Textual Histories: Readings in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 9781442680463

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TEXTUAL HISTORIES: READINGS IN THE ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE

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Textual Histories Readings in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

THOMAS A. BREDEHOFT

U N I V E R S I T Y OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2001 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-4850-1

© Printed on acid-free paper

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Bredehoft, Thomas A. Textual histories : readings in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-4850-1 1. Anglo-Saxon chronicle. 2. English prose literature - Old English, ca. 450-1100 - Criticism, Textual. 3. Great Britain - History Anglo-Saxon period, 449-1066 - Historiography. 4. Great Britain History - Norman period, 1066-1154 - Historiography. I. Title. DA150.B742001

942.01

C2001-901769-3

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS LIST OF PLATES

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Introduction

VI1

JX xi

3

1: The Common Stock Genealogies 14 1.1 The Metrical Form of the Genealogies 15 1.2 The Manuscript Presentation of the Common Stock Genealogies 23 1.3 The Historiographic Function of the Common Stock Genealogies 30 2: Cynewulf and Cyneheard in the Context of the Common Stock 2.1 Variation and Innovation in Annal 755: Orality and Literate Practice 41 2.2 Structural Indicators and the Meaning of Annal 755 within the Common Stock 53 3: The Post-Alfredian Annals 61 3.1 The Dynastic Continuations 63 3.2 The Northern Recension 67 4: The Chronicle Poems 72 4.1 Manuscript Presentation and the Identification of the Chronicle Poems 73 4.2 Metre and the 'Poems of Irregular Meter' 91 4.3 The Place of Poetry in the Chronicle 99

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5: Latin in the Chronicle 119 5.1 Latin in the Old English Chronicle 5.2 Asser and ^thelweard 126

120

6: Conclusions 137 6.1 The Ends of the Chronicle and the End of Anglo-Saxon History 6.2 Reading the Chronicle and Its Record 147 APPENDIX 155 NOTES 171 BIBLIOGRAPHY 213 INDEX OF ANNALS AND MANUSCRIPTS SUBJECT INDEX 225 Illustrations follow page 100

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138

AcknowledgmentsS

This project (I am somewhat mortified to discover) has occupied nearly a decade of my life, and the debts I have incurred during that time deserve more than these brief paragraphs can encompass. Nevertheless: To this project's earliest readers, Nicholas Howe, Alan K. Brown, and Andrea Lunsford, I owe a debt of gratitude for their patience and attention. Nick Howe, especially, has proved more than willing to read draft upon draft, until I have come to suspect he knows this project somewhat better than I do myself. Geoffrey Russom and Dan Donoghue read early versions of a portion of chapter 1; their comments were enormously helpful in my thinking about the metrical structure of the genealogies and their place in the Chronicle. Portions of chapters 1 and 6 have been presented at conferences (the Modern Language Association [1993] and the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists [1995, 1999]); my thanks to the organizers of these conferences and panels for the opportunity to try my early ideas out upon informed audiences. Paul E. Szarmach and Timothy C. Graham gave me the opportunity to participate in their NEH Summer Seminar in 1997; there I first began to grapple effectively with the question of the formal identity of late Old English verse. This project would have been physically impossible without the gracious access to manuscripts allowed me at the British Library in London, at the wonderful Parker Library at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, and at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. At the latter, I owe an especial debt to Martin Kauffmann, who made it possible for me to consult the Peterborough manuscript of the Chronicle. For permission to reproduce photographic images, I am happy to thank the Trustees of the British Library and the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. For financial support at various stages of this project, it is my pleasure to

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thank both the Ohio State University (and its English Department) and the University of Northern Colorado (and its College of Arts and Sciences). Having the support of my colleagues and institutions has been a wonderful experience; having their financial support has been even more rewarding.

Plates

Plate I Plate II Plate III Plate IV Plate V Plate VI Plate VII Plate VIII

BL Cotton Vespasian B vi, fo. 109r CCCC 173, fo. Ir CCCC 173, fo. 13r BL Additional 34,652, fo. 2v CCCC 173, fo. lOr BL Cotton Tiberius A vi, fo. 12r BL Cotton Tiberius B i, fo. 140r BL Cotton Tiberius B iv, fo. 53r

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Abbreviations

BL (in citations of manuscripts) Bodleian (in citations of manuscripts) CCCC (in citations of manuscripts) CUL (in citations of manuscripts) /Ethelweard ASC ASE ASPR Asser fo./fos HB HE OEG WSRT

British Library, London Bodleian Library, Oxford Corpus Christi College, Cambridge Cambridge University Library

The Chronicle of AZthelweard, cited from the edition of Campbell Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Anglo-Saxon England Anglo-Saxon Poetic Record Asser's Life of Alfred, cited from the edition of Stevenson folio, folios Historia Brittonum, cited from the edition of Morris Bede's Historia ecclesiastica, cited by book and chapter from the edition of Colgrave and Mynors Campbell's Old English Grammar West Saxon Regnal Table

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TEXTUAL HISTORIES: READINGS IN THE ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE

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Introduction

One should, perhaps, respond to my title as Shakespeare's Benedick responds to Beatrice's invitation to dine: 'There's a double meaning in that.' For indeed there is a double meaning: the readings of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle I offer here concern both the textual history of the Chronicle's texts and the textuality of history as embodied in the Chronicle. The force of my argument, as a consequence, has a double thrust. On the one hand, I investigate the textual presentation of the Chronicle manuscripts, frequently examining neglected textual features such as pointing, layout, and capitalization in order to interpret the function and significance of the Chronicle's generically diverse contents. On the other hand, I simultaneously explore the broader significance of the textual strategies employed by the chroniclers in the writing of their history. As my conclusions indicate, the two processes are inseparable, for as I argue, the Chronicle has interest not only as a record of historical events but also as a record of the development of historical writing in Anglo-Saxon England. It reflects, and even helps to construct, a developing Anglo-Saxon national identity, an identity that continued, like the Chronicle itself, even beyond the Norman Conquest. The Chronicle's existence as a primarily vernacular history is, perhaps, its most remarkable feature. The use of Old English as a medium of historical expression, however, was only one of the features that contributed to the cultural power of the Chronicle. The use of traditional alliterating genealogies in the Chronicle's original composition and the later, archaizing use of classical heroic verse in The Battle of Brunanburh offer two different, but equally powerful, means for basing a national identity upon a heroic past. It is important to note, however, that the Chronicle shifts from one strategy to the other; as political conditions and the conditions of historical writing changed during the Anglo-Saxon period, the Chronicle (and its chroniclers) responded by

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employing different textual and historiographic strategies. The Chronicle's, continued cultural presence (as it was copied, updated, augmented, and revised across a span of more than two and a half centuries) is likewise testimony to its continuing cultural significance. The textual strategies that allowed the Anglo-Saxon chroniclers to continue to produce such a work demand our attention if we are to understand what we read in its pages. The complexity of the Chronicle's textual record, however, makes it necessary for me to offer, at this point, some account of the various books and texts that fall under the broad and inclusive rubric 'The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.' Such an account is offered immediately below, in the spirit of a quick refresher course on the Chronicle's complex interrelations. It is both conventional and convenient to begin with the Parker Chronicle (manuscript A), that version of the Chronicle preserved in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, manuscript 173.' The Parker Chronicle itself saw irregular use for more than two centuries; its first hand (commonly dated to the 890s) records all of the annals through 891, which roughly comprise the Common Stock.2 The last contributions to the Parker Chronicle are the twelfth-century (or late-eleventh-century) revisions and additions attributed to the scribe of manuscript F, and the Acts ofLanfranc, a Latin annalistic continuation extending from 1070 to 1093. In between, the Parker Chronicle seems to have received irregular updates and supplements, with major interventions or additions probably to be dated in the 920s, the 950s, around the year 1000, and around 1070.3 The Parker Chronicle is prefaced by a copy of the West Saxon Regnal Table (WSRT); in the tenth century, a copy of the Laws of Alfred and Ine seems to have been added to the codex.4 An important manuscript for both its early date and its continued use, the Parker Chronicle is available in facsimile in an Early English Text Society volume, and was edited most recently by Janet Bately. The B manuscript of the Chronicle (BL Cotton Tiberius A vi, fos 1-35 and Tiberius A iii, fo. 178) is, by contrast, far less complicated, from both paleographic and codicological standpoints. Written all at one time, B extends from the Chronicle's beginning to 977. A copy of the WSRT fills the detached folio now found in Tiberius A iii; it had originally stood at the end of B, separated from the end of the Chronicle by two blank leaves.5 The B Chronicle is unusual among the Chronicle manuscripts in that a great number of its annal numbers are not present at all (they appear only sporadically between 652 and 945). It is possible that these numbers were originally intended to be inserted by a rubricator. B was first edited in its own right in 1983 by Simon Taylor. Manuscript C occupies folios 115v-64 of BL Cotton Tiberius B i; it is pre-

Introduction

5

ceded by a copy of the Alfredian translation of Orosius and by the poems now known as The Menologium and Maxims II. Although a change of hands occurs at annal 491, the C text appears to have been written up at one time in the 1040s and continued in a roughly contemporary fashion through 1056. The annals for 1065 and 1066 likewise appear to be roughly contemporary, except for eight lines added to 164r in the twelfth century. B and C are very closely related textually; it is possible that portions of C were copied directly from B.6 C was edited separately by Rositzke in 1940; a new edition by Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe has just appeared as well. The D version of the Chronicle (fos 3-86 of BL Cotton Tiberius B iv) is, in many ways, the most puzzling of them all. Like C, D exhibits apparent signs of contemporary writing in the middle of the eleventh century.7 Perhaps two gatherings had already been lost from D when Joscelin owned it; annals 262692 (and the beginning of 693) are represented here only by Joscelin's collations from other books on sixteenth-century leaves. A further gathering had apparently been replaced much earlier: annals from 1016 to 1051 appear to be preserved on 'supply leaves written in the 1070's or 1080's' (Ker, Catalogue 254). The D Chronicle extends to annal 1079, with a brief twelfth-century addition dated 1080, although this latter date is probably an error for 1130. G.P. Cubbin's recent edition of D will probably supersede the earlier edition of Classen and Harmer. The Peterborough Chronicle (manuscript E) is found in Oxford (Bodleian Laud Misc. 636). It was copied up to 1121 by a single scribe and extends, ultimately, to 1154, the furthest extent of any surviving Chronicle manuscript. Unlike the other manuscripts, the Peterborough Chronicle also differs in the extent of its localization: the original scribe interpolated into the text a number of Peterborough charters and documents under the relevant annals. Because of its completeness and extent, the E Chronicle has often (with A) been seen as one of the most important Chronicle manuscripts: with A, E served as one of Plummer's base texts, and E was published in facsimile (with an introduction by Dorothy Whitelock) in 1954. Plummer's text of E remains the standard, although Cecily Clark has edited annals 1070E to 1154E in a separate edition. Like E, the F manuscript also appears to have been a twelfth-century production. Preserved as folios 30-70 of BL Cotton Domitian viii, the F Chronicle is unique for its pervasive bilinguality. Further, F stands primarily as a synopsis of the Chronicle, especially in the earlier annals, which are often greatly reduced. In F, each Old English annal is followed immediately by a Latin version. The F scribe seems to have been working from A (which he heavily annotated) and the immediate ancestor of E; his product seems to have been a working copy, if we are to judge by the frequent crowding, interlinear

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insertions, corrections, additions, and even an added leaf (fo. 60). F breaks off, incomplete, at the end of a gathering in annal 1058. Although the Old English entries were printed in Thorpe's parallel-text edition of 1861, and the Latin entries were printed by Magoun in 1947, the portions of F had not been edited together until Peter Baker's edition was published in 2000. F was also published in facsimile (with a brief introduction by David Dumville) in 1995. The G manuscript of the Chronicle (in BL Cotton Otho B xi) was almost entirely destroyed in the Cotton fire of 1731. The current folios 39-47 of Otho B xi contain portions of seven charred and fragmentary leaves. A single leaf in BL Additional 34,652 (fo. 2) seems to have been a copy of the West Saxon Regnal Table originally associated with G; it survives unburnt. G was a transcript of A completed in the early years of the eleventh century, and it originally accompanied a copy of the Old English Bede. Perhaps because of its fragmentary nature and its status as a transcript of A, G has been unjustly neglected, although only A and B are older. Fortunately, G was transcribed by Laurence Nowell before the Cotton fire; his transcript (now BL Additional 43,703) was one of the resources that allowed Angelika Lutz to complete her reconstructive edition of G.8 Finally, there remains the single leaf that has been designated as 'manuscript H': folio 9 of BL Cotton Domitian ix. Hardly a manuscript at all, this lone leaf is nevertheless of immense importance, as it preserves portions of annals for 1113 and 1114 which are independent from those in the Peterborough manuscript. In preserving a record of twelfth-century chronicling, then, the survival of this leaf was fortunate indeed. Such a survey of the Chronicle manuscripts must be brief and selective; other details will necessarily emerge and be discussed as they relate to my further arguments in the chapters that follow. Even this short sketch, however, allows us to make some interesting observations. For example, the circumstantial evidence of the Chronicle manuscripts themselves suggests that the AngloSaxons felt the Chronicle to be an Alfredian production, at least in its origins. Where the Chronicle is associated with other texts, they are almost always Alfredian texts: the West Saxon Regnal Table (associated with manuscripts ABG); the Old English Bede (also frequently felt to be Alfredian, associated with G); the Laws of Alfred and Ine (AG); Alfred's translation of Orosius (C).9 These associations seem to have been made most frequently in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and they seem to insist upon a traditional and continuing identification of the Chronicle as an Alfredian work throughout the AngloSaxon period.10 Further, the summary confirms just how extensively and continually the

Introduction

7

Chronicle was augmented and revised throughout the period of its existence. Each manuscript, with the exceptions of F and G, includes the earliest record of at least some annals; although not explicitly noted above, independent composition of annals can be seen in manuscripts ACDEH. What we refer to by the simple name 'The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle' is in fact a complex and challenging collection of works based upon a common root but branching in a bewildering variety of directions. Taken together, these two observations mark the Chronicle as a truly exceptional set of documents. The contemporary association of the Chronicle with the reign of Alfred means, of course, that later Anglo-Saxon readers and (perhaps even more importantly) Anglo-Saxon chroniclers must have been aware that post-Alfredian annals were, in fact, not a part of the original composition. This knowledge that later chroniclers had contributed to the Chronicle surely authorized the continuing composition of annals; the well-recognized collaborative and accretive nature of the Chronicle encouraged continuous additions. Further, it is virtually certain that such readers and chroniclers were well aware that the copy of the Chronicle they had before them was not the only copy, and that the annals in that copy might well have differed from those in other copies.11 The Chronicle was therefore probably unlike most other textual items in the manuscript culture of the Anglo-Saxons, such as the Old English Bede or the Laws of Alfred and Ine: the Chronicle was recognized to be something more than a single, coherent composition reflected (perhaps imperfectly) in various physical books. In short, the Chronicle was clearly understood to be a cultural document quite literally larger than any one of its manuscripts. The existence of this notion of a 'larger' Chronicle (something akin to what we mean by 'The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle': a diverse and varied collection of Chronicles) makes the process of reading the Chronicle especially challenging. For example, the recent critical trend of reading Anglo-Saxon texts within their 'most immediate context' is obviously problematized when the context is a Chronicle manuscript. The 'immediate context' paradigm implicitly accepts manuscript context as being of primary importance. 12 Yet the most useful context for interpreting a poem such as the 1086E poem on William the Conqueror may not be Bodleian Laud Misc. 636, where it uniquely occurs, since this manuscript contains very few of the Chronicle poems. Indeed, no manuscript of the Chronicle contains all of the Chronicle poems, yet because the Chronicle was a cultural document larger than any one of its manuscripts, the Chronicle poems as a group define a context in which the 1086E poem can be usefully interpreted. My reading of the 1086E poem, in chapter 4, considers it within this broader context. But in principle, each manuscript of the

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Chronicle must be read not only as it stands (as its original readers would have encountered it) but also in the context of the Chronicle as a whole, for this context, too, would have applied to contemporary Anglo-Saxon readers and chroniclers. Indeed, my method in this book is to balance readings based upon immediate manuscript context with readings of the Chronicle's texts in their larger cultural contexts. But even the notion of 'immediate context' needs further investigation. When Fred C. Robinson published his famous 'Most Immediate Context' essay, he presented his reading of CCCC 41's Metrical Epilogue as a useful corrective to earlier readings that (often basing their readings on printed editions) had interpreted that poem as merely a scribal colophon. Similarly, the whole of the 'back to the manuscripts' approach appears to take a similar stance: manuscript context and manuscript evidence must be taken into account to avoid misreadings which might otherwise spring from modern editions that normalize, regularize, and in other ways alter their texts.13 The implicit interrelationship between the 'back to the manuscripts' movement and the question of editorial mediation can be seen in the recent flurry of books and essays on editorial theory in Old English texts.14 Yet the notion that editorial mediation can lead to misreadings must be supplemented by the realization that this is not the only sort of mediation operative when modern readers encounter Old English texts. To the degree that our literacy tradition and our paradigms of reading differ from those of the AngloSaxons, we are also at risk of importing reading practices from our own context into the act of reading Anglo-Saxon texts, even when we read them in their manuscript context. Our very habits of reading mediate our experience of Old English texts. Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe (in one of her essays on editorial practice) approaches an understanding of this phenomenon when she writes The most distinguishing hallmark of literate ideology is the unspoken assumption that literacy is a unitary phenomenon whose shape is defined by the modern conditions of literacy' ('Texts and Works' 58; emphasis in original). O'Brien O'Keeffe should probably note that this is a particular literate ideology; the Anglo-Saxons themselves presumably had an ideology of literacy, though it may not have included this notion. And where O'Brien O'Keeffe notes this sort of mediation as a phenomenon that should inform our editorial practice (our preferred method of mediation), I believe that our very reading (and interpretive) practices should be explicitly informed by an awareness of and attention to possible influences from our own literacy tradition and practices.15 But where a 'back to the manuscripts' approach seems designed as a corrective to misreadings based upon editorial mediation, it is not obviously suffi-

Introduction

9

cient to counter the mediating effects of our own literate practices.16 Indeed, I believe we must develop what might be called a 'historicized literacy': a scholarly understanding of Anglo-Saxon literate practice as it originally functioned. The process of developing a historicized literacy, however, will be at best a process of successive approximations.17 In such a process, of course, a reading of a medieval text such as the Chronicle through the lens of our modern reading practices becomes a valuable first approximation. But a first approximation must be followed by further approximations. In the following chapters, I attempt to historicize our understanding of Anglo-Saxon literate practice (at least where the Chronicle is concerned) in a variety of different ways. At times, I will consider types of evidence familiar from studies that take a 'back to the manuscripts' approach: evidence of pointing, capitalization, spacing, and page layout. I assume that, even where the use of these textual features differs from our own, they nevertheless served a purpose for Anglo-Saxon readers, writers, and scribes. At other times, I consider questions of form. Modern understandings of Anglo-Saxon poetic form, for example, draw the boundary line between verse and prose at a point different from where the Chronicle seems to draw it, and to understand the Chronicle's record demands that we pay attention to topics such as metrical form. Further, I shall sometimes consider copying practices and the scribal paradigm; scribal activity is a central feature of Anglo-Saxon literate practice, and, as it does not feature in modern literacy, it is all too easy to misread. Throughout, I proceed from the position that Anglo-Saxon texts are constructed for (and, indeed, help to construct) ideal Anglo-Saxon readers; by learning to accommodate our reading practices to those imagined for these texts' ideal readers, we can learn something about what Anglo-Saxon writers expected of their readers. In this way, a practice of historicized literacy can make us more sensitive to the subtleties of Anglo-Saxon texts. Crucially, the evidence gathered in the process of historicizing AngloSaxon literacy (from formal considerations, copying strategies, and textual habits such as pointing) must be brought to bear on the interpretive task. While a greater understanding of historical literate practice is itself a sufficient goal, a product of such understanding can be a greater understanding of historical texts. Thus, my analyses of textual practices serve here as introductions to interpretive arguments. My chapters are, then, readings of the Chronicle in at least two senses: literal readings, in which I examine the physical, visible presentation and effects of the texts involved, and interpretations, where I explore the significance of these texts, in the immediate context of their manuscripts, in the broader context of the Chronicle as a whole, and in the context of Anglo-Saxon England itself.

10 Textual Histories The sheer extent of the Chronicle, in its various manifestations, makes it impossible for me to read it closely in its entirety. In some ways, then, the readings that follow may seem like little more than the gathering up of the Chronicle's 'usual suspects,' as in my analysis of the Chronicle poems or of annal 755, which contains the famous story of Cynewulf and Cyneheard. Yet what draws my readings together is my attention to the Chronicle's moments of greatest textual tension: the use of genres different from prose, for example; the exceptional nature of the 755 annal; the problem of Alfred's death; the end of the Chronicle itself. My investigation of these textual moments, I believe, opens the door for an understanding of the developing textuality of both the Chronicle and its readers and writers. Previous scholars' focus on the poems, the genealogies, and the 755 annal confirms both the textual and historical significance of these moments. My investigation begins, of course, with considerations of various elements of the Chronicle's Common Stock. Chapter 1 focuses on the alliterating genealogies that appear repeatedly, from the narrative of the Anglo-Saxon invasion in the sixth century to vEthelwulf's genealogy in annal 855. Although the genealogies have long been associated with the Old English verse tradition, no detailed examination of their form has been attempted, and I begin by using the evidence of the early Vespasian manuscript to identify the structural principles of the traditional genealogical form. Though the geneologies are clearly different from classical Old English verse, I show that the genealogical tradition also had well-recognized standard forms and patterns. The details of the incorporation of genealogies into the Chronicle and the West Saxon Regnal Table show, however, that a single Alfredian scholar must have worked on both texts, perhaps even as primary author of both. This scholar's innovations in the genealogical form are of enormous interest because their characteristic patterns suggest that he modelled his own genealogical contributions on the metrical patterns of Old English verse rather than on the traditional genealogical forms seen in the earlier records. His signature forms give us information about the composition of these Alfredian texts as well as about the state of Old English metre during the Alfredian period. Then, by comparing the form and layout of the Chronicle genealogies both with tabular genealogies (such as those found in BL Cotton Vespasian B vi, CCCC 183, and elsewhere) and with non-tabular genealogies in the West Saxon Regnal Table, I show that the regular pointing tradition that developed for the genealogies arose in response not to a transition from orality to literacy but to the problem of textual space itself. A further comparison of the traditional alliterating form of the genealogies with the forms used in Latin works such as the Historia Brittonum suggests that the form of the alliterating gene-

Introduction

11

alogy is especially well suited to the task of indicating political legitimacy: the Common Stock's focus on West Saxon genealogy can confirm the Chronicle's political investment in the West Saxon descendants of ^Ethelwulf. Chapter 2 investigates the most famous single annal of the Common Stock, the 755 annal recording the struggle between Cynewulf and Cyneheard. The extraordinary record of textual variation and innovation in this annal suggests that Anglo-Saxon scribes had a considerable degree of freedom when approaching Anglo-Saxon texts and that their primary goal must have been the production of a smooth, readable text rather than a mechanical, word-forword reproduction of their exemplar. That the scribal task was not merely mechanical, however, suggests that scribes functioned as readers (even as interpreters) as well as copyists: their responses may well point towards contemporary understandings of the texts they copied. Indeed, my reading of the 755 annal investigates the use of prominent letters ('litterae notabiliores,' in Parkes's term) to mark out the structure of the annal. This evidence suggests that (contrary to most modern readings) the annal's narrative sympathies lie with the doomed Cyneheard and his men. My reading of the annal suggests that it functions within the Common Stock to promote the notion of a narrower pattern of succession; the tragedy of Cynewulf and Cyneheard stems from the fact that Sigebryht was succeeded by the distantly related Cynewulf rather than by Sigebryht's own brother. In an Alfredian context, such a message supports the maintenance of the West Saxon dynasty seemingly envisaged by Alfred's father, yEthelwulf. Finally, I suggest that the textual variation seen in the 755 annal cannot be tied to the supposed origin of the annal in an oral tradition. The 755 annal's unique status as an extended narrative contributes to the degree of variation; other long prose annals in the Common Stock appear to exhibit less variation because of their repeated use of 'frozen' (formulaic) expressions. In the third chapter, I move beyond the Common Stock to the postAlfredian annals. Post-Alfredian chroniclers, I suggest, were confronted by a serious historiographic problem: the Common Stock itself had had an abiding and powerful Alfredian telos, and the continuation of the Chronicle after Alfred's death necessitated a revision of the Common Stock's structuring principles. One response, I suggest, was the compilation of the Northern Recension, which seemingly replaced the Common Stock's West Saxon focus with a northern, perhaps specifically Northumbrian, focus. A second response involved a focus on Alfred's descendants. The Mercian Register (focusing on Alfred's daughter /Ethelflaed) and the Edwardian Chronicle represented most clearly in the A, B, and C manuscripts provide two examples of this response. In the early tenth century, I suggest, the Chronicle was subject to complex and

12 Textual Histories conflicting forces, and the localized concerns of the Chronicles that followed the careers of Alfred's offspring competed with the nationalizing efforts of the Northern Recension. Chapter 4, then, examines the record of poetry in the Chronicle as stemming from a mid-tenth-century re-envisioning of the Chronicle's purposes and effects. Because the Chronicle verse tradition seems to include both classical and non-classical verse forms, I begin with the conclusion drawn in chapter 2 that the use of formulas (in prose or verse) contributed to textual stability. Looking at the copying strategies employed by the various scribes as well as at the record of manuscript pointing, I show that scribes treated virtually all of the passages printed as verse by Plummer as poems. This conclusion allows me to investigate the tradition of 'Chronicle poetry' as a genre, and the second section of the chapter offers a metrical account of the non-classical Chronicle poems, suggesting that their metrical form and their increasing use of rhyme can be understood as more or less predictable outgrowths of changes in classical metrics. Finally, I argue that (beginning with Brunanburh) the tenthcentury Chronicle poems serve to recentre the Chronicle's narrative on the West Saxon dynasty, linking the development of an Anglo-Saxon nation to the fortunes of the West Saxon royal line. The poems of the eleventh century, of course, then respond (in various ways) both to the historical events they recount and to the historical vision embodied so powerfully in Brunanburh and the other poems of the tenth century; and the remarkably conservative classical form of the 1065 poem can itself be understood as an invocation of the Chronicle poems' traditional historiographic effects in response to the Norman Conquest. In chapter 5, the Chronicle's relationship to Anglo-Saxon Latinity is explored. Beginning with an investigation of the use of Latin in the Common Stock (chiefly in the annal indicators and the 855 genealogy), I then also briefly investigate the use of Latin in the twelfth century in manuscripts E, F, and A. In the second half of the chapter, I explore the Anglo-Saxon translations of the Chronicle in the works of Asser and yEthelweard. In their own use of genealogies and poems especially, these Latin translations transform the purposes and effects of the largely vernacular Chronicle. Ultimately, I suggest that a full understanding of the Chronicle in Anglo-Saxon England demands that we pay attention to the changing role of Latinity and bilinguality both in the Chronicle and in Anglo-Saxon culture at large. In my final chapter, I conclude my survey of the Chronicle by examining the ways in which the various Chronicle manuscripts end. Building on observations made in previous chapters, this concluding chapter argues that the endings of the Chronicle manuscripts demonstrate the cultural significance of

Introduction

13

the Chronicle's historical record. The record of the Norman Conquest and of the cultural changes it brought makes this a fitting place to end my survey; the various Anglo-Saxon responses to those changes, reflected in the manuscripts of the Chronicle, witness nothing less than the end of Anglo-Saxon history. The continuing vitality of the Chronicle into the twelfth century, however, seems to indicate that the end of the Anglo-Saxon period did not come as early as we might otherwise surmise. Throughout, I interweave discussions of manuscript presentation with observations on and analysis of genre and form. Both analysis and intepretation intertwine with my investigations of the Chronicle's changing purposes and effects. The Chronicle that emerges from this study is a complex set of documents deeply and constantly invested in the political state of AngloSaxon England, though the form and expression of that investment necessarily change and evolve. For two hundred and fifty years, Anglo-Saxon chroniclers negotiated the history of their nation and their own places within that history; likewise, they negotiated the complex interrelations of prose, verse, alliterating genealogy, and Latin. The Chronicle that emerged from that work was nothing short of the record of a developing Anglo-Saxon national identity. And along the way, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, it is clear, played its own role in the forging of that identity.

1 The Common Stock Genealogies

One of the most remarkable features of the Common Stock of the AngloSaxon Chronicle is its inclusion of a large number of alliterating genealogies. Twenty separate genealogical passages were entered into the Common Stock in nineteen separate annals; the fact that ten of these passages record West Saxon genealogies must urge us to think about their presence in political terms.1 To understand the genealogies of the Common Stock, however, we must investigate the role of the genealogies in the historical documents that precede the Chronicle. In this chapter, then, I investigate not only the Common Stock, but also the genealogies included in Bede's Historia ecclesiastica (HE), the Historia Brittonum (HB), the West Saxon Regnal Table (WSRT), and elsewhere. This chapter, in fact, falls quite readily into three parts: an investigation of the metrical form of the genealogies, an examination of their manuscript presentation, and, finally, a discussion of their historiographic function within the Alfredian context of the Chronicle's Common Stock. Although the genealogies have long been recognized as alliterating, no previous scholarly attempt to describe their metrical form has been attempted, as far as I am aware. Yet the attempt is clearly worth the effort, and I show that the earliest collection of Old English genealogical lore enables us to develop a fairly precise description of the metrical forms that were allowed in the traditional alliterating genealogies. Further, formal innovations seen in the genealogies recorded in the Alfredian period (e.g., in the West Saxon Regnal Table and the Chronicle) allow us to date the composition of new genealogical 'verses' to precisely this period of time. More importantly, the formal innovations seen in the Alfredian-era genealogies involve alterations in the classical genealogical form that bring the new passages more in line with the forms of classical verse. The metrical description of the genealogies I undertake here thus has value for understanding both the genealogical tradition itself and how

The Common Stock Genealogies

15

the genealogies are related to the poetry. Finally, the apparent Alfredian-era composition of genealogical material for both the Regnal Table and the Chronicle not only suggests that both were composed by the same Alfredian scholar but also seems to confirm that the genealogies were included within the Chronicle for deeply political purposes. In the second section of the chapter, I explore the record of manuscript pointing in the Chronicle genealogies. I argue that the highly regular metrical pointing seen in the later records of the genealogies arises not from any analogy to Old English verse, or from a transition from orality to literacy, but rather simply from the problem of presenting the genealogies in a running account, rather than in columns. By the time of the Common Stock's composition, the genealogies had already passed primarily into the realm of literate discourse; their placement, form, and function within the Chronicle will be best understood, then, as resulting from conscious and literate textual strategies. The final third of the chapter explores the significance of the genealogies' form in the Chronicle, noting that the genealogies present in the Old English Rede are not put into the metrical, alliterating form but rather are presented in simple prose. By considering genealogical form and presentation in Bede's Historia ecclesiastica, the Historia Brittonum, and the Chronicle itself, I suggest that the traditional alliterating form is especially relevant to the Common Stock's political purposes. Further, by a consideration of the formal innovations discussed in the first section of the chapter, I offer a series of revisions to our understandings of the textual histories of the genealogical records. In the end, I argue that the Common Stock genealogies are carefully selected, supplemented, and incorporated into the Chronicle to give it an implicitly 'historical' Alfredian telos: the Common Stock, and the Chronicle as a whole, is 'Alfred's history,' in more than one sense. Moreover, the Alfredian perspective generated by the Common Stock genealogies is one designed to provide imaginative ideological associations among the West Saxon dynasty, the Saxon invasion of Britain, and the tradition of heroic poetry. 1.1 The Metrical Form of the Genealogies The textual (or even oral) sources used by the compiler of the Chronicle's Common Stock have often been debated. The chronological epitome appended to Bede's Historia ecclesiastica is a well-recognized source,2 but beyond this, scholars usually move quickly into the realm of hypothesis and speculation. Michael Swanton's recent commentary can stand as a summary of typical ideas about the Common Stock's sources:

16 Textual Histories there seem to have been a set of annals extending Bede's work into the early ninth century; lists of Northumbrian and Mercian kings together with their genealogies (cf. annals 547, 560, 626 etc.); a list of the bishops of Wessex down to 754; and a set of West Saxon annals extending from the invasions to the middle of the eighth century. It is not impossible that some entries may have incorporated oral traditions first committed to writing in the seventh century. (Swanton xix) 3

Most of these sources, of course, can only be hypothesized from the contents of the Chronicle itself; they survive neither on their own nor in later contexts or copies. Too frequently ignored or underplayed in such considerations, however, is the surviving early-eighth-century collection of royal genealogies and episcopal lists found in BL Cotton Vespasian B vi, fos 104-9.4 While this manuscript is perhaps not a direct source for the Chronicle, it is virtually certain that the original compiler had access to a collection much like the Vespasian manuscript.5 The existence of the Vespasian collection, in fact, is of paramount importance. The Old English genealogies it contains stand as the only demonstrable (and surviving) vernacular source for the original Chronicle. The Common Stock compiler's use of such genealogies has much to tell us about his working habits, I believe, especially since the compiler also seems to have composed genealogical material of his own. The present section of chapter 1 explores the implications of the formal characteristics of the Common Stock genealogies, beginning with a much-needed examination of the metrical structure of the Vespasian genealogies. This analysis is crucially necessary for, as I show, the Common Stock compiler's genealogies exhibit identifiable formal innovations in comparison to those in the Vespasian collection. The specifics of which genealogical passages were composed or altered by the Common Stock compiler provide powerful insight into the purposes and effects of the Common Stock. The formal characteristics of the traditional genealogical genre can be inductively derived from the evidence of the Vespasian manuscript. A consideration of the careful columnar layout of the Vespasian genealogies (considered in more detail in the next chapter) indicates a scribal recognition that the basic element of genealogical structure was the single generation, consisting of name and patronymic. A small number of examples should be sufficient to show the basics of the form: Eduine Aelle Yffi

Aelling Yffing Uufcfreaing

(Dumville, 'Anglian Collection' 30)

The Common Stock Genealogies

17

As Dumville's own layout suggests, each genealogy in Vespasian is written in two adjacent columns, nominatives in one, patronymics in the other. This twoword structure, of course, has an obvious similarity to the two-foot structure frequently identified as the basis for Old English verse, and I will refer to each genealogical generation as a 'verse.' While it is clear that the traditional genealogical form differed from classical Old English verse, the parallels are nevertheless significant. 6 Indeed, borrowing elements of formalism from Geoffrey Russom's account of Old English verse (an account that argues for verse patterns as resulting from the juxtaposition of two separate word patterns), the following typical structures can be identified in the Vespasian material. 7 I present these verse forms in order of decreasing frequency of attestation, along with necessary comments and observations. Group 1: Ss/Ssx (D*). 33 occurrences (plus I exact repetition) Example: Uihtred Ecgberhting This form is the most commonly attested of the Vespasian forms, although the scansion I employ is one seemingly excluded from the classical verse tradition. 8 Alliteration patterns within this group support the scansion, as secondary stress seems to appear in both the nominatives and the patronymics. Twenty-two Group 1 verses show double alliteration on syllables with primary stress (SS alliteration); five of these verses likewise show alliteration of the secondary name elements (ss alliteration). 9 A further three verses, 'Lioduald Ecgualding' (twice) and 'Cuduine Liodualding' show only ss alliteration, while a single verse shows sS alliteration: 'Wegbrand Bernicing.' 10 Such a pattern of alliteration on secondary name elements appears too powerful to ignore, and it seems best to conclude that, in the genealogies at least, secondary elements did regularly maintain a relatively prominent level of stress." Group 2: Ss/Sx (A2a). 26 occurrences (plus 1 exact repetition) Example: Cudberht Bassing Nearly all Group 2 verses feature contraction in the patronymic, apparently caused by the addition of the -ing suffix to a name with an unstressed second syllable. 12 The only verses that do not result from such contraction feature patronymics based on the monosyllabic names 'Finn,' 'Hryp' and the somewhat, uncertain 'Ocg' (which fails to match the patronymic form 'Ocgting'). 13 Formally, contracted forms appear to be employed in preference to having patronymics of the form *Sxx;14 the spelling of the Vespasian manuscript clearly prefers contraction to any of the alternatives that might be hypothesized for

18 Textual Histories uncontracted forms: *Ss/Sxx, *Ss/Ss (with resolution of secondary stress in the patronymic), or *Sx/Sxs, with -ing on an 's position.' 15 Twenty-one Group 2 verses show SS alliteration; there are two examples of sS alliteration, including the example verse quoted above. Group 3: Sx/Ssx (D*). 18 occurrences (plus 5 exact repetitions) Example: Offa Uermunding The scansion here seems straightforward; these verses would clearly be acceptable in the classical verse tradition. Eleven Group 3 verses feature SS alliteration, while one ('Bubba Caedbaeding') features Ss alliteration. All five repeated verses are examples of the form 'Uoden Frealafing' with only insignificant orthographic differences. Group 4: Sx/Sx (A). 15 occurrences (plus 1 exact repetition) Example: Aelle Yffing Again, the structure of these verses seems clear. Eight Group 4 verses have SS alliteration. All sixteen of these verses result from the same contraction process outlined above in Group 2. Group 5: Hypermetric verses a. Ss/Sxsx. 6 occurrences; example: Ecgberht Erconberhting b.Sx/Sxsx. 1 example: Alusa Ingibranding All seven of these verses exhibit SS alliteration. The example verse from Group 5a includes the only example of ss alliteration. The scansion of 'Alusa' as Sx involves treating the first two syllables as a resolvable sequence; such a possibility seems justified by the fact that the Vespasian data do not include any clear examples of Sxx sequences. A unique example of triple (SSs) alliteration seems to be exhibited in the verse 'Uilgils Uestorualcning.' 16 Notice that, unlike in much classical verse, the genealogies do not clump these hypermetric verses together. Apparently, the two-word structure is sufficiently unambiguous to prevent confusion. 17 Group 6: Sxs patterns a. Sxs/Ssx. 2 examples: Ingibrand Wegbranding, Erconberht Eadbalding b. Sxs/Sx. 4 occurrences; example: Weodulgeot Wodning Both members of Group 6a feature ss alliteration, and five of the six Group 6 verses have SS alliteration. Although the first foot in these verses is notably heavy, they appear to be perfectly acceptable within the traditional genealogical genre. Verses of this form are excluded from classical verse.18

The Common Stock Genealogies

19

Group 7: Unusual verses a. S/Ssx. 2 examples: Finn Goduulfmg, Hryp Hrodmunding b. Sxsx/Sx. I example: Uestorualcna Soemling c. S/Sx. I example: Ocg I ding Each of the four remaining verses includes some unusual features. Those in Groups 7a and 7c include the only three monosyllabic names to appear in the Vespasian manuscript. 'Ocg,' as noted above, is an unexpected form, given that the preceding patronymic reads 'Ocgting': we would expect a nominative, perhaps, of the form '*Ocgta.'19 The possibility of a copying error is at least worth considering here. The form corresponding to 'Hryp' in the Historia Brittonum is 'Rippan' (HB 77), suggesting the possibility of an early form such as '*Hryppa.'20 Finally, the third verse with a monosyllabic nominative ('Finn Goduulfing') is remarkable for occurring in a genealogical passage that extends beyond Woden and Frealaf.21 All three monosyllabic names, then, are accompanied either by some uncertainty or by the likelihood of being late and possibly non-traditional. In the case of 'Uestorualcna Soemling,' we have a verse of unparalleled form. 22 The verse is unique, but there is no clear reason, in this case, to suspect that it is non-traditional or to exclude it as unmetrical in the genealogical tradition. To summarize, we might note that these metrical groupings can be characterized (for the most part) as stemming from a very simple conceptual scheme: the royal names recorded here take three primary forms: Ss, Sx, and Sxs (with only the exceptions collected in Group 7). The contraction process identified in Groups 2 and 4 reduces potential Sxx patronymics to Sx, and the addition of the patronymic suffix to the other name forms yields Ssx and Sxsx. Thus, we can schematize the construction of genealogical verses as follows: Nominative Ss Sx Sxs

Patronymic Ssx Sx Sxsx

Note that I have simply ordered the elements according to their frequency of occurrence; the ordering of the first six groups seen above is a natural consequence of the frequency of the three name forms.23 The fact that 113 of the Vespasian manuscript's 117 genealogical verses fit into such a scheme would

20 Textual Histories seem to mark these forms as the norm; royal names were apparently constrained, in general, to take the form Ss, Sx, or Sxs. Significantly, monosyllabic names (or resolvable disyllables) seem to have been excluded as appropriate royal names, since metrical genealogical verses would result only if Ss fathers bestowed such names.24 The existing monosyllabic names in the Vespasian genealogies are probably best understood as resulting either from errors or from the conscious invocation of the legendary tradition, where monosyllabic names seem more widely attested.25 The preceding digression into the metrical analysis of the Vespasian genealogies has been necessary simply because the compiler of the Common Stock seems clearly to have had different ideas about proper genealogical form. If we consider the records of late-ninth-century genealogies found in BL Additional 23,211 (West Saxon Regnal Table; East Saxon genealogies) and CCCC 173 (WSRT, Chronicle), we can make the following startling observation: genealogies corresponding in form (and distribution) to those of the Vespasian manuscript appear everywhere except for a handful of very specific areas: (1) the final two generations of the Additional East Saxon genealogies; (2) the Cerdic-to-Wodening passage in the WSRT and the Chronicle; (3) the added offspring of Cenred in the Parker WSRT; (4) the Geata-to-Sceafing portion of jEthelwulf's genealogy in the Chronicle's annal 855; and (5) the initial verses of genealogical passages in both the Chronicle and the WSRT. Examining the genealogies in each of these areas will allow us to determine the characteristic forms used by the Common Stock compiler. East Saxon Genealogies. Here the two innovative genealogical verses (and their scansions) are: Ants[ecg] Gesecging Gesecg Seaxneting26

Ss/(x)Sx (x)S/Ssx

The extrametrical syllable in the one case and the use of anacrusis in the other (both caused by the Ge- prefix) are not evidenced in Vespasian. Note that both forms are acceptable (if somewhat rare) in verse. The Cerdic-to-Wodening passage. This passage has been noted and studied repeatedly, but it is worth reprinting here, lineated as verse: Cynric Cerdicing, Cerdic Elesing, Elesa Esling, Esla Giwising, Giwis Wiging, Wig Freawining,

The Common Stock Genealogies

21

Freawine Fribogaring, Fribogar Branding, Brond Baeldaeging, Baeldaeg Wodening. (Bately, MSA 45-6; relineated)27

Verse forms appearing in this passage, but unattested in Vespasian, include those with the Gi- prefix: 'Esla Giwising' (Sx/[x]Sx) and 'Giwis Wiging' (x/Ssx). Note also the two unexpanded D verses, one of which ('Wig Freawining') Sisam suggests is caused by the importation of names from 'heroic legend' ('Royal Genealogies' 164-5). Notice also the form 'Wodening,' in which the contraction rule seen in Vespasian appears not to apply. Finally, note the much-remarked alliteration pattern, which replicates the alliterative pattern of poetic verses. The use of AAAX alliteration and C and D verses suggests that the use of a poetic model here leads the genealogist to innovate on the traditional forms as they were seen in Vespasian. Additions to the Parker WSRT. In the genealogy of /Ethelwulf in the Parker WSRT, we read the following genealogical verses, not present in the Additional WSRT: 1 ine Cenreding, 7 Cubburg Cenreding 7 Cuenburg Cenreding

(x)Sx/Ssx (x)Ss/Ssx (x)Ss/Ssx

(Bately, MS A 1-2; relineated)

As my scansions indicate, we might interpret these genealogical comments as using non-classical anacrusis (involving the conjunction 'ond') before expanded D verses. The Geat-to-Sceafing passage. Because a line seems to have slipped out of the Parker manuscript in this passage, I quote from the A manuscript so far as it goes, and then from manuscript B: Geat Taetwaing Taetwa Beawing Beaw Sceldwaing Sceldwea Heremoding Heremod Itermoning Itermon Hrabraing Hadra Hwalaing Hwala Bedwiging Bedwig Sceafing

S/Sxx Sx/Sx S/Sxx - Sx/Ssx Ss/Ssx Ss/Sxx

(Bately, MS A 46; relineated)

Sx/Sxx Sx/Ssx Ss/Sx

(Taylor, MS B 33; relineated)

22 Textual Histories TABLE 1.1 Metrical form of initial genealogical verses Verse form

Location/Annal

Scansion

Ond se /EfQelwulf] waes Ecgberhting 7 se Cerdic waes Elesing [Ida waes Eopping] se waes Cubaing [Cynegils waes Ceoling] Se Cubred waes Cuichelming 7 se Oswio waes /Epelferping se wes Cenfusing Se Ceadwalla was Coenbryhting Se Ecgfer|D was Osweoing Ponne waas se Ine Cenreding /Edelbald waes Alweoing Se Offa waes Pincgferping

Additional WSRT Parker WSRT [547A]29 597A [611 A] 648A 670A 674A 685A 685A 688A 716A 755A

(xx)Ss/(x)Ssx28 (xx)Sx/(x)Sx Sx/(x)Sx30 xx/Sxx Ss/(x)Sx (x)Ss/(x)Ssx31 (xx)Sx/(x)Ssx xx/Ssx (x)Ssx/(x)Ssx32 (x)Ss/(x)Sxx33 (xxxx)Sx/Ssx Ss/(x)Sxx (x)Sx/(x)Ssx

Again, we see that the contraction rule in Vespasian fails to apply, leading to Sxx feet in the patronymic. Further, the spellings here are not purely orthographic: three-syllable verses would result if contraction applied in 'Geat Taetwaing' and 'Beaw Sceldwaing.' The lack of contraction in the Chronicle genealogies will be discussed further below. Initial verses. Genealogies in the Chronicle and the WSRT are generally given a full-fledged clause structure by the addition of the verb 'wags' and other particles in the first verse.34 Characteristic examples are listed in Table 1.1. The verses in Table 1.1 can frequently be scanned as otherwise regular genealogical verses with an extrametrical syllable before the second foot and one or two (in one case, seemingly, four) syllables in (non-classical) anacrusis, before the first foot.35 The use of 'ond' in anacrusis should be compared to the verses added to the Parker WSRT discussed above. Two of the verses in the table scan as C verses, unexampled in Vespasian, but also appearing in 'Giwis Wiging.' It is important to note the lack of contraction seen in these verses as well. The forms 'Cubaing,' 'Osweoing' and 'Alweoing' are all unattested in Vespasian, though their appearance here might recall the uncontracted forms in 855A verses such as 'Geat Taetwaing.'36 As with the use of non-classical anacrusis and C verses, the lack of a contraction rule serves to indicate a common origin to the various groups investigated here. Indeed, two crucially important conclusions can be drawn from this exami-

The Common Stock Genealogies

23

nation of the innovative genealogical forms seen in BL Additional 23,211 and in CCCC 173. First is the probability that all the innovative forms are the handiwork of a single scholar: the use of extrametrical 'waes' is shared by the Chronicle genealogies and those in the WSRT; the use of anacrusis is seen in the initial verses from both of the preceding texts, in the additions to the Parker WSRT, and in the otherwise anomalous form 'Gesecg Seaxneting' in the Additional East Saxon genealogies. C verses appear in both the regularly alliterating Cerdic-to-Wodening passage and in the Chronicle's initial verses. Unexpanded D verses (unusual in Vespasian) appear in both the Cerdic-toWodening passage and the Geat-to-Sceafing passage. Because the Cerdic-toWodening passage appears in an apparently earlier form in Asser and the name 'Cuba' and the names between Scyld and Scef do not appear in ./Ethelweard's genealogy of vEthelwulf, it seems appropriate to conclude that these Latin texts (seemingly based on early versions of the Chronicle) do not record the Chronicle's genealogies in their final form. That is, the Chronicle genealogies were still in the process of being composed when the texts used by Asser and yfcthelweard were copied. The conclusion that all of this evidence seems to point towards is that we can be fairly sure that both the WSRT and the Chronicle's Common Stock were either composed or put into the shape in which we now know them by a single scholar, whom we should probably identify as the Common Stock compiler.37 The second major conclusion that needs to be drawn is that the compiler of these genealogies regularly used a verselike model for his innovations. Not only do we see the regularly alliterating Cerdic-to-Wodening passage, but virtually all of the forms used in the compiler's genealogies that are not seen (or are rare) in Vespasian have analogues in the verse tradition. The primary exception to this general rule is the chronicler's use of non-classical anacrusis, although even this, as I will show below in chapter 4, is quite typical of the later, non-classical verse. The appearance of this non-classical feature here, it seems, may well suggest that changes to the classical verse form occurred earlier than has frequently been realized. The possibility of a further relationship between verse and alliterating genealogy is discussed in the next section, where I examine the pointing and layout of the genealogical verses in the Chronicle and the WSRT; in the final portion of the chapter, I investigate why the chronicler chose to use the alliterating genealogical form in the first place. 1.2 The Manuscript Presentation of the Common Stock Genealogies As a look at even a single manuscript such as the Parker Chronicle will show, the inclusion of alliterating genealogies within the Common Stock raised

24

Textual Histories

important questions of layout and presentation for the Chronicle scribes. Significantly, however, the problem of textual space seen in the record of the Chronicle genealogies cannot be explained in terms of an orality/literacy dynamic, since the existence of the Vespasian manuscript confirms that the problem of how to record genealogies in writing had been solved long before the composition of the Chronicle's Common Stock.38 Instead, the history of the genealogies' presentation is a literate (even textual) history, one in which we can read developments in Anglo-Saxon literate practice. To understand the layout and presentation of the Chronicle's genealogies, it is necessary to begin by considering the presentation of the genealogies in the Vespasian manuscript. The genealogies begin on folio 109r (Plate I) with a brief Latin heading: 'Haec sunt genealogiae per partes brittaniae regum regnantium per diuersa loca.'39 And while the two rightmost columns of folio 109r begin the genealogical collection, the first lines of folio 109v will provide an even clearer picture of the Vespasian manuscript's layout. Item nordan-* Ceoluulf cuduining cu5[...] liodualding [.]iod[.]ald ecgualding ecguald edelming edhelm ocgting ocg iding Eadberht eating eata liodualding lioduald ecg[.]alding

Item merc[..] Adelbald alwih eowa Item mercna EcgfriQ offa SincfriS eanuulf

alwing eowing pybbing offing dincfri\5i/ng eanuulfmg osmoding

Cantwara AeSelberht uihtred ecgberht erconberht eadbald edilberht iurmenric oese

uihtreding ecgberhting erconberhting eadbalding edilberhting iurmenricing o[...] ocging40

This layout continues, in the longest column, through some thirty-five lines. The spatial features here are complex and regular. Six carefully ruled columns are used to present three sets of vertically organized genealogies, with each 'verse' occupying space in two adjacent columns. In general, the end of each genealogy is marked by the intrusion of a word or phrase indicating the nationality of the next genealogy, although even in the case where such a heading is missing, the beginning of the new genealogy is clearly marked by the use of a capital letter.41 An even clearer indicator of the boundaries

*In citations from manuscripts, the symbol '-' following a character is used to indicate a manuscript abbreviation. Old English manuscripts regularly use a horizontal line or macron placed over the last character before the omitted letters to indicate such abbreviations.

