Arthurian Studies in Honour of P.J.C. Field

ARTHURIAN STUDIES IN HONOUR OF P.J.C. FIELD Edited by Bonnie Wheeler

Arthurian Studies

ARTHURIAN STUDIES LVII

ARTHURIAN STUDIES IN HONOUR OF P.J.C. FIELD The essays in this volume celebrate the career of Peter Field, Professor of English at the University of Wales, Bangor. A distinguished Arthurian scholar, he is particularly well-known for his work on Malory’s Morte Darthur. Fittingly, this special interest is reflected by the contributors to this volume, which has a strong focus on Malory; there are many new insights into Malory’s text and sources, identifying him as a keen and critical reader, and a powerful stylist. However, a wide variety of other Arthurian and associated material is also covered; the chapters range over the whole field of Arthurian vernacular texts and include new studies of early French and German texts as well as an analysis of the impact of Arthurian materials on Galician-Portuguese poetry. BONNIE WHEELER is Director of Medieval Studies at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas.

ARTHURIAN STUDIES General Editor: Norris J. Lacy

ISSN 0261–9814

Previously published volumes in the series are listed at the back of this book

Image not available

P.J.C. Field. Photograph: Vanessa Field

ARTHURIAN STUDIES IN HONOUR OF P.J.C. FIELD

Edited by Bonnie Wheeler

D. S. BREWER

© Contributors 2004 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

First published 2004 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge

ISBN 1 84384 013 8

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Arthurian studies in honour of P.J.C. Field / edited by Bonnie Wheeler. p. cm. – (Arthurian studies ; 27) ISBN 1–84384–013–8 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Arthurian romances – History and criticism. I. Wheeler, Bonnie, 1944– II. Series. PN685.A78 2004 809’.93351 – dc22 2003027528

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by St Edmundsbury Press Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

Contents Abbreviations

ix

Foreword Bonnie Wheeler

xi

Professor Peter Field: An Appreciation Margaret Locherbie-Cameron 1

The Grail Romances and the Old Law

xiii 1

FANNI BOGDANOW

2

What did Robert de Boron really write?

15

LINDA GOWANS

3

On Capitalization in Some Early Manuscripts of Wace’s Roman de Brut

29

FRANÇOISE H.M. LE SAUX

4

Tristan Rossignol: The Development of a Text

49

GEOFFREY BROMILEY

5

What’s in a Name? Arthurian Name-Dropping in the Roman de Waldef

63

ROSALIND FIELD

6

The Enigma of the Prose Yvain

65

NORRIS LACY

7

Dreams and Visions in the Perlesvaus

73

ANDREA M.L. WILLIAMS

8

La Reine-Fée in the Roman de Perceforest: Rewriting, Rethinking

81

JANE H.M. TAYLOR

9

The Relationship between Text and Image in Three Manuscripts of the Estoire del Saint Graal (Lancelot-Grail Cycle)

93

ELSPETH KENNEDY

10 Wigalois and Parzival: Father and Son Roles in the German Romance of Gawain’s Son

101

NEIL E. THOMAS

11 Reading between the Lines: A Vision of the Arthurian World Reflected in Galician-Portuguese Poetry

117

AMÉLIA P. HUTCHINSON

12 The Lost Beginning of The Jeaste of Syr Gaweyne and the Collation of Bodleian Library MS Douce 261

133

MALDWYN MILLS

13 Enide’s See-through Dress ROGER MIDDLETON

143

14 A Note on the Percy Folio Grene Knight

165

DOUGLAS GRAY

15 ‘False Friends’ in the Works of the Gawain-Poet

173

AD PUTTER

16 Place-Names in The Awntyrs Off Arthure: Corruption, Conjecture, Coincidence

181

ROSAMUND ALLEN

17 Lancelot as Lover in the English Tradition before Malory

201

ELIZABETH ARCHIBALD

18 Malory and Middle English Verse Romance: The Case of Sir Tristrem

217

PHILLIPA HARDMAN

19 Sir Thomas Malory’s (French) Romance and (English) Chronicle

223

EDWARD DONALD KENNEDY

20 Romantic Self-Fashioning: Three Case Studies

235

DAVID MILLS

21 Are Further Emendations Necessary? A Note on the Definite and Indefinite Articles in the Winchester Malory

247

YUJI NAKAO

22 Lucius’s Exhortation in Winchester and The Caxton

253

RALPH NORRIS

23 The Historicity of Combat in Le Morte Darthur

261

K.S. WHETTER

24 Personal Weapons in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur

271

D.S. BREWER

25 ‘now I take uppon me the adventures to seke of holy thynges’: Lancelot and the Crisis of Arthurian Knighthood

285

RALUCA L. RADULESCU

26 Malory’s Language of Love

297

HELEN COOPER

27 P.J.C. Field’s Worshipful Revision of Malory: Making a Virtue of Necessity

307

SHUNICHI NOGUCHI

28 ‘Old Sir Thomas Malory’s Enchanting Book’: A Connecticut Yankee Reads Le Morte Darthur

311

JANET COWEN

P.J.C. Field: Publications

325

Notes on Contributors

331

Tabula Gratulatoria

335

Abbreviations Annales ESC ANTS OPS BBIAS BL BnF CFMA CT DNB EETS ES EETS OS EHR JEGP MED MLN NLS OED PMLA RES RMS SATF TEAMS TLF UTQ ZfdPh

Annales. Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations Anglo-Norman Text Society Occasional Publications Series Bibliographical Bulletin of the International Arthurian Society British Library, London Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris Classiques français du moyen âge The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer Dictionary of National Biography Early English Text Society Extra Series Early English Text Society Original Series English Historical Review Journal of English and Germanic Philology Middle English Dictionary Modern Language Notes National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh Oxford English Dictionary Publications of the Modern Language Association of America Review of English Studies Reading Medieval Studies Société des Anciens Textes Français Consortium for Teaching the Middle Ages/Medieval Institute Press, Western Michigan University Textes Littéraires Français University of Toronto Quarterly Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie

Foreword P.J.C. Field, Professor of English at the University of Wales (Bangor), is a distinguished Arthurian scholar and Vice-President of the International Arthurian Society. Although he is an expert in medieval literature in general, much of his scholarly life has been devoted to Malory’s Le Morte Darthur. Many of his most important articles have been reprinted in Malory: Texts and Sources (1998). Among many articles and other contributions to Malory studies, three works may be singled out. His Romance and Chronicle: A Study of Sir Thomas Malory’s Prose Style (1971) was the first comprehensive analysis of the features of Malory’s distinctive style. In The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory (1993), Professor Field uses several previously unexamined documents to probe Malory’s personal, social, and political contexts. He offered a new identification of Malory himself; it attracted considerable attention, described in the Literary Review as ‘a tour de force of scholarship and detective work. . . . So good it sets the mind racing’. Finally, his 1990 revised version of Eugène Vinaver’s The Works of Malory is a prelude to the comprehensive new edition of Malory that he is now preparing. It is with pleasure that the contributors of the twenty-eight essays in this volume seek to mark Professor Field’s contribution to Arthurian scholarship in particular – but beyond this we (along with the signatories of the tabula gratulatoria) wish to honour him as a learned and generous scholar who has been a reliable and kind guide to neophyte and expert alike. In her biographical preface, Peter’s colleague Margaret Locherbie-Cameron describes the contours of his professional life as a member of faculty at the University of Wales, Bangor. The other chapters are yoked only by this act of homage: readers may find the abstracts printed at the beginning of each essay useful as a guide. Collectively the essays are notable for their range and sweep over the whole field of Arthurian vernacular texts. The book includes provocative new studies of early French, English, and German texts as well as an analysis of the impact of Arthurian motifs on Galician-Portuguese poetry. As one might expect of a volume dedicated to this particular honoree, several chapters provide new insights into Malory’s text and sources, and these culminate in reflections on Malory’s impact on one later American reader, Mark Twain. The several chapters on Malory substantiate claims that have been at the core of Professor Field’s scholarship: that Malory was a keen and critical reader of his source texts and was himself a powerful stylist. Bonnie Wheeler Southern Methodist University

Professor Peter Field: An Appreciation MARGARET LOCHERBIE-CAMERON

Peter joined the English Department of the University of Wales, Bangor, as an Assistant Lecturer in October 1964, but his previous career (Oxford First Class Honours in English, brief period in the Dominican Order, and national service in the Royal Air Force which included duty on Christmas Island during the atomic test explosions in the Pacific) already demonstrated the scholarship, integrity and fascination with violent history that has dominated his academic career. His passion for Malory’s created and contextual worlds seems entirely appropriate, as does his living and working in a part of Britain so receptive to Arthurian history and myth. Peter’s academic career at the University of Wales, Bangor shows the steady recognition by others of his talents. He became a Lecturer in 1967, when he received his Oxford B. Litt., a Senior Lecturer in 1978, Reader in 1991, and was awarded a personal chair in 1995. During this time he served on numerous college and university committees, acted as external examiner for undergraduates at Trinity College, Dublin, Teesside University and Oxford, and for postgraduate degrees at the universities of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, London, East Anglia, Macquarie, Oxford, York and Sydney. He was a Specialist Subject Advisor for the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales, held a visiting fellowship for the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, organized and taught in summer schools on the Arthurian legend for the University of California, organized conferences for the International Arthurian Society, served as a member of the editorial board of Arthuriana, and became first a trustee and then a director of the Eugène Vinaver Trust. At the same time he has produced a steady stream of significant publications and papers on Malory and his background, and the Arthurian legend, culminating in his massive revised edition of Vinaver’s Morte Darthur. Peter’s status as an outstanding Arthurian scholar has contributed much to the Department’s reputation, as has the regular production of the successful postgraduates he has supervised and the popularity of his Arthurian courses. He is a formidable supervisor, reputed to be able to spot at twenty paces a misplaced single quotation mark, but one who spends endless time and energy helping his students to think and express themselves clearly. Undergraduates who are a little daunted by the professorial image tend to behave rather well in his presence, and are rarely late more than once for his classes, though Peter himself is not always renowned for his timekeeping. He can compensate for this, however, by lecturing at enormous speed, surpassing himself by delivering a carefully timed lecture for an absent colleague with five minutes to spare. That the lecture included a number of key quotations in

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PROFESSOR PETER FIELD: AN APPRECIATION

medieval Scots was no impediment; Peter delivered them all with conviction. Students who experienced this tour de force would find it hard to reconcile with Peter’s rare and reluctant appearances on stage as a member of the Staff Dramatic Society, but less so with his virtuoso performance as Noddy in a balloon debate for the entertainment of the Bangor English Society. This perhaps unexpected talent for performance may underline the success of his role as ‘distinguished professor ready to talk to everyone’, a role at which Peter excels and one which contributes greatly to the success of departmental Open Days. The respect shown to Peter by his students is more than shared by his colleagues. For many years he has acted as Senior Postgraduate Tutor, with responsibility for admitting postgraduates, overseeing their progress and assessment, and, most arduous of all, carefully guiding the examination boards through the minute details and procedures of the examination process. In all his administration, as in his teaching and research, Peter pays such meticulous attention to detail that his judgements go unquestioned, whether they relate to an examination mark or a disputed reading of an obscure passage. Whether his manuscript work created or evolved from his temperament is unclear, but it certainly relates to his critical position; he prefers fact and logical deduction to critical theorizing, respects the integrity of the text (once he has established what it is) and is deeply suspicious of new or fashionable ideologies. That the English Department’s current syllabus is firmly traditional owes much to his influence. His academic status is, however, only one side of Peter’s personality; it does not include his bubbling enthusiasm for his research projects, his kindness, his quick sense of the ridiculous, the generous hospitality he and Vanessa offer, or his pride in his two talented daughters. I have now worked with Peter for many years, and greatly value him as a wise and loyal colleague, but primarily as a good friend. His retirement will be a loss to the English Department, but I am proud to contribute on their behalf and my own to this testament to the respect in which he is so widely held.

1 The Grail Romances and the Old Law FANNI BODGANOW

Examines the ways in which anti-semitism is promulgated in varying degrees by means of imagery, explanation and open denunciation in a range of Grail romances, and contrasts a developing history of persecution with the theological stance of St Bernard. In his paper on ‘Medieval anti-judaism as reflected in the Chansons de Geste’, Gerald Herman points out that ‘more . . . than any other social, national, or ethnic group, Jews are portrayed in medieval French literature with relentless severity and scorn’.1 At first sight, it would seem that the thirteenth-century Vulgate Queste del Saint Graal2 forms an exception, as the predominant aim of the writer was clearly to encourage sinners to repent of their evil ways and to strive for union with God.3 But on closer examination it is evident that the author had also a secondary purpose: to promulgate and encourage anti-semitism by presenting the adherents of the ‘Old Law’ in an unfavourable and prejudiced light. This is apparent almost from the beginning of the Queste. When, in the grounds of the monastery to which Melyant had led Galaad, the latter had lifted the slab covering the tomb in which lay the body of the ‘evil and false Christian’ (‘dou crestien mauvés et faus’ Queste, p. 37.5–6), one of the monks explains as follows the meaning of the incident. The tomb, we are told, signifies ‘the great hardness of the Jews’ and ‘the body signifies the Jews and their descendants who were all dead on account of their mortal sin’ (‘La tombe senefie la grant durté des Gyeus et li cors senefie aux et lors oirs qui tuit estoient mort par lor pechié mortel’ Queste, p. 39.13–15). As for the voice which issued forth from the tomb, this signifies ‘the terrible words which they said to Pilate: “Let his

1 2

3

Gerald Herman, ‘A note on medieval anti-judaism, as reflected in the Chansons de geste’, Annuale mediaevale (Duquesne University), 14 (1973): 63–73. La Queste del Saint Graal, Roman du XIIIe siècle, ed. A. Pauphilet, CFMA (Paris, 1923, repr. 1949, 1967, 1980, 1984). I am preparing a new edition of the Queste in collaboration with Mrs Anne Berrie for the Lettres gothiques series. In the present paper, italics in quoted material are my own. F. Bogdanow, ‘An Interpretation of the Meaning and Purpose of the Vulgate Queste del Saint Graal in the Light of the Mystical Theology of St Bernard’, in The Changing Face of Arthurian Romance: Essays on Arthurian Prose Romances in memory of Cedric E. Pickford, ed. A. Adams, A. H. Diverres, K. Stern and K. Varty (Cambridge, UK, 1986), pp. 23–46. See also J. Chaurant, ‘La vieille loi et la nouvelle loi dans la Queste del Saint Graal’, Annales du C.E.S.E.R.E. 1 (1978): 25–37; repr. in Les parlers et les hommes (Paris, 1992), pp. 407–20; A.M. D’Arcy, ‘Li Anemis Meismes: Satan and Synagogue in La Queste del Saint Graal’, Medium Ævum 66 (1997): 207–35.

2

FANNI BODGANOW

blood be on us and our children!” as a result of which they were put to shame and lost themselves and all they had’ (‘Et la voiz qui de la tombe issoit senefie la dolereuse parole qu’il distrent a Pilate le prevost: “Li sans de lui soit sor nos et sor nos enfanz!” Et por cele parole furent il honi et perdirent aux et quant qu’il avoient’ Queste, p. 39.16–19). And in order to contrast the ‘hardness of the Jews’ with the Saracens, the Queste precedes the incident of the tomb with the account of how the Saracen king Ewalach became a Christian, adopted the name Mordrain and subsequently freed Josephé who had been imprisoned by Crudel, the Saracen king of Great Britain, and brought about the conversion of the whole of the country (Queste, pp. 32.6–33.29).4 Gauvain and Lancelot’s exploits which follow deal respectively with the themes of the hardened and repentant sinners, but with the second half of Perceval’s adventures the writer of the Queste returns to the underlying theme of the perfidy of the adherents of the Old Law. On the rock in the island where by chance Perceval had arrived, he went to the aid of a lion attacked by a serpent that had carried off the lion’s cub (Queste, p. 94.1–27). That same night, while asleep, he had a vision: an old lady seated on a serpent, while the younger, more beautiful lady, rode a lion (Queste, pp. 96.31–97.4). The young lady alerts Perceval that next morning he will have to fight a battle against ‘the most dreaded champion of the world’ and if he is defeated he would lose more than a limb: he would incur everlasting shame (Queste, p. 97.6–12). The old lady, for her part, reprimands Perceval for having slain a beast of hers, the serpent (Queste, pp. 97.17–98.2). Justifying his action, Perceval claims that the lion is of a nobler nature and does not have the same evil disposition as the serpent (‘por ce que li lyons est de plus gentil nature que li serpenz et de plus haut afere, et por ce que je vi que li lyons estoit meins mesfesanz que li serpenz, corui je sus au serpent et l’ocis’ (Queste, p. 98.6–9). Next morning, while Perceval was pondering over the vision he had, a boat arrives in which there was a man dressed like a priest (Queste, p. 99.12–17). At Perceval’s request, the priest tells him the meaning of the vision he had that night. The lady sitting on the lion, he explains, signifies the New Law, the lion representing Christ (Queste, p. 101.23–4). As for the lady riding on the serpent, ‘she is the Synagogue, the first Law which became irrelevant as soon as Christ introduced the New Law’ (‘ce est la Synagogue, la premiere Loi, qui fu ariere mise, si tost come Jhesucrist ot aporté avant la Novele Loi’ Queste, p. 103.5–7). And the serpent, the priest adds, ‘denotes the Scriptures wrongly understood and wrongly interpreted, in other words hypocrisy, heresy, iniquity and mortal sin, namely the Devil himself’ (‘Et li serpenz qui la porte, ce est l’Escriture mauvesement entendue et mauvesement esponse, ce est ypocrisie et heresie et iniquitez et pechié mortel, ce est li anemis meismes: ce est li serpenz qui par son orgueil fu gitez de paradis’ Queste, p. 103.7–10). Nor is this all. When the following day Perceval is tempted by a beautiful damsel, the priest explains to him that the damsel is no other than the Devil who had encouraged Eve to pluck the apple from the tree, ‘the serpent on which the previous day he, Perceval, had seen the old lady 4

In order to contrast again the ‘Old Law’ with the Saracens, the Queste repeats in the first half of Perceval’s adventures, though in much greater detail, the account of Josephé’s imprisonment by King Crudel culminating in the death of Crudel and his men at the hands of the converted Mordrain and his people (Queste, pp. 83.21–85.5).

THE GRAIL ROMANCES AND THE OLD LAW

3

ride’ (‘Li anemis qui ce li ot conseillié, ce fu li serpenz que tu veis avant hier la vieille dame chevauchier, ce fu la damoisele qui ersoir te vint veoir’ Queste, p. 113.22–5). In other words, it is the Old Law – the Devil – who day and night wages war on the knights of Jesus Christ and constantly lies in wait for them (‘Et de ce que ele te dist que ele guerreoit nuit et jor dist ele voir, . . . car il ne sera ja hore que ele ne gait les chevaliers Jhesuscrist . . .’ Queste, p. 113.25–8). One of Bors’s adventures is no less significant with regard to the Queste author’s attitude to the Old Law. He arrives one day by chance at the house of a beautiful, but poorly dressed, young lady, who at that moment receives news that her older sister has taken from her two of her castles, which she would not return to her unless she found a champion to fight her cause against Priadan le Noir. The reason for the dispute between the sisters, as the younger one explains, is that King Amans formerly loved her older sister to whom he gave control of her lands. But this older sister initiated harsh and cruel and unjust customs which enabled her to have a large number of her people put to death (‘ele . . . amena costumes mauveses et ennuieuses ou il n’avoit point de droiture . . . par quoi ele mist a mort grant partie de ses genz’ Queste, p. 169.20–2). The king, on being aware of her evil actions, exiled her and gave the younger sister control of the land. On his death, however, the older sister immediately waged war on the younger sister (Queste, p. 169.22–8). Now the younger sister, as a hermit explains to Bors, symbolizes Holy Church which upholds Christendom in true faith (‘par li entendons nos Sainte Eglyse, qui tient sainte crestienté en droite foi’ Queste, pp. 185.8–9), while the older sister represents the ‘Old Law, the enemy that constantly wages war on Holy Church and her people’ (‘Par l’autre dame . . . entendons nos la Vielle Loi, li anemis qui toz dis guerroie Sainte Eglyse et les suens’ Queste, p. 185.10–13). Nor is this all. When Bors had vanquished Priadam, he threatened the people who held their land from the older sister that he would destroy them if they did not abandon the older sister. And indeed those who refused, ‘were killed and disinherited and driven from the land’ (‘Si i ot assez des homes qui firent homage a la juene dame. Et cil qui ne li voldrent fere furent ocis et deserité et chacié de la terre’ Queste, p. 174.22–4). The author of the Vulgate Queste was, moreover, not the only writer to use the Grail theme to express his attitude to the Old Law. Chrétien de Troyes, to whom we owe the first Grail romance, the Conte du Graal,5 dedicated to his patron, Philip Augustus, count of Flanders, who died in June 1191 during the Third Crusade, was no less an anti-semite. In his first reference, in speaking of Christ he states simply that the ‘Jews did him much shame’ (‘Jhesucrist, le prophete sainte/ Cui juïf fisent honte mainte’ ll. 581–2). But on the second occasion, in the incident where one Good Friday Perceval meets three knights walking barefoot who remind him of what day it is, Chrétien, in the words of one of the knights, advocates genocide. ‘The false Jews’, he says, ‘ought to be exterminated like dogs’: ‘Li faus juïf par lor envie,/ C’on devroit tüer come chiens,/ Firent als mal et nos grans biens’ (ll. 6292–4). Robert de Boron, a Burgundian knight or cleric, who shortly after Chrétien’s

5

Chrétien de Troyes, Le Roman de Perceval ou le Conte du Graal, ed. W. Roach, TLF (Geneva and Paris, 1956, repr. 1959); Le Conte du Graal (Perceval), ed. F. Lecoy, CFMA (Paris, vol. I, 1975; vol. II, 1981). My references are to the Roach edition.

4

FANNI BODGANOW

Conte du Graal, probably between 1191 and 1212,6 wrote his early history of the Grail, the Roman de l’Estoire dou Graal, known also as the Joseph,7 was perhaps the most anti-semitic of all the romance writers. His remarks occur largely in the first half of his narrative in the section dealing with the events leading up to the Crucifixion. It is not the theme in itself, but the language that Robert de Boron uses, so much so that the redactor who early in the thirteenth century turned his verse romance into prose,8 though keeping certain of Robert de Boron’s anti-semitic comments and indeed reinforcing them at times, nevertheless felt himself obliged to remove others. The following are a few examples of the language Robert de Boron used compared with the language of the prose writer. (1) In the opening section where Robert explains that at the time when Christ was on earth the land of Judea was under the rule of Rome, the governor Pilate had under him a servant, Joseph, who loved Christ greatly but did not dare show his feelings ‘on account of the Jews who were of an evil way of life’: A lui servoit uns soudoiers Qui souz lui eut cinc chevaliers, Jhesu Crist vit, et en sen cuer L’ama mount; meis a nul fuer N’en osast feire nul semblant Pour les Juïs qu’il doutoit tant, Car tout estoient adversaire A Jhesu la gent de pute eire. (ed. Nitze, ll. 199–206)

The prose version omits the offensive remark ‘la gent de pute eire’ and says simply: Icil Pilate avoit un sien soldoier qui avoit non Joseph et servoit Pilate. Et cil sivoit Jhesucrist em plusors lius, et si l’ama molt en son cuer, et si n’en osoit faire semblant por les autres Juis. (ed. Cerquiglini, p. 19; ed. Roach, p. 316, ll. 41–3)

(2) When the Jews brought Christ to Pilate, according to both the verse and prose versions ‘they accused him as much as they could’: A Pilate Jhesu menerent De quanqu’il peurent l’encouperent.

(Nitze, ll. 401–2)

Et Jhesucris fu amenés devant Pilate; . . . Et l’encoperent li Juif au plus que il porent. (Cerq., p. 22; Roach, p. 318, ll. 112–14)

(3) At the point where Joseph asks Pilate for Christ’s body, he comments in Robert de Boron’s version ‘that he was wrongfully hung on the cross’, but here the 6 7 8

Cf. F. Bogdanow, ‘Robert de Boron’s vision of Arthurian Romance’, Arthurian Literature 14, ed. James P. Carley and Felicity Riddy (1996), pp. 19–52 (pp. 19–20). Robert de Boron, Le Roman de l’Estoire dou Graal, ed. William A. Nitze, CFMA (Paris, 1927). ‘The Modena Text of the Prose Joseph d’Arimathie’, ed. W. Roach, Romance Philology 9 (1955–56): 313–42; ‘The Middle French Redaction of Robert de Boron’s Joseph d’Arimathie’, ed. Richard O’Gorman, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 122 (1978): 261–85; Le Roman du Graal: Manuscrit de Modène, par Robert de Boron. Texte établi et présenté par Bernard Cerquiglini, Bibliothèque médiévale 10/18 (1981), includes (1) pp. 17–71: prose rendering of Robert’s Joseph; (2) pp. 73–195: prose rendering of Robert’s Merlin; (3) pp. 197–302: Didot Perceval (cf. n. 10). My references to the prose Joseph are to the Cerquiglini edition.

THE GRAIL ROMANCES AND THE OLD LAW

5

prose redaction is stronger, saying that the ‘Jews made him wrongfully suffer martyrdom’: – Sire, dist Joseph, granz merciz! Je demant le cors de Jhesu, Qu’il ont a tort en crouiz pendu.

(Nitze, ll. 454–6)

Sire, grans mercis, et je demant le cors de le prophete que li Juif ont martrié a tort. (Cerq., p. 23; Roach, p. 318, ll. 129–30)

(4) Having had his request accepted by Pilate, Joseph makes his way to the cross, but until Pilate intervenes in both versions the Jews refuse to let Joseph take the body down from the cross. And here too the prose writer is more emphatic in his comments: Dist (i.e. Joseph) as gueites (‘guards’) qu’il vit ester; ‘Pilates m’a cest cors donné, Et si m’a dist et commandé Que je l’oste de cest despit.’ Ensemble respondirent tuit: ‘Ne l’osterez . . .’ (Nitze, ll. 478–83) Il respondent: ‘Ainz t’ocirruns’. (Nitze, l. 489) Et vint la u on le gardoit et dist as Juis: ‘Pilate m’a douné le cors d’icest prophete por oster de cest despit.’ Et li Juif respondent tout ensamble: ‘Vous n’en avrois mie.’ . . . Et li Juif dient: ‘Nous vous ociriemes ançois.’ (Cerq., p. 23; Roach, p. 318, ll. 139–44)

(5) When Pilate requests Nychodemus to accompany Joseph of Arimathea to ensure the removal of Christ’s body from the cross, Robert de Boron refers to those who had placed him there as ‘li encrime’ (‘scoundrels’). The prose version significantly omits this offensive word: ‘Alez, dist il, errant la jus Avec Joseph d’Arymathye; Ostez Jhesu de sa haschie Ou li encrime l’ont posé.’ (Nitze, ll. 502–5) Atant s’en parti Joseph et vint a Pilate . . . et [Pilate] vit un home par devant lui ester qui avoit non Nichodemus, si li commanda que il alast avuec Joseph et que il meïsme l’ostast fors de la crois. (Cerq., pp. 23–4; Roach, p. 319, ll. 145–8)

(6) Similarly, in the following lines, at the point where Nychodemus, armed with pincers and a hammer, arrives at the cross, Robert de Boron not only says that the people (namely the Jews) who saw this were not pleased, but refers to them as ‘li chien puant’ (‘stinking dogs’), a remark omitted in the prose redaction: Nychodemus . . . Tenailles prist et un martel Qu’ilec trouva, mout l’en fu bel, Et vinrent a la crouiz errant. Quant ce virent li chien puant [=Jews] Si se sunt de cele part treit,

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FANNI BODGANOW

Car de ce leur estoit mout leit. Nychodemus dist . . . (Nitze, ll. 521, 524–9) et Nichodemus entra ciés un fevre et prist unes tenailes et un martel, et vinrent cele part u Jhesucris estoit en la crois. Et Nichodemus lor dist . . . (Cerq., p. 24; Roach, p. 319, ll. 154–6)

(7) On the other hand, later at the point where Christ’s tomb is found empty, both Robert de Boron and the prose version present the Jews as vicious people who after beating up Joseph threw him in prison: Chiés un riche homme l’ont mené, Forment l’unt batu et frapé . . . Avalé l’ont en la prison. (Nitze, ll. 695–6, 701) Lors le prisent li Juif, si le batirent molt durement et l’avalerent en le cartre. (Cerq., p. 26; Roach, p. 320, ll. 208–9)

(8) However, in the passage where Christ appears to Joseph in prison and Joseph asks him if he is indeed Christ, the prose version is more restrained in its wording. Whereas in the verse redaction the people to whom Judas sold Christ are not only said to have beaten up Christ, but are referred to as the ‘Juïs pautonniers’, in the prose version it is simply stated that the Jews took Christ to Pilate: – Comment, sire? – Joseph li dist, Estes vous donc Jhesus . . . Cil que Judas trente deniers Vendi as Juïs pautonniers Et qu’il fusterent et batirent . . .? (Nitze, ll. 779–80, 783–5) ‘Comment, Sire, fait Joseph, estes vos donques Jhesucris de Nazareth, . . . que Judas vendi trente deniers et que li Juif prisent et menerent devant Pilate, qui fu mis en la crois?’ (Cerq., p. 28; Roach, p. 321, ll. 238–40)

(9) And slightly further on in the passage where Joseph is still in prison, in the verse redaction Joseph is reassured by Christ that their mutual love will be openly apparent though very harmful for ‘the evil disbelieving Jews’. The prose writer preserves the passage, but significantly removes the words ‘evil Jews’: Nostre amour en apert venra Et chaucuns savoir la pourra. Meis ele sera mout nuisanz As mauveis Juïs mescreanz. (Nitze, ll. 843–6) Tu m’as amé celéement et jou toi, et saces bien que nostre amors revenra devant tous et sera molt nuisable as mescreans. (Cerq., p. 29; Roach, p. 321, ll. 262–3)

(10) Similarly, in one of the passages referring to the Crucifixion, where Robert de Boron as on an earlier occasion (see above, example 1) refers to the Jewish people as being ‘de pute eire’, the prose version again removes this offensive expression: Et quant pis ne li peurent faire Li Juïf, qui sunt de pute eire,

THE GRAIL ROMANCES AND THE OLD LAW

Si le firent crucefier En la crouiz et martirïer.

7

(Nitze, ll. 1059–62)

Et iceles gens donerent tant et promisent a çaus qui le pooient faire, por çou qu’il le haoient, qu’il le prisent et . . . le crucifierent et ocisent. (Cerq., p. 33; Roach, p. 323, ll. 346–8)

(11) In the passage, too, where Vaspasien’s son asks his father to allow him to avenge Christ’s death, the prose version again removes the denigrating words ‘these stinking scoundrels’ which Robert de Boron uses in referring to the Jewish people: Biaus peres . . . Que me leissiez aler vengier La mort mon seigneur droiturier, Que cil larrun puant Juïs Unt si vileinnement ocis. (Nitze, ll. 1733, 1735–8) . . . et je proi mon pere et mon segnor que je l’aille vengier de ceus qui l’ont ocis. (Cerq., p. 43; Roach, p. 328, ll. 574–5)

But not only did Robert de Boron express his attitude by the use of denigrating expressions. Even more sinister is his concurrence with the forced conversion of the Jews or death.9 In the passage where Vaspasien asks Joseph how he can save the Jews, Joseph replies ‘only if they are willing to believe in Mary’s son’. The prose version reinforces this message, adding that the alternative to accepting the Faith is to ‘perish in body and soul’: Li rois a Joseph demanda Comment cé Juïs sauvera. A ce Joseph ne se tust mie: ‘S’il vuelent croire ou Fil Marie . . .’

(Nitze, ll. 2293–6)

Lors vint Vaspasiens a Joseph, si li demanda: ‘Volras tu point sauver d’icest gent?’ Et Joseph respont: ‘Se il ne croient el Pere et el Fil et el saint Esperit et en la Trinité, il periront en arme et en cors.’ (Cerq., pp. 51–2; Roach, p. 333, ll. 751–4)

And indeed in an earlier passage where Vaspasien considered Pilate not as guilty of Christ’s death as he had thought originally, Vaspasien orders, both in the verse and prose version, the murder of the Jews by having them tied to horses’ tails and dragged along until they were dead: ‘Je vueil touz ces Juïs destruire, N’en i avra mul qui ne muire . . .’ Trente en ha d’une part sevrez; Assez feit chevaus amener Et as queues les feit nouer,

9

(Nitze, ll. 1887–8)

On the forced conversion of Jews in the Middle Ages, see Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century (Philadelphia, 1933), pp. 13–15; Robert Chazan, Medieval Jewry in Northern France: A Political and Social History (Baltimore and London, 1973), p. 12: ‘According to a variety of extant sources, the years between 1007 and 1012 saw a series of edicts across northern Europe, posing to the Jews the alternatives of conversion to Christianity and expulsion, or, on occasion, death.’

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Que touz trahiner les fera . . . Ainsi fist lé trente destruire. (Nitze, ll. 1892–5, 1897) ‘Pilate, vous n’avés mie si grant tort que jou cuidoie. Mais jou vuel tous ceus destruire qui furent a la mort del Segnor . . . Si fist Vaspasiens venir plenté de cevaus et les fist prendre quatre et quatre, si les fist maintenant tous desrompre. (Cerq., p. 45; Roach, p. 329, ll. 617–21)

Finally, when the Jews were unable to hand over Christ’s body, Vaspasien orders them to be exterminated, again both in the verse and prose version, though the latter omits the reference to some of the Jews being burnt alive, saying instead that a countless number were killed: Tant en ra feit morir a honte Que je n’en sai dire le conte, Ardoir en fist une partie: Ainsi leur vieut tolir la vie. (Nitze, ll. 1933–6) Lors dist Vaspasiens: ‘Tous les estuet morir, se il ne le rendent.’ Atant en refist tant ocire que je n’en sai le nombre dire. (Cerq., p. 46; Roach, p. 630, ll. 629–31)

Not all the Grail romances are of course equally anti-semitic. Characteristic is the Didot Perceval (le Perceval en prose),10 composed most probably before the Vulgate Cycle11 and forming the third part of a trilogy of which the first two are the prose rendering of Robert de Boron’s Joseph and Merlin. Though the writer made use both of the Joseph and Chrétien’s Perceval, he rejected their anti-semitic comments. Thus in the account of Perceval’s second visit to the Grail castle where Bron, the Fisher King, teaches his grandson ‘toute la creance Nostre Segnor’ (p. 241, l. 1870), he simply mentions how the noble men of the land of Judea had conceived hatred for the Lord and how a false disciple had sold him to the Jews (‘le vendi as Juïs’, p. 241, l. 1874). But particularly striking is an earlier passage where, as in Chrétien, Perceval encounters on Good Friday knights engaged in prayers: in contract to Chrétien, when the knights remind Perceval of what day it is, the Didot Perceval omits the anti-judaic sentiments expressed by Chrétien (Didot Perceval, p. 220, ll. 1459–64). As regards the verse continuations of Chrétien’s Conte du Graal, the shorter version of the First and Second Continuations date from before the Vulgate Cycle, the longer versions of these two continuations as well as those of Manessier12 and

10 The Didot Perceval according to the Manuscripts of Modena and Paris, ed. W. Roach (Philadelphia,

1941, repr. Geneva, 1977). My references to the Didot Perceval are to the Roach edition.

11 Cf. F. Bogdanow, ‘La trilogie de Robert de Boron: le Perceval en prose’, in Grundriss der Romanischen

Literaturen des Mittelalters, ed. Jean Frappier and Reinhold R. Grimm (Heidelberg, 1978), vol. IV, part 1, pp. 513–35; part 2, pp. 173–7. 12 The Continuations of the Old French Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes, ed. W. Roach (Philadelphia): vol. I, The First Continuation: Redaction of MSS TVD (1949, reprinted 1965); vol. II, The First Continuation: Redaction of MSS EMQU (1950, reprinted 1965); vol. III, part 1, The First Continuation: Redaction of MSS ALPRS (1952); vol. III, part 2, Glossary of the First Continuation, L. Foulet (1955); vol. IV, The Second Continuation (1971); vol. V, The Third Continuation by Manessier (1983).

THE GRAIL ROMANCES AND THE OLD LAW

Montreuil13

9

Vulgate.14

Gerbert de postdate the The writer of the shorter versions does not include any references to the Jewish people, while those in the longer redaction of the First Continuation (both those of MSS EMQU, Roach vol. II, and MSS ASP, Roach Vol. III) are less offensive as compared to those of Chrétien and Robert de Boron. In referring to the Sword with the strange hangings, the damsel whom Gauvain questions tells him that Joseph brought this sword with him when he came to Britain after Christ’s death ‘whom the Jews, the traitors, had wrongfully crucified’ (‘Que li juïf, li traïtor,/ Orent crocefïé a tort’, Roach, II, 136, ll. 4692–3). Later, in the account of Gauvain’s arrival at the Grail castle, in response to Gauvain’s questions concerning the bleeding lance, the king stressed that ‘the Jews and the sinners who killed Christ in treason ought to be greatly afraid’ (‘Molt devront avoir grant peor/ Li juïf et li pecheor/ Qui l’ocistrent par traïson’, Roach, II, 523, ll. 17527–9, cf. Roach, III.1, 478, ll. 7455–7). And in informing Gauvain of the history of the Grail, the king mentions how Joseph, who had collected Christ’s blood in the Grail, prayed daily before the shrine where he had placed the Grail, until his own people out of envy denounced him to the ‘wicked Jews’ who insured that he would be imprisoned: Tant qu’il en fu aparceüz Par ces genz et reconneüz Que il menoit si fete vie. Au[s] felons juïs par envie Le retraistrent et raconterent, Et cil quistrent et porchacierent Que il en fu enprisonnez. (Roach, II, 525–6, ll. 17625–31, cf. III.1, 482, ll. 7555–61; III.1, 483, ll. 7517–23)

In the Second Continuation, which has a strong religious overtone and where Perceval reaches the Grail castle, there are, as in the shorter version of the First Continuation, no anti-semitic comments. Instead the writer underlines that ‘he who forgets God in order to seek earthly esteem is very foolish’ (Roach, IV, 508, ll. 32486–7). Similarly, Manessier’s contribution, which follows on from where the Second Continuation ends and of which the Vulgate Queste is an important source, includes no anti-semitic references. On the only occasion when Jews are mentioned, in the episode where the Fisher King tells Perceval the history of the Holy Lance, the writer makes it clear that it was Longinus (Longis) who struck Christ on the cross ‘where the Jews had hung him’ (‘Ou li juïf l’orent pandu’ (Roach, V, 4, ll. 32660–2). As for Gerbert de Montreuil, he does not include in his composition a single anti-semitic comment. Rather, he stresses that ‘God did not create knights to kill people or wage war against them, but to uphold ‘droite justise’ and to defend Holy Church (vol. III, 58, ll. 15819–22).

13 Gerbert de Montreuil, La Continuation de Perceval, ed. Mary Williams, CFMA (Paris): vol. I (1922);

vol. II (1925), vol. III, ed. Marguerite Oswald (1975).

14 Cf. A.W. Thompson, ‘Additions to Chrétien’s Perceval – Prologues and Continuations’, in Arthurian

Literature in the Middle Ages, ed. R.S. Loomis (Oxford, 1959), pp. 206–17.

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Graal,15

The Estoire del Saint the first branch of the Vulgate Cycle, though not free of anti-semitic overtones, is somewhat more reserved than its main sources, including the Vulgate Queste. In the opening sections where the writer makes use of the prose rendering of Robert de Boron’s Joseph, we are told that at the time of Christ’s Crucifixion not many dared to express their faith openly, ‘for they were afraid of the Jews’ (‘car il doutoient les Juis’) (Estoire, I, § 31, p.22, ll. 14–15). Later, in the passage where Vaspasien is asked how he was healed of leprosy, he replies ‘by a prophet who was in Judea, whom the Jews killed wrongfully’ (‘par un prophete qui fu en Judee, ke li Juif ochisent a grant tort’, I, § 41, p. 29, ll. 11–12). And the reason why Christ was killed, the writer explains, was because ‘he had preached the truth and reproached the Jews for their felonies’ (‘pour chou k’il preechoit verité et k’il reprenoit les Juis de lor felonies’ (I, § 41, p. 29, ll. 16–17). Later when Vaspasien admits having had Jews burnt, the author does not add any derogatory adjectives (‘je fis ardoir les premiers Juis’, I, § 53, p. 36, l. 11). However, in explaining why Vaspasien wished to avenge Christ, we are told that this was to make an example of the disloyalty of the Jews who had crucified him (I, § 54, p. 37, ll. 1–6). With the Perlesvaus,16 which was composed after the Vulgate Cycle but before the Post-Vulgate, we return to the theme of the Old Law as the enemy of the New Law. The Rois du Chastel Mortel, described as ‘the most cruel and wicked man alive’ and who, as Margaret Schlauch has pointed out, typifies the Jews,17 wages war both on his sister and his brother, the Roi Pescheor (Perlesvaus, I, 177–8, ll. 3924–32, 179–80. ll. 3973–84). At first he is driven away by Perlesvaus (I, 188, 4207–10). But in order to strengthen the impression that the Old Law is the enemy of the New Law, the Roi du Chastel Mortel is presented subsequently as renewing his attacks on the Roi Pescheor (I, 218, ll. 4986–8). And after the latter’s death, the Roi du Chastel Mortel is said to have seized the dead king’s castle and land (I, 225, ll. 5148–9) and to have threatened with death those who would not accept the Old Law: li Rois del Chastel Mor[tel], qui la terre a sesie et le chastel, a fet crier par tout le païs que tuit cil qui voudront maintenir la Viez Loi et guerpir la Nouvele avront sa garantie et sun conseil et s’aide, et cil qui fere nel voudront seront destruit et essillié. (I, 235, ll. 5420–4)

That for the Perlesvaus the Jews are the ungrateful enemies is illustrated perhaps even more vividly in the explanation of the twelve yelping dogs in the belly of the little white beast: the dogs represent the Jews who, although the Lord had nourished them, crucified him and who ‘were, and always would be, savage’ (‘li .xii. chien ce sont li Juïs que Dex a norriz, . . . qui sauvaje sunt et ierent d’ore en avant’, I, 258, ll. 5999–6006). But the Perlesvaus also takes up the theme of conversion to the New 15 Edited most recently by Jean-Paul Ponceau, L’Estoire del Saint Graal, 2 vols., CFMA (Paris, 1997). 16 Le Haut Livre du Graal, Perlesvaus, ed. W.A. Nitze and T. Atkinson Jenkins, 2 vols. (Chicago,

1932–37, repr. New York, 1972). Cf. F. Bogdanow, ‘Le ‘Perlesvaus’, in Grundriss der Romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters, ed. Reinhold R. Grimm (Heidelberg, 1984), vol. IV, part 2, 44–67, 177–84. 17 M. Schlauch, ‘The Allegory of Church and Synagogue’, Speculum 24 (1939): 448–64 (449); J. Chaurand, ‘La vieille loi et la nouvelle loi dans in Queste del Saint Graal’, Annales du Cesere 1 (1978): 25–37; Anne Berthelot, ‘Sarrasins, Juifs et Paiens dans les romans en prose’, in Tolérance et Intolérance au Moyen Age, ed. D. Buschinger and W. Spiewok (Greifswald, 1997), pp. 15–21.

