his examination of the duties of humanity draws so much of its conviction. This examination is the main part of this dream, in fact, for once the seven deadly sins have confessed, the destructive criticism is over and we see the rather sad spectacle of humanity looking for a better part, casting around for constructive criticism: A thousand of men tho throngen togederes, Cryyng vpward to Crist and to hus clene moder, To haue grace to go to Treuthe; god leyue that thai mote! Ac ther was weye non so wys that the way thider couthe, Bote blostrede forth as bestes ouer baches and hulles. VIII.155–9 It is Piers Plowman himself who helps these people out of their bestial confusion and who sets out the duties of the world. The constructive element of the satire is laid out strongly and clearly – each person has his particular duty and Piers is the arbiter. This whole long sequence is very much in terms of temporal duties, and it seems that things are being sorted out well. True, it is not easy to control Hunger, as Piers finds, but there is the promise of a pardon from Truth and the poem seems to be drawing to a satisfactory conclusion. We are, it seems, deliberately led into believing that the coming pardon will end all problems: so much stress is placed on each person’s temporal duty that, by a kind of suppressio veri, we are led to believe that this is all that is their duty. Also the last passus of this second dream gives a very long account of those who will receive the pardon and those who will not – the validity of the pardon 34

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is an unspoken assumption throughout.19 At one moment even Piers takes on an anagogical significance in this dream, as it is suggested that work alone will bring men to heaven: Atte hye pryme Peers let the plouh stonde, And ouer-seyh hem hymself; ho so best wrouhte, He sholde be hyred therafter when heruest-tyme come. IX.119–21 The first dream, we might recall, told us truths, but not the complete truth, for it was necessary to go on and look at the Christian life of the individual after discussing the life of the state. And the same is true here: the pardon from Truth is, in a sense, illusory, for it merely suggests that the poem has not yet fully discovered what it is to do well.20 In one of those enigmatic climaxes that Langland seems to enjoy, when things are found to be not what they seemed, Piers himself is baffled. The satirical mode, we find, has not given us the whole truth, for it has dealt only in temporalities and in deeds. As the poem moves on into the ‘Vision of Do Well’ (as it seems to be most reliably called)21 the satiric mode no longer holds the centre of the poem. The poem changes to a more intellectual mode, to an attempt to find by cerebral means just what more is needed, just what the Christian life does entail as well as good deeds.

4 It is a highly dramatic change, of course, rather like the earlier moment when we found that Meed was not quite as simple as she seemed, but could do good things as well as bad.22 This sort of climax seems to have appealed to a love of paradox in Langland’s mind, and it is certainly effective in showing that we have all been taken in, have accepted a simplistic process. The audience is made to experience

19 This is particularly effective in C, where the discussion of those who will receive the pardon is greatly extended, see C X.186–281. 20 There now seems to be a general agreement on the meaning of the pardon scene, see Dunning, pp. 145–52, and for an authoritative analysis R. W. Frank, Piers Plowman and the Scheme of Salvation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), pp. 22–33. There is an omission here in the C-text, as if the A/B version is too complicated and allusive, and so any study based on C has to be cautious in discussing the pardon. But it seems that the general effect in C is the same as A/B. 21 The A manuscripts which name this section of the poem all call it the Vita (see Kane’s edition, pp. 1–18). The B and C versions seem to use the term Visio when they use a term at all. Many critics have spoken of the ‘lives’ of Do Well, Bet and Best, but the B and C texts do not divide the manuscripts in this way. This does not mean, of course, that the poem is not divided in this way, though it might make it seem rather less likely. The exact connotation of the manuscript divisions in the continuation of the poem is a difficult problem and may well be an important one, but it is one that cannot really be discussed adequately until the new editions of B and C appear. 22 I have in mind Meed’s speech against Conscience, IV.221–84.

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the sudden turn of the argument, for with a shock we are shown that things are not nearly over – we are just getting down to the really difficult business. The forthcoming business of the poem is clearly not satirical, though satire is still used from time to time for various purposes. Satire is not set aside, but it is not a total answer. Those earlier moments, when the immaterial was used as brief authority, are now to grow into the central issues of the poem: the Christian’s spiritual duty and the mechanics of salvation are the issues to be taken up now. But in the difficult passūs which follow, the poet’s credibility as an investigator depends on the force and fire with which he has characterised ordinary life in the preceding passūs; the way in which he writes satire gives him the basis of reality from which he can move into much more difficult fields. The theology rises out of the satire and, as we shall see, deliberately refuses to lose contact with it. At the beginning of Dowel, Thought rephrases much of the material of the first two dreams, as the Dreamer thinks over what he has seen. But as soon as new faculties are applied to the problems at hand, new sorts of answers are provided; Wit gives a much more cerebral analysis than any we have seen before: ‘Syre dowel dwelleth’, quath Wit, ‘nat a daye hennes, In a castle that Kynde made of foure kyne thynges, Of erthe, of aier yt is made, medled togederes, With wynd and water wittyliche enioyned. Kynde hath closed therynne craftilyche with alle A lemman that he loueth wel, lyke to hymselue. Anima hue hatte; to hure hath enuye A prout prikyere of Fraunce, princeps huius mundi’. XI.127–34 This sort of discussion is typical of what is to follow in the next few passūs: to an extent they are the theoretical centre of the work, as Langland seeks to explain and justify positions which are essential to his whole poem. But this does not mean that the satiric mode is abandoned for the theological mode. Rather, satire continues in a subservient character, for Langland introduces a good deal of detailed material from everyday life both to supplement what he is saying in theory and also to retain artistic hold of that real world, to which the theory must ultimately apply, or be worthless. Having spoken of ‘Kynde’, that great natural force, at some length, Langland makes, by a direct word-play, a transition to a much more mundane discussion: Ho so lyueth in lawe and in loue doth wel As these weddid men that this worlde susteynen? For of here kynde thei come, confessours and martyres, Patriarkes and prophetes, popes and maidenes. XI.203–06

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This begins a long discussion of matrimony, of the proper times for conception and of contemporary vices connected with marriage. It is a passage which could well come from the second dream but here it stands as a large counter-balance to the theoretical material that has been put forward. It does, though, stand rather clumsily in the passus, for the word-play which introduces the discussion is hardly convincing and the transition back to the theoretical study of Dowel is even less skilfully done: And thus ys Dowel, my frend, to do as lawe techeth, To louye and to lowe the and no lyf to greue. Ac to louye and to lene, leyf me, that is Dobet; Ac to ƺeue and to ƺeme bothe ƺonge and olde, Helen and helpen, is Dobest of all. XI.304–08 Perhaps here, where Langland writes clumsily, his intention is most clear, for artistic fluency has not obscured the sinews of his argument. It seems he is very concerned to maintain a connection with the real world of men and women that has been discussed in the first two dreams. Obviously a discussion as complex as the one which is proceeding at this time must deal very much in pure theory, but the poet seems unwilling to be completely esoteric for a long period. The abstract unity of the passus might have been much improved by the absence of this discussion of marriage, but, clumsy as it is, it appears to suit Langland’s purposes to include it, for in this way the real can subsist in the poem along with the theoretical. The centre of this whole sequence of the poem is the growth of two ideas; the first is the questioning of the value of ratiocination, for substantial doubts are raised about the value of reason in the theological context. It is Study who says plainly: Ac Theologie hath teened me ten score tymes, The more ich muse theron, the mystiloker hit semeth, And the deppere ich deuyne, the derker me thynketh hit. Hit is no science sothliche, bote a sothfast byleuye; Ac for hit lereth men to louye ich byleyue theron the bettere. XII.129–33 Arising from this argument, Langland, in another passage of paradox, shows that the apparently worthless characteristic of Recklessness can come very close to holiness, for it is this enigmatic figure who first broaches the issue of Patient Poverty, that important theme in the poem. Finally, Ymagynatyf sums up this long sequence of argument; he accepts some of Recklessness’s points but also shows that the overall reasoned case has its value, provided it is within the framework of

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true faith – his words are the synthesis of the conflicting strands of argument that Langland has laid out before us: So grace is a gyfte of god and kynde witt a chaunce, And cleregye and connyng of kynde wittes techynge. And ƺut is cleregie to comende, for Cristes loue, more Than eny connynge of kynde witt, bote cleregie hit ruwele. XV.33–6 Throughout this elevated conceptual discussion, which quite self-consciously at times mirrors the summa of the medieval theologians, there is another strand working, that strand of simple material discussion which has here been called satire. In passus XIII there is a passage of pseudo-autobiography23 before the long speech of Recklessness is sprung upon the reader. We hear how the Dreamer himself is led astray and in particular we hear how the friars have cordially assisted him in his errors: By so thow riche were, haue thow no conscience How that thow come to good; confesse the to som frere, He shal asoile the thus sone, how so thow euere wynne hit. XIII.5–7 A similar effect is created when Recklessness uses a very mundane image, exemplifying the virtues of poverty by suggesting a messenger can conduct his business much more quickly than a merchant, and can also walk without fear of robbery; this illustrates . . . the poure pacient purgatorye passeth Rathere than the ryche, thauh thei renne at ones. XIV.31–2 This is an extended exemplary metaphor in the manner of the sermon, and it performs in the poem all the services that the humble exemplum can perform for the preacher: it explains and clarifies and it keeps the audience in touch with the continuing argument.24 A function very similar to this is performed by the use of large images; indeed the image and the exemplum often merge together. The concrete imagery that 23 In The Autobiographical Fallacy in Chaucer and Langland Studies (London: Lewis, 1956) George Kane has effectively shown that we should use a term like pseudo-autobiography in a case like this. 24 The locus classicus is G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), especially Chap. 4, ‘Fiction and Instruction in the Sermon Exempla’.

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Langland uses throughout the satirical parts of the poem has been discussed to some extent by Langland scholars, but it is interesting to see that the same vivid flair continues throughout a sequence of very different general tone.25 Thus an extended image concerning types of seeds is used in passus XIII to illustrate the advantages of suffering: Ac seedes that been sowen and mowe suffre wyntres, Aren tydyour and tower to mannes byhofthe Than seedes that sowen beeth and mowe nouht with forstes, With wyndes ne with wederes, as in wynter-tyme; As lynne-seed and lik-seed and lente-seedes alle Aren nouht so worthy as whete, ne so wel mowen In the feld with the forst and hit freese longe. Ryght so, for sothe, that suffre may penaunces Worth alowed of oure lorde at here laste ende. XIII.186–94 And Langland says pithily of clerics who become greedy businessmen: Right as weodes wexen in wose and in donge, So of rychesse vpon richesse arisen al vices. XIII.229–30 Here the realistic touches, familiar in the satiric mode, add weight to the theory, but more interesting are moments when it seems that, after the theorisation has been made, the issue returns to satire. Thus at the end of Recklessness’s very long speech he assures the clergy that if they perform their jobs properly, they will not go hungry: . . . yf thay trauaile treweliche and tristen in god almyghty; Hem sholde neuere lackye lyflode, nother lynnen ne wollene. The title that ƺe taketh ƺoure ordres by telleth ƺe beth auaunced, And needeth nat to nyme seluer for masses that ƺe syngen; For he that tok ƺow title sholde take ƺow wages, Other the bisshop that blessed ƺow and enbaumede ƺoure fyngeres. XIV.102–07 25 Langland’s imagery has been discussed to some extent by Elizabeth Salter, Piers Plowman: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), especially pp. 48–52. There have been other discussions of elements of the imagery, like E. T. Donaldson’s examination of the minstrel images in Piers Plowman: The C-Text and Its Poet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), pp. 147–53 and R. E. Kaske, ‘The Use of Simple Figures of Speech in Piers Plowman B: A Study in the Figurative Expression of Ideas and Opinions’, Studies in Philology, 48 (1951), 571–600, but a full literary discussion, similar to Caroline Spurgeon’s analyses of Shakespeare’s imagery, would be very welcome.

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The topic here is a very detailed and a very practical one: the poet recognises the reasonable concern of priests for a living wage. It is reminiscent of the attitude in the first dream, where Langland had a practical eye to the ordering of the state. This is really the first re-entry of the satiric mode into the centre of the poem for a good while, and that it is no accident is shown by the end of Ymagynatyf’s speech. Here the Dreamer is being urged to accept the world, not to question it too much (a lesson he has been given before, but has hardly heeded, see XIII. 32 et seq.) and one of the issues he is to accept is the mysterious working of salvation: And where hit worth other nat worth, the byleyue is gret of treuthe, And hope hongeth ay theron to haue that treuthe deserueth; Quia super pauca fidelis fuisti, supra multa te constituam. XV.213–15 But the other issue is more mundane: he is to accept the ordering of life on earth, unjust as it may seem, for life on earth is ordered in the light of eternity: . . . the pokok and the popeiay, with here proude federes, Bytokneth ryght riche men that regnen here on erthe. For porsewe a pocok other a pohen to cacche, And haue hem in haste at thyn owene wil; For thei may nat fleo fer ne ful hye nother, For here fetheres that faire ben to fle fer hem letteth. XV.173–8 The reader must feel, on reading these passages, that the potent theology of the recent passūs has not been set out merely for its own sake: the poem may seem to be a summa in parts, but not here; it is looking again like a poem about the world and the way people live in it. This impression is greatly strengthened in the next major sequence of the poem, where Patient Poverty is confirmed as the only fit state of life for the ordinary Christian, where we discover, at last, what it is to Do Well – to live in a state of physical and spiritual humility.

5 The next dream is prefaced, as before, by a brief satirical glance at the corruption of the world, of the friars in particular,26 and then Langland plunges into a long dream sequence where, to a large extent, the poet brings together his realistic mode and his theoretical mode into a single domain. A barrage of concrete imagery introduces this structural theme as the Dreamer describes the dinner he attends:

26 XVI.9–12 discusses friars in detail; it is a short waking passage: Will falls asleep at line 25.

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Cleregie calde after mete, and thenne cam Scripture, And seruede hem thus sone of sondrie metes menie, Of Austyn, of Ambrosie, of alle the foure euangelies. XVI.43–5 But the master friar cannot eat this potent food: Ac here sauce was ouere-soure and vnsauerliche grounde, In a morter, post-mortem, of meny bitere peynes, XVI.49–50 The vivid opening to this dream leads into the important scene where Patience remonstrates with Activa-Vita (also called Haukyn in B). In this passage the poet condenses his two strands of thought, the satiric and the theological, into the one remarkable image of Patient Poverty: this is a state at once physical and spiritual, and it answers all man’s needs. The concept is put in some of Langland’s finest poetry, as Patience explains to Activa-Vita: For lent was ther neuere lyf bote lyflode were yshape, Wherof othere wherfore and wherwith to lyuen; The worme that woneth vnder erthe, and in water fisshes, The crykett by kynde of fur, and corlew by the wynde, Bestes by gras and by greyn and by grene rotes. In menynge that alle men myghte the same Lyuen thorgh leell byleyue, as oure lord wittnesseth. XVI.240–6 In answer to Activa Vita‘s question ‘“Have you any of that food with you?”’ Patience replies: ‘ƺe’, quath Pacience, and hente oute of hus poke A pece of the pater-noster and profrede to vs alle. XVI.248–9 The whole series of food-images that Langland has used for Christian faith and doctrine comes here to a paradoxical climax: this is not really an image at all, for we are being told that this is, indeed, sustenance, a sustenance which obviates the need for physical food. The establishment of this issue is really the end of the problem that was raised in the second dream – what is Dowel? This is the sustenance which replaces worry about physical issues. The point is pressed home at great length in the following passūs where Patience elaborates enormously the importance and the value of Patient Poverty. Again using a massive material image to create the spiritual world, and with that sense of the symbolism of the seasons that is so close to much 41

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medieval poetry,27 Patience states the unity of the creation, physical, climactic and spiritual: Muche myrthe is in May amonge wilde bestes, And so forth whil somer lasteth heore solace dureth; And muche myrthe amonge riche men is that han meoble ynow and heele. Ac beggers aboute Myd-somere, bredless thai soupe, And ƺut is wynter for hem wors, for wet-shood thai gangen, Afurst and afyngred and foule rebuked Of these worlde-riche men that reuthe hit is to huyre. Now, lord, send hem somer somtyme, to solace and to Ioye, That al here lyf leden in lowenesse and in pouerte! XVII.10–18 It is another of Langland’s dramatic paradoxes that the wretched poor of the first two satirical dreams here move into the theological spotlight: theirs is the state of grace now, their situation is not just one of the modes of physical life. This point is worth dallying on, for the stage is an important one. Langland has established to his own satisfaction what is the proper course of human life. And yet, as one so often has to say, he does not stop here. Problems have already been raised about the rationale of salvation, and the Dreamer has been told that it is a mystery which he should not presume to probe.28 Langland, therefore, does not probe it, but rather he undertakes to elaborate and celebrate the motive force behind the concept of salvation, the basic force of charity. Langland is at his most precisely allegorical here, for although it is Conscience, Clergy and Reason who have brought the Dreamer so far, it is Liberum Arbitrium, Free Will, who leads the Dreamer on, for only the freely-made choice can illuminate charity to the Christian – ‘“Credo ut intelligam”’ (‘I believe that I may understand’).29 The Dreamer speaks: ‘Leue Liberum Arbitrium’, quath ich, ‘ich leyue, as ich hope, Thou couthest telle and teche me to Charity, ich leyue?’ XIX.1–2 The slightly uncertain poetry here is not untypical of a good deal of the more conceptual passages of theology throughout this part of the poem; but although

27 There are obvious examples – Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, almost all of Chaucer’s works, The Testament of Cresseid and so on – but it is also common in lyrics and ballads for the season and climate to set the tone for the action and feeling of the whole piece. 28 Ymagynatyf has said this, XIV.230–4, and Study has implied it, XII.129–33. 29 David Knowles finds this to be the basic concept of St Anselm’s influential revitalising of Augustinian material in The Evolution of Medieval Thought (London: Longmans, 1962), especially pp. 98–106.

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it seems that at times Langland is not writing at his best, it is nevertheless easy enough to see what he is attempting to do, and perhaps one might suggest that the remarkable thing is that any of this difficult conceptual material rises to the level of good poetry, not that some of it is rather lame. The attempt is almost as confounding as the deed.

6 The poem had, for a while, picked up the satiric mode again as, in the large images of poverty and the humble life, the poet had stressed that the issues established theologically are to be lived in all the reality of the satiric world. But now Liberum Arbitrium moves on to more lofty theological issues. The immensely elaborate image of the Tree of Life introduces, and in its intricacy symbolises, a complex passage of theological discussion: the life of Christ up to Palm Sunday is interspersed with encounters with Faith and Hope, the two spiritual attributes basic to the Christian life, and finally the Dreamer encounters the Samaritan, type of Christ and the embodiment of charity, the summit of Christian virtues. The climax of this sequence, and the true climax of the poem, is the magnificent passus which recounts the Crucifixion and the Harrowing of Hell. Here Langland most clearly states his greatness as a poet, as his verse rises consistently to heights it has only suggested before and gives us a sustained poetic celebration of the central mystery of the Christian faith. Indeed, it seems that the magnificence of the passus is central to its meaning. There is no specific rational need to tell this story – the worst-informed of the audience would have been familiar with the details: the need is entirely poetic. The intensity of the concept of charity is created within the poem; it is not imported from outside, not accepted by hearsay. Langland recreates for us the very actions which bring charity and love into the world at their most intense. The passus is the keystone of the poem, for Langland’s authority as a poet derives ultimately from the quality of passages like Christ’s speech after the Harrowing, where we find that the alliterative line can achieve a remarkable height of style: And now bygynneth thi gyle agayn on the turne, And my grace to growe ay wydder and wydder. The biternesse that thow hast browe, now brouk hit thyself; That art doctour of deth, drynk that thow madest! For ich that am lord of lyf, loue is my drynke, And for that drynke todaye deyede, as hit semede; Ac ich wol drynke of no dich, ne of no deop cleregie, Bote of comune coppes, alle cristene soules; Ac thi drynke worth deth and deop helle thy bolle. Ich fauht so, me fursteth ƺut, for mannes soule sake; Sicio. May no pyement ne pomade ne presiouse drynkes 43

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Moyste me to the fulle, ne my thurst slake, Til the vendage valle in the vale of Josaphat, And drynke ryght rype most, resurreccio mortuorum. XXI.402–15 This is the summit of the theological mode in the poem and, as one might expect, this mode at its highest is, for a Christian poet, more inspiring and more farreaching than the satiric mode. The Dreamer is moved to prayer and the poem moves on into what the manuscripts call ‘Dobest’. Then, however, the poem’s tempo slackens, as the story of Christ’s life after the Resurrection is told at an intensity rather less than we have heard before. It is something of a poetical anti-climax: this may well be partly due to the difficulty of sustaining highly powered poetry over a good period, but it does have a successful pacing effect – the poem slows down here, for what is to follow is yet another dramatic turn. It is the last of these that Langland has for us, and it is quite the most effective, as he descends from the transports of theological celebration to the tragically mundane level at which he shows the state of the church on earth.

7 Satire comes back, and the rest of the poem is satire; the slowing of the poetical tempo in the first part of passus XXII seems to prepare us for the almost sickening anti-climax as we move from the exultation at the end of passus XXI to the revelation of the wretched state of human affairs. It is in the moment when Grace itself begins to counsel Piers Plowman that the poem moves back to its mundane sphere: For ich wolle dele today and diuyde grace To alle kynne creatures that can hus fif wittes; Tresour to lyue by to here lyues ende, And wepne to fight with that wol neuere faille. For Antecrist and hise shal al the worlde greue, And encombry the, Conscience, bote yf Crist the helpe. And fele false prophetes, flaterers and glosers Shullen come, and be curatours ouer kynges and erles. Thanne shal Pruyde be pope and pryns of holychurche, Couetise and Vnkyndenesse cardinales hym to lede. XXII.215–24 It is the specific nature of grace on earth that is found important: To somme men he ƺaf wit, with wordes to shewe, To wynne with truthe that the worlde asketh, As preostes and prechours and prentises of lawe, 44

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Thei to lyue leelly by labour of tounge, And by wit to wyssen other as Grace wolde hem teche. XXII.229–33 Langland, we see, has not forgotten ‘what the world asketh’. This is no mystical tract before us: it is a huge poem directed to the proper ordering of the Christian life – how it should be ordered and, above all, why it should be ordered in that way. Langland is not content to deal out injunctions; he has set out not so much to justify the ways of God to man, but rather to explain them. And having discussed the theoretical issues at such length and with such force, it is now time for him to turn back to material issues, to see just how human beings run their divinely organised world. The potency of the world is great, for man’s opportunities are huge – in a powerfully phrased conventional image Langland shows this: Grace gaf to Peers a teome of foure grete oxen; That on was Luc, a large beest and a louh-chered, Marc, and Matheu he thirde, myghty beestes bothe; And Ioyned til hem on Iohan, most gentil of alle. The prys neet of Peers plouh, passynge al othere. XXII.262–6 With such assistance the edifice of Holy Church is built, and the allegory makes it a barn, continuing to follow the strand of animal and vegetable imagery which has achieved the status of a major, and a majorly natural, theme in the poem: Now is Peeres to the plouh; Pruyde hit aspide, And gadered hym a gret ost; greuen he thenketh Conscience, and all Cristene and cardinale uertues, To blowen hem doun and breken hem and bite a-two the rotes. XXII.337–40 An apocalyptic battle ensues, a psychomachia which moves across the sociology and the history of medieval Europe.30 The forces of evil are described with rigorous satirical detail: The countrey is the corsedour ther cardinales cometh ynne; And ther thei liggen and lengen most lecherie ther regneth. XXII.419–20 During the hubbub the Dreamer himself enters the Church, but the end of his spiritual pilgrimage is far from the end of the poem: the battle rises to a crescendo 30 M. W. Bloomfield, in Piers Plowman as a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1961) gives a detailed analysis of this section of the poem, pp. 127–54.

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and finally, with that love of detail that so characterises Langland’s best satire, we are shown how one apparently small fault can destroy the defences of Holy Church. Contrition lies exhausted by ‘the plastres of the persoun’ and so a friar provides a more soothing balm: He goth and gropeth Contrition and gaf hym a piastre Of ‘a pryue payement and ich shal preye for ƺow, And for hem that ƺe aren holden to, al my lyf-tyme, And make ƺow my lady, in masse and in matynes, As freres of oure fraternite for a litel seluer’. Thus he goth and gadereth and gloseth ther he shryueth, Til Contrition hadde clene forƺute to crie and wepe and wake For hus wickede werkes as he was woned byfore. For comfort of hus confessour contricion he lefte, That is the souereyne salue for alle kynne synnes. Anon Sleuthe seih that and so dude Pruyde, And comen with a kene wil Conscience to assaile. XXIII.363–74 The poem has a gloomy end; here is no joyful ringing of bells and gathering of angels.31 Rather, there is a deliberately unsentimental assessment of the state of Christianity. Conscience alone, the individual’s sense of ultimate rightness, the voice of God in man, is left on the stage: ‘By crist’, quath Conscience tho, ‘ich wol bycome a pilgryme, And wenden as wide as the worlde regneth, To seke Peers the Plouhman that Pruyde myghte destruye’. XXIII.380–2 Conscience looks for that fit ecclesiastical authority symbolised by the ploughman, the man who approaches Christ and Peter most closely. But even these are not Langland’s last words – with a still determined sense for detail, for making each point conclusive, he makes Conscience continue: And that freres hadden a fyndynge that for neode flateren, And counterpleideth me, Conscience; nowe Kynde me avenge, And sende me hap and hele til ich haue Peers Plouhman! XXIII.383–5 Almost the last words of the poem point out that the real problem with the friars is an organisational one; they are forced to beg, and the transition is easy from holy 31 In this respect Piers Plowman is unlike The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Divine Comedy, and more like Paradise Lost.

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mendicancy to occupational mendicancy. The rule of the order, Langland implies, imposes conditions too strict for ordinary men.32 It is a charitable touch, even a very bold argument.33 But above all it is deeply serious and deeply practical, and it is only if we grasp the minute practicality of Langland’s work that we can grasp the totality, both low and high, that is Piers Plowman. Langland is a poet, but he is using his poetry to enforce his conceptual standpoint: the world, basically perfect and divinely ordered, is being appallingly run by men.

8 Satire is thus the final mode of Piers Plowman, and in a sense the whole poem is truly a satire. But Langland has so completely expanded the satirical mode that he has made it almost a hyper-satirical genre to itself. His huge ambition is to include, within his satire, the very moral concepts which give him the right to judge, the standards by which the world he observes is errant. Of course, ambition alone cannot elect one to literary greatness, and there are many poetic qualities which create Langland’s authority. His plain and colloquial language, his fluent and idiomatic metre, his rare but potent almost lyrical, positive poetry, and perhaps most particularly his flair for the humble but compelling image all create the style to enact the massive content.34 And the style is basically the hard-hitting plain-spoken style of the satirist – this is the source of the poem’s energy as poetry. To outline his theological standards, to illuminate the system against which the sad world is to be understood, Langland leaves the topics of the satirist, but this only means that he returns to satire finally with all the more weight behind his condemnation. The contrast between the passionate triumph of passus XXI and the dismal confusion of passus XXIII is a very powerful one, and this fine crisis is achieved partly by the poetic imagination of passus XXI and partly by the determination with which the poet returns to the world, his insistence to tell not only the truth, but the appalling whole truth. Piers Plowman is, then, in totality a satire, but Langland has extended the nature of satire and has set a new standard. Satire provides the opening scenes of the poem, where it discusses politics. It also leads into the discussion of the Christian’s duty, and when this discussion has moved out to the theoretical and 32 In this implication, Langland’s analysis rather agrees with the most authoritative modern historian; see David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, 2 volumes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948) especially vol. 1, chap. 9 ‘The Friars Minor’, pp. 114–26, and chap. 15 ‘The Evolution of the Franciscan Ideal’, pp. 171–9. 33 It is bold because such a questioning of an institution is rare: even FitzRalph’s attack is not so radical. Bloomfield discusses this issue, pp. 148–9, but he can find little other evidence of arguments quite like Langland’s; see also his Chapter 3. 34 John Lawlor has discussed Langland’s style at some length in Piers Plowman: An Essay in Criticism (London: Arnold, 1962) pp. 189–239, and Bloomfield has some perceptive comments, pp. 34–41. But in general, Langland’s diction and metrics, like his imagery, await a full critical discussion.

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conceptual plane in Dowel the satiric mode is referred to frequently and anchors the discussion in reality. Next, the poem abandons satire as a focal theme and moves into the fully theological, not to say liturgical, mood as it recreates the central acts of the Christian faith. At last satire comes back to its place in the centre of the poem but, because of the way the poem has developed, satire has been functionally redefined by Langland’s use of it – the vision of the world that satire finally reveals is filled with a consciousness of the immense spiritual forces at work in the Christian cosmos. The follies and vices that satire uncovers do not exist only in material terms, they also exist as tragic departures from the path of Christian duty that has been mapped out by Langland both at the temporal and at the spiritual level. The implications of the satire in the last two passūs are thus made huge. The attempt to discuss such topics in literature is in itself admirable; the fact that these topics are discussed with an authority that convinces the reader is the real mark of Langland’s standing as a writer. The greatness of Langland’s ambition and the extent to which it succeeds place him in very rare company. In English only Milton can really be called the same sort of poet, and the comparison is by no means in Milton’s favour – Langland’s realism and Christian-oriented urgency seem stronger. Of Dante alone can it be said that he writes with the same huge ambition, both spiritual and social, and surpasses Langland in some of the areas of the genre. That may be a large enough tribute to Langland, and one with which he would have been well content.

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3 CHAUCER AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF LITERATURE

From: Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2 (1980)

1. Introduction I know how irritating it can be to treat discourses in terms not of the gentle, silent, intimate consciousness that is expressed in them, but of an obscure set of anonymous rules. How unpleasant it is to reveal the limitation and necessities of a practice where one is used to seeing, in all its pure transparency, the expression of a genius and freedom. How provocative it is to treat as a set of transformations this history of discourses which, until now, has been animated by the reassuring metaphors of life or the intentional continuity of the lived. Michel Foucault1

Many people feel the sociology of literature recites facts about an author, a period, an audience and, worse, diminishes the individual liberty of author and reader, inhibits the notionally crucial act of free evaluation: irritating, unpleasant and provocative, as Foucault ironically says above, to press such inhumane determinations on literature. True, the sociology of literature is concerned with facts; it does investigate the source, nature and dynamism of what seems an author’s individuality, and it seeks to inhibit evaluation that is no more than a subjective league-table of authors. But the important and relatively recent property of the sociology of literature is that, from its contacts with expanding disciplines like linguistics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, as well as from its alliance with history, the approach has developed in the hands of European, particularly French, writers a powerful critique of the way in which literature functions in and for society. This approach also offers a critique of criticism, disclosing the social and political relations of the approaches traditionally pursued in literary studies. Much of this material has become available in English, and interpretative guides have started to appear; students and teachers can now encounter analysis 1 The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1972), p. 210.

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which has been doubly elusive, published in foreign languages and intrinsically difficult in any case. Chaucer’s texts, in their historical position and their curious polyvalence, are particularly rich ground for socio-literary analysis. Recent developments in the sociology of literature help to explain features that have puzzled Chaucer’s critics and strained their ingenuities to explain them away; further, the developments indicate more fully the dynamic nature of his texts, which put them among that small group whose power outlasts their period. Idealist critics have felt the ‘survival’ phenomenon adequately proves that the ‘best’ literature is quite unconnected to its social setting. In fact the lasting power of some texts comes from their authentic historical nature, the veracious way in which they realise conflicts in the social relations of a period, in the context of – and so revealing – the ideological limits of that period. In what follows I will relate some of the theory of recent French critics to Chaucerian texts: the ideological analysis of Pierre Macherey to Chaucerian structure and mimesis, and some of Jacques Lacan’s theories on subjectivity (in the context of historical epistemology) to Chaucerian characterisation, including that of the narrator. I by no means claim to have a mastery of difficult and often consciously elusive theorists; nor do I offer analyses in any sense that they are authoritative. Rather, I want to suggest that it is high time Chaucer criticism availed itself of some of the techniques, skills, and insights which these thinkers have developed. A writer of Chaucer’s complexity, range, and social awareness is only properly investigated with techniques of comparable authority. Traditional Anglo-Saxon criticism, since the decline of philology and source-studies, just does not work with that kind of intensity: it is the sheer weight of Robertsonianism against vacuous humanism that has given it such fascination. Chaucer in the light of modern French socioliterary theory is a more powerful, memorable – and disturbing – artist.

2. Ideological approaches Literature, language and culture play a prominent part in the process by which human society transmutes its world into order and sorts itself into powerstructures, sternly defending or merely accepting them – the selected verb depends on the speaker’s position vis-à-vis power. So it is specifically in the interest of a ruling power-group to conceal the dialectic process, to fix history in amber, and to assert that the existing situation, cultural, social, political and ultimately economic, has not in fact been created, but is permanent, unquestionable, above all, natural. Such a view sees society, in this case bourgeois society, but the pattern holds for other societies through time, replicating through its cultural aesthetics its own functional standards. The texts are unified, separate, complete, and so in sociological terms both reified and individualistic, and in economic terms they are infinitely reproducible, consumable, sellable – profitable. The literary criticism which only operates within this system, evaluating carefully in terms of bourgeois morality 50

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and aesthetics, is itself an ideological servant; only a criticism which stands back and assesses the process can be fully illuminating and historically objective. Semiotics, and certain psychoanalytic applications of its insights, have shown how such naturalisation operates within the signifier, constituting meaning by the codes in which the text is written (conveyed by their écriture, as Barthes calls it in Writing Degree Zero) and also by the codes excluded from the text: its marginal, impossible voices which delimit the ‘space’ in which the text locates itself.2 But Barthes, like most semioticians, has seemed more interested in small-scale verbal meaning-play, semiotic function seen largely without its political overburden. Though he is well aware of the more plainly political aspects of writing, since Writing Degree Zero and Mythologies his work rarely speaks overtly as literary sociology.3 Pierre Macherey, a critic who is more direct, bases his approach jointly on a semiotic understanding of the large-scale functions of the literary text and a sharply political reading of society in Althusserian Marxist terms. For some time largely unknown to Anglo-Saxon literary criticism, his major book A Theory of Literary Production has now been translated.4 At first seeming difficult and elusive, his arguments are, when you become familiar with the non-pragmatic, non-empiricist cast of mind, a lucid and sharp-edged approach to the constitutive function of texts, using a deliberately heuristic binary methodology, and with relatively little of that playful self-advertising characteristic of some Gallic scholarship. Macherey argues that texts are produced within an ideological framework that controls their possibilities of vision and interpretation. In trying to realise faithfully what it sees as reality the text must encounter these limits to what can be seen and said. In this process the text exposes these ideological limits, so allowing the critic to map the cultural aspects of the period’s socio-economic formation. The moments of this encounter, strains, limits, silences, absences, define the historical position and the socio-ideological function of the text. Macherey goes further than Lukacs did in his political criticism; Lukacs saw that the text splits between current ideology and historical reality, but Macherey insists that the text cannot of itself reach out to a later positive vision of ‘realism’ (this is Lukacs’s Hegelian and Marxist Achilles heel). Macherey states that by its very expression of limits, its very return to ideological structure, the text verifies that formation, feeds into the existing hegemony and plays a part in what Macherey, following Althusser, calls the ‘Ideological State Apparatus’.5

2 Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. A. Lavers and C. Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968). The word ‘code’ in French implies a structure, even one including sanctions as in ‘Code Napoléon’; English speakers tend to use the term reductively in a merely verbal context, because of the ‘cipher’ connotation. 3 Mythologies, trans. A. Lavers (St. Albans: Paladin, 1973). 4 A Theory of Literary Production, trans. G. Wall (London: Routledge, 1978). 5 See in particular the essay ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), pp. 121–76.

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Insisting on the moments of crisis from which the text withdraws, Macherey places great stress on observed ‘fissures’ in the text. These are the strains where the text turns away from its possibilities and returns to its ideological closure; from them we can read both the historical location of the text and its constitutive function in that specific ‘moment’. In the theoretical first half of his book Macherey over-organises the theory of fissures, suggesting that all texts are patterned and flawed in similar ways. In his own following analysis he discusses more accurately the variable amounts of strain in different works, some of which, as Eagleton remarks in his modification of Macherey, may be more problematic than others.6 The greater overt strain characteristically appears in the more investigative writers, who produce the more conflicted and dynamic texts. What do such fissures or strains amount to? They are sequences, functions, arrangements in a text which realise and confront material, attitudes, possibilities that are disturbing to a social ideology and predictive of forces hostile to the ruling ideology. Then those disruptive possibilities are closed off in a consoling way that delimits the fissure, reveals the strain, and in locating it, contains it – but the text remains a testimony to these urgent, contemporary sociopolitical conflicts.

3. Chaucer and ideology Chaucer’s texts lend themselves readily to such analysis. Indeed, had Macherey worked on him he would not have needed to make absence and fissure so metaphoric in category; Chaucer offers marked literal examples of both these limit-revealing phenomena. The two major absences in Chaucer are the labouring classes and a developed Christian treatment of secular material – unless one agrees with the Robertsonian ideology that all the secular material speaks in ironic reversal a dogmatic litany, a view whose litanic dogma illegitimately imposes an ideological apparatus on texts which are more problematic than that ingenuously consoling criticism desires to recognise. The invisibility of the productive classes is a necessary part of both feudal and capitalist socio-economic structures and ideologies: recognition to both inherently questions exploitation. But as will be noted, such people and their context can have an insurgent, unsettling presence in Chaucer’s work, as allegorically in The Hous of Fame, symbolically in The Parlement of Foules and recurrently, and personally, early in The Canterbury Tales. It is entirely characteristic of Chaucer’s own position, marginal to both systems, but cognisant of no worker-based social structure, that the two references to proletarian pressure in his work come in sanitised contexts – a glancing reference inserted in the firmly Christian passivity of ‘The Clerk’s Tale’ and a more specific reference (in simile for animals, note) in ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’.

6 See Criticism and Ideology (London: New Left Books, 1976), pp. 71–9 for a general discussion of this and related matters.

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The relative absence of Christian thought and the general dependence on an essentially secular ‘philosopher’ like Boethius indicate Chaucer’s imaginative disaffection from central Catholicism and, more importantly, emphasise the urgently ideological character of his orthodox Christian closures to Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales. In fact, as will be discussed, closure, resolving a work and its issues, is one of the most interesting limit areas in Chaucer and reveals clearly the disturbing power that his texts realise and, necessarily, finally disavow. Closure, in the sense of a climax of plot and meaning together, is not an inherent feature of ‘high’ medieval texts, as ‘Gothic structure’ theorists have shown.7 The structural fissures that a modern aesthetic finds in such texts were not then problematic because they replicated a world view expecting no organic grasp of the physical world from humans and their art – Christian Platonism implied a fragmented physical world where coherence rested only in the mind of God and his essential Ideas. The Book of the Duchess is a model text of this sort, as Robert Jordan has argued.8 Its ending merely stops the dream once the ‘thematic structure’ expressed at the beginning and throughout has been dramatically expressed by the Man in Black. A sociological view of the poem would show how White’s apotheosis occurs in the externalisation of her qualities through conventional praise, in quoted public activity and admiration, in the realisation of her ‘honour’ and ‘name’. A collective, feudal, honour-based value system is operated to correct and expose the individualist self-indulgence of the mourning figure – note his instant reaction when the narrator suggests that his assessment of her is personal, lines 1051–233: he is working back from aberrant individualism. This reading would then be located in a social structure of the poem: Gaunt must, for common profit, be like the active leader Octavian who symbolically rides back in royal honour to Gaunt’s white castle (historically provided and now, it seems, irradiated by Blanche). An aristocratic life must continue, cherishing and preserving the past, wrote the poet who spent his early years in the obsessively static courtly hegemony, living by a specifically feudal type of patronage. The Book of the Duchess is a text which has an unproblematic ideology; its fissures are seen and resolved from a firm base in aristocratic hegemonic culture; they are visible to us historically, but not ultimately disturbing in or to the text. Against this model The Hous of Fame is all the more startling. Here Chaucer consciously offers in Book I a pattern of love vision, and diverts it to epistemological, even ontological, concerns. It is a winter dream: this signals a departure from familiar models and confident expectation, and that is thematically fulfilled. Honour, that was so brightly important to the episteme of the earlier poem (and

7 Muscatine deals briefly with ‘Gothic Form’ in Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), pp. 167–73; D. W. Robertson, Jr. more fully in Preface to Chaucer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), especially Sections 2 and 3; Robert M. Jordan devotes a book largely to the topic, Chaucer and the Shape of Creation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967). 8 ‘The Compositional Structure of the Book of the Duchess’, Chaucer Review, 9 (1974), 99–117.

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its system of knowledge and value), can now be questioned. The mechanics of fame, both as acoustic phenomenon and as the functional core of social evaluation, are explored through exemplum and imaginative experience and found to be insecurely based. This is no theoretical, introspective fancy. Critics enmeshed in the aesthetic adventures of source-hunting and idealist theorisation have quite missed the strong basis of social reality in this poem.9 It is present in the topic, because, as too few observers have seen, fame was a central functional force in medieval, shame-oriented society. But Chaucer’s mimesis also indicates his material concern. Book II expresses in medieval and by no means contemptible scientific terms the physical nature of his inquiry; and in particular the House of Fame and the House of Rumour replicate in their processes of producing fame the natural means of production and reproduction basic to feudal economy. The castle on a hill is the seat of social authority, conferred by enrolment in the fame-based power structure. The temporary, squalid, chaotic dwellings at the foot of the hill house the labouring, non-powerful classes who send their product and surplus to sustain that structure. On that real basis is imposed the evaluative honour structure of medieval society; the intertwined model, both base and superstructure at once, shows how accurately the text catches hegemony at work. In support of such a material pattern, and encoding it through sensual data, metaphor urgently presses physicality: the densely material realisation of honour and shame from Aeolus’ horn insists that this analysed pattern of social values has real existence. Similarly the dynamic metaphor of non-aristocratic housing as a giant, fragile, whirling structure is a remarkable way of stating the physical uncertainty and alarming nature of the chaotic world outside castles, that world that is the ultimate – yet crucially unauthoritative – source which allows the powerful life to continue. The narrator dissents from fame before he leaves the castle. This indicates why he can now even see the proletarian world of productivity; had he remained within the castle structure, physical and moral, it would have been invisible to him. The moment of dissension by the narrator enables his wider vision, making him marginal and mobile. Most modern critics have felt this brief statement is weighty, the ‘answer’ to the poem’s problems or a crucial step towards one.10 But this is to privilege a narrator who elsewhere in this poem (and in Chaucer’s other texts) is 9 A striking example is in Beryl Rowlands’ essay, ‘Bishop Bradwardine, the Artificial Memory and the House of Fame’, in Chaucer at Albany, ed. by R. H. Robbins (New York: Burt Franklin, 1975), pp. 41–62; she says, of the House of Rumour, ‘No one has found satisfactory parallels for its location in a valley immediately below the hill of Fame, nor for the style and material of its construction’ (p. 52). She means no-one has found literary parallels. Real medieval hill-towns and their attendant housing, aristocratic and lower-class, are not considered. 10 This assumption is most sharply presented by Paul G. Ruggiers in ‘The Unity of Chaucer’s House of Fame’, Studies in Philology, 50 (1953), 16–29, see p. 26.; J. A. W. Bennett, Chaucer’s Book of Fame (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 163–4; B. G. Koonce, The Tradition of Fame: Symbolism in the House of Fame (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 246–7; Wolfgang Clemen, Chaucer’s Early Poetry (London: Methuen, 1963), pp. 108–9. Sheila Delany calls the

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unable to be so definitive, and to avow a viewpoint that is not otherwise supported. These critics uniformly assume that the missing ending would in some Boethian or Christ-like way have provided such authoritative reinforcement. That is credible as a projected scheme, but its incompletion is the crucially meaningful factor. Like the weakness of the narrator’s voice and the dizzying fearfulness of the whirling house, the fact that Chaucer’s pen failed as he wrote the word ‘auctorite’ is an index of the limits the text confronts. Having exposed the fragility of the honour-based, collective feudal episteme and its hegemonic structure, the text does not conveniently offer another. Chaucer’s own distance from orthodox Christianity is illustrated in his unwillingness to use it as a resolving code; only in later texts, in the face of more fully realised individualist formations, will the poet be able to – need to – do that. This most experimental of all his texts is without closure, and that final silence inscribes all the more sharply the history of emergent contemporary conflict between value systems and their social matrixes. The Parlement of Foules is a finished work which realises similar tensions but has mastered their conflict, confined their strains, through primarily aesthetic means, implying naturalisation through the activity of the signifiers themselves. The text identifies (and recreates) the luxurious sterility of courtly sensuality in the Temple of Venus and also Priapus, but its other social and evaluative formations are in problematic relations with each other. The Dream of Scipio presents sober Christian dogma about the future life; the eagles offer a thinly veiled account of the noble life, the lower birds depict again the unruly pressures of other social levels – and both sets of birds, both views, are fully natural. The birds’ naturalised communality has relation to Scipio’s dream through its insistence on the value of ‘common profit’ as a passport to heavenly bliss. That phrase itself and the harmonious rondel that ends the dream naturalise and resolve the conflict. As John McCall and David Chamberlain have shown in separate essays,11 the harmony that is heard in heaven and in its earthly replication in the birds is the binding force in a poem which, properly edited, has seven hundred lines, a hundred stanzas, with just the crucial rondel standing out – straining out? – of the rime royal structure. The crucial aestheticism and the marginal, dissatisfied nature of the narrator are the loose ends from which this ideological complex may be unraveled; these issues will be taken up later, in discussing the narrative persona and Chaucer’s linguistic practice. The three poems show quite different treatments of ideological forces. The feudally located Chaucer sees no problematic issue beyond the danger of individualism in The Book of the Duchess, and dissolves it with traditional confidence and strikingly referential aristocratic patterns. The bookworm bureaucrat remark a ‘cryptic manifesto’, and sees its fragility, in Chaucer’s House of Fame: the Poetics of Skeptical Fideism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 103–4. 11 John McCall, ‘The Harmony of Chaucer’s Parliament’, Chaucer Review, 5 (1970), 22–31; David Chamberlain, ‘The Music of the Spheres and The Parlement of Foules’, Chaucer Review, 5 (1970), 32–56.

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self-represented in The Hous of Fame can only realise more conflicts than he can resolve. The similarly positioned but more bookishly confident reader in The Parlement of Foules uses art and its harmonics as a medium in which to suspend and apparently resolve his perceptions of conflict. In his major works Chaucer will continue to encounter the ideological structures of his society, but the location and resolution of strains will indicate both his increased realisation of individualism and his complementarily growing dependence on orthodox Christian doctrine to find a consoling closure. In Troilus and Criseyde honour is not a matter of Troilus’ position in the martial aristocracy of Troy, but a matter of Criseyde’s anxiety about her own status.12 The episteme is still shame-oriented, but its relation to a social structure has become obscured, the point of view has shifted as the interest in individuality has grown – in that sense the text follows the narrator’s inquiries in The Hous of Fame, and Chaucer’s treatment of character will be pursued in the following section. Here though, and in the context of Macherey’s considerations, the fact that the Trojan War, the destruction of a society, has become no more than a casually relevant backdrop for a personal encounter is highly demonstrative of Chaucer’s own move away from the socio-cultural position of The Book of the Duchess. Troilus himself traces the same path, reversing the movement of the Man in Black. Troilus leaves his Octavian-like royal status for a tête-a-tête, a bedchamber, and at last the alienated misery of the lonely lover, outside a darkened house. But Criseyde is no externally seen female quagmire in which the noble hero may muddy his honour and drown; part of the poem’s limit-seeking is to realise not merely a figure as an individual experiencing convergent pressures, but a female individual. This is unusual, and imposes its own strain. In classic medieval romance the woman seemed all-important, but in fact had no more status than the objectified and transient trophy Guillaume de Lorris encapsulated in his symbol of a budded rose. This structure in itself was not merely an idealist fancy of male supremacy; its pervasive power suggests there are issues of greater problematic force involved. As Duby suggests in his essay ‘Youth in Aristocratic Society’13 (discussed in Chapter 5 in this collection), a specific social ideology underlay romance patterns: marrying an heiress was, in newly pacified Western Europe, newly observing primogeniture, the only way – in both reality and fantasy – that a younger son could hope to obtain the extensive property his self-concept demanded. But in Chaucer, with the exception of the consciously archaic texts ‘The Franklin’s Tale’ and ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’, such patterns of sovereignty have largely been lost, and even there they are in crisis with the investigative urge to invigorate the female persona. Such a process in its necessary contextual limitations can only emphasise the 12 D. S. Brewer makes this point in his survey of ‘Honour in Chaucer’, Essays and Studies, New Series 26 (1973), 1–19, see pp. 8–9. 13 Georges Duby, ‘Youth in Aristocratic Society’, Chapter in The Chivalrous Society, trans. Cynthia Postan (London: Arnold, 1977), pp. 112–27.

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foreclosure of the female character: with Criseyde, as with Dorigen and the Wife of Bath, Chaucer cannot develop in art the implications of his realisation. Closure in Troilus and Criseyde operates in the challenging palinode where the hero laughs, and Christian verities are asserted. As I will argue later, Chaucer strives semiotically to naturalise his closure and obscure the fissure, but no amount of poet’s craft can conceal the sudden breach, no amount of ‘irony’ found in the preceding books can turn this dramatically fissured poem into a simple, consoling organic development. Rather, in Troilus and Criseyde Chaucer creates authentically, dramatically, even melodramatically, the disturbing conflict between sensual, individual, private consciousness and the austere, public, collective structure that remained the dominant state and church ideology. If Troilus and Criseyde can and should be read in this decentered way, decoding it and finding its determinations, The Canterbury Tales lies startlingly open in its creativity, conflicted between polarities readily relatable to the conjuncture of feudal and capitalist worlds. The plan of the work itself is in crisis. Originally the pilgrims were to move from the Tabard to Canterbury Cathedral and back: the religious experience was to be contained in a secular frame, as is implied in the opening lines of the General Prologue. But St Thomas, not Harry Bailly, becomes the tutelary figure at the end. The plan was to conclude the pilgrimage with a discussion of the best story at a group dinner back in London, but that image of a festive secular collectivity focused by art is dissolved into an austere orthodox prose sermon on personal sin, and finally closed off with the Retracciouns, which break through the art-form of the poem and speak directly of tales that ‘sownen into synne’. Art in The Parlement of Foules was a fixative; in Troilus and Criseyde it both realised and finally sought urgently to conceal the extremity of fissure; here it has quite failed. The Robertsonian notion that Chaucer finally speaks directly what he has elsewhere said under allegory ignores the tone of crisis in the Retracciouns and the collapse of the artistic form at the end: here Chaucer espouses the authoritative and collective structure of the church that has shadowed his work and whose limitations he has often inspected, even overlooked. Such an extreme ideological closure is matched by the dynamic nature of the conflicts he has realised within the poem. They operate in many ways; I will discuss the developing individuation of character later; here, in the context of structural and mimetic strain the plain polarities of some tales must be mentioned. The fact that Chaucer begins with a deliberate opposition between Knight and Miller suggests how important such patterns were to him. As has often been noticed, the Miller retells the Knight’s plot in a different social location and episteme. Not so often observed is the defusing of the challenge: the apparently threatening world of Miller and Reeve is, in consoling closure, shown to self-destruct. The dissension of Miller and Reeve is in itself a suggestion of weakness, but their tales themselves foreclose their threat. The aristocratic ordering authority of Theseus, found problematic but largely successful, is transmuted into a mal-marié, a ludicrously failed Noah: enough signs of weakness 57

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there, but the latent text goes further – carpenter John’s literal fall and broken arm plainly add impotence founded on incompetence. Here and in ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ self-confessed chaos and sexual failure are placed in the mouths of the vulgar to inoculate the text against the perceived vigour of their class. Only the literate and worldly clerks have any success. They are at least potent, though failure attends Absolon for his obsessive engagement in a sensual world, Nicholas is incapacitated, and the northerners of ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ suggestively lose their horse for some time. Like the doubt-ridden narrator in Chaucer’s texts and, judging from the Retracciouns, the author himself, they suffer in power (= potency?) and self-esteem for their engagements in this world of sensual, selfseeking anti-structure. The aristocratic model is seen as flawed, questionable, but the vulgar model is far from avowed. Here, as before, the material which exposes strain in the dominant ideology is not itself ideologically secure; Zolaesque naturalism and politics may be marginally inscribed, but only a confident secular materialism will enable them to be realised in art and ideology. The disturbing nature of a socially aware realisation is plain: closure attends experiment, limits are uncovered. And closure must take epistemologically available forms, must enact limits inherent to the sociocultural formation. After the Wife of Bath’s formidable prologue (which only steadily, even experimentally, traces a path towards individualist mimesis in the final sequence with Jankin), this figure who can both ape and transmute masculine power structures is foreclosed. In part this occurs when she and the ‘loathly lady’ are ‘kind’ to their husbands, so imposing a simple domestic ideology – of some power and endurance. But at greater and more historically informative depth, the Wife’s combative, sex-linked individualism is transmuted through the power-filled ‘gentillesse’ speech in her tale into a fully Christian version of individualism. A position that would be, in Lollardy and Protestantism, socially dynamic, in this conjuncture limits and defuses the Wife’s threatening possibilities.14 Without this speech the tale would offer a pattern of woman’s sovereignty feebly extinguished by final ‘kindness’. The ‘gentillesse’ speech makes the challenge much more harmless than that, and more so still than the socially disturbing and specific account of female power over men and money that is now ‘The Shipman’s Tale’ but apparently was in an earlier, even more straining, version of the Wife’s formation, her own tale. Then the Pardoner is silenced with heterosexual verbal brutality. The problematic juxtaposition of his final prayer (a choice crux in individualist ‘characterising’ criticism) and his sales talk brings into such clarity the challenge of the created figure that closure is invoked. The Host is the vulgar voice that can neutralise the threat of the vulgar, and then a fully naturalising resolution is provided. The 14 Delany has argued that sublimation of feminine tension within masculine hegemony is a major force in female religious writers, and sees traces of it in the Wife of Bath, see ‘Sexual Economics: Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and the Book of Margery Kempe’, Minnesota Review, New Series 5 (1975), 104–15.

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Knight is the right socially authoritative figure to bring such obvious tension to a blandly harmonious embrace, the kiss of peace that combined church and state interests in resolving tension. At the end of ‘The Clerk’s Tale’ tribute is again paid to the dynamic force of the Wife of Bath. The tale itself, it seems, was not an affectively sufficient response to her challenge, and in what clearly seems a revision the Envoy was provided. This ironic dismissal has a double effect. Its extraordinary verbal skills semiotically authorise itself: brilliance, poetry, aesthetic force are claimed for men against women, a reversing replay of the Wife’s Prologue. Yet at the same time the Envoy releases the tension of the controlled asensual tone of the tale, evokes and inhabits the world of humane affectivity that the tale’s allegorical force has just denied, but which Petrarch was well aware of, and which Chaucer seems to have slightly augmented.15 The Envoy explodes from the control of the tale – and blames women for its need to explode: experiment, imagination and closure coexist again. Similar patterns are to be found in other tales: formations such as the masculine neurosis latent in ‘The Physician’s Tale’ (a Giant’s Daughter folk-tale in reverse) and the strange modal mixture of ‘The Merchant’s Tale’ invite a discussion of their inner dynamics and constitutive structures. The relation between tales, as has already been indicated, also works in this way. A full study of the biggest finished group of tales, that stretching from Shipman’s to Nun’s Priest’s, would show how genres, world-views, social ideologies are set in conflict. But the charm of art is still able to operate and ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ resolves the conflicts; it is so full of reference, wit, and seductive skill that its ultimately naturalising and disarming stasis predicts the passivist triumphs of bourgeois relativist art. The Chaucer I have tried to expose here is himself fixed in determinate sociocultural position but able, through the patterns of the text, to interpret those determinations for his audience, and so provide an epitomised version of their own fragmented world of experience. Also, through the writer’s power to transcribe such determinations in and around his text, he has laid them out for us, to see history and its dialectic process caught in time. The analysis I have given deals with some forces that are no longer problematic for us, such as feudalism and (for most of us) the church. But individualism remains highly critical in our culture; I have already suggested ways in which Chaucer structurally and mimetically confronts and forecloses this emergent formation, and the following section examines Chaucer’s treatment of a socio-cultural phenomenon which foregrounds individualism and which has come to crucial status in our period and in our theoretical criticism – namely subjectivity. 15 Robert Burlin has printed two contemporary responses to Petrarch’s version of the story, one moved deeply by its human pathos, one calmly acknowledging its allegorical verity. Petrarch was interested enough, and apparently pleased enough, by this testimony to his story’s ambivalence to write to Boccaccio about the reactions; see Chaucerian Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 141–2.

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4. Chaucer and subjectivity Jacques Lacan has developed a formidable and often contentious reputation for his rereading of Freud in the light of semiotic theory. The material can be extraordinarily elusive, partly because of Lacan’s radical rejection of contemporary premises, partly because he recognises and consciously employs the flexibility and polyvalence of the sign, the ‘sliding’ or ‘ambulatory’ signified in relation to a ‘chain’ of signifiers, as he characteristically puts it.16 From this slippery source emerges an argument of particular importance for an understanding of the function of literature. Lacan states that subjectivity is not an innate, preordained, eternally natural feature of human consciousness, but a construct. It is developed in relationship with the ego at what Freud called the ‘mirror phase’, clarified by projections and expulsions such as Freud found in the ‘Fort-Da’ game, and, crucially, structured both like and by language. This subjectivity may work as if it were an authentic original unit, expressing personal relation to the world of the Other (a rejective-expulsive perception of which is a crucial part of the formation of subjectivity), but it is not in truth a unit, merely a conjuncture of determinate forces. Language theory is important in the argument and Coward and Ellis sum it up:17 The signifier, then, is seen as the mark of separation by which identities and differences can be established. It is not, however, a simple matter of the subject learning to ascertain relation of contiguity and difference: it is also a matter of the subject’s own identity being achieved by this same process of differentiation, marking out of separations between itself and its own surroundings in order that it may find itself a place in the signifying chain. Identity, interstices, self-knowledge found in difference: the analysis is closely related to that Macherey makes of ideology being realised in fissures, and Barthes has used the model to explain not only the meaning but the sensual pleasure found in literary texts.18 But Lacan unfolds not just the text, the language, but the very

16 For central statements by Lacan see The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Hogarth Press, 1977) and Écrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1976). Anika Lemaire’s book Jacques Lacan, trans. D. Macey (London: Routledge, 1977) is useful, as is Chapter 5 on Lacan in Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism (London: Routledge, 1977), and the article ‘The Unconscious’, by J. Leplanche and S. Leclaire, Yale French Studies, 48 (1972), 118–75. The Language of the Self, trans. A. Wilden (New York: Dell, 1968) includes three basic papers by Lacan and a valuable commentary by the translator. 17 Language and Materialism, p. 98. 18 In The Pleasure of the Text, trans. R. Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), Barthes presses the erogenous quality of physical fissures and their textual analogues, or homologues as he wishes to see them. His title plays with the sexual connotations of ‘plaisir’ in French which, like those of ‘jouissance’ are reductively treated by direct translation.

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being and self-knowledge of the individual as determined and realised in such a way. The relation between his analysis and the fragmented consciousness of much modern art is clear enough: the artists are disassembling actively subjective structures and confronting the unsorted data of experience in a post-bourgeois ideological formation. What is not immediately clear is how this relates back in literary time. But the link to Chaucer can be made, and with considerable value. Developments in historical epistemology, especially by Foucault, have shown the relativity of epistemes and, by implication, ontologies, so that he is able to offer the famous challenge that ‘man’ is a recent invention.19 But the subjective man, and woman, is evidently a little older than that in England; the early development there of modern socio-economic structures is no doubt the reason. My argument here is that in Chaucer’s work, in terms of narrator and character we see the beginnings of the formation of subjectivity, the space being created which later confidences and needs will delimit and fill. The ontology that bourgeois capitalism both created and was validated by is marginally present; it can be perceived as an authentic formation of the period, but as such it is also foreclosed by the sentient ideology of the period in the poet. This argument explains well, and in a full context, the incomplete individuation of many Chaucerian characters and the tentative nature of the narrator: it also locates in their own perilous subjectivity the deep-seated need of many modern critics to fill out the humanist possibilities of Chaucer’s texts by explaining away their foreclosures. The development of the individual in the Middle Ages is hardly a new topic. Colin Morris has found it in religion, Walter Ullmann in feudal personal relations, Peter Dronke and Robert W. Hanning in literary texts of the high Middle Ages.20 But while some narrators develop through moral or satirical comment a kind of isolation, no texts produce in their characters and few in their narrators the selfconscious subjectivity that modern readers have happily felt begins to flower in Chaucer’s work. The knight of romance, as Auerbach showed well, is a solitary figure, but also an archetype: Southern over-modernises the position in The Making of the Middle Ages21 and Chaucer’s own knight restates the archetypal formation. In lyric and romance: feeling, whether religious or amatory, is expressed in quite objectively formalised ways, the ‘I’ is archetypal persona, not ego. These objective systems of knowledge and self-knowledge were, as William J. Brandt’s The Shape of Medieval History everywhere suggests but does not state, just as 19 Foucault makes the statement specifically in his ‘Conclusion’ to The Order of Things, translated anon. (London: Tavistock, 1970). 20 Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual 1050–1200 (London: SPCK, 1972); Walter Ullmann, The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966); Peter Dronke, Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970); Robert W. Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). 21 Erich Auerbach, ‘The Knight Sets Forth’, in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. W. R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), pp. 123–42; R. W. Southern, ‘From Epic to Romance’, in The Making of the Middle Ages (London: Hutchinson, 1953), pp. 219–58.

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constitutive for a shame-oriented, collective society as Lacanian subjectivity is for guilt-oriented privatised society.22 Figures in ‘The General Prologue’ like Knight, Parson, Plowman, and – with some traces of equivocating alienation – also Clerk are shown to find their identity through such a collective, formalised framework, and in their tales Chaucer lets secular, pastoral and intellectual aspects of the medieval hegemony speak. The Plowman’s silence as a tale-teller presumably bespeaks Chaucer’s unfamiliarity with or rejection of (both positions being ideologically constitutive) this class’s notional dutiful self-concept. At the other extreme stand ‘General Prologue’ figures where recent scholarly identification of formulaic details cannot quite remove the pressure of individualism felt through them – Wife of Bath, Miller, and Pardoner especially, though Reeve and Merchant, perhaps Franklin and Manciple as well, could also be seen as belonging inherently, or at least marginally, to this category. It is not merely that the assemblage of material details in itself suggests a screen-filling close-up, nor that the surprises in description are individually differentiating. The characters actually predicate a self-aware differentiation from elements of contemporary hegemony: the Wife from clerical male imperialism, the Miller from high-style aristocratic problem-solving, the Pardoner from collective Christian ethics and financing, the others in less structurally clear forms of hegemonic dissent. The social and functional position of the characters where subjectivity is partly discerned proclaims relation between ideology and socioeconomic structure. They handle cash, they have small businesses, their skills are marketable – though in an interesting masculinist move Chaucer partly conceals the Wife’s trade: only she is not designated by profession and her feminine dependence in the estate of wife obscures her self-sufficiency as weaver. Jill Mann has pointed out the importance of work, as we know it, in shaping what is in some senses like individuality in these cases.23 These quasi-subjective, anti-hegemonic figures actually interrupt the orderly proto-text as an index of and creation of their socially disruptive force. Miller and Friar force their way into the sequence, the first clearly against a status sequence from Knight to Monk, the second between the Wife’s Prologue and Tale, and then again before the Clerk’s response; the Summoner augments the disruption, which in this case may represent masculine foreclosure of the Wife as well as sheer disorder. Reeve and Cook need no invitation to speak; the Merchant presses in on the Clerk’s last word – Chaucer may have planned for the Wife’s first word ‘Experience’ to pick up a previous teller’s conclusion in the same way. The Franklin addresses the Squire before the Host invites him to relate a tale, and the Manciple similarly makes himself prominent in a self-confident manner. The Pardoner is formally invoked, but he also interrupts the Wife in full flow. Like the pressing

22 The Shape of Medieval History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966). 23 Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 202.

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chaos of the House of Rumour and the lower birds, the pilgrims who do not have a clear status, or whose instincts reject a proper, orderly fulfilment of their role’s duty, can act autonomously as characters while the others (including ‘Chaucer’, it is interesting to note) wait their turn in dutiful solidarity. The Knight and the Host are the other characters capable of autonomous intervention, but both act to impose or restore order. They make an interestingly dialectic authoritative pair, old and new socio-economic functionaries in league to conceal the conflicts they epitomise. I have previously indicated how the text imposes closure on those figures who act as mushrooms of subjective rebellion, and only such a dialectic, socially-aligned reading of these practices in the text can see their force and also comprehend how much of the irony-based criticism of recent years is self-validating subjectivism. The insistence on the tales as ‘speeches in character’, which has taken strainingly ingenious turns with pilgrims like Manciple, Shipman, Physician, is part of this culture-determined rewriting of Chaucer. But so has been the delicacy in speaking of the author’s intention. In New Critical tradition intention-rejection became a reifying aestheticism, not only excluding reductive biographical criticism from English studies, but also obscuring the historical productive processes of the text, constituting as they do a complex set of responses for the audience to assent to, to feel that life is indeed like that. The fully grasped intention of the work, the operating nature of the convergent determining pressures that the author has the power to realise – these are the full formations that take the text off the page into the processes of history in which we are still engaged. The modern absence of intentionalism has left a vacuum of subjectivity into which the Chaucerian narrator has been drawn as well as the pilgrims. He has had many transfigurations in recent years, covert versions of an authorial subjective control. For Kittredge, a self-effacing ironical reporter coterminous with the poet; for Donaldson an irony-producing puppet, lightly covering the poet’s manipulative fingers. Elsewhere he has been John of Gaunt’s psychotherapist; Criseyde’s discreetly besotted lover; an intellectual, cowering before high-flying authority and even (with restrained vengefulness) his own wife.24 The models reveal all too plainly the personae of their own authors, individualist academics with theatrical skills, bookish timidity and – apparently – wandering desires. The actual contemporary function of narrators in hegemonic medieval texts is not hard to determine from the texts: Jordan has spoken on the point and with relevance to this essay, discussing The Book of the Duchess (see note 8). The narrator was an objectified

24 G. L. Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1915), pp. 160–1; E. T. Donaldson, ‘Chaucer the Pilgrim’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America, 69 (1954), 928–36. B. H. Bronson gave Man in Black an early and prominent psychoanalytic reading in ‘The Book of the Duchess Reopened’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America, 67 (1952), 863–81. The narrator’s relationship with Criseyde has been stressed by Donaldson in ‘Criseyde and Her Narrator’, in Speaking of Chaucer (London: Athlone Press, 1970), pp. 65–83.

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and organic figure, a functionary of the text, available to guide the audience when useful but essentially a mediator. His transparency asserted the inscrutability to humans of that order that seemed, before all but the eyes of faith, to be chaos. Such a figure acts through The Book of the Duchess, humble functionary of the themeoriented verities of this deeply traditional poem. If some traces of an emergent subjectivity can be found in the Morpheus passage and the narrator’s folly, they are not inconsistent with the humble narrators of vertical debate, and are in any case firmly euphemised by their negative tone. The Hous of Fame, just as clearly, does argue itself to a point where a rejection of the honour-oriented value system and a critique of the castle-based powerstructure leave an individual voice to know itself. But as I have already discussed, there is no certainty here, and none to come in the poem’s conclusion. What we do find, as a tentative scaffolding for the frail structure of subjectivity, is an emergent notion of the artist as a distinct personality. There is, as Sheila Delany said, ‘a nascent awareness of the self-sufficiency of art’ in the invocation to Book I.25 Book III both offers and modestly withdraws a sense of artistic professionalism in its Proem. And as the narrator says he himself knows ‘best how I stand’: he continues: For what I drye, or what I thynke, I will myseluen al hyt drynke, Certeyn, for the more part, As fer forth as I kan myn art.26 (1879–82) The relation of artistic self-consciousness to the social position of the artist, to the means of production of works, and the system of rewarding art-work is well-enough known, especially from Arnold Hauser’s ground-clearing survey The Social History of Art. Chaucer is by this time in receipt of regular cash annuities; he is also now working outside the court at what is by no means a sinecure – as this poem takes care to state. He is no longer in an unmediated relation with the structures of aristocratic life; in the medial space, a separate position for the artist is being defined. But neither in The Parlement of Foules nor Troilus and Criseyde does the narrator have any developed status as a specially privileged, authoritative person. In the former poem knowledge comes to him through the collective wisdom of the past, or through the supra-individual medium of a dream – his own conscious experience is not powerful enough. The dreams discussed are only somnia animalia, where the events spring from the narrator’s waking life, if not mastered and comprehended in it. Though classical models provide for Troilus and Criseyde the 25 Chaucer’s House of Fame, p. 43. 26 Quotations are from F. N. Robinson’s edition, The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd edition (London: Oxford University Press, 1957).

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possibility of a narrated experience (with perhaps only ‘Palamon and Arcite’ – to become ‘The Knight’s Tale’ – to precede it in that new genre, its native versions being apparently of little interest or use to Chaucer), the narrator’s overt function is limited to formal tone-setting in prohemia to the poem’s five books and a partial involvement in defining Criseyde’s human subjectivity. As closure operates we hear a clearly professional artistic voice, but one that demystifies art by speaking of techniques and colleagues in a craftsmanlike, non-subjective tone, and is then anti-aesthetic by being contentedly immersed in the depersonalised Christian rapture of the end. None of this narrative self-consciousness would amount to very much were it not for the clearly experimental subjectivity in The Canterbury Tales, in the figures discussed above especially, but also in the narrator. Yet here too narrative subjectivity grows from familiar medieval soil. The problems of the narrator in the General Prologue are clearly enough those of the critics who fuss over them. The narrative voice is the objective minimum medium; Donaldson’s point, that the figure is not ironic but a channel for irony, indicates its necessary transparence. Since the ironies created in remarks like those about the Prioress’s secularity and the Miller’s animality operate in the context of a set of communal values, there is no cause for seeing any residual subjectivity in the creating author. His stance is no different in its objectivity from that of most satirists throughout the period – though it is as well to note that normally they came from outside the power structure of the church however much they may, like Chaucer and Langland, and even perhaps the Goliards, have remained within its hegemonic umbrella. Nor is the irony created in simile an individuating force in the narrator; it does not create a solitary, wise, and subjective voice. The metonymic structure, as Barthes has argued,27 belongs to and creates collective, un-metaphoric forms like epic, while metaphor is the authentic code of individualist comparisons. When the narrator likens the monk’s bridle-bells to his chapel bell, a non-mediated contiguity and a shared ethic about monasticism make the ironic point. The simile does not, as a metaphor must, shape a mediating creative ground where the artist’s individuality stimulates response. Chaucer very rarely uses metaphor, except when he is working from Boccaccio or Dante. But Chaucer’s text develops something different when the narrator apologises for having to report the Miller; the idea of authentic character-based language has some far-reaching individualist implications. And the strategy of apology, of being bound by one’s topic, is a deliberate use of the objectification posture of earlier narrators to mask a technique of subjectivising which runs counter to their whole direction (the same motif of concealment pervades the ‘discovered manuscript’ device of the later novel). The ultimate example here of this essentially euphemising ‘foolish narrator’ motif is in the extraordinary events which surround Chaucer the pilgrim telling his own tale. The host’s approach to him is

27 See Elements of Semiology, trans. A. Lavers and C. Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), p. 64.

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diminishing, allotting trivial status to the diminutive figure; his first tale assumes that role willingly. The quality of the parody is, of course, one of the euphemistically controlled elements of self-consciousness; only a great poet could write such a fine parody/bad poem – and so in this context fulfil the need to conceal his implicitly individualist greatness. Brought to silence by the Host, the character in whom the comic irony of ‘Sir Thopas’ has camouflaged the disturbing subjectivity with which he writes of himself then buries any trace of it, and of aesthetic self-consciousness, in a sage prose tale about the dangers of individualist action. The whole issue of the narrator’s persona seems critically problematic to Chaucer; unwilling, because of his investigative mind and the marginal position that empowers it, to speak conservatively like Knight or Parson, but unable by reason of ideological hegemony to speak like the proto-individualists he has created, the persona can hardly speak at all without at first deploying the medium of art, the superstructural mode of parody, to encode his voice, as is most notable in ‘Sir Thopas’. And then finally he speaks outside the poem form, decoding the voice to find it a place outside the art that has uncomfortably magnified it. So he locates a prosaic, conventionally religious code by which he can end the poem, first in the consoling arms of the Parson, then in his own unmediated voice as an artist who has presumed too much, whose destructured imagination has teemed towards sin. Sin, that useful medieval catch-all for extra-hegemonic activity, a word with power to control the disorder that other words have realised. Chaucer withdraws steadily, in what appears to be an authoritative final sequence of the tales, from his own creations. He finally makes overt the movement by saying that some of them ‘sownen into synne’. This must mean that somehow they encouraged wrongful activity, foreshadowed chaos in their counter-hegemonic direction. This essay has tried to set out some of the reasons why Chaucer might have felt that his artistic voice had said too much and why his final statement is unpoetic, rejective, silent. In this dramatic and powerful ending – without asserting either drama or power – The Canterbury Tales inscribes seriousness of two sorts. Firstly, its final medieval orthodox seriousness and secondly, its serious weight as a text which has realised with authenticity a conflict of ideologies and world views and has also been able to uncover to some degree the processes by which ideologies are constituted, processes that we are only beginning to understand. Chaucer’s lasting power is his power to write his own history in his text: a socio-literary criticism is able to read it as our history too.

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4 IDEOLOGY IN ‘THE FRANKLIN’S TALE’

From: Parergon, 28 (1980)

1. Introduction This paper uses the term ‘ideology’ to refer to the cultural formation by which a dominant social grouping protects itself. Analysts of ideology have shown that power in a society is cognitively displaced into a cultural form: religious authority, chivalric honour and moral quality have been notable ways of concealing different power-structures.1 Such mystifications enable those holding power to hide the character of their dominance, and also persuade the powerless to accept the situation as natural. This complex of cultural and social dominance is here called hegemony.2 Fictions play a large part in sustaining hegemonic power, and they work through a dual articulation. First they realise threats to existing power relations. Both the powerful and the powerless must be aware, if unconsciously, of the dialectical forces in a period and the resultant historical pressure for change to existing power arrangements. No text can be credible in its ideology without taking note of these negative forces, though it may well mystify them into categories like passion, diabolic power, sin, fickleness, so that the forces can be the more easily controlled. Such control is itself the second function of the text. It dramatises a process in which those anti-hegemonic forces are defeated, or at least contained, by the instrumental values which are the cultural projections of hegemonic power, such 1 The collection of essays On Ideology, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 10 (Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1977) offers a valuable survey of the topic and attitudes to it by Stuart Hall and a number of interesting analyses of ideology. Other useful works are Pierre Macherey, Towards a Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge, 1978), Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism (London: Routledge, 1978) and Jorge Larrain, The Concept of Ideology (London: Hutchinson, 1979). 2 The concept of hegemony in sociocultural analysis derives from Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971). Raymond Williams analyses hegemony in Marxism and Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 108–14.

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as duty, virtue, fidelity, honour, patriotism. The existence of the threat invokes the necessity of control. Both must be forceful for a text to appear to respond to reality and also to support the existing hegemony, to make it appear natural to those both within and without its structure. Chaucer’s work is notable both for vigorously fictionalised threats, and, as a result of that vigour, for urgent foreclosures – that is deliberate rejections of the disturbing possibilities of the text. Obvious examples are the conclusions to The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde. Those are both religious resolutions, but elsewhere Chaucer provides secular and aristocratic foreclosures, as in The Book of the Duchess and ‘The Knight’s Tale’.3 Like them, ‘The Franklin’s Tale’ operates in a largely secular context and presents a wide range of threats to hegemonic order, resolving some more confidently than others, as the following analysis will show. This paper is divided into two discrete, but ultimately convergent, discussions. The first section records the broad patterns of ideology in the text itself; the second discusses sources of both story and names in order to consider the ideological contexts and co-texts of the tale.

2. Ideological patterns of content An initial summary will expose the main features in the tale’s ideology: they will be examined more closely in the rest of this section. Arveragus is the hegemonic figure in the tale; at its opening he has both honour and wife: the wife’s part in establishing this honour will be considered later. He makes an arrangement with Dorigen that will bring love into their marriage, but for his continued honour this remains private. He leaves to pursue masculine and martial honour and in his absence threats emerge against hegemony – his own power, and also the general power-structure. Dorigen herself questions providence and, in a more specifically threatening way, Aurelius woos Dorigen. Because she has given Aurelius her word (the ‘rash oath’), the assistance of the magician enables Aurelius’s apparently slight threat to emerge as real, and Dorigen must face one dishonourable infidelity or another, must break her marriage or her word. She laments her misfortune and considers suicide, but does not act on that consideration. Another private adjustment between Arveragus and Dorigen then occurs; he orders her to keep her word to Aurelius in secret. This is couched in authoritarian personal terms and said to follow ‘trouthe’. The scene overrules the earlier private adjustment between them. Such a concept of fidelity, on both their parts, influences Aurelius to abandon his now established right to Dorigen, and he returns her to Arveragus, with admiration for the man and advice for women in general.

3 These points are discussed in more detail in my essay ‘Chaucer and the Sociology of Literature’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2 (1980), 15–51 (Chapter 3 in this volume).

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His own honour is now threatened through his own word: he promises to reimburse the magician handsomely. He attempts to make a private adjustment of this debt, but once again fidelity proves infectious, spread now by both Arveragus and Aurelius (Dorigen is not mentioned in this connection): the magician gives up his right to the money. Finally, the Franklin speculates on who might have been the most generous of the three, but no discussion or answer ensues: only the men are in mind, and their different social status seems basic to the question – presumably all are generous in their own way. This broad summary exposes patterns that remain obscure (and so subliminally persuasive) when the reader’s attention is immediately engaged with the action and poetry of the tale. In the basic challenge to hegemony, the wife is no more than an instrument: she makes the rash oath, she is the locus of Aurelius’s supplanting hopes, she is sent to him in the crucial resolving act, she goes unmentioned in the final sequence. But elsewhere she appears to be more than an instrument: she speaks against providence, makes clear her fidelity to Arveragus, laments her misfortune. In her capacity to have a point of view and a style both noble and forceful the woman has developed beyond the limits of a simple counter-hegemonic plot, and this threat to male order, foreclosed in the tale by nothing more than silence, invites further analysis, to be offered below. The remaining counter-hegemonic force in the tale is realised in the conflict of male characters, Dorigen being an instrument/object in this connection. The conflict has some striking features. Arveragus, Aurelius and the magician form two overlapping ideologically bonded pairs. At first Arveragus is threatened in both his wife and his honour (a revealing connection in itself, also, to be discussed below) by Aurelius, supported by the magician’s power. Is fin amor the real threat and magic only its enactment? Or is fin amor a mere plot device to establish the threat of learned, cash-earning, professionalism, itself mystified as magic? Or do both characters, lover and magician, represent a real but different threatening force? The last is the case that will appear the most likely, but whatever the full implications, it is immediately clear that Aurelius and the magician enact a serious challenge to hegemonic stability. Once the force of fidelity has resolved the threat that finally emerged through pairing Aurelius with the magician, a new and consoling union emerges. Arveragus and Aurelius join to figure forth stasis. They are two noble men, both admiring Dorigen in an unconflictive way, speaking now in a similar language: knight and squire re-established in hierarchical order. As a result the anti-hegemonic force turns against Aurelius as he faces the threat of dishonour through a massive cash debt. The combined weight of aristocratic fidelity sways the magician, and all is happily resolved, but the magician (unlike Aurelius, not ‘naturally’ Arveragus’s ally) disappears from the tale, while Arveragus and Aurelius continue to live in a re-ordered and once more static Breton society. Another basic encounter in the ideological plot sets the orderly force of public acts and public knowledge against private scenes which cause or resolve disorder. A particular tension arises between the two private arrangements made by 69

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Arveragus and Dorigen. It appears, indeed, that the first needs to some degree to be corrected by the authoritarian second for the plot to resolve itself satisfactorily. Private arrangements manage to dissipate the strains caused in the public systems, just as private deferment of public rights by both Aurelius and the magician enable the prior rights of the hegemonic figures to dominate. Private decisions are used to draw the sting of privately-based forces. The last striking feature that arises from this survey is the crucial importance of word and fidelity, which relates in an intimate and basic way to honour. This paper’s fuller examination of the ideology of content in the tale can conveniently start with this topic, central as it is to the whole ideology of the tale; the other two topics mentioned above, the threats to Arveragus’s honour and the threat of women in general, will then be developed in the context of word, honour, and their sociocultural implications. The modern reader often misses completely the functional force of honour as an instrumental value and a power-base in medieval and renaissance society. Splendid clothes, powerful and protective arms and horses, physical beauty through good diet and personal care, great wealth, cultural possessions and even attainments, widespread reputation as being both valued and powerful – these features move from material to cultural without ever leaving the dynamic of hegemony. They were based on the surplus appropriated from the productive classes and operated as the differentiations which both legitimated and mystified the powers and actions of the appropriating class – as well, it should not be forgotten, as making them physically formidable, capable of defending their positions in reality. The crucial nature of the given word within this material and cultural ensemble is obvious, and was made obvious in medieval texts, both administrative and fictional. In a period before contracts, or certainly before enforceable contracts, and with minimal persuasive power in the hands of the law and the throne, fidelity to agreements was at a premium – and was also at times challenged, as is shown by the number of legal and physical conflicts, and by the obsessive presence in literary culture of oaths that must be kept. The rash oath is a motif which expresses both doubt and ultimately confidence in a power structure where honour is based on word. It is essentially an ‘enemy within’ device, proposing that a member of the class or power group may err dangerously. Also, the recipient of the oath is often, as here, an enemy at least partly within the same class – a realistic representation of the disorder that fidelity sought to prevent. The rash oath must be made by a person whose position empowers the oath: it must be weighty to make it sufficiently troubling to need resolving. But the oath-making person must also demonstrate sufficient lack of central authority to leave room for greater authority to resolve the situation. In ‘The Franklin’s Tale’ masculine aristocratic authority and the insistence on ‘trouthe’ are the resolving force. These are socially determined values, as a contrast reveals: in the Middle Welsh Pwyll Pendeuic Dyuet (‘Pwyll Prince of Dyfed’) a feminine and at least semi-divine authority, Rhiannon, resolves the problem caused by Pwyll’s 70

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thoughtless generosity – the relevance of a comparison between these two texts will be developed in section 3 of this essay.4 The impulse to make the oaths, by both Dorigen and Pwyll, is not of itself wicked, merely uncautious. Such selective causation is itself ideological, asserting that crisis comes upon the power-holding group only through bad luck, or minor, even admirable errors. So the force of the ‘enemy within’ is much diluted: the ‘good fault’ in tragedy is of course the high point of this self-deluding encouragement for those who share the hegemonic values of the text. Chaucer does not make Dorigen merely perpetrate the rash oath; he enlarges the figure considerably and sets that disturbing action in the context of a developed set of attitudes that conflict with Arveragus’s hegemony. Dorigen figures forth feeling, exhibiting a lack of that overriding sense of duty and control over emotive responses which is the gloomy, but at least undisappointable, Boethian response to the world. When Arveragus goes overseas, her tendency to emotional despair is evident, and the fact that this response opposes both providence and rational control is elaborated in her apostrophe over the rocks, in which God’s dispositions are questioned, and clerical interpretation is consciously discarded. At the same time her real nobility, plain in her position and in her language, is asserted, but these powers of thought and speech do not always guide her actions. However, she is not an isolate or beyond recall from this dangerous brink: the society of her friends, hope, reason, the passing of time and Arveragus’ letters all make her calm. Dorigen does not irresponsibly create her own threatened destruction as some careless (or over-involved) critics would have it. Her original outburst over the rocks is controlled, itself ending in a prayer for her husband’s safety, and her apparent despair becomes successfully socialised. It is the determined seduction by Aurelius and the special power of the magician which recreate emotional despair in her: forces quite outside Dorigen operate to remove her (and with her, honour) from Arveragus. At the same time, her power to command a viewpoint is made clear in the apostrophe over the rocks, and no reading of the tale can ignore her status in it. She remains a figure of great weight in the tale and, it would seem as a result, at times she is curiously, and presumably urgently, reduced and contained. The context and the motives for making her rash oath are part of this containment. When she acts ‘in play’ this is not an act of foolish feminine whimsy as some critics, applying modern sexist ideologies, have thought. She is, rather, engaging in appropriate activities within the garden of entertainment, and her promise is a courtly lady’s suitably impossible imposition on an unwanted suitor, just as the fact she feels ‘pitously’ towards Aurelius is a lady’s correct fin amor response, not a trace of soft-heartedness. In the absence of her husband she is guided by an alternative social code, if briefly and playfully, against her bond with her husband, though she does express his proxy authority firmly to Aurelius. The importance of 4 Pwyll Pendeuic Dyuet has been edited by R. L. Thomson with notes and glossary in English (Dublin: Institute of Advanced Studies, 1957). The most accurate and faithful translation into English remains that by Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones in The Mabinogion (London: Dent, 1949).