The Common Stock Genealogies

25

between genealogies is the fact that each of these initial capitals extends a small distance beyond the left-hand ruling of the column; most of these capitals are also rubricated. The elegance and utility of this layout as a method of presenting alliterating genealogies in writing is arresting. Within the double-column format, each line corresponds to a single generation; each line is linked to the one that follows by the identity of the patronymic in one line with the nominative in the next. The succession of fathers itself can be read simply by reading down the first column alone.42 The power of this method of writing genealogies is attested by the fact that this columnar layout continued to be used (with occasional small modifications) for Anglo-Saxon genealogical material even in relatively late books such as the Textus Roffensis.43 The features of the layout in BL Vespasian B vi carry a portion of the meaning of the text: the physical organization of the lines in columns reflects and reinforces the structure of the text and the relationships between the names in the text. The complexly effective integration of columns, capital letters, headings, and rubrication here suggests that the maker of this manuscript had a sophisticated sense of the powers and benefits of an effective utilization of textual space; it has little (if any) of the look of a beginning effort. Late in the ninth century, however, the Common Stock compiler responsible for placing genealogies within the Chronicle and the West Saxon Regnal Table (WSRT) was faced with the challenge of integrating the information that was encoded in the spatialization of the columnar genealogies into a non-columnar layout. In the prose contexts of the Chronicle or the WSRT, ruling columns and writing genealogies into them would be not only difficult and time consuming but disruptive for readers as well. Instead, the genealogies needed to be written in long lines across the page. At the same time, they were themselves transformed into narratives, rather than simple lists of names, by the addition of the verb 'waes' to the first (and occasionally subsequent) pairs of fathers and sons in the various pedigrees.44 The history of the punctuation of these narrativized genealogies is precisely the record of how scribes responded to the challenge of transferring the information encoded in the columnar layout into the linear text. Fortunately, genealogies from both the Chronicle and the WSRT survive in a variety of manuscripts from Alfred's reign to the Norman period, enabling us to trace the history of the genealogical pointing in some detail. Considering that the evidence presented in section 1.1 above suggested that the compiler innovated in verselike directions, a comparison between verse pointing (as discussed in Visible Song by O'Brien O'Keeffe) and the genealogical pointing seen in the Chronicle is worthwhile. The remainder of this section explores this issue.

26

Textual Histories

As discussed above, two ninth-century manuscripts (BL Additional 23,211 and CCCC 173) include alliterating genealogies that have been incorporated into prose texts. In BL Additional 23,211, all of the genealogies (even those East Saxon genealogies that are not a part of the WSRT) are written in long lines rather than in columns, and they are almost entirely unpointed. The genealogy of jEthelwulf from the WSRT has been partially cropped, but it is representative of the manuscript's usage. It appears as follows: Ond se aed[ waes. ecgberhting ecgberht ealhcmunding ealh[ eabing eaba eopping eoppa ingilding ingild c[ ing coenred ceolwalding ceolwald cuduulfing cu5[ cudwining cuSwine ceaulniing ceaul\i/n cynri[ cynric crioding criodo ceardicing (BL Additional 23,211, fo. lv)45

This genealogy uses only a single point; significantly, the point appears after the inserted verb 'waes,' as if marking the point at which the genealogy actually begins. The transformation of this genealogy into narrative has perhaps resulted in a small misunderstanding regarding the boundary of the genealogical passage. The other genealogies on this leaf are similarly unpointed, although the East Saxon genealogy of Offa that follows the WSRT here does feature three points in the thirteen father-son pairs.46 The pointing of the WSRT genealogies in CCCC 173 is, by contrast, quite heavy. The passage (roughly) corresponding to the quoted material from BL Additional 23,211 is shown in Plate II, and it appears as follows: Se aepelwulf waes ecbryhting ecg bryht. ealhmunding. ealhmund. eafmg. eafa. eopping. eoppa ingil ding, ingild. cenreding. 7ine. cenreding. 7cupburg. cenreding. 7cuen burg, cenreding. cenred. ceolwalding. ceolwald. cupwulfing. cubwulf cupwining. cubwine. celming. celm. cynricing. cynric cerdicing. (CCCC 173, fo. lr)47 Here a point is used after almost every name, patronymic or otherwise. Such regular pointing does effectively recapture some of the spatial features of the columnar genealogies, where each name is spatially isolated from the others. Unfortunately, such heavy pointing not only makes passages such as this one somewhat difficult to read, it also conveys little (if any) more information than word spacing alone. Pointing every word lessens the communicative power of the points by making them, in a regularly spaced text, superfluous.

The Common Stock Genealogies

27

The scribe of the Parker Chronicle seems to have realized the ineffectiveness of such heavy pointing, for he abandoned it in the genealogies of the Chronicle proper. Within the Parker Chronicle, points are never used at all within genealogies and only occasionally precede or follow them (cf the 855A genealogy seen in Plate III).48 The unpointed presentation of genealogies within the Parker Chronicle and in BL Additional 23,211 does not appear to preserve very much of the relational information encoded in the layout of the columnar genealogies; these scribes must expect readers to bring this information to the text themselves, presumably from a knowledge of the alliterative genealogical form. By the end of the tenth century, however, a method of pointing the genealogies had arisen that more successfully recaptured the relational information encoded in the layout of the columnar genealogies. This method was the familiar 'metrical' pointing of the genealogies, where a point was used after each patronymic, corresponding to the metrical structure of the genealogy as described above. This manner of pointing genealogies when they were written in long lines was employed by a large number of scribes: this system appears in Chronicle manuscripts B (including the WSRT text from BL Cotton Tiberius A iii), C, and G (but not in the associated WSRT from BL Additional 34,652), and in the versions of the WSRT found in the Textus Roffensis, CUL Kk 3. 18, and CCCC 383. In the earliest of these texts, the tradition does not seem fully developed: in both manuscript B and manuscript G of the Chronicle, there is evidence for the gradual conventionalization of this method of pointing. A typical passage from the early part of the B Chronicle, for example, reads as follows: aelle wass yffing yffe uxfreaing uxfrea wilgisling. wilgils westerfalcing westerfalca saefugling saefugel sae balding, saebald sigegeating sigegeat swebdaeging swebdaeg sigegaring sigegar waegdaeging. waegdaeg wodening (BL Cotton Tiberius A vi, fo. 5v)

The pointing here is not heavy at all: only three out of eleven pairs of names are pointed. It is important to note, however, that the points are used only after the patronymics, never elsewhere. Later in the manuscript, the pointing is much more regular: all fifteen patronymics in the genealogy of Offa in 755B are pointed, and thirty-two of the thirty-four patronymics in the lengthy 855B pedigree are pointed. Significantly, the regular pointing of the genealogies in the Tiberius version of the WSRT corresponds to the B scribe's practice at the

28 Textual Histories end of the manuscript (in 755B and 855B, for example) rather than his practice at the beginning. The evidence from the texts of the Chronicle and the WSRT copied from CCCC 173 are equally interesting and instructive. The leaf in BL Additional 34,652 containing the WSRT is seen in Plate IV; it presents the genealogy of jEthelwulf (quoted from the Parker version above) as: Se aebelwulf waes ecbyrhting. ecbyrht. ealhmunding. ealhmund. eafmg. eafa copping, eoppa ingylding. ingyld. cenred ing. \7 ine/ cenreding. 7cupburhg cenreding. 7 cwenburhg cenreding. cenred. ceolwalding. ceolwald. cupwulfing[ cupwulf. cupwining. cupwine. celming. celm. cynricing[ cynric. cerdiceing.49 (BL Additional 34,652, fo. 2v) Here the scribe follows the heavily pointed Parker exemplar quite closely, although occasionally pointing only the patronymics.50 Fortunately, however, fragments of one of the genealogies from the largely burnt version of the Chronicle in BL Cotton Otho B xi also survive, allowing us to compare the G scribe's practice in the Chronicle with his work in BL Additional 34,652. The surviving genealogical material from G consists of portions of the 855G genealogy on folio 42v. The legible portions of three consecutive lines read: cupaing. cupa cupwining. cupwin[ lin cynricing. cynric cerdicing[ ele[.]a esling. esla giwi\si/ng. giwis wigin[

(BL Cotton Otho B xi, fo. 42v)

The G scribe's exemplar in the Parker manuscript, of course, is completely unpointed in this passage (Plate III). Here the G scribe clearly alters the punctuation of his exemplar, presumably to correspond to a pointing convention that had developed in the interval between the copying of the Parker text and the copying of BL Cotton Otho B xi in the early part of the eleventh century. By the middle of the eleventh century, the scribe of the C version of the Chronicle responsible for copying the genealogies uses this convention of pointing quite regularly: points appear after approximately 95 per cent of the patronymics in the C genealogies. However, the remaining genealogies in the roughly contemporary manuscript D of the Chronicle are somewhat inconsistently pointed, with points sometimes used after only the patronymics and sometimes after each separate name. This passage from 855D is fairly representative of this scribe's habits:

The Common Stock Genealogies gewissung. wig freawining. freawine. freobe garing. frobegar. branding, brand beldas ging. baeldaeg. wodening. woden frealafing.

29

(BL Cotton Tiberius B iv, fo. 32r)

This heavy pointing may be a survival of the sort of heavy pointing seen in the Parker version of the WSRT, or it may simply be a case of overenthusiastic pointing on the part of this scribe. A third possibility might be that a tradition of pointing such as that seen in the columnar genealogies in the Textus Roffensis (where points appear sometimes after one or both names in a generation) may be influencing this scribe. It does not appear to be possible to choose among these alternatives; what is clear, though, is that even the D scribe sees this genre as demanding heavy pointing, rather than light.51 This tradition of 'metrically' pointing the alliterating genealogies, as noted above, invites comparison with the metrical pointing of Anglo-Saxon verse, especially since the scribes of manuscripts B and C copied both alliterating genealogies and verse. In both of these manuscripts, in fact, these scribes point their genealogies somewhat more regularly than they point their verse. Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, in her valuable examination of the pointing of Brunanburh and the other poems of these manuscripts, draws the following conclusion about the pointing of verse in the Chronicle manuscripts: the differences in pointing which the four records of the Chronicle poems preserve are temporally distributed, from the earliest records in A (and, by inference, *B) with very light pointing, to those in B and the portions of C which were probably copied from B, which tend to point the b-line, to the late practice in C and D, which generally tended to mark both a- and b-lines. (Visible Song 137)

The structural analysis of the genealogical genre showed clearly, however, that there is (in general) no 'long-line' structure for the genealogies; there is no meaningful distinction between a-lines and b-lines, so any comparison is naturally strained.52 But a comparison of the pointing of Brunanburh in B and C to the pointing of the genealogies in these manuscripts is instructive: in Brunanburh, the B scribe (according to O'Brien O'Keeffe's count) points 62 b-lines and 12 a-lines (or 74 out of 146 total half-lines), while the C scribe points 59 b-lines and 33 a-lines (92 out of 146). Apparently the genres of genealogy and poetry were considered to be distinct enough by these scribes to demand different patterns of punctuation, with genealogies receiving heavier, more consistent pointing.53 Of course, while copying manuscripts B and C, the scribes concerned had already demonstrated their use of a pointing system that marked out each generation of a genealogy before they were faced

30 Textual Histories with the task of punctuating any of the Chronicle poems.54 The genealogies, we must conclude, are heavily pointed not because they are metrical (in the sense of being identified as classical verse) but because a separate tradition of pointing the genealogies after each patronymic had developed. It seems appropriate to conclude that the motivation for this tradition stemmed from the process of converting the highly spatialized columnar genealogies (as seen in the Vespasian manuscript) into the Chronicle's (and the WSRT's) running 'proselike' format. Although the genealogies must have been perceived as metrical (and at least sometimes as poetic, as the regularly alliterating portion of Cerdic's genealogy suggests), the pointing tradition that developed for them seems to be specific to the genealogical genre rather than having arisen through an analogy to (or as an example of) the pointing of poetic texts.55 The probability that the 'metrical' pointing of genealogies arose from the problem of textual spatialization is worth noting: the use of points in tenthand eleventh-century genealogies serves to mark out their structure, where, in the columnar genealogies, carefully ruled and controlled visual space was used for the same purpose. Where this genre is concerned, at least, changes in spatialization and pointing can be attributed to purely textual processes; regardless of the ultimate origins of the genealogical form, the genealogies seen in the Chronicle must be considered to be literate productions.56 The choice to use the traditional genealogical form, then, must be understood as responsive to more than simply the existence of a genealogical tradition; I examine the implications of this choice in the next section. 1.3 The Historiographic Function of the Common Stock Genealogies It is important to recognize that the alliterating genealogical form was not the only available choice for the Common Stock compiler. The ninth-century translator responsible for the Old English version of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica, for example, represents the genealogy of Hengist and Horsa as follows: Waeron da aerest heora latteowas 7 heretogan twegen gebroSra Hengest 7 Horsa. Hi wEeron Wihtgylses suna, [)aes faeder waes Witta haten, baes faeder wass Wihta haten 7 [)aes Wihta faeder waes Woden nemned (Miller, Old English Bede I, i, 52)57 The chronicler's inclusion of the genealogies in their alliterating form, then, must be seen as a conscious choice.58 To understand the implications of that choice, however, we need to look at the genealogical tradition in Anglo-Saxon historical writing as it existed before the composition of the Chronicle. The earliest surviving Anglo-Saxon genealogies, of course, are those re-

The Common Stock Genealogies

31

corded in Bede's Historia ecclesiastica, finished in 731. Bede includes three genealogies: those of Hengist and Horsa (HE i, 15), jEthelberht (ii, 5), and Raedwald (ii, 15). The first of these is the most famous, of course, appearing in Bede's well-known account of the Saxon invasion; the genealogy of Hengist and Horsa is traced back to Woden, of whom Bede writes: 'de cuius stirpe multarum prouinciarum regium genus originem duxit' (i, 15).59 The other genealogies, we might note, are introduced by Bede in order to explain tribal names: the genealogy of vEthelberht is supplemented by the comment that the people of Kent are called 'Oiscingas' after Hengist's son Oisc (ii, 5), and (likewise) Raedwald's ancestry reaches to Wuffa and ends 'Uuffa, a quo reges Orientalium Anglorum Uuffmgas appellant' (ii, 15).60 Bede's use of genealogical information to account for tribal and family names, however, differs markedly from both the way in which such information is used in the Chronicle and the way it is used in other Latin works such as the Historia Brittonum. In the Historia Brittonum, genealogical lore has a remarkably prominent role, at least when contrasted to Bede. The author of the Historia Brittonum clearly had access to a collection of Anglo-Saxon genealogies similar to the Vespasian collection: not only does he include a similar range of genealogies, but his Latin translations occasionally preserve the -ing suffixes of the Old English patronymics.61 But even more intriguingly, the Historia Brittonum includes a group of British genealogies, most prominently the genealogy of the mythical Brutus himself, placed in the context of a series of eponymic genealogical comments: Tres filii Noe diviserunt orbem in tres partes post diluvium. Sem in Asia, Cham in Africa, Jafeth in Europa dilataverunt terminos suos. Primus homo venit ad Europam de genere Jafeth Alanus cum tribus filiis suis, quorum nomina sunt Hessitio, Armeno, Negue. Hessitio autem habuit filios quattuor: hi sunt Francus, Romanus, Britto, Albanus. Armenon autem habuit quinque filios: Gothus, Valagothus, Gebidus, Burgundus. Negue autem habuit tres filios: Wandalus, Saxo, Boguarus. Ab Hisitione autem ortae sunt quattuor gentes: Franci, Latini, Albani et Britti. (HB 63)62

Significantly, this catalogue of the eponymous ancestors of the various European nations is followed immediately by the genealogy of Alanus, traced through Japheth to his father Noah, and thence on back to Adam himself (HB 63). The tracing of jEthelwulf's genealogy through Noah and back to Adam in the Chronicle, then, has an explicit precedent in the Historia Brittonum, though, as I will note again below, it is not accomplished without its own innovative forms and consequences.

32 Textual Histories The Anglo-Saxon genealogies in this Latin text, then, are given a context by the extensive genealogical lore that stretches even to Adam. By contrast, at least, they fail to extend backwards in time to a very impressive degree. Interestingly, however, as with the family of Alanus, the Anglo-Saxon genealogies collected at the end of the Historia Brittonum are largely presented with the remotest ancestor first.63 In chapter 59, for example, we read, 'Woden genuit Casser, genuit Titinon, genuit Trigil, genuit Rodmunt, genuit Rippan, genuit Guillem Guechan' (HB 77). Such a presentation, of course, is precisely opposite to the presentation of the Vespasian genealogies, where the most remote names appear last. It seems appropriate to identify the form of the Vespasian genealogies as that of 'ancestral' genealogies, which start with the latest descendant and stretch backwards in time towards more remote ancestors. The Historia Brittonum, on the other hand, tends to present the Anglo-Saxon genealogies as 'descentuaF or 'originary' genealogies, in which remote ancestors (usually Woden) begin the lists and are followed by their descendants.64 Yet, since the preservation of several -ing patronymic suffixes indicates that the Historia Brittonum relies on a source similar to Vespasian, we must conclude that the descentual form was used intentionally in the Latin text. Sisam comments on this presentational feature: 'The more natural form of Vespasian B vi makes it easy to add names at the remote end of a pedigree, the more artificial order usual in the Historia is convenient for adding recent names' ('Royal Genealogies' 151). Sisam's characterization of one form of genealogical record as 'natural' and one as 'artificial' seems needlessly prejudicial;65 it seems more useful to me to ask what differences in emphasis or effect arise from the use of the differing forms. Fortunately, the difference in emphasis seems relatively clear: ancestral genealogies tell about the family history of a particular individual; descentual genealogies tell about the origins of a particular family or race. The Historia Brittonum, then, seems to present the Anglo-Saxon genealogies primarily (as with the European eponyms) as a genealogical account of the larger 'Anglo-Saxon family.' The very presentation of the genealogies in this text as descentual emphasizes the unity and coherence of the various Anglo-Saxon tribes, perhaps as a result of the Historia author's own perspective as a Briton. At least in comparison, then, the ancestral genealogies of the Vespasian manuscript and those of the Chronicle and the WSRT have the contrasting effect, emphasizing the descents of the individuals named: the more or less obvious conclusion that the alliterating ancestral genealogies were used to indicate political legitimacy in these contexts seems difficult to avoid. As noted at the beginning of the chapter, the prominence of the West Saxon gene-

The Common Stock Genealogies

33

alogies in the Common Stock thus asserts the depth of the Common Stock's politically motivated interest in Alfred's West Saxon rule: fully half of the Common Stock genealogies are West Saxon, including the last and longest of them, jEthelwulf's 855 genealogy. But more can (and should) be said about the form and effect of the Common Stock genealogies. As noted above, the use of the alliterating genealogical form was not the only choice available to the original chronicler, as the genealogies of the Old English Bede show. Despite the difficulties posed by the problem of transferring, even translating, the metrical, columnar genealogies as presented in the Vespasian manuscript into his texts, the chronicler chose to use this form (if not the layout) in the prose documents of the WSRT and the Chronicle. And at the risk of oversimplifying the Common Stock's record, I believe a careful reading of jEthelwulf's 855 genealogy can indi- cate what motivated the Common Stock chronicler to employ this form so extensively. Kenneth Sisam's well-known essay, 'Anglo-Saxon Royal Genealogies,' of course, includes a lengthy analysis and discussion of the construction of Aithelwulf's genealogy; my observations here are primarily intended to supplement the arguments of Sisam rather than supplant them. Sisam identifies six major stages in the composition of the genealogy: (1) the primarily historical record from ^Ethelwulf to Ingild; (2) the passage from Ine to Cerdic; (3) the Cerdic-to-Wodening material (its alliterative form apparently to be dated later than a shorter, non-alliterative version); (4) Woden-to-Geating; (5) Geatto-Sceaf (again in a short form preserved in yEthelweard and the later longer form seen in the Chronicle); and (6) from Noah to Adam, added at or near the end of the whole process ('Royal Genealogies' 179). However, if my analysis above is correct, we can draw a handful of additional important conclusions. Consider, for example, the two forms of the Geat-to-Sceaf material: in jCthelweard, the sequence is Geat-Tetuua-Beo-Scyld-Scef (Campbell, /Ethelweard 33) while the Chronicle's version adds the names 'HeremodItermon-Hadra-Hwala-Bedwig' after 'Sceldwa' (855B). As my metrical investigation above showed, even the names recorded in ^Ethelweard here imply genealogical forms unparalleled in Vespasian (e.g., 'Geat Taetwaing'); the conclusion that even the yEthelweardian version of this passage is not traditional seems hard to avoid. Instead, the metrical analysis above suggested that the innovative forms were all to be attributed to the chronicler himself, which in turn suggests that the jEthelweardian version of this passage has more of the character of an early draft than of a truly earlier version.66 That is, the chronicler himself appears to be responsible for both versions of the Geatto-Sceaf material, since both versions employ his characteristic metrical

34 Textual Histories forms. The fact that ^Ethelweard leaves out 'Cuba' in a different genealogical passage thus can be understood as suggesting that the name 'Cuba' was another detail that showed up only in the chronicler's later revision.67 The conclusion that jEthelweard's version of the Chronicle preserved an early draft of the chronicler's genealogy of ^thelwulf may well indicate that the other most notable feature of ^Ethelweard's genealogy (its failure to identify Scef as a son of Noah and to extend the genealogy back to Adam) also reflected the state of the earlier draft.68 Even if this cannot be demonstrated, the record of ^Ethelweard's Chronicle (with its underlying exemplar) is invaluable for the glimpse it gives us of a chronicler who continued to revise and update jEthelwulf's genealogy, even within the context of a relatively complete Chronicle. The other passage in which the chronicler's revising hand is most clearly evident is the Cerdic-to-Wodening passage. Here, too, however, even the 'prerevision' forms cited by Sisam exhibit the chronicler's peculiar forms: Cerdic Aluca Giwis Brand Baeldaeg

Alucing Giwising Branding Baeldaeging Wodning (CCCC 183, fo. 67r, quoted from Dumville, 'Anglian Collection' 34)69

The West Saxon genealogy from which this passage comes is appended to a collection otherwise clearly parallel to the Vespasian collection; nevertheless, it includes the problematic form 'Giwis' and the unusual unexpanded D verse 'Brand Baeldaeging,' itself otherwise unrecorded until its appearance in the Chronicle's genealogies in annals 547 and 552. The conclusions of Sisam and Dumville that this passage is traditional would seem to be invalidated by the metrical arguments presented above; this West Saxon genealogical passage, too, must be a production of the Alfredian chronicler, though it, too, was later supplemented by the further revisions that brought it to its classically alliterating form.70 At this point it is worth noting precisely where the shorter versions of these later passages first appear: the short version of the Geat-to-Sceaf material appears in £ithelweard's Chronicle; the short version of the Cerdic-toWodening material appears (in slightly different forms) in both Asser and in CCCC 183. Yet CCCC 183 is almost certainly the book given by jEthelstan to the congregation of Cuthbert, as recorded in the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto (Dumville, 'Anglian Collection' 26). Since ^Ethelweard himself recounts his own descent from ^Ethelwulf, all three of these sources have fairly close ties to

The Common Stock Genealogies

35

the West Saxon dynasty. Sisam seems inclined to conclude that these family sources might preserve authentic family traditions, but it seems just as possible that they stem from early drafts (of either the genealogies or the Chronicle itself) kept in the family rather than distributed (as the final version of the Chronicle seems to have been) for wider, public consumption. The very agreement of the Chronicle manuscripts in these passages suggests that they all stem from a single archetype, one clearly at odds with those versions of the Chronicle used by Asser and ^Ethelweard. To summarize, then, the fact that neither passage (in either short or long form) is preserved anywhere from before Alfred's reign combines with the various non-traditional name forms and genealogical verse forms to suggest that all of the passages' unusual and non-traditional forms are due to the activities of the Alfredian chronicler. Monosyllabic and xS names ('Brand,' 'Geat,' 'Beaw,' 'Giwis') occur frequently enough to call into question these passages' age; the necessary metrical use of non-contraction ('Geat Taetwaing'; 'Beaw Sceldwaing'), likewise a characteristic of the chronicler, seems implied even in ^ithelweard's short version of the first passage in question. Clearly, the Alfredian chronicler was responsible for a remarkable flurry of genealogical activity, including even the East Saxon genealogies of Additional 23,211 and (presumably) the original West Saxon genealogy of Ine appended to the 'Anglian Collection' as copied into CCCC 183.71 Remarkably, the chronicler's use of the unusual form 'Giwis' is accounted for relatively easily: Asser writes of this name 'Geuuis, a quo Britones totam illam gentem Geguuis nominant' (Stevenson 2; 'Geuuis, from whom the Britons name all that people "Geguuis"'). As in both Bede and the Historia Brittonum, Asser here identifies an eponymous ancestor in the course of the genealogy. Such uses of genealogy, it seems, were part and parcel of the historical tradition available to Asser, and thus almost certainly available to the chronicler as well. It seems likely that the use of the form 'Giwis' thus stems from an effort to provide the West Saxons with an eponymous ancestor.72 The chronicler's revision of the Cerdic-to-Wodening passage that includes 'Giwis,' however, provides additional insight into his methods and intentions. This passage, after all, is the very passage so famous for its regular alliteration: the chronicler's use of poetic models for the composition of his genealogical verses here finds its fullest expression, as the verses are carefully arranged to result in A A AX alliteration. We can conclude that the chronicler first wrote this passage to include the West Saxon eponym; the further revision brought it into poetic alliterative regularity. Presumably, the effect was rhetorically motivated. In comparison to the Woden extensions of the Bernician, Deiran, and Mercian genealogies recorded in annals 547, 560, and 626, the West Saxon version of the same span is rhetorically heightened by its poetic

36 Textual Histories form: at the time of the composition of the Chronicle, when these earlier genealogies no longer served a contemporary purpose of political legitimation, they none the less functioned within the Chronicle to allow the West Saxon genealogy to stand out in even greater relief. The poetic rhetoric, of course, has another valence all its own: Cerdic and Cynric are highlighted by the poetic qualities of their own genealogy and are also the heroes of the Common Stock's account of the Saxon invasion. Significantly, however, the very genealogy most remarkable for its absence from the Common Stock is the genealogy of Hengist and Horsa, which is otherwise associated so closely with the invasion (appearing in both Bede and the Historia Brittonuni). Hengist's genealogy, itself seemingly associated with the heroic/poetic tradition by the copyist responsible for the passage 'Finn, filii Fodepald' (HB 67), is excluded; a poetic genealogy is instead supplied for Cerdic and Cynric, identified as West Saxons as early as annal 514. The collocation of poetry, genealogy, and the narrative of the Saxon invasion functions in the Common Stock to link the West Saxon line to the heroic age itself. A similar link, of course, is provided by even the shorter version of the Geat-to-Sceaf material, for the names 'Beaw,' 'Scyld'/'Sceldwea,' and 'Sceaf'/'Scef themselves seem likely to have been familiar from heroic verse.73 The logic is inescapable: the extensive genealogy of ^thelwulf found in the Chronicle insists, with an almost suspiciously anxious zeal, on a heroic West Saxon ancestry, one linked to the heroic age of the Saxon invasion and portrayed (in the Common Stock) as more central in that invasion than even Hengist and Horsa themselves. The connection must surely have had a political force in the Common Stock; Alfred's rule over southern England was surely authorized ideologically by such a heroic ancestry. But it is significant to notice that the chronicler uses poetic rhetoric to accomplish this imaginative connection between the West Saxon royal line and the heroic past: we see both names familiar from heroic verse and poetic verse forms intruding into the traditional genealogical genre. Such a method certainly seems to indicate a West Saxon familiarity with heroic poetry, or else the connection would seem to have little force.74 Finally, the revision of the Geat-to-Sceaf material may allow us one more important observation: as the shorter version of this passage (preserved in jEthelweard) consists of only five generations, the fullest version includes ten generations: the added names ('Heremod,' 'Itermon,' 'Hadra,' 'Hwala,' 'Bedwig') include at least one name from the heroic/poetic tradition ('Heremod') and possibly a second ('Hwala'; cf Widsith 14). The other three are otherwise unknown (cf Sisam, 'Royal Genealogies' 174). Here, the unique names may simply point to a desire to expand the genealogy: the sixteen generations

The Common Stock Genealogies

37

between Woden and Noah may well be intended to correspond to the seventeen (or nineteen) generations seen between Noah and Alanus in the Historia Brittonum's genealogy of Brutus (HB 63). Certainly, the extension of ./Ethelwulf 's genealogy back to Adam may have been inspired by the similar extension of Brutus's genealogy. The innovation of the 'ark-born son' of Noah (cf Hill) may even have originated as a counterpoint to the Historia Brittonum's extensive eponymic tracing of the ancestries of the nations of Europe: the Anglo-Saxons, virtually left out of the Historians catalogue of mythological eponyms, here assert a separate, but equally ancient, ancestry. A reconsideration of the genealogies of the Common Stock, as this chapter has shown, demands a lengthy journey through the records of early English historical writing. At the level of form, the extensive and early genealogical record of the Vespasian manuscript allows us to reconstruct the chief features of the genealogical genre's metrical form, a form that varies in clear and understandable ways from the forms of classical verse. The discovery of genealogical verses that (a) innovate in comparison to Vespasian precisely by the inclusion of forms seemingly derived from poetry and (b) are recorded only in Alfredian or later texts with West Saxon associations suggests that a single Alfredian scholar (whom I have called 'the chronicler') must be responsible for all such innovative forms. Such a conclusion has powerful consequences both for interpreting the textual histories of the various genealogical collections and for understanding the role of the genealogies in the Common Stock. Despite the influence of poetic forms on the Chronicle genealogies, the record of the various Chronicle manuscripts is remarkable for its suggestion that the genealogies continued to be read as a genre that differed from poetry. Scribal pointing practices developed that led to the regular 'metrical' pointing of genealogies, but such pointing was far more regular than the pointing of verse, even in the hands of the very same scribes. Further, such metrical pointing, I argue here, developed as a consequence of a strictly textual process; although the genealogical genre may well have been traditional, 'orality' does not appear to have played a significant role either in the composition of genealogical verses or in their pointing. The significance of this conclusion may well complicate our understanding of the development of pointing in the verse tradition. The chronicler's use of verselike genealogical forms nevertheless provides a powerful opening for interpreting the record of the Common Stock genealogies. Unsurprisingly, the genealogies propagandistically show themselves to support the West Saxon dynasty of Alfred's family; but the use of names and forms derived from the heroic poetic tradition suggests that one of the effects

38

Textual Histories

of the Common Stock is to provide the West Saxon ruling family with a set of heroic ancestors who played a pivotal role in the Saxon invasion. Such a reading helps also to explain the more limited role the Common Stock assigns to Hengist and Horsa. Finally, the chronicler's apparent invocation of an eponymous West Saxon ancestor ('Giwis') and the extension of ^Ethelwulf's genealogy to Adam may well best be explained as resulting from the influence of both Bede and the Historia Brittonum; the Common Stock, by supplementing and responding to these earlier English historical documents, takes its own place within the tradition of historical writing they represent. In the terms of contemporary historiography, the Common Stock of the Chronicle is more properly a 'history' than a 'chronicle'; the Common Stock embodies a clear narrative structure, one designed to culminate, as it in fact does, with the rule of Alfred himself.75 The Common Stock, we can surely say, is Alfred's history of Anglo-Saxon England.

2

Cynewulf and Cyneheard in the Context of the Common Stock

The well-known 'Cynewulf and Cyneheard' narrative contained in the Common Stock's 755 annal has long been subject to two complementary strands of critical response. On the one hand, the narrative is generally read for its political force, as taking some position on the potential for conflict between familybased loyalties and comitatus loyalty. On the other, the narrative's exceptional length (in comparison to other annals of the eighth century), its prose style, and its placement (in 755, rather than 784, where the same events are recorded a second time) have led to its being identified as an interpolation consisting of material from an earlier, perhaps oral, source.1 These critical trends are complementary precisely because the identification of the Cynewulf and Cyneheard narrative as exceptional, even misplaced, within the Chronicle has allowed critics to respond to the story as if it stood separate from the Chronicle. This 'oral' story, the logic would seem to go, 'has plainly been added to an annal which once existed without it' (Whitelock, ASC xxii), and it survives in the Chronicle only by happenstance. As such, apparently, it need not be read in the context of the larger Chronicle as a whole. In this chapter, I will relocate the Cynewulf and Cyneheard story within the Chronicle, first by examining the usefulness of 'orality' as a critical term for such a text, and second by offering an interpretation stemming from manuscript indications of the annal's structure. We might begin a reading of the 755 annal by noting one of its most crucially important features: the presence of the genealogy of Offa, the secondto-last and second longest of the Common Stock's genealogies. Offa's genealogy (like most of those of the Common Stock) appears at the notice of his accession, and the annal includes reference to both his thirty-nine-year reign and the later accession of his son, Ecgferth. We might note that the 'interpolation' of the Cynewulf and Cyneheard material, then, looks forward to a lesser degree than other material within the very same annal. But further, we must

40

Textual Histories

note that the Mercian succession that led to Offa's accession was itself troubled. The Parker version of this portion of annal 755 reads as follows: 7 by ilcan geare mon ofslog ^belbald Miercna cyning on Seccandune, 7 his lie lib on Hreopadune; 7 Beornraed feng to rice 7 lytle hwile heold 7 ungefealice. 7 by ilcan geare Offa feng to rice 7 heold .xxxviii. wintra, 7 his sunu Ecgfer\b/ heold .xli. daga 7 .c. daga. (Bately, MS A, 37-8)2

The death of /Ethelbald, the troubled and brief reign of Beornred, and the ultimate success of Offa might in fact remind us of the events of the Cynewulf and Cyneheard story; at the least, the story of the successful transition of dynastic power at the end of Offa's reign might usefully be compared to that of the troubles caused at the deaths of both jEthelbald and Cynewulf. Further, the fact that the well-known chronological dislocation of the annals in this section of the Chronicle places this narrative exactly one hundred years prior to vEthelwulf's genealogy may imply that we should draw an additional comparison.3 At the very least, the close textual association of the Cynewulf and Cyneheard material with the genealogy of Offa suggests that, within the Common Stock, the Cynewulf and Cyneheard material is usefully contextualized by the complex of relationships linking genealogical lore and West Saxon political legitimation examined in the previous chapter. Yet, in a remarkable number of critical investigations (and even editions) of the Cynewulf and Cyneheard narrative, the genealogy of Offa is often entirely ignored or suppressed.4 As I suggested above, it may well be that such oversights are prompted by the identification of the narrative as being interpolated into the annal from some pre-existing, possibly oral, source. To put it another way, critics seem to have taken the apparently composite nature of the annal as justifying the separate treatment of the component parts rather than as an occasion for asking what brought those parts together in the first place. Especially considering the frequency with which the narrative's style is tied to an oral origin, it is also remarkable how often critics and editors have misrepresented another feature of the 755 annal: its remarkable degree of textual variation from one copy to the next. While most critics take the Parker version of the annal as edited by Plummer for their main text, the student editions of Whitelock and of Mitchell and Robinson also commonly stand as the basis for scholarly interpretations.5 Scholars occasionally note one or two textual variants where it suits their arguments, but these editions are otherwise generally treated as authoritative, and the Parker text as well is granted implicit authority, presumably because of its early date.6 Yet (as I show in more detail below), the Parker version of the annal stands alone (or is supported only by

Cynewulf and Cyneheard

41

the G text, a direct copy) in at least eight separate places, and these three most commonly cited editions fail to note the actual degree of textual variation. Mitchell and Robinson simply print the Parker version (with one emendation; see below), while Whitelock states that 'Variant readings are given in the textual notes when of special interest, or when they could represent the original text, altered by A' (Sweet's 1). Nevertheless, Whitelock prints variants at only thirteen points, while Plummer's edition, printing both the A and E versions, includes variant readings from BCD at only eight points.7 In fact, however, as I will show in this chapter, there are no fewer than ninety points where there is a substantive variation in one or more of the manuscript witnesses to this annal, excluding orthographic variations, which would, of course, push the number even higher (see the Appendix). Considering that recent critical trends have tended to associate manuscript variance with the continuing influence of orality, it seems appropriate to investigate the variation in the 755 annal in just such terms. Such an investigation makes up the first portion of this chapter, although I ultimately argue for an understanding of the transmission of the Cynewulf and Cyneheard story based solely in textual processes. The second half of the chapter investigates a second crucial textual feature, the record of structural marking in the manuscripts, a record that can help us understand the effect of the annal in its Common Stock context more effectively. 2.1 Variation and Innovation in Annal 755: Orality and Literate Practice The 755 annal, including those final portions often excluded from analysis of the Cynewulf and Cyneheard story, is barely longer than 450 words. As noted above, substantive variations appear at no fewer than ninety points. Yet even this number fails to reflect accurately the true extent of the textual variation; nearly one-fourth of these ninety points preserve three or more separate readings, and at four points in the annal, the six manuscripts record five separate readings. The actual number of textual variants thus exceeds 130 (see Table 2.1, below). The sheer quantity of variation is surprising, and the processes that lead to such numbers are well worth investigation. When confronted with such textual variation, medievalists have generally resorted to one of two methodological positions from which a response can be articulated. The more venerable position has been to identify variation as the result of 'scribal corruption.' The portion of Whitelock's comment cited above that concerns variants possibly 'representing] the original text, altered by A' is typical of this 'scribal corruption' perspective. The 'corruption' view imag-

42 Textual Histories ines authorial activity as paramount, and scribal deviations from authorial originals as either mistakes or wilful alterations. Implicitly, this perspective envisages paradigmatic scribal activity as attempting to produce a word-forword copy of an authoritative exemplar. This viewpoint simply brushes aside as irrelevant or inappropriate any scribal or readerly values that may have had a different response to the notion of word-for-word copying. More recently, textual variation has been identified as stemming from variance, the French term adopted primarily from the work of Bernard Cerquiglini. 8 In a 1990 essay that brought Cerquiglini's perspective on variance to a broad audience of American and Anglophone medievalists, Suzanne Fleischman wrote that The editor of a medieval text is typically confronted with manuscript variation. In such a situation, Cerquiglini insists, it cannot be decided - nor is it interesting to ascertain - which variant is closest to the elusive Urtexf (25). Such variance is linked, in most formulations, to an 'oral residue,' a complex of perspectives or habits of language use derived from spoken language and imported into the literary situation. 9 This perspective of variance values scribal and readerly activity in its own right, as evidence of process and performance; authoritative 'Urtexts' are either unavailable or non-existent, and variance itself constitutes the 'life' of 'the text.' Further, Cerquiglini identifies variance as especially vital in the vernacular: 'Variance is the main characteristic of a work in the medieval vernacular ... This variance is so widespread and constitutive that, mixing together all the texts among which philology so painstakingly distinguishes, one could say that every manuscript is a revision, a version' (Cerquiglini 38-9; ellipses mine). In the context of the vernacular Chronicle, faced with the degree of variation between the versions of the 755 annal noted above, we may begin to find the concept of variance an appealing critical notion. The evidence of the Chronicle's 755 annal, however, suggests that we must define a middle position in which scribal activity frequently includes what I will call innovation, the apparently active or intentional alteration of an exemplar's text. Although the variation in the 755 annal's text ranges from clear-cut examples of 'corruption' to complex sets of readings that can usefully be described as cases of variance, the bulk of the textual variations seen here seem to be best understood as examples of innovation, and, insofar as a usus scribendi can be discerned for the Chronicle's scribes, it seems to have sanctioned textual innovation to a surprising degree. The most obvious examples of innovation in the Chronicle's record of annal 755 are those cases where the G record differs from the A manuscript, its immediate exemplar. Although the G manuscript has been largely destroyed (including all portions of the 755 annal), its use by Wheelock in his 1644 edi-

Cynewulf and Cyneheard

43

tion and Nowell's transcript in BL Additional 43,703 allow us to reconstruct its contents with a relatively high degree of confidence, as Lutz has done (Die Version G). Comparison of the G text with A shows that G (as reflected in Nowell's transcript) innovates in eleven places (see Table 2.1 and the Appendix). For example, where A begins Offa's genealogy with 'waes se offa pincferping,' the reconstructed G ('G*') reads 'se waes offa pincferping,' with a transposition of the first two words (45c).'° At least at the level of the G scribe's own activity, we can be certain what the 'original' text read, because G's exemplar survives in manuscript A; while the variant reading of G here might be considered as typical of mouvance or variance, it is also demonstrably an innovation in the text. Unfortunately, because the exemplars do not survive for any of the other Chronicle manuscripts, the identification of examples of innovation quickly becomes more complicated. Considering both the textual history of the Chronicle manuscripts as a group and the evidence of this annal, however, we can nevertheless identify (with a fair degree of confidence) many places where a particular manuscript appears to innovate. The well-recognized affinities of the BC and DE manuscript 'families,' for example, allow us readily to identify certain innovations." Thus, the BC reading, 'pa burh' for ADEG*'s 'bone bur' stands as an innovation in the BC ancestor (lOd); the E reading 'ofslagene waeron' for the simplex 'laegon' (or an orthographic variant) 12 in the rest is an innovation in E (20a).13 While other textual features such as spelling or the use of enlarged letters may sometimes also reflect meaningful textual relationships, they are not included in my account of innovations in annal 755.14 Of course, the concept of innovation cannot account for all of the textual variation seen in this annal. Consider the passage that reads as follows in the various manuscripts: 7 him cy[)don baet [hiera maegas him mid waeron] 7 heom cybde baet 7 him cyadon b~ 7 him cydde baet 7 heom cydde b~ 7 hi- cyddon b~

755A: 28b 755B: 28b 755C: 28b 755D: 28b 755E: 28b 755N: 28b

Here, A, G*, and C share the plural verb, while B, D, and E share the singular. Of the three primary families (AG*, BC, DE), two have one of the readings each, and the third is split; there is no way at all to determine which reading is 'original.' 15 The evidence of innovation is inconclusive, and we might conclude that such variation is in the realm rather of variance.

44

Textual Histories

Yet, as Table 2.1 suggests, such examples of indeterminate innovation are far outnumbered by cases where 'innovation' does seem usefully to describe the variations observed. Further, it is important to note that, to a greater or lesser degree, all of the Chronicle manuscripts exhibit such innovation. Presumably, the forces that led to such innovation continued throughout the period. Obviously, a large amount of data has been compressed into Table 2.1. Nevertheless, by consulting the table, and the texts themselves as they are presented in the Appendix, we can make a few preliminary observations about the habits of the scribes involved and about the nature of the innovations observed. 1 The B text is highly innovative. The B scribe in particular seems concerned to write a smooth, flowing text. As a result, more than half of his innovations involve clausal transitions and connectors: five times he deletes '7' from the transitional phrase '7 pa'; the abbreviation 'b~' is used (perhaps even misused) to replace 'op' (twice), 'oppaet' (three times), 'se' (once), and even 'ser' (once).16 Twice, the B scribe also adds 'p~' for clarification of reference and deletes pronominal subjects ('he') he apparently sees as redundant. As Simon Taylor has noted, 'B displays a degree of sophistication in its use of grammar and syntax at 755 (p. 26/27-30) when it omits ond, thus creating one subordinate and one main clause from two paratactical clauses' (xcii). Taylor also notes other omissions and additions that he sees as stylistic improvements (omissions: Ixxxix-xc; additions: xc-xci). The scribe of B clearly seems to take an active role in attempting to improve the text. 2 The E text is noticeably innovative, but for different reasons. The late E manuscript's version of the 755 annal is the second most innovative; presumably this tendency is, in fact, due to the date of the manuscript. The number of alterations of inflectional endings in E is certainly noteworthy, suggesting perhaps that the concentration of this sort of innovation in manuscript E results from the breakdown of the Old English inflectional system late in the period. Likewise, three of the innovations of E involve the addition or deletion of the ge- prefix, perhaps to bring the E manuscript into line with early-twelfth-century usage. Except for the remarkable number of substitutions made by E, however, E's practice otherwise is hardly distinguishable from the rest. 3 Additions to the text are only slightly less common than deletions. The table shows twenty-one additions and twenty-eight deletions. The difference is perhaps not statistically significant, and the similarity of the numbers seems

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45

TABLE 2.1 Textual innovation in the texts of Annal 755 A(G)

BC

B

G(N)

DE

C

Substitution inflectional endings prefixes other

1 0 1

0 2 3

0 0 9

0 0 4

1 0 4

1 0 3

0 0 1

6 2 6

Deletion '7' ('ond ') probable eyeskip other

0 0 1

1 0 2

5 0 5

0 2 2

0 0 2

0 1 0

0 2 1

1 0 3

2 1

0 3

1 5

0 1

0 3

1 2

0 0

2 0

Rearrangement

2

2

2

2

2

0

0

1

Rewriting

0

1

3

0

0

1

1

2

Totals

8

14

30

11

12

9

5

Addition

ge-

other

23= 112

In addition, there are nine places where innovation is indeterminate: 755: 8b (4 readings) 755: 18a (3 readings) 755: 21 a (3 readings) 755: 24a (5 readings) 755: 26a (4 readings) 755: 28b (2 readings) 755: 33a (5 readings) 755: 34b (2 readings) 755: 44c (3 readings) Assuming that one reading in each such group is 'original' (i.e., that if a passage preserves four different readings, then at least three must be due to innovations), we are still left with at least twenty-two additional innovations. Note: Manuscripts and families are placed in roughly chronological order; the DE family is placed before C simply out of the likelihood that the DE ancestor originated more than a dozen years before the initial copying of D; Plummer would place the Northern Recension soon after the Common Stock (see comments on the Northern Recension in chapter 3). At the least, the well-recognized divergence of D and E after annal 1031 suggests that the DE ancestor does most likely predate C, which was apparently copied at one time up to 1044 or so.