THE GRAIL ROMANCES AND THE OLD LAW

11

Law or death. When Perlesvaus had vanquished the Chevalier au Dragon who had threatened the Roïne au Cercle d’Or, the latter, after herself accepting baptism, gave her people the choice of baptism or death at the hands of Perlesvaus (‘tuit cil qui ne voudront aler au batesme et croire en la Novele Loi si soient ocis par vostre espee’, I, 254, ll. 5904–6). And this theme recurs in the story of the conversion of the blind Queen Jandree who, after recovering her sight, had all those of her people who refused baptism killed or sent into exile (‘La dame se fist lever et batoier, et tuit cil qui ne voudrent ansi fere, ele les fist essillier e destruire’, I, 374–7, ll. 9168–252). Finally, we must mention the Post-Vulgate Queste:18 while its author keeps the reference to the hardness of the Jews (Vulgate Queste, p. 39, ll. 13–19; Post-Vulgate Queste, II, § 61, p. 83, ll. 20–8), he does not include in his composition the other Vulgate sections denigrating the Old Law, having remodelled or omitted certain portions of the Vulgate Queste, including p. 46, l. 14 – p. 149, l. 6, and p. 167, l. 31 – p. 187, l. 31. On the other hand, the redactor who incorporated into the Second Version of the Prose Tristan a large part of the Post-Vulgate Queste, restored to his version portions of the Vulgate omitted by the Post-Vulgate, including most of the anti-semitic sections.19 The Grail romances were of course not the only form of literature imbued with anti-semitism. As Manya Lifschitz-Golden and others have shown, it was very common, too, in the Mystery plays and chronicles, as well as in the ‘Bibles moralisées’.20 Nor do the epics form an exception, even though in most of these the ‘enemy’ were the Saracens.21 Already in the earliest epic, the Chanson de Roland, on the capture of Saragossa, both Synagogues and mosques are destroyed: Li emperere ad Sarraguce prise, A mil Franceis funt ben cercer la vile, Les sinagoges e les mahumeries. (ll. 3660–2)22

That the Grail romances beginning with Chrétien de Troyes should have expressed anti-semitic sentiments is both surprising and not surprising. It is not surprising as the writers were in fact reflecting the spirit of their times. Already in the months preceding the First Crusade in 1096, the persecution of the Jews had begun first in the Rhineland and then in France.23 Crusaders from Swabia under the 18 Version Post-Vulgate de la Queste del Saint Graal . . ., ed. F. Bogdanow, SATF (Paris), vols. I, II, IV.1

1991; vols. III, IV.2 2001.

19 Cf. Le Roman de Tristan en Prose VIII, ed. B. Guidot and J. Subrenat, TLF (Geneva, 1995), § 56, pp.

123–4, ll. 58–64, § 105, p. 176, ll. 14–31, § 110, p. 181, ll. 3–6, § 120, pp. 192–3, ll. 15–17.

20 Manya Lifschitz-Golden, Les Juifs dans la littérature français du Moyen Age: Mystères, Miracles,

Chroniques (New York, 1935); Gilbert Dahan, ‘Les Juifs dans le théâtre religieux en France du XIIe au XIVe siècles’, Archives Juives 13 (1977): 1–10; G. Dahan, ‘Les juifs dans les Miracles de Gautier de Coincy’, Archives Juives 16 (1980): 41–9, 59–68; Bernhard Blumenkranz, ‘La représentation de Synagoga dans les Bibles moralisées françaises du XIIIe au XVe siècle’, Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities 5 (1970): 7–91; H. Pflaum, ‘Les scènes de Juifs dans la littérature dramatique du moyen-âge’, Revue des études juives 89 (1930): 111–34. 21 Cf. Gerald Herman’s volume mentioned in n. 1. Also Bernard Guidot, ‘L’image du Juif dans la geste de Guillaume d’Orange’, Revue des Etudes Juives 137 (1978): 3–25. 22 La Chanson de Roland, ed. F. Whitehead, Blackwell’s French Texts, second edition (Oxford, 1946), p. 107. 23 Jonathan Riley-Smith, ‘The First Crusade and the Persecution of the Jews’, in Persecution and Toleration, ed. W.J. Sheils (Oxford, 1984), pp. 51–72; Hans Liebeschütz, ‘The Crusading movement in its

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direction of Count Emicho of Leinigen began their massacres first in Worms and then in Mainz, Spiers, Cologne.24 The situation in France was no better. On February 16, 1180, Philip Augustus, Chrétien’s patron, had Jews arrested while they were at prayer in synagogues and all their property was seized.25 Subsequently, in April 1182, Philip Augustus expelled the Jewish citizens from his domain in Northern France under the pretext that they engaged in ritual murders.26 Nor did the situation improve in later years. As earlier, there was anti-Jewish polemical literature.27 In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries various papal decrees imposed restrictions on the Jewish people. For instance Jewish doctors were forbidden to treat non-Jewish patients.28 And beginning with the Fourth Lateran decree in 1215 Jews and Saracens were obliged to wear distinctive clothing so as to differentiate them from the Christians.29 On the other hand, it is surprising that amongst the Grail romance writers Chrétien de Troyes, Robert de Boron, and the authors of the Queste and Perlesvaus should have been so vehemently anti-semitic. It is surprising because they were steeped in the mystical theology of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux30 who, in contrast to

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

Bearing on the Christian attitude towards Jewry’, Journal of Jewish Studies 10 (1959), 97–111; Histoire des Juifs en France publiée sous la direction de B. Blumenkranz, Collection Franco-Judaïca (Toulouse, 1972), pp. 15–17. For an account of anti-semitism prior to the Crusades, see Rosemary R. Ruether, ‘The Adversus Judaeos Tradition in the Church Fathers: the Exegesis of Christian Anti-Judaism’, in Aspects of Jewish Culture in the Middle Ages, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (Albany, 1979), pp. 27–49. Riley-Smith, pp. 51–4. Cf. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (London, 1957, reprinted 1961, 1970), pp. 68–70; J.W. Parkes, The Jew in the medieval community (London, 1938) pp. 61–89; Paul Rousset, Histoire des Croisades (Paris, 1978), p. 52; Robert Chazan, ‘The Anti-Jewish Violence of 1096: Perpetrators and Dynamics’, in Religious Violence between Christians and Jews: Medieval Roots, Modern Perspectives, ed. Anna Sapir Abulafia (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 31–43. R. Chazan, Medieval Jewry in Northern France, p. 64; Gilbert Dahan, Les intellectuels chrétiens et les Juifs au Moyen Age (Paris, 1991). On the persecution of the Jews in medieval Europe, see Chazan, pp. 27–41, 53–5; James Parkes, ‘Church and Synagogue in the Middle Ages’, in Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England (1945–52): 25–33; James Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue: A study in the origins of antisemitism (London, 1934); J. Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jew: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and its relation to Modern Anti-semitism (New Haven, CT, 1943, repr. 1961, 1983). Chazan, Medieval Jewry, p. 65: Dahan, ‘Les juifs dans les Miracles de Gautier de Coincy’, 39. B. Monod, ‘Juifs, sorciers et hérétiques au Moyen Age d’après les mémoires d’un moine du xie siècle (Guibert de Nogent)’, Revue des Etudes Juives 46 (1903): 237–45. Yvonne Friedman, in her article, ‘An anatomy of Anti-semitism: Peter the Venerable’s letter to Louis VII, King of France (1146)’, in Bar-Ilan Studies in History, ed. P. Artzi (Ramat-Gan, 1978), pp. 87–102, quotes (p. 93) the following sentence from one of Peter the Venerable’s letters (ed. Constable, I, 328): ‘Why should we pursue the enemies of the Christian faith in far and distant lands while vile blasphemers far worse than any Saracen, namely the Jews, who are not far away from us, but who live in our midst, blaspheme, abuse, and trample on Christ and the Christian Sacraments so freely and insolently and with impunity’. See B. Blumenkranz, ‘Vie et survie de la polémique antijuive’, in Studia Patristica, ed. Kurt Aland and F.L. Cross (Berlin, 1957), pp. 460–76. B. Blumenkranz, ‘Une survie médiévale de la polémique antijuive de Saint Augustin’, Revue du Moyen Age Latin 5 (1949): 193–6; Jeremy Cohen, ‘The Jews as the killers of Christ in the Latin traditions, from Augustine to the Friars’, Traditio 39 (1983): 1–27. H. Prado-Gaillard, La condition des Juifs dans l’Ancienne France (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1942), p. 54; Théodore Reinach, Histoire des Israélites (cinquième édition revue et corrigée), Paris, Librairie Hachette, 1914), pp. 41, 109–10, 123–24, 129–32. G. Kisch, The Yellow Badge in History (New York 1942; originally published in Historica judaica 19, 1957, 89–147). S. Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the XIII Century (op. cit. above, n. 9), pp. 60–70. Cf. F. Bogdanow, ‘The mystical theology of Bernard de Clairvaux and the meaning of Chrétien de Troyes’ Conte du Graal’, in Chrétien de Troyes and the Troubadours: Essays in memory of the late

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13

the spirit of his time, condemned the massacre of Jews. In his letter 391 addressed to the English people, he writes ‘The Jews are not to be persecuted, killed or even put to flight.’31 In letter 393, this one addressed to the archbishop of Mainz, he asks the question whether ‘it is not a far better triumph for the Church to convince and convert the Jews than to put them all to the sword’.32

Leslie Topsfield, ed. Peter S. Noble and Linda M. Paterson (Cambridge, UK, 1984), pp. 249–82; Bogdanow, ‘Robert de Boron’s Vision of Arthurian History’ (see above, n. 6); Bogdanow, ‘An Interpretation of the Meaning and Purpose of the Vulgate Queste (above, n. 3); Bogdanow, ‘Le Perlesvaus’ (above, n. 16). 31 The Letters of St Bernard of Clairvaux, trans. Bruno Scott James (London, 1953, reprinted Stroud, 1998), p. 462.

2 What Did Robert de Boron Really Write? LINDA GOWANS

Textual study indicates that Robert de Boron wrote in prose, and is the author only of the Joseph part of the cycle associated with him. The standard intimation in guides to Arthurian literature is that Robert de Boron composed a verse Joseph and Merlin of which only a single manuscript survives; that the Merlin is fragmentary, but that we know what it contained because we have a prose redaction of both works made not long afterwards.1 I have already endeavoured to show that this hypothesis does not stand up to critical scrutiny,2 and now approach the subject again, hoping that my readers will suspend disbelief and consider the matter with an open mind. The concept that in Old French ‘verse came first’ applies, of course, both to the history of Arthurian literature and to specific narrative texts. Consequently, Robert’s work has been, and is still, on the receiving end of assumptions rather than of analysis. To make any real progress in refining study of Joseph, two situations need initially to be confronted. First, in the early years of Arthurian prose romance, the works which formed the Vulgate Cycle were not direct mises en prose of individual Old French texts (though, of course, they had their sources and inspirations). Second, a shift in perspective is called for, as Robert was not even writing an Arthurian romance. He was telling a story about the Crucifixion, Joseph of Arimathea and the most sacred of holy relics: an eminently suitable subject for treatment within an emerging vernacular prose culture concerned with the appearance of veracity,3

This is a revised text of the paper presented at the International Arthurian Congress, Bangor, Wales, in July 2002. I would like to thank those present for their comments and contributions; also the Bibliothèque Nationale, the British Library and the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes for supplying photocopies of manuscripts. 1 For example, Pierre Le Gentil, ‘The Work of Robert de Boron and the Didot Perceval’, in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History, ed. Roger Sherman Loomis (Oxford, 1959, repr. London, 2001), pp. 251–62 (esp. p. 256). My subsequent references to the extensive literature on the Joseph and Merlin will concentrate on work dealing specifically with manuscript relationships. 2 Linda Gowans, ‘The Grail in the West: Prose, Verse and Geography in the Joseph of Robert de Boron’, Nottingham French Studies 35.2 (Autumn 1996): 1–17. 3 See the contribution by Michel Zink to the discussion ‘La prose française et le “modèle” latin’, Perspectives Médiévales 3 (October 1977): 52–3, and Ludmilla Evdokimova, ‘Vers et prose au début du XIIIe siècle: Le Joseph de Robert de Boron’, Romania 117 (1999): 448–73 (pp. 451–2 and 471–3), a work which treats the verse as precedent, but contains many findings relevant to the present discussion. In ‘De monachis rithmos facientibus: Hélinant de Froidmont, Bertran de Born, and the Cistercian General

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which, by the end of the twelfth century, included a range of Biblical and ecclesiastical matter.4 In a wider European context, Jacob van Maerlant’s 1261 Dutch verse was avowedly based on the Prose Joseph and Merlin, not on the verse,5 so that a spirit of enquiry permits us to ask why should there not also have been a thirteenthcentury French versification of pre-existing prose – an unusual situation, but that fact in itself should not cause the possibility to be dismissed without a close examination of the evidence. My previously published work, suggesting the priority of the Prose over the Verse Joseph, showed how a number of problems in the verse narrative which relate to the Arthurian future do not arise in the prose (‘The Grail in the West’, 4–8). Examples include: Joseph free to choose his successors, when the Grail guardians are specifically to be appointed by divine announcement; two statements in the verse to the effect that members of the Grail family will be free from harm or injury, which hardly applies to the future Rich Fisher King; and the declaration that Alain will never marry, when he is obviously destined to have a son. I suggested that such anomalies arise because the versifier had not sufficiently familiarized himself with the story before starting work, or was lacking in background knowledge. Before moving on to other forms of evidence I would like to take one more example; but first, an explanation of some of the problems is desirable. Analysis of the manuscript tradition is forever indebted to the immense work of the late Professor Richard O’Gorman, whose parallel edition of verse and prose gives variants from almost all of the seventeen prose manuscripts (some fragmentary).6 He constructed a prose stemma (Joseph, p. 15), which represents the principal groupings within two families, y and z (the latter including the two cyclic manuscripts Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, nouv. acq., fr. 4166 (D), and Modena, Biblioteca Estense, E. 39 (E) which preserve the Didot/Modena Perceval), but he

4

5

6

Chapter of 1199’, Speculum 55 (1980): 669–85, William D. Paden, Jr notes a statute of the General Chapter of the Cistercian Order evicting monks who make poems, though he suggests that the prohibition was not as inclusive as may appear. Professor Carol Chase and Dr Richard Barber have kindly pointed out to me the latter two references. The nature of early French prose was indicated over a century ago by Paget Toynbee, Specimens of Old French (IX–XV Centuries) (Oxford, 1892), pp. 47–50, 101–8. More recently, see Brian Woledge and H.P. Clive, Répertoire des plus anciens textes en prose française depuis 842 jusqu’aux premières années du XIIIe siècle (Geneva, 1964), including translations of Papal documents (nos. 3, 17); matter to be recited during offices (4); a commentary on the Psalms (14); hagiographic matter (37); psalters (39–42); Biblical translations (48, which the editors note is a free rather than a close rendering, 70); sermons (57–62), and translated sermons (64–5). The text of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 320, fols. 37–75 (Psalter and canticles in Anglo-Norman), was composed in England in the first half of the twelfth century – on the role of Anglo-Norman in the development of French prose, see M. Dominica Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background (Oxford, 1963, repr. Westport, CT, 1978), pp. 176–9. I am grateful to Dr Martin Kauffmann for guidance on the materials for this note. Jacob van Maerlant, Historie van den Grale und Boek van Merline, nach der Steinfurter Handschrift, ed. Timothy Sodmann (Cologne, 1980), vv. 1560–2. On the Dutch writer’s own concerns and attitude to his source, see Bart Besamusca and Frank Brandsma, ‘Jacob de Maerlant, traducteur vigilant, et la valeur didactique de son Graal-Merlijn’, in Miscellanea Mediaevalia: Mélanges offerts à Philippe Ménard, ed. J. Claude Faucon et al. (Paris, 1998), I, 121–31. My thanks go to Dr Brandsma for help with Maerlant’s text. Robert de Boron, Joseph d’Arimathie: A Critical Edition of the Verse and Prose Versions, ed. Richard O’Gorman (Toronto, 1995). The MS for which variants are not given is the mid fifteenth-century Paris, BnF, fr. 1469 (F), edited separately by O’Gorman, ‘The Middle French Redaction of Robert de Boron’s Joseph d’Arimathie’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 122.4 (August 1978): 261–85.

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saw over thirty years ago that there are troublesome variants. In particular, Chantilly, Musée Condé 644 (K), and Rome, Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, Reg. Lat. 1687 (V), belong to family y but show influence from z.7 In fact, the more one investigates, the more one finds surprising minor agreements between unexpected manuscript groups. A major problem is the lack of a good early manuscript. All except two are about a century after composition at the least, and all are believed to date from after the material had been used in the creation of the Vulgate Cycle. The complexity of relationships among the surviving copies leaves us wondering how many lost antecedents can be envisaged. Particularly unfortunate, and a measure of the difficulties which beset Robert studies, is a situation in which our earliest manuscripts, Paris, BnF, fr. 748 (C) and Modena (E), both dated by O’Gorman to the second half of the thirteenth century (Joseph, p. 7), are the most heavily reworked by helpful scribes; C with an uncontrollable urge to prolixity, and the tidy-minded E whose thoughtfulness enables the production of readable editions and translations today but is less beneficial for text-critical analysis. For his base, O’Gorman used the fourteenth-century Tours, Bibliothèque Municipale 951 (T), though its undeniable closeness to the verse by no means applies in every detail. I have already noted (‘The Grail in the West’, 11–17 passim) a relationship between T, C and the verse, whereas T and C are widely separated in O’Gorman’s stemma. The present state of our knowledge supports the suggestion that some scribes had multiple exemplars: this both Micha and O’Gorman (independently and for different reasons) indicate in the case of C.8 One of O’Gorman’s criteria for the selection of his base manuscript is the presence of authorship and patronage claims, but some of these are not necessarily indicative of an early date, and could be considered a contrivance: a notable example is the reference, unique to T, to ‘mon seignor Gautier de Monbeliart, en cui service je sui’ (Joseph, p. 113, with O’Gorman’s equivocal note on p. 425). Indeed, it is a curious fact that mentions of Robert, his patron or their respective locations do not diminish with the passage of time – as Emmanuèle Baumgartner observes, ‘Robert de Boron s’impose progressivement comme le nom emblématique des écrivains du Graal’.9 For example, Robert is more than once claimed as author of the post-Vulgate Merlin continuation in London, British Library, Add. 38117 (Huth=H),10 though manuscripts of this family (including E, to which H is closely related) have had all reference to Robert and Gautier excised from the Joseph section, an action probably 7

Richard O’Gorman, ‘La Tradition manuscrite du Joseph d’Arimathie en prose de Robert de Boron’, Revue d’histoire des textes 1 (1971): 145–81 (pp. 171–2). 8 O’Gorman, ‘Tradition manuscrite’, 177–8; Robert de Boron, Merlin: Roman du XIIIe siècle, ed. Alexandre Micha (Paris and Geneva, 1980), p. xlii. 9 ‘Robert de Boron et l’imaginaire du livre du Graal’, in Arturus Rex, vol. II: Acta Conventus Lovaniensis 1987, ed. Willy Van Hoecke, Gilbert Tournoy, Werner Verbeke (Leuven, 1991), pp. 259–68 (p. 268), reprinted in Emmanuèle Baumgartner, De l’histoire de Troie au livre du Graal (Orléans, 1994), pp. 487–96 (p. 496). 10 Merlin: Roman en prose du XIIIe siècle . . ., ed. Gaston Paris and Jacob Ulrich, 2 vols. (Paris, 1886); more recently, with the continuation only, La Suite du roman de Merlin, ed. Gilles Roussineau, Textes littéraires français, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1996). See also Emmanuèle Baumgartner, ‘Luce del Gat et Hélie de Boron: le chevalier et l’écriture’, Romania 106 (1985): 326–40, and, for ‘Peryne de Mounte Belyarde’, P.J.C. Field, ‘Author, Scribe, and Reader in Malory: The Case of Harleuse and Peryne,’ in Noble and Joyous Histories: English Romances, 1375–1650, ed. Eiléan Ní Cuilleanáin and J.D. Pheifer (Dublin, 1993), pp. 137–55.

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intended to tidy up the cycle being completed with the Prose Perceval which now survives only in D and E. My own working method is to use the unpublished late thirteenth-century manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal 2996 (A), checking its many imperfections against a cross-section from other groups (see ‘The Grail in the West’, 3). I come now to my new example of prose and verse comparison, which concentrates on one of the most troubling of all passages in the Verse Joseph. The following (in which I deliberately show the scribes’ own pause marks) will give some idea of the problems involved in attempting to establish anything like a definitive reading for the prose. Cross-section of Prose MSS (contractions expanded, / = spacing uncertain due to line-end break in MS) A, fol. 4v (Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal 2996, end of thirteenth century) Family q. si verras . et [auas (?) crossed through] la voeiz du st . esprit parler o toy . et ie ne ten/merroi pas de ci . car il nest pas raisons . tu remainras* en tel prison et si obscure comme elle estoit . quant tu i fus mis . ainsi obscure sera . quant tu iseras remes . et ne tesmoie mie quar moult sera tenue ta deliurance a grant merueille. . . . * written ‘remairas’ with nasal mark over the ‘i’.

K, fol. 66v (Chantilly, Musée Condé 644, first half of fourteenth century) Family q. Si sauras . eoras la uoiz do saint esprit parler atoi . et je ne ten mentrai pas de ci . Car il nest pas raisons . tu remandras en tel prison . et si oscure . con elle estoit quant tu yfus mis . Et en si oscure sera quant tu enseras gitiez . ne tes maier mie. . . .

T, fol. 162v (Tours, Bibliothèque Municipale 951, first half of fourteenth century) Family q. si orras et uerras lavoiz du saint esperit . parler atoi ge ne ten menrai : pas de ci car il est misons (O’Gorman: ‘il [n]’est mi[e rai]sons’) . tu remaindras en itele prison . et si oscure come ele estoit quant tu ifu mis . Einsin : oscure sera quant tu en seras gitez et ne tesmaie mie. . . .

H, fol. 4v (London, British Library, Add. 38117, beginning of fourteenth century) Family z. Related to E. Contains Huth Merlin. si sauras et orras la vois dou . s’. esprit parler a toi . Je ne ten mentirai mie de chou que che nest mie raisons . tu remanras en ceste prison . et ne tesmaie mie. . . .

Resolution of passage by scribes of earliest surviving MSS (from published editions) C (Paris, BnF, fr. 748, second half of thirteenth century. Hucher’s edition, Le Saint Graal (Le Mans, 1875), I, 227.) Family q. tu orras la voiz del saint esperit parler à toi. Et je ne t’enmenrai ore pas d’ici, car il n’est pas raisons; ainz remaindras en itel prison et einsinc obscure comme ele estoit qant tu i fus mis. A cele hore que tu en seras gitez et jusqu’alors, te durra ceste clartez que tu as ores; et ne t’esmaier mie, . . .

19

WHAT DID ROBERT DE BORON REALLY WRITE?

E (Modena, Biblioteca Estense E.39, second half of thirteenth century. Roach’s edition, Romance Philology 9 (1955/6), 322.) Family z. Cyclical MS related to H. si saras et oras la vois del saint Esperit. Je ne te mentirai ja de ce, car ce n’est pas raisons. N’i remanras en tel cartre ne en tel prison ne en si grant oscurté com ele estoit quant tu i fus mis, et ne t’esmaier tu mie, . . .

Unique Verse MS R (Paris, BnF, fr. 20047. O’Gorman’s edition, pp. 114, 116.) Et tu orras, ainsi le croi, Le seint Esprit paller a toi. Or, Joseph, je m’en irei.* De ci mie ne t’em menrei,** Car ce ne seroit pas reison; Ainz demourras en la prison.

948

La chartre sanz clarté sera Si comme estoit quant je ving ça. Garde que tu n’aies peeur Ne au cuer friçon ne tristeur, Car ta delivrance tenrunt A merveille cil qui l’orrunt.

956

952

* MS Ore ** MS temmenrei (fol. 15v)

At this point in the story Christ has brought the Grail to Joseph in prison, and Joseph has seen a radiance.11 Christ implies that the time is not yet appropriate for Joseph’s release, though He assures him of eventual deliverance, thus providing for a break with the underlying situation in the apocryphal Acts of Pilate, in which Joseph is taken straight away to his own house.12 The ‘mentirai’ reading of family z therefore appears secondary, with K’s ‘mentrai’ an example of the contamination noted by O’Gorman (see note 7 to this article). However, our concern here is with the radiance, for later, when Vespasian eventually releases Joseph after his long imprisonment he, too, will find the prisoner by the light (Joseph, pp. 210, 211) – though the reader or listener doesn’t yet know this. A has one of its characteristic lapses here, seemingly confused about ‘remanoir’ and ‘remetre’, so we need to look at the other manuscripts to find that Joseph is going to be ‘let out of’ (or more precisely ‘thrown out of’ in this case), not ‘put back into’ his place of captivity. After digesting the cross-section of variants, we come up with a probable reading not far from K. What Jesus is saying to Joseph is ‘you will stay in such captivity, and as dark as it was when you were put there, it will be as dark when you are taken out of it’. This is, in fact, correct in terms of the story. Joseph was indeed initially in the darkness, until Christ came to him with the Grail, and once Joseph leaves he will be taking the holy vessel with him, so the cell will revert to its previous state. There is no problem for the author, who knows what he means and what he is going to do with his story – but the potential is there for differences in scribal perception and interpretation. K and T, which appear to provide glimpses of punctuation in the course of development, indicate that some could have thought more along the lines of ‘It isn’t right you’ll stay here in such darkness’, though there are attendant grammatical difficulties. Some, like H, omitted the problem altogether. At this point 11 Joseph, pp. 92 (verse), 93 (prose). The ways in which Joseph is subsequently led to recognize both Jesus

and the vessel would form another revealing comparative study. 12 See J.K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford, 1993), pp. 169–85 (p. 182).

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Jacob van Maerlant reverted to the New Testament apocrypha that Robert had adapted and therefore tells a different version, without the dialogue (Historie van den Graal, pp. 126–7). Of the two earliest scribes, E has turned the statement into a somewhat laboured negative, and C, characteristically, has tried to help but only made matters worse. The verse, however, is emphatically at odds with what happens later. With the omission of the ‘when you are freed’ clause in the course of the poetic process, the statement becomes simply that the cell will be dark, the implication being ‘from now on’. The change to first person in line 954 does not help interpretation, but in spite of everything the verse, as verse, reads satisfactorily in itself. In other words, the text we have reflects not so much scribal confusion as failure to anticipate the coming internal inconsistency: an important point to be considered later. A full study of all examples would help to clarify both Robert’s wording and his authorial concerns. Meanwhile, the verse can tell us something else. At vv. 949 and 956 are two examples of rhyming ‘filler’ lines – some passages of comparable length have far more. Not only is the statement made, and the vocabulary used to make it, completely absent from any of the prose manuscripts at this point in the story (Joseph, p. 115), but in one case, v. 949, the additional line has created an unnecessary emphasis. The prose does not have Christ announcing His personal departure, for He has promised Joseph the voice of the Holy Spirit, and has left him the vessel with the Holy Blood; so, theologically, in a text which in its first few lines has introduced the concept of the Trinity, He will not be absent. Recent work by Ludmilla Evdokimova (see note 3) explains just how much shorter the prose is than the verse, from which she believes that the prose redactor has deleted many superfluous lines. However, it would appear highly suspicious that there are, indeed, so many rhyming lines that would have been capable of being deleted without fatally undermining narrative cohesion, and which could sometimes even provide clarification by their removal. I have checked the whole verse text carefully, line by line and word by word, and find that, excluding the instances where a whole couplet is additional to the prose, in the Verse Joseph 29% and in the Verse Merlin fragment 28% of the total number of couplets have one full line that is completely absent from the prose; i.e., none of its vocabulary appears at that point in any of the prose manuscripts, and importantly neither does the sentiment expressed or observation made. The line is usually the second of a couplet (83% of examples in the Joseph, 93% in the Merlin). A further 6% of couplets in the Joseph and 10% in the Merlin fragment have a line which conveys sentiments similar to the prose but still with no overlap in vocabulary. It seems extraordinary that a prose redactor would not have picked up at least the occasional word from so many supposedly discarded lines. I would see, instead, a picture of the versifier at work, taking a statement from the prose and supplying ‘padding’ to complete the couplet and provide a rhyme,13 thereby creating a state-

13 The figures quoted do not include half-line and single-word rhyming ‘fillers’, i.e. cases in which part of

the line’s vocabulary does appear in the prose. Where both rhyme words in a couplet also occur in the prose they frequently contain verb endings (which form naturally coincidental rhymes in other prose texts), or involve changes to spellings or parts of speech. The exceptions (such as ‘reison’ and ‘prison’ in

WHAT DID ROBERT DE BORON REALLY WRITE?

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ment not always compatible with the story. Even where there is no actual confusion, the nature of the additions can be revealing. Material in the verse but not in the prose – sometimes whole couplets and passages as well as rhyming ‘filler’ lines – often represents general Scriptural matter or commentary, whereas the prose is more tightly focused on the story being told. For example, vv. 613–22 adds to the account of the Resurrection, vv. 749, 756 and 2163–4 provide extra comment on the Fall, and vv. 883–4 inserts a statement on belief and repentance. In this context, the long Marian passage early in the verse shows signs of being a digressionary expansion of matter that is hinted at as the prose takes up its story, not a completely separate unit. Another habit of the verse writer is to add to the sparser prose narrative by providing derogatory comments about the Jews: ‘Car tout estoient adversaire/ A Jhesu la gent de pute eire’ (Joseph, vv. 205–06: ‘de pute eire’ not in prose); drawing attention to their specific presence where the prose has only a pronoun indicating speakers or bystanders: ‘Tout li Juïf qui la estoient,/ Qui toutes ces paroles oient,/ Dient’ (Joseph, vv. 1557–59: ‘tuit’ alone identifies the speakers in prose l. 625); or emphasizing Christ’s suffering at their hands: ‘Et puis le suaire verrez/ Ou Diex essua sen visage,/ Cui li Juïf firent outrage’ (Joseph, vv. 1576–8: vv. 1577–8 not in prose), ‘[. . .] Mout li feisoient vilenie,/ Nepourquant ne se pleignoit mie.’ (Joseph, vv. 1609–10: not in prose.) The prose subsequently has Jews put to death or sold, as a relevant narrative detail drawn from the New Testament apocrypha being used as a source,14 but every single one of the comments of the ‘chien puant’ (v. 526) variety is in the verse only – the prominent anti-Semitism of which is, I suggest, attributable not to Robert de Boron but to an anonymous versifier. The poet’s theological interests are confirmed by the passage given overleaf, in which Christ explains to Joseph the symbolism of the Mass. The passage in the Prose Joseph appears to be out of sequence with a broad agreement between the Verse Joseph and a Latin example of the antecedent exegetical tradition. In fact, in the prose there is a specific reason for the order used, as Christ is giving instructions for the institution of a sacrament with which, in narrative time, both Joseph and the Christian world are as yet unfamiliar. I suggest that Robert de Boron is carefully setting out the meaning of the Mass, rearranging his source to provide a sequence that concentrates on the visual impact with table, vessel, cover and cloth, and bringing in the significance of each item. The versifier, on the other hand, uses his knowledge of the underlying material, though he does not exactly restore the Biblical sequence of Crucifixion, Deposition, burial and closure of the tomb. The Latin is concerned with signification; the prose adds the naming of the corporal, while the verse has a further example of nomenclature, that of the chalice. As a result, with the reference to the sepulchre having already been used in v. 902,

the example given above) account for only 2.5% of the couplets in the Joseph (2% in the Merlin fragment). 14 See Elliott, pp. 214–16.

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Honorius Augustodunensis, Gemma Animæ,15 Cap. XLVI, De passione Christi, and Cap. XLVII, De Joseph

Prose Joseph, MS A, fol. 4v, with a missing portion, in brackets, supplied from K, fol. 66r (contractions expanded)

Verse Joseph (MS R) from O’Gorman’s edition, p. 110, vv. 901–13

altare crux intelligitur in quo corporale in forma corporis Christi distenditur. . . . Hic oblata, et calix cum corporali cooperitur, quod sindonem mundam significat, in quam Joseph corpus Christi involvebat. Calix hic, sepulcrum; patena, lapidem designat, qui sepulcrum clauserat.

seront plusors des tables establies a moy sacrefier qui senefiera la croeis . (Et lo uaissel o lan sacrifiera) et saintefiera la pierre ou tu meis mon cors* et le plataine qui sera desus mis senefiera le couvercle de quoy tu me couvris . et li drap . qui sera clamez corporax senefiera . le drap** de quoy tu me envelopas .

Ce que tu de la crouiz m’ostas Et ou sepulchre me couchas, C’est l’auteus seur quoi me metrunt Cil qui me sacrefierunt. Li dras ou fui envolepez Sera corporaus apelez. Cist veissiaus ou men sanc meïs Quant de men cors le requeillis Calices apelez sera. La platine ki sus girra Iert la pierre senefiee Qui fu deseur moi seelee Quant ou sepuchre m’eüs mis.

(By the altar is understood the cross, on which the corporal is extended in the form of the body of Christ. . . . The sacrifice and the chalice are covered with the corporal which symbolizes the clean sindon, in which Joseph wrapped the body of Christ. The chalice designates the sepulchre, the paten designates the stone which enclosed the sepulchre.)

* C (ed. Hucher, I, 226) adds ‘que li caalices sénéfiera’. ** suaire in other MSS. C has ‘li dras qui sera desus lou caalice, qui sera clamez corporaux, si sénéfiera lou suaire, cest li dras de quoi tu m’envelopas’.

vv. 907–09 are effectively further from the Latin than the prose, which like its source equates the vessel with the tomb.16 The theologically motivated expansions or revisions occur principally in the earlier part of the story, before the narrative moves from Joseph’s imprisonment and liberation to the founding of the Grail company. A rare attempt to expand the latter part of the story produces a clumsy, less focused addition that displays the versifier’s own authorship rather than recourse to his knowledge of other works. In both prose and verse, Joseph has already explained to his brother-in-law Bron God’s plan for Bron’s son Alain. The prose has: ‘Lors l’en emena arreres a son pere et si li dist: – Cist sera garde en terre de ses freres et de ses serours’ (Joseph, ll. 1331–2),17 whereas the verse includes Bron’s wife:18 15 J.-P. Migne, Patrologiæ Latinæ 172 (Paris, 1895), cols. 557–8, translated here by Daniel Scavone. For

other works concerned with allegorical exegesis of the Mass see O’Gorman’s note to v. 901 (Joseph, p. 361), and Daniel Scavone, ‘Joseph of Arimathea, the Holy Grail, and the Edessa Icon’, Arthuriana 9.4 (Winter 1999): 1–31 (pp. 7–8). Both Scavone and Nicholas Vincent (The Holy Blood: King Henry III and the Westminster Blood Relic (Cambridge, UK, 2001), pp. 65–6), independently note a commentary relevant to the question of Robert’s sources, attributed to the eighth-century Germanos I, patriarch of Constantinople. 16 On pierre for ‘sepulchre’, see O’Gorman’s note to v. 577 (Joseph, pp. 357–8). It might now be added that v. 580, which conversely uses tumbe to refer to the ‘stone cover’, is one of the rhyming ‘filler’ lines. 17 For ease of comparison, quotation will now be from O’Gorman’s published edition: line-by-line MS variants can be found on each page. 18 The addition is also made, perhaps coincidentally, in the fourteenth-century MS Paris, BnF, fr. 423 (see Joseph, variants to l. 1331 listed on p. 311).

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Lors le mena Joseph arriere Et a sen pere et a sa mere 3172 Dist que ses freres gardera Et que touz les gouvernera, Et ses sereurs . . . (Joseph, vv. 3171–5)

He now, in the prose, makes a short statement: ‘Et si li dounez veant aus vostre grace, si l’en croiront plus et ameront’ (Joseph, ll. 1335–6). The verse repeats the call to the parents, both repeats and expands on the plan for Alain, and, I suggest, undermines Robert’s presentation of his story: A Bron le pere ha commandé Et a sa fame l’a rouvé, Car il vieut qu’il doignent Alein La seignourie de leur mein 3184 Sur leur filles, seur leur enfanz, Uns et autres, petiz et granz, Devant eus; et plus l’en creirunt Et douterunt et amerunt. . . . (Joseph, vv. 3181–8)

In the prose, Joseph has asked simply and concisely for Alain’s father’s parental blessing on God’s plan for Alain’s earthly guardianship. The verse omits ‘en terre’, and seems to require both parents formally to hand over an authority that has already been transferred by divine edict. O’Gorman realized many years ago that the prose can clarify contentious passages in the verse,19 though his solution was to think in terms of our surviving, late thirteenth-century, verse manuscript R being particularly corrupt, and there having been far more exact, but lost, earlier copies (‘Prose Version’, p. 450). In an endeavour to explain a verse original for the Merlin, Micha constructed a complex hypothetical stemma,20 far more intricate than that produced by O’Gorman for the Joseph (Joseph, p. 13). In view of all that has been written about it,21 it comes as quite a surprise to find that the supposedly notoriously inaccurate verse account turns out, upon inspection, to be preserved in a carefully crafted manuscript. It is not a question of text attractively written but garbled: in most places R reads clearly in itself, and it is the inconsistencies in the story, not obscure or corrupt readings, that have given it a bad name. So far as I am aware, no one since the much-maligned Eugène Hucher in the 1870s seems to have considered that we could be dealing with a versification incorporating some over-hasty rhyming without realizing the implications for the story.22 Such a situation would also mean that our surviving verse 19 Richard O’Gorman, ‘The Prose Version of Robert de Boron’s Joseph d’Arimathie’, Romance Philology

23.4 (May 1970), 449–61. 20 Alexandre Micha, Étude sur le ‘Merlin’ de Robert de Boron: Roman du XIIIe siècle (Geneva, 1980),

p. 76. 21 Loomis, for example, judging Robert by the story told in MS R, wrote: ‘his style is crude and his narra-

tive is marred by gross blunders which can be explained only as due to misreadings of an earlier text’; ‘a poem as confused and crude as Robert de Boron’s Joseph . . . the work of a stupid rimester’. Roger Sherman Loomis, The Development of Arthurian Romance (London, 1963), pp. 115 and 119. 22 Eugène Hucher, ed., Le Saint Graal (Le Mans, 1874), I, 1–137, for his detailed discussion and comparison of manuscripts. O’Gorman considered Hucher’s introductory remarks ‘worthless’ (Joseph, p. 3). See also Gowans, ‘The Grail in the West’, 1–2.

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manuscript need not be as far removed in time from the initial versification as has been proposed to justify its inconsistencies. It may even have been made for a specific purpose only, for it does not seem to have circulated widely: I am not aware of any text that has been claimed to draw upon it. In the thirteenth-century manuscript Paris BnF, fr. 20039, the end of the verse Bible of Herman de Valenciennes has been replaced with a passage from the Prose, not the Verse, Joseph that forms O’Gorman’s manuscript L (see Joseph, pp. 8–9). Even the interpolator of the First Continuation23 may rather have had access to the prose, with readings Barimacie (First Continuation MS M, v. 17575), and variants, that are closer to the prose (particularly to the variants in Joseph MSS P and B noted on p. 201 of O’Gorman’s edition)24 than to anything in the verse. So far as the Merlin is concerned, in the course of an intensive reading it soon becomes apparent that the prose is a very different prospect from that of the Joseph, and that a versifier would have been faced with a far harder task to convey what was in the already highly verbose text. As noted earlier, 10% of the couplets in the verse Merlin fragment have a rewritten line, in addition to the 28% with rhyming ‘filler’ lines. The latter statistic makes it hard to imagine what a full Verse Merlin – like the Joseph, much longer than the prose – would have been like,25 and it is possible that the versifier simply gave up. In fact, the point at which the verse breaks off could be significant. The temptress is talking about the delights which men and women may enjoy together: Meis se vous sentu avïez La joie as autres et saviez Ques deduiz autres femmes unt 485 Quant aveques leur amis sunt, Certes ne priserïez mie Vostre eise une pomme pourrie . . . N’est si granz eise, ce me semble, Comme d’omme et de femme ensemble. (Merlin, vv. 483–8, 497–8)

The verse ends at v. 504. In the succeeding prose the temptress achieves her aim of directing the girl’s actions: ‘Vos vos abandoneroiz as homes . . . si feroiz de vostre cors vostre volenté’ (Merlin 4, 61, 63). This is not at all the type of material that the versifier has been working on, and by now he may have felt that enough was enough. The Joseph/Merlin verse text we have is preceded in the manuscript by a 23 See William Roach and Robert H. Ivy, Jr, The Continuations of the Old French Perceval of Chrétien de

Troyes. Volume II: The First Continuation. Redaction of Mss E M Q U (Philadelphia, 1950, repr. 1965), pp. 524–9, and Roach, The Continuations. . . . Volume III, Part 1: The First Continuation. Redaction of Mss A L P R S (Philadelphia, 1952, repr. 1970), pp. 480–9. 24 Joseph MS B also has ‘sidoine’ in agreement with the First Continuation, rather than ‘drap’ in most Prose Joseph MSS (Joseph, pp. 79 and 81). B is part of Paris, BnF, fr. 770, and consists of three long interpolations from the prose Joseph in the text of the Vulgate Estoire (Joseph, p. 7): access to such a text could help to explain much of the mystery surrounding the passage in the First Continuation. 25 There is one perplexing reference, to ‘l’Histoire de Merlin, en vers’, in an inventory of the manuscripts of a sixteenth-century collector. See André Vernet, ‘Les manuscrits de Claude d’Urfé (1501–58) au château de La Bastie’, Académie des inscriptions & belles-lettres: Comptes rendus (Jan–Mar 1976), 81–97 (p. 92). I am grateful to Dr Roger Middleton for this reference. The manuscript has not been traced, and, with no mention of a preceding ‘Joseph’ or ‘Grail’, could instead be a work relating to the Prophecies.

WHAT DID ROBERT DE BORON REALLY WRITE?