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this false socialisation in the narrative and the ideology of the tale becomes clear later; masculine hegemony can only accept female socialisation through the husband. The isolated wife, if not fully recreating her husband’s presence, is a danger to his honour even though she acts socially, not privately. The woman’s dependence extends to her inability to act wilfully, as is indicated by the motive for the rash oath: a new social nexus and its forms of behaviour are merely accepted by her. A number of forces converge to make this a critical moment – Aurelius’s own honour, his obsessive urge to supplant and dishonour Arveragus, his access to the magician’s strange and special powers; but Dorigen’s act itself is minor, acceptable, even laudable: the rocks promise is evidently focused on wanting to save her husband from danger. It is not simply caused by her high emotion or capacity to despair when alone; the proxy authority of her absent husband may weigh too lightly on her before, but she enacts it herself here. The text insists she did not want Aurelius: insists so much that a strain is implied, a compulsion that the emotive power and viewpoint of this powerful woman must not be allowed to operate in free choice at this crucial juncture. The latent patterns of meaning discussed in the next section will explain this strain. The ideological absence of Dorigen’s emotionality at this point, except in anger at Aurelius, is confirmed when the topic of emotion is reintroduced in the scene where Arveragus cuts the knot and sends her to Aurelius. He does this in the name of ‘trouthe’, but, crucially, he does it with emotion, as the rhyme on ‘kepe’ and ‘wepe’ insists in lines 1479–80. It is a striking moment: emotion is appropriated to Arveragus, made brief, controlled by both rhyme and ‘trouthe’, and so made to seem a valid type of self-sacrifice that functions in the plot to bring resolution, where Dorigen’s larger, genuinely disturbed emotion was made non-functional, and when it threatened to seem a dangerous functional motive, it was vigorously suppressed. Emotion is used to defeat the effect of emotion, but it is held within constraints and made urgently secret as well. The structure is, of course, still very familiar in the ideology of the sexes. When men are upset, something must be done: women are held to be emotional by nature. In the light of the controlling absence of emotion at the rash oath, this moment clearly appropriates the created feminine mode of response and locates it within masculine control. The insistence on a self-destructive threat is crucial: Arveragus’s appropriation of Dorigen’s central value is a classic piece of hegemonic absorption. A similar manipulative use of the essence of a challenge to frustrate itself is seen in the final defeat of the two other challenges to hegemony in the tale through the figures of Aurelius and the magician, when they privately give up what private powers have given them public right to possession, respectively Dorigen and money. There is more to say about these figures than this, however. The two forces which bring near disaster to the plot through the medium of Dorigen are figured in the characters of Aurelius and the magician. Learning and magic activate the challenge of fin amor, making it less easily controlled than had seemed likely. The two anti-hegemonic forces are separate, but it is interesting to speculate on Chaucer’s imaginative connection of them, especially in its 72

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development from his Boccaccian source, and I will return to this after looking at them separately. Aurelius’ threat is overtly that of fin amor to the married state, the young man who may alienate the wife from her husband, and shame the husband at the same time. The danger of fin amor is theoretically contained in the lengthy opening sequence of the tale in which it is made clear that love has a place in this marriage; this controlled love defuses the threat of passion. The viewpoint through the scene is consistently male: this is what a fine husband offers his wife and she responds – as Dorigen also does, rightly and wrongly, to Aurelius. Women in Chaucer and other writers, at least up to the nineteenth century, avoid guilt by having no responsibility in spite of their status: even the Wife of Bath is not shown doing anything constructive and responsible, though she is a strongminded working woman who runs a household. Less clear than this sexist ideology is the tone of the notably rhetorical passage where the Franklin quibbles about ‘love’ and ‘service’ (791–8). The lines certainly privilege the contradictory nature of the Arveragus-Dorigen arrangement, and so neither in content nor tone support the Kittredgeian view that this marriage is stable, nor easily fit in with Mathew’s premise that love and marriage were commonly united in the period.5 The problematic nature of the mixture is stressed here and in the tale as a whole. Lines 791–8, like the list of problems in lines 776–86, emphasise the provisional character of the Arveragus-Dorigen arrangement, and so at least partly predict the second private adjustment scene where a liberal tolerance on Arveragus’s part (not equality, see lines 787–90) is shown, however admirable, as incapable of being a sufficient force against disorder. It is not tolerance in marriage which resolves threatened disorder and dishonour: it is masculine authority and masculine, not feminine, fidelity to word. This gap between initial values and the actual mechanism of problem-solving is an important element in ideological writing.6 In ‘The Franklin’s Tale’ Arveragus is initially presented as wise, sensitive and loving; this overlays and indeed euphemises his final exercise of absolute authority, which the plot covertly but insistently shows to be the real solution, the iron fist of hierarchy within the velvet tolerance of the ‘modern’ marriage arrangement. The harsh ideological conclusion may seem palliated by the earlier problem-solving model, but is actually confirmed by its rejection.

5 See G. L. Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1915), p. 207, for a classic statement on the ‘perfect accord’ in the marriage of Arveragus and Dorigen; also see Gervase Mathew, ‘Marriage and Amour Courtois in Late Fourteenth England’, in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, ed. by C. S. Lewis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), pp. 128–35. 6 Crime fiction exemplifies this well. Neither Sherlock Holmes nor Hercule Poirot employ in their solutions the methods and values so much privileged in the texts, ‘deduction’ and ‘psychology’. A discussion of the matter can be found in my book Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1980), see pp. 84–7 and 118–21.

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Aurelius activates the traditional fin amor challenge; he is a model lover with model speeches. He is noble and admirable, apart from his love for Dorigen, his semi-admirable flaw, like her emotional nature. And, still like her he acts a role rather than engages in personal guilt. But in the role is its meaning: it is a threat to the man equipped with wife and property; the ‘senior’, as Georges Duby points out in a valuable discussion of the complex, is challenged by the unmarried ‘iuvenis’.7 The disorderly nature of Aurelius’ action is implicit in the speech when he first suggests an anti-hierarchic equality between Apollo and Lucina, then suggests the latter might actually appropriate power over the rocks. But the figure of Lucina also suggests the threat of a woman who is equal, or worse, superior to a man. In spite of, or more probably because of, these latent implications the tale so far appears to minimise Aurelius’s threat; it is thoroughly contained by the adjusted affectionate marriage, by Dorigen’s strong-minded reaction and by Aurelius’ discreditable reaction (prostrate isolation and an emotive and pagan speech). Does this mean that the threat of losing wife and honour, is actually perceived as trivial? Or as so powerful and deep-seated that it is seen to need and even elude such a powerful defence? Rash oaths portend their awkward fulfilment, so the latter is perhaps more likely. The topic will be resumed after considering the threat posed by the magician. The resolution of the fin amor challenge is complete and neat. Aurelius adopts Arveragus’s values by imitation and returns Dorigen in legal, not amatory, language; the tone is curiously like a property contract, and a link between wife and property is growing clearer. Aurelius also speaks a few words advising wives, 1540–3: some modern editors are too locked into an individualist ‘characterising’ response to accept these lines as Aurelius’s own.8 But the lines reveal Aurelius’s new position; in action, language and attitude he rejoins the hegemonic group as aristocrat, gentleman, adviser to women and, the legal language suggests, adviser on the control of property. Aurelius, whose individual desires have challenged the hegemonic order, makes an individual choice to respect again the patterns of that order. He abrogates his rights in formal language: individualism chooses individually to deindividualise itself. It is a gratifyingly autonomous defeat, related to the presence of emotion in Arveragus and the use of love in marriage to frustrate the threat of passion outside it – the hegemonic absorption process in classic form. 7 See Duby’s discussion in Medieval Marriage, trans. E. Forster (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 12–15. 8 Aurelius’s speech was ended at line 1540 in John Koch’s edition, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Heidelberg: Winter, 1915) and the same practice was adopted in F. N. Robinson’s first edition, The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933) and Phyllis Hodgson’s separate edition of The Franklin’s Tale (London: Athlone Press, 1960). A different solution to this notional problem was provided by John Manly and Edith Rickert in their eight-volume edition The Text of The Canterbury Tales (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940): they moved 1541–4 to a position between 1550–1, on the model of the linked pair of manuscripts Rawlinson Poetry 223 and Glasgow Hunterian U.1.1. Robert A. Pratt followed this pattern in The Tales of Canterbury, Complete (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

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Aurelius does not only rejoin the hegemonic group. He becomes an avatar of Arveragus, who was previously threatened with the loss of wife and honour by Aurelius, backed by the magician. Now Aurelius, changing sides, is threatened by loss of money and honour by the magician. (Note that wife and money are in the same ‘potential loss’ paradigm here: more evidence of their latent link.) But this rejoining the body of male authority is to be rewarded by the waiving of contracted duties that have become awkward or disruptive – his massive debt. The question that arises must be whether the magician is a minor figure here, a mere enactor of Aurelius’ threat, or whether he might be the real enemy, introduced by the plot mechanism of fin amor – or indeed whether the tale deals with separate challenges which are capable of gaining strength by acting together. Chaucer has spent time and care realising and expanding the magician, though he is a figure of some substance in the two Boccaccian sources. Is this just a deployment of the poet’s investment in astrological lore? Prudent poetic housekeeping should never be forgotten as a determinant, but some deliberate modifications stand out oddly and point towards a larger purpose. First, the debt: Chaucer has chosen to make it a cash one and has also decided that Aurelius cannot find the money. In both Boccaccian stories the lover can pay, and only in The Decameron, clearly the minor source at best, is it a matter of cash: in Il Filocolo he offers land and property. Secondly, the final scene is odd. The magician turns and leaves on his horse, though Aurelius has visited him. Just before doing so he releases Aurelius ‘“As thow right now were cropen out of the grounde”’ (1614) – a somewhat insulting image, and accepts ‘vitaille’ as payment. Minor details like these often converge to reveal a latent structure, inexpressible in manifest terms because of its disturbing nature. As a lover uncaring of – indeed hostile to – property relations, Aurelius would have given away the wide world. Now as a restored figure of hegemony he owes cash to an employed professional and risks shame: it is a critical Gesellschaft relationship intruding on feudal stasis. But through the ideological closure the tradesman waives the debt and instead accepts the type of reward intrinsic to a Gemeinschaft relationship, board and food. In doing so, he vanishes. These details, then, indicate that the magician is not a mere lay figure, but has some special meaning. The vigour and mystery of his powers through the tale assert this too, as does the Franklin’s repeated statement of their unChristian nature. Even the question about ‘gentilesse’ at the end, which clearly includes the magician, implies that if hegemony has been restored, it has not been fully seen to be restored . . . men can still creep out of the ground or professionally appear and challenge those whose honour and property have long weighed down the land and held down its productive labourers. It is clear that magic is by no means the real burden of the magician’s challenge. Magic is in part a piece of plot mechanics, to make the rocks disappear. It is also a displacement, as dream analysis terms it, a relocation of a force so it can be realised and confronted. And having made the displacement of professional learning to magic it is, of course, all the easier to disapprove of the character’s powers. 75

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These are not entirely magical at all, and to call him ‘magician’ is something of an obfuscation, one that criticism has traditionally continued, and so far in this paper the use has gone unchallenged. But from now on this discussion will follow the text, and call him ‘Master’.9 The emphatically personalised demonstrative ‘this’ is consistently used of him, even when ‘Master’ is not. Learning and individuation appear to be equally important signifieds in his context. His practices are suggestive: he walks alone, has no living associates beyond Aurelius’s brother, works in a book-lined room, has special knowledge of his visitors’ intentions. The signs of mysterious mental powers are, however, combined with a curious accessibility. He can readily be hired, is remarkably biddable when on the job, is anxious to please his employer, is enormously expensive. So in our terms he is a professional, highcost, efficient intellectual, perhaps a high-powered tax lawyer, though ‘Academic’ is about the best contemporary translation for ‘Master’, especially for the pejorative implications of the word in this tale. The ideological drift is clear. The threat of supplanting by a man within the hegemonic system seems trivial; but when it is allied to an intellectual, professional, cash-related force both servile and mysteriously powerful, disapproved by the hegemonic church, then the threat is suddenly enacted in full power. It can only be countered by a forceful exertion of conservative values, reawakening absolute authority. And in this struggle the chivalric contenders have to close ranks to retain their property and honour in traditional hierarchical solidarity. Read ideologically, the tale is a fable about perceived but inarticulated threats to the continued power of the feudal aristocracy, ultimately coming jointly from a cash system that generates crippling debts, and an administrative, learned subclass, both of them operating outside the power structure of church and aristocracy. The conditions of the decline of feudalism and the rise of capitalism are imaginatively realised; the feared event is that the aristocratic class would not remain solid, but some would compete successfully for the control of resources through a treacherous dependence on clerical and cash powers, that is, bourgeois powers. That this did happen is a matter of history. That the ideological edifice is structured along the lines of fear of personal supplanting and fear of magic shows the functional power of Chaucer’s imagination to correlate the personal and the supernatural with the social into expressive – and expressible – fictions. Several commentators on the tale have seen class-conflict as an element in it, a response to historical forces.10 But this need not be so. We have grown so used 9 The word ‘Master’ is consistently capitalised in the two most authoritative manuscripts, Hengwrt and Ellesmere, but this is no special distinction as many roles and professions are treated in the same way, e.g. Fawconer, Tregettour, Squier, Clerk. 10 The notion of the Franklin as a class-conscious and somewhat vulgar bourgeois was forcefully transmitted by R. K. Root, The Poetry of Chaucer (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), p. 273, and is still disseminated by remarks like Phyllis Hodgson’s comment on lines 681–5: ‘The Franklin’s monetary comparison betrays his bourgeois origin’, see p. 72 of her edition. In his essay ‘The Art of Chaucer’s Franklin’, Neophilologus, 51 (1967), 55–73, Robert Burlin considers this view of him justifiable from the headlink, but not so readily derivable from the ‘General Prologue’.

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to the notion of class-consciousness as the basis of radical critique that we may not see that identifying class can be of itself a conservative force if power and value remain ‘naturally’ with one class. It is so in the Franklin’s final remarks, for his own position and the wording of the concluding question, however wide its implications may be, imply no foreseen change in the existing class structure or the associated ownership of the means of production. To see why this is so, it is first relevant to note that those who have studied the matter are by no means satisfied that a franklin represented (or at least would be conscious of representing) a class other than the aristocratic. Gerould some years ago showed that franklins stood with the aristocracy in socioeconomic terms, and Pearcy has more recently indicated this is the perceived pattern in all but fabliaux.11 Chaucer obviously knew fabliaux, and indicates in his headlink that the Franklin may be detached to some degree from the aristocracy, as the Host’s response to him unquestionably shows. This deepens the ideological impact and operation: the figure is distinct from, but shares the interests of, the aristocracy. Marginal members of a power group are both very common and extremely credible as agents of ideology, as in the early nineteenth-century English ‘Silver Fork’ novel: a questionable but devoted status convincingly empowers such a figure to realise and also to dismiss threats from the hegemonic standpoint, and to act among the powerless as an apparently disinterested propagandist for hegemony. In a relatively narrow compass the text makes quite clear both the Franklin’s marginality and loyalty. It has frequently been noted that he consciously favours manners and ‘discrecioun’ in the headlink, yet he does not prefer them to money, as some have thought, but to ‘possessioun’, to property that produces income. In an unnoticed parallel to this sequence the Franklin sees in his prologue the mastery of rhetoric as having two possible sources – sleeping on Parnassus or learning from books. The former is, of course, a model for living in the honourable aristocratic community, homologous with the House of Fame high on its hill, but also full of words.12 The Franklin does not have this ‘natural’ claim on rhetoric, but can conceive of book learning as an access to it. Chaucer has chosen to deploy the reference in the Franklin’s mouth: his imagination has found some inner resonance between the remark and the figure he is realising. These two sequences predict the polarities of the tale where Aurelius and the Master will show what threats can be posed by words and manners that lack respect for another’s property – explicitly honour and wife – and by learning outside the aristocratic or clerical ring-fence.

This split is visible through critical commentary on the character: scholars who write on the ‘General Prologue’ description generally see the hegemonic position of the figure; but the headlink is thought to expose his arrivisme. 11 See G. Gerould, ‘The Social Status of Chaucer’s Franklin’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America, 41 (1926), 262–79; and Roy J. Pearcy, ‘Chaucer’s Franklin and the Literary Vavasour’, Chaucer Review, 8 (1973), 33–59. 12 This matter is discussed in the essay referred to in note 3, see pp. 49–66 in this collection.

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If a form of marginality is sketched in here, upper-class loyalty is plain in the scattered but carefully constructed remarks where the Franklin expresses distaste for noble women’s emotion (818), Aurelius’s fanciful foppery (1084–6) and the Master’s dangerous learning (1131–4, 1291–3). So he both mildly represents and stoutly resists the threats that Arveragus figurally defeats: the Franklin maintains the vulnerability that invokes ideology, just as his final question both doubts hegemonic structure and invites its reaffirmation. To ask if squire or professional can be as ‘generous’ as a lord is to doubt in part; but to make the category generosity is to arrange the problematic so that all positions share the value of hegemony – and exclude the woman who has no such rights, again unlike Rhiannon). The structural value of the powerful, all-owning feudal lord is his largesse, by which he rewards the exploited at all levels, and the question points inwards to a hegemonic answer. As this paper has shown so far, a full understanding of the ideological content requires reading carefully into the text. But it may also require reading outside the text into other texts and contexts, both literary and historical. Many of the features only partly discerned through studying the action and narrator are illuminated by uncovering the sources of both narrative and of names.

3. Sources and ideology Concerning the sources of the tale, it seemed for some time that Tatlock and Dempster had contributed a definitive essay to Sources and Analogues, and the names of the characters appeared adequately treated there and in Tatlock’s The Scene of the Franklin’s Tale Visited. But another look at the sources can be illuminating, as Gaylord has shown,13 and this process can continue, especially since new attitudes to narrative have deflected attention from the simple study of accidental details and plot-motifs to the essential and functional structures of texts, whether they be narrative syntagms, as for Propp and Todorov, or semantic paradigms as for LéviStrauss and (in a more specifically ideological context) Macherey,14 as discussed in Chapter 3 in this collection. Some source-study in these terms will be informative and will, in the light of recent research in Welsh studies, help to clarify some features that remained hitherto obscure, particularly the status of Dorigen as wife,

13 See Chapter 14 of Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ed. by W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (London: Routledge, 1941); J. S. P. Tatlock, The Scene of the Franklin’s Tale Visited (London: Kegan Paul, 1914); Alan Gaylord, ‘The Promises in the Franklin’s Tale’, English Literary History, 31 (1964), 331–65. 14 See for examples of their methodology V. I. Propp, The Morphology of the Folk-Tale, trans. Laurence Scott, 2nd revised edition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968); Tzetvan Todorov, Grammaire du Décaméron (The Hague: Mouton, 1969); Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘The Structural Study of Myth’, in Journal of American Folklore, 68 (1955), 428–44. For a fuller example of his paradigmatic analysis, see The Origin of Table Manners, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (London: Cape, 1978): Lévi-Strauss says that the whole volume is an analysis of the ‘conjugal misadventures of Monmankei the hunter’, p. 199. A less efflorescent example is the same book’s treatment of the ‘Star-Husband Tale’, pp. 227–73. For Macherey see note 1.

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mediator of honour, and shadow of property. After that, an analysis of the names in the tale will fill out and specify the observed pattern of conflict. Tatlock and Dempster insisted that any ‘Breton lay’ features in the tale were Chaucerian pastiche, perhaps having a literary basis in the Auchinleck manuscript. Tatlock had stated previously in The Scene of the Franklin’s Tale Visited that the Celtic names were from Geoffrey of Monmouth and though the place-names were broadly authentic they were by that very fact alien to the nature of Breton lays. In positivist terms there seemed much to recommend this view. Schofield’s earlier offer of Equitain as a Breton lay analogue to the tale is certainly unconvincing; he was merely looking for detailed identity and this was the best he could find.15 However, going behind the plot details first to story-pattern (syntagmatic) then through it to ideological structure (paradigmatic) will reveal surprisingly Celtic formations in ‘The Franklin’s Tale’, and these will be supported by a new look at the personal names. G. V. Smithers’ essay on ‘The Types of the Breton Lay’ is a useful departure point.16 He identifies the ‘fairy mistress’ pattern as Type I and two sorts of supplanting threat as Types II and III. Since these last two are structurally the same, merely operating different categories of supplanter and different outcomes, they would in any syntagmatic analysis be classed together. The supplanting aspect of the tale has already been discussed, and it relates to this joint Type II/III. But the tale bears clear traces of being a Type I story as well, derived in part from a fairy mistress story, in which Type II/III supplanting is threatened after the happy relationship with the providing lady has been established. This is a fairly common development of Type I, though loss of the lady is usually dependent on the breach of some taboo. Dorigen’s rash oath is a version of this ‘function’, as Propp would call it. To see this structure clearly in the tale it is necessary to go behind the overt pattern of the fairy mistress story and grasp its ideological force. A crucial step is the recognition of the ‘sovereignty’ theme in fairy mistress stories, largely revealed in studies by Rachel Bromwich and Glenys Goetinck.17 Briefly, the notion and practice of sovereignty in a Celtic tribe were conceived of as residing in a female, and a man achieved power by marrying this figure, anciently in a ceremonious fashion. Literature reflects the pattern by tracing the

15 W. H. Schofield, ‘Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America, 6 (1901), 405–47. 16 Medium Aevum, 22 (1953), 61–92. 17 A useful summary of the topic, with references to earlier work in Celtic studies, is given by Goetinck in Chapter 3 of Peredur: A Study of Welsh Tradition in the Grail Legends (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1975). An essay of particular relevance to ‘The Franklin’s Tale’, with its alleged Breton lay character, is Bromwich’s important statement of the relation between fairy mistress/sovereignty themes and French lay and romance, ‘Celtic Dynastic Themes and the Breton Lays’, Études Celtiques, 9 (1961), 439–74. She has also made some interesting additional comments in her essay, written in Welsh, on the three Welsh Arthurian romances in Y Traddodiad Rhyddiath yn yr Oesau Canol (‘The Prose Tradition in the Middle Ages’), ed. by Geraint Bowen (Llandysul: Gwasg (Press) Gee, 1974).

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fortunate marriage of a newly powerful man. Figures like ‘the sovereignty of Ireland’ are well known, as are real women of sovereign power like Cartimandua and Boudicca in Roman Britain, and cultural counterparts like Irish Medb and Welsh Rhiannon. Whether this rationalises a matrilinear society or a quickdying warrior society, or combines both forces, is a matter for speculation: its historical and cultural reality is plain. Pwyll himself has such a marriage with Rhiannon, and the connection between Welsh or Breton stories like that and medieval French material is evident. Bromwich refers to the ‘general popularity of fairy-mistress stories in the twelfth century and remarks that the Breton lays are ‘preoccupied . . . with the fairy mistress theme’. She shows well how a wide range of French and English lays and romances preserved the motifs of female sovereignty much as Celtic story presented them.18 The narrative pattern that Bromwich outlines in general and that Goetinck relates more specifically to the Welsh pre-Grail prose story Peredur (see Chapter 12 in this collection) is deployed in lay and romance in response to the pressures and needs of what Georges Duby outlined as the iuvenes, the unmarried and property-less men who could neither win by the sword nor inherit property in northern Europe in the twelfth century, by then relatively pacified and recently become primogenitural.19 The romance of the knight who proves himself and wins both fairy mistress and inalienable territory is a dynamic fable of the high period of romance. This was two centuries before Chaucer’s time, but neither the social reality nor the cultural force of the pattern had passed when he wrote. Blanche of Lancaster, a woman of great beauty and massive property, elevated John of Gaunt from a younger royal son into a formidable figure, even in time to be, through another marriage, King of Castile. Chaucer professionally served Elizabeth de Burgh, who brought Ulster into the power of Lionel, another of Edward III’s iuvenes. Joan of Kent was a famous beauty and woman of considerable power and property who augmented the position of her husband the ‘senior’ king’s son, the ‘Black Prince’. The patterns of the sovereign woman are clear in several of Chaucer’s texts. The Book of the Duchess presents the structure overtly and The Hous of Fame has obvious reflexes of the pattern in both Dido and Fame herself. ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ is a direct fairy mistress story with the original ‘transformed hag’ functions, and ‘Sir Thopas’ is a parody of the genre. Canace’s relation with the falcon in ‘The Squire’s Tale’ looks as if it has absorbed the animal-avatar traditions of the fairy mistress along with other material in this attenuated compendium of medieval romances. ‘The Knight’s Tale’ itself presents royal Amazons, one much sought after by deracinated knights, the other the powerful and conquered consort of Theseus. Whatever the mediating sources and attitudes, the lineaments of sovereignty tales seem clear enough, and it would be odd if they were not. A pattern which

18 ‘Celtic Dynastic Themes’, pp. 468 and 460. 19 See the reference in note 7.

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is clear in Le Chevalier au Lion, implicit in Le Roman de la Rose, and still vital enough for Malory to recreate in his most original piece of work, ‘The Tale of Sir Gareth’, can hardly have eluded Chaucer’s notice. Through recognising the sovereignty aspect of the fairy mistress it is possible to close in on the links between lady and property. There are many suggestive details in the texts: the lady is often seen first at a window of her castle; the hero is by right of arms her protector: whether he killed the previous protector or her oppressor is a minor feature, the oppressor structure being the more euphemised version. The lady can be first named at the wedding, as in Le Chevalier au Lion – or she even has a territorial name like Laudine in that text (originally named for south-east Scottish Lothian), or Lyonesse in Malory. The land which the knight wins through her is, crucially, separate from the power of King Arthur, a fantasy of inalienable property, not merely a fief. This property aspect of the lady is not an overt feature in Chaucer: though Dorigen is at ‘hire castel’ (847) the connections of lady and property seem latent. Certainly the masculine anxiety which usually accompanies the process of gaining property by sexual liaison is much reduced in Chaucer. Chrétien abounds in castration images – the horse and spur-slashing portcullis in Le Chevalier au Lion, the similar vagina dentata symbolised in the ‘joie de la Court’ episode of Érec et Énide, the cutting of the hand while forcing open a barred aperture in Le Chevalier de la Charrette – a motif so dynamic as to be borrowed from the prose Tristan. Malory makes do with the castrating scorn of Lynette, the shrewd and magically skilled avatar of the territorial lady in ‘The Tale of Sir Gareth’. In Chaucer, Arveragus’s fear of Dorigen (736) may well be the same function euphemised, as could be the brutal fighting in ‘The Knight’s Tale’, and both the threat of execution and the curtain lecture in ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’. There is also in Chaucer the curious phenomenon that men who adore women, rather than marrying them, tend themselves to be effeminate. One might regard this as some generally neurotic masculine reaction were it not that in Érec et Énide and, in negative form, Le Chevalier au Lion this feature is expressly linked to the wife-property theme: you win land through a woman, but you face the threat of losing thereby your masculine identity. The relative effeminacy of Absolon and Troilus is a continuation of the original castration function, but no longer bearing its special relation to property. Knowing Le Roman de la Rose as well as he did, Chaucer must have been influenced by that poem’s powerful presentation of the love/property theme. The castle metaphors for a besieged love (like the dense feudal and martial imagery of love) have a literal basis, and bear the essential latent message of the text. That poem can be read as an account (mystified and so ideologically effective) of the castleseeking that was then endemic in Northern France, which occurred either politely through marriage or by rude force: rose, woman, castle are an inseparable complex of desire and property-seeking objectification. The text of the Roman also provides the apparently inevitable response: a castration function in the strangely bisexual symbolism of the spring of Narcissus, where the phallic pine overshadows the vulvular spring, but the testicular globes lie within the orifice itself: the 81

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details of description mix an optical image of the desired garden with a version of the engulfing and emasculating vagina.20 The intertwining of love and property in texts like these is so strong, and apparently so ideologically functional in its nature, that it is necessary to suggest that throughout the whole course of medieval romance the notion ‘love’ is no more than a euphemism for (or, better, a displacement of) the desire for property. The woman has a castle, is besieged, is pledged fidelity in return for transfer of her property – and then the newly propertied male may be threatened by a challenger. The real possibility of marrying an estate was basic to the pattern, as the failure of younger sons to obtain family land was dynamic to the fantasy development of the motif. The notion of love allowed great lords to struggle, in the texts, without revealing the actual dynamic of their desires, the socioeconomic aggressions beneath the mystifications of courtesy. That courtesy, with the courtesy of love prominent in its ensemble, was nothing but a surplus of manners to legitimise the alienation of a surplus of productivity, and the dialectic of love is a displaced dramatisation of the often bitter conflicts for the control of exploitable means of production. Like the developed and supplanting-threatened sovereignty structure, the names in ‘The Franklin’s Tale’ point to a Celtic source of some sort, no doubt at some remove from a Celtic language but tracing back to a story of conflict over and through a property-figuring woman of fairy power – that suggests as a source just what the Franklin says, a Breton lay. Early attempts to explain the names were offered by Rajna and Schofield, while Tatlock suggested that after deciding to shape a Breton lay for the Franklin, Chaucer drew the names of Arveragus and Aurelius from different parts of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae and altered Geoffrey’s Genuissa to Dorigen.21 Tatlock recognised the validity of Tyrwhitt’s note that Dorigen was the queen of Alain I, prince of Brittany from 888–907: although known as Ohuergen in the earliest Breton sources she was named by medieval chroniclers as Dorigen. Tatlock did not explain why Chaucer might have changed Genuissa from Geoffrey of Monmouth, nor speculate why he might have been influenced by Breton chronicles: had he considered the point he would no doubt have put it down, like the place-names, to deliberately introduced Breton local colour. However, discussion of the names will show that rather than being a bogus suggestion of Breton, or at least British, material, they all have a 20 The continuing character of this obsessive masculine fear is indicated by Gershon Legman’s long sequence of obscene stories and songs featuring the vagina dentata, which frequently threatens the whole male scrotum, including testicles, not merely the penis or a displaced symbol of it. See No Laughing Matter: The Rationale of the Dirty Joke, second series (London: Granada, 1978), pp. 481–766; for a section on castration see pp. 489–542. 21 P. Rajna, ‘L’Episodio delle questone d’amore nel Filocolo del Boccaccio’, Romania, 31 (1902), 28–81, see p. 41; and also his essay ‘Le origini della novella narrate del “Frankeleyn” nel Canterbury Tales del Chaucer’, Romania, 33 (1903), 204–67, see pp. 264–7; Schofield, pp. 409–16; Tatlock, The Legendary History of Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950), p. 120; Tatlock and Dempster, in Bryan and Dempster, Sources and Analogues, pp. 383–5.

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specific Breton character, and an interrelation that leads back to a sovereignty conflict. Philology and ideology can marry fruitfully. The names will be taken in order of transparency. Aurelius may be the name of a fifth-century British leader and several Roman emperors, but more relevantly to this tale it is the basis of the place-name Orléans. Late fourteenth-century sources knew this, and the university normally used the adjective Aurelianus, as Oxford still employs Oxoniensis.22 So Aurelius’ name and location of his magicointellectual assistance are convergent. This is unlikely to be a coincidence in the work of a well-travelled and quite scholarly writer like Chaucer, in spite of F. P. Magoun’s opinion to that effect.23 But named as he might be, it appears that Aurelius is meant in the story to be a Breton; he is described as Dorigen’s ‘neghebour’ (961) and this no doubt means he lived nearby, not that he was by her in the dance. Orléans was, as Tatlock noted, the university where Bretons normally went.24 This may perhaps suggest a real basis to the professional threat structure discussed above, and the link between name and place clearly binds together more firmly the dual threat of Aurelius and the Master. The other man’s name is also suggestive, though it is less clear whether Chaucer would have been directly aware of its significance. Arveragus is a name of some antiquity: Juvenal uses it in his fourth satire in the form Arviragus, evidently knowing its Celtic connection.25 There is an obvious explanation of the name; it does create some philological and historical problems, but these may be products of our own misinformation and confusion. No philological difficulty arises from explaining Arveragus as a Celtic development of the Latin adjective Armoricus, meaning Breton – itself formed from Celtic ar ‘on’ or ‘at’, and mor ‘sea’ (cf. the modern Breton adjective arvorig, ‘by the sea’). These words must have been Gaulish when the Romans encountered them. After the development of mutation in early Brittonic (dated by Jackson in the middle of the fifth century)26 the /m/ would become /v/ after the preposition ar as in the Welsh place-name Arfon (composed of ar and ‘Mȏn’, the part of North Wales opposite Mȏn, or Anglesey). So in Breton Arveragus would be a local toponymic. The vowel changes from Armori-

22 A late fourteenth-century usage is referred to in H. Heidrich’s Das geographische Weltbild des spätes Englischen Mittelalters mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Vorstellung Chaucers and seiner Zeitgenossen (Freiburg im Breisgau: Hammerschlag, 1915). It says (in abbreviated translation) ‘the university of Orléans played a great role in Chaucer’s time’, p. 84. The university’s importance is stressed (and the Latin version of its name is recorded in many footnotes) in the section on Orléans in H. Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, re-edited F. M. Powicke and A. B. Emden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936). 23 A Chaucer Gazeteer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 118. 24 The Scene of the Franklin’s Tale Visited, p. 44. 25 The reference is in Satire IV, 126–7: 26 See K. H. Jackson, Language and History in Early Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1953), pp. 543–53. Breton is one of the Insular Celtic or Brittonic languages (as distinct from the Gaelic branch of Celtic) and the language was part of the settlement of modern Brittany from South-West England and Wales in the fifth century AD.

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cus present no difficulty, nor does the variation of suffix with Armoricanus, which provided French Armoricain. In fact an ‘Arveraganus’ version is extremely interesting: by various recorded processes of stress-shift and syllabic absorption, it would give rise to a form easily represented as ‘Fergaint’, which is the commonest spelling for the cognomen of Alain IV of Brittany, who ruled from 1086–1112. The name Fergaint has not been satisfactorily etymologised: ‘white ankle’ has now been discredited and ‘of perfect strength’ seems even less credible.27 As a usually pro-Norman Breton married to the conqueror’s daughter, he would presumably have been known to Geoffrey of Monmouth and if his name is indeed a version of Armoricus and Arveragus, this may well explain the puzzling prominence given to Arverigus in the Historia Regum Britanniae. Chaucer, however, clearly had a source for these names outside Geoffrey of Monmouth, as shown by his adoption of Dorigen, rather than Geoffrey’s deliberate re-formation Genuissa, used as part of his relocation of the Arvorigus-Dorigen story among the Gwenhwys, or men of Gwent in south east Wales.28 In such an ultimately Breton source, which Geoffrey himself presumably shared, it is highly likely that Alain IV had become confused with Alain I, husband of Dorigen, and so Fergaint/Arvorigus was treated as the husband of Dorigen. Unless indeed a more likely but unrecorded fact occurred, that Alain I, usually known as Alain the Great, as befits the founder of medieval Brittany, was also known by the province’s toponym in one of its forms. It is highly probable that Chaucer had access to some originally Breton story whose plot broadly resembled that of Boccaccio’s two fables, but in which the essential conflict was property-based through a sovereign woman, between the overtly named lord of Brittany and a supplanter named for northern France and its urban and intellectual culture. There were depths in this beyond Boccaccio, possibilities that meshed with Chaucer’s own responses to conflict in his period, and he kept the names.29 If husband and supplanter have these startling toponymic names, what of the woman? The form Dorigen is not merely an error for a form beginning with O. The medieval unanimity on the form, a probable etymology, interesting analogies

27 See Bromwich, Trioedd Ynys Prydein (‘Triads of the Island of Britain’), 2nd edition (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1978), p. 528, where in an additional note she withdraws ‘white ankle’, offered on p. xciii, and accepts ‘of perfect strength’, offered by Léon Fleuriot, ‘Breton moyen fer, gallois ffêr’, Études Celtiques, 11 (1964–5), 138–42. 28 Schofield, p. 415. 29 There is one special problem with the reference to Juvenal. Why does he use a mutated form long before the accepted date of mutation in Brittonic? This problem also faces the traditional etymology, holding that the name stems from Biracos, see A. Holder, Alt-Celtischer Sprachsatz (Leipzig: Teubner, 1896), s.v. ‘Arviragus’. Dr J. C. Martyn, of the University of Melbourne, who is preparing a new edition of the Satires, has told me that the reading ‘Arviragus’ cannot be doubted – there is thus no possibility of modern editors having projected Geoffrey’s reading back onto Juvenal. One response to the conundrum is that the date of this type of mutation may well not be correct and the change occurred earlier, at least in Gaul. It is, though, possible that Latin speakers might have heard Celtic /m/, in this case perhaps already a bilabial fricative, as /v/.

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that Tatlock mentions, all these give it its own standing. There are several suggested etymologies for Dorigen.30 If its date of development and recording is like that of Arveragus (which is not necessarily the case), then the mutated /m/ in that name must make it seem most unlikely that the second formant of Dorigen is Celtic gwen, ‘fair, white, pure, holy’, since at the same period second formants mutate and the /g/ would have been lost. So dor-gwen, ‘very fair’ can be discarded: it is not a likely noble name in any case. A compound using gwen which avoids this problem is drwg-(g)wen, or ‘bad-fair’, which would be teasingly like the Welsh Gwenhwyfair: the basis of Guinevere, this is thought to mean ‘white/fair phantom’, or, perhaps better, ‘white/fair enchantress’.31 But a first formant drwg is by no means easily developed to dorg. The probability in a royal name is that the second formant is gena-, a female form of the common Indo-European word for ‘born’. The intensive dor- is a possibility for the first formant, but ‘well-born’ would be unusually transparent for a royal name in Celtic: those whose etymology is known tend to be specific, naming a rank, a characteristic or a totemic association (Urbgen or Urien means ‘nobly-born’ but is not an exception to this statement, as the first element, meaning ‘heir’, is more specific than ‘well’). The best suggestion in philological and historical terms for the origin of Dorigen is that made by F. N. Robinson, whose Chaucerian expertise has somewhat obscured his skill as a Celticist. He offers *dwbro-gena as the source of the name, that is ‘water-born’ – in later Welsh/Breton becoming dwr + gena.32 That would be a fine name for a sovereignty figure, as sea, springs and streams are so commonly the source and locus of sovereign powers in Celtic and other early culture (cf. Boann in Irish and Sabrina in Welsh). The fairy mistress and the fight between men for the sovereign woman are both associated with watersources, and the association of this particular figure with tidal waters is strongly suggested by the references Tatlock gives to rocks and coastal features which bear a version of the name.33 There is evidence of sovereign status in Dorigen beyond the implications of her name. Chroniclers agree that Alain I shared rule with his wife.34 Geoffrey of Monmouth consciously makes her such a figure, Genuissa, the tribal symbol (i.e. sovereignty figure) of the men of Gwent and sovereign of the city of Gloucester. This was itself a Roman city, the sort of red-brick assemblage called in Breton/Welsh Caerrhud, ‘the red city’, the same name as Kayrrud, Averagus’s seat. Laƺamon, it might be noted, also makes much of the queen’s substantive royal rank and like

30 Tatlock surveys the etymological possibilities in The Scene of the Franklin’s Tale Visited, p. 40. 31 See Bromwich, Trioedd Ynys Prydein, p. 380, where she discusses possibilities, and p. 553 where in a note she accepts the ‘white enchantress’ argument of Melville Richards in ‘Arthurian Onomastics’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (no volume number), part 2 (1969), 250–64, see p. 257. 32 See Robinson’s note on line 815 of ‘The Franklin’s Tale’. 33 The Scene of the Franklin’s Tale Visited, p. 38. 34 Ibid.

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Geoffrey insists that Arveragus’s co-rule was empowered by love; he also adds a ‘word-keeping’ motif to the story, an interesting parallel, or analogue, even conceivably a source, to Chaucer’s development.35 The traces of sovereignty and special powers are not hard to detect in Dorigen, and may well be associated with the developed power of her viewpoint and character in the story. It can hardly be a coincidence that Chaucer elsewhere used an overt fairy mistress story to relate to an even more potent feminine figure, the Wife of Bath, in her tale. These Celtic patterns appear to have meshed with his own interest in the nature of power in the challenge women offered to men, though in both stories he carefully foreclosed the full property-linked element of the challenge. The argument so far is based on logic and probabilities. But speculation is possible. If an original sovereignty lay related to the winning of Brittany, with a development about the defence of Brittany, had as central figure a woman of power associated with water, it is hardly credible that her power did not concern the major water-phenomenon in Brittany – its extraordinary tides. In a conflict for her and Brittany, it is probable that she would exert her force in favour of her chosen mate, as fairy mistresses do, and this would probably involve her power over tides, either to let the chosen Breton prince pass the rocks or make the challenger perish on them (water-spirits do this kind of thing frequently in Irish literature). So Dorigen’s association with rocks, tides and the safety of her mate is probably authentic to the story, but a negative transformation has occurred: her power over tides has, in keeping with medieval Christian views of women and pagan forces, been removed from the plot detail and invested in intellectualism and scholarly masculine magic, of which she is the victim. There are many such total realignments of motifs in story. The sword that symbolises a notional purity between Tristan and Iseult in the medieval, male-oriented romance was put there in Irish by the handsome hero shamed into elopement by the powerful woman: he put it there to keep her away from him.36 Such motifs, rocks and swords, are too rich to forget in story, but their significance is redirected for new ideological ensembles. To return to facts and probabilities, the names of ‘The Franklin’s Tale’ trace the lineaments of a legitimating myth for a prince like Alain I. There is also a successful defence of Brittany and its female-linked sovereignty against forces suggestively French, actions characteristic of Alain I and, at times, Alain IV, surnamed Fergaint. Chaucer plainly knew something of this material, as the name Dorigen and the Breton location show. But rather than recreating a Breton myth, he made use of its structure to develop the social and gendered conflict he found

35 See Layamon’s Brut, lines 4762–83, in the edition of G. L. Brooke and R. F. Leslie, Early English Text Society, Original Series, No. 250 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962). Jerome W. Archer has discussed the Brut in ‘On Chaucer’s Sources for “Arveragus” in The Franklin’s Tale’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America, 56 (1950), 318–22. 36 The motif is discussed by Sigmund Eisner, The Tristan Legend: A Study in Sources (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969), see pp. 93–4.

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in Boccaccio, and to expand the issues involved in this process he realised in fictional shape implicit dramas of his own socio-economic structure, itself not fully out of contact with the pattern which had reshaped in chivalric romance the core of Celtic sovereignty stories. The ideological sharpness of ‘The Franklin’s Tale’ can be readily seen by comparing it with ‘The Knight’s Tale’, another story of love-conflict, but there between very close rivals, who are without sociopolitical variation. In ‘The Franklin’s Tale’ the pattern has been doubly reorganised through Boccaccian and Celtic models. The male rivals have been separated in marital status, age and class to create a chain of anti-hegemonic threats, and the instrumentality of the conflict has been taken out of the hands of the gods and the duke and located in rival males and contemporary powers. To that specificity Chaucer added the remarkable feature of making the central woman figure both a committed wife and also a speaking, feeling, position-taking figure. Here, as in his other major women, realisation of the female position cannot survive uncontained, but it severely strains the foreclosure and apprehends a feminine force that in literature and society together took several centuries to apprehend and more to release from submission and exploitation. The figure of Dorigen, in its testing and enigmatic character, is an important extension of the ideological force of the tale, and through her, as to some extent through the Master, the text indicates that its final confident dismissal of threats to hegemony is not all that it has to say but that to some extent it implicitly criticises that hegemony. The Canterbury Tales as a whole has the same force. The power of its ultimate foreclosure, like the neat resolution of ‘The Franklin’s Tale’, does not conceal Chaucer’s vision of the pressures that were to disrupt hegemony and, particularly in the case of the forces of science and of women, were to continue their dialectic dynamism up to, and no doubt beyond, the present society, whose silence on the topic of literary ideology is one of its own ideological and selfsustaining practices.

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5 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF THE MIDDLE ENGLISH ROMANCES

From: Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology and History, ed. by David Aers (Brighton: Harvester, 1986)

1. Sociopolitical approaches The romances are the ugly ducklings of medieval English studies. With rare exceptions, they offer no niceties of style for the New Critic, no depth of reference for the exegete. They fall between the elaborate courtesy of their French ancestors and the blunt simplicity of their junior siblings, the British ballads. Both extremes have found many to applaud and examine them as differing models of culture, but the Middle English romances as a whole are rarely studied and less often read. Yet the romances are there, in surprisingly large numbers for medieval texts that are in English and relatively unsophisticated – so basically ill-qualified for early literary recording. At least a hundred of them existed – the count varies, depending on how many quasi-hagiographies and near-novels are admitted, and while many of the early and shorter romances survive in single copies, some achieve double figures in manuscripts and early prints, outperforming many of the poems of Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate. The romances show variety in form, source and topic, but they share the figure of the knight and the ethic of chivalry: all definitions of the genre, however hesitant, recognise that point of convergence. Since the figure and the ethic belong to a particular social and economic formation, that of feudalism, an invitation emerges to investigate the social function of the romance genre. This approach has been noted by some of the more thoughtful critics, though hardly pursued very far. Auerbach discerned chivalric self-projection in the classic French romance, and also the contradiction inherent in the birth of the chivalric ideal at the time and place of mercantile take-off (1957, pp. 131, 133, 138). Recent historians of romance considered the possibility of a socio-historical approach. Mehl felt some ‘data’ might emerge from a geographic and social study (1968, p. 35); Pearsall recognised the approach more fully, but his essentially literary stance made him sceptical of its value (1977, p. 126). Gibbs’ introduction 88

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to his edition acknowledges Auerbach’s initiative but goes only a little further along that line (1966). A more complex study has a more sophisticated vision of the romances in context: Wittig sees them as based on an essentially social myth (1978, p. 183), rather than the much-favoured individualist, persona-realising, view offered intrinsically by Stevens (1973). Finlayson’s essay in definition rejects any relation with social reality (1980, p. 54), while Barrow’s The Medieval Society Romances (1924) is based on naive reflection theory, assuming that feudal society was intensely courteous and employed the romances as handbooks to fine manners. A different initiative is taken in the undeveloped political comment made by Kettle when positioning himself for his Introduction to the British Novel (1951, vol. 2, p. 29): he states that romance was the non-realistic aristocratic literature of feudalism. It was non-realistic in the sense that its underlying purpose was not to help people cope in a positive way with the business of living, but to transport them to a world different, idealised, finer than their own. It was aristocratic because the attitudes it expressed and recommended were precisely the attitudes the ruling class wished (no doubt usually unconsciously) to encourage in order that their privileged position might be perpetuated. Kettle goes no further, though his colleague in early English Marxist literary criticism, A. L. Morton, argued out in some detail the basis for the summary Kettle gave (1960). Neither would appeal greatly to modern theoretical Marxism because of their view that there is an unproblematic ‘Real’ with which culture should confront people, but the sharply political sense of the role of culture in class conflict should survive from Kettle’s pronouncement, and underlie any understanding of the full social role of romance, however much elaboration and modification might be needed. Two central elements in the recent analysis of culture and its social role need to be incorporated, though Auerbach goes close to subsuming them in his sociohistorical asides. The principle of hegemony, stemming from Gramsci’s work (Adamson, 1980), has established that culture is not a ‘superstructural’ or relatively insignificant part of political process, but is a most important domain, helping to create consent to the dominance structured throughout a particular society and reproduced in its cultural forms. This is of special importance in the medieval context, where the appropriation of surplus from producers, as goods or feudal rent, was not brought about by an economic mechanism as in the capitalist appropriation of surplus value, but was primarily made possible by a set of coercions of a political, cultural and religious character (Hindess and Hirst, 1975, pp. 222–3). Secondly, and as part of that hegemony, there is the valuable Althusserian concept of cultures as an ‘imaginary’ in which people produce for themselves an ideological relationship with actual events and forces (1971). In spite of criticism (Coward and Ellis, 1977, pp. 74–5; Eagleton, 1983, pp. 171–3), the imaginary remains a valuable account of how people make use of and are controlled by a dominant ideology. The corpus of romance evidently filled the role of an imaginary for a complex audience, which can be reconstructed to some degree. The use of the English language would exclude from the audience at most the upper 89

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aristocracy and royal family, and those not after the mid-fourteenth century. A significant role in the audience must have been played by those who actually controlled the economic and social relations of the feudal mode of production, landlords and their families. For them the romances detail a whole range of threats to their tenure of power, and also resolve those threats by employing the values that seem from their viewpoint the most credible – partly the euphemised values of chivalry, and partly the realistic values of cavalry. The majority of the audience would have been people who were not in positions of power but accepted the values of those who were, that acceptance depending upon cultural persuasions as well as more tangible coercions, as is normal in such situations. This broader audience (to whom the feudal threats and values were both an ideological imaginary and a structure of false consciousness) would include many who have been wrongly thought outside the world of feudal social and cultural relations. Marx showed that pre-capitalist formations such as primitive manufacturing (weaving for instance), local circulation of goods for cash (carrying trade), and urban artisanship (guild and journeyman crafts) do not in any way breach the economic and social bases of the feudal mode of production (Grundrisse (1973), p. 512; Capital, 1 (1975), p. 510). The fact that mercantile values are seen as a threat in many of the romances only points to the dialectical and historically developing nature of the feudal mode of production; similar strains are to be found within the culture of the capitalist mode of production. It should be said at this stage that the term ‘feudal’ has a distinct value, in spite of problems raised by some historians about its variability of meaning over time. The concept functions usefully as the description of a specific economic and social structure, perceived in medieval Western Europe as dominant both in its time and by historians since then (Mukherjee, 1985). The texts to be discussed here will be considered in terms of their relationship with feudality, not in terms of their chronological historicity, genre or literary form, though those features can help to reveal the parts played by various romances in feudal hegemony – central to it, peripheral to it or, in some cases, critical of it.

2. Three romance types This paper will first give a brief general account of the inherent and centrally ideological structure of the romances, followed by a more detailed account of the realisation of that pattern through three major romance types. The first is that in which a lonely hero wins honour, wife and property; the second is that in which a whole family is disrupted and through difficulties re-establishes itself in honour and power; the third type contains romances which in both theme and form interrogate and even cast doubt upon the ideological patterns of most romances. While some from the first two types do contain aspects of social critique, there is a distinct third category of critical romances – and they have been traditionally regarded as having special ‘literary critical’ value. It will be argued here that such ‘quality’ is actually an element of their socially critical role. 90

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First, a general summary of romance ideology. The romances confront problems seen from the viewpoint of a land-owning, armed class, and resolve those problems with values felt to be both potent and admissible. Threats and values are coded to produce a self-concept for the powerful and to present an acceptable image of power to those without it. But the coding and generalising into a cultural form of political dominance does not sever the ideology from a traceable historicity. In the classic romance, the knight establishes his authority over property and creates a family; he excludes enemies and challengers from his land, just as the texts exclude from their purview the productive classes; he is his own lord, honoured by the king, but not in any way ruled by him. Those three familiar features act out dynamically what Hindess and Hirst find to be the three crucial and particular elements of the ‘Feudal Mode of Production’ (1975, pp. 235–7). Title and exclusion form the dual mechanisms by which the lord appropriates surplus; the absence of centralised state power is the overarching political factor that typifies the world of feudal relations. Those basic patterns of urgent and structural value in medieval secular society are ideologically central in English romance, and so is the consistent representation of a basic contradiction of feudalism, the public and honorific concept of a knightly class in dialectic with the actual one-to-one relations of lord and liege (Ullman, 1966). The result is a pattern of ‘competitive assertiveness’ (James, 1979, p. 1) – feudal knights reacting in that basically hostile way towards others who are either of their class or aspire to their position. That structure underlies romance and is its central dominant ideological feature, validating the practices of the feudally powerful, and persuading the non-powerful of the authenticity of the whole imaginary. A classical example of a hegemonic culture. A paper like this one might well examine individual romances in terms of title, exclusion, devolution of power as the overall structure within which competitive assertiveness was the personalised response. That would compile an historical and political analysis of the genre, and be of some interest. However, there is another area of operation, and so of necessary analysis, in studying an ideological imaginary. The detailed and manifold ways in which the central pattern is realised in varying human instances construct the system through which a total imaginary is produced in human subjects, the creation of what Jameson has described as the ‘political unconscious’ (1981). This paper will take as established the inner ideological core that has just been described and will move towards an understanding of the detailed realisation of the romance imaginary, the inherent political unconscious as it operates through the three major romance types detailed above.

3. Hero-focused romance The best-known pattern of romance deals with an unmarried hero who wins his way to a wealthy wife and so establishes both a family and his own honour: this will be called the knight-alone structure. The threats realised are multiple – at first, isolation, poverty, lack of honour, physical opposition. It is also usual, later in the 91

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story, to derive some form of threat, or at least embarrassment, from the need to have, even to defer to, female company in order to be both honoured and wealthy. The values that stand against these problems are those of courage and martial skill – prowess or proesce is the quasi-technical term, and endurance and fidelity to duties or goals. loyalty, or leute. Sometimes chivalrous behaviour towards men is a value, and often the texts prize feelings of love towards the propertied women, but both aspects of courtesy exist in awkward tension with the need to be a ferocious warrior and with the negative aspects of the woman’s power. However, in the English romances courtesy and love are very rarely instrumental; they are at best masking values. Christianity, however, is sometimes presented as a force which does bring results, through prayer or Christian deeds. Mehl (1968, Chapter 5) identifies a category of ‘homiletic’ romances, but while these do at times approach validation of the Church as an institution different from the feudal class, as in the ‘hagiographic’ versions of Amis and Amiloun, his instances are mostly feudal romances which incorporate Christian values. The hero-alone pattern is familiar from a famous and very early romance, Chrétien de Troyes’ Le Chevalier au Lion (also known as Yvain). The pattern of a hero’s progress towards honour and wife is standard in culture from epic to folk tale, but it has been argued that the particular isolation of the hero in this type of romance takes its force from circumstances in France in the early Middle Ages, partly from changes in inheritance laws which left younger sons of the knightly caste quite without financial support (Duby, 1977) and also from social conflict within an expanded aristocracy (Köhler, 1974; Knight, 1983, Chapter 3). The ‘fair unknown’ story is a major hero-alone structure which reveals the complexity of romance ideology: it both expresses and euphemises the theme of social arrivisme. It was the basis of Chrétien’s late twelfth-century Le Chevalier au Lion, and was still powerful in Malory’s late fifteenth-century ‘Tale of Sir Gareth’. The vitality of the pattern suggests it realises important forces: Mills provides a good survey of its main versions in his edition of Libeaus Desconus (1969, pp. 42–64). The ‘fair unknown’ is at first, and in French, a threatening figure, uncouth but strong and determined; he learns to be courteous as well as powerful, wins a lady, property and honour (not always in that order, as will be discussed). Somewhere along the way he becomes known, and it is revealed that he is not the incursionary thug that his presentation has implied, but in fact a member of the aristocracy, sometimes even of royalty. A crucial point is that the later this revelation comes, and the more abuse and anxiety aroused by the figure on the way, the stronger is the realisation of social advancement through martial force. Through the ‘fair unknown’ there rises to consciousness the threat of social arrivisme; but the threat is also culturally resolved, steadily through his ‘cortois’ behaviour, and especially when his qualities are finally revealed as of noble origin. A similar use of an imaginary at work is found in the ‘lost heir’ stories which in the nineteenth century both faced and dissolved the fear of inexplicable (and so disturbing) sudden wealth and power: they are common in the novels of Wilkie Collins and G. W. M. Reynolds. 92

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Libeaus Desconus, the English romance whose name bespeaks the ‘fair unknown’ structure, is a good example of the knight-alone romance, with telling socio-historical relations. Popular in England (six manuscripts survive against only one of the earlier French version), this is a suitable choice for a moderately detailed analysis. The purpose is to show just how much ideological material is suspended in these narratives, how passages and motifs fill out in specific detail the basic structure of the imaginary. The earlier French concern with arrivisme is much reduced in Libeaus Desconus; the threat of the ‘fair unknown’ himself is seen as less threatening in English. The hero is immediately named as Gyngelayne, Gawain’s illegitimate son, and the ‘damsel maledisaunte’ becomes friendly and admiring after his very first victory. Like other English ‘fair unknown’ patterns, Sir Percival, Sir Degaré and (in variant form) Ywain and Gawain, the story develops a series of problems associated with a knight’s rise to power and maintenance of that position, exploring the fourteenth-century specifics of title, exclusion, devolution and competitive assertiveness. Gyngelayne moves swiftly through the battles that establish him (Benson called this a ‘proving’ pattern, 1976, pp. 99–101). A malicious knight is disposed of, and his vengeful relatives soon submit to the hero and take themselves to court as tokens of his power and honour – a model of the weak central authority in feudalism. Then Gyngelayne deals abruptly with two giants who are oppressing a young woman. None of this action has presented major problems for the hero or demanded emphatic treatment in the text. But from here on the episodes grow in length and impact as they explore more thoroughly and anxiously the threats and values of the feudal imaginary. The hero now defeats the knight of the falcon, who insists his lady is more beautiful than all others. This sort of sequence is common in romance and is treated by most commentators as nothing more than escapist material. In fact, it has an important effect in ideologically sealing the hero’s attainment of high status. He no longer brawls with giants or knightly thugs; this is graceful and courteous fighting at a high social level, and in service of a lady’s honour: this is high-level self-assertion. The whole network of chivalry and courtesy provides a euphemistic cover for the brutal practices of feudal cavalry, and this type of episode enacts that function within their imaginary. Morton (1960) offers some analysis along these lines, and I have done so elsewhere (1983, Chapters 3 and 4): the ideological masking effect itself still operates in conventional and idealistic treatments of chivalry, as recently exemplified in Keen’s work (1984). There follows a movement towards real problems. Arthur hears of Gyngelayne’s honour and sends him the huge sum of a hundred pounds. With it the hero establishes a feast in Cardiff while Arthur rules in Carlisle. The life-style that brought together show, honour and so the authority of title and local rule had to depend on extra income; here the need for cash surplus is realised, but its origin is alleged to derive through honour alone and from a willing royal acceptance of devolved authority, not from the actual feudal appropriation of surplus in cash form. The sequence condenses real patterns and their euphemisations. But the text 93

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is not always as blandly and confidently ideological as that. The actual source of luxury-producing surplus is indicated in the following passage. In a firmly emphasised sequence of action, Gyngelayne takes a fancy to a dog that crosses his path, and seizes it. Its owner and his men pursue the dog and its catcher, but they are all defeated. As a result the hero wins not only a dog but also Tresure, land and rente Castell, hall and boute. (1272–3) This startling episode cuts through the cultural coding of tournaments and royal gifts as the source of feudal authority. Feudality was based on violence and selfinterest, and all the romances at some stage recognise this disturbing reality, in order to make valid their cultural concealment of it, as has happened here. The hero Libeaus Desconus is now well-established; he is no longer the property-less knight needing for his success to win a lady. That was a historical possibility as well as a fictional structure, and continued to be so – Edward III’s sons tended to marry very rich women. Gyngelayne’s romance, like most of the English ‘hero alone’ stories, exhibits a sturdily self-reliant patriarchy in social ascent. Yet that does not exclude from the text the embarrassment caused by women and love in the earlier pattern. Rather it is dealt with more confidently, more starkly, and more briefly than in the earlier French versions. In the next sequence the hero meets a woman named nothing less than La Dame Amoure. She entraps him through specifically-named powers of sorcery and makes him forget his knightly quest: this topic was treated with more subtlety and more anxiety by Chrétien in the cases of Érec and Yvain. Often in the early French romances that have so often been accepted by conservative critics as idealistic and courteous it appears that love-service of women actually functions either as a specific rationale for gaining their property or as part of a more general sophistication, part of the chivalry that concealed the brutal reality of cavalry. The English Libaeus Desconus, apparently derived from Le Bel Inconnu, c.1200, is more specific, even vulgar, about dangerous female power. But Gyngelayne is reminded of his knightly and non-amatory duty by his faithful and distinctly asexual (so non-embarrassing) female guide Elleyne. He next encounters a new enemy whom he fights but who then becomes his helper. This is the steward of Synadoun, the city of the woman he has come to rescue. Stewards and seneschals, themselves also court officials, masters of a knight’s material needs, are often treated with hostility in romance – Sir Kay is the archetype. This one, though, means more than the usual figure, for he is named Sir Lombard. If Lombards were known at all in the period, it was for banking, not their ancient military history; this figure is a potent condensation of the court official and a man who controls cash, two figures the feudally powerful had many reasons to regard with caution, and needed to neutralise or, preferably, make into allies. 94

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The story continues to range through the intimate enemies of the knightly class as Gyngelayne makes his promised rescue. The woman is held not by the usual villain knight – they have been disposed of before the story moved to a more searching level of threat and resolution. Two ‘clerks’ have her under control in a ‘paleys queynte of gynne’ (1763). The hero’s final act is to release the lady from the cunning power of a learned and non-military class. This seems to encode feudal anxiety about on one hand the church and its legalistic threat to property, and on the other the increasing dependence of the landed classes on trained professionals, such as lawyers – a fact glancingly referred to in the description of the Manciple in Chaucer’s ‘General Prologue’ (576–83); I have argued elsewhere that the same problem underlies a major part of ‘The Franklin’s Tale’ (Knight, 1980), (see Chapter 4) in this collection. The resolution of this threat to feudalism is, as so often in romance, condensed with escape from a patriarchal fear. Released by the hero’s courage, the lady turns from a hideous and threatening Lamia into the ideal and property-bearing wife: she is final testimony to the historical relevance and imaginative vigour of the motifs and structures found throughout the Middle English romances and typified by Libeaus Desconus. Another interesting case is the story of Sir Amadace, an unjustly ignored romance. He owes money because of his rash generosity – a feudal fortunate flaw. He goes into exile with his remaining forty pounds, and encounters the corpse of a merchant who failed because he was not mean-minded enough. His creditor, a more successful merchant, refuses his body burial because his debt is outstanding, so Amadace pays the thirty pounds owing and, with his last ten pounds, arranges a funeral. Then he organises a huge feast, at the expense of the merchant who lives by meanly mercantile values. Finally, Amadace retires, ruined, into the forest. So much seems a neat and firm response to mercantilism from a feudal viewpoint. But the story, like Libeaus Desconus, grows more searching as it continues. A White Knight appears: he supports Amadace both spiritually and financially, and says they must share everything. Through Amadace’s knightly efforts (a proving pattern again), he wins a wife and will inherit a kingdom after her father dies – another familiar feature. When the White Knight reappears he rejects all shared goods except half the wife and child, and he means a literal half of their bodies. The wife urges Amadace to dismember her to keep his oath. As he is about to do so, the White Knight calls it all off: a happy, though hardly unstrained, ending follows. After Amadace’s easy victories over the bourgeoisie, this Abraham/Isaac-like conflict motif appears to outline the difficulty of living in a collective fraternal system, as feudality is alleged to be, and emphasises the danger of ever having to rely on anyone else’s help. Knighthood is shown in crisis because of the clash of private acquisition and public duties, mediated through the ever-present oath – and the poem seems to have the power to interrogate, by its imagination and emphasis, its own ideological positioning. This self-criticism will be a feature of the most powerful and long-lasting of the romances like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 95

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and Malory’s Arthuriad (discussed later in this essay), a version of ‘critical realism’ as Lukacs called it (1972), the power of the historically aware imagination to present an essentially radical critique from an essentially conservative position. Some aspects of this interrogative process appear in other hero-alone romances, which are usually dismissed as no more than ‘conventional’. In Sir Degrevant the hero’s initial nadir is caused by an unusually realistic oppressive neighbour; the hero of The Squire of Low Degree is exiled because of a jealous royal steward; in Sir Launfal he suffers from the Queen’s hostile power and then from mercantile fickleness; Sir Gowther is at first a terrible model of unrestrained knightly savagery. In all of these cases, however, the penetratingly real threat is resolved in a fully ideological way. Sir Degrevant himself comes to love the neighbouring villainous lord’s daughter; The Squire of Low Degree’s hero (with no personal name) has a strong-minded princess for a lover and she waits seven years for his return; Sir Launfal’s success relies on that folk-tale myth, a fairy mistress who prohibits any revelation of her existence (so indicating her status as private fantasy compensation); Sir Gowther’s violence is neutralised from the beginning by making him the child of a diabolic incubus, and yet he is able to reform his ways into a remarkable piety. If those romances explore problems inherent to the feudal world, others seem to be at best peripheral to that social context. The wide-ranging Havelock shows lowerclass features in its village games and physical work, royal myth in its hero and his revelation, urban connections as an origin legend for Grimsby. This text is much broader than the specifically knightly and feudal world, being both older than and marginal to the main romance pattern. A similar example of uneven development is Gamelyn. About a dispossessed younger son, it does not activate the values of chivalry or even cavalry in his quest for title. He becomes leader of an outlaw band and they help him establish some very unknightly rough justice. Here the problem of lack of inheritance seems to have transposed itself to the late medieval world of the egalitarian Robin Hood ballads. The romance can reach out to new formations.

4. Family-based romance Though the hero-alone story has been seen as ‘the basic paradigm of the romance’ (Finlayson, 1980, p. 55), the family-based pattern is both very common and ideologically rich. In this structure, at the beginning the knight already has a family and a disruptive force separates its members. They must struggle through many trials to enjoy reunion; the knight’s own role is often important, but never total, and may indeed be marginal; his wife or son can be the main agent of family re-establishment. The family structure is likely to be the underlying pattern in romance, as it is dominant in ballad and folk-tale; apparently the special circumstances of late twelfth century France brought forward the hero-alone pattern, but other contexts saw the re-emergence of the family-based form, which is not structurally the same. When Wittig saw the basic romance pattern as ‘Separation and Reunion’ she made the family structure primary (1978, p. 179), but it might be better, and 96

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consistent with her view of romance as an essentially social myth, to recognise the two major types in such a structural summary. If her two categories were represented as ‘social dysfunction’ and ‘social function’, then in the first segment the hero-alone story offers ‘Lack’ and the family-based pattern reveals ‘Crime’. This is to borrow terms for the initiating narrative function from Propp (1968); his analysis is of considerable value in romance study, as is suggested by Bordman’s intriguing motif index of romances (1963). Significant differences between the knight-alone and the family-based patterns are located in their threat and resolution structures. Threats to the family may be in part the same as those of the knight-alone type – exile, isolation, shame. But many of the family-based romances involve threats to more than a single hero. The wife often plays a major role: she may be ‘calumniated’, as the folklorists call it, and exiled or threatened with various oppressions. The child or children may also be of an age to suffer consciously; if very young, they may be abandoned, stolen by animals, or by misfortune placed in the care of merchants or infidels. The values which rescue the feudal family from these dire fates are also wider than in the knight-alone romances. True, fighting often plays a major part, but it may be conducted by a son as well as, or instead of, a father, so embracing the reproduction of title and authority, as well as their re-imposition. The wife and mother’s virtues are often substantial and instrumental – endurance, fidelity, courage, shrewdness, but also physical action and intervention. Her overarching virtues of passivity and loyalty to her menfolk locate the stories in a patriarchal context, but some romances, such as Emaré and The King of Tars, depict women in something approaching historical terms; that is, they operate with genuine power and impact, provided that the limits of patriarchy are not breached. A good example of the family-based romance would be Sir Eglamour of Artois, a popular mid-fourteenth-century production with six manuscripts and four early prints surviving. This is basically a ‘giant’s daughter’ story: many folk-tales follow this pattern and so do Celtic stories such as The Wooing of Emer and Culhwch and Olwen, respectively featuring Cuchulainn and Arthur’s cousin Culhwch. Sir Eglamour of Artois is not a hero-alone story because he and the giant’s daughter have a child before he is sent off on the task-fulfilling quest, which precedes (and, as the giant hopes, might prevent) the marriage. She is exiled with their son: he is stolen by a griffin and then adopted by the King of Israel. These are stereotypical family romance disruptions, a mixture of exotic projections and the mundane uncertainties of life in the military caste. Then this story, like so many romances, turns the screw and enacts a starker drama. The son meets his mother unknowingly, woos her, and wins her in a joust. Only when they are approaching sexual intimacy does a recognition scene occur, and then in the following action the father, equally unknowing, wins her by defeating his son. Romance often euphemises conquest through courtesy, but here a new love motif becomes the mechanism of a dark threat inside the family itself. But things grow no worse: recognitions flourish and the family is reunited after its extraordinary strains. The hero-alone romance was quite capable of realising private 97

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tensions within its social pattern: in the early classics the masculine fear of woman was deeply etched in Yvain’s imprisonment in Laudine’s gatehouse; Lancelot’s and Tristan’s adventures with their lover’s bedroom window offer in condensed form images of both deflowering and castration. But the family romances also realise sexual anxiety and disturbance, not in terms of one-off images and incidents, but as a thoroughly structured part of their meaning: the family’s dangers do not come all from outside. Other family-based dramas lay different emphases. Emaré makes the woman most important; she has to avoid the incestuous wishes of her father, and go through trials with her child without much help from husband or son – the story pattern found, in distinctly restrained form, in the story of Constance used by both Gower and Chaucer. Women play a large role in other family romances, especially Lai le Freine, The Erl of Tolous, Le Bone Florence of Rome and Sir Triamour. Although a general deference to the male is evident, the neurotic control of feminine power found in the hero-based structure does not seem to be a feature here. The long and arresting romance Octavian is full enough to involve a mercantile theme. At first the malicious mother-in-law (a recurring figure of familial strain) brands the queen as adulterous for having twins. The queen is exiled, and her two sons are stolen by an ape and a lioness. The ape-child becomes a butcher, sponsored by a money-lending merchant named Clement le Vileyn; the lioness child (the nobler beast, and child, of course) goes straight into a slot as an adopted prince. A complex double-plot ensues, involving the butcher-boy as a ‘fair unknown’ fighting the giant of Montmartre (and so rejecting his butcherly urban connections) and meeting his family through various chivalric actions. Octavian could be seen as combining the family-based and hero-based patterns, which is certainly true, almost programmatically so, of Sir Degaré and Sir Beves of Hamtoun. Other versions of the family-based romances are origin legends like Sir Beves of Hamtoun, Guy of Warwick and, in their European origins, Partenaye and William of Palerne. A non-familial grouping is the basis of fraternal romances such as the very popular Amis and Amiloun (some of its versions become distinctly hagiographical), The Avowing of Arthur and, in basis, both King Horn and Athelston. In each of these, competitive assertiveness is the inner strain upon the fraternal bond. Some of the group-based romances seem, like a few hero-alone stories, quite outside the feudal world, either before it like Athelston or after it like The Tournament of Tottenham and the ‘King and Subject’ popular romances (sometimes seen as long ballads), where the emergent sense of class is both the social bond and the challenge to the feudal and royal authority: examples are King Edward and the Shepherd and Rauf Coilyear.

5. Non-feudal romance There are other romances and types of romance whose functions lie largely outside the central knight-alone and family-based patterns that have been discussed. One particular group of texts seems to privilege learning more than usual: the 98

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‘epic romances’ (Pearsall, 1965, p. 92) are Arthour and Merlin, Richard Coeur de Lion and Kyng Alisaunder. Written in the later thirteenth century, and perhaps by the same man, they load their narratives with information and moralism, envisaging an audience which values informational and didactic culture more highly than that of the mainstream feudal romances. Mehl sees these texts as early ‘novels in verse’ (1968, Chapter 7), but some clerical connection appears a likely context for their production. The later fifteenth century offers different sorts of non-feudal romance. There are the major literary popularisations of chivalric material, either in manuscript like Henry Lovelich’s The History of the Holy Grail and Malory’s Arthuriad, or many romances in print like Caxton’s ‘torrent of Burgundian-style chivalric prose romances’ (Pearsall, 1976, p. 72) which includes Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, the first editing of his work. In this ‘Indian Summer of English Chivalry’ (the title of Ferguson’s somewhat general book, 1960), feudally originated texts found an expanding and literate audience in the complex mixture of aristocrats and businessmen (not exclusive categories) who valued the ideology of chivalry urgently at a time when what reality it had contained, or subsumed, was rapidly disappearing. Lovelich the skinner and Caxton the wool-merchant are typical purveyors of chivalry and romance to a world for which it was an inauthentic but valuable force: just as, but in different ways, it had always been. At the same time the spread of literacy recorded a very different sort of romance, the popular versions that are usually derogated with some metaphor such as ‘debased’ or a partial evaluation such as ‘vulgar’. Several romances exist in a ballad version such as Hind Horn, The Marriage of Gawain or the Guy of Warwick cut-down which enmeshes the noble hero with the folkloric ‘Dun Cow of Dunsmore Heath’ (Crane, 1915, p. 180). It is a matter of some doubt whether all of these do (as is usually assumed) post-date the ‘high’ – or at least long – romance forms, that is, forms which treat in more focused detail the concerns of the powerful. In Kempy Kay, for example, regarded as extremely debased and even an ‘unpleasant piece’ (Child, 1965, vol. 1, p. 301), Arthur’s peppery seneschal Sir Kay is presented in something much like his earlier form as a Celtic warlock. The theory that ballad and popular story are ‘down-sinking cultural goods’ may be consoling to conservative scholars, but has no inherent credibility. The popular forms have their own vitality and function which are separate from the special ‘high’ forms and so may precede, parallel or follow them with equal ease.

6. Interrogative romances There remains another important type of romance. It is found in the texts which are most often discussed, namely Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Malory’s Arthuriad. These ‘quality’ romances have a subtlety of style and theme which has provided raw material for academic labours, but the texts do not belong to some new ‘good’ category: they are, in fact, another socially functional variant. They do not simply promulgate an ideology, as do most of the romances, whether naively 99

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like Sir Launfal, or with some complexity like Libeaus Desconus. These literary favourites are critical texts in the sense that they show both an instinctive grasp and a distinct critique of the social structures of feudal England and its cultural projections. There are other romances which come close to doing this. Tragedies like Sir Tristrem and the stanzaic Morte Arthure have, by virtue of their endings, a serious and sombre tone, but seem to go no further than an austere view of fatefully conflicting loyalties. Some of the ‘happy ending’ texts are closer to being critical through the complex patterns they suggest: Sir Amadace’s uncomfortable success and Octavian’s turbulent path to reunion both leave strain and disturbance in the mind. The classic text of this kind is Chrétien’s Le Chevalier au Lion (see Knight, 1983, chapter 3 for a discussion). Its socially critical sting is quite absent in the broadly similar English Ywain and Gawain, together with the second half of the action. Some critics have felt that the alliterative Morte Arthure treats its imperialist theme in a sceptical way (Matthews, 1960; Finlayson, 1967) but this seems a modern re-reading (Kelly, 1986). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Malory’s Arthuriad go further than any other English romances in treating their world and its values critically; they grasp its inherent socio-cultural structures and also – the aperture for merely literary criticism – they realise that critical position in imaginative and purely formal terms as well as in suggestive thematic statement. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is based on a structure familiar in the Arthurian romances, especially in those encyclopedic ones which provide a series of adventures stemming from Arthur’s court. Some disruption occurs just as the court is about to feast and so celebrate its honoured unity. A challenger-knight rides in, or a visitor (sometimes a woman) reports some distant oppression, or some strange occurrence indicates disruption of the Arthurian and feudal stasis – on one occasion there enters a rout of hart, hounds, woman and knight; another time the Grail arrives with its varied attendants. The hero of the particular adventure will travel out, resolve the disorder, and return to his portion of honour and the renewed Arthurian calm. The Gawain poet resists the easy consolation of this bland threat-resolution structure. The threat he provides in the Green Knight most formidably and directly questions the heroic values of Arthur’s court. Then it is found to have an alternative court, equal or even superior in courtesy to Arthur’s world, marked by vigour and natural activities against which the Christmas sport of Camelot seems both artificial and immature. An alternative must imply critique, just as Parzival’s court of the Grail surpasses Arthur’s court of earthly chivalry. But it is primarily from Gawain’s own viewpoint that the challenge to traditional feudal values is made. These values are first of all exposed as vulnerable. When Gawain is told he just cannot be the real and publicly known Gawain, when servitors gather to watch his fabled performance of courtesy, when he is the prisoner of his reputation, in all these instances the external system of honorific value is denaturalised, made to seem culture-specific, and so a set of values capable of being altered. The key critique of the feudal and chivalric values is 100

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Gawain’s own dissent when the court interprets his journey as a success, but he insists it is failure. All wear the green baldric, but one is a nonconformist: personalised dissent is conceived as possible. It is only from the position of internalised Christianity that this judgement can be made. Gawain is Mary’s knight, but she is on the inside of his shield, she is his guide in personal extremity, not part of any public religious performance. Wyclif’s emergent idea of a desocialised religion, between God and believer alone, is an inherent critique of both the public wealth of the Church and the public role of the priest, and such a position makes it possible for dissent to be raised against the feudal matrix of values. That point of contact between religious and social protest was clearly observed in the period, in terms of Lollardy and the so-called ‘Peasants’ Revolt’ (Aston, 1960). There is a social as well as a historical context for the Gawain poet’s critique. Bennett (1979) has located its language and geography as belonging to the upwardly mobile professional soldiers of fourteenth-century Cheshire, hardhanded self-made barons like Knolles and Calveley. There was in fact no NorthWest Midlands aristocratic court for cultural reception, that fantasy of literary critical reflection theory over the decades. Bercilak’s castle, as an alternative Camelot of hard hunting, true hospitality and clear-eyed, non-traditional assessments, may well enshrine the projected self-consciousness of that new class fraction of arriviste soldiers. The thrust of the poetic form in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, that artistic power that clearly separates it from the bulk of the mundane romances, is itself convergent with the poem’s innovative and proto-humanist critique of traditional ideology. Dynamic physical detail, sharp naturalistic focus, vivid realisation in brisk sound and tight syntax of a tactile world, this deep-laid sense of tangible form invokes a material and sense-available epistemology and so ontology. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as in most late medieval art that has been valued in bourgeois society, there is an emergent individualisation in the form, as well as in Gawain’s final dissenting position. That pattern meshes with the inherent critique of feudal ideology and its cultural projection in romance; it also relates to economic and socio-cultural aspects of the post-feudal world, which are evidently both detected and realised through the imagination of the major artist. Malory has rarely been considered as acute and perceptive a writer as the Gawain poet, and yet a structural conflict between feudal collectivity and an opposing privacy is thoroughly developed in his Arthuriad. By his selection and treatment of episodes, from his opening ‘The Tale of King Arthur’ onwards, he appears to be instinctively aware of the contradiction at the heart of feudal life, that its collective honorifics are both the result and the concealment of the pattern of competitive self-assertiveness. The impact of the Grail story on his work, and perhaps on his imagination, is to oppose a Christian system of internalised values to the external values of honour and shame, previously the only, and rather frail, set of sanctions available in his Arthurian world. The pattern closely resembles that of critical evaluation in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. 101

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In Malory’s last two tales a complex presentation of the private and public worlds is undertaken, showing that they are not merely opposed, but become dialectically interwoven as Launcelot, then Arthur, then Gawain (and perhaps even Aggravayne) all act on grounds of honour and seriously exacerbate a matter which was inherently private – and untroublesome while it remained so. The issue, and Malory’s consciousness of it, is clear in sequences he expands from his sources, such as the argument between Guinevere and Launcelot immediately after his return from the Grail quest. At the end of ‘The Knight of the Cart’ the matter is presented in an extraordinary dumb show as the lovers are unable to speak when they both wish Meleagaunt dead: their private world is becoming public, and so must be constrained. Like the White Knight in Sir Amadace, the contradictions of the feudal structure are eventually appalling. They are also formally realised. Malory juxtaposes Launcelot’s Christian final speech with the famous elegy by Ector, and both are high points of verbal complexity and art. Malory realises at the level of form the tensions of his text, as did the Gawain-poet; both speeches bring to a head the two polar styles of the Arthuriad. Launcelot speaks in the thoughtful, hypotactic, analytic style that is normally wielded by Merlin, hermits and, finally, Arthur – by those who can internalise and judge. Ector speaks in a heightened version of the declarative, paratactic style that has so often chronicled battles and knights’ instinctive, unreflective, feudal responses to feudal threats. Although the impact of the tragedy and the tone of the last tale are that confusion, sin, and private interest on many parts have brought down the public Round Table, the book does not rest with a glum prospect of tragedy as do other English Arthuriads. Malory shows how the system of feudal organisation and public values is itself a major element in its catastrophe, and he amplifies its contradictory destructive mechanisms, as in the crucial scene where Gawain abandons his fraternal loyalty to Launcelot, and in the long speech where Launcelot defends himself before his peers in language which is definitely noble but, on the question of Guinevere, unavoidably false. The text demonstrates both its ideological adherence to Arthurian and feudal values, and at the same time their radical instability; it also transmits through its formal meaning an underlying prediction of value in the individualised sphere. Again like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the form conveys values that the theme cannot ideologically encompass, and inscribes a process of history and social change within the text. In an increasingly novel-like structure, in an increasingly individuated presentation of personality and speech, the Arthuriad finally implies that a personalised ontology and epistemology are not only counter-feudal, but are also positive forces, a proper topic for art. Malory’s tendency to move towards the novel has long been evident: that such a pattern arises from his imaginatively critical response to his social world and its forces has not so readily been recognised. Like its poetic partner as a critical romance, Malory’s text has an evident context. Other challengers for the authorship have faded, and the Warwickshire Malory appears to be the man. He was a Warwick man too, a member of the 102

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Kingmaker’s powerful and turbulent affinity. As such, this Sir Thomas was part of the violent and acquisitive politics of the period. There are specific ways in which this experience shapes an ideological treatment of the clash between Warwick and Edward IV, as I have argued elsewhere (Knight, 1983, Chapter 4). But there is also a general relation between the text and its social matrix. Malory has the imaginative power to project his experience of an increasingly privatised world into the romance genre, and so to dramatise the inherently personal aspects of the knightly world as well as the historical inadequacy of chivalric and feudal structures to contain that socially destructive force. Those texts that have been seen as ‘the best’ by critics who use ‘literary’ values to protect themselves from society and history are in fact the most historically and socially attuned of all. They bring into full artistic and critical focus the strains and tensions that have been evident at times but are readily resolved or concealed in most of the romances. Taken as a whole, seen in their historical position and their social function, the Middle English romances are a wide-ranging and powerful body of cultural production. They are the best testimony to the hopes and fears of the medieval English ruling class, and a part of the cultural pressure on those who permitted them to rule. The romances deserve more attention.