46

Textual Histories

to suggest that we cannot assume that either type of innovation is inherently more 'natural' than the other. 4 The D text has relatively few innovations. With only five innovations, D is noticeably conservative. It is striking, moreover, that two of D's five innovations are apparently eyeskip errors. A third innovation, the example of rewriting, is clearly anomalous, as D includes the verb 'waes' twice within a single clause, perhaps through a sort of dittography. Thus three of manuscript D's innovations might reasonably be described as 'scribal errors.' 5 Lexical rearrangement seems more common early than late. This may suggest that (possibly in conjunction with the weakening inflectional system) word order was becoming more rigid. On the other hand, late manuscripts do not generally seem to alter word order to suit more recent practice; instead it appears that scribes may simply have felt freer to alter word order in the earlier texts. This might suggest that a standard of exact word-for-word copying began developing during the period (cf D's general conservatism). Beyond these observations, however, the most striking features of the textual variations in the 755 annal are the relatively small numbers of variations that fit most clearly into either the 'corruption' paradigm or the variance paradigm. Of all the textual variants noted here, there are only one probable case of dittography and five probable examples of eyeskip. But even some of the cases of eyeskip are less clear than we might wish; consider the following passage from 755 A and the corresponding passage from 755G*: 7 pa on paes wifes gebaerum onfundon paes cyninges pegnas pa unstilnesse 7 pa pider urnon swa hwelc swa ponne gearo wearp 7 radost 7 hiera se aepeling gehwelcum feoh 7 feorh gebead 7 hiera naenig hit gepicgean nolde:- (755A: 15-19)17 7 pa on paes wifes gebaeru- onfundan. paes cyninges pegnas pa unstylnesse 7 pa pider urnon swa hwelc swa ponne gearo waes 7 radost 7 hiora naenig hit gepingian nolde. (755N: 15-19)18

Lutz, in her edition of G*, reinserts the missing passage into the annal, although she acknowledges that the G* text would work fine without it ('gebingian, ganz ahnlich geschrieben wie gepicgean, passte deshalb rechte gut in den Kontext von G' Die Version G, 158-9). Nevertheless, in context, this passage should almost certainly be seen as a case of variance: the combination of missing material and lexical substitution here serves to provide an entirely new version of the material, and neither 'innovation' can be definitely identified as the 'original' first variant that caused the second.19 An equally intriguing example of innovation occurs in the same passage in

Cynewulf and Cyneheard

47

manuscript B, where the first clause has been rewritten. In B, we read 'pa onfundan \p~/ paes kinges geferan on paes wifes unstilnesse' (755B: 15c; Then, by the woman's unstillness, the king's companions discovered that'). Here, the very words of the clause are radically reorganized; 'unstilnesse,' for example, now refers to the woman's cries, rather than the clash of the battle. Yet B's text is still coherent. I am inclined to agree with Taylor's assessment of this passage: 'B's version is too different from the others, and too coherent in itself, to be due entirely to careless copying. It is possible that B's version did in fact begin life as a copying error which the scribe corrected almost immediately. He then made an intelligent and successful attempt at rectifying without having to erase' (MS B Iv-lvi). Indeed, it appears likely that the B scribe may have (eye)skipped from an exemplar's 'on paes wifes gebaerum' to 'onfundan,' written the phrase 'onfundan paes kinges geferan,' and then realized his trouble (presumably as his gaze returned to the exemplar). The interlinear insertion of the abbreviation 'b~' (as Taylor notes [Ivi]) and the following text certainly hint that this sort of process may have lain behind the genesis of B's text here. Taylor suggests that the B scribe may have been trying to avoid the necessity of erasure. But surely this interpretation is not necessary; as the most innovative of the Chronicle scribes in this annal, the B scribe clearly demonstrates a willingness (even a wish) to alter and improve the text before him. This particular innovation may indeed have stemmed from a brief eyeskip, but his solution to the difficulties caused by this momentary slip merely confirms that his primary goal was the production of a smooth and readable text, rather than the production of a text identical to its exemplar. These are not the only places in the 755 annal where one innovation on the part of a particular scribe has subsequently led to another innovation. Indeed, this process of linked innovations seems to be more prevalent than the alternative, which would be to go backwards and 'fix' the problem caused by the earlier innovation as soon as it became clear that an innovation had altered the structure or syntax of the passage.20 In all of the manuscripts (except perhaps the relatively conservative manuscript D), it seems clear that scribes felt quite comfortable about altering their texts. Yet, even so, such cases are certainly no more frequent than the cases where innovation is clearly and easily determinable. Quite the opposite is the case, in fact: simple 'innovations' far outnumber examples of both 'corruption' and 'variance.' Most frequently, in fact, cases which might well be identified as typical of variance seem to stem (as the just-cited examples suggest) from multiple or linked innovations. Perhaps simply because of the survival of so many closely related texts of annal 755, we find it necessary to adopt the notion of innovation as a middle ground between those of corruption and variance.

48

Textual Histories

As far as the evidence from annal 755 suggests, then, scribes of the Chronicle were free to engage in innovation, altering the text, usually in small ways, but occasionally going so far as to rewrite entire clauses. Two consequences immediately come to mind. First, it is clear that these scribes were generally paying attention to the syntax and meaning of the texts they copied, so that, where their activities might point towards interpretation, modern scholars ought to take their responses seriously. Second, if variance has been conventionally linked to the influence of orality, the question of the relationship between innovation and orality still needs to be defined. I will take up the first issue in the second portion of this chapter and turn to the question of orality here. As outlined above, recent critical trends in medieval studies in general have tended to suggest that features of medieval textuality that come under the rubrics of variance or mouvance can be ascribed to the continuing influence of 'oral' thought processes in a literate context. Orality, as it is commonly understood, does not accommodate itself well to the idea of a 'fixed' text, and so texts that fail to remain fixed are commonly characterized as showing evidence of oral ways of thinking or of some other oral 'residue' lingering within a literate culture. The most powerful expression of this tendency in AngloSaxon studies is surely Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe's influential book Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse. In this work, O'Brien O'Keeffe argues powerfully for a continuing performance of Anglo-Saxon poetic scribes as participants in an 'oral-formulaic' compositional/transmissional process. Yet while O'Brien O'Keeffe's argument is carefully conducted (and her attention to the ways in which mechanisms of orality might influence written texts is exemplary) the version of orality she employs is specifically linked to the oral-formulaic tradition and has no obvious relevance for a prose text such as the Cynewulf and Cyneheard narrative. The Cynewulf and Cyneheard material is nevertheless frequently interpreted as having originated in an oral context or having been influenced by one. Studies that link the Cynewulf and Cyneheard story to a hypothetical Anglo-Saxon saga tradition (Wrenn, McTurk) seem implicitly to invoke a sort of oral tradition besides the poetic one, a tradition of saga-like prose storytelling, although the evidence for such a tradition in Anglo-Saxon England is disturbingly thin. 21 Nevertheless, for most scholars, the assertion that orality of some sort lies somewhere in the 'textual' history of the Cynewulf and Cyneheard story seems to have reached the status of a critical commonplace.22 Considering the prevalence of this viewpoint, the suggestion that innovation in the 755 annal is linked to the annal's 'oral' origins might seem to be a straightforward conclusion.

Cynewulf and Cyneheard

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Yet the textual innovations in annal 755 continue to occur in sections of the annal that are not part of the Cynewulf and Cyneheard material proper but belong rather to the more conventional 'annalistic' portions of the entry. Such an observation would seem to be a serious problem for any causal link between innovation and the 'saga' tradition, since the 'annalistic' portions of the annal would seem to have no saga-like origins at all. If orality plays any role, then, it must be related not to the form of the material but to the practice of the scribes, in the form of an 'oral residue.' Yet the scribal practice of innovation, I believe, may have nothing to do with orality at all, unless we choose to define every difference between our textuality and that of the Anglo-Saxons as derived from orality: such a position, of course, exposes what O'Brien O'Keeffe has called a 'literate ideology' in which 'the unspoken assumption that literacy is a unitary phenomenon whose shape is defined by the modern conditions of literacy' prevails ('Texts and Works' 58; emphasis in original). Such a 'literate ideology' simply explains textual difference as stemming from no literate or textual process at all, but rather from 'orality,' which, in turn, is usually vaguely or obscurely defined, if at all. What is clear is that innovation occurs; to suggest that innovation occurs in this literate tradition because of the influence of orality explains only by stepping outside the institution of literacy. In fact, I think the degree of innovation seen in annal 755 can be accounted for through a better understanding of purely literate and textual processes. As a point of comparison, it is instructive to turn to one of the longer ninthcentury annals, such as the 871 entry recording Alfred's accession to the West Saxon throne. Here, too, careful comparison of the various manuscript texts reveals a great deal of innovation, as the following numbers show: Innovation in A Innovation in BC Innovation in B Innovation in G* Innovation in DE Innovation in C Innovation in D Innovation in E Indeterminate innovativeness

10 3 12 0 1 3 4 7 1 (3 readings in 4 manuscripts).

Interestingly, however, there is only one passage in the 871 annal where we have what we might call variance, where it is procedurally impossible to determine where the innovation lies. Likewise, the total number of innova-

50

Textual Histories

tions in the 871 annal is significantly smaller than in the 755 annal. Here we find barely forty innovations in about 380 words of text (about one for every nine and a half words) as opposed to more than 130 innovations in just over 450 words of text in the 755 annal (about one for every three and a half words). The evidence from the 871 annal (if we can take it as fairly typical) indicates that scribal innovation is the norm (rather than the exception) in the annalistic annals as well as in the Cynewulf and Cyneheard passage, although it is equally clear that the degree of innovation in the 755 annal is far greater than that in the 871 annal. Again, we might be tempted to say that it is the genre of the writing that prompts the difference in scribal treatment: that the Cynewulf and Cyneheard passage's 'oral roots' lead to the greater freedom on the part of the scribes to alter the text. However, this response, too, I believe, is untenable. In fact, a better explanation can be found. A brief glance at the 871 annal will show that, despite the historical importance of the events narrated, the annal is fairly typical of the longer late-ninthcentury annals. It is replete with repeated phrases and formulaic expressions.23 Consider the following formulaic phrases from the 871 annal: 7 paes ymb X niht 7 paes ymb X monab/monbas

4 occurrences 2 occurrences

On four occasions, one of these two formulas is linked to the following phrase: gefeaht N wib (alne) pone here

4 occurrences

and we can also see the following formulas: pa deniscan ahton waelstowe gewald ba deniscan sige namon aebered cyning 7 aelfred his brobur paer wses micel wael geslegen on gehwaepre hond paer wearb micel waelsliht on g~hwaebere hond 7 N wearb ofslaegen 7 baer wearb N ofslaegen 7 baer wearS feala busenda ofslegen

3 occurrences 1 occurrence 4 occurrences 1 occurrence 1 occurrence 1 occurrence 2 occurrences 1 occurrence (ms B)

These formulaic expressions alone account for more than 120 words of the 871 annal; almost a full third of the annal consists of only these phrases. And

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significantly, almost all of these formulas have fairly close parallels in other ninth-century annals.24 It certainly appears as if these formulas are part of the normal, perhaps even conventional, phraseology of the ninth-century annals.25 The degree to which these phrases are formulaic in the sense that they are somehow 'frozen' expressions can be confirmed by two very different examples from 87IB. In the first, the B scribe (who we concluded from the evidence of the 755B annal was greatly interested in producing a smooth-reading text) seems consciously to avoid some of the repetitiveness caused by the dense use of formulas in the text. Of the four places where the other manuscripts read 'aebered cyning and aelfred his brobur' (871 A), the B scribe preserves this reading twice, and twice alters it to 'aepered king 7 his bro5or aelfred' (87 IB), shifting the word order in an apparent attempt to vary the otherwise mechanically repetitive phrasing. Yet the B scribe himself is not immune to thinking (consciously or unconsciously) in formulas: at a different point in 871, he alters the relatively long clause that appears in the A manuscript as '7 baer wearb sidroc eorl ofslaegen se alda 7 sidroc \eorl/ se gioncga 7 osbearn eorl 7 fraena eorl 7 hareld eorl 7 ba hergas begen g~fliemde 7 fela pusenda ofslaegenra' (871 A; 'And there were slain Jarl Sidroc the old, and Jarl Sidroc the young, and Jarl Osbearn, and Jarl Fraena, and Jarl Hareld, and the armies both put to flight and many thousands of slain'). B makes this long clause into two clauses by altering the final portions: '7 hie pa hergas begen geflymdon. 7 baer wearsr wes \>tzt brydeala

mannum to beala. (manuscript E)21

Both seem to be clearly intended both to rhyme and to alliterate (though we must allow fourth-stress alliteration; see section 4.2, below). Determining which version is closer to the presumed original, however, is probably impossible. Both versions appear to have features that make them attractive: the E version has a b-line of a quite familiar metrical form, while the D version appears to feature an extra, ornamental alliteration on m in the b-line. Certainly, without a far better understanding of the possibilities offered by the late verse form featured in the Chronicle poems, choosing between these readings is a pointless task. The passages found at the ends of these annals offer equally intriguing possibilities. In the D manuscript, we read the following: sume hi wurdon geblende. and sume wrecen of lande. and sume getawod to scande. |)us wurdon f>as kyninges swican genyflerade.22

The Chronicle Poems

85

The E manuscript's version, on the other hand, is much different: sume hy wurdon ablaende and sume of lande adrifene. swa wurdon Wille/mes swican genidrade.23

Once again we are faced with separate readings, both of which have a certain poetic effectiveness. The D manuscript's version of this passage has the more effective rhyme by far, extending across three consecutive half-lines, though there is no apparent rhyme or alliteration in the final line (it may, however, be just possible that assonance between the root syllables in 'kyninges' and 'genyderade' is intended to function as a poetic linking device). In the E version, on the other hand, no rhyme appears to be present, resulting in an apparently greater reliance on alliteration: now 'sume' in the first of these two lines seems to alliterate (non-classically), and we either have sw- alliteration in the second line, or more probably AAXX alliteration (on w). An attempt to reconstruct an 'original' reading from these passages is almost certainly doomed. On the one hand, the D version's use (and pointing) of rhymes clearly suggests that the scribe of this portion of the D manuscript read this as a poem; on the other, it seems equally possible that the E text's apparent preference for alliteration here represents a poetic rewriting that privileged alliteration.24 The evidence of other poetic passages is frequently intriguing, though often far from being as clear-cut as we might like. In the Wulfstanian passage entered under annal 959, for example, we might note that the D and E records of this long poem are in remarkable agreement. There are a handful of orthographic variants present between the two texts but only one substantive innovation (according to the definition used in chapter 2): manuscript E reads 'gode daeda' for D's 'goddsda.' Further, the two records agree in capitalizing the initial letters of the same five words in this passage. Such agreement is not unheard of in prose texts (D and E also agreed on the placement of litterae notabiliores in the 755 annal, for example), but the co-occurrence of such agreement in capitals alongside the relative stability of the text certainly seems to suggest a scribal effort of conservatism here. The 959 poem is more than one-third the length of the 755 annal, but the one innovation separating the D and E texts here cannot approach the twenty-three innovations observed in 755E. To be sure, the 959 poem and the 755 annal do not have the same textual origins, and this fact might account for some of the disparity, but it is difficult to deny that the text of the 959 poem was highly stable. In such a case, it seems quite likely that scribal recognition of its poetic nature contributed to this poem's textual stability as a result of the greater constraints operating during the copying of poetic texts.25

86

Textual Histories

Though the 979 poem is also contained in both the D and E manuscripts, the same degree of textual stability is certainly not present. Indeed, this poem is significantly shorter than that in 959, yet there are at least four textual innovations (again, not counting simple orthographic variants). One of these (in the E text) certainly seems to interfere with the metre: where the D manuscript includes what has been read as a half-line 'eordlic cyning,' the E version has only 'eordlic cing,' which is clearly metrically inferior, having only three syllables.26 Also unlike the 959 poem, the D and E versions of the 979 passage do not agree on their use of prominent letters.27 Where the stability of the 959 poem seems to have marked a recognition of its poetic nature, the 979 passage did not get the same treatment in the D and E manuscripts. Instead, this passage's rhetorically balanced antitheses may well have been perceived merely as heightened prose, in one or both manuscripts.28 The treatment of the poetic passages in 959 and 979 by the scribe/compiler of the F manuscript is very much worth considering at this point as well. Both passages are much reduced in F's shortened Chronicle, but in quite fascinating ways. Indeed, the F scribe's treatment of verse in general is worth noting: for example, the differing 975 poems that were present in the F scribe's exemplars (the E archetype and the A manuscript) are both replaced in F by a simple prose statement ('Her Eadgar cing forpferde. 7 Eadward his sunu feng to rice.' 'Here King Edgar died and Edward his son seized power'). In 958F and 979F, however, we see another type of reduction entirely. At the top of folio 58v, for example, manuscript F reads as follows: On his dagu- hit godode georne. 7 god hi- geude p~ he wunode on sibbe |?a hwile da he leouode. butan gefeohte eal he gewylde p~ he sylf wolde. 7 he dyde swa hipea\r/f was. he wurdode godes naman georne. 7 godes laga smeade oft 7 gelome. 7 godes lof raerde wide 7 side. 7 wislice raedde eal\r/e his peode for god 7 for worulde.

We might arrange this in verse as follows (more or less as Thorpe does in his edition): On his dagum hit godode georne. and god him geude fycet he wunode on sibbe pa hwile 5a he leouode. butan gefeohte eal he gewylde \>cet he sylf wolde. and he dyde swa him bea\r/f was. he wurSode godes naman georne. and godes laga smeade oft and gelome. and godes lof raerde

5

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87

wide and side, and wislice raedde eal\r/e his beode for god and for worulde.

Such an arrangement is, in fact, quite effective, giving possible assonance or off rhymes in lines 3, 4, and possibly 9; alliteration in 4, 6, 7, and 8; and alliterative linking of lines in 1-2, 2-3, and 6-7.29 In addition, although the F scribe conventionally uses a point before the abbreviation for 'and' (here at Ib, 4b, 6a, 7a, and 8a), he avoids doing so in this passage when the abbreviation appears within half-lines (7a, 8a, 9b). When we compare this version of the passage to the DE version, we notice that this poem's lines 3b-4b appear much later in the DE version and are here placed between sections of the poem that are, in the DE version, contiguous.30 Likewise, the half-lines in this version's line 9 are reversed when compared to their order in the DE text. Clearly, the activities of the F scribe here encompass more than simple reduction; this is rewriting. Such rewriting, with its apparent attention to metrical structure (evidenced by both the final form of the rearranged passage and the avoidance of non-metrical points) certainly seems to suggest that the scribe of manuscript F both recognized this passage (as it appeared in the E ancestor) as poetic and produced a new version of it that also must be considered to be poetic. The additional fact that the capital O that began the 958F poem at the top of folio 58v is set partially in the margin has consequences also for our reading of the reduced passage in 979F. The capital ;V that begins the reduced version of the 979DE poem is also set into the margin, here even farther to the left than the annal number, two lines above. Like the passage in 958F, the 979F passage is also greatly shortened in comparison to the 979DE text, though oddly. Where the D and E passages rely upon balanced antitheses, the F scribe here cuts away one-half of one such antithetical pairing and fuses it to the following pair. In the passage in question, E reads as follows: ba eordlican banan woldon his gemynd on erdan adilgian. Ac se uplica wrecend hafad his gemynd on heofenum ond on eordan tobrsd ba be nolden eoda. ID- aferan Eadmund[es] ofer ganetes bad cyninges hine wide wurdodon side. bugon to cyninge swa waes him gecynde. Naes se flota swa rang, ne se here swa strang. \)~ on Angelcynne aes him gefetede. f)a hwile {?e se aepela cyning cynestol gerehte.

5

(Plummer I, 119-21; relineated)40

Without even considering questions of scansion, we find that classical alliteration seems to fail completely in lines 2, 3, 4, and 7 and alliterative patterns are (at best) unusual in lines 5, 6, and 9.41 Rhyme appears to supplement or replace alliteration in 5 and 7, a phenomenon also seen in Maldon, but not to this extent. Unusual anacrusis seems to be featured in 2b, 4a, and 8a. Only line 1 would be acceptable in 'classical' verse, and the exclusion of this poem (and others like it) from the classical tradition seems, for the reasons described here, to be completely justified. Yet a closer look is in order. A line like '7 Myrcene mundbora,' we might recall, seems to have an explicit precedent in the genealogical verses discussed in chapter 1, where 'ond' also seems to have been used anacrustically before forms corresponding to expanded D verses.42 And, indeed, I believe that the verse forms present in the 975DE poem can be seen as evolutionary developments from classical norms.43 Two primary changes appear to have taken place: first, the metrical subordination rules that characterized classical verse appear no longer to be in effect, and second, resolution is no longer effective. I will discuss these two developments in order, using the 975DE poem as a touchstone text. Metrical subordination is the conceptual notion that Geoffrey Russom uses to explain the alliterative patterns of Beowulf, and his explanation is a power-

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ful one.44 In it, each line is paradigmatically conceptualized as being divided into four units or 'feet' (two in each half-line) with rightward elements generally subordinated to leftward elements. Thus a line of Old English verse with two A-type half-lines can be schematized as: a-line (strong)

b-line (weak)

strong node weak node

strong node

weak node

Sx

Sx

Sx45

Sx

Russom's concept of the workings of positional subordination defines alliteration as being mandatory on the strongest S position of each verse, with alliteration optional on singly subordinated S positions and excluded from doubly subordinated positions. Certain well-known features of classical verse are a natural consequence of such subordination in Russom's system, especially single and double alliteration patterns in the a-line and restrictions on alliteration in the b-line. Specifically, Russom's formalism allows single or double alliteration in the a-line and alliteration only in the first foot of the b-line. The 'breakdown' of metrical subordination that I hypothesize here, however, would seem to have equally identifiable consequences. First, b-lines would no longer be subordinated to a-lines in the same way: alliteration, for example, would not necessarily be excluded from a second S position in the bline. Further, positions of individual feet could no longer be identified as 'strong' or 'weak.' To put it another way, if I am right that metrical subordination 'broke down,' we would expect the alliterative requirements operative in classical verse to have been reinterpreted. Presumably, at least two alliterating stresses would still be required, but their positions might no longer be ordered by subordination rules. The XAAY alliteration pattern seen in lines 5 and 9 can thus easily be seen as resulting from the breakdown of subordination. Likewise, the AAXX (line 4) and AABB (line 2) patterns in this poem seem equally explainable, the latter as an example of supplementary alliteration analogous to 'cross alliteration' in classical verse.46 Presumably, the use of a light A3 verse in 6b is also allowed here, as the classical exclusion of such verses in b-lines seems tied to the rules of subordination.47 The appearance of rhyme as a poetic device linking half-lines may also result (in a somewhat roundabout fashion) from the loss of metrical subordination. If loss of subordination sanctions AAXX lines (as I suggested above), rhyme can be understood as a device that reasserts the linkage between half-

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lines in the absence of linking alliteration. Rhyme had been a secondary poetic effect in classical verse, but here it seems to have been promoted to the status of a primary effect (e.g., in line 7). Line 5 indicates that linking alliteration and linking rhyme are, nevertheless, both allowed in a single line. Since all theories of Old English metre have taken as a given that alliteration must link half-lines, poetic features such as linking rhyme and AAXX alliteration have generally been understood as being excluded from the Old English metrical system. But if Russom is right that classical alliteration patterns result from a principle of subordination operating on Old English verses and feet, then a poem such as the 975DE poem can be seen as largely metrical - with the understanding that it represents a stage of metrical development where metrical subordination has ceased to be observed. Given that Old English was undergoing more or less continual linguistic change, we should anticipate that the metrical system would likewise undergo change. Considering the structures seen in the 975DE poem as resulting from the breakdown of metrical subordination provides an extremely powerful perspective: where a classical analysis of alliterative patterns could identify only one line of this poem as metrical, the 'post-subordination' perspective I employ here leaves unaccounted for only the alliterative/rhyme pattern of line 3. The loss of metrical subordination thus seems to be an easily identifiable change that can account for the alliterative/rhyme patterns seen in the 975DE poem. If loss of subordination can account for the alliterative and rhyme patterns of such verse, the scansion of individual lines in this poem nevertheless remains largely intractable from a Sieversian perspective. Yet I believe a consideration of resolution (and its loss) can help account for most of the verse patterns we see here. The breakdown of resolution as a productive poetic process, however, is much harder both to identify and to explain than the loss of metrical subordination, although it is likely that the loss of resolution is also linked to linguistic changes. To begin looking at the issue of resolution, it is useful to compare the following two half-lines and their scansions, according to Russom's formalism: 8a: b~ on Angelcynne

(xx)Sx/Sx

9a: ba hwile be se aebela cyning

(xxxx)x/Sxs

In 9a, the scansion depends upon occurrence of resolution in both 'lifts' (the S and s positions), and the metrical pattern is a regular one for even classical verse (although the number of initial unstressed syllables makes the type somewhat unusual). In 8a, on the other hand, the apparent anacrusis is of a

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form unusual, at best, in classical verse. The occurrence of non-classical anacrusis, of course, is a well-recognized feature of 'late' Old English verse, and I believe it is connected to the loss of resolution. If we imagine resolution as no longer productive, for example, then 8a and 9a must be scanned as follows: 8a: b~ on Angelcynne

(xx)Sx/Sx

9a: ba hwile be se aebela cyning

(xxxxx)Sxx/Sx 48

Nothing seems to change in the scansion of 8a, but this scansion makes 9a look like an A verse with a very long series of syllables in anacrusis, and the two verses suddenly seem to have quite similar structures. At this point, it is crucial to notice that the first two words of 8a, 'paet on,' unusual as they might be in anacrusis, would be perfectly acceptable as the initial unstressed elements in a classical C verse. I might point to Beowulf 274a: 'pact mid Scyldingum' as a parallel example of a classical C verse with the form facet + preposition + tribal name. If we start from an understanding of such classical C verses, we see scansions such as the following: Beeowulf214i\: bast mid Scyldingum

xx/Ssx

Widsith 63h: ond mid Heaboreamum

xx/Ssx

In the verse from Widsith, resolution applies to 'Heapo-' and Russom's scansions (like the Sievers scansions of these verses) are otherwise identical. If we imagine resolution as no longer applying, however, and again replace the resolved 'S' with 'Sx,' we would get a scansion such as the following: Widsith 63b: ond mid Heaboreannum

xx/Sxsx

This discussion of these classical C verses seeks to suggest, of course, that line 8a from the 975DE poem is not 'an A-verse with non-classical anacrusis' at all, but rather a C verse modelled more or less directly along the lines of these verses from Widsith and Beowulf, but at a point in time when resolution was no longer poetically functional. The key to understanding the verse is to realize that, if resolution fails to persist in Old English verse, long syllables become acceptable in positions where only short syllables were allowed in classical verse. While 'Heaboreamum' and 'Angelcynne' are not equivalent in

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classical verse because their first syllables differ in length, they do appear to be rhythmically equivalent if resolution no longer applies. Although the dating of this shift in Anglo-Saxon poetics is very difficult to trace, the non-classical anacrusis seen in 2b, 4a, and 8a may well have been initially motivated by perceived parallelism between such 'unresolved' C verses and the otherwise similar A verses: because of the resulting overlap of patterns, the breakdown of resolution would have had the natural consequence of loosening restrictions on what kinds of syllables could be used in • 49 anacrusis. To the degree that these changes in classical metrics (loss of metrical subordination and loss of resolution) are losses, I suppose Mclntosh's term for the metre of this poem, 'debased verse,' might seem justified. But it seems more evenhanded simply to treat these changes as poetic shifts: the new metrical possibilities opened up by these changes altered the form of Old English poetry, but the scribal recognition of this passage as verse seems indisputable, and (as I hope to have shown) the metre of this poem is almost entirely explicable, despite its difference from the classical forms. A brief look at the metrical forms of some of the other Chronicle poems is valuable as well. For example, lines from the 1036 poem, The Death of Alfred, confirm the observations made regarding the 975DE poem. Although this poem uses rhyme to a greater extent than it uses alliteration, alliteration still has a poetic usefulness in it, and certain metrical observations can still be made. First, the restriction against alliteration in the final lift of a line is clearly no longer in effect: 23: ful wurSlice

swa he wyrSe waes

x/Ssx

xx/Sxs50

Anacrusis is used extensively, and in ways excluded or uncommon in classical verse: 6a: Ac Godwine hine ba gelette

(x)Ssx/(xxxx)Sx

8b: sume hreowlice acwealde

(xx)Sxx/(x)Sx

25b: seo saul is mid Criste

(x)Sx/(x)Sx

24a: aet bam sudportice

(xx)S/Sxx

But further, changes in rules of metrical subordination seem to have resulted in a more radical shift involving at least one verse that appears to have three lifts:

The Chronicle Poems 16a: Se adding lyfode ba gyt

97

(x)Sxx/Sxxxs

If we imagine the finite verb as completely unstressed, we might suppose we have a hyperexpanded B verse, but it seems more likely that this verse is patterned on a classically acceptable expanded D verse with (unusual) anacrusis ([x]Sx/Sxxs). The (off) rhyme linking 16a and 16b certainly seems to suggest that the final syllable receives noticeable stress, and such verses may well have three full stresses. The rules of metrical subordination (which say that a verse may have three stresses if one is subordinated) may give way here to a verse that has three full stresses, and henceforth I will generally scan such three-stress verses with three S positions.51 Wulfstan's early-eleventh-century contribution on the expulsion of monks (in annal 975D) is also largely amenable to the sort of analysis I am proposing here. In full, this poem reads as follows: On his dagum for his iugode Codes wibsrsacan Codes lage braecon. /Elfere ealdorman. 7 obre manega. 7 munucregol myrdon. 7 mynstra tostaencton. 7 munecas todraefdon. 7 Codes beowas fesedon. be Eadgar kyning het aer bone halgan biscop Apaelwo[l]d gesta[de]lian. 7 wydewan bestryptan oft. 7 gelome. 7 fela unrihta. 7 yfelra unlaga. arysan up siQdan. 7 aa aefter bam hit yfelode swide.

(Plummer I, 121; relineated)52

Eight of the ten lines appear to be linked by alliteration, although frequently not in classical modes. Inflectional rhyme (which also appears in the 1086E poem; see above) links halves of two lines, while a more impressive sort of rhyme applies in line 2. Only line 1 shows no evidence of linkage between half-lines. The passage is, it must be admitted, replete with the 'five-position' verses that Cable argued were characteristic of prose (on the basis of identifying the Wulfstanian passage in 959DE as prose; see Meter and Melody, chapter 3). But, again, it seems probable that the appearance of such five-position verses may stem from the loss of functional resolution (see note 49, above). Indeed, the alliterative irregularities of a line such as 6 are counterbalanced by the powerful poetic effect of lines such as 2, 3, and 7.53 Each of these lines, in fact, deserves careful attention. Again using my modifications to Russom's formalism, we might scan these three Wulfstanian lines as follows:

98

Textual Histories 2: Codes wi^sersacan

Codes lage braecon.

Sx/Sxsx

Sx/Sx/Sx

3:/Elfere ealdorman.

7 obre manega.

Ssx/Sxs

(x)Sx/Sxx

7: Abaelwo[l]d gesta[5e]lian.

7 wydewan bestryptan

Sxs/(x)Sxx

(x)Sxx/(x)Sx

In line 2, we see the use of a three-position verse, but the a- and b-lines are linked by both initial alliteration and half-line rhyme. In line 3, we seem to have an example of cross alliteration, where the vocalic alliteration is supplemented by a secondary alliteration on '-man' and 'manega.' Likewise in line 7, the second element of /Ethelwold's name provides the alliterating syllable, while the st- cluster causes the second components of the two half-lines to alliterate with one another.54 This complex and effective alliteration is probably sufficient to confirm that the seemingly anomalous alliteration of 'het' and 'halgan' in line 6 is probably functional despite its non-classical effect. Such use of both primary and secondary poetic effects as are seen in lines 2, 3, and 7 surely suggests that this entire passage was intended to be received as poetry rather than 'rhythmical prose,' as Wulfstan's characteristic compositions are regularly styled.55 Finally, it is worthwhile to look at a portion of the post-Conquest poem on William the Conqueror, from annal 1086E. While some portions of this poem are less metrically regular than others (especially if one follows Plummer's lineation), others fit well within the scheme outlined here: Det he nara be wihte. 7 mid mycelan unrihte of his landleode, for litte[l]re neode. he was on gitsunge befeallan. 7 graedinesse he lufode mid ealle. he saette mycel deorfrid. 7 he laegde laga paer wid. (Plummer I, 221; relineated)56

Though half-line rhyme is the primary poetic structural feature here, alliteration still plays a powerful (albeit secondary) role, linking some half-lines together (e.g., the second and third lines quoted), but also sometimes appearing as double alliteration in a single half-line (as in 'of his landleode' or in the last-quoted half-line).57 As these lines also show, the 1086E poem uses nonclassical anacrusis and appears to use verses with three 'feet,' or at least with three relatively powerful stresses. Both, of course, are features also observed in the previously examined poems. Although my examination of the metrical form of these non-canonical Chronicle poems cannot pretend to completeness, I hope I have shown that a great deal of their metrical form may be understandable as developing from

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the classical forms through an evolutionary process. A more or less simultaneous breakdown of metrical subordination and metrical resolution would lead to many (if not all) of the innovative metrical features seen in the Chronicle verse: relaxed restrictions on alliterative patterns; non-classical anacrusis; increased prevalence of 'five-position verses' and verses with three stresses; and increased reliance on rhyme. Rather than identifying these passages as 'debased verse' (Mclntosh) or 'rhythmical prose,' we ought to understand and describe them as their authors and scribes saw them: as verse. Metricists have tended to despair of accounting for the form of the lines seen in the late Chronicle verse. Yet the realization that the Old English verse tradition could not have been static in the midst of linguistic change can (as I hope to have shown) open the door to seeing this late verse as having developed from classical forms. Such a perspective has powerful consequences. To take just one obvious example, the fact that even the Wulfstanian passage examined here shares formal verselike structures with these other Chronicle poems confirms that he must have intended at least his contributions to the Chronicle as verse. From the perspectives both of manuscript presentation and of metre, the Chronicle verse tradition seems to have been both well recognized and culturally powerful; the remainder of this chapter examines the literary effect of that tradition and its place within the Chronicle as a whole. 4.3 The Place of Poetry in the Chronicle The arguments regarding poetic presentation and poetic form made in the previous two sections of this chapter suggest, of course, that our understanding of the genre of 'Chronicle poems' must be supplemented by the realization that the Chronicle's 'decanonized' poems nevertheless functioned as poems for the Chronicle's, original readers and writers. Further, as I suggested at the very beginning of the chapter, the likelihood that The Battle of Brunanburh was indeed written with the Chronicle in mind suggests that the inclusion of poetry serves identifiable and important historiographic purposes in the Chronicle, at least at its beginning. Here, I attempt a reading of the Chronicle's collection of poems, suggesting that they fall most naturally into three distinct groups, based upon the history of their composition and entry into the Chronicle. First, there is a group of tenth-century poems, including those in annals 937, 942, 973, 975ABC, 975DE, and 979. The second group, much smaller, includes the poems in 959, 975D, and 1011; these poems all date from the early eleventh century and make up what might be designated the 'Wulfstanian' group of Chronicle poems. The final group includes all the rest of the Chronicle poems, which

1 00 Textual Histories might be designated as 'late eleventh century,' though the 1036 poem may actually date from before mid-century. This group's defining characteristic is a general proximity to the Norman Conquest: the cluster of verses in annals 1057, 1065, 1067, 1075E/76D, and 1086 is matched in density only by the cluster of poems in the 970s. The key features of the Chronicle poems as a group, I show, are largely those already present in Brunanburh: a concern with English nationalism, an explicit focus on the royal succession in the West Saxon line, and a tendency to make historical comparisons, writing about relatively current happenings in comparison to more remote events. The presence of these elements in Brunanburh was intimated at the beginning of the chapter, but a closer reading of the poem can focus my reading of the tenth-century poems.58 After the opening passage of Brunanburh, where the genealogical and dynastic relationships of ^Ethelstan and Edmund are delineated, the poem accomplishes additional political work in its characterizations of the opposed forces. On one side are Anlaf, king of the Dublin Vikings, and Constantinus, king of the Picts and Scots. Their troops are variously styled Scotsmen (lla, 19b, 32a), Northmen (18b, 33a, 53a), and seamen (lib, 32a). Twice (lla-b, 32a) such names are poetically paired to suggest that ^Ethelstan's enemies were a combined force: seamen and Scots. On the other side, however, ^Ethelstan's forces are also a combined group, as the following passage indicates: Wesseaxe ford ondlongne daeg eoredcistum on last legdun labum beodum, heowan hereflyman hindan bearle mecum mylenscearpan. Myrce ne wyrndon heardes hondplegan haeleba nanum baera be mid Anlafe ofer aera gebland on lides bosme land gesohtun

(11 20b-27)59

Here West Saxons and Mercians operate in complete complementarity; stan's force has a unity explicitly opposed to the apparently temporary alliance of the Scotsmen and the seamen, whose very mobility marks them (and their alliances) as transient. Further, while Anlaf and his men seek out their homeland in boats, the winners of the battle (synecdochically identified as 'pa gebrodor begen aetsomne': 'Both the brothers together'; 1. 57) seek out 'Wesseaxna land,' exulting in the victory (1. 59). By implication, then, Wessex thus becomes the familiar homeland of both West Saxons and Mercians, at least as Brunanburh presents things. '

Figure I: London, British Library Cotton Vespasian B vi, folio 109r.

Figure II: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 173, folio Ir.

Figure III: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 173, folio 13r.

Figure IV: London, British Library Additional 34,652, folio 2v.

Figure V: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 173, folio lOr.

Figure VI: London, British Library Cotton Tiberius A vi, folio I2r.

Figure VII: London, British Library Cotton Tiberius B i, folio 140r.

Figure VIII: London, British Library Cotton Tiberius B iv, folio 53r.

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A further claim to national unity, however, seems to be made in the Parker version of the poem's final passage, where the adventus Saxonum is invoked as a point of comparison to the events at Brunanburh. Here, we read in manuscript A: ne wearS wael mare on pis eiglande aefre gieta folces gefylled beforan J)issu/n sweordes ecgum baes be us secgaS bee ealde udwitan sibban eastan hider engle and seaxe up becoman ofer brad brirnu brytene sohtan wlance wigsmibas weealles ofercoman eorlas arhwate card begeatan.

(11 65b-73; CCCC 173, fo. 27r)60

The force of the comparison serves to suggest that vEthelstan (as leader of the West Saxons and the Mercians) is the fitting heir to the Anglian and Saxon invaders of the fifth century.61 The traditional enemies of the invaders, the British, are invoked through the name 'Britain'; the apparent reference to the Welsh in the next-to-last line hints at the (partial) identity of the invaders' enemies and ^thelstan's. But the exceptional reading of 'weealles' in manuscript A (as above) seems to suggest that scribe A3 identifies the protagonists (both during the migration and at Brunanburh, presumably) through the inclusive first-person plural pronoun, 'we.'62 The end of the poem thus suggests that the victory at Brunanburh is a fitting resumption (or inversion) of the Migration-age conquest, this time directed by /Ethelstan; the poem's repeated emphasis on yEthelstan and Edmund's descent from Edward (11 7, 52), when read in the context of the preceding Chronicle genealogies, reminds readers that ^thelstan is the literal descendant of at least some of the invading Saxon leaders as well as the heir to their martial spirit. More specifically, the figuration of the Anglo-Saxon migration as a shared element of history works to support the notion of a coherent English nation. The Chronicle's account of the migration and settlement (accompanied by many of the Chronicle's early genealogies) can, of course, be read as a series of national (or kingdom-level) origin stories, but no hint of such multiplicity is present in Brunanburh's invocation of the migration. Instead, the invocation of the adventus Saxonum in Brunanburh serves to collapse the Chronicle's migration narratives into a single 'master narrative.' If the publication of the Chronicle's Common Stock had the effect of presenting the West Saxon supremacy of Alfred and his family as the culmination of the earlier Saxon invasion, Brunanburh clearly functions to further such a perspective.

102 Textual Histories Significantly, this final passage of Brunanburh also invokes the power of textual authority for allowing such comparisons between Brunanburh and the Saxon invasion to be made in the first place. Through the poetic variation (and grammatical apposition) of 'bee' and 'ealde uoSvitan,' history books themselves are identified as 'old authorities'; Brunanburh thus insists upon the power of books and texts for preserving historical knowledge. At this moment in the history of the Chronicle's textual development (certainly at some point near the middle of the tenth century), the Chronicle itself receives the text of Brunanburh, a poem that serves to validate the Chronicle as a historical record nearly as obviously as it praises ^Ethelstan for his military victory. The inclusion of Brunanburh within the Chronicle suggests the existence of a mid-tenth-century perspective that valued the Chronicle for the manner in which it could place the West Saxon dynasty in historical perspective; the very inclusion of material relating to the later West Saxon kings serves to indicate that their place in Anglo-Saxon history is as firm as that of earlier figures, such as Cerdic and Cynric, in the Common Stock's narrative, the leaders of the Saxon invasion itself. Brunanburh's explicit link between the textual nature of historical authority and the invocation of the adventus Saxonum serves to identify the Chronicle itself (with its detailed narratives of the fifth-century conquest) as a central cultural document, precisely because it offers the possibility of a continuing narrative of English history.63 As Brunanburh appears to suggest, the existence of the Chronicle allowed the later Anglo-Saxons to see themselves as the culminating figures of their own history. In an important sense, then, Brunanburh indicates how the disparate historiographic strategies of the early-tenth-century chroniclers examined in chapter 3 were ultimately combined. Brunanburh continues the dynastic focus of the Edwardian annals and the Mercian Register, but in the broader context of a nationalizing narrative. Wessex is still the Chronicle's homeland, but the victory at Brunanburh is portrayed as a victory not just for Wessex but for all the Anglo-Saxon peoples. Even further, Brunanburh explicitly links its own textual strategies to a textual origin in the Chronicle's own record of history. Brunanburh's apparent reference to the Chronicle strongly suggests the Chronicle's own role in the creation of the national identity that the poem so clearly celebrates. The record of the Chronicle poems that succeeded Brunanburh confirms that the interest in the West Saxon dynasty and in the functioning of history (and history books) remained a central concern. The remainder of the Chronicle poems written in the tenth century (under annals 942, 973, 975ABC, 975DE, and 979)64 allow us to see the directions in which these concerns

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developed. In the 942 poem, The Capture of the Five Boroughs, for example, we can see in particular the focus on dynastic succession and English nationalism. In a striking example of the use of a rhetorical 'envelope,' the first and last lines of this poem call our attention to Edmund's dual roles as king of the English and son of Edward: line 1 reads 'Her Eadmund cyning, Engla peoden' ('Here King Edmund, ruler of the English') and line 13 reads 'afera Eadweardes, Eadmund cyning' ('son of Edward, Edmund the king'). The Mercians (whom we might recall as being supporters of Edmund and his brother at Brunanburh) are quickly conquered ('Myrce geeode' 1. 2b), but the end of the poem consists of the following remarkable passage: Daene waeran aer under NorSmannum nyde gebegde on haebenra haerteclommum lange brage, ob hie alysde eft for his weorbscipe wiggendra hleo, afera Eadweardes. Eadmund cyning.

(118b-13)65

Here the Danes are explicitly opposed to the harassing Northmen; the settlers of the Danelaw are identified as being under the protection of the English king, in need of his efforts to release them from the fetters of the heathens. If Brunanburh hinted at the significance of cooperation, alliance, and even national identity as linking West Saxons to Mercians, this poem goes a step farther and includes the Danes of the Five Boroughs within that polity. Edmund's designation as 'Engla peoden' subtly reinforces such a perspective, of course, since his heritage is strictly West Saxon, while the Mercians are historically Anglian. 66 In the poems on Edgar, entered at his coronation in 973 and at his death in 975, we see further developments on both fronts. The 973 poem begins with Edgar being described as 'ruler of the English': Her Eadgar wees, Engla waldende, cordre mycclum

to cyninge gehalgod

(11 1-2)6

He is later more explicitly identified as 'Eadmundes eafora' (1. 17; 'son of Edmund'). Once again, we see the insistence on identifying the West Saxon king - within his genealogical context - as ruler of 'the English'; the continued identification of the kings of Alfred's line as rulers of the English functions to assert a unity of national identity. The calculational passage in the middle of the poem is even more striking in its effects:

104 Textual Histories And 9a agangen waes tyn hund wintra geteled rimes fram gebyrdtide bremes cyninges, leohta hyrdes, butan daer to lafe ba get waes wintergeteles, baes 5e gewritu secgad, seofon and twentig; swa neah waes sigora frean dusend aurnen, da ba 5is gelamp.

(11 10b-16)6

Such calculations may be clumsy, even dull, as poetry, but here we see Edgar's coronation being precisely placed within a well-defined thousandyear span, indicating (if nothing else) the very relevance of such chronological thinking to the poet. It seems to be of crucial importance to note that the Chronicle itself is structured according to the very chronological perspective invoked here: the Chronicle, too, begins its stretch of consecutively numbered years with the year one, in which Christ's birth is recorded. Even more remarkable, it seems, is the poem's claim to textual authority in line 14 ('paes 5e gewritu secgad'), which identifies the chronological calculation as being based upon textual foundations. But the document that most clearly places the coronation of Edgar twenty-seven years before the end of the thousand-year span must surely be the Chronicle itself: The Coronation of Edgar thus seems to be characterized by a certain self-referentiality in which the poem invokes its own position within the Chronicle as guaranteeing its historical authority.69 At the same time, the form of the calculation involves a sense of history as something that extends into the future as well as encompassing the past. The 975ABC and 975DE poems on Edgar's death allow us an interesting glimpse of two different perspectives on what is appropriate within the genre of "Chronicle poems.' The 975ABC poem continues the Chronicle poetry's concern with the genealogy of the West Saxon dynasty: the first one and a half lines read: Her geendode eordan dreamas. Eadgar, Engla cyning

(11 l-2a)7

Further, this poem indicates that Edgar's son, Edward, immediately took the throne himself, in a passage that makes the genealogical connections quite explicit (11 10b-12). The roundabout manner of identifying the day of Edgar' death as the eighth of July (11 4b-9b) may remind us of the calculational pas sage from the 973 poem, but the final two-thirds of the poem seem to constitute a departure from the tradition of Chronicle poetry as it has so far been seen. Here we read about neither the doings nor the genealogy of the West

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Saxon kings, but rather all the other events of the year: an expulsion of monks in Mercia (11 16-19a); the exile of Oslac (11 24-28b); the appearance of a comet (11 29-33a); and the great hunger (11 33b-35a). Notably, the 975DE poem relegates this later material to the prose portion of the annal following the poem.71 Instead, the 975DE poem focuses only on Edgar himself, beginning by stressing the various groups over which he rules: Her Eadgar gefor Angla reccent WestSeaxena wine. 7 Myrcene mundbora.