25

verse Image du Monde in the same hand and distinctive decorative format, with the first letter of each line separated from the rest of the text, and a horizontal line drawn from the end of the text on each line to the right-hand margin. The Image is a mid thirteenth-century French encyclopedic work by Gossuin of Metz, from Latin sources, concerned with God’s creation, learning, astronomy, earth and heaven (see Joseph, pp. 5–6 and refs. there cited); the Merlin story being unfolded had moved on from the more strictly Biblical an/*d apocryphal subject-matter of the Joseph and its own immediate opening. As well as being heavy going, it could have begun to look as though it was reaching the limits of its relevance to the versifier’s, or his patron’s, interests. The far more voluble narrative of the Prose Merlin argues for different authorship from the Prose Joseph; as, it might be suggested, does the difference in sophistication which emerges from a comparison by Liliane Dulac of a significant passage in both works26 – and this becomes entirely feasible if we envisage a common versifier of two texts by different authors, which had earlier been brought together. I have already published the passage from A which may show this happening (‘The Grail in the West’, 15–16): in short, I suggested that part of the ending of the Prose Joseph describes Robert’s proposals, and part the redactor’s intentions, and that the correct placing of the crucial third to first person division which demonstrates this is preserved in A. Micha has analysed the vocabulary, narrative style and dialogue of the Prose Merlin (Étude, pp. 199–214), making it possible to compare the Prose Joseph. There are undoubted similarities, notably the frequent use of ‘Lors’ and ‘Einsi’ to structure the narrative, but there are also striking differences. I cannot trace in the Joseph the frequent use of ‘Mout’ and ‘Mais’ which characterises the Merlin, nor do I find the predilection for expressions of the type ‘Et voil je bien que vos sachiez’ or ‘Tant vos puis je bien dire’ beloved of speakers in the Merlin (Micha, Étude, p. 212). In fact, all I have found in the Joseph are two occurrences of ‘tant vous pui ge bien dire’ (Joseph, p. 123), both in the same speech, in which the pilgrim is eagerly telling his host about the miracles of Jesus. Enthusiasm and conviction come over in the lines he is given, whereas dialogue elsewhere in the Joseph is normally required to be more solemn. Much more work could be done on comparison of style and vocabulary. For example, some passages in the Prose Merlin look back to the earlier work and show signs of being composed using wording specific to the Prose Joseph, not the Verse. One such passage is the attribution to Robert de Boron after the account of how Arthur becomes king in three of the many Merlin manuscripts (one a fragment),27 its suspiciously derivative nature effectively summarised by Fanni Bogdanow some time ago.28 Another is the earlier reference to Robert (Merlin, 16, 115–16) in which ‘mes sires’ agrees with l. 1324 of the prose Joseph rather than with ‘Meistres’ at v. 26 Liliane Dulac, ‘L’épreuve du siège vide: esquisse d’une lecture croisée d’un épisode du Joseph et du

Merlin de Robert de Boron’, in Rewards and Punishments in the Arthurian Romances and Lyric Poetry of Mediaeval France: Essays presented to Kenneth Varty on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, ed. Peter V. Davies and Angus J. Kennedy, Arthurian Studies 17 (Cambridge, UK, 1987), pp. 31–43. 27 See Micha, ed., Merlin, 91, 59–69, and the transcription of the Amsterdam fragment in Liesl A. Clark and P.J.C. Field, ‘The Amsterdam University Fragment of the Old French Prose Merlin’, Medium Ævum 61 (1992), 275–84 (p. 277). 28 Review of Micha’s edition, French Studies 38 (1984), 322–3 (p. 323).

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3155,29 and is closely followed by ‘le conte dou Graal’ (Merlin, 16, 117), comparable with ‘le conte del Greal’ at l. 1082 of the Prose Joseph, where the verse has ‘estoire’ (v. 2684). This, again, occurs in only two manuscripts of the Merlin,30 but the following form part of the main text: Prose Merlin (ed. Micha)

Prose Joseph (ed. O’Gorman)

Verse Joseph (ed. O’Gorman)

je te conjur dou Pere et dou Fil et dou Saint Esperit, einsis veraiement com je sai et croi que ces .III. parties sont une meisme chose en Dieu . . . (16, 42–5)

i l[e raient] par le Pere et par le Fil et par le saint Esperit; toutes ses trois parties sunt une meïsme chose en Deu. (ll. 10–12)

Li Peres la raençon fist Par lui, par son Fil Jhesucrist, Par le saint Esprit tout ensemble. Bien os dire, si con moi semble, Cil troi sunt une seule chose, L’une persone en l’autre enclose. (vv. 91–6)

car li apostole ne mistrent riens en escrit de Nostre Seingnor qu’il n’eussent veu et oï . . . (16, 98–9)

ne de ceste prison ne palerent pas li apostre ne cil qui establirent les Escriptures . . . . car il n’en midrent rien en escrit que il [n]’eüsent oï et veü . . . (ll. 380–1, 384–5)

Ne de lui meis plus [ne] pallerent, Meis trestout ester le leissierent. (vv. 963–4)

Einsis avient de plusors qui cuident engingnier autres: si engingnent els meismes . . . (51, 7–8)

Il nos peut bien engignier; et s’il nos engigne, il engigne[ra] soi meïsmes avant. (ll. 1109–10)

Ce devuns savoir, non quidier, Que il ne nous puet engignier. S’il n’est boens, il s’engignera Et tout premiers le comparra. (vv. 2747–50)

si avra non toz jorz mais . . . tes livres li livres dou Graal . . . (23, 63–4)

Et ce ne peut nus hon fere s’il n’a oï conter le livre del Graal de ceste estoire. (ll. 1453–4)

. . . nus hons nes puet rassembler S’il n’a avant oï conter Dou Graal la plus grant estoire. . . . Unques retreite esté n’avoit La grant estoire dou Graal . . . (vv. 3485–7, 3492–3)

One small but revealing extract allows us to compare all four accounts. It occurs early in both texts, as the effect of the introduction of Christian baptism on the powers of Hell is explained. The prose Joseph has: ‘Einsint lava nostre Sires luxure 29 Both prose Joseph (l. 1445) and verse (v. 3461) have a later reference using the title ‘Messires’. If

‘Meistres’ at v. 3155 has inadvertently been supplied by the versifier, the problem of Robert’s status may be simplified. O’Gorman’s note on v. 3461 (Joseph, p. 405) is effectively concerned with that of the verse writer. 30 The Amsterdam fragment does not contain this part of the text, but its later attribution to Robert (see note 27 above) has ‘misire’.

WHAT DID ROBERT DE BORON REALLY WRITE?

27

d’ome et de fame et de pere et de mere; einsint perdi li Deables sa vertu qu’il avoit sor les homes tant que il meïsmes repechasent’ (Joseph, ll. 30–2). The prose Merlin author refers back to the work for which he is writing a continuation, dropping ‘home’ and ‘feme’, as the demons discuss their losses: ‘par cele iaue a lavé le delit del pere et de la mere. . . . Or les avons perduz par cel lavement que nos n’avons nul pooir sor els devant que il meismes reviengnent a nos par lor euvres’ (Merlin, 1, 27–8, 30–2). The versifier, working his way through a prose manuscript of the combined Joseph and Merlin, instead omits ‘pere’ and ‘mere’ when he both rhymes and expands the passage in the Joseph: Ainsi fu luxure lavee D’omme, de femme, et espuree, 172 Et li Deables sa vertu Perdi que tant avoit eü. A bien peu cinc mil anz ou plus Les eut il en enfer la jus, 176 Meis de tout son pouoir issirent Dusqu’atant que il s’i remirent. (Joseph, vv. 171–8)

When he comes to the passage in the Merlin, he selects ‘mere’ only: En non de Dieu laver les fist Et dou Fil et dou Seint Esprist Dou pechié qu’en la mere avoient, Quant de son ventre hors issoient, . . . Or les avuns perduz briement Trestouz par cel avenement. Nous n’avuns meis seur eus pooir Ne nous ne li pouons avoir Devant qu’il meïsme reviegnent Et a nos uuevres se repreignent.

60

65

70

(Merlin, vv. 59–62, 65–70)

Shortly after, at v. 72 of the Merlin, the versifier uses the word amenuisié as a rhyme-word which is not present in the prose. He has made a similar innovation not long before, with amenuisant at v. 3352 of the Joseph. Considered together, all of the foregoing examples may be seen to confirm the order of composition I have proposed in this article. Therefore, I suggest that, when Jacob van Maerlant tells us that Robert de Boron wrote ‘sonder rime’ (Historie van den Grale, v. 1562), he was right. ‘What Robert de Boron really wrote’ was a Prose Joseph, to which was added, by successive continuators, a Prose Merlin, and then a Prose Perceval. The Joseph and part of the Merlin were put into verse by a poet who in the course of his search for rhyme and scansion both expanded his original and at times undermined its narrative cohesion. He may also have been unaware of the Arthurian implications that lay behind Robert’s scheme to provide in retrospect a destined Grail-keeper who, his father having remained celibate before the journey to the West, could be referred to as Perceval the Welshman. I base my suggestion not only on narrative sense but on evidence from manuscripts, with attention to dating and care that unpublished manuscripts are given equal weight with published ones.

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What, then, is the way forward? In the absence of a truly satisfactory base manuscript, and given the need for constant comparison of multiple manuscripts to attempt to establish a likely primary reading, any sustained endeavour to recreate Robert’s work would result in a prime example of the situation described here by Elizabeth Scala: [E]ditorial production tends to hide the fact that it produces singularly ahistorical objects, modern texts for which we have no identical, medieval witnesses. Obviously, printed editions of . . . medieval works are absolutely necessary to the practice of our critical scholarship. But when we (re)create the ‘author’s’ text from the scribal copies that actually circulated in medieval culture (the individual manuscripts that comprise our historical evidence), we change what we mean by the word ‘historical’.31

It could equally well be proposed, however, that Grail scholarship has everything to gain from a careful attempt to verify Robert’s interests, meanings and intentions. Whatever method is adopted, it can only be stressed that the manuscripts themselves should be allowed to speak for Robert de Boron in future critical discussion.

31 Elizabeth Scala, Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval

England (New York and Basingstoke, 2002), p. 6.

3 On Capitalization in Some Early Manuscripts of Wace’s Roman de Brut FRANÇOISE H.M. LE SAUX

This chapter compares the patterns of capitalization in the earliest Anglo-Norman witness of the Roman de Brut with those of the Continental ‘Guiot’ manuscript. The question of the possible significance of the placing of majuscules (i.e., capital letters) by the various scribes who have transmitted Wace’s Roman de Brut to us surfaces with some regularity in informal discussions of the work. The issue arises primarily from the division of the poem into indented paragraphs by Ivor Arnold, in his edition of the work for the Société des Anciens Textes Français:1 the practice remains uncommented on in the Introduction or in the discussion of editorial principles, but these highly visible textual dividers naturally lead the reader to wonder about medieval scribal usage in this regard. Intuitively, one would expect a text of the length of the Roman de Brut (14,866 octosyllabic lines, typically well over 100 folios of parchment) to have displayed some form of structural division, possibly from the earliest days of manuscript tradition, simply for practical reasons. As pointed out by Mary Carruthers in her now classic study The Book of Memory and Paul Saenger in his groundbreaking Space Between Words,2 manuscript layout was an important element in the mnemonic techniques used by medieval readers. Moreover, the systematic study of the manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes over past decades has shown that the study of the placement of capitals can provide useful insights into the way a text was read.3 The nature of the information highlighted or systematized in this manner could be expected to vary from one manuscript to another, reflecting the interests of the patron or manuscript planner, and following the ways in which a given text was received in time and space. A fourteenth-century luxury manuscript of the Roman de Brut produced on the Continent is thus likely to prioritise different features to, say, a

1 2 3

Le Roman de Brut de Wace, ed. Ivor Arnold, 2 vols. (Paris, 1938, 1940). All references are to this edition of the work. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, UK, 1990); and Paul Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford, CA., 1997). See especially Roger Middleton, ‘Coloured Capitals in the Manuscripts of Erec et Enide’, Les Manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes, ed. Keith Busby, Terry Nixon, Alison Stones and Lori Walters (Amsterdam and Atlanta, 1993), I, pp. 149–193.

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thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman manuscript containing the same work, but designed for a monastic readership. Or at least, so one would assume. The present study proposes to put this assumption to the test, comparing the pattern of capitalization in the Wace section of our earliest Anglo-Norman witness, the late twelfthcentury MS Durham Cathedral CIV 27, to that of the corresponding section in the celebrated ‘Guiot’ manuscript (Paris, BnF, fr. 794), copied on the Continent in the thirteenth century. In a scribal culture where punctuation is relatively underdeveloped (to the eye of the twenty-first-century reader at least), and where such punctuation as exists is used in a sometimes strikingly different way to later texts,4 capitalization is an obvious device to signal breaks in the text copied. The more or less ornate aspect of a letter may signal a structural hierarchy: for example, the initial letter of the first word of a work is typically much larger and more ornate than those that follow, its function, in the absence of the convention of announcing a new text by a title, being to mark the distinction between two texts. In the two manuscripts that concern us here, capitals other than the very first one of the text are typically penned in coloured ink, red alternating with blue,5 the extra space required for the capital (and the pen strokes that frequently adorn it) being provided by the indentation of the following line of text. Moreover, the medieval scribe could, and frequently did, make use of marginal annotations or inscriptions to draw the reader’s attention to a given aspect or detail within the text copied. The glosses or nota signs, of varying lengths and degree of ornamentation, were sometimes planned from the inception of the copying work, thus providing useful clues as to the reception of the text(s) at a given time by a specific reader.6 Additional glosses and marginalia by later readers then give evidence of complementary, sometimes conflicting, interpretations.7 To date, this aspect of the textual transmission of Wace’s Roman de Brut has not been the object of much scholarly scrutiny; possibly due to the complexity of the manuscript tradition of the work, which has defeated all attempts to place the extant witnesses in a neat stemma, but perhaps also reflecting the fact that few of the ‘better’ Roman de Brut manuscripts bear strong signs of readerly activity. MS Durham Cathedral C IV 27 is the oldest extant manuscript of Wace’s Roman de Brut; it also has a somewhat mysterious past, and is notable for the discrete but still visible marks left by at least two layers of medieval readers. This manuscript was not copied in or for Durham; it appears to have been acquired in the post-medieval period from some unknown source at some unknown date, the only certainty we have being that it already featured in the collections of the Cathedral in 1727, when Thomas Rud compiled his list of the manuscripts held by Durham.8 It is roughly 4 5

6 7

8

See the groundbreaking article of Christiane Marchello–Nizia, ‘Ponctuation et “Unités de lecture” dans les manuscrits médiévaux ou: je ponctue, tu lis, il théorise’, La Langue Française 40 (1978): 32–44. Scribes are not entirely consistent in these matters; the alternation between the two colours is not always respected, and capitals missed out entirely are not uncommon, even in a carefully produced manuscript. See Middleton, ‘Coloured Capitals’, pp. 150–7. A good example of this may be found in the text of the Roman de Brut preserved in London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius A X. See Elizabeth J. Bryan, Collaborative Meaning in Medieval Scribal Culture: The Otho La
amon (Ann Arbor, 1999) for an analysis of comparable marginal inscriptions in London, British Library, MS Otho C. XIII of La
amon’s early thirteenth-century translation of the Roman de Brut. See Thomas Rud, Codicum Manuscriptorum ecclesie cathedralis Dunelmensis (Durham, 1825), pp.

CAPITALIZATION IN EARLY MANUSCRIPTS OF WACE

31

in-8o in size, though originally it would have been somewhat larger (as is often the case, much of the margins was cut off in the bookbinding process), and contains Wace’s Roman de Brut, followed by two other histories of Britain in verse, Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis and Jordan Fantosme’s Chronique. The Wace text is copied in two 36–line columns, the first line of text beginning under the first line drawn on the parchment – an indication that this is indeed a twelfth-century copy; later, scribes adopted the practice of writing above the first line. After the ornate and multicoloured initial capital letter marking the beginning of the work, capitals are typically two lines high (not counting any flourishes), alternating in red or blue ink (though this is not systematic throughout the manuscript). Where a capital letter was planned, the couplet is indented to allow sufficient space for the coloured-ink scribe. A marked change occurs on folio 60. Though certainly the product of the same scriptorium, the hand is larger and less neat; the lineation is done with a wider stylus, and the scribe was using a thicker quill. The page layout remains identical, however, and the text picks up exactly where folio 59 verso ended. The interesting thing to note here is that Folio 59 verso ends with a blank space at the end of the second column – enough to copy some sixteen lines of text. This suggests that the scribes were copying from an original with a different page layout, making it difficult to estimate with precision how much parchment would be required for a given section. The blank space may be accounted for by the interpolation, from folios 42 to 48, of the Prophecies of Merlin, translated by one Helias; it could also (somewhat less convincingly) point to a ‘master copy’ with large, ornate capital letters – in other words, a luxury or presentation exemplar. The Durham copy was clearly intended for serious study, and the manuscript bears evidence of this. Most of the readers’ inscriptions in the margins occur in the first part of the manuscript; one may discern two generations of medieval marginalia, one in a faded light brown ink, the other in a later, darker ink. Neither appears to have been contemporary with the planning of the manuscript, though the same light brown ink is also used to correct the text in the Locrin section (l. 1267), suggesting that some of these inscriptions were made very soon after the completion of the copying task proper. The Wace text preserved in the Durham manuscript contains ninety-two capital letters (not counting the initial letter of the text, or those in the interpolated Prophecies of Merlin section), very unevenly distributed over a total of ninety-five folios: only four capitals until the Roman invasion of Britain (i.e., roughly one every thousand lines), two of those being ‘bunched’ together in the first five hundred lines. Four capital letters appear in the section recounting Caesar’s successful invasion, spread over some 400 lines; then nothing for almost 800 lines, when a capital letter adorns the mention of King Lucius’s death without leaving an heir (5269). Capitals become more common as the dynasty that will produce Arthur is introduced, appearing roughly every 126 lines, on average. From folio 60, capitals become more plentiful: forty-nine in total, on average one every 116 lines. By contrast, marginalia are at their most copious in the first 6000 lines of the text, where capital letters are most scarce. 311–2. I wish to thank the Librarian of Durham Cathedral Library, Mr Roger Norris, who kindly looked for further information in the cathedral archives for me, in vain.

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One may distinguish in this manuscript between three types of medieval marginalia: nota signs indicating to the reader an interesting point of detail within the text; circles with horizontal, vertical or slanting inner bars, originally with a numeral above them, in the margin beside lines where a new king accedes to the throne (the numerals counting from Brutus as King number One); and more explicit glosses (either in words – mostly irretrievable – or in the form of ink doodles). The interest in keeping count of the kings on the British throne was an enduring one. The older, brown ink circles are frequently ‘touched up’ in darker ink by a later (medieval) reader, where the quality of the parchment or of the ink itself had caused them to become too faint; and the second part of the manuscript continues the practice of marking the accession of new kings with circles and numerals in the margins, in what at first glance looks like faded modern pencil, but in fact is medieval carbon point.9 For the earliest as for the later readers of the work, one of its main values was therefore as a king-list. Other marginal inscriptions are relatively few, though some will have been lost in the bookbinding process: — a faded brown mark opposite line1008 of the text (the death of Turnus, Corineus’s nephew, after whom the city of Tours is named) — a brown ink nota sign opposite the foundation of London (1221) — dark brown ink gloss, ‘Brutus’, with a little crowned head underneath, right-hand margin, opposite 1240ff. — Latin gloss, same hand as the ‘Brutus’ in the right-hand margin, bottom margin of fol. 8v, ‘Brutus regnavit xxiiii ann. Et habuit tres filios’ (Brutus reigned 23 years and had three sons’) — brown-ink nota opposite 1272 (the naming of Wales) — brown-ink nota opposite 1311 (the name of the Humber) — brown ink nota opposite 1501 (the first British war of aggression) — brown ink nota opposite 1522–6 (the names of Ebrauc’s foundations; esp. York) — brown-ink nota opposite 1741–5 (Cordeille’s answer to Leir) — dark brown gloss opposite 2817: ‘Ici la pes forme’ (after Tonuenne reconciles her sons) — gloss opposite 3196: ‘issi change l’em plusurs nuns’ (‘here several names are changed’, re. Caerleon) — 3213, black ink gloss: Billing (re. Billingsgate) — opposite 3524: very long (tail extending to the last line of the column), faded brown ink nota, and illegible gloss (Elidur’s subterfuge) — opposite 3755–90: faded brown ink nota (on the names of London) — opposite 4810: dark brown ink gloss, in French; mostly cut off in the binding. (‘. . . ous pars’: the Britons give Caesar hostages and tribute) — 4865, red ink nota and inscription: Thelesini de Christo; a little lower in the margin (i.e., bottom of col. 2 of fol. 28v), dark brown ink symbol (Taliesin prophecies the birth of Christ) — top margin of fol. 29r. in faded black ink: ‘Jhesuz’

9

Regrettably, I was unable to determine with certainty whether the numerals in the latter part of the manuscript follow on from those above the ink circles in the former part, as they are very faint.

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— faded brown-ink nota opposite 5073–80 (the naming of Gloucester) — opposite 5230: black ink star and crescent moon (the mission of Dunian and Fagan) — opposite 5870: red-brown ink symbol (marriage leading to dynastic change) — opposite 5948: nota, very faded ink (the name of Brittany) — opposite 6839–44: faded nota (lands granted to Hengist) — opposite 8056–66: faint remains of nota (Merlin explains the virtues of the Giant’s Circle) — opposite 10447: trace of a light brown cross (the Queen at the Whitsun celebration) — opposite line 13316, faint trace of annotation (illegible; killing of Modred’s sons?) — top margin of fol. 91r, light brown ink: ‘Legere et non intellegere non legere est’, ‘to read and not to understand is not to read’ (Cadwalan defeats Edwin) It is noticeable that the nota, particularly those in the faded brown ink similar to that of the marginal circles pointing to the accession of a new king, are overwhelmingly concerned with onomastics. Ten of these draw the reader’s attention to the origins of certain toponyms and/or the changes undergone by these names through the course of history or due to linguistic factors. Other interests betrayed by the faded ink annotations appear to have a moral colouring: the first war of aggression waged outside of Britain after the British settlement, imposed on Ebrauc by the restlessness of his men; Cordeille’s words of wisdom to her father (‘E pur faire tei plus certain/ Tant as, tant vals e jo tant t’aim’, ‘And to leave you in no more doubt: you are worth as much as you possess and I love you accordingly’);10 the narrator’s exclamation at Elidur’s forgiveness and generosity towards his brother Argal (‘Deus! Ki vit mais tel pieté/ Tel amur, tel fraternité!’, ‘Lord, who ever saw such pity, such love and such brotherly feeling!’ 3523–4); the murder of Modred’s two sons whilst claiming sanctuary in churches; and of course, the final invitation to reflect on what we have read in order to understand its implications – ‘To read and not understand is not to read’. Of the two remaining pale ink marginalia, one has a possible political dimension (Vortigern grants Lyndsey to Hengist) whilst the other would appear to belong to the category of mirabilia, with Merlin explaining to Aurelius why the stones in the Giant’s Circle are so desirable. However, in this last instance, the point may equally be didactic, as the lines in question correspond to a quasi-sermon on the superiority of skill over brute strength: Reis, dist Merlin, dunc ne sez tu Que engin surmunte vertu. Bone est force e engin mielz valt; La valt engin u force falt. Engin e art funt mainte chose Que force commencer nen ose. (8057–62)

10 Lines 1471–2. Unless specified otherwise, all translations of the Roman de Brut are from Wace’s

Roman de Brut: A History of the British, ed. and trans. Judith Weiss (Exeter, 1999).

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(‘King’, answered Merlin, ‘then you don’t know that skill surpasses strength. Might is good, skill better; skill prevails where might fails. Skill and art achieve many things which might doesn’t dare to start.’)

The earlier readership, as represented by the faded brown marginalia, was thus clearly approaching the Roman de Brut as a work of history. The most systematic area of interest was the name and sequence of the successive kings of Britain, but beyond the detail of political history we also find a real concern for what might be termed the human geography of the country, the circumstances surrounding the foundation of cities, principalities or kingdoms, the reason for their names, the rationale behind name-change. This information was of practical value, but it equally ties in with a moralising reading. Wace regularly ascribes the change of toponyms and towns to linguistic corruption grounded in ignorance (3762–84): the absence of continuity in the names of the British towns becomes a symptom of the mutability suffered by a post-lapsarian world. This means that such passages would be rich food for thought for the reader wishing to learn the lessons of the past, and ‘understand’ what he was reading. The darker ink marginalia share much of the concerns of the earlier reader or body of readers. The circles marking the beginning of a new reign were clearly felt to be valuable, as they were, when necessary, ‘freshened up’, together with the numerals which accompanied them. There is no evidence, however, that fading nota were similarly retraced in darker ink, which might suggest that the question of linguistic change and its effect on place-names was not paramount in the minds of these slightly later readers (the hand in the glosses is pre-fourteenth-century). The interest seems to be directed more at the narrative itself: Brutus’s achievements; the restoration of peace between Belin and Brennes after their mother’s moving plea; the modalities of Cassibelan’s submission to Caesar; Taliesin’s prophecy of the birth of Christ; the mission of Dunian and Fagan. There is more than one reader at work in the margins at this later date, as may be seen from the fact that some glosses are in French and others in Latin, and the interests appear to be more dispersed; but there is a clear consensus in privileging the mention of the birth of Christ, which is signalled by a red ink nota (possibly dating back to the planning of the manuscript), a dark brown ink symbol and a black ink inscription. Similarly, the black star and crescent moon in the margins of the conversion of the British by saints Dunian and Fagan point to the espousal of a hierarchy of events that transcends the political or military. But there is little sense that the Roman de Brut was being read on a level other than the immediate, literal one. The survey of the marginal annotations in this manuscript reveals a striking lack of response to the Arthurian section, with only one, faint cross at the point where Wace turns to the Queen’s role in Arthur’s crown-wearing festivities. In view of the patterns discerned in the faded brown ink marginalia, this is perhaps not unexpected. However, one might have thought that the later readers would have found something to highlight in this particularly long and rich section of Wace’s work. Are we to interpret this as indicating a lack of interest in Arthur on the part of these thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman readers of the Roman de Brut? Before we draw such a conclusion, it is necessary to consider the patterns of capitalization in the manuscript. One may identify three main potential functions of capital letters:

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paragraph)11

— to mark the beginning of a new division (typically, a new in Wace’s source, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae; — to mark a new focus in the narrative, typically indicated in the text either through a temporal conjunction such as ‘quand’, or through the mentioning of the protagonist who is to be central to the new phase of action; — to indicate that a passage in direct speech, an aside by the narrator, or a purple passage has started, or (more commonly) come to an end. These three categories are not mutually exclusive, but they provide an adequate working grid. Of the ninety-two passages set off by capital letters, thirteen correspond to a new chapter in Geoffrey’s Historia, nine of these occurring in the second part of the manuscript, from folio 60 onwards. Fifteen capital letters mark the beginning or end of a passage in direct speech or of an intervention by the narrator and eighty-five mark a change in narrative focus. It is clear from these figures that there was no systematic attempt on the part of the manuscript planner to return to Geoffrey’s text for guidance. All occurrences of capital letters in conjunction with the beginning of a new chapter in the Historia Regum Britanniae also coincide with the presence of syntactical or rhetorical markers indicating a change of focus in the narrative. This is not surprising, as similar markers are to be found in Geoffrey at the beginning of his paragraphs; they are the indispensable stock-in-trade of any competent writer of complex narrative. The relatively low proportion of capitals corresponding to Geoffrey’s textual divisions may in turn be explained to some extent by the fact that Wace’s recasting of the material in verse can lead to an obscuring of the boundaries of his source’s paragraphs. A good example of this may be observed at line 1608 of the Roman, where Ruhundibras becomes king after a period of lawlessness during his father’s final years. Where the Historia (variant version) of §29 begins: ‘Post hunc regnauit filius suus Rudhudibras .xxxix. annis’,12 ‘After him, his son Rudhudibras reigned 39 years’, Wace reads: ‘Mais un sun fiz Ruhundibras/ Fut emprés reis de grant justise’ literally: ‘but a son of his, Ruhundibras, was after him a king of great justice’.13 Through the addition of ‘mais’, the French writer creates a transition explicitly opposing the strength of the new king to the weakness of his predecessor, thus connecting the two sections in a way that the Latin text does not. It is therefore safe to conclude that the internal structure flagged out by the presence of capital letters was one determined by the manuscript planner on the basis of his reading of Wace’s text. To venture an interpretation of the distribution patterns of capitals in the manuscript, it is useful to make an additional distinction to the more obvious break in scribal hand observed at folio 60. At folio 26, though no gap appears in the manuscript page, no change is apparent in the ink and layout, and the marginal inscriptions continue unmodified, one may discern a change in the care with which the text was copied – the hand is slightly less regular and neat. This 11 All references to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae are from The Historia Regum

Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth II. The First Variant Version: a critical edition, ed. Neil Wright (Cambridge, 1988). 12 The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth II, p. 22. 13 Judith Weiss’s more elegant translation reads: ‘But his son Ruhundibras was subsequently a most righteous king’.

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barely perceptible change in hand coincides with more plentiful capitals in the text: thirty-nine capitals over some twenty-eight folios (some six folios being devoted to the Prophecies of Merlin, which we are not taking into account here), as opposed to just four over the preceding twenty-five folios. We might thus be dealing with three sections, and potentially as many manuscript planners, rather than just two; all three responsible for a portion of the work rather than its entirety, in order to expedite speedy copying. It is equally possible, however, that this sudden proliferation of coloured capitals reflects the interests of the specific body of readers that the manuscript planner(s) had in mind. The narrative up to folio 26 may be said to belong to mythical time, inasmuch as we are dealing with distant events involving kings who would have been largely unknown from other sources. The two initials on lines 253 and 457 of the poem both mark the end of a protracted passage in direct speech (Brutus’s letter to Pandrasus, King of Greece, and Brutus’s battle-speech before the massacre of the sleeping Greeks), functioning as punctuation rather than as a structural or thematic marker; while the fourth capital letter (3659) draws attention to King Cherim’s succession by his three sons, to whom no specific story is attached. The passage introduced by line 3417 – the sea-monster that ravages the country under Morpidus – may however point to an interest in the circumstances surrounding the death of that monarch, or at the very least, may show appreciation of Wace’s rhetorical pyrotechnics in this episode. From folio 26 a more consistent pattern emerges. Only very few instances of ‘typographical’ majuscules may be identified: the resumption of the narrative after Merlin’s prophecies (7583), and the end of Hengist’s speech to his troops (7703), prior to his last battle. The Roman conquest of Britain, and more especially the relationship between Androgeus and Caesar, is highlighted by four capital letters (4425, 4683, 4807, 4829), hinting at an interest in the Roman past of Britain which resurfaces in the Arthurian section, notably when Arthur invades Gaul (Frollo unsuccessfully tries to defend the land, 9917). Another area of interest is Brittany: a capital introduces a passage, in direct speech, where Maximien offers his rival Cunan the newlyconquered Armorica as a kingdom of his own (5913); and when King Aldroën of Brittany is appealed to for help (6335), leading to the establishment of the dynasty that will produce Arthur. The overwhelming majority of passages opening with a majuscule, however, is concerned with issues of succession and power struggles: the absence of an heir to saintly king Luces (5269); the civil war leading to Coel’s seizing of the throne (5598); Trahern’s victory over the usurper Octaves (5765), following Constantine’s decision to remain in Rome (5739), rather than defend his throne himself – leading eventually to the reinstatement of Octaves after the murder of Trahern; the vacuum of power leading to the raids of Wanis and Melga (6141, 6259); the election to the throne of Constantine of Brittany (6439); the crisis following his murder (6469); Vortigern’s manipulation of the monk-king Constans (6555), effectively depriving him of his royal authority; the measures taken to preserve Constans’s younger brothers, after his murder (6675); Hengist’s manipulation of Vortigern (6845), leading to the first grant of land to the Saxons, and, eventually, Vortigern’s own demise; the British revolt at the favour shown the Saxons (7067), leading to the

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crowning of Vortimer; Vortimer’s energetic campaign against the Saxons (7121); Hengist’s return at the head of an army at Vortimer’s death (7197) and the treacherous Saxon coup that ensues (7227); Aurelius’s establishment of his rule (7653); Vortigern’s son Paschent’s’ attempts to invade the land (8181); Arthur’s oath to oppose the Saxons (9033) and his war against Childric (9119). In a handful of cases, capitals appear to function as nota drawing attention to seemingly incidental events, such as the massacre of Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins (6081), which might tie in with the Breton interest; Ronwen’s wassail and Vortigern’s consequent infatuation (6953), which proves crucial in strengthening the position of the Saxons; Count Eldulf’s admonition by Aurelius (7625), reminding the reader of previous events after the interpolated Prophecies of Merlin; Hengist’s trial and condemnation to death (7837); the conception of Arthur (8733); the marvels of Britain (9529); the twelve-year peace and the fables about Arthur (9787). The pattern of capitalization in this first part of the manuscript gives the sense of a build-up towards the accession to the throne of Britain of the dynasty born of Conan of Brittany, the ‘Roman’ line having failed to protect the land adequately. All of the seemingly ‘gratuitous’ highlights concern this dynasty, directly or indirectly. The rape and murder of Ursula and her companions deprives Conan of his bride – and, possibly, of the opportunity to claim the throne of Britain in his own right through what could have been a dynastic union.14 It also condemns the Breton settlers to miscegenation, a fate freely embraced by Vortigern, whose coup de foudre for Ronwen confronts Conan’s heirs with the reality of a hostile, alien people in Britain. The extent of the threat posed by the Saxons is underscored by the presence of capitals in passages such as Aurelius’s spurring on of Eldulf, reminding him of the butchery of Stonehenge, and Arthur’s oath to be relentless against the pagan enemy; whilst the moral high ground held by this Breton dynasty is underlined by the Biblical authorities invoked in Hengist’s trial scene. There is no denying that Arthur has a privileged position within this privileged dynasty. No fewer than three out of the seven ‘miscellaneous’ passages highlighted by a capital relate to him; and none of these three can be said to tie in with political concerns – with the exception, arguably, of the conception scene, which could be construed as proving Arthur’s parentage, and therefore the legitimacy of his rule. From this point of view, the interests of the manuscript planner seem somewhat different to those of the readers who left their trace in the margin. The passages highlighted with capitals in the final section of the poem, on folios 60 and following, reinforce the impression of a special emphasis on Arthur, but the focus changes. Of the forty-nine capitals in the last 5000–odd lines of the poem, thirty-two occur in the Arthurian section: seventeen of these are related to the build-up to war and its practice, such as battle arrangements, taunting, battle-speeches or single combat scenes (9977, 10113, 11503, 11741, 11881, 12041, 12083, 12263, 12305, 12397, 12655, 12743, 12813, 12967, 13953, 13143, 13167); a further five occur in the section describing the Roman embassy presenting Arthur with the Roman ultimatum and the discussions which ensue (10621, 10639,10711, 14 On the question of Brittany/Armoriche in the HRB and its vernacular reworkings, see Elizabeth J

Bryan, ‘The Afterlife of Armoriche’, La
amon. Contexts, Language and Interpretation, ed. Rosamund Allen, Lucy Perry and Jane Roberts (London, 2002), pp. 117–55.

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10865, 11005). Four capitals focus on ceremonial and festivities (10147, 10303, 10385, 10437), leaving six ‘isolated’ instances. The account of the Whitsun festivities contains an aside on Caerleon, marked by a capital letter (10235), as are the mention of Arthur’s entrusting the regency of Britain to Modred (11173) and the king’s final voyage to Avalon (13275). Two capital letters frame the account of Arthur’s fight with the Mont St Michel giant (11317, 11599), marking not only the beginning of the campaign against Rome, but also Arthur’s first voyage to Brittany since he was made king. Finally, a short passage describing the emperor Lucius (12451) establishes the worthiness of Arthur’s opponent during the Roman war. The emphasis on the details of warfare is a striking new addition to the concerns signalled by capitalization in the first part of the manuscript, and suggests a greater interest in narrative for its own sake. Arthur as superlative war-leader, leading outstanding heroes, is at its most prominent in this section, indicating that the campaign against Rome was felt to have especial resonance for the manuscript planner(s). The question of legitimacy is raised with the mention of Modred’s entrusting with the stewardship of the land, whilst the Breton connection is reaffirmed, but in a somewhat ambiguous way. It is a land of monsters, and Arthur’s stature as monster-slayer is established when he kills the Mont St Michel giant; but nevertheless, he did not manage to save Helen, a fact underscored by Hoel’s lament (coloured majuscule, line 11599), and that hints at his limitations as protector of the people – and his own kin. There is a markedly literary flavour to a number of the passages highlighted by the presence of a capital in this section, especially in the descriptions of pomp and splendour, whilst the mythical dimension to Arthur, giant-slayer and possible immortal in the isle of Avalon, is clearly considered of real note. The relatively high density of capitals observed in the Arthurian section of the final part of the manuscript is maintained in the last 1500 lines or so of the poem, with a total of seventeen passages highlighted by a capital letter. As we are no longer dealing with just the one king, but with a series of successive monarchs, the circles reappear in the margins. The somewhat more straightforward narrative structure to this part of Wace’s work may also account for the fact that six of the passages introduced by a capital letter coincide with new paragraphs in Geoffrey’s Historia. The core of interest pointed at by the distribution pattern of capitals is firmly connected with the mission to the pagan Anglo-Saxons, with the stress on the destructiveness of the new wave of pagans under Gurmund’s leadership (13493; 13625), Augustine’s mission and the Dorchester miracle (13683, 13745), and culminating in the new balance of power that leads to the Bangor massacre (13987). The consequences of these events – the unsuccessful attempt at shared power between the British and the now Christian English, and Cadwalan’s eventual victory over Edwin and his successors – are then given some prominence (13965, 14051, 14115, 14205, 14325, 14425, 14495, 14639). Special attention is paid to the character of Brian, in particular the episode where he sets out hunting to obtain meat for his ailing king (14205), and his role in reinstating him in power after killing Edwin’s astrologer (14325). This could be construed as a certain attraction to the anecdotal; though the symbolical dimension to Brian’s slicing flesh from his own thigh to feed Cadwalan when his hunting expedition proves unsuccessful might also indicate a more abstract reading of the text. The last three capitals point to the famine that led the last British

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king to flee Britain for Brittany (14707); King Alan of Brittany’s search for authorities to interpret Cadwalader’s vision (14807), and the discussion of the origin of the name of Wales (14855), in the closing lines of the work. The placing of this last majuscule is especially noteworthy, as it occurs in the middle of a comment by the narrator, rather than at its beginning, and implicitly shifts the emphasis from the extremely unflattering image given of the Welsh people – said by Wace to be totally degenerate, all ‘mué’, ‘changié and ‘forslignié’ (14852–3) – to more learned considerations. The final note is therefore not dissimilar to the nexus of interests identified in the first section of the manuscript. The main focus is clearly on the historical dimension to the work, in particular issues of succession and transmission of power. The Arthurian section, which the manuscript planner(s) apparently anticipated would be a major source of interest to the readers, does not seem to have elicited strong enough a response to induce those readers to leave their mark in the margins. It would certainly suggest that the reception of Wace’s work in early thirteenth-century England was essentially as a learned authority, with relatively little interest in its entertainment potential. BNF, fr. 794, better known as the ‘Guiot’ manuscript after the scribe who copied it, was produced on the Continent in the thirteenth century. In addition to Wace’s Roman de Brut (the seventh item), the manuscript contains the Roman d’Eneas, Chrétien de Troyes’s Chevalier de la Charrette, Cligès, Yvain and Perceval, the continuation of the Perceval, the Siège d’Athènes, Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie, and Calendre’s Les empereurs de Rome.15 We therefore have a mix of Arthurian romances, Matter of Antiquity romances, and historical texts relating to the matter of these romances. This range of material would lead one intuitively to assume that for the intended readers of the Guiot manuscript, Wace’s work functioned as a subtext to romance. On the other hand, Guiot’s shop in Paris was opposite a Cistercian monastery, if Cangé (who owned the manuscript and donated it to the King of France in 1733) is correct;16 so it is not impossible that like the Durham manuscript, it also included among its potential readership scholars interested in the Roman de Brut for its informative value as authority on the history of Britain. To what extent does the manuscript support these two, apparently conflicting, assumptions? Contrary to the Durham manuscript, the margins of the Wace section of the Guiot manuscript show no evidence of reader reception, partly because there is simply no (or very little) space for annotation. The text is copied in three 44–line columns per page, which means that any inscription relative to the middle column in particular would be extremely difficult to pen and ambiguous to interpret. This was not a manuscript meant for the scholarly reader intent on supplementing it with his/her own glosses. The Wace section of the manuscript contains 248 capital letters in red or blue ink, on average roughly every sixty lines of text; fifty-nine of these coincide 15 For a detailed description of this manuscript, see Mario Roques, ‘Le manuscrit Fr. 794 de la

Bibliothèque Nationale et le scribe Guiot’, Romania 73 (1952): 177–99, and Terry Nixon, ‘Catalogue of Manuscripts’, Les Manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes, ed. Keith Busby, Terry Nixon, Alison Stones and Lori Walters, 2, pp. 1–85 (28–31). 16 Cangé notes at the conclusion of his table of contents to the manuscript: ‘L’Abaye du Val, Vallis Sanctae Mariae, fondée à Paris l’an 1136, fut desservie par des Moynes des Citeaux’. See Rocques, 177–8.