References Primary Mehl gives a full list of romance texts (1968, pp. 287–9), but some of these editions are now not easy to obtain. Several anthologies have recently been published or republished. The largest remains those edited by W. H. French and C. B. Hale, Middle English Metrical Romances (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1966), and A. V. C. Schmidt and N. Jacobs, Medieval English Romances (London: Hodder and Stoughton; 1980). M. Mills’ smaller edition Six Middle English Romances (London: Dent, 1973) has a thoughtful introduction and an unconventional selection of texts; A. C. Gibbs’ Middle English Romances (London: Arnold, 1966) also has a worthwhile introduction. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. by F. J. Child, five volumes in ten parts (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1882–98; reprinted in five volumes, New York: Dover, 1965). Libeaus Desconus Early English Text Society, Original Series, No. 261, ed. by Maldwyn Mills (London: Oxford University Press, 1969). Morte Arthure, ed. by John Finlayson (London: Arnold, 1967).

Secondary Adamson, W. Hegemony and Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). Althusser, Louis. ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), pp. 121–76. Aston, Margaret. ‘Lollardy and Sedition, 1381–1431’, Past and Present, 17 (1960), 1–44, reprinted as Chapter 15 in Peasants, Knights and Heretics, ed. by R. H. Hilton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 273–318.

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Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western European Literature, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Doubleday, 1957). Barrow, Sarah F. The Medieval Society Romances (New York: Columbia University Press, 1924). Bennett, M. J. ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Literary Achievement of the North-West Midlands: The Historical Background’, Journal of Medieval History, 5 (1979), 63–88; incorporated into Chapter 10 of M. J. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism: Cheshire and Lancashire Society in the Age of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Benson, Larry D. Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976). Bordman, Gerald. A Motif-Index to the English Metrical Verse Romances (Helsinki: FF Communications, 1963). Buchan, David. The Ballad and the Folk (London: Routledge, 1972). Coward, Rosalind and Ellis, John. Language and Materialism (London: Routledge, 1977). Crane, R. S. ‘The Vogue of Guy of Warwick from the Close of the Middle Ages to the Romantic Revival’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America, 30 (1915), 125–94. Duby, Georges. ‘Youth in Aristocratic Society’, in The Chivalrous Society, trans. Cynthia Postan (London: Arnold, 1977), pp. 112–27. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). Ferguson, A. B. The Indian Summer of English Chivalry (Durham: Duke University Press, 1960). Finlayson, John. ‘Definitions of Middle English Romance’, Chaucer Review, 15 (1980), 168–81. Gibbs, A. C., ed., Middle English Romances (London: Arnold, 1966). Hanning, Richard W. The Individual and Society in Twelfth Century Romance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971). Hindess, Barry and Hirst, Paul. Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (London: Routledge, 1975). James, Mervyn E. English Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485–1642 (Oxford: Past and Present Monographs, 1979). Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious (London: Longman, 1981). Keen, Maurice. Chivalry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). Kelly, Henry A. ‘The Non-Tragedy of Arthur’, in Medieval English Religions and Ethical Literature: Essays in Honour of G. H. Russell, ed. by G. C. Kratzmann and J. Simpson (Cambridge: Brewer, 1986), pp. 92–114. Kettle, Arnold. Introduction to the English Novel (London: Hutchinson, 1951). Knight, Stephen. ‘Ideology in the Franklin’s Tale’, Parergon, 28 (1980), 3–35; reprinted in this collection, Chapter 4. Knight, Stephen. Arthurian Literature and Society (London: Macmillan, 1983). Knight, Stephen. Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). Köhler, Erich. L’Aventure chevaleresque: Idéal et realité dans le roman courtois (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). Lukacs, Georg. Studies in European Realism (London: Merlin, 1972). Matthews, William. The Tragedy of Arthur (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960). Mehl, Dieter. The Middle English Romances of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (London: Routledge, 1968).

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Morton, A. L. ‘The Matter of Britain’, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 8 (1960), 5–28; reprinted in Morton, A. L. The Matter of Britain (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1966), pp. 88–121. Mukherjee, S. N. ‘The Idea of Feudalism from the Philosophes to Karl Marx’, in Feudalism: Comparative Studies, ed. by Edward Leach, S. N. Mukherjee and John Ward (Sydney: Sydney Association for Studies in Society and Culture, 1985), pp. 25–39. Pearsall, Derek A. ‘The Development of Middle English Romance’, Medieval Studies, 27 (1965), 91–116. Pearsall, Derek A. ‘The English Romance in the Fifteenth Century’, Essays and Studies, 29 (1976), 56–83. Pearsall, Derek A. Old and Middle English Poetry (London: Arnold, 1977). Propp, Vladimir. The Morphology of the Folk-Tale, trans. Lawrence Scott, 2nd revised edition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968). Stevens, John. Medieval Romance (London: Hutchinson, 1973). Ullmann, W. The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966). Wittig, Susan. Stylistic and Narrative Structure in the Middle English Romances (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978).

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Part 2 MYTHIC AND POPULAR MATERIALS AND THEIR CONTEXTS

6 ARTHURIAN AUTHORITIES Ideology in the legend of King Arthur

From: Words and Worlds: Studies in the Social Role of Verbal Culture, ed. by Stephen Knight and S. N. Mukherjee (Sydney: Sydney Association for Studies in Society and Culture, 1987) This paper will not discuss the origin of the legend of King Arthur, nor its historical development, nor the ways in which Arthurian writers have used their sources, nor the beauties and literary qualities of the legend. Especially not the last. In fact this paper will not discuss the Arthurian legend as a closed literary entity, a pleasant pasture for critical play. Rather, it will treat the legend in the context of social and political forces: the central topic here is the ideological function of the many versions of the Arthurian legend in their periods. The analysis is limited to the legend in Britain and in the associated culture of medieval France. Arthur has always been a version of authority. His legend has realised, through its problems and its values, both the anxieties and the hopes of the sponsoring social formations. The legend is a lengthy continuum of sources for socio-literary study. The origins of Arthur lie in British (that is, Welsh) society around the year 500 A.D. But I am not going to discuss the possible historicity of Arthur – or not yet: since the ‘did Arthur exist’ question is no more than a recent ideological redaction of the legend, it needs to be analysed later on, in its modern social and historical context. The central thing about the earliest British references to Arthur is that in them he is a persuasive model of heroic authority. It was crucial to persuade young men to fight and even die for the tribe or the existing social organisation and patterns of authority would be swamped by other tribes, Celtic or Germanic. In a preChristian culture, heaven was not available as the ultimate inducement to courage, but an effective substitute lay in fame. Your good name would live on: the undying honour of yourself and your family was the reward. In two early Welsh poems, The Gododdin and a lay about the hero Geraint, Arthur is the supreme warrior (see Barber, 1972, for texts). These poems come directly from the day-to-day culture of British Iron Age heroic society; they are functionally evaluative, and Arthur is the recognised standard of heroism and the honour it brings. These poems are quite secular and pragmatic, but elsewhere Arthur’s status was augmented by mythological force. In ‘The Spoils of Annwfn’, 109

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a poem primarily about Arthur’s warband, great heroic feats have supernatural contexts. Similarly, the notion that Arthur did not die is found quite early in Welsh. Since pagan religious details were used to strengthen the functional force of Arthur in heroic society, it is hardly surprising that British Christian writers appropriated the hero for their own versions of authority. They created a figure whose power rested on the fact that he was both British and Christian. The two references to Arthur in the early ninth-century Cambrian Annals and the list of his battles in the Historia Brittonum, also from the ninth century, and formerly attributed to ‘Nennius’, are usually discussed as pseudo-history (e.g. Alcock, 1971) but they are just as end-directed as the hero’s other appearances – they merely belong to a social formation with a different ideology. Whether pagan-heroic or Christian-nationalist, these are only brief references, without any full development. But a larger pattern about Arthur did clearly exist in the early British period, and the surviving major source is the Welsh prose text Culhwch ac Olwen (‘Culhwch and Olwen’), one of the stories found in The Mabinogion. Culhwch ac Olwen is often dismissed, even by Celtic scholars, as a crudely structured, perhaps incomplete, piece of Celtic fancy. But the story contains much more than a few aesthetic frissons. Its structure is not in fact, strange or incomplete, or not if you understand how Celtic narrative works, and, more importantly in the present context, it contains a strong ideological structure relating to the period when the story was put together, which, for reasons mentioned below, I believe to be the tenth century: see Chapter 16 in this collection for a discussion of emotion in this text. Before Wales was brought under partial Norman and then complete English control, it was no more than a collection of separate tribes, each a gathering of extended families with certain of them controlling a tribe because of their warrior skills and resultant socioeconomic power. The economy was based on pastoralism and occasional agriculture; the only major supplement came from raiding other communities for cattle or portable goods. But the families had to remain strong: the fact that the chief had the right to admit people into his kin indicates the need to supplement its strength; the huge and at times mythical warband which supports Arthur’s family is a fictional resolution to this realistic problem. The kindred’s failure to reproduce itself sufficiently is a central fear in the story. Culhwch, one of Arthur’s cousins, is cursed by a hostile step-mother that he will only be able to marry Olwen, the giant’s daughter – and so will either die in the attempt or go wifeless and childless. Another cousin, Goreu, is the lone survivor of twenty-four sons, more victims of the giant. But the failing Arthurian family is saved, partly by its own action, but more by extra-family help, ranging from the relative credibility of the warband to the fantastic extremes of help from animals and gods. The ruling family also faces threats from outside. The giant himself represents an enemy tribal chieftain, and so does the Twrch Trwyth, the giant boar who arrives from Ireland: his ravages include the areas where early Irish raids and settlements were most common. In addition he attacks the power-base of Hywel Dda 110

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(Hywel the Good), the tenth-century prince who tried to gain the overkingship of Wales and whose efforts are ideologically legitimised by the fact that Arthur has the unusual role of ‘Chief Prince of this Island’. There are formal similarities between Culhwch and Olwen and works produced under Hywel’s patronage, and the language of the text is so much older than other Welsh prose fiction that a tenth-century origin is quite possible. The connection with Hywel may explain the recording of this particular story long before other Welsh prose. Culhwch ac Olwen represents the fully Welsh Arthur, but a series of accidents made his legend widely-known outside Wales. The main influences were the localisation of the legend in south-eastern Wales and the early and substantial Norman presence in that area, which was both fertile country and a natural salient into Wales. Breton contact with the Normans may have been a factor, but it was the Norman military take-over of Britain which led directly to the first major European work in the Arthurian legend, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, ‘The History of the Kings of Britain’ (c. ll36). Geoffrey was a Welshman, based in Oxford, who adapted native traditions in the interest of the Norman overlords of Britain. Written in dramatic Latin prose, his pseudo-history of the Celtic kings of Britain basically realised the Norman contempt for the Anglo-Saxons, as well as their own sense of glory, their fears of what might destroy that glory, and a fictional resolution of those fears. Arthur is only one of the British kings, but much the most important. He conquers the Saxons, rules in grandeur, challenges and defeats Rome, then is destroyed by Modredus, a traitor in his own camp – the future Mordred. Above all, Arthur is a war-leader, ferocious, powerful, despotic, making a kingdom from a doubtful inheritance. The model of William the Conqueror is clear, and there are strong parallels between Arthur’s early wars and those of William, both at home and abroad. Then the problems William’s successors William II and Henry I had with Normandy are realised in Arthur’s first French war against Frollo, ruler of Roman France, who to some extent represents their brother Robert, Duke of Normandy. Arthur deals even more firmly with Lucius of Rome, a consoling reversal of Henry’s complete failure to handle Louis VI of France, which came to a head in the disastrous campaign of 1124. Not only the major external dramas of the Norman kings are dealt with through Arthur. Internal rebellions were also common; Arthur puts them down in just the same areas as William, but with a culturally pleasing royal benevolence, not William’s notorious savagery. The text also realises tensions within the Norman power-group. Family feuds for the throne are a feature of the whole Historia, not just the Arthur section, and the dominant mode is dissension between brothers, just like that between William’s sons. The emphasis favours a harassed but morally admirable younger brother – as Henry I liked to see himself. The strange episode when Arthur kills the aggressive phallic giant of Mont St Michel is probably a fictional compensation for Henry’s total humiliation by his elder brothers there. He had bought the towering Breton Mont from Robert, but William II and Robert combined to take it from him and make him again a landless and so insignificant man. 111

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Modredus’s rebellion is the final and destructive thrust, creating that possibility of familial treason that the Normans, more than most, always had to consider as likely. Against such a threat the text offers the centralised authority of the king, which the Normans worked so hard to establish, and which Geoffrey supported throughout his lucid and dramatic story. The Historia was enormously successful in its Latin form and members of the Norman elite soon arranged French translations. Geoffrey’s biography of Arthur meshed with the oral tales of knightly adventure that were widespread in French, and a new literature was developed. Chrétien de Troyes is the great original, and much has been made of him as the poet of individuality, the first novelist in verse, the voice of the twelfth-century renaissance. His work is indeed elegant, is based on single figures, and is both newly learned and newly realistic. But all those qualities relate to sociocultural forces of the period, especially to a double pattern of anxiety and authority that converged on the baronial courts where Chrétien and his followers worked. Unlike the Normans in England, the French kings did not impose wide authority in France. The great barons feared the actual rule of the king and his increasing interest in trade and cities, already a booming source of income (Köhler, 1974). In the new romances the Round Table offered a comforting image of the king as only one of the great knights, and Arthur is passive except for honouring his heroes – a royal act the barons could accept. The vacuum of royal authority was filled by the emphasis laid on the hero knight who, through his physical power and lonely adventuring, won both honour and, usually, also a wife who owned a land in her own right. That pattern pleased baronial independence. But it was also a dreamlike resolution of a threat felt by many young men who were the bulk of the audience for romance. In twelfth-century France the custom of primogeniture was new; previously the family inheritance had been shared out (Duby, 1977). Now younger sons had to leave home and fend for themselves. Lands like England or the Mediterranean, areas under Norman conquest, were obvious places to go, whether the landtaking was rationalised by Crusade or not. Equally realistic was the possibility of marrying an heiress: it did occur, but not as often, nor as prosperously, as in the romances. So Chrétien’s plotting offered comfort to two dominant socio-political problems faced by his audience. He also offered a new ideology of behaviour in chivalry. This, it has been well shown, is not just a sudden desire by people to behave well, especially to women. It is a social ideology which rose out of the expansion of the aristocracy to take in what were called ministeriales, functionaries of various sorts, especially professional soldiers and bureaucrats, who thrived in the increasingly complex world of the newly large and newly prosperous baronial courts (Köhler, 1964). Chivalry was an attractive false consciousness which concealed the split between old and new aristocracy by a shared behavioural model (much like the bourgeois moralisation of aristocratic values in the nineteenth century). Chrétien’s 112

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texts, especially the very influential Le Chevalier au Lion (also known as Yvain), are an extraordinarily rich mixture of these themes, stressing, if also eliding, the aggressive and neurotic masculine individualism of the feudal period. His work was a dominant influence in the formation of the feudal period, and long before his pattern was merged with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s. The early thirteenth-century prose Vulgate Arthuriad was the completion of this process, telling the whole Arthurian story from the sword in the stone to Arthur’s mysterious disappearance, with many narrative extensions. The Vulgate also included the story of the quest for the Holy Grail. Deriving in literary terms from Chrétien’s Percéval, this was a thirteenth-century myth that owed a good deal to the loss of Jerusalem in 1187 and the resultant internalisation of spirituality (see Chapter 1 in this collection). It also owed something to the growing power of the Cistercian movement: in the fully developed Grail story, where Galahad is the Grail achiever, his authority is not only spiritual, it is decisively Cistercian and anti-Benedictine. The full development of French Arthurian story, with the Grail and even the Tristan and Isolde story added, has become well-known in English through the late fifteenth-century redaction by Sir Thomas Malory, often called Le Morte Darthur, the title Caxton gave it in his printed version from 1485. Malory translated from many sources, including earlier English ones, for the sizeable audience who could no longer understand French yet accepted the ideology of chivalry. This was no longer a standard concealment of the greed and aggression inherent to authority based on cavalry. It was an ideology falsified much further in a time of crossbows, professional soldiers, gunpowder and – eroding the social base of chivalry – a rapidly expanding mercantile economy and the cash relations of ‘bastard feudalism’. But the importance of an ideological text can lie in what it refuses to discuss, and Malory deals with a disordered society in determinedly conservative terms. His story is not as unrealistic as it might seem: it is a displacement of contemporary reality, not a complete rejection of it. The pattern Malory gives for hundreds of pages is of knights riding out to put down wrongdoers – such as a wicked but powerful knight who oppresses good men, a churl who has seized a noble lady, some warrior who obstructs a river crossing for money or plunder. It is not a world of dragons (an Italian Renaissance fantasy) and only rarely a world of malign enchanters, who themselves incite bad knights. The pattern of knightly justice is in fact remarkably like a streamlined and dreamlike version of fifteenth-century justice, which depended on great men, the magnates and their own followings, to be enacted, if it was enacted at all (Lander, 1977, Chapter 7). The peace-keeping system does not finally work in Malory – as it basically did not in the disturbed fifteenth century. The essential ideology of the Arthuriad is to explain how things go wrong, and explain that in a way acceptable to Malory’s conservative audience, which no doubt included businessmen like Caxton, who printed Le Morte Darthur, all of whom basically accepted the values of the older world, and also many aristocrats now turning to business. 113

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In explaining how the Round Table collapses, Malory rejects the simplistic Christian moralisations developed by the earlier French writers. They argued that it was because of bad fortune or personal failings, like the adultery of Lancelot and Guinevere, or Arthur’s fathering of Mordred on his half-sister Morgana (sometimes Morgause) and then trying to kill the child in his own massacre of the innocents – but Mordred would take his revenge in the end. Malory gives a complex of reasons, including all of those. He also stresses that, as tensions developed, the leading figures all acted honourably in spite of their different interests, and that the catastrophe was both inevitable and somehow mollified by the display of admirable behaviour. That itself would be a highly consoling action in a period like Malory’s when the feudal aristocracy was well-aware that authority was slipping from its grasp, and at its end the story does deal with the fading of a particular person’s mighty authority, both Arthur and Launcelot. There has been dispute about Malory’s identity, but there seems now no good reason to doubt the old candidate, Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel in Warwickshire. Throughout an active and sometime violent life he was a Warwick man, serving in various ways the Earl of Warwick, the Kingmaker as he was known. Warwick gave his great power to the Yorkist cause in the Wars of the Roses, he helped Edward IV to the throne in 1461, steadily fell out with him after 1464, and helped put Henry VI briefly back on the throne in 1470, the year by which Malory finished his Arthuriad. Warwick was celebrated as a paragon of chivalry in his period, which helped gloss over some negative habits such as piracy and arrogance. There are strong parallels between him and Sir Launcelot, the greatest of Arthur’s knights. In the last two books, where Malory is undoubtedly at his most original and effective, he creates a contemporarily credible version of how a great king and his greatest baron fall out steadily, and finally become opposed in civil war. Both of them are honourable, and Launcelot is given an especially sympathetic treatment. He has a noble basis for his dissent from the king in his love for Guinevere, and he has a whole series of splendid actions which sometimes resemble Warwick’s own publicly-conscious ‘noble’ behaviour. Malory’s representation of Launcelot acts as a general consolation for a debilitated chivalric authority, and also as a special idealisation of a leading guilty figure. After Malory the Arthurian legend came to seem non-authoritative: too medieval for humanists, too Catholic for Protestants, too royal for republicans. Spenser did know and use the legend, but his version was both classicised and allegorised: his knights are moral virtues, not medieval barons. Here Prince Arthur is just a fit mate for Gloriana, the Faerie Queene herself: in the time of Elizabeth I Arthur can only have a conceptual, fanciful and non-kingly authority. The unfinished Faerie Queene never had a solid socio-economic base – Spenser’s cognomen, ‘the poet’s poet’, reveals the limits of his range in his period and his impact since then. In 1691 Dryden produced King Arthur, but it is hardly a major contribution to the legend. It is only the book for a masque, and its survival has depended heavily on the quality of Purcell’s music. Dryden went back to Geoffrey of Monmouth for 114

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his source, because Latinity lent a certain authority in a basically still classicised culture, especially for such an inherently conservative author. Others disagreed: John Milton and Ben Jonson had thought of writing an Arthurian epic, but both decided it was too royalist and Catholic, and perhaps too unhistorical as well. Malory was not reprinted between 1634 and 1816 and it is usually said that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Arthurian legend went underground. That is only true if by above ground you mean belonging to the metropolitan literary elite. In fact, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Arthur survived healthily in other domains, where authority did not depend on the values of the classically-educated bourgeois elite. Arthurian place-names were common, and Arthurian traditions about many other places remained alive right through this period into the present. There was some literature about Arthur, too, ranging from the work of old-fashioned authors like Richard Blackmore, who favoured King William of Orange, through ballads and folk-tales which lived largely in oral form, to nursery-rhymes and fairy-tales, where heroes like Jack the Giant Killer and Tom Thumb (discussed in Chapter 15 in this collection) came to Arthur’s court, as Lancelot and Tristram had done before them. King Arthur was not underground: he was alive and well if you ventured out of Oxbridge and the London bookshops. Children, the provincials, the illiterate, the unfashionable, they all wondered at Arthur. Not a bad audience, and one that was to be exploited when the king’s authority again became of interest to the literary elite in the nineteenth century. There are many reasons why medieval material became popular in the later eighteenth century and why the widespread Gothic taste of the nineteenth century developed. Many of the reasons are more concerned with politics and social authority than literary history has recognised (as discussed in Knight, 2018). Those who found the democratic pressures of the emerging period oppressive also found the hierarchical certainties of medieval culture consoling; those who blamed modern disturbances on commercialism and rationalism would equally find little to threaten them in the past (Chandler, 1970; Girouard, 1981). Of deeper basic importance is the formation that Lukacs points towards in his discussion of Scott (1962). The ideological self-consciousness of the new urban bourgeoisie, he argued, was culturally created against a distant historic background and an equally distant nationalistic world-view. In the space left by the omission of intimate and unacceptable socio-economic reality, the new false consciousness of individualism could be developed. The bourgeois view of the world and the self found the unreality of medievalism very helpful, a cultural Crusoe’s island for creating that new and ideologically authoritative self-concept, the self. Tennyson’s audience was dominantly bourgeois, and his Idylls of the King was both a major example of newly medieval art and an important force in developing the taste and the need for such art. The poem took a long time to produce but the bulk of it was written in two bursts, in 1856–9 and 1868–72. These periods produced Idylls which are now interwoven through the whole poem, but if they are read in order of their composition and original publication it becomes clear how 115

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Tennyson handles social issues in the poem, in particular how he both examines and defends the authority of the Victorian male. At first he had in mind the politics of the family, not the state. The first four Idylls, published in 1859, take the role of woman as their central issue: in fact they are much more woman-based than Arthur-based. ‘Guinevere’ is familiarly adulterous, ‘Vivien’ (later ‘Merlin and Vivien’) really comes from the French sources cited in the introduction to Southey’s 1817 edition of Malory, and Tennyson drew on The Mabinogion rather than Chrétien for his early Idyll ‘Enid’ (later split into ‘The Marriage of Geraint’ and ‘Geraint and Enid’). Malory provided some material for most of ‘Elaine’ (later ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ – the addition of male names seems a later part of the containment of these troublesome women). The first two of these Idylls, ‘Vivien’ and ‘Enid’, in their first appearance together, went under the general title ‘The True and the False’: Tennyson would abandon the title but not the idea. In his first four Idylls he both raises and crushes the notion of female authority within the family – specifically against the male as husband or lover. The threat is the impact sexuality can have on the male, making him lose his independence and dominance: this was a major contemporary issue (Johnson, 1975). It is clear that the new isolation of the family unit (Stone, 1977) both emphasised and threatened the role of the husband and father. His patriarchal authority had to be forced ideologically on the wife who now provided or supervised all the emotional and physical needs of the family – she was in a position of genuine and dynamic authority. The direct physicality of her power is especially disturbing and has to be repressed by the non-physical, absent, moral authority of the patriarch, so morality mediates social and financial power, the essential process of bourgeois ideology. The first two Idylls in particular create powerfully, urgently, the familiar Victorian figures of the harlot and the madonna in Vivien and Enid. The second two Idylls support that pattern – Guinevere combines the sexual sin of Vivien with husband-challenge, and then comes the wifely submission of Enid. The Idyll ‘Elaine’ replays the sexual sin from the male viewpoint and sympathises deeply with the male sinner and the anguish it causes him. The four Idylls stand together as a powerful and widely applauded statement of a totally patriarchal position on the family in a period when male authority was felt to be under pressure – apart from the inherent strains inside the modern family, a divorce bill was being put through parliament. Tennyson later said he had the whole of the Idylls planned from the start, but this appears to be a rationalisation. He certainly seemed to have been satisfied with what he had done in 1859, and said he felt ‘Guinevere’ made a good ending to the Arthurian story. But when he returned to Arthurian Idylls it was with a quite different topic in mind, a concern with authority and its problems in a context wider than the family. The new 1869 Idylls deal with broad-based social issues, especially the weakening of traditional deference to authority. ‘The Holy Grail’, the first to be written, offers social reform as a king’s proper role: Arthur disapproves of the quest for the Grail as distracting from the social 116

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duties of himself and his knights. In part a rejection of the Oxford Movement’s introverted spirituality, this also acknowledges, at some distance, the Christian Socialism espoused by Tennyson’s acquaintances Charles Kingsley and F. D. Maurice. But in Arthur’s final speech Tennyson makes it clear he sees social work not as an end in itself, but as a painful path towards a transcendent heavenly peace for the individual: this is the first of a series of withdrawals from social reality and its attendant problems. Having confronted those forces, the poem now and in future will steadily move away from them and provide various consolations to a conservative, and still male, authority under threat. ‘The Coming of Arthur’ was written next. It is socially conscious, yet the issue is not necessary reform, but the anxiety of rule. The central problem is to discover what gives Arthur his royal authority. This is argued in terms of his birth, assuming that power, property and birth are all interwoven. That essential conservatism is supported by heavenly consolations when real social disorder is envisaged. Leodegran dreams of a king who fails to control a brawling world, but is seen in certain command only when the dream conveniently shifts to heaven. The threats to authority actually posed on the turbulent slopes of nineteenth-century commercialism and democracy are not confronted, but ideologically elided heavenwards. Then ‘The Passing of Arthur’ (an expanded version of the earlier elegy for Tennyson’s close friend Arthur Hallam) refers clearly to the increasing weakness that the ruling class were feeling, as authority ‘forgets a dying King’. Tennyson sees the failure of that ‘deference’ which Bagehot found central to the English constitution. Finally there is a ray of hope, the glimmer of a new dawn as Arthur disappears in his barge: but it is a faint hope indeed. And so far there is no trace at all of what ideological writing really must have, someone to blame for this weakening of authority. There must be explanations; they are provided in all the major Arthuriads, and they must be acceptable, in tune with the dominant ideology. It is ‘Pelleas and Ettarre’, the often overlooked last of the 1869 Idylls, which creates this crucial element. Essentially, it re-awakens the anti-woman theme of the 1859 Idylls and now applies it as an explanation of disorder not only in the family but in the state at large. There had been a trace of this idea both ‘Enid’ and ‘Guinevere’, but it is now massively and urgently mobilised. Pelleas, the archetype of Arthur’s new, post-Grail knights, is sexually betrayed by Ettarre: in despair he runs mad with anti-social violence, doubting and flouting the authority of everyone at the Round Table. In the last lines of the Idyll, Modred, spelt after Geoffrey of Monmouth, slides onto the stage to predict the end of Arthurian society. The remaining Idylls merely filled in and emphasised the plan visible in the eight Idylls available by 1869. ‘The Last Tournament’ is a largely original realisation of the Arthurian world in, post-coital collapse and despair, with Lancelot and Tristram central figures – Tristram is especially powerful, with his combination of sexual and political libertarianism. In ‘Balin and Balan’ Tennyson altered Malory’s story to make woman the cause of Balin’s violent despair – Guinevere drives him from the court and then Vivien stimulates him into a murderous passion. The 117

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only remaining Idyll was ‘Gareth and Lynette’ which Tennyson wrote as an early happy sequence: the way in which his imagination was possessed by gloom is shown both by the need for this Idyll, and by the fact that it is lifted almost completely from Malory. To the end Tennyson was imaginatively fired by threats to authority, both social and familial. In order to contrive his ideological response, he had to turn his back almost completely on the real forces of industry and commerce in the period. But elsewhere the Arthurian legend did deal with those forces, and as a result found convincing consolations a good deal harder to contrive, indeed found any acceptable authority impossible to discover. Mark Twain’s extraordinary novel The Adventures of a Connecticut Yankee in Arthur’s Court (1889) started as a typically Twain-like burlesque, reversing and making fun of Malory, but soon developed as a complex analysis of the contemporary world. Hank Morgan, the Yankee, is a New England democrat with mechanical skills and business drive. He erupts through time-travel into the legend and denounces the oppressive behaviour of the church, throne and aristocracy in Europe both past and present – and nineteenth-century England is a notable target. Yet the novel does not confidently support an American, mercantile and democratic authority. Much of what develops is critical of America. Twain raises his own views as an anti-slavery Southerner and in 1884 a ‘Mugwump’ Republican (supporting a Democrat candidate for President because of the Republican candidate’s corruption, see Budd, 1962). But the novel goes much further than this. It begins to expose the oppressive nature of industrial capitalism itself, through Hank as an active character. He is called Sir Boss, like a slave-master, but also like the northern-style politician Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall. His jokes can be cruel, his business practices exploitative and humiliating. There is a steady build-up to the stunning ending, where Hank and his apprentices, an industrial image, confront the chivalry of England – a new version of the fateful last battle between Arthur and Mordred. Through their use of electrified fences, hydraulic power and Gatling guns, the mechanical warriors win, but destroy the whole land, and themselves die of plague. Twain finally envisages the technological holocaust that the twentieth century has seen come to reality. The novel traces a compressed history of the industrial capitalist from craftsman to monopolist – Twain himself had experienced that development in America and his imagination projects its future, creating an anxiety beyond easy consolation. The rural beauty of Camelot and the simple nobility of Arthur and Lancelot stand out as values – and so does the family Hank has left in what, in a painful subtitle, the novel calls ‘The Lost Land’. Authority is finally found to rest only in nostalgia, and in the ability to see things clearly. That pattern is both paralleled and developed in another very popular Arthurian novel, T. H. White’s The Once and Future King written just before and during the Second World War and published as a quartet in 1958. The remarkably innovative first book The Sword in the Stone appeared in 1938. This is devoted to the modern 118

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dream that authority lies in correct education, but White makes Arthur’s upbringing by Merlin include natural wisdom, learned among animals. The hope is that Arthur will be able to contain contemporary-style sheer might within the authority of a wide and natural right. This does not work – neither the Arthurian legend itself nor White’s own nineteen-thirties could give such an idea much chance. However, White does not really show that the idea fails completely: the three books which follow The Sword in the Stone are little more than a moderately psychologised retelling of Malory, with some good whimsical jokes added, and the themes of the Grail and royal adultery much reduced. Like the Yankee’s ideology of industrial progress, Merlin’s dream of education and liberal authority is a light that fails. That it shocked White by failing is clear from the fifth book of his Arthuriad, which remained unpublished until 1977. The Book of Merlyn has very little narrative, being basically a diatribe about the viciousness of man, conducted by Merlyn, Arthur, and the animals from his education. At times appearing hysterical, and seriously socially alienated as it is, the book seems to foreshadow later negative metafiction and also, like White’s own life, points towards the rural fantasies often lived out in recent years, where value and authority reside in anything that is not modern. In general, the twentieth century has seen many versions of the Arthurian legend. Some have been unique, like Edwin Arlington Robinson’s early-century narrative poems, combining Malory’s story, Tennyson’s genre and a novel-like presentation of the narrative, or like John Arden and Margaretta Darcy’s play trilogy The Island of the Mighty (1972) which sets early British events in the political context of modem populism – but its radicalism, of form and content, has seriously restricted its public performance. Much more widely seen have been the many Arthurian films, which range from Hollywood action romances, where Arthur has a wise presidential authority, to modern expressions of youthful attitudes like the films Monty Python and the Holy Grail and its hip nihilism and Excalibur with its traces of psychobabble and drug-culture. There have been several categories of twentieth-century Arthurian material which use the figure of Arthur and his legend to buttress certain social and personal positions. One of these approaches turns back to the Grail as a source of value and finds authority only in the spiritual realm. The poems of Charles Williams and David Jones had – and have – a cult following in Britain, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) also exploits this material for its positive aspect as well as for its symbology of a spiritual desert in the modern world. In case this approach seems limited and recherché, there is the more general resurgence of Glastonbury as a part of the ‘mysterious Britain’ culture – and also the extraordinary success of the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, a farrago of quasischolarship which was selling in tens of thousands early in 1982. Apparently more intellectually respectable is the ‘historical Arthur’ industry. Some books and many articles have examined the possibility that Arthur did really exist. All the faith-support systems of positive scholarship are used – maps, footnotes, material facts, criticism of sources. Yet a pervasive sentimentality survives: 119

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Leslie Alcock’s Arthur’s Britain (1971), the sanest of the books, had a romantic technicolour dust-jacket. More specifically, these studies all develop the classically bourgeois ‘great man’ theory of history; they also often insist that this ghostly Arthur was the last of the Romans, so linking the authority of one empire with the fading power of Britain’s – it is striking that it is the British, not the Americans, who are fascinated with the authority of the historical Arthur. The third modern trend is basically related to such historical research. This is the sequence of historical novels which recreate, in more or less scholarly ways, the world of Arthur. Rosemary Sutcliff s Sword at Sunset (1973) is a classic, but John Masefield and Henry Treece also produced notable examples and there are many others, including some film versions like the British television series Arthur of the Britons (1972–3). Mary Stewart’s trilogy (1970–79) based on Geoffrey of Monmouth is an ingenious variation, starring Merlin. These writers all use the quasi-historical material to lend weight to the pattern of bourgeois ideology: a decisive hero, faithful and individualised followers, exciting and finally submissive women, material success and a place in the triumphant progress of British history. As a figure of authority under pressure, Arthur has been ideally suited for recreation, time after time, as a bearer of the fears and hopes of social formations in different periods. The legend of Arthur is the best-known and the longest-lasting of the British legends, now at least a thousand years old. But that long period is not in itself a continuity; the legend is not a separate asocial entity, not an object for aesthetic and academic admiration. Rather, it is a series of texts each related to its contemporary circumstances, especially to the problems faced by authority. To study the legend from its political and socio-economic viewpoint can reveal a good deal about the changing forces in history. It can also suggest a good deal about the political ways in which literary culture can work, handling the historical forces of change as they act within a period, both to express and conceal them. To recognise that structure of meaning is to see the inherent political tendency of the Arthurian legend, and of all other cultural productions – and so it is also to see that treatments of culture which do not express and expose its political aspects are themselves working in a deeply political way. This paper is not a new and politicised version of the Arthurian legend. It is a commentary on the long-ignored political function of Arthur and the authorities he has symbolised.

References Alcock, Leslie. Arthur’s Britain (London: Lane, 1971). Barber, Richard. The Figure of Arthur (London: Longman, 1972). Budd, Louis J. Mark Twain: Social Philosopher (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962). Chandler, Alice. A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (London: Routledge, 1970). Duby, Georges. ‘Youth in Aristocratic Society’, in The Chivalrous Society, trans. Cynthia Postan (London: Arnold, 1977), pp. 112–27.

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Girouard, Mark. The Return to Camelot (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). Johnson, W. S. Sex and Marriage in Victorian Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975). Knight, Stephen. Arthurian Literature and Society (London: Macmillan, 1983). Knight, Stephen. ‘“Hail Greybeard Bard”: Chaucer in the Nineteenth-Century Popular Consciousness’, in Chaucer: Contemporary Across the Centuries, Stephanie Trigg Festschrift, ed. by Anne McKendry, Helen Hickey and Melissa Raine (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), pp. 153–71. Köhler, Erich. ‘Observations historiques et sociologiques sur la poésie des troubadours’, Romania, 81 (1964), 385–97. Köhler, Erich. L’aventure chevaleresque: Ideal et realité dans le roman Courtois (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). Lander, J. R. Conflict and Stability in the Fifteenth Century, 3rd edition (London: Hutchinson, 1977). Lukacs, Georg. The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin, 1962). Stone, Laurence. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977).

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7 WHY WAS ‘LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT’ THE MOST POPULAR BALLAD IN EUROPE?

From: Medieval English Poetry, ed. by Stephanie Trigg (London and New York: Longman, 1993)

1 This paper has two purposes. One is to provide an answer to its title question, and in doing so to suggest that such questions are proper ones, and that other categories such as aesthetic value, genre, formal excellence, moral insight are less primarily relevant to analysis of cultural phenomena than is a study of the relations between those phenomena and the social formations that produce and consume them. The second purpose is to practise a set of comparative techniques: a comparison of the many versions of a ‘text’; a comparison of such versions across languages; a comparison of that multiple phenomenon with its social context and social impact. These comparisons all act against the conventional and restrictive practices common in literary study: restrictions to one language and nation, to the imaginary confines of one text, and to ‘literature’ itself – a self conjured into being to legitimise the academic and litterateurish self, wilfully and wishfully severed from its social world. Another mode of comparison will be with the techniques of reading text and context developed in medieval studies. The inadequacies of recent ballad criticism largely stem from their being located within literary criticism of the New Critical kind. The texts of a ballad itself offer little for the scrutinising eye beyond a certain naive charm. The old kinds of scholarship and folkloric studies offered more material, but had no relation with the text as a structure; the ballad was merely a surface to destroy in the process of excavation. Medieval literary analysis, on the other hand, draws its strength from the contexts – social, intellectual, theological, to which the texts themselves naturally and consistently refer, and this essay will presume, and implicitly argue, that this is the proper method for ballad analysis as well, and such conclusions can be meshed with the thematic structure and detail of the ballad – and its often not inconsiderable variations in variants. Ballads themselves survive only rarely from the medieval period, and then they tend to be atypical, like the tuneless and somewhat bookish fifteenth-century 122

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Robin Hood texts. But the forms of language, mimesis, structure and social reference in the ballads all indicate that while some may not have been recovered even until the nineteenth century, the context of discourse they represent is primarily medieval. The method of comprehension offered here is that which appears to be highly informative in the case of medieval genres like romance, fabliau and drama, that is a reading of the text as a social document, not as an alienated, individualised and transhistorical message.

2 ‘Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight’ is the title given by F. J. Child to the group of ballads he prints as his ‘Ballad no. 4’ (reprint edition, 1965, volume 1, pp. 22–62). Six versions appear there and more are scattered through the ten parts of the first edition of Child’s collection; references to the addenda are in the ‘Index to Ballad Titles’ in Volume 5 of the 1965 reprint edition. Child said ‘of all ballads this has perhaps obtained the widest circulation’ (1.22) and his survey of its dissemination across Europe is his longest Introduction to any ballad. The scope of ‘Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight’ is stressed by Bronson in his study of ballad tunes: he calls it ‘one of the most impressive of all the ballads for the geographic sweep of its popularity and vital tenacity’ (1959, p. 9). He supports this by printing no less than a hundred and forty-one tune variants. There are no early manuscript or printed versions of the ballad, which implies a long existence outside literacy and its socio-cultural connotation, if the ballad is not a recent art-creation. Child considers it an early ballad (hence its low number in his collection – 4) and the antiquity of the non-English versions supports that conclusion. This paper is not concerned with the quest for a single, antique and so notionally authoritative text, but with the structural core or ‘essence’ of the ballad, its basic narrative pattern, inherent function and variations to those formations. The essential core can be reconstructed and summarised like the structure of a folk-tale by comparing versions and considering how differences are related. The process of core (or ‘essence’) and variants can be broadly associated with historical development, since the earliest texts appear ‘essential’ and there are many later-appearing stages of variation, especially to euphemise challenging core features of the ballad. But at the same time the ‘essential’ text survives alongside and often within its variations. Development is not linear and historical, but multiplex and ideological, charting different types of response to the basic pattern of the ballad. Here the text taken as typical of the ‘core’ of the ballad (no. 1 in Appendix 2 below) is Child’s no. 4 A – from here on referred to as ‘Lady Isabel’.

3 The study of ‘Lady Isabel’ has been restricted to traditional paths. H. O. Nygard’s work is a good example: he surveys the ballad across many languages and tries to 123

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construct a historicist stemma. This leads to several odd results, such as having to assume Child’s A text of ‘Lady Isabel’ is spurious, because it is in several respects (including title) unlike British variants recorded previously (1958, pp. 297–316). Elsewhere he follows another type of authority-quest, source study (1961). As he summarises it, the story of ‘Lady Isabel’ has been traced to, among other things, solar myth, the Old Testament’s ‘Judith and Holofernes’ (a story which has certainly affected the names in some versions), and Bluebeard – which may indeed be related to ‘Lady Isabel’, in an indirect manner. However, if ballads are considered in terms of social function, it soon becomes clear that they form coherent thematic groups, not single source-oriented structures. ‘Lady Isabel’ itself belongs to the ‘Mysterious Lover’ group, where a strange (in both senses) travelling man appears to a woman alone. He offers sexuality, sometimes marriage. She normally masters him, though there are some substantive variants where he is an agent of her punishment for a former infidelity to a man, as in ‘James Harris’/‘The Demon Lover’ (Child no. 243). This whole group stands in related opposition to the group of ‘Daughter’s Lover’ ballads like ‘Clerk Saunders’ (Child no. 69), where the family takes vengeance, usually bloody, on the daughter’s deliberate choice of a lover because he has disrupted family order – by entering the house or her bedroom, by abducting her, by making her pregnant, and so on. A reflex of this is the ‘Prospective Bride’ set of ballads, like ‘Gil Brenton’ (Child no. 5) in which she is examined for virginity. Another related group, perhaps a resistant sub-group of the ‘Daughter’s Lover’ group, allows the daughter to retain her chosen lover against the family’s will through her own courage and cunning, as in ‘Brown Robin’ (Child no. 97) and ‘The Gay Goshawk’ (Child no. 96). In these cases, however, the male lover appears to be consistently shown as inferior in terms of social status and/or virility: suggesting that the wilful daughter’s reward is slight is apparently as a way of minimising her success and so containing the threat that this pattern offers to a patriarchal structure. To return to the ‘Lady Isabel’ group: the narrative structure shared by these ballads is: 1 2 3 4 5

Woman alone in springtime. Sexual rapport between her and a knightly man who is to some degree supernatural. When the two are in sexual or quasi-sexual rapport, he threatens her with the death he has dealt to other women. By the use of stereotypically ‘feminine’ actions and responses, of a non-sexual or only mildly sexual character, she disarms him. She kills him either with his own weapon, or in water.

4 To move towards interpretation: ‘Lady Isabel’ (like the ‘Mysterious Lover’ group to which it belongs and many of the other ‘Family Ballad’ groups) dramatises 124

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tension between the daughter’s personal sexual inclinations and the family’s anxiety to control and then barter her sexuality for its own ends – family is almost always represented only by the male members, a number of brothers and often the father (unlike the ‘Prospective Bride’ group shown in ‘Gil Brenton’, where the mother is usually dominant in the action). There were strong social and economic reasons for this familial restriction on daughters. It is clear that in the past (at least as far as most English-speaking cultures are concerned), whatever the social standing of the family the marriage of a daughter was seen as an important social and economic step. Her capacity to produce children was transferred with care and with a clear eye to at least an indirect share in her future productivity. At the peasant level, co-operation in labour and equipment could be expected from the link with another labouring family; at the gentry level less directly tangible rewards would stem from the marriage – patronage of one sort or another, such as preference to posts or favoured treatment in law-courts and other official structures. In the cash-context, at a number of social levels, the return for the daughter might simply be her marriage portion, which her father would usually keep, nominally in her interest. Material on marriage practices and attitudes is quite common in historical and sociological work on the family. Brief but telling passages about peasant practices appear in MacFarlane (1978, pp. 24, 28), and those of the gentry are discussed by Stone (1977, pp. 86–9). It should be noted that this paper’s discussion of attitudes to a daughter’s marriage does not depend on a position in the controversy as to whether the family in earlier England was extended or essentially nuclear (see Laslett, 1972, pp. 1–89 for a controversial statement on this). While I disagree with Laslett’s position, which seems an attempt to find pre-capitalist legitimation for the bourgeois nuclear family (like MacFarlane’s treatment of individualism), it is in fact rare for ballads to refer to any family member who is not nuclear. It is not irrelevant, by the way, to speak of both peasants and gentry families in the context of a ballad that uses as its personnel ‘lords and ladies’. It appears that ballads about aristocratic figures were part of the cultural and ideological experience of labouring families, since the ballad community based on manor, household, large farm or, as in Buchan’s research, the ‘fermtoun’ (1972, Part.1.3), shared communal interests across what later viewpoints have recognised as social classes. Such communal cultural activity ends both with the separation of the upper class into different types of education and resultant culture, and with the intervention of bourgeois training and culture. As a result ballads, when recorded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, usually remain in the mouths of labouring people of both genders, though sometimes socially higher people, like the ballad-rich Mrs Anna Brown of Falkland in the late eighteenth century, learned their ballads from servants and neighbours.

5 The broad context of many ‘family’ ballads is the anxiety about daughters making their own choice of a sexual partner and so damaging or destroying them as an 125

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object for the marriage market. Within this range, ‘Lady Isabel’ and its group have features which appear to be central to its dynamic success. The major unique element is the absence of the family. They may be implied in the existence of a building in which the lady often has a bower, and she does frequently wish to see her family, particularly her father, before her notional death, but the essential feature of ‘Lady Isabel’ is that the woman both invokes and then outwits the threatening mysterious lover on her own. The only apparent contradiction to this is the ‘brothers’ rescue’ ending, a variant where members of the young woman’s family arrive in time to kill the Elf-Knight. Child is satisfied that this is late, not an abandoned element of the ‘essential’ ballad, and it therefore appears to represent a resurgence of the masculine family into the ballad, containing its unusual female force. The isolation of the woman in ‘Lady Isabel’, her sexual arousal, her competence to defend herself, all without male dominance or even assistance, must raise the question whether this ballad and others somewhat like it represent an independent voice and role for women – in short, a feminist ballad. It is certainly true that ballads were in many cases performed and, it would seem, composed by women. Child has many woman-transmitted ballads; Lönnroth (1978) offers Swedish examples. The large number of women among the performers who transmitted ballads to their recorders may have occurred partly because in the recording period women were more likely than men to be still in touch with pre-literate, pre-scholastic culture, both because of the differential education of boys and girls and because educated women often had long-term intimate contact with uneducated servants: the oral source of a recorded transmission is often a cook, a nanny, a housemaid. But in spite of this educational imbalance, it is evident that the ballads were produced and performed by both genders. However, the shadow of patriarchy seems to lie heavily on the possibility of a feminist ballad. When women act independently in ballads, their action often seems to be problem-causing, and there is always somehow some explicit or implicit containment of their role, like Chaucer’s treatment of the Wife of Bath or Shakespeare’s presentation of active women as versions of men. The same structure has been identified in Norse saga, which contains many powerful women (Clunies-Ross, 1977), and is also observable in Celtic literature of the past. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which some ballad-groups, including the one under discussion, do give expression to a female self-consciousness which, though oppressed, is still capable of types of resistance. This will be discussed later on. But patriarchy is a supple force. Bronson (1959) describes ‘Lady Isabel’ as a ‘bride-stealing’ ballad (p. xiv) – whose bride is she? This masculinist notion is also found in Nygard’s analysis (1958, p. 320), where he both privileges the man (the opening sequence is improbably called ‘The Courtship’, p. 261) and insists that the basis of the ballad is theft of the father’s human property (p. 265).

6 ‘Lady Isabel’ is the most extreme realisation in all the ballads of this dynamic female power, and a central reason for its popularity may be that it does realise 126

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this threat to patriarchy so strongly. But that threat is treated as a threat, not as a natural force. A more detailed reading of each of the main functions described above shows an implicit pattern of patriarchal ideology, taking here the form of recommending auto-repression to young women. 1 2 3

Lady Isabel is aroused by a horn and invites the knight in: he leaps through the window and remarks on her taking the initiative. They ride together to the wild wood. He is the elf-knight. He has killed many women and will now kill her. Either: A

By restful, stereotypically feminine calming, she lulls him to sleep, and kills him with his own dagger.

Or: B

She uses maidenly modesty as a trick to push him into water and drown him.

This pattern is not hard to understand in the context of anxiety about a daughter’s sexuality. In 1, female sexuality is active and outside socialised control – she invites him in through the window and/or they ride out into the woods on stolen horses. In 2, by diabolising the hero to a degree, the dangers of such an instinctive sexual reaction are implied. But then her own resistant behaviour, judged from the family viewpoint, seems itself somewhat elf-like, as in 3: by instrumentalising traditionally passive female practices, which can range from modesty to delousing, she defeats the threat of the elf-knight; that is, she becomes auto-repressive as well as against male sexual aggression. The daughter is culturally urged to see danger in releasing her own sexuality and is further urged that she can only save herself from this threat by traditional and stereotypical female passivity. So much is plainly an effective piece of patriarchal ideology, the family controlling the daughter on those crucial occasions when it is not present. And the travelling lover is not merely a symbol of her own ‘elvishness’: he is also a pragmatic figure. Meeting a stranger and going away with him was both the ultimate threat to the family’s power over the girl, and a common occurrence, like modern runaways. The intrusive male lover is always a credible threat to the family’s control of a daughter – a travelling knight, a wandering scholar, a roving sailor.

7 Though the structure discussed so far is effective, and especially powerful because of its unusual female force, this is only part of the ballad-group’s ideological function. Condensed with the message about female auto-repression is another statement about female sexuality, which is seen from a male viewpoint more sharply, even more incisively. It is noticeable that the mimetic viewpoint of the ballad varies a good deal. That is a common formal feature of many early ballads, a part of what Gummere called 127

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their ‘leaping and lingering’ (1907, pp. 90–2). Stemming from a non-individualist epistemology, the result is often to broaden the ideological force of the ballad. In ‘Lady Isabel’ a male viewpoint is developed as well as Lady Isabel’s. The elf-knight is surprised when invoked, an interchange of viewpoint follows, and the final scene is basically experienced as his ‘ain’ view of being stroked, lulled, killed, even taunted after death (a particularly important event in defeat within a shame-oriented culture). Related to this emergence of a male viewpoint is the fact that the ballad implicitly realises a sexual narrative. The knight is aroused sexually: implied in ‘Lady Isabel’ by the horn and then the leap through the window. In other versions she will pluck a flower and he will surge up from the bush, or some other version of invasive sexual symbolism. They will ride together into the wild wood; then he is lulled to sleep in her lap; finally he is killed in a way which suggests castration. His own dagger is appropriated for this in ‘Lady Isabel’; elsewhere he is beheaded or plunged into water. In Bluebeard his last, successful, wife returns to him his bloodstained key after penetrating the forbidden room. To summarise these details: condensed within the story about the social autocontrol of female sexuality there is a story that expresses individual masculine fear of that same force. It is the story of a single sexual encounter where the man weakens and dies through the power of a woman who is still vigorous when, she ought, in normative social terms, to be still and vigour-less.

8 This second and latent structure in the ballad may well explain why he should be an elf-knight, not a demon. As a lone travelling knight he is a male fantasy of adventure, including sexual adventure, and it is interesting to note that elves are not normally thought in European folklore to be murderous (Nygard, 1958, p. 310). Condensed though they are in ‘Lady Isabel’, the outer, social and familial anxiety and the inner masculine anxiety do not have the same resolution. The wish that a possibly sexually active daughter should remain within the familial structure was fulfilled in the story, in that the daughter did repress her initial sexuality, but a considerable residual anxiety remains, as no familial authority is involved in this repression – she is as strong in finally denying her sexuality as initially in liberating it. At the same time the threat of sexual incompetence, even castration, encountered by the elf-knight as the initially attractive male invader is simply resolved in humiliating death. The daughter is herself hardly familial: she may mention her parents when teasing the elf-knight, but finally she very rarely returns home and then only in a perfunctory way (Nygard, 1958, p. 278): familial containment is absent or sketchy. A similar negative strain derives from the suggestively erotic refrain (of which there are many versions). It recurs throughout the ballad – a feature which is inherently subversive of the auto-repressive structure, and, from a conventional viewpoint, a reason why that resolving auto-repressive structure is so important. If the story is 128

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one of young female self-control, it also implies there might be many reasons and situations why and where this might not operate.

9 So both latent structures of the ballad have residual tension, especially the inner masculine sensitivity one. That tension is a normal feature of successful cultural phenomena, especially the great popular ballad successes, and brings to a dynamic conclusion the tensely balanced ideological conflicts of ‘Lady Isabel’. By now an answer has been collected to the question in the title of this paper. ‘Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight’ was the most popular ballad in Europe because its fiction condenses particularly acute aspects of patriarchal anxiety, namely the threat of the independent sexuality of women at both the social and personal levels and gives a positive value to such a force. Resolutions are offered at the social level in terms of feminine auto-repression, but there is an unresolved fear at the inner and personal male level: that latter fear is itself generated by the disparity between ideology and reality at the social level. If women are repressed socially then they are most formidable where their physical powers are quite plainly superior to men, and where social repressions do not adequately operate. That answers the question, but answers it from a basically male viewpoint. Not from that of the author of this paper, but from that of the patriarchal dominance of culture. The feminine viewpoint in the ballad is brought to auto-repression; the male viewpoint emerges and becomes of dominant, even narcissistic, interest. How does this square with the strong feminine component in ballad-creators and ballad audiences? Obviously women may well be bearers of patriarchal ideology, or it would not in fact be a dominant force. Yet at the same time it is not hard to conceive of some at least of the female part of the audience finding ‘Lady Isabel’ compulsively interesting as a statement of the experienced pressure of a patriarchal world, and also as a coded statement of the existence of certain powers actually held by women within that world. This is also true of the ‘Daughter’s Lover’ group of ballads, many of which indicate how wrong and foolish the family males are to attack the daughter’s lover, how they destroy daughter and family along with the intrusive male. There is more than a trace of the pressure of historical feminism, or at the very least an alternative gendered viewpoint, in some of the ballads, and that is presumably because they are not a gender-linked form in terms of production and consumption. Few ballads, however, express that pressure in as dramatic and conflictive a way as the ‘core’ or ‘essential’ version of the ‘Mysterious Lover’ group, ‘Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight’.

10 So far this has been a discussion of the ‘essential’ ballad typified by ‘Lady Isabel’. But it has many variant versions, and these (almost always ignored) are in a real sense a guide to the responses of audiences in their re-creation of texts as they are transmitted and consumed. 129

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Obviously, for many, the dynamic power of ‘Lady Isabel’ was valuable – hence its ‘vital tenacity’ in Bronson’s phrase (1959, p. 39). But the pattern of variants indicates that it was sometimes too dynamic, and containment by variant is a discernible process. There are a number of examples, but I will deal with only two here, one containment for each of the two latent structures of the ballad. The first exists in an additional sequence often attached to ‘Lady Isabel’: the ‘parrot’ ending (no. 2 in Appendix 2). These variants presumably all have the same origin in that some performer altered the ballad and others assented to and re-used that version. (Bronson records sixty-six uses of the ‘parrot’ ending among his hundred and forty-one tune-owning texts.) It is a powerful variant indeed, and apparently only exists in English (Nygard, 1958, pp. 281–2, 296). In the extra scene, the daughter returns home and the parrot knows where she has been. In return for material comforts, the parrot conceals its knowledge, telling the father that its noise was caused by a cat visiting the cage – but now the daughter has driven the cat away. The effect is a further and final containment of the woman; in one particularly popular version of this variant she is herself named Polly, the traditional name for a parrot. The woman returns to her house as the parrot does to its cage: cats and elf-knights are driven away, material comforts are resumed. This ending operates basically in terms of the social and familial structure of the ballad, but it also has general force as a reducer of the independent and sexual role of the woman – she is presented finally in a patriarchal mode, indeed as a bird in a gilded cage. The other euphemised variant of ‘Lady Isabel’ worth considering is actually described by Child as a quite different ballad, ‘The Elfin Knight’ (Child no. 2 – see No. 3 in Appendix 2). Child said that this ballad had borrowed stanzas 1–4 from ‘Lady Isabel’ and that its last two stanzas were incomprehensible (1.13). Nygard thought ‘Lady Isabel’ had borrowed its opening from ‘Elfin Knight’ (1958, p. 310). However, the construction and meaning of the ballad become quite clear once it is seen as a contained variant of ‘Lady Isabel’. ‘Elfin Knight’, which itself has many versions, especially in Bronson (1959), employs the well-known folk-lore motif of the ‘impossible tasks’ structure as the conflict function to replace the sexual conflict function of ‘Lady Isabel’. This is a drastic euphemisation of the sexual threat of the woman, an encounter of wits rather than genitals – she offers him riddle-like tasks, not her disempowering feminine charm. To cover all the sexual material latent in ‘Lady Isabel’, however, the ‘impossible task’ section had to be developed to such an extent that it filled all but the first four and last two stanzas – hence Child’s inventive but incorrect notion that the intervening stanzas were the core of the ballad and that the opening and closing were inauthentic and mysterious (1.13). Being a variant of ‘Lady Isabel’, ‘Elfin Knight’ asserts the auto-repression that young girls should feel when faced with travelling men, but this structure is euphemised because the conflict is one of wit rather than physicality. The social and familial pattern of ‘Lady Isabel’ is represented in a diluted form. In this respect the containing function of ‘Elfin Knight’ is like that of the ‘parrot’ 130

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version of ‘Lady Isabel’. But ‘Elfin Knight’ does more than this. It is the inner masculine-anxiety structure of ‘Lady Isabel’ that is most strikingly euphemised by the variation found in ‘Elfin Knight’. This is clear from the ending, in which the knight returns to his wife and children rather than suffering an impotent death. Not all of ‘Elfin Knight’ is as blandly un-anxious as that ending: it euphemises the threat of ‘Lady Isabel’, rather than dissipating it. The refrain about the wind blowing a plaid away is implicitly sexual, indeed more direct than most of the spring-time implications of ‘Lady Isabel’ refrains like ‘Ay as the gowans grow gay’, though it is not clear which gender might lose the plaid – probably potentially both. The curious exchange of refrain in the last stanzas (which was part of Child’s problem with them), changing the plaid-possessor from knight to lady, indicates the knight’s defeat and his acceptance of a non-oppressive sexual position originally feminine – this is a displaced version of the castration images of ‘Lady Isabel’. Other material in the ballad seems to turn from male aggression to female triumph, albeit in a discussion of sexual relations, not in their enactment. Marriage is the offer by this elf-knight, but this seems itself a euphemisation. When he demands that to win ‘marriage’ from him the girl sew him a shirt, he employs a motif very common to mysterious lovers and other would-be seducers. The word ‘sark’ means shirt or chemise, and many of its early usages have a sexual context (not unlike ‘petticoat’). In the famous ship’s name, ‘Cutty Sark’: cutty means ‘tight-fitting’ and on the figurehead the ‘sark’ is a diaphanous chemise. Whatever the exact significance of the knight’s remarks, the girl appears to understand them clearly, and responds in similarly obscure but apparently sexlinked form. She has an acre of good ‘ley-land’ (no doubt pronounced, intriguingly, ‘lay-land’), which he is to plough with his horn. This seems frank enough, in a moderately disguised way. But as she goes on, the scale of his effort is made minuscule, his equipment makes such acre-ploughing an impossible task indeed. This seems a displaced castration image, and the real reason why the knight huffily returns to wife and children. The girl has been too powerful for him in sexual wit, if not, as with Lady Isabel’s innuendoes, in suggested sexual practice.

11 Even in its distinctly contained and euphemised variants, ‘Lady Isabel and the ElfKnight’ remains a dynamic ballad, realising the serious threat to patriarchal order posed by the vigour of sexually awakened woman. Seen in a comparative way, across versions, across languages, against their medieval origins, and particularly across the all too frequently created gap between literature and society, many of the ballads that have survived appear both to present and contain a challenge to patriarchal simplicities as part of their challenge to a whole phalanx of undesirably authoritarian postures and practices. It is apparently because ‘Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight’ does all these things with such dynamic and complex condensation that it was the most popular ballad in Europe. 131

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References Bronson, Bertrand. The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, 4 volumes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959). Buchan, David. The Ballad and the Folk (London: Routledge, 1972). Child, F. J. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 10 volumes (Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin, 1882–98; 5 volumes reprint, New York: Dover, 1965). Clunies-Ross, Margaret. ‘Women in Early Scandinavian Myth and Literature’, Refractory Girl, 13–14 (1977), 29–37. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams (London: Penguin, 1976). Gummere, Francis B. The Popular Ballad (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1907). Laslett, Peter (ed.). Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). Lönnroth, Lars. ‘Sir Olof and the Elves’ (manuscript translated by M. Karlsson-Lillas as ‘Herr Olof och Alvoma’), in Den dubbla scenen (Stockholm: Frima, 1978), pp. 81–111. Macfarlane, C. B. The Origins of English Individualism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). Nygard, H. O. The Ballad of Beer Halewijn (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1958). Nygard, H. O. ‘Child Ballad no. 4: Ballad Source-Study’, in The Critics and the Ballad, ed. by M. Leach and T. Coffin (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961), pp. 189–203. Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex and Marriage, 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977).

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Appendix 1 METHODOLOGY

For the purposes of this paper ‘ballad’ is merely taken to mean texts of the sort published by Child and Bronson. It is generally recognised that Child’s canon was restrictive, particularly in the light of songs discovered in the USA and also in the context of folk-tale studies. But even keeping only to Child and Bronson, there is a huge amount of material, and elementary patterns and tests of methodology may be worked out there with some confidence. Very many ballads were sung, and many tunes have survived. The discussion in this paper takes no account of performance and music. This goes against the trend of ballad studies to some degree, and for several reasons. One is that my knowledge in this area is not sufficiently sophisticated to deal confidently with a musical sociology of the ballads. But I do not see that as a disabling disadvantage, because another reason for this paper’s non-musicality is that the emphasis on music in the ballads has had the effect of a new type of aestheticism, a way of restricting discussion to mere description, or admiration. An approach not as inauthentic as old style ‘literary appreciation’, but in its way quite as far from comprehending socio-cultural function. Finally, a speculation. In discussing the inherent meaning of ballads in this paper, I have on several occasions used terms from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1976). This is not a casual borrowing. I would be prepared to argue that the patterns outlined here bear a remarkable resemblance to the basic structuration of dreams described in his Chapter 6 – and not because I started with that terminological model. It was when I was halfway through the analysis that I realised what was happening, and recognised the usefulness of Freud’s terms and categories. Briefly, the inherent compression of the ballad-story responds to Freud’s elementary form of ‘condensation’; the significant motifs throughout the variants are examples of ‘representation’ and these may well include a type of ‘displacement’ as in the transfer of ‘elvishness’ from the knight to Isabel. More important structural relations are visible between ballad and dream. The double latent structure of ‘Lady Isabel’, both female auto-repression and male castration anxiety, is a version of Freud’s structural ‘condensation’, and a number of features of the ballad are therefore ‘over-determined’. The ‘parrot’ ending is, in terms of the whole ‘Lady Isabel’ ballad-group, a ‘secondary revision’ and the 133

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substitution of the ‘impossible tasks’ function in ‘Elfin Knight’ for the implicit sexual encounter is a structural ‘displacement’. I am not suggesting that Freudian content-analysis has any special role in comprehending these ballads and their function: I am sceptical about that for several reasons (among them the non-individualist ontology and the familial context inherent to the ballad, apart from any feminism-oriented doubts), but I think it is possible that Freud’s mechanics of dream-structuration and his ways of reading a text can be separated from his own use of them. I suggest they may be the most useful part of his work for an analysis which is seeking the latent meaning of the manifest cultural product.

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Appendix 2 TEXTS

1

Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight 1 Fair Lady Isabel sits in her bower sewing, Aye as the gowans* grow gay. There she heard an elf-knight blawing his horn, The first morning in May. 2 ‘If I had that horn that I hear blawing, And yon elf-knight to sleep in my bosom’. 3 This maiden had scarcely these words spoken Till in at her window the elf-knight has luppen.* 4 ‘It’s a very strange matter, fair maiden’, said he, ‘I canna blaw my horn but ye call on me. 5 ‘But will ye gang to yon greenwood side? If ye canna gang I will cause you to ride’. 6 He leapt on a horse, and she on another, And they rode on to the greenwood together. 7 ‘Light down, light down, Lady Isabel’, said he, ‘We are come to the place where ye are to die’. 8 ‘Hae mercy, hae mercy, kind sir on me. Till ance my dear father and mother I see’. 9 ‘Seven king’s daughters here hae I slain, And ye shall be the eight o them’. 10 ‘O sit down a while, lay your head on my knee, That we may hae some rest before that I die’. 11 She stroakd him sae fast*, the nearer he did creep, Wi a sma charm she lulld him fast asleep.

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12 Wi his ain sword-belt sae fast as she ban* him, Wi his ain dag-durk sae fair as she dang* him. 13 ‘If seven king’s daughters here ye hae slain, Lye ye here, a husband to them a’. (Refrain repeats in every stanza.) *gowans – daisies; luppen – leapt; fast – firmly; ban – bound; dang – struck 2

‘Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight’ – ‘parrot’ ending She leapt on her milk-white steed, She led the dapple grey; She rid till she came to her father’s house, Three hours before it was day. ‘Who knocked so loudly at the ring?’ The parrot he did say; ‘O where have you been, my pretty Polly, All this long summer’s day?’ ‘O hold your tongue, parrot, Tell you no tales of me; Your cage shall be made of beaten gold, Which is now made of a tree’. O then bespake her father dear As he on his bed did lay: ‘O what is the matter, my parrot, That you speak before it is day?’ ‘The cat’s at my cage, master, And sorely frighted me, And I calld down my Polly To take the cat away’.

3

The Elfin Knight Refrain My plaid awa, my plaid awa. And ore the hill and far awa. And far awa to Norrowa, My plaid shall not be blown awa. 1 The elphin knight sits on yon hill, Ba, ba, ba, lilli ba 136

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He blaws his horn both lowd and shril. The wind hath blown my plaid awa. 2 He blowes it east, he blowes it west, He blowes it where he lyketh best. 3 ‘I wish that horn were in my kist*, Yea, and the knight in my armes two’. 4 She had no sooner these words said, When that the knight came to her bed. 5 ‘Thou art over young a maid’, quod he, ‘Married with me thou il wouldst be’. 6 ‘I have a sister younger than I, And she was married yesterday’. 7 ‘Married with me if thou wouldst be, A courtesie thou must do to me. 8 ‘For thou must shape a sark* to me, Without any cut or heme’, quoth he. 9 ‘Thou must shape it knife-and-sheerlesse, And also sue it needle-threedlesse’. 10 ‘If that piece of courtesie I do to thee, Another thou must do to me. 11 ‘I have an aiker of good ley-land, Which lyeth low by yon sea-strand. 12 ‘For thou must eare* it with thy horn, So thou must sow it with thy corn. 13 ‘And bigg* a cart of stone and lyme, Robin Redbreast he must trail it hame. 14 ‘Thou must barn it in a mouse-holl, And thrash it into thy shoes soll. 15 ‘And thou must winnow it in thy looff*, And also seck* it in thy glove. 16 ‘For thou must bring it over the sea, And thou must bring it dry home to me. 17 ‘When thou has gotten thy turns well done, Then come to me and get thy sark then’.

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18 ‘I’ll not quite my plaid for my life; It haps* my seven bairns and my wife’. The wind shall not blow my plaid awa. 19 ‘My maidenhead I’ll then keep still, Let the elphin knight do what he will’. The wind’s not blown my plaid awa. (Refrain repeats in every stanza, with variants as indicated in the last two stanzas.) *kist – chest; sark – shirt; eare – plough; bigg – build; looff – palm; seck – dry; haps – covers.

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8 RABBIE HOOD The development of the English outlaw myth in Scotland

From Bandit Territories, ed. Helen Phillips (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008)

1. Introduction National heroes can have strange origins. If King Arthur, that doyen of English monarchs, had any historical reality it was as a Briton, speaking Welsh, fighting against the English. And quite possibly coming originally from Scotland and certainly arriving late to the English language and his canonisation as the strangely hybrid emblem of English kinghood. Cultural heroics can do more than reverse apparent conflicts as the Arthur story does. They can be quite exotic in origin: those with grown-up children may well recall the bizarre phenomenon of the Ninja Turtles, where Western child culture crossed both species and the globe to find comfort and delight in heroes displaced in both their Eastern and chelonian kind. The cultural mix I want to look at here stands somewhere between Arthur and the turtles, and I want to apply a mix of methodologies, in part socio-political and in part post-colonial to explore the development of the English hero Robin Hood as a figure who was in Scotland hybridised in various ways and then re-exported to the colonising centre in a different and remarkably successful form. Any survey of the influences and developments of the Robin Hood tradition over time must soon enough notice the recurrent element of Scottish involvement with the tradition – and yet there has been almost no analysis of this, presumably because of the force of the identification of the hero as English. The Scottish interest has had two major periods, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the time of Scott – and the two are not unconnected. In both periods Scotland developed an interest in and a version of the English outlaw, and I will argue that it was in fact the Scottish versions which lay behind major changes in the tradition of the allegedly English hero, changes which of themselves have made it still popular today. There is no birthright for continued fame for mythic heroes: some of them undergo crucial changes that reinvent them, while others die away. Whatever happened to Guy of Warwick and Bevis of Hampton? Those forgotten heroes 139

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remained in fully medieval English form, and only had archaic appeal in the early modern period, being unchanged for a new era. Robin Hood changed a lot however, and so was able to present new ideas of the meaning of resistance to authority, and still does: there is a Caledonian flavour to some of the most important of these changes. In this paper I will concentrate on the early period, as more work needs to be done on the nature and origin of Scott’s reinvigoration of the Robin Hood tradition, but I will at least mention finally some features of that second stage of Rabbie Hood. It has long been known that late medieval Scottish literary references to the English outlaw exist and that Robin Hood activities took place in Scottish towns in the late Middle Ages; the role of Scots chroniclers and writers in promulgating the English outlaw myth has been referred to by scholars. But these phenomena have not been looked at as a body, and not considered in terms of their wider implications, as I plan to do here. Lewis Spence’s brief 1928 essay, ‘Robin Hood in Scotland’,1 only deals with some of the material, though it did open up the idea interestingly – without being pursued by other scholars. Apart from the intrinsic interest and relative neglect of the topic of Rabbie Hood, another good reason to return to it is that the whole phenomenon of a Scottish version of Robin Hood can now be looked at in the light of recently developed knowledge and theorisation about how colonised cultures operate and, most interestingly for this paper, how they interact with native traditions, both in the colony and back with the coloniser. If Robin Hood in Scotland is one of the themes of this paper, Rabbie Hood in England is another. In this case, as in so many instances of colonialism and post-colonialism, the traffic was by no means one way. Scottish studies tend to resist post-colonialism on the self-protecting grounds that Scotland was never a colony of England, just a negotiated ally and federate, but the more complex and contributory role of Scotland to the Robin Hood myth may even in such a delicate context make post-colonial critical discourse conceivably acceptable.

2. To Aberdeen The evidence of the inter-relationship in this outlaw myth between England and Scotland is clear. The Appendix to my 1994 book on the outlaw gathered together, thanks to researcher Lucy Sussex, all the pre-1600 references that could be traced. There were 270 of them, and 53 are clearly related to Scotland or to Scottish authors. The quantity of the early Scottish references may of course be caused in part by the relatively sophisticated nature of lowland Scottish urban and mercantile life (which extends at least in this context up the east coast to Aberdeen), and also by both the detail and the relatively high survival ratio of their records. About a fifth is still a large proportion, but it is also noticeable that this fifth contains a much larger proportion than one fifth of the specific and amplified

1 Lewis Spence, ‘Robin Hood in Scotland’, Chambers Journal, 18 (1928), 94–6.

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references to the outlaws – many of the English ones just refer to a Robin Hood play-game taking place, or to buying cloth for costumes for such an event. The Scots references tend to report characters appearing in the streets, with their actions described, or they are literary references with some detail; or they are – and here the Scots have an exclusive – references to apparently real outlaws by chroniclers from Andrew of Wyntoun onwards. There will no doubt be more Robin Hood references found in the present process of the publishing the full records of early drama, but the relative weight and quality of the Scottish references is unlikely to be much diminished. The extent, specificity and inherent importance of the early Scottish Robin Hood references clearly indicate that something was going on in this context in the north at that time. How are we to interpret this phenomenon? Robin Hood is not the only British mythic figure to turn out to have strong early Scottish elements. King Arthur is the obvious candidate, and so perhaps are Myrddin/Merlin, Ywain, and Gawain (passing over on this occasion Sherlock Holmes’s Edinburgh connection). The scholars who have pursued the northern King Arthur have seen it as a matter of origins, suggesting with some credibility that the real original hero of that myth operated in the heroic British north and his tradition was preserved where the language of that area survived, namely Wales. But that does not seem to be a viable model for the dissemination of the Robin Hood myth, and in spite of neo-empiricist passions on the point, the concept of a historic Robin Hood is even less persuasive than that for a real King Arthur. An originary Scottish Robin Hood, disseminating south, is in any case not suggested by the evidence. Rather, as I have argued in my 1994 book, Robin Hood is a multiply located figure of anti-authoritarian myth, who may well be supportive of community when it is local and organic, but will become involved in opposition to authority when that community comes into conflict with external and intrusive authorities such as those of Abbot, Sheriff or indeed King.2 His reality is like that of Santa Claus or Cinderella, a functional idea, one that invites people not to identify him, but to identify with him. In the case of Robin Hood, it is likely that he is traceable to the medieval French pastourelle figure, Robin des Bois, who sometimes loves and defends Marion but always celebrates with his rural friends. This connection can explain the very curious early distribution of benign play-game Robin (as distinct from outlaw ballad Robin) in south-western England and south-eastern Scotland. These were sites of maritime contact with France which were not dominated by English aristocratic culture, and local celebration used this French figure intermittently as a model for a local summer celebrant and fund-raiser.3 That figure is in fact always

2 Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 113–15. 3 Stephen Knight, ‘Robin Hood: The Earliest Contexts’, in Images of Robin Hood, ed. by Joshua Calhoun and Lois Potter (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), pp. 21–40.

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called Robin Hood, a name which appears to have developed in England by the fourteenth century, and presumably the drastic nature of that period enhanced his powers as a figure of resistance to authority. Whatever the origins and implications of the surname Hood, by using it the Scottish events clearly show some cultural transmission through England. Hybridity is plain enough in the name of the ship ‘Le Robin Hude’ which docked in Aberdeen in 1438, itself in an aura of criminality: we have the record because the master was accused, as if eponymously, of stealing goods in transit.4 However various the origins may be, the process of localisation is clear in the Scottish play-game records. Aberdeen in May 1508 has a requirement very like those from south-western England stating ‘all pepil that ar abill within this burghe . . . to pass with Robyne Hude and Litile Johnne’. They are to be in costume (most of the English records are notes of the cost of costumes): ‘thair arrayment maid in grene and yellow, bowis, arrowis, brass and all uther convenient thingis according thairto’.5 Robin Hood moves towards Rabbie Hood when both the date and the concept of the figure change. In the Aberdeen Municipal Statutes for the same year, 1508, under 17th November, it says that: all personiis, burges, nichtbouris, and inhabitaris, burges sonnys, habill to ryd, to decor and honor the towne in thar array conveinant therto, sall rid with Robert Huyid an Litile Johne, quilk was callit in yers bipast, Abbat and Prior of Bonacord, one every Sanct Nicholas day, throw the towne. as use and wont has bene . . .6 This is a communal fund-raising activity, as is indicated by the substantial fines to be paid by those required to ride but unwilling to do so – twenty shillings to St Nicholas ‘werk’ and eight shillings to the ‘bailyeis’. That itself is an elaborate and prosperous – basically urban – version of the humble play-games in south-western England where Robin and John travel from the woods to a nearby small town and collect for their parish. But the time of year is unusual. The English play games take place in May, usually late May, at Whitsun. The presence of Robin Hood in May 1508 was a new phenomenon in Aberdeen: in the previous year this May festival was led by the ‘Abbat and Prior of Bonacord’. But the greatest innovation is the date of this second Robin Hood event: December 6th. St Nicholas’s Kirk is the main medieval church in Aberdeen. St Nicholas’s guilds were associated with clerics who acted in medieval England and December was the date of the ‘Boy Bishop’ ceremonies, the monastic Feast of Fools with temporary reversal of ranks.

4 For details on this case, see Knight, ‘Robin Hood: The Earliest Contexts’, pp. 27 and 36. 5 Peter Hume Brown, ed., Scotland Before 1700 from Contemporary Documents (Edinburgh: Douglas, 1893), p. 189. 6 Ibid., p. 190.

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There are no English instances of a winter Robin Hood until his earlynineteenth-century inclusion in the Mummers’ Play, which is a complete cultural mish-mash – he shares the stage with Lord Nelson.7 It looks as if the resettlement in Scotland of Robin Hood had also changed the figure significantly, detaching him in part from the strong natural symbolism of the English Whitsun practices – perhaps northern weather had an influence there – and making him more a figure of year-round urban harmony as implied in the title of the figure he replaced, Bonacord, itself apparently a local cultural transmission from France. It is already clear that Rabbie Hood is quite distinguishable from Robin Hood. It is not clear what leads to the change from one non-Scottish cultural reference – the Abbot of Bonacord – to another, but it may just be that fund-raising activities tend to be up with the latest imported crazes, as we see still in charity pageants. 1508 is in a very active period in the Robin Hood tradition, and there are other signs of the name having cultural power in Scotland about this time, as we shall see. But the striking feature of this reference is the creation of a winter Robin, a distinctly northern transformation, it would seem. The Abbot of Bonacord had walked in both the summer and winter festivals, so, having replaced him in May, Robin served in the same role again in winter. There seems to have been a more multiple and complex form of cross-border traffic concerning Robin Hood. Rabbie Hood is not simply a quaint kilt-wearing Robin Hood. He is a specialised and syncretic figure. The Scottish Robin Hood, like the nineteenth-century French Robin des Bois, the Hindu Ravi, is not a locally originated social bandit, like the French Thierry de la Fronde or the Indian Bandit Queen, or indeed the Scots William Wallace. Rabbie Hood, by virtue of being borrowed, fits into another world-wide model: the hero from another place who brings external and therefore specially credible values which are used to define a sense of local lack and need. As with Aeneas, Beowulf, John Wayne, Cristiano Ronaldo, a sense of local weakness (or in Robin’s case disaccord) may be calmed by the special powers of the supra-local hero by virtue of his externality. Robin Hood in Scotland can mean more through his ability to be re-formed for special purposes, from Bonacord onwards.

3. Rabbie Hood in Scottish chronicles There are Rabbie Hood formations beyond the Aberdeen winter street collector. A particularly striking phenomenon is the remarkable fact that the only chronicle references to Robin Hood before the dawn of English antiquarianism in the mid sixteenth century come from a range of Scottish historians. The references deserve special and separate attention; they have some connections, but each introduces new features indicating that this is not just a sequence of chroniclers being faithful to each other: each generated a new type of Rabbie Hood.