(11 1-2; Plummer I, 119; relineated)72

Edgar is here (in contrast to the 975ABC poem) poetically linked to his father: he is described as 'aferan Eadmund[>,s]' (1. 4a; 'son of Edmund': cf 973ABC, 1. 17), and the poem celebrates the degree to which Edgar's political and military powers were respected: Naes se flota swa rang, ne se here swa strang. \)~ on Angelcynne aes him gefetede. \)a hwile be se a^ela cyning cynestol gerehte. (11 7-9; Plummer I, 121; relineated)73

Notably, the date of Edgar's death is entered in the D manuscript immediately before the poem (immediately following the year), and so the events of the poem are indicated as taking place on 8 July 975, and the poem, quite naturally, does not concern itself with other events of the year.74 The differences in form and content between the 975ABC and the 975DE poems are of fascinating import. The 975DE poem, which is of postclassical form, nevertheless seems to evidence a clear contemporary sense of what was and was not appropriate for a Chronicle poem: material relating to a ruling (or recently deceased) king certainly seems to have been appropriate; other annalistic material such as is found in the final two-thirds of the 975ABC poem is explicitly excluded from the 975DE poem. The 975DE poem, after all, is either an entirely separate composition from the 975ABC poem (in which case it testifies to a different sense of what was appropriate material for a Chronicle poem) or else it was a conscious rewriting of the 975ABC poem, which would suggest even more strongly that the later material in the longer poem was felt to be inappropriate.75 In either case, however, the poem that is less metrically regular (from the perspective of classical verse) nevertheless features content more representative of the tradition of Chronicle poems seen so far. Regardless of the fact that the 975DE poem is the first to appear in manuscripts of the Northern Recension, it clearly seems to have been composed by a poet who

106 Textual Histories was aware of the traditional content of the earlier Chronicle verse, despite the fact that he composed in a less traditional verse form. The last of the tenth-century Chronicle poems confirms my observations about what was seen as appropriate material for poetic expansion in the Chronicle. Like the 975 poems, this poem also takes the death of the ruling Anglo-Saxon king as its subject matter. In this case, the poem concerns the violent murder of the young Edward, who was referred to as succeeding his father in the 975ABC poem. Remarkably, however, this poem makes no explicit mention of Edward by name and includes no genealogical information at all. Indeed, this passage obscures genealogical relationships, such as those which might serve to remind readers that Edward's successor was his own brother, ^thelred. It is also important to note that this poem must have been entered into the Chronicle some time after the events it describes, since it describes Edward as a 'heofonlic sanct' ('heavenly saint'). Yet despite these divergences from the concerns of the earlier tenth-century poems, the 979 poem opens with a historical comparison that must call to mind the invocation of the adventus Saxonum at the end of Brunanburh: Ne wearS Angelcynne nan waerse daed gedon, bonne beos waes. sySdon hi aerest Brytonland gesohton.

(11 1-3; Plummer I, 123)76

Once again, despite the even more radical departures from classical metrical form, we see the concern with historical precedent that seemed so important not only in Brunanburh, but also in the calculational passage in 973. The identification of this murder as a national tragedy likewise serves to assert a national identity, and the fact that the last of the tenth-century Chronicle poems employs the same strategy as the first ought to indicate to us how important it is to read these poems within the tradition of Chronicle poetry in general and not only within the 'immediate context' of a single manuscript.77 The eleventh-century responses to this tradition of Chronicle poems likewise confirm the necessity of reading all of these poems in context. The 'Wulfstanian' Poems: 959, 975D, and 1011 Some time near the beginning of the eleventh century, probably after his elevation to the position of archbishop of York in 1002 (and perhaps as late as the second decade of the eleventh century), Wulfstan saw fit to supplement the Chronicle's record of the previous century with two passages in his signature style. These appear as the 959 and 975D poems. And although Wulfstan's

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style has generally been perceived to be prose rather than any kind of verse, it seems that Wulfstan's specific intent in these compositions was to supplement the pre-existing Chronicle poems of the tenth century. Angus Mclntosh's comment about the critical acceptance of these passages as poetic ('such a description has been accepted implicitly for two compositions of Wulfstan, the Chronicle poems of 959 and 975' 117), then, can serve as a reminder of the possibility that Anglo-Saxon readers, too, may have accepted these passages as poetic, even if Mclntosh did title his own essay 'Wulfstan's Prose.'78 My own metrical analysis in the previous section also strongly suggests that, for at least these passages, Wulfstan was composing verse. We can turn first to the 959 poem. This poem is entered into the Chronicle at the accession of Edgar following the death of Eadwig, and thus it parallels the function of the 973 poem, although the latter celebrates his delayed coronation rather than his accession. An additional difference between the two poems is the historical perspective that Wulfstan can employ: here he summarizes Edgar's reign and generally praises it, making clear that some time has passed between Edgar's death in 975 and the composition of the passage. And though the passage that begins Wulfstan's contribution does not (as so many of the tenth-century poems do) open by identifying the king in question and his genealogical relationships, this may be because the single prose sentence that precedes Wulfstan's passage does this already: the first sentence of the annal reads: 'Her Eadwig cyning forSferde. 7 feng Eadgar his brodor to rice.' (959E: Plummer I, 113; 'Here King Eadwig passed on, and Edgar his brother succeeded to the kingship'). In terms of content, the 959 poem differs in some ways from the tenthcentury poems that preceded its entry into the Chronicle. Most of the Chronicle poems of the 900s function to praise West Saxon kings, at their accession, coronation, death, or some other significant moment. Wulfstan's 959 poem does serve this function: it praises both Edgar's piety and his political power, for example. But it also chastises him: Ane misdaeda he dyde beah to swide. b~ he aelbeodige unsida lufode. 7 hasdene beawas innan bysan lande, gebrohte to fsste. 7 utlsndisce hider in tihte.

(11 21-5; Plummer I, 115)79

A note in the third edition of Stenton's Anglo-Saxon England that can almost certainly be attributed to Dorothy Whitelock proposes a reason for this condemnation: 'It may have been Edgar's tolerance of Danish customs in the

108 Textual Histories Danelaw that caused Archbishop Wulfstan in the next generation to write [this passage] after a panegyric on Edgar' (371, note 2). Where a poem like The Capture of the Five Boroughs apparently treated the Danes in the Danelaw as an important component of the English polity, Wulfstan's early-eleventhcentury perspective is not so tolerant of the Danes and their practices, it seems. Instead, Wulfstan interprets this acceptance of heathen customs on Edgar's part as being inappropriate: it is an occasion where Edgar stumbles in apparently preferring political unity to religious uniformity. Virtually the entire direction of Wulfstan's career, with his dual concerns for the appropriate practice of the faith and the rule of law, suggests how pervasive Wulfstan found the connections between religious conformity and social responsibility to be; Edgar's apparent religious tolerance would undoubtedly have seemed, to Wulfstan, to be problematic at best. The 975D poem appears to continue the work that Wulfstan began in annal 959. But here, it seems, we must imagine that Wulfstan writes this poem to supplement an annal that already contains the 975DE poem. Whether Wulfstan simply expands a prose passage such as we find at the end of 975E or writes substantially new material is, perhaps, impossible to determine.80 Significantly, however, the content of Wulfstan's 975D poem parallels, in some ways, the content of the later passages of the 975ABC poem. The end of the 975 ABC poem recounts the expulsion of monks in Mercia, the exile of Oslac, and observations on natural history such as the notices of the comet and the great hunger; Wulfstan allows the prose following the 975DE poem to cover the comet and the famine, writing his poem specifically about the expulsion of the monks in Mercia and thus continuing the religious theme he employed in the 959 poem.81 But regardless of the poem's restricted scope, Wulfstan makes the effort to make it fit into the Chronicle poem tradition. Specifically, he begins the poetic passage with the phrase he had used earlier to begin the 959 poem ('On his dagum'). By starting thus, Wulfstan's 975D poem not only echoes the earlier poem but also stands as a commentary on the happenings during Edward's reign: this, too, is a poem about a West Saxon king, at least superficially. The fact that an earlier poem (i.e., that in 975ABC) had treated the same event may have prompted Wulfstan's composition of this poem: for Wulfstan, material such as this was certainly appropriate for a Chronicle poem, even if the 975DE poem suggests that an earlier chronicler had a more restricted sense of Chronicle poetry as a genre. The 1011 poem employs none of the stylistic peculiarities that would allow us to ascribe it to Wulfstan, but the date of the poem (most probably during Wulfstan's archepiscopacy), its form (with its marked tolerance for unpaired half-lines and its use of binary expressions), and its content all work together

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to suggest that Wulfstan may have had a hand in its composition and its inclusion in the Chronicle. The last bit of the 1011 poem ('for Code. 7 for worulde.'; Plummer I, 142), for example, echoes a line from the 959 poem, and although the line itself is neither characteristically Wulfstanian nor specifically poetic, the verbal parallel seems significant. The focus on ecclesiastical matters (here the capture of Archbishop Alfheah by the Danes) is certainly shared with the 959 and 975D poems; the balanced antitheses recall the 979 (non-Wulfstanian) poem. Equally significant is the identification of Canterbury as the place from which Christianity came to the English: rather than invoking the arrival of the Saxons, this poem asks readers to recall the Augustinian mission. Even here, then, the 1011 poem both fits itself within the tradition of Chronicle poetry by echoing previous poems and invoking historical origins and also marks out new territory in its focus on church matters. Even if we cannot confidently ascribe it to Wulfstan himself, the 1011 poem does seem parallel in form and function to the 959 and 975D poems. As a group, the 959, 975D, and 1011 poems seem to attempt to shift the emphasis of the Chronicle poems from the secular and royal to the ecclesiastical. Edgar's accession to the throne in 959 provided Wulfstan with the opportunity to summarize the details of his reign in terms of both his political accomplishments and his piety. Indeed, Wulfstan does not hesitate to chastise Edgar for his apparent tolerance of foreign (and even heathen) customs. In annal 975D, we find a second Wulfstanian passage that takes the accession of Edward as an opportunity to summarize his reign, focusing upon the crimes Edward could not prevent because of his youth and the expulsion of monks from monasteries previously established by Edgar and £ithelwold. Once again, Wulfstan moves from the political to the ecclesiastical; both poems, though, are placed within the Chronicle at the notices of royal deaths and successions: traditional places for poems in the Chronicle. Indeed, the existence of the 975ABC poem in other branches of the Chronicle - a poem that also mentions the anti-monastic reaction during Edward's time - may well have motivated Wulfstan to compose poems for the Chronicle text available to him in the first place. Finally, after the 975D and 979 poems, which deal with Edward the Martyr and his reign, we find the 1011 poem, which, even if it bears none of the hallmarks of Wulfstan's characteristic style, may well be due to him. Here the martyred archbishop of Canterbury is praised in terms that invoke not the adventus Saxonum but the equally significant adventus Christianorum. In their concerns, then, these poems seem to make a relatively coherent group; nevertheless, their entry into the Chronicle was accomplished through an attempt to make them fit into the already established genre of Chronicle poems. That Wulfstan was ultimately unable to redirect the focus of

110 Textual Histories Chronicle poetry as a whole, however, is shown by a consideration of the eleventh-century Chronicle poems that are grouped around the Norman Conquest. Eleventh-Century Chronicle Poetry While the tenth-century Chronicle poems and the Wulfstanian poems of the early eleventh century form more or less coherent groups, the Chronicle poems between 1036 and 1086 might best be considered in three separate subgroups.82 The first of these would include the 1036 and 1065 poems, which take as their subject matter the deaths of Alfred the ^theling and Edward the Confessor, two important representatives of the West Saxon royal line. The second major grouping includes the poems from the D manuscript under annals 1057D and 1067D. Finally, the 1086 poem, William the Conqueror, stands alone as the last of the major Chronicle poems and as a fitting end to the tradition. The 1036 annal, in both its versions, identifies Alfred as 'Aibelraedes sunu cinges' (1.1; 'son of King jEthelred'), though this occurs in the prose text that precedes the poem itself. In this sense, this annal fits well into the Chronicle poetry's concern with West Saxon genealogy. Within the context of the other Chronicle poems, however, the most remarkable passage within the poem is surely the following: Ne weard dreorlicre daed gedon on £>ison earde syb£>an Dene comon and her fri5 namon.

(11 11-12)83

The first of these lines is a close parallel to the beginning of the 979 poem examined above ('Ne weard Angelcynne nan waersa daed gedon.' 979E; Plummer I, 123); but the second line invokes neither the arrival of the Saxons nor the arrival of Christianity (cf 1011) as the basis for historical comparison, but rather the arrival of the Danes in the early eleventh century. The 1036 poem thus implicitly identifies the murder of Alfred as a greater crime than anything perpetrated by Cnut and his family since their rise to power. The fact that the C version of the poem explicitly blames this murder on Godwine and his party urges us to identify the murder as treason, a kind of national betrayal. Yet the poet's echoing of the 979 poem and the pattern of historical claims made in other Chronicle poems (especially Brunanburh, but also the poems in 979 and 1011) give this passage a secondary valence, one that implicitly links the invasion of the Danes and the earlier adventus Saxonum. A host of familiar cultural associations are thus linked in order to highlight the depths to which

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the English have sunk. Just as Wulfstan's Sermo Lupi ad Anglos had invoked the adventus Saxonum in order to highlight the decline of English values (drawing a parallel between Migration-era British corruption and current English corruption), the 1036 poet here draws a similar parallel, depicting at least some of the English as superior to the Danes only in treachery and disloyalty. By invoking the eleventh-century Danish conquest in terms designed to recall the adventus Saxonum, the 1036 poem implicitly lays the blame for the Danish conquest at the feet of the English and their moral decline. The death of Alfred is presented as something the English have more or less brought upon themselves, and this poem emphasizes the betrayal of the English national heritage precisely by revising the terms of the Chronicle's conventional historical perspective. Within this poem, the Danes have literally and figuratively taken over the 'proper' place of the Anglo-Saxons, both as triumphant conquerors of Britain and as the political leaders in the Chronicle narrative. That the national tragedy recorded in 1036 is the death of a member of the West Saxon line, however, serves as an ironic indication of the Chronicle's continued interest in that line. By the time the 1065 poem on the death of Edward the Confessor is entered into the Chronicle, though, the temporary ascendancy of the Danes is long past. Indeed, it seems that the 1065 poem is most probably a post-Conquest production, as the flattering references to Harold as having been granted the kingdom by Edward (11 29ff) might seem to be most apt after Harold's own death at the hands of the conquering Normans. Nevertheless, The Death of Edward adopts a somewhat odd position within the Chronicle-poem tradition regarding the Danes. Edward is (in an utterly conventional manner) identified as belonging to the West Saxon royal line (he is called 'byre vtdelredes' in 1. lOb), and described as lord of the English ('Engla hlaford,' 1. Ib). Further, the extent of Edward's realm is indicated as follows: weold wel gebungen Walum and Scottum and Bryttum eac, byre ^Edelredes, Englum and Sexum

(11 9-1 lb)84

The date of his accession, though, highlights the Danish invasion in the early decades of the century: beah he lange aer, lande bereafod, wunode wraeclastum wide geond eor5an, sySdan Cnut ofercom kynn ^delredes and Dena weoldon deore rice

112 Textual Histories Engla landes XXVIII wintra gerimes, welan brytnodon.

(1116-21) 85

From the perspective of this poem, the Danish conquest can be seen as a portion of history that is over and done with; the reference here would seem to look both backward (with the historical perspective of other Chronicle poems) and forward, to the possible end of a (hopefully temporary) Norman rule.86 Nevertheless, the 1065 poem's repeated references to jEthelred (in both quoted passages) take on an especially poignant irony in the context of the preceding Chronicle poems: while a constant theme of the Chronicle poems had been the genealogical continuation of the West Saxon line, this poem's references to ^thelred's family also must serve to remind readers that no further kinsman of jEthelred appears to be available. While the poem's insistence that Edward had entrusted the kingdom to Harold appears to legitimate Harold, the poem cannot place Harold in the West Saxon line. Whether intentionally or otherwise, the 1065 poem implies that the end of the West Saxon dynasty will, in fact, coincide with the end of Anglo-Saxon history. To this degree, the links established in the tenth-century Chronicle poems between poetry, history, and genealogy have proved to be enduring; precisely because of these links, the apparent failure of the West Saxon line (as presented in this poem) leaves post-Conquest readers (such as we are) with a powerful sense of an Anglo-Saxon ending. Significantly, the forms of the 1036 and 1065 poems demand our attention. The passage in 1036, which revises the political and historical perspectives of preceding Chronicle poems, also stands as the one canonized example of the Chronicle's 'poems of irregular meter.' At the same time, the 1065 poem's classical metrics have long been cited as a powerful indication of the continuance of the classical tradition. A closer look at 1065, however, might call such a perspective into question: in particular, the 1065 poem is notably repetitive, as if the range of this poet's skills was in fact quite limited.87 We see close repetition in the following pairs of verses: weolan britnode (7b) hyrdonholdlice(14a) byre ^Selredes (1 Ob) XXII1I (6a) aedelum kinge (13b) syddan Cnut ofercom (18a)

and and and and and and

welan brytnodon (21 b) hyrde holdlice (32a) kynn ^Edelredes (18b) XXVIII (20b) aebelumeorle(31a) Syddan ford becom (22a)

Further, a number of verses in the 1065 poem seem explicitly modelled on verses in previous Chronicle poems:

The Chronicle Poems Her Eadward kingc (DEd 1 a) Engla hlaford (DEd Ib) Englum and Sexum (DEd 1 la) wintra gerimes (DEd2\a.) XXIIII (DEd 6a; cf. 20b)

113

Her Eadmund cyning (Capture 1 a)88 Engla beoden (Capture Ib) Engla waldend (Coronation 1 b) Engle and Seaxe (Brunanburh 70a)89 waes wintergeteles (Coronation 14a) nigon and XX (Coronation 18a)

Although not all verses in The Death of Edward are anticipated in previous Chronicle poems, it seems important to note the degree to which the 1065 poet does seem to recycle material from his own poem and from previous Chronicle poems. The conclusion we probably ought to draw here is that the 1065 poem employs a large degree of conscious archaism, using the traditional verse form (by now, perhaps, old fashioned, if we are to judge by the poet's reliance upon previous models) for the very purposes for which it was first employed in the Chronicle: to make an explicit link between the West Saxon line and its legitimacy to the heroic tradition. The Death of Edward, then, is in some senses the last gasp of the particular historiographic perspective initiated by Brunanburh. The 1057D and 1067D Poems Where The Death of Edward implicitly links the Norman Conquest to Edward the Confessor's position at the end of the West Saxon dynastic line, the 1057D and 1067D poems (which are almost certainly post-Conquest productions; see Whitelock, Peterborough Chronicle 28) propose an alternative branch of the West Saxon line as potential rulers. The handwriting of the D Chronicle's annals from the 1054 annal to its end in 1079 is varied but similar, giving at least the appearance of discontinuous writing; but if Whitelock is correct that the 1057 material must have been composed after 1070 (Peterborough Chronicle 28), the best explanation for the visual appearance of the end of the D manuscript may well be that it is intended to look like a Chronicle manuscript that had been 'written up at intervals.' Ker's and Cubbin's attempts to discern 'changes of hand,' then, may prove to be ultimately fruitless, except insofar as they may expose the method of the last D compiler's deception.90 What is clear, however, is that the 1057D poem begins, in the conventional manner of Chronicle poems, by citing the genealogical connections of its subject: Her com Eadward aspeling to Englalande. se waes Eadwerdes brodorsunu kynges

114 Textual Histories Eadmund \cing/; Irensid wass geclypod

for his snell scipe.

(11 1-4; Plummer I, 187, relineated)91

Although (as I suggested above) the interlineation of 'cing' and the elusive nature of the genealogical connections may not give us confidence in the scribe's treatment of this passage, we can recognize the poem's conventional opening. Like the 979 poem's invocation of the adventus Saxonum, the opening of the 1057D poem seems to confirm that (despite any reservations we may have about its metrical form) we ought to read this passage as belonging to the tradition of Chronicle poems. Like the 1036 and 1065 poems, the 1057 poem also makes explicit reference to the Danish rule that began some forty years before the events of 1057: 'Pisne aebeling Cnut cyng hsefde forsend on Ungerland to beswicane' (Plummer I, 188; 'Cnut the king had sent this setheling to Hungary to betray [him]'). But the poem also effectively inverts one feature of the tradition: rather than appearing at the announcement of the death of the poem's subject, the 1057D poem begins with the 'news' of Edward's arrival in England, delaying the material on Edward's death until the twelfth line (out of eighteen). Finally, although Edward must have been very much an outsider in English politics, his death is presented in the poem as something of a national tragedy, 'hearmlic eallre bissere beode' (Plummer I, 188; 'harmful to all this nation'). Considering that the 1057D poem must date from more than a decade after the events it describes, its composition and placement in the D mansucript must be understood as serving an end other than simply the memorialization of Edward. The poem presents Edward the aetheling as a potential West Saxon heir to Edward the Confessor not so much because Anglo-Saxons at the time felt him to be so, but for a post-Conquest rhetorical purpose: the continuing promotion of the claims of this formerly exiled branch of the West Saxon line. The likelihood that the 1057D poem was placed into the D Chronicle with an awareness that the 1065 poem would follow it should remind us not to take too seriously the claim that Edward the aetheling's death was really a national tragedy; instead, the chronicler here employs the rhetoric of the Chronicle-poem tradition in order to highlight the more familiar tragedies that followed Edward the Confessor's death and to prepare the reader for the suggestion made in 1067D that a link to the old West Saxon line could still be forged through the offspring of Edward the aetheling. The brief poem in 1067D, however, would seem to give us little to work with when it comes to parallels to other Chronicle poems. Its subject is not a king but a woman: Margaret, daughter of Edward the aetheling, although her genealogy is not recounted in the poem itself. Nor does the poem deal with either of the primary events that have motivated other Chronicle poems: death or accession. And, finally, the 1067D poem also makes no real reference to the

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historical narrative embedded in the Chronicle. Yet (as I will argue in more detail in chapter 6), elsewhere in the annal we are given information about Margaret's genealogy, and the annal's account of her resistance to Malcolm and her eventual marriage to him might be read as implying the future continuance of this branch of the West Saxon line. In the context of manuscript D, where the 1067D and 1065 poems occupy annals bracketing the narrative of the Conquest, it is difficult not to read the 1067D annal as offering a corrective to the apparent demise of the 'kynn /Edelredes' described in the 1065 poem. It is important to observe that Plummer believed the 1067D poem (along with the other material relating to Margaret in the 1067D annal) was composed after 1100, after the marriage of her daughter to Henry I. Whitelock suggests that the verse passage, in particular, could not have been inserted into D before 1093: 'the interpolator ... could hardly have had access to a Life of [Margaret] before her death in 1093' (ASC xvi; my ellipses). Such interpretations, I think, could well be supplemented by the line of reasoning I have indicated here: the 1067D poem can be read in the context of the Chronicle poems (and the D manuscript's poems, in particular) without imagining activity quite so late. 1067D's concern with an alternative branch of the West Saxon line fits well within the Chronicle's poetic tradition, without our having to hypothesize either a lost Life of Margaret in Old English verse or a meaningful context after the marriage of Edith-Matilda to Henry I. The 1067D poem may well have been written specifically for the Chronicle (perhaps for this very manuscript) some time in the early 1070s. ' William the Conqueror' In the 1086E annal (which concerns events properly dated 1087), we find the last of the major poems from the Chronicle. But where the northern interests embedded in the D Chronicle continued to emphasize the possibility of a viable West Saxon claim to the throne, the version of the Chronicle exemplified in this portion of the Peterborough manuscript takes a radically different perspective. Here we find, after all, a poem entered into the Chronicle at the death of the king, even though this king happens to be William. In the context of the Chronicle as a whole, then, this poem functions to memorialize William as king of the English. Yet, like Wulfstan's poem on Edgar at 959, this poem does not simply praise William, but actively presents negative facets of his character: Ac he [waes] swa stiQ. f)~ he ne rohte heora eallra nid. ac hi moston mid ealle |3es cynges wille folgian

116

Textual Histories

gif hi woldon libban. o55e land habban. land o55e eahta. o55e wel his sehta.

(Plummer I, 221 )92

Interestingly, however, where the 959 poem explicitly referred to Edgar's tolerance (and even importation) of foreign customs and practices, no such comment about foreigners appears in relation to the 1086E poem. Instead, the poem is immediately followed by this remarkable passage: Das ping we habbad be him gewritene. aegder ge gode ge yfele. p~ pa godan men niman aefter beora godnesse. 7 forleon mid ealle yfelnesse. 7 gan on done weg. be us lett to heofonan rice. (Plummer I, 221 )93 With its obvious parallels to Bede's comments about the value of history in the Preface to the Historia ecclesiastica, the 1086E annal surely asks its readers to place William into the same historical narrative begun by Bede and continued in the Chronicle. William, it seems, has come to be accepted as an English king - or perhaps the chronicler merely encourages readers to see him in this light. Either way, the context of the preceding Chronicle poems (not just those in manuscript E, but the whole of the Chronicle's, poetic tradition) helps readers interpret the function and effect of the 1086E poem. Although my survey of the Chronicle poems, their manuscript presentation, and their metrical form has been necessarily brief, it has been sufficient to identify some important features of the Chronicle poetry tradition. First, the manuscript presentation of the Chronicle poems indicates that many of the passages printed by Plummer but excluded from the ASPR were most likely identified as poems by their original scribes: metrical pointing marks the rhyming poems in 1067D and 1086E, as well as the poem in 975E; the parallel (non-Wulfstanian) 975 poem in manuscript D seems to have been set off from the surrounding prose by the use of capitals and space; the careful copying of the 959D and E poems (and the activities of the F scribe) suggest that these poems, too, were identified as poetic by their scribes. The evidence of these early readers of the Chronicle thus helps to define the scope of any investigation into the role of poetry in the Chronicle without relying on modern reconstructions of the alliterative verse form. The consequences both for understanding the Chronicle and for expanding our notions of Old English verse forms are significant. Indeed, a brief examination of the metre of these frequently ignored poems suggests that late Old English verse developed in recognizable ways. Specifically, the Chronicle poems provide powerful evidence for the late loss of rules

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for both metrical subordination and resolution: loss of these processes results in the altered alliteration patterns seen in the late verse, as well as the occurrence of certain rhythmic variants excluded by the classical tradition. While the continued use of classical verse models in poems such as The Death of Edward indicates the survival of classical verse at least as a literary tradition, the 'non-classical' poems of the Chronicle indicate at least one direction of change in Old English verse. By closely reading both the Chronicle's fuller roster of poems and paying attention to metrical developments, the third section of this chapter argued that the Chronicle poems as a group tend to focus on the activities of the ruling West Saxon dynasty. Starting with the tenth-century poems, they record the West Saxon kings' genealogical relationships, thus effectively replacing the genealogies of the Common Stock. The appearance of poetry in the Chronicle thus both continues one of the themes employed by the Common Stock and probably explains the general lack of additional genealogical passages: where poetic rhetoric heightened the Cerdic-to-Wodening passage of the 855 genealogy in order to link ^thelwulf's dynasty to a heroic Migration-era past, the Chronicle poems make the link even more explicitly, as at the end of Brunanburh. Further, the Chronicle poems use historical comparisons to emphasize both the West Saxon kings' historical significance and the authority of history books such as the Chronicle manuscripts themselves. Indeed, the very prevalence and persistence of these thematic trends may help explain why none of the 1011 poem's scribes clearly recognized it as poetic: of all the Chronicle poems examined here, it stands farthest from the centre of the Chronicle's poetic tradition. But most importantly, a fuller understanding of the Chronicle poems leads to a fuller understanding of the cultural functioning of the Chronicle. The Death of Edward, for example, appears to employ what may well have been archaic poetic (and metrical) forms in its panegyric, a final tribute not only to the last effective Anglo-Saxon king but also to the Chronicle's use of (classical) poetry to valorize the West Saxon kings. Likewise, the (non-classical) poems we find at the end of the D Chronicle and in 1086E exemplify two very different responses to the Norman Conquest. The D chronicler, by exploiting the poetic tradition's focus on the West Saxon royal line, appears to promote the alternative branch of the West Saxon family led by Edward the astheling as potential heirs for the English throne, using poetry to buttress the validity of the claim of Edward's descendants. The E Chronicle, on the other hand, by straightforwardly incorporating a poem on William in the annal recounting his death, subtly insists that William, indeed, has a place both in the Chronicle and in the history of the English people and their kings.94 Though William,

118 Textual Histories like Harold, could not be placed in the West Saxon line, his memorialization in a Chronicle poem indicates how securely he had found a place on the English throne. In looking at the late poems of the D and E manuscripts, though, it is crucially important to observe that these post-Conquest Chronicle poems must have been written with the context of the Chronicle's poetic tradition in mind. The themes of the Chronicle and its poems were known and recognized to a sufficient degree to allow these later chroniclers to manipulate those themes and perhaps even the metrics of their compositions - for their separate political ends. The modern critical habit of distinguishing among the Chronicle poems according to their various degrees of classical metricality has, of course, obscured our understanding of the entire tradition of Chronicle verse, but these contemporary writers appear to have understood the tradition well. But perhaps the most important observation we can make regarding the Chronicle poems is the remarkable degree to which they appear to have embodied consistent themes over a century and a half of composition. Clearly, the Chronicle was, during this period, something far more than a haphazard collection of variously composed annals: the Chronicle and its verse had a rhetorical and political effect that the chroniclers were able to recognize, contribute to, and even turn to their own ends. The degree to which the later Chronicle's rhetorical and political effects mirrored those of the Common Stock (in the emphasis on dynasty, legitimacy, and historical example and authority) indicates even more powerfully the Chronicle's continued cultural presence and power from Alfred's day to the Norman Conquest and beyond.

5 Latin in the Chronicle

To a much greater degree than is usually recognized, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is a bilingual production, if such a term can can be used to designate its use of two languages rather than one. At least brief passages of Latin appear in all of the surviving manuscripts. Three manuscripts have relatively extensive Latin components: we see thirty-eight annals or parts of annals in Latin in manuscript E;1 F is thoroughly bilingual, with each Old English annal followed immediately by a Latin version of the same material; and the Parker Chronicle's Old English annal for 1070 is followed by Latin annalistic material extending to 1093 (frequently treated as a separate document, the so-called Acts of Lanfranc). In addition, two extensive translations of the Chronicle survive from before the Norman Conquest: the histories of Asser and jEthelweard.2 To understand the Chronicle in its Anglo-Saxon context demands that we pay more attention than is frequently paid to its Latin components and its Latin versions. The pervasive, if subtle, bilinguality of the Chronicle has frequently been obfuscated in printed editions through the use of Arabic numerals for the annal numbers (e.g., Plummer, Classen and Harmer, Rositzke, Lutz). The general rule throughout the manuscripts, of course, was to begin each annal with the abbreviation 'an-' followed by Roman numerals indicating the year.3 Most often, this indication of the year was followed by the Old English locative adverb 'Her,' which served to introduce the productive annals. Such a system of chronological location makes explicit the Chronicle's debt to the world of Latin learning. In particular, the Chronicle's chronological scheme appears to derive more or less directly from that used by Bede in his 'Chronological Epitome' (HE v, 24). In that text, we can see that the more complex chronological locators used by Bede ('anno ab incarnatione domini,' 'anno

120 Textual Histories incarnationis dominicae') are quickly replaced by the simpler 'anno' (HE v, 24; pp 560-2).4 The 'anno' portion of Bede's chronological system remains within the Chronicle, but the use of the additional locative 'Her' is the Chronicle's own innovation. The juxtaposition of the Latin 'anno' and the Old English 'Her' is a powerful one, and it allows us a fascinating glimpse into the complexity of the interactions between Latin and Old English during the period. We can take the Parker Chronicle's annal 39 as an example: 'an- .xxxix. Her onfeng gaius rice:-' (CCCC 173, fo. Iv: 'In the year 39: Here Gaius received the kingdom'). Such a format, shared by the majority of the Chronicle's productive annals, raises a remarkable question: are the annal numbers themselves to be read in Latin or in Old English? Our general habit of translating such material into modern English obscures the importance of the linguistic difference, since the meaning is clear enough to us. But the very difficulty of answering this sort of question should be a reminder of how little we really understand the practices of literacy in Anglo-Saxon England. In this chapter, I attempt to illuminate at least some of the relationships between Latin and Old English in the period, both by examining the Chronicle's use of Latin in the Common Stock and in later annals and by investigating the production and effect of the Chronicle's two best-known Anglo-Saxon translations, those of Asser and jEthelweard. 5.1 Latin in the Old English Chronicle As I suggested above, the question of how a contemporary Anglo-Saxon would have verbalized (or vocalized) the annal numbers while reading from a Chronicle manuscript is a difficult one, and the evidence that can help answer such a question is surprisingly complex and difficult to assess. It is appropriate to begin with the 'an-' abbreviation, which is explicitly Latin, apparently standing for 'anno' ('in the year').5 'Anno,' of course, is the form used in Bede's 'Chronological Epitome' (as seen above), and the post-Conquest scribe of manuscript E certainly interprets the abbreviation as standing for 'anno,' as he writes the word out in full no fewer than sixteen times on the E manuscript's first page of annals (fo. Iv).6 The earlier records of the Common Stock, however, give no such clear indication of the way this word was read. When we turn to the numerals themselves, the E manuscript again gives the most clear-cut evidence. In E, numerals were apparently intended to be read in Latin, rather than Old English: on folio Iv, we see not only 1ANNO .jcv/.' but also 'ANNO .xvii0.' (where the superscript o is placed directly above the 'ii'). The latter, of course, must be read as 'Anno septimo-decimo' ('In the seven-

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teenth year'). But even in the E manuscript, the use of such superscript os is somewhat rare, generally occurring only on the first page of annals (1 v) and in the annals from 1122 to 1130.7 For annals after 1000, however, the E manuscript generally begins with 'Millesimo' or 'Mill~mo,' suggesting that all such numbers are best understood as Latin. This evidence from the E manuscript, of course, is relatively late, and it may not have much to tell us about earlier practice. Where manuscripts C and D extend beyond 1000, however, they also use 'M~' as the most frequent abbreviation for 1000.8 Further, it is the common practice in manuscripts ACDEF to drop the 'an-' entirely for dates after 1000. The E manuscript's fuller forms provide the strongest evidence for Latin annal numbers in the later annals, since 'M~' itself might conceivably be read as Old English 'busend' (or an inflected form thereof) and the dropping of the 'an-' abbreviation leaves the remaining numerals especially ambiguous.9 In the earlier records of the A and B manuscripts, however, there simply is no evidence for a Latin reading of the annal numbers other than the common 'an-' abbreviation. Such a situation, it seems likely, derives from a similar lack of indicators in the Common Stock's preferred usage. This lack of indicators, however, might be interpreted as having been intentionally ambiguous: a reader faced with material such as the beginning of the Parker Chronicle's annal 30 ('an- .xxx. Her waes crist g~fulluhtud') might well have understood it in any of the following fashions: Anno tricesimo. Her waes crist gefulluhtud. Anno britig. Her waes crist gefulluhtud. Anno britigoda. Her waes crist gefulluhtud.

or possibly, britig. Her waes crist gefulluhtud. bam britigodan geare. Her waes crist gefulluhtud. or even (pace Clemoes - see note 5), Annus triginta. Her wass crist gefulluhtud.

The very ubiquity of the 'an-' abbreviation (one of the Chronicle's most productive formulas) would have allowed readers quickly to master its essential meaning regardless of how they understood it linguistically. What is probably most significant about the Chronicle's mode of introducing its

122 Textual Histories annals is that the year indication is extra-syntactic in the sense that a powerful syntactic boundary separates the year indicator from the contents of the annal itself.10 This state of affairs, it is important to note, stands as a radical change from the Chronicle's probable source for the annal indicators. In the entries of Bede's 'Chronological Epitome,' the annal indicators are syntactically integrated. For example, we can read in Bede, 'Anno DCV Gregorius obiit' (HE v, 24: 562: 'In the year 605, Gregory died'). The Chronicle's use of 'Her' marks a shift from Bede's usage, as it appears to exclude the possibility of reading the annal indicator as a temporal locative, at least not within the clauses beginning with 'Her.' What we see in the annal openings of the Common Stock, then, is not the smooth conjunction of languages seen in macaronic texts but a Latin chronological framework upon which the Old English annals are somewhat precariously hung. Readers faced with a text of this nature presumably did have a great deal of flexibility in their readerly task: the conjunction of the consistent and easily mastered 'an-' abbreviation, the Roman numerals, and the Old English adverb 'Her' would have allowed readers with varying Latin literacy skills to expand the annal openings meaningfully in any of the ways indicated above. Although the form of the annal numbers might clearly recall the world of Latin learning to our eyes, it is important to acknowledge that contemporary readers might well have negotiated the Chronicle's chronology with little or no knowledge of Latin numeration. While the Common Stock set the pattern for annal indicators for most of the Chronicle's succeeding annals, its use of Latin in the 855 genealogy of ^thelwulf gives us a second glimpse into the Common Stock's perspective on Latin. The end of the 855 genealogy appears in the C manuscript as follows: Bedwig sceafing. Id est filius noe se waes geboren on baere earce noes, lamech. matusalem. enoh. iared. malalehel. camon. enos. seth. Adam primus homo. Et pater noster id est xp~s. (Tiberius B i, fo. 129v)u

Significantly, where the ambiguous Roman numerals of the annal numbers bridge between the Latin 'an-' and the Old English 'Her,' the Latin passages in the genealogy also serve as bridges, bracketing precisely the portion of yEthelwulf 's genealogy that derives from biblical learning. The Germanic portions of the genealogy (featuring the typical Germanic patronymics) are linked to the biblical portions by the macaronic assertion that Sceaf was the son of Noah born in the ark.12 The following non-Germanic names have no patronymics, and the later Latin sentence describing Adam caps the entire geneal-

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ogy in such a way as to facilitate the reader's transition back to Old English. 13 The careful use of Latin to bracket or envelop the biblical portion of the genealogy cannot have been accidental; in the context of the Chronicle's Common Stock, this passage most probably receives special emphasis as sacred material through the use of the Latin language.14 Although it appears to be defective at the beginning, the A manuscript's record of this passage deserves an even closer look. The end of the genealogy appears in the A manuscript as follows (see Plate III): ada~ prini3 homo etpat~nr~fxp~sam~:.

(CCCC 173, fo. 13r)

With the various abbreviations expanded, we can read 'adam primMs homo et pater noster id est cristus amen' ('Adam, the first man and our father, that is Christ. Amen'). The density of abbreviation here is quite unusual for the Parker Chronicle's first scribe, although occasionally, when attempting to squeeze material onto a line, he approaches this density (e.g., 878A, fo. 15r, 1. 17). But even more significantly, the sorts of abbreviations and other graphic forms used here are unusual and remarkable. The superscript macron (the familiar mark of suspension in almost all Old English manuscript texts) here serves a wider range of functions than is normal in Old English; the form of the e in 'et' is quite unparalleled in my reading of the manuscript; the abbreviation J for '-us' is otherwise used by this scribe almost exclusively in Latinate names. 15 Further, the abbreviation '-^-' for 'id est' is likewise unseen in the Old English portions of the Chronicle. It is possible that the density of abbreviation seen here is a space-saving measure: the remaining three lines of text within the 855A annal are quite full, and the three 'n-a' ligatures in these lines (which take the horizontal space of a single letter) are quite unusual, suggesting that saving space was indeed a concern here. But the range of abbreviation and the use of forms unique to, or at least unusual in, this manuscript suggest that the orthography here serves to highlight the difference in language. To put it another way, the very fact that the passage is in Latin seems to allow the Parker scribe to use an especially dense textual style. Two conclusions, I think, should be drawn from these features of the 855 A genealogy. First, the juxtaposition of the Germanic, alliterative genealogical form (as discussed in chapter 1) and the biblically derived list of names does not coincide accidentally with the juxtaposition of Old English and Latin. This passage, which Craig R. Davis has described as a 'bold imaginative coup which secured for the West Saxon kings the most prestigious progenitors available' ('Cultural Assimilation' 30-1), nevertheless highlights the distinc-

124 Textual Histories tion between the native and biblical traditions through the contrastive use of Old English and Latin.16 Intentionally or otherwise, it seems that at least this stage of the composition of the 855 genealogy is textually foregrounded.17 But secondly, the use of Latin (especially the highly abbreviated and thus difficultto-read Latin seen in the Parker text) must have served to mystify the biblical portion of the genealogy for at least some contemporary readers. The relative lack of abbreviations in Old English texts (especially in comparison to contemporary Latin texts, as here) surely indicates that vernacular textuality was more reader-friendly, and for such Old English readers as this state of affairs would seem to imply, the Parker genealogy's text must have posed especially difficult problems. Where the system of annal numbers (and its highly repetitive 'an-' abbreviation) could be easily mastered by purely vernacular readers, this bit of Latin in the Common Stock is perhaps intentionally difficult. That such a brief and seemingly straightforward piece of Latin might have seemed difficult to an Anglo-Saxon audience certainly goes far to suggest that the original audience for the Common Stock may have had little or no working knowledge of Latin.18 The apparent degree of Latin literacy available to the Common Stock chronicler and to his original audience may thus have diverged quite radically. These bits of Latin appearing in the annal beginnings and in the 855 genealogy remained the most prominent usages of Latin in the pre-Conquest Old English versions of the Chronicle (the translations of Asser and jEthelweard will be discussed separately below). In the E and F Chronicles, on the other hand, Latin is used with increasing frequency, though to markedly different effects. In the E Chronicle, thirty-eight Latin annals (or parts of annals) appear, most seemingly borrowed from the Annals of Rouen or from 'a source akin to the Annals of Rouen' (Whitelock, Peterborough Chronicle 27). Since eleven of the thirty-one entries that Whitelock traces to this source text also appear in manuscript F, it seems reasonable to conclude that an Old English Chronicle manuscript was supplemented with Latin material from the Annals sometime between 1054 (the latest of the Latin entries cited by Whitelock) and 1121 when E was copied in Peterborough. This activity probably occurred in Canterbury, the probable home of the E exemplar (VE) during this period, and it probably took place after the Conquest.19 The incorporation of this Latin material into the E exemplar thus marks an important shift, where it became acceptable to supplement the Old English annals with Latin entries. The Latin annals' general concern with Norman, Prankish, and other nonEnglish ecclesiastical matters (cf Whitelock, Peterborough Chronicle 27) suggests that they were added after the Conquest, but the fact that Whitelock's first group of Latin annals does concern purely English ecclesiastical matters

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125

suggests that the process involved was more than a simple case of Norman appropriation of the Old English Chronicle. Indeed, what is probably most significant about the post-Conquest incorporation of Latin annals into the \E manuscript was the fact that this manuscript continued to be a primarily Old English text. The Latin annals were supplementary, but no more. This situation should be compared to that seen in the Parker manuscript, also at Canterbury by the time of the Conquest. In the Parker text, Old English annals of the eleventh century are few and brief, until we encounter the relatively extensive 1070A annal, written in two hands, with the work of the second hand spilling somewhat untidily across the top of folio 32r. Immediately following 1070A, however, we read again 'i~. Ixx.' (with additional figures apparently erased; Bately suggests 'from "1076"?' MS A 84, note 12). Immediately following, of course, is the socalled Acts of Lanfranc, beginning 'Hoc anno Lanfrancus ...' (Bately, MS A 84; 'In this year, Lanfranc ...'). Written in a smaller (and tidier) hand than either of those seen in 1070A, this material, which was apparently written all at one time, extends to events in 1093. Dates in the Acts are given in reference to the year of Lanfranc's archepiscopacy, so that where the Acts reads 'Anno .xi.' on folio 32v (Bately, MS A 86), it refers to events in 1080. The reuse of the pre-existing annal numbers on folio 32r (cf Bately, MS A xxxix) to anchor the chronologically organized Latin Acts gives us an interesting glimpse into one post-Conquest bridging strategy used to link an Old English and a Latin text. In a remarkable fashion, the Acts of Lanfranc is both integrated into the Parker Chronicle's narrative (by the use of the annal number 1070) and separated from it (by the revised dating scheme as well as the change in language). The F manuscript of the Chronicle, yet another Canterbury book, gives us a third perspective on the post-Conquest use of Latin and Old English in the Chronicle. Where the E manuscript (and the reconstructed VE) indicates that Latin was sometimes used merely to supplement an Old English Chronicle manuscript, and where the Parker Chronicle seems to show Latin replacing Old English as the language of choice for chronicling activity, the F Chronicle is deeply and pervasively bilingual. In F, each annal is presented in both an Old English and a Latin version, with the Old English annals preceding their Latin translations.20 The significance of the fact that the Old English annals are placed before their Latin counterparts should not be underestimated: the F Chronicle thus inverts the linguistic hierarchy seen in other pervasively bilingual Anglo-Saxon documents such as the Wonders of the East in BL Cotton Tiberius B v, The Enlarged Rule ofChrodegang in CCCC 191, the various bilingual versions of the Benedictine Rule, and the fragments of The Capitula

126 Textual Histories ofTheodulf'm Bodleian 865. The F Chronicle implicitly still identifies Old English as the Chronicle's primary language. These examples of 'bilingual' post-Conquest manuscripts seem to suggest that the relationships between Latin and Old English were in a state of flux during the decades following the Conquest. Although the Parker manuscript might seem to indicate the ultimate replacement of Old English with Latin (as do other twelfth-century translations of the Chronicle, such as those by Henry of Huntingdon and John of Worcester), the evidence of E and its proximate ancestor VE, F, and the fragmentary H leaf all attest to the Chronicle's continuing identity as a primarily English document. The incorporation of more extensive Latin texts into these Old English Chronicles, however, does seem to suggest the existence of a truly bilingual audience: even the example of the Acts ofLanfranc should probably be read this way, since it is difficult to imagine the value of this post-Conquest addition to the Parker text to an audience not literate in Old English. To put it another way, one would have to wonder about the usefulness of placing the Acts at the end of the Chronicle if the Old English Chronicle itself were unreadable to the imagined audience. Nevertheless, the use of a Latinate chronological framework had always given the manuscripts of the Chronicle a more or less explicit textual dependence on Latinity: the later manuscripts' seeming agreement in reading the annal indicators in Latin (as evidenced by the treatment of the year 1000) allows us to see the production of at least the later annals as having been written in Old English purposefully in distinction to Latin. After the well-known Benedictine reform of the later tenth century, contributors to the Chronicle such as Archbishop Wulfstan were not writing Chronicle entries in Old English out of a lack of Latinity but rather because the Chronicle's vernacularity seems to have been both traditional and functional. Yet, at virtually the same time, jEthelweard's translation of the Chronicle into Latin suggests that the relatively persistent monolingualism of the Chronicle manuscripts was not without its exceptions. In the remainder of this chapter, then, I turn to the important pre-Conquest Latin translations of Asser and ^thelweard in order to assess both their relationship to the vernacular Chronicle tradition and what they can tell us about Anglo-Saxon perspectives on a Latin Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. 5.2 Asser and ^thelweard Among the similarities we might point to in the translations of Asser and jEthelweard is the suggestion made in both cases that the texts were prepared for a foreign audience: ^Ethelweard's Chronicle is explicitly directed to his