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with new paragraphs in Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniæ. They are distributed as follows: — Brutus episode (9–1256): 37 capitals, 6 of which mark the beginning or end of a passage in direct speech, and 6 of which correspond to new paragraphs in the Historia. — From Brutus to Belin and Brennes (1257–2312): 33 capitals, 3 of which mark passages in direct speech (all in the Leir episode), and 2 of which correspond to new paragraphs in the Historia. — Belin and Brennes (2313–3240): 15 capitals, 2 connected with direct speech, 3 coinciding with paragraphs in the Historia. — From Belin to Julius Caesar’s invasion of Britain (3241–826): 7 capitals, 3 of which correspond to new paragraphs in the Historia. — Roman conquest (3827–4834): 20 capitals, 4 connected with direct speech, 5 coinciding with new paragraphs in the Historia. — From the Roman conquest to Maximian (4835–5800): 10 capitals, 2 of which coincide with new paragraphs of the Historia. — From Maximian to Vortigern (5801–6468): 10 capitals, 2 of which mark the boundaries of passages in direct speech, and 3 of which coincide with new paragraphs in the Historia. — Vortigern to the end of Merlin’s prophecies (6469–7583): 6 capitals, 5 of which mark passages in direct speech. — Aurelius (7583–8284): 9 capitals, 3 of which mark boundaries of passages in direct speech, and 4 of which coincide with new paragraphs in the Historia. — Uther (8285–9008): 13 capitals, 4 of which mark boundaries of passages in direct speech, and 6 of which coincide with new paragraphs in the Historia. — Arthur’s early reign (9009–730): 18 capitals, 3 marking boundaries of passages in direct speech, 4 corresponding to new paragraphs in the Historia. — Round Table, conquests and Whitsun crown-bearing ceremonies (9731–10620): 17 capitals, one marking a passage in direct speech. — Roman campaign (10621–13009): 37 capitals, 9 marking boundaries of passages in direct speech, 12 coinciding with new paragraphs in the Historia. — Last campaign against Modred (13010–298): 4 capitals, one corresponding to a new paragraph in the Historia. — From Arthur to Cadwalan (13299–14026): 5 capitals, 2 coinciding with new paragraphs in the Historia. — Cadwalan to Cadwalader (14027–656): 4 capitals, 2 coinciding with new paragraphs in the Historia. — Cadwalader to end (14657–858): 3 capitals, 2 coinciding with new paragraphs in the Historia. One may note that the proportion of capital letters in the different sections varies considerably, with certain episodes containing on average more than five times as many majuscules as others. The episode with the highest incidence of capital letters is that of the early kings between Brutus and Belin (on average, one every thirty-two lines), closely followed by the foundation of Britain and the reign of Brutus (on average, every thirty-four lines). At the other end of the spectrum, we have the account of Vortigern’s rise to power and eventual downfall, where majuscules

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appear on average every 185 lines only, a paucity unmatched even in the episodes immediately following Arthur’s reign.17 The nature of the narrative dictates that a high proportion of the capital letters signal the beginning or end of a given reign, or mark the different phases of military campaigns or specific battles. Over half of all passages marked by a majuscule belong to either of these two categories – almost exclusively the latter in the longer episodes focussing on the deeds of just the one leader, such as Brutus, Belin, Julius Caesar, Uther or Arthur. If we accept the premise that the density of capital letters in any given episode reflects a degree of interest in that episode on the part of the manuscript planner, a certain narrative hierarchy emerges. The foundation of Britain is given especial prominence, presumably because of its ties with the Matter of Antiquity in general, and in particular with the romans antiques contained in the same manuscript. However, Britain’s subsequent relations with Rome, which have been identified by a number of critics as a core issue in Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniæ,18 do not appear to have elicited the same enthusiasm. The account of Belin’s reign, during which he and his brother conquer Rome, has no more majuscules than would be expected from the overall textual average (indeed, rather fewer: one every 61.5 lines only). The power struggles that follow the Roman conquest of Britain, and lead to a Roman emperor born of a British royal princess, are singularly undistinguished by the manuscript planner, with a capital letter appearing on average every 96.5 lines only. Even Arthur’s Roman campaign has fewer majuscules, on average, than the text as a whole – just one every 64.5 lines. Where the presence of majuscules points to an interest in Romano-British power relations, it is significant that the focal point is Rome, with Britain very much in a position of subordination: thus the section of the conquest of Britain by Julius Caesar (one capital letter on average every fifty lines), an event of note even in Classical authorities; and, arguably, Cadwalader’s pious end in Rome (on average, one capital every sixty-seven lines), which marks the end of British supremacy and the beginning of (legitimate) Anglo-Saxon dominion over Britain. A closer look at the specific instances of majuscules occurring at points where Rome enters the narrative confirms the manuscript planner’s pro-Roman bias. Julius Caesar is projected as a great war leader, but also as a skilled negotiator when he buys the loyalty of the French after his initial defeat against the British (4183), and as a culture hero capable of building wondrous edifices such as the tower at Odres (4201). After the Roman conquest, majuscules tend to draw attention to kings who are either pro-Roman, or Roman themselves: for example, King Kimbelin (4877), whose achievements – apart from being a proto-Christian – are essentially that he maintained such good relations with Rome that he could, had he so wished, have with-

17 The section comprising the post-Arthurian kings up to the reign of Cadwalan has on average one capital

letter every 145 lines, whilst the reign of Cadwalan only has a capital letter every 157 lines, on average. All these figures have been rounded up or down. 18 See the special Geoffrey of Monmouth issue of Arthuriana, especially the articles by Kellie Robertson, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Translation of Insular Historiography’, Arthuriana 8 (1998): 42–57; Fiona Tolhurst, ‘The Britons as Hebrews, Romans and Normans: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s British Epic and Reflections of Empress Mathilda’, Arthuriana 8 (1998): 69–87; and Jane Zatta, ‘Translating the Historia: The Ideological Transformation of the Historia Regum Britannie in Twelfth Century Vernacular Chronicles’, Arthuriana 8 (1998): 148–61.

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held the British tribute; or King Arviragus, who initially withholds tribute (5099), but who thanks to his Roman wife becomes a lifelong loyal subject of Rome (5147). The inability of the British to defend themselves effectively without the support of Rome is highlighted by the presence of capital letters marking scenes such as Carais hoodwinking the Roman Senate into supporting his career as a pirate (5373); the Roman general Gratian proclaiming himself king over a Britain that had sunk into anarchy (6127); the ravaging of the land by the pirates Wanis and Melga after Gratian’s murder (6259). The implicit agenda glimpsed through this pattern of capitalization sits somewhat uncomfortably with the fact that the great hero of the Roman de Brut is a king who not only refuses to pay any tribute, but arguably engages in unprovoked acts of aggression against Rome when he invades (and conquers) Paris and North-West France. It therefore comes as no real surprise that the distribution of majuscules in the Arthurian section indicates a degree of ambivalence towards its subject-matter. As is to be expected, Arthur’s reign has a higher incidence of capital letters than most other episodes. As a whole, the Arthurian section has a capital letter roughly every fifty-six lines, the fourth highest ‘score’ for any given reign, after Brutus, Leir19 and Uther.20 Reflecting the considerable number of campaigns fought by Arthur in his reign, a high proportion of these majuscules highlight material of a military nature: the debate in the run-up to conflict, the description of a particularly fearsome adversary (such as Frollo, the Mont St Michel Giant, or the Emperor Lucius), the number and placing of troops, the various phases in a given battle, individual feats by specific worthies, the occasional rousing battle-speech. Most of the majuscules in the second half of Arthur’s reign occur in this context, the only notable exceptions being the elaborately stage-managed entrance of the Roman messengers bearing the emperor’s ultimatum (1062), Gawain’s defence of peacetime pursuits (10756), the appointing of Modred as regent of Britain (11173), Hoel’s sadness at Helen’s death and the learned aside on Tumbeleine (11599), a learned aside on the etymology of the name of the town of Chinon (12997) and Guinevere’s shame when she hears of Modred’s lack of success in battle (13201). On a purely quantitative basis, the high point of Arthur’s reign would appear to be his struggle against the Saxons (one capital letter every forty lines), closely followed by the more expansionist phase culminating in the lavish descriptions of pomp and circumstance at Caerleon (one capital every fifty-two lines). Interest then seems to decline, with the Morte section displaying just four capital letters over 288 lines (i.e., one every seventy-two lines). A disproportionate number of majuscules in the pre-Roman part of Arthur’s reign mark non-military descriptive passages. The description of Arthur’s armour is signalled by two capital letters (9273 and 9293), the second one drawing attention to the portrait of the Virgin on Arthur’s shield. The marvels of Britain described by Arthur to Hoel are marked with three majuscules (9527, 9537, 9555), while the

19 The Leir episode has nine coloured capital letters over 410 lines (if one counts the short-lived reign of

Cordelia as part of the section) or 393 lines (if one stops at Leir’s death), an average of one per 44/45 lines. 20 Coloured capital letters occur in the account of Uther’s reign roughly every 55/56 lines; none of them occur in the account of Arthur’s conception.

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crown-bearing ceremonial at Caerleon comprises no fewer than six capitals drawing attention to its various facets.21 A seventh capital letter (10301) appears in this section introducing a list of the prestigious guests attending the event. The fact that over a third of the capital letters in this part of the work are connected with amplificatio may simply be seen as indicating that Guiot (if it was indeed he who planned the manuscript) enjoyed such passages, but it is noteworthy that this delight in description is not detectable elsewhere. In particular, it stands in stark contrast with the Easter scene in Paris (lines 10147 ff.), unadorned by any majuscule, where Arthur distributes lands and towns to his most senior followers. While the descriptive element in this passage is relatively undeveloped, the list of fiefs and their incumbents could have warranted a capital letter, as this occurs elsewhere in the manuscript – for example, a majuscule introduces the list of King Ebrauc’s many sons (1543), and another that of his numerous daughters (1583). It could be that the manuscript planner was less than eager to highlight such a politically sensitive scene, where a victorious invading Arthur carves out France to reward members of his retinue. The Caerleon crown-bearing, on the other hand, takes place in a suitably distant and exotic location (for a Continental audience, at least); the ceremonial and festivities suitably consonant with the world projected by Chrétien de Troyes, and the gifts bestowed by the king suitably vague and unlocalized. The pattern of capitalization at this point appears to be a conscious attempt to foster in the reader an impression of identity between Wace’s Arthur and the king of romance. A similar, if more discrete agenda may underlie the use of majuscules throughout the Arthurian episode to draw attention to Arthurian worthies,22 like Cador, Loth, and of course Gawain. Arthur’s nephew’s first mention in the poem (9639–40), as Loth’s young son, passes relatively unnoticed, but his first involvement in a military campaign alongside Arthur is duly marked by a majuscule (9853): De saint Soplice l’apostoire La ki aume ait repos en gloire Ert Walwain nuvelment venuz Chevaliers pruz a cuneüz. (9853–7) (Walwain had recently returned, a renowned and valiant knight, from St Soplice, the pope, may his soul have rest and glory.)

While it is understandable that the child Gawain should not have been considered suitable material for a capital letter (after all, the infant Arthur does not have that honour in the Guiot manuscript either), a consequence of the highlighting of this later passage is the underlining of Gawain’s Roman nurture, identified as clerical and Christian through the mention of Pope Sulpicius. The paragon of courtesy and chivalry at Arthur’s court is thus a cultural hybrid and his most admirable virtues are implicitly the result of his Roman upbringing: an unobtrusive but effective way of asserting the superiority of Rome over Britain – a view which, as we have seen, the Guiot manuscript planner appears to have wished to promote. Gawain’s superlative

21 Lines 10197, 10385, 10417, 10437, 10483 and 10589. 22 The names of their opponents are also highlighted on occasion, but less frequently; for example,

Baldulf (9059), or King Gillomaur of Ireland (9669).

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qualities are further flagged out by majuscules in the much-quoted passage where he defends peace and ‘druerie’, countering Cador’s eagerness to be involved in warfare (10765), and on two occasions during the campaign against Rome (11673, 12813). The general impression of the Arthurian section is one of a constant dilution of the facts and figures of ‘history’ in amplificatory narrative, particularly when read against the backdrop of the opening and closing reigns of the poem. This of course corresponds to the reality of Wace’s poem, but the contrast is emphasized by the placing of majuscules in the Guiot manuscript. Only one of the 12 majuscules in the post-Arthurian section points to material anecdotal in nature, and not directly related to a change in the balance of political power or to a new king: it marks the ploy used by the pagan king Gurmund to capture the town of Cirencester, through the medium of sparrows with nut shells filled with Greek fire attached to their feet (13589). The cloak-and-dagger adventures of Brian, Cadwallan’s devoted nephew, are copied without any attempt to draw the attention of the reader to this striking (and unsettling) episode.23 Similarly, St Augustine’s mission and the miracles that accompany it are not deemed worthy of a capital letter; the only majuscule to appear in this section is when the conversion of the Saxons has been completed, and Augustine’s over-zealous partisans massacre the holy men of Bangor (13813). The importance of the account of the reigns up to Belin and Brennes as a ‘scholarly pedigree’ for the rest of the work appears to have been recognized by Guiot, inasmuch as learned asides are regularly signalled by majuscules; for example, on the sirens encountered by Brutus and the Trojans on their travels (735), on the giants of Britain (1063), or on the events in world history supposedly contemporaneous with a given British king (1289, 1451, 1469, 1511, 2107, 2111).24 The etymology of certain place-names (a matter of especial interest to Wace) are also highlighted in this manner: for example Italy (25) and London (1231). Similarly, the origins of the four main parts of Britain (Cornwall, England, Wales and Scotland) are the object of some attention (1201, 1267, 1283). The overall image is therefore markedly different to what was observed in the Durham manuscript. Interest in the history of Britain proper appears to be limited. Where Britain is in conflict or rivalry with Rome, there is a noticeable predilection for episodes where Rome has the upper hand, in political, military and religious arenas. The paucity of capitals in the section recounting Augustine’s mission to the English suggests that religious issues were not considered to be of prime importance,25 though Teleusin’s visionary proclamation of the birth of Christ is marked by a capital letter (the actual mention of Christ’s birth by the narrator, however, is not). Arthur himself loses some of his appeal once the Roman ultimatum tarnishes the gloss of the peace, prosperity and glamour associated with the Round Table. The 23 By contrast, Wace’s English translator Layamon gives the episode especial prominence in his Brut

(early thirteenth century): see Lucy Perry’s recent article, ‘The Life of Brian: a loyal retainer and a loving subject’, La
amon. Contexts, Language and Interpretation, ed. Rosamund Allen, Lucy Perry and Jane Roberts, pp. 385–411. 24 There is just one instance of such a time rubric graced with a majuscule after line 2111; it occurs on line 5093, where Claudius’s return to Rome is said to have happened at the same time that St Peter had left Antioch for Rome. 25 The only capital letter adorning the Augustine section does not occur in connection with his missionary activities, but on line 13813, which sets the scene for the Bangor massacre, where the Anglo-Saxons converted by the ‘Roman’ Augustine butcher the ‘British’ clergy of the Celtic Church.

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most striking difference between the two manuscripts is undeniably in the implied attitude towards Merlin: while his prophecies are carefully interpolated into Wace’s narrative in the Durham manuscript, showing the importance they held for the manuscript planner (to the extent, indeed, of allowing too much space for them), there is no indication that either the prophet or his sayings were of particular note in the Guiot manuscript. Three capital letters mark the beginning or end of different stages of Merlin’s exchange (in direct speech) with Vortigern concerning his collapsing tower, but this use of capitalization is essentially ‘typographical’ in nature, designed to signal to the reader of the manuscript a change in speaker (or addressee). The prophetic component to Merlin’s speech, which includes the foretelling of the coming of Arthur, ‘ki iert de Cornoaille/ Cume senglers fiers en bataille’,26 is not highlighted in any way; neither indeed are the accounts of Merlin’s moving of the Giants’ Circle from Ireland to Stonehenge, or of Arthur’s wondrous conception. This marginalization of Merlin in the page layout is consistent with the relative lack of interest in British political history evidenced by the distribution patterns of capital letters. The political resonance of Merlin’s prophecies is well established, as is that of Arthur’s later campaign against the world-power of his day: this is a dimension that the Guiot manuscript clearly does not wish to stress. The evidence offered by the distribution of majuscules leads to the obvious conclusion that whoever planned the layout of the Guiot manuscript of the Roman de Brut read the work in the light of Chrétien’s romances, rather than on its own terms or as ‘straight’ history – or at least, that he expected the readers of the manuscript to do so. It is highly significant that the twelve-year peace before Arthur’s campaign against Rome is highlighted by majuscules twice, on both occasions Wace mentions it: in line 9731, ‘Duze anz puis cel repairement/ Regna Artur paisiblement’, ‘For twelve years after his return, Arthur reigned in peace’; and later, when the narrator explicitly situates the events of Arthurian romance within those twelve years (line 9787): En cele grant pais ke jo di Ne sai si vus l’avez oï Furent les merveilles pruvees E les aventures truvees Ki d’Artur sunt tant recuntees.

(9787–91)

(In this time of great peace I speak of – I do not know if you have heard of it – the wondrous events appeared and the adventures were sought out, which are so often told about Arthur.)

These two majuscules, situated relatively close together at less than sixty lines distance and underlining the same information, show clearly that to the manuscript planner, this was something that the reader could not be allowed to overlook. However, one should not overestimate the differences between the two manuscripts. The passage just quoted above is also highlighted by a majuscule in the Durham manuscript, and a relatively high proportion of the capital letters in the Durham copy coincide with capitals in the Guiot text, hinting at some degree of 26 Literally, ‘who will be from Cornwall/ Like a ferocious boar in battle’; lines 7577–8.

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community of interest. Of the four majuscules in the Durham manuscript in the section of the work prior to Julius Caesar’s invasion of Britain, two (the first ones, when Brutus is still in Greece) occur in the same place as in Guiot. In the section from Julius Caesar to the break on folio 60, fifteen of the thirty-nine majuscules in the Durham manuscript correspond to what is found in Guiot,27 and in the final section of the manuscript, seventeen out of the forty-nine majuscules highlight the same lines as in Guiot.28 The overwhelming majority of ‘common’ majuscules occur from the reign of Vortigern onwards, with an implicit stress on the treachery of the Saxons and their legal claims to land in Britain (6675, the minders of Aurelius and Uther take them to Brittany; 6845, 7227, Hengist’s treachery and the Salisbury Plain massacre; 7625, 7653, 7703, the campaign against the Saxons; 7837, 7957, Hengist’s defeat and Aurelius’s grant of land to the Saxons; 8181, 8407, the Saxons rise up against the British). The reign of Arthur is also a major interest. Of the six majuscules in the Arthurian section contained in the Durham manuscript before folio 60, two appear at the same place in the Guiot text; in the latter part of the Durham manuscript, no fewer than sixteen of the thirty-two majuscules in the Arthurian episodes correspond to majuscules in Guiot. In both cases, we therefore have a disproportionate accent on Arthur, his battles and his court. On the other hand, the apparently shared interest in the struggles against the Saxons in the pre-Arthurian episodes runs somewhat counter to the general lack of interest in what might be termed internal British politics indicated by the pattern of distribution of coloured capitals discerned in Guiot; whilst the only ‘shared’ majuscule after the reign of Arthur, towards the end of the reign of Cadwallan (14639; a summing up of his achievements as king), is not only isolated, but arguably anomalous – one might rather have expected the last passage to be highlighted by both manuscripts to relate to the last king of Britain. Which in turn begs the question to what extent the capitalization patterns in the Roman de Brut manuscripts were inherited from earlier textual tradition. Could it be that some of the majuscules are to be ascribed to the occasional passive acceptance of older patterns by the manuscript planner, rather than to his own readerly agenda? The present survey is too limited in scope to allow more than the most tentative hypothesis in this respect; study needs to be extended to the other extant manuscripts of Wace’s Roman de Brut. One may, however, note that the evidence is not inimical to such a hypothesis. In conclusion, as was anticipated, the distribution patterns of capital letters in the two manuscripts under scrutiny suggest a considerably stronger interest in matters of British history and politics in the Anglo-Norman manuscript, whilst in the Continental manuscript the prime focus is on amplificatory narrative. Both copies betray a strong interest in Arthur, though they privilege different aspects of his reign. The manuscript planners were sophisticated readers, however, and their mediation of Wace’s work is far from one-dimensional. The reader of the Anglo-Norman copy was not impervious to the less scholarly elements in the Roman de Brut, just as the

27 These correspond to lines 4425, 4683, 6259, 6675, 6845, 7227, 7625, 7653, 7703, 7837, 7957, 8181,

8407, 9703, 9787. 28 These correspond to lines 10385, 10437, 10621, 10639, 10711, 11173, 11599, 11741, 11881, 12263,

12305, 12392, 12451, 12655, 12743, 12813, 14639.

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continental French reader’s interest was not purely subordinated to the material’s relevance to romance. Moreover, the location of certain majuscules hints at tensions underlying the agenda of the manuscript planners, which may (or may not) be palimpsests of past readerly activity. This is a line of investigation well worth pursuing.

4 Tristan Rossignol: The Development of a Text GEOFFREY BROMILEY

The Tristan Rossignol story should possibly be viewed as a relatively late work, partly created out of elements found already within the corpus of traditional Tristan material. The Tristan Rossignol story is a well-known representative of that corpus of French texts which deal with Tristan material. It is found in the major collective editions and loosely associated with other so-called episodic poems, such as Marie de France’s Chèvrefeuille, the two Folie poems, the Folie Tristan d’Oxford and the Folie Tristan de Berne.1 The Folie poems are obviously episodic in that they do not tell a full version of the legend but simply recount one incident, an incident which can be attached to a particular moment in the scenario, when Tristan chooses to travel from Brittany (where he has married Iseut aux Blanches Mains) in order to visit Queen Iseut in Cornwall. In much the same way, the Lai du Chèvrefeuille does not contain a full version of the legend but simply recounts one return of Tristan to visit Iseut, a return which probably should be attached to a rather earlier point in the story. The Tristan Rossignol tale is similarly episodic in that it does not contain a full version of the legend, but it is also episodic in a rather special way. The Folie poems, and the Chèvrefeuille, notwithstanding their relative brevity, are complete in themselves: they may draw upon sections of the full legend for their inspiration, but they stand as independent artistic creations. The Tristan Rossignol poem, however, differs significantly from these texts in that it has no independent existence, but is known only as part of a larger work, the Anglo-Norman poem, Le Donnei des amants.2 In seeking to ascertain the provenance of the text and its mode of creation, it is therefore worthwhile first of all to consider Le Donnei des amants, the larger entity (some 1244 lines in all) in which the Tristan Rossignol poem is embedded. The title

1

2

See, for example, Tristan et Iseut: les poèmes français, la saga norroise, ed. D. Lacroix and P. Walter, et al., Lettres Gothiques (Paris, 1989), pp. 321–3, Tristan et Yseut: les premières versions européennes, ed. C. Marchello-Nizia et al., Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris, 1995), pp. 967–73, Early French Tristan Poems, ed. N. J. Lacy, Arthurian Archives I and II, 2 vols. (Cambridge, UK, 1998), II, 199–213. All references to the Tristan Rossignol section (ll. 453–683) of the Donnei des amants are from the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition. Le Donnei des amants has been edited on just one occasion: G. Paris, ‘Le Donnei des amants’, Romania 25 (1896): 497–541. It survives in a single manuscript, formerly Phillipps 3713, now Cologny-Geneva, Bodmer 82.

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itself merits some consideration, appearing in the incipit as le Donne[i]z des amanz and also suggested in the body of the text: Ki demande de cest roman[z], Le Donei ad num des amanz. (115–16) (If anybody asks about this story, it is called the Donei des amanz.)

It has been variously translated, but since Gaston Paris3 there has been general agreement as to its basic significance: we are dealing here with a ‘courtly interview’, with a ‘lovers’ conversation’, the material which makes up the central substance of the poem. The verb donneir and its related forms are found elsewhere, in Thomas’s version of the Tristan story, for example, where Cariado is thus described: ‘Il ert molt bels e bons parleres,/ Doneür e gabeeres’ (1021–2).4 The poem establishes itself in a very typical courtly milieu. The poet relates that, in early summer, he rises early and goes towards an enclosed garden. He listens to the birds, which are no ordinary birds but learned birds, engaged in a discussion, so it would seem, not merely making their own individual music: ‘Oï ses oiselès chanter,/ Un respundre, autre oposer’ (15–16). We are presumably meant to see in the exchanges of the birds an anticipation of the arguments which will be brought forth by the lovers. The poet is then led to think that all God’s creatures have a capacity for joy and entertainment, joie and enveisures, and goes on to reflect upon the vilein and the gelus, figures who are opposed to such and similar feelings, ‘deduiz, joie e chant’ (32): Li oiselet, men essiënt, Quant il chantent plus doucement, S’esforcent plus e seir e mein Pur tariër le fel vilein, E les gelus ensurquetut, Ke joie e chant heent de but. (41–6) (The birds, so I believe, when they sing more sweetly, are striving more both morning and evening to provoke the spiteful boors and especially the jealous, for they hate joy and song.)

Once again, there is a proleptic element here, for, in the Tristan Rossignol section itself, there is a long and imaginative passage on the supposed etymology of gelus (543–88). The birds continue to sing, until interrupted by the appearance of a pair of lovers: Estez vus une damaisele K’illuec venoit, mut gente e bele, E pas par pas alat tut dreit A sun ami qui l’atendeit. (97–100)

3 4

See Paris, Romania 25 (1896): 522–3. Tristan et Yseut: les premières versions européennes, p. 151. The term donney is included elsewhere in the Donnei des amants (ll. 210–12): ‘Jo revendrai a mun dreit curs/ E el gardin e al donney/ Ke illuques vi en secrei’.

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(There then came a young lady, very fine and beautiful, and step by step went straight to where her friend was waiting for her.)

The poet eavesdrops upon the lovers’ conversation and proposes to relate what he has witnessed and pass on the illustrative examples he has heard, seeing his work not so much as a fictional re-creation but more as a didactic treatise: Tels ensamples plusors oï Ke pas ne voil metre en obli, Einz les voil traire en remembrance: E enveisure mut avance, Quant l’em i trouve bon respit Ou bel proverbe ou sage dit. (145–50) (I heard several such stories which I do not want to have forgotten but rather I want to have them remembered: and it furthers enjoyment considerably when one comes upon an intelligent saying, a fine proverb or a wise expression.)

We then come, at line 217, to an account of the couple’s conversation, of the series of arguments and counter-arguments. The lover, the male participant, speaks first, suggesting that love must be more than mere words, and refers to the ancients to support his case. He gives examples of the ladies who have helped their lovers, Dido,Ydoine, Ismène, Helen, and also Iseut. The mention of Iseut leads the lover on to mention a specific episode, Iseut’s escape from the funeral pyre: Or recordez tut lur haan E lur agueiz e lur poürs E lur peines e lur dolurs: Dire poez od quer tut sert Ke poi avez pur mei suffert Vers ce que les autres suffrirent Ke pur amur tel chose firent Dunt se mistrent en aventure Ki tant fu perilus[e] e dure Ke elz covint perdre la vie, Cum fit Ysoud la fin[e] amie, Ke fu mene[e] pur ardeir, Ben en avez oï le veir, Pur sun ami qui tant ama, Mès Deus mut tost la delivra. (404–18) (Now think of all their suffering, their torment and their fears, their pains and their sorrows: you can say for certain that you have suffered little for me compared with what the others suffered, for they acted for love in such a way that they placed themselves in such dangerous and difficult situations that they were to lose their lives, as did Iseut the loyal lady, who was led out to be burnt – you have heard the truth about this – for her friend whom she loved so much, but God very quickly freed her.)

The lady recognizes the strength of these examples, but maintains that the time has not yet come for her to show her love openly. Then, the lover, to support his case, tells the Tristan Rossignol story, an exemplum which begins at line 453 and

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continues until line 662. The lover’s intention is to show what Iseut was prepared to do for her partner. The lady’s riposte takes the form of her recounting an anecdote, clearly related in some way to the Folie stories, in which Tristan endures humiliation on behalf of his lady (663–83) and demonstrates effectively the seriousness of his love: ‘Apertement dunt il mustra/ Ke pas en gaberes nen ama’ (673–4). The lady here has introduced a gloss on the Tristan Rossignol story, suggesting her lover may not have the same seriousness of intent as was demonstrated by Tristan in the Folie-based example she cites. Tristan, so she indicates, was prepared to risk more and act more genuinely than her prospective partner is willing to do. The Tristan material has run its course and classical material, touched on briefly by the lover, now returns as the lady picks up the reference to Dido. She describes the ingratitude of Æneas and couples this with a set of general observations on this same theme. We may well feel that we are now moving away from the main theme, as this leads into the story of the vilein and the serpent, probably taken from the Disciplina Clericalis.5 Within the tale, placed in the mouth of the fox who has been chosen to judge the dispute between the vilein and the serpent, we find presented a saying of ‘li seives Salomon’ (‘the wise Solomon’). Unfortunately the reference is incomplete (the allusion ends in mid-sentence), but one may be safe in assuming that what followed here was a story relating to the ingratitude shown by the criminal to any benefactor. Although there is no break in the manuscript, and possibly none in the copyist’s exemplar, there is clearly a longish lacuna here, for at line 929 a new story begins which, so line 1159 gives us to understand, must be placed in the mouth of the lover. The new example is a telling of the story of the vilein and the little bird, the oiselet, similarly taken, so it would seem, from the Disciplina Clericalis.6 This new section closes with the summing up of the lover in lines 1159–60 on the significance of this story, before he presents a general declaration of good faith in lines 1161–72. There is further degeneration of the text now. Paris signals a lacuna at this point, and certainly it does seem that the statement of the ami is incomplete and that a series of exchanges will have followed before the lady embarks, in line 1173, on a long speech outlining the difficulty of finding trustworthy friends. This statement is again clearly incomplete when it comes to an end in line 1216, and it is once more necessary to suppose a section then followed in which the lover presumably again proclaimed his loyalty. The text restarts at line 1217 with the lady warning the lover against drunkenness. This passage finishes on a religious note, out of keeping with the general tenor of the text, before the abrupt conclusion to the whole work: «De Deu servir seit nostre cure, Kar ceste vie trop est dure.» Ore est escrit cest romanz; Ki l’escrit seit en fin joianz (1241–4)

5 6

See K. Busby, ‘The Donnei des Amants and Courtly Tradition’, Medioevo romanzo 14 (1989): 181–95 (p. 191). See Busby, ‘The Donnei des Amants and Courtly Tradition’, 192. For further information on this story, see M. Potelle, ‘Le conte de l’oiselet dans Le Donnei des Amanz’, in Mélanges offerts à Rita Lejeune, 2 vols. (Gembloux, 1969), II, 1299–307, N. Cartlidge, ‘The source of John Lydgate’s The Churl and the Bird’, Notes and Queries 44 (March 1997): 22–4.

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(May we devote ourselves to the service of God, for this life is a very painful one. Now this story is written; may the writer ultimately find happiness.)

The authentic ending of the poem might well have presented the rejection of the lover by the lady, or perhaps a resolution more amenable to the lover. In spite of the disappointment of the final sections of the text, which must presumably be the responsibility of figures other than its original composer, there is no doubt that the real qualities of the poet shine through. A concern for coherence is plain, signalled in part by the presence of iterative elements. As has already been noted, the observations on the gelus in the opening sections are picked up by the etymological musings in the Tristan Rossignol section: likewise, the birdsong at the opening of the poem may be seen to anticipate the lovers’ exchanges.7 Indeed, birdsong provides a leitmotif throughout the whole text: it is present at the outset before the lovers take centre stage, Tristan imitates the song of the nightingale to alert Iseut to his presence, and Tristan’s ability to imitate birdsong in general is echoed by the oiselet, who is also presented as speaking and singing to the vilein. Proverbs and similar dicta also contribute regularly to the fabric of the poem. The lady draws on a proverb as she concludes her speech on ingratitude (749–52), and the lover then seems to refer to the story of the vilein and the serpent which follows as a respit or popular saying.8 One might also draw attention to another feature concerning the text as a whole. The fox’s presentation of the saying of Solomon is set within his own speech, which is in turn set within the speech of the lady. This mise en abîme technique governs in fact the whole of the poem: the author presents a narrator, who records the words of two lovers who, in turn, relate the stories of others. And the stories which are related are many and varied, testifying to the wide literary knowledge of the writer. It is true that two of the examples, the story of the vilein and the serpent and the Conte de l’oiselet seem to be drawn from the Disciplina Clericalis, but one can identify other sources of inspiration as well. The classical allusions, notably the presentation of the ingratitude of Æneas, presumably betray a knowledge of the romans antiques. Self-evidently, the author knew of the Tristan legend and exploited it for the Tristan Rossignol section and elsewhere, and it is also abundantly clear that the author was thoroughly acquainted with the courtly lyric tradition. As we have seen, the poem is set in a courtly milieu, and, in the opening exchanges, the lady expresses, in classic courtly fashion, her fear of slanderers (331–4).9 The birdsong theme also inevitably evokes memories of Marie de France’s Laüstic. This is not to suggest that the poet is merely passing on received information in a conventional spirit. What has long been accepted, in the case of the stories drawn from the Disciplina Clericalis, for example, is that the poet has not at all acted in a passive manner, but has amplified and imaginatively enhanced the material he inherited. In the case of the vilein and the serpent story, this was particu-

7

8 9

M.R. Blakeslee offers the view that, amongst the episodic Tristan poems, the Tristan Rossignol ‘is most closely linked to the larger context of the work in which it figures’ (Love’s Masks: Identity, Intertextuality, and Meaning in the Old French Tristan Poems, Arthurian Studies 15 (Cambridge, UK, 1989), p. 87). On these cohesive elements, see Busby, ‘The Donnei des Amants and Courtly Tradition’, 194–5. The guaitu[r]s mentioned in line 332 return in the Tristan Rossignol section (l. 656) and could therefore be regarded as another unifying element in the poem.

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larly noted by Gaston Paris in his pioneering edition of the Donnei10 and has been reiterated on more than one occasion. The same is true of the Conte de l’oiselet, as Michel Potelle has pointed out a little more recently. He chooses to emphasize the humour of the tale, seeing it as a pastiche of the jeu-parti: ‘Ainsi, ce conte de l’oiselet, pourtant fort connu, a été marqué par une certaine originalité de composition et par un désir de renouveler les techniques habituelles du genre.’11 Armed with this knowledge of the poet’s characteristic manner, we can now approach the Tristan Rossignol section itself and try to suggest the creative process which may lie behind it. Let us begin at the end and consider not the Tristan Rossignol passage itself but the lady’s riposte, lines 663–83 of the printed text. The lover, through the exemplum he has just presented, is urging the lady to risk all for love, as Iseut was prepared to do. The lady concurs that Iseut acted correctly, but qualifies her agreement by citing another Tristan-based anecdote, one with an obvious relationship to the Folie Tristan tale. There are six, main representatives of this material elsewhere: it takes the form of independent, self-contained texts in the Folie Tristan de Berne and in the Folie Tristan d’Oxford; it is to be found in the French Roman de Tristan en prose, and in Eilhart’s Middle High German version, and also in the continuations by Heinrich von Freiberg and by Ulrich von Türheim of Gottfried’s retelling of the legend.12 The anecdote related by the lady is very short, but has interest and offers a particular modulation of the story: Tristran pur li fit grant atie, Plus qu’ore ne freit nus pur s’amie. Rere se fit, dreit cum fol, Barbe, gernuns, chef e col, E bricun se feseit clamer, Ewe de bro sor sei geter. (667–72) (For her Tristan gave many proofs of love, more than anybody would give now for his lady. He had himself shaved, just like a madman, his beard, moustache, head and neck, suffered insults and had soup dregs thrown over him.)

The parallels with other French tellings of the Folie tale are clear. The Oxford Folie tells us of the severe haircut Tristan inflicts upon himself: Tristran unes forces aveit; Il meimes porter les soleit. De grant manere les amat: Ysolt les forces lu donat. Od les forces haut se tundi:

10 See Paris, Romania 25 (1896): 537–40. 11 M. Potelle, ‘Le conte de l’oiselet dans Le Donnei des Amanz’, p. 1303. See also p. 1305: ‘On peut donc

déduire de ces rapprochements que l’auteur du Donnei s’est inspiré de la Disciplina Clericalis qu’il imite dans la plupart des détails. Mais si l’on compare l’allure des deux versions, on sera frappé par tout ce qu’apporte notre poète.’ 12 For a brief survey of this material, see Le Roman de Tristan par Thomas, ed. J. Bédier, 2 vols. (Paris, 1902–05), II, 282–96. (In pp. 374–9, Bédier edits the text found in a Paris manuscript of the Tristan en prose, Paris, BnF, fr. 103.) See also Tristan et Yseut: les premières versions européennes, pp. 1310–23.

TRISTAN ROSSIGNOL: THE DEVELOPMENT OF A TEXT

Ben senlle fol u esturdi. En aprés se tundi en croiz.

55

(205–11)13

(Tristan had a pair of scissors which he used to carry with him, and which he liked very much: they had been given to him by Iseut. With the scissors he chopped off his hair on the top of his head, so that he looked like a mad or distracted individual. He then gave himself a tonsure in the shape of a cross.)

Similarly, we read in the Folie Tristan de Berne: Tondrë a fait sa bloie crine. N’i a un sol en la marine Qui ne croie que ce soit rage. Haut fu tonduz, lonc ot lo col. A mervoille sambla bien fol. (130–2, 152–3)14 (He has his fair hair cut off. Nobody on the shore thinks that he is anything other than mad. . . . His hair was cropped short and his neck was long. He looked very much like a madman.)

We also find accounts elsewhere of the mockery Tristan must endure. In the Oxford Folie, he is made fun of as he enters the palace: Li fol entre enz par le wiket. Encuntre lui current li valet, Le escrïent cum hom fet lu: «Veez le fol! hu! hu! hu! hu!» Li vaslet e li esquier De buis le cuilent arocher. Par la curt le vunt cunvaiant Li fol valet ki vunt siwant. (247–54)15 (The fool goes in through the gate and young boys run to meet him, shouting at him as if he were a wolf. ‘Look at the fool! Hu! Hu! Hu!’ The boys and the squires start to hit him with branches of boxwood. The young fools follow him as he makes his way through the court.)

As Tristan approaches his goal in the Bern Folie, he has a similar unfriendly reception: ‘Conme fous va, chascuns lo hue,/ Gitant li pierres a la teste’ (135–6).16 But nowhere, so it would seem, does Tristan suffer the indignity described in the Tristan Rossignol of having ‘ewe de bro’ (presumably leftover soup, or something

13 Tristan et Yseut: les premières versions européennes, p. 222. 14 Tristan et Yseut: les premières versions européennes, pp. 248–9. See also Jean Renart, Le Lai de

l’ombre, ed. F. Lecoy, CFMA 104 (Paris, 1983), ll. 124–7: Onques Tristans, qui fu a force tondus com fols por Yseut, n’ot le tiers d’ahan con cil eut desi qu’il en ot sa pais fete. 15 Tristan et Yseut: les premières versions européennes, p. 223. 16 Tristan et Yseut: les premières versions européennes, p. 248. Tristan enjoys the same rough treatment when, in Thomas’s version, he visits Iseut in the disguise of a leper (see Tristan et Yseut: les premières versions européennes, ll. 1961–5, p. 176).

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equally obnoxious) thrown all over him. Although the Vie de saint Alexis may very easily come to mind,17 this detail represents an addition to this particular tradition; it may not be recorded as having occurred elsewhere in the tradition, but it is the kind of thing that might have occurred.18 As he has demonstrated already by the modifications made to the Disciplina Clericalis examples, the author sees himself as part of a culture which does more than simply receive but which actively innovates. When we turn our attention to the Tristan Rossignol proper, we find this same innovative spirit. It is perhaps worth reiterating the point that this story is not found elsewhere; there is no external confirmation that it ever had an independent existence in the form we find it now. It may, therefore, be viewed differently from the Conte de l’oiselet which almost certainly represents material imported from elsewhere, even though the material undergoes considerable modification as it is absorbed into its new environment. When we consider features of the text, we do find the Tristan Rossignol section differing from the other short Tristan poems with which it is normally associated. We may find it more difficult than usual, for example, to attach the story to a particular point in the whole scenario.19 There are problems with the Chèvrefeuille in knowing precisely where the episode fits in, but it does seem that we should attach it to a relatively early part of the story: Tristan has been exiled from court simply on the strength of the word of slanderers, there are hopes of a reconciliation with King Mark and of the reinstatement of Tristan to his former position at court. When we consider the two Folie poems we have no real difficulty at all in attaching the story to a precise point in the scenario. Indeed, in the Oxford Folie in particular, the author is very much concerned in re-creating methodically the history of the lovers up to the moment when the encounter narrated in the poem takes place: Tristan has almost certainly been in Brittany, married to the second Iseut (a point made plain in the Bern Folie, if not in the other version), before crossing the sea to seek out the queen. But the clues as far as the Tristan Rossignol is concerned are rather vaguer. Tristan returns ‘de Bretaine’ (457), but there is no mention of any relationships established there, and if the Brittany reference suggests a late stage in the full narrative the involvement of the dwarf could be held to indicate a relatively early point. There is, of course, no compelling need for this story to be anchored at a particular point in the legend. In the Folie poems, by contrast, this is essential. Tristan must draw upon a series of past, shared experiences to persuade Iseut of his identity: he must allude to events which can be recognized by Iseut and, indeed, by the audience, which quite rightly expects to take pleasure from identifying allusions to earlier episodes in the biography of the lovers. But in the Tristan

17 See La Vie de saint Alexis, ed. G. Paris, CFMA 4 (Paris, 1911), ll. 263–7:

Li serf son pedre qui la maisniede servent Lour lavedures li getent sour la teste: Ne s’en corrocet ned il nes en apelet. Tuit l’escharnissent, sil tienent por bricon: L’aive li getent, si mueillent son liçon. 18 In the notes to the Folie poems in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition (Tristan et Yseut: les premières versions européennes, p. 1313), the possibility is mentioned that the detail could be the invention of the author: ‘Aucune version de la Folie Tristan ne comporte ce détail du brouet jeté sur la tête de Tristan. A moins que le poète du Donnei n’ait inventé ce motif. . .’ 19 See, for example, the comment of Paris, Romania 25 (1896), 536: ‘On a quelque peine à lui trouver sa place dans l’ensemble de l’épopée tristanienne.’

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57

Rossignol the lover has a different aim: he is seeking to convince the lady, through the telling of a single anecdote, of the need to sacrifice herself as Iseut was prepared to sacrifice herself in the one incident he describes. And if the story is not anchored to a particular point or dependent for its impact on including a recognizable stock of material, the author is relatively free to invent. This is not to say that the material is strikingly original; indeed, one may have quite the opposite impression, of a collection of relative commonplaces. The setting, as has been mentioned already, is a classic courtly setting and, more specifically, a setting familiar to us from the Tristan story: Entur la nuit, en un gardin, A une funteine suz un pin, Suz l’arbre Tristran seeit, E aventures i atendoit. (459–62) (At nightfall, in a garden, by a stream beneath a pine tree, Tristan sat down beneath the tree and waited for the right moment.)

The beginning of Beroul’s Tristan fragment will immediately come to mind, as will many other episodes of the legend and other courtly pieces.20 Again, it hardly surprises us when it is stated that Iseut has not seen Tristan for a year: ‘Quele chose Ysoud fit pur Tristrant/ Quant ne l’aveit veü d’un an’ (455–6). In Chèvrefeuille, it will be recalled, Tristan remains the same length of time in his homeland of Suhtwales before returning to Cornwall: En sa cuntree en est alez En Suhtwales u il fu nez. Un an demeurat tut entier, Ne pot ariere repeirier. (15–18)21 (He returned to his homeland, to South Wales where he was born. He remained there for a full year, and could not come back.)

Although birdsong is a regular accompanying feature of any description of a garden, there is more originality in that Tristan is presented as having the long-standing skill to imitate the birds: Humaine language deguisa, Cum cil que l’aprist de peça: Il cuntrefit le russinol, La papingai, le oriol, E les oiseals de la gaudine. (463–7) (He disguised his own voice, something he had learnt to do a long time ago: he imitated the nightingale, the parrot, the oriole and the woodland birds.)