7 See R. J. E. Tiddy, The Mummers’ Play (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923).

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Andrew of Wyntoun wrote his metrical history of Scotland in the 1420s and under the year 1283 he said: Litil Iohun and Robert Hude Waythemen war commendit gud; In Ingilwode and Bernnysdaile Thai oyssit al this tyme thar trawale.8 That is, ‘Little John and Robin Hood, highwaymen, were praised highly; in Inglewood and Barnsdale they conducted their operations during the whole of this period’. The lines read a little oddly to a textual editor – not because John precedes Robin: in my view they were originally equal but John has been steadily downgraded to a strapping servant. But there is a sense of padding about ‘commendit gud’ and an awkward feel to the last line. Wyntoun is usually very brisk. A hypothesis worth considering is that there was previously a popular jingle: Litil Iohun and Robert Hude Waythemen were in Ingilwode. The further hypothesis is that Andrew knew this couplet but, good scholar and chronicler as befits an Augustinian canon from a daughter house of St Andrews, he also knew of the Robin Hood of Barnsdale tradition (his source will be a subject of later speculation). So he compiled this slightly clumsy elaborated reference. The date is of course intriguing: nothing in the surviving English Robin Hood narratives can take us back to 1283, though that is a ‘Robin des Bois’ time, and in another area, the ‘real Robin Hood’ historians would like to think of a thirteenthcentury origin for the tradition. There appears to be an implicit comparison between the English noble – but peasant – outlaws and the near-contemporary Wallace, that Scottish social bandit for whom Wyntoun has so much sympathy: Joseph Ritson noted this in his influential 1795 account of the outlaw.9 Certainly the implication is that Little John and Robin Hood are opponents of the English authorities under Edward I, and so have interests in common with similar figures to the north: the concept of an outlaw from a Scottish viewpoint entails a political and nationalist identity for the figure. Rabbie Hood is emerging. Wyntoun has no doubt of Robin and John as real outlaws; he has nothing specific to say about their cultural popularity, though it can be assumed from the sense of ‘commendit gud’. The next Scottish chronicler to take up the theme had more to say about culture than politics. Walter Bower, writing in Latin only twenty years

8 See J. C. Holt, Robin Hood, 2nd edition (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990), pp. 69–70. 9 See Joseph Ritson, ed., Robin Hood, A Collection of All the Ancient Poems, Songs and Ballads Now Extant Relative to the Celebrated English Outlaw (London: Egerton and Johnson, 1795), p. ix.

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later, continued John of Fordun’s chronicle Scotichronicon and dated his Robin Hood to 1266, the time of Simon de Montfort’s rebellion against Henry III. He sums up more severely than Wyntoun, to be translated as: Then arose the famous murderer, Robert Hood, as well as Little John, together with their accomplices from among the dispossessed, whom the foolish populace are so inordinately fond of celebrating both in tragedy and comedy.10 But though here very negative, Bower also tells a story of Robin’s fidelity to the church, insisting as he does on finishing Mass deep in the forest before fighting off the sheriff. This might sound simply like a Christianised Robin Hood adventure, but the Latin suggests more: the sheriff is called ‘viscount’ and Robin is hiding from the ‘iram regis et fremitum principis’ (‘the wrath of the king and the roaring of the prince’), which seems in spite of Bower’s dating in the time of Henry III to have a resonance of attacks on Scotland by Edward I and his son, and certainly sees Robin as an anti-royal noble on the Wallace pattern, a sense not found in the early English texts. Rabbie Hood is emerging more clearly. As a Scot and a canon of the Catholic church, Bower’s story sophisticates Wyntoun’s story and sets it in another time of resistance to an English king – in the period of Simon de Montfort’s resistance to Henry III, an idea much liked in the nineteenth century, because it could associate this Robin with the alleged founder of the English parliament. If Bower sophisticates the Scots chronicle tradition somewhat, and directs its idea of an anti-royal Robin back towards England, a third Scottish chronicler, the Scottish born and Paris educated John Major completes that process. Written probably in Paris, certainly published there in 1521, his Historia Majoris Britanniae11 not only gentrified Robin somewhat, but took him back into the time of bad King John, so his rebellion against royal rule could itself become fully legitimate. Major probably used the story of Fouke Fitz Waryn as a model for this distressed gentleman narrative. But in making Robin seem noble, as well as by making him resist a bad king, as is implied by the 1190s date, Major is closer to the Scots anti-royal war-leader model than the popular English hero, who was a plain man among men with no thoughts of nobility or politics beyond robbing a monk, shooting the sheriff, and having fun with money in Nottingham. Major makes Robin a ‘most famous robber’ and a war leader with a hundred ferocious bowmen – a warband fit for a resistant noble like Wallace, not a

10 Walter Bower, Continuation of John of Fordun’s Scotichronicon, ed. by Thomas Hearne (Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre, 1722); this translation is by Alex Jones, printed in Knight and Ohlgren, Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, pp. 25–6. 11 John Major, Historia Majoris Britanniae (Paris: Josse Badius, 1521); extract in Knight and Ohlgren, Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, pp. 26–7.

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highwayman. He is famous all over Britain (not England); he is noble in manner and also in self – being the ‘humanest and the chief’ – and the Latin word ‘dux’ for ‘chief’ may well have inspired further chroniclers like Richard Grafton, who followed Major closely, to state that Robin was a nobleman. Commentators, including myself, have stressed the gentrification process in the history of the Robin Hood tradition: class remains an object of fascination, or obsession, for us all in Britain. But gentrification is also a different political model, shaping a man who moves on a national political stage, rather than lurking locally in a forest. Major’s Robin of 1521 very easily becomes the Earl of Huntington which Anthony Munday turned him into in the twin plays of 1598–9, The Death and The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntington: the resistance to a bad prince was already established in Major’s dating of the hero to the 1190s. As Renaissance chroniclers like Grafton and Stow absorb this Robin back into the cultural bloodstream, it is as a respectable, aristocratic and national hero. This is a massive reconstruction of the anti-authoritarian myth which nevertheless still reverberates throughout the tradition, and the reconstruction appears to derive from a distinctly Scottish reading of the figure – though not yet one that reads the figure as himself having national and anti-Norman French identity: that lies in the future and the hands of Walter Scott. If Major himself was an example of that tedious phenomenon, the Anglophile Celt, the balance was, as usual in such colonial battles, redressed with interest, and Hector Boece and David Buchanan in their later sixteenth-century chronicles firmly restored a fully Scottish viewpoint, Boece even offering the view that Little John was a true giant and was buried in Moray.12 To theorise what happened in the case under examination, the destabilised character of the English Robin Hood in Scotland permitted developments which in England would have been blocked because Robin as social bandit was not so free-floating a figure. In the early English ballads he is empowered by stable and local organic values and is not as fluid a signifier as he became in transmitted and potentially hybrid form. It is in fact the non-local nature of the figure in Scotland, borrowed both in some way from England and in another way from France, which enabled him to be so labile there and so begin to form the structure that was to become the national anti-bad authority hero and also the distressed gentleman in England. Studying the relationship with Wallace will both confirm and develop the sense of a striking Scottish influence on the Robin Hood tradition, but before looking at that it is relevant to look back at a previously unexplored channel of contact between England and Scotland in Robin Hood matters.

4. Rabbie Hood, nobility, and royalty The surprising presence of ‘Bernnysdaile’ in Wyntoun’s chronicle is worth considering. Robin Hood scholars have long speculated that the Yorkshire Barnsdale,

12 See Ritson, pp. cxxii–iii.

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mentioned in the Gest of Robin Hood, is an early location of the myth, which became easily conflated with the Sherwood forest variant.13 The existence of other apparent forest locations for Robin Hood around the country, including far northern Inglewood, makes this only more probable. R.B. Dobson and John Taylor, the best of the historians, however, were a little uneasy about the Yorkshire Barnsdale, knowing it had never been a royal forest, was too sparse for serious outlaws, and so did not really fit the myth however much the compiler of the Gest (by definition an agent of a secondary and literary process) might think that was the hero’s address.14 But there was another forest called Barnsdale, and that originally a royal one, deep in the heart of Rutland. It had never been noticed by the empiricist historians, though if they had driven from Cambridge to Nottingham they would have gone through it on the A303, Stamford to Oakham. There are a number of local Robin Hood associated caves, stones and similar topographic affiliations.15 But the major surprise is to find that this Rutland Barnsdale, right through the Middle Ages, had belonged to the Earl of Huntingdon, no less. And who was he? He was, no less again, usually a close male relative of the King of Scotland. This was known to Spence, and he speculated in 1928 that an estate near Huntingdon might have been a place for learning the Robin Hood ballads and taking them back to Scotland.16 He did not seem to know the Rutland Barnsdale was part of the estate, and the presence of that name in Wyntoun is an intriguing link between the idea of Scottish aristocratic independence and the tradition of Robin Hood. Inglewood too was a royal Scottish forest, and Wyntoun’s connection of the two seems, seen from north of the border, fully rational. Less certain, but interesting enough, is to speculate that perhaps Antony Munday knew of the Barnsdale-Huntingdon connection. There has never been any explanation why Anthony Munday, when writing The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntington in 1589, chose that particular title for his newly gentrified hero. To speculate that the concept of hunting is the link seems an example of scholarly despair (especially as Robin never does any hunting), and David Bevington’s argument that the name comes from a pretender to the throne of the 1560s, while more specific, seems even more improbable.17 Munday does firmly locate his forest exile in Barnsdale and I strongly suspect that John Stow, the all-knowing Elizabethan antiquarian, an acquaintance of Munday, knew about the Rutland Barnsdale and the Huntingdon connection and gave him the hint. But I cannot find any evidence of that in Stow’s writing. A less likely link is the 1596 visit by Shakespeare’s

13 For a discussion of these issues see Holt, Robin Hood, Chapter 5, ‘The Physical Setting’. 14 R. B. Dobson and John Taylor, Rymes of Robin Hood: An Introduction to the English Outlaw (London, Heinemann, 1976), p. 20. 15 Knight, 1994, pp. 29–32. 16 Spence, p. 95. 17 David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 295.

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Chamberlain’s Men (rivals to Munday’s Admiral’s Men) to the heart of Barnsdale at Christmas to play for Sir John Harington’s nine hundred Christmas guests Titus Andronicus – apparently the Christmas Carol of its day. Whatever his source, if Munday did know somehow about the title and the forest, then that is another instance of the Scottish connection at the heart of gentrification. A link with Munday remains speculation. The Wyntoun connection is stronger. It seems more than guesswork to suggest that he was influenced in discussing Robin Hood partly by the long-standing Scottish royal connection with the Rutland Barnsdale, and partly by the existence there of local Robin Hood connections – in 1354 a man who was arrested for deer-poaching named himself as Robin Hood in Rockingham forest only twenty miles away.18 But should this sound like a mere one-way colonial borrowing, albeit one where the Scots royal house was colonising darkest Rutland, the actual situation appears more complicated, more multiple. If there was a Scottish presence and transmission deep in the East Midland Robin Hood area, there was apparently also an equally mysterious reflex, a soldierly nationalist Robin Hood far in the north. In David Laing’s 1872 edition of Andrew of Wyntoun’s Chronicle, the famous Inglewood and Barnsdale reference is not the only citation to the outlaw in the index. There is also a reference to a certain ‘Hwde of Edname’ who helped Sir Alexander Ramsay take Roxburgh by storm from the English in 1342. The reference is presumably to Ednam near Roxburgh (though tantalisingly there is also an Ednam in southern Lincolnshire, not far from Rutland). If the Rockingham 1384 Robin is likely to be an auto-creation, a man taking the name because he did the appropriate deeds, then why, as Laing thought, should that in Ednam not be another example, though here it is a Rabbie Hood, a noble Robin Hood attached to the Scottish national cause.

5. Rabbie Hood and the Wallace in Scottish poetry The previous argument does not only bear on the issue of how many Robin Hoods, how many Rabbie Hoods? It also stresses multiplicity: if there is a Hood of Inglewood, who can be linked with tales of faraway royal Scottish Barnsdale, there may as easily have been a more martial borderer from Ednam, who also used that name while fighting the soldiers of Edward III. More generally, though, what this implies is the fact that the Scottish reading of the outlaw figure is clearly not the same as the English, especially in terms of national significance. Rabbie and Robin were two different men. In England, Robin represents regularly the local against the national, the village against the sheriff, the people of the forest against the regulating mechanisms imposed by foresters, and the whole imagined rural organic community against the cash-oriented nexus of abbot and town business.19

18 See Dobson and Taylor, pp. 12–13. 19 For more detailed argument on this point see Knight, 1994, pp. 112–14.

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That is what the Rockingham man represents, while Hwde of Ednam is a nationally conscious freedom-fighter, at home among gentry, a leader of his people. This notion of different heroes whose stories inter-relate is best exemplified in the relationship between Robin Hood and the best-known Scottish national outlaw. It is clear from the epic Scots poem on William Wallace, apparently written by 1488, perhaps ten years earlier, by ‘Blind Hary’ or Henry the Minstrel, that there are close resemblances to events in a number of Robin Hood ballads. But these outlaw motifs in a fully Scotticised form have a powerful political thrust, now embodying resistance to English imperialism. In ‘Robin Hood’s Progress to Nottingham’,20 the hero is provoked when young into violence and outlawry by hostile opponents: in Wallace’s case the cause is specified as an Englishman, young Selby, whereas for Robin Hood they are simply foresters. Both heroes later on save themselves from serious trouble by dressing as a woman with the help of a sympathetic old woman (‘Robin Hood and the Bishop’, Child no. 143), but where Wallace hides from Selby senior and his English soldiers, Robin escapes the Bishop, in a secular-clerical, not national conflict. Both outlaws rob and (rarely in Robin’s case) kill travellers (the Gest of Robin Hood, Child no. 117; ‘Robin Hood and the Monk’, Child no. 119; ‘Robin Hood’s Golden Prize’, Child no. 147), and both beat off a fierce ambush (for Robin in The Gest), but again only Wallace’s opponents have a national denomination. Both outlaws end by having a difficult encounter with the king, tragic and nationalist in Wallace’s case, unsatisfactory but negotiated in the instance of Robin. They share a noble death at the hands of their enemies, and leave an enduring and highly valued memory, but only Wallace’s enemies and meaning belong in the domain of national and aristocratic politics. The closest and most interesting of all the parallels is when both heroes play the part of a potter to enter a town, a strong suggestion of motif transference between the traditions (‘Robin Hood and the Potter’, Child no. 121). Wallace of course penetrates an essentially English borough in this way, but for Robin it is a journey to the heart of urban mercantilism. The relation between the two traditions is also intriguing in terms of date. In almost all cases the Robin Hood survivals are a good deal later than that of Blind Hary’s Wallace, though the two earliest Robin Hood ballads seemed a little earlier. The manuscript of ‘Robin Hood and the Potter’ has long been thought to date from around 1500 at the earliest, but Thomas Ohlgren in a recent and very close study feels it is more likely to come from about 1468. The manuscript version of ‘Robin Hood and the Monk’ has usually been dated ‘c.1450’, but Ohlgren pushes that forward a little, suggesting this ballad was added to its manuscript after 1465.21

20 F. J. Child, ed., English and Scottish Popular Ballads, five volumes, reprint edition (New York: Dover, 1965), vol. 3, no. 119. Reference to other ‘Child’ ballads will be given in the text by their numbers in his edition. 21 See Thomas H. Ohlgren, ‘Date of the Manuscripts’, in Robin Hood: The Early Poems, 1465–1560 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), for ‘Monk see pp. 39–40 and 66–7, for ‘Potter’ see pp. 74–5.

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While a misreading of Child’s comments on the Gest have led commentators to think he thought it was written by about 1400, he actually only meant it at times used language linked to that period.22 Others have guessed it was written by the mid-fifteenth century, but its first recorded versions were printed only at the very end of the fifteenth century and there is no evidence to date its writing much earlier than that. So ‘Robin Hood and the Potter’ and ‘Robin Hood and the Monk’ are the only English outlaw narratives which can be thought with any confidence to predate the Wallace in written form. Most commentators (most of them English) have assumed that the Robin Hood materials represent motifs that have long been in existence in the outlaw tradition, were used in the oral Robin Hood rhymes that Langland mentioned in the 1370s23 and Bower in the 1440s, and so, by implication, were borrowed (in colonial style) into the Wallace narrative. However, the Wallace lays down very specific versions of a number of major Robin Hood events which are remarkably like those found in English, mostly long afterwards. It is conceivable that Rabbie Hood may in fact in some important sense instigate Robin Hood: ‘Robin Hood and the Monk’, ‘Robin Hood and the Potter’ and the Gest represent a new literary realisation of the English popular and orally known Robin Hood, and it is entirely credible that these texts were influenced by and textually structured on the model of an existing story about a heroic Scottish outlaw about to be canonised by ‘Blind Harry’, especially as both heroes were well known at the same time in Scotland. The resemblance between Robin Hood and the Wallace was long ago noted, though not quite as long ago as Spence thought, relying as he did on a mistaken dating of the document written by a prior of Alnwick who calls Wallace Scotico illi Robin Whood, ‘that Scottish Robin Hood’. Spence thought it had the sensational contemporaneity of 1304, but the modern opinion is 1504.24 That later date, though, has its own relevance to this topic. It is quite clear that the two traditions are circulating more or less together – but only in Scotland. The Wallace is printed in Scotland in 1508 and appears to have been in this form in manuscript by 1488, with an originating date of about 1478. These are precisely the years when the Gest of Robin Hood attained its present form: printed between 1505 and 1510 and constructed not very long before – post 1450, it would seem.25 The Gest was being printed in the very period when Robin Hood newly walked in Aberdeen. There are also literary references. As Dunbar’s poetry was being printed in Edinburgh at just the same time as the Gest appeared (though not, as was once thought, by the same printer, Chepman and Myllar) it is hardly surprising that

22 On Child’s comment and other comments on the date, see the ‘Introduction’ to the Gest in Knight and Ohlgren, Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, pp. 80–9, p. 80. 23 William Langland, Piers Plowman: A Parallel Edition of the A, B, C, and Z Versions, ed. by A. V. C. Schmidt (London: Longman, 1995), pp. 230–1, B 5:395, C VII:11: Sloth does not know his paternoster despite knowing the ‘rymes of Robyn Hode’. 24 Spence, p. 95. 25 On the date of the Gest’s early versions see Ohlgren, Robin Hood: The Early Poems, 2007, pp. 98–9.

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the poet refers to the English outlaw in ‘Of Sir Thomas Norrey’ as ‘vyld Robeine under bewch’ (‘wild Robin under bough’ – in the wood), but Dunbar’s knowledge is a good deal wider that the Gest itself. He speaks of Robin’s opponents ‘Guy of Gisburne’ and ‘Allan Belle’ – presumably Adam, as in the long early sixteenthcentury ballad about outlaw bowmen, ‘Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough and William Cloudesly’ – all in the context of archery.26 At this time the ballad ‘Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne’ (Child no. 118) was nearly a hundred and fifty years away from its only recording in Percy’s Folio manuscript, written c. 1650, though a play with some of the same action has survived from about 1475. Perhaps the early plays about the friar and the potter had travelled as far as Edinburgh? It is notable that another contemporary reference is theatrical, a simple mention of the Robin Hood processions in the poem formerly attributed to Dunbar, and dated very early in the sixteenth century, ‘Ane Litill Interlude of the Droichis Part of the Play’. Gavin Douglas’s Palice of Honoure, dated before 1518, mentions Robin and Gilbert with the White Hand – this makes it clear he knew the Gest, the only text where Robin appears, at the archery tournament, with this minor outlaw. A Scottish poem recorded in the Hyndford manuscript in 1588 is usually dated between 1500 and 1510, and it reads: Thair is no story that I of hier Of John nor Robene Hude Nor yit of Wallace wicht but weir That me thinkes half so gude.27 It is clear that the English outlaw story is common knowledge in early sixteenthcentury Scotland, and that Robin Hood and the Wallace are in some ways linked, though it is also clear that, for the latter, national identity is dominant. It seems that, in so far as Rabbie Hood exists, he may well, as the chroniclers suggest, be a hybrid of the Wallace and Robin Hood, a nationally conscious gentleman outlaw, royally mistreated by the king of England, noble, resistant, heroic in life and death – all of those features are not in the early Robin Hood story, but are in the Wallace story, and then the gentrified later Robin Hood tradition. And it is far from impossible that when the Robin Hood story is amplified in written and non-sung form in the long literary ballads like ‘Robin Hood and the Monk’, ‘Robin Hood and the Potter’ and the Gest, elements of plot and structure from the Wallace story, are employed, themselves often shared with earlier outlaw stories, like those of Hereward, Eustace and Foulk. Rabbie Hood may even have provided some of the actions and narrative linking for the ungentrified English Robin Hood.

26 William Dunbar, Selected Poems, ed. Priscilla Bawcutt, 2 volumes (Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1998), vol. 1, pp. 131–2. 27 Quoted by Spence, p. 95.

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6. Transition: Scott and Rabbie Hood My argument, then, is that in Scottish hands the figure of Robin Hood was reformulated. As in the English south-west there was probably a first stage where Robin de Bois was adapted as a figure of local festival, but even then he had gained his English surname by a form of cultural colonising. But in Scotland there were more urgent things for a popular hero to resist than a corrupt sheriff or abbot: natural justice there included a sense of national identity and resistance to a usurping king, neither of which had been central or even of any importance to the original Robin Hood. So Rabbie emerged, remodelled along the lines of Wallace, and it may well be that some of the Wallace detail, such as the potter’s disguise, was used back in England in Robin Hood ballads. Certainly the greater nobility and greater political weight of the Scotticised figure was the mainspring of gentrification. This figure was returned to England, where he became highly valuable in Renaissance ideology, both to remove what the authorities and their lackeys would find the unappealingly radical element of Robin Hood’s resistance to kings and lords, and also to figure a nobleman under pressure from Catholic churchmen and bureaucrats, a central element of Munday’s late sixteenth-century plays, through which gentrification of the outlaw was strongly disseminated. This argument makes sense in itself, but may well seem unusual in this process of the return of the variant figure to impact on the original. There are, however, models of this process in existence: I will suggest two, that relate to the topic here. Note how Raymond Chandler hybridised the tough American private eye with his own English-educated aestheticism and then through the rehybridisation of Hollywood, the complex mix became authoritative in both America and Britain. In the context of Robin Hood and of Scotland there are two separate examples of this process. One is the very interesting and I think in a real way parallel account given by Robert Crawford28 of how, to use his fine chapter title, there was in the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth century a ‘Scottish invention of English Literature’, which was then very influential in England outside the establishment circle of Oxbridge. A parallel process has occurred actually within the Robin Hood tradition, this time in America. Most people of advancing years, on hearing the name Robin Hood, smile and hum the tune of the 1950s television series. The essence of Englishness, surely, was Richard Greene playing the dapper officer-type Robin Hood who was feared by the bad and loved by the good. The tradition of the popular ballads seemed to have been handed down directly to the modern welfare state. Not so. The dynamic of these stories was American. The private television company wanted an advertisement-attracting drama series, and no-one in Britain knew how to do them. Through Hannah Weinstein, an American producer with left sympathies, working for that reason in London,

28 See Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), Chap. 2.

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they hired some good writers who would work cheap. The series was shaped by black-listed Americans, principally Ring Lardner Jr. and Ian McLellan Hunter. In distant New York, without passports, they created left-liberal greenwood idylls that were shot in England at Burnham Beeches, among a whole covey of American radicals, including the economist Bill Blake and his wife, the major Australian novelist Christina Stead. English writers followed the lead set from the States as the hero was doubly re-localised . . . just as I am arguing happened in the late medieval period from Scotland.29 The excellent film Fellow Traveller (1989), written by Michael Eaton, tells this story. Just as Edward I’s mailed fist can be seen as the hand behind the Scottish-grounded gentrifying politicisations of the late medieval Rabbie Hood, so Joe McCarthy was the energising daemon behind the ghost writers of Richard Greene as a newly somewhat socialist Robin Hood. Though the late medieval process of Scottish-located hybridisation did bring Robin Hood into the 1190s, it did not, as most people think, make him a Saxon. That was a later process, and one consistent with other changes to the hero which made him fit – or appealingly unfit in medievalist terms – for a modern world. It too was guided from Scotland. Walter Scott in Ivanhoe made Locksley a Saxon – albeit a non-commissioned officer kind of Saxon, illiterate to boot. That in my view is because Scott knew all about and disliked the radical potential of Robin Hood, being familiar with the 1561 Edinburgh riot when, refused the right to a Robin Hood procession, the citizens rebelled, opened the Tolbooth, took the prisoners out and put the magistrates in. Scott refers to the events in his notes to The Abbot, and there is some resonance of them in his account of the Porteous Riots in The Heart of Midlothian. But he also made Locksley a modern hero, aggressively English nationalist and even, through his process of arrow-splitting, a sexually potent male. In doing all this Scott made a major contribution to the modern Robin Hood, a handsome hero who lives in the woods and represents nationalist honour and ecological value, as well as a marginally acculturated hyper-masculinity. However, it is not appropriate to go further into the topic, and not only because of lack of space. There are elements here that in my view need more work – such as from just where did Scott get the central idea of splitting the arrow and what does it really imply? Or also, just why did so many people, including Scott, start writing about Robin Hood in 1818 and the immediately following years? That period and those questions are discussed in my book Reading Robin Hood (2015)30 and in any case the topic itself is really the Scott,

29 On this see an article by Tom Dewe Mathews in The Guardian, October 7th, 2006, http//books. guardian.co.uk. He says Weinstein assembled twenty-two black-listed writers, and newly names Waldo Salt, Adrian Scott and Robert Lees among them. 30 Stephen Knight, Reading Robin Hood: Content, Form and Reception in the Outlaw Myth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), see Chapter 5, ‘Romantic Robin Hood’, pp. 103–42.

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not the Scottish, influence on Robin Hood. The point of this essay has been to look at an earlier and rather more obscure period in which many Robin Hood roads led to Scotland – and, as I have argued, also back again, with considerable impact. As in so much in English culture, there is a significant deep-laid Scottish element in the construction and the continuing popularity of the tradition of Robin Hood.

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From: Critical Survey, 5.3 (1993)

1 In Robin Hood and his Crew of Souldiers,1 when the Sheriff’s messenger demands loyalty to the newly crowned King Charles II, the hero of English outlawry merely says: ‘“I am quite another man; thaw’d into conscience of my Crime & Duty, melted into loyalty & respect to vertue”’ (448–9). These are very unusual words to come from the mouth of Robin Hood. His story had been told in many modes in the two hundred years before 1661, but Robin had never previously apologised or indicated any sense of guilt. He was always a man of ‘loyalty’ and ‘duty’, but his ideas of ‘respect’ and ‘vertue’ were not opposed to his outlaw activities: rather he was driven by and consistently represented a spirit of virtuous anti-authoritarianism. It is this play and its vigorous intention as Royalist propaganda that chooses to make Robin recant and truckle to the power of the royal state. Opponent to wrongful authority as he elsewhere was, the figure of the bestknown English outlaw still took many forms before 1661, and would do so in the future. The first ballads present him as a social bandit, leading by consensus a group of like-minded libertarians, resisting the wrongful local authority whether it was in lay or clerical hands, with sheriff or abbot. Though he was always loyal to the Virgin and a rightful king (named only as Edward in the earliest texts, and the reference could be to first, second, third or fourth), this early Robin was certainly an outlaw and robber, and trailed clouds of radical meaning. Hence the Elizabethan reformation and gentrification of the tradition, which directed his resistant energy against a specifically bad lord; this new Robin rebels in the name of true lordship as well as his own confiscated honours, and so he changes from a social bandit to a distressed gentleman. For the first time the attachment to the period

1 The full text and an introduction can be found in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. by Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University Press, 1997), pp. 441–9: references to this edition are provided in the text.

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of King Richard emerged, and Robin became the Earl of Huntington, suitably equipped now with lady and, soon enough, a pedigree going back to one Robert Fitzooth, an improbable Norman progenitor.2 But in none of those versions, nor in any of the twentieth century’s many popular representations in film and television, does Robin ever surrender: with his reliable band of supporters, sometimes a king among them, he always opposes wrongful power and triumphs over it in some way. But at the Restoration in Nottingham in 1661, in a specific place and time, the fact that Robin Hood consistently represents resistance to questionable authority was felt to be too troublesome a meaning to go uncontained. The title page of Robin Hood and his Crew of Souldiers itself indicates the tensions and purposes which generate this play. ROBIN HOOD and his Crew of Souldiers A COMEDY Acted at Nottingham on the day of His sacred Majesties Corronation Vivat Rex ------------------------------------------------------The Actors names. Robin Hood, Commander. Little John. William Souldiers. Scadlocke. Messenger from the Shieriffe ------------------------------------------------------LONDON, Printed for James Davis. 1661. The last words of the lengthy title, stating the coronation acclamation ‘Vivat Rex’, usually translated as ‘Long Live the King’, but literally ‘May the King Live’, a Latin subjunctive, emphasise the connection with the occasion, and other unusual language suggests how the outlaws threaten royal power. Nowhere else in the tradition is Robin described as ‘Commander’ or the normally ‘Merry Men’ as soldiers. Will is not only erroneously described as two characters here and in the first stage direction, he also has his most threatening name ‘Scadlock’, indicating someone who scathes,

2 The best source for the early ballads, with introductions and glossaries, is Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, see above note; they are also discussed in Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: a Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), Chapter 3.

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or breaks, locks and steals property. Continuing this hostile note, the group is called a ‘Crew’, a word originally meaning a detachment of military reinforcements (the army ‘accrued’ them), and then just a body of men: by the mid-sixteenth century the word had acquired the additional negative sense of a disorderly crew. Setting and date relate this sense of disruptive action to the Civil War. Charles I had raised his standard against parliament in Nottingham because that was the closest he could come to hostile London and keep in touch with his support in the North and West.3 From Nottingham he struck at the capital, but his own support there was slight; the city remained solidly parliamentary to the end. Now that London is the king’s again, that city publishes this missive to the formerly, perhaps still, unruly provinces.

2 In making the Nottingham region and its famous figures of resistance succumb to authority, the author of this play is laying to rest, in symbolic and quite severe form, the whole notion of anti-royal activity; that act of propaganda is developed in terms of argument rather than the briskly dramatic action which is normal in the early Robin Hood repertoire, most of which is in ballad form, but which includes some plays. The most vigorous moments of Robin Hood and his Crew of Souldiers are the first, when Robin and his two followers are surprised and alarmed by loud shouts of ‘general joy’. In an epic simile (itself stylistically foreign to the Robin Hood tradition) the outlaw leader expresses ‘Wonder and Astonishment’ like that of villagers facing an ocean in flood. The image asserts the overwhelming validity of royal power and at once Robin, speaking in verse, almost confesses: And thus it is with us; the guilty breast Still pants and throbs, when others are at rest. (445, 15–16) That opening motif of the outlaws’ weakness will be filled out by the lengthy discourse and relatively little action that will follow. Little John investigates the noise and returns with the ‘Shierifs Messenger’. John’s mood is darkly negative: he speaks in prose: ‘“Gives and Fetters, Hatchets and Halters, stincking prisons, and the death of dogs is all we can expect.”’ (446, 22–3) He explains further: ‘Tis the King’s Coronation; and now the Shieriffe with a band of armed men, are marching to reduce us to loyalty, and the miseries of an honest life; this Messenger here can tell you a rufull tale of obedience, that is expected’. (446, 25–8)

3 See A. C. Wood, Nottinghamshire in the Civil War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), p. 20.

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Defeat is not only embedded in John’s mood and words; it is structural to the play. From the start the struggle is unequal, and several basic features of the Robin Hood genre have already been abrogated. The notion that the sheriff is approaching with armed men is normally the impetus for a sequence of outlaw cunning and courage, ending with the discomfiture of the royal running dog – and John would always be the last to admit fear. Here, though, it is assumed by the strongest outlaw that the sheriff is too powerful to resist. An equally authority-oriented position is inherent to John’s phrase ‘“reduce us to loyalty”’. The recurrent structural value of the Robin Hood ballads is the loyalty the outlaws hold to each other and to a libertarian ideal that will not yield to any oppression by church or state. Here, though, ‘loyalty’ only means submission, and John accepts it, going on to admit with equally damaging effect that an honest life would be a misery. As enfeebled criminal rebels, rather than the usual lusty opponents of inequitable law, the outlaws are in no position to resist the messenger as he formally requires ‘“a chearfull and ready submission to his Majesties Laws, with a promise of future obedience”’, to be followed by ‘“the rest of your lives running in a s[m] ooth stream of loyalty and honest allegiance”’. With that in prospect he offers ‘“pardon of all past misdemeanors”’, but otherwise they are to “expect the miseries of a sudden destruction”. The outlaws’ response further invalidates their position. In terms of generic expectation, it is Robin who should speak with noble contempt to any emissary from sheriff, abbot or king. But in this world of inverted values, the followers have taken over, and John and Will exchange ignoble regrets. John demurs to royal authority, though in self-incriminating terms: ‘hath thy Master so little braine to think that we who know the sweets of theft and rogery, to whom dangers are as pleasant as dried suckets, who have been nurs’d & fed fat with blood and slaughter, can be content to bear part of your general joy . . . ’ (446, 39–41) Will is crasser: ‘Shall I change Venison for salt Cats, and make a bounteous meal, with the reversion of a puddings skin? . . . shall it be said that thou O famous little John becomes the Attendant of a Tripe-woman?’ (446, 43–7) Robin remains silent while the other ranks exchange further lengthy paragraphs of anarchic resistance and regret; John says ‘“after all my fam’d exploits to hang for stealing sheep ‘twould grieve me”’ (446, 50–1) and Will comments:

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‘If this geare takes then we may turn our Bows into Fiddle-sticks, or strangle ourselves in the strings, for the daies of warre and wantonness will be done’. (447, 55–6) Instead of statements of conscious rebellion, the outlaws have made no more than aggressive and churlish grumbles. But the play moves into a more searchingly ideological phase as John speaks again, and in his language calls up some of the more extreme and therefore more easily rejected ideas of the revolutionary moment. John suddenly sounds like a Leveller: ‘Every brave soule is born a King; rule and command o’re the fearfull rabble, is natures stamp; courage and lofty thoughts are not ever confin’d to Thrones, nor still th’appendages of an illustrious birth, but the thatcht Hovell or the simple Wood oft times turns forth a mind as fully fraught with Gallantry and true worth as doth the marble Pallace . . .’ (447, 65–9) Finally Robin speaks; weakened in the drama by his initial fear and his subsequent silence, he can only play a negative role, though it remains a substantial one: his speech has weight equal to John’s egalitarian statement. But Robin’s remarks represent a different and more complex kind of threat to the restored hierarchical state. His speech takes a position that is partly one of aristocratic self-will and partly one of Hobbesian rapacity, and so the play disavows and dismisses what might be taken as the worst-case ideologies of both sides in the Civil War. First Robin asks: ‘“Why then should the severities of obedience, and the strait niceties of Law shackle this Noble soul, whom nature meant not onely free but soveraigne . . .”’ (447, 77–8). Laws, he argues, turning the levelling spirit on its head, ‘first chiefly toucht the vulgar herd and throng of men, that masse of feare and folly, who therefore closed together, and with an easie fondnesse suffered themselves to be manacled by Lawes . . .’ (447, 80–2) And by contrary: ‘But the bold daring Spirit hath in all times disown’d this sneaking lownesse, and with a commend able brav’ry challeng’d their darling Liberty; and from th’insulting Lawes rescu’d their enslaved honoure . . .’ (447, 85–8)

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Sounding more like a Prince Rupert who had read Leviathan than a Cromwellian trooper, Robin sums up with a finely fustian spirit: ‘No we have Swords, and Arms, and Lives equally engaged in our past account, and wilest these Armes can wield oure Swords, or our uncurdl’d blood give vigor to those Arms, hopes of submission are as vain as is the strange request’. (447–8, 91–5) Robin has waited his time, but finally made his impact. Normally, this is the moment of resistance when, blowing his horn, brandishing sword or bow, or sometimes both, he leads his loyal band to storm the castle, confront the sheriff, swarm over the soldiers, restore the king – the grand action of the climactic scene of the archetypal Robin Hood narrative. In this different, delimited discourse, the messenger merely responds with a speech. The inactive exchange in itself implies a new world of debate and legislation rather than the rumbustious past of Civil War and Robin Hood plays. The messenger’s words justify the imposition of a passive role on the former outlaws, in both the new state and in their own genre. First he asserts that, if boldness were the yardstick, the outlaw project would be honourable, but their ‘“wild designs”’ are no longer appropriate. Laws, he adds, have been made not ‘“to enslave the Generous, but Curb the Proud and Violent”’. And in addition to their anti-state malpractice, the outlaws are actually in the moral wrong: ‘“your disobedience betrayes aboundlesse pride”’ (448, 102). He summarises by saying that in this new world of ethical and political order ‘“by the Laws which careful Princes make, we are commanded to do well and live virtuously”’ and to live in this world of mutual benefit ‘“is not to be esteemed slav’ry but priviledge”’ (448, 104–6). To that cool message is added the fervour of royal reverence: ‘“especially, when with his regality and Kingly power, are joyn’d the true embellishments of piety and real goodnesse”’ (448, 112–4). The climax of the messenger’s speech is an apostrophisation of the king as a transcendent authority: ‘A Prince of such an influential sweetnesse . . . his Princely Soul was grown his peoples Genious. A King so dear to Heaven as if he was it’s onely care . . . Whose Virtue is as great as his Birth and his Goodness unlimitted as his Power, To whom the illustrious persons former Ages brag’d of were no more comparable then the Nights Glimmering to the Noon-dayes Splendor’. (448, 114–24) Fluently the Messenger concludes: ‘This Great, this Gracious Prince is this day Crown’d, and offers Life, and Peace, and Honour, if you will quit your wilde rebellions, and become 160

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what your birth challenges of you, nay what ever your boasted gallantry expects of you that is: loyal subjects’. (448, 125–8) The reference to birth is clearly a glance at the ennobled Elizabethan Robin; the contradictory notion that gallantry ‘expects’ loyal subjection reveals the considerable tensions that underlie this argument that brave and independent spirits should automatically accept a new royal order. The greatest mark of strain in the whole play is Robin’s response. Without reason, without emotion, especially without action, he simply agrees. The whole tradition of English anti-authoritarianism which Robin Hood so vigorously represents, then as now, is put to silence. The line that bears the news of its repentance has its own depths of presumably unintended irony: ‘“Ha! Whence is this sudden change?”’ (448, 129). It is now that Robin speaks the uncharacteristic lines about being ‘“thaw’d into conscience of my Crime & Duty; melted into loyalty & respect to virtue”’. He does not understand, as he well might not; he simply asks questions: ‘“How all my pride now is undermin’d? How am I dwarfd in mine own sight?”’ and most appropriate of all, as hero and legend, ‘“How am I torn now from my selfe?”’ (449, 135–6 and 137–8). In this essentially inauthentic form of the Robin Hood tradition, he envisages his men monstrously transformed like Circe’s victims – ‘“they’ve shapes of beasts, rude, uncomely and very affrightfull”’ – but they too realise it – ‘“yet doe I see remorse bud in their blushing brows, as if with me they felt shame and true penitence for their forepast Crimes”’ (449, 141–3). With this sudden turn, the play is over; Robin leads forward his two outlaws and the three sing thanks to heaven which ‘hath (not only to our Land Restor’d but) Crown’d our king’. (449, 148–9) And so the formerly rebellious and violent Crew accept that they should ‘to joy and generall mirth This glad day set aside’, (449, 150–1) and agree that their own submissive voices should join the celebratory noise that so startled them at the start of the play: ‘Let the Neighb’ring Woods now Eccho forth Our shouts and Loyal Pride’. (449, 152–3) 161

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Finally, they throw their once-rebellious weight behind the penalties of the new state: ‘May Halters that Mans fate attend That envies this dayes Glee And’s name meet a perpetual brand For his Disloyalty’. (449, 154–7) It is perhaps natural for such a sudden reversal of the outlaw myth to dally at last on the negative and reduce opposition to mere envy; though it may also seem a little ominous for Glee at last to be over-rhymed by Disloyalty. Even within Royalist constraint, rebellion has the last word; that final strain indicates the special effort that has gone into this particular reorientation of the outlaw myth.

3 Other versions of the Robin Hood tradition can in their own ways be conservative. To change Robin from a social bandit to a distressed earl was to redirect the levelling thrust of the story with a state-serving energy characteristic of Elizabethan cultural politics; when in the early twentieth-century hands of Newbolt, Squire, Drinkwater, Noyes, Robin became a Georgian gentleman on rural holiday, another period enacted its less purposive dreams of order. But both of those were versions rather than perversions of the tradition. Robin Hood and his Crew of Souldiers lacks the action and the élan of the echt Robin Hood material, and its static, unconvincing character realises the mechanical nature of its propagandising mission. All that had been done by Parliament to counter oppression and all the principled determination of the Rump were here reduced to brawling self-seeking; such political analysis that exists in the play is designed to degrade and demean the ideologies of egalitarianism and self-construction, those poles of the modern world between which the seventeenth-century revolution struck its arc. Set firmly in history as it is, with its date and place and specific purposes, the play also has a breathtaking absence of historicity, in its bland representation of absolutist royal authority, less than a generation after the excesses and deficiencies of just such a monarch had driven the anti-authoritarian spirit encapsulated for the English in part by Robin Hood to the ultimate act of regicide. Unconvincing and extreme as the play might seem today, it was in its time potentially a forceful political instrument, but its formal and so ultimately ideological inadequacy is indicated by the processes of reception. Though this is a clear and aggressive pastiche of the Robin Hood materials, it had no impact whatsoever on them: Robin Hood and His Crew of Souldiers has in itself a striking powerlessness in the face of such a thoroughly permeating and transgressive tradition. In the play, holiday is the final note, as in so many Robin Hood ballads, but here it is not, as is normal, the spirit of power-reversing carnival: these men make 162

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merry in service to autocracy. In this respect the play goes against the tendencies of the Robin Hood tradition that were established by 1661; but it also contradicts patterns that were to remain in place. Even after the royal Restoration and the emergence of this newly faithful, even craven Robin Hood, the outlaw hero did not in popular tradition yield so readily his long-standing role as a symbol of determined resistance to what was perceived as wrongful authority.

4 Distinct from the tradition as it is in both form and ideology, the play still has contact at many points with the Robin Hood repertoire. It provides by no means the first royal restoration in the Robin Hood tradition. As early as the very late fifteenth century, in The Gest of Robin Hood,4 King Edward (which one is not clear, presumably III or IV) came disguised to the forest, then revealed himself and was effectively re-established. A little later, as bad King John became the royalty-saving image of an authority that deserved resistance, Richard I was regularly unveiled as the king ushered back to glory by the honourable outlaw Robin Hood. This is the final theme of Martin Parker’s popular long ballad A True Tale of Robbin Hood, from 1632,5 and recurs in many references, fully fictional or quasihistorical, to the outlaw in the seventeenth century. But the author of Robin Hood and his Crew of Souldiers did not adopt that general and fictional form of royal restoration. Both Nottingham and the recent counter-authority actions were less easily adapted to the specifics of the new royalist rule; outlaw behaviour could not now be appropriated within a world of order. As the Civil War ended and General Monck manoeuvered towards restoration, those who had led the parliamentary state in the Nottingham area came under scrutiny. They were urged to sue for pardon and find ways of disassociating themselves from royal execution. Some refused, like Francis Harker, who was himself executed in October 1660.6 Others, like Colonel John Hutchinson, sought a way of composing with their new masters; a man with status and following in the county, he was in Nottingham when Charles raised his standard, and at the Banqueting House on the day of execution. Through a mixture of influence and apparently genuine repentance he was reprieved, only to be arrested soon after, but he refused further apology and died in jail.7

4 5 6 7

See Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, pp. 80–168. See Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, pp. 602–25. Wood, p. 184. Wood, pp. 183–4. R. B. Dobson and J. Taylor, Rymes of Robin Hood: An Introduction to the English Outlaw (London: Heinemann, 1976), p. 237, go so far as to suggest the king might have been involved in motivating the play: ‘the burgesses of Nottingham may have been particularly anxious to display their own loyalty to Charles II just because they had recently returned a notorious regicide, Colonel Hutchinson, as one of their two members to the first Restoration parliament’.

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Like Hutchinson, the notion of Robin Hood the popular hero had an elusive but stubborn quality of resistance. The figure might have become genteel as in Jonson’s unfinished masque The Sad Shepherd, in para-court trivia like Anthony Munday’s London Mayoral masque Metropolis Coronata of 1615 (where Robin rises from the grave to lead the praise of the merchants’ leader), or in a gentrified ballad like ‘Robin Hood’s Birth, Breeding, Valour and Marriage’ where a Robin of knightly family and Clorinda, his transformed Marian, dance through a stagy forest with gilded costumes and at least some aureate discourse. Yet Robin Hood had in the past been strongly associated with vigorous types of real resistance, mostly identified as criminal, and that tradition persisted. In 1439 one Piers Venables, of Aston in Derbyshire, had taken to the woods with a ‘company like as it hadde be Robin Hoode and his meyne’ and from there he killed some people and menaced many others. In 1497 Roger Marshall, under the name of Robin Hood, led a riotous assembly of a hundred armed men to rescue two of the law’s prisoners at Wednesbury. Far from the Midlands, in 1561 this tradition of popular action was renewed in Edinburgh. John Knox reports ‘the rascal multitude were stirred-up to make a Robin-Hood, which enormity was of many years left off’.8 The Edinburgh mob opened the Tolbooth jail, smashed a gibbet and imprisoned the magistrates until they issued a pardon for the rioters – events strikingly reversed in the pattern of Robin Hood and his Crew of Souldiers. Other passing references indicate that Robin Hood stood for various kinds of both equity and carnival.9 The Robin Hood ‘play-games’ of late spring and early summer where money was collected for the parish may well have supported such notions; they were widely spread from Exeter (1427), Leicester (1543), to Kelso (1610), with many other Scottish instances of the later sixteenth century.10 The traditional outlaw is even turned into a defender of the church during the ‘Marprelate’ controversy, and a poem exists where Robin represents the bishops, John is Oxford and Cambridge and their enemies symbolise the secular predators of the church.11 That is a highly traditional form of dissent, but the radical possibility of Robin as a symbol is indicated by the legal encounters mentioned above and by the anxiety, especially in Scotland, to suppress occasions where Robin Hood acted as the Abbot of Unreason and other carnivalesque figures. References in the seventeenth century indicate that the radical Robin Hood is far from forgotten. In 1605, in the context of the Gunpowder Plot, Lord Robert Cecil wrote in a letter: ‘It is also thought fit that some martial men shold presently

8 See Anna Jean Mill, Medieval Plays in Scotland (Edinburgh: University of St Andrews Publications, 1927). 9 For examples of anti-kings which include Robin Hood see Sandra Billington, Mock Kings in Medieval Society and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 17–28. 10 For a discussion of these phenomena see Billington, pp. 55–60, and David Wiles, The Early Plays of Robin Hood (Ipswich: Brewer, 1981), Chaps 2 and 3, pp. 7–30. 11 Helen Cooper discusses the poem, found in MS Harley 367, in Pastoral: Medieval to Renaissance (Ipswich: Brewer, 1977), pp. 57–8.

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repaire down to those countries where the Robin Hoods are assembled to encourage the good and to terrifie the bad’.12 With inherent irony, his own tenants in the period between 1607 and 1612 composed a rhyme with a contrary reference: Not Robin Goodfellow, nor Robin Hood But Robin the encloser of Hatfield Wood.13 And a second version was written after his death: Not Robin Goodfellow nor Robin Hood But Robin the devil that never did good.14 In 1644 the arch-conservative jurist Sir Edward Coke saw no nobility at all in the outlaw when he located him in Richard I’s period and described his malfeasance in a remarkably contemporary criminal way as ‘robbery, burning of houses, felony, waste and spoile, and principally by and with Vagabonds, idle wanderers, nightwalkers and draw-latches’.15 So while there is a surviving early modern tradition of Robin Hood as a generally rebellious figure, the references are often negative, as in the Restoration play, or conservative in more positive modes like the Life of Robin Hood, first appearing in 1662,16 which takes Martin Parker’s gentry version into the solidity of prose, and has a genealogy going back to one Robert Fitzooth, descended from a niece of the conqueror, to prove his antique validity. Robin Hood is one of Fuller’s Worthies 1662,17 and ballads about him in a gentrified or at least blandly apolitical role flourish as the popular publishing industry moves into a higher gear in the decade after the Restoration. The earliest surviving of the ‘Robin Hood Garlands’ (chapbooks containing a dozen or more ballads, mostly of the later and tamer kind) is dated to 1663. But rebelliousness still survives; not all the ballads are gentrified. ‘Robin Hood’s Progress to Nottingham’ tells how the young Robin is driven to violent action by dishonest foresters – he shoots them all down. The

12 See Sir Ralph Winwood, Memorials of Affairs of State, 2 volumes (London: Sawyer, 1725), vol. 2, pp. 172–3, quoted in J. C. Holt, Robin Hood (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), p. 195. 13 See Algernon Cecil, A Life of Robert Cecil, First Earl of Salisbury (London: Murray, 1941), p. 328. 14 See P. M. Henderson, The Second Cecil (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1959), p. 316. 15 Sir Edward Coke, The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England (London: Hesler, 1634), p. 197. 16 The Noble Birth and Gallant Achievements of the Remarkable Outlaw Robin Hood, His Life and Ballad Collection (London: Vere, 1678). This appears to be a version of a 1662 collection, see M. A. Nelson, The Robin Hood Tradition in the English Renaissance, Salzburg Studies in English Literature no. 14 (1973), p. 248. 17 Thomas Fuller, Anglorum Speculum or The Worthies of England (London: Wright, 1662), pp. 561–2.

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ballad was in Wood’s mid-seventeenth-century collection and was in active circulation after 1661. The ballad ‘Robin Hood Rescuing Three Squires’ appears in the Percy Folio manuscript, written down in the 1640s: much later recorded is its peasant version, where the young men whom Robin saves from the hangman are the sons of a poor widow, but this version was already known to Munday for his 1598 gentrified-outlaw play The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntington. Neither the factitious drama of Robin Hood and His Crew of Souldiers nor the widespread elevation of Robin to a Royalist earl served to silence completely the significance of Robin as a figure of anti-authoritarian equity. However, diluted by Hollywood, mocked by the burlesquing traditions of popular art – that prankster tradition to which Robin Hood has always been very close – the radical Robin survives. In 1984, after the British miners’ strike, the Bristol Old Vic presented a Robin Hood pantomime in which Will had the surname Scargill, the same as the miners’ leader, and was by no means a figure of fun. The Nottingham poll tax protesters of 1990 burst into the council chamber wearing green hoods. Roberta Kevelson recently concluded that to the present ‘Metaphorically, Robin Hood is equivalent with the concept, or sense, of outlawry, alienation, rebellion’.18 Whether as reinforcements to those who still believe in social and political equity or just as agents of liberating merriment in the modern world, Robin and his men – not a ‘Crew’ – are still with us; but outside the 1661 play, they rarely think of wearing ‘Gives and Fetters’ and hardly ever contemplate giving that ‘submission to government’, which is the meaning, motive and purpose of Robin Hood and his Crew of Souldiers, a text whose ideological transformations are Restoration in politics but revolutionary in terms of the Robin Hood tradition.

18 See Inlaws/Outlaws: A Semiotics of Symbolic Intervention: ‘Robin Hood’ and the ‘King’s Law’ (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1977), p. 75.

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10 ROBIN HOOD AND THE CRUSADES When and why did the longbowman of the people mount up like a lord?

From: Florilegium, 23.1 (2006)

1. Introduction In the mid 1950s some thirty million people in the USA and the UK would each week watch an episode of the British-made ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’. It starred Richard Greene as the officer-type hero, returned from the Crusades, and forced, through the vileness of the Norman lords under bad Prince John, to take to the forests to defend English freedom.1 As a gentleman and a returning Crusader, Robin rode into the opening scene, and he is remembered as a cavalryman: the theme song, still widely-known, goes – ‘Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen, Robin Hood, Robin Hood, with his band of men’.2 What does this imply? Is it just Robin on a horse leading his faithful infantry? Or are all the band mounted, like fox-hunters, or lost cowboys? Or are the two lines alternatives: perhaps Robin might either ride through the glen on his own, or might just be there on foot with his band of men? And why in any case is it a glen – a word connected with Scotland, not the English Nottingham region? This paper will discuss issues like these in the light of the long-lasting Robin Hood tradition. But the most interesting question is simply where did this idea of Robin on horseback come from, and where and why did the Crusades become involved?

1 For a description of the series and its reception see Jeffrey Richards, ‘Robin Hood on Film and Television since 1945’, Visual Culture in Britain, 2 (2001), 65–80, see p. 67. 2 Whereas people firmly, even aggressively, recall this as the opening song, it was in fact performed as the end credits rolled; television, and film, had not yet developed the identifying and marketing device of the pre-title song, though there was over the opening titles in the series a completely forgotten, and very feeble, sung quatrain that summarised the action of the following episode, as if in a Canto of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.

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2. A mounted Robin? The earliest Robin Hood ballads are remarkably unlike the modern standard image of the hero.3 He is a yeoman, not a lord, and his social relations with his band are lateral not hierarchical. He is not hiding away in the forest until his king returns: he is, like a real outlaw, there all the time and always against the king, or at least his officers. He has a very small (and so historically accurate) band, not the politically challenging regiment of men that he develops under the influence of Scottish ideas of resistant outlawry.4 He lives in the late medieval present, not in the time of good King Richard or bad Prince John – the latter’s usurping villainy made, in a sixteenth-century renovation, Robin’s resistance in fact hierarchy-supporting and conservative. He has no relations with a Lady Marian: his only gendered emotion, apart from his male friendships, is his worship of St Mary. Most striking of all, he does not rob the rich to give to the poor: he takes from the rich and corrupt to give to himself and his friends, not yet deploying the de haut en bas patronisation of charity. This image of a reasonably credible late medieval outlaw is emphasised by the fact that he is always on foot. Not only was that a basic marker of class: it was also functional. There is no way in which you can draw and shoot a longbow from the saddle, and that seriously threatening weapon, which could pierce armour and fell a war-horse, is central to the earliest identity of the ballad outlaw, and to the social challenge inherent in his representation. It seems entirely proper in that context that the proverbial statement, recognised in late medieval law as an example of a well-known truth, is that ‘Robin Hood in Barnsdale stood’, as distinct from television Robin riding onto our screens. There would appear to be a contradiction to the notion of Robin Hood the pedestrian in a woodcut at the start of the earliest version of The Gest of Robin Hood, printed in Antwerp in about 1500. It shows a bow-carrying man on a large horse, much like a knight’s charger. As far as I can see no commentator has thought this is odd. But my argument here, that Robin has only in later centuries come to ride, and to Crusade, requires engagement with this illustration. Firstly there is its textual inauthenticity. This woodcut is actually re-used from Pynson’s slightly earlier version of Caxton’s The Canterbury Tales, where it represents the yeoman.5 That sort of print-shop economy was common, right

3 This paragraph summarises material found in Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), see especially chap.1 ‘“Many Men Speak of Robin Hood”: Versions of the Hero’, pp. 1–10. 4 On this point see Stephen Knight, ‘Rabbie Hood: The Development of the English Outlaw Myth in Scotland’, in Bandit Territories, ed. by Helen Phillips (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), pp. 99–118, Chapter 8 in this collection. 5 I am grateful to Thomas H. Ohlgren for sharing with me his research on the dates and publishers of these texts ahead of its publication in Robin Hood: The Early Poems, 1465–1560, Texts, Contexts and Ideology (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), pp. 103–7.

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through to the nineteenth century, but must question the authenticity of an equestrian Robin so early. Whether Chaucer refers to Robin Hood in the yeoman, as he surely does in the devil in ‘The Friar’s Tale’, both mounted, is another matter, not relevant here, though intriguing enough and possibly answerable in the positive, but both would be no more than the shadow of an equestrian Robin Hood, quite absent from the ballads. But it is still true that, even if borrowed, this very early image offers a mounted Robin. Or does it? How sure are we that this illustration in fact is Robin? Would Robin Hood really wear spurs, as this figure does? A knight would, and the only mounted person in the Gest who rides alone carrying a bow is in fact the knight: after Robin has helped him regain his lands, he comes back to the forest riding on ‘his good palfrey’ with bows and arrows as ‘A pore present’ for Robin.6 I suggest this may well be a representation of the return of the knight. Apart from perhaps justifying an illustration of somebody riding with a bow, the story of the knight in the Gest is unusual in several ways. It starts the multiple narrative, and seems to link with certain early resemblances, unique to this text, both in its period and since, between Robin and King Arthur. Robin waits for a guest before having dinner, and gives formal commands to his men as he never does elsewhere, not even when he later becomes an earl and after that a horseman and even a Crusader. I suggest that just as much of Caxton’s business was to present chivalric material to a largely urban audience in what A. B. Ferguson called ‘The Indian Summer of English Chivalry’,7 so the gentry opening to the Gest, featuring the knight and Robin’s rescue of his endangered status, is audience-targeted, and this manoeuvre is for good sales-oriented reasons focused in this initial (and only) illustration. I think it is quite possible that the woodcut, like the opening stanzas, is meant to elevate the plodding outlaw story to a level more in keeping with the genteel, even chivalric, tone of most printed books at the time. Interestingly – class will out – this gentrifying opening does not last. The knight’s story is resolved and the Gest continues with more familiar conflicts between Robin, Little John and the Sheriff. The story of the knight is used to start the Gest on a socially elevated and, as far as Robin’s actions are concerned, upwardly mobile basis, tapering the yeoman radical into the bookbuying market. But though the knight is definitely a horseman, he is not a returning crusader: in fact he suggests that his ruin is so complete he may have to go on Crusade: ‘Hasteley I wol me buske’, sayde the knight, ‘Over the salte see,

6 A Gest of Robin Hood in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. by Stephen Knight and Thomas H. Ohlgren, second edition (Kalamazoo: University of Western Michigan Press, 2000), pp. 80–158, lines 1049 and 1100. 7 Arthur B. Ferguson, The Indian Summer of English Chivalry (Durham: Duke University Press, 1960).

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And se where Criste was quykke and dede, On the mount of Calveré;’ (223–6) Later, when the king arrives it is not from Crusade, which is hardly surprising as this is a King Edward (number not specified) not the king who is from the sixteenth century on involved with Robin, Richard I, the Lionheart. It is not just Crusading that is of no interest in the early Robin Hood context: the mounted knight himself made no impact on the Robin Hood tradition. The Gest was to an extent a source for broadside ballads: though ‘The King’s Disguise and Friendship with Robin Hood’ and ‘Robin Hood and the Golden Arrow’ have only survived in print from the eighteenth century they were both known to the editor of the ‘Forresters’ manuscript of about 1670.8 But the story of Robin rescuing the knight was completely disregarded by poetic and theatrical versions of the story until the nineteenth century, as in Tennyson’s late verse play The Foresters, where the Gest was used as a medievalising source and, compatible with Robin’s now widespread gentrification, horse-riding came, at a slow and uncertain pace, into the tradition and its meaning. There are some other equestrian moments in the Gest – but they focus on characters who are not outlaws. As well as the knight, the sheriff rides, while Little John (briefly his servant) goes on foot; the monks ride luxuriously ‘Eche on a good palferay’ (852) but the outlaws do not steal their horses, only their money. The knight’s wife expresses her class position by riding, but outlaw transportation remains on foot: Robin ‘walked into the forest’ (1313). The king and his men ride to Nottingham and the forest but then they too walk into it, followed by their horses, now proletarianised from cavalry mounts to pack-horses. The one moment when Robin is mounted is when he and the king finish their manly games and they ride together to Nottingham. Equally interestingly, the ballad that is cut out of this part of the Gest, ‘The King’s Disguise and Friendship with Robin Hood’ does not accept this moment of equine appropriation, and merely says they have ‘gone’ together to the town.9 So in general, and as a class-based political rule, it is two legs good, four legs bad in the yeoman ballads. A couple of horses do appear among the outlaws, but they both seem inauthentic. In the Gest Robin was able from some mysterious source to equip the knight with horse and accoutrements, and in ‘Robin Hood and the Potter’ he finally provides a lady’s horse for the Sheriff’s wife. Just as the knight himself seems a gentrified detour at the start of the Gest, so the courtly language between Robin and the wife suggests a brief loop from a romance. Horses again, as in the woodcut, seem a sign of generic contamination.

8 For ‘Robin Hood and the Golden Arrow’ see Knight and Ohlgren, pp. 541–8; ‘The King’s Disguise and Friendship with Robin Hood’ is available in F. J. Child, ed., The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 volume reprint edition. (New York: Dover, 1965), 3.220–22. 9 Child, vol. 4.222, stanza 33, line 1.

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In the ballad of ‘Robin Hood and Sir Guy of Gisborne’ Robin’s opponent appears disguised as a forester, and heavily disguised at that – he is wearing a horse skin, including the head. Commentators have been excited at the possible sighting of an appealingly extreme version of folklore here, and the enthusiasm has even been extended into Robin’s own possible homoerotic nature.10 But perhaps, as with Pynson’s mounted apparent outlaw, there is another explanation. Part of Guy’s status as a serious enemy is that he too does not ride at all, he just dresses like a horse: he is not so much a horseman as a horse-man. A walking yeoman inauthentically doing gentry bounty-hunting business in heavy disguise lies behind this strange appearance, I suggest, not just, or perhaps not at all, the magical or gender matters that have so far been preferred. Robin of course hi-jacks and reverses this equine social posturing when, having killed Guy, he frees Little John while himself dressed in the horse-skin. And to distance the horse element of this ballad further, just as it was not unfair to point to the actual inauthenticity of Pynson’s wood-cut, it is legitimate to note that ‘Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne’, being not recorded until the Percy Folio manuscript of the 1640s, and bearing in its first stanza a quite suspicious resemblance to the first stanza of ‘Robin Hood and the Monk’, is a text whose medieval authenticity must be quite doubtful. But even though it may well be a piece of sixteenth-century medievalism, like Chevy Chase or The Battle of Otterburn, not to mention the generically much closer Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough and William of Cloudesley, and though it at least admits the appearance of a horse, the Guy of Gisborne story in its action keeps its human feet firmly on the ground. At the end even the Sheriff simply runs away, which is remarkable as he has to get all the way from Yorkshire to Nottingham town: no wonder John catches him with an arrow through the head. The notion of the pedestrian outlaw lasts a good time. Matthew Parker, in his long printed ballad of 1632, The True Tale of Robbin Hood, makes the hero an Earl readily enough, but never puts him on horseback. His enemies, an Abbot and the Bishop of Ely, ride with massive bodies of men, but the outlaws stand and deliver from their longbows.11 Anthony Munday, the originator of the gentrified narrative, is himself very shy about riding. Little John does tell Robin ‘your horses’ will be waiting at an inn,12 but when they leave he is merely loading a pack-pony (513–14). There is no hint of equestrian behaviour as Robin approaches or is in the

10 On Robin, Guy and folklore see Stuart Kane, ‘Horseplay: Robin Hood, Guy of Gisborne, and the Neg(oti)ation of the Bestial’, in Robin Hood and Popular Culture, ed. by Thomas Hahn (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000), pp. 101–10: on p. 106, note 13 Kane discusses Guy as ‘an imperfect version of the traditional wildman image’: he also explores the homoerotic potential of the encounter, pp. 107–10. 11 Martin Parker, A True Tale of Robin Hood, see Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. by Knight and Ohlgren, pp. 602–25. 12 Anthony Munday, The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntington, in Knight and Ohlgren, pp. 303–401, line 294.

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forest. But King Richard is appropriately, royally, different: he gallops in from the ‘heathen warres’, and with him are ‘twenty score of horses’ (2708, 2657). The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ballads, in single-sheet ‘broadside’ and collected ‘garland’ form, tell of an unmounted Robin, with very few exceptions. In the common ‘Robin Hood meets his match’ ballad structure, the hero strolls through the forest and fights on foot whomever he meets. When he is accompanied on his trouble-seeking forest trips, he, John and Will ramble about taking the air and their chances together. A striking version of this pedestrianism is ‘Robin Hood and the Prince of Aragon’. It has some romance features – a maiden on a horse brings news of the king’s ogre-like foreign, demanding his princess daughter, there is a tournament and the need of a hero to save a lady. But although the king offers the outlaws lances, and ‘the trumpets sound a charge’,13 the heroic three just march into battle, and a remarkably quick victory. In ‘Robin Hood and the Valiant Knight’ the king commands ‘a trusty and worthy knight’14 to arrest Robin, but Sir William leads only bowmen against Robin’s men in a bitter infantry battle; in ‘Robin Hood’s Chase’ it would seem, from the territory covered by the king and his quarry Robin (the length of England from London to Newcastle via Sherwood and back), that they must be mounted, but the matter is left silent: the only verbs of motion used are ‘go’ and ‘come’, and not a horse is mentioned. In the same way ‘Robin Hood and Queen Catherine’ does not state how the outlaws travelled from Sherwood to London. And though the Queen’s page/messenger who invites them south might seem to be a rider, as the queen tells him to ‘post’ – in fact he goes on foot: ‘Sometimes he went, sometimes he ran’.15 In the ballads, even a Lord Robin does not ride. The one fully gentrified version, ‘Robin Hood and Maid Marian’, a print-shop confection of the late seventeenth century,16 has Robin as an earl and Marian as his beloved: it deploys the upmarket fiction of the girl seeking her beloved in male costume, followed by misrecognition, a fight – she does well – then recognition and embracing. But this detritus of gentry romance does not include any sign of a horse, let alone a Crusade. The earl and his beloved settle down as forest outlaws for life, and the ballad is basically still a yeoman structure, however elaborated. But Robin can seem to change his habits. The familiar seventeenth-century broadside ballad-accompanying woodcuts of Robin and his friends in Civil War

13 ‘Robin Hood and the Prince of Aragon’, Child, 3.147–50, st. 39 line 1 and 38 line 4. 14 Child, 3.225–6, st. 4 line 1. 15 Child, 3.197–200, st. 6 line 1. This is from a Wood broadside ballad, dated perhaps as early as 1640, see Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. by Knight and Ohlgren, p. 563. The parallel sequence is ripped out of the contemporary Percy Folio version and there is no page’s journey in the 1663 Garland version; but the Forresters manuscript of about 1670, which has a fuller and much clearer account of all the action, follows the Wood version quoted, so this can be taken as authoritative. 16 ‘Robin Hood and Maid Marian’, in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. by Knight and Ohlgren, pp. 493–8.

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outfits will occasionally have spurs added, though no horse. Yet when the texts, rarely, make him ride there seem clear signs of exoticism. In ‘Robin Hood and the Bishop’ the bishop thinks Robin is mounted, because he has him under arrest on a horse, but in fact he has in custody an old woman Robin has previously helped, who has changed clothes to save him. This deutero-Robin carnivalises the situation when she invites the sheriff to prove her gender identity, suggesting he – ‘Lift up my leg and see’,17 while she is still on the horse. The one ballad where Robin is on horseback is ‘Robin Hood’s Birth, Breeding, Valour and Marriage’. Here he is, very rarely for the ballads, somewhat gentrified: at the start he and his mother ride off to his uncle Gamwell’s mansion. Then Robin and Little John, himself somewhat gentrified as a ‘page’, go hunting in Sherwood – though only with longbows – and meet Clorinda, a rough-hewn fairy mistress. That sign that we have wandered from the outlaw story into a gentrified literary compôte is confirmed when suddenly they are all on horses: ‘Before we had ridden five Staffordshire miles’.18 The reversal seems itself marked in the text as Robin, John and Clorinda are held up by some non-mounted yeomen. But our heroes fight and win, apparently on foot, and then, if not as outlaws at least not as gentry, they go to the distinctly plebeian pleasures of Tutbury bull-baiting fair. We can write off this poem’s two mounted moments, like Clorinda herself, as an uncharacteristic sport, and we can sum up the early material as realising an outlaw who walks and does not ride as a central meaning of Robin Hood that, strikingly, carries over into most of Robin’s gentrified appearances, and is only contradicted under special circumstances.

3. Mounted Robin The present is different. Both horse and Crusade have become a recurrent feature in film and television. In 1922 Douglas Fairbanks first appears in full knightly splendour and goes on Crusade as second-in-command to the king. Before riding through the dubious glen in 1954 Richard Greene was in the Holy Land. Sean Connery (Robin and Marion, 1976) and Kevin Costner (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, 1991) both start as both mounted and Crusaders. The old ballad tradition is not entirely forgotten. Though Errol Flynn as Hood in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) leaps a horse into his first shot, he never leaves on Crusade: in general the film was faithful to the early structures, with the Washington University scholar F. Morgan Padelford as an adviser. Part of the irony of Robin Hood Men in Tights (1993) is that the only riders are Marian and her very large maid – to the horse’s regret. More politically unequestrian yet is the 1980s television series

17 ‘Robin Hood and the Bishop’, in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. by Knight and Ohlgren, pp. 549–55, line 72. 18 ‘Robin Hood’s Birth, Breeding, Valour and Marriage’, in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. by Knight and Ohlgren, pp. 527–40, line 161.

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‘Robin of Sherwood’: the opening sequence powerfully realises just how hard it is for a man on foot to escape a mounted officer, part of the class-conscious and resistance-oriented element of this version from the high days of anti-Thatcherism just before the British Miners’ strike. But in general, for modern cultural consumers, Robin on horseback and returning from Crusade has become normal, which is probably why people do not see the oddity of the woodcut in The Gest. What happened to change home-loving earthbound Robin into an international equestrian ? At first thought, it would seem likely that the ideas of Robin riding and Crusading had their origins in the substantial development of Robin Hood in the nineteenth century, that home of gentry fiction and imperialism.19 It is true that through Scott, Peacock and several more minor talents, the outlaw hero was reconceived in Romantic and nationalist terms: he was linked to the Saxon race – or more exactly the anti-Norman-French race; he felt as fulfilled among deep nature as any Romantic poet; he was distinctly and newly masculine, in both the arrow-splitting phallic competition that Scott invented and the ‘between men’ pattern Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has observed from this period.20 The new presence of a handsome villain serves the hero both as rival for Marian and as a potential homoerotic partner. Peacock’s crucial contribution was to combine for the first time the image of the lordly hero with the energy of the yeoman outlaw, locating this condensation firmly in the time of John and Richard. But while it might seem a simple step to make unfairly outlawed Lord Robin a rider and a Crusader, and as such an emblem of international adventure, even empire, this development is strikingly elusive. Thomas Love Peacock’s Maid Marian (1822) begins with Earl Robin and his men galloping up on ‘foaming steeds’ to the church where he is to marry Marian.21 This is reminiscent of the image of Richard I charging into the narrative in Munday’s play, but curiously it is Robin’s last appearance on a horse in the novella: in the fight at the bridge in Chapter 6 it is not clear that the outlaws are mounted, and it seems improbable, as Robin fires a longbow arrow in front of the Sheriff’s horse. Later Robin, Marian and her father walk from Hampshire to Northumberland, the length of England, disguised as pilgrims. And there is no enthusiasm for Crusading: Peacock as narrator comments that when Richard goes it is ‘to the great delight of many zealous adventurers who eagerly flocked under his banner, in the hope of enriching themselves with Saracen spoil, which they called fighting the battles of God’ (p. 123). Such a critique of imperialism – painfully valid

19 The following paragraph summarises arguments offered in Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), see chap. 3, ‘Robin Hood Esquire’, pp. 94–149. 20 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 21 Thomas Love Peacock, Maid Marian (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1822), p. 123.

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to the present – comes intriguingly from a man who to recoup his finances took a lifetime job in the East India Company, at the core of empire. But for Peacock, nobility, did not connote exploitation of the peasants. In Maid Marian Lord Robin’s fall from aristocratic grace is caused by his passion for hunting in the royal forests: a liberal and inherently pro-peasant dissent to proprietorial enclosure of forests and waste lies behind this. Peacock wrote elsewhere a moving account of ‘The Last Day of Windsor Forest’ as after 1813 the great public forest was enclosed by the royal family – a day when he claims to have met an old forester called Scarlet who was looking for his friend Robin Hood. Rob Gossedge has written on this context and this encounter as being crucially formative for Peacock’s quite anti-royal novel.22 Peacock stressed in a prefatory note to Maid Marian that ‘This little work, with the exception of the last three chapters, was written in the autumn of 1818’. He finished it off by early 1822 – setting himself up in the East India Company had intervened. His point was to avoid being thought an imitator of Scott, who had given Robin Hood a substantial role in Ivanhoe, published for Christmas 1819. Only timing could have raised such an idea: the stories differ greatly. Scott’s outlaw is no lord, a tough yeoman and superb archer who, in newly invented action, helps the Saxons and the incognito King fight the brutal French lords and then, back to older material, comes the forest encounter where King Richard is revealed, a scene still beloved of Robin Hood films. This nationalist updating of the ballad Robin also restrained his vigour: Scott, a Tory, was no admirer of yeoman resistance in reality, no doubt bearing in mind the events in Edinburgh in 1561 when a Robin Hood procession turned into a riot, released prisoners from the Tolbooth and put the magistrates in, and no doubt also relating such Robin Hood resistance to radicalism of his own day, from the French revolution to the Luddite and Captain Swing activities of the post-1815 period as well as the highly publicised Peterloo Massacre of early 1819, when troops attacked a mass demonstration in Manchester and killed at least eighteen people. So Scott’s Saxon Robin is not empowered as either gentleman or liberal: he can have a threatening demeanour, is illiterate and, when Isaac first appears early on, Robin seems quite anti-Semitic – the novel as a whole is not so clearly in that mode. At most, Locksley (he is hardly ever even called Robin) is a peasant, useful in war, but socially very limited. Yet Scott evidently saw more in the Lord Robin story than he was willing to make overt. The novel contains a displaced lord, returned from crusade, mistreated by John and his lackeys, loyal to Richard, and restored when the king comes home – but he is named Ivanhoe. To release the power of the Lord Robin story, Scott has invented a hero who avoids aggrandising

22 Thomas Love Peacock, ‘The Last Day of Windsor Forest’, in Calidore and Miscellanea, ed. by Richard Garnett (London: Dent, 1891), 151; Rob Gossedge, ‘Thomas Love Peacock, Robin Hood and the Enclosure of Windsor Forest’, in Robin Hood in Greenwood Stood: Alterity and Context in the English Outlaw Tradition, ed. by Stephen Knight (Turnhout: Brépols, 2011), pp. 135–64.

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possibly radical Robin, and though he is an early riding and Crusading hero, is definitely not Robin Hood. Even after Peacock’s gentrification and energisation of the hero, very wellknown in its light opera form with music by J. R. Planché (also from 1822), the image of Robin as a solid, even resistant, yeoman, perseveres. The Chartist Thomas Miller used Robin in Royston Gower (1838) as a tough elderly Saxon soldier, supporter of those oppressed by the Norman yoke.23 In Forest Days G. P. R. James, an early master of historical romance, validates Simon de Montfort as the father of parliamentary democracy – a particularly improbable liberal notion of the Victorian period – and Robin Hood is similarly mythic, previsioning Zorro as both forest outlaw and mounted popular avenger.24 In the final scene he appears as ‘a yeoman on a white horse’, to kill a lordly villain the king has pardoned: as his arrow strikes from a distance, he cries ‘Whom kings spare, the Commons send to judgement’ (vol. 3, p. 303): though still rich in yeomanly radicalism, he is now, it seems naturally, mounted. A clumsier multi-class Robin appears in Pierce Egan’s Robin Hood and Little John (1840),25 a very popular long novel in which the earl, brought up as a forester, faces dishonest lords and sensational adventures, enjoys romance and marriage with Marian, but hardly ever mounts a horse and certainly has no interest in the Crusades. It is a distinctly bourgeois Victorian cultural product, with a lot of hunting, quite a lot of kissing, some ghosts, and some weird inventions – Robin defeats an enemy named Caspar Steinkopft. Egan’s all-purpose novel was successful enough to generate in 1849 a sort of sequel in Joachim Stocqueler’s Maid Marian, or The Forest Queen.26 This may be sub-subtitled, Being a Companion to ‘Robin Hood’, but it is very different from Egan, being partly an invented story about a returning Crusader Sir Wilfrid (Ivanhoe’s first name), with other Scott-derived material, and partly a richly fantastic story about a Robin Hood who is not only a Crusader but brings back with him a fat surly Arab male and his beautiful belly-dancing daughter. In a plot that reads like a parody of the Costner film long before Mel Brooks, there is also a local witch, Minnie Eftskin, a crazed Norman would-be rapist, Hugo Malair, and quite a bit of history, both Crusading and domestic. Stocqueler had spent twenty years in India (there is probably a Peacock connection somewhere in the archives) and then returned to London as an all-purpose writer and wit about town. Stocqueler’s novel is both orientalist and imperialist, and yet does not present Robin riding to Crusade – though he has been there. When he arrives back in Britain, he is on foot, leading three horses, one for each of his two Arabs, and one for

23 Thomas Miller, Royston Gower, 3 volumes (London: Nicholson, 1838). 24 G. P. R. James Forest Days: A Romance of Old Times, 3 volumes (London: Saunders and Otley, 1843). 25 Pierce Egan the Younger, Robin Hood and Little John, or The Merry Men of Sherwood Forest (London: Forster and Hextall, 1840). 26 Joachim H. Stocqueler, Maid Marian, or The Forest Queen (London: Pierce, 1849).

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his baggage. He briefly mounts a horse for the siege of Southwell Manor – Scott’s siege of Torquilstone replayed, much closer to Nottingham. But in the two early chapters set in Palestine it is clear that Robin, however much admired by the king, is no more than a captain of archers, a longbow-bearing infantryman in the yeoman tradition, not the knightly, mounted kind of Crusader. In the same uncrusading way, when in 1846 Stocqueler co-wrote Robin Hood and Richard Coeur de Lion, a very entertaining pantomime (it opens with a parody of Macbeth as three writers, late with their script, conjure a tiny Robin from an inkwell), Richard is home from Palestine, and the only Arab presence is Abd El Kadir, ‘The Old Man of the Mountains’ who has returned with the king and is basically friendly.27 Neither of Stocqueler’s little-remembered works can be taken seriously as the source of the Fairbanks image of Robin. Nor can Tennyson’s account. Admirer as he was of knights and horses, as the Idylls of the King can testify, and certainly an enthusiast for empire, when around 1880 he turned to the Robin Hood story and wrote The Foresters for Henry Irving, there are no horses or Crusades. No doubt the former would, as in theatre legend, have been risky on stage, and the absence of equine-style derring-do is no doubt one of the reasons Irving found it too dull to play. However, the music of Sir Arthur Sullivan and the flair of the American impresario Augustin Daly made it a great success in the USA from 1892 on,28 a production clearly stimulated by the triumph in 1890 of Reginald de Koven’s light opera Robin Hood. Here too Robin is noble, but never leaves home, and, between his youth, the simplicity of the plot, the absence of the Crusades, and the demands of theatre, de Koven provides no horses. A riding Robin seemed natural enough to Alfred Noyes in his poem ‘Sherwood’, written by 1904. He imagines Robin as leading a pack of hunters crashing through the woods: . . . from aisles of oak and ash Rings the Follow! Follow! And the boughs begin to crash, The ferns begin to flutter and the flowers begin to fly, And through the crimson dawning the robber band goes by.29 This dashing action, especially with the cry of ‘Follow’ is closer to upper-class fox-hunting than either Crusading or mounted robbery, but is also highly unusual in written representations of Robin Hood, gentleman though he usually is after

27 For an account of Robin Hood and Richard Coeur de Lion, see Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw, 1994, pp. 192–4. 28 For a discussion of The Foresters, see Lois Potter, ‘The Apotheosis of Maid Marian: Tennyson’s The Foresters and the Nineteenth-Century Theatre’, in Playing Robin Hood: The Legend as Performance in Five Centuries, ed. by Lois Potter (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), pp. 182–204. 29 Alfred Noyes, ‘Sherwood’, in Poems (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1904), p. 7.

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Peacock. Though it might seem equally obvious to condense the two ideas of Richard’s Crusade and Britain’s empire, only Stocqueler of nineteenth-century British writers seems to have glimpsed the point, and then only as an attentionseeking start to his rambling inventions and borrowings.

5. Robin the filmic cavalryman So it seems to be just film that invented in a substantial and widely imitated way the Crusading horse-rider. There must remain some doubt exactly when this happened, because no film scholar has yet discovered or reconstructed all the images and themes deployed in the extraordinary number of seven Robin Hood films made before 1914. It seems a fair assumption that horsemanship was involved, as such outdoors mobility is a natural for movies shot in natural light, but the plots that have been traced make no mention of the Crusades and just focus on the triangular romance of Robin, Marian and a villain.30 The Fairbanks picture of 1922, however, makes riding and Crusading major from the start. The source of this is less easy to identify. The previous Fairbanks film was The Three Musketeers, which Edward Knoblock, author of Kismet, had written on the basis of the novel by Alexandre Dumas, Père. So it might seem likely that the new Robin Hood film, and its Crusade orientation, might also be based on Dumas. But things are not so simple: Knoblock’s autobiography says he was in Europe while the film was developed and shot (though he has a credit on it as a ‘literary advisor’).31 More to the point, neither Prince des Voleurs (1872) nor Robin Hood le Proscrit (1873), both attributed to Dumas, make Robin a Crusader.32 Both are based heavily on Piers Egan’s novel, and Robin stays at home. The Prince of Thieves cover showed vigorous Robin with bow, arrows and dashing moustache: the cover of the translated second novel, Robin Hood the Outlaw (1904) shows the older king, with mail, longsword and a bold red cross – evidently King Richard as a Crusader. Conceivably that cover provided the inspiration for Crusading Robin, and the inspiree was presumably Lotta Woods, the experienced writer (with a wonderful name for Robin Hood work – actually Charlotte) who researched the material and led the drive to persuade Fairbanks to do this film.

30 Kevin Harty’s research, collected in The Reel Middle Ages: Films about Medieval Europe (Jefferson: MacFarland, 1999) has traced story elements in three of these films, summarised in Knight, Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography, 2003, p. 153. 31 Ernest Knoblock, Round the Room: An Autobiography (London: Chapman and Hall, 1939), pp. 298–300. 32 Alexandre Dumas, père, Prince des Voleurs, 2 volumes (Paris: Lévy, 1872) and Robin Hood le Proscrit, 2 volumes (Paris: Lévy, 1873), translated by Alfred Allison (‘and a group of able scholars’) as Prince of Thieves (London: Methuen, 1903) and Robin Hood the Outlaw (London: Methuen, 1904). In fact the novels are not by Dumas – he died in 1870, and the Lévy editions merely say they are ‘publié’ by Dumas. The author seems to have been his collaborator Marie de Fernand, who also wrote as ‘Victor Percival’ and had produced Ivanhoé in French under the name of Dumas, see Nicole Vougny, Alexandre Dumas Site, www.dumaspere.com.