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cousin Matilda in Germany, and Asser is frequently supposed to have been writing for a Welsh audience (cf Keynes and Lapidge 41; 56f.).21 Yet it is worth recalling that (from what we can discern about the damaged or destroyed manuscripts) both histories also found an audience in Anglo-Saxon England. Likewise, both found post-Conquest historians who were not above using them as sources: John of Worcester incorporated long passages from Asser directly into his history, and William of Malmesbury acknowledges that he consulted /Ethelweard. Without discounting too quickly these authors' apparent intention to translate the Chronicle for foreign audiences, it is nevertheless important also to consider the continuing appeal of these texts for an Anglo-Saxon audience. The relationships between the texts of Asser and ^thelweard and the Chronicle manuscripts are complex and often confusing: the bulk of Janet Bately's Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: Texts and Textual Relationships is devoted to exploring the textual history of these works (and the Annals of St. Neots). Rather than replicate or duplicate Bately's careful and detailed work, I examine here the changes of form, structure, and effect that the translations of Asser and /Ethelweard brought to the Chronicle. Not surprisingly, then, I end up looking at the chronology and scope of both translations, at their use of genealogical material, and (in the case of yEthelweard) at the place of poetry in the text. That features such as genealogy and verse (features so central to the cultural functioning of the Chronicle) make their way into the Latin translations indicates both how central these genres are to the Chronicle and how traditional these translations are. Taking things in chronological order, we should begin with Asser. In generic terms, Asser's text is primarily a vita, rather than a chronicle, as its familiar title indicates, although Asser uses the Chronicle's annalistic form as a loose structuring principle. Interestingly, as early as his first chapter, Asser can be seen adapting the chronological annal openings to the Latin context of his translation: at the beginning of his chapter 1, we read: 'Anno Dominicae Incarnationis DCCCXLIX natus est Alfred' (Stevenson 1; 'In the year of the Lord's incarnation 849, Alfred was born'). Breaking from the Chronicle's habit of placing the year indicator outside the syntax of the annal's first sentence, Asser here returns to the form of chronological location used in Bede's 'Chronological Epitome.' This usage continues throughout Asser's Life. Rather than translating the Chronicle word for word at the annal beginnings, Asser's Latin translation effectively reverses the notable change that was brought about by the translation of the chronicle format into the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's usage in the first place. As I have noted, Asser's use of the Chronicle's annals 851-87 seems pri-

128

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marily intended to provide a rough chronological organization to his biography of Alfred: these annals are generally translated and then supplemented with varying amounts of added material, often quite extensive. The earlier annals, of course, are largely unused by Asser, since the focus of his text is Alfred's life. But when Asser does use earlier material, it seems significant, and the clearest example of his use of earlier annals is in his chapter 2, where he discusses Alfred's mother and her ancestry. The passage in question relates to Oslac, Osburh's father (and thus Alfred's grandfather), who held the office of 'pincerna' (usually translated as 'butler') of jEthelwulf: Qui Oslac Gothus erat natione; ortus enim erat de Gothis et lutis, de semine scilicet Stuf et Wihtgar, duorum fratrem et etiam comitum, qui, accepta potestate Uuectae insulae ab avunculo suo Cerdic rege et Cynric filio suo, consobrino eorum, paucos Britones eiusdem insulae accolas, quos in ea invenire potuerunt, in loco, qui dicitur Guuihtgaraburhg, occiderunt. (Stevenson 4)22 The reliability of this genealogical information is difficult to assess; Stevenson devotes a good deal of space in his notes to the apparent (and problematic) identity of the Jutes and Goths that Asser here asserts, but it seems most likely that Asser identifies Stuf and Wihtgar as Jutes on the basis of the familiar passage in Bede's Historia ecclesiastica (i, 15) where Bede claims 'De lutarum origine sunt Cantuari et Uictuari' ('Of Jutish origin are the people of Kent and the people of [the Isle of] Wight').23 Discussing this passage, Barbara Yorke suggests that 'Asser makes it clear that in ninth-century Wessex Stuf and Wihtgar were believed to be Jutish' and that '[ajlthough it would not have been impossible for Cerdic to have Jutish nephews, it is not a claim which carries much conviction' ('Jutes' 88). But nowhere in the Common Stock is such a claim made, and there may be no compelling reason to try to reconcile the accounts of the Chronicle and of Asser. Indeed, the familial relationship of Stuf and Wihtgar to Cerdic and Cynric might just as well mark them as Saxons. In this context, the evidence of annal 514 is certainly worth considering: Her c[u]omon Westseaxe in Bretene mid .Hi. scipum in pa stow pe is gecueden Cerdicesoran \7/ Stuf 7 Wihtgar, [7] fuhtun wip Brettas 7 hie gefliemdon. (Bately, MSA 20)24 The erasures and insertions here notwithstanding, the 514 annal does seem to imply that Stuf and Wihtgar are West Saxons, not Jutes at all.25 Given the probability that the compilation of the Common Stock took place under

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Alfred's auspices, it seems unlikely that Asser has access to material or traditions unavailable to the chronicler, so the most likely conclusion is that Asser in his chapter 2 assigns to Oslac (and Osburh) an aristocratic Jutish origin (perhaps based indeed on a family connection to the Isle of Wight) for which the evidence is troublingly thin at best. Yorke concludes that 'the story of Cerdic and Cynric and Stuf and Wihtgar could be seen as growing out of a desire on the part of the West Saxons to justify Caedwalla's violent annexation of the Jutes. For the Chronicle's account stresses that the West Saxons had a prior claim to the Isle of Wight and that the founders of the royal house of Wight were kinsmen of the West Saxon rulers' ('Jutes' 95). The case is even stronger if we follow the Chronicle in seeing Stuf and Wihtgar as (West) Saxons themselves. Asser, it seems, accepts the Chronicle's version of history but supplements it with information from Bede, and the result seems to be a set of confusing and multiple assertions about Stuf and Wihtgar's tribal identity. Although Asser's version makes sense enough taken on its own terms, it seems to introduce historical complications that the Chronicle itself managed to avoid.26 Perhaps because of the mode of his writing (a vita, rather than the Chronicle) Asser seems to downplay or ignore the political context of the Stuf and Wihtgar material, making them into Jutes in order, perhaps, to give Alfred aristocratic ancestors on both sides of his family. Other points of interest can be seen in the passage where Asser presents Alfred's genealogy, in a passage roughly corresponding to the genealogy of ^ithelwulf from the Chronicle's annal 855. Significantly, in Asser, the genealogy is explicitly linked to Alfred, not to his father. Such a circumstance apparently confirms my conclusion in chapter 1 that the genealogies function in the Chronicle as Alfredian propaganda: Asser dispenses with the Chronicle's polite linkage of this genealogy to ^Ethelwulf and applies it directly to this particular son. But other features of this genealogy demand our attention, such as the Cerdic-to-Woden material, which appears as follows in Stevenson's edition: ... Cerdic; qui fuit Elesa; (qui fuit Esla;} qui fuit Geuuis, a quo Britones totam illam gentem Geguuis nominant; (qui fuit Wig; qui fuit Freawine; qui fuit Freothegar;) qui fuit Brond; qui fuit Beldeag; qui fuit Uuoden;... (Stevenson 2)27

As noted in chapter 1, Asser's identification of an eponymous West Saxon ancestor has important ramifications for understanding the West Saxon genealogy. But, just as importantly, the 'short version' of this passage present in Asser fails to feature the alliterative regularity seen in the corresponding passage of the Common Stock genealogy.28 It may be significant that, as I

130 Textual Histories concluded above, the alliterative passage functioned to highlight the West Saxon genealogy in contrast to the Woden extensions of the other kingdoms; in Asser's Latin text, not only would the alliteration be non-functional but the comparison would fail because the other genealogies are not present. The chronicler's motives in composing the fuller Cerdic-to-Woden passage simply do not apply to Asser, and (perhaps as a result) we see only the short version of the genealogy. One other passage from Asser's genealogy of Alfred is worth attending to. When Asser reaches Geata, we read: ... qui fuit Geata, quem Getam iamdudem pagani pro deo venerabantur. Cuius Sedulis poeta mentionem facit in Paschali metrico carmine, ita dicens: cum sua gentiles studeant figmenta poetae grandisonis pompare modis, tragioque boatu ridiculove Getae seu qualibet arte canendi... [seven more lines of Sedulius's Latin verse follow, then,] Qui Geata fuit Taetuua;... (Stevenson 3; my ellipses)29

Here Asser draws a link between the Geata of the genealogy and the Geta mentioned in Sedulius's poem, whom (as Stevenson points out) Aldhelm knew to be different from the god Geat, though Asser apparently did not (Stevenson 163). Instead of a Germanic god, Sedulius's Geta is a character from the dramas of Terence; but even if Asser was unaware of the real referent of Sedulius's Geta, the digression here is significant: by shifting from the world of Germanic learning implied by the genealogy to the world of Latin learning implied by the use of Sedulius, Asser constructs a different sort of bridge between the two than we saw in the use of Latin in the 855 genealogy. Perhaps because the linguistic shift was unavailable to Asser, who was writing in Latin, he here indicates (and smooths over) the cultural boundary through this poetic citation. in In the end, Asser's use of forms and material from the Chronicle is of particular interest precisely because he is writing not as a chronicler but rather as a royal biographer. The information he gives about the tribal identity of Stuf and Wihtgar, rather than indicating an authentic ninth-century historical tradition, seems designed to valorize Alfred's maternal descent. The Chronicle's version of the invasion, in which Stuf and Wihtgar are implicitly presented as West Saxons, clearly seems to function (as Yorke suggests) within a broader political realm, and the concerns of that realm do not seem to affect Asser very powerfully; Asser has an even narrower West Saxon/Alfredian focus. His

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treatment of Alfred's paternal genealogy can be understood in similar terms, as it fails to feature the long version of the Cerdic-to-Woden material, which, as I have argued, serves a political function specific to the Chronicle and to its appearance in Old English. If, as I suggested at the end of chapter 1, the Chronicle was 'Alfred's history,' Asser employs it only insofar as it can be reshaped as Alfredian biography. But where Alfred is still a historical character in the historical narrative presented by the Chronicle, Asser inverts the order, making history an element of Alfred's life. In many ways, ^Ethelweard's treatment of the Chronicle appears to share a number of concerns with Asser's treatment, though how those concerns are handled is frequently different. Where Asser limits his translation of the Chronicle to the annals from 851 to 887, yEthelweard supplements the Chronicle's material with brief comments on world history (possibly derived from Isidore's Etymologiae; see Campbell's edition, xvii) and material from Bede's Historia ecclesiastica. Where Asser reverted to the system of chronological location found in Bede's 'Chronological Epitome,' ^Ethelweard, in general, dates the events of each year according to how much time had elapsed since the last reported events (e.g., 'After the lapse often years ... Then after twelve months ... After a period of four years ...' Campbell 21; ellipses mine). Both authors' purposes no longer explicitly involve a history of the island of Britain such as is found in the Chronicle: Asser limits his scope to those years in which Alfred was alive; ^ithelweard extends the scope to world history in general, with a focus on England.31 In other ways, as well, vEthelweard's translation is quite different from Asser's. In part, the difference stems from the fact that jEthelweard's version of the Chronicle went well beyond the Common Stock, including material at least as late as the 975 poem found in manuscripts ABC. Related concerns in other chapters of this study make it especially worthwhile here to examine ^thelweard's treatment of the Chronicle's genealogies and his translation of the 973 and 975 poems. Since /^Ethelweard's translations include the whole of the Common Stock, we would expect to see him include all of the Common Stock genealogies, but in fact he does not do so. Somewhat strangely, ^Ethelweard includes genealogical material only in the passages of his history corresponding to the annals 547, 560, 597, 674, 688, 755, and 855.32 Further, except for the genealogies in 755 and 855, yEthelweard gives the rest of the included genealogies only in abbreviated form. Consider, for example, the genealogy of ^Elle (from the 560 annal): JElle quippe Iffing ad Northanhymbre seriem mittitur, quorum genus usque ad generalissimum ascendit, id est Vuothen. (Campbell 13)33

132 Textual Histories This genealogy is the only one in ^Ethelweard to employ the native -ing patronymic; the elimination of intermediary stages of the genealogies, as here, is typical of £khelweard's practice. jEthelweard makes other changes to the genealogies as well. Where Asser (like the Common Stock) seemed concerned to link the Germanic portions of the genealogy of vEthelwulf (or Alfred) to the world of classical and biblical learning, jEthelweard's genealogy of ^Ethelwulf extends (famously) only to Scef.34 With some small but interesting variations (the omission of Cuba, the replacement of Baeldaeg with Balder),35 ^Ethelweard presents /Ethelwulf's genealogy in much the same form as does the Common Stock through his eighteenth ancestor, Scyld. At this point, the Common Stock genealogies include a number of names beginning with Heremod and (in BC) ending in Sceaf; these names are not included in ^Ethelweard's text. Instead, in a passage famous for its potential parallels to Beowulf, jEthelweard immediately identifies Scef as the father of Scyld and recounts his arrival on the island of Skaney 'cum uno dromone ... armis circundatis' (Campbell 33, my ellipses; 'With one light ship ... with arms all round him' - Campbell's translation). It is important to remind ourselves that, in jEthelweard's translation, the genealogy of ^thelwulf ends at this point. I suggested in chapter 1 that jEthelweard may be working from a copy of the Chronicle in which the genealogy extended no further. But crucially, unlike the Common Stock (but like Asser), yEthelweard does not claim that Scef was born in Noah's ark. Sisam suggests that jEthelweard's 'scholarly friends like ^Elfric would not encourage belief in the fabulous birth in the Ark of an ancestor of Sceaf ('Royal Genealogies' 178). But it seems significant that where the Common Stock includes a macaronic sentence to accomplish its shift between Germanic and biblical genealogical traditions, jEthelweard famously summarizes a story so apparently Germanic that our drawing a comparison to Beowulf is almost irresistible. Indeed, if the differences between vEthelweard's genealogy of ^thelwulf and that preserved in the Common Stock indicate that .flithelweard's version stems from a preliminary version by the chronicler (as I argued in chapter 1), then vEthelweard's story of Scef becomes his genealogy's most outstanding feature. The history of ^Ethelweard's Chronicle, however, gives us little to go on. The Scandinavian or Danish story of Scef that ^Ethelweard cites seems to parallel vEthelweard's use of 'Balder' (for 'Baeldaeg') in giving this version of the genealogy a specifically North Germanic flavour, and we might recall the evidence recounted above in chapter 3 suggesting that ^Ethelweard's exemplar had had access to Northern (English) material very early in its history, when Danish influence in the North was still especially strong. Whether ^Ethelweard himself is responsible for these features or whether they are inherited from his

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exemplar may be impossible to determine; in either case, the incorporation of North Germanic elements into the genealogy seems likely to have been politically motivated in an effort to allude to a common ancestry between the Anglo-Saxons and the Danes of England. We should recall that such a political linkage also seems to lie behind the 942 Chronicle poem, The Capture of the Five Boroughs. The possibility that the genealogy of ^Ethelwulf may serve some of the same political ends as some of the tenth-century Chronicle poems leads us to a consideration of the poems in ^thelweard's Chronicle. Interestingly, yEthelweard's translation of the Chronicle appears to reflect a situation regarding poetry unparalleled in surviving Chronicle manuscripts: there is no indication at all under annals 937 and 942 that jEthelweard either translates poems or simplifies the poems we find in manuscripts ABCD into prose, although ^thelweard's account of the battle at Brunanburh is fuller than we see in manuscript E of the Chronicle. On the other hand, the 973 and 975 poetic passages have clearly inspired the poetic passages that conclude ^thelweard's Chronicle. As Campbell notes, these poems are 'not translations,' although 'they derive leading thoughts from the OEC poems on the same subjects' (xxxi). Campbell further notes that the 'leading thoughts' of the Chronicle poems are distributed unevenly between ^thelweard's poems: ^Ethelweard's first poem seems to contain only some of the material from the 973 poem, The Coronation of Edgar, while /Ethelweard's second poem includes material from the end of the Coronation as well as material from the beginning of The Death of Edgar (from 975). The prose passage between the two Latin poems seems to be inspired by the convoluted poetic indication of date in the Coronation (11 10b-16b). Considering the Chronicle poems' concern (described above in chapter 4) with recounting the familial relations of the ruling English kings, it is important to note that among the 'leading thoughts' from these poems that ^thelweard sees fit to translate are 'Eadmundes eafora' (Coronation, \. 17, rendered as 'proles Eadmundi') and 'Eadgar, Engla cyning' (Death of Edgar 2a, rendered as 'Anglorum insignis rex Eadgarus'). Further, jEthelweard adds a final set of titles to Edgar that are not paralleled in the Old English poems: 'Monarchus Brittanum / Nobilis, ex stirpe frondens Saxonum / Eadgarus anax' ('Noble king of Britain, arising from the race of the Saxons, Edgar the king'). 36 The fact that ^Ethelweard here contributes to the continuing themes of the Chronicle's poems, using an apparent claim to shared 'Saxon' history that we might compare to Brunanburh's invocation of the adventus Saxonum, indicates how accurately he seems to understand the place and function of poetry in the Chronicle. The fact that he ends his translation of The Death of

134 Textual Histories Edgar at line 10, before the announcement of Edgar's successor, however, seems to indicate that vEthelweard is also not above manipulating the content of his translation for his own ends: here, to finish his work on the high note of his praise of the exemplary Edgar.37 The contents of the final portions of /Ethelweard's Chronicle, however, demand additional comment, especially since there is an apparent mismatch between the chapter headings given at the beginning of Book iv and the chapters actually present in the Cotton manuscript.38 Yet a close look at chapters 7 to 9 of /Cthelweard's Book iv reveals a remarkable circumstance: the only chronological comment made for the reigns of Eadred, Eadwig, and Edgar is that Eadwig 'Tenuit namque quadriennio per regnum' (55; 'He held the kingdom continuously for four years'). In other words, at some point in the late 940s, it seems as if yEthelweard effectively abandoned his previous methods of chronological location. Rather than chronologically oriented commentary, j^Ethelweard's chapters 7 to 9 appear primarily as a king-by-king account, and all of the chapter headings from Book iv suggest that this was, in fact, jEthelweard's conception of the organization of his fourth book. But through his chapter 6, at least, vEthelweard maintained his previous system of chronology. The chapter headings listed at the beginning of Book iv also promise material for the reigns of Edward and vEthelred; these chapters' non-appearance in BL Cotton Otho A x may be mysterious, but it must be seen as a flaw in ^thelweard, rather than a problem in his Chronicle manuscript, which probably also lacked significant material for the reigns of Eadred and Eadwig. What jEthelweard's abandonment of chronological ordering suggests, of course, is that ^Ethelweard's exemplar of the Chronicle may not have extended meaningfully beyond the 940s, with the notable exception of the 973 and 975 poems. This observation is of crucial importance, since it suggests that jEthelweard's exemplar was far less complete for the tenth century than any of the surviving manuscripts that extend so far. Further, the fact that vEthelweard nevertheless had access to the 973 and 975 poems suggests a continuing habit of publishing more or less official continuations to the Chronicle: these two poems, we can see, served to augment the otherwise unrelated Chronicle manuscripts A, BC, and ^thelweard's exemplar. The appearance of these poems in three branches of the Chronicle that are otherwise not closely related during this period testifies to an apparent effort to include this material in a broad range of Chronicle manuscripts.39 The record of /Ethelweard's Chronicle for the genres of poetry, prose, and genealogy suggests that his understanding of the interrelations of these genres in the political functioning of the Chronicle was complex and subtle. Though writing for an ostensibly German audience, ^Ethelweard continues (and even

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focuses) the tradition of Chronicle verse explored in chapter 3, highlighting in particular the issue of Edgar's descent. His abbreviation of many genealogies focuses attention on what is important about them: ^Ethelweard frequently limits his genealogical comments to remarks that various rulers were descended from Woden, and vEthelweard's understanding that the issue lying behind the genealogies was political legitimation and descent could hardly be clearer. The citation of the extensive genealogy of jEthelwulf functions to flatter and inform his specific audience and also to set the stage for the genealogical comments included in the poems. The continued Anglo-Saxon audience that yEthelweard's Chronicle apparently found, of course, indicates that, despite the difficulties of /Ethelweard's Latinity, at least some of his contemporaries saw his work as a valuable contribution to the Chronicle tradition. Michael Lapidge's important essay on the 'hermeneutic' style of Latin composition in tenth-century England identifies ^thelweard's prose style as characteristic of a whole school of Latin composition. In its use of archaisms and grecisms (usually derived from glossaries) and neologisms, the hermeneutic style seems, in /Ethelweard's hands especially, to mark a certain kind of educational pretension. So far had Latin learning in England come: where the Common Stock of the Chronicle seems to imply that even a rudimentary understanding of Latin may have been beyond the grasp of the Chronicle's initial audience, ^Ethelweard can attempt to show off his mastery of a most ostentatious variety of Latin only a century or so later. What is remarkable, in some ways, is the fact that, despite the very real resurgence of Latin learning and Latin literature, the translations of Asser and /Ethelweard failed to make a significant impact on pre-Conquest literary culture in England. Both texts (as I noted above) were apparently intended for foreign audiences, but both survived into modern times only in manuscripts that had apparently remained in England. Yet neither Asser's nor ^thelweard's text stood as the basis for any continuation of the Chronicle, even while Old English versions of the Chronicle were being continuously updated during the period following the Benedictine reform and even later. The fact that John of Worcester used Asser and William of Malmesbury used ^Ethelweard indicates that these twelfth-century Latin historians had a use for Latin translations of the Chronicle; until that time, however, the Old English versions of the Chronicle seem to have been predominant. Despite the understanding of the Chronicle's use of genealogy and poetry exhibited by /Ethelweard, then, the Chronicle's existence as a primarily Old English document seems to have endured throughout the Anglo-Saxon period: the precarious survival of Asser's and j£thelweard's books in single manu-

136 Textual Histories scripts cannot compare to the survival of no fewer than seven versions of the vernacular Chronicle. Even more remarkably, both Latin authors seem to have recognized the essentially vernacular nature of the Chronicle as a chronicle: Asser uses the Chronicle only as a resource for his Life of Alfred, and ^Ethelweard contextualizes Anglo-Saxon history by incorporating material on world history into his beginning books. If we see the composition of the Chronicle as a nationalistically motivated component of Alfred's political and educational program, we could hardly have a clearer indicator of the Chronicle's success: within a century the Chronicle had established itself as the primary AngloSaxon historical record, and its pervasive vernacularity continued to assert a powerful Anglo-Saxon cultural identity. Yet the Latinate chronological framework continuously employed in the Chronicle should stand as a reminder of how solidly the Anglo-Saxon vernacular literary tradition was built upon a Latin foundation. The Chronicle's continued vernacular record, especially considered alongside the translations of Asser and ^ithelweard, represents the expression of a cultural identity none the less marked out as separate from Latin-based culture. In these terms, the relationships between Latin and Old English as seen in the Chronicle are indeed complex and revealing. But the sense of national and linguistic identity fostered by the Chronicle was, of course, seriously challenged by the Norman Conquest of 1066; my final chapter will examine how the Chronicle manuscripts end and how those endings exemplify different responses to the historiographic challenge posed by the reality of the Conquest.

6

Conclusions

When I began this project, I planned to write a book on the Chronicle as a record of Anglo-Saxon literate practice. The Chronicle's record of Old English prose, poetry, genealogy, and even Latin across a span of two and a half centuries seemed to make it a perfect testing ground for discussing the influence of orality and the influence of Latinity on the remarkable vernacular literary culture of the later centuries of the Anglo-Saxon period. Yet, as even this brief summary makes clear, the investigation of literate practice inevitably led to an investigation of the various genres recorded in the Chronicle; likewise the interrelationships among these genres within the Chronicle led me to investigate their historiographic purposes and effects. Somewhat to my own surprise, then, the book I eventually produced has had a more or less constant three-pronged approach. My questions about Anglo-Saxon literate practice have urged me to incorporate methods and perspectives from the 'back-to-the-manuscripts' movement that has been so valuable in recent Old English studies: my examination of pointing, layout practices, and copying strategies have helped shape most, if not all, of my chapters. Questions about genre and generic identity have urged me to investigate two very different kinds of text on the margins of the Old English verse tradition: alliterating genealogies and the Chronicle's late verse. Both sorts of investigation have shaped my conclusions about the Chronicle as a living historical document. In keeping with my multi-pronged approach, this final chapter offers a dual conclusion. First, I look at the endings of the Chronicle, exploring what the latest chroniclers' activities can tell us about the historiographic responses to what was probably the Chronicle's greatest challenge: the political reality of the Norman Conquest of 1066 and the subsequent decades in which Norman rule was consolidated and institutionalized. Second, I offer a 'reading' of the

138 Textual Histories Chronicle as a whole, attempting to gather together the various strands that make up my argument. This section both reviews the textual and historiographic strategies of the Chronicle and examines what conclusions can be drawn from my study regarding Anglo-Saxon literate practice. The effort to consider all these things in isolation is, as my argument throughout has attempted to show, troublingly reductive; in this final chapter I try to bring back together the various parts of the Chronicle considered so far. 6.1 The Ends of the Chronicle and the End of Anglo-Saxon History If the degree to which even the Common Stock of the Chronicle employs Latin and Old English is too rarely remarked upon (as I suggested at the beginning of the previous chapter), the fact that all of the Chronicle manuscripts (except G) received their latest additions in the twelfth century is even less commonly observed. But as long as we accept that the activities of the F scribe are best dated after 1100, then there can be little doubt that almost all of the surviving manuscripts of the Chronicle continued to be read, consulted, and supplemented well into what is conventionally considered to be the Norman period. To understand the life of the Chronicle after the Norman Conquest, we must examine the ways in which the surviving manuscripts of the Chronicle end; their various endings witness both the end of Anglo-Saxon historiography and the end of Anglo-Saxon history. The surviving manuscripts with twelfth-century additions might well be subdivided into three major groups: those located at Christ Church, Canterbury, after the Conquest (A, B, and F) constitute one group; the C and D manuscripts (which end before 1080, but have brief twelfth-century additions) stand as a second group; and the E and H manuscripts, extending well into the twelfth century, form a third group. Significantly, these three groups exemplify three differing historiographic reponses to the Conquest and the changes it brought. The terminations of the Chronicle manuscripts thus allow us a final glimpse at some contemporary reponses to the Chronicle and its purposes. At the same time, the endings of the Chronicle also help us understand the cultural work that the latest chroniclers attempted to put it to. The 'Canterbury Group' David Dumville's complex and detailed essay 'Some Aspects of Annalistic Writing at Canterbury in the Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries' provides a remarkable examination of the Christ Church, Canterbury, contributions to manuscripts A and B of the Chronicle, as well as the composition of manu-

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script F (also at Christ Church) and the probable Canterbury component of E. But where Dumville is largely concerned with the textual history of the Chronicle, my focus here is somewhat different, and although Dumville's commentary on these manuscripts remains invaluable, I hope to supplement it here by considering the cultural significance of the Canterbury additions to these manuscripts. In their general habit of supplementing vernacular annals with Latin material, the Chronicle manuscripts that end at Canterbury seem to suggest that by the early twelfth century the vernacular literary culture that had fostered the continuation of the Chronicle had been profoundly affected (but not entirely supplanted) by the Latin literary culture supported by the conquering Normans. It is convenient to begin with manuscript B. In his edition of the B manuscript, Simon Taylor reconstructs the order of the medieval contents of manuscript B as follows: T propose that the original order was, after the main text, the two blank folios, the Regnal List, then (added, perhaps, early in the twelfth century) fo 35, its bad condition possibly partly due to the fact that it was an outside leaf (MS B xxii). The 'two blank folios,' ruled in the same manner as the Chronicle text, may suggest that the B scribe expected his text one day to be supplemented by further annals, which would then have been situated before the B manuscript's copy of the WSRT. Folio 35, which does not appear to have been part of the B scribe's book (MS B xx-xxii), contains a note (in Latin) on Pope Sergius and a list of the popes who sent pallia to Canterbury and the archbishops who received them. In Taylor's opinion, the same hand responsible for manuscript B's folio 35 also wrote a very similar list of popes and archbishops on folio 54v of manuscript A (MS B xxi). The addition of such similar material to two manuscripts of the Chronicle deserves our attention. Folio 54 of the A manuscript belongs to what Parkes has identified as the fourth booklet ('Palaeography' 150-1); the evidence from manuscript G suggests that (at least at the time when G was copied, around 1000) this fourth booklet was placed between the annals and the Laws, although currently this booklet follows the Laws (Parkes 170). Such listlike material, it appears, was deemed to be appropriate at the end of manuscripts of the Chronicle: perhaps the presence of the WSRT at the end of manuscript B and the papal and episcopal lists following the Chronicle in manuscript A influenced the decision to add to both manuscripts the list of popes sending pallia to the archbishops of Canterbury. ' Annalistic compilations and lists of popes and bishops, of course, are similar in that both (in principle) can be kept up to date as time goes on. Such similarities might well account for the collocations of annals and lists seen in manuscripts A and B. Indeed, it is important to note that on folio 54v of the A

140 Textual Histories manuscript, the list of popes and archbishops has been updated in precisely this manner.2 Likewise, the incomplete list of popes on folio 53r of the A manuscript was updated in the twelfth century, in a hand identified by Taylor as that of the scribe of the so-called Acts of Lanfranc (MS B xxi).3 Within the context of the Parker Chronicle, the Acts of Lanfranc, as I argued in chapter 5, stands as both a remarkable Latin continuation of the Chronicle (through its annalistic form) and a work which strongly marks the cultural dislocation brought about by the Conquest (through the Acts' use of Latin and of 1070 as the key point of chronological reference). The fact that, in CCCC 173, the addition of list material to the end of the Chronicle was practically contemporary to the addition of the Acts of Lanfranc may help us understand the addition of the same list material to the end of the B Chronicle. Like the Acts, the lists of popes and archbishops of Canterbury in A and B both mark their entry points as the ends of their respective Chronicles and simultaneously imply a continuity across the dislocation of the Conquest. Although no attempt seems to have been made to update either the B Chronicle's annals or the papal/episcopal list on folio 35 in early-twelfth-century Canterbury, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the B manuscript was given an ending that paralleled the end of the Chronicle in manuscript A. That the papal/episcopal list on folio 54v of the Parker Chronicle was updated, however, suggests that these Chronicle manuscripts were not really ended by the addition of such lists, but rather that they might indeed continue as living historical documents. At about the same time that the Acts of Lanfranc was appended to the Parker Chronicle, another Canterbury scribe (with a similar hand) made a number of major interventions in the Parker text. This scribe was, of course, the scribe of the F manuscript as well. Dumville argues that the F scribe's additions to the early part of A are 'directed towards a single aim, namely bringing the text of A into line with the so-called "Northern Recension'" ('Some Aspects' 43). Working from this conclusion and the fact that this attempt at revising A was apparently abandoned, Dumville suggests that, 'In short, he ran out of steam, and we may rather suspect that a new project engaged his attention. If so, that would have been the compilation of MS F itself ('Some Aspects' 43). Although this suggestion has a certain appeal, it is unlikely that we can ever be sure of the chronology of the F scribe's works; what we can say for certain is that the F scribe seems to have found the production of both strictly vernacular and thoroughly bilingual versions of the Chronicle to be an appropriate use of his time. It is, as Dumville notes, unfortunate that the F Chronicle ends imperfectly in the annal for 1058. Certainly, the care and energy invested in F (exemplified by the numerous additions, corrections, and the act of translation itself)

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suggest that the F scribe was deeply concerned to produce a relatively complete (if abbreviated) version of the Chronicle. If we accept the possibility that the production of manuscript F replaced the revision of manuscript A as this scribe's employment, it is tempting to suggest that the production of this bilingual Chronicle supplanted purely vernacular chronicling activity at Christ Church, Canterbury, in the early twelfth century. Such a conclusion would fit well with Dumville's argument that the 1081-1121 portions of VE were not composed at Canterbury ('Some Aspects' 38) and with his overall conclusion: 'We should do well, I think, to consider the chronicling to be part and parcel of the various major efforts, which were stirring the community in these years, to recover the Englishness of their house-traditions and, where appropriate, to unite them, without subordination, with the demands of more recent fashions and necessities' ('Some Aspects' 54). The activities of the F scribe, paralleling the various Christ Church, Canterbury, contributions to manuscripts A and B of the Chronicle, can be read as exemplifying an attitude of post-Conquest cultural reconciliation in which Norman 'fashions and necessities' are, by implication, grafted onto Anglo-Saxon originals. The fact that the F manuscript of the Chronicle maintains the priority of its vernacular material by placing it before the Latin translation may well represent a continuing sense of English nationalism, expressed, as it had been in earlier centuries, in the Chronicle itself. The Endings of the C and D Chronicles The ending points of the C and D Chronicles are both quite remarkable, although in different ways: the C Chronicle famously ends with the account of Harold's victory at Stamford Bridge, with no comment at all about William and the death of Harold at Hastings. Furthermore, the 1066C annal (ending incompletely on folio 162v) has been finished in a twelfth-century hand, giving the equally famous account of a lone and valiant Norse defender stabbed from beneath the bridge he held. While the D Chronicle includes an account of the Conquest, extending in a more or less contemporary hand to 1079, it too was supplemented in the twelfth century by a brief annal for 1130 that was apparently misnumbered as 1080. In their endings around the Conquest and in their (much) later final additions, these two manuscripts of the Chronicle exemplify a different set of responses to the Conquest than the Canterbury manuscripts discussed above. And considering the time spans involved in the final contributions to these manuscripts, it is useful to consider separately the late-eleventh-century endings of these manuscripts and their twelfth-century postscripts.

142 Textual Histories Itis, first of all, important to note that the twelfth-century addition to the C Chronicle occurs upon the final bifolium of the book, suggesting that the addition of these two leaves may well have been contemporary with the addition of the twelfth-century material. It is, therefore, possible that the addition was intended to replace original eleventh-century material that had become detached, was lacking, or was otherwise defective.4 Even if this is not the case, the presentation of annals 1065 and 1066 in this manuscript is also remarkable: 1065C is preceded in the manuscript by a page left half blank (163v).5 The annals for 1065C (containing the notice of the death of Edward the Confessor) and 1066C (narrating Harold's victory at Stamford Bridge) are visually separated from the preceding Chronicle material in a fashion that might suggest they were intended to cap off the C Chronicle entirely.6 It is certainly possible that the scribes responsible for annals 1065C and 1066C intended their manuscript of the Chronicle to end with the 1066 annal, and they may have intended it to end without mention of the Conquest. Such a possibility would be a strong indication of a contemporary (or near-contemporary) perception that the arrival of William entailed irreversible cultural consequences.7 The D manuscript, on the other hand, extends several years beyond the narrative of the Conquest included in it, though only as far as annal 1079 (again, excluding the twelfth-century addition). As Dorothy Whitelock has suggested, much of the later material from the D Chronicle must have been written after 1070 (including the poems in 1057D and 1067D; see Peterborough Chronicle 28); reading these annals in particular (and much of the end of the D Chronicle) as responsive to the Conquest seems crucially important. The 1067D annal is particularly valuable and rewarding for thinking about the ending of the D Chronicle; annal 1067D includes not only a poem but also a passage of alliterating genealogy (tracing Margaret's descent from Edgar) and a passage of Latin (which is glossed in Old English). Thus, this one annal includes all the various types of text that make up the Chronicle itself. The genealogy and the poem in 1067D function to invoke the genealogical and poetic traditions within the Chronicle, both of which are (I have suggested) centred on justifying the political legitimacy of the West Saxon dynasty in its rule over a more or less united Anglo-Saxon England. The form of the 1067D genealogy is especially revealing: hire faeder waes Eadward aebeling, Eadmundes sunu kynges, Eadmund jEbelreding, -flibelred Eadgaring, Eadgar Eadreding, 7 swa ford on paet cynecynn (Cubbin 83)8

This is the first and only alliterating genealogy to appear in annals beyond the

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Common Stock, and its appearance here seems designed to recall both those earlier genealogies and their historiographic effects. Margaret's ancestry is here traced back to what is implicitly identified as the familiar West Saxon dynastic line. More specifically, that line is traced through Edward the aetheling (memorialized in the 1057D poem) back to the virtuous Edgar, himself memorialized in a small handful of Chronicle poems (not all of which, it is important to recall, appear in manuscript D).9 This genealogy in particular, then, also invokes the Chronicle's own status as a repository of Anglo-Saxon history. The collocation of genealogy, poetry, and Latin in the 1067D annal is unique within the Chronicle', the juxtaposition of all these types of text here works by invoking all the major textual strategies that I have discussed in previous chapters. Such a juxtaposition of these strategies, especially placed in the annal immediately following the narrative of the Conquest, indicates the import of the annal. The 1067D chronicler pulls out all of the rhetorical stops in order to identify Margaret as carrying on the West Saxon dynasty itself. The textual links to earlier annals embodied in the 1067D annal's recapitulation of the Chronicle's generic contents serve to insist upon a historical (and historiographic) link as well. That the implied link also extends well beyond the Danish Conquest of the early eleventh century (and beyond the troubled reign of yEthelred entirely) also subtly argues that the 'present troubles' of the Norman rule may well prove as temporary as the Danish rule had. The 1067D annal makes a valiant attempt to ensure a continuing Anglo-Saxon national identity linked to the West Saxon dynasty. The limitations inherent in the view of Anglo-Saxon politics apparently transmitted in the 1067D annal, however, are clear: as William ruled, he was able to consolidate his position until, by the time of his death (if not well before), he could ensure that the succession would then pass through the Norman royal line. Indeed, it may be the likelihood of William's success in this matter that brought about the end of the D Chronicle in 1079. Perhaps by the 1080s the hope for a return to West Saxon rule - a hope that was still possible in the 1070s - was no longer realistic, and the D Chronicle's optimism could no longer be sustained. The D Chronicle seems to have linked its position as a record of Anglo-Saxon history to the fortunes of Margaret and her descendants; as the West Saxon line faded from public view and political viability, the D Chronicle almost certainly lost its reason for continuing. Nevertheless, like the C version of the Chronicle, the D manuscript also received a final, but brief, addition in the twelfth century. In both manuscripts, the contents of the additions are, perhaps, far less interesting than the fact that they were entered into these manuscripts in the first place. Like the Latin

144 Textual Histories material appended to the A and B manuscripts, the vernacular additions to manuscripts C and D indicate a twelfth-century interest in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Although neither the C Chronicle nor the D Chronicle can be described as a 'living chronicle' in the twelfth century, neither were they entirely moribund: at the very least, these late additions attest to a continuing audience for the vernacular Chronicle, an audience of readers literate in Old English and interested in reading about the history of Anglo-Saxon England. Living Twelfth-Century Chronicles: E and H Unlike the other surviving manuscripts of the Chronicle, the E and H manuscripts (and, indeed, probably the VE text, wherever it was compiled) can usefully be described as living twelfth-century chronicles. Though H consists of only a single leaf, its partial annals for 1113 and 1114 would appear to be contemporary compositions. As Ker writes, 'The difference between the 1113 and 1114 annals in manner of writing and colour of ink and a change of ink in the course of the 1114 annal at "Her aefter he ferde" (Plummer 245/23) give the impression that these are contemporary entries written up at short intervals' (Catalogue 188). Like the twelfth-century additions to C and D, the contents of the H leaf are of less interest than the simple fact of its existence: the H leaf provides crucial evidence to suggest that the survival and continuation of a vernacular Chronicle exemplified by the E manuscript was not an isolated and exceptional case. But where the H Chronicle's fragmentary nature gives no indication of how (or even if) its version of the Chronicle negotiated the dislocation occasioned by the Norman Conquest, the E manuscript does. As discussed above in chapter 4, the inclusion of the rhyming poem on William the Conqueror in the 1086E annal suggests one strategy employed in VE for the continuation of vernacular chronicling. The treatment of William as a king of the English (through the textual strategy of including a memorial poem in the Chronicle at his death) was a strategy that had not been employed even at the death of Cnut; this strategy, however, implicitly seems to acknowledge the end of the Wessex dynasty that had built the unified Anglo-Saxon kingdom. By including this poem on William, then, the VE text effected a remarkable and significant transformation in the cultural significance of the Chronicle: where the genealogies of the Common Stock and the poems of later annals continued to present the history of England as synonymous with that of the West Saxon dynasty, the 1086E poem insists that the Chronicle's record is (at least now) a history of the English kingdom and its people, rather than a family history. If the Chronicle did indeed help to foster an Anglo-Saxon national identity, few more powerful testimonials to its efficacy could be imagined.

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Significantly, however, it is worth recalling that when the VE text was copied in the process of writing the Peterborough manuscript, it was extensively supplemented by documents and charters exclusively concerned with Peterborough. In a sense, the Peterborough manuscript thus employed a second strategy for the continuing composition of the Chronicle: by explicitly including local documentary sources (a practice unparalleled in the other Chronicle manuscripts, despite their sometimes detectable local interests), the Chronicle was, in effect, here transformed into a local history.10 As an ostensibly local history, a vernacular text such as the Peterborough Chronicle may have been less susceptible to the Latinizing forces that apparently led to the late additions to manuscripts A and B and the translation represented by manuscript F. On the other hand, of course, for all the insistence of the Peterborough Chronicle's localization, it continues to have a kind of national interest: the famous material about the reign of Stephen (so frequently anthologized in modern collections of Middle English prose) can hardly be described as being of only local Peterborough interest. To its end, even this manuscript of the Chronicle concerns itself with the kingdom in general, using the vernacular to record and comment on the history of the Anglo-Saxons in their own language. If the Canterbury additions to manuscripts A and B (and the production of manuscript F) represent the Latinizing of the Chronicle in the early twelfth century and the E and H manuscripts represent an alternative attempt to maintain a vernacular Chronicle, the C and D manuscripts remain the only versions of the Chronicle to treat the Conquest and its consequences as a terminal point. The importance of this fact should not be understated: the C and D manuscripts, in their treatment (or non-treatment) of the Conquest and its consequences each imply a particular narrative. The chroniclers responsible for the endings of these manuscripts do more than record events year by year in classic annalistic fashion: they tell a story. But, tellingly, the evidence of C and D belies the terminal narrative these manuscripts attempt to present, since their later, twelfth-century additions attest to a continuing readership for these books. Despite modern historical perspectives, then, which often see the Conquest as marking the end of one period and the beginning of another, the Chronicle itself would seem to suggest that Anglo-Saxon history continued at least into the twelfth century: the cultural changes brought about by the Conquest were, apparently, more gradual than instantaneous. To the degree that the Anglo-Saxon chroniclers saw their task as the recording of their nation's own history (and the Chronicle poetry's investment in a written historical tradition confirms this perspective), we should, perhaps, date

146 Textual Histories the end of the Anglo-Saxon period much later than 1066: 1154, the date of the last entry into the Peterborough manuscript, might serve as a convenient terminal point for the period. But in the apparent efforts to replace the early Chronicle's focus on the descendants of jEthelwulf (seen in the Common Stock genealogies and much of the poetry) with a more national focus (seen in the acceptance of William and even the report on Stephen's reign), the Peterborough Chronicle may indicate the ultimate success of the Chronicle (and the subjects of its narrative) in forging an Anglo-Saxon national identity.11 But the Chronicle succeeds in these ends precisely by having a story to tell - by having an implicit narrative structure. The twelfth-century continuations, supplements, and additions to the various Chronicle manuscripts indicate the very power of the Chronicle's continuing narrative: the Canterbury contributions (with their bilingual focus) function, in Dumville's words, 'to recover the Englishness of their house traditions and ... to unite them, without subordination, with the demands of more recent fashions and necessities' ('Some Aspects' 54; my ellipses). The C and D Chronicles, despite their insistence on an ending point at the Conquest, cannot overcome the power of the Chronicle's narrative, as it continues to function at Christ Church, at Peterborough, and at the anonymous home of manuscript H; the twelfth-century additions to C and D merely indicate the degree to which their attempts to narrate the end of Anglo-Saxon history were premature. But the narrative of Anglo-Saxon history that the Chronicle embodies (and, again, it is crucial to recall that I refer to a sense of the Chronicle that is larger and more encompassing than any single manuscript) was, clearly, set into motion by the Common Stock itself. The Alfredian Common Stock determined the Chronicle's focus on political legitimacy and the succession in both its use of genealogies and the exceptional 755 annal. The early-tenth-century responses to the Chronicle themselves anticipated the responses to the Conquest: the Mercian Register, for example, attempted a localized Chronicle', the Northern Recension attempted a national Chronicle. The poems of the tenth century not only merged these two themes but added a third: the reliability of historical authority itself, the reliability of the Chronicle. In the eleventh century, as I discussed above, the Chronicle poems show us how the Chronicle (and, of course, how Anglo-Saxons) negotiated the challenges to the Chronicle's overriding narrative, challenges brought first by the Danish Conquest at the beginning of the century and then by the more enduring Norman Conquest. The Chronicle's ultimate ability to negotiate these challenges, we might say with justice, stemmed from the power of an original Alfredian vision: the idea of the Chronicle, and the idea of the Anglo-Saxon nation.