20 See the articles fontaine, source and verger in the Répertoire appended to the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade

edition (Tristan et Yseut: les premières versions européennes, p. 1636 and pp. 1696–7). See also M. Lazar, Amour courtois et fin’amors dans la littérature du XIIe siècle (Paris, 1964), pp. 123–4, and A. Guerreau-Jalabert, ‘Lovers’ rendez-vous in garden’, in Index des motifs narratifs dans les romans arthuriens français en vers (XIIe et XIIIe siècles), Publications romanes et françaises 202 (Geneva, 1992), p. 189.

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The birdsong is a signal, the significance of which is known only to Iseut, in much the same way as she alone is alert to the bastun in the Chèvrefeuille. As Iseut muses on her situation, she reflects on the fact that Tristan shares with her just the one life, but that, while her body remains with her, her heart is with Tristan: Nostre vie est dreit commune, Mes cele part ki est la fors Ai plus chere que li mien cors. Poi prisereie ceste de ça, Si cele part perist de la. (504–08) (Our life is one, but the part which is outside of me is more dear to me than my own body. I would place no value on this, if the other were to perish.)

It goes almost without saying that the theme of the heart separated from the body of the loved one is a well-known one, finding notable expression in Chrétien de Troyes’s Cligès, which, significantly enough, is often regarded as a response to the Tristan story in its final emphasis on the impropriety of sharing one’s body with one man and loving another.22 Notwithstanding these obvious reminiscences, the opening passages are by no means uniformly predictable. Before the action proper begins and Iseut sets out to meet her lover, a long development (543–88) on the sources and significance of gelus is introduced. The narrative flow is interrupted, as the lover relates gelus to gelee, ‘frost’: Ki me demande de ço nom E si en volt oïr raisun, Pur quei seit cil nomee gelus Ke pur sa femme est envius E si la guarde estreitement De ome estrange e de parent, La dreite reisun si orrez Pur quei gelus est apellez: Gelus est nomee de gelee. (543–51) (If anybody wants to know how the jealous man got his name, he who is obsessed with his wife and guards her closely away from outsiders and relatives, this is the reason why he is so called: jealous comes from gelee.)

The passage could be said to further the lover’s purpose in that the lady is presumably married herself and suffering from the over-zealous control of her husband, a gelus of the kind disparaged in this passage. It also, of course, lends justification to Iseut’s behaviour in this anecdote as she slips, literally and metaphorically, from her

21 Tristan et Yseut: les premières versions européennes, p. 213. 22 A. Fourrier writes thus of the relationship between Cligès and the Tristan story (Le Courant réaliste

dans le roman courtois en France au moyen-âge (Paris, 1960), p. 177: ‘Son Cligès ne représente point un Anti-Tristan plus moral que l’autre, mais plûtot un Super-Tristan, en ce sens que, lavant, pour ainsi dire, le corps d’Isolt de sa souillure conjugale, il veut que sa Fénice agisse comme le Tristan de Thomas et contrairement à son Isolt, qu’elle se réserve à son seul amant toute entière, cœur et corps.’ See also L. Polak, Chrétien de Troyes: Cligés, Critical Guides to French Texts 23 (London, 1982), pp. 50–69.

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59

husband’s grasp. One can only believe that this passage is the invention of our author (indeed, one might easily take the me of line 543 as referring to the author), for it is difficult to believe that it formed part of any pre-existing short Tristan tale which might be at the source of our Tristan Rossignol anecdote. But it does fit in well with the Donnei des amants as a whole: it represents a kind of exemplum within an exemplum, a feature we have seen already, and it is associated in our minds, as we again have already noted, with the references to the vilein and the gelus at the beginning of the text. At the same time it does break up the progress of the narrative. The action proper seems to be beginning as Iseut leaves the marital bed and makes her way through her guards, all of whom are fortunately asleep on this occasion: En un mantel forré de gris Alee se est, covert le vis, E par les chevalers trespasce Dunt ad leinz une grant masse.

(519–22)

(She has gone off, her face hidden, in a coat lined with grey fur, and passes through the knights of which there are a great number there.)

However, after the gelus excursus, the action has to make a new start: ‘Mes cele nuit, quant fu levé,/ Par mi les guaiturs est alee’ (591–2). The communal bedchamber suggested here is, like the initial garden setting, reminiscent of a location in Beroul: in the piège de la farine episode Tristan performs a set of mighty leaps, to and from the bed of Iseut.23 As on that occasion, the dwarf is involved, alerted when the queen makes a sound as she attempts to open the door: Belement vint ci que a l’us, E quant la barre trait sus, Li anelez un poi sona, E li culvers neim s’eveilla: Esgarde de totes parz Cum fel culvert de males ars.

(593–8)

(She cleverly made her way to the door, and when she draws back the bar the chain made a little sound which awoke the horrible dwarf: he looks all around him, this wicked monster of spiteful cunning.)

Dwarves rarely get a good press in Arthurian romance. In Beroul, he regularly suffers character assassination, and notably in the piège de la farine scene: Ha! or oiez qel traïson Et con faite seducion A dit au roi cil nain Frocin! Dehé aient tuit cil devin! Qui porpensa tel felonie Con fist cist nain, qui Dex maudie?

(643–8)24

23 See Tristan et Yseut: les premières versions européennes, pp. 21–2. 24 Tristan et Yseut: les premières versions européennes, p. 20.

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(Ah! Now hear what a treacherous and deceitful act this dwarf Frocin proposed to the king! Damned be all such magicians! Who ever thought of such a foul deed as did this dwarf? May God curse him!)

But, contrary to what happens in the Beroul episode, here the dwarf gets his comeuppance. When he challenges Iseut, she strikes him in anger and removes four of his teeth: Ysoud en ad al quer irrur: La palme leve par vigur. E pus tele buffe al neim dona Ke quatre denz li eslocha. (611–14) (Iseut felt very angry: she raises her hand energetically. And then dealt the dwarf such a blow that she dislodged four of his teeth.)

This may be unexpected, but the rest of the treatment of the dwarf falls into a familiar pattern. He is termed a toad (‘le crapouz’, l. 619) and is then characteristically misjudged by King Mark who, as in the first episode in the Beroul fragment,25 refuses to believe that the dwarf has told anything approaching the truth: Li reis respunt e si li dit: «Tais tei, wicard, que Deu te aït! Quant dame Ysoud est si hardie. Ben sai n’ad ren de folie. (633–6) (The king replies saying to him: ‘Silence, rogue, may God help you! Since my lady Iseut is acting so boldly I know that nothing improper is going on.)

Again, as in the first Beroul episode, the queen is granted as a consequence of this incident greater freedom than hitherto: ‘Ceo peise mei ke plusurs feiz/ Trop l’avum tenu en destreiz’ (643–4). The story then follows its predictable course. Iseut is able to leave and meet up with Tristan and events have a happy ending: Meinent lur joie et lur deduit Mut grant pece de la nuit: Meinent lor joie et lur amurs Mal gré le neim e les guaiturs.

(653–6)

(They abandon themselves to joy and pleasure for a great part of the night: they abandon themselves to joy and love in spite of the dwarf and the guards.)

The ending could hardly be more conventional, except that it is not accompanied in this variation by the pain of parting. The emphasis is on deduit and especially upon joie, those pre-eminently courtly sentiments which find an echo in other Tristan texts. In the Oxford Folie, for example, we read at the end: Tele joi en ad de sun ami Ke ele ad e tent dejuste li Ke ele ne set cument cuntenir. 25 See Tristan et Yseut: les premières versions européennes, p. 10.

TRISTAN ROSSIGNOL: THE DEVELOPMENT OF A TEXT

Tristran en est joius e lez: Mut set ben ke il est herbigez.

61

(989–91, 997–8)26

(She has so much joy from her lover, whom she has and holds close to her, that she does not know how to contain herself . . . Tristan is joyful and delighted: he knows he has found a comfortable resting-place.)

Similarly, in the Thomas fragments, a moment of reconciliation is described in characteristic vocabulary: Acordent sei par grant amur, E puis confortent lur dolur. Tristran a Ysolt se deduit. (2147–9)27 (They are reconciled in a great show of love and then seek consolation for their sorrows. Tristan finds pleasure with Iseut.)

If one reviews, then, the material contained in the Tristan Rossignol section of the Donnei des Amants, one has the impression of a combination of the old and the new. We find the old in the presentation of familiar motifs, the garden setting, King Mark’s misjudgement of the situation, and in the presence of familiar characters, such as the unnamed dwarf. But we are also very conscious of the presence of the new. Roughly a quarter of the lines in the Tristan Rossignol are devoted to the excursus on gelus, and this passage justifies its existence, not because it is a regular theme in the Tristan story, but because it links up with references to the vilein and to the gelus earlier in the framework narrative. The incident itself, notwithstanding the fact that many of its individual components have parallels elsewhere, is essentially new in that these components are deployed in a novel combination. In contrast with other material imported into the Donnei des amants, there is no evidence that the author had here a ready-made tale on which to draw. Are we thus in the presence of an invented episode, inspired certainly by pre-existing material, but an original creation all the same? It must be admitted that the lover suggests, as he introduces the story, that the lady is familiar with it already: Oi! bele, poi vus sovent E relement en memorie tent Quele chose Ysoud fit pur Tristrant.

(453–5)

(Oh! my lady, you hardly seem to recall or to remember properly what Iseut did for Tristan.)

Keith Busby rightly remarks that ‘the lover presents the Tristan Rossignol story as if it were something his lady ought to know’.28 The emphasis here is correct. The story has to be presented as if it were well known if it is to fulfil its function as an exemplum and stand alongside other imported material such as the Conte de l’oiselet: for rhetorical purposes it must be presented as if it shares the same status. 26 Tristan et Yseut: les premières versions européennes, p. 243. 27 Tristan et Yseut: les premières versions européennes, p. 181. 28 ‘The Donnei des Amants and Courtly Tradition’, 188.

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The other episodic poems have similar calls to the memory, the Folie Tristan d’Oxford being an obvious case in point. But no anecdote in the relatively extended Oxford Folie enjoys the same amplitude as the Tristan Rossignol reference here. The allusions in the Oxford Folie are to familiar, pre-existing episodes; a briefer reference is all that is needed to stimulate Iseut’s memory and simultaneously to allow the audience the thrill of recognition. Similarly, before the Tristan Rossignol passage begins, the lover can allude briefly to the threat to Iseut of being burnt to death. We quote the relevant lines again: Cum fit Ysoud la fin[e] amie, Ke fu mene[e] pur ardeir. Ben en avez oï le veir, Pur sun ami qui tant ama, Mès Deus mut tost la delivra. (414–18) (. . . as did Iseut the loyal lady, who was led out to be burnt – you have heard the truth about this – for her friend whom she loved so much, but God very quickly freed her.)

But here the story must be told in toto, for it is being told for the very first time: only now is its truth, its authenticity, ‘le veir’, being created. The episode merits its modern title: what is memorable about the tale is the way in which Tristan summons Iseut by imitating the song of the birds and of the nightingale in particular. On this mythic skill the author has built a full anecdote, forming the body of his text from melding together generally familiar Tristan motifs. In a sense, what we have here is one culture feeding and then supplanting another. The stimulus for the tale comes from an older tradition, one which ascribes to the hero a special range of skills. But the author of the tale then draws upon a literary culture to flesh out his account and to lend to the Tristan Rossignol story its particular identity. Perhaps, rather than assume that all the short Tristan poems have a similar provenance, we need to be a little more discerning and to distinguish between those which can lay claim to considerable ancestry and those which are of more recent inspiration.

5 What’s in a Name? Arthurian Name-Dropping in the Roman de Waldef ROSALIND FIELD

The apparently random use of Arthurian names for characters in the Anglo-Norman Roman de Waldef may be a deliberately negative response to the Matter of Britain. Any reader, medieval or modern, of the Anglo-Norman Roman de Waldef, could be disoriented by the apparently random occurrence of names from disparate traditions.1 Amongst the names redolent of earlier English tradition (Bede, Edwin, Erkenwald, Hereward) are several Arthurian ones – Uther, Merlin, Hoel, Morgan and Morderet. The editor Holden’s understandably impatient dismissal of this – ‘banalité . . . peut être due au hasard’2 suggests a carelessness, even ignorance, on the part of an author requiring a cast-list of hundreds. However, I would suggest that this judgement be reconsidered in the light of recent work on the purposes and the reception of the dominant British history of Geoffrey and Wace in twelfth-century England.3 Waldef is a long, multi-layered narrative, eclectic to a fault but conspicuously well-informed of contemporary narrative developments.4 Its rambling account of factional wars between the petty kingdoms of an imagined pre-Conquest England has at first sight little to do with the carefully structured providential history of Geoffrey and his followers. Indeed, the Anglo-Norman romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries can be seen to distance themselves from the contemporary fashion for Arthurian material, offering what scholarship would later identify as a Matter of England legendary history as an alternative to the Matter of Britain. There is no comparable use of Arthurian names in other insular romances.

1 2 3

4

Le Roman de Waldef, ed. A.J. Holden, Bibliotheca Bodmeriana 5 (Geneva, 1984). Le Roman de Waldef, p. 28. R. Rees Davies, The Matter of Britain and the Matter of England (Oxford, 1996); John D. Niles, ‘The Wasteland of Loegria: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Reinvention of the Anglo-Saxon Past’, in Reinventing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. William F. Gentrup, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 1 (Turnhout, 1998), 1–18; John Gillingham, ‘The Context and Purposes of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain’, in The English in the Twelfth Century (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 9–40. Rosalind Field, ‘Waldef and the Matter of/with England’, in Medieval Insular Romance: Translation and Innovation, ed. Judith Weiss et al. (Cambridge, UK, 2000), pp. 25–39.

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The simplest explanation for the inappropriate use of familiar names – a provincial ignorance of British history, at least as presented by Wace – can be discounted. The prologue to Waldef cites ‘le bruit’ as the source of British history (18 and 47), and it is from Wace that it derives its emphatic introductory reference to the contribution of Androgeus of Kent to the final success of the conquest of Julius Caesar (17). As Holden points out, this reference to the Androgeus episode in Wace5 identifies the likely model for two central episodes in Waldef featuring accidental death.6 Following Wace (Brut 3840), Waldef refers to Caesar as ‘emperere’ (9), and the imperial theme is later echoed in the handful of references to Arthur himself, who is mentioned five times in the poem’s 22000 lines. Arthur may be presented as a figure of exemplary stature, a benchmark for the more modern times of ‘English’ history, so that a princess is the most beautiful since the time of Arthur (18148), but as this formula is repeated (21776) the implication is that the Arthurian standard has indeed been surpassed. More significantly, Arthur is cited as an exemplary figure not by the author, nor by his main protagonist, but by the ambitious, empire-building Guiac, Waldef’s son, who has his own designs on the Roman Empire, an ambition that gains him a divine rebuke.7 Arthur is thus a shadowy figure in the background, suggestive of conquest and empire in a text which is arguably suspicious of both. The misuse of Arthurian names also raises intriguing questions about the reception of Arthurian material. Several names – Hoel, Morgan, Morderet – are attached to minor figures, and may indeed be no more than the equivalent of a modern novelist thumbing through the telephone directory. However there are two prominent figures sporting resounding Arthurian names – Uther (Uthier, Utier) king of London, and his crony Merlin, king of Hertford (in the inflationary politics of this text, every county boasts a king). It seems unlikely that these names could exist free of their Arthurian associations for an audience such as that addressed by Waldef. As actors in the drama of Waldef’s career, these are two of his earliest and most stubborn opponents, representing the centralizing ambitions of London and its satellite kingdoms, at continual warfare with, and finally defeated by, Waldef of Attleborough and his allies. Such negative casting of characters with Arthurian names, combined with the attitude noted towards Arthur himself, suggests that the Waldef author has an agenda consistent with the tendency of Anglo-Norman romance to resist centralized royal power and its legendary icons. If we discount ignorance of Arthurian material on the part of the author and audience of Waldef, we are left with the likelihood that this mischievous manipulation of Arthurian names is part of a larger pattern of opposition between the Matter of England and the Matter of Britain as literary histories expressing the power tensions inherent in the alternative self-images of post-Conquest England.

5 6 7

Wace’s Roman de Brut: A History of the British, ed. and trans. Judith Weiss (Exeter, 1999), 3991–4834. Le Roman de Waldef, p. 28. Le Roman de Waldef, 15015, 17663.

6 The Enigma of the Prose Yvain NORRIS LACY

MS 444D in the National Library of Wales is known as the Prose Yvain but consists of seven apparently unrelated Arthurian episodes. The only previous studies of the manuscript have traced the sources of several of the episodes (e.g., Chrétien de Troyes, the Prose Tristan) but have identified no organizing or connecting principle. A re-examination, however, authorizes speculation that the episodes preserved in 444D may have been the raw material for an Arthurian cycle that was, to the best of our knowledge, never realized. Manuscript 444D in the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, preserves an anonymous fourteenth-century composition known as the Prose Yvain,1 which is not, as the title might suggest, a prosification of Chrétien’s romance concerning Yvain. MS 444D has never been edited, although a 1929 Swansea M.A. thesis by Meta McRitchie includes a flawed transcription.2 Apart from that thesis (and several very brief notices or descriptions), the only publications devoted to this work, to my knowledge, are two short articles, one by Lynette Muir in Romania in 1964, the other a piece I contributed to the Mélanges for Jean-Claude Faucon.3 I have also undertaken an edition of the text. The manuscript itself is decidedly unprepossessing, written in a somewhat awkward hand on mediocre vellum with a good many stains and holes. More important, it lacks eleven of the numbered sixty-five folios (fols. 2–3, 6–8, 13–15, 22–23, 30). The codex begins with a historiated initial and contains twenty crudely executed miniatures. The Prose Yvain comprises seven independent episodes, at least three of them evident reworkings of portions of late twelfth- and thirteenth-century texts known to us,4 and it 1

2 3

4

The text opens with the rubric, ‘Ceste livre est le livre de monseigneur Yz [=Yvain] et parole de maint buen chevaliers’, suggesting that the entire codex constituted the ‘livre de monseigneur Yz’. Although it is not impossible that this title was intended to refer only to the first episode, no title is assigned to any of the other episodes, and ‘livre’ is a curious term to apply to a narrative as brief as the Yvain sequence. McRitchie’s title is ‘A Study of an Hitherto Unconsidered Yvain Manuscript. National Library of Wales. Add. Ms. 444–D (Williams Ms. 530)’. Lynette Muir, ‘A Reappraisal of the Prose Yvain’, Romania 85 (1964): 355–65; Norris J. Lacy, ‘Perceval’s Sister in the Prose Yvain’, in Guerres, voyages et quêtes au Moyen Age: Mélanges offerts à Jean-Claude Faucon, ed. A. Labbé, D. Lacroix, and D. Quéruel (Paris, 2000), pp. 255–63. McRitchie says four (nos. 1, 2, 4, 7), though the precise details of the last one do not correspond to those of any known version of the Prose Tristan, from which McRitchie believes it descends via an intermediary redaction.

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therefore offers, in addition to modest intrinsic interest, some revealing insight into the fourteenth-century adaptation of earlier compositions.5 In this essay, I concentrate principally on the three episodes for which we have obvious analogues: the first, second, and fourth. I will conclude with general observations about this strange composition – or group of compositions. Initially, though, because the work is known to very few medievalists, a brief census of the seven episodes provides a proper context for my discussion. The seven are: (1) Yvain and his lion; (2) Perceval’s sister giving her blood and her life to save a leprous woman; (3) a story of Lancelot and Palamedes, who interrupt a dispute in order to rescue Gaheriet from his captor; (4) the central episode (of which I will have more to say below) drawn from Li Chevaliers as deus espees but concentrating on Gauvain; (5) another liberation of Gaheriet (who obviously has a gift for getting captured); he is saved by the Chevalier a la cotte mal taillé (Brunor), who then joins forces with other knights to liberate Yvain; (6) an episode in which Lancelot rescues Tristan, after which the two defeat two giants and liberate their captives; and finally (7) an incomplete episode involving Tristan, Yzeut aux blanches mains, and Kahedin, who find themselves imprisoned (by a giant) in a valley from which no one can escape. The codex – an exceedingly odd thematic stew – breaks off during a battle between the knights of Logres and those of Norgales. The work opens, as noted, with a treatment of the Knight with the Lion. A brief summary is required here, since the episode differs in a number of ways from the events in Chrétien de Troyes’s romance. In the earlier work, Yvain comes upon a lion and serpent (or, here, a dragon) that are fighting. He decides to kill both animals. After destroying the dragon, he prepares to dispatch the lion, but surprisingly, it bows before him. Deciding to spare it, Yvain turns and rides away, only to have it follow him. He again prepares to attack the animal, but it again shows humility, and the two of them join forces. Here occurs the first of the several very frustrating lacunae in the manuscript. Following it, a lady thanks Yvain for saving her nephews from a knight named Argondres le Ros. Eventually Argondres’s brother Sadoc and his men attack Yvain and the animal, but are defeated by them. Following the battle, man and lion return to Camelot, where Arthur has their adventures recorded in writing. Anyone familiar with Chrétien’s work will have recognized the first part of this account,6 but surely not the rest, for the precise details are found nowhere else.7 5

6

7

We cannot know with certainty, of course, whether the redactor drew directly from his ultimate sources or whether, as both McRitchie and Muir believe, from an intermediate adaptation. My reference to his use of his sources, though it may imply direct descent, is purely a matter of convenience. I believe that Muir is correct in her assumption that the Yvain derives from a now lost form of the Rusticien-Guiron tradition. She points out (‘Reappraisal’, 362) that forty-eight of the forty-nine characters named in the Prose Yvain also occur in the Rusticien-Guiron, but that the episodes do not necessarily agree with events in the Yvain. But even if the narrative of Yvain’s initial encounter with the lion is familiar to us all, there are alterations, not only in small details but also in the conception of the animal’s role. Insofar as we can discern – since the lacuna has deprived us of at least one episode involving the lion – there is no reflection here of the insistence, as in Chrétien, that the lion be excluded from battles. It appears that the author has picked up from Chrétien the kernel of the story but has then used the lion simply as an effective and impressively ferocious military ally. McRitchie (‘Study’, pp. 120–1), concerned with identifying sources wherever possible, points out that characters named Argondres are found in the Prose Lancelot and the Prose Tristan, but they are

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Following another lacuna, we find that the second episode is already in progress. It is the familiar story of Perceval’s sister, who, in the Queste del saint Graal, charitably sacrifices her blood and thus her life to cure another woman of leprosy. This is the episode that I earlier treated briefly in writing (see n. 3), and I will limit myself here to only three points. The first is that the Prose Yvain curiously de-emphasizes Perceval’s sister and her sacrifice to concentrate more squarely on the leprous woman and her reactions. Second, the Yvain deletes references to the Grail and to the holy city of Sarras, which are included in the corresponding portion of the Queste. Thus, if we did not know the story from the Queste (or from the Prose Tristan or other works in which versions of it also occur8), there would be nothing other than the presence of Perceval and Galahad to relate this episode to Grail material. And third, the fact that we do know the earlier work likely leads us to assume and involuntarily provide a Grail context for the later version, a phenomenon that I have elsewhere called ‘intertextual contamination’,9 by which I mean an unavoidable psychological amplification realized by the reader. In both episodes mentioned thus far, we can observe changes of narrative fact and focus. Those modifications have the effect of de-emphasizing symbolism and consequently limiting the texts to the straightforward narration of event. There are also changes in motivation, in the case of Yvain’s reason for killing the dragon before the lion10 and especially in the second episode, where primary emphasis is on the recipient, not the giver, of blood. Of the seven episodes transmitted in 444D, the most elaborate and longest (fols. 18v–34v) is the fourth, an analogue of an extended thematic development known to us through the thirteenth-century romance Li Chevaliers as deus espees or conceivably from an intermediary or independent source. The narrative offered by the seventeen folios devoted to this episode in the Prose Yvain can be indicated in a few sentences. Burian wishes to marry a lady whose mortal enemy, she says, is Gauvain. Finding Gauvain unarmed, Burian attacks and seriously wounds him and returns to assert conjugal claims. The woman agrees to marry him if Gauvain is not found alive within forty days. Of course, Gauvain reaches her castle in time and defeats Burian but then rejects a marriage proposal from the lady and rides away. The most striking fact about this sequence of events, at least to readers familiar with the Chevaliers as deus espees, is the absence of the eponymous hero of that romance. In the earlier text, the adventures of Gauvain are interlaced with those of the Knight with Two Swords, and they eventually converge; in fact, the knights even do battle with each other before becoming allies and fast friends. In the Prose Yvain, since the absence of the Knight with Two Swords forces a modification, the battle is between Gauvain and Yvain. The redactor of the romance has ‘unlaced’ the episodes

defeated by Lancelot and Perceval, respectively. Characters named Sadoc appear in the Tristan, but none is the brother of Argondres. Obviously, the author has blended Yvain material descended from Chrétien with episodes (or at least characters) drawn from other texts or traditions. 8 Those include the Spanish and Portuguese Demandas; see Muir, ‘Reappraisal’, 360, n. 3. 9 In my ‘Perceval’s Sister’, p. 258. See above, n. 3. 10 In the Prose Yvain, the hero reasons that it will be easier to kill the dragon while it is dealing with the lion than when it is unoccupied; conversely, the lion, if victorious, would be easier to dispatch after the battle than would the dragon. Yvain is simply playing the odds. (In Chrétien, Yvain had chosen to attack the serpent because it was venomous and evil.)

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and retained only certain of those that involve Gauvain. He (or his source) has thus created a brief but self-contained Gauvain narrative, far less complex and less intricate, yet curiously more unified, than the original. There are a good number of other differences between the Prose Yvain and the corresponding passages from the Chevaliers as deus espees. Few of them are substantial, though several appear designed to emphasize the worth of Gauvain and the ignominy of his opponent. Three brief examples will suffice. In the Chevaliers as deus espees, Brien, defeated by Gauvain, is sent to Arthur’s court (following a familiar Arthurian tradition). Having given there an account of his defeat, Brien is treated with extreme courtesy and is henceforth known only as the ‘handsome prisoner’ (‘biel prison’). In the Yvain, by contrast, the defeated Burian, who had viciously attacked an unarmed Gauvain, simply rides away and disappears, humiliated and angry. On the face of it, this could be part of an effort to de-emphasize the courtly atmosphere of the text in general, but it also appears to represent an attempt to rationalize the text: surely a man so villainous and cowardly as to assault an unarmed knight, and especially a knight as revered at court as Gauvain is, should not be admired and considered courtly, noble, and worthy of respect in Arthur’s realm. In the earlier romance, Brien claims to have killed Gauvain, and his word is accepted without question. In the Prose Yvain the lady agrees to marry Burian in forty days unless in that time Gauvain is found to be alive. This addition to the Yvain suggests either that the lady is simply temporizing or that she seriously doubts that Burian could have killed Arthur’s greatest knight. In either case, the result is to exalt Gauvain and further diminish his opponent, whose word cannot be accepted. The Chevaliers as deus espees includes several romantic interludes involving Gauvain. They are absent from the Yvain but, by way of compensation, the prose text offers a curious episode lacking in the verse. After Gauvain defeats Burian, the lady for whose hand Burian was fighting proposes marriage to Gauvain. Of course, most offers that Gauvain might receive from a woman are offers that he cannot refuse, but a marriage proposal is a glaring exception. He declines her offer of matrimony, but he gives a curious excuse: he is already married (‘. . . je ne puis car je sui mariés’, 31v). Although it is not impossible that the redactor of this work (or of an intermediate source between Li Chevaliers as deus espees and the Prose Yvain) has remade Gauvain as a married man, we have no indication of that fact, and it would be highly unusual in a French text.11 This pretext, if that is what it is, may serve as a courteous way of declining her offer instead of rejecting her outright. If indeed it was intended to represent kindness and diplomacy on his part, it goes far beyond the standard rejection formula: ‘I would willingly give you my heart if it were mine to give.’ In any event, it must have been surprising and perhaps even comical to readers familiar with the Gallic Gauvain, traditionally the embodiment of male commitment 11 It is not inconceivable that he is married, though textual evidence is lacking. There are of course

instances of a married Gawain, but they tend to occur in literatures other than French, e.g., in Wirnt von Grafenberg’s Wigalois and in some settings of the Loathly Lady theme, such as the fifteenth-century The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell. Other texts, including French ones, give Gawain a son, but often without indicating whether he was married. For example, Renaut de Beaujeu’s Le Bel Inconnu makes the title character the son of Gauvain and of the fairy Blancemal, but with no suggestion that the parents were married. (Wigalois is related to Le Bel Inconnu, but Gawein’s wedded status in the German work may well be Wirnt’s innovation.)

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phobia. But the lady is not left without a husband, because Arthur gives her a consolation prize: Agloval, the brother of Perceval (34r). That scene concludes the folios related to the Chevaliers as deus espees. The Prose Yvain offers us a series of mostly brief narratives, juxtaposed rather than interwoven, and pivoting on the longer and quite unified Gauvain sequence that stands at the centre of the work. Furthermore, as I suggested, readers who are aware of the episodes’ sources cannot help but supply the missing context and import into the text questions, if not answers, about the selection and transformation of the Prose Yvain material. In the process, it may perplex us to find an Yvain without a fountain, a bride, or a crisis; Perceval’s sister without a Grail anywhere in view; Gauvain without the Knight with Two Swords who was alternately his enemy and his ally. This extraction of episodes and their juxtaposition lead us to seek at least a very general principle to explain the choice of contents. To consider just the three episodes discussed here – Yvain’s rescue of the lion and later victory over opponents, Perceval’s sister making a heroic sacrifice, and Gauvain’s more complex demonstration of his chivalric distinction – we might infer at most that the intent was to select or extrapolate from longer compositions a few examples of excellence, moral or chivalric, and to offer them to readers almost as exempla or specula. But is there a further principle of design? Even if not, that absence itself would reveal something about the implied literary tastes of a later audience. We are accustomed, in general, to thinking of later French romance as impressive for the dimensions of texts, which may moreover be combined with yet other texts to produce lengthy compilations. In some instances, the basic compositional principle of compilations and of other late romances appears to be accumulation, with or without interlace. However, the Prose Yvain is sui generis, and a reading suggests that its redactor may have collected some pre-existing narrative units (and perhaps composed others) as the potential raw material for an unrealized cycle or compilation. In partial support of that contention is the redactor’s use of the standard interlace formula, beginning or concluding some sections by the statement that he is leaving off this material for the present or is now turning to another subject.12 However, in what we have of this work he never returns to the material to complete the interlace. Lynette Muir contends that the episodes exhibit ‘no overall pattern or sequence’.13 To an extent, her assessment must stand at present: there appears to be no self-evident and prominent unifying principle. However, I am not persuaded that this manuscript is merely a random gathering of discrete episodes. In addition to a rudimentary structuring effort based on doubling and repetition – giants as captors, wounds inflicted on Gauvain, repeated captures of the same knight – the redactor offers episodes that focus centrally on a capture and a rescue. The second episode, with Perceval’s sister, admittedly recounts a cure rather than

12 But instead of referring to his authority as li contes (as in the Vulgate and elsewhere), he refers to le

maistre, a reference that is also characteristic of Rusticien de Pise, a likely source for the Prose Yvain, according to Muri, ‘Reappraisal’, 363–4. 13 Muir, ‘Reappraisal’, 356. She does observe, though (365), that the episodes tend to consist of a fight, a rescue, one or more additional battles, and a return to Camelot.

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a rescue, and we cannot of course speculate that the contents of the missing folios of that episode might provide more precise parallels with other scenes. Apart from that episode, the remaining ones offer some striking similarities. In the first one Yvain not only saves the lion but also liberates the captives of Argondres. (The narrative of that liberation disappeared with folios 2–3, but reference to the event is explicit.) In episode 3, Palamedes has captured a young woman, but before Lancelot can free her through combat, they join forces, along with Gauvain and Hector, to liberate Gaheriet. In the process, Gauvain is seriously wounded, as he will be in the following (fourth) episode as well. In the fifth episode, Gaheriet is again captured and is liberated by Brunor. Soon after, it is learned that Yvain has been captured, and a group of knights rescue him. In episode 6, Tristan is a prisoner and is liberated by Lancelot; the two of them then liberate other prisoners. In the last episode, Tristan, his wife Yzeut aux blanches mains, and Kahedin find themselves captive and must do battle to free themselves.14 If the overall impression is, as I suggested, that the author has selected depictions of heroic rescue by Yvain, Gauvain, Lancelot, Tristan, and others, it is difficult to explain a fascinating discussion in episode 5. During a lull in the action, the knights debate the relative merits of Uther’s generation and Arthur’s (fols. 39r–40r). Speaking first, Gaheriet praises Uther’s knights over Arthur’s. To refute him, Galinans lists some of Lancelot’s accomplishments and praises Tristan and Gauvain for their feats and fame. But Gaheriet then offers a counter-example to prove his point, relating an instance in which a knight of the older generation, Sir Sigurans le Brun, ‘fu quintaine’ at a tournament: he served as the quintain, the target or jousting dummy, for all the knights there; and Lancelot, considered the best in the world (or at least in the younger generation), struck him three times but could not unhorse him. Gaheriet goes on to assert that, remarkable as that was, even Sigurans was not as great as Guiron li Cortois, Meliadus, and other representatives of the older generation. After further discussion, all agree that Uther’s generation was indeed superior. The conclusion that Arthur’s knights are inferior to their forebears is underlined by the author’s frequent emphasis on the fathers from whom Arthur’s men are descended.15 Of course, the reference to genealogy is a venerable commonplace, but traditionally, such references emphasized the distinguished bloodline in order to establish the excellence of the descendants. Here, however, it acquires a different tonality when accompanied by an explicit acknowledgment that the earlier generation surpassed the later. Here the encomium of an earlier generation implies instead the decline of chivalry, and that implication is at variance with the text’s glorification of Gauvain, Lancelot, and the others. The uncomfortable tension between these two tendencies – the simultaneous exaltation and diminishing of Arthur’s knights – is perplexing, and it is difficult to understand how, if at all, that tension might be resolved without the excision of the discussion of chivalric excellence. Clearly, factual and thematic conflicts have not been harmoniously reconciled; at the same time, thematic similarities or continuities among the otherwise disparate episodes imply some degree of systematic selection. 14 However, their captor, a giant obviously unschooled in the principles of chivalric fair play, requires the

knights of Logres to use wooden swords. 15 This emphasis was pointed out by Muir, ‘Reappraisal’, 364.

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The remaining disparities, along with the vestigial interlace formulas, may provide some support for my earlier – and very tentative – speculation that this codex transmits undigested material intended for revision and that it exhibits the kind of rationalization typical of later texts. But on the other hand, even the customary rationalizing tendency of later adaptors does not resolve every contradiction, and prudence militates against confident conclusions. Absent such conclusions, we are left with a moral and chivalric florilegium that a capable redactor might have been able to rework into a superficially random but thematically unified composite. If that was ever done, the result apparently has not survived. But the text we have, though by no means a neglected masterpiece, is not quite the pile of literary rubble that it may first appear to be.16 In any event, the text is surely worth studying for the evidence it provides concerning late medieval adaptation of earlier works and for the curious embrace of disjointure and simple juxtaposition that make it almost a miscellany – but a miscellany that exhibits just enough thematic linkage to imply a rudimentary plan. We cannot know, of course, what it might have become under other circumstances, but as it stands, it offers tantalizing hints of a particular stage in late-medieval literary adaptation. We may speculate at most that the raw materials for a compilation seem to have been gathered and arranged, but in MS 444D the process of recasting those materials and assembling them into a cohesive text, if that was indeed the redactor’s intent, has barely begun.

16 My estimate of the work is thus slightly more charitable than is Muir’s; she characterized the author (at

least of the immediate source of the manuscript) as ‘a very poor writer’ (‘Reappraisal’, 365).

7 Dreams and Visions in the Perlesvaus ANDREA M.L. WILLIAMS

In the Perlesvaus, characters’ dreams and visions reveal the extent of their ability to interpret their adventures, and show how thematic repetitions shape narrative structure. The Perlesvaus is substantial1 and displays a highly complex structure, both in broad terms of narrative interlace (whereby the tale follows different strands, thus charting the progress of various knights on the Quest) and in terms of what William Nitze and Norris Lacy have described as linking and analogy, forms of interlace which operate at the level of detail and involve groups of or individual figural elements within and across episodes.2 Repetitions and variations on a theme provide the building-blocks for this romance, as they do for others of the period.3 The adventures experienced by the knights have symbolic significance related to their progress (or lack thereof) on the Quest. In fact, the aventures encountered by the characters are tests of their spiritual worth, and, as such, are to a greater or lesser degree manifestations of the merveilleux, often with specifically Christian overtones.4 Some adventures appear, at first sight, to consist of non-figural elements or events; however, even these adventures can be interpreted retrospectively as having figural significance.5 I propose to approach the problem of relating metaphor and structure in the Perlesvaus initially by examining those adventures in which the merveilleux is clearly present, and such episodes can be sub-divided into several

1

2 3

4

5

Perlesvaus, ed. William A. Nitze and T. Atkinson Jenkins, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1932–37; repr. New York, 1972); all page references below are to this modern edition which runs to over 400 pages, compared, for instance, to around 280 pages for Albert Pauphilet, ed., Queste del Saint Graal, CMFA (Paris, 1923, repr. 1984). Perlesvaus II, 165–9; N.J. Lacy: ‘Linking in the Perlesvaus’ in Contemporary Readings of Medieval Literature, ed. G. Merman, Michigan Romance Studies 8 (Ann Arbor, 1989), pp. 169–78. See E.J. Burns, Arthurian Fictions: Rereading the Vulgate Cycle (Columbus, 1985), pp. 139–40; and Andrea M.L. Williams, The Adventures of the Holy Grail: a Study of La Queste del Saint Graal (Oxford, 2001), p. 186. In the case of La Queste del Saint Graal, the very title given by the manuscripts, ‘Les Aventures del Saint Graal’ (my italics) reflects the centrality of the concept. For further discussion of this point, see A.Pauphilet, Études sur la Queste del Saint Graal (1921; repr. Paris, 1980, p. 26; E. Baumgartner, L’Arbre et le pain: Étude sur la Queste del Saint Graal (Paris, 1981), p. 52; Andrea M.L. Williams, The Adventures of the Holy Grail, pp. 105–6. For instance, in an episode describing a combat between human knights, the defeated character may later be revealed as being less advanced on the quest for salvation than his victorious opponent.

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categories: illusions; dreams and visions; sounds (especially Voices) and odours. Note that these are all sensory experiences. In the twelfth century John of Salisbury (c.1120–80), following Jerome, defined a hierarchy of the senses, according to which touch and taste are the basest and hearing is the highest, with smell and sight in between.6 Applying this hierarchy to manifestations of the Divine in the Grail romances gives us a sliding scale whereby provision of nourishment is at the lowest level, followed by odours (of sanctity or corruption),7 then visions, and finally Voices (plus sound effects such as claps of thunder) at the top.8 The narrative of the Perlesvaus is entirely set within the framework of the highest manifestation of the Divine: in the opening paragraph the anonymous author declares the text to have been dictated by ‘la voix d’un angle’.9 In the Grail romances (and the Perlesvaus is no exception), Voices usually give the characters unequivocal instructions, or are used (depending on whether they are described as harmonious or cacophonic) to indicate the presence of angelic or demonic beings. From the perspective of narrative structure, they do not tend to play a central role, but, given the hierarchy described above, it seems important at this stage to justify an approach to a medieval Grail romance involving an analysis of the structural role played in the text by sensory experiences of a visual nature, that is, by dreams and visions. The concept of understanding the significance of the Grail involves an attempt to express what is ultimately ineffable (‘ce que langue ne porroit descrire ne cuer penser’, to borrow a turn of phrase from La Queste del Saint Graal).10 Therefore, metaphoric language is necessary, and in these texts we find numerous signifiers drawn from the semantic field of the visual. In particular, those Grail romances with a strong Christian slant, and both the Perlesvaus and La Queste del Saint Graal are in this category, tend, unsurprisingly, to employ imagery drawn from Scriptural sources: imagery connected with darkness and light, and with blindness and clearsightedness. The nature and interpretation of dreams and visions were of great interest to medieval theologians: the notion that dreams and visions are a possible manifestation of the Divine has Biblical authority.11 Drawing on antiquity, in particular Macrobius’s Dream of Scipio, medieval theorists categorized dreams, with the most significant corresponding to Macrobius’ somnium, a dream susceptible of symbolic interpretation.12 It must be said, however, that there is a confusion of terminology

6 7 8

See John of Salisbury, Policraticus, ed. C.C.J. Webb (Oxford, 1909), Book 8, section 249. Some examples of these from the Perlesvaus include I, 301 and I, 251. See, for instance, Perlesvaus I, 407 for examples of both a Voice and a loud noise signifying divine intervention. 9 Perlesvaus I, 23 (my italics). 10 La Queste del Saint Graal, p. 278. 11 In Numbers 12.6 we find: ‘Si quis fuerit inter vos propheta Domini, in visione apparebo ei, vel per somnium loquar ad eum’, and in Job 33.15–16: ‘Per somnium in visione nocturna, quando irriuit sopor super homines, et dormiunt in lectulo, tunc aperit aures virorum, et erudiens eos, instruit disciplinam’. 12 For a fuller discussion of dream theory in antiquity and the Middle Ages, see Constance B. Hieatt, The Realism of Dream Visions (The Hague, 1967), in particular p. 27. Macrobius himself claimed that a somnium required interpretation: ‘Somnium proprie vocatur, quod tegit figuris et velat ambagibus non nisi interpretatione intellegendam significationem rei quae demonstratur’. Macrobius, In Somnium Scipionis, ed. J. Willis (Leipzig, 1963), I, p. 11.