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He was reluctant, famously saying ‘I don’t want to look like a heavy-footed Englishman trampling about in the woods’.33 The script Woods produced (and which Fairbanks allegedly reworked, under his nom de plume Elton Thomas) avoided that entirely by making Robin in the first half of the film a mounted Crusader, and in the second half a tricksterish acrobat. Fairbanks’ urge to be anything but pedestrian may itself be the major reason for the enormously influential first Hollywood use of the mounted Crusader image. Woods’ biography is obscure, but it seems clear that as a well-read woman born in 1887 she would have been brought up in literary terms under the influence of Scott, and to elevate the outlaw image, presumably triggered by the cover of the ‘Dumas’ translations, and conceivably advised by Knoblock, she simply redeployed Scott’s borrowed image of the displaced lord Ivanhoe, restoring him, as it were, to the Robin Hood tradition. There is another likely source for the idea of a Crusading Robin, an American light opera Woods is very likely to have seen. As a follow-up to their very successful Robin Hood of 1890, Reginald De Koven and Harry Bache Smith produced in 1901 Maid Marian, which was performed widely across the USA in 1901–03 (and is not to be confused with the pseudonymous Maid Marian, the title under which their Robin Hood was played in London – presumably because there had been too many recent Robin Hoods by then).34 The first act is set at home, while Robin, as Earl of Huntington is on Crusade with the king. The Sheriff and Guy, who yearns for Marian, cause trouble, and then Act 1 ends with the Crusaders’ March as Little John and others go off as reinforcements. Act 2 takes place in Palestine, with the Sheriff and Guy again up to mischief, and as spies they arrange a defeat for the Crusaders and Robin’s capture. In Act 3 they are back at home, still assailing Marian, but Robin finally escapes and returns in time for a happy Christmas finale. It is hardly the plot of the more serious and much more lively Fairbanks film, but the setting of Act 2 and the motif of Robin’s return to rescue Marian from Guy and resolve problems may have planted a seed more suggestive than the simple cover of the Dumas translation. That may have been rather early for Woods to see, but whatever his source, the riding Robin who opened the Fairbanks film became central to the visual tradition. There is a splendid scene at the opening of The Bandits of Sherwood Forest (1946) when, after the deaths of Richard and John, national mischief re-emerges and the

33 See Ralph Hancock and Letitia Fairbanks, Douglas Fairbanks: The Fourth Musketeer (New York: Holt, 1953), p. 101. 34 While the existence of this musical has been known for some time, it is only the energetic research of Lorraine Stock, who has identified several slightly different manuscript versions, which has made the de Koven/Bache Smith Maid Marian available. I am extremely grateful to her for her comments on the text and its reception, and especially for providing me with a copy of the fullest version, held in Brandeis University Library Special Collections. Her first statement on the work is in ‘Recovering Reginald de Koven and Harry B. Smith’s 1901 Light Opera Maid Marian’, in Images of Robin Hood, ed. by Lois Potter and Joshua Calhoun (Newark: Delaware University Press, 2007), pp. 256–65.

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aging Robin calls together the men of Sherwood. They canter in cowboy mode down tracks, under trees, through streams, into a huge clearing, about a hundred of them, all on ponies straight from the Western movies. An action movie means a mounted movie in the early days of Hollywood. But Crusading was not quite so widespread, and certainly not so positive as honest American horsemanship. In 1922 Marian calls Robin back from Crusade to help sort things out at home, and the Fairbanks film’s ultimate view of Crusading seems inherently negative, linked to and sceptical about the value of the American expedition to World War I, very costly in lives as it was. The implied position that there is much to do at home is remarkably close to Woodrow Wilson’s isolationism of the period35 and this is presumably why as the 1938 film starring Errol Flynn opens, though he first appears melodramatically on a horse, he has not been nor plans to go on Crusade. The king’s Crusading is over and he is actually in an overseas prison, finally to return in honour to help Robin resolve the national problems But once the Robin-Crusade link is made, it is, as here, inevitably political. Something like the Fairbanks’ film’s dissent to Crusading can be read through Jennifer Roberson’s novel Lady of the Forest (1992). Here Robin has returned in a traumatised state from the now less than holy Land, and it is evident that Roberson is using the post-Vietnam mood as the basis for her weakening of Robin to permit a ‘strong woman’ presentation of Marian.36 The element to which Richard’s Crusading interests distracted him from good government is well-known to historians, who tend to exculpate King John from all charges except personal unpleasantness. The anti-Richard idea is sometimes used in a coded form to warn against adventurism – there are clear traces of this at the end of the Flynn film and also in a novel like Locksley (1983) by ‘Nicholas Chase’ (the brothers Anthony and Christopher Hyde). The beginning of the fine film Robin and Marion (1976) brings its aging Crusaders (mounted, though no gentlemen) home with relief, showing in its opening sequence the Lionheart’s brutality, and apparently justified death. More of a puzzle is the exact positioning of the most overtly Crusade-linked Robin Hood film since Fairbanks, the Costner picture of 1991, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Kathleen Biddick has linked it with the first Gulf War in negative terms,37 and it does seem that by having an American international action hero whose buddy is a combination of a Muslim and an African-American this film may be having its ideological cake and eating it. Yet at the same time Robin does withdraw from the gulf and does offer a wide-ranging sense of tolerance (though notably not to British Celts). The film certainly lacks the anti-militarism implicit

35 Kevin Harty, the notable scholar of films with medieval topics, see note 30, has commented in an email that he sees a ‘doughboy’ concept behind this film. 36 Jennifer Roberson, Lady of the Forest (New York: Kensington, 1992). 37 Kathleen Biddick, ‘The Return of Robin Hood’, in The Shock of Medievalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1988), pp. 58–82, see pp. 74–75.

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in the cruel Crusaders of the ‘Seven Poor Knights of Acre’, an early 1984 episode of Robin of Sherwood, or the militarist mania represented by Jurgen Prochnow in the other 1991 film Robin Hood, but the liberal positioning on Crusading shared by those productions can be clearly identified in the Costner film, especially viewing it from the period of the second Gulf War. But Crusading lord Robin still rides a horse, and so has to dismount to use his long-bow. There remains a structural inauthenticity or an ideological strain in that, just as there is about that original illustration in the Gest. Such tensions can go further than a surface conflict. The mounted Crusader of the 1950s television series, like the horseman in the Pynson woodcut, deserves closer inspection. There are acutely political reasons for the distant vagueness of setting in the 1954 television series. As has long been generally known, and now is becoming better recorded, this television series was in fact shaped and often written by American script-writers. In part because America had a clear lead in the techniques of producing fictional television series, but also because the producing team, British Sidney Cole and New Yorker Hannah Weinstein, knew some fine writers who would be glad of the work, because they had been black-listed (Weinstein was in London for similar reasons). This series was created by American left-wing writers who knew very well what political crusades could entail, and the result of resistance to wrongful authority: they re-created in considerable detail a meaningful post-Crusade politics for both Americans and British. Michael Eaton’s film Fellow Traveller (1989) delivered the tribute of an English radical – and one from Nottingham at that – to these yeoman outlaws of the typewriter, who included Ring Lardner Junior, Ian McLellan Hunter, Waldo Salt, Adrian Scott, Richard Lees, as Tom Dewe Mathews has recorded.38 Even though filmic Robin rides like a lord, and can Crusade like an imperialist, he has to some degree always borne the imprint of resistance – even nonCrusading Errol Flynn has been taken as speaking an international challenge to fascism.39 The dialectic force of the Robin Hood tradition seems undying. Though he became a gentleman, the story found it very hard to make him behave, or even ride, like a lord. When the camera, and California, brought horses to the story, and a script-writer of some brilliance, Charlotte Woods, condensed hero, period and horse into the concept of sociopolitical crusading, the myth retained its inner core of liberal resistance. In 2006 on the BBC, and during the second Gulf War, we saw in Jonas Armstrong a new Robin Hood who is slight but enduring, ironic but resistant, mounted but egalitarian, noble in both birth and attitudes: he bears his experience on Crusade like a cross. Like his predecessors, he is testimony to the lasting vigour of the idea of resisting wrongful authority and the continuing strength of the outlaw

38 Tom Dewe Mathews gave some new details in an article in The Guardian, October 7th 2006, including naming as contributing script-writers Waldo Salt, Adrian Scott and Robert Lees. 39 See Knight, 1994, p. 230.

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myth. This was a re-creation that, perhaps to the surprise of older viewers, met a real response: the BBC reported excellent viewing figures in the 8–12 years age bracket. A recessive, wily, eminently cool Robin, with designer stubble and an Estuary accent, speaks to and for the kids, and is at home with the idea of domestic crusade as he is with the Eastern Mediterranean version. He is the latest indication of the remarkably old and remarkably persistent range of forms in which the idea of Robin Hood resistance exists, and must exist, even though he has finally, and filmically, been sent however briefly, and with some personal inauthenticity, on Crusade.

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11 THE ARCTIC ARTHUR Patriotic medievalism

From: Arthuriana, 21.2 (2011)

1. Arthur and the walruses Over some thousand years Arthur has appeared in strange situations. A Welsh giant threw stone spears at him; King Ryens wanted his beard to complete the collection for a mantle; Dryden had him attack a tree that turned out to be a fake version of his beloved; Tennyson apotheosised him on a mountain top; Zimmer Bradley had him impregnate his half-sister at the Beltane celebrations. But it seems fair to suggest that none of these situations is as unforeseeable, improbable or downright weird as when in 1848 Bulwer Lytton made him leader of a Viking ship sailing above the Arctic Circle. And then the walruses attacked: Uprose a bold Norwegian, hunger-stung, As near the icy marge a walrus lay, Hurl’d his strong spear, and smote the beast, and sprung Upon the frost-field on the wounded prey;– Sprung and recoiled – as, writhing with the pangs, The bulk heaved towards him with its flashing fangs. Roused to fell life – around their comrade throng, Snorting wild wrath, the shapeless grisly swarms – Like moving mounts slow masses trail along; Aghast the man beholds the larva-forms – Flies – climbs the bark – the deck is scaled – is won; And all the monstrous march rolls lengthening on. ‘Quick to your spears!’ the kingly leader cries. Spears flash on flashing tusks; groan the strong planks With the assault: front after front they rise With their bright stare; steel thins in vain their ranks, And dyes with blood their birth-place and their grave; Mass rolls on mass, as flows on wave a wave. 183

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These strike and rend the reeling sides below; Those grappling clamber up and load the decks, With looks of wrath so human on the foe, That half they seem the ante-Daedal wrecks Of what men were in worlds before the Ark! Thus rag’d the immane and monster war – when, hark, Crash’d thro’ the dreary air a thunder peal! In their slow courses meet two ice-rock isles Clanging; the wide seas far-resounding reel; The toppling ruin rolls in the defiles; The pent tides quicken with the headlong shock; Broad-billowing heave the long waves from the rock; Far down the booming vale precipitous Plunges the stricken galley, – as a steed Smit by the shaft runs reinless, – o’er the prows Howl the lash’d surges; Man and monsters freed By power more awful from the savage fray, Here roaring sink – there dumbly whirl away.1 The battle with the walruses is only the most memorable part of Lytton’s northernising of the Arthur myth: Arthur in Odin’s hall and Gawain among the Eskimos run it close. The poem, of little impact in its own day and overlooked ever since, is not only a surprisingly scholarly and richly ideological mid-Victorian statement on many topics, but also the last and the most developed element in an almost unknown formation of the Arthurian story, which is hard not to call the Arctic Arthur. While R. S. Loomis said that ‘with the Romantic Movement Arthur and Merlin heard the magic horn pealing through fairyland and returned once more to the fellowship of men’,2 and Stephanie Barczewski felt that ‘the Arthurian legend possessed such a potent appeal during the years of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars’,3 others, who have looked more closely at the actual evidence, are aware that Arthur’s myth did not interest either classical Augustans or the

1 Edward Bulwer Lytton, King Arthur, 2 volumes (London: Colburn, 1848), vol.2, 9.23–28, pp. 89–90. This poem, like several others to be quoted, does not have line-numbers: here book and stanza numbers are available, but in other cases only books. In each instance page numbers will be given as well as those others available. The first edition of King Arthur is only attributed to ‘the author of The New Timon’, but the second edition of 1849 and the Tauchnitz edition of the same year carried Lytton’s name as well. 2 Roger Sherman Loomis and Laura Hibberd Loomis, The Arthurian Legend in Medieval Art (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1938), p. 144. 3 Stephanie Barczewski, Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth Century Britain: The Myths of King Arthur and Robin Hood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 36.

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major Romantics.4 It did however in the period from the late eighteenth century to the early mid-nineteenth century appeal for reasons of nationalistic alterity to Cornish, Welsh and some Scottish writers.5 There is a curious parallel to those separatist nationalist interests in the use by some English authors of a northern Arthur myth, an Arthur who, through being maritime, warlike, linking with Scandinavia and the Arctic north in all its bracing masculine grandeur, not to mention its exploitational imperial possibilities, seems a forgotten thread in the tapestry of politicised English narratives. The Arctic Arthur tradition would, as if it were a maritime passage in the Canadian far north, both promise and ultimately deny a breakthrough to fame to writers. To comprehend this unique sequence of cultural history, it is necessary to travel a long distance, both in space and time.

2. Arthur and the North When his myth first appeared in written form, Arthur had an aura of widelytravelled dominion. In the Welsh Culhwch ac Olwen (‘Culhwch and Olwen’) written down around 1000 CE, his military career had included triumphs in ‘Egrop, and in Africa . . . and the islands of Corsica’, presumably a British Celtic memory of Roman expansive fantasies.6 There was more realpolitik in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin account from the mid-1130s, re-creating Arthur’s authority in distinctly Norman terms – including representing the Saxons as destructive brutes, and giving a distinctly Norse flavour to Arthur’s military grandeur. The king’s post-wedding military mission in the north brought the defeat or submission of Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Gotland and the Orkneys. The French thirteenth-century writers who so much developed the Arthurian story to realise the dreams and fears of feudalism had little interest in Britain, let alone the further north, and abandoned, along with Merlin’s British political prophecies, Arthur’s northern connections – his base in Carduel, presumably Carlisle, became Caerleon (following Geoffrey in this), and the action was exclusively between southern Britain and northern France. This model survived, and not even the re-Anglicisation of the Arthur myth in the more northerly discourse of Laƺamon’s Brut and, later, the alliterative Morte Arthure significantly relocated the Arthurian story. But Geoffrey’s Viking connection was, like his British origin legend, not forgotten, and it gave rise to a striking political deployment of the Arthur myth in the

4 See James Douglas Merriman, The Flower of Kings: A Study of The Arthurian Legend in England between 1485 and 1835 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1973); Rob Gossedge and Stephen Knight, ‘Arthurian Literature from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries’, in The Cambridge Companion to Arthurian Literature, ed. by Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 103–19. 5 See Gossedge and Knight, pp. 109–11. 6 See Culhwch and Olwen in The Mabinogion, trans. Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones, revised edition (London: Dent, 1993), pp. 80–113, see p. 83.

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hands of another Geoffrey-like sage and inventive Welshman, John Dee. When he prepared a validation for Elizabethan imperialism (itself recently discovered), including seeking what would be called the North West Passage, he emphasised ‘your Highness iust Arthurian claym’ to Northern Europe and America, right up to the North Pole.7 Dee himself invested in a Passage expedition, and the dream of a route to the prosperous east much faster and safer than the perilous odyssey around Cape Horn was to be a significant element in the formation of the Arctic Arthur, holding out as it did golden imperial rewards for those who could conquer the forbidding northern seas. This was a reversal and redemption of the image of the north in Christianity. An evidently Mediterranean perspective had long associated the north with the devil – so the innermost part of Dante’s Inferno is frozen hard; the church door facing north was always the least important, and it was held that Lucifer set up his breakaway throne in the far north – the image survives in Paradise Lost as his defeated legions retreat across Lethe: Beyond this flood a frozen Continent Lies dark and wilde, beat with perpetual storms Of Whirlwind and dire Hail, which on firm land Thaws not, but gathers heap, and ruin seems Of ancient pile; all else deep snow and ice, A gulf profound as that Serbonian bog Betwixt Damiata and Mount Casius old, Where Armies whole have sunk: the parching Air Burns frore, and cold performs th’effect of Fire.8 If the idea of great wealth to be possibly accessed through the icy regions displaced the former Rome-focused horror of the north, there were more domestic reasons for a rapprochement with the cold. Throughout the seventeenth century there was a steady worsening of the weather in Britain, with a deepening of the Little Ice Age that had first affected the early fourteenth century. In 1683–4 there was a particularly long freeze in London, and a famous frost fair on the Thames, which could be behind the ‘frozen’ scene in King Arthur, the semi-opera by Dryden and Purcell first performed in 1691 but re-using material drafted in the mid 1680s. Central to the story is Arthur’s love for the beautiful Emmeline, and Love itself is realised as a force that can even awaken the symbolic figure of the frozen north:

7 John Dee, The Limits of the British Empire, ed. by Ken MacMillan with Jennifer Abeles, Studies in Military History and International Affairs (Westport: Prager, 2004), p. 83. 8 John Milton, Paradise Lost in The Poetry of John Milton, ed. by Helen Darbyshire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), vol. 1, Book 2, 587–95.

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To Yzeland and the furthest Thule’s Frost Where the proud God, disdaining Winters Bonds, O’erleaps the Fences of Eternal Snow And with his Warmth, supplies the distant Sun.9 There is more going on in Dryden’s imagination than just a memory of a bitter winter. King Arthur offers a subtle response to the arrival in 1688 of the Protestant joint monarchs William and Mary, when Dryden, a Stuart loyalist and Catholic convert, lost his Poet Laureateship. The text represents the British Arthur as a Stuart-like monarch of ancient connections, eventually welcoming into his traditional glory the insurgent Saxons, who are themselves noble warriors worth incorporating. William’s Orange was actually in Germany, not Holland, and this is a reverse replay of ‘The Glorious Revolution’ of 1688. Its predicted blending of the peoples through respect for the Saxons acknowledges and itself incorporates some of the Parliamentary rhetoric about the virtue of the Anglo-Saxon system – basically the ‘Norman Yoke’ theory about the essentially English democratic and legal virtues put at risk by the feudal Norman invasion. This rhetoric had itself been used as a means of validating the 1688 Protestant takeover, and much more is made of this Saxon, and by extension northern, ideology in the Whig response to Dryden’s King Arthur, the long verse epics Prince Arthur (1695) and King Arthur (1697) by Sir Richard Blackmore, physician and self-appointed poetic ideologue to King William. Prince Arthur offers a closer approach to a northern, if not yet quite Arctic Arthur. The style is Miltonic, though Blackmore’s blank verse plods heavily where Milton created vigorously many tones and tunes. More interestingly, the structure of the text is a striking transition and coalition between the Christian north of Lucifer and the Scandinavian north linked to the Saxons – both here seen negatively for all their northern grandeur. Raphael advises Arthur on military tactics, and the old Christian idea of the north is referenced – Lucifer is ‘confin’d to Barb’rous Northern Lands’ and he flies to the North Pole.10 Lucifer remains an agent hostile to Arthur and Britain, but the poem is also interested in a different northern tradition. Thor is ‘Lucifer’s liege’ (1.8 – these are book and page numbers) and Lucifer finds allies in the Nordic myth: Th’infernal Prince engag’d and wreckt with care Swift, as exploded Lightning from the Skies, A second time to Lapland mountains flies Where the rough Monarch’s noisy Palace stands, (5.129)

9 John Dryden, King Arthur, or The British Worthy: A Dramatick Opera (London: Tronson, 1691), 3.2. 273–76. 10 Richard Blackmore, Prince Arthur (London: Awnsham and Churchill, 1695), 1. pp. 3, 6.

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With this ‘Emperor of the Winds’ as his ally, Then Lucifer does Odin’s shape assume And with Stern Grace enters King Octa’s room (5.131) Lucifer addresses Octa as his son, and sends him and others off to war against Britain. Responding to seventeenth-century military events – and Dutch-English maritime rivalry – Arthur has to fight a naval battle against these mixed diabolicScandinavian forces, and the winds. The underlying story of Arthur versus the invading Saxons is also involved, but the Saxons are aggrandised into fullyfledged Scandinavians: Hengist is himself descended from Odin, and his army is soon joined by the Picts. Miltonic materials and traditions about the founding of Britain in a northern context are both directed towards the present: King Uter (sic) comments ‘“Their Arms the British Empire shall assail”’ (5.146), and in the second poem, King Arthur (1697), King Clovis of France, himself a Goth, becomes a leading enemy, so uniting the interests of King William in both Britain and Holland, as opposed to France and a potential Germanic federation. As a result the epic becomes less interested in the north, but there is a survival of the diabolic tradition when Arthur visits a region called Pomona, which, though the name refers classically to the goddess of fruits and gardens, is here a bleak place beyond Thule and the Orkneys where he will defeat ‘Hell’s Terror’ (6.161). Dryden and Blackmore represent a form of rapprochement between Arthur and the north that is without any clear ideological meaning and does not offer any firm narrativisation of the notion that the north represents a Protestant and democratic tradition: instead both seem to stage but also reject the value of the north, Dryden on Stuart and Catholic grounds, Blackmore more puzzlingly, perhaps because in his own mundane quest for Protestant and businesslike interests he lacked the imagination to see its possibilities. He did not pick up on the idea of northern values that Sir William Temple in 1690 implicitly related to the changes of 1688 in his lengthy essay ‘On Heroic Virtue’:11 this impressive piece of scholarship surveyed heroism all round the world, but its political thrust lay in the fact that it traced English military and liberal virtues back to the Germanic, or Gothic, tribes.

3. The Gothic north Other writers, both scholars and poets, were to see much more in the possibility of the north as a domain of the imagination, both nationalistic and democratic. It is well-known that the Arthurian story became of limited interest after the high

11 Sir William Temple, ‘On Heroic Virtue’, in The Works of Sir William Temple, 4 volumes (London: Rivington, 1814), vol. 3, pp. 313–405; see ‘The Northern Regions’, pp. 357–78.

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point of Malory’s redaction, in spite of some retrospective use of the story by writers like Leland and Spenser. Former arguments that the Tudors seriously celebrated an Arthurian connection have been shown to have a weak basis,12 and the heavyweights Jonson, Milton and Dryden all abandoned plans to create an Arthurian epic. Both his royal and his unclassical status were against Arthur, and when new interest in British history did develop, it focused on the Germanic, or rather ‘Gothic’, antiquity of the country as a back-validation of the view that Britain had a more advanced democracy and legal system than countries like France, seen with some reason as being still in totalitarian mode. R. J. Smith, the recent historiographer of this view, following Samuel Kliger, sees ‘the ubiquitous Gothic theory’ originating in the encounter between Stuart politics and constitutional legal theory.13 After 1688 the Gothic theory was used – but not by Blackmore – to justify the Protestant seizure of the throne from the Catholic James II: Robert Miles calls this ‘a political mythology in which Britain’s modern constitutional monarchy – the envy of Europe – was shown to derive, ultimately, from the Goths’.14 The Gothic theory was so effective as to be generalised, even being used by the Tory Bolingbroke against the dictatorial tendencies of Walpole.15 The theory was based largely on records of Anglo-Saxon juries and that period’s collective practices, but also, ironically, had classical sources, drawing on first-century Tacitus and especially sixth-century Jordanes’ account of the influence and ‘rude democracy’ of the Germanic peoples, all of which were distilled through the patriotic arguments of the sixteenth-century Swedish writer Olaus Magnus, and now influentially transmitted by Temple.16 Often using the Normans as the link between the north and modern England, and, however improbably, seeing Magna Carta as a resumption of democratic northern attitudes against the centralist and essentially French kings of medieval England, the ‘Gothic theory’ took its name and its sense of general validity from the idea that as Rome grew more and more corrupt, the invading ‘Gothic’ northerners were in both military and political terms worth admiring and even imitating. The concept was most influentially formulated by Montesquieu in L’Ésprit des Lois (1748), translated as The Spirit of the Laws (1750), which described the northern world as ‘the manufactory of the instruments that broke the chains forged

12 See Sidney Anglo, ‘The British History in Early Tudor Propaganda’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 44 (1961), 17–48, p. 32. 13 R. J. Smith, The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688–1863 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 2–8; see also Samuel Kliger, The Goths in England: A Study in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952). 14 Robert Miles, ‘Eighteenth-century Gothic’, in The Routledge Companion to Gothic, ed. by Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 10–18, see p. 4. 15 See R. J. Smith, p. 66 and, on Bolingbroke, pp. 58–70. 16 H. Arnold Barton, Northern Arcadia: Foreign Travelers in Scandinavia, 1765–1815 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), p. 152.

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in the South’: that is, the Goths operated as a major force against slavery in the Roman world.17 Throughout the eighteenth century the ‘Gothic theory’ reappears recurrently, in part as a lateral justification of growing English patriotism, in part as Protestant self-justification, and also it seems as an implicit class weapon. The Grand Tour to Italy was very largely an aristocratic activity, as was much in politics, embracing both the Tory party and Walpole’s Whig rivals Townshend and Carteret. It is notable that the main practitioners of versions of Gothicism appear to be technically skilled men of essentially middle-class origin such as Thomas Percy, Thomas Warton, Thomas Gray and, in spite of his father’s minor title, Horace Walpole. Allowing for their dallying with patronage – especially Percy with the ducal house of Northumberland – they bore an underlying hostility to things they saw as linked: Rome, the classical world, its aesthetic formulae, its inherent collectivism, and even its absolutist oppression. In this context, innovative statements like Gray’s fierce attack on Edward I in ‘The Bard’ and Walpole’s potently imagined The Castle of Otranto (1764) are a delayed cultural realisation of the moment of 1688, from which the rise of modern business-like bourgeois Britain can be traced; the attraction of the Gothic north is a part of this. But the new forces also focus new ideas of personal liberty and identity. The voices that espouse the Germanic past consistently do so in the name of some idea of liberty of the subject, and this is very readily meshed with, even displaced in, the liberation of subjective feeling that is inherent in the rise of the Gothic aesthetic. That was not a universal view. Edward Young’s very popular Night Thoughts (1742–49) is often linked to Gray’s work and certainly adopts a gloomy and inherently sublime position, but the viewpoint is firmly Christian, and also basically classical; although Young often deals in moralised weather and topography, especially in the first half of the last sequence, ‘Night IX’, the cold north has no interest or meaning, either for good or ill.18 But the Gothic position was already developed. James Thomson, born and raised in Scotland, starts his Britannia (1729) with ‘the Gale That hoarse and hollow, from the black surge blew’,19 and celebrates the northern storms that scattered the Spanish Armada in a way that looks forward strikingly to Arthur’s maritime experience in the northern seas nearly a century later. In Thomson’s very widely read The Seasons (1726) the ‘Winter’ sequence moves imaginatively into ‘the spa-

17 Charles de Secondat, Baron Montesquieu, De l’ésprit des lois (1748), as The Spirit of Laws, trans. and ed. by Anne M. Kohler, Basia Carolyn Miller and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), see p. 283. 18 Edward Young, Night Thoughts, ed. by Stephen Cornford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); in addition to Night IX, the moralised travel of Night VI, 762–801, Nature’s allegorical world journey in Night IV, 706–27, the allegorical maritime sequences in Night VIII, 150–205, and the terrestrial metaphor of Night VIII, 1079–1140 are all without any northern Gothic elements. 19 James Thomson, Britannia (London: Warner, 1729), p. 3.

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cious Regions of the North’20 and combines a setting suggesting sublime horror with a view of intrinsically virtuous peasant life among the ‘sons of Lapland’ (834) – Thomson is drawing on early eighteenth-century travel material about the region,21 and sees them as: Thrice happy race! by poverty secured From legal plunder and rapacious Power: In whom fell Interest never yet has sown The seeds of Vice; (881–4) The poem goes on to celebrate the sublime north in some detail and with considerable power. At the pole there is a ‘wild stupendous scene’ (892) and the politicisation of the Gothic north is also present: Russia is praised in terms of ‘Her floods, her seas, her ill-submitting sons’ (956). In his ‘Ode on Liberty’ (1734) Thomson returned to the theme, drawing clearly on Temple.22 In book 3 Liberty expresses both the fascination of the icy world: ‘. . . the furry millions there Deep-dig their dens beneath the sheltering snow’ (3.527–8) and also the concept of northern freedom: ‘Long in the barbarous heart the buried seeds Of freedom lay, for many a wintry age’ (3.539–40) Then in book 4 Liberty describes how ‘In wintry Scandinavia’s utmost bound – There is the manly race, the parent hive

20 James Thomson, The Seasons, ed. by James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), see line 834. 21 Sambrook’s notes indicate Thomson’s familiarity with a range of material on the far north, including John Sheffer’s Lapponia, of 1673, translated into English as A History of Lapland, 1674, and, for the geographical data, Pierre Maupertius, The Figure of the Earth, translated into English in 1738, see Thomson, pp. 392–3. 22 James Thomson, Liberty: A Poem, in The Complete Poems of James Thomson, ed. by J. Logie Robertson (London: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 312–21; on the Temple connection see Margaret Omberg, Scandinavian Themes in English Poetry 1760–1800, Studia Anglistica Upsaliensa, 29 (Uppsala, 1976), pp. 115–16. Liberty 4.377 has a footnote referring to Temple as a source.

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Of the mixed kingdoms, formed into a state More regularly free . . .’ (4.371–4) She sums up the value of these northern people: ‘“They, wise and dauntless, still sustain my cause”’ (4.378). Later in the same book, the Genius of the Deep offers a northern extension of the British empire, saying that ‘“All my dread walks to Britons open lie”’ (4.398) and while most of these are under the sun, he also offers dominion in: ‘. . . those that, to the poles approaching, rise In billows rolling into Alps of ice’. (4. 410–15) Against the poem’s development of a sense of a simple, dramatic, un-aristocratic and bracingly masculine context, scholars found in other sources less immediately sentimental value in the north. In an influential form of early medievalism, writers merged their delights in medieval romance, as it was transmitted by Ariosto and Spenser, with a decisive turning away from the classical world that had in fact given rise to the romances in the process of translatio studii (‘transfer of culture’), which matched intellectually the northern European political take-over from Rome known as translatio imperii23 (‘transfer of power’). Bishop Hurd, in his very influential Letters on Chivalric Romance (1762), starts by seeing the classical period as ‘Heroic’ and the Middle Ages as ‘Gothic’, speaks of ‘the old chivalry of the Gothic times’, and asserts that ‘Gothic chivalry led to Romance’.24 The general anti-classicism of the position was joined by further contemporary implications. As Nick Groom comments, Hurd ‘was effectively legitimising the medieval ballads Percy was editing in his Folio MS for the Reliques as examples of native Gothic genius’.25 Percy’s Reliques of English Poetry (1765) offers implicitly the assertion that literature of value can be found in medieval England and that in perusing it Englishness can be revered – the Reliques is also a reliquary. Percy also had a decisive northern perspective: he was familiar with Temple,26 and his first edition contains a short ‘Essay on the Ancient English Minstrels’, which links Celtic and Germanic: ‘It is well known what respect was shewn to their Bards by the Britons: and

23 For a discussion of the process by which romance was formed on an amalgam of classical tradition and modern European contexts, see Christopher Baswell, ‘Marvels of Translation and Causes of Transition in the Romances of Antiquity’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. by Roberta Krueger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 29–44. 24 Bishop Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (London: Miller, 1762), pp. i, vi. 25 Nick Groom, The Making of Percy’s Reliques (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 84. 26 Omberg, p. 50.

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no less was paid to the northern Scalds by most of the nations of Gothic race’.27 This northern interest is substantially expanded in Percy’s essay ‘On the Ancient Metrical Romances’, appearing in the third edition of 1775. His main point is that this material, including the Arthurian stories, does not trace itself from French aristocratic sources, but from the more populist and by extension more patriotic northern tradition: The seeds of chivalry sprung up so naturally out of the original manners and opinions of the northern nations, that it is not credible they arose so late as after the establishment of the Feudal System, much less the Crusades.28 Denying the impact of France, and behind it Rome, was, however inaccurate, an appealing position. Even the learned Thomas Warton basically concurred with Percy’s northern-oriented Gothicism when he stated ‘Arthur and Charlemagne are the first and original heroes of romance’.29 He was sceptical about Percy’s broad-based northernism, sensibly commenting ‘the inchantments of the Runic poetry are very different from those in our romances of chivalry’, but added ‘I do not mean entirely to reject this hypothesis’ – and he was in correspondence with Percy as he started writing his History of English Poetry.30 While he firmly, and correctly, separated ‘Odin’s Goths’ who ‘made a settlement in Scandinavia’ from those who ‘at length extinguished the Roman Empire’, and he preferred to focus on the Viking tradition, he still accepted the view of Hurd and Percy that chivalry had existed in the north, and his literary focus enabled him to link the tradition of ‘the Gothic scalds’ and Arabic story-telling as the two elements that combine in chivalric romance in France. Again, the classical tradition was conspicuously absent, and so basically were the Celts (though Percy felt they somehow transmitted Arab materials). Warton, however, incorporated Ossian by stating that ‘The Caledonians are expressly labelled by many judicious antiquaries a Scandinavian colony’. The Normans, being both northern and feudal, were seen as the lynch-pin of this complex, bringing together the traditions of Arthur and Charlemagne. In Gothic theory code, Charlemagne is a northerner, a Frank, who rescued the Roman empire for Germanicity, while Clovis was a Frank who succumbed to the Roman embrace, to become merely French.

27 Volume I, pp. xvi–xxiii, see p. xvi. 28 Thomas Percy, ‘On the Ancient Metrical Romances’, Appendix 2 of the third edition of the Reliques (1775), vol. 3, pp. 339–76, see note l, pp. 341–2. 29 Thomas Warton discusses Charlemagne and Arthur, chivalry and their connections in his ‘Dissertation’ titled ‘Of the Origin of Romantic Fictions of Europe’, in his History of English Poetry (London: Dodsley, Walter and Becket, 1774–81), vol. 1, ‘Dissertation’; this is unpaginated: the discussion runs over six pages. 30 See Joan Pittock, The Ascendancy of Taste: The Achievement of Joseph and Thomas Warton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 182.

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Warton’s evident learning and authority on earlier literature gave force to his creation of a newly independent English tradition. However, not everyone took such a favourable view of the Goths. Gibbon, who combined a detailed knowledge of military and political history from wide classical sources with a distaste for religion, especially Catholicism (with which he had formerly toyed), admired Charlemagne as a powerful ruler and re-founder of empire, but not in any way as a Goth. He describes the wars between Rome and the Goths in some detail and after a long and cool account of the Goths as warrior insurgents, sums them up as a people who resisted the civilising temptations of fertile Europe ‘and still adhered to a life of idleness, of poverty and of rapine’: later he calls the Goths ‘An undisciplined and unsettled nation of barbarians’.31 Gibbon’s scepticism apart, the appeal of the Gothic north was widespread, and this was facilitated because the term Gothic had a very broad range: Omberg comments ‘eighteenth-century writers seldom use the term Scandinavian, preferring northern, and even more frequently, Gothic’.32 It certainly meant the anti-Roman empire tribes, Goths, Huns, Vandals and Lombards, but it also certainly, as with Warton, could be taken to mean the Anglo-Saxons and the Scandinavian-VikingNorman complex which settled in Britain. More surprisingly, until about 1760 it could also mean Celts. Paul Mallet, an influential French scholar, published in 1756 in Copenhagen a book entitled Monuments de la Mythologie et de la poésie des Celtes et particulièrement des anciens Scandinaviens, but this striking confusion did not survive. Percy made the distinction very clear in his 1770 translation of Mallet’s very influential Introduction à l’Histoire de Dannemarc (1755) as Northern Antiquities, with the addition of translations of selected mythological prose Edda: in both their hands the scholarship consistently pressed what Omberg calls the ‘theme of northern liberty’, with specific reference to Montesquieu,33 and Percy published Five Pieces of Runic Poetry in 1763.34 Percy was not alone: Gray produced his translations of two Norse poems, ‘The Fatal Sisters’ and ‘The Descent of Odin’ by 1761 and published them in 1768, as a matching pair to his versions of Welsh poems. Dialectically, it was Gray’s excellent classical scholarship that enabled these influential and inherently anti-classical departures: he knew the Welsh material through the work of seventeenth-century Latin-writing Welsh scholars, and he used Latin translations of the Norse poems. But he had a clear interest in communicating the substantial alterity of both Norse

31 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 6 volumes (London: Dent, 1910), vol. 1, p. 239 and vol. 3, p. 31. 32 Omberg, p. 15. 33 Omberg, p. 53 34 On Percy’s substantial efforts in early Norse studies see Omberg, pp. 33–6, 48–57; Margaret Clunies Ross, The Norse Muse in Britain, 1750–1820 (Trieste: Parnaso, 1998), pp. 31–5 and 51–104; and the ‘Introduction’ to Clunies Ross’s edition of a facsimile of the Five Pieces of Runic Poetry Translated from the Islandic Language (Turnhout: Brépols, 2002), pp. 1–17.

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and Celtic to the classical tradition, and they seem to be a displaced affirmation of the simmering anti-establishment feeling of his better-known English poems, like the ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’ with its deeply democratic spirit (usually pigeonholed as moralism) and the remarkably anti-royal ‘The Bard’. In this respect Gray seems to bring to a political or at least ontological head the interest in the dark, the grim, the deeply felt, which is visible in both Young and Thomson and led to the three being identified as the ‘graveyard school’ of poetry. Andrew Wawn comments ‘how closely linked in the minds of many late eighteenth-century readers were the worlds of Gothic ballads, graveyard lyrics, and Eddic lay’.35 The Gothic sentiment of Walpole and the Gothic scholarship of Percy, Mallet and even Warton matched the Gothic sublime that Gray, after Thomson and Young, made so effective in his poetry, but the clinching northernism, and the current that opened the channel for the Arctic Arthur was the sudden appearance and enormous impact in the period of the Ossian phenomenon: in The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) Goethe makes his hero say ‘“Ossian has replaced Homer in my heart”’.36 After the Jacobite rising of 1745 was crushed, Scottish self-consciousness took a cultural path, and while in the cities and universities this had a classical European and intellectual basis, the encounter between Gaelic tradition and modern scholarship produced a range of translations and imitations of bardic poetry – Jerome Stone’s ‘Albin and the Daughter of Mey’ (1756) included the Gaelic original and a literal translation. These efforts were eclipsed when James Macpherson published first his Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland in 1760 and then the more ambitious series purporting to be prose versions of poems by the medieval Gaelic bard Ossian, beginning with Fingal in 1761, and gathered in The Works of Ossian in 1765. Where Stone’s calm verse merely elaborates somewhat the sentiment that is in the original both restrained and objectified (a characteristic of all early Gaelic, indeed early Celtic, literature), Macpherson insists emphatically on the voices of the Gothic north which emotionalise both the Gothic sublime and modern subjectivity, as in Fragment V: Autumn is dark on the mountains; grey mist rests on the hills. The whirlwind is heard on the heath. Dark rolls the rivers through the narrow plain. A tree stands alone on the hill, and marks the grave of Connal. The leaves whirl round with the wind, and strew the grave of the dead. At times are seen here the ghosts of the deceased, when the musing hunter alone stalks slowly over the heath.37 Part of the construction of a Scottish national consciousness is the idea that this is an ancient Scottish poetry that merely has some relation with Ireland, rather

35 Andrew Wawn, ‘John Thomas Stanley and Iceland: The Sense and Sensibility of an EighteenthCentury Explorer’, Scandinavian Studies, 53 (1981), 52–76, see p. 55. 36 Wolfgang Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, trans. Eric Lane (Sawtry: Dedalus, 1988), p. 83. 37 Ossian and Ossianism, ed. by Dafydd Moore (London: Routledge, 2004), vol. 1, see p. 141.

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than, as in reality, being a literature of ancient Irish origin transplanted to Scotland with the invasions of Dalriada in the sixth century and displacing the earlier British Celtic, that is Welsh, culture. The Ossianic material is essentially a Scottish origin legend that mimes the Gothic theory – as Stafford comments: In Macpherson’s eyes the Highlanders were direct descendants of the ancient Caledonians, who had remained undefeated by the Romans and all subsequent invasions. They seemed to be living representatives of an early society, free from the corrupting influences of civilisations and retaining the virtues of their heroic ancestors.38 The mythic family of Alpin and the MacAlpine clan, a name itself formed from the same root as Albion, the snowy country, is worked into the Irish saga-derived stories of Cuchulain, Conchobar and Oscar. But this is not just a British north: the Ossian poems frequently look towards Scandinavia and the northern seas to establish the concept of a northern heroic world different from temperate Ireland. As Omberg notes, Macpherson was familiar with Mallet’s 1755 book, before Percy’s translation of 1770.39 The texts recurrently refer to the Scandinavian north. In Macpherson’s Fingal, Book 6, it is told how Trenmor, the founder of the heroic Scottish tribes, and Fingal’s great-grandfather, fought in ‘Lochlin’, Scandinavia, and married a Viking princess; ‘Oithona’ involves Scottish war with the Orkneys; in ‘The Battle of Lora’ Fingal has to fight rival chiefs who have gained support in Scandinavia, including the love of the king’s wife. In ‘Oina Morul’ Fingal sends Ossian to help a Scandinavian ally in war on the distant island of Fuärfed, and in ‘The War of Inis-Thona’ Oscar avenges the death of his Scandinavian friends in war on another distant northern island. Wild sea journeys, dramatic northern landscapes and an overall sense of heroic activity far from feudal and Mediterranean Europe are part of the appeal of the Ossian poems. There was at the same time a growth in both travel and commerce with Scandinavia and Russia, and a series of books appeared describing and praising the intriguing north: Barton describes ‘a notable increase in the numbers of foreign visitor to the North’ and lists fifteen travel books from 1773 to 1813.40 Especially during the Napoleonic Wars, when normal grand-tour travel to Europe was impossible, there was a substantial increase in English tourism through the Baltic, but the travel-books were more than merely functional in approach. Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, in one of the earliest, sums up the mix of excitement and passivity derived from the Gothic sublime when he finds the woods ‘spread a gloom

38 Fiona J. Stafford, The Sublime Savage: A Study of James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988), p. 153. 39 Omberg, p. 145. 40 Barton, pp. 7–12.

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and awfulness not unpleasing to a contemplative mind’.41 Andrew Swinton in his more practical Travel into Norway, Denmark and Russia (1792) describes cold-weather nature and the military and commercial links between Britain and its northern neighbours, but the sublime and the Gothic north are also themes: Letter 1 deals with both the Kraken, the mighty Scandinavian sea-monster, and ‘the Ancient Norwegians’. Mary Wollstonecraft offered a more urban and intellectual account of an English visitor to Sweden in Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark.42 At the same time, the dream of a North West Passage was being invigorated. There were optimistic ideas that one last push would solve the problem, as well as the widely-held, if completely misguided, notion that the North Pole was in fact set in an ice-free sea, advocated by the energetic Daines Barrington (one of the very few northern enthusiasts to be of aristocratic family). Many were attracted by his dream of breaking through as if into some polar Pacific. Parliament clearly saw the political and commercial value of the Passage, and in 1744 offered the huge prize of £20000 for the first merchant ship to make it, then in 1776 extended this to any ship, including naval vessels. To encourage developments £5000 was offered for any ship that reached within one degree of latitude of the North Pole.43 When James Cook’s last voyage ended in 1779 with his murder in Tahiti, he was returning from exploring the Bering Sea with a view to attempting the Passage from the western end. In 1789 the first serious effort was made up Canadian rivers by Alexander Mackenzie, but international exploration was brought to a halt by the long European war. At the same time, for a mixture of reasons, imperial adventure, capitalist expansion, anti-classical feeling, Gothic excitement, democratic back-validation, the political and the personal jumbled together, it felt right for many people to see Britain as a distinctly northern country. The north Welsh landowner Thomas Pennant, whose family was to become fabulously rich exploiting north Welsh slate – and north Welsh slate-miners – was a serious scholar: his Arctic Zoology of 1784 still commands respect. Its two-hundred-page ‘Introduction of the Arctic World’ starts at Dover and through twenty-two pages moves slowly north through Britain, determinedly turning its back on the continent of Europe and centuries of culture, learning and religion. These attitudes lasted: when the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, who was both Governor-General of Canada and Viceroy of India, wrote his engaging

41 Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, Cursory Records Made on a Tour through Some of the North Parts of Europe (London: Cadell, 1775), p. 165. 42 Andrew Swinton, Travel into Norway, Denmark and Russia in the Years 1788, 1789, 1790 and 1791 (London: Robinson, 1792); Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (London: Johnson, 1796). 43 For a useful summary of these events see Peter J. Kitson, ‘Introduction’ to Travels, Explorations and Adventures: Writings from the Era of Imperial Expansion, 1770–1835, vol. 3 North and South Poles (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001), pp. vii–xxii, see pp. xv–xvii.

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Letters from High Latitudes about his 1856 trip to Iceland, he spoke of the north as a fantasy back-story for an England without, it seems, either Marquesses or Viceroys: To these Things, and to the Norse invasion that implanted them, and not to the Witangemotts of the Latinised Saxons, must be referred the existence of those Parliaments which are the boast of Englishmen. Noiselessly and gradually did a belief in liberty, and an unconquerable love of independence grow up among that simple people. No feudal despots opposed the unprotected, for all were noble.44 Intriguing, even intoxicating, for both personal and political reasons, the imaginative power of the north would encroach on the toe-hold in the Arthurian myth that it had been given by Dryden and Blackmore.

4. Arthur in the radical north While some of this cultural realisation of the north was transmitted into English poetry in more or less accurate Norse terms, as several scholars have explored,45 the combination of Gothic excitement, English liberty, heroic deeds and medievalism did have an impact on the largely dormant myth of King Arthur. Since brief resurgence and somewhat northerly direction in the hands of Dryden and Blackmore, he and Merlin had remained in a cultural underworld, often appearing only to be belittled, as in Fielding’s Tom Thumb (1730), see Chapter 15 in this collection, or in theatrical performances, mostly French comic seductions, or London spectacles with lightly-clad ladies.46 It could be argued that it was the overflow effect of the northern Gothic of the eighteenth century that initiated the return of Arthur to English poetry of any weight. Richard Hole studied law at Oxford and had military friends, but after marrying the daughter of a rich Exeter merchant he became an Anglican vicar in Devon. His first published poetry was the Ossianic Poetical Translations of Fingal (1772), but he later produced ‘The Tomb of Gunnar’, a poem taken from Njals Saga which, Wawn reports, he found in scholarly mode in Bartholin’s Latin Antiquitatum Danicarum of 1689.47 He was the first to make in this period the specific link between

44 Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple Blackwood, Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, Letters from High Latitudes (London: Murray, 1857; reprinted London, Merlin, 1990), p. 219. 45 See Omberg, 1976; Clunies Ross, 1998. Andrew Wawn’s book The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000), relating mostly to a later period, is a valuable development of these studies. 46 For the fortunes of Merlin in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries see Stephen Knight, Merlin: Knowledge and Power through the Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), pp. 112–32. 47 Richard Hole, ‘The Tomb of Gunnar’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 56 (1789), p. 937; see Wawn, pp. 250–1.

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Arthur and the north in Arthur, or The Northern Enchantment (1789);48 it has an epic form, though with the distinctly unclassical number of seven books, but on the title-page is called ‘A Poetical Romance’, looking back to the generic definitions of Percy and Warton and what the Preface calls ‘the old Gothic fable’ (p. v). The Preface also refers to ‘the extraordinary narrative of Geoffrey of Monmouth’ (p. iii), and in a fast-moving sequence name-checks Ossian, the Weird Sisters, Mallet and Bishop Hurd (pp. x–xv), defends the use in an Arthurian context of Scandinavian materials ‘for, independent of the marvellous, they were really and originally the same’ (p. xii), and even argues, along with Warton, for the existence of chivalric tournaments in the Scandinavian north (p. xv). As Omberg comments, Hole ‘although well-versed in northern myth, chose to concoct his own version’.49 The poem’s opening both appropriates Arthur to the Ossian tradition and appears to recall Blackmore: Arthur is cast ashore in the Western Isles, but Merlin assures him the fleet is safe. Hengist is fighting the British in the far north of Scotland, and Irish warriors and kings are in the battle on Arthur’s side. The Saxon invasion is strongly Scandinavianised – Hole says ‘the rude North had pour’d her iron swarms On Britain’s coast’ (2, p. 46), referring to the Saxons, Danes and Norwegians: Haakon king of Norway and Valdemar King of Denmark fight beside Hengist. The force of the Scandinavian pantheon is enlisted: in Book 4 Odin, related to both Hengist and Valdemar, appears to them, but it is Urda, an even more important and female Scandinavian deity (better-known as Urđr, one of the Norse Norns or Fates), who has previously intervened against Arthur. Northernism gathers as Hole adds lengthy notes on Valhalla (4. pp. 120–2), religious scepticism (4. pp. 123–4), skalds (4. pp. 139–40) and then in Book 6, presenting what Omberg calls ‘a similar picture’ to Thomson’s in ‘Winter’.50 relocates the story to Lapland as Arthur pursues his enemies among the Gothic sublime: Where, half the circling year grim darkness reigns: Save, when thick-glimmering mid th’ethereal plains, Heaven’s sparkling fires, or meteor’s wide-stretch’d blaze, The scene in horror visible arrays. (6. p. 173) Not only the horror is splendid: here in the far north, indeed just within the Arctic, the wounded Hengist, ‘Awaking from his death-like swoon’ (6. p. 178) sees a sight to delight a poet, and please even more his merchant father-in-law: The sapphire’s blue and topaz’ golden gleams, The ruby’s glow, the crystal’s liquid beams,

48 Richard Hole, Arthur, or The Northern Enchantment (London: Robinson, 1789). 49 Omberg, p. 69. 50 Ibid., p. 115.

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Mix’d with the diamond’s varied rays, unite In glittering wreaths to captivate the sight. (6. p. 179) Romance is also present in the plot: Hengist loves Merlin’s daughter Inogen – a presumably deliberate one-letter change from Shakespeare’s heroine in Cymbeline – and though he fails to win her, this, as in Dryden’s King Arthur, indicates the underlying nobility of the Saxons who can be welcomed, if not too directly, into the British family. But for all its Gothic appeal, the far north is eventually defeated and Merlin confines the powerful Weird Sisters in Hecla, identified in a note as ‘the Etna of the North’ (7, p. 249) – referring to one of the most famous of Arthur’s alleged locations of long sleep, as found in the thoughts of the late twelfth-century speculative quasi-historian Gervase of Tilbury . Hole has a much nimbler style and clearer structure than Blackmore, and is quite strongly invested in the power of the northern myths. The cause for the eventual triumph of Merlin and Arthur may be, as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography suggests, that as a Devon loyalist, Hole ‘was attempting to do for west Britain what Macpherson’s Ossian had done for Scotland’51 – though his setting has no localism to match Macpherson’s north, it is apparently swayed by the force of that northern focus. There were successors to Hole in the northernising of the Arthur story. A littleknown but well-defined poem directly links Arthur to the Ossian personnel, but by making its purpose lyrically elegiac disavows the political and mythical baggage of both traditions. Matilda Betham, whose poetry won praise from Coleridge, Southey and the Lambs, included in her Elegies and Other Small Poems, ‘Arthur and Albina’, a poem which the text states was written on 27th August 1794.52 The setting is Arthur’s war against the Romans, a concept that Gibbon had mentioned with some scepticism. Albina here seems a female form of the name used in a pre-Macpherson Gaelic poem by Jerome Stone, ‘Albin’, and as she is apparently from the Gaelic royalty of ancient Scotland, the Arthur-Albina love implies a panBritish union. Betham was well-read, and there may well also be some resonance of the figure of Albiona from what Anke Bernau calls ‘the “new” fourteenthcentury English origin myth’.53 Opposite the opening of the poem is stated ‘A British Maid awaits the arrival of her love from the battle on a hill where, at its commencement, she had retired to make vows to heaven for his success – Evening’. Albina speaks, anxious for

51 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 127 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 633. 52 Matilda Betham, Elegies and Other Small Poems (London: Burrell, 1797); I am very grateful to Kate Garner for drawing my attention to this poem. 53 See Anke Bernau, ‘Beginning with Albina: Remembering the Nation’, Exemplaria, 21 (2009), 247–73, see p. 247.

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the return of her lover Arthur, in a tone that invokes more the classical heroic than the Celtic sublime: Reward the flame, ye great celestial pow’rs, The noble flame that in his bosom glows! Inspire him, Druids, from your holy bow’rs With strength to conquer iron-breasted foes! (p. 3) Suddenly she hears a slow step ‘with weary caution, move’: it is Arthur, fatally wounded. ‘“Sweet maid” he says, “We made the haughty Roman chiefs retire”’ (p. 7). Then Betham plays a Welsh Celtic card: as the druids believe in metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls, Arthur says he will ‘“return, clad in a noble form, Again to triumph and again be slain”’ (p. 8). Albina mourns him as if he is indeed dead, but there suddenly appears a stranger ‘clad in robes of purest white’ whose ‘silver beard did reverence demand’ and whose ‘shrivell’d fingers grasp’d a flaming brand’ (p. 12). This imposing person is the barddruid hybrid that Gray imagined in ‘The Bard’, and that Thomas Jones influentially realised in his 1774 painting of that name. At this time most writers seem too familiar with Merlin as a clown and theatrical trickster to name him as such: occasionally he is called, with antique Welsh authority, Taliesin. Here he goes unnamed, and rather than recommending the rebirth powers of druidism which Arthur invoked, the antique Celtic dignity speaks in Christian terms. He tells Albina that her beloved ‘“To worlds of never-ending joy is flown”’ and ‘“You soon shall meet where you can part no more.”’ So finally she ‘bow’d her humble, grateful head, resigned’ (p. 13). As an elegy for a lover, the poem is ultimately richer in sad sentiment than in Celticism, and the Ossianic link is little more than the name of Albina – though there are plenty of such forlorn laments in the Macpherson materials. There also seems a link back to Warton’s impressive adventures in sentimental medievalism, published in 1777, like his Ode X, ‘The Grave of King Arthur’, Ode III, ‘Written At Vale-Royal Abbey’, and the more modernly Gothic Ode VI, ‘The Suicide’.54 A level of emotion comparable to Betham, but linking the northern material and the British commitment of Hole, is found in the liveliest and most strongly developed of these northern Arthur poems, the three-act drama The Fairy of the Lake by John Thelwall. A radical lecturer and agitator, Thelwall had in the conservative paranoia of the 1790s attracted the hostility of government forces, including spies, and in 1797 withdrew to Llyswen, a village in the Brecon Beacon mountains of south-eastern Wales. As his widow recorded,55 he identified with Wales because Thelwalls had settled in north-east Wales centuries before, though his own family

54 Thomas Warton, Poems (London: Becket, 1777). 55 See The Life of John Thelwall, by his Widow (London: MacCrone, 1837), p. 1.

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had returned to England. He clearly invested emotional energy in the country: a moving series of poems where he and his wife mourn their infant daughter are all set in some nearby place, and The Fairy of the Lake, written in this period, which he calls a ‘dramatic romance’,56 energises nearby locations and Welsh myths to retell the story of Arthur versus the Saxons in a nationalised and distinctly British form. The long first act ultimately draws on Geoffrey of Monmouth, much northernised: Rowenna is daughter of Hengist and wife of Vortigern, but she is also a full-blown Norse sorceress, who invokes in high Gothic mode Woden, the Fatal Sisters, Thor and the frozen north: . . . Even the nether world, Seasons, and circling Elements obey My potent biddings. Cloud-compelling Thor Must wield his thundering Gauntlet, or controul, With lifted Mace, the Giants of the Frost If I but chaunt the Rhyme. (1.1, p. 6) But this is a romance, and the British have powers: Rowenna is in love with Arthur and plans to unite their persons and their peoples in a new version of the Celtic-Saxon rapprochement idea that had been long a topic among historians.57 Thelwall admired Dryden,58 and drew this idea from him, as he does the notion of the Incubus who is ‘son of Frost’ (1.2, p. 15) and says: ‘O! how gay then I’ll flirt and I’ll flutter around, Where the belles of the young 19th Cent’ry are found! Their charms so obtrusive shall kindle a flame, Shall melt all the ice that now stiffens my frame; And I’ll think while Love’s ardour shall glow in each pore, Of the regions of Frost and of Hell as no more’. (1.2, p. 18) Where Dryden and Purcell make the idea poetically and musically entrancing, Thelwall, as capable of poetical as political disruption, makes it a comic scene, with room for theatrical body-humour in words like ‘obtrusive’ and ‘stiffens’. Comedy continues: the Incubus manages to immobilise all of Arthur’s men except the king himself and Tristram, who is represented as a drunken Welshman,

56 John Thelwall, ‘The Fairy of the Lake’, in Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement (Hereford: West; London: Hughes, 1801), pp. 1–92. 57 For a discussion of this recurrent re-imagining of the war for control of Britain as a civil war with a one-nation resolution see Knight, Merlin, pp. 83–4. 58 On Thelwall’s use of Dryden see Roger Simpson, Camelot Regained: The Arthurian Revival and Tennyson 1800–1849 (Cambridge: Brewer, 1990), p. 128.

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with a song about ‘Cwrw’, the Welsh for beer: he is even more comic than Shakespeare’s Fluellen, but will turn out to be just as military. The setting is also Welsh: Arthur and his men are wandering along the ‘Lunvey’ or Llynfi, a small river flowing from Llyn Syfaddan, also called Lake Llangorse, near which Thelwall was living. This lake is where Vortigern’s castle stands, moved by Thelwall from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s north Wales into the Brecon Beacons of south Wales. He calls the castle Gwrtheyrnion: Gwrtheyrn is the modern Welsh version of the name Vortigern. Rowenna encounters Arthur wandering in despair at having failed to save Guenever, Vortigern’s daughter, from her evil father’s control: the enchantress has hopes – ‘“I am calm, in confidence renew’d, And wait predicted bliss”’ (2.4, p. 49) – and as her troupe imprisons him in a magic dance, she offers him everything: ‘Generous Arthur! Too long by an unworthy flame inthrall’d To an incestuous wanton: lo! my Charm Shall set you free: and on a worthier choice Empire and Love await, and deathless Fame’. (2.4, p. 54) As in Dryden, Arthur is able to resist both magic and deception – Rowenna claims Guenever is Vortigern’s incestuous lover – and her Norse prophecies of success in love prove wrong when Arthur angrily replies: ‘Sorceress of Elb! devoted Britain’s curse! Hence with thy wanton chant. Tho thus inthrall’d – Betray’d by Love’s affliction (sentient there Beyond a maiden’s softness) in these bonds Powerless I stand, yet can my soul disdain Thy blandish’d witcheries’. (2.4, p. 55) Rejecting the northern Gothic, Thelwall’s preference for British tradition – a proactive version of Hole’s western loyalism – leads him to deploy the Lady of the Lake as Arthur’s rescuer. She has been watching over him, but this is not just the useful sword-provider of Malory: she is the Lady of Llangorse Lake. Thelwall creates her as another of the powerful water-spirits of Welsh myth, like the Lady of Llyn y Fan Fach, just to the north. Judith Thompson can see no more here than ‘a deus ex machine (sic)’ in ‘a masque-like allegory’,59 but in fact this

59 Judith Thompson, ‘A “Double-Visag’d Fate”: John Thelwall and the Hapless Hope of Albion’, in John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon, ed. by Steve Poole (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), pp. 125–39, see p. 135.

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idea has strong British roots. The lady rescues Arthur and transports him to his Arthurian base, where all the knights are awakened from the spell cast by the Norse Incubus. Act 3 in this well-organised and often powerfully-written play is the dramatic siege of Vortigern’s castle – there seem signs that Scott used this as a model for the attack on Torquilstone in Ivanhoe. Tristram reappears, now sober, and engages in both comic action and the rescue of Guenever. Rowenna has murdered her husband Vortigern, but Arthur rejects her overtures of peace, and passion, on the grounds of her murderous nature rather than ethnic hostility. A spectacular ending follows which, although the piece was apparently never performed, deploys the typically grandiose stage effects of contemporary theatre – fire on stage and a collapsing tower. The tower of course refers back to the original crumbling Vortigern’s tower in Geoffrey of Monmouth, and with a fine flourish Thelwall decrees that the lake on which the tower was unwisely founded is in fact a base for the Lady herself: she rescues Guenever from the falling tower, and sums up: ‘See, Arthur, see! to crown your matchless worth, Nature relents, and miracles have birth’. (3.5, p. 86) Lake Llangorse itself ‘“now spreads at my command”’ and she states that it, as indeed it still does, ‘. . . shall stand, An alpine wonder in the Cambrian land’. (3.5, p. 86) It is not only a finely written moment: Thelwall is also asserting that Britain has its own resources of Gothic splendour to match its inner heroic identity. The ferocious northernism of Rowenna, so vigorously realised in the first act, has itself been defeated in favour of the British tradition of Arthur: this could be interpreted as a thematic pattern to match Thelwall’s own taking refuge in Wales itself, but wider politics are involved. Arthur himself is less than a warrior: Lupack has commented how unheroic he is, like the play itself.60 Arthur is more a man of moral rigour and unswerving faith, not unlike Thelwall, and while the latter may have made a strategic retreat to Wales, his views are unchanged. By firmly linking Rowenna to the Elbe, that central river of Germany, Thelwall connects the negativity of northern magic and planned national take-over to the house of Hanover, so much the enemy of radicals like himself. Vernon Grumbling has seen the references as being against a war-time alliance with conservative Prussia and

60 Arthurian Drama: An Anthology, ed. by Alan Lupack (New York: Garland, 1991), pp. xvi–xvii.

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Austria,61 but Arthur’s words have a more personal and more Britain-oriented impact than that, having a contemporary edge that classes the northern Gothic as distinctly negative. Accordingly the poem ends with elegant, magic-loving Welsh poetry from Taliessin about the Lady and her Lake: ‘May ever on thy brink appear Earliest fragrance of the year, And lingering Autumn in the face Reflected see his latest grace;’ (3.6, pp. 91–2) But the Chorus has the last word and it wishes to ‘Blow the martial trump again, Give to Fame the closing strain’ (3.6, p. 92), both an assertion that the poem is underlyingly about national conflicts played out at the cultural level, and, it may well be, a promise that Thelwall will himself be returning to the political battle – as was indeed to be the case in the year that The Fairy of the Lake was published, 1801. Arthur’s enemies are the north embodied, and the Gothic attraction of northern myth. The political notion of northern freedom, which attracted so many either in itself or through the Ossian prism, and which Hole appropriated for the western Arthurian tradition, is here seen as Germanic hostility to true British freedom: Thelwall’s drama is effectively an anti-northern text. In this it was of its period, as the idea of a northern Arthur seem to fade away, presumably because the idea of the north as standing for English freedoms did not weather the storms of conservatism that the French revolution caused in Britain, and ‘the Gothic idea’ was not heard again with any liberal political force. The attraction of the Gothic sublime remained powerful at an emotive and personal level, as in the Gothic novel, but Thelwall’s radical anti-Gothicism was the last to be heard of the northern Gothic until, ironically, it became attractive to conservatives in the post-war generation.

5. Arthur in the conservative North For nearly a generation the northern Gothic was marginal. Reginald Heber, bishop, poet and fine medievalist, visited Scandinavia and Russia in 1805, and wrote vividly about the trip, but he records that a planned search for ‘Runic antiquities’ was disrupted by rain.62 His work is equally distant from the value of the imagined north, except briefly in the well-known hymn ‘From Green-

61 Vernon O. Grumbling, ‘John Thelwall: Romantick and Revolutionist’, Ph.D. thesis, University of New Hampshire, 1977, p. 183. 62 His letters on the journey are reprinted in The Life of Reginald Heber DD by his Widow, 2 volumes (London: Murray, 1830), see vol. 1, p. 61.

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land’s icy mountains’. There are almost no northernisms in Heber’s unfinished poem ‘Morte d’Arthur’, though he does represent the Saxons Arthur humiliates as having Scandinavian connections when ‘the Scandia raven’s robber wing Stoop’d to his dragon banner’ (1.7, p. 192) and later ‘the youth of Denmark’ are fighting against Arthur (3.22, p. 360). A similar cultural northern interest, with a more overt masculinism, is evident in the work of M. G. Lewis, which seems to steadily move north. His first novel The Monk (1796) relocated the woman-oriented and emotively-positive Gothic novel of southern Europe, exemplified by Ann Radcliffe, to a more sadistic and male-focused Catholic Madrid; his play The Castle Spectre (1801) was based on German sources and he is also the author of Tales of Wonder (1801),63 a set of Gothic ballads with links to Ossian but also directly using Scandinavian material, especially ‘The Sword of Agantyr’ and ‘King Hacho’s Death Song’, going back to Percy’s Five Pieces of Runic Poetry, but also look forward to the Blackwood’s Magazine ‘Tales of Terror’ which, as part of what Ian Duncan calls the magazine’s ‘thoroughgoing reactionary aesthetic’, often used a wild northern setting to realise individualistic masculinism.64 Not all were impressed by Lewis’s posturing poetry: an amusing parody, Tales of Terror, also appeared in 1801, with jokes like ‘Believe not every courteous knight, Lest he should prove a water-sprite’.65 The progress of hostilities with France, that had made so difficult a radical position like Thelwall’s, also made maritime adventures to the north more a matter of the navy in the Baltic or tourists, like Heber, substituting Russia for Italy – this is the period when St Petersburg became known as the Venice of the North. But the idea of the sublime north was not forgotten: it provides an intriguing frame to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), in which the northern explorer Walton meets both the scientist and – out on the ice – his fugitive monster. The northern frame may be in part influenced by Mary Shelley’s mother’s Swedish diaries, by her own residence in northern Scotland,66 and also by the sudden deterioration in the climate: she wrote her great novel in ‘the year without a summer’, 1816, when a sudden Arctic ice-melt was causing temperatures to drop across Europe. But the frame might be more fully understood as Shelley’s powerful parallel to the earlier writers who deployed the northern Gothic as a medium to reconstitute

63 M. G. Lewis, Tales of Terror, 2 volumes (London: Bulmer, 1801). 64 Ian Duncan, ‘Walter Scott, James Hogg and Scottish Gothic’, in A Companion to the Gothic, ed. by David Punter (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 70–8, see p. 73. On the central role of gender in Gothic fiction see Donna Heiland, Gothic and Gender: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Cyndy Hendershot, The Animal Within: Masculinity and the Gothic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998). 65 Tales of Terror, p. 21. 66 Miranda Seymour, Mary Shelley (London: Murray, 2000), p. 77, argues that Shelley started the Walton frame-story when living in Broughty Ferry in 1812, near the whaling port of Dundee, where people were familiar with the Arctic and ships being frozen in.

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value: it is just that she did it in a fully modern way that reverberates to the present, in terms of science, politics and gender, whereas they used the older certainties of heroic romance and masculinism as their basis of value. It is, however, notable that both Hole and Thelwall, as if proleptic of and responding to the feminist concerns so strongly focused by Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft in her major book A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), substantially restrain the masculinism of early Arthurian romance – Hole did this through the still romanceoriented Merlin’s daughter story and Thelwall more positively through the newly empowered Lady of the Lake. Nineteenth-century developments made the northern world newly attractive, and not just to democratic fantasists or lovers of the sublime. The ice-melt of 1816 did not merely affect the weather severely. The shrewd and energetic John Barrow, who went on to become Second Lord of the Admiralty – the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes him as ‘an ardent imperialist’ – realised that this might make easier the fabled North West Passage, and also knew that in 1816 the Russians were at work on a North East Passage around their northern shores. In April 1818 John Ross and David Buchan left London on separate governmentsponsored explorations – the imperial undertow of the northern myth is clear when the Scottish Ross named the Inuit he met ‘Arctic Highlanders’.67 In 1819 William Edward Parry was at Melville Island, and John Franklin was on his first journey on the northern Canadian rivers.68 This revival of North West Passage excitement in 1818 coincided with Henry Milman publishing his Samor, Lord of the Bright City.69 He had been working on it since at school at Eton, soon after Thelwall’s verse drama was published, but this involvement of Arthurian story with an updated version of eighteenth-century northern Gothic must have had some connection with the new excitements, if only in terms of its reception. Samor appeared just after three editions of Malory in 1816–17, the first since 1634, and Milman appears to be consciously directing his epic poem away from familiar Malorian paths by focusing it in title and to some degree narrative on Samor, another name for Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Eldol, Count of Gloucester, based on Robert of Gloucester, Henry I’s powerful illegitimate son.70 Milman also moved in circles of power – his father was George III’s physician (a coincidental resemblance to William of Orange’s Blackmore), he did brilliantly at Oxford, was a Fellow of Brasenose College and then Professor of Poetry (like Warton before him): he went on to be a prolific poet and scholarly writer, editing Gibbon, attacking Newman, and ending in the high position of Dean of St Paul’s.

67 68 69 70

See Kitson, p. viii. See Kitson, pp. xvii–xviii. Henry Milman, Samor: Lord of the Bright City (London: Murray, 1818). In this sideways step via Geoffrey of Monmouth, Milman predicts the move by another well-connected person, Lady Mary Stewart, who in the 1970s used Geoffrey as the source for the first of her Arthur series at a time when T. H. White and Vinaver’s new Oxford University Press edition had made Malory newly dominant.

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It is curious that this pillar of the establishment and Thelwall, his precise opposite, should both mesh Arthur and the northern myth, but they do so quite differently. Milman is much happier than Thelwall with the British-Saxon compromise idea, going back to Dryden and before, and he effectively opens the second, conservative phase of the northern Arthur, which will actually take the king to the Arctic. Samor starts fairly conventionally with Arthurian adventures versus the Saxons, but in Book 3 the Welsh chieftain Caswallon of the Mountains, now Arthur’s ally, ventures north and the Gothic sublime emerges through, as so often, the Northern Lights: With show of heavenly warfare daunting earth To that wild revel of the northern clouds. (3.126–7, pp. 51–2) There is also a clear celebration of the Germanic people who are coming to Britain – both it would seem English back-dated patriotism and a sense of solidarity with the Germans who fought together with Britain at Waterloo: the Germanic ‘iron wealth of warriors’ are, reverting to Gothic theory, those who ‘shook free Rome with dread’ (3.371, 375, p. 62). Arthurian activities continue, leading to a lengthy final battle, represented with that mix of brutality and sentiment characteristic of armchair military enthusiasm. The Saxon leader has the much-used Norse name Argantyr, and it is finally he who predicts the one-nation theme, foreseeing a time when: . . . flow Their waters reconcil’d in one broad bed, Briton and Anglian one in race and name. (12. 171–2, p. 56) Milman is both more conservatively patriotic and more certainly masculinist than Hole or Thelwall. This is in part due to his establishment position, but it also seems that the actuality of polar expedition in itself reduced the imaginative development of the northern Arthur of the later eighteenth century: the explorers had become the chivalric heroes. Just after Milman published Samor, Ross’s account of his expedition with Parry to Baffin Island was widely admired – Keats referred to it with some excitement in a letter to his brother and sister.71 If changes of taste and attitudes, political and personal, were against both Arthur and the northern Gothic, especially among the major Romantics, there was to be

71 The Letters of John Keats, ed. by Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 volumes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), vol. 2, pp. 6–7; in a letter of 16th December 1818 to his brother and sister Keats refers to the dramatic experiences related in Captain John Ross’s just-published A Voyage of Discovery, about the Ross-Parry maritime expedition to Baffin Island.

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one last, indeed final, creation of the Arctic Arthur, appropriately by the liberalturned-conservative Edward Bulwer Lytton. Seeking a form of high-culture grandeur to equal his standing in popular fiction, he produced his slow-moving, stanzaic epic King Arthur (1848). It looked back across time to Blackmore, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and the northern Arthur of the eighteenth century, but Lytton wanted also to speak about the present – the satirised King Clovis is clearly Louis Philippe of France, and like Milman he generates a vision of modern Britain from his massive epic. In his lengthy Preface he writes ‘the Romance from which I borrow is the Romance of the North – a Romance like the Northern mythology, full of typical meaning and latent import’ (p. ix). This is straight from Percy and the Gothic theorists, though it has Lytton’s characteristic mix of self-importance and melodrama: he continues about ‘The Great North from which Chivalry sprung – its polar seas, its natural wonders, its wild legends, its antediluvian remains’ (p. xii). He had, like everyone, read Ross’s adventures, and he seems to have set to work after Franklin left on his much-vaunted expedition for the Passage in 1845. The Gothic sublime enters the poem early: Arthur is on a sort of holiday in Wales when a ‘Phantom’ calls him and leaves behind a sense of ‘ice-bound horror’ (1.16, p. 8); the Arthur-Charlemagne connection from Warton is linked to the northern sublime – racial history as bad weather: . . . . The North Pour’d from its teeming breast, in tumult driven Now to, now fro, as thunder-clouds sent forth To darken . . . burst, – and bursting, clear the heaven; Ere yet the Nomad nations found repose, And order dawn’d as Charlemain arose. (2.44, p. 73) After crossing Europe, somewhat in the spirit of Gibbon – Arthur even visits an Etruscan ‘Happy Valley’ – the plot moves north. Gawaine is an amusing figure, perhaps an imitation of Thelwall’s comic but also soldierly Tristram, with an unfortunate reliance on Lytton’s attempt to imitate Byron’s flickering wit: he is captured by Vikings, but will escape. Arthur himself ends up in the frozen north, sleeping like some displaced Galahad on a deserted Viking ship. The crew arrive, they sail off in this world of ‘Magnificent horror’ (9.3, p. 82). The amazing battle with the walruses follows, resolved in pure melodrama like a modern all-action movie when one disaster – an iceberg collision formed a tidal wave – solves the other, and the walrus-attack is washed away. They sail on, and Arthur speaks like a North West Passage seeker: ‘Lo where the icebay frees us from the wave And yields a port in what we deemed a grave!’ (9.34, p. 92) 209

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Northerly exploration follows: Well had divined the King, – as on they glide, They see the silvery Arctic fox at play, Sure sign of land, – and, scattering wild and wide, Clamour the sea gulls, luring to his prey The ravening glaucus sudden shooting o’er The din of wings from the grey gleaming shore. (9.37, p. 93) These are all local fauna: the ‘glaucus’ is the Iceland glaucous gull. As equally fits the context, they become, like North West Passagers, ice-bound. When their ship is destroyed, they take to the freezing land but only Arthur has any spirit and strength: ‘Forth from the tomblike hamlet strays the King’ (9.50, p. 98). In a scene close to bathos, they are all rescued by the comic Gawain, living there among the ‘Esquimaux’. In banally Byronic mode the text visits his igloo: But Gawaine’s home, more dainty than the rest Betray’d his tastes exotic and luxurious, The walls of ice in furry hangings drest. Form’d an apartment elegant if curious; Like some gigantic son of Major Ursa Turn’d inside out by barbarous vice versâ. (9.71, p. 106) Book 10 has them sailing on in ‘Polar Seas’, presumably in the long-abandoned Daines Barrington tradition, and Arthur gains the ‘Silver Shield of Thor’ that will help him triumph. Lytton melodramatically (and with over-excitable enjambement) generalises the vigour of the north into the renewed English claim to represent freedom. The Shield is being kept: For one whose race, with Odin’s blent, shall be Lords of the only realm which suits the Free Ocean! (10.87–8, p. 154) There is even a fantasy offer by the Norse chieftains of military assistance: ‘Needs’t thou our arms against the Saxon foe ? Our flag shall fly where’r thy trumpets blow!’ (10.88, p. 154) And Lytton himself speaks to bring to a triumphalist head the previous two centuries’ idea that the north was the cradle of freedom: 210

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What made the Briton free? not crashing thrones Nor parchment laws? The charter must begin In Scythian tents, the steel of Nomad spears; To date the freedom, count three thousand years! (10.80, p. 151) Nevertheless, the Saxons’ own affiliation to the Norse north is not of ultimate value: as the final battle for Britain approaches Round Odin’s shrine wild Priests, rune-muttering, Task the weird omens hateful to the skies; (12.46, p. 252) And after the battle The North’s fierce idol, roll’d in pools of blood, Lies crush’d before the Cross of Nazareth. (12.168, p. 293) The distance between this triumphalism and the year of revolution in which it was published, 1848, was too far for credibility, and Lytton lacked the poetic energy or thematic subtlety of a Dryden, Thelwall or even Hole to give conviction to his political arguments. His northern Gothic is a hundred years away from the aesthetic and individualist origins of that important force of cultural renovation, and in any case, like Blackmore, his method of compilation rather than imaginative regeneration did not generate the power of the Arthurian tradition at its best – which the world would soon see again in Tennyson’s hands. But at least Lytton’s mix of technical skill and sheer determination as a compiler meant that he constructed the major text of the Arctic Arthur: his plodding steps reached the final achievement of that journey of infertile discovery that had begun so long ago in Geoffrey of Monmouth, and his epic poem still stands, a lonely unvisited cairn of stony stanzas in a deserted waste of misplaced frozen epic.

6. Arthur leaves the North The tradition of the Arctic Arthur led up to Lytton, and it also died with him: but not simply because the poem is clumsy or uncertain in tone. All Lytton’s work is like that, but much of it has survived, and indeed seems to be strengthening on the modern international literary market. In this case, history was as cruel to his hopes of epic glory as to the men he implicitly wrote about. In the same year that Lytton published King Arthur, the Admiralty launched a search for Franklin and the missing Passage explorers: the tragic and wretched ways in which the men and their ship were lost was revealed in 1859, the very year in which Tennyson would fulfil the promise of his 1842 poem ‘Morte Darthur’ and refashion Arthur as a figure 211

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of morality and masculinity that were both uncertain and contemporary, a figure who faced in passionate women and easily distracted men challenges much more intriguing, memorable and self-revealing to the Victorian audience than the frozen north and a mob of angry walruses. The quest for the North West Passage was remembered as a noble and tragic British failure, in sentimental journalism and in those core indicators of English official culture, prize poems at Oxford and Cambridge.72 The still closed Passage would wait for global warming; meanwhile the quest for the poles would in its turn offer both bold aspiration and emotive English failure. Arthur’s strange romance in the north would melt in the heat generated by the personal and political energy through which Tennyson, Mark Twain, Edwin Arlington Robinson and T. H. White would clarify a role for chivalric romance as central in an interpretation – not a very positive one – of moral leadership in the modern bourgeois world. Eighteenth-century scholars and authors had, for an intriguing variety of reasons, sent Arthur and his story on a journey into the excitements of the Gothic north, but by the mid-nineteenth century that had become a domain so foreign, forbidding and far away that neither Arthur nor his myth could find passage through to the safe seas of literary prosperity.

72 In a striking example of contextual parallelism at the universities, the high period of exploration was realised at Cambridge by George Stovin Venables in ‘The Attempt Made to Find a North-West Passage’, 1828 and at Oxford in 1829 by Thomas Legh Claughton (later Bishop of St Albans) with ‘Voyage of Discovery to the Polar Regions’. Then the Franklin disaster was both deplored and justified, morally and nationally at Oxford (with an over-optimistic title) in Francis Law Latham’s ‘The Discovery of the North West Passage’, 1858, and at Cambridge in ‘The Arctic Regions’, 1859, by F. W. Farrar, who combined the moral and active strands of English authority by being the future Dean of Canterbury Cathedral and grandfather of Field-Marshal Montgomery.