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6.2 Reading the Chronicle and Its Record As should be clear, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's manuscripts are complexly interrelated, and they contain complicated (and sometimes contradictory) material. The process of 'reading' the Chronicle is thus always the process of reading the textual history of the Chronicle. Contemporary readers must often have agreed: there seems to have been a contemporary notion that the Chronicle was Alfredian, and later readers would have understood post-Alfredian annals as having a differing textual history. But also, the acts of conflation and supplementation seen in the Mercian Register, the Acts of Lanfranc, and all the changes of scribal hand would likewise have signalled the complex textual origins of the various parts of the Chronicle to contemporary readers. The nature of the Chronicle prompted these acts of conflation (as I noted in the introduction) precisely because the Chronicle has always encouraged its readers to become readers of textual history. But further, the Chronicle's use of varying genres (Old English prose, genealogy, verse, Latin) encourages readers to read various portions of the Chronicle in varying ways. Even the difference between the short and formulaic annals of the eighth century and the longer, more stylistically complex 755 annal seems to have functioned meaningfully in the Common Stock. With regard to these sorts of textual differences, the process of reading the Chronicle has also always demanded a careful attention to form: the textual history of the Chronicle cannot be understood without an accompanying understanding of the history of forms (or the history of genres) in Anglo-Saxon England. A brief summary of the arguments I have made in the preceding chapters can illustrate the interconnectedness of the issues. In my consideration of the Common Stock genealogies, for example, I examined not only the textual history of the surviving ninth-century genealogical records but also the formal characteristics of the genre itself. The latter examination, in fact, allowed me to conduct the former more accurately. The identification of the 'traditional' forms allowed in the genealogies (using the Vespasian collection as a database) made it possible to identify the innovative 'poetry-like' forms used by the 'chronicler.' In turn, the appearance of the chronicler's signature forms helped to explain features of the genealogies' textual history both within the Chronicle and elsewhere. The probability that the West Saxon genealogy of Ine was not originally associated with the 'Anglian Collection' before Alfred's time is an important conclusion, but my readings of the genealogies' form and history also underlie my interpretation of their historiographic role in the Chronicle. To the degree that chapter 1

148 Textual Histories exemplifies a method of integrating formal analysis, textual history, and literary interpretation, it stands as a useful introduction to my method throughout this book. In my examination of the copying strategies employed by the Chronicle scribes in their treatment of the 755 annal, I looked at a different aspect of the relationship between textual history and form. The famous 'Cynewulf and Cyneheard' story from this annal has often been associated with 'orality' (and thus asserted to have a non-literary form, and a non-literate 'textual' history), and my investigation turned on the question of a connection between textual variance and orality. But as I argued, the textual variation seen in the 755 annal can be far more accurately described as stemming from 'scribal innovation' rather than 'variance''; the processes that led to the observed innovation, I showed, were purely textual in origin. At the same time, in the 'literary interpretation' portions of chapter 2, I relied on previously undervalued evidence from scribal practice (the use of capital letters or other litterae notabiliores) and textual history (the association of the Cynewulf and Cyneheard narrative with Offa's genealogy; the presentation of the story in the Common Stock itself) to argue that the 755 annal (like the genealogies) was concerned to promote a West Saxon, even Alfredian, dynasty, one with a relatively narrow pattern of royal succession. Such a reading runs against the grain of traditional scholarly readings of the story, but the 755 annal and the genealogies can be seen as working together to give the Common Stock a powerful West Saxon and Alfredian focus. The extensive record of Alfredian events from the 860s to the end of the Common Stock appears to confirm that narrating the history of Alfred's reign was a central motive for the Common Stock's composition. In my third chapter, I asked how the Alfredian Chronicle described in my first two chapters was able to negotiate the historical (and historiographic) disruption caused by the death of Alfred, who had been the focal point of the Common Stock. Turning again to textual history, I discussed first the evidence for seeing that two major branches of chronicling activity focused respectively on Alfred's descendants Edward and vEthelflaed, giving us a brief Edwardian chronicle and the Mercian Register. But such a move would have occasioned additional complications at the deaths of these figures, and, in a different centre of activity, another solution appears to have presented itself. The so-called Northern Recension appears to have responded to Alfred's death by attempting to construct a Chronicle with a more national focus, recentring Hengist and Horsa in the narrative of the Saxon Invasion, for example, and replacing the politically charged genealogies with a great deal of information on northern figures and events that had been either unavailable or uninteresting to the

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West Saxon compiler of the Common Stock. While the added material is certainly northern in orientation, the resulting Chronicle is far less 'northern' than the Common Stock was 'West Saxon': the 'Northern Recension' was, instead, the first step towards a truly 'national' Chronicle. The two strategies (that of nationalization and that of dynastic interest) appear to have been remarkably and powerfully combined during the reign of jEthelstan, and The Battle of Brunanburh combines both perspectives in its often-quoted ending. Even more important, however, Brunanburh uses the forms and conventions of heroic poetry to accomplish the historiographic connection, fulfilling the imaginative link forged by the Common Stock compiler in his use of poetic forms in the genealogies. That the ending of Brunanburh simultaneously invokes both the heroic adventus Saxonum and the power of texts for the preservation of the historical record indicates the degree to which the Chronicle itself had begun to affect the Anglo-Saxons' conception of history: Brunanburh both invokes the Chronicle's preceding historiographic strategies and self-referentially invokes the Chronicle's historical authority. My fourth chapter examined the consequences of this remarkable moment by considering the role of poetry in the Chronicle. Responding to the continuing critical uncertainty about what passages in the Chronicle are and are not verse, I began by considering again the scribal response to suggest that AngloSaxon readers almost certainly saw the genre of 'Chronicle verse' as being much broader than the few poems canonized in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records would suggest. Such a conclusion, of course, led naturally to a reconsideration of poetic form, and section 4.2 argued that a great deal of the 'noncanonical' Chronicle verse might be better classified as 'postclassical' Old English verse. The chief features of this postclassical verse seem to be a decreased reliance on metrical subordination and a lack of poetic resolution. These two divergences from classical verse, in fact, can be used to explain the majority of 'non-classical' features of the bulk of the Chronicle verse. The reassessment of the nature of the Chronicle poems, of course, then demanded a reconsideration of their role in the Chronicle, and the third portion of chapter 4 considered this question. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the majority of tenth-century poems took up the concerns articulated so clearly in Brunanburh, focusing on the West Saxon dynasty, national identity, and historical recording. But increasingly, just as the classical verse form was being replaced by postclassical forms, the later Chronicle verse began to reshape the concerns of Brunanburh; the 1011 poem, for example, referred to the coming of Christianity, rather than the coming of the Saxons, as the defining historical moment; the 1036 poem (somewhat ominously) invoked the coming of the Danes. In their formal differences, the 1065 poem, The Death of Edward, and

150 Textual Histories the 1086 poem, William the Conqueror, provide a remarkable window into post-Conquest attitudes. The earlier poem (almost certainly written after the Conquest) should probably be seen as a consciously archaizing invocation of the heroic poetic tradition associated with the West Saxon royal line throughout the Chronicle, while the 'postclassicaF rhyming verse on William seems tacitly to acknowledge William as a king of the English. The formal (and perhaps somewhat clumsy) archaic forms of The Death of Edward provide both a fitting tribute to the last of Alfred's dynasty and an implicit acknowledgment that that dynasty's era was past. By considering the Latinity of the Chronicle, chapter 5 somewhat paradoxically explored the Chronicle's remarkable vernacularity. Although the Chronicle's own form descended from and depended upon the world of Latin learning, the Chronicle's dependence upon the vernacular is surely its most intriguing feature. And while the Common Stock's use of Latin argues for an imagined audience with little or no background in Latin, the existence of the translations of Asser and ^thelweard offered later (and more learned) AngloSaxons the opportunity for continued Latin chronicling activity. Yet even Asser's 'history of Alfred' failed to generate further annals, as the Chronicle itself did; despite Asser's and jEthelweard's clear and impressive understanding of the Chronicle's forms and function, neither translation had the cultural impact (within the Anglo-Saxon period) that the vernacular Chronicle had. For all they tell us about the textual history of the Chronicle, and for all their evidence of the bilingualism of Anglo-Saxon learned culture, Asser and Aithelweard also implicitly confirm that the Chronicle worked to build an Anglo-Saxon national identity through its own vernacularity. The apparently contemporary perception that the Chronicle had been begun by Alfred no doubt contributed to the Anglo-Saxon preference for an Old English Chronicle. Finally, the first half of this chapter returns to basic questions of codicology, form, and textual history in order to discuss the ways in which the various manuscripts end. The twelfth-century contributions to every manuscript but G attest to the Chronicle's continued relevance to a post-Conquest audience, but the various manuscript endings nevertheless reflect the forces that brought an end to the Chronicle. The Canterbury endings tend to indicate a Latinization of the Chronicle, as if presaging the use that later Latin historians would put it to. The C and D manuscripts, on the other hand, appear to attempt to draw Anglo-Saxon history to an end as a more immediate response to the Conquest. But in the H and E manuscripts, where vernacular chronicling extends nearly fifty and ninety years, respectively, beyond the Conquest, we can see the degree to which the historiographic and textual strategies at the chroniclers'

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disposal were, indeed, able to survive this most difficult test for a remarkable period of time. The Chronicle that the readings offered in these chapters allow us to see, I believe, is still a series of complexly interacting historical documents. But in the complementary effects of the Chronicle's textual and historiographic strategies we can glimpse even more complex interactions. Poetic (or versified) genealogies, classical verse, and postclassical poetry all work to continue (and to develop) the Chronicle's repeated ideological linking of the West Saxon dynasty to the heroic past and the Saxon invasion. The link itself seems to have originated in an urge to assert the political legitimacy of the West Saxon ruling family, as the Common Stock genealogies and their 'ancestral' genealogical form seem to suggest. Yet, in the later Chronicle, the link seems to operate in the opposite direction: the 1067D poem seems to suggest that Margaret of Scotland's descendants would themselves be legitimate candidates to rule: from the anxious effort to (re)assert the legitimacy of an established dynasty, the end of the D Chronicle, at least, seems to argue for the illegitimacy of competing rulers. Likewise, the Chronicle's imaginative linking of the West Saxon ruling family and the unified Anglo-Saxon nation (articulated so clearly in Brunanburh) has its own consequences. For Chronicle manuscripts such as C and D, this linkage seems to have resulted in their virtual demise as a consequence of the Norman Conquest. But, like the Northern Recension, a chronicle that took the nation (rather than a single family) as the focus of its narrative could easily outlast that family's political lifetime. It hardly seems accidental that the two Chronicles continuing most productively into the twelfth century (VE, extending at least to 1121, and E, extending to 1154) are precisely those including the 1086 poem, William the Conqueror, a poem that used the Chronicle's poetic tradition of royal panegyric to grant William himself a place in AngloSaxon history. As all these examples should indicate, the textual strategies used by the chroniclers (such as working with genres different from prose) are inseparable from their historiographic strategies. To understand the Chronicle as a whole demands that we understand not only the interrelationships among the manuscripts but the significance of the textual choices, variations, innovations, and alterations as well. The process is complex but rewarding: the process of reading the Chronicle. The preceding paragraphs have focused on the benefits of my reading of the Chronicle for understanding its historical record; but a second focus of my investigation has been to read the Chronicle as a record of Anglo-Saxon liter-

152 Textual Histories ate practice. In particular, my examination of the Chronicle manuscripts has helped to clarify a number of issues related to Anglo-Saxon literacy. The treatment of genealogy, prose, poetry, and Latin in the Chronicle manuscripts gives us a remarkable picture of these genres and languages across the centuries spanned by these manuscripts. Understanding these developments in Anglo-Saxon literacy and literate practice is of crucial importance for understanding the Chronicle's place in Anglo-Saxon culture. First and perhaps most important, my study of the Chronicle manuscripts has found no compelling evidence of 'orality' as a feature contributing to the form of the Chronicle texts as they are preserved. My examination of alliterating genealogies within and outside the Chronicle suggests that Anglo-Saxon writers employed a highly sophisticated, visually meaningful format for columnar genealogies, even in the very earliest surviving genealogical records. The development of 'metrical' pointing in the Chronicle genealogies (which might otherwise have seemed parallel to O'Brien O'Keeffe's description of the development of metrical pointing in verse) seems likely to have stemmed primarily from an effort to recapture information encoded in the spacing and layout of the columnar genealogies rather than from any possibility that the genealogies descend from an originally oral form. The fact that a manuscript such as B features (towards the end of the Common Stock) very regular pointing of the genealogies but less regular pointing of verse should suggest that if pointing practices in the two genres influenced one another at all, the influence may well have passed from the genealogies to the verse rather than the other way around. Further, my examination of textual variation in the prose of the 755 annal provides a crucially important point of comparison for the variation O'Brien O'Keeffe observes in manuscripts of Old English poetry. Rather than providing evidence of a 'residual orality' operating through an oral-formulaic process, however, the degree of textual variation and innovation seen in the 755 annal must stem from some other source. My analysis, in fact, suggests that the variation seen in the 755 annal stems simply from a facet of Anglo-Saxon literacy that differs from our own expectations: the Anglo-Saxon scribes of the Chronicle apparently felt no implicit or explicit pressure to copy these texts with word-for-word accuracy. The smaller degree of variation seen in the 871 annal (variation of approximately the same order as seen in Brunanburh) can be explained by 871's greater reliance upon prose formulas. For both poetry and prose, the density of formulas contributes to the stability of the text because the 'frozenness' of formulaic expressions is less amenable to scribal alteration. For poetry in particular, the added constraint of metre (added to the prosaic requirements of copying that preserves the meaning of the work and

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uses effective syntax) means that variation in poetry is actually less extensive than in prose. And since the variation in prose cannot be accounted for by processes linked to oral-formulaic formula substitution, it is hard to justify explaining the lower degree of variation in verse through any mechanism of orality. My examination of the manuscript record of the Chronicle poems (including those frequently disparaged as being of 'irregular meter') suggests that many of the Chronicle poems (especially those with well-developed rhyme patterns) were recognized as verse by their scribes. Indeed, the Chronicle's evidence for a late-Anglo-Saxon tradition of rhyming verse (seen most clearly in the poems in 1036CD, 1067D, 1075E/76D, 1086E, and 1104E) challenges the critical viewpoint that sees the presence of alliteration as the defining characteristic of all Old English verse. A greater understanding of the late tradition of rhyming verse is necessary to understand both how poetry functions in the Chronicle and how traditional metrical and alliterative forms of verse developed in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The very development of a tradition of rhyming verse might well indicate that traditional alliterative verse was no longer a powerful cultural presence in a truly oral-formulaic sense: late alliterative verse may well be metrically conservative and formulaic, but that is not to say that it is 'oral-formulaic.' Indeed, the side-by-side existence of the alliterative (and apparently archaizing) 1065 poem and the rhyming 1067 poem may well suggest that both poems are essentially 'literate' (rather than oral) in their particular origins. The lack of evidence for orality as a productive force in the Chronicle manuscripts, of course, is in some ways confirmed by the pervasive (if subtle) bilinguality of the Chronicle. The nearly ubiquitous 'an-' year indicators that begin so many annals make explicit the Chronicle's structural reliance upon Latin learning and historical chronology. True, the Chronicle's overwhelming preference for the vernacular simultaneously distances the bulk of its contents from the world of Latin scholarship (as does the complexly abbreviated Latin passage in 855A), but the trace of that background remains, none the less. The Latinization of the Chronicle in Asser and ^Ethelweard anticipated the use the Chronicle would be put to by later historians such as Henry of Huntingdon, John of Worcester, and others; the fact that Latin translations of the Chronicle found Anglo-Saxon audiences should remind us not to take the Chronicle's general preference for the vernacular as an indication of the continuing scarcity of Latin-literate readers: during the tenth and eleventh centuries, it would seem, the literary culture of Anglo-Saxon England was almost certainly remarkably bilingual (even if the same cannot always be said about the individuals involved). Instead, the key lesson to be taken from Asser and ^thel-

154 Textual Histories weard is that the existence of Latin versions of the Chronicle did not lead to continuations of these Latin Chronicles. The norm for Chronicle manuscripts seems to have been initial copying followed by subsequent composition of annals (only B and G fail to include subsequent additions), yet Asser and jEthelweard never served as fruitful stocks for further chronicling. Finally, although its forms and practices may sometimes seem strange to us, the Chronicle indicates that a remarkable and sophisticated literate culture thrived during the final three centuries of the Anglo-Saxon period. From the composition of the Common Stock to the writing of the final passages of the Peterborough manuscript, the Chronicle itself existed as both a record of Anglo-Saxon history and a cultural force in its own right in Anglo-Saxon England. In the Chronicle's own self-referential invocations of history books and historical comparisons, in the chroniclers' clever and effective use and even manipulation of the Chronicle's traditions of genealogy and poetry, and in the Chronicle's continuing twelfth-century audiences, we can read the Chronicle for its record not only of what happened but also of how the Anglo-Saxons themselves wanted to tell their story.

APPENDIX

The Texts of Annal 755

In this appendix, I attempt to present more or less diplomatic transcriptions of the surviving witnesses to the full text of the Common Stock's 755 annal. Manuscript F, having only an abbreviated version of the annal, is not represented here. The texts are arranged in parallel in order to facilitate comparison among the various manuscript versions.1 So far as has been practicable, I have preserved manuscript punctuation and capitalization, although word division has generally been normalized; manuscript spacing has been freely altered to allow comparison of parallel passages. Manuscript abbreviations are indicated (with the symbol '-') rather than expanded; single quotation marks surround passages entered interlinearly or otherwise supplementarily to the text as originally written. Line breaks and page breaks in the original manuscripts are indicated by / and // respectively, and are presented for the sake of completeness, though manuscript lineation is sacrificed for the purposes of comparison here.2 Rubricated letters are marked by underlining; in this annal they are restricted to the annal's first word, 'Her.' Litterae notabiliores (as discussed in chapter 2) are represented here as 'capital' letters, except for the enlarged cte in manuscript B, which are printed here as enlarged in order to distinguish them from the letter D. Horizontal lines below the grouped transcriptions mark and identify substantive textual variations. Simple orthographic variants are ignored rather than marked; thus the difference between A's 'hamtunscire' and N's 'hamtunscyre' and similar variations are not considered innovations (755AN: 2). Other spelling variants are not identified as innovations, even where they seem to reflect manuscript affiliations (for example, places where B and C stand together with the monosyllable 'cing' where the others have the disyllabic 'cyning'). Differences in inflectional endings are considered innovative only if a change in consonant appears; final -a and -e are treated here as interchangeable, as are all endings of the form -Vn, but the variation between 'bryt-

156 Appendix tiscum' (755B: 20b) and 'bryttiscan' (755C: 20b) and the like are considered to be innovations. Although I have attempted to minimize their numbers, some textual variants continue from one line to the next; these are identified according to the first of the two lines. Each locus of variation is assigned a letter to distinguish it from others in the same 'line' of text. In this scheme, then, the first textual variant in line 1 of the 755 annal is identified as variation 755: la; the particular reading shared by the D and E manuscripts in 755: la is identified as 755DE: la. This notation is used throughout chapter 2. At the end of each line of text stands a capital letter indicating which of the major Chronicle manuscripts that line represents; 'N' here indicates a line from Laurence NowelFs transcript of manuscript G in BL Additional 43,703. Following the transcripts is a list of innovations identified according to the summary of data presented in Table 2.1. Annal 755 line 1 Her cynewulf benam Her cynewulf benam Her cynewulf benam Her cynewulf benam Her cynewulf benaHer cynewulf benam line 2 for unryhtum daedufor unrihtum daedum for unrihtum daedum for unrihtum daedum for un/rihtum daedufor unryhtum das/duline 3 ofslog ofsloh ofsloh ofsloh ofsloh ofsloh

sigebryht his rices 7 westseaxna wiotan/ sigebrihte his rices. 7 westsexna/witan sigebrihte his rices. 7 wessexna/ witan sige/bryhte his maege his rices 7 waestseaxna witan/ sigebrih/te his maege his rice. 7 wsstseaxna witan sigebryht/ his rices 7 wesseaxna wiotan a b

A B C D E N

buton butan butan butan buton buton

he/ he he he he he/

A B C D E N

7 hiene £>a cynewulf/ 7 hine J3a cynewulf 7 hine \)a cynewulf 7 hine {)a cynewulf 7 hine Ipa cynewulf 7 hine J)a cynewulf

A B C D E N

hamtunscire hamtunscire hamtunscire hamtunscire./ hamtunscyre. hamtunscyre

t>one aldormon |?e hibone ealderman {>e him J3one ealdorman f>e him J)one ealdorman/ {>e him done ealdorman £>e him {Done ealdormon \>Q hi-

lengest lengest/ lengest/ mid laengst lengs lengest

a

7 he 7 he/ 7 he/ 7 he 7 he 7 he

haefde J3a o{5 haefde t>a b~ haefde f>a o5 haefde J)a o5 hafde \)aJ od haefde t>a o9 a

wunode wunode wunude. wunode. wunode./ wunode/

Appendix line 4 on andred on andred of andred on/ andred on andred on andred a

adraefde 7 h~ adraefde 7 he adraefde/ 7 he adraefde. 7 he adrefede. 7 he adraefde 7 he

line 5 aet pryfetes flodan aet pryfetes flodan aet pryfetes/ flodan aet pryftes aet wryftes 3 flodan./ aet pruntes flodan

line 6 1 se cynewulf 7 kynewulf 7 cynewulf/ 7 se/cynewulf 7 se cyne/wulf 7 se cynewulf a line 7 1 y~b .xxxi. 7 ymb./xxxi. 7 ymb .xxxi. 7 ymb. xxi. 7 ymb; xvi. 7 ymb .xxxi. a_4

baer baer/ baer baer baer baer

wunade wunode wunode wunade. wu/node wunode

obbaet b~ obb~ oy ilcan geare/ man ofsloh gaeb to certice. 7 by ilcan geare/ mon ofsloh gae5 to certice. 7 by ilcan geare man ofsloh geb to/ cerdice. 7 by ilcan gear mon ofsloh

cyning cing.// cing cyning cining cyning

on seccandune on secggandune. on seccandune. on sae/candune. on secandune. on seccandune

7 his lie lip 7 his lie lip 7 his lie/ lid 7 his lie raesteS 7 his lie restad 7 his lie lip/ a

on hreopa/dune on hreopandune. on hreopandune. on hreopandune. on reopan/dune. on hreopandune

A B C D E N

A B C D E N

line 42

1 he/ ricsade .xli. wintra. 7 he rixade .xli. wintra.

line 43 1 lytle hwile heold 7 hit lytle hwile heold 7 hit lytle 'h' wile/ heold 7 lytle hwile heold 7 litle hwile heold 7 ly/tle hwile heold a

7 7 7 7 7 7

7 beornraed feng to rice 7 beorn/red feng to rice 7 beornred feng to rice 7 beornred feng to rice./ 7 ba feng beornred to ri/ce. 7 beornred feng to rice b

A B C D E N

ungefealice ungefealice. ungefealice. ungefealice. ungefealice. ung~fealice

A B C D E N

7 by/ ilcan geare 7 by/ ilcan geare 7 by ilcan geare 7 py ilcan geare// 7 ba ilcan geare 7 py ilcan gear// b_

Appendix

167

.xxxuiiii. wint.xxxix. wintra. .xxxix. wintra . .xxxix. wintra . .xxxix./ wintra. .xxxix./ wint-

A B C D E N

line 44

offa geflemde beonred of/fa geflymde beornred

offa feng to rice feng offa to rice feng ba offa to rice/ 7 feng to bam rice. 7 feng to bam rice, offa cyning feng to rice

a

7 7b~ 7 11 1 1 b

heold heold heold heold heold heold

c line 45 I his sunu ecg/fer'b' heold II ecgferd his sunu 7 ecgferS his sunu 7 his sunu ecgferd heold./ 7 his sunu ecgferd heold 7 his sunu ecguerS heold a

line 46 A bincgfer|)/ eanwulfmg eanwulf'osmoding osmod eawing eawa pybing pybba/ creoding creoda cynewalding cynewald cnebing cnebba iceling/ icel eomaering eomasr angelpowing angelbeow offing offa waer/munding wasrmund wihtlaeging wihtlaeg wodening:-

.xli. daga. 7 c. daga. .xli. daga. 7 c. daga. .xli. daga. 7c./ daga. xli. daga. 7 c. daga waes .xli. daga. 7. c. daga./ .xl. daga. 7 an hund daga. b

B bingferfl eanwulfmg. eanwulf osmoding. os/mod eawing. eawa pybbing. pybba. creoding. creoda/ cynewalding. cynewald cnebbing. cnebba iceling. icel/ eomaering. eomaer angelbeowing. angelbeow offing, offa/ wasrmunding. wasrmund wihtlaeging. wihtlaeg wodening.

Se offa waes bincgferbing Se offa waes bing/ferbing. se offa waes bingferbing. se offa waes bincferbing. se offa waes bingcferbing. Se waes offa bincgferbing. c

C bingferfl eanwulfmg./ eanwulf osmoding. osmod eawing. eawa pybbing. pybba/ creoding. creoda cynewalding. cynewald cnebbing. cnebba/ iceling. icel eomaering. eomasr angelbeowing. angelbeow/ offing, offa waermunding. wajrmund wihtlaeging./ wihtlaeg wodening.

A B C D E N

1>

bin'c'g/fero 1 eanwulfmg eanwulf osmoding. osmod/ eawing. eawa pybing. pybba creoding. creo/da cynewalding. cynewald cnebbing. cnebba/ iceling. icel eomaering. eomeer angel|>e/owing. angelbeow offing, offa wasrmunding. waermund wyhtlaeing. wihtlaeg wodening. 6

168 Appendix Identification of annal 755 innovations as summarized in Table 2.1 Substitutions

A(G)

BC

B

G*(N)

DE

C

Inflectional

11a

-

-

-

6d

20b

Prefixes

-

1 8 d 34a

-

--

Other

39a

10d 12c

17b 19a

7a 20b

11a 11b 13a 29b 36a 37a

39a

4la

B

G*(N) DE

26b

2a 5b

10c

26d

39b

4a 18c

10a 16a 18d 28c 31b

6b

38c

A(G)

BC

C

T ('ond')

-

38b

Eyeskip

-

-

-

18b 19b

-

Other

31 c

6a 17a

4b 12b 15b 35c 38a

21 a 45d

35c 38a

11c 34a

5b 7a

9c

20a 36a 43b

D

-

12a 26c 29a 31 a

E 1b

-

Deletions

9a

D

E 35b

13b

5a 8c

-

32b

9b 23a 18c

Appendix

169

Identification of annal 755 innovations as summarized in Table 2A-(Concluded) Additions

A(G)

BC

B

ge-

18f 26c

_

28a

Other

19c

6b 10b 43a

7b

DE

C

_

25a

8a 25a

44c

1a 42a 44a

3a 14a

_

G*(N)

19d 20c

D

E

30a 44b

Rearrangements

Rewriting*

A(G)

BC

B

G*(N)

DE

C

D

E

15a 36b

22a 22b

1 3c 18e

35a 45c

4c 35a

_

_

6c

A(G)

BC

B

G*(N)

DE

C

D

E

_

45a

15c

_

37a

45c

19a

19a 42b

32a

Indeterminate innovativeness: 8b; 18a; 21a;24a;26a;28b; 33a; 34b; 44c *Note that some examples of rewriting might alternatively be analysed as combinations of two or more other processes, such as rearrangement plus deletion.

Notes 1 See Amos, Linguistic Means, 171-96, for a similar parallel presentation of Old English prose materials. 2 The 755 annal begins, in the various manuscripts, on these pages: manuscript A, lOr; manuscript B, 11 v; manuscript C, 125r; manuscript D, 22v; manuscript E, 22v; Additional 43,703, 209r. Although slanted brackets are used in the main text to indicate manuscript additions and interlineations, single quotation marks are used for this purpose in the appendix to avoid confusion with slanted brackets indicating line ends. 3 The reading 'wryftes' here is clear, though not recorded even in Plummer's edition. Nevertheless, since it is an obvious orthographic error, I do not count it as a textual variant. Nor do 1 count Nowell's apparent misreading of G*'s 'pruutes.' 4 The variants in the numerals here I consider as an innovation in DE and a second in

170 Appendix E. The likeliest explanation for the surviving numerals is that a common predecessor had .xxi., which was further altered to .xvi. in E. 5 This word is written into the Parker manuscript in an early modern hand, identified by Lutz as that of Abraham Wheelock. A hole in the vellum obscures the original reading. 6 As noted in chapter 1, the 755DE genealogy has been reduced to a single generation; thus, I do not count the DE genealogy as innovative, since it was probably the result of a revision in the DE common ancestor (perhaps the Northern Recension). Other DE innovations such as 755: 42a and 755: 44a may also stem from similar intentional choices (rather than from the process of copying itself), but they are none the less tabulated in Table 2.1 and in the summary of innovations that follows it.

Notes

Introduction 1 Also contained in CCCC 173 is an eighth-century book containing Sedulius's Carmen Paschale, partially glossed in Old English. Malcolm Parkes's valuable essay The Palaeography of the Parker Manuscript' investigates the connections between these two, originally separate, books. 2 The 'Common Stock' is the name conventionally given to the 'base Chronicle,'1 that version of the Chronicle first put together some time during Alfred's reign, and perhaps at his instigation. The end of the first Parker scribe's stint in 891 offers one possible dating for the Common Stock; Audrey Meaney ('Materials and Transmission') argues for 892, a date with which David Dumville agrees (Wessex and England). In Texts and Textual Relationships, Janet Bately argues for an '890 Chronicle.' 3 There are, as well, a number of other, less extensive, contributions to A; see the introduction to Bately's edition, MS A, for a detailed account of the various hands and their contributions. 4 The West Saxon Regnal Table (WSRT) is a brief account of the various West Saxon kings beginning with Cerdic, with regnal lengths and a genealogical account; it was edited in 1986 by Dumville from all of its witnesses ('Regnal List'). The WSRT in the Parker manuscript appears immediately before the opening of the Chronicle, in the hand of the first Parker scribe. The Laws appear to be in a hand of the tenth century, and thus seem to have been added to the Chronicle at that time. See Parkes, 'Palaeography.' 5 The Tiberius copy of the WSRT extends to the reign of Edward the Martyr but does not include his death (recorded in other versions of the Chronicle in 979). A date for the compilation of B between 977 and 979 thus seems both plausible and appealing but cannot be certain. Cyril Hart ('B-text') argues that the scribe of B

172 Notes to pages 5-8 was Byrhtferth of Ramsey; such a possibility will also probably remain undecided. 6 Ker suggests that for annals 491-652 (where the regular numbering in B ceases) and 945-77 (where numbering is resumed), the relationship is 'so close as to suggest a common exemplar, if not direct copying of B. i from A. vi' (Catalogue 252). 7 This contemporary activity begins, perhaps, in 1054: see Ker, Catalogue 254 and Cubbin xiii ff. 8 G also served as the base text for Abraham Wheelock's 1644 edition of the Chronicle. 9 Notice also that those manuscripts not associated with Alfredian texts (DEFH) are completely free-standing, and are not associated with other Anglo-Saxon texts at all. 10 The Laws were added to A in the middle 900s; G was added to the Old English Bede at the time of its copying (between 1001 and 1013); C and Orosius were copied together after 1044. 11 The relatively clear-cut cases of manuscript collation and textual conflation that took place in the Anglo-Saxon period support this claim. To take only the most agreed-upon examples, the incorporation of the Mercian Register into BC implies collation (see further chapter 3, below); and the distribution of the Register's annals to their proper places in D suggests even further care in integrating annals from diverse sources. Further, D appears to have reinserted the 855 genealogy into an annal that had previously lacked it (see Whitelock, Peterborough Chronicle 28, and the discussion of the Northern Recension in chapter 3); the F manuscript collates A and the ancestor of E; scribe 3 of the Parker manuscript inserts annal 71OA at some point in the middle tenth century. 12 Fred C. Robinson's essay 'Old English Literature in Its Most Immediate Context' argues that the 'most immediate context [of a work] can sometimes be its most important context' (29) and explicitly identifies the 'most immediate context' as 'the poem's context within the manuscript in which it is preserved' (11). Robinson's essay has surely prompted much of the recent 'back-to-the-manuscripts' work that has been so prevalent in recent Anglo-Saxon scholarship. 13 As suggested in the previous note, the 'back-to-the-manuscripts' approach was largely prompted by Robinson's 'Immediate Context' essay; perhaps the most influential work within this mode has been Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe's Visible Song. Two essays that approach the Chronicle with manuscript context in mind are Janet Bately's essay 'Manuscript Layout' (the 1988 Toller Memorial Lecture) and Paul Szarmach's essay on the Mercian Register ('.flidelflaed of Mercia: Mise en page}. 14 See the essays collected in Scragg and Szarmach, The Editing of Old English, and Keefer and O'Brien O'Keeffe, New Approaches to Editing Old English Verse. Also

Notes to pages 8-9

173

see the separate essays by Lapidge ('The Edition, Emendation and Reconstruction of Anglo-Saxon Texts'; Textual Criticism and the Literature of Anglo-Saxon England') and O'Brien O'Keeffe (Texts and Works: Some Historical Questions on the Editing of Old English Verse'). Lapidge's essays tend to urge editors to continue informed mediation of texts; thus, he often seems opposed to scholars such as O'Brien O'Keeffe who conceptualize the ideal editorial position as essentially nonintrusive. The back-to-the-manuscripts approach seems to have led Anglo-Saxon scholars to conceptualize the editorial task as primarily concerned with the representation of the text, rather than with the traditional goal of textual scholarship, the establishment of 'the text.' But the debate is over matters of degree: how much editorial mediation of texts is appropriate. 15 Carol Braun Pasternack makes a similar point: 'we can try to understand the textuality of other cultures, but we cannot escape our own' (29). Indeed, in her book, The Textuality of Old English Poetry, Pasternack attempts to provide a new understanding of how Old English poetry functions by bringing our attention to the 'movements' that seem to structure many Old English poems as an insufficiently understood feature of Anglo-Saxon literary expression. Yet Pasternack seems too quick to identify writing and print: '[Old English poems] do not function in the same ways as printed texts ... I shall therefore put orality in my circle of reasoning as an influence on the poetry's textuality' (4; ellipses mine). Later, 'in comparison to printed texts, Old English verse was considerably more dependent on the ear than on the eye' (9). Such statements, especially in the very beginning of Pasternack's book, where the theoretical basis of her reading is being worked out, seem to expose an oversimplified view of writing, print, and orality. 16 Note, however, the movement of the movement: from improving readings that previously relied on mediated editions to improving the mediation of editions: Robinson's 'Immediate Context' essay was itself followed by his re-editing of the 'Metrical Epilogue' of CCCC 41 (' "Bede's" Envoi to the Old English History: An Experiment in Editing'); O'Brien O'Keeffe followed Visible Song with her essays and the edited collection cited in the preceding notes. As it descends from the backto-the-manuscripts movement, the current focus on editing practice thus considers manuscript evidence as crucial to the process bringing Old English texts into a form accessible to our literacy tradition; the debate (again, as noted above) centres on how best to represent Anglo-Saxon texts to ourselves rather than how to change our reading practices to suit Anglo-Saxon texts. 17 Indeed, compare O'Brien O'Keeffe's formulation: 'acknowledging the historicity of literacy requires the negotiation of a fundamental difference between ourselves as readers and the medieval readers for whom the texts we study were produced. The first step in this process of negotiation lies in our methods of editing' ('Editing and the Material Text' 149). While, as I suggested above, I believe the 'first step'

174 Notes to pages 9-17 requires the very reading of the texts involved rather the editing of them, O'Brien O' Keeffe's point that the process must be ongoing accords well with my own view. 1: The Common Stock Genealogies 1 West Saxon genealogies are recorded in annals 552BC, 597ABC, 611BC, 648ABC, 674ABC, 676ABC, 685ABC, 688ABC, 728ABCD, and 855ABCDG. Six Northumbrian genealogies are included: 547BC, 560BC, 670ABC, 685ABC, 731ABCD, 738ABCDE. Three Mercian genealogies (626BC, 716ABC, and 755ABC) and one Kentish genealogy (694ABCD) make up the rest. The Parker manuscript would include all of these, except for the fact that some have been erased, probably by the scribe of F. The genealogies included in E under annals 449 and 593 will be discussed in chapter 3. 2 See Plummer II, cxiii, and further chapter 5, below. 3 Compare the similar sets of sources listed by Whitelock, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle xxii, and Plummer II, cix-cxiv. 4 In his edition of these genealogies, Dumville suggests that this collection has an 'Anglian' origin and should be dated to '805x814' ('Anglian Collection' 24). The manuscript is old and fragile, but with the aid of ultraviolet light, Dumville was able to read almost every letter of the genealogies. In this chapter, I cite the Vespasian genealogies from this edition. 5 As Sisam writes, at least the 'non-West Saxon pedigrees are based on the same materials as those of Vespasian B vi, and most of the differences seem to be due to carelessness in the Chronicle' ('Royal Genealogies' 156). 6 Hermann Moisl's essay on the genealogies suggests a Germanic tradition of alliterative genealogical composition, though he does not approach the question of metre, which is my concern here. Geoffrey Russom's recent book, Beowulf and Old Germanic Metre begins with a discussion of the inscription of the Gallehus horn, which includes the half-line 'ekhlewagastiR: holtijaR' ('I, Hlewagast, son of Holt'; Old Germanic Metre 1). Since, as Russom notes, the Gallehus horn probably dates to around 400, the genealogical verses investigated here would seem to have a long history. 7 See, in particular, Russom's account in Old English Meter and Linguistic Theory. His more recent book, Beowuf and Old Germanic Metre, is also useful. I will also use Russom's formalism in chapter 4, where his perspective will allow me to attempt at least a brief account of the metrical form of the later Chronicle poems. A Sieversian perspective on metre has led to the virtual decanonization of these poems, primarily because Sievers's system cannot easily accommodate them. 8 Standard accounts of Old English verse do not allow secondary stress in the expansion of D verses. Thus, a seemingly parallel verse such as Beowulf 53a, 'Beowulf

Notes to page 17

9

10

11

12

13

175

Scyldinga' is usually scanned as /x/\x (i.e., Sx/Ssx in Russom's formalism). Here as elsewhere, verses from Beowulf are quoted from the edition of Klaeber; verses from other Old English poems are cited from Krapp and Dobbie, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (ASPR), unless otherwise noted. For further comments on secondary stress in such verses, see note 11 below. The verses with both SS-alliteration and ss-alliteration are: 'Centwine Cundwaling,' 'Cundwalh Coenwaling,' 'Eadbald Edilberhting,' 'Ceolwulf Cuduining,'and 'Aelfwald Alduulfing.' As the quoted examples indicate, my scansions often include resolution applying regularly to both the primary stress of the nominative and the patronymic. Resolution likewise seems to apply in the secondary stress of the nominative, although (as in the verse) resolution of secondary elements in these types of verses seems not to apply in the patronymic (i.e., in the second foot). Thus, within Group 1 alone, we have ten cases where the final half-lift falls on a short syllable. Similar principles of resolution appear throughout the Vespasian data, but they do not seem to call for additional comment. Campbell writes as follows of the second elements of compounds (including names): 'The verse shows that the general rule is that they retain a half stress only when they themselves are disyllabic ... or have an inflexional syllable added' (OEG 34, §88; ellipses mine). These genealogical verses would seem to suggest the opposite conclusion, that secondary name elements retain secondary stress even when monosyllabic and uninflected. Also working from classical verse, Fulk suggests both that 'Campbell's conclusions cannot be so firm as to exclude the possibility that the Beowulf poet could lend ictus to the second elements of uninflected personal names at will' (191) and that 'secondary stress in the expansion of type D* is unknown' (221). The functioning of secondary stress in the genealogical tradition may be cause for a re-evaluation of the role of personal names in Old English verse. The contraction rule that applies in the Vespasian genealogies appears to be the following: with the addition of the patronymic suffix -ing, final short, unstressed vowels are contracted; also, short vowels in final syllables of the form -VC are contracted. This rule leads to the observed forms: 'Ufcfreaing' but 'Osuing' and 'Blaecmoning'; 'Eamering' but 'Wodning.' Note that this contraction rule also appears to be at work in the Beowulfian 'genealogical' verses 'Higelac Hrebling' (1923a) and 'Hasdcen Hrebling' (2925a). One patronymic in this group is of particular linguistic interest: 'Alwing' from Alwih + -ing', here we see loss of h as in the socalled contracted verbs. One genealogy ends with the patronymic 'Geoting'; I take the nominative form of this name to be something like '*Geota' rather than '*Geot' as the Vespasian manuscript generally avoids monosyllables (see below). Forms analogous to '*Geota,'

176 Notes to pages 17-19 of course, appear in both Asser and in jEthelwulf s genealogy in 855B. See Sisam's commentary on 'Geata' 171f, especially note 4. 14 One patronymic might appear to be an exception both to this claim and to the contraction rule described above: 'Casering,' which we might otherwise expect to see as '*Casring,' since the nominative form is 'Caser.' However, Fulk identifies the lexical item 'casere' as generally following his 'rule of the coda,' though also fitting into a distribution such as that described by Kaluza's law: 'the middle syllable bears ictus in the onset only when the inflection is etymologically long' (224). Fulk concludes that the evidence of 'casere' is ambiguous, but that it at least sometimes appears to have tertiary stress; such stress presumably prevents contraction in 'Casering.' The verse Tyttman Casering' is accordingly included in Group 1. 15 Cable suggests that -ing can take 'some degree of metrical stress' (Alliterative Tradition 15; see also 148), at least in words such as 'Scyldinga.' But in the genealogical verses examined here, both the preference for contraction and the existence of verses such as 'Aelfwald Alduulfing' (where -ing is subordinated to the syllable with secondary stress) suggest that -ing does not take significant stress. 16 The possibility of triple alliteration here would be, of course, unusual at best in the classical verse tradition. Note that the records of this genealogy in annal 560 of the Chronicle manuscripts (BCG; the genealogy has been erased from 560A) do not show triple alliteration here, reading 'Wilgils Westerfalcing' (560B). 17 Verse boundaries are always unambiguous in the genealogies, since the end of each generation is marked by -ing. Likewise, the use of double alliteration in all of these hypermetric examples may reflect another strategy for keeping these verses from being difficult to identify. 18 See Russom's comment: The long heavy feet Sxs and Sxxs, which correspond to unusual word patterns, always appear in second position' (Linguistic Theory 29). 19 The consonant cluster -cgt would probably not end a monosyllable; thus, we should expect to see at least a following unstressed vowel in the nominative. 20 '*Hryppa Hrodmunding' would fit into Group 3. 21 Bede's genealogy of Hengist and Horsa does not extend beyond Woden (HE i, 15), and thus we should probably conclude that the Woden-to-Geoting portion of the genealogy was composed after the Historia ecclesiastica. Sisam seems willing to date the Woden-to-Geoting portion of the genealogy to the late eighth or early ninth century: that is, roughly contemporary with the Vespasian manuscript or a bit earlier (Sisam, 'Royal Genealogies' 165ft). 22 We might suspect that the o in 'Uestor-' is a parasite vowel, intruding in an original monosyllable; even if this were the case, the form of the name would still be unique: Ssx. 23 The only genealogical verse form implied by this scheme but not actually appear-

Notes to pages 19-22

24

25

26 27

28 29

30 31 32

33 34

177

ing is the form Sxs/Sxsx, which we would expect to be rare at best. It does not seem as though it would be excluded in principle, however. It is important to note that, so far as it may have applied to actual people (as potentially different from names in a genealogy), such a constraint may well have been limited to royal families. Anglo-Saxon names of other forms may have been current in non-aristocratic families. At this point it may be worthwhile to note the limited range of monosyllabic names even in the 'genealogical' verses of Widsith. The only examples are (cited from volume III of the ASPR): 'Fin Folcwalding' (27a), 'Hnaing' (731 A). Occasionally, 'waes' is inserted in other verses besides the initial ones (e.g., the reconstructed 547A, 855A). These additional cases, however, add nothing to my analysis.

178 Notes to pages 22-5 35 The beginning of one genealogical passage has been excluded here, from 552A: 'Cerdic waes Cynri[ces faeder]': this passage may be intentionally unscannable as verse. Since the typical form ('Cynric Cerdicing') would begin the alliteratively regular Cerdic-to-Wodening passage, this generation may be presented in a non-verselike form to hinder recognition of the verselike characteristics of the rest of the genealogy. If this is the case, then the alliterating portion of ^Ethelwulf's genealogy would stand out as even more exceptional than otherwise. 36 'Cupaing' regularly appears as 'Cuping' in the BC versions of the Chronicle. 37 The Common Stock, of course, may have been a collaborative enterprise, in which the genealogist currently under discussion was only one member of a larger team. Yet this genealogist's influence was clearly pervasive, and to identify him as the compiler does not seem too problematic. 38 The forms reflected in the Vespasian manuscript and analysed above may well (as I have argued) stem from traditional naming constraints. To this degree, traditionally structured genealogical verses might be said to stem from an 'oral' tradition (though 1 would stress the genre's traditionality rather than its orality). As noted above, Hermann Moisl's essay on the genealogies argues for a Germanic tradition of alliterating genealogies. 39 'These are the genealogies for the parts of Britain, for kings ruling in various places.' This material is obscured in Plate I by stains resulting from the application of a reagent. 40 The cited portions of Vespasian B vi are from my reading of the manuscript rather than Dumville's edition ('Anglian Collection'), though Dumville (through the use of ultraviolet photography) was able to read significantly more of the names than I was. Note that Dumville regularizes the use of capital letters. 41 Note that Sweet (Oldest English Texts) does not print the genealogy of Eadberht as separate from that of Ceoluulf, despite the presence of the capital (170). 42 Some of the other material in Vespasian B vi, such as regnal lists and lists of bishops, is organized in simple vertical columns (see Plate I); genealogies, however, cannot function as simple vertical lists of names because the patronymics are necessary, in that they allow a reader to distinguish a genealogy from a regnal list. The two-column format, then, is especially appropriate for these genealogies. 43 Columnar alliterating genealogies continued to be copied right through the AngloSaxon period: see CCCC 183; Cotton Tiberius B v vol. 1; and the Textus Rqffensis, Rochester Cathedral Library A. 3. 5. In the Textus Roffensis, the genealogies are generally written in a single vertical column (most often with a point separating nominative from patronymic), but the columnar format clearly continued to be useful. It is useful to compare also the complex visual layout used for the genealogies

Notes to pages 25-9

44

45

46 47

48 49

50

51

179

in a post-Conquest manuscript such as CCCC 92 (though, of course, this manuscript no longer employs the patronymics). See above, for my comments on the metrical changes accompanying these additions. And for an intriguing parallel to the insertion of 'wass' into the genealogies, see Nicholas Howe's discussion of the verbs governing Widsith's second and third 'thulas' (Catalogue Poems 170-3). 'And this ^thfelwulf] was the son of Ecgberht' and so forth. Due to their repetitive nature, I will not translate genealogical passages in this chapter. The brackets at the ends of lines in the transcription indicate material missing as a result of the cropping of the page. Two of the three points in this genealogy occur after patronymics; the third occurs between a nominative and the following patronymic. In the preceding section, I noted that the additions to this genealogical passage appeared to be marked by the forms characteristic of the chronicler's genealogies. Dumville, in his edition, includes this material, only noting in the textual variants that this information is omitted from BL Additional 23,211. Yet the variation must be more significant: BL Additional 23,211 preserves only the genealogy of ^Ethelwulf to Cerdic: to suppose that scribal error (through loss) is responsible for the difference seems inappropriate (cf Sisam, 'Royal Genealogies' 155). Most probably, BL Additional 23,211 represents a stage in the development of the WSRT before this information regarding jEthelwulfs indirect ancestors was added. Notice also the presumably unusual form of '7cu5burg. cenreding. 7cuenburg. cenreding.' where female names are supplemented by the patronymic: either we must allow for the possibility that traditional genealogical lore included more information about women than the preserved genealogies would indicate, or we have a second justification for the conclusion that this material (like the perfectly alliterating passage of the Cerdic-to-Woden ing pedigree) was a late addition to the genealogical record and was not in keeping with traditional forms. Points precede the genealogies in 755A and 855A. In the Parker Chronicle, points follow genealogies only at the ends of annals, except in the case of 855A. The brackets at the ends of the fifth and sixth lines indicate places where the binding made it impossible for me to determine if points were present or not. The inserted text '7 ine' is written in the left-hand margin, with a mark of insertion at the proper point in the text. In the earlier genealogy of Cerdic in this text, the scribe has regularized the Parker scribe's practice, pointing some names that are unpointed in the Parker exemplar. By the time he gets to the genealogy of ^ithelwulf, though, he is beginning to adopt the standard pointing practice, although still nof completely. In this context, it is worth noting the form of the 449E genealogy (which is not one of the Common Stock genealogies, but rather is a feature of the Northern Recen-

180 Notes to pages 29-30

52 53

54

55

56

sion). It reads: 'Heora heretogan waeron twegen gebrodra. Hengest. 7 horsa. P~ waeron wihtgilses suna. wihtgils waes witting, witting witta. wecting wecta. wodning' (fo. 7r: Their war-leaders were two brothers, Hengest and Horsa, who were the sons of Wihtgils. Wihtgils was the son of Witta; Witta son of Wecta; Wecta son of Woden'). This genealogy should prompt a number of interesting observations. First, it is worth noting that in this translation of material from Bede, Bede's account of the ancestry of Hengist and Horsa is put into traditional alliterating form, though the same is not true of the translation of the same passage in the Old English Bede (see below). Second, the use of manuscript points after every second name in the genealogy seems to suggest scribal knowledge of the pointing tradition described above; the fact that the scribe writes 'Witting' twice, however, upsets the functioning of the points. The E scribe's adherence to this pointing convention can here be observed in the breach; nevertheless, the 449E genealogy may well suggest that the twelfth-century Peterborough scribe was none too familiar with the genealogical genre. The exception, of course, is the regularly alliterating passage of jEthelwulf's genealogy, as apparently revised by the Common Stock chronicler. It seems that O'Brien O'Keeffe's conclusion becomes all the more remarkable in light of the genealogical data: the initial tenth-century response (to point b-lines, primarily) might be seen as corresponding to an identification of the 'long-line' as the basic unit of verse, as the single generation was the basic unit of the genealogy. The switch to pointing a-lines as well as b-lines may mark an important shift in how poetic structure was conceptualized in later Anglo-Saxon England. See further chapter 4, below. Recall that The Menologium and Maxims II, though immediately preceding the C Chronicle, are in the C Chronicle's first hand, while hand C2 begins at annal 491. It is hand C2, then, which is responsible for the pointing of the C genealogies and all of the C poems except that under 1065C. A second possible explanation for the insistent pointing of the Chronicle genealogies might be that the conjunction of metrical form and syntactical form (where, in effect, clause boundaries always correspond to the ends of 'half-lines') proved irresistible in these 'genealogical poems.' But the evidence I have presented in this section for the development of the genealogical pointing tradition (and of 449E, where the pointing runs counter to the syntax) suggests that the more conservative interpretation - that the genres of genealogy and poetry were subject to different pointing conventions - is probably the safest. Of course, the chronicler's use of 'verselike' models for genealogical verses that included features such as non-classical anacrusis implies the same thing: the chronicler's poetic sense must not spring from an in-depth knowledge of an oral-poetic tradition. Instead the Common Stock chronicler's use of non-classical poetic mod-

Notes to pages 30-2

57

58

59 60

61

62

63

64

65

181

els for the composition of genealogical verses strongly argues for the chronicler's immersion in a highly literate milieu. 'At first, then, their leaders and commanders were two brothers, Hengest and Horsa. They were the sons of Wihtgyls, whose father was called Witta, whose father was called Wihta, and the father of this Wihta was named Woden.' Translations throughout are my own, unless otherwise indicated. The Common Stock does not include the genealogy of Hengist and Horsa in the narrative of the invasion, but when the relevant portion of Bede is retranslated for the Northern Recension, the traditional alliterating form of the genealogy is used. For further discussion of the Northern Recension, see chapter 3. 'Of whose stock the royal families of many kingdoms draw their origin.' 'Wuffa, from whom the kings of the East Angles are called Wuffings.' Note Bede's use in both the genealogy of ^ithelberht and Raedwald of the Old English -ingas forms. For example, 'Eadbalt filius Alguing' (78), 'Soemil genuit Sguerthing' (78), '... Alhun, genuit Adlsing' (78). See Sisam, 'Royal Genealogies' 150-2 for the suggestion that the Historia Brittonum draws on a document similar to the Vespasian collection. The three sons of Noah divided the world into three parts after the flood. Sem in Asia extended his boundaries; Cham in Africa; Japheth in Europe. The first man of Japheth's family who came into Europe was Alanus with his three sons, whose names are Hessitio, Armenon, and Negue. Hessitio had four sons; they are Francus, Romanus, Britto, Albanus. Armenon had five sons: Gothus, Walagothus, Gebidus, Burgundus, [and Langobardus]. Negue had three sons: Wandalus, Saxo, Boguarus. From Hessitio are the origins of four races: the Franks, the Latins, the Albans, and the British.' The passage goes on to identify the other races originated by the grandsons of Alanus. The same is not true of the genealogy of Hengist and Horsa in chapter 31 of the Historia Brittonum, which, nevertheless, extends beyond Woden to Geta, while the Vespasian genealogy extends only to the verse 'Uoden Frealafing' (Dumville, 'Anglian Collection,' 31). Note also that the sequence 'Hors et Hengist... filii Guictglis, filii Guitta' (HB 67; 'Horsa and Hengist... sons of Guictglis, sons of Guitta') agrees with Bede against Vespasian, which reads, 'Hengest fitting' and 'Uitta Uihtgilsing' (Dumville, 'Anglian Collection' 31). The use of descentual genealogies in the Historia Brittonum is not entirely consistent in chapters 57-61; the Mercian descendants of Pybba (ch. 60) and the two wives of the Northumbrian Oswy ('Osguid,' ch. 57) have their ancestries traced, for example. Sisam ignores the fact, for example, that the 'natural' order for episcopal lists even in Vespasian B vi is to put the most chronologically remote name at the top of the

182 Notes to pages 32-4

66

67

68

69

70

list, with more recent names towards the bottom (see Plate I). Such an order is precisely opposite to the ordering of Vespasian's columnar genealogies. The only 'natural' feature of the ancestral genealogy in Anglo-Saxon England seems to be that the traditional alliterative form was itself ancestral. But in a Latin text such as the Historia Brittonum, both forms seem equally natural, and the choice must be seen as rhetorical. Sisam suggests that 'His text points to a pedigree of jEthelwulf, possibly contained in the copy of the Chronicle used by ^Ethelweard but more likely to be preserved in a family tradition, from which the five names from Heremod to Bedwig were absent' ('Royal Genealogies' 175). My suggestion here is that the existence of forms such as 'Geat Taetwaing' suggests that, while Sisam is undoubtedly right to hypothesize an earlier form roughly like that recorded in j£thelweard, even the names preserved there are not traditional and should be attributed to the chronicler. Note Sisam's comment: '[jEthelweard] omits Cutha = Cuthwulf before Cuthwine, which is a natural slip, since Cutha is a short form for both the compound names' ('Royal Genealogies,' 175, nl). The name 'Cupwulf appears in this position in the WSRT (including the Parker version) but in none of the Chronicle manuscripts, where it appears, instead, as 'Cuba.' As noted above, the uncontracted forms 'Cubaing' in the Parker Chronicle seem to belong to the chronicler; the conclusion that 'Cubaing' was a late addition to the Chronicle's genealogies that was nevertheless not present in ^Ethelweard's copy seems to be unavoidable. Here I depart from Sisam, who suggests: 'Up to Scyld |7Ethelweard's] Chronicle seems to have had that most developed form of the pedigree which appears in the Parker MS., and for the part beyond Scyld it is unlikely that the names in Asser and all extant copies of the Chronicle were unknown to Athelweard and his correspondents' ('Royal Genealogies' 175, n5-176). It is perfectly plausible to suppose that Athelweard simply relies upon the form of the 855 genealogy in the Chronicle manuscript he has at hand. The names here, of course, correspond closely to those in Asser: 'Cerdic,' 'Elesa,' 'Geuuis,' 'Brond,' 'Beldeag,' 'Uuoden' (Stevenson 2; eliminating his bracketed reconstructions). Note that the verse forms of 'Aluca Giwising' (Sx/(x)Sx), 'Giwis Branding' (x/Ssx), and 'Brand Baeldaeging' (S/Ssx) were all identified above as boih unusual in Vespasian and typical of the chronicler's genealogical forms. Sisam dates this passage to the reign of Egbert, '802-39' ('Royal Genealogies' 163); Dumville supposes it is original to the Anglian collection's original copy (39-40), though he does not offer much explanation for its failure to appear in either Vespasian or the Historia Brittonum. The arguments of both are complex and difficult; nevertheless, it seems most likely to me that the Alfredian chronicler is responsible for both this form of the genealogy and its classically alliterating revision. See below.