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relating to dreams and visions, an ambiguity traceable to antiquity. For instance, Virgil uses the terms somnium, somnum and insomnium interchangeably, and even in the Bible one does not find consistency of terminology in the Hebrew and Greek. In the Vulgate, we find both visio and somnium used without distinction.13 For the purposes of the present analysis, I intend to adopt the following straightforward definitions: experiences undergone in the waking state will be treated as visions and those undergone by characters whilst they are asleep will be classed as dreams. As has already been said, dreams and visions in texts such as the Perlesvaus are often recounted by means of a densely metaphorical mode of narrative. The characters themselves frequently encounter difficulties in understanding their experiences, and, perhaps more importantly, not to mention inconveniently, the reader also struggles with such passages. Given, then, this central theme and central problematic, it seems logical that an examination of the use of dreams and visions as a narrative strategy by the authors of Grail romances will, as it were, shed some light on the authors’ central purpose in these texts, which were not composed merely for the sake of entertainment. The Perlesvaus contains two particularly noteworthy general features of the author’s use of dreams and visions. There is a concentration at the very beginning of the text (Branch 1), and, with the exception of Gauvain’s adventures in Branch 6, they are even more abundant towards the end of the romance (Branches 8–11 inclusive). Interestingly, Branches 6, 8, 9, 10 and 11 are also the longest, and in his study of the text, T.E. Kelly points out that there is a correlation between the length of a Branch and the importance of its content.14 We can infer that, except for Branch 1, the Branches containing a concentration of scenes describing dreams and visions are also the most significant in other respects. The second striking feature is the author’s choice of which characters experience this particular form of Grail adventure. It is not surprising that those who feature most prominently in the Quest, Perceval, Gauvain, Lancelot, and King Arthur, are, generally speaking, those singled out – however, as we shall see, there are some significant differences in their adventures which establish a clear hierarchy amongst them. Furthermore, in both the first Branch and the last (Branch 11), we find characters who at first sight might seem insignificant experiencing dreams and/or visions; however, there are sound reasons for this connected with narrative structure. The total number of episodes is relatively high (upwards of a dozen), so I propose here to consider just a few of the more significant ones in detail. One of the early relevant scenes is that of a vision experienced by King Arthur in the Chapel of Saint Augustine.15 Arthur arrives at this chapel, sees a hermit preparing to celebrate Mass, and attempts to enter. But he cannot do so, despite the fact that the doors are wide open: ‘Mes s’il deüst conquerre tot l’or du mont n’entrast il dedenz; e si ne li deffendoit nus, car li huis estoit overz, ne il ne voit nului qui li deffendist. Li rois en ot grant vergoigne’. The author is at pains to stress

13 H. Braet, Le Songe dans la chanson de geste, Romanica Gaudensia 15 (Ghent, 1975), p. 63. The distinc-

tion proposed by Braet (that visions have an element of verbal revelation, whereas dreams comprise only images) seems unhelpful if not counter-intuitive. 14 T.E. Kelly, Le Haut Livre du Graal: Perlesvaus, a Structural Study, p. 42. 15 Perlesvaus I, 35 (Branch 1).

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the fact that there is no physical impediment to Arthur’s entry into the chapel: the forces at work here are clearly not operating on the plane of the literal. The reader thus infers that his inability to cross the threshold is an indication that he is in a state of sin: Arthur himself seems aware of this, as is confirmed by the reference to the king’s sense of shame. What is more, the collocation ‘s’il deüst conquerre tot l’or du mont’, which seems at first a mere commonplace, is anything but: King Arthur, renowned in Logres and elsewhere as a man who has achieved great military conquests and great wealth, that is, success in the worldly domain, is here revealed to be spiritually inadequate. After the conclusion of the service, the hermit, when he admonishes the king, addresses him as ‘li plus riches rois du mont e li plus poissanz’,16 thereby further underlining the contrast between worldly values and spiritual ones. Notwithstanding his spiritual failings, King Arthur is granted a vision – first he sees a child of great beauty, wearing a rich crown, accompanied by a beautiful Lady, who says to the child: ‘Sire, vos estes mes pere, e mes filz, e mes sire’.17 Arthur sees a great flame come into the chapel through a window, and come to rest above the altar: this is clearly a reference to the conception of Christ, with the Holy Spirit (the Flame) entering the Virgin Mary without polluting her unsullied flesh (the unbroken window). He then hears angels’ voices singing the responses, and the text repeats the king’s distress at the fact that he is debarred from participating in the Mass. After the reading of the Gospel, the lady offers her child to the hermit, who places him on the altar. The king kneels and prays, and when he looks up he sees the hermit at the moment of consecration holding not a child, but the figure of a man, with bloody hands, feet and side, and wearing a crown of thorns. The figure then disappears, leaving the king weeping, and when he has recovered himself, he looks towards the altar once more and sees the child, who takes his mother by the hand and they and the flame vanish from the chapel, accompanied by a heavenly host. At this point, the hermit invites the king to enter the chapel, saying ‘Sire, or poez entrer dedenz, e molt poïssiez estre joianz en vostre cuer se vos eüssiez deservi par coi vos poïssiez estre entrez au comencement de la messe’. And, further: ‘Par vostre pechié ne poïstes vos hui entrer dedenz ceste chapele tant com on chanta la messe’:18 in case the reader had been in any doubt, the hermit explains the significance of Arthur’s inability to participate in the service. Arthur’s vision of the Eucharistic mystery is not given any exegesis: what he sees is merely described, it being assumed that the reader will be able to do the interpreting for him or herself. However, the author is careful to include in this passage several signposts indicating Arthur’s own lack of comprehension of what he is experiencing – for example, his puzzlement at the fact that the lady has addressed the child as both her father and her son; and his shock at the fact that the hermit receives the offering of the child without first washing his hands. The first puzzle (admittedly not a difficult one!) is left for the reader to solve; the second is explained by a narratorial intervention (the hermit is so pure in body and soul that he has no need to wash his hands). Arthur is presented as very literal-minded in this scene, which, in the context of the Grail romances, is a sign of 16 Perlesvaus I, 37. 17 Perlesvaus I, 35. 18 Perlesvaus I, 36–7.

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unworthiness and imminent failure in the Quest: those characters worthy of experiencing the Grail mysteries and completing the Quest successfully are able to look beyond the literal meaning of their aventures to the spiritual senefiance underlying them. Throughout this passage Arthur’s vision is described almost as if it were objective reality, with a status no different from that, for instance, of any joust recounted elsewhere in the text. In particular, he sees the crucified Christ ‘en propre figure’.19 The author of the Perlesvaus is here making a statement with theological import.20 However, we are provided with one crucial reminder that what we are reading is seen through Arthur’s eyes – we are told that the king ‘regarde devers l’autel, e cuide veoir l’umaine figure’.21 This small detail, included at the climactic moment of the vision, in fact serves to foreground the subjectivity of the entire scene – the vision is Arthur’s, part of his experience of the quest for the Grail. My second example is Gauvain’s vision of the Grail itself. In Branch 6, Gauvain has arrived at the Castle of the Fisher King, and is attending a feast, at which he has twelve companions, unidentified save as knights who, although they look to be no more than forty years of age, are in fact all over a hundred years old.22 During the meal, the Grail is carried into the hall by a maiden, and its imminent arrival is heralded by the appearance of a great light, dimming that of the candelabra placed in the room by human hands. The association of light with the Grail is traceable to the latter’s earliest manifestation in medieval French literature, Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte dou Graal.23 Here, however, the Grail procession is a little different from that described by Chrétien and his continuators, and merely consists of two damsels, walking alongside one another, one bearing the Grail, with her companion carrying the Bleeding Lance, which drips into the Grail itself, thereby affirming its identity as the receptacle for the Blood of Christ. The overtly Christian associations are here further reinforced by the use of the epithet saintisme, and by the fact that the two damsels emerge from a chapel, rather than from a mere room as in Chrétien’s text. The sweet ‘odour of sanctity’ accompanies the Grail’s presence, and is powerful enough to distract the diners from their food, perhaps confirming what has been said above regarding the hierarchy of the senses: smell is superior to taste. Furthermore, it is being suggested that the spirituality of the Grail dominates such worldly and bodily needs as hunger (particularly as the author has taken the trouble to describe the food with some relish). Gauvain contemplates the Grail, ‘et li senble q’il voie une chandoile dedenz [. . .] et li senble qu’il voit ii angres qui portent ii chandelabres d’or espris de chandoiles’.24 Gauvain is not able to perceive the Grail mystery other than in its 19 Perlesvaus I, 36. 20 In his notes on this section of the text, Nitze states: ‘Arthur witnesses what is commonly known as the

21 22

23 24

‘Miracle of Saint Gregory’. [. . .] The author [. . .] states by means of this episode his belief in the orthodox doctrine of the reality of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist.’ (Perlesvaus, II, 215) Perlesvaus I, 36 (my italics). Although Nitze identifies these knights as having possible analogues in the twelve companions of St. Brendan (Perlesvaus II, 266), surely the more obvious comparison, and one made explicit in similar scenes elsewhere (e.g., in the Queste, p. 271), is with the Apostles. Chrétien de Troyes: Le Conte dou Graal, ed. W. Roach (Geneva, 1959), ll. 3227–9. Perlesvaus I, 119. Note that Nitze gives the reading ‘chandoile’, whereas several manuscripts give ‘calice’. There are arguments to support each of these readings (see Perlesvaus II, 271).

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relatively simple form – the candle as a metaphor for Christ (the candelabrum Christus est topos). When, however, the maidens return, the two angels have become three, and this time ‘li semble q’il voit enmi le Graal la forme d’un enfant’.25 As in the Chapel of Saint Augustine episode, the author is supporting orthodox doctrine on the Eucharistic Mystery, and the presence of the third angel represents the Holy Spirit, thus completing the Trinity: hence the three drops of blood which fall on to the table in front of Gauvain.26 The knight’s inability to touch the drops of blood provides a thematic link at the level of metaphoric discourse with Arthur’s inability to enter the Chapel of Saint Augustine: like Arthur, Gauvain is unworthy. The scene ends with the two damsels becoming three, with the Grail seeming to float high in the air, and with the appearance of the crucified Christ above it, as in the Chapel of Saint Augustine, but this time the Lance actually pierces His side, further confirming the reality of the Presence in the Eucharist. Gauvain, however, is so absorbed in contemplation of the mysteries he has just witnessed that he fails to speak: he has been struck not only dumb, but deaf as well.27 Silence is a polysemic signifier in the Grail romances: it can be associated with a de-humanization of characters, reducing them to the level of beasts, or it can represent contemplation of ultimate mysteries, beyond human articulation. Here it seems to fulfil both functions simultaneously: from Gauvain’s own perspective, he remains silent because he is lost in the wonders of the Divine Presence, but from the point of view of the onlookers (the twelve knights who are his companions at the table) he is a sinful character, so unworthy that he cannot ask the crucial question and thus bring the perilous adventures of the Grail to an end. Throughout this episode, no homiletic passages are provided, but the detail of the passage reveals much to an alert reader. This vision is Gauvain’s, and his alone; here, as in the case of Arthur’s vision, we find signposts of subjectivity: this time expressed by the repetition of ‘li senble que . . .’, variations on which occur no less than six times within twenty lines of text. Both Arthur’s vision in the Chapel of Saint Augustine and Gauvain’s vision in the Grail castle are linked, through repetitions of patterns of metaphor, to the opening scene in the Perlesvaus: that of the squire Cahus’s dream, to which I now turn.28 Branch 1 begins with King Arthur at Carlisle for the feast of the Ascension, one of the high feasts of the Christian calendar. The queen is unhappy, lamenting the lack of adventures at court compared to former times: in the context of the Grail romances, where the adventures have symbolic significance and represent stages along the path to spiritual perfection, lack of adventures invariably reflects unworthiness of the character or characters concerned. Thus we can assume that the paucity of adventures at Arthur’s court implies that the king and his retinue are lacking in spiritual qualities. The queen suggests that Arthur ride out to the Chapel 25 Perlesvaus I, 119. 26 The link between the three drops of blood here and those described by Chrétien has been pointed out by

several critics, notably Nitze (Perlesvaus II, 269), but there is a further parallel: in the Conte dou Graal (l. 3198) the drops of blood fall on to a white surface, snow; here they also fall on to a white surface, the ivory table. Whereas in Chrétien the red-on-white calls to mind the face of the hero’s beloved, here they must surely represent the red of the sacrifice of Christ and the white of His purity. 27 Perlesvaus I, 120. 28 Perlesvaus I, 28–9.

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of Saint Augustine, and it emerges that finding the chapel is an adventure in itself. Given that Arthur does eventually manage to reach it, we must infer that he is not entirely without worth – had it been otherwise, he would have suffered the fate of many a sinful knight and wandered aimlessly, lost in the forest. The queen persuades Arthur, against his better judgement, to take a squire with him on this aventure, and the king chooses Cahus, son of Yvain li Avoutres.29 On the eve of their departure for the Chapel of Saint Augustine, Cahus sleeps outside Arthur’s chamber, and dreams that the king set off without him. Cahus follows the tracks of Arthur’s horse, but the trail goes cold outside a chapel, which the squire enters, and in it he finds a bier, on it the dead body of a knight, with four candles burning in gold candlesticks at each of its four corners. Cahus takes one of the candlesticks, putting it down his trousers (literally, between his breeches and his thigh), then rides off into the forest, where he encounters a giant, noir et let, armed with a fearsome double-bladed knife. The giant demands that Cahus return the candlestick, which he refuses to do, so the giant stabs the squire, pushing the knife into his side, up to the hilt. At this moment Cahus wakes and cries out; the king, queen, and chamberlain, hearing the scream, enter the antechamber, and find the squire lying mortally wounded with a knife in his side. He also has the candlestick, still secreted in his hose. As before, no exegesis is offered. The king merely interprets the events surrounding the dream as a sign that he should journey to the Chapel of Saint Augustine alone. The incident may well reflect badly on the queen, for it was she who advised Arthur to take a squire with him, and it is undoubtedly true that causing the death of another through misfortune is one of the curses of spiritually unworthy characters in the context of the Grail adventures. As for the details of the dream itself, some illuminating parallels can be drawn between this episode in the Perlesvaus and one in La Queste del Saint Graal, in which a young knight, Melyant, is punished (although not by death) for stealing a golden crown which he finds in the forest.30 The double-bladed knife of the Black Giant in the Perlesvaus may be interpreted as the dual sins of pride and covetousness, just as the Black Knights in the Queste represented Melyant’s misdemeanors. However, there are further dimensions to the Perlesvaus episode: for example, the Black Giant of Cahus’s dream may be (the text is not clear on this point) the same knight who later attacks Arthur when the king leaves the Chapel of Saint Augustine.31 Furthermore, there is the topical element of the candlestick, and here the details of the scene describing the temptation of Cahus are most illuminating. In order to steal the candlestick, Cahus has first to remove the candle it supports. This act amounts to a desecration and surely has symbolic significance: the candle, with its Christian connotations, is cast aside in favour of the object of material value, the candlestick. And, to return for a moment to Gauvain’s vision, in the Perlesvaus the candlestick tends to be associated metonymically with the Grail. Therefore, Cahus’s misadventure can be reinterpreted as foreshadowing the failure of Arthur himself (since Cahus is Arthur’s squire and a ‘substitute’ for 29 It is possible, of course, that Cahus’s father’s epithet, with its connotations of sin, is connected to the

‘crime’ and subsquent punishment of the squire. 30 Queste del Saint Graal, pp. 41–3. 31 Perlesvaus I, 38.

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him, as evidenced by the fact that in his dream he is unable to find Arthur) in the Quest for the Grail. The dream, then, is doubly prophetic – in an immediate sense, as the squire says, it has ‘molt ledement averez’ – it has come true in the most unpleasant way, and, in a broader sense, it is prophetic in terms of failure in the Quest. The physical punishment of Cahus follows the Biblical example of Jacob, who was left with a thigh injury after his struggle with the angel; according to theological tradition, ‘we should [. . .] particularly believe those dreams in which men dreamed that they were purged or punished, for often God leaves a definite mark on such people to show that they had been aware of real pain and terror in their dream’.32 The physical evidence of Cahus’s punishment could not be more extreme. The disturbing outcome of this opening scene, with its smooth and thereby all the more deeply unsettling transition from dream to reality is, for a reader familiar with Arthurian romance, something of a shock, as Francis Dubost states: ‘la première nuit, celle qui normalement devrait être sans histoire, est tout entière consacrée en effet au rêve tragique de Cahus [. . .]. Avec cette ouverture fantastique, les images oniriques prennent statut de vérité tandis que s’abolit la frontière entre songe et vie réelle’.33 So, dreams and reality can become blurred, and, as we have seen, signifiers in dreams and visions cannot necessarily be reduced to a univocal interpretation. We have been warned, not least by John of Salisbury himself.34 From the above analysis of two visions and one dream in the narrative of the Perlesvaus, it is clear that repetitions of precise collocations and patterns of metaphor from one episode to another provide keys for the interpretation or reinterpretation of individual events. The next phase of this analysis will be to expand the study to include the remaining dreams and visions in the text, with particular reference to homiletic passages (where those exist), and the extent to which metaphoric discourse is left uninterpreted by the author. Already it is clear that the Perlesvaus, in common with its contemporary La Queste del Saint Graal, uses the narrative device of dreams and visions to establish a hierarchy amongst its characters, as well as to attempt to express what are ultimately inexpressible divine mysteries. Furthermore, the Perlesvaus shares the technique used by the author of La Queste, whereby the structure of the narrative is articulated primarily through the use of metaphor. However, in La Queste, the culmination of the quest for the holy vessel lies in the scene describing the Grailwinner Galahad’s vision, when he looks inside the Grail at Sarras, and sees the ‘merveilles de totes merveilles’,35 whereas we find no such moment in the Perlesvaus. Galahad in La Queste is a ‘visionary’ in a sense in which the eponymous hero of the Perlesvaus is not; and despite certain similarities between the two texts, for the above amongst other reasons, irrespective of which of the two romances was composed first, it seems increasingly likely that the Perlesvaus was developed from a tradition at best parallel to that of the Lancelot-Grail cycle.

32 C.J. Holdsworth, ‘Visions and Visionaries in the Middle Ages’, History 48 (1963), 145. 33 F. Dubost, ‘Les Nuits magnétiques du Perlesvaus’, in Miscellanea Mediaevalia: Mélanges Philippe

Ménard, ed. J.-C. Faucon, A. Labbé, D. Quéruel (Paris: Champion, 1998), p. 438. 34 John of Salisbury, Policraticus, Book 2, sections 428, 432, 462. 35 Queste del Saint Graal, p. 278.

8 La Reine Fée in the Roman de Perceforest: Rewriting, Rethinking JANE H.M. TAYLOR

The role of the key character, the Reine Fée, in the Roman de Perceforest is an amalgam of the roles attributed to Merlin and to such marginal, ambivalent characters as Morgue la Fée in the Arthurian Vulgate Cycle and its avatars. The romancier minimizes what might seem disturbing in her by capitalizing on her femaleness and by focusing on her as progenitor of what the romance imagines as the later Arthurian kingdom. The Roman de Perceforest1 is a veritable gallimaufry of characters: enchanters, dwarves, monsters, loathly damsels and naughty children dog the footsteps of the heroes and, by their positively Dickensian variety, prevent the romance from foundering into commonplace. I concentrate on one of the most unusual of these characters: the Reine Fée. I begin by explaining who she is, and I shall then examine some intertextualities which govern her conception, not in order to explain her away merely as a recycling of previously used motifs, but rather to return to Kristevan intertextuality2 which supposes an engagement with, a dual-focused reading of, the later and deriving text. I argue that the Reine Fée of the Perceforest is an absorption and transformation of certain figures culled from those most authoritative models, the Vulgate Cycle of Arthurian romances, and the Prose Tristan: Merlin particularly, but also, in certain of their manifestations, that curious constellation of women who operate on the dubious, ill-reputed margins of the Arthurian world like Morgue la Fée, the Dame du Lac, Sebille, Niniane. . . . My focus here, then, is Lydoire, later to be known as the Reine Fée. As we first meet her, she seems perfectly colourless – just another of the courtly young women who mill around Alexander the Great’s charismatic leadership. She will become an individual, and a powerful one, only when her husband, Gadifer, whom Alexander on his imperial progress to Britain has created King of Scotland, is hideously wounded by the poisoned tusk of a monstrous wild boar, and carried off to the 1

2

The romance has not yet been published in its entirety. I quote as follows: Book I: from Le Roman de Perceforest, première partie, ed. Jane H.M. Taylor (Geneva, 1979), and thenceforward from BnF, fr. 345; Book II: from BnF, fr. 346; Book III: from Perceforest, troisième partie, ed. Gilles Roussineau (Paris/Geneva, 1988); Book IV: from Perceforest, quatrième partie, ed. Gilles Roussineau (Paris/ Geneva, 1987); Book V: from BnF, fr. 348; Book VI: from Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, 3493–4. Julia Kristeva, Semiotiké: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (Paris, 1969), pp. 145–9.

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Royaume de Féerie. Lydoire too retires there, to tend to her husband and devote herself to her children, but she makes periodic and unexpected appearances in the real world; she orchestrates events in Scotland and indeed in England too. She becomes, in other words, a sort of invisible éminence grise in a kingdom unhappily abandoned by its rightful king – and later, she will become a wise and learned woman, gifted with prophecy, whose reading of the stars makes her one of the few within the British Isles to recognize that the multiple gods of antiquity must soon be replaced by the single Dieu Souverain. How, then, does the anodyne and uninteresting Lydoire become the powerful and intriguing Reine Fée? The explanation has to do with her husband’s wound. Gadifer is, as I said before, wounded by a wild boar: he will be cured only by an unguent made precisely from the ground-up tusk of the boar, and meanwhile will be known only as the Roi Mehaigné. Lydoire, the future Reine Fée, along with a young woman called Lyriope who is adept in cures and simples, takes charge of his illness. In this, she is helped by one of the damoiselles de la forest who have had to develop magic and illusionist skills in the anarchy which has preceded Alexander’s arrival. Corrose, we are told, is ‘une des subtilles enchanterresses et qui plus sçavoit de conjuracions et de nigromancie qui fust ou pays’;3 it is from her that Lydoire absorbs her remarkable powers: La royne estoit de bon sens et de cler engin, et sy y mist toute son entente, et avec ce elle y adjousta sy grant foy par le grant desir qu’elle avoit de sçavoir la science qu’elle en sceut dedens ung pou de temps plus assez que sa maistresse, et venoit a chief de trop de merveilleuses choses faire par ses conjuracions que Corrose ne sçavoit ne sy ne pouoit a chief venir.4

In Gadifer’s illness – and in the lethargy which it provokes – Lydoire, the Reine Fée, becomes a sort of tutelary genius: she makes occasional appearances for political purposes in the kingdom of Scotland, orchestrates her children’s marriages, distributes reward and punishment, receives knights errant into the Royaume de Féerie, and more. But one cannot, I think, entirely abstract even the most beneficent of ‘nigromancers’ from an ambivalent, uneasy attitude towards magic, ‘ingromancie’, within the Arthurian complex. However laudable Lydoire’s acts, there remain some discreet hints that she deploys her powers if not unjustly, then certainly manipulatively. In particular, having conceived a sense of burning resentment against those who encouraged their king in the hunt, she resolves to keep him secluded and invisible, preventing any of the knights who urgently seek their king from finding him. For this purpose she makes use of a most ingeniously concocted potion which dulls his perceptions, makes him forget all pain and distress, forget even the fact that he was ever king – a sort of medieval Prozac which masks pain and distress and promotes a state of benign good humour: ‘le beuvraige a l’oubly, car il fait oublier toutes choses qui peuent ennuyer au coeur’.5 However, the writer paints the scene within which the potion is first administered with an interesting – revelatory? – 3 4 5

See Perceforest II, 81v. Perceforest II, 81v–82r. Perceforest II, 82v.

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choice of words: the emphasis throughout is on the king’s unquestioning – misplaced? – trust in Lydoire’s ministrations (‘le roy qui garde ne se donnoit’6) and on the arbitrary way in which she attributes blame for her husband’s misfortune entirely and unjustly to those who were in his train when he undertook the ill-fated boar-hunt. The writer tends to put this vengefulness down to female lack of logic (‘vous sçavez que les dames et les damoiselles ne regardent pas toujours a la raison en prenant vengeance de leurs voulentés’7), but to acquire skills of this sort, with such rapidity and completeness, shades into an ambiguous, parallel world of enchantments and sorceries whose adepts cannot but seem at best ambivalent, at worst menacing.8 It is true that the author of the Perceforest seems to concede that there is magic and magic, dividing those who practise it firmly into two camps: one maleficent, which uses its powers to oppress women and the poor, and to gain an unfair advantage in warfare and single combat, and the other beneficent, turning to healing and using illusionist powers only to manufacture invisible castles – but Cassandra, the writer says, was consumed, horribly, by fire simply because she made the mistake of teaching nigromancy to the inhabitants of the forests of Britain. Even if, then, the Reine Fée becomes a healer, using her skills and studies at the service of the kingdom of Scotland and to a lesser extent England, not to its destruction, some ambiguities attach legitimately to her, despite the best efforts of the romance-writer, as witness his guarded attitude towards the way in which, for many decades, the Reine Fée contrives to dull her husband Gadifer’s memory into acquiescence; the palace she elaborates in the forest which is as elusive and dangerous a locus as is Morgue’s (only discoverable when she, the Reine Fée, wishes); and above all, the curiously arbitrary way in which the Reine Fée bestows and withdraws favour. A couple of examples: to punish one of her husband’s most faithful followers for a passing infidelity to his lady, and another for the carelessness with which, she thinks, he has allowed her husband to be wounded, she turns the first for seven years into a bear and the second, for just as long, into a nine-headed bull who rampages through the forests. The Arthurian world is also marked by ambivalence about the value and virtue of magic, and our first instinct is to attach Lydoire firmly to that elusive, shifting, female world9 whose representatives – Niniane, Sebille, the Dame du Lac, the Reine de Norgales, the Dame d’Avalon – flit unpredictably in and out of the great Arthurian cycles, occasionally beneficent, more often threatening. Like the Roman de Perceforest, Arthurian romances have an ambivalent attitude to magic: the Prophecies du Merlin may postulate a comfortably polarized universe which classifies the enchantresses of Arthur’s kingdom, Morgue to the satanic category, the Dame du Lac to the angelic: 6 7 8

9

Perceforest II, 82v. Perceforest III, 164v. It is significant that before Alexander’s arrival, the kingdom has been given over to a race of what I called ‘renegade knight-enchanters’ – and there also surfaces in Book IV of the romance an enchanter-king, Aroès, who uses illusionist powers at what one might call Nuremberg rallies avant la lettre: see my ‘Aroès the Enchanter: an episode in the Roman de Perceforest and its sources’, Medium Ævum 47 (1978): 30–9, and more recently Michelle Szkilnik, ‘Aroès l’illusionniste’, Romania 113 (1992–5): 441–65. On which see especially Laurence Harf-Lancner, Les Fées au moyen âge: Morgane et Mélusine: La naissance des fées (Geneva, 1984).

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‘Taisiés, sire, çou dist Mierlins, que iou croi vraiement ke cele Morghe nasqui dou fu de luxure. Et de la biele dame dou Lac croi iou que ele nascui auques pries de paradis. Cele Morghe porcace et fait les males oeuvres. Et cele del Lac fait les boines oeures. Cele fait ocire les bons chevaliers et cele les fait secorre et aidier. Cele fera encore secourre les orphenins et cele Morghe les fera destruire en despit de lor peres et de lor meres’10

But ambivalences cannot, surely, but attach even to Morgue and to the Dame du Lac. Morgue, after all, and rather disconcertingly, turns out to be, like Lydoire, a healer: when Arthur is transported into an Otherworld, after his ‘death’, for healing, it is Morgue who seems to welcome him into her boat11 – and on the other hand, the Dame du Lac is, in a number of the later, non-canonical Arthurian texts like the Prophecies du Merlin itself and the Suite du Merlin, identified with the highly ambivalent Niniane who becomes Merlin’s avid disciple and then uses the magic she has learnt to imprison the latter.12 The Reine Fée – healer, purveyor of magic, arbitrary and difficult preceptor of Scotland and England – cannot but be inducted into that shady, parallel female universe.13 But this is not the case that I want to pursue: I do not see the Reine Fée only in this ambivalent, and in some ways marginal, role. What I propose to argue is a political and ideological reading of the Reine Fée as a tutelary genius more closely allied to, and certainly to be read against, the more important, indeed central, Arthurian figure, Merlin. She, like other characters in late medieval romance, is the product of what I call distributional intertextuality – by which heavy-handed term I mean that the writers segment their sources and distribute motifs and characteristics imaginatively among their own fictional casts. Here the writer segments Merlin into two distinct characters – the Reine Fée herself and a certain Zephir – and distributes between them the elements that attach to Merlin, resolving the ambiguities that mark the latter by ensuring not one but two avatars, one principally ‘diabolical’ to take over Merlin’s dubious self, another principally ‘angelic’. As in so many other cases, the writer of the Perceforest resituates his characters, heuristically, within a new pseudo-historical teleology which rewrites Arthurian history backwards, as it were, to recreate Arthur’s kingdom from a quite other perspective. First, then, Zephir. In the midst of that providential storm which brings Alexander the Great to England, the emperor, who is not unnaturally terrified, has a vision; an old man in a black cloak and hood who reassures him that the storm is actually a

10 Quoted by Anne Berthelot, ‘De Niniane à la Dame du Lac, l’avènement d’une magicienne’, in

L’Hostellerie de pensée: Etudes . . . offertes à Daniel Poirion par ses anciens élèves (Paris, 1995), pp. 51–7 (p. 55). 11 See La Mort le roi Artu, ed. Jean Frappier, TLF (Geneva/Lille, 1954), § 193. 12 See for instance La Suite du Merlin, ed. Gilles Roussineau, TLF (Geneva, 1996), § 332, and Les Prophesies de Merlin, ed. Anne Berthelot (Cologny/Geneva, 1992), p. 137: ‘Sachent vraiement tout cil qui le conte mon signeur Robert de Borron escoutent que ceste damoisiele fu cele qui puis fu apielee la damoisiele dou lac, cele qui norrist grant tens en son ostel Lanscelot dou lac, ensi comme la grant ystoire de Lanscelot le devise’. 13 I should point out that Morgane actually appears in the Perceforest, having lost all those rather ominous traits that mark her in the Lancelot and having become a harassed nursemaid; as Jeanne Lods says (Le Roman de Perceforest: Origines – composition – caractères – valeur et influence [Geneva/Lille, 1951], p. 44), she is ‘traitée avec une sorte de familiarité plaisante’. Another example of distributional intertextuality?

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omen.14

good The old man, it will turn out, is one of the many guises of Zephir – who turns out to be a demon, ‘un des angels qui furent trebuchiez avec Lucifer’, and who takes the reader, in Book IV of the romance, on a quite extraordinary tour of Hell during which we are introduced to Lucifer himself.15 We are, of course, reminded of Merlin in his ‘demonic’ manifestation – except that Zephir, extraordinarily, is turned only to the most trivial of uses. Virtually all that we see of this potentially powerful and exciting character is his skill in shape-shifting (in which, of course, he resembles Merlin16): he appears variously as an ass, a bear, a charming young girl.17 But his role in the romance is disappointingly minor: his sole demonic pleasure, it seems, is in teasing mortals, as he tells the chief butt of his humour, Estonné: ‘Je n’ay (. . .) d’autre deduit que toi et les autres decepvoir’ (II, 96v), and at most, he turns his attention to ensuring that Merlin’s ancestors, Passelion and Gaudine, conceive their offspring auspiciously. Certainly, there is no question of his fulfilling those central roles that are Merlin’s speciality as Wace and Robert de Boron, the Vulgate Cycle and the Huth Merlin, imagine him: as mysterious genius, half human, half demonic, of the Kingdom of Britain, preternaturally informed of the future and of the workings of providence, charged with ensuring the advent of Arthur himself and the political fruition of Arthur’s kingdom.18 His occasional interventions on the political front are curiously inconclusive: to revert to his appearance to Alexander in a dream, Zephir, it seems, rather than manufacturing the storm, as a Merlin, with his demonic but responsibly used powers might have done, operates simply as a reassuring presence in a storm which is the product of machinations and magic on the part of the goddess Venus. It is as if the author of the Perceforest, having invented him, had been unable to find a suitable role for him: to use an expression which I have used elsewhere, this promising motif is blocked or end-stopped.19 Working on the hypothesis that I share with those who work on the Roman de Perceforest and in particular on its cyclicity,20 that it is the role of this huge romance to prefigure, in the most literal way, all the most telling elements of the Arthurian cycles as recorded in the Vulgate and in the prose Tristan, this means that there is a vital role going begging: the Arthurian universe, it seems, for ideological and hierarchical reasons, requires a tutelary figure. Once the more ludic, and the more diabol14 See Perceforest I, ed. Taylor, p. 133. 15 Indeed, he takes Estonné’s son Passelion to the gates of Hell and shows him Lucifer and the souls of the

damned: see Perceforest IV, ed. Roussineau, 2, pp. 739 ff. 16 Cf. the Vulgate Merlin: ‘Toutes les fois qu’il veut se change il et mue par force d’art d’ingremance dont

17 18

19

20

il est tous plains’ (ed. H. Oscar Sommer, The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances [Washington, DC, 1908], II, 123, and cf. Prophéties de Merlin, ed. Lucy Paton (New York and London, 1926), I, 104. A young girl tells Estonné that ‘il se transforme en tant de manieres et change sa voix en tant de manieres de sons que je ne sçaroie donner’ (II, 91v). For a useful summary of Merlin’s role in these guises, see Francis Dubost, Aspects fantastiques de la littérature narrative médiévale (XIIème–XIIIème siècles) (Paris, 1991), II, 710–51, and cf. Paul Zumthor, Merlin le prophète, un thème de la littérature polémique, de l’historiographie et des romans (Lausanne, 1943). See my ‘Mélusine’s Progeny: Patterns and Perplexities’, in Mélusine of Lusignan: Founding Fiction in Late Medieval France, ed. Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox (Athens, GA, and London, 1996), pp. 165–84. See my ‘The Sense of a Beginning: Genealogy and Plenitude in Late Medieval Narrative Cycles’, in Transtextualities: Of Cycles and Cyclicity in Medieval French Literature, ed. Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox (New York, 1995), pp. 93–123.

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ical, of Merlin’s skills – like shape-shifting – have been hived off and bestowed on Zephir, the more admirable and the more politically and ideologically vital can be bestowed on another figure: the Reine Fée who gathers into her hands certain of the key, political roles that Merlin, fictionally later, is to play: his ‘genetic’ role, his prophetic role, and finally his role as ‘guardian’ of the integrity of the kingdom – and the kings – of Britain. Let me start with the Reine Fée’s genetic role, her role as ‘creator’ of what will later be not only Arthur’s lineage, but also that of all the major heroes who will furnish Arthur’s Round Table. This is precisely the point of the Roman de Perceforest: this prolongement rétroactif, to use a term of Vinaver’s,21 has as its core the wish to make Arthur’s Britain predictable, not idiosyncratic. In this endeavour, the Reine Fée’s efforts are crucial, partly because it is her genetic inheritance (her gene-pool!) that produces Arthur (her great-grandson marries Alexander’s greatgrand-daughter, her daughter is the distant progenitor of Tristan, her second son of Gauvain), but more particularly because her efforts go to ensure that the marriages of her children are delayed, often for years of waiting and endeavour, until astrologically favourable moments. We are not told, directly, that this is because the Reine Fée foresees Arthur’s kingdom with precision – but as the romance, with leisurely insistence and surprisingly often with the active help of the Reine Fée, goes to the root of one family tree after another, it is difficult not to be reminded of the Merlin who, in the Arthurian cycles, exploits his magical powers to take charge of the births of Arthur himself, and, of course, of Lancelot;22 the Merlin whom Dubost calls, in a nice phrase, the entremetteur du destin.23 What is missing – and it is typical of the Perceforest’s careful redistribution and reassignment of roles – is Merlin’s ‘diabolicalness’: the Reine Fée simply makes herself and the brides and grooms who are progenitors of Arthur’s heroes elusive and invisible, not shape-shifted, and the liaisons she promotes, unlike those in which Merlin has a hand, are not adulterous or culpable.24 Nevertheless, however discreetly, she is figured as having that same originary role, that same recognition that Merlin has of genetic circumstances creating a glorious future Britain under Arthur. Like Merlin, she is vouchsafed a clear vision of the future, the gift of prophecy, and because this is her most remarkable role, it is the centrepiece of my account. Merlin, of course, is par excellence the prophet of Arthur’s kingdom: Zumthor, indeed, calls him the ‘prophet of the Grail’.25 But prophecy is a dangerous trait – and especially so in a character whose origins are so studiously murky: does prophecy

21 Eugène Vinaver, ‘La genèse de la Suite du Merlin’, in Mélanges . . . offerts à Ernest Hoepffner (Paris,

1949), pp. 295–300 (p. 297). 22 For Utherpendragon and Ygerne, see for instance the Perlesvaus, ed. William A. Nitze and T. Atkinson

Jenkins (Chicago, 1932–37), p. 281, and for Ban de Benoïc and the daughter of Agravain, see the Vulgate Merlin, ed. cit., pp. 404 ff. See also note 12 in this chapter. 23 Aspects fantastiques de la littérature narrative médiévale, II, 721. 24 Merlin in Robert de Boron’s Merlin, for instance, recognizes his own culpability in the adulterous liaison that creates Arthur, and atones for it; see Merlin, ed. Alexandre Micha, TLF (Paris and Geneva, 1980), p. 247. 25 For Zumthor, Merlin is the engineer of a ‘redemption’ which figures the eschatological, by modelling the Round Table on the table of the Last Supper, and by making the Grail the ultimate goal of chivalry (Merlin le prophète, p. 131); cf. also Alexandre Micha, Etude sur le ‘Merlin’ de Robert de Boron (Geneva, 1980), pp. 105–10.

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come from God, or from the devils who gave Merlin birth? Carefully, assiduously, the authors of the Arthurian texts Christianize and sanitize his gift – witness, say, Robert de Boron’s Merlin which attributes his historical knowledge to the devil, but his prophecy, firmly, to God’s will: Par cestes raisons sot cist les choses faites, dites et alees, car il les tient de l’ennemi; et le surplus qu’il set des choses qui sont a venir volt Nostre Sires qu’il seust contre les autres choses qu’il savoit por endroit de la soue partie: si se tenra a laquele que il veura, car se il volt, il puet randre as diables lor droit et a Nostre Seingnor le suen.26

The Reine Fée, of course, has no need of any such apologetics, and yet her gift of prophecy too, and if possible even more directly, is made the servant of God’s purpose. I turn now to an extraordinary shared seeing to which she and the hermit Dardanon are privy. The Reine Fée, it turns out, is an astrologer of remarkably advanced powers, taught by Aristotle. Meditating in her forest fastness on the future of the Kingdom of Britain, she is dismayed to see an impressive comet, with a tail some twenty feet long – and knowing, like all medieval star-gazers, just how ominous a comet is, she retreats into a sort of observatory in the mountains where she can spend her time studying the heavens and interpreting the stars.27 But her own powers are insufficient, and it is thus that she makes an expedition to consult Dardanon (an extraordinary character who had been clerk to Cassandra of Troy and who arrives in Britain before Brutus himself), who will (she hopes) be able to inform her more clearly and more completely. At this point she is vouchsafed a vision which makes her, like a very few of the pagan world, notably Virgil,28 a prophet of the coming of Christ. She and Dardanon see in a blaze of light a vision of Nature, and behind Nature, ‘une moult belle vierge de quinze ans d’eage et, m’estoit advis, en blances vestures qui representoyent tres grant pureté. Celle noble vierge si estoit enchainte de vif enffant’ (IV, 569). When Nature sees the virgin, she is overcome by grief, and laments, lengthily and bitterly, that by God’s command her ‘forge’ has been superseded, and that the sacred charge laid on her by God, to be mistress of ‘generacion’, has been bypassed. It is, she tells the Reine Fée, because from the virgin will come forth a child who will wash from mankind the sin of Adam and Eve. Now, this will be familiar: all of us, surely, will have come across a mourning Nature, in Alain de Lille’s de Planctu Naturae, and in Jean de Meun’s Rose. But the result of this episode is, of course, to make the Reine Fée, extraordinarily, privy to God’s purpose: to make her one of those who wait, patiently but with confidence, for the Incarnation; to make her far more unambiguously irreproachably orthodox than Merlin (however unorthodox the means by which the romance-writer engineers this).

26 Ed. Micha, pp. 50–51, and cf. his Etude sur le ‘Merlin’, pp. 81 ff. As Dubost (Aspects fantastiques de la

littérature narrative médiévale, II, 717) points out, this laborious reassurance is suspect: it arises, surely, precisely because Robert is nervous lest his Merlin come to seem dangerously diabolical. 27 ‘sus une haulte montaigne, la ou sans aucun empeschement elle pouoit plainement voir la reondeur du firmament; et au plus hault du mont elle avoit sa chaiere tournant, ou elle seoit de nuit garnie de ses esperes et instrumens magistrals pour esprouver et mettre a fin toutes ses oppinions’ (Perceforest, IV, ed. Roussineau, p. 521). 28 On which see Domenico Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, trans. E.F.M. Benecke (London, 1966).

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What then are the consequences – narratively and ideologically29 – of the Reine Fée’s ‘Revelation’? In addition to the extraordinary authority which her foreknowledge of Incarnation confers on her, it also assimilates her into that small and select group who, because of their foreknowledge, become harbingers. Like Simeon in the temple (Luke 2.25–35), the Reine Fée becomes if not eternal, at least the very embodiment of anticipation. And not only the Reine Fée herself: in a sense, like Merlin, the gift of waiting comes within her grasp. Arthur, we remember from La Mort le roi Artu, as he lies mortally wounded, is transported by Morgue by boat to his tomb:30 for the purposes of the Roman de Perceforest, on the other hand, the fact that the ‘history’ is figured as pre-Christian would doom the great of Perceforest’s kingdom to the torments of purgatory, which would clearly be unacceptable. After the great battle of the Franc Palais, therefore, during which the Romans destroy the combined forces of Scotland and England, and leave Perceforest and Gadifer torn and bleeding on the field, it is the Reine Fée who takes charge of their fate. Like the ladies who come to the battlefield of Salisbury to transport Arthur, gently, in their boat, the last surviving champions of the British (Perceforest and Gadifer) are gently carried off in white chariots by ladies dressed all in white – and we discover later that they have been transported to the ‘Isle de Vie’, ‘ou nulz ne puet jamais morir s’il ne se fait porter hors’ (IV, 823).31 Withdrawal to this island, it seems, is in the gift of the Reine Fée, who has also been responsible for the white chariots; she has arranged for the kings and the hermit to live there in perpetuity, in spite of the agony of their wounds,32 so that they may await the ‘visitation du Dieu Souverain’ (IV, 1001). As Gilles Roussineau points out in his edition of Book IV of the romance,33 this tradition is based not just on directly Arthurian sources (‘l’ille d’Avalon ou les dames conversent qui sevent toz les enchantemenz del siécle’34), but precisely on Giraldus Cambrensis’s Momonia borealis. The Reine Fée has appropriated the island for devout and Christian purposes: she selects who it is who will live eternally there; she promises her protégés rest when once the ‘bonne nouvelle’ reaches Britain, that the child whom the Reine Fée had seen in a vision has been born; she it is who, at the very end of Book VI of the romance, makes it her role to go to the Isle de Vie and liberate the wounded heroes, and thus bring to a suitable, and cyclic, end 29 Colette Beaune seems to argue that the Reine Fée’s prophecies stem from the political deployment of

30 31 32 33

34

prophecy at the end of the Middle Ages and in the court of Hainault from which the romance was generated: see ‘Perceforêt et Merlin: Prophétie, littérature et roman au début de la guerre de Cent Ans’, in Fin du monde et signes des temps: Visionnaires et prophètes en France méridionale (fin XIII – début XVe siècle (Toulouse, 1992), pp. 237–55; I admit to finding her argument difficult to follow. For an interesting discussion of Merlin as prophet, especially in the Huth Merlin, see Kate Cooper, ‘Merlin romancier: paternity, prophecy and poetics in the Huth Merlin’, Romanic Review 77 (1986): 1–24. La Mort le roi Artu § 194. On the Isle de Vie and its inhabitants, see an interesting article by Michelle Szkilnik, ‘Les morts et l’histoire dans le Roman de Perceforest’, Le Moyen Age 105 (1999): 9–30. They ‘vivent a grant paine par leur mehaing et viellesse qui les menace tous les jours de mort, qui grant tamps a fust venue s’ilz n’estoient en l’isle ou elle n’ose entrer’ (Perceforest IV, 999). See his notes, IV, 1189–91: Roussineau gives at length Giraldus’s account, from his Topographia Hibernica, distinctio II, cap. IV, and analyses in some detail where the Roman de Perceforest conforms to it, and where it differs (or where, more particularly, the romance-writer has made his source incoherent). It would be interesting to discover, if that were possible, whether the author might have used an existing translation, or if this is simply another of his ingenious redeployments of authorities (as he had redeployed Geoffrey of Monmouth, Orosius and Dares Phygius in Book I). La Mort le roi Artu, p. 60.