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Part 3 MODERN APPROACHES TO MEDIEVAL MATERIALS

12 RESEMBLANCE AND MENACE A post-colonial reading of Peredur

From: Canhwyll Marchogyon: Cyd-destunoli Peredur (‘Candle of the Knights: Contextualising Peredur’), ed. by Sioned Davies and Peter Wynn Thomas (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000)

1 The authority of that mode of colonial discourse that I have called mimicry is therefore stricken by an indeterminacy: mimicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal. (Bhabha, 1994, p. 86)

There is nothing new in suggesting that Peredur was created in a context where Welsh and Norman-French cultures meet, whether in the south-east as R. M. Jones (1957) argued, or in the north as Peter Wynn Thomas’s dialect researches suggest (1993). It is, though, a new and potentially very illuminating approach to conceive the textual relationship with Welsh and French texts, as realised in Peredur, in terms of colonisation and the complex culture that is generated in that process. I want here to employ some of the insights and analyses that have recently been developed in post-colonial criticism to cast light on this early, though by no means unique, example of a basically colonial text in Welsh. In this I will be deploying some of the ideas of the post-colonial critic Homi Bhabha. His work is particularly interesting both because of its searching nature and also because it focuses on the actual form of the colonial text as a medium of meaning, whereas much postcolonial criticism is concerned primarily with a politics not embodied in the texts but immanent in the social and ethnic conflict to which they relate. It is appropriate to give some outline of Bhabha’s statements before looking at how they might cast light on Peredur. Post-colonial criticism, it is worth noting, operates in an enigmatic time-space. The criticism is itself after colonialism because it looks back at the process from beyond the phenomenon itself; but the critics are speaking as if they are now outside a colonised cultural and social

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system where they have in fact lived, and whose language and customs they still largely practice; they are themselves the products of a highly sophisticated colonial education and are aware of the compromising nature of their situation. That sense of dual temporality and influence, of highly qualified authority, is often part of the scholarly discourse itself, notably so with Bhabha. It may well also be so in the case of modern academic interpreters of early Cymric, working as they usually do inside an academic structure that is certainly not so clearly Celtic in its epistemology or ontology. But that sense of inculpation, of evaluative indeterminacy, is, I will argue, a marked feature of Peredur itself. We can learn from the texts. In his well-known, much-discussed essay ‘Of mimicry and man: the ambivalence of colonial discourse’ (first published in the journal October 28 (1984), 125–33 – but I will refer throughout to the more readily available version in Bhabha’s 1994 book The Location of Culture), Bhabha explores the persistent presence and the elusive role of mimicry in the colonial situation. The native-born Indian, for example, might well speak, dress and write in modes associated with the power of the English imperial presence. But such mimicry would never be entirely ventriloqual, as the speaking faces would remain nonEuropean, as would much of the positioning: Rabrindinath Tagore is a major English-language writer, but not an English writer in the national sense. Bhabha uses the deliberately challenging word ‘hybrid’ for such a figure. Robert Young (1995, pp. 22–6) has recently suggested that Bhabha participates in racialist power structures through using this term, but that reading seems in itself partial, using an unduly sexualised agenda and too little aware of the conscious ironies of Bhabha’s usage – and the hybrid in botany is the stronger form. As part of defending, and reapplying, Bhabha’s usage, it might well also be noted here that not only the coloniser’s discourses of conservative power can be mimicked: Mulk Raj Anand, the Bengali Marxist novelist, grew his own hybridity on a different radical European stock, which he developed in the English language, but mostly in Indian contexts. If those processes can be interpreted as mimicry produced by the colonised, it should be noted that there is another sort of writing that emerges from the experience of the coloniser. Kipling is thought of as a crassly imperialist writer, and he did produce work of that kind, especially in poetry, but he also creates a hybrid text, both admiring and appropriating some Indian values; while it is easy to see ‘Gunga Din’ as patronising and Kim as a public-school espionage story, there is a degree of racially-based indeterminacy and re-evaluation about them, a questioning of the full authority of the white ruler which hybridises with colonised values. In the medieval Arthurian context, Chrétien de Troyes may well be a Kiplingesque figure, dominating and exploiting, yet also being seduced by, Celticity of various kinds: but that is another issue, another paper. The point is to explore how mimicry can be a multiple medium for critique of colonial authority, or at least can be a means of realising an unstable and inherently hybrid sociocultural situation, such as that found in parts of twelfth-century Wales. Within the rule of colonial power the play of the text can ironise the new 216

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culture, value the old, and more particularly produce a structural and aesthetic matrix for the conflicted feelings and self-considerations of people who receive and in some ways mimic the imposed social and cultural forces. The literary process weaves those complex forces into a whole statement, riven as it will be with tensions of various kinds. If the voice is that of mimicry, and the character and author and text are hybrid, the organising technique of the mimicked hybridity is what post-colonialism describes as syncretic, a credible, yet still visible and so disputable, linking together of discrete elements. Least discussed in post-colonialist theory, probably because of the flight from formalism that has followed the diminution of the Leavisite and New Critical schools of close reading, the meaning of form in the syncretic colonial text can be very revealing. The syncretic text will linguistically, imagistically, structurally, bring together formal elements which are not usually found together and which mark, even realise, the ideological and personal strains of the colonised situation. My last point in this opening general account is to consider the remarks by Bhabha which I am using as epigraph in the title for this chapter. The epigraph sums up Bhabha’s subtlest and most radical thoughts on this topic. He begins a major sequence of his essay by dealing a simple card: ‘mimicry represents an ironic compromise’ (1994, p. 86). New Criticism could get that far, and be happy to admire blandly the tension revealed. Bhabha goes further. He moves on to state that ‘the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence’ (1994, p. 86). Critical theory tightens up the language, sharpens the perceptions: this is now a ‘discourse’, that is language with power in context; matters are ‘constructed’, they do not just exist naturally ab ovo: ‘ambivalence’ is the anti-centralist focus of this argument. With his theoretical throat cleared in this way, Bhabha lays out his analysis in full form, saying that the ‘authority’ of ‘that mode of colonial discourse that I have called mimicry’ arises through the nature of its multiplicity, which is ‘stricken by an indeterminacy’ (1994, p. 86). He indicates that there will be something present of which we cannot be confident; the power of the hybrid discourse runs in more ways than one – but one function of which we can be sure is ‘disavowal’: the authority of the colonial situation is resisted. But there may be more than imposed power to disavow; by being hybridised, the voice of the colonised may, in its antique purity, itself be disavowed. As with Rushdie and the Mullahs, there may as a result be a crucial split and disavowal present between the mimic artist and the native sources of cultural authority which are being deployed as part of the hybrid structure. The mimicker in some way gives value to the thing mimicked. Nobody comes out clean. As Bhabha sums up epigrammatically, and for me in titular form, ‘mimicry is at once resemblance and menace’ (1994, p. 86). The ‘resemblance’ that is created in the mimicry looks in two directions: both coloniser and colonised are involved as subject and object of the mimicry; the brutality of the coloniser and the exploitation of the colonised are at once represented, revealed and evaluated, even in menacing terms, in the process of hybridised mimicry. 217

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2 That set of positions almost demands to be brought to bear on Peredur – and indeed on the texts of many English-language Welsh authors, like Caradoc Evans and the Thomas trio, Dylan, R.S., and Gwyn (of Rhondda) – but not on those who are inherently unhybridised either by remaining inward-facing like Dafydd ap Gwilym, or by being inherently relocated elsewhere like Raymond Williams. To focus on Peredur, the medieval Welsh context is clearly colonial, with the imposed power Anglo-Norman in racial and political terms and Norman-French in cultural terms, as is indicated in the text by great castles, ethnic intermarriage, place-names, sociopolitical practices and, of special interest here, cultural manifestations. It is evidently appropriate to construct an argument about how Peredur looks in terms of a post-colonialist critique. Since critics began to tire of the apparently endless speculation about the relationship of Peredur to Chrétien’s Perceval, there have been a number of structural analyses of Peredur, the most searching being those by Goetinck (1975), who saw the text as elaborating a range of episodes deriving from a sovereignty myth, and Lloyd-Morgan (1981) who stressed the oral and non-linear character of the narrative, but also perceptively described many balances and connections between sequences through the story. Commentators tend to concur broadly on the various segments of the story (which largely agree with the divisions indicated with large initials in the White Book, for what that is worth), but to group them in from three to five segments depending on their wish to connect, or to separate, themes beneath the story. Lovecy summarised these arguments at some length in his essay on structure (1978, pp. 139–45) and more briefly in his overview essay on Peredur (1991, pp. 172–4). Yet for all this analysis there has been little recent confidence that the structure has any rationale: Lovecy has firmly criticised Goetinck’s view of a sovereignty-focused single structure and comments that ‘The structure of the separate parts of Peredur could still be examined more closely’ (1978, p. 146). Lloyd-Morgan (1981, pp. 230–1) shows many interesting parallels and continuities between elements of the tale, yet she does not see a ‘deeper structure’ in existence – but rather ‘a central narrative trunk’, which is the story of Peredur himself, with ‘side-shoots’ that are not clearly connected but, in the characteristic mode of oral narrative, enrich and expand the tale. Lovecy’s negative and Lloyd-Morgan’s positive analysis of the structure of the tale both seem valid; but I want to argue here for the existence of a further pattern, namely that the lack of a sovereignty-centred deep structure, the oscillation between incident and incident, and the relation between ‘central narrative trunk’ and ‘sideshoots’ can all be understood in terms of the types of writing and the types of response that come from, and also express, the position of a writer in a colonial situation. A reading based on a post-colonial premise sees the text divide clearly into four segments. The first runs up to Peredur’s acceptance by Arthur and the king’s rebuke of Cai for being rude to the young man; the second moves through a range of varied adventures until Peredur’s relationship with Angharad Law Eurog 218

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(‘Angharad Golden Hand’) and his remaining at Arthur’s court; the third goes up to his fourteen-year relationship with the Ymerodres (‘Empress’); and then follows the last sequence of the text. Other analysts divide the opening half differently, often, like Thurneysen (1912, p. 186), continuing the first part until the end of the ‘blood on the snow’ sequence. But the slightly different divisions I have proposed rest on stages in the socialisation, the colonial incorporation, of the hero. Several of these sections will be seen to have structural and thematic variations within them, especially the last sequence, which falls into two quite different parts, with relation to source treatment and its presentation of native and imposed materials. But the movement of the whole text appears to depend on these four, as it were, acts of the developing sociocultural drama, four stages in realising in cultural form the tensions between colonised and coloniser.

3 The opening pages of the text seem to plot clear moves in a bi-cultural tension where Celtic and Gallic motifs and themes collide in a continuous narrative. The process is syncretic, the effect is hybrid. Peredur himself is from the British Old North, become Northumberland. He is the last male survivor of warfare, bundled off to safety among ‘meek contented folk who were incapable of combats or wars’ (translations are taken from Jones and Jones, 1949, abbreviated as JJ: JJ 183). The warlike past is consumed, replaced by a cowering present remembering only dimly and tragically the native glories of the past, lost in yr Hen Ogledd, ‘the Old North’. The motif of the last survivor is well enough known in Welsh – as in the early Llywarch Hen poetic saga or the figure of Gorau in Culhwch ac Olwen, but here the cause of past disaster is itself modern in reference, as is implied by the fact that Efrog fought in a Gallic twrneimeint as well as in Cymric ymladeu a ryueloed (‘battles and wars’) (references to the text are to Goetinck’s edition of Historia Peredur, 1976, abbreviated as HP, here: HP 7.3–4). This hybridised treatment continues in Peredur’s encounter with knights. They are not simply Anglo-Norman colonial oppressors: they are also heroes of Celtic culture – Gwalchmai, Gwair and Owain. Peredur may at first represent a location for innocent Celticity between a lost past and a compromised present, but he, and so we, are at once drawn into the structures of mimicry central to the imperialising situation and familiar in colonial literature at large. This process is exemplified in a brilliant image, one of many in this text, and a classic of colonised mimicry: having seen these Gallo-Celtic knights, Peredur the pure Cymro (‘Welshman’) imitates their harness and trappings with ‘withes’, flexible willow branches. It may seem a ludicrous, even pathetic process, suggesting the inherent inauthenticity of Peredur’s actions; but it is also a debilitation of Celtic heroism. The withe is the all-purpose medium of ancient Celtic heroic self-expression, as found memorably in the Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge (‘The Cattle-Raid of Cooley’), where the hero’s boyhood deeds include chasing wild animals, as in Peredur. In this sequence the 219

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text of Peredur expresses its sense of a complex and double-facing position for the situation it represents. Retreat into the mountains of Celtic cultural antiquity is not an option: engagement with the colonising force is a reality. The equipment for that engagement is uncertain, a mixture of doubtfully relevant tradition and contemporary improvisation. The harness made from withes is a figure for the whole text and its meaning. This makeshift, hybrid response is what the situation urges on Peredur; there is no future among the tame folk of the mountain retreat – or not according to the ideology of Normanised Wales. The complex, ironic, and also ineluctable, nature of this process of involvement in the new culture and the improvised response of mimicry are also to be seen in the strangely incoherent, possibly dangerous, and fully hybrid advice given by his mother, a garbled litany of correct chivalric behaviour that is just as improbably ill-founded and just as distant from, but still referential to, Celtic heroism as is Peredur’s wickerwork harness. So, syncretising Celtic tradition with Norman-French institutions, and suggesting neither to be entirely admirable or even authentic – the ‘disavowal’ that Bhabha identifies – Peredur moves off with a mixture of resemblance and menace embodied in his adventures, and fully familiar to the post-colonial critic. The hero confronts a formidable enemy who is encased in Norman armour; he defeats him in a fully native tradition with a spear through the eye, linking him, according to Goetinck (1975, pp. 184–6), with Balor, the Irish giant. But this is not a simple cartoon of native triumph: he does not know how to disarm his victim until he is acculturated into the techniques of chivalry, and this occurs in the text. Even a guerrilla victory becomes an inculpating process. French culture embraces the hero in his victory as much as it did the he- and she-dwarves at court who, in their sullen incorporated defeat, act as figures symbolising the diminished Welsh present, as do the non-giant characters in Breudwyt Ronabwy (‘The Dream of Rhonabwy’). As the text continues, Peredur visits his two uncles: similar but different, they etch in intermingled form both Cymric value and its present incapacity. The first uncle sits in grandeur on brocaded silk before a blazing fire, induces Peredur’s successful swordplay and praises him in distinctly native terms: ‘“thou wilt be the best man that smites with a sword in this Island”’ (JJ, 190), using yn yr ynys hon (HP 18.10, ‘in this island’, so familiar in the Trioedd and the Mabinogi). The second uncle’s house is less grandly welcoming but there are many squires who are ‘excellent . . . in courtesy and service’ (JJ, 191). Jones and Jones press the Gallic implication with their word ‘courtesy’ though the original word is actually gwybot, ‘knowledge’ (HP 18.30). Swordplay here involves smiting an iron column, which smashes Peredur’s sword, in spite of the conclusion that he is the ‘the best man that smites with a sword in the kingdom’ (JJ, 192). The wording is much less referentially Cymric than at the first uncle’s house, simply yn y teyrnas (‘in the kingdom’, HP 19.27). In keeping with that change, setting and context suggest that this is a colder, harder, world of blood and iron, implicitly an Anglo-Norman world – there was a myth 220

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that Richard I, that hero of the period of the early French romances, could cut an anvil in half with his sword. If it seems a problem that these referentially different men are both uncles, it is worth empirically noting that intermarriage was a major feature of the Celtic-Norman Wales of the text’s context. Welsh wives were common among the Norman lords and many people listening to such Welsh romances could have had Norman uncles on their mother’s side. The type of bicultural relationship is here a medium for both the syncretic combination and the sense of a hybrid tension in the situation, and from a Cymric viewpoint it amounts to a disabling, sword-smashing involvement with the colonising power that the text is already expressing. The second uncle’s house, however, is more than merely Norman-French in its cultural connections: it is also the locale of events which clearly relate to the myth of the Grail procession. Here we find the bleeding lance and the human head on a platter. Whatever the sources of such motifs might be in Celticity – mystic ritual and sovereignty symbolism being the favourites – it is hard here to separate them from the lance which was the major Norman weapon and the death it brought to their enemies; the double meaning of pen in Welsh (‘head’ and ‘chief’) is also suggestive: on the platter lies not only a human head, but also the notion of independent Cymric chieftainship, cut off with military defeat in the areas where this text was developed. In this sequence Peredur gains both gwybot and gwassanaeth (HP 18.30–19.1), which, in their literal sense of ‘comprehension and ‘vassalage’ (rather than the translators’ ‘courtesy’ and ‘service’, JJ, 191), offer a full translation of the sociocultural conditions of the Welsh gentry under Anglo-Norman rule. The end of the first sequence is Peredur’s enrolment in the fully Gallicised court of Arthur, embodied in Arthur’s praise of the young man and his intention to seek him for the purposes of honour; Cai is also rebuked for treating Peredur churlishly. Though there are some resonances of Culhwch’s welcome at court here, the text has shown us how Gallic this court inherently is and it is no surprise to find that the pattern will elsewhere surround the incorporation of new heroes at the chivalrous court of the Norman-French Arthur, such as Gareth, Libaeus Desconus, (‘The Fair Unknown’) or even Galahad.

4 The second section of the text begins consistently with the tone with which the first section ends. In the following pages, Peredur has a dense series of adventures – he loves and remembers a mistreated beautiful lady, meets and deals with the witches of Caer Loyw (Gloucester), repulses Arthurian knights while in a love-induced reverie, exchanges courtesies with Gwalchmai, defeats a lion and also a third of an opposing host, kills a serpent, conquers in joust Arthur’s knights and the king himself, meets again his beloved Angharad Law Eurog, encounters socially with his peers and so, finally, he ‘tarried in Arthur’s court’ (JJ, 207). The structure and character of this section are quite unlike the events of the first section which had led up to Peredur’s incorporation at Arthur’s court. Peredur is 221

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no longer a humble, withe-entwined ironic Welsh pastiche of a Norman-French knight; he has become a version of such a knight in operation. There are two ways in which this second section seems to show a Gallic incorporation of the Cymric hero and his story. The structure of this narrative is very familiar to anyone who knows the French single-hero romances – this could be a sketch of Chrétien’s Le Chevalier au Lion and his hero Yvain. Equally, most of the material here is evidently a good deal less Celtic in its origins than that of the first section. That might seem as if hybridisation is fading from the story, apart from its Welsh language. But this is not the case: in fact this section contains the most powerfully Celtic of the themes in the whole text – and presumably that is why both the structure and the other events are so fully Gallic, in order simply to foreclose, and as it were colonially possess, the strongly Celtic material. The crucial figure is the beautiful but ragged young woman with whom this sequence begins and who appears, as Peredur’s beloved, to be doubled by Angharad Law Eurog. Goetinck has argued most fully that this woman represents the concept of sovereignty (discussed in Chapter 4 in this collection), well-known in Celtic, especially Irish tradition. In fact Goetinck bases her whole reading of the text on Peredur’s quest to be reunited with this figure of sovereignty, and has linked this directly with the text’s being a propaganda piece for Wales under Norman rule. She suggests (1975, p. 39) that the head on the platter is that of Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, mid-eleventh-century king of Wales. Lovecy (1978) was distinctly negative in his response to Goetinck’s suggestions, and Lloyd-Morgan (1981, p. 188) indicates her agreement with him. I am myself persuaded by Goetinck that the girl with red-spotted cheeks does indeed represent the traditional concept of Celtic sovereignty; she is Peredur’s first love and she is the lady whose dominion he ultimately re-establishes. In contemplation of her splendour he is able to resist both the assaults and the courtesy of the Celticised Arthurian knights. Yet it is also true to note, as Bromwich (1991, pp. 283–1) comments, that the concept of sovereignty itself is somewhat distanced from the text. But that is the point: this is a hybrid text where Celticity is itself distanced and incorporated; it is not a fantasy of positive Celtitude, to adapt Frantz Fanon’s concept of négritude, an essence of black value. The Celtic material is in constant disavowing dialectic with the French features – both Peredur’s native success in the first section and sovereign love in the second section are in fact no more than the platform on which he becomes fully hybridised, assimilated to Arthur’s kingdom, and from which he departs again in the next sequence. This is the process of the cultural work of the text: having battled in the first section to establish the hegemony of French socioculture, it now moves on with confidence to capture and further distance the crucial symbolic figure of sovereignty, enclosing the hero from the Old North in cross-Channel practices. He loves first the nameless figure of sovereignty, but she fades from the text and his memory and he secondly loves a beautiful woman he meets at Arthur’s court, Angharad Law Eurog. Her name suggests a rich dowry – but it is sovereigns rather than sovereignty. 222

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The last word in her name means ‘golden’, based on ‘eur’, ‘gold’, but u and f could in early Welsh spelling be interchangeable, as ‘u’ could mean ‘v’, so it could seem the same as Peredur’s patronymic, Efrog (York): there may here be a whisper of the sovereign lady with the name of a land, like Laudine (the lady) and Lothian (the land) in Chrétien’s Le Chevalier au Lion. But a whisper of Celtic sovereignty is all that survives, and there is a remarkable symbolic displacement of this separation in the fact that Peredur’s service of Angharad is achieved while he is ‘The Dumb Knight’. The changing of languages, that constant feature of tension in the colonial context, is figured in the text just as Peredur transfers his attention from a tattered, but still beautiful and still recognisably Celtic, version of sovereignty to a firmly Gallicised and gold-bearing version of the power-bringing female. To affirm this incorporation, Peredur himself operates like any Norman in medieval life or romance, seizing property through the convenient mechanism of marriage – a process basic to both reality and romance in the period (Duby, 1977; Knight, 1983, Chapter 3). The text seems to have carried out a form of sociocultural closure; there is little more than a trace of wistful implication to remind the Cymric-orientated audience of the past grandeur and even sovereignty that have now become hybridised, enclosed, in the structures of power and culture of a Norman court.

5 If the process of that second section seems like an ending, the opening words of the next section certainly sound like a new beginning. Structural commentators agree that with the words Arthur a oed yg Kaer Llion ar Wysc (HP 42.19, ‘Arthur was in Caerleon on Usk’), a new sequence in the text begins. This continues until the moment when Peredur settles down to rule with the Ymerodres (‘Empress’), for fourteen years, a process that takes place some fourteen pages later in Goetinck’s text – about a quarter of the story. In some respects, as Goetinck notes (1975, pp. 71–3), this at first is a much more Gallic-seeming sequence, as befits the hero’s location at and departure from the royal court. Peredur moves, either with Arthur or without, through the isolative romance-like wilderness more often than the socialised valleys and hills more common in the Welsh texts; there is a coherent, though scarcely cause-and-effect-linked, sequence of adventures that is much like the French romances and quite unlike the sharply differentiated and power-related sequences of action in Culhwch ac Olwen or even the Mabinogi. Yet at the same time there is a difference. Gallic the shape may be, but the material is mostly Celtic: the adventures themselves and the figures within them are not in Perceval and do not seem drawn from French materials so much as Celtic wonder-tale. Here we find the black one-eyed man, the Du Trahawg (close to the ‘Black Oppressor’, the Du Traws in Owein and credibly related by Goetinck to Cu Roi and similar Gaelic figures (1975, pp. 146–7)); the cave of the addanc (‘monster’), described in a familiar Celtic way as a gormes (‘plague’, HP 45.30), a traditional Cymric concept which appears to override any possible French connections 223

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(Goetinck, 1975, p. 145); the dolorous mound and the worm appear in minor episodes which appear without clear French links. Goetinck’s analysis shows that this sequence in general is further from Chrétien’s Perceval than any others in the text (1975, pp. 59–73). After the romanceorientated opening there is a growing awareness of native tradition in the movement of the story, though its coherent French-style action (rather than listbased revelation) does have some resemblance to the gaining of the anoethau (‘difficult tasks’), in Culhwch ac Olwen. And yet, as before, this identifying of the Celtic does not generate a sense of Cymric triumph; they are past references rather than present realities. And after the somewhat Celtic middle movement of this section, colonising closure operates. The overarching structure is distinctly feudal and romantic as Peredur encounters the Empress, serves and succeeds with her; he is courted by a lesser star in the aristocratic heaven, a mere countess, but finds a suitable partner for her in a man he encounters, Edlym, much as do the chivalric heroes with their multiple female admirers through French Arthurian Logres. The whole third section seems more like a consistently inter-woven piece of syncretic writing than is the first section, where the hybridity took challenging form on a number of occasions before its resolution into Norman-French imitation and Cymric nostalgia in the second section. Where the first section for some distance quite sharply opposed the Celtic and the French components, as with the two uncles, in the third section, although it uses a good deal of overtly Celtic material, there is from the start a much more fully synthesised mix of two cultures, ending in the summit of Gallic heroic progress, imperial honour for Peredur and his Ymerodres (HP 56.14) – ‘Empress’ being a word clearly suggestive of the greatest of ladies in the mid-twelfth century, the Empress Matilda herself, daughter, wife and mother of kings. The Empress is indeed, as Goetinck suggests (1975, p. 147), a figure of sovereignty, but it is a fully Anglo-Norman form of royalty. Peredur has gone like an Arthurian hero from Arthur’s court to his own even grander royalty; however Celtic the elements, his trajectory is ultimately foreclosed within the fullest power-fantasy of romance. In one manuscript, Peniarth 7, that remarkable ascent is the conclusion and climax of the text, a magnificently successful end to Peredur’s career as an upwardly-mobile modern Gallic-style lord, and that version can be seen as having progressed through the tense representation of a hybrid situation in the first part, through the memorialisation of past Celtic power in the second section, to the fully Gallicised rewards for faithful service in the arms of the Empress. Mimicry moves from uncertain critique, through incorporation, to fully syncretised acceptance in the three ‘acts’ of the Peredur drama found in Peniarth 7. Resemblance grows stronger and the sense of menace, both to the colonising power and the colonised person, is weakened through the process. I am persuaded that Peniarth 7 represents a complete form of the text in its first entity. Mary Williams thought this a good while ago (1909). Thurneysen shortly afterwards felt the final section was by the same author but from a different source (1912, p. 188), which might well be the case, but does not mean that Peniarth 7 224

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was not complete before the expansion was developed elsewhere. Lovecy notes how the Peniarth 7 manuscript ‘seems to end very definitely’ (1991, p. 172). Even though Goetinck noted the independent source and ‘lively style’ of Peniarth 7 (1975, p. 317) she did not recognise the version as having priority or completeness, because she felt the whole text was focused on the final act of revenge. While the White Book versions have in the past usually been taken as the authoritative version, and Peniarth 7 is usually classed as a ‘fragment’, it is earlier than the White Book (Daniel Huws, 2000) and there seem good grounds for seeing it as a first complete text, before amplification. It is intrinsically hard to see why a good quality text like Peniarth 7 should lack a whole final section if the whole text as we now have it was composed at one time. The Peniarth 7 text would be in postcolonial terms a quietist one, ultimately a cultural apology for and rationalisation of the Normanisation of Celtic warrior aristocracy – an exculpation for incorporation. It would be easy to imagine the colonial circumstances under which such a text might have been produced, and why the deliberately interrogatory nature of its first sequence and its initially Celtic-privileging second sequence were transmuted to the quietist syncretic harmony of the final sequence, rather than continuing the menace inherent to strong mimicry, so clearly evident in the tensions of the opening sequence.

6 But as we know, the full text does not close there, and if Peniarth 7 was indeed the original, the ending we now have was added and communicated to other manuscripts. Though it might seem a dangerously easy step in considering a complex text to assume that it is not all composed at the same time, two kinds of causes lead me to suggest this was the case. One is considerable experience in medieval manuscripts, both French and English, and their intermittent augmentations. Reflecting on the state of The Canterbury Tales and its later editorial additions, and also reflecting on the multiple post-dated continuations of Chrétien’s Perceval, makes this seem not a strained proposal in the context of Peredur, but rather one that relies on clear probability and common practice to suggest that a text of this kind might have been augmented. In addition, there is the argument from post-colonialist theory – that a syncretic or assembled text is in fact the norm, and that addition, elision and editing are themselves part of the process of a text being created in a disputed and often ideologically strained context. The final sequence of Peredur certainly has some features that mark it off in a sharp way from the rest of the text, and to read the whole text post-colonially as a hybrid of Cymric and Gallic patterns will bring those characteristics into sharp focus. The source-hunting scholars all agree on one thing about the last section of the text: it is much closer in detail and movement to the structure of part of Chrétien’s Perceval than are previous parts of Peredur. From the moment when the ugly and hero-abusing maiden enters, through the interpolation of a Gwalchmai adventure, and up to the meeting with the priest 225

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on Good Friday, it seems clear that the text shares the same path, condensed and mildly varied though it might be, as the narrative structure of Chrétien’s poem Perceval. This has not been the case before in Peredur. There have been features of French romance, and evident knowledge of an early version of the romance genre, but they have not been linked like these or related to a known text in this way; in addition, the previous sections have a constant reference to Celtic structures, hybridised and incorporated as they might have become. There are varied ways of explaining this newly evident presence of Perceval as a source, that are worth raising briefly. One is to surmise that Chrétien had always been the source, but that the Welsh author has previously altered and interpolated his French source a good deal, yet now begins to lack variant imagination and so reveals his source’s authority. However, it seems deeply improbable that a text as powerful as Chrétien’s Perceval would not have shown its presence as a source previously, and I favour a more complicated but, in terms both of medieval literature and post-colonial critical experience, more credible account. I believe that the original text did end in a foreclosed way with the hero and the Empress coming together and that the text represented in Peniarth 7 was completed by another author – conceivably the original one – after the experience of having read, or heard, Chrétien’s Perceval. Chrétien’s text apparently dates from the 1180s, before the disaster of Hattin in 1187, as I have discussed elsewhere (Knight, 1993 – see Chapter 1 in this collection). Whereas up to the ending of the Empress third section, where Peniarth 7 concludes, Peredur is a syncretic negotiation between the Celtic and the Gallic, a politically hybrid text with menace running in both directions out of its forms of resemblance, the final sequence seems a consciously Cymric response to Chrétien’s full Gallicisation of materials which are at least in part Celtic. The prologue to Perceval indicates that Chrétien was given a certain book as a source by his patron Philippe of Flanders: there is no good reason to doubt this statement and it seems mostly likely that it was a least in part the Cymric story of Peredur. It is perfectly possible that the Peredur itself in its Peniarth 7 version, translated into French, was the basis of that source, so constituting a text much like Béroul’s Tristan, that clearly part-Celtic, indeed hybrid, version of the Tristan and Isolde story, and source for Thomas’s more fully romance-orientated text. The ideological and post-colonial meaning of Béroul’s Tristan is in fact similar to that of Peredur, as outlined here. Nothing that has emerged so far from this analysis would contradict the possibility of Peredur in the Peniarth 7 version being the source for Chrétien’s Perceval. The way in which a post-colonialist critique has unfolded the text suggests that the structure of the single-hero adventure pattern of French romance literature is known to the author of Peredur author in terms of behaviour, setting, accoutrements and, the most important point, the opening of the third, ‘Empress’, section shows knowledge of the structure of a classic single-hero romance narrative. However, there is no clear evidence for a single-hero romance existing in French before the second half of the twelfth century, which makes Goetinck’s date of 226

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‘soon after 1135’ (1975, p. 39) seem distinctly early. Béroul’s Tristan might be taken as being early in its original form, through the evidence of Celtic patterns in its technique and structure, but the actual date of the surviving text is a good deal later than that. The lais that have been associated with the name Marie de France, usually dated to the 1160s or 1170s, do seem to be aware of such a single-hero structure, but this is obscured because they consistently work from a different viewpoint, either female or neutral. The date-disputed Arthurian tympanum at Modena Cathedral (probably by 1150) and the work of the widely-known Cymric oral story-teller Bleddri (apparently before 1150) seem to suggest the possibility of such adventure stories existing before the mid-twelfth century (see Bromwich, 1991 for a recent survey of this material). The structure of Culhwch ac Olwen itself is inherently a much ramified single-hero adventure, which appears to be dateable in something like its present form to the early twelfth century at the latest (Roberts, 1991, p. 73). These points, allied to the fact that Peredur has, up to the final sequence, no evident dependence on Chrétien de Troyes, indicate that there is no reason to think that the bulk of the text as found in Peniarth 7 need be much later than about 1150.

7 The reason I would argue with confidence for the separate and originary existence of the Peniarth 7 version is that the later part of the final section of Peredur does not in fact follow carefully, in colonised slavishness, a major sequence of the French Perceval but in fact in its own way ultimately re-creates the indeterminacy of the early parts of the whole text. This last, post-Peniarth 7, section is itself in two parts; Lovecy has noted the change between the first part of this section, faithful to Chrétien, and the second: from the meeting with the priest, he says ‘the Welsh and French diverge, and any remaining comparisons are on the level of motifs rather than stories’ (1991, p. 178). The second part steadily devalues the Gallic element, and gives growing authority to motifs and references which are fully Celtic. In this, the last section is less fully incorporative of the hero in Norman-French culture than is the third or ‘Empress’ section of the previous text. The last section of the Peredur, that is, engages in a full colonised mimic response to the coloniser mimicry of Chrétien’s Perceval. Up to the meeting with the priest, all of the first part of the additional section is clearly romance-orientated, a condensed and translated, but a largely intact representation of the beginning of the final sequence of the Perceval. The possible Celtic antiquity of elements like the ugly maiden cannot contradict the fact that the order and treatment of the materials here is close to Chrétien’s text: the Celtic materials are suspended in the amber of the Gallic poem, and that in some form must be the source for this first part of the last section. Then things change. In spite of the French-seeming implications of Caer yr Enrhyfeddodau – (‘Chateau des Merveilles’) this seems the obvious original here, pace Goetinck (1975, p. 263). But this Castle of Wonders has, as Goetinck also observes, connections with the 227

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fortress of Annwfn, the ‘Otherworld’ (HP 112, see note to 66.18). Celticity grows stronger as Peredur enters and watches the two sets of gwyddbwyll playing each other – meaning ‘wood-sense’, this is a Celtic version of chess, fidchell in Gaelic. The next caer has the irreducibly Celtic name of Ysbidinongyl. Goetinck’s suggestion (1975, p. 261), that this might be a translation of ‘Chateau Espinogre’ seems the wrong way round: it is more likely to be a Celtic fossil. There Peredur needs to kill a gormes (‘plague’), as before a Cymric concept reminiscent of Cyfranc Lludd a Llefelys, (‘The Story of Lludd and Llefelys’), but here improbably romance-oriented in the form of a rogue unicorn. That is not so much colonial incorporation as a parody of it. This jarringly hybridising technique is still present as Peredur next jousts (Gallic) with a black or dark man (Cymric), but all is brought firmly back to a Welsh and local focus, as the witches of Caerloyw (‘Castle Shining’ – also Gloucester) are blamed for everything; and where they were formerly dealt with in a Gallic-style heroic narrative sequence, here they are killed in an ending strongly reminiscent of the heroic upswing at the end of Culhwch ac Olwen. This is, however, not quite a fully Celtic sequence: there is inserted, clumsily, a rather romance-orientated narrative explanation of the motivation for all these events: Goetinck took this very seriously as the mainspring of the plot, but that is to accept too readily a linear and rational romance structure. As Lloyd-Morgan (1981, pp. 187–93) makes clear, it is easier to agree with Lovecy (1991, p. 180), who feels this explanation is an ‘after-thought’: that air of inauthenticity about this non-Celtic moment itself indicates how far the redactor of the last part of Chrétien’s Perceval has moved from the Gallic acceptance of the ending of the third ‘Empress’ section, the conclusion of the Peniarth 7 version. This final section, that is, works its way from the dominance of the colonising French text through a hybridised interchange to a firmly Celtic end that evidently refers to the conclusion of the truly Celtic Arthurian masterpiece, Culhwch ac Olwen. This process, in fantasy at least, relives the Celts at their most aggressively masculine and their most triumphant over oppressors and enchantments – those two hostile modes in which the young Peredur apprehended the powerful and entrancing colonising forces with which he came into contact. The ending is, in a real sense, asyncretic, separating the text’s two discourses and finally privileging the Cymric. Where the ending of the Peniarth 7 version accepted resemblance and had largely buried the sense of menace, even to the colonised people themselves, the final sequence of the full text, as Peredur swings fiercely at the witches, recreates the Celtic hero in something like his menacing ancient power, resembling very little in Norman-French culture and so constituting in ideational form a distinct menace to the colonisers of medieval Wales. It is not probable that this quite elaborate approach-avoidance relationship with French culture and its military power could have been constructed in one unbroken creative sequence in response to Chrétien’s text, because the French text does not exert a clear and coherent influence until the last part of Peredur, which manuscript evidence suggests, as strongly as the source evidence, was an addition. I believe that the varying nature of the relationship with the Perceval throughout 228

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Peredur is best explained as I have proposed here; this account also most clearly marks out the way in which the text is a hybridised syncretic dialogue with the culture of the coloniser, as is characteristic of all texts from this kind of context. It is a dialogue in which naive triumphalism is by no means the dominant element in the voice of the colonised, and wry self-inculpation may well be a recurrent feature as well as anger at, complicity with and, ultimately, fictional triumph over, the newly imposed authorities. The whole is just the indeterminate mixture of mimicry and doubly-directed disavowal that Bhabha identifies as characteristic in these colonial circumstances. The straightforward ‘guerrilla politics’ reading of the text given by Goetinck needs to be given considerable sophistication, both as a reading of the overall function of Peredur and also as a detailed account of the way the text moves through its narrative effects – as well as its physical construction. Post-colonial theory provides the vocabulary and the techniques to understand the cultural and ideological implications of the multicultural context that R. M. Jones (1957) identified as basic to the text. Other products of that context can be reinterpreted through the lens of postcolonial critique. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s work is an epic of syncretising that immerses the Celtic world within the culture of Norman power, as well as embracing the authority of biblical events and the classical world. Gerald of Wales produced more strained hybrid texts, revealing more of what it was experientially like in the force-field of twelfth-century cultural politics. Others like Walter Map and Marie de France, elusive in both identity and the direction of their texts, belong in the same field. It has always been clear that the Welsh Arthurian romances and their avatars from the hand of Chrétien de Troyes have a special and elusive relationship: a post-colonial reading can both identify and interpret the forces which are at work on and through those texts. The effect of such a reading is to see much more – both literary and political – in Peredur than was previously visible. Rather than a clumsy borrowing from French romance, rather than a rough-hewn source for Chrétien’s polished jewel Perceval, Peredur can and should be read as a complex representation of and negotiation with the real conditions of its socio-political context. It is a text which is, like the characteristic major works of colonial culture, multi-tonal, structurally and referentially enigmatic, evaluatively elusive, replete with indeterminacy and disavowal as well as hostility – and for all those reasons dynamic, within its own culture and as an influence in others, right through time to the post-colonial present.

References Primary Historia Peredur vab Efrawc, ed. by Glenys Goetinck (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1976). The Mabinogion, trans. Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones (London: Dent, 1949).

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Secondary Bhabha, Homi. ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, in The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 85–92. Bromwich, Rachel. ‘First Transmission to England and France’, in The Arthur of the Welsh, ed. by Rachel Bromwich, A. O. H. Jarman, and Brynley F. Roberts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991), pp. 273–98. Duby, Georges. ‘Youth in Aristocratic Society’, in The Chivalrous Society, trans. Cynthia Postan (London: Arnold, 1977), pp. 112–27. Goetinck, Glenys. Peredur: A Study of Welsh Tradition in the Grail Legends (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1975). Huws, Daniel. ‘Y Pedair Llawysgrif Ganoloesol’ (‘The four medieval manuscripts’), in Canhwyll Marchogion: Cyd-destunoli Peredur (Candle of the Knights: Contextualising Peredur), ed. by Sioned Davies and Peter Wynn Thomas (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), pp. 1–9. Jones, R. M. ‘Y rhamantau Cymraeg a’u cysylltiad ȃ’r rhamantau Ffrangeg’ (‘The Welsh Romances and Their Connection with the French Romances’), Llên Cymru, 4 (1957), 208–27. Knight, Stephen. Arthurian Literature and Society (London: Macmillan, 1983). Knight, Stephen. ‘From Jerusalem to Camelot: King Arthur and the Crusades’, in Medieval Codicology, Iconography, Literature, and Translation, ed. by P. R. Monks and D. D. R. Owen (Leiden: Brill, 1993), pp. 223–32; reprinted in this collection, Chapter 1. Lloyd-Morgan, Ceridwen. ‘Narrative Structure in Peredur’, Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie, 38 (1981), 187–231. Lovecy, Ian. ‘The Celtic Sovereignty Theme and the Structure of Peredur’, Studia Celtica, 12/13 (1978), 133–46. Lovecy, Ian. ‘Historia Peredur ab Efrawg’, in The Arthur of the Welsh (1991), pp. 171–82. Roberts, Brynley F. ‘Culhwch ac Olwen, the Triads, Saints’ Lives’, in The Arthur of the Welsh (1991), pp. 73–95. Thomas, Peter Wynn. ‘Middle Welsh Dialectics: Problems and Perspectives’, Bwletin y Bwrdd Gwybodau Celtaidd (Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies), 40 (1993), 17–50. Thurneysen, Rudolf. ‘“Adolygiad” (“Review”) of Mary Williams’, Essai sur la composition du roman Gallois de Peredur, 1909, Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie, 8 (1912), 186–9. Williams, Mary. Essai sur la composition du roman Gallois de Peredur (Paris: Champion, 1909). Young, Robert J. C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London and New York: Routledge, 1995).

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13 ‘LOVE’S ALTAR IS THE FOREST GLADE’ Chaucer in the light of Dafydd ap Gwilym

From: Nottingham Medieval Studies, 43 (1999)

1. Introduction To relate Chaucer to Wales might seem a challenging topic, as he neither wrote about the region nor visited it.1 That is only a problem if we seek Chaucer’s borrowing, the cultural profit he extracted from the country, but that apparent viewpoint is not the only one. Wales was England’s first colony – or at least the first Anglo-Norman colony. Postcolonial analysis has shown how to understand the way in which the colonised answers back, including critically; this paper considers what can be seen in Chaucer, as an English resident of French family, by a view from Wales. Examination in the raking light from the Celtic West will illuminate features and cast shadows that make Chaucer look rather different from the familiar configuration seen from the viewpoint of London and other Angloimperial centres, including those former ones in America. Drawing upon the concepts of postcolonial critique, this paper explores how Chaucer’s work looks as compared with a poetic art that was in the fourteenth century much older, much more refined, and in a number of ways more secure – yet was also in a range of intriguing ways parallel to Chaucer’s. Of the Welsh poets Chaucer’s closest contemporary was Iolo Goch (c.1325 – c.1400), and there are several parallels in both the mode and the themes of their work, from the techniques of court poetry to moralising positions, including a positive evaluation of ploughmen. But those are narrow bands compared with the wide, rich terrain of comparison available in the case of the Welsh poet who is Chaucer’s equal in

1 The reference in Chaucer’s ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’ to Christians fleeing to Wales (544) seems his only unequivocal comment on the country. As far as visits are concerned, Chaucer may have been to North Petherton in Somerset while holding the royally-appointed post of Forester there (though not if it was a sinecure), and so might have seen the coast of Wales across the Severn. If so, his viewpoint would have inherently been that of a coloniser: the local forest was in the domain of the Earl of March, by his very title an English (or rather Norman-French) guardian of the Welsh borders.

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national standing, and with whom there are significant overlaps in period, attitudes, themes and, most interestingly, in both daring and impact – but also revealing differences. Dafydd ap Gwilym (‘David son of Guillaume’),2 c.1325 – c.1370), belonged to the caste of Welsh administrators and intellectuals who exercised authority in sometimes uneasy relation with the Norman-French authorities – hence his mix of names, Welsh and French. His uncle had been the constable of a castle, and also a recognised poet. Dafydd inherited both sceptical contact with the colonising power and also the knowledge and skills of the highly regarded bardic craft. Much has been written in Welsh, English, and indeed French, about his work, but it is not his breathtaking power with words and images that is the primary theme here: a previous essay has explored that, in a light cast by Chaucer.3 Here the topic is Dafydd’s connections, and also the lack of them, with Chaucer, and the way they illuminate the English author, especially in the context of post-colonial analysis. The presence and absence of connections may be usefully summarised. First, the two poets are alike in a number of ways made familiar in a range of critiques of their work: Both raised colloquial native forms into standard modes of high poetry; for Dafydd the cywydd, a seven-syllable couplet form; for Chaucer the rhyming couplet, originally, in both French and English, octosyllabic. Both poets made changes: Dafydd developed greatly the Welsh cynghanedd or consonant rhyme (see note 5 for details); Chaucer added two syllables, or one stress, to the French octosyllabics, the English tetrameter. They both also experimented with other forms, traditional and more recent, but the couplet mode was their major creative instrument, and their bequest to successors. Both combined high-style formality with comic and vulgar material, and also had a penchant for ironic satire and mockery, including selfmockery. They both, rarely in the period, used their personae in an ironic mode, abandoning the pomposity of previous poetic voices, whether bardic or courtly. Both write a good deal, and directly, about love and women, transmitting the full courtly concept, but also ironising it and injecting dynamic sensuality into the languid codes of fin amor. Both wrote about urban society and its strange and disturbing ways, though both seem to have had, at least occasionally, a small primary audi-

2 Welsh has no initial W unless it is a mutated form of Gw, and so the Norman form William was not acceptable in Middle Welsh; Gwilym answers to Guillaume: in the Arthurian prose tale of c. 1100, Culhwch ac Olwen, the conqueror is known as Gwilhenin. 3 See ‘Chaucer’s British Rival: On Chaucer and Dafydd ap Gwilym’, Leeds Studies in English, new series, 20 (1989), 87–98.

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ence of an aristocratic kind. Neither appears to have had stable employment as bard or courtier poet. Mobility is a constant feature of their work both in terms of themes – physical and social travel, and in terms of technique – a wide referential range and rapid changes of tone. They were both very popular in their period and exerted an almost damaging dominance over succeeding writers. Many of these similarities are modal or conceptual. There are also clear differences, many of them relating to topics and themes: The discursive traditions they used were different, Welsh relying on elaborately worded perceptions and condensed images, often sensual, while Chaucer’s English (being outside the heroic alliterative tradition) was relatively direct in expression, though often complex in vocabulary, concept and reference. Dafydd is rich in metaphor, Chaucer in metonymy, especially simile. Reference varies: Dafydd’s work is all confined to Wales, but Chaucer’s narratives and characters are world-wide in terms of England-based knowledge at the time. Social and economic context varies with the cultures of the two: Chaucer shows familiarity with the professional, mercantile and financial world of Europe at large, and beyond, while Dafydd is only familiar with mercantilism to the extent of small-town shop-keepers and their practices. The world of Wales also lacks the fine distinctions made between class fractions in Chaucer. Nature, especially flora and fauna, is celebrated and even apotheosised by Dafydd; by comparison Chaucer’s celebrated interest in daisies seems distinctly limited. Genre is an area of some difference, though also contact. Dafydd is primarily a lyric poet, with some embedded narratives, dreams and socio-historical references. He does not venture the lengthy narratives of Chaucer’s work, nor write in prose (Welsh had a rich prose fiction, as in the Mabinogi, but the bardic tradition tended to make writers genrespecific). It may though be fair to note that by the early 1370s, when Dafydd was almost certainly dead, Chaucer had written no narratives as such: in fact the early pre-Italian Chaucer is much closer in genre, reference and thematic concerns to Dafydd than in his later work.

2. Nature That summary indicates a good deal of overlapping methodologies and materials, and to explore the implications it is appropriate to consider some texts. To start with a classic piece of Dafydd, the poem usually called Mis Mai (‘The Month 233

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of May’) is both a dyfalu, or description, of springtime and also an evaluation of the natural.4 Harddwas teg a’m anrhegai, Hylaŵ wr mawr hael yw’r Mai. Anfones ym iawn fwnai Glas defyll glȃn mwygyll Mai. Ffloringod brig ni’m digiai, Fflŵr-dy-lis gyfoeth mis Mai. (9–14) A fair handsome youth has given me gifts: a generous nobleman is May. He has sent me true currency, pure green leaves of May’s tender hazels. Florins of the tree-tops, they brought no tristesse. Fleurs-de-lys, the wealth of May. In a cywydd the rhyme must fall in the same couplet on one stress and one off-stress, creating an effect like half-rhyme (as, not accidentally, in the AngloWelsh poet Wilfred Owen). This reduced formal impact of end-rhyme is formally compensated by the mixture of internal rhyme and consonant rhyme called cynghanedd, literally, ‘singing together’.5 The binding of the sound of the lines obviously intensifies the impact of Dafydd’s nature poetry, but there are also content references to consider. May is here an aristocrat who has made the poet his vassal – but the key element, as so commonly in Dafydd, is the multiple direction of the imagery. These are not the metaphorical flowers of the fleur de lis found on French coins – notably the relatively worthless jeton: these are the real, unalienated things, flower-florins, the currency of the grove.

4 A large body of material exists, much of which is thought to be apocryphal, ‘School of Dafydd’ rather than the master’s own work. The main edition is by Thomas Parry, Gwaith Dafydd ap Gwilym (‘The Works of Dafydd ap Gwilym’), second edition (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1963). Work has continued since then, and this paper follows the text and interpretations of Rachel Bromwich, ed., Selected Poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym (Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1982); translations are my own and attempt to convey specific meaning rather than imitate the complex sound-patterns of cynghanedd. The titles of Dafydd’s poems are editorial, but are generally agreed. 5 The first four lines exhibit the four main types of cynghanedd: 1 2 3 4

teg . . . rheg (cynghanedd lusg, ‘trailing’ cynghanedd; internal rhyme on penultimate syllable) h l r m r – h l r m (cynghanedd groes, ‘cross’ cynghanedd; all consonants except last from first half-line repeat in order in second) n f n – n f n. . (cynghanedd draws, ‘over’ cynghanedd; some consonants from first half-line repeat in order in second) yll – m yll – m (cynghanedd sain, ‘harmonious’ cynghanedd; first segment of line rhymes with second of three, leaving short third segment with at least one consonant linked with second: i.e. a combination of internal rhyme and consonant-linking).

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Dafydd sees nature at work through many other forms of metaphor. In Y Deildy (‘The Leaf-House’), May is at work again in another image: Dwylo Mai a’i hadeila, A’i linyn yw’ gog lonydd, A’i ysgŵr yw eos gwŷdd A’i dywydd yw hirddydd haf, A’I ais yg goglais gwiwglaf; Ac allor serch yw’r gelli. (24–30) May’s hands will construct it – his line the calm cuckoo, his square the woodland nightingale, for roof-beams the long summer-day, for laths the pangs of love-sickness; and love’s altar is the forest glade. The poet calls himself May’s mwyall, ‘adze’, the keen-edged instrument by which the seasonal spirit shapes his woodland dwelling. Chaucerians will note the appropriation of the classical rhetorical idea of building a house as an image for art – yet this is not a house at all, but a place of outdoor delight, and also a place of reverence that condenses sense and spirit. Metaphor and sound-structure make potent combination in the summary image Ac allor serch yw’r gelli – ‘and love’s altar is the forest glade’. That might sound rather non-Chaucerian in style and theme. Elaborate imagery and heightened reference like this seem foreign to his usual tone, unless he is deep in Dante or Boccaccio at the time, and the reverence for nature seems unlike the usual voice of this highly urban poet. But before dismissing the climax of Y Deildy as Celtic rural mystique, let me put a question. How many happy or valued scenes in Chaucer happen indoors; how often is a building associated with value? My candidates in order of confidence are the catacombs in ‘The Second Nun’s Tale’, sombre though their value may be; the ‘narwe cottage’ in ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’, a place of joyless health; the dreamer’s bedroom in The Book of the Duchess – yet it is phantasmagorically open to the outdoors. Troilus and Criseyde is the great indoors poem, but also a source of architectural unease – the bed-chamber’s joys are mediated through a set of highly artificial practices, and Criseyde’s house is only celebrated when hollow, empty of her loveliness. If none of these indoors scenes are fully positive, it also appears that bad things happen indoors in Chaucer just as they do in Dafydd, from Fame’s Hall to Apollo’s domain in ‘The Manciple’s Tale’. The daisy, the bird-song, the ‘launde’ and the forest are as positive for Chaucer as for Dafydd, and our lack of locational thinking, now so firmly pressed on us by Dafydd, has led us to miss some of Chaucer’s topographic meaning. In his narrativised and socialised way, Chaucer too seems to be suggesting that gwell yw ystafell os tyf, one of Dafydd’s most 235

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dramatic and harmonious dramatic lines from Y Deildy, meaning ‘better is a room if it grows’. In Dafydd this natural harmony occurs in delineated and familiar areas, and we might ponder further on the idea of region. It is very important in Dafydd to grasp where the poem is set. His own area, his bro, as the Welsh say, was inland and uphill from Aberystwyth on the coast of mid-West Wales – near Strata Florida, the Cistercian Abbey where he is thought to have been buried. Although many of his most intense poems are set in this region, Dafydd was not a bard at a settled court, but travelled the world where his language was understood. In one mode he was, said Iolo Goch in his fine elegy to Dafydd, hebog marched deheubarth, ‘the hawk of the girls of the south’.6 But Dafydd also wrote for the lords of Aberffraw in the north, the ancient capital of Mȏn, known in English as Anglesey: actually a Norse name – the Saxons had their setbacks as well as did the Welsh. Dafydd is deeply aware of travelling the regions of Wales, but not of any nationalistic concept: his language and the world of nature are the vertebrate structure of his world.

3. Regions Regionality is one striking illumination cast by a Welsh light on Chaucer. Indeed, England’s regional character is still the most revealing view of that country seen from Wales, clearer than for the Scots, looking down a terrestrial tube as they are. The way England opens up into its regions, with London far away, awkwardly placed, stridently bullying, is plain from Cardiff, itself ready of access to the southwest, the midlands and even up the border by a magically surviving railway line, to Lancashire and the north. If regionality is the way Dafydd and Wales prompt us to think with regard to England, what, then, is Chaucer’s bro? If you plot the origins of his pilgrims and his stories, the folk of the ‘General Prologue’ all belong to what historical topographers call the Lowland Zone, defined by the Roman civil frontier along the Fosse Way, that runs diagonally across England from Devon up to Lincolnshire and leaves on one side mostly fertile plains and low rolling hills, and on the other side, with few exceptions, rougher or wetter pastures, and mountains. Chaucer’s people are distributed through this southern zone, basically in accordance with medieval population density: quite a few in London, several in wellpeopled East Anglia; two tough characters, the Shipman and the Wife of Bath, from the Western frontier. The knight presumably comes from rougher, forested hunting land like that in Leicestershire or Northamptonshire, as should the hardriding monk – and the poor widow is likely to be out on the marginal lands of north East Anglia or the Lincolnshire Wolds.

6 See Marwnad Dafydd ap Gwilym (‘Elegy for Dafydd ap Gwilym’), in Iolo Goch: Poems, ed. by Dafydd Johnston (Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1993), line 13.

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Outsiders only appear in the stories as trouble: a few northerners have come south, bringing conflict with them – the clerks in ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ and the Devil in ‘The Friar’s Tale’: and there are no Celts at all. So this is a self-validating representation of Southern and Eastern England – a world of growing commerce, military peace and some social tension. It is by no means the same as the areas identified with the great lords whom Chaucer served, owners and denizens of major military bastions in the north and west of Britain and through continental Europe. Chaucer’s world and world-view is that of an immigrant businessman’s son, an economically active England, as different from feudal landed lordships as it is from the nature-focused communality of the Celtic world. Though that is the region of Chaucer’s pilgrims, the tales tell an interestingly different story. Just half of them deal with the English Lowland Zone and its immediate overseas contacts – Flanders in ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’ and ‘Sir Thopas’, France in ‘The Shipman’s Tale’ and Brittany in ‘the Franklin’s Tale’: it may be no accident that travel is a major feature in those four tales. But if half the tales realise Chaucer’s sense of busy, business-like lowland England and its cross-channel hinterland, the other half are set in a larger world where the topography is literary rather than physically experienced – contemporary northern Italy (realised culturally rather than in relation with England), the classical world and Asia, and in ‘The Tale of Melibee’ and ‘The Parson’s tale’, the Utopian nowhere, or everywhere, of Christian moral discourse. Chaucer maps not only a lowland England, prosperous and socially mobile, but also the world of European culture where men like the Clerk live in books, and poets like the Chaucer of the dream poems research both their travels and their thematics through sources they hope to be appropriate. Dafydd has no such wideranging intellectual imperialism of mind; he is not above appropriating ideas from various classics, modern or ancient,7 but they are eclectic adornments of his own cultural tapestry. From his natural ambience, Dafydd has a speaking magpie with the confidence of Chauntecleer, and elsewhere a sprightly fox who is said to be ‘a lad who loves the hens’.8 There is also a roebuck who acts as a llatai, the specialist Welsh term for ‘love-messenger’, a figure who not only mediates love but can also become the object of it, rather like the hart in The Book of the Duchess – and also, as in the same Chaucer poem, Dafydd elsewhere writes about a dream which is ended by a clock striking.9 The last connection is probably from the common source of Froissart, and the others are to some degree shared medievalisms: but it seems clear that Dafydd’s

7 For discussions of this material, see Helen Fulton, Dafydd ap Gwilym and the European Context (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1989) and Huw M. Edwards, Dafydd ap Gwilym: Influences and Analogues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), chapters 6 and 7. 8 See Cyngor y Biogen (‘The Magpie’s Advice’), Bromwich, 1983, pp. 80–3 and Y Llwynog (‘The Fox’), Bromwich, 1983, pp. 88–91. 9 See Y Carw (‘The Stag’), Bromwich, 1983, pp. 86–9 and Y Cloc (‘The Clock’), Parry, 1963, no. 66.

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domain of borrowing is small-scale and incorporationist, not a way of constructing an intellectual basis for a discrete epistemology – and so an ontology – as seems to happen in Chaucer’s referentiality, especially through Boethius.

4. Women But that is not to suggest that Dafydd does not encompass the broad imaginative reach that Chaucer finds in time and place through literary scholarship. Dafydd does project an idea of power and a place beyond intense descriptive dyfalu and condensed humano-natural metaphor, and that in a way which Chaucer does not quite match. This difference emerges through comparing the poets’ representations of women. The similarities between the two poets in this domain should be explored first. One resemblance is simple enough. Dafydd has a poem traditionally called Cyrchu Lleian (‘Wooing the Nuns’), which demonstrates much the same sexualised gaze as appears in Chaucer’s description of the Prioress. The poet addresses his love-messenger: Dwg o’r cŷr ddyn deg i’r coed, Un a’i medr, einym adail, A’r lleian du i’r llwyn dail. O’r caf finnau rhag gofal O’r ffreutur dyn eglur dȃl, Cȃr trigain cariad rhagor Cais y glochyddes o’r cȏr, Hoywne eiry, honno erod, Cais frad ar yr abades, Cyn lleud haf, ceinlliw tes. (23–34) Bring from the chancel a fair girl to the wood, you can do it, to our bower, a black nun in the grove of leaves. If I may get from the care of the frater a fair foreheaded girl, the friend of sixty other darlings, seek the singer from the choir: if she comes not to win fame, in spite of asking, brightness of snow, seek to seduce the abbess before the summer moon, fair colour of warmth. Like Chaucer, Dafydd can be impressed by female untouchability which is more than religious. There are also women of power for Dafydd: this is Dyddgu in the poem Morfudd a Dyddgu (‘Morfudd and Dyddgu’): 238

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Hocrell fwyn ddiell fain dda, Gywair o ddawn, gywir, ddoeth, Gynilamp, gu, anwylgoeth Gair unwed etifedd tir, ... Dewis yr wyf ar ungair Dyddgu i’w charu, o chair. (4–8, 53–4) A maiden gentle, worthy, slender, complete with skills, true and wise, expert, dear, highly cultured, and in a single word, inheritor of land. ... I choose at once Dyddgu I’ll love, if she’s to be found. Chaucer’s equivalent of Dyddgu is White in The Book of the Duchess: both are absent, mysterious, disappeared. In some way Griselda and Dorigen, women of beauty, power, authority and also strange inactivity, appear to come into the same category. Perhaps that is why Dorigen seems to be absent in the last third of ‘The Franklin’s Tale’ and why Griselda is so deeply passive: such ideal women must be ultimately absent. Dafydd has another female object of poetry and tension, Morfudd, bright and apparently sexually available; she appears frequently and is married to Y Bwa Bach (‘The Little Hunchback’), an urban figure (who really existed),10 and so she is involved with modern mercantilism. Morfudd’s attractions are strong, and ultimately alarming, as also stated in Morfudd a Dyddgu: Nid felly y mae Morfudd, Ony fel hyn, farworyn rhudd: Yn caru rhai a’i cerydd Rhywyr fun, a rhyir fydd; Yn berchennog, barc uniawn, Tŷ a gŵr, yn ddyn teg iawn. (17–22) Not like that is Morfudd: but like this, a fiery coal, loving those who rebuke her, a stubborn girl, exasperating all the time,

10 See Parry, 1963, no. 75.

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the owner – unified beauty – of house and husband: someone fit for respect. She seems like the intriguing sexualised women who are also seen by Chaucer in some way as being inherently dangerous, like Criseyde (another ‘fiery coal’) – and Emily of ‘The Knight’s Tale’ and the ‘formel eagle’ of The Parlement of Foules can be read as being in the same exciting-alarming mode. Then there are good-time girls of the lower echelons like the two Alisouns (the Wife of Bath and the wife in ‘The Miller’s Tale’), May in ‘The Merchant’s Tale’, the miller’s daughter and wife from ‘The Reeve’s Tale’, the wife in ‘The Shipman’s Tale’. All of them enjoy sexuality but are also – or because of that – consciously down-graded in terms of class and morality. For Dafydd it is Elen Nordd in Dewis Un o Bedair (‘Choosing One From Four’) – the number is in the feminine, so it is four women who are to be chosen from: Gwraig rwy benair, Robin Nordd, Elen chwannog i olud, Fy anrhaith ȃ’r lediaith lud, Brenhines, arglwyddes gwlȃn, Brethyndai, bro ethindan, (16–20) Wife of a certain burgher, Robin North, Elen, eager for wealth, my love with thick-tongued speech princess, lady of the wool, of warehouses and land for gorse-firing. Elen is the wife of an English merchant, and in addition her sexual availability has two demerits: she has poor Welsh and llediaith llud (‘thick-tongued speech’)11 and, we hear, in a distinctly negative tone, that she responds to poems about her with presents of coarse woollen stockings. Dafydd’s encounters with women are more than a menu of promiscuity: they invite a political reading. Dyddgu is the lost true Welsh nobility; Morfudd is what is left of it, fair and bright in Norman style and hideously, Englishly, mated. Elen is the crass everyday reality, with bad Welsh and worse taste.12 These manoeuverings with symbolic women and Welsh politics are all in the one domain, and through imagery and reference are very closely connected with the sense of regional belonging. In this respect they are on a par with Chaucer’s English

11 Welsh speakers consistently regard English people as lacking the lingual dexterity of the Celts: in Trafferth men Tafarn (‘Trouble in a Tavern’), discussed below, Dafydd describes someone speaking English as having soeg enau, ‘a slushy mouth’. 12 See the discussion of sovereignty in Chapter 4 in this collection.

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regionalism, not with his international culturalism. But Dafydd can step up a gear and match Chaucer’s cultural projections. In Dewis Un o Bedair, he goes on to say that beyond his known three – exquisite but disappeared Dyddgu, Morfudd the splendid but degraded, and Elen of the thick mouth and hot feet – there is a fourth: Gwawr brenhiniaeth, maeth a’i medd, Y byd ŵyr, yr’r bedwaredd. Ni chaiff o’m pen cymen call, Hoen geirw, na hi nac arall Na’i henw, na’r wlad yr hanoedd, Hoff iawn yw, na pha un oedd. (39–44) The kingdom’s sovereignty, she rules its growth, the world knows, is the fourth; she’ll not from my lips, discreet and wise the wave’s vivacity, nor any other be named, nor the land from where she comes – a true pleasure she is – nor who she may be. A knowledge of Celtic discourse makes it clear that the unnamed fourth who is both behind and within the triune women is Y Sofraniaeth, ‘The Sovereignty’, that mythic woman whom Irish and Welsh kings had married to gain royalty, and is here re-imagined at the vanishing point of Celtic authority. She is the powerful presence brooding behind the great women of Irish and Welsh myth like Medb in the Táin Bó Cúailnge (‘The Cattle Raid of Cooley’), Rhiannon in Pwyll, the first branch of the Mabinogi (for a discussion of the sovereignty figure see Chapter 4 in this collection).

5. Male selves Chaucer’s treatment of women shares obvious basic patterns with Dafydd’s, and there are also resemblances in the presentation of the male self. Dafydd shapes himself as a failed or foolish lover, and so obviously touches the motifs used as a setting-up position by Chaucer, especially in the dream poems, but more striking is the way both poets use themselves as comic foils, people to laugh at in a mildly condescending way. This probably has less to do with male modesty than with the uncertain position of these poets, seeking praise and reward in an insecure context. They are at times courtiers in search of a court, constrained to an underdog rhetorical position, rather than having the aggressive confidence of the truly established bards, like Dafydd’s sonorously titled poetic ancestors, such as Taliesin, called a cynfardd, ‘first bard’, or Cynddelw, whose cognomen was simply Y Prydydd Mawr, ‘The Great Poet’. 241

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Dafydd creates the ironic, and so rhetorically tolerable, male poetic self in Trafferth Mewn Tafarn (‘Trouble in a Tavern’). He approaches the town as a squire, with a spring in his step that is mirrored in the lively energy of the verse: Deuthum i ddinas dethol, A’m hardd wreangyn i’m hȏl. ... Canfod rhiain addfeindeg Yn y tŷ, mau enaid teg. Bwrw yn llwyr, liw haul dwyrain, Fy mryd ar wyn fy myn main. (1–2, 7–10) I came to a choice city, in my train my handsome squire. ... I espied a slender beauty in that house, my fair beloved, setting fully on my slim darling, my heart, colour of the rising sun. The poem maintains two intertwined narratives: in one the speaker fantasises he is a lover who meets a heroine and steals her heart; in another he is a scruffy wanderer who bargains for a grapple in the dark with a complaisant barmaid. This is the reality, and even that goes wrong. It is dark, he trips over, a basin ‘yells’, the English travellers assume the Welsh are robbing them as usual, and he skulks away to his gwal, a word meaning animal bed, ‘lair’, not human bed, gwely. Chaucer’s self-mockery is briefer, and lighter, but in ‘Sir Thopas’ and the dream poems he interweaves the same themes of language-based arrogance, overweening self-concepts and the guarded appeal for credit for the individual lurking behind this mask of foolish individuality.

6. Difference In spite of all these resemblances, there appears to be a distinct area of difference between the two poets. Dispossessed as Dafydd is, both as poet and Welshman, he is still able to find a focus of true and consistent value. It was close to the surface of the poems Mis Mai (‘The Month of May’) and Y Deildy (‘The Leaf-House)’, but it comes out most fully in the famous cywydd Offeren y Llwyn (‘The Mass of the Grove’). The llatai, ‘love messenger’, here a thrush-cock, comes from Morfudd, but he carries a grander message of earthly passion than she can offer: Amdano yr oedd gasmai O flodau mwyn gangau Mai, A’i gasul, debygesynt, O esgyll, gwyrdd fentyll, gwynt. 242

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Nid oedd yna, myn Duw mawr, Ond aur oll yn do’r allawr. Mi a glywwn mewn gloywiaith Ddatganu, nid methu, maith, Darllain i’r plwyf, nid rhwyf rhus, Efyngyl yn ddifyngus. Codi ar fryn ynn yna Afrlladen o ddeilen dda. Ac eos gain fain fangaw O gwr y llwyn gar ei llaw, Clerwraig nant, i gant a gȃn Cloch aberth, clau ei chwiban, A dyrchafel yr aberth Hyd y nen uwchben y berth; A chrefydd i’n Dofydd Dad, A charegl nwyf a chariad (15–34) About him was a vestment of the flowers of the sweet branches of May, and his chasuble seemed to be the winged green mantles of the wind. By great God there was nothing but gold in the altar roof. I heard in bright language chanting, long and without cease, and read to the parish with clarity a gospel at good speed. raised up on a mound for us was a perfect leaf as mass wafer, and the eloquent slender nightingale from the corner of the nearby thicket the valley’s poetess sang to the heavens, Sanctus bell with pure sound, and there was raised the sacrifice to the sky above the grove with adoration of our Lord the Father with a chalice of joy and love. European connections appear evident here, though Jean de Condé’s somewhat similar Messe des Oiseaux is not ‘regarded as a source’ by the authoritative Rachel Bromwich.13 The development of the idea is primarily native to Wales;

13 See Aspects of the Poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1986), p. 77.

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this grand piece of nature poetry shows Dafydd moving into Christian animism to resolve harmoniously the tension of his position. The sonorous chains of cynghanedd are, finally, both tightly and sacramentally bound, and are themselves fully natural. It is in this respect that Chaucer seems most different from the other masterpoet of the time in Britain. He is unable to bring into coherence the secular and the spiritual as Dafydd does. For Chaucer there is ultimately a rupture between the two modes, and his texts are deeply marked with the strain between them, either in uncertain gaps and silence, as at the end of The Hous of Fame, or in major palinodes as in Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales, where the abrupt anti-world endings express the difficulty to be found between world and spirit.

7. Responses to colonising That difference of evaluative climax between the poets may well have common roots in the responses they make to the different kinds of colonisation in which they are involved. Dafydd fills the well-known role of the colonised artist before hybridisation, the committed native artist who retains his indigenous culture as a whole and only partakes of the culture of the conqueror in a way that appropriates it or in inherent resistance. Like an Australian Indigenous artist painting totem shields with acrylic paint, Dafydd challenges the world that threatens him, and in the cultural domain masters it. Dafydd, however, is not the only one of these two poets to be in the context of colonisation. Geoffrey Chaucer’s name is fully French, while Dafydd’s is only half French. If Chaucer is English, it is through his acceptance of the colonised world in which he lives, as the descendant of a colonising family that took full residence in the colony. Out of the conflict between English and French, conquered and conqueror, there comes hybridisation, and the colonised come to speak and write, and so live, a culture that adopts the values of the dominant forces but translates them, often enrichingly, into the native tongue. That is not a bad description of the richly innovative, deeply unusual in English, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, inherently un-English in all but language. Chaucer writes like a native, but one with rich international connections. Even in this he has a Welsh parallel: it is easy to read the moves and impact made by Chaucer, and liken them to the work of Morgan Beibl, the great Welsh scholar who translated the Bible into magnificently formal Welsh, and so created the weirdly syncretic pulpit culture of Celticity and Christianity. Strong until the present, that formation has in its potently inauthentic way sustained the language – unlike what happened in Gaelic Ireland and Scotland, which adopted religions that remained largely unhybridised in terms of language. Chaucer in the same way is the creator of a fully syncretic oeuvre, the coloniser’s world serving the colonised. The robust humour is French-style vulgar stories; the sensitive love poetry is largely lifted from Italian; the moral sobriety 244

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comes from Latin, mostly via his familiar French. Language and most of the social contacts are, it seems, essentially English, though a much enriched English, and that largely developed from French or its Latinate origins. There is a very clear difference between Chaucer’s language and the stiffly robust native and Christian diction, as well as the strict moralism, of Langland. To read Chaucer as a syncretic and hybridised colonial artist, accepting and massively enriching the culture of his colonised context, is a good way of understanding the strange tensions and fusions in his art that make it today of so much interest in comparison with Dafydd, whose poetry has a culturally coherent, essentially uniform, naturo-Christian vanishing point – and so a modern reading of it can risk the simplifying danger of identifying it as nationalist. The sophisticated multiple nature of Chaucer’s work, comedy, romance, moralism, Christianity, all from all over the European past, but also localising themselves largely in his own modern England, may have some positive interrogative grace in lacking a single, and so possibly simplifying and constricting, vanishing point. But charity to the coloniser, even one who accepts a colonised context, can be overdone: Chaucer’s texts still make their imperialist claims, even though they are only launched on the oceans of culture. In the language of the colonised English, Chaucer’s texts in fact trace the world-acquiring reach of their colonising overlords, and this explains, and requires, the international half of The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer’s epistemological ships have brought back the cultural freight of the Mediterranean and the east, as did the far-flung Crusades, and as later stages of the English syncretised state were to do in golden imperial literality.

8. Conclusion Ultimately Dafydd’s art is that of a still native culture, embattled but at ease with itself, named Cymraeg. In the coloniser’s language the word for the colonised people is Welsh, coming from the Anglo-Saxon ‘wealh’, which means ‘foreigner’ – the Welsh name for Wales, Cymru, means ‘The Companions’. The Cymraeg model is indeed foreign to Chaucer’s restless, deracinated, hybrid, widely and richly colonising culture, which he and almost all since have called English. In Wales the name is ‘Saeson’, remembering uneuphemistically that ‘seax’ in Saxon was the word for a warrior’s sword-like knife. At their highest value, the two poets differ over whether love’s altar was indeed in a forest glade or, despite sinful distractions, inside the stony walls of a church. But there are other illuminations to be examined through this askance glance across the still Celto-Romanically named Severn. Against the model of the Welsh maestro, Chaucer is much less the child of nature and transgression than he has seemed, but also much less the poet of harmony and coherence than he has been desired to be in his widely favoured role as the ideal of medievalism in miserable fragmented modernity. The characteristics that show up in the searching light of 245

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Dafydd’s profound poetic are that Chaucer’s colonised and coloniser skills are devoted to the Lowland Zone; servant to the dominant power; eager for domain overseas; an objectifier of women of all kinds; deeply, even obsessively, aware of social stratification; having only limited interest in the phonic or imagistic essence of poetry; and finally, or terminally, unable to consolidate delight and religion. In a Welsh light, Chaucer does indeed seem a credible progenitor of the essence of what it is to be English.

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14 CHAUCER’S FABLIAUX AND LATE MEDIEVAL STRUCTURES OF FEELING

Unpublished

1. Introduction This paper reviews Chaucer’s use of fabliaux in The Canterbury Tales in a primarily social and political light, the kind of light from which mainstream figures of cultural capital like Chaucer have so often been shaded. I will be arguing that he read and used the fabliaux as a political instrument, though not a single-sided one, and that while it seems most probable he picked up from Boccaccio the idea of redeploying what was by his time an old-fashioned French genre, he had a quite different purpose from the use of fabliaux in the Decameron, as he also basically had in reusing the Italian master’s work in Troilus and Criseyde and ‘The Knight’s Tale’. In this discussion, as my title suggests, I will be using another genre that seems to have faded from fashionability, the critical analysis of Raymond Williams, relying on two chapters from the 1977 Marxism and Literature, chapter 9 on ‘Structure of Feeling’ and the previous one on ‘Dominant, Residual and Emergent’, the three modes of sociocultural self-realisation Williams explores. He sees ‘structures of feeling’ as patterns of ‘meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt’:1 any context will register variant versions, residual, dominant, and emergent, and overlaps among them. With those instruments I want to reflect on what Chaucer was doing by creating these very unusual pieces of English literature. But I will start in the spirit of historicity, as Williams would recommend, going back in time to look at the earliest formations of the fabliaux, and the modern debate about their socio-political context and meaning.

2. Bédier and Nykrog Major study of the fabliaux is to be traced to Joseph Bédier’s massive study of 1893,2 which drew together and moved on from the work of many scholars,

1 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 132. 2 Joseph Bédier, Les Fabliaux: études de littérature populaire et d’histoire littéraire du moyen âge (Paris: Champion, 1893).

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notably Gaston Paris. They had established there was a mass of comic and often scatological French verse tales that became, around and soon after 1200, a recognised popular genre named fabliau – which just means ‘story’. The dominant originary reading of them was that their main dynamic was from the East – The Arabian Nights was no doubt the model in the scholars’ minds. The crucial new thing about Bédier’s reading was that it was against the Eastern-origin idea, and insisted that the fabliaux were essentially pre-Crusade and their origin was the voice of the new world of bourgeoisie and artisans in the towns that developed under twelfth-century French prosperity. Bédier’s position that the fabliau celebrates the sub-gentry world held sway for a long time, including in the critical work of Charles Muscatine, whose influential book Chaucer and the French Tradition came out in 1957, the same year as a book that turned the Bédier thesis upside-down. Per Nykrog just read all the fabliaux and analysed them newly:3 on fabliau origins, he accepted the anti-Eastern thesis, but then reversed the pro-popular idea. His analysis showed that high lords play very little part in the stories, never becoming involved in a sexual triangle, just appearing occasionally as a judge – a king of England does twice get into humiliating mischief, but that can be put down to French patriotism, not class interest. The rank below lords, vavasours, vassals of a vassal, i.e. gentry holding land from a lord (a king’s vassal) do appear, but mostly in a ‘morally elevated’ context.4 Chevaliers, lower gentry, also feature and can often be involved in sexual activity, but in general they are rivals of clerks and are rarely disgraced, though at times outwitted. Interestingly, and Nykrog thinks bad news for Bédier, if a bourgeois appears and is sympathetically represented it will be because he behaves in a surprisingly noble way, and a really useless bourgeois is seen as being equivalent to a villain (‘churl’). There are plenty of churls in the stories, and they are usually humiliated by their wives, often cuckolded by chevaliers and clerks. There is the church as well. Bishops are rare, and usually judges, though just a few become involved in the sex that is more common lower down the church. But the clerks in general are not humiliated or physically mangled, as is common for random artisan or bourgeois seducers. A clerk, Nykrog says, is never denigrated in a fabliau5 – but clerk means a scholar. The parish priests are the real fall guys, full of lust and incompetence. Nykrog reports that monks are rarely seen as bad. He feels the very substantial power of Benedictine monks in towns was the cause of this. He even suggests there might be some authorial role for ordinary clerks and scholars, hostile to parish priests and sometimes monks, and capable of having written the fabliaux that mock them.

3 Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957); Per Nykrog, Les Fabliaux: étude d’histoire littéraire et du stylistique médiévale (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1957). 4 Nykrog, p. 122. 5 Ibid., p. 132.

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Out of all this intriguing analysis, Nykrog concludes that Bédier had it quite wrong, and he sees the main and recurrent thrust of the fabliaux as being in favour of the upper classes and courtly values: he sums the fabliaux up as ‘contes courtois antifeministes’.6 He makes them the downmarket partner of courtly romance, and bearing quite the opposite of the social meaning that Bédier had suggested. This interpretation appealed to people, in part because it was new: fashionability and innovation are elements in critical reception. Perhaps also because the argument seems relaxingly anti-political in being pro-establishment – as if that is not political. But Nykrog’s reading is too simplistic, a naive reflective theory, as was, in reverse, Bédier’s. Bédier thought if they were common stories, then common folk consumed them: Nykrog thought if they favoured the court, then the court was the base. If we run Raymond Williams over these ideas and the originary context, it all changes. The two social levels, popular and courtly, are not necessarily opposed – they may be dialectically related. The first major author of what became fabliaux, and beast-fables as well, is Marie de France in her massive late twelfth-century Ysopet, Aesop medievalised in over a hundred tales, and to some degree Easternised. But she was also the author of twelve elegant, courtly, romance-focused Breton lais. To Nykrog Williams would say you are overlooking the fact that a new sociocultural self-realisation is based on appropriated elements of the former dominant culture. The fabliau, that is, can be read in Williams’ terms as an emergent cultural form which redeploys much of the dominant cultural form, the courtly romance. It is because the base social group is bourgeois that it is so bothered about seeming too bourgeois, and so wants to value the courtly and the chivalric. The medieval church was involved as well in the fabliau context. The church was part of a dominant cultural power, but by the twelfth century it was splitting on one hand into the established monks and priests, differently ranked bad people in the fabliaux; on the other into the clerks, the secular religious, the clever men who have been to university and can manage the administration and do a lot of writing – a sort of insurgent clerical bourgeoisie. Nykrog may well have had a good instinct that the clerks were involved in producing this new mode; these are men who are in low-level holy orders, but have not been made priests who can perform the sacraments. We will see more of them in Chaucer’s hands. So the original fabliau can be identified as an emergent cultural form, with identifiable social connections, but being necessarily obscure, displaced, falsely conscious, in its own socio-political self-realisation. In a similar way the first printers in London did little except print volumes about the wonders of chivalry, which they sold to successful citizens such as grocers and butchers who owned no wide lands and were not comfortable on a horse. False consciousness we called that in the 1970s.

6 Ibid., p. 254.

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3. Boccaccio Chaucer scholars have shown that he appears to know fabliaux from French sources, as might be expected from his familiarity with that culture, but in recent years the former opinion that he did not know Boccaccio’s Decameron, with its substantial loading of fabliaux, has been reversed. There is another series of tales with a structured frame in the works of Giovanni Sercambi, but there the tales are all told by the narrator, and in any case recent scholarship suggests that Sercambi’s Novelle were not available until the 1380s at the earliest.7 It seems most likely that Chaucer derived the idea of a tale series with different tellers from Boccaccio. This was a special connection, not an obvious move. The fabliau, as was shown by Bédier, was by then no longer popular in France, and though it had been re-used by Boccaccio in his recent Decameron, that does not seem a single and primary source for Chaucer. Not, as was once thought, because he did not know the work: as has been summarised by Donald McGrady,8 recent scholarship has argued it is most unlikely that someone who knew Boccaccio’s other work well, used it closely in Troilus and Criseyde and ‘The Knight’s Tale ’, had travelled in Italy, and very probably met Petrarch, would not have known of the quite widely discussed popular prose tales of the Decameron. The most recent study of Boccaccio’s use of the fabliaux shows an uncanny resemblance to Chaucer’s deployment of them – Brown counts twenty-seven of Boccaccio’s hundred tales as based on fabliaux,9 a good deal more than other scholars have, but almost exactly the same percentage as the fabliaux are of The Canterbury Tales; the Decameron also bunches them for enhanced effect, as Chaucer does. Aware of what Boccaccio was doing, and using a similar structure, but not following him in detail, it is most likely that Chaucer’s purpose is simply different from Boccaccio’s. McGrady suggests that if Chaucer had followed the Decameron more closely ‘such a dependence upon a single work might have appeared unseemly to the poet and his contemporaries’,10 but it is more likely that Chaucer had different sociopolitical interests, as will be discussed here. There are some fabliaux contacts between Chaucer and Boccaccio, see Appendix, but none of those suggest direct borrowing. Important in separating Chaucer’s use of fabliaux from Boccaccio’s is the different interaction between narrators on the basis of the stories. It seems generally agreed that the two authors have a different purpose in their tale-teller relations. Boccaccio uses the tales as elements

7 Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, Sources and Analogues of The Canterbury Tales, 2 volumes (Cambridge: Brewer, 2005), see vol. 2, p. 736. 8 Donald McGrady, ‘Chaucer and the “Decameron” Reconsidered’, Chaucer Review, 12 (1977), 1–26. 9 Katherine Brown, Boccaccio’s Fabliaux: Medieval Short Stories and the Function of Reversal (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2014). See Appendix, Table 2, ‘Decameron novelle and fabliaux analogues’, pp. 171–2. 10 McGrady, p. 15.

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in realising a particular thematic/generic concept, as found in the themes for eight of the ten days – the first and ninth are open – and also a much debated set of themes embodied in the non-tale material, the prologue and the cornice. All this material is ethical and intellectual; there is no complex relationship with the teller and the tale or between the tellers on the basis of their story. The servants at the tale-telling tell no stories: all the tellers are generally of the same class, ladies and gentlemen. The several fabliaux found on day one are clerical exposés rather than sexual tales, Boccaccio’s choice rather than a theme agreed by the tellers; on the third where they are mostly sexual stories under the theme of achieving an object lost or desired, and on the seventh day under the theme of tricks on husbands. The tales give rise to no conflict between tellers – at first the ladies express some opposition to the sexual stories, but soon enough laugh, and this benign attitude is restated before the main vulgar sequence, on day seven. Coming to terms with sexuality is the main outcome of the use of the fabliaux by Boccaccio, and he uses the stories as elements in his exposition of social attitudes to challenging behaviour. The stories do not deal in social conflict, and the only sign of conflict between tellers, or even complexity between teller and tale, is when some of the seven ladies object for a while to the sexual nature of tales told by some of the three gentlemen. Boccaccio’s stories shape a wide-ranging account of human ethics and interactions, and scholars have found deeper meanings at times in the symbolic settings of the frame, or cornice – one reading suggests that the drive of the whole work is to show how Reason can contain Anger and Lust when aided by the seven Classical and Christian virtues, as personified by the seven ladies.11 Chaucer realises a much more socially dynamic understanding of what his narrators represent than Boccaccio does, and makes the fabliaux, at least at first, into instruments of social challenge.

4. Chaucer Chaucer, among many remarkable achievements, was the only English poet to undertake the form of the fabliau – it is hard to find any other example in English, as John Hines has noted.12 A text always listed as a fabliau is Dame Siriz and the Weeping Bitch, a late thirteenth-century comic poem relating a seduction trick: a woman is persuaded to take a clerk as her lover because Dame Siriz, a procuress, claims her dog, whose eyes are watering through the application of pepper and mustard, was transformed from a woman who refused a clerk, and now constantly weeps. It only survives in one manuscript and has no evident contact with Chaucer’s work. There are two other fabliau-style pre-Chaucer English texts, ‘The Fox and the Wolf’, a simple trick story, and ‘A Pennyworth of Wit’ which does involve a merchant and his mistress, but is slight in plot and detail.

11 See Victoria Kirkham, ‘An Allegorically Tempered Decameron’, Italica, 62 (1985), 1–23. 12 John Hines, The Fabliau in English (London: Longman, 1993), pp. 37–42.