Notes to pages 35-40

183

71 Notably, all the copies of this collection that include the West Saxon genealogy of Ine themselves have origins connected to the circles of Alfred and his descendants: CCCC 183, as noted above, seems to have been commissioned by jEthelstan; BL Cotton Tiberius B v includes with the genealogies 'material belonging to the West Saxon tradition of royal records' (Dumville, 'Anglian Collection' 27). Preceding the genealogies in Tiberius B v is 'an unpublished regnal list for Wessex'; following the genealogies is 'an elaborate genealogy of King Edgar' (27). The version of the genealogies in the Textus Roffensis also includes the genealogy of Edgar. These West Saxon associations thus limit the power of Dumville's conclusion that the West Saxon genealogy of Ine was original to the Anglian Collection; it is at least as likely that the genealogy was appended to an Alfredian copy that later spawned these other copies. The argument made here about innovative forms, then, is not necessarily in conflict with other features of the textual history of the genealogical collection. 72 One wonders if the use of the equally unusual name form 'Gesecg' near the end of the East Saxon genealogies in BL Additional 23,211 might have been motivated by a similar eponymic urge. 73 Cf Alexander Callander Murray's essay, 'Beowulf, the Danish Invasions, and Royal Genealogy,' in the Chase volume, The Dating of Beowulf. Also, Sisam notes about another pair of names, 'Freawine and Wig, father and son, belong to heroic legend' ('Royal Genealogies' 164). 74 We should probably recall Asser's comments about Alfred's love for 'Saxon songs' in Asser's chapter 23; for an intriguing reading of this material, see the second chapter of Seth Lerer's Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature. 75 See, for example, Hayden White's fascinating account of these terms in relation to their relative degrees of 'narrativity' in chapter 1 of The Content of the Form. 2: Cynewulf and Cyneheard in the Context of the Common Stock 1 Consider Michael Swanton's comment in his recent translation of the Chronicle: 'Notable is the remarkable story of the coup d'etat at Merton (s.a. 755) where the scribe has incorporated what appears to be saga material complete with exchanges in direct speech; this seems undoubtedly to derive from oral, perhaps poetic, transmission. The mere mention of the names Cynewulf and Cyneheard had triggered an anachronistic entry which properly belonged thirty-one years on, s.a. 784' (xvii). 2 'And the same year, they killed ^thelbald, king of the Mercians, at Seckington, and his body lies in Repton; and Beornred took over the kingdom and held it but a little while, and miserably. And the same year, Offa took over the kingdom and ruled 39 years, and his son Ecgferth ruled 41 days and 100 days.'

184 Notes to pages 40-3 3 The two-year dislocation that causes the 755 annal to record events from 757 is well-recognized (see, for example, Plummer II, cii-ciii). I do not mean to suggest that the dislocation itself was contrived to bring about the hundred-year spacing, but it might be significant that the 855 genealogy is not placed at ^thelwulf's accession (recorded in annal 836). The placement of the 855 genealogy in the same annal as the record of ^Ethelwulf's journey to Rome seems appropriate, but it may be far from insignificant (in the context of annal 755) that the genealogy is delayed from its expected position in 836 to 855. 4 The genealogy of Offa is missing from the student editions of Whitelock (Sweet's) and of Mitchell and Robinson. It is likewise missing from the texts or translations provided in the essays by Waterhouse, Wrenn, Moorman, Magoun, Battaglia, Towers, and Wilson. 5 Whitelock's student text from Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader is used by Johansen and Heinemann; Mitchell and Robinson's text is used by S.D. White and RulonMiller. 6 McTurk is an exception to the general lack of attention paid to textual variants; his essay on the annal includes an edition with 'substantial variants' from manuscripts ABCDE. 7 Nor does Whitelock truly note all places where A stands alone against the BCDE group; in three places not noted by Whitelock A uses the ge- prefix where the others do not; at one point A reads 'him mid' where the rest have 'mid him.' Obviously, such differences are minor, but they are worth noting, especially considering Whitelock's claim. 8 An alternative term, also moving from Old French studies (particularly the work of Paul Zumthor) into English medievalists' vocabulary is 'mouvance.' Mouvance appears to highlight the processes that result in variation. 9 'Oral residue' is Walter Ong's term (Fleischman 21, n5); see also, however, the essay by Albert Lord, 'Oral Composition and "Oral Residue" in the Middle Ages.' Indeed, the essays contained in this collection (Nicolaisen's Oral Tradition and the Middle Ages) and in Machan's Medieval Literature: Texts and Interpretation might provide useful points of reference for the impact of these perspectives on Medieval English studies, although their focus tends to be in the Middle English period. 10 'Offa was the son of tnncferth.' Lutz actually prints 'Se Offa waes fnncferping' for G*, but notes that both Wheelock's edition and Nowell's transcript read 'se waes offa pincferping' (31). See the Appendix for an explanation of the notation I use here for locating such quoted readings from the 755 texts. 11 The close relationships between B and C and between D and E have long been recognized. Janet Bately (Texts and Textual Relationships) has recently suggested that the BC and DE families together constitute a single, larger manuscript family; while this may be so, I will identify cases where the AG* group deviates from

Notes to pages 43-66

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

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BCDE as innovation in A rather than innovation in the hypothetical shared ancestor ofBCDE. Implied here, of course, is a distinction that can be drawn between 'orthographic' variations and 'substantive' variations. See the Appendix, where the innovations are tabulated and identified, for a fuller discussion of this distinction. Of course, the innovation seen in E here may well have taken place in some earlier manuscript. Nevertheless, for the purposes of my counting of innovations in this chapter, I label innovations according to the texts they appear in, rather than complicating the issues by constantly invoking potential ancestor manuscripts. I do treat the BC and DE families as well enough established to justify the assertion of a single ancestor; the innovations attributed here to BC and DE themselves appear to justify this procedure. For example, note that the BC family is characterized by monosyllabic 'cing' for the 'cyning' used most frequently elsewhere. B and C stand against the rest in every occurrence of this word in annal 755, which might be counted as an additional nine shared innovations in this annal. I discuss the use of capitals or enlarged litterae notabiliores in section 2.2. Because of this indeterminacy, a comment such as the following from Mitchell and Robinson's student edition of the annal seems somewhat misleading, possibly even disingenuous: The text is that of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 173 except in line 29, where we adopt cyfrde, the reading of most manuscripts, for cyddon [sic] of our manuscript' (Guide 208). While literally true (if the evidence of manuscript G* is ignored), this assertion does not take into account the familial relationships of the surviving manuscripts, relationships that make the judgment based upon mere numbers irrelevant. It is at least possible that the scribe of B uses the abbreviation 'b~' both for 'paet' and for 'oppaet.' However, compare 755B: 20c, where B reads 'opp~' for the other manuscripts' 'op.' 'And then, on account of the woman's cries, the king's thegns discovered the commotion and then ran there as they were then ready and swiftest; and the aetheling offered to each of them life and property; and none of them wished to receive it.' 'And then, on account of the woman's cries, the king's thegns discovered the commotion and then they ran there, as they were then ready and swiftest, and none of them would settle it.' One should compare Cerquiglini's comment: 'the variant is never punctual. Paraphrastic activity works on the utterance itself, like dough; variance is not to be grasped through the word; this must be done, rather, at least at the level of the sentence if not, indeed, at the very heart of the complete utterance' (78). In the cases of rewriting and indeterminate innovation, the record of annal 755 really does

186 Notes to pages 46-54

20

21

22

23

24

25

26 27

approach to variance', but, as I have noted, cases of innovation outnumber those of variance, at least for this text. See below. Besides the two examples just given, another case appears to be 755E: 19a, where the CD texts indicate a non-innovative reading something like: 'heora naenig bicgan nolde' (755D: 19a), while E reads 'heo naenig bicgan noldan.' The E scribe here reads 'heo' rather than 'naenig' as the subject, and this leads him to change the verb form as well. The addition of 'ba' in 755C: 14a likewise may have been prompted by the eyeskip in 755C: 13b. The primary evidence for any saga-like tradition in Anglo-Saxon England is the Cynewulf and Cyneheard narrative itself. Note that, in another context, orality has also been linked to later Anglo-Saxon prose texts; see Andy Orchard's 'Crying Wolf essay, which investigates the prose of Wulfstan. Here is just a sampling of those who attribute the annal's style, parallelism of action, or heroic sentiment to the story's supposedly oral roots. Whitelock suggests that This long account in annal 755 is from some non-annalistic source, possibly oral tradition' (Sweet's 1); PIummer compares the annal with Icelandic sagas: 'The annal which most recalls the Sagas is the slaying of Cynewulf and Cyneheard under 755; and that too may have developed orally before it was written down' (Plummer II, xx n). Mitchell and Robinson defer to other critics: 'The narration is so swift and breathless, the selection of detail so adroit, that some scholars have felt that the chronicler was recording a saga refined by many retellings in oral tradition' (208). Greenfield and Calder also appear to hedge their bets, writing, 'the story is detailed in a prose that suggests an oral tradition or an even earlier written source' (60), but even this seems to imply that an 'earlier written source' would presumably have more 'oral-like' features. Since I am here considering prose, I use 'formulaic' not in the strict sense in which it is employed by oral formulaicists, but simply to mean more or less 'frozen' expressions, repeated with little or no variation from one occurrence to another. Compare: '7 baes ymb .iii. wiecan' (878A); '7 ba denescan ahton waelstowe gewald' (833A); '7 ba deniscan ahton waelstowe gewald' (837A); '7 ba deniscan sige namon' (870A); 'aepered westseaxna cyning 7 aelfred his brobur' (868A); '7 baer wearb micel wael geslaegen' (833A); '7 baer was ungemetlic wael geslaegen' (867A); '7 paer weard ordheh cyninges pegn ofslaegen' (893A); and '7 paer wearp monig mon ofslaegen 7 adruncen on gehwaepere hond' (853A). As there are many other, even more common, formulaic phrases in the Chronicle: 'Her N forpferde'; '7 py ilcan geare'; 'N waes to aercebiscepe gehadod'; and so forth. The exception, of course, is the scribe of manuscript F, who radically abbreviates this annal. The activities of this scribe are discussed in more detail in chapter 5. Wilson, for one, does attempt to historicize his reading by describing the chronicler

Notes to pages 54-6

28

29 30 31

32

33 34

187

responsible for this annal as 'Living under the shadow of the Dane in a period when monarchs rose and fell with startling suddenness, and aware of a deep-seated longing in the hearts of his countrymen under the leadership of Alfred for stability and order' (314). Towers also briefly suggests that 'national feeling' in the late ninth century can account for the appearance of this 'old tale of princely ambition, rebellion, and royal reform' (316) in the Chronicle. Again, Wilson is the exception to the rule, citing Beorhtric's succession from annal 784. Yet, even so, Wilson brings the issue up only to dismiss it: This kinsman [Beorhtric] is not mentioned in the 755 entry, and, for the purposes of the chronicler, it was not necessary that he be. As far as the development of his exemplum is concerned, the chronicler gives us Osric as the lone survivor who could take charge for the time being' (316, n5). Magoun also cites the 784 annal in full, but makes no further reference to it in his analysis. Magoun's opinion here is particularly blunt: 'Osric is in every sense the hero of the narrative' (374). For the use of litterae notabiliores across a spectrum of medieval texts, see Parkes, Pause and Effect. In all five surviving Anglo-Saxon versions (ABCDE), the annal also begins with an enlarged or capital h, but my focus, of course, is on the internal markers of structure. The texts or translations of the following critics show paragraph breaks at this point: Magoun, Towers, Wrenn, Waterhouse. Wilson, Ferro. The student editions by Whitelock and Mitchell and Robinson likewise include paragraph breaks here, although the critical editions of Plummer, Bately, Classen and Harmer, Rositzke, and Taylor do not. Plummer, interestingly, includes within his edition of A the capitals in 'Ac' and 't>a' (which, however, Plummer prints as 'Da') as well as the heavy mark of punctuation preceding 'Ac.' Bately also includes both capitals and notes the mark of punctuation in a footnote. Plummer is careful to limit his modernization of capitals in this annal to proper names; Bately, however, includes other capital letters in her edition, in addition to proper names, so the significance of these manuscript capitals in her text is effectively occluded. I underline the first letter in the 755B passage to indicate that it is enlarged; in the Appendix, I print it in a larger size. Waterhouse suggests that There is a certain admiration implied in their aspiration to emulate the king's thanes, and there is a kind of envy in the term "eowre" that they are "yours" and not "ours." ' (639). This interpretation, of course, sees Cyneheard's men not only as in the wrong but as knowing (or thinking) themselves that they are wrong, or at least less heroic than Cynewulf's men. But surely we need only read their comment as implying that their loyalty and honour are quite the equal of Cynewulf's men's. Compare Waterhouse's position to Johansen's: 'they

188 Notes to pages 56-61

35 36 37

38

39

[Cyneheard's men] implicitly accept the conduct of Cynewulf s men as defining correct behavior in such circumstances. As a result, even when they themselves can be said to act in accordance with the heroic ethos, they focus our attention on the greater heroism of Cynewulf's men' (5). See note 34, above. Also see Wilson: 'there may be some question as to the purity of the motives of Cyneheard' (315). In his study The hireling,' David Dumville conveniently summarizes the succession of kings from Alfred to Edmund in 1016 (2). If Eric John is correct in maintaining that the Chronicle's reference to Alfred's papal consecration in 853 is to be understood in the context of ^Ethelwulf's apparent desire to prevent his kingdom from being divided at his death (Reassessing 714), then we should probably also conclude that >Ethelwulf had managed to ensure that his kingdom would pass only to his sons (and, certainly, this is what did happen to ^Ethelwulf's kingdom). It is /Ethelwulf, therefore, whom we ought to credit with instituting a West Saxon dynasty; the record of the Chronicle (including the 755 annal), however, indicates that Alfred worked hard to keep the dynastic impartibility of the kingdom in effect. Note that John's argument provides a nice account of the passage in Alfred's will that effectively disinherits ^thelred's sons. Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr, has recently argued for a familial relation between the two, though by analogy rather than the direct evidence of the annal: 'the relationship between Cynewulf and Cyneheard can best be understood as that of paternal uncle and nephew' (454). Since we know that Cyneheard was Sigebryht's brother, Cynewulf would seem to have been uncle to both, if this view is correct. The DE innovation in the first clause of the annal, adding the qualifier 'his maege' to make it read 'Her cynewulf benam sigebryhte his maege his rices' (755D: 1), explicitly contrasts 'his maege' with the later 'se cyneheard wes baes sigebrihtes brodor' (755E: 8-9) to suggest that Cyneheard's relation to Sigebryht is much closer than Cynewulf's.

3: The Post-Alfredian Annals 1 The A manuscript appears to have originally dated this annal as 900, and I follow Bately's edition in citing annals from A by number in this section. See Bately's edition, pages xcviii-xcix, for commentary on the dates and their alterations in this section of the Parker manuscript. The other manuscripts (BCD) date this annal to 901, and the annal is frequently discussed as 'annal 901.' 2 'Here Alfred son of jEthelwulf passed away ... and then Edward his son succeeded to the kingdom. Then ^ithelwald his paternal uncle's son occupied the estate at Wimborne and at Twinham without the leave of the king and his councillors. Then the king rode out with an army until he camped at Badbury near Wimborne; and

Notes to pages 61-5

3

4

5 6

7

8

9 10

189

jEthelwald sat in the estate with the men that submitted to him and had all the gates fortified against them, and [he] said he would either live there or die there. Then beneath that [cover], he stole away at night and sought the army amongst the Northumbrians; and the king commanded [the army] to ride after him, and then no one might overtake him. Then they rode after the woman that he had earlier seized without the king's leave, and against the order of the bishops, since she was earlier consecrated as a nun.' Bremmer notes the similarities between the 755 annal and the 901 annal: 'the Chronicle entry for 901 bears a remarkable resemblance to that of 755: a barricaded fortification with a rebel inside, a loyal retinue, an immanent clash [sic, for "imminent"?], and a resolve to fight till the end. There is even a woman involved. The outcome, though, is rather stale as compared to the enduring loyalty which resulted in destructive violence in the annual [sic] for 755' ('Germanic Context' 453). Bremmer, however, makes no further comment on the relationship, using annal 901 only to buttress his assertion that Cynewulf and Cyneheard are uncle and nephew, as are Alfred and ^Ethelwold. See Clark, 'Narrative Mode' 221-4; also Bately, 'Manuscript Layout' 25 ('the scribe of annal-numbers *894 to *896 enters them in the centre of the line above the annal-material'). See note 1, above. Whitelock's comment is typical: 'Both [D and E] differ from the versions hitherto discussed in their inclusion in the early part of the Chronicle of much material of northern interest, drawn from Bede and from other northern annals' (ASC xiv). Note the powerful point made by Parkes that the Laws of Alfred and Ine originally followed 25v, as if, at the time the Laws was added, the Chronicle had been considered to be at an end ('Palaeography'). In other words, if A was updated in 912 and the BC archetype in 916, then no more than four years passed between successive updates of the common source. Even if Ker is right that 892A-924A are all in one hand, then perhaps ten years separate the updating of the BC ancestor (after 915) and A (after 924). Obviously, if Bately is right about the makeup of this section, then A was presumably updated both around 912 and around 925. Neither vEthelweard's Chronicle nor the Northern Recension appears to have had access to this possibly 'official' document; see below. On the manuscript context of the Register, see now Paul E. Szarmach's essay, '^Selflaed of Mercia: Mise en page.' Szarmach goes even further in hypothesizing (on the basis of the usage of the Latinate 'dative absolute') that 'Somewhere in the genesis of the Mercian Register is a Latin account or perhaps poem that offers the gesta Adelfledf (119). While the dative absolute may indeed mark Latinate influence, I am not convinced that such

190 Notes to pages 65-8

11

12

13

14

15

16

structures enter Old English only through translation and not through other processes, such as explicit instruction in Latin (and Latinate) composition. In the B manuscript, a 'c' has apparently dropped out: for a presumed 'dcccxcvi' and so forth, there appears 'dcccxvi' et cetera. Comparison with C suggests, however, that this is in fact simply a feature of B, and that the BC ancestor did read 896 and the like. The probable date of this collation is worth investigating. The Mercian Register seems to include annals extending to 924 (the fact that annal 924 appears to break off in mid-sentence is perhaps best explained if the exemplar of the Register ended imperfectly at this point). Thus, the BC ancestor was first produced no earlier than 924. If Simon Taylor is correct that 'C was using B as his exemplar... from 947 to 977' (MS B 1), then that might point to the probability that the collation was accomplished no later than 956 (the first 'fruitful' annal in BC after 946). But the uncertainty of the relationship between B and C may suggest that we cannot date the collation with certainty other than to say it must precede the apparent production of B in the later 970s. Regardless, it seems that by the middle tenth century the existence of varying Chronicles was well enough known to prompt this act of collation. One might recall that ^Ethelweard traces his descent to king ^Ethelred, brother of Alfred, and that ^Cthelwold was himself ./Ethelred's son. The significance (or even directness) of the familial relationship between the two is not clear, and JEthelweard's silence about Mhelwold's rebellion may be due to his source. But then again, it is tempting to wonder if /Ethelweard's lack of access to the Edwardian annals and his Chronicle's 'northern' interest during this period might stem from jEthelwold's association with the Danes. Such a question, however, cannot be answered, and the Edwardian bias in jEthelweard's 893 annal suggests that the status of his exemplar was highly complex, at best. In chapter 5,1 suggest that yEthelweard's Chronicle manuscript may not have contained any annals later than 946, suggesting that if this text was northern it probably arrived there no later than mid-century, or we would expect to see later annals added to it along with the existing northern-interest annals in ^Ethelweard. As I hope is clear (or will become clear) I take the 'Northern Recension' to be the production of a revised Common Stock, possibly to include further annals up to the point in time where the revision was accomplished. This Northern Recension might then have become (as seems clearly to have been the case with the E manuscript) the 'Stock' upon which a further Chronicle or Chronicles might be based. My argument here is largely concerned with establishing a date for the act of revision that resulted in the Northern Recension. Plummer's claim that the 'barrenness of E' after 892 suggested that the Northern Recension was accomplished before any annals had been added beyond 892 (II,

Notes to pages 68-70

17

18

19 20

21

22

23

24

191

cxix, n2). But the status of D as a conflation calls this into question, as D's record of the 'Wars of Alfred' annals (and later annals not present in E) almost certainly stems from the act of conflation; see below. The notion of preparing a 'local' (perhaps specifically monastic) Chronicle also seems to have had some currency later in the tenth century. See Patrick Conner's edition of The Abingdon Chronicle for an argument for such a localized Chronicle. In principle, any date before the much-noted divergence of D and E after annal 1031 might be possible for the act of revision responsible for the Northern Recension. I will argue here, however, for a much earlier date. The F manuscript is also a Northern Recension manuscript, although it, too, is a conflation, this time with A. But the abbreviated contents of F prevent it from adding much of significance to my argument here, and I will refer to it only when necessary. The material missing entirely from D (the gap from annal number 261 to the surviving portions of annal 693) also complicates the picture. It is very tempting to speculate that this preface (with its geographical opening, referring to the entirety of the island of Britain) was intended to replace the explicitly West Saxon WSRT, which was closely associated with A and B (and, presumably, the BC ancestor: C's non-use of the WSRT may derive from its association with the Orosius translation and the poems that precede the Chronicle). Unfortunately, it is probably impossible to determine whether the WSRT was 'published' along with the Chronicle, although it seems likely to have been. If the 'Brittene igland' preface of the Northern Recension did indeed replace the WSRT, that would fit quite well with my general argument that the Recension was intended as a more 'national' document than the West Saxon-oriented Common Stock. Note also that the genealogy of Offa in annal 755 is reduced in both D and E to a single generation, and thus that D does not reinsert this genealogy, although the reduction of the genealogy should probably be attributed to the Northern Recension. The genealogy in annal 738 is present in both D and E. This is the only genealogy of the Common Stock that does not seem to have been removed during the preparation of the Northern Recension. It may be significant that (at two generations long) it is both the shortest of the Common Stock genealogies and the most syntactically integrated of them, and was hence both the least intrusive and the most difficult to excise. Annals 449 and 593, of course, are missing entirely from the D manuscript, so the E witness is the only one upon which we can rely for information about the Northern Recension. The F manuscript summarizes 449 without the genealogy and leaves out annal 593 entirely. We might note, in addition, that the middle tenth century had already seen a great deal of conflationary activity with respect to the Chronicle: the incorporation of the

192 Notes to pages 70-4 Mercian Register into the BC ancestor; and the addition of annal 710 by the Parker Chronicle's scribe 3. If these activities are any indication, by mid-century chroniclers were already trying to rectify and minimize the diversity of existing Chronicles rather than producing new versions. 25 Even the details are sometimes important: litterae notabiliores are used in the 871 annal to mark the sentence that narrates the accession of Alfred to the throne in all of the Chronicle manuscripts, including D and E. This important moment in West Saxon history is not downplayed in the Northern Recension. 4: The Chronicle Poems 1 See, for example, the comment of John C. Pope: The later poems of the Chronicle also begin with Her, and in one of them, The Coronation of Edgar, it is clearly required by the metre. Perhaps some or all of these later poems were written specifically for the Chronicle, as The Battle ofBrunanburh in all likelihood was not.' (Seven Poems 58). More recently, Paul E. Szarmach writes: The insertion of the Battle ofBrunanburh as the 937 entry may be the most famous literary intervention' into the Chronicle ('/Edelflaed' 107). 2 There was no greater slaughter on this island ever yet, of folk felled by the edges of swords, before this, as the books tell us, the old authorities, since here from the east Angles and Saxons came up over the broad waves, sought Britain. The proud war-smiths overcame the Welsh; fame-eager warriors seized the (home)land.' As here, the canonical Chronicle poems will generally be cited from theASPR, unless otherwise indicated, except in cases where manuscript forms are the salient features of the illustrative quotations. 3 A fuller reading of Brunanburh (and of this passage from it) is included below in section 4.3. 4 The ASPR prints the poems found in annals 937ABCD (The Battle ofBrunanburh), 942ABCD (The Capture of the Five Boroughs), 973ABC (The Coronation of Edgar), 975ABC (The Death of Edgar), 1036CD (The Death of Alfred), and 1065CD (The Death of Edward). In addition, Plummer prints portions of the following annals as poems: 959DE, 975DE, 975D, 979DE, 1011CDE, 1057D, 1067D, 1075E/1076D, 1086E (William the Conqueror), and 1104E. Since two separate passages appear in the 1075E/1076D annal, this gives a total of seventeen poetic passages. The hypothesis that lies behind this chapter is my belief that we should read all of these passages as poems rather than as prose; one of my goals will be to show that such is the case. For ease of reference, I will generally refer to poems simply according to the annal they appear under (as listed here), though, necessarily, I will distinguish the 975ABC, 975DE, and 975D poems and the 1075E/

Notes to pages 74-81

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12 13 14 15

193

1076Da and 1075E/1076Db poems. I will also occasionally refer to these poems by their familiar titles, where they have them and where doing so will not cause confusion. It is worth remembering that the Chronicle was fairly well studied in the sixteenth century by early Anglo-Saxonists such as Robert Talbot, John Joscelin, and Laurence Nowell. See Lutz's important article on these last two scholars' contributions to study of the Chronicle. O'Brien O'Keeffe's argument demands that the poems she considers spring from a formulaic tradition that is heir to a purely oral-formulaic tradition. Since neither she nor anyone else (so far as I am aware) argues for a tradition of oral-formulaic composition of rhyming poetry in Anglo-Saxon England, it is not at all clear to me why she includes a consideration of the 1036 poem, unless she simply feels compelled to examine it because of its presence in the ASPR. For a fuller account of O'Brien O'Keeffe's argument in this book, see below. Note also that O'Brien O'Keeffe generally characterizes the second scribe of manuscript D as barely competent; she likewise dispenses with both the 1036 and 1065 poems in less than a page. I follow Ker's reading of the manuscripts here for the identification of the various scribes; scribes identified with annal numbers are those responsible for annals that were apparently written up at short intervals, presumably close to the events described. Many of my observations here about the visual presentation of the Chronicle poems are also included in my essay The Boundaries between Poetry and Prose in Old English Manuscripts.' One expects to see a comment on the pointing of 973A on page 133 of O'Brien O'Keeffe's Visible Song, but there is none. I see fourteen points after b-lines and eleven points after a-lines in this twenty-line poem. 'He forbid the [hunting of] harts, and so likewise of boars; he greatly loved the stags as if he were their father; likewise he ruled about the hares that they might go free.' For what I hope are obvious reasons, poetic passages cited in this section will generally be presented as this one is: with the manuscript punctuation and capitalization, but with abbreviations expanded and marked by italics. I use modern conventions of layout to highlight poetic structure. The letter erased before 'faran' in the passage above appears to have been an/. 'But they must in all follow the king's will.' 'With bodily heart, in this short life.' Interlined above 'lichoman' in this poem are the letters 'Here,' apparently to give 'lichomlicre.' There is, however, no mark of deletion present. The 1075E passages are not helpful here because in the first couplet, the first

194 Notes to pages 81-5

16

17

18 19

20 21 22 23 24

(unpointed) rhyme word falls at a line end, where the lack of a point may not be particularly significant; in the second passage, rhyme is less of a feature than in the corresponding 1076D passage. Note also that capitals are used in the D version of the 975DE poem at the beginnings of (poetic) lines 1 3, 5, and 7; it is possible that these capitals serve primarily to distinguish this passage from prose. Also in manuscript D, the poetic passage from annal 979 is followed by a small space and a prominent letter ('Her feng aepelred to rice,' etc.). Since the space is here relatively small, however (no more than two letters long), and since this poem has six capitals in the D manuscript, it is difficult to determine if this is intended to mark the end of the poem visually or not. It is possible, though, that the D scribe uses litterae notabiliores within the poem (and after it) to help readers to differentiate poetry and prose. See also my comments below on the spatial layout of the relevant passages in 958F and 979F. 'Kings widely honoured him greatly.' This is how this line appears (sans capital letter) in the editions both of Classen and Harmer and of Cubbin, though Cubbin, of course, prints the entire passage as prose. Neither edition marks the probable insertion of s discussed below. 'Kings honoured him far and wide.' This possibility is difficult to prove, however. Certainly, the ascender in the d in this word is shorter and more nearly horizontal than in other occurrences of this letter in this annal, but it is still not nearly as horizontal as are the ascenders in most examples of his d. The basic form of the letter, then, seems almost intermediate between this scribe's usual shapes for d and d. See Plate VIM. There was that bridal feast which was the bale of many men.' There was that bridal feast, to the bale of men.' 'Some, they were blinded, and some banished from the land, and some harassed into ignominy; thus were the king's betrayers brought low.' 'Some, they were blinded, and some driven from the land; so were William's betrayers brought low.' The presence of three rhyming half-lines in the D manuscript alongside two (probably) alliterating half-lines in the E manuscript suggests that the E version is reduced from a longer version; the elimination of an unpaired half-line might well be intended to improve the quality of this poem's form. Nevertheless, we cannot exclude the possibility that the D text here innovates to provide both rhyme and a third half-line. Though the D and E versions of this annal clearly share a great deal of material and presumably share a source, they vary widely from one another, both at the level of word order and phrasing and at the level of information contained and viewpoint. The divergences are great enough to make us wonder if the differences between the poetic passages might not be related to the different political perspectives adopted in the two manuscripts.

Notes to pages 85-88

195

25 Prose passages that are shared by D and E from the late tenth century are frequently quite similar to one another, without significant evidence of innovation, perhaps because of their general brevity. In a longer entry such as that in 972, however, we certainly can see the sorts of textual variations seen in the prose of the 755 annal. Compare the following readings from D and E in this annal:

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

D reading

E reading

pentecostenes msssedaeg his scipfyrde 7 ealle wid hine getreowsodon

pentecoste mzessedaei his sciphere 7 ealle wid trywsodon

As chapter 2 suggests, such variations seem to be quite typical of prose, and these can serve as a useful contrast to the stability of the 959 poetic text in the D and E manuscripts. The E manuscript clearly prefers (but not exclusively) the monosyllabic form; note, however, that E preserves the disyllabic 'cyning' twice in 959E, once in the poem proper and once in the material preceding the poem. The monosyllabic form, of course, is typical of late West Saxon: see Campbell, OEG §391, page 160. The other three innovative variations between the D and E records of this passage are Mibbendan' (D)/'libbendu~' (E); 'heofonlic' (D)/'heofonlica' (E); and 'asft' (D)/ 'aerest' (E). All four of the words capitalized in the E manuscript's record of the passage in question are also capitalized in D. In addition, two other words are capitalized in the D version. The D version seems much the more likely candidate of the two for scribal recognition of the passage's poetic nature, however: see my comments on the use of capitals and space in annal 975D in note 16 above. Assuming w/hw alliteration. See Amos 94-5 for comments on /z-cluster alliteration. Even if not employed to the same degree, such a complex use of varying poetic devices, of course, can be paralleled in the 1036 poem as well as in some of the metrical charms. In Plummer's lineation of the 959DE poem, the lines corresponding to 958F lines 3b—4b are lines 12-13; these lines are placed (in F) between lines corresponding to the 959DE poem's lines 3 and 4. 958F's lines 5bff correspond to 959DE's 16ff. The F version of this poem is thus a sophisticated revision of the longer DE poem. Those earthly slayers wished to destroy his memory on earth, but the Avenger above has multiplied his memory in heaven and on earth. Those who did not wish before to bow to his living body, now happily on their knees bow to his dead bones.' 'But the Lord above has multiplied his memory in heaven and on earth, because

196 Notes to pages 88-92

33

34 35

36

37

38

39

40

41

those who would not before bow to his living body, they now happily on their knees bow to his dead bones.' It is important to note that of the variations described before between the D and E records of the 979 poem, the F manuscript agrees with E at both places where the F text includes the relevant material. These are 'aerast' (where D has 'ajft') and 'libbendu-' where D has 'libbendan.' These innovations, then, seem to lie either with the E archetype (rather than with E itself) or with D. When we recall that a half-page is left blank at the point in manuscript F where we would expect to see Brunanburh, the possibility that the F scribe recognizes poems but does not generally wish to include them seems more than reasonable. Perhaps the F scribe's concerns about the space available to him led to his wish to avoid or shorten the often lengthy verse passages available in his exemplars. 'Here Edward aetheling came to England; he was the nephew of King Edward. Edmund the king was called "Ironside" for his boldness.' 'He was then a captive, who before was the head of the English and of Christendom. There one might see wretchedness, where one before saw bliss, in the wretched city from which first came to us Christendom and bliss, before God and before the world.' Significantly, in the 101 IF annal, there is a point after 'mid him.' Presumably, the F scribe alters the punctuation of the E archetype. Other features of this passage, however, are shared by E and F, suggesting that they go back to the common ancestor. See below. Though the relationships between manuscripts are not as clear in this part of the Chronicle as they are for the Common Stock, the order of the words 'angelcynnes heafod' is probably best interpreted as an innovation in the EF family (i.e., in the E-archetype), rather than in CD. See Cubbin's edition, xxxix ff for the suggestion that D's version draws from ancestors of both E and C for this annal. 'Among them then was a prisoner, who before was the head of the English people, and of Christendom. There one might then see misery where one often before saw bliss, in the wretched town from which came first Christendom and bliss before God and before the world.' Classical metrical patterns would not allow the second half of the compound 'angelkynnes' to provide the alliterating element, but such alliterative patterns may well have been acceptable in non-classical verse. See below, section 4.2. 'Here died Eadgar, ruler of the English, friend of the West Saxons and protector of the Mercians. It was widely known among many nations over the gannet's bath that kings widely and greatly honoured the offspring of Edmund, bowed to the king as was appropriate to him. There was no fleet so proud, nor an army so strong, that it fetched carrion to it amongst the English while the noble king ruled the throne.' In line 5, 'cyninges' ought to alliterate, rather than 'wide'; in 6, we seem to have a

Notes to pages 92-55

42

43

44 45

46

47

48

197

light A3 verse in the b-line; in 9, the adjective 'aebela'ought to alliterate, rather than 'cyning.' Note also that Maldon has conjunctions as syllables in anacrusis; e.g., 182a: 'and begen ba beomas' and 193a: 'ac wendon fram bam wige.' It seems reasonable to conclude that such usages must be a feature of later verse. In the discussion that follows, I will assume that readers are more or less familiar with the standard 'five-types' formalism introduced by Sievers and in widespread use in accounts of Old English verse. A standard (if brief) explication of the basic elements can be found in Mitchell and Robinson's introductory textbook. I will, nevertheless, necessarily have to depart from the Sieversian formalism because of its inability to account for forms such as those seen in the non-canonical Chronicle poems. The following summarizes (and probably oversimplifies, to an extent) Russom's explication in Old English Meter and Linguistic Theory, 75ff. In Russom's formalism, 'S' designates a fully stressed syllable or its resolved equivalent; Y designates the same entities with secondary stress, and 'x' designates an unstressed syllable. Thus a basic A-verse is /x /x in Sieversian formalism, Sx/Sx in Russom's formalism. Cross alliteration is the supplementary alliteration across the caesura of stressed syllables in addition to the primary alliteration; it is frequently abbreviated as ABAB alliteration. One should note that many of these classically anomalous forms appear also in other verse such as the metrical charms, e.g., 'ofer 5e bryde bryodedon, ofer be fearras fnaerdon' (The Nine Herbs Charm 10; AABB); 'Saharie and ec Marie, modur Cristes' (A Journey Charm 17; XAAY). Alliterative 'anomalies' such as these in many of the charms suggest that the charms' verse forms may be closely related to the verses under discussion here; Maldon and the metrical charms will be my basic texts in this section for providing 'canonized' examples of many of the metrical forms seen in the Chronicle verse. That is, an exclusion of light A3 verses from the b-line seems to depend upon the notion of subordination that marks b-lines as 'weak.' For other places where such A3 verses show up in b-lines, compare again the charms 'ge hit bebicgan' (For Delayed Birth 19b; alliterating on b) and 'paet he hit odlasde' (For Theft of Cattle lOb; alliterating on /). In such a scansion, of course, I simply treat the stressed syllables as S positions, regardless of their length, rather than treating the combination of 'stressed short syllable plus unstressed syllable' as an S position. As will become clear, I use Russom's formalism here in ways that his own work, based as it is on the metre of Beowulf, would not sanction. Nevertheless, Russom's formalism is both illuminating and flexible, and it seems the best fit for the perspective I adopt here.

198 Notes to pages 96-7 49 In other words, the following patterns might result from the breakdown of resolution:

50

51

52

53

Forms with Resolution

Forms without Resolution

x/Ssx x/Sxs

x/Sxsx x/Sxsx

and so forth. Syllables and sequences that previously were limited to preceding Ssx or Sxs sequences (i.e., at the beginning of B and C verses) might thus begin appearing before SxSx sequences, resulting in the expanded sorts of 'anacruses' identified here. Note that while Cable suggests that a substantial preference for 'five-position' verses is a feature of Old English prose (Meter and Melody), this process produces 'five-position verses' quite naturally. Five-position verses may simply become common in late verse if resolution ceases to be a productive process. Note again that the breakdown of resolution seems tied to a resultant confusion over foot boundaries; it is fascinating to speculate that a perception of parallelism between verse forms such as x/Sxsx and x/Sx/Sx corresponds to a breakdown in metrical subordination. A fuller analysis, then, might suggest that the metrical changes evidenced in the 975DE poem might all result from one poetic change, the loss of resolution. Compare to the following line from the canonical Coronation of Edgar from annal 973: 'wintra on worulde, pa bis geworden wss' (Coronation 19). Here, too, we see alliteration on the final stress of the line. Three-stress half-lines are also attested among the charms; for example, 'Erce, Erce, Erce' (For Unfruitful Land 51 a), which goes even further to suggest that not only could three stresses appear in a verse, but all three could receive alliteration. 'In his days, on account of his youth, God's enemies broke God's law: ealdorman ^Elfere and many others. And they hindered the monastic rule, and dissolved monasteries, and drove out monks, and drove away the servants of God whom King Edgar had earlier commanded the holy bishop jEthelwold to establish. And they robbed widows often and frequently, and evil unlawfulnesses rose up afterwards, and always after that, it grew even worse.' Even line 6 is probably explicable with the following scansions 6a: 6b:

be Eadgar kyning het a;r bone halgan biscop

(x)/Ss/Sx/Sx (xx)/Sx/Sx

In other words, 6a seems to have three 'feet,' and the whole line does have alliterative linking between its halves.

Notes to pages 98-101

199

54 A familiar example of the alliteration of the second element of a compound name can be seen in Maldon 282a: 'Sibyrhtes brodor.' This line from Maldon, of course, is one of the two lines where rhyme rather than alliteration seems to function as a linking device. The full line, 'Sibyrhtes brodor ond swide maenig ober,' would fit well within the tradition of verse we see in the Chronicle, although it is obviously problematic from a classical perspective. 55 1 do not intend to make any argument here about the status of Wulfstan's other compositions. I simply wish to suggest that this passage is best interpreted as a poem, both on formal grounds and (as in the next section) based upon its position and function in the Chronicle itself. The rest of Wulfstan's body of work would demand a separate and extensive analysis, of course. 56 'He took that by weight, and with great injustice, from his people for little need. He was fallen into avarice, and loved greediness above all. He set up great gamepreserves, and laid down laws therefore/ 57 At least one other b-line has double alliteration ('b~ he mosten freo faran'). 58 My reading of the tenth-century poems parallels, in some ways, that of Martin Irvine (The Making of Textual Culture 451-60), although with some important differences. For one, Irvine limits his discussion to those poems present in CCCC 173, while I consider all of the tenth-century Chronicle poems. See also Irvine's 'Medieval Textuality and the Archaeology of Textual Culture.' 59 The entire day, the West Saxons, in splendid troops, followed forth on the track of the hateful people, hewed the army-deserters, pierced from behind by mill-sharp swords. The Mercians refused hard hand-play to none of the warriors who, with Anlaf, over the mixing of waves, on the sea's bosom, sought the land.' 60 'There was no greater slaughter on this island ever yet, of folk felled by the edges of swords, before this, as the books tell us, the old authorities, since here from the east Angles and Saxons came up over the broad waves, sought Britain. The proud war-smiths overcame the Welsh; fame-eager warriors seized the (home)land.' Though points now appear in the A text of Brunanburh, they do not appear to be original to scribe A3, and I leave them out of my transcription; see O'Brien O'Keeffe, Visible Song 131-2. 61 Compare the commentary of Nicholas Howe on Brunanburh in Migration and Mythmaking 30-1, and more recently, Irvine, Making of Textual Culture 452ff. 62 Commentary on the spelling of this word (which appears as 'wealas' in BCD) generally focuses on the doubled e spelling, which is paralleled earlier in the A version of this poem by the spelling 'heeardes'; Bately, for example, notes both spellings (MS A cxxxi) and directs readers to section 26 of Campbell's Old English Grammar, which includes the following comment: 'Vowel length is occasionally indicated, especially in early manuscripts (e.g., Cp. [i.e., the Corpus Glossary, CCCC

200 Notes to pages 101-4

63

64

65

66

67 68

144, from the eighth or ninth century]), by doubling the vowel. Some mistakes occur in the application of this device' (OEG 12-13). As 'wealas' has a long vowel in the root syllable, this ought to be an example of the regular functioning of the 'vowel doubling device' (though A3's 'heeardes' must therefore be a mistaken application of it). The doubled / and the final vowel e, however, would seem to indicate that the A3 scribe in fact intends 'we ealles.' Intentional or otherwise, this would seem to be an interesting case of formulaic (or at least metrically appropriate) substitution. It is interesting to compare Brunanburh 's citation of historical authority with a similar passage from the Common Stock, found at the end of annal 851: '7 hi- g~feaht wib aepelwulf cyning 7 aepelbald his sunu aet aclea mid west seaxena fierde 7 pasr p~t maest wael geslogon on haepnu- herige be we secgan hierdon op bisne 7 weardan daeg 7 paer sige namon' (851 A; CCCC 173 fo. 12r: 'And ^thelwulf the king and ^thelbald his son fought with them [the Danish here] at Aclea with the West Saxon home-army, and there accomplished the greatest slaughter that we have heard tell of until this present day, and there [they] took victory'). Brunanburh replaces the Common Stock's (formulaic) claim to oral authority ("secgan hierdon') with a claim to textual authority. Further, by echoing this very passage, Brunanburh explicitly contrasts Mhelstan's victory to ^thelwulf's: it is precisely this claim in the 851 annal that gives the claim in Brunanburh its force; again, the Chronicle itself thus provides the poem's most effective context, despite some readers' feelings that Brunanburh was imported into the Chronicle from some other source. Recall that the 959 and 975D poetic passages were almost certainly not entered into the Chronicle until after Wulfstan became a bishop (996) and most likely not until he became archbishop of York in 1002. These passages will be treated in the following section. The Danes were earlier, under the Northmen, beset by oppression, in the shackles of heathens, a long time, until afterwards, the protector of warriors released them for his honour, the son of Edward, Edmund the king.' In her commentary on this passage, Janet Thormann notes that the B manuscript reads 'denum' for 'daene' (83, n34), a reading that would place the Danes and Norsemen in apposition. Thormann's essay is one of the few treatments of the Chronicle poems to include consideration of the passages 'of irregular metre,' though she limits her discussion to tenth-century poems and makes no mention of the 979 and 975D passages. Nevertheless, her general argument that the Chronicle poems 'further a national ideology when they develop a discourse of history' (78) fits well with my own argument about them. 'Here Edgar was, ruler of the English, with great ceremony consecrated as king.' 'And then was passed ten hundred winters, counted in numbers, from the birth-day

Notes to pages 104-7

69

70 71

72 73 74 75

76 77

78

79

201

of the glorious king, shepherd of the lights - except there was yet a remainder of winter-counts (as writings say) seven and twenty: so near was a thousand [years] of the Lord of glory run by when this occurred.' It may be significant that the Parker Chronicle's fifth principal scribe writes not only both of these poems (973 and 975ABC) into CCCC 173 but also the annals and annal numbers through the year 1001. 'Here ended the earthly joys of Edgar, king of the English.' This observation, of course, is only true regarding 975E; in 975D a second poem appears in the style of archbishop Wulfstan and will be discussed below. It is not entirely clear whether the final portions of 975E are a simplified prose version of this poem or whether Wulfstan's version in 975D is an expansion of a previously existing prose account. Whitelock suggests that the latter is the case: regarding the 975D passage, she writes, 'E has replaced this with a brief summary' (Peterborough Chronicle 28). For a fuller comment on this question, see below, note 80. 'Here Edgar passed on, ruler of the English, friend of the West Saxons and protector of the Mercians.' There was no fleet so proud, nor an army so strong, that it fetched carrion to it amongst the English while the noble king ruled the throne.' No such indication of the day occurs in the 975E annal (or in the 975F annal). Though the poetic forms of the poems are quite different, it is important to note that at least one half-line is shared by both: 'ofer ganetes bad' (Plummer I, 121). Though used in reference to different figures, this repeated half-line may indicate that the 975DE poet knew the 975ABC poem. The fact that the DE poem also explicitly notes Edgar's father ('aferan Eadmundfes]'), while the ABC poem does not, may likewise suggest that the 975DE poem is designed to do the work of both the 973 poem and the 975ABC poem. The 973 poem, of course, does not apppear in manuscripts D and E. There was no worse deed done to the English people than this was, since they first sought Britain.' It is this contextual link, I think, that makes the strongest argument for the inclusion of the 979 poem among the Chronicle poems, even though there was little clear evidence from the manuscript presentation that it was always read as a poem by its scribes. See above. Hal Momma's recent book, The Composition of Old English Poetry, reconsiders Mclntosh's characterization of various registers of Old English style, concluding that ^Elfric's prose is more 'verse-like' than Wulfstan's, and that Wulfstan's style is, necessarily, more 'prose-like.' See especially 7ff. 'One misdeed, however, he performed too greatly: that he loved foreign vices and brought heathen customs within this land too securely, and established outlandish/ foreign [customs? people?] herein.'