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the history of the kingdom which she has done so much to promote, generating another history, if anything even more glorious: the new history of Arthur’s Britain. I chose the word ‘generate’ carefully, because now I turn to what I call the ‘significance’ of the Reine Fée: if I am right, and she is a sanitized avatar of Merlin, then what might the substitution signify to an audience in the fourteenth-century court of Hainault which seems, from all the available evidence, to have created both the romance and her? I am tempted by veristic analogues of the sort that Peggy McCracken argues for the queens of twelfth- and thirteenth-century romance: that the fictional queens ‘negotiate anxieties about women’s access to political power’.35 One thinks, for instance, of such powerful women, in the immediate circle from which the Roman de Perceforest appears to have derived,36 as Philippa of Hainault, wife of Edward III, or more alarmingly Isabella wife of Edward II. Is there, we cannot help but wonder, a political message here? Is the Reine Fée a tribute to Philippa? A counter-example to Isabella? The hypothesis is tempting – but it cannot be sustained. There is not the slightest trace of extra-textual political polemic, none even of that habitual nostalgia which might proffer a few platitudes about the decline of contemporary chivalry. An alternative significance might perhaps be found in something loosely (and vaguely) like a contemporary climate of thought, one which might be envisaged as challenging more conventional contemporary gender configurations: might we, for instance, point to analogues like Jean d’Arras’s Mélusine (c. 1393),37 who is the architect of prosperity, the bringer of peace and plenty, the orchestrator of affairs for the counts of Lusignan? Or might there be folklore analogues – a Reine Fée who is a survival, distant but still defiant, of the sylvaticae of classical legend?38 But I see no trace in the Reine Fée of a supernatural self – on the contrary, the writer of the Perceforest points out that all those known as fées in Britain are called so not because they are ‘fairies’, but because the common people find them puzzling and otherwise inexplicable. I do not find any of these ‘explanations’ particularly promising, but I would like to suggest, tentatively, a view which I think may be useful. I shall illustrate it with one of those central episodes in which the Reine Fée’s ‘historical’ role and individual self collide. I mentioned earlier the first of the ‘great invasions’ which destroy the kingdom: Julius Caesar’s. During the great battle of the Franc Palais in which the latter is victorious, terrible wounds are inflicted on Betis/Perceforest and on all his lineage – and the Reine Fée, as I said, arranges that the heroes be carried off to the Isle de Vie by damsels in white chariots. There, one of her grandsons, Ourseau, who for complicated reasons has been brought up in Rome, finds them a generation later: their wounds, he says, cry out for vengeance. But the Reine Fée is there before him: as her second son, Nestor, lay dying from a blow treacherously inflicted by Julius 35 The Romance of Adultery: Queenship and Sexual Transgression in Old French Literature (Philadel-

phia, 1998), p. 177. 36 Not only does the writer claim that the original MS. of the romance was ‘found’ in England by

Guillaume de Hainault, father of Edward III’s Queen Philippa, but he shows far more special knowledge of Hainault and the Low Countries than he does of Britain, or indeed France. Research in progress by Janet van der Meulen (University of Leiden), for her doctoral thesis on literary culture at the court of Hainault-Holland, suggests that she will be able to enlarge on this. 37 Jean d’Arras’s Mélusine, ed. Louis Stouff (Dijon, 1932), and recently translated by M. Perret (Paris, 1979). 38 See Harf-Lancner, Les Fées, pp. 23–5.

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Caesar himself, she had realized that a part of the lance-head has remained in the wound. She draws it out – and has preserved it until this very moment when Ourseau, whose coming she has been able to foresee, can be delegated to carry out her vengeance39 in the successful assassination of Caesar. (Parenthetically, he does so. The lance-head is made into twelve hooks, each of which is used by the conspirators: Brutus, Cassius, more remarkably Ourseau himself . The writer has a cavalier attitude to ‘history’!) For my present purposes, the details are unimportant: what is important is the question that Ourseau asks her. Why, he says, does the Reine Fée not retire to the Isle de Vie to eat the golden apples of eternal youth?40 Her reply is interesting, at all sorts of levels: she cannot do so, she says, ‘pour ce [. . .] que l’isle n’est prouffitable a ceulx qui ont a besongnier au monde. Or y ay a besongnier pour mes enffans.’41 Rather than withdrawing as her own generation is slaughtered or is carried to the Isle de Vie, she remains, benignly, far-sightedly, orchestrating events in the newly-restored kingdom, ensuring that vital inheritance which her children and her children’s children will bring, ensuring above all that Gallafur (the onomastic link with Galaad is no accident) marries la Pucelle aux Deux Dragons – they will be, in turn, the progenitors of Arthur. She becomes, in other words, and in what is the most literal way, the ‘Mother’ of the Kingdom of Britain: the Britain of her immediate descendants and, more crucially, the Britain of Arthur. Assuming that my hypothesis is correct and that the Reine Fée is, recognizably, a creative transformation of Merlin, then it seems to me that the text invites its readers to respond intertextually to a gender configuration in which the tutelary genius of Britain becomes a woman, a configuration which might seem signally to challenge the cultural norm. I believe that the last episode which I described suggested what that reading might involve: a focus – and I recognize the essentialism of what I am suggesting – on the Reine Fée as mother and nurturer. Consider for a moment Merlin’s Britain: a Britain fatally flawed, from the very outset, by the adulterous birth of Mordred, a Britain in which (in those canonical texts, the Vulgate and the prose Tristan, to which the Perceforest is tributary) the kingdoms are sterile, devoid of heirs. If Merlin is the progenitor of that Britain, it is difficult not to wonder if it is his ambiguity, his dangerous proximity to the diabolical, which has created a kingdom whose destruction will be so complete, a kingdom which does not carry any of the seeds of its own renewal. By contrast, the Perceforest’s Britain may know periodic destruction – but always, from that disaster, will spring new and even more glorious kingdoms which will, ultimately, culminate in Arthur’s own. Might it be that the author of the Perceforest is exploiting a convenient ‘myth of woman’ – invoking ‘motherhood’ and ‘wifehood’ to recuperate the moral and ethical virtues which will attach so signally to his cyclic vision of history, by contrast with the moral ambiguities which attach to the Britain that Merlin will ‘create’? Let me be clear: I am not arguing that the author of the Perceforest is, anachronistically, challenging gender behaviours and gender stereotypes. Rather I see him as writing in

39 Perceforest IV, 1011. 40 There are strong echoes, here, of the Celtic Otherworld; see T.P. Cross, Motif-Index of Early Irish Liter-

ature (Bloomington, IN, 1952), sections D. 950.10, F. 162.3 and 4. 41 Perceforest IV, 1007; my italics.

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acquiescence with the social order, in the happy confidence that the ‘motherly’ genius he has invented will generate metaphors like ‘mother of the nation’, and hence re-create, ‘re-present’ an Arthurian kingdom in which no worm gnaws at the heart of the rose.

9 The Relationship between Text and Image in Three Manuscripts of the Estoire del Saint Graal (Lancelot-Grail Cycle) ELSPETH KENNEDY

This chapter explores the relationship between text and image in three early fourteenth-century manuscripts from northern France and southern Flanders (British Library, Additional 10292–4 and Royal 14 E III; Amsterdam, Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, MS 1). In the episode studied here, where King Mordrain is stranded on a rocky island and is visited in turn by two boats, Royal and Amsterdam share a textual omission that is reflected in the colour given to a sail in Royal’s miniature illustrating one of these visits. Additional gives a miniature of the same scene which depicts the correct version of the text. This chapter has its origin in the project of a team of art historians and medieval literature specialists directed by Alison Stones. We are exploring the relationship between text and image in a group of three early fourteenth-century Lancelot-Grail manuscripts from northern France and southern Flanders that are closely linked textually and artistically: British Library, Additional 10292–4 (of which I will here be using 10292, henceforth Add); British Library, Royal 14 E III (henceforth Royal), which only contains the Estoire del Saint Graal, the Queste del saint Graal, and the Mort Artu, and a cyclic manuscript now spread between three libraries: Amsterdam, Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, MS 1 (henceforth Amsterdam), which contains the Estoire del saint Graal, the Estoire de Merlin without a Suite, and most of the Lancelot; Oxford, Bodleian, Douce 215 and Manchester, John Rylands, French 1 that contain between them the last part of the Lancelot, the Queste, and the Mort Artu, although some folios are missing. The three manuscripts for most of the cycle are textually linked to a group of manuscripts giving the short cyclic version of the Lancelot-Graal, of which two important thirteenth-century representatives are Paris, BnF, fr. 110 and Bonn, University Library, S 526, dated 1286. The Bonn manuscript is to be published under the direction of Philippe Walter in an edition prepared by Daniel Poirion under the title Le Livre du Graal, of which the first volume has already appeared; here I will be using Ponceau’s edition of the text, which is based on Amsterdam, but will also refer to Sommer’s edition, based on Add.1 Most scholars consider the short cyclic version to be later in date than the 1

Le Livre du Graal, ed. Daniel Poirion and Philippe Walter, vol. I (Paris, 2001); L’Estoire del saint

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version.2

long cyclic The complete cycle developed in three main stages: a pre-cyclic stage that does not include a Grail quest but brings the story to an end with the death of Lancelot’s friend Galehot; a first cyclic stage which takes over the pre-cyclic version virtually unchanged up to Lancelot taking his seat at the Round Table, but produces a new version of the events leading up to the death of Galehot that looks forward to a Grail quest yet to come, to be achieved by a descendant of Lancelot, and includes a new version of Chrétien’s Lancelot romance, Le Chevalier de la Charrette, a Grail Quest, and a Mort Artu. The third and final stage adds an early history of the Grail, a Merlin, based on Robert de Boron and a continuation or suite that prepares the way for the account of Lancelot’s childhood in the Lake with which the earliest form of the romance started. In most manuscripts the cycle developed without any consistent rewriting in order to eliminate any possible contradictions between the various branches. However, in the group to which for most of the text the three manuscripts we are now studying belong, there appears to have been a deliberate attempt in an early ancestor to remove inconsistencies. Yet, curiously enough, for the first half of the first branch of the complete cycle (corresponding to the first volume of Ponceau’s edition), two of our manuscripts, Amsterdam and Royal and a later manuscript, BnF, fr. 113, give the long cyclic version and only switch to the short version in the last half, whereas Add, like BnF, fr. 110 and Bonn, 526, give the short version. This would suggest very close links between these two manuscripts (and BnF, fr. 113, not examined here), and it is this special relationship that I will study in this piece in comparison with Add, which gives the short version. What is particularly interesting is the close textual relationship between Royal and Amsterdam alongside a contrasting pattern in the use of rubrics and miniatures. This is combined with one of the best examples of a link between text and image that I have ever met; it takes the form of a textual error common to both manuscripts that is reflected in a miniature to be found in one of them. I want first to look briefly at the use of rubrics almost like chapter headings in Amsterdam, but before doing this it is important to point out a difference between the two manuscripts throughout the cycle, or in Royal’s case, the parts of the cycle which have survived. In Royal the choice of the scene to be depicted and its placing in relation to the text appears to have been carefully planned in advance, it would seem with a patron in mind who was interested in some of the more spiritual and theological aspects of the work. Add’s miniatures and their placing also provide evidence of overall planning of the miniatures in relation to a particular patron, but here one with different interests, law and feudal questions.3 In contrast, in the cyclic manuscript now spread across three libraries, in Amsterdam, Oxford, and Manchester, there are considerable differences in the pattern in relation to the use of rubrics and miniatures from one branch of the cycle to another and no clear evidence of central planning for a particular patron. The part of the text studied here in relation to the pattern of rubrics and minia-

2 3

Graal, ed. Jean-Paul Ponceau, 2 vols. (Paris, 1997); The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, ed. H. Oskar Sommer, 8 vols. (Washington, DC, 1909–16). See for example Alexandre Micha, Lancelot: Roman en prose du xiiie siècle, 9 vols. (Paris and Geneva, 1978–83), I, xiv. See Elspeth Kennedy, ‘The placing of miniatures in relation to the pattern of interlace in two manuscripts of the Prose Lancelot’, in Por le soie amisté: Essays in honor of Norris J. Lacy, ed. Keith Busby and Catherine M. Jones (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA, 2000), pp. 269–82.

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tures starts with the beginning of the Estoire and continues up to p. 229 in Ponceau’s edition, here with Amsterdam, fols. 1–52v as the base text, and up to p. 106 in Sommer’s edition, based on Add, fols. 1–27r. A more detailed study of the relationship between miniatures, rubrics, and position in the text is made in relation to the last miniature in this section in Royal, fol. 36r, a rubric without a miniature in Amsterdam, fol. 45, and the last three miniatures in Add, fols. 23v to 25v. The first point to be made is that while there are considerably fewer miniatures in Amsterdam (six) than in Royal (twenty-three), wherever there is a miniature in Royal, in Amsterdam there will always be in exactly the same place in the text either a miniature with a rubric above it (except for the opening miniature) or only a rubric with a large champie initial, except on four occasions where there are just large champie initials without a rubric (fols. 9r, 9v, 15v, 15v). Eight of these miniatures in Royal and rubrics with or without miniatures in Amsterdam are placed at the point where the text switches from one narrative thread to another. There are usually three elements in the formal switch: (a) a declaration that at this point no more will be said about a character or set of characters; (b) an indication of the new direction which the tale will take, sometimes repeating information about the circumstances in which the character to whom the tale is returning found himself at the point when it last left him; (c) a new sentence beginning the next stage in the action, marked by a large coloured initial, in some manuscripts preceded by a miniature, usually with a rubric above it. This sentence usually introduces the name of the character whose adventures are now to be followed, often with a quant clause to place this resumption of a particular narrative thread in relation to events already told, and quite frequently containing a reference to the conte. An example of a short version of this type of switch is to be found in Amsterdam, fol. 25r (Ponceau, p. 106) and Royal, fol. 21r, in the following passage: Or vous lairons de Tholomé et si vous conterons del roi Evalach. Chi dist li contes ke, quant il fu entrés en Lacoine pour soi garandir, si apiela un sien sergant . . . (Now we will leave Tholomé and will tell you about King Evalach. Here the tale says that when he sought refuge in Lacoine, he summoned one of his men-at-arms . . .)

Here the taking up of the new thread by the tale is marked in Amsterdam by a rubric and a champie initial, in Royal by a miniature, with space left for a rubric above it. It is also marked in Add, fol. 13v (Sommer I, 51) by a rubric and miniature. However, in another example of a traditional type of switch, Royal, fol. 32r places a miniature and Amsterdam, fol. 40r (Ponceau, p. 174) a rubric (here not related to the scene depicted in Royal but more like a chapter heading) and a champie at the same place in the text, before the two sentences leading up to the switch away from the narrative thread rather than before the taking up of the new thread with ‘Chi dist li contes’, where Add, fol. 21v (Sommer, I, 84) places its miniature. There is also an unusual type of narrative switch that seems only to be found in the Estoire and is not confined to Royal and Amsterdam. It does not emphasize the break between the leaving of one narrative thread and the taking up of another in the way that is achieved by the traditional switch. It is to be found in the following example:

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Or vous lairons atant ester del roi, si vous parlerons de Joseph, qui se gist en son lit mout pensis et mout angoisseus del roi Evalach, comment il le porroit tourner a la creanche Jhesucrist, car il se pense . . . (We will now leave the king and will tell you how Joseph lies in bed very thoughtful and anxious as to how he can turn him towards belief in Jesus Christ, for he thinks that . . .)

Amsterdam, fol. 15v (Ponceau, p. 65) here has a champie but no rubric; Royal, fol. 14r has a miniature of Joseph kneeling beside his bed and having a vision of God. Add, fol. 8r (Sommer, I, 29) at this point has a traditional narrative switch and a miniature of a later scene. As stated earlier, throughout the text where Royal has a miniature, Amsterdam will always have a rubric, with or without a miniature, or occasionally just a champie without a rubric. However, there is one example of a rubric in Amsterdam, fol. 21r (Ponceau, p. 89) above a large champie, but only a pen-flourished initial in Royal, fol. 37v. Yet the nature of the rubrics varies in an interesting way. Where there is a miniature in Amsterdam, the rubric normally relates to what is depicted, although the miniature itself may not be so closely related to the details given in the text as is almost always the case in Royal. But there is one case where neither rubric nor miniature are accurate in Amsterdam, fol. 30r (Ponceau, p. 128). The miniature shows the White Knight (with divine connections as the text indicates clearly) unhorsing Tholomer, whereas the text says that he takes him by the rein. The rubric is also inaccurate as it states that King Tholomer is killed by St George: Tholomer is not killed but is eventually taken prisoner, and the White Knight is never identified with St. George in the text. In contrast, in Royal, as usually happens in this manuscript, the space for the rubric is left empty, but the miniature provides a much more accurate depiction of the events related, as indeed occurs throughout the branches of this manuscript which have survived. Elsewhere in Amsterdam, where there is no miniature, although quite frequently the rubric would apply well to the miniature (without a rubric) in Royal, in a number of places the rubrics are more like chapter headings. For example, at a narrative switch from Josephés, son of Joseph of Arimathea, and queen Sarraquite (Sarracinte in most manuscripts), both in Sarras, to King Evalach in Orcaus, where Royal, fol. 28r has a miniature of Tholomer on his knees offering his sword to Evalach, at exactly the same place in the text Amsterdam, fol. 34v (Ponceau, p. 149) has the following rubric: ‘Chi parole comment Evalac s’en rala a Sarras et se fist crestiener entre lui et sen serourge.’ (‘Here the tale tells how Evalac returned to Sarras and he and his brother-in-law became Christians.’) This summarizes nicely the contents of this section of the text. The differences alongside the close textual relationship between Amsterdam and Royal and the links between words and image, compared with the link between text and image in Add, are well illustrated in a boat scene in Royal with a rubric in Amsterdam and three boat scenes in Add. These scenes are linked to King Mordrain, the name Evalach took when he was baptized a Christian. He has been carried off by mysterious supernatural forces to a rock in the middle of the sea and while he is looking for God’s help he sees a series of boats approaching. I am first going to examine how this is depicted in Add, where the placing of the miniatures in relation to the order in which the scenes they present appear in the text is, at first sight, somewhat disconcerting. Two boats come to Mordrain in the text, both more

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than once, and two boats are illustrated: one white boat and one black. The first miniature of these boats occurs at a narrative switch, here from Pompee to Mordrain (see Add, fol. 23v, Sommer, I, 93; cf. Ponceau, p. 197). The miniature at the narrative switch in this manuscript usually depicts the next major incident in the text, but here, in Add’s text, just after the miniature and at the top of the next folio is recounted the arrival of a boat with a white sail with a red cross from which a good man disembarks and talks to Mordrain of religion. Yet the rubric describes the boat as black: ‘Ensi que li rois Mordrains regardoit une nef qui argoit et elle estoit noire.’ Indeed the boat is black in the miniature; it must therefore be the second boat watched by Mordrain, according to the text (Add, fol. 24r, Sommer, I, 94–5; cf. Ponceau, p. 201) a black one, arriving after the white boat; from it a beautiful woman will disembark and try to persuade Mordrain to have sinful sex with her. Mordrain does not respond, but is tempted. She gets back into the black boat and sails away. Then, according to the text, Mordrain begs for help from God to resist the temptations of the devil, and at that point sees the white boat return. The following words lead up to the next miniature: si se commencha mout durement a repentir du corage qu’il avoit devant eu et en cria merci a Nostre Signor mout durement. (Add, fol. 25r, Sommer, I, 97; cf. Ponceau, p. 208) (He began to repent deeply of the attitude he had had and to beg for God’s mercy.)

Then follows the rubric: Ensi que li rois Mordrains est en mer et .i. hons blanc vestus parole a lui. (How King Mordrain is by the sea and a man clad in white speaks to him.)

The miniature depicts Mordrain on the right talking to a man clad in white. There is a cave on the lower right of the rock; the boat, painted silver, is on the left in the water and has a white sail with a small red cross on its upper right. Beneath the miniature the text continues: Quant il vit la neif aprochier si descendi d’en haut et s’en vint au pié de la roche aval et esgarda en la neif. Si vit toutes les plentés de viandes. (When he saw the boat approach, he came down to the foot of the rock, looked at the boat and saw that it was full of provisions.)

The text then explains that he sees the man in white who had spoken to him of Christian matters before and who now comes from the boat onto the rock and speaks of such things again, reproaches the king for doubting, but comforts him and gives him food. The details in the text concerning the boat with the white sail with a red cross in the corner and the man in white within it, given below the picture of the black boat, are picked up again here visually so that in a sense both visits are combined in the one picture. Mordrain is left alone again, the black boat returns, the woman tempts Mordrain a second time, but he now rejects her, and she leaves him. This return is not illustrated. Mordrain’s final temptation comes in the text (Add, fol. 26v, Sommer, I, 104–5; cf. Ponceau, pp. 226–8) when the black boat returns, this time with the shields of Mordrain and Nascien attached. The text recounts how the devil in disguise leads

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Mordrain by his left hand on board, telling him that Nascien’s body lies on the ship, but when Mordrain makes the sign of the cross, he finds the ship empty of people and of the body. It is on this boat, after it has been purified by the man in white from the white ship, that he is eventually able to leave the rock. The miniature of this scene shows Mordrain being led onto the black boat by a man clad in black who is clasping the king’s left hand. It is preceded by the following rubric: ‘Ensi que .i. noire nef et .i. noirs hons prent le roy Mordrains par le main senestre.’ (Here is a black ship and a black man takes King Mordrain by the left hand.) However, the miniature is placed on fol. 25v (Sommer, I, 100; cf. Ponceau, p. 214), well before the scene is described in the text. It is preceded by a passage in which the man in white from the white ship warns Mordrain of temptations to come and which ends as follows: ‘Et por ce que tu te veus tenir del tout a la volenté de ton Creator, tu ne dois nul conseil prendre qui soit encontre sa volenté. Et se on te promet grans dons por faire cose qui desplaise a ton Creator, tu ne le dois pas por ce faire.’ (‘And because you want to submit yourself completely to the will of God, you should not accept any advice that is against His will. And if great gifts are promised to you in return for doing something displeasing to your Creator, you should reject this.’)

The miniature is placed above the following passage: En ceste maniere parla li hons de la neif au roi moult longement et mout plorent ses paroles au roi et li dounerent grant confort. Si que en la fin il demanda au preudome: ‘Sire, combien demourai jou en ceste roce?’ Et il li dist: ‘Tu i seras tant que li diables t’en jetera par la main senestre.’ (The man from the ship talked to the king in this way for a long time and gave him much comfort. In the end he asked the good man (holy man): ‘Sire, how long will I stay on this rock?’And he replied: ‘You will be there until the devil takes you off it by the left hand.’)

Thus the foretelling of the event and its significance are underlined rather than the event itself. Add uses this type of placing elsewhere in the cycle; for example, a miniature of a judicial duel will be placed above the arguments leading up to it rather than above the combat itself.4 The patterning of these three boat miniatures in Add does not, therefore, relate directly to the close textual environment, but places the white-sail boat between the two black boats in a way that helps to bring out the religious significance of Mordrain’s time on the rock. In Royal and Amsterdam, in their depiction of Mordrain’s time on the rock, the pattern of relationship between text and image and text and rubric, and the particular emphasis given, are different from Add. Only the white boat is illustrated in Royal, neither of the two black boats appear in a miniature, and at this point in Amsterdam only rubrics are being used, not miniatures. In Royal the miniature of Mordrain being talked to by the man in white from the first boat is placed immediately above the narrative switch from Pompee to Mordrain:

4

See Add 10293, fol. 7r. I discuss this further in the article cited in note 3.

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Atant se taist ore li contes de Pompee et si retorne au roi qui est en la roche mout esbahis et mout trespensés de che qu’il ne savoit ou il estoit ne en quel maniere il i estoit venus. (Amsterdam, fol. 45v; Royal, fol. 36r; Ponceau, p. 197) (Now the tale falls silent about Pompee and returns to the king on the rock, who is most disturbed and concerned that he does not know where he is nor how he has got there.)

The description of the boat occurs opposite the miniature in the next column so that text and image are well related. There is no rubric in Royal, but in Amsterdam there is at this point no miniature but a very explicit rubric: Chi parole comment une nef la ou dieus en sambl[anc]e d’ome vint au roy a la roche et li preche le foy. (Here it is told how a boat brought God in the semblance of a man to the rock and He preached of the faith.)

However, there are curious features about the miniature. A man robed in white stands on the land next to the cave, talking to King Mordrain. The boat is white (it is described as silver in the text), but it does not have the white sail to be found in text and picture in Add, but a red one, with a red cross on it. However, the text says in Amsterdam and in Royal that ‘li voiles estoit ausi tous viermaus’ (the sail was all red). Ponceau, the editor, who uses Amsterdam as his base manuscript for this part of the text, emends to ‘et li voile estoit ausi blanchoians comme nois negie et si avoit el milieu une crois qui estoit toute vermelle’ (and the sail was as white as snow and had in the centre a red cross). This is the reading with a few minor variants of other manuscripts giving the long version at this point and is indeed similar to the short-version reading in Add fol. 23v (Sommer, I, 93). There would, therefore, appear to have been a jump from estoit to estoit in the source of Amsterdam and Royal. What is very interesting is that the miniature follows what is to be found in the surrounding text and as a result produces a picture based on a textual error. This underlines once again that the miniatures in this group of manuscripts are not just inherited but closely based on the text of the particular manuscript being illustrated. To sum up, the differences as well as the similarities between the three manuscripts studied here are revealing. From the purely textual point of view, Royal and Amsterdam are very closely linked. They both give the long version here, but leave it at exactly the same point to join the short version, that is the version to be found in the rest of the Amsterdam/Douce/Rylands cycle as a whole; Royal also gives the short version in its other surviving branches, the Queste and the Mort Artu. They also share the same textual error that gives a red sail to the boat bringing the man in white to Mordrain and are closely linked too by the sometimes rather idiosyncratic placing of miniatures and rubrics at particular points in the text. However, in other ways they are very different. The miniatures in Royal seem to have been carefully planned in advance for a patron with strong theological and spiritual interests. This is true in relation not only to the Estoire but also to the Queste and the Mort Artu. These miniatures almost always reproduce faithfully the information given in the text and are carefully placed within it to give particular significance to the picture. In Amsterdam/Douce/Rylands there is no such carefully central overall planning; the patterning of rubrics and miniatures varies enormously from one branch of the cycle

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to another and, on occasion, even within a branch. It is interesting, for example, that in the Queste the miniature will not necessarily be placed at exactly the same place in Amsterdam/Douce/Rylands as the miniature of the same scene in Royal; this is in contrast with the situation in the Estoire. The miniatures also tend to be less accurate in their depiction of events in a way consistent with the details given in the cycle’s text of the Estoire; this is also true of other branches of the cycle. There is, therefore, a tension between similarities and differences in relation to Amsterdam and Royal. Add, as noted above, in the part of the Estoire studied here gives a different version of the text. Its miniatures, like those of Royal, will almost always be carefully based on details given in the text; this manuscript may also use an unusual placing to emphasize the significance of the event rather than the event itself. There is, therefore, in these manuscripts no mechanical use of traditional material, and two of them, Add and Royal, seem to have been carefully prepared from the outset for different patrons with particular individual requirements. Yet the third, Amsterdam/ Douce/Rylands, linked closely in other ways to Royal, does not seem to have been made to fit the requirements of a specific person or type of person in mind in terms of the relationship between text and image.

10 Wigalois and Parzival: Father and Son Roles in the German Romance of Gawain’s Son NEIL E. THOMAS

Gawein’s legendary son provides a context in which his father may redeem himself from his ambiguous record as a sexual harasser and deserter, a process which leads to the father’s contrition and his taking part in the son’s quasi-sacral form of kingship, this being an inclusive and assimilative regime which offers an implicit critique of Wolfram’s Parzival where the quintessentially Arthurian knight, Gawan, is not permitted to join Parzival in the Grail realm. Wirnt von Gravenberg’s Wigalois1 differs from the better-known Arthurian romances of Hartmann von Aue in its eclectic use of source material. Where Erec and Iwein largely depend on unitary French sources by Chrétien de Troyes, Wigalois is a syncretic work whose material lies athwart a number of story-types and genres.2 A tradition of Gawein’s liaison with Florie (a fée whose name is attached to a somewhat different tradition in the Old French Merveilles de Rigomer)3 appears to underlie the introductory story of the hero’s parents, which is then succeeded by an account of a young knight’s testing sequence similar to that occurring in other European variants of the Fair Unknown cycle and Malory’s ‘Tale of Sir Gareth’.4 This is followed by an account of the redemption of an ailing king and his stricken land, a sequence bearing similarities with Parzival and other medieval Grail stories, whilst the sequel describing a protracted siege is probably an invention – albeit one influenced by aspects of the chanson de geste tradition of collective combat. The following is a brief summary of its narrative stages: 1

2 3

4

Wigalois. Der Ritter mit dem Rade, ed. J.M.N. Kapteyn (Bonn, 1926), translated with Introduction by J.W. Thomas, Wigalois: The Knight of Fortune’s Wheel (Lincoln, NE, 1977). Nothing certain is known of the author of Wigalois beyond his given name, the information that Wigalois was the author’s first work (140) and his connection with Gravenberg (the modern Gräfenberg north-east of Nuremberg and Bayreuth). Cf. Stefan Fuchs, Hybride Helden: Gwigalois und Willehalm. Beiträge zum Heldenbild und zur Poetik des Romans im frühen 13. Jahrhunder (Heidelberg, 1997). This post-Chrétien verse romance penned by the otherwise unknown Jehan (possibly a collective nom de plume for a number of scribes) has a triple quest in which Lancelot (unsuccessfully) and Gauvain (successfully) set out to lift the curse of the mysterious castle of Rigomer, followed by the torso of an account in which King Arthur himself takes up the challenge. Gauvain is here protected by a tutelary fairy mistress named ‘Lorie de la Roche Florie’. On this tradition see Jutta Eming, Funktionswandel des Wunderbaren: Studien zum ‘Bel Inconnu’, zum ‘Wigalois’ und zum ‘Wigoleis vom Rade’ (Trier, 1999).

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Wigalois starts with an account of Gawein’s marriage to Florie in a wondrous kingdom where the goddess Fortuna resides as the tutelary deity. The story of Gawein’s son begins after his father – who receives a magic belt bestowing good fortune whilst in the wondrous kingdom – has ridden back to Camelot (omitting to take with him the girdle of Fortune which is later passed to his son). Bearing the belt left by his father, the son seeks out his father at the Arthurian court where Gawein (whom, we are told, the son does not recognize) is appointed as his chivalric mentor. Here Wigalois, in an action portending his future pre-eminence, is able to sit on Arthur’s ‘stone of virtue’. In an initial series of skirmishes with sundry adversaries under the censorious gaze of a female emissary (Nereja), he persuades his sceptical guide that he is the equal of his father (whose services she had requested in preference to those of the youth). He thereby wins the qualification to proceed to the major challenge of defeating the Mohammedan necromancer, Roaz of Glois, Lar’s murderer, and so to release the unquiet soul of Lar. This task he accompanies with the aid of an abundance of holy objects (not with the belt of Fortune which has in the meantime been stolen) which help him to defeat a succession of devilish enemies. The work of salvation completed, he marries the old king’s daughter, Larie, and rules over the now restored land of Korntin. In an extensive sequel he is joined by his father (whose identity has in the interim been formally revealed to him) and other Arthurian knights in his campaign against a second malefactor, Lion of Namur. The siege of Namur successfully accomplished, Wigalois pays a ‘state visit’ to Arthur at Nantes before resuming kingship in the land of Korntin where his rule maintains standards of statesmanship and Christian compassion inaugurated by the late King Lar.

The similarities between Wigalois and the Grail tradition have long been recognized 5 and were already perceptible to Heinrich von dem Türlin when he used a variation of Wigalois’s ‘grôz âventiure’ to supply the metaphysical logic underpinning his Grail sequence in Diu Crône.6 Wigalois, like Diu Crône and Parzival, is concerned with the redemption of a stricken land and the subsequent assumption by the hero of a quasi-sacral form of kingship. Common to Wigalois and many Grail romances is a disquiet concerning a homicidal event glossed in cosmic terms as a sacrilege bringing divine wrath upon a bereaved people and a blight over the victim’s land. The curse is to be overcome by a saviour knight by the exercise of spiritual power and/or by his exaction of vengeance upon the original malefactor.7 The duty to lift the curse is typically linked to a further obligation where the redeemer, having avenged his late predecessor, is set to restore order and dominion within the wasted realm. These narrative patterns are evident in Wigalois where the eponymous hero triumphs over an apostate malefactor with God’s aid, avenges the just king murdered by that malefactor and assures a proper continuation of the Christian rule recently overturned. 5 6

7

On this point and for the older literature on the subject see J.W. Thomas, Wigalois (as in note 1), esp. pp. 37–8. When Heinrich’s Gawein succeeds in redeeming the old Grail King from a limbo girt with what are termed ‘wonders’ of hellish fire, the author portrays a similar mode of messianic salvation to that described by Wirnt when his eponymous hero releases the old King Lar’s wraith from its purgatorial abode in the castle full of unearthly flames and lamentations. Lar, like Hamlet’s father, is a ghost to whom God grants a periodic respite from purgatorial torments as a recompense for his charitable acts when he was alive (Wigalois, 4663–88). Such is the case in Peredur, Sir Percyvell of Galles and in Manessier’s Continuation of the Conte du Graal where Perceval uses the reforged Grail sword to slay the Lord of the Red Tower who had slain the brother of the Fisher King.

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Despite these underlying similarities between the Grail quest and Wigalois’s redemptive journey, however, Wirnt chose to blunt a central theme of the Perceval/ Parzival tradition; namely, that the quest be undertaken as a penitential labour by an erring knight. Whilst Wolfram’s commitment to the ideological premise of the ‘fair unknown’ dimension of the Parzival story8 is demonstrated by his unsparing treatment of Parzival’s errors and in his altering of the predestinarian ‘Grail premise’ to allow his erring protagonist to gain tenure of the sacral kingship, the moral force of the untutored cadet theme is all but blinded in Wigalois. Unlike the heroes of the French and English Fair Unknown cognates, Wigalois is presented from the outset as the issue of a formal marriage. Not ‘begotten be a forest side’ like his English counterpart,9 he is a legitimate hero who knows the name of his father and is able to benefit from paternal tuition (1591–603). This transforms him into a knight whose essential purpose is not so much to find his father as to emulate him in a sequence where he aspires to follow in his father’s footsteps: ich wil benamen hinnen varn, in mîner jugent erwerben daz daz man mich von rehte baz erkenne danne ein andern man, als mîn vater hât getân. (1294–8) (I will go forth to ensure that whilst I am still young people will acknowledge me before all other knights – just as my father was able to achieve in his time.)

Wirnt’s narratorial persona of conservative moralist repeatedly moves him to defend a socially exclusive definition of the chivalrous estate, expressing vivid premonitions of social chaos should any social opportunist succeed in making his way up through the ranks (2339–48). According to his frequent moral/political commentaries, chivalry should be passed down in dynastic succession and any breach of this procedure would lead to social anarchy as surely as neglect of God’s law would produce moral chaos (2137–48, 10245–305). Before battle with one of his more formidable opponents, Hojir, Wigalois is told that a successful knight must be ‘chosen’, a point reinforced by the spirit king.10 Wirnt’s protagonist is not a tumber man but from the start the legitimate, accredited son of Arthur’s second-in-command acting with foreknowledge of his father’s example. Hence his first series of trials, where he stoically withstands the criticisms of his female guide,11 is framed not so much as a paternal quest as the attempt to attain the standard set by his legendary father12 (there are a number of echoes of 8

On the pervasive influence of this theme in Middle High German literature see Anthony van der Lee, Zum Literarischen Motiv der Vatersuche (Amsterdam, 1957). 9 The swift desertion by Gawain and consequential bastardy of his son were part of the original tradition according to the earliest known version of the Gauvain/Floree story in the Old French Livre d’Artus (where Gauvain’s son is likewise the illegitimate issue of a fleeting sexual encounter). See The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, ed. H.O. Sommer, 7 vols., repr. (New York: AMS, 1973), VII, 109–11. 10 ‘Dâ von muoz er sîn erwelt/ der zem besten wirt gezelt;/ daz bejagt her Gwîgâlois der helt’ (2964–6); ‘Du solt von rehte sîn ein helt,/ wan dîn vater ist erwelt,/ der süeze her Gâwein’ (4792–4). 11 ‘Wand er solher zühte pflac/ daz er daz bewarte ie/ daz er wider ir willen/ deheiner slahte dinc getet/ ern erwürbez ê mit sîner bet’ (2198 ff). 12 See Fuchs, Gwigalois und Willehalm (as in note 2), esp. pp. 115–19.

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Gawan’s manoeuvres in conciliating the rebarbative Orgeluse in Wolfram’s Parzival,13 emphasizing the similarities between father and son). The eponymous hero had furthermore already given prior demonstration of his superlative moral standard through the ‘rock of virtue’ motif (on which testing object he is able to sit since his heart was ‘free of any villainy’).14 Despite some functional equivalence of Wirnt’s ‘Tugendstein’ and the Grail in Parzival,15 the motif of a spiritual test is positioned initially in Wigalois rather than as the moral consummation of the protagonist’s career, a prolepsis making any further development of moral character unnecesssary. Against this image of the ‘parfit gentil knight’ one scholar has, to be sure, argued that Wigalois’s reverse when prostrated by a fearsome dragon shows God punishing him for his hubris (since the knight expresses a sense of being the recipient of divine wrath).16 But such subjective feelings of sinfulness are experienced in the same romance by the virtuous King Lar17 and, like the deceased king, Wigalois commits no identifiable sin of omission or commission, having therefore no need of divine sermons against the hubris of purely secular projects. His response to the loss of the magic belt of Fortune (stolen by a fisher couple after his prostration by the dragon) shows him already well aware of the shortcomings of purely worldly powers:18 Des begunde er got genâde sagen, dar under tougenlîche klagen den gürtel und sîn îsengwant. Er gedâhte ‘nu sol ich zehant Gegen der âventiure varn; Wâ mit sol ich mich bewarn Sît ich den gürtel han verlorn Den ich ze trôste hêt erkorn Zallen mînen dingen? Noch muoz mir gelingen Zer selben âventiure; Sin ist nie sô ungehiure Ichn welle dâ tot geligen, Od mit der gotes kraft gesigen’. (5992–6005)

13 14 15 16

The likenesss was noted by Jessie L. Weston, The Legend of Sir Gawain (London, 1897), p. 56 n. ‘sîn herze was âne mein/ und ledic aller bôsheit’ (1492–3). See Eming, Funktionswandel des Wunderbaren (as in note 4), pp. 164–5. ‘Seine Verfehlung besteht darin, Gott eine untergeordnete Rolle im höfischen Wertekanon zugewiesen zu haben. Wigalois hat zu lernen, Gott als oberstes Prinzip anzuerkennen und sich Gottes Führung vorbehaltlos anzuvertrauen’ (Ingeborg Henderson, ‘Selbstentfremdung im Wigalois’, Colloquia Germanica 13 (1980): 35–46, here 44). 17 The messenger, Nereja, says of Lar that he ‘vergaz doch nie/ sîn der imz gegeben hêt/ in des gewalt diu werlt stêt/ dem diente mîn lieber herre/ und minnete in alsô verre/ mit almuosen und mit messen/ daz ims diu liute wessen’ (3737–4300). His tribulations in his wraith-like state are any case on the point of expiry due to his good works whilst he was alive (4852–5). 18 We might contrast a sequence in the Lancelot-Grail cycle where a divine voice reproaches Lancelot with hubris as he draws his sword: ‘Einsi come Lancelot ot trete l’espee, si regarde contremont et voit venir une main toute enflamee qui le feri si durement par mi le braz que l’espee li vola de la main. Lors oï une voiz qui li dist: “Ha! Hons de povre foi et de mauvese creance, por quoi te fies tu plus en ta main que en ton Criator?” ’ (La Queste del saint Graal, ed. A. Pauphilet (Paris, 1972), p. 253).

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(He thanked God but secretly mourned the loss of the belt and his armour. He thought, ‘I will meet my challenge without delay (but) how shall I defend myself since I have lost the belt which I always chose as my aid in all my straits? Yet I may still prevail in this adventure, and, however terrifying it may turn out to be, I will triumph with God’s aid – or die in the attempt.)