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Chaucer appears to have decided to deploy fabliaux as another of his Euroinnovations, a decision emphasised by the fact that six of the first ten tales are in that form. Miller, Reeve and Cook all offer classic sexual fabliau stories (as later will the Shipman).13 Friar and Summoner have the slightly less common anticlerical mode, and the Merchant melds fabliau-style marital misadventure with a parodic treatment of romance in a way that seems, largely unnoticed by Chaucerians, to refer back to the opening Knight-Miller collision of socially and tonally extremely different accounts of passion versus authority. After that ‘The Franklin’s Tale’ seems to play with the possibility of becoming, or at least adapting, the fabliau form, and ‘The Manciple’s Tale’ could be read as a beast-fabliau – though Chaucer’s other beast-fable, ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’, has no fabliau element of social or sexual conflict. The key element in Chaucer’s use of fabliaux seems to be a form of sociopolitical challenge, made unmistakable in his decision to make three of his first four tales fabliaux. That this is thematically purposeful is plain when the Miller in the second tale offers a barrage of vulgar and contesting response to the story told by the evident social leader on the pilgrimage, the Knight. The ‘General Prologue’ has given an account of the pilgrims in a manner that in structure represents and confirms contemporary social confidences. The Knight and his entourage lead, representing civil authority, landholding, military power and, in the yeoman, the policing of it. Then religious establishment figures come in rank order, a Prioress before a Monk, and then a Friar. Innovation emerges as Chaucer lists a group who are above churls and are all in some way free people with skills, providing services and living in the market: they are led by a Merchant and include, quite high up, a Clerk – he is not with the formal church people. This new class group closes with the morally good Parson and Plowman, who are brothers and evidently of humble origin, but operate with moral, if also conservative, independence. They are followed by the churls, led by the Miller – and modestly, even sneakily, including Chaucer himself. These social groupings have in them a recognition of new social forces, especially in that group between church and churl, but as the tales themselves begin it is clear that the Host intends to supervise a continuation of court-church order. Though he says he is arranging a lottery for tale-order, he evidently presses the short straw for first tale on the Knight, and when he finishes, the Host simply calls on the Monk to follow. But this does not work, and the political use of the fabliaux explodes into the poem. When the Host invites the Monk to ‘quite’ the Knight’s tale he just means by that verb ‘match’ – but the Miller makes it mean ‘challenge’. His description is animal-like, he is drunk, he disrupts literary as well as social order, and Chaucer bestows on him the height of his art.

13 Kolve has questioned if there was enough of the tale to predict its future to be that of a fabliau, but there seems enough to show it was headed for vulgarity, and the final words point clearly enough to sexual comedy: V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984), p. 275.

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As is well-known, ‘The Miller’s Tale’ reverses the knight’s story. That was about two noble friends who love the same beautiful distant princess in Theseus’s Athens. The Miller tells of modern Oxford, where a sexy young carpenter’s wife is up for mischief, and is wooed by two clerks obsessed with desire, one foppish and foolish, one fanciful and focused. Theseus has become an elderly carpenter, whose highly willing wife Alison and their clerk-lodger Nicholas get rid of the husband by claiming a new Noah’s Flood is coming: he hangs himself up in the roof in a tub to float to safety. Only Alison gets what she wants without penalty. The foppish admirer Absolon has been outraged by kissing her ‘nether eye’ – she thought it fun to put her backside out of the window when he asked for a kiss. But Nicholas, in return for actually having her, is worse wounded, as Absolon returns with a red-hot ploughshare intending to thrust into Alison, but Nicholas, intending to ‘amend the jape’, was at the window this time. And the poor old husband has broken his arm. As he hears Nicholas scream ‘Water’ when the ploughshare strikes, he thought the flood has arrived, cuts the rope and crashes to the ground – much as has done the fine rhetoric and cultural capital of ‘The Knight’s Tale’ itself. The male insurgents have all come to harm through their folly, and in a way so does the Miller. Social challenge is built into the Miller’s ‘quiting’, but then the Reeve’s angry response creates disabling dissent among the insurgent social forces and imposes some closure on the Miller’s energy. In this the Reeve speaks for his position of petty authority within the existing system. The Reeve originally a carpenter, and on behalf of his trade is very offended by the miller’s story; in a hostile tone he insists on telling a tale about humiliating a miller. Not many Chaucer scholars think about the Reeve’s other position – a Reeve controlled the serf-peasantry on an estate. While the Reeve’s action against the Miller might just be seen as comic play, mere fabliau activity, it also has the effect of blunting the Miller’s substantial challenge to ‘The Knight’s Tale’ and its world of courtly culture; the angry malicious Reeve, in culture as he did in life, acts to certify that upper-class power is natural, and privileged, and churlish dissent must descend into churlish conflict. Having raised through the Miller a socio-cultural challenge to ‘The Knight’s Tale’, Chaucer diminishes its status and value through the Reeve, and this evaluative deterioration of the churls’ narratives appears to continue as the Cook, enjoying the Reeve’s anti-Miller spirit, insists, with the Host’s support, on telling a ‘jape’. He is a servant of the group of city businessmen, and he is distinctly unappealing: he has an infected wound on his shin – one of the manuscripts has a fine illustration of it, with a bloodstained dressing. He claws the Reeve on the back with pleasure and launches into his tale of misbehaviour in London, and ends when discussing the wife of a friend, who kept a shop but, in the final words, is revealed as a prostitute who ‘swived for her sustenance’ (p. 86, line 4422).14

14 Quotations are from The Riverside Chaucer, General Editor Larry D. Benson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

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Abandoning a story is a recurrent practice in The Canterbury Tales – the Monk’s boring account of classical tragedy is halted by the Knight, saying we have had enough of this; Chaucer himself is asked to stop his feeble (and parodic) romance by the Host, who thinks ‘Thy drasty ryming is nat worth a toord’ (p. 216, line 930). The Squire’s more elaborate romance is unfinished and though there is no link, many Chaucerians feel it was to be stopped to permit the Franklin to provide a moralisation of romance themes aware of class, religious and even intellectual issues. The sudden and verbally lurid ending of ‘The Cook’s Tale’ seems very likely to be another of these ruptures, and as such would have been the way Chaucer was planning his way out of the opening fabliaux assault on the gentry. It seems that someone was going to interrupt ‘The Cook’s Tale’ on the basis of its verbal offensiveness. Indeed, the sequence of tales then takes a sober turn, with ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’ drawing on the riches of Christian ethical learning, completing a usually unnoticed court and church frame around the fabliaux. He was socially the top-listed pilgrim following the knight and his entourage, so he was the second senior male, and might well have been used to interrupt the Cook, in an unwritten link. His incorporation with those elevated figures effectively closes the disruptions of the opening group in conservative orderly terms. So for Chaucer the fabliau has at first a socially disruptive role that is in various ways contained. But how far is its reference, how disruptive are its implications? It is some years since I offered the scholarly world the notion that the whole Canterbury Tales is a discursive reversal of the 1381 rising.15 I pointed out that the pilgrims exactly reverse the route by which the Kentish rebels marched on London and entered it through Aldgate, when Geoffrey Chaucer was living in an apartment above Aldgate itself. But his pilgrims take their narrative disruptions away with them and never return from Canterbury, as was originally planned: and when they arrive there the Parson insists, in prose, on the need to worship the order of God. Not many Chaucer scholars like to think about that sombre shadow of political reality, but the first fragment fabliaux can be read as Chaucer’s displaced recognition of the disorderly social forces of his own period. Jack the Miller was identified memorably in the widely distributed John Ball letter as a mythical leader of the social disorder of 1381.16 This was in later discussions entitled ‘The Peasants’ Revolt’, which is in itself a class simplification, even euphemisation, of the multiple character of the rebellion: most leaders were not peasants but artisans, small landowners and town-dwellers, not unlike Chaucer’s fabliau-narrators. None seems to have been a reeve, the one who introduces damaging dissent to the popular voice – and who, if he were promoted would have been a shire-reeve, or

15 Stephen Knight, Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), see pp. 66–9. 16 See Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (London: Methuen, 1976), p. 223.

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sheriff, so making a link between his hostility to social challenge here and that of the main enemy in the late medieval Robin Hood materials. Other possible connections exist. The forces of disruption in 1381 moved from country centres into London, like the first three fabliaux; minor officials of the church were often involved, as they are in the disruptions of these stories. The whole event was seen as a breach of traditional obedience, and the Miller handles this last connection in comic reversal. Nicholas’s deployment of Noah’s Flood for his private purposes can be seen as a farcical displacement of the great biblical punishment for disobedience, which was in the period (and notably in the miracle plays mentioned in the tale) usually focused as lechery; and like Noah one man shows fidelity to his duties, albeit now only a stupidly credulous artisan. While Noah’s wife dissented from entering the ark, Alison is keen both to enter and leave it – though only with Nicholas. In Chaucer’s hands, fabliau is resurrected both for entertainment and for complex socio-political purposes. Chaucer continues a disruptive rather than expressive mode of fabliau-use when the Summoner and Friar exchange hostile anti-clerical fabliaux, exposing mutually the failings of friars and summoners in the tales by those two (a pair of hostile fabliaux much like those of the Miller and the Reeve) – but then, as if invoked by that anti-clerical operation from within the church, Chaucer follows this (though there is no link, all the manuscripts have this order) by using a non-fabliau story quite close to Boccaccio’s final story, Day 10 number 10, as ‘The Clerk’s Tale’, asseverating the value of patience and devotion, from peasant woman to lordly husband. That might seem surprisingly docile of Chaucer – though it is a sort of prolepsis of ‘The Parson’s Tale’, and the Clerk does, as if questioning the containment, provide the remarkable ‘Envoi de Chaucer’ which rejects all that docile anti-feminism in the name of the Wife of Bath, a figure who has her own relationship with fabliaux. The Wife’s Prologue shows her as sexually-experienced, self-confident and narratively dominant, like any of the mature heroines of the fabliaux of adultery, and it would have seemed obvious to continue with a gender-triumphalist fabliau from her. Indeed there is a candidate – many commentators feel she originally told ‘The Shipman’s Tale’. This is a well-developed story of a sexually active wife, with a lusty clerical lover and a complaisant, even affectionate husband. It is in many ways a classical fabliau, certainly a pro-feminist one: and its prologue indicates that the narrator is a woman. Yet it is allotted to the Shipman, a ‘General Prologue’ character who is vivid enough in his own terms, but seem to have little connection with others, and might well have been available for the re-allocation of a story, especially an overseas-set one. When the Wife does tell her tale it is an old-fashioned romance, based on the folk-tale like story of the ‘loathly lady’, a woman who is ugly but wise, and is transformed into a beauty, and partner to the appealing hero. Though it does early on mock friars in a fabliau tone, it has no contact with that genre, and it may well be that having completed her learned and brilliantly self-assertive Prologue, with its suggestion of inner personal feeling, Chaucer thought that even a finely-developed classical fabliau would not 255

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be complex enough for this rich voice, and the Shipman became the improbable recipient of the tale, with an unrevised headlink. If the Wife’s notional fabliau disappeared in a quest for higher complexity, further confrontation is found, embedded in fabliau forms, in two other tales from this potent sequence often called ‘The Marriage Group’ – a focal theme naturally attractive to fabliaux. In ‘The Merchant’s Tale’, a familiar enough fable about old husband, lusty young wife and handsome squire – the chevalier element – is both told and ironically elaborated as a fabliau of social and sexual assumption and usurpation. Its complex voice sounds as if Knight and Miller speak in turns, even at times simultaneously. The comedy can be vulgar, even vile, as in the bedroom scene when the old, unshaven January forces his martial attentions on the silent but clearly less than excited May. But as their names suggest, the story is also given an elevated discursive structure. The mix in part parodies the aspiration to gentry status by the rich old Merchant but also – Chaucer can seem astonishingly perceptive – mimes the process discussed above as the basis of the first French fabliaux, providing a vulgar, falsely conscious, claim on chivalric status. The next sequence offers another encounter with narrativised social challenge. First the Squire, son of the Knight, attempts a fanciful romance, genuinely of Eastern origin. He does not finish: it seems likely that someone is meant to interrupt him politely, quite probably the Franklin, who then tells his own tale, a gentry story rich in social anxiety. In this a squire basically entraps a noble wife, Dorigen, to be his mistress through clerical magic. It looks as if lust, empowered by clerical cunning, is going to overturn the gentry marital applecart, much as Nicholas did at the carpenter’s house. But here (where the husband is truly noble, unlike both the carpenter and January), all will be well: the fabliau is avoided, as is discussed in Chapter 4 in this collection. Arveragus’s nobility in yielding his wife is matched by the chevalier in possibility Aurelius (himself already a squire), who abandons his lust and his clerically/magically-won claim on Dorigen, for a socially and maritally orderly ending. This outcome matches that of the sub-plot, a fabliau-style story of social and sexual usurpation, where the clerk-magician’s contemporary learning (which Parsons sees as a development from clerical fabliaux),17 provides the disruptive power but finally chivalric fidelity and self-sacrifice is imitated by the insurgent Aurelius – so finally ‘The Franklin’s Tale’ is an anti-fabliau. The fabliaux found in the ‘Marriage Group’ express a sense that having mastered the form, Chaucer wanted to do much more complex things with it than it had originally achieved – more than Boccaccio had attained and that even he had achieved of social challenge in the first fragment. That may also be true of

17 Ben Parsons, ‘No Laughing Matter: Fraud, the Fabliau, and Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale’, Neophilologus, 96 (2012), 121–36. The essay stresses at length the magician’s mix of skill and ‘sense of dishonesty’ (p. 126); his work is briefly seen as ‘on behalf of Aurelius’ (p. 132) but Aurelius is seen as ‘conventionally romantic’ (p. 133) not, as the plot indicates, potentially a fabliau-style sexual insurgent.

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the little noticed ‘The Manciple’s Tale’, a short recounting of the fable ‘How the Crow’s Feathers Became Black’. The white-feathered bird observed the wife of his master Phoebus Apollo with her lover, told his master, who killed his wife, but then blamed the crow and turned his feathers black. Both the context and the genre are fabliauesque, but more important – and in its subtle complexity more Chaucerian – is the function of the story in The Canterbury Tales itself. It is a moral lesson about the danger of speaking too freely, especially on sexual matters. This final semi-fabliau is used to disempower the disruptive spirit of Chaucer’s earlier fabliaux, and that conformist message will then be hammered home, moral nail after moral nail, in the Parson’s closing prose sermon.

5. Fabliau as emergent structure of feeling Several voices other than Chaucer’s also realise the conflicted context that gives rise to his fabliaux, further recognising the forces in the wider late medieval sociopolitical context that he references in those tales. This other material is itself linked to his work by including a second Cook’s tale, inserted to fill the gap before ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’. In the sizeable cd group of manuscripts, the Cook tells another tale. That text is Gamelyn, which also survives separately as a medium-length late fourteenth-century poem – and which has its own element of socio-political disruption by putting outlaw violence behind the lone hero’s re-establishment against the corrupt authority of his gentry family. These manuscripts that use Gamelyn as a second Cook’s tale lack accepted authority (though the poem is in the early Corpus 198 manuscript, which some have perhaps improbably traced to Chaucer’s lifetime – the current dating is 1390–1415). The clumsy style and unnuanced voice of Gamelyn make it unbelievable as Chaucer’s work (and is not like ‘Sir Thopas’ readable as parody), but some scholars have thought Chaucer had it among his papers to work up into a second Cook’s tale. It is naïve to state, as does the Riverside Chaucer, that Gamelyn ‘does not seem at all appropriate to the Cook’ (p. 853). Making strange-seeming tales fit uncannily, revealingly, is part of Chaucer’s exploration of his story-tellers, as with the Wife of Bath or the Nun’s Priest. There are at least some points of contact: Gamelyn says to his treacherous brother ‘“I will not be thi coke”’,18 then uses a large cook’s pestle as a weapon. Whatever might be the full meaning of the Cook-Gamelyn juxtaposition, it evidently links the fabliaux incursion into the Canterbury Tales to popular romance: both present a social challenge to authority and its cultural self-realisation. What is especially interesting about this is what sort of poem it is, and how well it and its presence mesh with Chaucer’s use of the

18 ‘The Tale of Gamelyn’, in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. by Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, TEAMS Series (Kalamazoo: University of Western Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 184–226; see pp. 196, 92.

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fabliau to realise some sort of social challenge to established authority and order. Looking at this will take us back to Raymond Williams. Gamelyn tells of a youngest brother who is cheated out of his modest inheritance by his oldest brother and corrupt legal advisers. He takes to the forest and joins the outlaws; when their leader retires he replaces him, and with outlaw support attacks the law-court where his good middle brother is being charged and likely to be executed. Gamelyn breaks the judge’s arm, then hangs him, his bad brother and – this is stern stuff – the entire jury, so gaining his inheritance. The king is happy with this, and makes him a forester. We call this ‘popular romance’, well away from the glories and honour of high romance, or you might say unpopular romance. The outlaws and the forest also link to the late medieval dissenting texts. In a recent paper I have argued that a group of new cultural formations in late medieval England is a move towards realisation of a new class, between lords and churls.19 I explore the parallel operation of popular romance, Chaucer’s fabliaux, Robin Hood ballads, and a fourth, little-known, genre called ‘King and Subject ballads’, where the king, out alone, meets a subject, they debate and dispute, and somehow the story resolves this apparent conflict – usually by a patronage appointment like making the subject a chief forester. All of these of course are, like Chaucer’s early fabliaux, part of a late medieval emergent structure of feeling, and all of them both realise some aspects of innovative independence and also confront the forces of what Williams calls incorporation. In part incorporation is already in potential place, because the emergent cultural forces deploy elements of the previous model – the Miller is parodying courtly romance; Gamelyn is worrying about his inheritance. But there are also ways, in Chaucer at least, in which the challenge is side-tracked, actually incorporated into hegemony – another churl is angry and speaks up for true order like the Reeve. Or more fully the Man of Law will speak for scholarly Christian conservatism, as the Franklin’s ultimately dutiful performance will close down the riot of the Merchant’s sinful characters and the inadequacy of the Squire’s Tory blather, incorporating both into the renewed, enlarged, socio-political orthodoxy. The violent Gamelyn becomes a lord as social complexity is personally brutalised. In his representation of this new conflict in his fabliaux, Chaucer sees things more subtly, and, finally at least, more conservatively. Williams of course was mostly thinking about the incorporation of working class and resistant writing in the nineteenth century. But what he says will work for the fourteenth: ‘A new class is always a source of emergent cultural practice, but while it is still, as a class, relatively subordinate, this is always likely to be uneven and it is certain to be incomplete’.20 For Chaucer, the fabliau is much more than just a funny story.

19 Stephen Knight, ‘Untraditional Medieval Literature: Romance, Fabliaux, Robin Hood and King and Subject Ballads’, in Medieval English Literature, New Casebooks Series, ed. by Beatrice Fannon (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 60–75. 20 Williams, p. 124.

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Canterbury Tales/Decameron fabliau overlaps McGrady’s summary indicates ‘The Miller’s Tale’ has some overlap with Decameron 3.4 and a little with 8.7, ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ has some with 9.6, ‘The Shipman’s Tale’ some with 8.1 and ‘The Merchant’s Tale’ some with 7.9 and a little with 2.10. The closest links between The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron are nonfabliaux, day 10, tale 5 and ‘The Franklin’s Tale’ (though it may be even closer to Boccaccio’s poem Il Filocolo) and day 10, tale 10 and ‘The Clerk’s Tale’. See Donald McGrady, ‘Chaucer and the “Decameron” Reconsidered’, Chaucer Review, 12 (1977), 1–26.

Fabliaux in The Canterbury Tales First group ‘The Miller’s Tale’ – sexual and clerical ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ – sexual and clerical, hostile response to above ‘The Cook’s Tale’ – unfinished – apparently sexual Second group ‘The Friar’s Tale’ – church satire ‘The Summoner’s Tale’ – church satire, hostile response to above

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15 MEDIEVALIST COMIC RELIEF Trashing the medieval in the eighteenth century

From: postmedieval, 5 (2014)

1. Introduction When did medievalism really start? I always thought Malory was consciously harking back in order to speak of his own fifteenth century, but then I realised that Chrétien de Troyes and the Charlemagne authors were doing much the same. Currently what Raymond Williams called the elevator of periods back to past golden ages seems to have reached the Historia Brittonum and quite possibly Gildas’s De Excidio Britanniae as a contender for the earliest, indeed pre-medieval, piece of medievalism. But while that train of thought, or to be medievalist that carriage of thought, might be instructively minatory, we can still speculate about just when did people start doing in a conscious way what we now describe as medievalism, that is consciously deploying stories from the medieval past to realise, debate, or just admire, issues of modernity in displaced form. Consciously is the key. It seems to me possible to be decisive and assert that neither Spenser nor Dryden were actually medievalists in that sense. They were both conservative enough to feel that major elements of the past were still alive or deserved to be – for Dryden and Charles II, literally so, but Spenser and Dryden were not conscious of an unbridgeable difference across which they might displace thematic material. It seems important to recognise that Dryden’s King Arthur, The British Worthy of 1691 (though drafted in some form before 1688) sees or would wish to see a continuity with the medieval, the Catholic, the Stuart. That was not the case with Dryden’s own imitator Sir Richard Blackmore, doctor to King William, Whig ideologue and author of the distinctly dull Prince Arthur (1695), and the even duller, even in its title, King Arthur (1697), see pp. 187–8 in this collection. He understood it was a new world, but Dryden’s model weighed heavily on him and especially on his leaden poetry: modernity was only really evident in his awkwardness. But we do soon after this see writers making confident displacing moves with the medieval material, reworking it consciously as comedy and satire, at once displaying displacement and a spirit of disposal for the culture of centuries not 260

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capable of admiration as modern. The writers discussed here are Pope, Fielding and Voltaire. I will take them out of chronological order, to assert an order higher than chronology, namely the level of engagement with the medieval – and the fact that Fielding is also here, at least, an Arthurian with some contact with Dryden gives this procedure a certain formalist gloss, or perhaps just glossiness.

2. Fielding In 1730 Henry Fielding created four short and quite successful plays. The mode was parody, especially of the grandiose classical theatre that the Whig-leaning royal influence favoured; one of the four was the two-act play Tom Thumb. This was ‘Fielding’s first overwhelming success’, says its editor L. J. Morrissey.1 It had a forty-night run and packed houses, though always as an after-piece – the first version is only ten pages long. In a sense it is only a gesture towards medievalism: King Arthur is the only ancient survivor. Indeed the real other may not be the Middle Ages so much as Dryden’s King Arthur (1691), as all the action is like a broad parody of Restoration theatre, both romantic and tragic. Arthur’s queen has become the Italianate joke Dollalolla and their daughter is named Huncamunca. Tom Thumb, as in the early seventeenth-century ballad in which he is born, by Merlin’s art, to an old couple, has gone to court, and is the mightiest of Arthur’s heroes – there is a crowd of captured giants outside the court, and also a giant princess, Glumdalca. The early action is a parody of restoration romance: both Tom and Lord Grizzle, a trouble-making courtier, love Huncamunca, or Huncky as she is known to Tom; but Queen Dollalolla also loves Tom, and in generous addition she loves Grizzle. Extending the comedy, a couple of other courtiers named Noodle and Doodle comment on events and introduce antiWalpole satire: Tom’s title ‘Tom Thumb the Great’ is a reference to Walpole being widely called ‘The Great Man’, much to Fielding’s contempt. That makes Dollalolla the queen into Queen Caroline of Anspach, another Tory target of the time. Colly Cibber, a personal enemy of Fielding’s, and Pope’s, is another viciously treated target. Much of the writing is comic: Arthur hopes Tom and Hunca will breed like maggots in a Cheshire cheese. It all turns to ludicrous tragedy. The king hears that Tom has been eaten by a red cow, and royal triumph turns to deep lament; in the very sudden aftermath the scene turns into a fine parody of the end of Hamlet, best presented through a quotation – remembering Grizzle is Tom’s rival for Huncky: Ghost of Tom Thumb rises. GHOST Tom Thumb I am – but am not eke alive. My Body’s in the Cow, my Ghost is here.

1 Henry Fielding, Tom Thumb and The Tragedy of Tragedies, ed. by L. J. Morrissey (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1970), p. 3.

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GRIZZLE Thanks oh ye Stars, my Vengeance is restor’d, Nor shalt thou fly me – for I’ll kill thy Ghost. Kills the Ghost. HUNCAMUNCA O barbarous Deed! – I will revenge him so. Kills GRIZZLE. DOODLE Ha! Grizzle kill’d – then Murtheress beware. Kills HUNCAMUNCA. QUEEN O Wretch! – have at thee. Kills DOODLE. NOODLE And have at thee too. Kills the QUEEN. CLEORA Thou’st kill’d the Queen. Kills NOODLE. MUSTACHA And thou hast kill’d my Lover. Kills CLEORA. KING Ha! Murtheress vile, take that. Kills MUSTACHA. And take thou this. Kills himself, and falls. (Act 3, Scene 12, 26–36) Barely medieval as it is, this could be just taken as no more than a sign of the possibility of comic medievalism at the time. But it is intriguing to note that as the play develops it becomes more medievalist. In 1731 Fielding reworked it in three acts as The Tragedy of Tragedies. One major new element was the provision of preface and footnotes parodying Whig scholarship, as Pope and Swift had done, even making the link by allotting both play and commentary to ‘Martin Scriblerus the second’, using the name of the informal writers’ club of the time, which included Pope and Swift, so making a move from scanty medievalism into fashionable modernity. But there is also more action, including more medievalism: Merlin actually appears saying he is ‘Merlin by Name, a Conjuror by Trade’2 (Act 3, Scene 8, 14) and as in his major medieval function, he prophesies fame for Tom and the play, but also Tom’s bovine fate. The show marched on. In 1733 Eliza Haywood and William Hatchett produced The Opera of Operas or Tom Thumb the Great, a musical version with no less than thirty-three songs, including at least some music by the substantial composer

2 Fielding, The Tragedy of Tragedies, Act III Scene 8, line 14.

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Thomas Arne, whose son played Tom Thumb. Here again there is a little more medievalism. When Tom has been eaten by the red cow, Merlin appears and instructs it to regurgitate him, in what may be one of the finest pair of couplets of Augustan comedy, if not English poetry: ‘Now, by emetick Power, Red Canibal, (waves his Wand) Cast up thy pris’ner, England’s Hannibal. Forth from her growling Guts, brave Worthy, come, And be thyself – the Little Great TOM THUMB’.3 (p. 42) Though the play has so far been very much the basis for the opera, the end is different, and entirely happy. Grizzle’s rebellion is over; Merlin brings all the murderees to life and Tom is set for a very happy and sexually active future with Huncamunca: Thum. Tell me, Huncy, without feigning, Dost thou longer like abstaining? Hunc. View my eyes, and know my meaning. Thum. I see the lent of love is past; Hunc. And yet I have not broke my fast; Thum. But soon you shall – I’m in the fit. (p. 43) In general response the king cries ‘Thrice three! nine times happy Arthur!’ And we end with the finely mock-heroic chorus ‘Let fierce animosities cease’ (p. 43). The strengthening of the medieval here may be based on little more than the rising fame of Merlin on the stage as a general trickster, often in charge of lightlyclad ladies, but it does indicate a move towards the recuperation of the rejected medieval, with a sexual implication – the final musical version extends the space for sexual reference. This double appropriation of the medieval for both contemporary comment and personal licence – two forms of resistance to eighteenthcentury modernity – is what we see in fuller form in the two other instances under discussion.

3. Pope Dryden not only re-validated Arthur and Merlin. He also reworked and published in his Fables (1700) a substantial version of Chaucer. Not fully aware of how

3 Eliza Haywood and William Hatchett, The Opera of Operas; or Tom Thumb the Great (London: Rayner, 1733), p. 42, reprinted in Selected Fiction and Drama of Eliza Haywood, ed. by Paula R. Backscheider, Women Writers in English 1350–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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Chaucer’s verse sounded, he found the work ‘a rough diamond’,4 but was still strongly committed to its quality as art of value – and not without classical features. Pope knew this edition well but also had a copy of Speght’s 1687 edition of the works. That he wrote at first something quite dismissive of Chaucer, though also of real interest to himself, is evident from the short ‘Imitation of Chaucer’ he produced, apparently when only in his teens. Here, as later, he sees the base form as tetrameter – partly because he missed the pronunciation of final e, but also because he did not have Skeat and Robinson to insist on, if necessary fabricate, the perfect iambic pentameter in all lines. But also what catches the lad’s eye, and imagination, is sexuality. The duck’s neck, focal to the story, is a large borrowed phallus displayed to knowing women: the imagined medieval permits boyish sexual fantasy: Women ben full of Ragerie, Yet swinken nat sans Secresie. Thilke moral shall ye understond, From Schole-boy’s Tale of fayre Ireland: Which to the Fennes hath him betake, To filch the gray Ducke from the Lake. Right then, there passen by the Way, His Aunt, and eke her Daughters tway: Ducke in his Trowzes hath he hent, Not to be spied of Ladies gent. ‘But ho! Our Nephew’, (crieth one), ‘Ho!’ quoth another, ‘Cozen John!’ And stoppen, and lough, and callen out, – This sely Clerk full low doth lout: They asked that, and talken this, ‘Lo here is Coz, and here is Miss’. But, as he glozeth with Speeches soote, The Ducke sore tickleth his Erse Roote: Fore-piece and Buttons all to-brest, Forth thrust a white Neck, and red Crest. Te-he cry’d Ladies; Clerke naught spake: Miss star’d; and gray Ducke crieth Quaake. ‘O Moder, Moder’, (quoth the Daughter,) ‘Be thilke same thing Maids longen a’ter? ‘Bette is to pyne on Coals and Chalke, ‘Then trust on Mon, whose yerde can talke’.5

4 John Dryden, Essays, ed. by W.P. Ker, 2 volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), vol. 2, p. 265. 5 See Alexander Pope, The Poems, The Twickenham Edition, Volume 6, Minor Poems, ed. Norman Ault, completed John Butt, corrected reprint (London: Methuen, 1964), pp. 41–2.

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Interestingly, the first edition of 1727 spoke of the ‘Lecherie’ not the ‘Ragerie’ of women, and gave the story in line four to a ‘Clerk’, not a ‘Schole-boy’.6 These seem a little more direct and uncensored: lechery is plainer than ragery and the clerk, a traditionally sexually active figure, is presumably father to the boy’s desires; the maturer Pope of 1737 displaced the sexuality a little further, but left the clerk in the action as the central figure, next to the duck. Like Tom Thumb at Arthur’s court, a simple gesture of resistance to contemporary mores finds a convenient means of expression in a medieval motif, here a low-level version of a fabliau to express both boyish sexuality and knowing female management of it – an adolescent dream one might think. The women who meet the duck play much the same complicit role as Huncamunca in the Haywood/Hatchett ending of Tom Thumb. But after this, Pope goes further than Fielding or Haywood/Hatchett in seeing the medieval matrix as a way of expressing contemporary issues. A few years later he turned to Chaucer’s actual practice in his reworking of ‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue’ and ‘The Merchant’s Tale’ – possibly not in that order: the dates are obscure. These are not the sexually obvious fabliaux, but two stories which deal in somewhat restrained, indeed again displaced, ways with sexuality. This was not only a topic for Pope: as Geoffrey Tillotson shows in his introductory note,7 there were three fabliau versions by other writers in 1712–13 and another in 1731, but there is special interest in seeing what Pope’s comic medievalism amounted to. In the Chaucer connection it is notably very different from the hostile account of tyrannical Norman forest rule in Pope’s near-contemporary Windsor-Forest, which reads curiously like a highly anti-medieval version of the ‘Norman Yoke’ theory, especially since the hunting enthusiasms of modern monarchs are much admired in a later part of the poem. In the Chaucer reworkings, the verse is again tetrametric, but can be very close to the original – occasional lines survive intact. Pope tends to cut the more medieval and theological of the material, and also the one-line summaries which Chaucer uses to mark a transition from one narrative unit to another. The former means that the Wife’s Prologue is, especially in the opening two hundred lines, a good deal shorter – and also that the emphasis is thrown on the Wife’s sexuality rather than Chaucer’s parallel revelation of her quasi-scholarly wit.

6 The original edition of 1727 opens with the lines: Women, tho’ nat sans Lecherie, Ne swinken but in Secrecie: This is our Tale is plain y-fond, Of Clerk, that woneth in Irelond. See Pope, p. 41. 7 Alexander Pope, The Poems, The Twickenham Edition, Volume 2, The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems, ed. by Geoffrey Tillotson, 3rd edition (London: Methuen, 1962), p. 6.

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So we are seeing a shape emerging where Chaucer, the medieval, is a medium for the expression of the sexual. The duck has come into the parlour. But not all the way in. Pope recurrently blurs or censors the most explicitly sexual references. Warton noticed this, saying that Pope ‘omitted or softened the grosser and more offensive passages’.8 But this is not so major a feature of the Wife rewrite, the choice of the source being in principle a way of resuming the sexual interest in women from the early poem, now emphasising the female voice and presence. Pope makes her say she has led ‘Five Captive Husbands from the Church to Bed’ (P. 8),9 where Chaucer merely mentions five ‘Housbondes at chirche dore’ (Ch. 6); similarly, Pope introduces the idea that though she ‘took no Pains to please’ she in fact ‘had more Pleasure than they had ease’: here Chaucer’s Wife only speaks of ‘my profit and myn ese’ (Ch. 214), where profit might well imply financial matters. But if this suggests Pope wishes to foreground sexuality, it is still somewhat subject to displacement – through the use of ‘bed’ and ‘pleasure’ and in other euphemising instances, closer to the pattern that Warton saw, Pope does diminish and also defeminise, sexuality. For example, where Chaucer’s Wife speaks fondly of her ‘bele chose’ (Ch. 447), Pope refers merely to ‘what Nature gave’ (P. 201). In the same mode, Pope quite omits Chaucer’s reference to her having ‘Martes mark’ both on her face and ‘in another privee place’ (Ch. 619–20). When the Wife speaks of a husband-murderer, Pope omits the comment that she then ‘lete the lecchour dight hire al the night’ (Ch. 767) and maybe this relative reticence is why he omits from a list of classical man-killers Pasiphae, the details of whose activities even Chaucer conceals – one of Pope’s very few classical cuts in this text. The apparent withdrawal from the power of women, especially in sexual mode, may explain why Pope does not refer to the real happiness, including sexuality, of the fifth marriage, and conceivably why he changes the image of the whining and biting wife from potent horse to probably manageable, and at least domestic, dog (P. 152, Ch. 386). So with the classical referentiality generally respected and even enhanced, the medieval sexuality both privileged and euphemised, this is a distinctly modern, Augustan, treatment of the medieval, and it would seem clear that the sex-linked potential of the material is what is of interest to Pope – if somewhat difficult interest. The Prologue operates like a developed projection of the ‘Imitation of Chaucer’ poem: a sexually challenging woman’s voice again invades masculine sexual anxiety, but here the memory of female action is added. In Pope’s other Chaucerian juvenilium, ‘The Merchant’s Tale’, retitled ‘January and May’, that action is brought to present life, though only eventually and after

8 Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry, 2 volumes (London: Dodsley et al. 1775–81), vol. 2, p. 7. 9 See Pope, Poems, vol. 2. Line numbers are inserted in the text, as here, P. 8. Comparable Chaucer lines are taken from Larry D. Benson, et al., eds, The Riverside Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

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a substantial masculine prologue (though fraught with fragility), and some further sexual action is added, though with significant containment of the original. This offers a fuller display of the same patterns as the Wife’s Prologue and, though certainty is not possible the creation of the Merchant rewrite appears to follow in date that of the Wife. First, it asserts the sexual value of the medieval: For long ago, let Priests say what they cou’d, Weak, sinful Laymen were but Flesh and Blood. (P. 7–8) As it did in the Wife’s Prologue, the text adds the words ‘in Bed’: here the previous conceivable euphemism completes January’s fantasy about ‘young Flesh in Bed’ (P. 102), but there may well be a male-viewpoint double entendre when January says ‘Now Sirs you know to what I stand inclin’d’ (P. 137). Chaucer’s old fool is simply direct in his claims of sexual potency. Pope does however omit what is apparently a wry joke about bachelors: ‘On brotel ground they build’ (Ch. 1279), perhaps just because ‘brittle/brothel’ is not a pun in the eighteenth century. In fact there is little else but these opening displaced sexualisations to testify to the sexual interest the story had for Pope. He makes it clear that May is pregnant when she speaks of January’s chance to ‘save the life Of thy poor Infant, and thy longing Wife’ (P. 725), where Chaucer just leaves this implied by her interest in apples (which might just be affection for Damian’s tree). Pope also cuts the friendly physicality of January stroking May’s ‘womb’ at the end: this may be anti-physical in motive, or just part of Pope’s reduction of the inner life of the characters. Throughout, Warton’s comment on Pope’s euphemisation – that he ‘omitted or softened the grosser or more offensive passages’ – fits well. The physical reality of sexuality and its connections is consistently reduced. January at Pope 244 does not as he does at Chaucer 1599 fantasise about her in his bed; Pope after 348 quite omits January’s parallel fantasy that he will be too fierce for her through his ‘corage’ being ‘so sharp and keene’ (Ch. 1759). The wedding night scene is quite without Chaucer’s bravura sequence showing the white-whiskered old man straining away – and May reflecting, it seems glumly, on her experience. Equally Pope quite omits the sharp physical commentary where May first reads Damien’s letter in the privy and then, when delivering her answer, fiercely twists his hand. In the same censored mode, the scene in the fruit tree ends for Pope not with Damian’s blunt action – ‘in he throng’ (Ch. 2353) but May thinking this was ‘a merrier Fit’ than she had felt before (P. 745–6); and where Chaucer’s old husband says he saw that ‘ye, algate in it wente’ (Ch. 2376), Pope’s January says ‘I plainly saw thee whor’d; Whor’d by my slave’ (P. 769–70): for Pope the sexuality is contained in moral, and indeed class terms. What for Pope is clearly a story attractive for its sexuality and its atavistic liberation is also a story that needs to be controlled, made not too atavistic. It is also tonally controlled: the entire Pluto-Proserpine sequence is cut. By that sequence 267

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Chaucer made complex both this particular story and also his own range of social and intellectual reference, but Pope clearly wants the medieval to make no claim on the classical – interestingly, he also cuts Venus’s wedding presence and the reference to Martianus Capella. In the same way – and here not unlike Pope’s treatment of the Wife’s Prologue – January’s opening speech is simplified in referential terms. The story is pared down towards a fabliau of age and youth, but also to one where both the natural force of sexuality and the conflict in desires of the characters, including Damian, are brought under a form of control. So here too we see the comic medieval serving a contemporary sexual interest, much like the action of the ‘Imitation of Chaucer’ poem, but also, by its retreatment, indicating some of the contemporary difficulties around the assertion of sexual liberty for characters and, especially, authors. The mix of past and present was also a factor in Pope’s fourth and most serious piece of medievalism, his reworking of Chaucer’s The Hous of Fame as The Temple of Fame. This is a major response that invites serious critical treatment but as it is not in any way comic or sexuality-oriented it is not relevant here, though it is interesting to note that Pope uses none of the sexually highly-charged AeneasDido sequence of Book One, and almost all of the amusing ironies, including the eagle, are removed from the rest. Comic medievalism in the eighteenth century survives and goes further with Voltaire. Where Fielding just used the medieval as a convenient peg for comedy and satire, and where Pope saw a specific value of sexuality as, within limits, available in the medieval material, Voltaire combines their impact and introduces to a serious medieval topic, the legend of Jeanne d’ Arc,10 both modern-based satire and a prurient interest in sexuality.

4. Voltaire La Pucelle d’Orléans is a travesty of the life of an intriguing, noble and tragic woman. In being that, it combines and seriously magnifies the offences done against Chaucer and King Arthur and the medieval period in general by Pope and Fielding. A long poem, of over eight thousand lines, it appears that Voltaire started writing it by 1730: it became popular by word of mouth and through borrowed or even stolen manuscript versions, though Voltaire also distributed them himself, including one to Madame de Pompadour. Copies were being printed by mid-century, some of them pirated and apparently varied by other hands. There was church criticism and also some civil deploring of its obscenity. Voltaire apparently did some rewriting to tone it down and in 1762 – some say 1755 – produced an authorised version, but others, editors and rewriters, seem to have heightened its offensiveness. The textual state is a mess: the number of cantos varies from

10 ‘Joan’ is an inappropriately English form of the name. As ‘Jeanne’ is a preferable version and the one found in Voltaire’s text, that is what will be used here.

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eighteen to twenty-four, there are many parallel passages and so far editors have not constructed a credible authorial original, with specific later reworkings. The version used here is that of 1762, with twenty-one cantos, but a number of variant sequences will also be noted. The poem makes one hostile reference to the earlier Jeanne d’Arc source material by Jean Chapelain, the sombre seventeenth-century poet who in 1656 treated her story as an archetypal Christian and patriotic allegory: he is seen by Voltaire as ‘thou whose violin Produced of old so harsh and vile a din’ (I. p. 2).11 In general, the poem is far from the well-known legend of Jeanne, though it is not alone in this. Other writers have resisted her dark fate. Shaw made her a dream re-visitant to the French king; Schiller more simply ended with the final battle against the English (where she dies in romantic grandeur), and others thought the crowning of Charles VII at Reims was a good place to stop. Voltaire only got as far as the raising of the siege of Orléans, and though he has Jeanne fighting well in Canto 3, she only shares the attack on Orléans in Canto 21, in the revised version. Extensive sequences of the poem are Jeanne-free filling: a lengthy one is about a French hero La Trémouille and his beloved Dorothée – they are killed by the English in the revised version and Jeanne insists on the taking of Orléans to avenge them. This sub-story, like others in the poem, spends time drifting about in Italy – not the classical world so much as the renaissance Italy of Ariosto, who is namechecked and broadly imitated: story-threads with classical links also appear, and even some Old Testament-inspired passages. There is a good deal of Christian satire in Hell and in various religious establishments, mostly focusing on corrupt and demented medieval clerics with comic names, Grisbourdon and Lourdis. The English occupy a fair amount of the text, notably the ferocious general Chandos and the very handsome page Monrose – both are involved not only with warfare but with a major recurrent plot about Agnes Sorel and Charles VII. The king is at least a presence from the true Jeanne legend, as is Dunois, the Bastard of Orléans, who is here, as in Schiller, ramped up into being Jeanne’s beloved as well as co-warrior. Many of these elements can be seen as medieval – as well as the Jeanne story itself, the romance sequences which have some semi-Arthurian contact, the extreme exposés of the medieval Catholic church, and the occasional interest in medieval fighting and cruelty. The text does at one moment claim a satirical position when it states ‘Wisdom must yield to superstition and rules, Who arms with bigot zeal the hand of fools’ (I.104). As here, the satirical reference throughout is primarily religious and there is no trace of any anti-aristocratic or anti-royal attitude – but much personal perusal, both physical and mocking, of Jeanne herself.

11 ‘Voltaire’ (= François-Marie Arouet), La Pucelle d’Orléans, Les Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 7, ed. by Jeroom Verrcruysse (Genève: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1970). Translations come from ‘Voltaire’, La Pucelle: The Maid of Orleans, trans. Ernest Christopher Dowson, 2 vols: vol. 1. London, Lutetian Society, 1899; vol. 2, Internet Archive, http//:archive.org/stream/lapucellemaidofo02voltila.

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While both Pope and Fielding offered some contemporary political satire, though not quite like Voltaire’s excitable anti-clericalism, the main thrust of all three of these eighteenth-century comic medievalism writers deals with gender, and especially sex. With Voltaire, the first point to note, and in some ways the most offensive, is that the actually very strong personal power of Jeanne d’Arc is here disavowed, or as Voltaire would no doubt have preferred to say, stripped from her. Here she does not invent the idea of crowning Charles and saving France: this is all dreamed up by the national saint, St Denis himself, who plays a strong recurrent role as master of ceremonies, unsatirised, patriotic, and occasionally involved in combat with St George of England. As the spirit of France he is not vulnerable to anti-clerical mockery, and Jeanne is the main target of diminution. At the start of Canto 2 she is belittled by the statement that her father was the local curate and that at sixteen she was like a handsome barmaid. She is always seen as only a partner of Dunois in battle and her very rare veridical moments of authority – like insisting on attacking Orléans – seem strange, as she is consistently set as an operative in a male world, with saint, bastard, king and soldiers crowding out her real heroic personality. She is shown as wearing armour, but the only time she is specified as wearing male clothing, it is Sir John Chandos’s trousers, or in a variant his underpants, as a result of a sequence of allegedly comic confusions. Jeanne is reduced to being both a lackey of St Denis and also Dunois’s ladyfriend: her actions are remarkably restricted as a fighter or even as a protagonist. It will not seem surprising, remembering Pope in particular, that her central recurrent role is to play a handsome woman who is recurrently threatened with sexual activity or made victim of scopophilia – a male viewing presence is consistently established. It is rather revealing, and not in Voltaire’s usual way, that the ‘test for virginity’ sequence that she more than once underwent in reality is only briefly mentioned, comes at the unemphatic end of a canto, and seems to bear no interest for the text. She is stripped naked, as is not uncommon with women in this story, but this is the only instance when a woman’s body, especially thighs, buttocks and breasts, are not described in considerable if also repetitive detail – – this scene takes only four lines, presumably because the impact is anti-sexual. The text makes up for this elsewhere. As we first hear of Jeanne she is said to be ‘in stays and petticoats arrayed’, which of course rhymes with ‘maid’ (1.1), and we immediately hear that this story is about ‘how she kept her maidenhead – a year’ (1.2). We regularly observe scenes where a woman’s body, both breasts and waist, front and back, become exposed, as if in an extreme version of Carry On comedy and the seaside postcard. First it is Jeanne, in Canto 2, asleep and scrutinised by an English Franciscan and a muleteer. They will recur in the text as bad people: all they do here is permit the text to observe Jeanne’s body and St Denis drives them off. Jeanne is then for some time replaced as a sexual focus by Agnes Sorel, who is quite often undressed, falls revealingly off a horse, or is even, by Chandos, skirt-lifted while asleep. There are other grounds for body-examining: though the virginity test is quick Jeanne and Dunois are in Canto 4 both captured in the palace 270

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of Hermaphrodix (a classical intrusion ultimately from The Golden Ass: he is the ass on whom Dunois flies and with whom Jeanne will be later involved), and as a result they are condemned to be impaled, and are stripped naked for the purpose. Much of the rank flavour of this early medievalism is in this scene, offering sadism as well as sexual fantasy, and also a dream of chaotic legalism – a triple dark other of Augustan retroculture. After this, in a narrative owing more to The Golden Ass than medieval romance, Agnes does further stripping and has sex with Charles, and with Chandos, and with the very handsome English page, Monrose – in a particularly grotesque scene, to escape Charles the page pretends to be a saint posing nude in a niche. They identify him because Jeanne has earlier, in a scene without much lucidity, painted two fleur de lis on his bare buttocks – gutter patriotism joins in. The vulgarity can as readily embrace religion, and there are various sex-crazed clerics and nuns, even a few apparent nuns who are in fact sex-crazed non-religious males. The sequence showing Dorothée and La Trémouille in Italy, lasting for several cantos, affords a fair amount of nudity and sex, and the intersection of both. The Agnes/Chandos/ Monrose narrative passes through a nunnery: Jeanne is also briefly present, long enough to be again stripped, and to kill a would-be rapist. A little later we find Jeanne thinking of Dunois when he is himself naked. As if in narrative revenge, she is soon defeated by Chandos, who undresses her and admires her breasts: he goes no further, but the text offers a lengthy digression on sex in history, largely classical. That point possibly inspired what seems an attempt to legitimate all the dirty postcard activity, an invocation to Venus: ‘O thou voluptuousness, in whom we see Nature’s true source, Venus the bright Deity’, (I.21) And this is extrapolated a little: ‘Let universal love control us all, To flames our coders and flimsy laws consign, We only follow one; and that is thine’. (I. 22) The text will finally become battle-oriented as Jeanne in Canto 19 declares Orléans must be their goal, but in Canto 17 it has lurched off into a fantasy where all, including Jeanne, lose their minds, think each other is an enemy and behave very foolishly – and of course all become naked. Though Jeanne is largely a spectator of this grotesque action her secondary role is remembered in comments like ‘The mighty Bastard and his lady blest’ (I.48). But threats gather round her: in the penultimate canto 20, the corrupt cleric Grisbourdon, now in Hell, decides he needs revenge on her. Hermaphrodix himself 271

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the rude bits in Latin, classical knowledge can serve a base purpose. But grotesquerie grows; this was also the ass on whom Christ rode into Jerusalem. Then epic simile is enlisted – Jeanne is troubled as in a storm at sea, and so she bares her nether parts, ‘Twisting her rump and twining close her thighs’ (II.92) and, with a few more classical references, the deed is done and the ass three times ejaculates into the maid of France. Early versions often illustrated the poem, and this was a favourite moment. Suddenly, Jeanne hears a voice calling her to war: it is Dorothée, not dead in this first version, who is shocked at this scene, noted as similar to Venus with Vulcan. Jeanne asks her to keep it secret; Dorothée agrees, but then gives her a good telling-off, asking how could she: ‘The handsome Dunois for an ass to leave Hoping, withal, some pleasure to receive; For pleasure you received, my beauteous Dame, I read it in your eyes, your eyes of flame’. (II.92) Jeanne sighs and says she wished Conculix had loved Dorothée instead of her. And that is the end of the canto and apparently the end of this version of the poem, a bathetic, obscene, anti-woman ending that reveals fully just what the medieval can liberate as comic relief and can be taken, whether by Voltaire or not, as the logical completion of his unpalatable attitudes to Jeanne d’Arc, as shown throughout the poem.

5. Conclusion Describing a heroine having sex with an ass is in a real way a logical extension of waving a duck’s neck out of your trousers at two women, and only slightly different in its expression of masculine desire in dialectic with masculine weakness is the image of a tiny but heroic Tom Thumb who defeats giants and has royal women lusting after him. Fielding’s medium, the stage, required greater displacement of male sexual hostility than the verse of Pope and Voltaire, but the three early medievalists are walking the same side of the aggressively neurotic masculinist street. And as has become clear in each case, they have all back-tracked to cover the worst of their traces. The duck’s neck becomes the story of January and May, and also the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, still revealing sexually active and quick-witted women but bringing them under the control both of their original ironising author and the euphemising touch of Pope – and his last engagement with the Chaucerian medieval in The Temple of Fame is fully inserted into both classicism and contemporary satire, stripped of the sexual excitement of the Dido-Aeneas sequence that Chaucer stresses in Book 1. In very much the same way Fielding’s initial bald fable is about masculine size reversed (and as Pope’s duck’s neck and Voltaire’s 273

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ass’s penis indicate, size is a sexually literal matter here, except on the stage): but that concern is then concealed beneath a costume of contemporary satire in the elaborate scholarly mechanisms of the 1733 edition of Tom Thumb the Great. The rewriting by Voltaire is usually concerned with toning down sexually direct references, concerned with all three of the female leads, though there appear to be some other more mechanical motives for improvement – there is a completely new Canto 17, which seems more based on narrative improvement than sexual caution. But the variation of the two versions of Canto 21 is enough to confirm that the prime source of excitement in the medieval for these writers was its availability as an alternative domain where writers could misbehave and deploy without guilt elements of sexual desire and sexual fantasy. Interestingly, the earliest of them is closer in touch with a real medieval sexual motif: Pope can find in Chaucer material that at least adverts to the overtly phallic domain of his adolescent interest, though this obscures the levels of irony and critique that Chaucer has inserted. Both Fielding and Voltaire as it were pervert the dignity of their medieval sources to bear the burden of sexuality – displaced in Fielding’s case, extremely and grotesquely emphasised in the case of Voltaire, or really reversed: Jeanne’s virginity is the new challenge. Though they all went on to cover their traces, the banal sexual drive of this early medievalism is both clear and disturbing. We might well wonder how much of it has really gone away. There are always dumb football-playing students who think Chaucer is going to be dirty fun; for the pre-Raphaelites the medieval is always in some way a form of interpersonal sexuality except when Christianity gets in the way (and sometimes you have both as in Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience); for moderns the bodice-ripper is firmly medieval. We think of Scott as pretty stitched up, but Ivanhoe has Locksley perform a remarkable act of symbolic phallic destruction when splitting the arrow, and also has a pair of women, dull necessary wife and exciting female outsider who is unmarriagable. Thrilling medievalism for the nineteenth-century male.

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16 THE SOCIAL INTEGRATION OF EMOTION IN EARLY ARTHURIAN ROMANCE

Unpublished This is a study in forces at work in both the contexts and the texts of early Arthurian material, especially the way in which emotion is registered and is seen to play a role, either disruptive or integrative, in the world and action of the texts. Emotion is found both in the celebration of warrior nature and in the development or constraint of that force in varied forms of culture. Emotion, whether love or hate, is found to be central, but also potentially disruptive as well as, in socially positive terms, resolving of disorder. The texts demonstrate, debate, deplore, even parody, emotion, and assign a range of roles to emotion and to its constraints. The two texts I will look at are Culhwch ac Olwen (‘Culhwch and Olwen’), a Welsh prose narrative that in its present form is from the late eleventh century, and Chrétien de Troyes’ Érec et Énide, usually thought to be his first surviving romance, probably from around 1170: Nitze links it with some credibility to the Christmas festivities at Nantes in 1169, including Henry II and his son Geoffrey.1 Related to the discussion will be other texts, and some comments will be made on the early Irish saga the Táin Bó Cúailnge (‘The Cattle-Raid of Cooley’) and linked narratives like ‘The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu’ (also known as ‘The Sorrows of Deirdre’), and the lays of Marie de France, which can be read as somewhat closer to the Celtic material than Chrétien’s romances. I am taking Culhwch ac Olwen as a model of the form in which Arthurian romances came, in Brittany and Britain, to the knowledge of French-speaking audiences and, most importantly, writers. The fact that the text was written down quite early for Welsh prose material gives it special status and the enormously long list it offers of two hundred and three men at Arthur’s court is a strong sign of the imposition of literacy on a richly oral tradition. The elaboration of the list of very difficult deeds the giant requires before his daughter’s marriage has much the same bookish impact, though the sequence is formally oral. But aside from those features, which have distracted many commentators, Culhwch ac Olwen can be

1 William A. Nitze, ‘Erec and the Joy of the Court’, Speculum, 29 (1954), 691–701, see p. 700.

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read as a single-hero adventure, comparable to Érec et Énide and its successors – and also interestingly contrastable with them. By way of a wider context I want to refer briefly to patterns often found in the riches of the early Irish prose material. Passion here can be destructive. In ‘The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu’, Conchobar’s demand for the lovely, though fated, woman Deirdiu, and then her own obsession with the very handsome Noisiu both lead to war across Ireland and her own death: riding in her chariot she deliberately shatters her head against a rock. In this material, the head and especially the face can play a large role in delineating the disruptive force of emotion as passion. Deirdriu sees the colours of Noisiu’s face, white, black and red, before she meets him, a feature that survives in both the Tristan and Perceval stories. But love is not the only disruptive passion: the drama and tragedy of the great Cattle Raid is caused because Queen Mebd is jealous of her husband Ailill’s possession of a great bull – so she sets off with their army to take the great dun bull of Ulster. Hatred and vengeance will remain emotions in parallel with love through stories both Celtic and French, but first the Welsh and then the French will seem to seek ways of disarming the hostility of passion and society, where the early Irish material trends to dramatise their conflict. Though Culhwch ac Olwen is found in the collection later called The Mabinogion it is very different in style from the ‘Branches of the Mabinogi’ proper, four linked semi-mythical stories which seem an attempt by a literate writer, who appears, from the nature of his syntax, to know Latin, to tell that very unusual thing, a pan-Wales set of narratives. Culhwch ac Olwen is much simpler in vocabulary and syntax – it is not necessarily older, but for all its elaborated lists it is something closer to the mainstream of the Arthur story material as it has scantily survived in other early Welsh references and a few poems which, for example, detail Arthur’s raid on the otherworld and a list of heroic deeds, often engaging with the supernatural like fighting witches and then a giant cat. Culhwch ac Olwen is a giant’s daughter story. Culhwch’s step-mother, through the emotion of jealousy, imposes a taboo that he can only marry Olwen, daughter of Ysbaddaden, ‘Chief Giant of the Island of Britain’. Giants always resist such non-giant connections, and she intends that Culhwch will not marry, and so her own son will inherit. But Culhwch has an advantage: Arthur is his cousin, and he enlists him and his warband in his marriage mission. Eventually Culhwch goes off with six specially skilled helpers – no lonely hero here – to find Olwen. They confront the giant and he issues a spectacular list of demands, fantastic preparations for the wedding, including his own toilet and dressing. Culhwch’s helpers include semi-gods like Manawydan (basically it seems a sea-god) and Mabon, the mythical ‘Young Son’ (mab means ‘son’), as well as mystically-powered ‘Oldest Animals’ like the owl and the huge salmon. After mastering all the almost-impossible tasks, they brutally ready the giant for the wedding, having obtained the wondrous razor and comb he specified as required: And then Culhwch set forth, and Goreu son of Custennin with him, and everyone that wished ill to Ysbaddaden Chief Giant, and those marvels 276

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with them to his court. And Cadw of Prydein came to shave his beard, flesh and skin to the bone, and his two ears outright. And Culhwch said ‘Hast had thy shave, man?’ ‘I have’, said he. ‘And is thy daughter mine now?’ ‘Thine’, said he. ‘And thou needst not thank me for that, but thank Arthur who has secured her for thee. Of my own free will thou shouldst never have had her. And it is high time to take away my life’. And then Goreu son of Custennin caught him by the hair of his head and dragged him behind him to the mound, and cut off his head, and set it on the bailey-stake. And he took possession of his fort and his dominions.2 (113) The giant’s lands are seized by Culhwch’s other cousin Goreu, last of twentyfour sons destroyed by the giant – but as his name means simply ‘best’ in Welsh, not all there is tragic. Before that they indeed shave the giant as he asked, but it is flesh and blood to the bone, and then he is beheaded. This brutal acculturation of the giant is not just a dark joke. To understand the underlying theme, we need to look at the hero as he sets off to find Arthur and so his bride: Off went the boy on a steed with a light-grey head, four winters old, with well-knit fork, shell-hoofed, and a gold tubular bridle-bit in its mouth. And under him a precious gold saddle, and in his hand two whetted spears of silver. A battle-axe in his hand, a forearm’s length of a fullgrown man from ridge to edge. It would draw blood from the wind; it would be swifter than the swiftest dewdrop from the stalk to the ground when the dew would be heaviest in the month of June . . . Four clods the four hoofs of his steed would cut, like four swallows in the air over his head, now before him, now behind him. A four-cornered mantle of purple upon him, and an apple of red gold in each of its corners; a hundred kine was the worth of each apple. The worth of three hundred kine in precious gold was there in his footgear and his stirrups, from the top of his thigh to the tip of his toe. Never a hair-tip stirred upon him, so exceeding light his steed’s canter under him on his way to the gate of Arthur’s court. (81–2) This fantastic piece of rhetoric has an underlying theme. Culhwch is a hero of culture, mastering nature: his axe will draw blood from the wind; at each pace his horse’s hooves suspend four clods of earth in the air like four swallows, his splendour is valued in cattle; most importantly, even at a canter not a hair-tip stirs, so sophisticated are the young man and his horse: as a hero of culture he is a conqueror of nature.

2 Quotations are from Culhwch and Olwen in The Mabinogion, trans. Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones (London: Dent, 1949).

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(currently male) will be the agent. As an ass he attends Jeanne, who is asleep and unprotected by St Denis, who has become rather cross with her. But after some routine breast-viewing Dunois hears the ass: St Denis returns, and Jeanne and Dunois drive the animal away. In the last canto it is Dunois who attempts her virtue, with the usual elements of body-viewing, but in spite of her fondness for him Jeanne refuses, saying ‘“tis not yet time”’ and that when he has defeated the English ‘“Thine I protest the virgin bed shall be”’ (II.81). Then she gives him a possibly misinterpretable thirty sisterly kisses. This prefaces the final battle at Orléans, given in some detail, where the English general Talbot fights hard. Love themes recur in the narrative but finally the French win: all we are told is that Jeanne keeps her oath to Dunois – presumably giving him her maidenhead. That seems a consistent ending, downgrading Jeanne as limited, if at least determined, uplifting the male French, whether generals or saints, and maintaining a steady obsession with sexuality and the female body. But, and it is a remarkably large but, that version of Canto 20 is a rewrite. An earlier version, which has been claimed as not by Voltaire, without any clarity in the argument, opens with comic and vulgar business in which Louvet, a French politician and his wife, are ludicrously and erotically involved with Talbot – whom Voltaire basically seems to admire, perhaps because as an English general he hates French aristocrats and priests. Then the metamorphic ass, in his animal form, visits Jeanne. In this version he is known as Conculix, which basically means ‘Shagger’: the more classical and distanced name Hermaphrodix, implying ‘sexual shape-shifter’, is a later form, characteristic of the self-censorship Voltaire practised in his rewrites, and was deployed apparently because people objected to the obscene implication of ‘con’ in French. The question remains whether the obscene sequence is Voltaire’s own. He claimed other hands had put unacceptable material in the text, but this is a complete and early ending to the whole text: if that is by another hand, what did Voltaire have there in the original? Editors seem to want to avoid this debate, but as it stands it seems Voltaire is most likely to have generated and then withdrawn the very offensive sequence about sex with the ass. In the recent major edition Jeroom Verrcruysse appears satisfied that Voltaire’s tone throughout is merely one of ‘scepticisme irréligieux’, yet the evidence he brings does not suggest with any clarity that the encounter between Jeanne and the ass is not authorial: the evidence suggests rather that it was by Voltaire, and was withdrawn and rewritten.12 In this narrative, Jeanne asks the ass if it is true he loves her: he assures her it was always so. She is amazed and angry, yet also a little flattered, and extends her ‘lily hand’ (II.91) – the ass refers to animal-lovers Leda and Ariadne: like leaving

12 For the ‘scepticisme irreligieux’ comment, see La Pucelle d’Orléans, p. 11. Verrcruysse’s discussion of the versions appears to give some standing to the Jeanne-ass encounter, and, interestingly, he appears to show that the change from Conculix to Hermaphrodix, on the basis that the former seemed offensive, is quite late.

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When his stepmother lays the taboo on him, Culhwch suddenly flushes with love for Olwen, though he has never seen her. This is serch, the Welsh word for refined love, not just car, common or garden love. It is to fulfil this love he goes to Arthur’s court. The emotion of love and the emotion of war are linked as Culhwch famously – and with powerful emotivity – invokes all of Arthur’s warriors, and some others as well, like Cuchulain and William of Normandy. So he locks the warrior ethos into his passion. He also invokes a range of ladies as well to make the emotionally integrative point. But most revealing is his first approach to Arthur. He says he has come to ask him to trim his hair. Arthur agrees: and as he combs Culhwch’s head, he says ‘“My heart grows tender towards thee: thou art sprung from my blood”’ (84). This is acculturation: family feeling and the fulfilment of emotion, both social and sexual, is realised in the context of the defeat, acculturation, of raw nature. And eventually the giant, being nature, will be brutally acculturated with razor and comb before he is terminated, and his daughter and property taken. Olwen is very beautiful – giant’s daughters are not giantesque: Gwenhwyfair (to become Guenevere) was herself the daughter of Ogrfan the Giant. Olwen is beneficent nature: her name, meaning ‘white track’, refers to the fact that daisies spring up wherever she walks. The warrior lord’s family will defeat brute nature in the form of the giant and appropriate its natural beneficence through his daughter – as well as his lands. Culture is the domain on which the disruption of emotion is resolved for this story, and integrated with the emotion of warfare. The successes are substantially assisted by the natural animal world, especially when Arthur’s men are told they need to release from captivity Mabon: only he can catch the Twrch Trwyth, the terrible ‘Chief Boar of the Island of Britain’. The Twrch is himself a complex enemy: he was once a human prince but he was so bestial God has turned him beastly, demoted him from culture to nature, but he still bears cultural signs. The razor and comb still between his ears are what they need, according to the giant, to prepare him for the wedding. For the early Welsh, Mabon is the mythic figure of active fertility: but Arthur’s men do not know where he is. They ask the oldest animals one after another and finally the most ancient of all, the giant Salmon of Llyn Llyw, knows and Cei and Bedwyr ride on his noble shoulders up-river on the mighty Hafren, in English Severn, to Caerloyw, or Gloucester. There they release Mabon: it is not clear how – perhaps it is from the womb, or even a Roman prison, but the release is evidently thoroughly mythical. Just as the strange eyes and potent faces in the Táin are often close to animals and nature, so the power of animal nature, like that of the mighty salmon, is enlisted in the acculturation process. But natural forces can also threaten: LéviStrauss would have liked the ironic reversal of nature-myth as Cei (later to be Sir Kay) meets Arthur’s aunt: They came forward to the gate of the shepherd Custennin’s court. She heard the noise of their coming. She ran with joy to meet them. Cei 278

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snatched a log out of the wood-pile, and she came to meet them, to try to throw her arms around their necks. Cei thrust a stake between her two hands. She squeezed the stake so that it became a twisted withe. Quoth Cei, ‘Woman, had it been I thou didst squeeze in this wise, there were no need for another to love me ever. An ill love, that!’ (p. 92) She is Arthur’s aunt, but she goes unnamed and she is almost outside culture in her nature-dominated context. She and her shepherd husband have themselves suffered from wild nature, having lost twenty-three sons to their neighbour the giant – though not Goreu, ‘the best’ – and she herself is too is too close to giant nature for Cei’s comfort: as noted above, he needs his cultural wit to frustrate her mighty embrace. So this rich story asserts the power of culture and its integrative remodelling of emotion to absorb the destructive emotive forces of love and hate, envy and malice as well as wild nature – there are many links to those themes in the references and passing comments about off-stage action, as well as in the actual events. Essentially, the narrative itself asserts that warrior coherence, animal help, the power of Arthur, will make a world of culture and security. It would be tempting to liken this to Le Chevalier au Lion, where the shared structures are clearer – notably the Lion and the Giant Herdsman – and the new concern with courtly gendered status is exposed very clearly. It would also be interesting to look at Marie de France and see how fragments of this structure often inform her stories – the hawk-lover and the vengeance his son enacts in Yonec; the final regenerative role of the weasels in Eliduc; the insistence on both warrior honour and human love in Guigemar; and perhaps the finest, or strangest, the loss of face and indeed the loss of noses in the family of the faithless wife of the titular hero, and werewolf, of Bisclaveret – a finely parodic treatment of wild nature and worse culture. But if Érec et Énide is the first preserved romance, and indeed may well have serious Breton connections, I feel this is the proper place to look for both links and divergences from the presentation and management of emotion in Culhwch ac Olwen. There are some signs of a French-Welsh connection. Chrétien seems to say he builds his story on a single ‘conte d’aventure’; the later Welsh Gereint mab Erbin is clearly basically the same story and the two are usually thought to share a single source, presumably Welsh. However there are, given Chrétien’s capacity to re-shape material, some notional links with Culhwch ac Olwen: the ‘lone hero seeks a bride’ opening; a few mystic animals; the appearance of a generous helper in Guivret; the role of Mabon or, in Érec et Énide, Mabonagrain; the benign, noble, and even hunting, lordliness of Arthur; the final establishment of the hero as a lord. I would not be surprised if Culhwch ac Olwen was a partial basis for Chrétien’s remarkable work. Like Culhwch, Érec starts his story in trouble, alone, but connected with the highest. Humiliated by a ferocious dwarf, without his armour, he rides off to regain his honour, lost before the queen. But the context is somewhat different. 279

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The opening event of Érec et Énide is the hunt of the white stag, not dissimilar to the hunting enthusiasms by which Arthur ends Culhwch ac Olwen. Yet there is a new factor: Gauvain is concerned because by Arthur’s code of practice the man who kills the white stag must kiss the fairest of maidens. He fears this mix of warrior skill and courtly behaviour will cause dissension: this juxtaposition of nature and culture may be disruptive. Where Olwen was merely beneficent nature, there is now a sense that women are part of the social whole. It was an idea already raised in Geoffrey of Monmouth and clearly relates to Norman French advances in gender relations, both in the extensive elaborations of fin amor and also more directly. Le Chevalier de la Charrette is dedicated to Chrétien’s patroness the Countess of Champagne: she commissioned it and, he says, provided ‘The material and the treatment of it’ (270). Much else will seem new. Off on his own like Yvain, Érec is very different from Culhwch, who has massed ranks of Welsh warriors, animals and semigods behind and around him. Feudalism of course is an inherently private concept about personal possession: the system struggles with some difficulty to be or at least appear ideologically collective. Status is conveyed by victory in fighting and confirmed by a personal donation by the feudal lord, dependent on personal fidelity. This is ideologised via honour into a collective system. As in Malory’s Tristram book, you fight one-on-one to gain honour, and then somehow share it all around – a central textual contradiction of Arthurian romance. This process is how Érec ascends from his opening nadir, in a privatised replay of what Gauvain thought could go wrong. Instead of the previous mass stag-hunt and dissent at court we have the personalised Sparrowhawk conflict. Érec challenges for the hawk, owned by the most beautiful lady in a court, and his opponent is Yder son of Nut – who is clearly the Welsh Edern, brother to Gwyn ap Nudd, Lord of the Otherworld. In Chrétien’s secular civilised world he is something nearly as diabolic, a hostile noble warrior, the face of brute warfare. He has humiliated Érec when they were in the forest with Guinevere and, as Érec puts it to Yder as he begs mercy, ‘“thou didst allow they ill-bred dwarf to strike my lady’s damsel”’ (14). Before the court, Érec gives mercy after a long, bitter fight, so showing his own warrior power and his cortoisie – but it is condensed with, even driven by, his fortunate success in the field of love with Enide: Érec looks towards his beloved as she utters heartfelt prayers for him. No sooner has he seen her than great strength has surged back into him. Her love and beauty have restored his great fighting spirit.3 (12–13) But as with Yvain and Laudine, and unlike Culhwch, there will be a recoil. Chrétien’s romances test their ideological compilations before asserting them: the

3 Quotations are from Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances, trans. W. W. Comfort (London: Dent, 1914).

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Welsh text merely celebrates their resolution. Drawing attention to the inherent polarity of war and love, Chrétien shows that Érec and Énide are too happy: In neither the realm nor the empire was there a lady of such fine character. But Érec was so deeply in love with her that he no longer took any interest in arms or attended tournaments: he no longer cared to joust, but spent his time playing the lover to his wife. He treated her as his sweetheart and mistress. He set his heart and mind only on embracing and kissing her, seeking no other pastime. His companions were sorry about this and often complained among themselves that he showed her far too much love. (32–3) So he famously reduces himself to a bare warrior, and she is made in theory a mere observer without emotional attachment to his military might. But, as the story recounts, her love is insurgent and insistent. Tennyson liked this so much it became one of the very early Idylls of the King, eventually providing two of the twelve, the only story to do so. After several of these partly comic encounters where she must warn him and he must be angry, we come to a new stage: She warns him. He threatens her but has no mind to harm her, for he perceives and truly understands that she loves him above all else, and his love for her cannot be greater. (50) There is more going on than this. The knight she has warned him against is on a huge, furious horse. They fight viciously and both are seriously wounded. But there is to be a surprise. This fearsome knight is named Guivret le Petit; he is of Irish origin; he is king of this land; all his neighbours fear him; he would like to be Érec’s close friend. Is he not the exact reverse of Ysbaddaden Chief Giant? And, as his name suggests, perhaps a dwarf? When Érec’s emotion-based and emotiondenying estrangement from Énide comes to a close, so too does the situation of meaninglessly hostile knights: the warrior situation is acculturated as well as the love situation. Guivret seems to have gone under the radar in discussion of this story – just to clinch the case for his importance in both ideology and its emotional sustenance, I turn to the very end: Érec stayed at court with Guivret and Énide, the three of them together, until the death of his father the king, who was old and had reached a great age. At once the messengers set out, noblemen, the most distinguished in his land, who went looking for him until, after their searches and inquiries, they found him in Tintagel twenty days before Christmas and told him the truth about what had happened to his old, white-haired father, now dead and gone. Érec’s sorrow was far greater than he showed to the 281

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people; but grief is not becoming to a king, and it is not seemly for a king to show sorrow. (86) In one way we see here the idea of the control of emotion for true kingliness: Érec has become an avatar of Arthur. But the more intriguing thing is the presence of Guivret with Érec and Énide: like Goreu taking Ysbaddaden’s lands as Culhwch takes his daughter and the other part of his nature-power, Guivret is there to socialise the hero’s success, to suggest this is a working social ideology, not just a fable. The story has realised the possible threats or embarrassments of both warrior nature and courteous culture in what appears a feudalised and court-oriented interrogative version of the dramas of Culhwch ac Olwen. One striking parallel is that both seem to relate to historical and social realities of mythical importance. In a very striking sequence, on each one of three days Culhwch and his helpers enter the giant’s hall and he throws a spear at them. They catch it and throw it back. The main narrative point is that each spear pierces the giant but hardly affects him: nature cannot be easily defeated. But there is also a sudden historical reference. When the giant throws the spears they are stone: when they return them they have become iron. Is this just sorting weapons into natural and cultural? Or a much deeper racial memory of the ancient La Tène culture, the Iron Age arriving with the Celts in Britain – rather like the link between Welsh Mabon and possibly Roman Gloucester? Narrative culture may be suggesting some deep and ancient memories and ideas. In a parallel historico-social way, Érec et Énide seems to relate to the presence in Nantes at Christmas 1169 of Henry II of England and his fourth son Geoffrey. In 1166 Henry had defeated the Breton Duke of Brittany, Conan, and forced him to resign. He also made him to promise his six-year-old daughter Constance to be Geoffrey’s bride – he was only eight at the time. This meant Geoffrey would when they married in 1181 become Duke of Brittany, inheriting through his wife’s right, as was common in Celtic society – both Queen Mebd in Ireland and Rhiannon in Wales ennobled their husbands. (For a discussion of the Celtic female sovereignty myth, see Chapter 4 in this collection.) And of course this process is common in romance: Yvain marries a lady and a land. Enide is not an inheritress but they do end up as King and Queen of Nantes, stressing again the Breton connection – which is itself featured in that ‘Érec’ is as Nitze notes,4 a French version of the Breton ‘Guerec’, name of a Count of Nantes who died in 990 and was celebrated in local story. The name might possibly have been in the Breton version of the Celtic story Chrétien is reworking – in Welsh it survives somewhat later as Gereint. There may be some trace of Bretonicity in Érec’s naming, as in his final position, just as there is a clear awareness in the story of the possible unredeemed

4 Nitze, p. 700.

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violence of the patterns of chivalry so much deployed against the enemies of modern France, including Bretons. At a simpler level, just as Culhwch ac Olwen can proceed by parody, as in Cei’s dangerous embrace from Arthur’s aunt or the deliberate bathos of the lame ant who brings in the last flax seed, so Érec and Énide can venture into parodic selfrealisation in ways that both expose and contain emotion. After Érec and Énide and Guivret have all made friends there is another bizarre episode in which, having left Guivret, they venture into contradictory adventure territory again. Érec is badly hurt by the Count of Limors and laid out as dead. But he comes round, and they cry: ‘“Flee, flee, here comes the dead man”’ (64). He seizes a horse; Énide has his lance and jumps aboard; they together smash into Limors’ hall and kill him at his dinner table. Warrior nature is at its most ferocious, but it is all emotionally acculturated as Érec announces his reconciliation with Énide and off they ride with gendered courtesy is at its most devoted: he and she and their socialised acculturation are all alive again. A different parody, one of the set-pieces that Chrétien does so well, follows this parodic – and also problem-resolving – moment. The newly united couple, and Guivret, who has, not accidentally, reappeared to balance them in the socialised warfare department, hear of King Evrain’s Castle at Brandigan, where they will find the fearsome knight Mabonagrain and the fierce danger of the ‘Joie de la Court’, where visiting knights are killed. In this sequence, which has received much attention in Chrétien commentary, of considerable interest are the clearly Welsh nature of the names and the apparent reference to Mabon – Bran, as in Brandigan, is the Welsh word for raven, but also the name of a major divinity, celebrated in The Mabinogi. But the reference to Celticity is in fact a disguise for a worst-case instance of warrior nature versus chivalry culture in disruptive not integrated mode. Mabonagrain, as he confesses in defeat to Érec, has been the archetype of what Érec thought he was, a knight under female control: King Evrain, whose nephew I am, dubbed me in the presence of many very worthy men in this very garden where we are. My damsel sitting there immediately took me up on my word, saying I’d pledged her never to leave this place until some knight should come and vanquish me in armed combat. It was right that I should stay rather than break my oath, even though I should never have pledged it. Since I saw the good in her, I should not give any indication or impression to this person who is dearest to me that I was displeased with anything; for had she noticed it, she would have quickly have withdrawn her heart from me – and I would not have wished that on any account, whatever might happen. (80) Mabonagrain is not only locked into love and submission for destructive purposes. He is also locked in an enclosed magical garden, an earthly courtly paradise, a sexualised prison – it is surrounded by pikes with knight’s heads on them: 283

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it is fatal for the passing warrior. This is what Érec rode away from through wild and dangerous nature; the love Énide bravely endured for him is the opposite of the possessive manipulation Mabonagrain has received from the lady to whom he gave total authority, so driving his warrior nature into negativity. Mabonagrain is over-emotive and his undue chivalry has destroyed his inherent knightly status – a distinctly negative use of a Welsh reference, even seeming an insult to the supernatural Celtic grand ones, Mabon and Bran. In this remarkable sequence, Érec and Énide, not to forget Guivret, have exorcised the opposite of their own worst-case confusions of warrior nature and gendered chivalry. After the tournament at Brandigan, at Celtic Nantes, and after Érec’s father dies, in the new world of King Érec and Queen Énide warfare and courtesy are both laden with emotion and, it is asserted, are both in compliant balance. Where Culhwch ac Olwen showed how the emotional friendships and loyalties of human culture out-weigh the dark passions of a natural world, in Érec et Énide, Énide’s values of love and loyalty finally embrace, both spiritually and literally, the dark hostilities of masculine military competition to which Érec is recurrently pressured. A sign that civilisation has substantially triumphed is that they have not needed to shave off anyone’s beard, face and ears. Thriving technically and artistically on the melodrama of Celtic story motifs, romance has moved on, in its new feudal and courtly world, to debate and confront the conflicting behavioural and genderrelated aspects of emotion in both the social and gendered renovations of modernity and the surging power of Arthurian romance.

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17 ‘ARTFUL THUNDER’ Merlin, wisdom and the environment

Unpublished

1. Introduction In Merlin: Knowledge and Power Through the Ages (2009) I argued that in the stories about him Merlin consistently represents knowledge, but this power not only changes its nature in terms of changing understandings of what knowledge is, but also its capacity to evaluate people and behaviour varies quite radically across time through its varying encounters with power, especially that of secular authority. Whether he is an early Celtic mocker of heroic society, a Christian critic of medieval secularity, or a learned and idealistic opponent of modern materialism, Merlin presents different modes of knowledges across time, and also ones which are consistently at odds with the power structures of the changing periods – and so his myth realises central concerns and problems of those varying times. The book argues that out in some detail, and I hope with some credibility. Here I want to turn to something else which is at times touched on in the book, but is not followed up there, because it seemed a different, if inherently interwoven, narrative about the meaning of the Merlin myth. This is the curious, even compelling, fact that Merlin consistently has a relationship with what we now tend to call the environment, the natural world and its implied values, rather than with the created world, social and material, of human activity. But here too his meaning and its relationship with its opposites is neither stable nor consistent through time, and so tracing its path can offer an understanding of changing relationships between knowledge and the environment, and of their separations – as in the environmental ignorance and destructivity that are today all too evident, and deeply problematic.

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2. Apple tree and little pig We first hear of Merlin, under the name Myrddin, in early Welsh poems located in Cumbria, then still Celtic, which were recorded by about the year 1000.1 In Afallen (‘Apple-Tree’) Myrddin speaks: Sweet apple tree, growing in a glade, a treasure hidden from the lords of Rhydderch. With a crowd round its base, a host around it, a delight to them, brave warriors. Now Gwenddydd loves me not, nor welcomes me, and I am hated by Gwasawg, Rhydderch’s ally. I have destroyed her son and daughter; death takes everyone; why does he not welcome me? After Gwenddolau, no lords revere me, no sport delights me, no lover seeks me out. In the battle of Arfderydd, my torque was gold; today I am no treasure to a swan-like girl. (35–46) Myrddin is an exile, in the forest. The story is that after the battle of Arfderydd in 573, just north of Carlisle, he suffered what we now call war trauma, having seen friends and relatives die, some apparently at his own hands. This was a real battle and perhaps (some would say probably) he was a real lord of Celtic Cumbria – but the point of the poem is the distance between Myrddin and the local heroic court.2

1 Commentary on and translations of the Myrddin poems can be found in John K. Bollard, ‘Myrddin in Early Welsh Tradition’, in The Romance of Merlin: An Anthology, ed. by Peter Goodrich (New York: Garland, 1990), pp. 13–54. The translations given here, by this book’s author, are more literal and closer to the original. 2 These titles, like so many in early poetry, are generated by later editors, sometimes from manuscript titles but often just from the opening of the text itself. The titles have no real status, and can vary – ‘Apple Tree’ can be given in Welsh as the plural Afallenau (‘Apple Trees’) and ‘Little Pig’ can be called, with another plural, Oianau (‘Greetings’) as each stanza begins with Afallen, ‘apple-tree’, or Oian, ‘greeting’. But as there is only one tree and pig to greet, however often referred to, the plurals seem wrong. The dates are early. Rachel Bromwich states that ‘Myrddin and Taliesin’, ‘The Song of Myrddin in the Grave’ and ‘Myrddin and Gwenddydd’ were ‘certainly composed before 1100’ and adds that ‘At least the nucleus of the Afallenau and the Oianau are probably as old’, in her edition of Trioedd Ynys Prydein (‘Triads of the Island of Britain’) 2nd edition (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1978), p. 470. A .O. H. Jarman agrees, saying that the oldest part (lines 35–65) of Afallenau ‘might be dated in the ninth or tenth centuries’ in the ‘Rhagmadroddiad’ (‘Introduction’) to Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin (‘The Black Book of Carmarthen’), ed. by A. O. H. Jarman (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1982), pp. xiii–lxxii, see p. xxxvi. He also says the ‘Myrddin’ poems were written down ‘during the second half of the eleventh century, 1050–1100’, ‘Rhagmadroddiad’

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The poem Afallen indicates clearly the power of nature: each stanza starts by invoking a ‘Sweet apple tree’ with its ‘tender blossoms’ (47): the tree’s ‘special virtue’ (83) is evidently a symbol of Myrddin’s desocialised natural wisdom. His only associate is another natural world feature which he addresses in another poem, Oian (‘Little Pig’): Greetings little pig! It is clear day. Hear the voice of the water birds, sad voices. Years and long days will be ours, and unjust lords, fruits withering, and bishops will support thieves, churches be vile, and monks will earn their load of sins. (1–6) The poems clearly deplore the result of heroic action, and a question asked about the battle of Arfderydd – ‘where is its cause’ (23) – itself points to a critique of heroic society: Welsh tradition records the view that this battle was fought for no good reason.3 The idea of a prince who has been traumatised in battle and takes to the wild, even to madness, is familiar in Celtic tradition, and the Myrddin story seems the earliest recorded – a later version is the Irish story of Suibhne Geilt, ‘Sweeney the Wild’. These poems offer the original Myrddin. He is not a prophet: he merely lives in alterity, and so implicitly criticises heroic society: occasionally he does that explicitly. As these stories were remembered in Wales, under Anglo-Saxon attack, the figure of alteritous knowledge became a voice for Welsh resistance, prophesying a British triumph. That is the second Myrddin, who was himself worked into the Cumbrian Myrddin texts in the process of their transmission to Wales. When speaking generally of war, this second Myrddin is also place-linked – now not outside the Cumbrian battle and court, but at the Welsh locations of battles against the Saxons: And I will prophesy the battle on the Iddon, and the battle of Machafwy, and the battle of Afon, and the battle of Cors Mochno, and the battle in Môn,

(‘Introduction’) to Ymdiddan Myrddin a Thaliesin (‘Discussion of Myrddin and Taliesin’) (Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru (University of Wales Press), 1951), p. 53. 3 The Triads, a rhyming repository of condensed commentary on Welsh events, record it as one of ‘The Three Futile Battles of the Island of Britain’, and elsewhere it is said to have been ‘brought about by the cause of a lark’s nest’ – which may simply link the idea of futility to the name of the nearby fortress Caerlaverock, meaning ‘lark’s castle’ in Welsh. Line 24 of Oian, ‘All their lives they prepare for it’, makes a classical statement of heroic training – the warband achieves meaning in its military moment – but that ideal has bitter meaning against the brutal, even futile nature of this battle: the tone is a negative version of the early Welsh elegiac heroic poem Y Gododdin, and the heroic tradition is rejected from the standpoint of the knowledge of the northern wise men, Taliesin and Myrddin.