202 Notes to pages 108-12 80 Jost (121) suggests that this poem has in fact simply been expanded from a preexisting text such as we read in 975E. His argument is, at least in part, a metrical one ('v.6a hat zuviele Hebungen und ist rhythmisch sehr ungeshickt' and thus may be a carry-over from the process of transforming prose to verse [121]). But since, as I argued in section 4.2, this poem does not conform to the standards of classical verse, such an argument may not carry much weight. Whitelock appears to believe that the E version is a simplified version of Wulfstan's poem: the 'passage in 975D [is] replaced by a brief abstract in E' (Peterborough Chronicle 29; see also Whitelock, ASC xiv). At the least, we can be sure that none of the characteristically Wulfstanian words or phrases appears in the versions in E and F; the possibility that a reviser has excised them as excess verbiage cannot be eliminated. 81 The sentence about Oslac that follows Wulfstan's comments about the expulsion of the monks can conceivably be scanned as verse, but may best be read as prose. Its status is thus uncertain. See my comments on this passage in 'Boundaries.' 82 I leave out of consideration here the very brief poems in 1075E/76D and 1104E, as they seem less like examples of 'Chronicle poems' than examples of current poetic tags (almost proverbial in nature) that make their way into the Chronicle. They are thus more useful in identifying the late tradition of rhyming poems than in defining the essential characteristics of Chronicle poems in general. 83 'There was no bloodier deed done in this land since the Danes came and here made peace.' 84 The son of ^Ethelred ruled, greatly distinguished, the Welsh and the Scots, and also the British, the English, and the Saxons.' 85 'Though he long earlier, deprived of his land, dwelt upon the exile-paths, widely over the earth, after Cnut overcame the family of ^Ethelred, and the Danes ruled the dear kingdom of England, enjoyed [its] riches for the count of 28 winters.' 86 Obviously, such a perspective demands that we see the 1065 poem as being a postConquest production. The poem's appearance in manuscript C (which famously ends with the 1066 annal) might be seen as suggesting that the poem is pre-Conquest, but its entry into the D manuscript must have taken place after the Conquest, during the work of the historian(s) responsible also for the 1057D and 1067D poems. It seems appropriate, then, to read the 1065 poem in this post-Conquest context. For the 1057D and 1067D poems, see below; for a suggestion that the ending of the C Chronicle in 1066 was probably a post-Conquest contrivance (in an act of chronicling that might well include the 1065 annal), see chapter 6 below. 87 Julie Townsend's 1996 essay, 'The Metre of the Chronicle-Verse,' concludes that 'generally the Chronicle-verse precisely follows the rules of Anglo-Saxon poetic composition identified by Bliss' (158). Townsend considers only the five 'classical' poems included by the ASPR, avoiding consideration of the 1036 poem. Nevertheless, she also concludes about the 1065 poem under consideration here that

Notes to pages 112-17

88 89

90

91 92

93

94

203

The Death of Edward-poet seems the least skilful! of all the poets,' citing especially the lack of metrical variety in this poem (158). Note that the final word in this verse appears as the monosyllable 'cing' in the BC versions of the 942 poem. Note the B and C spellings of A's 'Seaxe': 'sexan' (B) and 'sexe' (C). The spellings here and those noted in note 88 would seem to indicate that the composer of the 1065 poem had a version of the Chronicle poems before him that resembled the surviving BC text more closely than the A text. The identification of the hand of these late annals with the hand of scribe D3 (who writes the 'replacement section' 1016-52) provides the most interesting reason for considering the possibility that the 'replacement section' might intentionally include a component of revisionary history, perhaps downplaying the C Chronicle's antipathy for Godwine in 1036, for example. A reconsideration of this complex question, however, lies outside the scope of my inquiry here, though I might point out that the D Chronicle's interest in the West Saxon-descended Edward the aetheling and Margaret of Scotland would seem to make the rehabilitation of Godwine unnecessary after the death of Harold. 'Here came Edward the aetheling to England; he was nephew to king Edward. King Edmund was called "Iron-side" for his boldness.' 'But he was so strong that he cared not for the enmity of them all, but they must in everything follow the king's will, if they wished to live or have land, land or possessions or even his favour.' Taking 'forleon' as if for 'forleton' (or some such): These things we have written about him, both good and bad, so that the good men will take after their goodness, and let go of all evilness, and go on the path that leads us to the kingdom of heaven.' This reading of the 1086E poem contrasts with a recent reading offered by Seth Lerer. Lerer, following the conventional wisdom that the use of rhyme as a structural verse principle is due to the influence of French, suggests that the 1086E poem is 'an attempt to phrase William's life and rule not in the traditional metrics of Anglo-Saxon England but in the Continental verse forms of the Conqueror's own court' ('Genre' 134). As I have suggested in this chapter, it seems important to me to note that the use of rhyme as a structural principle can easily be traced in the Chronicle in poems in 1067D and 1036CD, with even the 975DE poem featuring rhyme in two of nine lines. A failure to pay attention to the context these earlier poems provide appears to lead Lerer to underestimate the power of rhyme in late Old English poetry, especially in the poetry of the Chronicle. It would seem difficult to avoid the conclusion that the ASPR's focus on alliterative poetry of a particular metrical form has obscured the significance of those Chronicle poems structured according to different principles.

204 Notes to pages 119-20 5: Latin in the Chronicle 1 For a full listing of the E manuscript's Latin annalistic material, see the Appendix to Dumville's 'Some Aspects' 55-7. 2 There may well have been additional translations of the Chronicle from the AngloSaxon period, as there certainly were translations into Latin later. The annals on folio 111 of manuscript 17 at St John's College, Oxford, appear to translate the annals from 1 to 99 of some manuscript of the Chronicle, but since these early annals do not concern the history of Anglo-Saxon England, I do not consider them in detail here (see Hart, 'B-Text' and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle at Ramsey'). The suggestion has also been made that the Annals of St. Neots (or a portion of them) were, in fact, translated from the Chronicle during the Anglo-Saxon period (Hart, 'East Anglian Chronicle'; John, Reassessing 159-60, n5). My general argument in this chapter might well be supplemented by a consideration of these additional translations, but the familiar texts of Asser and jCthelweard are, necessarily, at the heart of my arguments about translation. 3 The general rule, of course, has exceptions. Annal numbers are virtually nonexistent for a long stretch of the B manuscript (annals 653-946); in manuscript F, the 'AN-' abbreviations extend only through annal 30 at the bottom of folio 32r; beyond this point, only Roman numerals are used by the F scribe. Magoun's edition of the F text's Latin annals makes the curious choice of representing those annals accompanied by 'AN-' with an expansion of the abbreviation and Roman numerals; bare Roman numerals in the manuscript are represented in Magoun's edition by Arabic numbers. Further important exceptions are noted below. 4 The Chronicle probably owes an even greater debt to Bede's epitome: both begin with Caesar's invasion of Britain (in both texts dated to sixty years before Christ's incarnation), and both proceed with sequentially numbered annals with years numbered according to the number of years elapsed since that incarnation. The Chronicle obviously includes much more material than Bede, but the underlying structure of the Chronicle almost certainly derives from that used by Bede. 5 Contrarily, Clemoes, who is perhaps the only scholar to address the question of how the annal numbers were read, takes the 'an-' abbreviation as standing for the nominative 'annus' ('Her' 31; see also his n7, p. 33). 6 The annals from manuscript 17 at St John's College, Oxford, provide additional confirmation for reading 'an-' as 'anno': here most annals are preceded by bare roman numerals, but annal 34 begins with 'Anno, xxxiiii,' and the barren annal number 40 is also preceded by 'Anno.' The treatment of annal 2, however, is especially intriguing in this context; for the year 2, we read: 'II Anno magi ueniunt' ('2: In [this] year the magi came'; Hart, 'B-Text' 295). At this early point in this translation, the Old English Chronicle's 'Her' is apparently trans-

Notes to pages 120-3

7 8

9

10

11

12 13

14

205

lated as 'anno' as the position suggests; later in the St John's College translation, 'Hie' is regularly used. Note that Cecily Clark's edition of annals 1070E to 1154E is quite careful in indicating the forms of the annal numbers. Why the mark of suspension is used in the 'M~' abbreviation is not clear, however. One ought to expect the simpler 'M' to stand as the abbreviation for 1000. It is at least possible that the use of 'M~' indicates that the implied word is an inflected form, rather than the bare 'mille.' Roman numerals were, of course, frequently used in manuscripts in place of Old English words, as (for example) the use of Roman numerals in poetic manuscripts confirms. Thus 'M~' can plausibly represent either 'mille' or 'pusend.' The diversity of treatments for the year 1000 itself is worth noting: in A (Bately's hand 5), we see only 'M~,' perhaps best expanded 'Mille' ('one thousand'); in C, we see 'mille ann~' and in D we see 'Mille anni' ('one thousand years'); E reads 'An~. mill~mo' ('in the thousandth year'); and in F we see 'Millesim'' (i.e., 'Millesimus': 'the thousandth [year]'). Cf Bately, 'Manuscript Layout,' 25 and note 33. Clemoes, too, notes the lack of syntactic continuity: 'The number was glossed by the adjacent wording, "an- dclxxxuiii. Her Ine feng to wesseaxna rice ..." means " 'Year 688' = 'Ine succeeded to the kingdom of the West Saxons' "' (31). 'Bedwig, son of Sceaf. That is, the son of Noah; he was born in the ark of Noah. Lamech, Methuselah, Enoch, Jared, Mahalaleel, Cainan, Enos, Seth, Adam: the first man and our father: that is, Christ.' I quote this passage from manuscript C because it appears to be defective in A (the A scribe has apparently skipped three generations of the genealogy and the phrase 'Id est filius noe,' perhaps by skipping an entire line in the exemplar). The B version is more complete but lacks the /in the first 'Id,' which was apparently left to be filled in during rubrication. The / in this position in the C manuscript is preceded by a half-line of writing space left blank. It is rubricated, as tall as three lines of writing, and placed in the left-hand margin. See Thomas D. Hill's essay The Myth of the Ark-Born Son of Noe.' In all four of the manuscripts where the 855 genealogy appears, the Latin ending of the genealogy is clearly marked as a terminal point. In manuscripts B and C, points follow the last Latin word, and the text resumes at the beginning of the next line (or at the beginning of the next page, in C) with a capital O in the left-hand margin. Manuscript D uses heavy punctuation followed by a capital '#'; manuscript A follows the genealogy with 'am-' ('amen'), heavy punctuation (the sort usually used for annal endings in manuscript A), and a following capital O. Note that the bracketing use of Latin here seems to confirm that this portion of the genealogy was a single addition to the genealogy of Mhelwulf; as noted above in chapter 1, ^thelweard's record of ^Ethelwulf's genealogy may preserve its immediately preceding state.

206 Notes to pages 123-8 15 This abbreviation for '-us' appears in at least a dozen Latinate names on folios Iv2r, but is also used at least once in an Old English word: 'weorp3te' in 878A, folio 15r. 16 The fact that patronymics stop appearing at the same point stands as an additional marker of difference between the two portions of the genealogy. 17 The highlighting is accomplished in another fashion in the B and C Chronicles, where the beginning of the Latin passage in question was (or was intended to be) marked by a rubricated capital placed in the margin. See note 11 above. 18 The alternative explanation for the Parker scribe's willingness to abbreviate the Latin passage to such a degree would involve the conclusion that he imagined an audience easily able to decipher the Latin material's more abbreviated form. While such a conclusion is possible, it goes against the grain of the general understanding of late-ninth-century literacy, which suggests (along with Alfred's Preface to the Pastoral Care) that English literacy was more widespread than Latin literacy. To put it another way, if we feel that the production of a vernacular Chronicle took place at the same cultural moment as Alfred's translation program, we must have difficulty imagining an audience of sophisticated Latin readers who were unsophisticated readers of Old English. Thus, it seems to me that the complexly abbreviated passage we see in 855A was intentionally complex (perhaps even mystifying) rather than merely convenient. 19 For a more detailed consideration of the post-Conquest contributions to the manuscripts of the Chronicle, see chapter 6. 20 Magoun concludes that the Latin version of the Chronicle in F was not, in fact, a translation of F's Old English annals because of their occasional differing content (240f). Yet the general appearance of F as a working draft seems to suggest otherwise, and it seems more plausible that the F scribe only incompletely coordinated his translation and redaction. 21 For a consideration of Matilda's role in the production of /Ethelweard's Chronicle, see van Houts. 22 'Oslac was a Goth by race, for he was descended from the Goths and Jutes, and in particular, from the line of Stuf and Wihtgar, two brothers - indeed, chieftains, who, having received authority over the Isle of Wight from their uncle King Cerdic and from Cynric his son (their cousin), killed the few British inhabitants of the island whom they could find on it, at the place called "Wihtgarabyrig"' (translation from Keynes and Lapidge 68). The information that Stuf and Wihtgar are nephews of Cerdic comes from annal 534: 'Her Cerdic forpferde, 7 Cynric his sunu ricsode forip .xxvi. wintra; 7 hie saldon hiera tuaem nefum Stufe 7 Wihtgare \eall/ Wi[e]ht[e] eal[o]nd.' ('Here Cerdic died and Cynric his son ruled for 26 further years; and they gave the Isle of Wight to their two nephews Stuf and Wihtgar'; Bately, MS A 21; the interlineation may be the work of scribe 8 (i.e., the F scribe).

Notes to pages 128-9

207

23 This passage from Bede about the three tribes of the invasion does not appear in the Chronicle's Common Stock, although it was added to the Northern Recension. From there it was also added into the Parker manuscript by the F scribe. Asser, therefore, must draw the information directly from Bede. 24 'Here came the West Saxons into Britain with 3 ships, in the place that is called "Cerdic's Shore"; and Stuf and Wihtgar fought with the Britons, and put them to tlight: 25 Significantly, the use of the term 'Westseaxe' in annal 514 is the first occurrence of this designation in the Chronicle's Common Stock: the Common Stock apparently does not use the term again until annal 560, when we read, 'Her Ceawlin feng to rice on Wesseaxum 7 Elle feng to Norbanhymbra [rice]' (Bately, MS A 23; 'Here Ceawlin succeeded to the kingdom in Wessex and Elle succeeded to the Northumbrian [kingdom]'). One must suspect that annal 514 introduces some sort of anachronism here in its use of 'Westseaxe,' which would otherwise seem to imply a division of the continental Saxons into Western and Eastern factions. At the least, the linking of Stuf and Wihtgar to the West Saxons in this annal seems significant. 26 A further historical/genealogical problem is associated with Asser's account in his chapter 2, as Keynes and Lapidge note: 'In describing Cynric as Cerdic's son, Asser thus follows the Chronicle, but contradicts the genealogy [of Alfred] provided in chapter 1 which makes Cynric son of Creoda grandson of Cerdic' (230, nlO). This difficulty, however, is one inherited by Asser from the Common Stock; for a discussion of the Creoda problems, see Sisam, 'Royal Genealogies' 157-8, 195-6. Neverthless, the proximity of the contradictory genealogical statements in Asser's text (chapters 1 and 3) suggests that Asser may be paying less attention than the first Parker scribe (or his ancestor), who corrects the 'Creoda problem' in a book where the points of conflict are far more widely separated. 27 "... Cerdic; who was [son ot] Elesa; (who was [son of] Esla;} who was [son of] Geuuis. from whom the Britons call all that race "Geguuis"; (who was [son of] Wig; who was [son of] Freawine; who was [son of] Freothegar;) who was [son of] Brond; who was [son ot] Uuoden.' The translation is my own; Keynes and Lapidge do not translate Stevenson's bracketed additions. Note that Asser's clauses in the quoted passage are somewhat weak syntactically: he begins the genealogy as follows: 'Alfred rex, filius /Ethelwulfi regis; qui fuit Ecgberhti; qui fuit Ealhmundi' ( ' K i n g Alfred, son of King ^Ethelwulf; who was [son] of Ecgberht; who was [son] of Ealhmund'). The use of genitive forms to express the father's relation to the son, however, disappears at this point in Asser's genealogy, and readers are left with the less effective forms seen above in the Cerdic-to-Woden portion of the genealogy. Cf the Historia Brittonum's genealogies and the comments on them in chapter 1. 28 Smyth (Alfred the Great 173-4) explains the omissions of these names in Asser as the result of familiar sorts of copying errors, but the coincidence implied in Asser's

208 Notes to pages 129-31

29

30

31

32

33

text's omission of precisely the names not witnessed in the other genealogies cited by Sisam strains credulity. The form of this genealogy must stand as one of the strongest pieces of evidence that Asser had access to a West Saxon genealogical tradition predating that seen in the Chronicle and the WSRT, and hence as evidence of a 'genuine' Asser. Nevertheless, the genealogical problems seen in chapter 2 of Asser's text (described above; some of the same problems in Asser's chapter 2 are also described by Smyth 174) might indicate an unfortunate degree of carelessness or even sloppiness on Asser's part. '... the son of Geat (whom the pagans worshipped for a long time as a god). The poet Sedulius mentions Geat in his poem Carmen Paschale, as follows: Since the pagan poets sought in their fictions to swagger either in highflowing measure, or in the wailing of tragedy's speech, or with comedy's absurd Geta, or by means of any sort of verse whatever [plus the remainder of the verse, then,] Geat was the son of Taetwa' (translation from Keynes and Lapidge 67; my ellipses). Significantly, the Chronicle's 'bridge' moment between Scef and Noah (discussed above) is obscured by Asser's text, which simply reads 'Hwala; qui fuit Beduuig; qui fuit Seth; qui fuit Noe' (Stevenson 3; 'Hwala; who was [son of] Beduuig; who was [son of] Seth; who was [son of] Noah'). Asser's Latin text, of course, cannot use the lack of patronymics to indicate the shift, but his failure to mention the supposed birth of Sceafing/Seth on the Ark may hint at the motive for the quotation from Sedulius: Asser, too, may have felt a need to provide some sort of bridging mechanism to the world of classical learning, and the Geta/Geata material allowed him to link an ancestor with a well-known Germanic pedigree to a well-known poet. To put it another way, the Chronicle puts world events into the context of English history, since the Chronicle begins with Caesar's invasion of Britain and continues throughout to focus on events with a relevance to Britain. jEthelweard's Chronicle, however, puts the focus on Britain into a world history context by its use of the history of the world as an opening strategy. Almost certainly, this change of emphasis stems from ./Ethelweard's intended audience outside of Britain. In Book One, chapter 3, which consists of material derived from Bede's Historia ecclesiastica, ^Ethelweard also includes the information that Hengist and Horsa were descended from Woden. The same events are narrated later in the translation of the Chronicle but (as in the Common Stock) without the genealogical information. 'AUle, son of Yffe, took his place in the Northumbrian succession [of kings], whose race goes back right to the most universal ancestor, that is to Woden' (Campbell's translation).

Notes to pages 132-9

209

34 Note that ^thelweard abbreviates at least one other genealogy as well: the 547 genealogy of Ida extends to Geat in the Common Stock, but ^thelweard comments only that his family derives from Woden (Campbell 12). Note also that the Common Stock analogues to the 560 genealogy quoted above extended beyond Woden in 560AG, but not in 560BC. 35 On the omission of 'Cuba,' see chapter 1, above. 36 Campbell notes that 'Brittanum' must be omitted for metrical reasons and does not translate it (56), though I have included it here, ^thelweard's competence as a poet seems to me to make it uncertain how far we ought to allow metrical arguments to determine the text here. 37 Two observations must be made at this point. First, it might be hypothesized that ^Ethelweard does not translate the parts of The Death of Edgar that do not fit the Chronicle's tradition of poetry very closely (i.e., 11 13-37, which do not really concern themselves with royal affairs). But Ethelweard also does not translate lines 10b-12b, which recount Edgar's son Edward's accession to the throne. Thus .Ethelweard must choose his stopping point in the translation of the 975 poem. (This line of argument would seem to indicate that ^Ethelweard's Chronicle does not provide evidence for a Chronicle tradition that featured a shorter version of the 975ABC poem.) The contents of/^thelweard's 975 poem are also sufficient to rule out the possibility that his exemplar contained a poem like that in 975DE. In addition, however, it is important to note that the list of chapter headings for ^Ethelweard's fourth book (Campbell 34) promises two further chapters after the death of Edgar, chapters that were apparently not included. The question of 'the end' of /Ethelweard's Chronicle, then, is somewhat vexed. 38 This conflict was Barker's primary reason for claiming that Savile had used a manuscript differing from the Cotton Otho A x manuscript; Campbell suggests that The explanation probably is that Ethelweard's MS of the Old English Chronicle did not provide any matter after the death of Edgar, and he did not feel equal to original historical composition' (/Ethelweard xi-xii). 39 The dating of this 'continuation' is notable: if B is dated to the later 970s, we can conclude that the 973 and 975 poems make it into all three branches within a twenty-year span or so: the A continuation containing these poems is clearly to be dated around 1000, as is /Ethelweard. The D Chronicle presumably takes the 973 poem from his collation of the BC ancestor. 6: Conclusions 1 The order of the Parker manuscript's contents at the turn of the twelfth century was almost certainly different from their current order (as it also differed from their order in the middle tenth century). As Parkes notes, from the evidence of manu-

210 Notes to pages 139-43

2

3

4

5 6

7

8

9

script G, around the turn of the eleventh century the manuscript's order must have been as follows: WSRT, annals to 1001, list of popes (to Damasus), episcopal lists, Laws (Parkes, 'Palaeography' 170). The papal and episcopal lists now follow the Laws, but I presume that the order around 1100 was the same as it was around 1000. Parkes (151-2) cites Thomas James's 1600 description of the manuscript to show that, at that time, the Sedulius portion of CCCC 173 apparently preceded the Laws', whether the current booklet 4 (containing the lists) was appended to the Chronicle or the Laws in 1600 is unclear. The list entered onto CCCC 173 folio 54v originally ended with the pairing 'Urbanus Anselmo' ('[Pope] Urban [sent the pallium] to Anselm'). A later hand has added the pairing 'Paschalis Radulfo' ('Paschalis to Radulf). Plummer identified the scribe of the Acts ofLanfranc as the scribe of 'some of the lists,' but also identified this hand as the F scribe (II, xxvi). Bately (MS A xliii) agrees with Taylor's identification of the hand of the Acts and of the conclusion of the papal list; she further agrees with Taylor (against Plummer) that this hand is not the F scribe. The possibility that C had once extended beyond the 1066 annal and was deliberately truncated at 1066 at the time the twelfth-century portion was written can be neither proved nor disproved; it is simplest, therefore, to treat C as if it ceased to be a living Chronicle in 1066. Ker's gathering 24 appears to have been bound in the wrong order; according to their annalistic material, the proper order for folios 160-3 is: 161, 163, 160, 162. Note that the 1065C annal and the beginning of the 1066C annal are in the same hand, while the remainder of 1066C (excluding the twelfth-century addition) is in another hand. 1065C, then, could not have been entered into the C Chronicle before 1066. See Ker, Catalogue 253. The possibility that C may have been intended to end at 1066 may well be supported by the fact that Ker's gathering 24 consists of only four leaves; it is possible that, when the 1065 and 1066 annals were entered into this manuscript, the two inner sheets of a gathering of eight leaves were removed. That is, the annals of the 1050s in gathering 24 may have been entered onto the first two leaves of a full gathering of eight, but when the 1065-6 material was added the two inner sheets of the gathering were removed, leaving a four-leaf gathering. The possibility must probably remain purely hypothetical, but such an explanation might account for the structure of the end of the C Chronicle remarkably well. 'Her father was Edward the aetheling, son of King Eadmund: Eadmund, son of ^thelred; ^Ethelred, son of Eadgar; Eadgar, son of Eadred; and so on in that noble race.' Edgar is the subject of the following poems: 959DE, 973ABC, 975ABC, and 975DE.

Notes to pages 145-6

211

10 Gransden's comment on the continuance of the E Chronicle suggests another possibility: 'the Peterborough version survived the longest presumably because it was written in an area which became a center of English resistance' (40). 11 Although Dumville would hesitate to place the 1121 ancestor of E at Christ Church, Canterbury, the F scribe's removal of genealogies from A and his treatment of poems in F makes the possibility mentioned above that the F scribe may have contributed to the 1121 VE very provocative. Certainly, more work needs to be done to date the activities of the F scribe and to localize VE and determine exactly what it might have looked like.

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Bibliography

Manuscripts consulted Cambridge, Corpus Christi College CCCC 92 CCCC 173 CCCC 183 CCCC 383 Cambridge University Library C U L K k . 3. 18 London, British Library Additional 23,211 Additional 34,652, fo. 2 Additional 43,703 Cotton Domitian viii, fos 30-70 Cotton Domitian ix, fo. 9 Cotton Otho B x Cotton Otho B xi, fos 39^7 Cotton Tiberius A iii, fo. 178 Cotton Tiberius A vi, fos 1-35 Cotton Tiberius B i, fos 115v-64 Cotton Tiberius B iv, fos 3-86 Cotton Vespasian B vi, fos 104-09 Oxford: Bodleian Library Bodleian Laud Misc. 636

214

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Index of Annals and Manuscripts

Chronicle Annals annal 547: 35, 131, 174n 1; annal 552: 174nl;annal560:35. 131-2, 174n1, 176nl6, 207n25, 209n34;annal 597: 131, 174nl: annal 611: 174nll; annal 626: 35, 174n1;annal 648: 174n1; annal 670: 174nl; annal 674: 131, 174n 1; annal 676: 174n 1; annal 685: 174n 1; annal 688: 131, 174n 1; annai 694: 174nl; annal 728: 174nl: annal 731: 68, 174nl, 191n22; annal 755: 10-11, 39-61, 76, 79, 85, 131, 146-8, 152, 155-70. 174n I ; annal 784: 39, 54; annal 836: 184n3; annal 851: 200n63; annal 855: 10. 12, 20, 68, 123-4, 131, 174nl; annal 871: 49-52, 59, 76, 152, 192n25; annal 901: 62, 64, 69-70; annal 902: 65-6; annal 937: see Subject Index under Chronicle poems; annal 942: see Subject Index under Chronicle poems; annal 956: I90nl2; annal 959: see Subject Index under Chronicle poems; annal 973: see Subject Index under Chronicle poems; annal 975: see Subject Index under Chronicle poems; annal 979: see Sub-

ject Index under Chronicle poems; annal 1011: see Subject Index under Chronicle poems; annal 1031: 191nl8; annal 1036: see Subject Index under Chronicle poems; annal 1057: see Subject Index under Chronicle poems; annal 1065: see Subject Index under Chronicle poems; annal 1067: see Subject Index under Chronicle poems; annal 1075: see Subject Index under Chronicle poems; annal 1086: see Subject Index under Chronicle poems; annal 1130:74

Chronicle Manuscripts and Specific Annals A (CCCC 173; 'Parker Chronicle'), 4-6, 11-12, 21-3, 26-9, 66-7, 71, 78-9, 119-21, 125-6, 134, 138-41, 143, 145, 150, 170, 172nlO, 174nl, 177n27, 177n29, 179n48, 191n20, 207n23; annals: 30A, 121;39A, 120;514A, 128;547A,22, 177n34;552A, 178n35; 560A, 177n30; 597A, 22; 611A, 22; 626A, 177n30; 648A, 22; 670A, 22; 674A, 22; 676A, 177n31; 685A, 22;

222

Index of Annals and Manuscripts

688A, 22; 694A, 177n31; 710A, 172nl 1, 191n24; 716A, 22; 731 A, 177n33; 755A, 22, 42, 45-6, 55-6, 58, 179n48; 833A, 186n24; 853A, 186n24; 855A, 21-2, 27, 122-3, 153, 177n34, 179n48, 205nl3; 867A, 186n24; 868A, 186n24; 870A, 186n24; 871 A, 49, 51-2; 878A, 123, 186n24, 206nl5; 892A, 63-4; 893A, 186n24; 893-6A, 62-3; 897A, 65; 900A, 61-2, 66, 72; 903A, 66; 904A, 65-6; 911A, 63^; 912A, 63; 924A, 63-^; 937A, 52, 72-3, 101; 973A, 193nlO; 1000A, 205n9; 1070A, 119, 125, 140 B (BL Cotton Tiberius A vi), 4-5, 11, 21, 27, 29, 64-8, 71, 78-9, 121, 134, 138-41, 143, 145, 150, 152, 154, 1 7 2 n l l , 178n36, 184nll, 191n20, 204n3; annals: 755B, 27-8, 43-5, 46-7, 51, 55-6; 855B, 21, 27-8, 33, 132, 175n 13,205n 13; 871B, 49,50-1; 937B, 29 C (BL Cotton Tiberius B i), 4-5, 11, 27-9, 64-9, 71, 78-9, 121, 134, 138, 141-3, 145-6, 150-1, 172nnlO-ll, 178n36, 184nll, 191n20; annals: 491C, 180n54; 755C, 43, 45, 55-6; 855C, 122, 132, 205nl3; 871C, 49; 937C, 29; 1000C, 205n9; 1065C, 142, 180n54; 1066C, 141-2, 202n86 D (BL Cotton Tiberius B iv), 5, 8, 69-70,78-9, 113,115, 117, 121, 138, 141-3, 145-6, 150-1, 172n9, 172nll, 184nl 1; annals: 694D, 69; 716D, 69; 728D, 69; 731D, 68; 755D, 43, 45-7, 55-6, 69, 191n21; 801D, 68; 802D, 68; 855D, 28-9, 68, 205nl3; 871D, 49; 901D, 69; 910D, 68-9; 972D, 195n25; 975D, 82-3, 116; 1000D,

205n9; 1067D, 142-3; 1079D, 141-3; 1130D, 141 E (Bodleian Laud Misc. 636; 'Peterborough Chronicle'), 5, 12, 62, 68-70, 78-9, 119-21, 124, 126, 138, 144-5, 150-1, 172n9, 172nll, 184nll; annals: 449E, 69-70, 174nl, 179n51, 180n55; 593E, 69, 174nl; 755E, 43-5,55-6,70,85, 191n21;871E,49; 937E, 133; 972E, 195n25; 975E, 108, 116, 201n74; 1000E, 205n9; 1086E, 7, 116;1154E, 146 F (BL Cotton Domitian viii), 5, 12, 79, 116, 121, 124-6, 138-41, 145, 150, 172n9, 172nll, 174nl, 186n26, 191nl 8,204n3; annals: 449F, 191n23; 755F, 155; 958F, 74, 86, 88,91; 975F, 201n74; 979F, 74, 86-8, 91; 1000F, 205n9; 1011F, 74, 196n36; 1058F, 140 G (BL Cotton Otho B xi), 6, 27-8, 138-9, 150, 154, 172nlO, 177n29; annals: 755G, 42-3, 45-56; 855G, 2; 871G, 49 H (BL Cotton Domitian ix, fo. 9), 6, 126, 138, 144-6, 150, 172n9 West Saxon Regnal Table (WSRT) BL Additional 23,211 (including EastSaxon genealogies), 20, 23, 26-7, 35, 177n27, 179n47, 183n72 BL Additional 34,652, fo. 2 (associated with manuscript G of the Chronicle), 6, 27-8 BL Cotton Tiberius A iii, fo. 178 (associated with manuscript B of the Chronicle), 4 CCCC 173 (Parker WSRT), 20-2, 26, 29, 177n27, 182n67

Index of Annals and Manuscripts Other Manuscripts BL Additional 43,703 (Laurence Nowell's transcript of manuscript G): 6, 43, 184nlO; annal 755: 43, 45-6 BL Cotton Otho A x: 134 BL Cotton Tiberius Bv: 178n43, 183n71 BL Cotton Vespasian B vi: 10, 16-25, 32^,37, 147, 181n61, 181n63, 182n70

223

CCCC92: 178n43 CCCC183:10, 34-5, 178n43 CCCC 383: 27 CULKk. 3. 18:27 Oxford, St John's College 17: 204n2, 204n6 Rochester, Rochester Cathedral A. 3. 5: 25,27,29, 183n71

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Subject Index

Abegg, D., 75 Acts ofLanfranc, The, 4, 119, 125-6, 140, 147 /Ethelflaed, daughter of Alfred, 11, 65, 67, 148 /Ethelred (The Unready'), King, 106, 110-12, 115, 134, 143 ^thelstan, King, 34, 70, 72, 100-2, 149, 183n71 jEthelwulf, King, 11, 35, 54, 58, 117, 146. See also under genealogies Alfred, King, 6-7, 10-12, 15, 33, 35-8, 49, 58-68, 71-3. 101, 103, 127-32, 147-8, 150, 183n74 alliteration, 17-18, 21, 34-5, 84-5, 87, 91-4,97-9, 129-30, 153 Amos, A.C., 169, 195n29 anacrusis, 21-3, 92, 94-9 Annals of St. Neots, The, 127, 204n2 Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, The (ASPR), 74-5, 78, 83, 116, 149, 174n8, 193n6,202n87 Asser (author of the Life of Alfred), 12, 23.24-5, 119-20, 124, 126-32,

back-to-the-manuscripts approach, 8-9, 137,172nl2 Baker, P., 6 Barker, E.E., 209n38 Bately, J., 4, 63-4, 125, 127, 171nn2-3,

172nl3, 177n27, 177n29, 184nll, 187n32,188nl,189n4,189n8, 199n62, 205n9, 210n3 Battaglia, E, 53-4,57, 187n4 Battle ofMaldon, The, 92, 197n42, 197n46, 199n54 Bede (author of the Historia Ecclesiastica), 14-15, 31, 35-6, 38, 67-9, 116, 119-20, 122, 127-9, 131, 176n21, 179n51,181n58 Benedictine Rule, The, 125 Beowulf, 92-3, 95-6, 132, 174n8, 175nl2, 177n25, 197n48 Bessinger, J.B., Jr, and P.H. Smith, 75 bilingualism, 5, 12, 119, 125-6, 141, 146, 150, 153 Bredehoft, T.A., 193n9, 202n81 Bremmer, R.H., Jr, 188n38, 189n3 Budny, M., 76

135-6, 150, 153-4, 175nl3, 182n69, 183n74

Cable,!., 97, 176nl5, 198n49

226

Subject Index

Campbell, A., 66, 131, 133, 175nll, 195n26, 199n62 Capitula of Theodulf, The, 125-6 Cerquiglini, B., 42, 185nl9 Chase, C, 183n73 Chronicle of A^thelweard, The, 12, 23, 33-6, 64-7, 71,119-20, 124, 126-7, 131-6, 150, 153-4, 189n8 Chronicle poems, 7, 10, 29-30, 72-118, 142-4, 146-7, 149-50; specific poems: annal 937 (The Battle ofBrunanburh), 3, 12, 29, 52, 70, 72-6, 78-80,99-103, 106, 110, 113, 117, 133, 149, 151-2, 196n33; annal 942 (The Capture of the Five Boroughs), 70, 74-80, 82, 99, 102-3, 108, 113, 133; annal 959, 74-5, 79, 85-8, 97, 99, 106, 107, 109, 115-16, 200n64; annal 973 (The Coronation of Edgar), 70, 74-6, 79-80, 99, 102-4, 106-9, 113, 131, 133-4; annal 975ABC (The Death of Edgar), 70, 74-6, 79-80, 99, 102-6, 131, 133^, 198n50; annal 975DE (The Death of Edgar II), 70, 74,76,79,81^,91-6,99, 102, 104-5,116; annal 975D, 74,79, 97-9, 106-9, 200n64; annal 979, 86-8, 99, 102, 106, 109-10, 114, 200n64; annal 1011, 74, 79, 88-91, 99, 106, 108-10, 117, 149; annal 1036 (The Death of Alfred), 74-6, 79-82, 96, 100, 11011,114, 149; annal 1057D, 74, 78-9, 88-9, 100, 110, 113-14, 118, 142-3, 200n86; annal 1065 (The Death of Edward), 74-6, 78-80, 82, 100, 110-15, 117-18, 149-50, 153; annal 1067D, 74, 78-9, 81-2, 100, 110, 114-16, 118, 142, 151, 153,202n86; annal 1075E/1076D, 75-6, 79, 81-2, 84-5, 91, 100, 110, 202n82; annal

1086E (William the Conqueror), 7, 74-6, 79-82, 98, 100, 110, 115-18, 144, I49_5i Clark, C, 5, 189n4, 205n7 Classen, E., and F.E. Harmer, 5, 119, 187n32, 194nl7 Clemoes, P., 121, 204n5, 205nlO Cnut, King, 110-11 Common Stock (of the Chronicle), 4, 10-11, 14-16, 20, 23^, 33, 38-9, 45, 55, 60-3, 67-72, 101-2, 117-18, 120-2, 124,128-9,132, 135, 142-4, 147-52, 207n23 Conner, P., 191nl7 Cubbin, G.P., 5, 68-9, 113, 172n7, 194nl7, 196n37 Davis, C.R., 123 Doane, A.N., 59 Dumville, D., 6, 34, 63, 138-41, 146, 171n2, 171n4, 174n4, 178n40, 179n47, 182n70, 183n71, 188n36, 204nl Eadred, King, 134 Eadwig, King, 107, 134 E-archetype (\/E; ancestor of E manuscript), 5, 68, 124-6, 139, 141, 144-5, 151, 195n32, 196nn36-7 Edgar, King, 103-5, 107-9, 116, 133-5, 142-3 Edmund, King, 70-2, 100-1, 103, 105 Edward (The Confessor'), King, 12, 110-14, 142 Edward (The Elder'), King, 61-7, 72, 101, 103, 148 Edward (The Martyr'), King, 104, 106, 109, 134, 171n5 Enlarged Rule of Chrodegang, The, 125

Subject Index Ferro, K., 53-4, 187n32 Fleischman, S., 42 formulaic reading, 51-2, 77, 84, 152 formulas and formulaic expression, 11-12, 50-3, 59-60, 76, 119, 147, 152 Fulk, R.D., 175nll, 176nl3

227

Keefer, S.L., and K. O'Brien O'Keeffe, 172nl4 Ker, N.R., 5, 78, 113, 144, 172nn6-7, 189n8, 210nn5-7 Keynes, S., and M. Lapidge, 207nn26-7

Lapidge, M., 135, 172nl4 Laws of Alfred and Ine, The, 4, 6-7, 139, genealogies, 3,10-11,13-38,54, 61, 69, 172nlO, 189n7 70-2,92, 123, 134, 137, 142, 144, Lerer, S., 183n74, 203n94 146-8, 151-2; genealogy of ,-Ethelliteracy and literate practice, 8-10, 23, wulf (WSRT, annal 855), 10, 12, 20-3, 49,77, 120, 122, 124, 137, 151-3 26, 31, 33-4, 36-8, 40, 60-1, 117, litterae notabiliores, 11, 55-6, 78, 80, 122-4, 129-30, 132-3, 135, 172nll, 82-3,85,87, 148, 155, 185nl4, 175nl3, 177n28, 178n35, 179n47, 192n25 179n50, 180n52; genealogy of Offa Liuzza, R.M., 52 (annal 755). 39-40, 69-70, 148, Lord, A.B., 184n9 191n21 Lutz, A., 6, 43, 46, 119, 170, 177n29, Gibson, E., 74 184nlO, 193n5 Godwine, Earl, 110, 203n90 Gransden, A., 21 In 10 Machan, T., 184n9 Greenfield, S., and D. Calder, 186n22 Mclntosh, A., 92, 96, 99, 106-7 McTurk, R.W., 48, 184n6 Harold, King, 141-2, 203n90 Magoun, P.P., 53^, 57, 184n4, Hart, C, 171n5, 204n2, 204n6 187nn28-9, 187n32, 204n3, 206n20 Heinemann, F.J., 184n5 Margaret of Scotland, 142-3, 203n90 Henry of Huntingdon, 126, 153 Maxims II, 5, 180n54 Hill, T.D., 37, 205nl2 Meaney, A., 171n2 Historic! Brittonum, 10, 14-15, 19,31-2, Menologium, The, 5, 180n54 35-8, 182n70 Mercian Register, the, 11, 64-8, 71, Howe, N., 179n44, 199n61 146-8, I 7 2 n l l , 191n24 metrical charms, 195n29, 197nn46-7, Ingram, J., 74 198n51 Irvine, M, 199n58, 199n61 metrical subordination, 92-4, 97, 99, 117, 149 Johansen, J.G., 184n5, 187n34 Mitchell, B., and F.C. Robinson, 41, John, E., 188n37, 204n2 184n4, 185nl5, 186n22, 187n32, John of Worcester, 126-7. 135, 153 197n43 Joscelin, J., 5, 193n5 Moisl, H., 174n6, 178n38 Jost, K., 202n80 Momma, H., 201 n78

228

Subject Index

Moorman, C., 184n4 mouvance, 43, 48, 184n8 Murray, A.C., 183n73 Nicolaisen, W.F.H., 184n9 Norman Conquest, 12-13, 110, 112-14, 117-18, 119, 124-5, 136^6, 149-51 Northern Recension, 11-12, 45, 62-3, 67-71, 105, 140, 146, 148-9, 151, 170, 172nl 1, 179n51, 181n58, 189n8, 207n23 Nowell, L., 6, 43, 193n5. See also under BL Additional 43, 703 O'Brien O'Keeffe, K., 5, 8, 25,29,48-9, 52, 59-60, 75, 77-8, 80, 82, 172nnl314, 173nnl6-17, 199n60 Old English Bede, The, 6-7, 15, 30, 33, 69, 172nlO, 179n51 Old English verse, 9-10, 12-15, 17, 23, 29-30, 52-3, 59-60, 72-118, 127, 137, 152; 'classical' verse, 3, 12, 18, 30, 37, 77, 92-5, 99, 112-13, 117, 149,151, 153, 196n39; 'non-classical' verse, 12, 23, 73, 77-9, 82, 91-9, 112, 117, 149, 151, 153, 196n39 Ong, W., 184n9 oral-formulaic theory, 48, 52, 77, 152-3 orality, 10, 24, 37, 39^1, 48-50, 53, 55, 77-8, 137, 148, 152-3 Orchard, A., 186n21 Orosius (author of History against the Pagans, translated by King Alfred), 56, 172nlO Parkes, M.B., 63, 139, 171nl, 171n4, 187n30, 189n7 Pasternack, C.B., 173nl5 Plummer, C., 5, 41, 45, 62, 65, 67-8, 74, 76,83,89-91,98, 115-16, 119, 169,

174nn2-3, 184n3, 186n22, 187n32, 195n30, 210n3 pointing of manuscripts, 15, 25-30, 39, 55,76-83,85,87,90-1, 116, 137, 152, 155 PopeJ.C., 192nl resolution, 18, 20, 92, 94-6, 99, 117, 149, 174nlO rhyme, 12, 77, 80-6, 91-4, 97-9, 116, 149, 153 Robinson, F.C., 8, 172nl2, 173nl6 Robinson, F.C., and E.G. Stanley, 75-6, 92 Rositzke, H.A., 119, 187n32 Rulon-Miller, N., 184n5 Russom, G., 17, 92-4, 97, 174n7, 176nl8, 197n48 Schrader, R., 75 Scragg, D., and P.E. Szarmach, 172nl4 scribal activity or practice, 9, 11, 16, 24-30, 41-2, 44, 46-8, 50-5, 63, 73-91,96, 116-17, 120, 137, 148, 152-3 Sedgefield, W.J., 75 Sievers, E., 75, 78 Sisam, K., 21, 32-4, 36, 132, 174n5, 175nl3,176n21, 179n47, 181n61, 182n70, 183n73, 207n26, 207n28 Smyth, A.P., 207n28 Stenton, P.M., 107 Stephen, King, 145-6 Stevenson, W.H., 130 Swanton, M., 15-16,76, 183nl Sweet, H., 178n41 Szarmach, P.E., 65, 172nl3, 189n9, 192nl Talbot, R., 193n5

Subject Index Taylor, S., 4, 44, 47, 139-40, 187n32, 190nl2 textual innovation, 11, 42-53, 55, 60, 84-5,90, 142, 152, 168-9 textual spatialization, 10, 24-6, 30, 7883,91,99, 137, 152, 155 textual variation, 11, 40-2, 46, 52-3, 59, 78,83-5, 148, 152-3 Thormann, J., 200n66 Thorpe, B., 74, 86 Towers, T.H., 57, 184n4, 186n27, 187n32 Townsend, J., 202n87 vanHouts, E., 206n21 variance, 41-4, 46-8, 49-50, 53, 55-6, 148 Waterhouse, R., 54, 57, 184n4, 187n32, 187n34 West Saxon Regnal Table (WSRT), 4, 6, 10, 14-15, 20-3, 25-30, 32-3, 58, 139, 179n47, 182n67, 191n20

229

Wheelock, A., 74, 170, 172n8, I84nl0 White, H., 183n75 White, S.D., 57, 184n5 Whitelock, D., 5, 39, 41, 65, 67-9, 107, 113, 115, 124, 142, 172nll, 174n3, 184n4, 186n22, 187n32, 189n6, 201n71,202n80 Whiting, B.J., 80 Widsith, 36, 95-6, 177n25, 179n44 William (The Conqueror'), King, 1424, 146, 150-1 William of Malmesbury, 127, 135 Wilson, J.H., 53^, 184n4, 186n27, 187n28, 187n32, 188n35 Wonders of the East, The, 125 Wrenn, C.L., 48, 184n4, 187n32 Wulfstan, Archbishop (the homilist), 82, 85,97-9, 106-11, 115, 126, 186n21, 200n64, 201n71,202n80 Yorke, B., 128-30 Zumthor, P., 184n8