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and the battle of Cyminod, and the battle of Caerleon, and the battle of Aber Gwaith, and the battle of Ieithion, and when Dyfed may be made a borderland for stags a youth will rise, good for the Britons. (‘Little Pig’, 174–80) So in this early phase, in one language, but already having two different locations and political contexts, the now multi-meaning Myrddin can see the environment as a place of alterity or a heartland, or even both, as the poems link the two concepts.

3. Stag, leaf, maritime science: Merlin and nature Geoffrey of Monmouth, a twelfth-century Welshman writing in Latin, first dealt with Merlin (the name-change is discussed below) in his Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1136), a full, very popular ‘History of the Kings of Britain’ narrative primarily related to British Celtic royalty, its conflicts and final downfall. More interesting in the context of this essay is his later Latin poem Vita Merlini (c. 1150, ‘The Life of Merlin’).4 This starts in touch with the Cumbrian material and relates how after the battle of Arfderydd Merlin went mad and took to the woods. In winter he suffered, and spoke to a wolf, his ‘dear companion’ (p. 59 – these poems have no line-numbers). Then comes a newly recorded but surely old story. Merlin returned to court but the crowds drove him mad again. The king detained him in chains, and tried to calm him with music. One day the queen entered, the king took a leaf from her hair, and Merlin laughed. The king pressed him for an explanation, and in return for a promise of freedom, he says that the leaf was there from the queen’s encounter with her lover in ‘the undergrowth’ (p. 67) – he reads the natural signs to uncover social disorder. The queen was angry, and Merlin left the court after saying his wife could re-marry, provided that the husband avoided him – and he would attend the wedding ‘with fine gifts’ (p. 73). Back in the forest, after some time Merlin realised from the stars and planets that his wife was re-marrying. He mounted a stag, having organised stags, does and she-goats in three lines before him, and journeyed grandly, and naturally, to the court. The bridegroom laughed at the sight: Merlin ripped off the stag’s horns and threw them at the man’s head, killing him. Here Merlin is aggressively natural – but he is not so always. When he left the court for the woods, despite his sister’s pleading him to stay, he had asked her to provide for him a house with seventy doors and seventy windows so he could watch the stars, and seventy secretaries to record his words. Taliesin, the famous – and real – late sixth-century Welsh bard and visionary, visits Merlin and,

4 Geoffrey of Monmouth, Vita Merlini, ed. by and trans. Basil Clarke (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1973).

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at his request, explains wind and rain, the sea, types of fish, then the topography of Britain and, more briefly, other places. After covering the environment they discuss history, but then hear a new spring has broken out, and go to it. Merlin is made sane by the spring, and Taliesin explains about varied types of health-giving waters around the world. Chieftains and leaders come to see the new spring, and Merlin is asked to resume his kingship. He says he is too old, and will remain happily in the forest – and, developing environmental knowledge further, explains the nature of types of birds. The natural world he outlines is elevated with classical learning, but there are still Welsh connections in the sequence. The horn-throwing Merlin seems linked to Cernunnos, the Celtic god represented on a famous silver cauldron preserved in Denmark as himself bearing horns and having as his animal familiar a stag with the same horns. It may not be accidental that the horned god’s other animal familiar is a serpent, representing wisdom, a figure which may be partly implied in Geoffrey’s development of the name Merlin. In Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniae,5 the new name has some environmental features. In early Welsh spelling Myrddin is represented as ‘Merdin’, and to Latinise this as ‘Merdinus’ would produce a name redolent of the French word merde, ‘excrement’, as Gaston Paris noted long ago.6 Avoiding this earthiness, Geoffrey neatly revised the name as ‘Merlinus’ to fit the figure’s new sociocultural context – and perhaps suggest more positive environmentalism. While most commentators assume the name refers to the merlin, smallest of the European hawks, it is not evident that this meaning was then known: the Latin word merula, which is probably the source, means both bird and fish (modern French merle, blackbird, and merlan, whiting, are both derived from it). I suggest Geoffrey found a name that suggested natural liberty: he may even have imagined Merlin’s animal avatar as a winged serpent, the epitome of wisdom, and so even perhaps a dragon, the hostile creature Merlin encounters and defeats, deep beneath the ground when Vortigern’s tower collapses – maybe that was a family matter. Environmental connections operate among the politics in the Historia. Merlin is found among the Gewissei tribe, at Galabes Spring ‘where he often went’ (p. 196) and suggests that as Aurelius wishes to build a monument to the men fallen in the war he should bring ‘the choir of the giants’ (p. 196) from Mount Killare in Ireland, valuable healing stones, moved in the past from Africa by giants. Uther and an army go to fetch them, with Merlin’s support and advice. They defeat the Irish, but cannot move the stones. Merlin laughs and ‘with his own machinery’ (p. 198) moves them to Amesbury. This is a classic knowledge versus power moment, showing Merlin is not simply at the beck and call of a king, however powerful:

5 Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe (London: Penguin, 1966), p. 196. 6 Gaston Paris, ‘Review’ of Arthur de la Borderie, Les véritables Prophéties de Merlin, Romania, 12 (1883), 367–76.

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the sequence also displays a form of natural force, not just magical manipulation. Much the same is true when Uther is turned by Merlin into Gorlois in order to conceive Arthur. According to Geoffrey, the solution is more a matter of natural knowledge than magic: ‘By my drugs I know how to give you the precise appearance of Gorlois’ (pp. 206–07) – and so the king becomes identical to his enemy. In the Historia Merlin has come close to royal power – though he never meets Arthur, just arranges his conception. He is also centrally involved in royal and national prophecies, and is now not really in a Cumbrian-style state of alterity – he is simply familiar with and able to manage the natural world. The next few centuries will make it very clear that political Merlin, as grand vizier to feudal monarchs – when Advice displaces Wisdom – is not in any dominant way environmental Merlin. But just as natural Myrddin engaged with social politics, so socio-political Merlin has clear elements of his natural force, constrained as it might now be in the royal world.

4. From nature to grand vizier Geoffrey of Monmouth’s story became the structure against which detailed medieval French accounts of Arthur developed. At first Merlin became a Christian authority figure, the prophet of the Grail who advised Uther and then Arthur to improve themselves. But this Christian-critic Merlin faded away: his natural connections seem to have made him too unorthodox for this kind of knowledge, though Robert de Boron tried to re-channel this alterity by making Merlin the son of the devil rescued for the church (see the discussion in Chapter 1 in this collection). In the massive thirteenth-century prose Vulgate Arthuriad Merlin acted in fully secular mode, as adviser and guide to Arthur, including in military terms. But both his natural connections and the early Celtic stories haunted the texts and unsettled their secular certainty. One figure located in distant country, usually Northumberland – far northern Britain again – is Blaise, who writes down the stories Merlin tells him. His name has been linked to Breton bleizh, meaning wolf, and they relate this to the old grey wolf Merlin befriends in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini.7 But the name probably comes from a different but real source: the twelfthcentury Bleddri, a historical oral story-teller, himself from Caerfyrddin, like the Welsh Myrddin.8 The French version of his name, Bleheris, was reworked in terms of the French (originally Armenian) St Blaise. This figure is also clericised as a scribe – and perhaps for that reason was very often illustrated. He is like

7 For the argument that Blaise’s name comes from ‘wolf’ in Celtic, see Philippe Walter, Merlin ou le Savoir du Monde (Imago: Paris, 2000), p. 138, and Robert Baudry, ‘La Vita Merlini ou les Métamorphoses de Merlin’, in Fils sans père, ed. by Denis Hüe (Orléans: Paradigme, 2000), pp. 175–89, see p. 179. 8 The Welsh respelled the place-name to link it to Myrddin: for the Romans it was Moridunum: the preceding caer means ‘castle’.

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a hermit, that environmentalised clerical source of wisdom, used very much in the Grail stories to oppose secular chivalry. Another figure who has also been mis-traced to Welsh roots is Vivian, the dangerous beauty who stops Merlin’s activities. She is involved because the figure of wisdom has to leave the narrative, so it can end tragically – though sometimes he returns for a rueful final comment. Her name ranges from Ninianne to Vivianne, with all stops in between. Early Celtologists wanted to trace her name to ‘chwifleian’, found in the Myrddin poems, and this view was picked up by the influential Cambridge Chaucerian and medievalist W. F. Skene. But later scholarship showed this was not a name at all, just a word for ‘pale wanderer’ – the also suggested source in the name of the Mabinogi queen Rhiannon is even less likely. But the figure is still Welsh in a way: Vivian first appears in the French/Breton Lancelot du Lac and it is most likely that the Welsh saint’s name Ninian, well-known in Brittany, was misread as female through misreading of the minim-based letters ‘n’ and ‘v’, a common problem in Gothic script.9 Whatever her name, or origin, she is used to remove Merlin, the knowledge-rich and troublesome royal adviser, from the text – another kind of Merlin-containment. Her impact is the reflex of that of Blaise: where he trains and records Merlin, she learns from and silences him. But her connection is also environmentally linked: when she disposes of Merlin, he ends up in a tomb or a cave, somewhere in a forest – and will speak from there. She is also of course natural in her beauty and sensuality, though her nature is hostile: but she wants Merlin’s brains, not his body. Merlin does not always disappear from the story to his grave: he can simply retire, as in the Vita Merlini, but that seems to occur only in the texts where he does not confront secular power too directly. A notable example of this is in the Perceval, written or perhaps just inspired by Robert de Boron (see Chapter 1 in this collection): when the Grail quest is over Merlin takes to a tower outside the Grail castle, called an ‘esplumoir’. The word, it is generally agreed, refers to a moulting cage, as would be inhabited by a real merlin in its inactive time.10 Nature can be often disconcertingly close to the surface of the text, challenging the power of society.

9 On Rhiannon as the origin of Vivian see Sir John Rhŷs, Studies in the Arthurian Legend (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891), p. 284. The pioneer Celticist Skene thought ‘hwimleian’ (also ‘chwifleian’) was a woman’s name and the Bretonist de Villemarqué argued for a French development like ‘Vivleian’, see W. F. Skene, The Four Ancient Books of Wales, 2 volumes (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1868), 2.2, 336–7: he quotes the view of Rev. Thomas Price (known as ‘Carnhuanawc’), Literary Remains, 2 volumes (Llandovery: Rees, and London: Longman, 1854–5), 1.144. Jarman sees it as merely a compound word translatable as ‘pale wild wanderer’, Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin (‘Black Book of Carmarthen’), Glossary, under ‘huimleian’, p. 151. It would seem Gaston Paris was right when he traced the name’s source to the Celtic name Ninian, see his ‘Introduction’ to Merlin: Roman en Prose du XIIIe Siècle, ed. by Gaston Paris and Jacob Ulrich, 2 volumes (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1886), vol. 1, pp. li–lxxx, see p. xlv, note 1. 10 William A. Nitze, ‘The Esplumoir Merlin’, Speculum, 18 (1943), 69–79; Helen Adolf saw connections with Jewish mystical tradition in the image: ‘The Esplumoir Merlin: A Study in its Cabbalistic Sources’, Speculum, 21 (1946), 172–93.

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One important feature of the Merlin narratives is what is usually called disguise, but is really transformation: there is no original Merlin to be disguised, he always just symbolises knowledge, in many human versions – but not courtly or aristocratic ones: he is never power itself. He transforms as an ugly deformed herdsman from Northumberland, an old white-haired man, Uther’s mistress’s serving boy, a blind beggar with a dog, even a stag. This too is a knowledge/power element, in that his knowledge surpasses social power, but it is also often environmentally linked, as in the big boots of the peasant, the animals he handles when transformed, or himself becomes, and even the simple wooden club he bears as a peasant boy. Merlin’s magical powers still exist, and are distinctly environmental, especially through the way he deals with Arthur’s enemies. As they threaten the king, first he sets their tents on fire, then in the major battle that follows, Arthur’s enemies faced ‘a great wind and storm that Merlin sent against them and a fog’11 (1.229). Later he raises a river and also a fog to help defeat the ten thousand Saxons who have renewed their attack on Britain in Arthur’s realm (1.298). When Merlin brings the Breton army to Arthur, he, in the spirit of famous Celtic warrior-priests, ‘led them riding in front on a great black horse’ (1.228). With the same mix of older patterns and new commitments, he says to Arthur, after telling him the story of his own birth: ‘I want to keep going back to the woods; and this is by the nature that came to me from the one who sired me, for he does not seek out any companionship that might come above from God. But I do not go into the wood for fellowship with him, but to keep company with Blaise, the holy man’. (1.221) As clearly in contact with the Celtic trickster are some digressions later in the Vulgate Arthuriad, where the author seems to be amusing himself and his audience with exotic stories. The longest begins with Merlin suddenly appearing in ‘the wide and deep forests of the country around Rome’ (1.123) as ‘black-skinned wild-haired, bearded and shoeless and in a ragged tunic’ (1.124). Shortly he will run into Julius Caesar’s palace in the form of a stag and interpret the emperor’s dream about a sow and twelve wolf-cubs. Following this startling opening comes a summary of the plot of the romance Silence, only found elsewhere today in one manuscript, from the later thirteenth century, about a young woman disguised as a man who is desired by the lascivious empress.12 Merlin, in human shape, with satiric laughter at various ironic situations, explains all, and the empress is

11 Quotations from the Vulgate Arthuriad are translated from The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, ed. by H. Oskar Sommer, 8 volumes (Washington: Carnegie Institution Publications, 1908–16). 12 Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance, ed. by and trans. Sarah Roche-Mahdi (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1992).

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executed, along with her twelve lovers – they are the sow and the wolf-cubs from the emperor’s dream. A retrospective digression involves Merlin taking Arthur, on his anti-Roman European tour, to Lausanne, where he tells him about the devil cat of that region – a story itself reminiscent of the giant Cath Palug of Welsh tradition, which survived in French and Creole myth as ‘le chapalu’ and made a widely-admired reappearance in film in 1965 in the form of Jane Fonda as Cat Ballou, the female gunslinger. Merlin’s end also has an environmental development. When Vivien leaves him entombed this becomes dynamised in Christian form, much as Blaise’s ending was. There develops a recurrent story motif about a knight finding by accident Merlin’s grave and receiving advice and prophecies. One story called La Conte del Brait (‘The Story of the Cry’),13 has not survived in French, but has a major development in Il Baladro del Sabio Merlino (‘The Cry of the Wise Merlin’), a late medieval story in both Spanish and Portuguese.14 The grave-voice story is in Christian terms a version of the Cumbrian exile, alone, wretched, speaking truth to power. It is an image that will show renewed vigour in the nineteenth century. But before that, both Merlin’s power to use knowledge critically and also his environmental connections were largely sidelined in the late medieval and early modern centuries, when royal power came to dominate his treatment. In the English reworkings of the story, where Arthur becomes a figure of national leadership, English now rather than British, and definitely so rather than Welsh, Merlin’s only function is as a prophet of Arthurian grandeur and eventual tragedy – and this pattern runs right through to Malory and beyond.

5. Merlin versus the Renaissance In Book Three of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, here quoted from Sir John Harington’s 1591 translation,15 Merlin prophesies from his tomb about Bradamant and the splendour of the D’Este family.16 This aggrandises the medieval single knight receiving advice, and then the idea of Merlin’s cave is massively amplified: in this fine classical space Merlin: . . . in milke white marble did engrave Strange stories which things future strangely taught.

13 Some scholars have felt the post-Vulgate author was inventing a text to avoid elaborating his story, and a Spanish author later provided it, but recent scholarship tends to assume there was a now lost French version. See Fanni Bogdanow, ‘The Post-Vulgate Roman du Graal’, in Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, ed. by Carol Dover (Cambridge: Brewer, 2003), pp. 33–51. 14 See William J. Entwistle, The Arthurian Legend in the Literature of the Spanish Peninsula (London: Dent, 1925). 15 Sir John Harington, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, ed. by Robert McNulty, 2 volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), vol. 2. pp. 1, 7–12. 16 Peter H. Goodrich, ‘Introduction’, in Merlin: A Casebook, ed. by Peter H. Goodrich and Raymond H. Thompson (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 1–102, see p. 20.

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The verie images seemd life to have, And saving they were dumbe, you would have thought Both by their looks and by their lively features That they had mov’d and had bin living creatures. (26.2, 3–8) Advice from the grave goes further politically upmarket in Book 33 when Bradamant sees murals about the future wars of France painted by ‘the British Merline’: (33.3, 7): He made by Magicke art that stately hall, And by the selfe same art he causd to be Straunge histories ingraved on the wall. (33.4, 1–3) The new figure of Merlin as a Renaissance mage serving royal power is developed by Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene (1590–96).17 Merlin made Arthur’s shield: But all of Diamond perfect pure and cleene It framed was, one massie entire mold, Hewen out of adamant rocke with engines keene. (1.7, 33, 5–7) This made a magic mirror for King Ryence, and Princess Britomart sees her future husband Artegall through a magic glass he made. Merlin’s cave is like an industrial hell: And there such ghastly noise of yron chaines, And brasen Cauldrons thou shalt rombling heare, Which thousand sprights with long enduring paines Doe tosse, that it will stonne they feeble braines, And oftentimes great grones, and grieuous stoundes, When too huge toile and labour them constraines. (3.3.9, 2–7) This strange sequence describes the effort to build a ‘brazen walle’ around Carmarthen, with Merlin managing chaotic nature to defend power. Both Ariosto and Spenser see Merlin as mage and artificer, but both impose power-supporting limits on the critical use of his environmentally-linked knowledge.

17 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene in The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. by J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt, 3 volumes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), see vol. 1, pp. 7, 33, 5–7.

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Ariosto uses his figure Melissa like a classical Vivien; Spenser just makes Merlin see his own terrifying end. This period does the same with his capacity for prophecy: Renaissance Merlin only prophesies up to the present, as if to back-validate the present ruler. He would be updated about every generation to add more grand monarchs, but never see into the future: time had stopped with God’s most newly anointed. Merlin’s natural connections were not forgotten, but they were marginalised. Michael Drayton’s Polyolbion, in its 1612 first version, locates Merlin in Monmouth, Carmarthen and Snowdon, but with little interest in prophecy, disseminates his power in a folkloric way, treating him like a tutelary deity of the British landscape: Of Merlin and his skill what Region doth not heare? The world shall still be full of Merlin everie where.18 (159–60) That environmentalised demoticism is matched by the now discernible popular Merlin. A pamphlet by Richard Johnson survives from 1621 about Tom Thumb. In King Arthur’s time an old man sent his elderly barren wife to Merlin in quest of a child, even a tiny one: Tom is born and will have a lively career at Arthur’s court. This story will be persistent, and have special anti-heroic, even anti-liberal, political meaning in the eighteenth century (see Chapter 15 in this collection), but here it just indicates the cross-cultural potential of popular Merlin in the early modern period. Another instance is The Birth of Merlin, a play by William Rowley written by 1612. A major figure is the clown, Merlin’s doltish peasant uncle. Merlin is young and both a patriotic-historic seer and a folkloric trickster. They cross Britain in a comic and melodramatic narrative, mixing up a playful devil and the Saxon invasions – some thought Shakespeare was involved, and it has his multi-tonality, if not his verbal skill and creative judgement. A popular environmental Merlin is also found in the royalist pamphlet of 1641, Thomas Heywood’s The Life of Merlin Sirnamed Ambrosius.19 Here Merlin at Vortigern’s court offers aerial hunting, with flying hares and dogs, and then a tournament enlivened by pigmy archers – within the comedy, Merlin was at least firmly set in a Britain both natural and mythical. Equally localised and demotic were the very popular ‘Merlins’, tiny paper almanacks recording sunrise and sunset, tides, phases of the moon through the year, and even reporting market prices: in a popular and everyday way they were deeply environmental. They certainly grounded Merlin in ordinary life, and could even be

18 Michael Drayton, Polyolbion, in The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. by J. William Hebel, 5 volumes (Oxford: Blackwell, 1933), vol. 4, p. 101. 19 Thomas Heywood, The Life of Merlin Sirnamed Ambrosius (London: Emery, 1641); pp. 1–41, up to the death of Arthur, are reprinted in The Romance of Merlin, ed. by Peter Goodrich, Chapter 8, pp. 206–17 (see note 1 above).

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involved in civil-war politics. William Lilly’s Merlinus Anglicus Junior, a collection of new prophecies, sold out in a week in 1644, and in 1647 he started a longrunning series of Merlini Anglici Ephemeris (‘The Calendar/Journal of English Merlin’), which had many rivals and successors, into the eighteenth century. At a loftier level Merlin was cut adrift both from political prophecy and popular locational energy but still, as in Ariosto and Spenser, could have some esoteric link with the natural world. Where Ariosto’s Merlin created prince-pleasing frescoes in his cave and Spenser’s Merlin built a defensive wall of brass, in Dryden’s musical play King Arthur (1691),20 Merlin, as genius of the British resistance to the Saxons (and also spirit of possible Stuart resistance to William of Orange), has contact with Philidel, an ‘Airy Spirit’, as Dryden had found it in Sir John Harington’s 1591 translation of Ariosto: . . . I have view’d thee in my Magick Glass, Making thy moan, among the Midnight Wolves, That Bay the silent Moon: Speak, I conjure thee. ‘Tis Merlin bids thee, at whose awful Wand, The pale Ghost quivers, and the grim Fiend gasps. (2.1, 7–12) Dryden’s royally servile Merlin lacks nature-connected powers – he says: There’s not a Tree in that Inchanted Grove But numbred out, and given by tale to Fiends; And under every Leaf a Spirit couch’d. But by what Method to resolve those Charms, Is yet unknown to me. (3.1, 26–30) But this Merlin does have social vision – a positive and up-to-date political one, as the plot makes Dryden’s Stuart faith embrace Whig business practices: this is made clear when Merlin finally predicts to Arthur as he folds together the Saxons’ vigour and the future mercantile exploitations of the environment: Behould what Rouling Ages shall produce: The Wealth, the Loves, the Glories of our Isle, Which yet like Golden Oar, unripe in Beds, Expect the Warm Indulgency of Heav’n To call ‘em forth to Light. (5.2, 76–85)

20 John Dryden, King Arthur, or The British Worthy, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. by Vinton A. Dearing, 20 volumes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), vol. 16.

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Such a multifarious, but essentially limited and power-serving Merlin did not survive: for the Tory Fielding he was a comic buffoon, in both the 1730 Tom Thumb: A Tragedy, and its 1731 sophistication into The Tragedy of Tragedies: The Life and Death of Tom Thumb.21 (See Chapter 15 in this collection.) In the 1731 text, introduced as ‘Merlin by name, a Conjuror by Trade’, he sings about ‘the mystick getting of Tom Thumb’ (p. 50). He can have natural powers, but hardly serious ones: in the musical version by Eliza Haywood, The Opera of Operas of 1733 he addresses the ‘rav’nous Cow’ which has swallowed Tom in one of the great comic couplets of the British stage: Now, by emetick Power, Red Cannibal, Cast up thy Prisoner, England’s Hannibal. (p. 217)

6. Gothic Merlin Fielding’s Tory mockery of natural wisdom was almost immediately contradicted. George II’s queen, Caroline of Anspach, a substantial Whig intellectual, established in 1732 at Richmond a ‘Hermitage’ dedicated to learning, with busts of Newton, Boyle and Locke. By summer 1735 she had arranging the building nearby of a cottage with Gothic windows and thatched roof, set into a hill and known as ‘Merlin’s Cave’. Its six life-size wax images are Merlin and his male secretary, Queen Elizabeth, Henry VII’s Queen Margaret, and two wise women, one Renaissance, either Britomart or Bradamante, one classical, Minerva or Melissa. Reclaiming knowledge from the pompous Renaissance as natural, modest and, intriguingly, gender-aware, the cave is wisdom-linked, and the first instance of Gothic Merlin. A contemporaneous new element was developed. Celebrating the cave, the Welsh poet Jane Brereton, herself writing as Melissa, in Merlin: a Poem (1735)22 sees Merlin in part as a forerunner of modern science like Newton, but also, like a Celtic bard, he declaims: I study’d Nature, through her various Ways; And chaunted to this Harp, prophetick Lays. (p. 7) Thomas Gray’s poem ‘The Bard’ and Thomas Jones’s very influential painting by the same name were to disseminate a similar figure. They did not call him Merlin: the name may have become too much mocked or popular for that. But the Celtic-Gothic link (in the eighteenth century the two were close) was of interest

21 Henry Fielding, Tom Thumb: A Tragedy (London: Roberts, 1730) and The Tragedy of Tragedies: The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great (London: Roberts, 1731). 22 Jane Brereton, Merlin: A Poem, Humbly Inscrib’d to Her Majesty (London: Cave, 1735).

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to some opinion-makers: Thomas Warton’s ‘The Grave of King Arthur’ tells how an ‘elfin queen’ bore Arthur’s body to Avalon: In Merlin’s agate-axled car To her green isle’s enamel’d steep Far in the navel of the deep.23 The young Cornish-raised scientist Humphrey Davy, himself a master of cleverness, wrote in a poem of about 1795 about ‘mighty Merlin’, ‘The Master of the spell’, a figure of ‘anguish’ with a ‘dull dark eye’, who suffered a highly Gothic death in ‘a dark cave upon the flinty rock’.24 These were only forerunners; Merlin’s return to the cultural mainstream would be by a much more roundabout route. Mainstream English Romanticism was not at all favourable to Merlin – or indeed, for that matter to Arthur, although their narratives were readily available in selections and editions (see p. 00).25 The Romantics preferred medievalism to be found in the plain-man, long-suffering, moralism of the popular ballads; they basically agreed with the Renaissance view of Merlin as mere cleverness, and could see no real use for him as the symbol of that. The major English Romantics all name-checked Merlin, but in narrative he was negative: Scott’s The Bridal of Triermain (1813) has him enchanting Arthur’s illegitimate daughter Gyneth to sleep, for dubious purposes. In Wordsworth’s ‘The Egyptian Maid’ (1828) he is negative nature, sinking the maiden’s ship and then, under pressure from Nina – Wordsworth’s version of Vivien, flying her to Caerleon in ‘The very swiftest of thy cars’ (109), drawn by ‘two mute Swans’ (177). It all ends well, but not by Merlin’s action. An equally negative Merlin appears in ‘The Masque of Gwendolen’ by the much-underrated medievalist poet, Anglican bishop Richard Heber. He offers the heroine Gwendolen a partner like a dark version of the lordly Renaissance Merlin or a Celtic Lucifer with: . . . a regal throne Of solid adamant, hill above hill, Ten furlongs high, to match whose altitude

23 Thomas Warton, Poems (London: Becket, 1777), pp. 63–72, see p. 65. 24 The poem ‘The Death of Merlin’ is printed by Roger Simpson as ‘An Unpublished Poem by Humphrey Davy: Merlin in the Late Eighteenth Century’, Notes and Queries, new series 35 (1988), 195–6. 25 The medieval Merlin material, like the Arthur material, was readily available in the early nineteenth century in selections like George Ellis’s Specimens of the Early English Metrical Poems of 1805 and John Dunlop’s for long popular History of Fiction of 1814: they offered selections from Geoffrey’s Historia and Vita and the Vulgate Arthuriad. The Preface Robert Southey wrote for the new Malory edition of 1817 contained references to Robert de Boron’s Merlin and gave in detail an account of the Vulgate story of Merlin and Nimue, as well as Heywood’s Life.

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Plinlinmon fails, and Idris’ stony chair Sinks like an infant’s bauble.26 She rejects him; he turns her into a ‘ghastly spectre’, and the plot of the Wife of Bath’s tale is then deployed to frustrate his malice. A curious aside to the Romantics’ negative and naturally evil Merlin is in the small group of minor poets who set the story of Arthur in the north – the ‘Arctic Arthur’ school as I call them in a 2011 essay (see Chapter 11 in this collection). They use Merlin as his benign helper, continuing the British politicised grand vizier tradition, but also in the new environmental context of Ossian and the notion of the northern heroic world. The major authors in this intriguing Arthurian by-way are Richard Hole, 1789, John Thelwall, 1801, and Henry Milman, 1818: the fullest text, and also the last, is Edward Bulwer Lytton’s 1848 stanzaic epic King Arthur. Tennyson, ignoring such Northern exoticism, linked back to Romantic negativism when the first he wrote of his twelve The Idylls of the King was ‘Merlin and Vivien’, published in 1859.27 From the start it is both fateful and natural: it begins ‘A storm was coming’ (1), and when the storm breaks Merlin will finally be overcome by Vivien’s sexuality, and yield to her his knowledge. He is represented as a clever man of science with no moral knowledge – Darwin is probably the model, and Tennyson disposes of the man of natural wisdom in order to persevere with his king of moral value. He introduces Merlin as . . . the most famous man of all those times, Merlin, who knew the range of all their arts, Had built the King his havens, ships and halls, Was also Bard, and knew the starry heavens; The people call’d him Wizard; (164–8) But his failings are as naturally oriented as his skills, and Vivien controls him through her own natural power: The pale blood of the wizard at her touch Took gayer colours like an opal warm’d. (947–8) The myth that opals, through their colour variation, are unlucky lies behind the image.28

26 Reginald Heber, Morte Darthur: A Fragment in the Poetical Works (London: Murray, 1840), p. 207. 27 Alfred Tennyson, ‘Merlin and Vivien’, in The Poems of Tennyson, ed. by Christopher Ricks, 2nd edition, 3 volumes (London: Longman, 1987), vol. 3, pp. 393–422. 28 The idea was common in the period: Scott refers to it in Anne of Geierstein (1829) by making the ill-fated Lady Hermione wear a great opal. Queen Victoria was considered to have favoured them in order to rebut the negative connections of the stone in order to help the new Australian opal trade.

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Finally, a storm of animality takes over: Merlin’s wish for love in age is fulfilled in lust in a decidedly malign environmental context, in brilliantly gasping poetry: . . . she call’d him lord and liege, Her seer, her bard, her silver star of eve, Her God, her Merlin, the one passionate love Of her whole life; and ever overhead Bellow’d the tempest, and the rotten branch Snapt in the rushing of the river-rain Above them; and in change of glare and gloom Her eye and neck glittering went and came; Till now the storm its burst of passion spent, Moaning and calling out of other lands, Had left the ravaged woodland yet once more To peace; and what should not have been had been. (951–62) If this is Merlin’s nadir, Tennyson will decades later advert to Merlin’s newly developed zenith – though he had never rejected Merlin’s role as a bard: in 1852 Tennyson had published two poems under the pseudonym ‘Merlin’.29 In what he meant as his only autobiographical poem, ‘Merlin and the Gleam’ (1889),30 he offered a survey of his poetic life. Its opening states: I am Merlin And I am dying, I am Merlin Who follow The Gleam. (7–10) Tennyson identified ‘The Gleam’ with Nimue (which had been Vivien’s name in the first version of the Idyll) and also with ‘the higher poetic imagination’, drawing on the Welsh scholarly view of the period that Vivien was Myrddin’s chwifleian (see note 9, p. 291). But he was also, more importantly, referencing the strong new development of Merlin as the deeply insightful man of nature, or Der Naturmensch.

7. Der Naturmensch The German Romantics conceived from Celtic sources a modern Merlin, now again positively set in the context of nature. The Celtic Myrddin found in Ellis’s

29 David Staines, Tennyson’s Camelot: The Idylls of the King and Its Medieval Sources (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1982), p. 26. 30 Tennyson, pp. 205–10, 7–10.

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Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances (1805) inspired Ludwig Uhland’s ‘Merlin der Wilde’ (1829).31 Merlin sits ‘In wooded isolation’, on a mossy stone by a lake and listens to ‘der Geist der Welt’ (309, ‘the spirit of the world’). This universalised version of the Cumbrian Myrddin develops its source. A hart carries Merlin off to the king’s castle and the king asks to have a demonstration of ‘die Spruche’ (310 – ‘the statements’, or, here, ‘the wisdom’) that Merlin has learnt in the wild. To do this, the king asks him to explain something: last night the king thought he heard whispering, like lovers, by the linden tree. The king’s daughter comes in, Merlin takes from her hair a linden leaf and explains that the voices were the king’s daughter kissing her lover – the ancient Cumbrian story of queenly sexuality (see p. 00) is euphemised. Uhland stresses that it is nature which has answered the question; Merlin returns to the forest, and lies on the moss, where his voice still sounds. Karl Immerman’s early poem ‘Merlins Grab’ (1818, ‘Merlin’s Grave’) celebrated Merlin as the Naturmensch (‘Man of Nature’). A young man goes to consult the sage: the grave now has a Romantic Gothic setting, being in the forest, by a fast-running river, in a grotto, lit by a red glare. Merlin speaks about the conflict on earth between the clear-sighted brave and the narrow-minded deaf. To attain virtue requires hardship, faith, strength: essentially ‘All Happiness comes from inside’.32 Immerman’s major work, Merlin: Eine Mythe (1832), is an epic medieval Christian drama, but in 1833 he wrote ‘Merlin im tiefen Grabe’ (‘Merlin in the Deep Grave’),33 which seems in effect a second epilogue to, almost an apology for, Merlin: Eine Mythe – people now do not hear the sage’s message from the grave. Other nineteenth-century German Merlins following the Naturmensch concept include Heinrich Heine, saying at the end of his in his ‘Romancero’ (1851) ‘I envy you, dear colleague Merlin, These trees and the fresh breezes blowing through them’.34 In the same spirit ‘Nicolaus Lenau’, starting one of his 1840s ‘Waldlieder’ (‘Wood-songs’), sees Merlin linked to the muse of poetry: ‘In the chalice of finest moss, Sounds the eternal poem’.35 French writers also developed a positive Romantic Merlin. The Breton Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué included Merlin in his 1842 Contes populaires des ancient Bretons, and Edgar Quinet’s long novel Merlin l’enchanteur (1860) represented Merlin as ‘patron of France’.36 Both are more political-historical than natural, but do give

31 Ludwig Uhland, ‘Merlin der Wilde’, in Gedichte (Stuttgart: Gotta, 1854), pp. 308–12. 32 Karl Immerman, ‘Merlins Grab’, in Werke, ed. by Harry Maync, 5 volumes (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1936), vol. 4, pp. 433–8. 33 Immerman, ‘Merlin im tiefen Grab’, Werke, pp. 439–40. 34 Heinrich Heine, ‘Postscript to the Romancero’, in The Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine: A Modern English Version, trans. Hal Draper (Berlin: Suhrkamp/Insel, 1982), pp. 693–8, see p. 693. 35 ‘Nicolas Lenau’ (= N.F. Niembsch von Strehlenau), Waldlieder und Gedichte (Stuttgart: Gotta’schen, 1878), pp. 393–5, see p. 393. On Lenau see Adelaide Marie Weiss, Merlin in German Literature (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1933), pp. 128–31. 36 Simone Bernard-Griffiths, Le Mythe Romantique de Merlin dans l’Oeuvre d’Edgar Quinet (Paris: Champion, 1999), p. 14; Geoffrey Ashe, Merlin: the Prophet and His History (Stroud: Sutton, 1996), p. 186.

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Merlin a sort of druidic leadership as well. That concept is celebrated by Guillaume Apollinaire in his potent prose poem L’enchanteur pourrisant (‘The Decomposing Enchanter’), published in 1909 with superb illustrations, bold black and white brush drawings by André Derain. Apollinaire – born Wilhelm de Kostrowitsky – worked on this when living in the Ardennes forest37 and he transmutes the Romantic druid and the Naturmensch into the disembodied claims of art itself. He subtly restated this concept in one of his finest poems, ‘Merlin et la vieille femme’ (1912, ‘Merlin and the Old Woman’). There, Merlin explores the poetic process: I made white gestures in the wilderness Lemurs ran swarming through my nightmares My leaps and twirls expressed that bliss Which is an effect of art and nothing more. (p. 97) And he locates his own vitality with his art: The lady awaiting me is called Vivian And when comes a springtime of new sorrow Couched among coltsfoot and sweet marjoram For ever I live on beneath the hawthorn flowers. (p. 99) The American Ralph Waldo Emerson transplanted very influentially the Germanoriginated Romantic Merlin initiative when he took Merlin as a figure of the poetic muse and its transcendental power both in his essay on ‘Poetry and the Imagination’ (1844) and in ‘Merlin I’, published in Poems 1847:38 The kingly bard Must smite the chords rudely and hard, As with hammer or with mace; That they may render back Artful thunder, which conveys Secrets of the solar track, Sparks of supersolar blaze Merlin’s blows are strokes of fate. (p. 91)

37 Jean Burgos, ‘Introduction’, in Guillaume Apollinaire, L’enchanteur pourissant, ed. by Jean Burgos (Paris: Minard, 1972), pp. v–clxii, see p. x. 38 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Merlin I’, in Collected Poems and Translations, ed. by Harold Bloom and Paul Kane (New York: Library of America, 1994), p. 91.

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And more specifically in ‘Merlin’s Song’: Of Merlin wise I learned a song, – Sing it low, or sing it loud, It is mightier than the strong, And punishes the proud. I sing it to the surging crowd, – Good men it will calm and cheer, Bad men it will chain and cage. In the heart of music peals a strain Which only angels hear; Whether it waken joy or rage, Hushed myriads hark in vain, Yet they who hear it shed their age, And take their youth again. (p. 172) A more sophisticated educational figure emerged in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s lengthy and fine poem Merlin (1917). Here he is basically just a clever insightful man: his strong connection with nature is actually a withdrawal from the real troublesome world, as he joins Vivien in Brocéliande rather than continue advising Arthur; he only returns to see the final disaster. This is a powerful and modernist realisation of the failure of knowledge, or now education, to change the tragic path of history: the date 1917 is crucial. For the world as well as Merlin, the final words are bitterly true: Colder blew the wind Across the world, and on it heavier lay The shadow and the burden of the night; And there was darkness over Camelot. (2623–6) The transcendental druidic Merlin, linking nature and poetry, returned late to Tennyson, as has been shown, but there was another, if negative and nonenvironmental, version of the figure in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur (1889). Here Merlin is a dark force of the past, as he had been for the English Romantics, and a large number of poems and plays around the turn of the century will also rework the medieval advisory Merlin: his role is usually to fail to avert the Arthurian tragedy. But the wise Naturmensch resurrected by the German Romantics was also the dynamo for the next, and still current, major meaning of Merlin, strongly environmental in many ways, but principally Merlin the educator.

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8. Professor Merlin There had been traces of this educational Merlin idea in the past, but it had never settled in a consistent formation. In Spenser Merlin supervised Prince Arthur’s education in north-east Wales near the river Dee, but only by appointing a tutor. In Bulwer Lytton’s much overlooked King Arthur (1848: see Chapter 11 in this collection) the heavily-bearded Merlin is like a ‘wizard on a Druid throne’,39 and he has also been Arthur’s quasi-paternal educator in ‘the young hopeful day When the child stood by the great prophet’s knee, And drank high thoughts to strengthen years to be’ (1.41–3). America was more practical. As Alan Lupack has shown, Merlin as the educator was realised in the Arthurian boys’ groups, notably those founded by William Byron Forbush well before the Boy Scout movement took off in Britain in 1907.40 Boys were encouraged to join as ‘Knights of King Arthur’; each group was called a ‘Castle’, led by an adult ‘Merlin’; a guide for the guides was The Merlin’s Book of Advanced Work.41 Groups for girls, or ‘Queens of Avalon’, were led by ‘Ladies of the Lake’. Twentieth-century poets reworked Merlin the visionary adviser to a world in crisis. For a Georgian like Alfred Noyes he was in ‘The Riddles of Merlin’ (1920)42 limited to sentimental nature-loving: Tell me Merlin – it is I Who call thee, after a thousand Springs, – Tell me by what wizardry The white foam wakes in whiter wings, Where surf and sea-gulls toss and cry Like sister-flakes, as they mount and fly, Flakes that the great sea flings on high, To kiss each other and die? (p. 135) Stronger-minded poets could see more in the potential of Merlin as a darkly educational voice: one example is ‘Merlin’ by Edwin Muir (1927):43 O Merlin in your crystal cave Deep in the diamond of the day,

39 Edward Bulwer Lytton, King Arthur, 2 volumes (London: Colburn, 1848), vol. 1, 41. 40 Alan Lupack, ‘Visions of Courageous Achievement: Arthurian Youth Groups in America’, in Medievalism in North America, ed. by Kathleen Verduin (Cambridge: Brewer, 1994), pp. 50–68, see p. 53. 41 Lupack, pp. 54 and 56. 42 Alfred Noyes, ‘The Riddles of Merlin’, in The Elfin Artist and Other Poems (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1920), pp. 135–7. 43 Edwin Muir, ‘Merlin’, in The Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1963), pp. 73–4.

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Will there ever be a singer Whose music will smooth away The furrow drawn by Adam’s finger Across the meadow and the wave? (p. 73) A little more positive is the later poem by Thom Gunn ‘Merlin in the Cave: He Speculates Without a Book’,44 where Merlin reviews his life through images of nature: But I must act, and make The meaning in each movement that I take. Rook, bee, you are the whole and not a part. This is an end. And yet another start. (p. 84) Gunn’s sense of the surviving value of nature and animal life was recreated by Geoffrey Hill in ‘Merlin’,45 apparently spoken in Merlin’s own voice: Arthur, Elaine, Mordred; they are all gone Among the raftered galleries of bone. By the long barrows of Logres they are made one, And over their city stands the pinnacled corn. (p. 8) A similar position is taken by Leslie Norris, a Welsh poet long based in America, in ‘Merlin and the Snake’s Egg’,46 where Merlin actually – and consciously referring back to the Myrddin tradition – becomes part of nature: Feathers sprout from his arms, His nose is an owl’s hooked nose, His eyes are the owl’s round eyes, Silent and soft he flies. (pp. 4–5) It is the natural intelligence of his dog, Glain, who finds that totem of true wisdom, the serpent’s egg.

44 Thom Gunn, ‘Merlin in the Cave: He Speculates Without a Book’, in Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1993), pp. 82–4. 45 Geoffrey Hill, ‘Merlin’, in New and Collected Poems, 1952–92 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), p. 8. 46 Leslie Norris, ‘Merlin and the Snake’s Egg’, in Merlin and the Snake’s Egg (New York: Viking, 1978), p. 45.

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In the major post-war Welsh poet R. S. Thomas’s poem ‘Taliesin 1952’47 Merlin – clearly here the Celtic Myrddin – is just one of the voices of the speaker’s despair: I have been Merlin wandering the woods Of a far country, where the winds waken Unnatural voiced, my mind broken By sudden acquaintance with man’s rage. (p. 105) The educational implications of natural Merlin in these poets were fulfilled with some power and impact by T. H. White, who combined being a schoolmaster with a deep dedication to nature, and condensed both with a full knowledge of Malory. There is no sign that White had read the Myrddin poems or the German Romantics: rather, it is as if Tennyson and the Gleam and, through Emerson, English Romanticism have caught up and now can deploy Merlin as means of educating the Wordsworthian child. In the late 1930s with White’s Arthur, a boy known as Wart, the development of an English Naturmensch has political as well as moral meaning. What Wart, or Arthur, learns as a fish or a hawk is both to see the structures of power in the social world and also to learn ways in which the individual can gain personal authority and seek to improve social politics, as the narrator follows Malory to the end of the story in four volumes, most of them written in war-time. The original story was less directly sociopolitical: in the 1938 The Sword in the Stone Arthur met cannibals, a grass-snake and the comic, if also unsettling, hostile witch Madame Mim. The overall negative account of what seemed like modernity was further developed in the four-book version published in 1958 by more overtly political, and moral sequences, like the fascist ants and the communal geese. These were now re-located in Book 1, having been moved from the unpublished fifth volume, the post-disaster The Book of Merlyn, a distinctly grim account of modern versions of Arthurian politics, given to Merlyn by the animals from Book 1 – Book 5 was written in 1942 but, found too bleak for war-time reading by the publishers, did not appear until 1977.48 The natural wisdom Arthur learns at first in Book 1 from the animals is found to be noble but ineffective. The darker side of nature in human cruelty and violence is also much realised through the book, both personally and politically. In many ways White magnifies the insights of Robinson, though there is no sign of a source relationship. The long-unpublished fifth book returns to a world of animals in a badger’s den which is just like a Cambridge dons’ common room, and all the wise analysis finally boils down to Arthur’s human courage in the face of social

47 R. S. Thomas, ‘Taliesin, 1952’, in Song at the Year’s Turning (London: Hart-Davies, 1955), p. 105. 48 For a discussion of these changes see Elisabeth Brewer, T. H. White (Cambridge: Brewer, 1993), pp. 33–44.

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and international brutality.49 That was a fair position for the 1940s, and there is resonance with Clemence Dane’s contemporary radio drama series, The Saviours (1942), where Merlin supervises a parade of British heroes through history, from King Arthur to the Unknown Soldier. In White the educator Merlyn returns to supervise in natural mode the tragic outcome, and this has become a common feature, as found in the film Excalibur (1981), where Merlin is a national Naturmensch bearing a New Age mantra that the land and the king are one. A stronger version of the educational Naturmensch is in the major German performance piece Merlin oder Das Wüste Land by Tankred Dorst and Ursula Ehler (1981),50 where Merlin is the central figure, re-energising the sage’s knowledge and values as democratic principles in a world seen as ravaged by capitalist imperialism, and so brought to tragedy. Merlin’s survival to the gloomy end is also common in a whole range of historical novels, which have become the dominant mode of disseminating the stories of Arthur and Merlin, and routinely show Merlin as Arthur’s tutor. They are often child-oriented like White’s work, and they recurrently assert the value of nature. Merlin can be stigmatised as too Welsh to be of value, as by the English writers Godfrey Turton in The Emperor Arthur (1968) and John Gloag with Artorius Rex (1977). But it is more normal for his Celticity to be celebrated as both natural and essentially wise, as in Merlin (1988) by the American Stephen Lawhead, Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicle series (1995–7), and especially in Mary Stewart’s trilogy starting with The Crystal Cave (1970), one of the few to offer a saga-like account of Merlin. American novels tend to stress youth: Jane Yolen’s trilogy, Passager (1996), Hawk (1996) and Merlin (1997) represents Merlin as a boy with special skills, so looking forward to the 2008–12 BBC television series. Yolen also looks back to Emerson, saying she understands the inner meaning of Merlin as ‘a metaphor for the Maker’.51 A consciously Americanised variant is Steel Magic (1967) by ‘André Norton’ (Alice Norton) where Mr Brosius (i.e. Ambrosius/Merlin) welcomes two ordinary kids into a transatlantic Avalon where Arthur fights with local and environment-friendly help from a Robin Hood-like Native American named Huon. Another regional wise natural Merlin appears in recent French novels, where he is Breton and his love affair with Vivien has, naturellement, a happy ending Théophile Bryant’s Le Testament de Merlin (1975) is about ‘Merlin, l’immortel commandeur de la Celtie’.52 Michel Rio’s novels make central the Arthurian traditions in the French traditions of Merlin as the figure of love, subtlety and artistic

49 T. H. White, The Book of Merlyn (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977); five-book edition of The Once and Future King (London: Voyager, 1996). 50 Tankred Dorst and Ursula Ehler, Merlin, oder Das Wüste Land (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981). 51 Rozalyn Levin, Tom Holberg and David Bachi, ‘Dream Weaver: An Interview with Jane Yolen’, Avalon to Camelot, 2 (1987), 20–3, see p. 21. 52 Théophile Bryant, Le Testament de Merlin (Nantes: Bellanger, 1975).

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insight, while René Barjaval’s L’Enchanteur (1984) is a full medieval story ending blissfully in Brittany’s forest of Brocéliande.

9. A force of nature Merlin, and Myrddin, began in nature and both celebrated and validated it. Environmental authenticity remained intrinsic to the figure even as the cultural forces of political power brought him into their difficult embrace, and he finally emerged as poet and naturalised educator to reassert the critical values of nature and wisdom. But it is not a simple or triumphant story: it is consistently and sometimes dramatically dialectic. In both Edwin Arlington Robinson and T. H. White it is clear that war has once more – as at the very beginning – forced its way into the world of the Merlin myth, and the myth has responded strongly, if also darkly, and always dialectically. Recent realities can be striking. In the Battle of Britain the salvation of the Spitfire was driven by an engine named Merlin: the positive side of natural knowledge, honourably serving power. But in the lead-up to the first Iraq war, a British scientist called David Kelly, of Irish origin, brought up in Wales, found his knowledge as a weapons inspector was at odds with the requirements of current political authority. After he made this known, he was discovered mysteriously dead, in a wood, outside Oxford – knowledge as the victim of power, in the natural environment. Knowledge and power are part of a dialectic that the Merlin myth consistently debates: the values of wisdom and the environment are deeply involved in that dialectic. The conflicts continue to be dramatic, but the myth tells us that there remains a possible positive outcome through our understanding of, and adherence to, the values of Merlin, wisdom and the environment.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PUBLICATIONS

Books The Structure of Sir Thomas Malory’s Arthuriad (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1969). with Martin, B. K. Aspects of Celtic Literature (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1970). Rymyng Craftily: Meaning in Chaucer’s Poetry (Sydney and London: Angus and Robertson, London and Sydney, 1973; Atlantic Heights: Humanities Press, 1976). The Poetry of the Canterbury Tales (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1974). Arthurian Literature and Society (London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1983). Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). Merlin: Knowledge and Power Through the Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). Reading Robin Hood: Content, Form, and Reception in the Outlaw Tradition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015).

Essay collections edited Robin Hood: An Anthology of Scholarship and Criticism (Cambridge: Brewer, 1999). Robin Hood in Greenwood Stood: Alterity and Context in the English Outlaw Myth (Turnhout: Brépols, 2012).

Texts edited with Ohlgren, Thomas H. Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, TEAMS Series (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University Press, 1997; second edition, 2000). Robin Hood: The ‘Forresters’ Manuscript (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1998). Robin Hood Classic Fiction Library, 8 volumes (London: Routledge, 2005).

Chapters in books ‘Satire in Piers Plowman’, in Piers Plowman: Critical Approaches, ed. by S. S. Hussey (Methuen: London, 1969) (Chapter 2 in this collection). ‘Arthurian Authorities’, in Words and Worlds, see under Essay Collections above, 1983 (Chapter 6 in this collection). ‘Jack Lindsay, Medievalist’, in Culture and History: Essays Presented to Jack Lindsay, ed. by Bernard Smith (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1984).

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‘Why was “Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight” the Most Popular Ballad in Europe?’, in Not the Whole Story, ed. by Sneja Gunew and Ian Reid (Sydney: Local Consumption, 1985; reprinted in Non-Chaucerian Medieval Poetry, ed. by S. J. Trigg, London: Longman, 1993) (Chapter 7 in this collection). ‘The Social Function of the Middle English Romances’, in Medieval Literature: Culture, Ideology, History, ed. by David Aers (Brighton: Harvester, 1986) (Chapter 5 in this collection). ‘Chaucer’s Religious Canterbury Tales’, in Medieval English Religious and Ethical Literature: Essays in Honour of G. H. Russell, ed. by Gregory Kratzmann and James Simpson (Cambridge: Brewer, 1986). ‘The Borders and their Ballads’, in Jacobean Poetry and Prose, ed. by Clive Bloom (London: Macmillan, 1989). ‘Carbonek and Camelot: The Crusades and the Development of the Grail Myth’, in Medieval Codicology, Iconography, Literature and Translation: Studies for K. V. Sinclair, ed. by P. R. Monks and D. D. R. Owen (Leiden: Brill, 1994) (Chapter 1 in this collection). ‘The Emergence of Robin Hood as a National Hero’, in Robin Hood: The Many Faces of That Celebrated Outlaw, ed. by K. Carpenter (Oldenburg: Bibliotheks- und Informationssystem der Universität Oldenburg, 1995). ‘Outlaw Myths: Or, Was Robin Hood Alone in the Woods?’, in Myth and Its Legacy in European Literature, ed. by N. Thomas and F. Le Saux, Durham Modern Language Series (Durham: University of Durham Press, 1996). ‘Splitting the Arrow’: Robin Hood, History and Historicism’, in History, Literature and Society: Essays in Honour of S. N. Mukherjee, ed. by Mabel Lee and Michael Wilding (Sydney: Sydney Studies in Society and Culture 15, 1997). ‘From Script to Print: Editing the Forresters Manuscript’, in Ballads Into Books: The Legacies of Francis James Child, ed. by Tom Cheesman and Sigrid Rieuwerts (Bern: Lang, 1997). ‘“Quite Another Man”: The Restoration Robin Hood’, in Playing Robin Hood: The Legend as Performance in Five Centuries, ed. by Lois J. Potter (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998). ‘The Tale of Gamelyn’, in Medieval Outlaws: Ten Tales in Modern English, ed. by Thomas H. Ohlgren (Stroud: Sutton, 1998). ‘Listeth and Listneth: Reading Gamelyn for Text not Context’, in Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Romance, ed. by Rosalind Field (Cambridge: Brewer, 1999). ‘Which Way to the Forest?: Approaches to Robin Hood Studies’, in Robin Hood in Popular Culture: Violence, Transgression, and Justice, ed. by Thomas Hahn (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000). ‘The Voice of Labour Fourteenth-Century English Literature’, in The Problem of Labour in Fourteenth-Century England, ed. by James Bothwell, P. J. P. Goldberg and W. M. Ormrod (York: York Medieval Press, 2000). ‘Resemblance and Menace: Post-Colonial Peredur’, in Canhwyll Marchogyon: Cyddestunoli Peredur, ed. by Sioned Davies and Peter Thomas (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000) (Chapter 12 in this collection). ‘Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales’, in Literature in Context, ed. by R. Rylance and J. Simons (London: Palgrave, 2001). ‘Places in the Text: A Topographicist Approach to Chaucer’, in Speaking Images: Essays in Honor of V. A. Kolve, ed. by Robert F. Yeager and Charlotte Morse (Asheville: Pegasus Press, 2001).

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‘How Red Was Robin Hood?’, in Running Wild: Essays, Fictions and Memoirs Presented to Michael Wilding, ed. by David Brooks and Brian Kiernan (New Delhi: Manohar, 2004). ‘“Meere English Flocks”: Ben Jonson’s the Sad Shepherd and the Robin Hood Tradition’, in Robin Hood: Medieval and Post-Medieval, ed. by Helen Phillips (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005). ‘Rabbie Hood: The Development of the English Outlaw Myth in Scotland’, in Bandit Territories, ed. by Helen Phillips (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008) (Chapter 8 in this collection). With Hahn, Thomas. ‘“Exempt me Sire, I Am Afeared of Women”: Homosocial and Homosexual in the Robin Hood tradition’, in Bandit Territories, ed. by Helen Phillips (see above). ‘Robin Hood: The Earliest Contexts’, in Images of Robin Hood, ed. by Joshua Calhoun and Lois J. Potter (Newark: Delaware University Press, 2008). with Gossedge, Rob. ‘Arthur in the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries’, in Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend, ed. by Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). ‘Celtic and Christian in Arthurian Romance’, in Christianity and Arthurian Romance, ed. by Rosalind Field and Michelle Sweeney (Cambridge: Brewer, 2010). ‘“Toward the Fen”: Churls and Church in Chaucer’s Fabliaux’, in Chaucer and Religion, ed. by Helen Phillips (Cambridge: Brewer, 2010). ‘Classicising Christianity in Chaucer’s Dream Poems’, in Chaucer and Religion (see above). ‘Robin Hood versus King Arthur’, in In Strange Countries: Middle English Literature and Its Afterlife: Essays in Memory of John Anderson, ed. by David Matthews (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). ‘Indexing Vivien’, in Re-Fashioning Myth, ed. by Jessica L. Wilkinson, Eric Parisot and David McInnis (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). ‘Alterity, Parody and Habitus: The Formation of the Early Robin Hood Texts’, in Robin Hood in Greenwood Stood: Alterity and Context in the English Outlaw Tradition, ed. by Stephen Knight (Turnhout: Brépols, 2012). with Clemens, Justin. ‘Magna Carta and English Political Myth: From Edward Coke to Robin Hood’, in Australia’s Magna Carta, 2nd edition (Canberra: Department of the Senate, 2015). ‘Untraditional Medieval Literature: Romance, Fabliaux, Robin Hood and King and Subject Ballads’, in Medieval English Literature, New Casebooks Series, ed. by Beatrice Fannon (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). ‘Feasts in the Forest’, in Telling Tales and Crafting Books, Essays in Honor of Thomas H. Ohlgren, ed. by Alexander L. Kaufman, Shaun F. D. Hughes and Dorsey Armstrong, Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, Medieval Institute Publications (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University Press, 2016). ‘Parody and Archery: Re-Generating the Robin Hood Tradition’, in Robin Hood in Outlaw/ ed Space: Media, Performance and Other New Directions, ed. by Lesley Coote and Valerie Johnson (London: Routledge, 2017). ‘“Hail Greybeard Bard”: Chaucer in the Nineteenth-Century Popular Consciousness’, in Chaucer: Contemporary Across the Centuries, Stephanie Trigg Festschrift, ed. by Anne McKendry, Helen Hickey and Melissa Raine (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). ‘Chartism and Medievalism’, in Medievalism From Below: Subaltern Medievalism in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by David Matthews and Mike Sanders (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2020).

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Essays ‘The Meaning of “The Parlement of Foulys”’, Southern Review, 2 (1967), 223–39. ‘The Oral Transmission of “Sir Launfal”’, Medium Aevum, 38 (1969), 164–70. ‘Rhetoric and Poetry in “The Franklin’s Tale”’, Chaucer Review, 4 (1970), 14–30. ‘Style and the Effects of Style in Malory’s Arthuriad’, Parergon, 9 (1974), 3–27. ‘Some Aspects of Structure in Medieval Literature’, Parergon, 16 (1976), 3–17. ‘Chaucer and the Sociology of Literature’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2 (1980), 15–51 (Chapter 3 in this collection). ‘Ideology in “The Franklin’s Tale”’, Parergon, 28 (1981), 3–45 (Chapter 4 in this collection). ‘Proesce and Cortoisie: Ideology in Chrétien de Troyes’ “Le Chevalier au Lion”’, Studium, 14 (1982), 1–53. ‘Textual Variants, Textual Variance’, Southern Review, 16 (1983), 44–54. ‘Bold Robin Hood: The Structures of a Tradition’, Southern Review, 20 (1987), 153–67. ‘Turf Bench and Gloriet: Medieval Gardens and Their Meaning’, Meanjin, 47 (1988), 388–96. ‘Larded Milk and Pastry Castle: The Social Semiotics of Medieval Food’, Meanjin, 48 (1989), 124–33. ‘Chaucer’s British Rival: On Chaucer and Dafydd ap Gwilym’, Leeds Studies in English, new series 20 (1989), 87–98. ‘The Men of the North: British Southern Scotland and Its Cultural Heritage’, Australian Celtic Studies, 2 (1990), 3–10. ‘Robin Hood and the Royal Restoration’, Critical Survey, 5.3 (1993), 298–312 (Chapter 9 in this collection). ‘“Love’s Altar is a Forest Grove”: Chaucer in the Light of Dafydd ap Gwilym’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 43 (1999), 172–88 (Chapter 13 in this collection). ‘Robin Hood and the Printer’, Trivium, 31 (1999), 155–68. ‘The Lordship Claim in “The Monk’s Tale”’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 22 (2000), 181–6. ‘Remembering Robin Hood: Five Centuries of Outlaw Ideology’, European Journal of English Studies, 10 (2006), 149–61. ‘Robin Hood and the Crusades: When and Why Did the Longbowman of the People Mount Up Like a Lord?’, Florilegium, 23 (2008, for 2006), 201–22 (Chapter 10 in this collection). ‘From Myrddin to Merlin and Back again’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 14 (2008), 5–20. ‘The Arctic Arthur’, Arthuriana, 12 (2011), 59–89 (Chapter 11 in this collection). ‘Medieval Comic Relief: Duck’s Neck, Cannibal Cow, and Carry on Joan of Arc: Trashing the Medieval in the Eighteenth Century’, postmedieval, 5 (2014), online (Chapter 15 in this collection). ‘Robin Hood and the Forest Laws’, Bulletin of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies, 1 (2017), 1–12. ‘“The Original Hoods”: Late Medieval English Crime Fiction’, Journal of Early Modern Studies (Florence), 12 (2020) online.

312

INDEX

Aberdeen 140, 142, 150 Adolf, Helen 8–10, 15 Alain I, Prince of Brittany 82, 84, 85, 85 Alain IV, Prince of Brittany 84, 86 Alcock, Leslie 110, 120 Anand, Mulk Raj 216 Andrew of Wyntoun see under Wyntoun, Andrew of Anspach, Caroline of see under Caroline of Anspach Apollinaire, Guillaume: L’enchanteur pourissant (‘The Rotting Enchanter’) 302; ‘Merlin et la vieille femme’ (‘Merlin and the old woman’) 302 Arden, John and Margaretta Darcy, The Island of the Mighty 119 Arfderydd (Arthuret) Battle of 287 Ariosto, Ludovico, Orlando Furioso 293–5 Armstrong, Jonas 181–2 Arthuret see under Arfderydd Arthur, King see under King Arthur Artorius Rex see under Gloag, John Auerbach, Erich 61, 89 Baigent, Michael and Lincoln, Henry, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail 119 ballads 122–38, 149–51, 165–6 The Bandits of Sherwood Forest (film) 179–80 Barber, Richard 109 Barczewski, Stephanie 184 Barjaval, René, L’Enchanteur 308 Barnsdale Forest 146–8 Barrow, John 207 Barthes, Roland 51, 52, 60n18 Barton, Arnold 196 Bédier, Joseph 247–9

Beibl, Morgan 244 Béroul, Tristan 226, 227 Betham, Matilda 200–1 Bhabha, Homi 215–17, 220–9 Biddick, Kathleen 180 The Birth of Merlin (play) see under Rowley, Samuel Blackmore, Sir Richard 115, 187–8, 199, 260 ‘Blind Harry’ (Henry the Minstrel) 149 Bloomfield, M.W. 45, 47 ‘Bluebeard’ 124, 128 Boccaccio, Giovanni 75, 250–1, 255; Il Decameron 75, 250–1, 255; Il Filocolo 75 Boece, Hector 146 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus 53 Boorman, John 16 Bordman, Gerald 97 Bower, Walter 144–5 Bradley, Marion Zimmer 183 Brereton, Jane 297 Britannia see under Thomson, James Bromwich, Rachel 79, 80, 85, 243, 277 Bronson, Bertrand 123, 126, 130 Bryant, Théophile, Le Testament de Merlin 307 Burrow, John 1 Carman, J. N. 16–17 Caroline of Anspach 297 Cath Palug (Palug’s Cat) 293 Caxton, William 113, 168, 169 Cecil, Lord Robert 164–5 Chamberlain, David 55 Chandler, Raymond 152 Chapelain, Jean 269 Charles II, King see under King Charles II

313

INDEX

‘Chase, Nicholas’ see under Hyde, Anthony and Christopher Chaucer, Geoffrey 27, 49–87, 169, 231–46, 247–59, 264–8, 274; The Book of the Duchess 53; The Canterbury Tales 57–63; ‘The Franklin’s Tale’ 67–87, 256; The Hous of Fame 53–5, 64; ‘The Manciple’s Tale’ 231n1; ‘The Merchant’s Tale’ 256; Troilus and Criseyde 56–7 Child, F. J. 99, 123, 124, 126, 130, 133, 149 Chrétien de Troyes see under de Troyes, Chrétien Civil War (English) 159, 163 Clunies-Ross, Margaret 126 Coke, Sir Edward 165 Condé, Jean de see under de Condé, Jean Connery, Sean 173 Cook, Captain James 197 Cornwell, Bernard, Warlord Chronicles 307 Costner, Kevin 180, 197 Coward, Rosalind and John Ellis 60 Crawford, Robert 152 The Crystal Cave see under Stewart, Mary Culhwch ac Olwen (‘Culhwch and Olwen’) 110–11, 185, 227, 228, 275–9, 282, 284 Curtius, E.R. 22 ‘Cutty Sark’ 131 cynghanedd (‘singing together’) 232–3, 234 Dafydd ap Gwilym 231–46 Dane, Clemence, The Saviours 307 Dante, Alighieri 48, 186 d’Arc Jeanne see under Jeanne d’Arc Darcy, Margaretta see under Arden, John and Margaretta Darcy Davies, Sioned 215 Davy, Sir Humphrey 298 The Death of Robert Erle of Huntington see under Munday, Anthony de Boron, Robert 11–13, 18; Joséph d’Arimathie / Le Roman de L’ Éstoire dou Graal 11–13, 14; Perceval 291–2, 296 Il Decameron see under Boccaccio, Giovanni Dee, Sir John 186 de France, Marie 279 De Koven, Reginald 177; Maid Marian (musical) 179 (with H. B. Smith); Robin Hood (musical) 177 Delany, Sheila 58

de la Villemarqué, Théophile Hersart, Contes populaires des anciens Bretons 301 de Lorris, Guillaume 56 de Montesquieu, Baron 189, 190 de Montfort, Simon 145 de Troyes, Chrétien 81, 92, 216, 218, 222, 223, 226, 227–8; Le Chevalier au Lion 9, 81, 92, 100, 112–13, 222, 223, 279; Le Chevalier à la Charrette 10, 81; Le Conte du Graal (Perceval) 8–9, 15, 113, 218, 223, 226, 227–9; Érec et Énide 81, 279–84 Didot Perceval 13–14, 16 Dobson, R. B. 147 Donaldson, E. T. 63 Dorst, Tankred and Ursula Ehler, Merlin, oder das Wüste Land 307 Douglas, Gavin 151 The Downfall of Robert Erle of Huntington see under Munday, Anthony Drayton, Michael, Polyolbion 295 Dryden, John 114–15, 183, 186, 202, 260, 261, 263, 296–7; King Arthur 186–7, 200 Duby, Georges 56, 112 Dufferin and Ava, Marquis of see under Marquis of Dufferin and Ava Dumas, Alexandre père: Prince des voleurs 178; Robin Hood le proscrit 178 Duncan, Ian 206 Earl of Warwick (‘The Kingmaker’) 114 Eaton, Michael, Fellow Traveller (film) 153, 181 Edinburgh 175 Edward I, King see under King Edward I Egan, Pierce, Jr, Robin Hood and Little John 176 Ehler, Ursula see under Dorst, Tankred Eliot, T. S., The Wasteland 119 Ellis John see under Coward, Rosalind Ellis, George, Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances 300–1 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 302–3 Empress Matilda 224 L’Enchanteur see under Barjaval, René Eschenbach, Wolfram von see under von Eschenbach, Wolfram Excalibur (film) 16, 119, 307 fabliaux 247–59 Fairbanks, Douglas 173, 178–9

314

INDEX

‘fair unknown’ motif 92–3 The Fairy of the Lake see under Thelwall, John Fellow Traveller see under Eaton, Michael Ferguson, A. B. 169 Fielding, Henry 198; Tom Thumb 198, 261–2, 297 fin amor 73–5 Finlayson, John 96 Flynn, Errol 173 Fonda, Jane 293 Forbush, William 304 Forest Days see under James, G. P. R. The Foresters see under Tennyson, Lord Alfred Foucault, Michel 49 France, Marie de see under de France, Marie Frankenstein see under Shelley, Mary Freud, Sigmund 133–4 Froissart, Jean 232 Fuller, Thomas, The Worthies of England 165 Gamelyn 257–8 Gaylord, Alan 78 gentrification (of Robin Hood) 145–6, 162, 172, 176 Geoffrey of Monmouth see under Monmouth, Geoffrey of The Gest of Robin Hood 149–51, 163, 168, 169–70 ‘Giant’s daughter’ motif 97 Gibbon, Edward 194 Gloag, John, Artorius Rex 307 Y Gododdin (‘The Gododdin’) 109 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 195 Goetinck, Glenys 79, 80, 218, 219, 220, 222, 223–4, 225, 227 Gossedge, Rob 175 Gower, John 27 Gramsci, Antonio 89 Gray, Thomas 190, 194; ‘The Bard’ 297 Greene, Richard 151, 167, 173 Groom, Nick 192 Grumbling, Vernon 204 Guillaume de Lorris see under de Lorris, Guillaume Gummere, Francis B. 127–8 Gunn, Thom, ‘Merlin in the Cave’ 305 Gwilym, Dafydd ap see under Dafydd ap Gwilym

Hatchett, William see under Haywood, Elizabeth Havelock 96 Haywood, Elizabeth and William Hatchett, The Opera of Operas, or Tom Thumb the Great 262–3 Heber, Bishop Richard 205–6; ‘The Masque of Gwendolen’ 298 Heine, Heinrich, ‘Romancero’ 301 Henry II, King see under King Henry II Hill, Geoffrey, ‘Merlin’ (poem) 305 Hindess, Barry and Hirst, Paul 89, 91 Hines, John 251 Hirst, Paul see under Hindess, Barry and Hirst, Paul Hole, Richard 198–9; Arthur or the Northern Enchantment 198–200 The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail see under Baigent, Michael and Lincoln, Henry The Holy Grail 8–20 Hunter, I. M. 153 Huntingdon, Earl of (real figure) 147 Hurd, Bishop 192 Hutchinson, Colonel John 163–4 Hums, David 225 Hyde, Anthony and Christopher (as ‘Nicholas Chase’), Locksley (novel) 180 Immerman, Karl: Merlin: Eine Mythe 301; ‘Merlin in tiefen Grabe’ 301; ‘Merlins Grab’ 301 Irving, Henry 177 Ivanhoe see under Scott, Sir Walter Jackson, K. H. 83 James, G. P. R., Forest Days 176 Jameson, Fredric 91 Jean de Condé see under de Condé, Jean Jeanne d’Arc 269, 270, 273 John, King see under King John Johnson, Richard 295 Jones, Gwyn 219 Jones, R. M. 215 Jones, Thomas (editor and translator) 219 Jones, Thomas (painter) 201, 298 Jonson, Ben, The Sad Shepherd 164 Jordan Robert M. 53 Juvenal 83 Kettle, Arnold 89 Kevelson, Roberta 166 ‘King and Subject’ motif 98

315

INDEX

King Arthur 7–20, 93, 109–21, 141, 183–212, 221–5, 227–8, 288–307 King Arthur (poem) see under Lytton, Bulwer King Edward I 145 King Edward III 148 King Henry II 282 King John 163, 168 King Richard I 163 Kipling, Rudyard 216 Kittredge, G. L. 63, 73 Kliger, Samuel 189 Knoblock, Ernest 178 Knox, John 164 Köhler, Erich 112 Kolve, V. A. 1, 30, 252 Lacan, Jacques 60–2 The Lady of the Forest see under Roberson, Jennifer Lander, J. R. 113 Langland, William, Piers Plowman 21–48 Lardner, Ring, Jr 153 Lawhead, Stephen, Merlin 307 Legman, Gershon 82 ‘Lenau, Nicolas’ (N. F. Niembsch von Strehlenau), ‘Waldlieder’ 301 Lewis, M. G., The Monk 206 Libaeus Desconus 93–4, 95 The Life of Robin Hood 165 Lilly, William, Merlinus Anglicus Junior 296 Lloyd-Morgan, Ceridwen 218, 222, 228 Locksley (novel) see under Hyde, Anthony and Christopher (as ‘Nicholas Chase’) Loomis, R. S. 184 Lorris, Guillaume de see under Guillaume de Lorris Lovecy, Ian 218, 22, 227, 228 Lukacs, Georg 51, 115 Lupack, Alan 304 Lytton, Bulwer, King Arthur 183–5, 209–11, 304 The Mabinogion 71, 116, 276; ‘Math fab Mathonwy’ (Fourth Branch) 283; ‘Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed’ (First Branch) 70–1, 241 MacFarlane, C. B. 125 Macherey, Pierre 50, 51, 52, 60 Macpherson, James 195, 196, 201 Magna Carta 189

Magoun, F. P. 83 Maid Marian (musical) see under De Koven, Reginald, with H. B. Smith Maid Marian (novel) see under Peacock, Thomas Love Maid Marian – The Forest Queen (novel) see under Stocqueler, Joachim Major, John (historian) 145–6 Mallet, Paul 194 Malory, Sir Thomas 19–20, 92, 101–3, 113–15 Mann, Jill 62 Marie de France see under de France, Marie Marquis of Dufferin and Ava 197–8 Marshall, Roger 164 Martin, Bernard 2 Marx, Karl 90 Mathew, Gervase 73 McCall, John 55 McCarthy, Joseph 153 McGrady, David 250 Mehl, Dieter 88, 92, 99 Merlin 285–308 Merlin (novel) see under Lawhead, Stephen Merlin, oder das Wüste Land (play) see under Dorst, Tankred and Ursula Ehler ‘Merlin’ (poem) see under Hill, Geoffrey Merlin as Naturmensch 300–2 ‘Merlin in the Cave’ (poem) see under Gunn, Thom Messe des Oiseaux (‘The Mass of the Birds’) 243 Metropolis Coronata see under Munday, Anthony Miles, Robert 189 Miller, Thomas, Royston Gower176 Mills, Maldwyn 92 Milman, Henry, Samor, Lord of the Bright City 207–8 Milton, John 48; Paradise Lost 186 The Monk see under Lewis, M.G. Monmouth, Geoffrey of, Historia Regum Brittaniae (‘The History of the Kings of Britain’) 13, 79, 82, 84, 111–12, 120, 185–6, 202, 288–90 Montesquieu, Baron de see under de Montesquieu, Baron Montfort, Simon de see under de Montfort, Simon Monty Python and the Holy Grail (film) 119

316

INDEX

Morte Arthure (alliterative poem) 100 Morton, A. L. 89, 93 Muir, Edwin, ‘Merlin’ (poem) 304–5 Munday, Anthony: The Death of Robert, Earle of Huntington; Metropolis Coronata 164; The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntington 146, 147, 148, 152, 164, 166, 171–2 Muscatine, Charles 248 Nelson, Lord Horatio 143 Nitze, W. A. 11, 12, 16 Norris, Leslie, ‘Merlin and the Snake’s Egg’ (poem) 305 North-West Passage 186, 197, 207, 209–10, 211–12 ‘Norton, André’ (Alice Norton), Steel Magic (novel) 307 Nottingham 156, 157 Noyes, Alfred 177–8; ‘Riddles of Merlin’ (poem) 304 Nygard, H. O. 123, 128, 130, 131 Nykrog, Per 248–9 Octavian 98 Orlando Furioso see under Ariosto, Ludovico Ossian 193, 195, 196, 198 Owen Wilfred 234 Padelford, F. M. 173 Paradise Lost see under Milton, John Paris, Gaston 289 Parker, Martin, A True Tale of Robbin Hood 163, 165, 171 Parzival see under von Eschenbach, Wolfram Pauphilet, Albert 19 Peacock, Thomas Love, Maid Marian 174–5 Pearcy, Roy J. 77 Pearsall, D. A. 88, 99 ‘Peasants’ Revolt’ 101, 254 Pennant, Thomas 197 Perceval see under de Troyes, Chrétien Perceval, Didot see under Didot Perceval Percy, Thomas 192–3, 194; Percy Folio 171; Reliques of Ancient English Poetry 192–3 Peredur 10, 215–30 Perlesvaus 16–17 ‘Peterloo Massacre’ 175

Petrarch, Francesco 59 Piers Plowman see under Langland, William Planché, J. R. 176 Polyolbion see under Drayton, Michael Pope, Alexander 263–8; ‘Imitation of Chaucer’ 264–5; ‘The Merchant’s Tale 266–8; The Temple of Fame 268, 273; Windsor Forest 265 post-colonialism 216–17, 245–6 ‘Preiddeu Annwfn’ (‘The Spoils of Annwfn’ ) 109–10 Prince of Thieves (novel) see under Dumas, Alexandre père Propp, V. I. 97 Pynson, Richard 168 Queste del Saint Graal 17–19 ‘The Real King Arthur’ 119–20 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry see under Percy, Thomas Richard I, King see under King Richard I Rio, Michael 307–8 Ritson, Joseph 144 Roberson, Jennifer, Lady of the Forest 180 Roberts, Brynley F. 227 Robin and Marian (film) 180 Robin Hood 139–82 Robin Hood (opera) see under De Koven, Reginald Robin Hood and His Crew of Souldiers 135–66 Robin Hood and Little John (novel) see under Egan, Pierce Jr Robin Hood and Richard Coeur de Lion (pantomime) see under Stocqueler, Joachim Robin Hood ballads 168–9, 171–3 Robin Hood le Proscrit see under Dumas, Alexandre père Robin Hood: Men in Tights (film) 173 Robin Hood play-games 142, 164 Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (film) 180–1 Robin of Sherwood (television series) 173–4, 181 Robinson, Edwin Arlington 119, 303, 308 Robinson, F. N. 85 Le Roman de la Rose 81 Rowley, Samuel, The Birth of Merlin (play) 295

317

INDEX

Royston Gower see under Miller, Thomas Russell, George H. 1 Ruthven, Kenneth 2

Swinton, Andrew 197 Sword at Sunset see under Sutcliff, Rosemary

The Sad Shepherd see under Jonson, Ben Samor, Lord of the Bright City see under Milman, Henry satire 21–4, 47–8 The Saviours see under Dane, Clemence Scargill, Will 166 Schiller, Friedrich 269 Scott, Sir Walter 146, 153–4, 176–7, 204; The Bridal of Triermain 298; Ivanhoe 153, 176–7, 204, 274 The Seasons see under Thomson, James Sedgwick, E. K. 174 Shakespeare, William 200 Shaw, George Bernard 269 Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein 206–7 Silence (medieval romance) 292–3 Simon de Montfort see under de Montfort, Simon Sir Amadace (medieval romance) 95 Sir Degrevant (medieval romance) 96 Sir Eglamour of Artois (medieval romance) 97 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 95, 99–10, 102 Skene, Walter F. 291 Smith, R. J. 189 Smithers, G.V. 79 Southern, Richard W. 7, 61 sovereignty 79–80, 218 Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances see under Ellis, George Spence, Lewis 140, 150 Spenser, Edmund 114 ‘The Spoils of Annwfn’ see under ‘Preiddeu Annwfn’ The Squire of Low Degree (medieval romance) 96 Stafford, F. J. 196 Stewart, Mary 120; The Crystal Cave 307 Stocqueler, Joachim 176–7; Maid Marian – The Forest Queen (novel) 176–7; Robin Hood and Richard Coeur de Lion (pantomime) 177 Stone, Jerome, ‘Albin’ (poem) 195, 200 Stone, Lawrence 125, 195, 200 Stow, John 147 Sussex, Lucy 141 Sutcliff, Rosemary, Sword at Sunset 120

Tagore, Rabindranath 216 Táin Bó Cúailgne (‘The Cattle-Raid of Cooley’) 219, 241, 275, 276 Tatlock, J. S. P. 78–9, 82, 85 Taylor, John 147 Temple, Sir William 188 Tennyson, Lord Alfred 170, 177, 183; The Foresters 176, 177; ‘The Holy Grail’ 116–17; The Idylls of the King 115–18, 211–12, 281, 299–30; ‘Merlin and the Gleam’ 300 Le Testament de Merlin see under Bryant, Théophile Thelwall, John, The Fairy of the Lake 201–5 Thomas, Peter Wynn 215 Thomas, R.S., ‘Taliesin 1952’ 306 Thomson, James: Britannia 190; The Seasons 190–2 Thurneysen, Rudolf 219 Tillotson, Geoffrey 265 Tom Thumb see under Fielding, Henry Tristan see under Béroul, Tristan Troyes, Chrétien de see under de Troyes, Chrétien A True Tale of Robbin Hood see under Parker, Martin Turton, Godfrey, The Emperor Arthur 307 Twain, Mark, A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur 118, 303 Uhland, Ludwig, ‘Merlin der Wilde’ 301 Venables, Piers 164 Verrrcruysse, Jeroom 269, 272 ‘Voltaire’ (François-Marie Arouet), La Pucelle d’Orléans 268–73 von Eschenbach, Wolfram 9, 14 Wallace, William 144, 145, 149, 150–1, 152 Walpole, Horace 190 Warlord Chronicles see under Cornwell, Bernard Warton, Thomas 193, 194, 266, 267; ‘The Grave of Arthur’ 298 Weinstein, Hannah 152–3, 181 White T. H.: The Book of Merlyn 308; The Once and Future King 118–19; The Sword in the Stone 306–7

318

INDEX

Williams, Charles 8 Williams, Mary 224–5 Williams, Raymond 2, 3, 247, 258, 260 Wittig, Susan 96–7 Wolfram von Eschenbach see under von Eschenbach, Wolfram Wollstonecraft, Mary 197, 207 Woods, Charlotte (‘Lotta’) 178, 179, 181

The Worthies of England see under Fuller, Thomas Wraxall, Sir Nathaniel 196–7 Wyntoun, Andrew of 141, 144, 148 Yolen, Jane: Hawk 307; Merlin 307; Passenger 307 Young, Edward, Night Thoughts 190 Young, Robert 216

319