Unlike the protagonist of the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight who does not realise that the girdle (a legendary cognate of the belt occurring in Wigalois)19 bestowed upon him by Sir Bertilak’s wife is a moral snare, Wigalois acknowledges that none of his victories would have been possible without God’s aid (7119–21, 8770–1). The terrors inflicted on the hero in this episode therefore appear probative rather than punitive and an expression of God’s loving-kindness20 (according to the somewhat circular logic of medieval notions of Providence).21 Against the grain of the ‘classical’ pattern of an eponymous hero’s sin-and-rehabilitation found in Parzival and in Hartmann’s romances, the problematic character in Wirnt’s narrative appears to be not the protagonist himself but his fictional father whose conduct, if it had remained at the same moral standard we witness in the early part of the narrative, would have thrown doubt on his suitability as a role model for the son. Shortly after Gawein’s betrothal to Florie, he becomes homesick for the world of knights and, in an action resembling that of Hartmann’s Iwein, determines to return to Karidol, purportedly for a short time, ostensibly forgetting that it will not be possible to re-enter his wife’s enchanted abode without Fortuna’s girdle or else having Joram as his guide. Tiring in turn of the knightly round with his Arthurian peers, he is unable to regain his erstwhile home, and so remains cut off from his wife and future son. Gawein’s problematic sexuality in Wigalois appears to have derived from a tradition which supplies a subtextual dynamic in a wide variety of medieval texts such as Hunbaut, Meraugis de Portlesguez, Gliglois, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Parzival.22 Even in Diu Crône, which presents the most positive depiction of Gawein in German medieval verse, he commits an unspecified form of sexual harassment (with regard to a woman there named as Flori).23 Whilst Heinrich von 19 See R.S. Loomis, ‘More Celtic elements in Gawain and the Green Knight, JEGP 62 (1943): 149–84. 20 ‘got der was genaedic ie’ (6483). 21 According to the self-confirming medieval conceptions of Providence, to suffer a serious reverse led

many to the subjective conviction of being sinful (in some way hitherto unrevealed to the sufferer). If the wicked person encountered adversity this was a punishment from God. The godly person who was smitten was being tested and tried. The correct reaction on the part of a believer afflicted by ill fortune was therefore to search one’s conscience in order either to discover the moral defect which had provoked God’s wrath, or to eliminate the complacency which had led the Almighty to perform tests and trials. The theological point has already been widely studied with regard to Hartmann’s Der Arme Heinrich: see Rolf Endres, ‘Heinrichs hôchvart’, Euphorion 61 (1967): 267–95 and Christoph Cormeau, Hartmanns von Aue ‘Armer Heinrich’ und ‘Gregorius’: Studien zur Interpretation mit dem Blick auf die Theologie zur Zeit Hartmanns (Munich, 1966). 22 For instance, Gauvain’s immature and unreliable conduct falls well below the standard of the eponymous hero in Hunbaut, and in Meraugis de Portlesguez his philandering leads to his having to promise that he will not stay two successive nights in the same castle lest he compromise the good name of its maidens and ladies. See Keith Busby, ‘Diverging traditions of Gauvain in some of the later Old French verse romances’, in The Legacy of Chrétien de Troyes, ed. Noris J. Lacy, Douglas Kelly, Keith Busby, 2 vols. Faux Titre 37 (Amsterdam, 1988), II, 93–109, and Ute Schiessl, ‘Die Gawangestalt im Wigalois des Wirnt von Gravenberc’, unpublished dissertation, University of Munich,1968, pp. 156–74. 23 Die Krone (Verse 1–12281) nach der Handschrift 2779 der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, ed.

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dem Türlin leaves vague the nature and extent of the harassment, the sexual assault mentioned in Wigalois is foregrounded to the extent of being cited as the reason for Gawein’s failure at the Tugendstein: ezn was dâ vor nie geschehen daz ie iemen würde ersehen ûf demselben steine, niwan der künic [al] eine: der was âne wandel gar. her Gâwein der reichte dar mit der hant, und niht baz; ich sagiu wie er verworhte daz er dem steine niht moht komen, als ichz ofte hân vernomen: eine maget wol getân die greif er über ir willen an, sô daz si weinde unde schrê. deheiner slahte untugent mê er von sîner kintheit nie unz an sînen tôt begie; diu selbe in zuo dem steine niht lie.

(1501–17)

(Never before had it happened that anybody [besides Wigalois] had been seen upon this stone except for the King (who was without fault). Sir Gawein was able to touch it with his hand, but he could do no better than that. I will tell you how he forfeited his right to approach the stone (as I have often heard tell). He once grabbed a beautiful maiden against her will, so causing her to shout out and scream. He committed no other offence for the rest of his life, but it was this which disallowed his approach to the stone.)

The moral implication of the desertion of the protagonist’s mother would have been clear to audiences acquainted with the eponymous hero’s desertion of Laudine in Hartmann’s Iwein, or the forsaking of Belakane by the hero’s father in Parzival.24 A number of homiletic asides show that Wirnt’s moralistic narrator did not regard the dereliction of emotional obligations as a venial peccadillo; rather does his contention that ‘all good things in life come from the presence of women’,25 together with frequent eulogies to noblewomen (and a corrresponding anathematization of abuses committed against them),26 suggest the conviction that he believed good relations Fritz Peter Knapp and Manuela Niesner, Altdeutsche Textbibliothek 112 (Tübingen, 2000), ll. 1994– 2000. 24 In the seventeenth-century Artushof (which follows Wirnt fairly closely but omits the whole of the Lion section) Gabein, knowing his wife to be pregnant, nevertheless insists on returning to the Arthurian court, responding in answer to his wife’s question about what they should call their offspring ‘As you wish’ (‘wi du wilt’) – a somewhat callous response. See Leo Landau, Arthurian Legends or the Hebrew-German Rhymed Version of the Legend of King Arthur, Teutonia 21 (Leipzig, 1912), p. 21a, l. 32. Achim Jaeger has recently pointed to this symptom of ‘Unaufmerksamkeit, ja Gleichgültigkeit Gaveins in familiären Angelegenheiten’: Ein jüdischer Artusritter. Studien zum jüdisch-deutschen ‘Widuwilt’ (‘Artushof’) und zum ‘Wigalois’ des Wirnt von Gravenberc (Tübingen, 2000), p. 247. 25 ‘Wan swaz diu werlt vreude hât/ diu komt uns von den wîben’ (2097–8). 26 Assaults on noblewomen are entirely foreign to the narratorial ideal of the chivalric enterprise: ‘eine juncvrouwen al eine/ sâhen si vür sich rîten./ bî den selben zîten/ was gewonlich,/ si waere arm ode rîch,/ daz si wol mohte durch ir muot/ rîten swar si dûhte guot,/ unbesprochen und âne leit./ daz was dô

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between the sexes were ‘essential to preserve harmony in society and the Christian community’.27 Unlike Ulrich von Zatzikhoven in his descriptions of Lanzelet’s serial philandering, the moralist narrator of a romance once anomalously assigned to the genre of the courtly ‘Unterhaltungsroman’ was not willing, like his predecessor, to ‘dispense with edifying pretensions’.28 Any attempt to formally problematize the issue of Florie’s desertion in the body of the text by analogy with Iwein’s desertion of Laudine would have had the untoward effect of distorting narrative proportions relative to father and son, but Gawein’s later, self-denying ordinance of abjuring knighthhood on hearing of his wife’s death suggests elliptically a process of contrition for once having too zealously pursued knightly goals at Florie’s expense: sô sprach her Gâwein der degen, ‘wan daz mîn vreude sî gelegen mit ir hiute vür disen tac der ich mit hôhem muote ie pflac. ichn wil konlîcher ê mit staete gepflegen nimmer mê, noch rîterschaft, michn twinges nôt.

(11380–6)

(The bold Gawein said: ‘From this time forward my joy is no more on account of [the death of] her to whom I was always devoted. I will never again seek such a union, nor will I practise deeds of arms, unless compelled to do so by dire necessity’.)

Gawein’s advice to his son not to let emotional volatility cloud his counsels,29 linked with the directive not to forget his mother, Florie (11554–6), has often been understood in terms of a ‘third education’30 dispensed for the benefit of his son. Yet since Gawein rather than the son had been afflicted by the emotional lapses adverted to, these words appear to suggest something of what Gawein had come to learn about his own failings. Hence Wigalois’s integration of his wife into his martial regimen suggests a symbolic corrective to his father’s conduct. That conduct had consisted in his behaving like an irresponsible iuvenis31 who viewed chivalry and love as mutually exclusive areas of life (rather like Iwein before his journey of restitution).32 By having Gawein acknowledge his fault and Wigalois symbolically cancel it, Wirnt sustains the ‘chivalry topos’ according to which Love and Prowess are combined in

27 28 29 30 31 32

gewonheit,/ swâ man deheine rîten sach,/ daz ir niemen niht ensprach./ nu ist diu werlt valschaft/ und ist âne meisterschaft/ beidiu liute unde lant’ (2355–69). Cf. also 2388–94; 5408–12; 9696–715. Annette Loyola, ‘The Role of the Women in Wirnt von Gravenberg’s Wigalois’. Doctoral dissertation, State University of New York at Albany (Ann Arbor, MI, 1999), p.133. Nicola McClelland, Ulrich von Zatzikhoven’s ‘Lanzelet’: Narrative Style and Entertainment (Cambridge, UK, 2000), p. 234. ‘Und lât niht verdringen/ Die jugent iuwer sinne’ (11535–6). He receives his first instruction in Florie’s domain and the second from Gawein when the latter is assigned to be his tutor when he first visits Arthur’s court. See Georges Duby, ‘Dans la France du Nord-Ouest au XIIe siècle: les “jeunes” dans la société aristocratique’, Annales ESC 19 (1964), 835–46. In Iwein Gawein fails to be able to understand how Iwein’s desire to rejoin Laudine can override his obligation to the Arthurian court. Gawein’s advice to Iwein not to become a second Erec precipitates the crisis where Iwein loses Laudine’s favour (cf. 3029–58).

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an action where the married couple takes on the responsibility of upholding justice together.33 Despite his frequent plaints against sexual abuses, Wirnt shows a remarkable indulgence towards Gawein which distinguishes his treatment of that fallible figure from the tendentious treatment of a number of other romance writers who used Gawein as a negative exemplum.34 Evidence of narratorial partiality is implicit in a number of extenuations advanced to rationalize his conduct. After his desertion of Florie it is implied that Gawein left the magic belt with her in order to relieve her sorrow (1195–201); he had committed no more sexual assaults in his adult life resembling the one carried out in his youth (1514–16); he acts as a newly solicitous father to the once abandoned protagonist, whilst the sharing of grief over Florie’s death by father and son (11329–66) leads to a strengthening of the father-son bond.35 The clearest sign of his moral rehabilitation occurs when the son gives him an unequivocal encore by summoning him by letter to be his advisor in the narrative finale: Daz was niht ein wunder War umb si kômen in daz lant: Her Gwîgalois der hêt gesant Einen brief dem herren Gâwein.

(9613–6)

(It was no surprise that the Arthurian knights repaired to Wigalois’s kingdom since Wigalois had sent out a letter of invitation to Gawein.)

The lack of any verifiable source for the Lion campaign and the dearth of fabulous elements36 in the final section of the narrative (7908–11708) have suggested to most readers an extemporized closure (although if we accept a late dating for Wigalois, it is possible that there may have been some influence from the direction of Wolfram’s Willehalm).37 The completion of the ‘great adventure’ had already been announced (7904), and the provocation for the Lion conflict arises unheralded in the midst of the nuptial festivities which had appeared to form the natural conclusion of the work.38 Henceforth romance conventions are discarded and the term âventiure (in the sense of a proving ground for individual knightly prowess) is explicitly rejected

33 See Cornelia U.D. Dandaraw, ‘Wirnts von Gravenberg Wigalois: Eine thematische und strukturelle

34

35 36 37

38

Interpretation im Vergleich zu Hartmanns von Aue Erec’. Doctoral dissertation, State University of New York at Albany (Ann Arbor, MI, 1997), p. 58. Wirnt did not for instance attempt to make of Gawein a negative exemplum on the Lancelot-Grail pattern or on that of the thirteenth-century Gliglois (where Gauvain’s presumptuous sexual advances lead to his humiliating rejection by the heroine of a romance, who chooses the more honourable overtures of Gauvain’s own page). See Gliglois. A French Arthurian Romance of the Thirteenth Century, ed. C.H. Livingstone (Cambridge, MA, 1932). Gawein says to his son that he must be his sole source of happiness from that time forward (9684–93). Cf. also the warm response of Larie to her new father-in-law when she calls him ‘väterlîn’ (9767). See Wolfgang Mitgau, ‘Nachahmung und Selbständigkeit Wirnts von Gravenberc in seinem Wigalois’, ZfdPh 82 (1963): 321–37. For this view see Werner Schröder, ‘Der synkretistische Roman des Wirnt von Gravenberg: Unerledigte Fragen an den Wigalois’, Euphorion 80 (1986): 235–77. The dating of Wigalois is problematical with conjectures ranging from 1205 to 1235. See the Forschungsbericht in Jaeger, Ein jüdischer Artusritter (as in note 24), pp. 96–116. ‘Hie ist diu âventiure geholt?/ wâ ist nu der minne solt,/ Des wunsches âmie/ Diu schoene Larie?’ (7904–7).

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as a descriptor for the Lion engagement in a sequence which is described in naturalistic terms.39 During the siege of Namur, for instance, responsibility is delegated to numerous combatants in a massed action which takes place within a realistic time frame of six weeks (11047).40 After the campaign, Wigalois attends to civic order by making the defeated city of Namur a dukedom under a regent, Moral, granting the defeated citizens of Namur their lives on condition that they accept his authority, exacting thirty thousand gold marks from the citizenry in order to ensure the solidarity of his own soldiery (11157ff). Meanwhile, the Arthurian knights (Erec, Lanzelet and Iwein) are reallocated practical duties far removed from their wonted literary biographies as knights errant.41 The tone of military realism and the integrative function performed by the residence of Gawein and his three peers at the new king’s court are at conspicuous variance with conditions in Wolfram’s enigmatic ‘Grail’ realm.42 The millennial notions surrounding Wolfram’s Grail may at a later date have been perceived by that author himself as a moral aporia, for in Willehalm (c.1217) the Oriental utopia yields to a more serious engagement with the sectarian dilemma of the age, fabulous subjectmatter being now rejected in favour of the weightier Cross/Crescent theme. If Wirnt’s reference to Wolfram is testimony that he was composing in a similar literary milieu and perhaps at approximately the same time as Wolfram was issuing his literary ‘retraction’, 43 Wigalois might suggest a second, external confrontation with Wolfram’s ahistorical utopia. Wirnt’s text appears to be concerned with the theme of how Arthurian knights might comport themselves in a narrative world untrammelled by romance conventions – a context in which the fabulous Grail and associated utopian associations would have been out of place. Wirnt can hardly have viewed the herald of notoriously uncertain meaning as a symbol conducive to his didactic purposes.44 Although the tone of Wigalois is considerably more pious than that which we 39 Cf. 10182: ‘hie enist niht âventiure’. 40 The realistic descriptions of time and place in the last 4000 lines bear no relation to the fantastical

41 42

43

44

topography and supernatural time schemes found in earlier parts of the narrative. After the defeat of Roaz, more than six weeks elapse before the hero’s coronation. There then occur twelve days’ festivities followed by twelve days’ preparations for the military campaign (9347, 9797, 10139, 10720). After the six weeks of campaigning the journey back to the Arthurian court takes twelve days and the sojourn there seven days (11393, 11480). Erec gives advice on strategy (9994ff), Iwein and Erec are made responsible for the safe escort of Larie (10645ff), whilst Gawein is made commander of the troops. Cf. Christoph Cormeau, ‘Wigalois’ und ‘Diu Crône’: Zwei Kapitel zur Gattungsgeschichte des nachklassischen Aventiureromans, Münchener Texte und Untersuchungen 57 (Munich, 1977): ‘Wirnt (wollte) den Verhaltensentwurf des Aventiureromans demonstrativ näher an die soziale Realität rücken, um seine Verbindlichkeit zu wahren’ (p. 38); also Frank Ringeler, Zur Konzeption der Protagonistenidentität im deutschen Artusroman um 1200: Aspekte einer Gattungspoetik (Frankfurt, Berlin, Berne, 2000), p. 223. Horst Brunner, ‘ “Artus der wîse höfsche man”: Zur immanenten Historizität der Ritterwelt im Parzival Wolframs von Eschenbach’, in Germanistik in Erlangen. Hundert Jahre nach der Gründung des deutschen Seminars, ed. Dieter Peschel, Erlanger Forschungen 31 (Erlangen, 1983), pp. 61–74, here p. 72 (‘eine Art Selbstkritik des Parzival–Romanciers’). Parzival finally remains an open text at whose conclusion the son, Loherangrin, is plunged into the same compulsive behaviour of question-asking as his father before him and where the fate of Gawan remains unclear. On this aspect see Annette Volfing, ‘Parzival and Willehalm: Narrative Continuity?’ in Wolfram’s ‘Willehalm’. Fifteen Essays, ed. Martin H. Jones and Timothy McFarland (New York, 2002), pp. 45–59.

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encounter in Hartmann’s romances, Wirnt appears to have resembled Hartmann in holding to a ‘firm belief in Christianity as a courtly asset’45 and would not perhaps have dissented from Hartmann’s notion of ‘the courtly God’. He can have had little inclination to direct an audience’s aspirations towards a vaguely defined or purely metaphysical sphere of experience. Although the son’s ‘great adventure’ in the pagan citadel requires messianic resources, the same redeemer is nevertheless obliged to acquire a ‘normal’ chivalric background resembling that of his father (rather than remain an ineffectual Galahad figure whose life inheres in the spirit alone). Recent critics have rightly pointed to a decided lack of moral rigorism in Wigalois’s initial exploits with the damoiselle maledisaunte.46 When Wigalois kills his first opponent inadvertently,47 the narrrator refers to the act in morally neutral terms as an unfortunate occurrence48 with only the practical disadvantage that it deprives the company of a place to sleep for the night (the pair are forced to sleep in the open air rather than at the slain knight’s castle). It is for that reason that in his second challenge (the defence of a maiden against two rapacious giants) he is careful to spare the life of the second malefactor in order that he may live to escort the maiden back to Camelot.49 Similarly, his shows of ‘courtesy’ in his dealings with the messenger are the somewhat Machiavellian means to the end of winning the favour of his unwilling companion, this emerging clearly from the incident where Wigalois steals a little hunting dog to give as a bribe to Nereja (in the French version Hélie steals it for herself).50 Since Wigalois is required in the concluding part of the narrative to discharge the practical obligations of kingship, an experience of the ways of Realpolitik is part of his preparation for that task. Wirnt shows the crowned hero putting spiritual experience to practical effect in a sequence whose realistic tone has points of contact with the early exploits performed ‘according to his father’s precepts’ (3019).51 For Gawein and other fictional peers, a pragmatic defence of individual êre, that form of peer-group approval not connected to internal standards of absolute ethical integrity in the modern sense, represented the highest chivalric goal.52 The early association 45 George Edward Harding, ‘Tradition and Creativity. Narrative Elements in Wirnt von Gravenberg’s

46

47 48 49 50

51 52

Wigalois and Heinrich von dem Turlin’s Diu Crône’, unpublished dissertation, University of Tennessee (Ann Arbor, MI, 1985), p. 34. For a fuller analysis of Wirnt’s theological views see Heidi Wildt, ‘Das Menschen-und Gottesbild des Wirnt von Gravenberc in seinem Wigaloisroman’, unpublished dissertation, University of Freiburg i. Br., 1953. On the morally dubious nature of some of the early exploits see Jutta Eming, ‘Aktion und Reflexion: Zum Problem der Konfliktbewältigung im Wigalois am Beispiel der Namurs-Episode’, in Spannungen und Konflikte menschlichen Zusammenlebens in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters, ed. Kurt Gärtner, Ingrid Kasten, Frank Shaw, Bristoler Colloquium 1993 (Tübingen, 1996), pp. 91–101. Gert Kaiser had already made the point that Wigalois’s adventures were ‘mitnichten alle artuswürdig’ in ‘Der Wigalois des Wirnt von Gravenberc. Zur Bedeutung des Territorialisierungsprozesses für die “höfisch-ritterliche” Literatur des 13. Jahrhunderts’, Euphorion 69 (1975): 410–43 (412). ‘âne sînen danc’, 1999. ‘ungeschiht’, 2029. ‘Dâ entweich der edel rîter in./ Daz tet er niwan durch den sin/ daz er in slüege ân sînen schaden:/ sô kunde er in ze hûse laden’ (2127–30). The gift of a little brachet (bräkelîn) was popular with court ladies, as is indicated by the dog Petitcriu in Gottfried’s Tristan (whose little bell Isolde removes so as not to be gladdened by its sound as an act of solidarity with her beleaguered lover). ‘nâch sînes vater lêre’ (3019). Cf. also: ‘Sînen zorn begunde er anden/ als in sîn vater lêrte’ (3555–6). The medieval conception of ‘honour’ might include actions which moderns would feel most dishonourable such as Isolde’s attempted assassination of Brangaene lest she should tell of Isolde’s sexual

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of the eponymous hero and his father with Frou Saelde, a ‘worldly’ goddess closely linked on German soil with the allegorical character Lady World (Frou Werlt),53 indicates the capacity of both men to win the world’s approbation by their ability to establish and retain worldly êre.54 Although in his second sequence of challenges the son must be ready to draw on reserves of spiritual inspiration unknown to his father’s legendary biography,55 Gawein’s speciality of being able to win ‘the plaudits of the world’ plays an indispensable part in the future king’s moral formation. Both Ulrich Füeterer in his Wigoleis and the author of Der Artushof refer to Gawein as his son’s chivalric tutor (‘Gabon, sein zuchte maister’, Wigoleis, stanza 48; ‘zucht meinstr’, Artushof, p. 30a, l. 39).56 This formulation appears to echo Wolfram’s description of Gurnemanz as Parzival’s tutor in knightly etiqeutte (‘zuht’) and implicitly assigns Gawein the same role of mentor to his son as that of Gurnemanz to Wolfram’s protagonist. Towards the end of the sequence of exploits done in possession of the fortunate belt the female tester (whose character in the German version is so colourless and abstract when compared with her French equivalent, Hélie, that almost by default she takes on a quasi-allegorical status as a representative of ‘the world’), states that her companion is required on the morrow to be able to win ‘der werlte lop’: nu habt ir iu daz vür geleit daz ir den lîp verliesen welt od rîterlîche als ein helt der werlte lop erringen; under den zwei dingen muoz iu morgen einz geschehen.

(3620–5)

(Now you have undertaken either to forfeit your life or to gain the world’s plaudits in true knightly fashion. One of these alternatives must be enacted tomorrow.)

53

54

55

56

‘dishonour’. See Friedrich Maurer, ‘Tugend und Ehre’ in his Dichtung und Sprache des Mittelalters. Gesammelte Aufsätze (Berlin, 1963), pp. 335–45 for further examples. As in the English version of the Fair Unknown romances at this stage, ‘action [. . .] more often exists for its own sake – or, at best, as proof of the hero’s physical strength – than to exemplify any chivalric ideal’. Chapter on ‘Libeaus Desconus’ by Maldwyn Mills in The Arthur of the English: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval English Life and Literature (Cardiff, 1999), pp. 124–9, here 126. In German-speaking terrritory in the Middle Ages Fortuna’s role as an autonomous metaphysical power was somewhat weakened for being conflated with her ‘allegorical double’, Frou Werlt, whose sphere of influence was likewise restricted to the sublunary sphere. See Marianne Skowronek, ‘Fortuna und Frau Welt: Zwei allegorische Doppelgängerinnen des Mittelalters’, unpublished dissertation, Freie Universität Berlin, 1964; J.W. Thomas, trans., Wigalois, The Knight of Fortune’s Wheel (as in note 2), Introduction, pp. 29–38. ‘Saelde’ has been defined in this context as ‘ein Symbol für ritterliche saelde und Sieghaftigkeit’: Max Wehrli, ‘Wigalois’, in Max Wehrli, Formen Mitelalterlicher Erzählung. Aufsätze (Zurich and Freiburg, 1969), pp. 223–41, here 231. Once the magical properties of Fortune’s belt have been invoked as a prop to launch the narrative, it is its metaphorical properties which come to the fore. On the distinctive tone of this section see Ingeborg Henderson, ‘Dark Figures and Eschatological Imagery in Wirnt von Gravenberg’s Wigalois’, in The Dark Figure in Medieval German and Germanic Literature, ed. Edward R. Haymes, Stephanie Cain Van d’Elden, GAG 448 (Göppingen, 1986), pp. 99–113. Wigoleis, ed. Heribert A. Hilgers, Altdeutsche Textbibliothek 79 (Tübingen, 1975); Arthurian Legends or the Hebrew-German Rhymed Version of the Legend of King Arthur, ed. Landau, Teutonia 21 (Leipzig, 1912).

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Studies of the relationship between Wigalois and Parzival were long guided by the assumption that the successors of the more famous German romance writers, Hartmann von Aue and Wolfram von Eschenbach, were merely ‘epigones’ of their predecessors. Although the second editor of Wigalois, Franz Pfeiffer, was generous in his praise of Wirnt’s independence and versatility in his edition of 1847 (expressing the wish that other, more lauded poets had eschewed a written French source and composed their romances from oral hints),57 Georg Friedrich Benecke’s view of Wirnt as an imitator of Hartmann and Wolfram expressed in the introduction to his editio princeps of 1819 eventually became the common opnion.58 His conclusion was ostensibly endorsed by Wirnt’s lapidary praise of Wolfram as one whose verses had never been surpassed by any layman: her Wolfram Ein wîse man von Eschenbach, Sîn herze ist ganzes sinnes dach; leien munt nie baz gesprach. (6343–6) (Sir Wolfram, the sage of Eschenbach to whose heart many secrets are known: no lay person ever composed better verses.)

Wirnt’s praise of Wolfram however brings up a critical anomaly which has as yet received little attention. Although the remoter provenance of what Wolfram himself termed his ‘crooked’ style is still a matter of unresolved scholarly debate, it is clear that he favoured registers remote from the currently accepted norms of poetic usage. Even if Gottfried von Strassburg’s reference to the author who ‘invented wild stories’ and whose writing (in contradistinction to the pellucid verses of Hartmann) was unclear and erratic (Tristan, 4638–90) is not an ad hominem critique of Wolfram, Rudolf von Ems couches his (named) criticism of Wolfram in remarkably similar terms, describing Hartmann and Wolfram as separate branches of the ‘tree’ represented by their twelfth-century predecessor, Heinrich von Veldeke.59 Hence if Wirnt had meant to 57 ‘Für eine freiere, selbständige Entwicklung unserer einheimischen Poesie waere dies gewiss der beste

Weg gewesen und auch den einzelnen Dichtern selbst mancher besondere Vortheil daraus erwachsen’, Wigalois: Eine Erzählung von Wirnt von Gravenberg, ed. Franz Pfeiffer, Dichtungen des deutschen Mittelalters 6 (Leipzig, 1847), ‘Vorrede’, p. XV. 58 Benecke writes of Wirnt as ‘der treueste widerschein seines älteren zeitgenossen, Hartmann’s’, Wigalois, der Ritter mit dem Rade, getihtet von Wirnt von Gravenberch (Berlin, 1819), ‘Vorbericht’, p. xv; while Lachmann in an annotation to his 1843 edition of Iwein wrote that Wirnt ‘in einem grossen theil seiner erzählung Hartmann nachahmt. Während er schrieb, erschienen die ersten bücher des Parzivals; daher er gegen das ende in der ersten bewunderung (6345) mehr von Wolfram entlehnte’. (Iwein, eine Erzählung von Hartmann von Aue, mit Anmerkungen von Georg Friedrich Benecke und Karl Lachmann [Berlin, 1843], p. 413). On the weaknesses of establishing influence by means of verbal correspondences see Heidi Wildt, ‘Das Menschen-und Gottesbild’ (as in note 45), pp. 236–7 and Mitgau (as in note 36), esp. pp. 321–5. Methods of establishing influence by verbal correspondences have been widely rejected in French and German scholarship of the present generation since it is now recognized that most authors in this era used a similar storehouse of motifs which they versified in the poetic lingua franca of their age. 59 In Parzival we encounter elliptical or periphrastic syntax, circumlocution, the use of the apo koinou construction and various forms of unusual word order (hyperbaton). Rudolf wrote: ‘Mit wilden âventiuren/ kund er [sc. Wolfram] die kunst wol stiuren,/ Des gap sîn âventiure/ Der kurzwîle stiure’. Rudolf von Ems, Alexander, ed. Victor Junk (Leipzig, 1928), 3135–8. Wolfram wrote: ‘Mîn tiutsche ist eteswâ doch sô krump,/ Er mac mir lîhte sîn ze tump,/ Den ichs niht gâhes bescheide:/ Dâ sûme wir uns

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give Wolfram a bona fide plaudit for his poetic felicities, this would have been a minority verdict according to contemporary standards and one which, furthermore, would have been contrary to Wirnt’s own stylistic standards (which largely conform with the norms of the contemporary Dichtersprache established by Heinrich von Veldeke and Hartmannn).60 To be sure, imitation of both the style and content of Wolfram’s oeuvre had a notable precedent in Albrecht’s Der Jüngere Titurel,61 but Wirnt’s own style bears no relation to the trobar clus or to any other recherché variety with which Wolfram’s style has been linked. 62 Hence it is possible that Wirnt’s praise of Wolfram (assuming it was not simply a pro forma obeisance), contained an element of ironic zwîvellop, an ambivalence which appears to have have characterized his view of the content of Wolfram’s oeuvre. Wirnt’s single reference to the character of Parzival is to the coercive sexual encounter with Jeschute during his untutored youth (where we are told that Parzival assaulted the unfortunate woman, removing her ring from her finger and wresting a kiss from her, so causing her untold grief at a later time – an allusion to the later depredations of her lover, Orilus).63 There is no reference to Parzival’s later moral triumphs (unlike in Diu Crône where, despite much obloquy, there is at least one reference to Parzival’s moral rehabilitation),64 hence Wirnt’s negative portraiture is implicitly allowed to stand. The reason for Heinrich’s prejudiced lectio facilior of the character of Parzival as a coward who had not ‘dared’ approach the Grail is not difficult to discern since he depicts his ‘grail’ largely as an Arthurian trophy to be won in a quasi-military quest. In a polemical romance which opposes spiritualizing appropriations of the quest theme Heinrich rejects the allegedly effete Parzival in favour of Gawein, the traditionally ‘secular’ knight. Wirnt on the other hand can have had little interest in

60

61

62

63 64

beide’. Willehalm, ed. Werner Schröder, trans. Dieter Kartschoke (Berlin, New York, 1989), section 237, ll. 11–14. Wolfram seems to express a delight in obscurity when he writes in prefatory remarks to Parzival (possibly as a riposte to strictures already levelled at him), that his fleet metaphors will outstrip the wits of the less quick-witted in his audience: ‘Diz vliegende bîspel/ ist tumben liuten gar ze snel,/ sine mugens niht erdenken:/ wand ez kan vor in wenken/ Rehte alsam ein schellec hase’, Parzival, ed. Karl Lachmann, sixth edition, with modern German trans. Dieter Kühn and commentary by Eberhard Nellmann (Frankfurt am Main, 1994) I, 15–19. Benecke long ago drew attention to the ‘solid instinct which saved Wirnt from the errors of Wolframian mannerism’ (Wigalois, as in note 58, p. xv). Wolfram’s loudly trumpeted ambition to remain independent of the normalized literary language of his age and his provocative mixing of linguistic registers was saluted by Bahktin as a realistic narratorial signature bringing Parzival into a close apposition with the modern novel. See further Neil Thomas, ‘Wolfram von Eschenbach: modes of narrative presentation’, in A Companion to Wolfram von Eschenbach, ed. Willard Hasty (New York, 1999), pp. 223–41. Albrecht employed an esoteric idiom matching Wolfram’s ‘wilder’ locutions with which to incorporate the master’s uncompleted Titurel into his own, unitary Grail opus. See Linda Parshall, The Art of Narration in Wolfram’s ‘Parzival’ and Albrecht’s ‘Jüngerer Titurel’, Anglo-Germanica 2 (Cambridge, UK, 1981). Earlier studies of Wolfram’s style posited some influence upon him of the Provençal trobar clus – an ornate style used to express an author’s ‘awareness of a division in the audience between wise and foolish [and] the technique of gradually unfolding meaning through symbols or the complex interweaving of thoughts, to reveal difficult truths and to arrive at clear thinking’: Linda Paterson, Troubadours and Eloquence (Oxford, 1975), p. 207. Wigalois, 6325–37. Ralph Read, ‘Heinrich von dem Türlin’s Diu Krône and Wolfram’s Parzival’, Modern Language Quarterly 35 (1974): 129–39.On Parzival’s rehabilitation from his sin see Diu Crône, ed. G.H.F Scholl, repr. (Amsterdam, 1966), ll. 24607–15.

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lauding a purely secular ideal of knighthood since he gives a special emphasis to his own hero’s spiritual motivation and inspiration throughout the Roaz sequence, differing from Diu Crône by retaining the sacral pretensions of the quest theme (even though the motif of the Grail itself is omitted).65 Wirnt’s prejudice against Parzival appears to have rested on the rather different grounds of his being untutored and tump, negative qualities ruling him out of the lists as a credible saviour figure. Wigalois advances a polemical confrontation with Parzival written by an author whose homiletic urge suggests the aspiration to present aspects of Wolframian ethics in a more clearly programmatic form. Wigalois’s career as an inerrant protagonist proceeds in a carefully graduated movement in a manner which, though inimical to modern sensibilities,66 was well suited to the author’s didactic purposes. The eponymous hero’s path proceeds from an initial knightly proving to a katabasis in the demonic underworld and thence to an ‘anabasis’, that is, an ‘ascent to a position of social and psychological security’,67 his final theocratic rule indicating his ability to find favour with both God and world. Meanwhile, the final battle line in which combatants on both sides of the medieval religious divide join forces to punish a miscreant for non-sectarian reasons presents a better evocation of an ecumenical vision than that found either in Willehalm (which, being a commissioned work depending on some version of the Bataille d’Aliscans, was vitiated by interfererence from a source which stylized Muslims as the enemy), or in Parzival, where the depiction of Feirefiz’s baptism (motivated by his desire for the beauty of the Grail bearer, Repanse de Schoye, rather than by spiritual impulses), is so bereft of spiritual content as to border on farce. In the case of Wigalois’s ‘pagan’ ally, Adan, by contrast, whose baptism the hero facilitates, the conversion springs from longnourished inner conviction: Swie gar ich sî ein heiden, von dem gedanke kom ich nie ichn minnet iedoch den got ie der uns geschuof von nihte. (8199–202) (Notwithstanding the fact that I am a heathen through and through, I never wavered from love of the God who created us from nothing.)

There is reason to think that this ecumenical finale was Wirnt’s own improvisation since here the earlier ‘explicit condemnation of paganism seems to be all but forgotten’.68 Wirnt’s disinclination to think in binary terms by creating a false division between (noble) men and women of good will is reflected in his inclusion of Gawein

65 In this particular respect resembling the English and Welsh cognates of Le Conte du Graal, Sir

Percyvell of Galles and Peredur. 66 Because most modern readers have thought that ‘to be able to doubt oneself, to grope one’s lonely way,

step by uncertain step, appears to represent a higher achievement of consciousness than naively to follow collective ideals’: Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz, The Grail Legend, trans. Andrea Dykes (Boston, 1986), p. 215. 67 Gary Shockey, ‘Homo Viator, Katabasis and Landscapes: A comparison of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival and Heinrich von dem Türlin’s Diu Crône’, doctoral dissertation, University of California at Davis (Ann Arbor, MI, 1999), Preface, p. i. 68 Ingeborg Henderson, ‘Eschatological Imagery’, p. 108, n. 19. For the narrator’s earlier-expressed view see ll. 8180ff.

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at the new king’s court, an indication that there is a place for the values of both father and son in what appears to be a more practical vision of medieval kingship than that implied by the ‘Grail’ kingdom which Wolfram’s continuator, Albrecht, not unnaturally glossed as implying the translation of spiritual authority from the sinful West to the Orient.69 Wigalois’s regimen gives concrete shape to a harmonization of Arthurian and theocratic elements which the more lauded author acknowledges as an abstract desideratum,70 but which he perhaps teasingly declined to depict in concrete terms.

69 See Klaus Zatloukal, Salvaterre: Studien zu Sinn und Funktion des Gralsbereiches im ‘Jüngeren

Titurel’ (Vienna, 1978), esp. pp. 246–50. 70 ‘swes lebn sich sô verendet,/ daz got niht wirt gepfendet/ der sêle durch des lîbes schulde,/ und der doch

der werlde hulde/ behalten kan mit werdekeit,/ daz ist ein nütziu arbeit’ (Parzival, ed. Karl Lachmann, as in note 59, section 827, ll. 19–24).

11 Reading between the Lines: A Vision of the Arthurian World Reflected in Galician-Portuguese Poetry AMÉLIA P. HUTCHINSON

This chapter analyzes Arthurian references in Galician-Portuguese poetry, attempting to reconstruct the concept of the Arthurian world as imagined by Iberian poets. The Matter of Britain had a profound influence on the development of Portuguese literature. It can be said that Portuguese literary prose began with the translation of French romances, mainly those belonging to the Post-Vulgate Roman du Graal, into Galician-Portuguese.1 The estimated date for these translations is the second half of the thirteenth century, assuming that King Afonso III of Portugal brought the fashion and the original romances from Burgundy, on his return to Portugal to claim the throne from his brother Sancho II, in 1345. Narrative strategies inherited from the Arthurian romances in translation were adopted by Fernão Lopes, the father of Portuguese historiography, as late as the mid-fifteenth century in his Crónica de D. Fernando and Crónica de D. João I.2 The earliest presence of Arthurian characters and themes in Galician-Portuguese literature, however, is to be found in the poetry of the cancioneiros. These are collections of poetical compositions produced by Iberian poets: jograls, troubadours, members of the nobility, even kings. The Cancioneiro da Ajuda, Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional, and Cancioneiro da Vaticana are the most comprehensive repositories of Galician-Portuguese lay poetry, although there are other extant shorter collections attributed to individual authors, as well as loose manuscript pages. To these must be added a fourth major cancioneiro, the Cantigas de Santa To Peter Field, dear friend and respected colleague, I dedicate this chapter as a token of friendship from the day I joined the International Arthurian Society in 1985, and in gratitude for his patience in guiding a young colleague on her first steps along Arthurian paths. 1 João Soares Carvalho, ‘Primeira Época: A Poesia Trovadoresca e a Prosa Anónima. Apresentação: dos primórdios da poesia e da prosa’, in História da Literatura Portuguesa: das orígens ao Cancioneiro Geral, ed. Francisco Lyon de Castro (Lisbon, 2001), pp. 95–99 (p. 99). 2 Mário Martins, ‘Frases de Orientação nos Romances Arturianos e em Fernão Lopes,’ Itinerarium, 95.23 (1977); Amélia Hutchinson, ‘Arthurian Influences in Fernão Lopes: getting down to the structure’, paper presented at the Twentieth International Arthurian Congress, The University of Wales, Bangor, 2002.

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Maria, compiled by Alfonso X, king of León and Castile. The main distinguishing feature of this cancioneiro is that all compositions are intended to laud the Virgin Mary, often by telling the miracles she has performed. Giuseppe Tavani in A Poesia Lírica Galego-Portuguesa believes that the Cantigas de Santa Maria form a category of their own, owing to their essentially and consistently laudatory and narrative nature, which lends the compilation an added note of cohesiveness.3 Despite this particularity, which distinguishes them from the rest of Galician-Portuguese lyrical production, the Cantigas de Santa Maria will be considered in this article, if only because they are written in the same language, share the same period and author(s) as the other cancioneiros, and also because they have Arthurian implications. Galician-Portuguese was the language spoken in the western fringe of the Iberian Peninsula. In 1143, however, the Condado Portucalense, a county corresponding roughly to northern modern Portugal, declared its independence from the kingdom of León. In the course of two centuries, the political rupture brought about by Afonso Henriques, the first Portuguese king, gave rise to an equivalent linguistic separation, as the language spoken in north-eastern Iberia developed into two different languages – Galician and Portuguese. Despite their political division, twelfth- and thirteenth-century Portuguese and Galicians still shared a common culture and language, which became the conventional vehicle of expression of lyrical poetry in the western kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula. The conventional date accepted for the distinction between Galician and Portuguese is that of the death of King Dinis of Portugal in 1325. The chronological boundaries proposed by Giuseppe Tavani for Galician-Portuguese lyrical poetry are the dates of 1196 and 1350. The former corresponds to João Soares de Paiva’s earliest cantiga, and the latter is the date of the testament of Dom Pedro, Count of Barcelos, the last great patron and poet of the period.4 Needless to say these are merely working dates as, inevitably, there would have been a phase of gradual development and another of decline at either end of the period considered. According to the Ars Poetica opening the Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional, the poems in the cancioneiros can be grouped into various broad genres and subgenres.5 The cantigas de amigo, cantigas de amor and cantigas d’escarnho e mal dizer are the three broadest genres with the largest number of compositions, and are perhaps the most idiosyncratically Galician-Portuguese. The cantigas de amigo (songs of a friend or lover) are deceptively simple compositions, which seem to derive from an archaic tradition, and usually follow specific patterns of poetical formality including parallel lines, metre, rhyme, often a refrain, and other poetical artifice. As a rule, they express the voice of a young woman speaking of her longing for her lover or friend, but they can also assume the form of a dialogue between the young woman and her mother, or another female friend. The cantigas de amor (songs of love) correspond more closely to the concept of courtly love, fin amor, as received in the Iberian Peninsula through the influence of Provençal poetry. As a

3 4 5

Giuseppe Tavani, A Poesia Lírica Galego-Portuguesa (Lisbon, 1990), p. 15. Tavani, A Poesia Lírica, pp. 17–18. Giuseppe Tavani, ed., Arte de Trovar do Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa (Lisbon, 1999), pp. 39–44; Jean-Marie D’Heur, ‘L’Art de trouver du Chansonnier Colocci-Brancuti. Édition et analyse’, Arquivos do Centro Cultural Português 9 (1975):321–98.

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rule, these poems express the voice of a man suffering the pains of hopeless, unrequited love for a married lady of high social standing, whose name must remain a secret for convenient as well as poetical reasons. The cantigas d’escarnho e mal dizer (songs of mockery) are satirical poems with explosions of more or less cutting socio-political criticism, often reaching the boundaries of the obscene. Among the other sub-genres: bailadas, barcarolas, tensões, pastorelas, descordos and lais, the latter is the most relevant for the present paper because it demonstrates the permeation and ready moulding of Arthurian material to Peninsular tastes, both in prose and in poetry. The lais da Bretanha in the Galician-Portuguese cancioneiros are poetical compositions uttered by characters pertaining either to romances of the Arthurian cycles or to an original Peninsular romance inspired on Arthurian models, the Amadis de Gaula. There are no references to the Matter of Britain in the cantigas de amigo. Joam Garcia de Guilhade, however, is the author of the only known cantiga de amigo alluding to a romance, the twelfth-century non-Arthurian French romance of Floire et Blanchefleur.6 The absence of the romances from the world of the cantigas de amigo in general may be explained by the formulaic nature of these compositions, as well as by the non-aristocratic nature of the female voice heard in the poems. As a rule, it belongs to a simple girl of the common people expressing her obsessive longing for her lover, often reflected in the refrain. She is frequently engaged in simple pleasures such as going on pilgrimage, dancing with her friends, or making use of other opportunities to meet or to exhibit herself before her lover. Occasionally, the cantigas de amigo relate to the performance of tedious tasks such as weaving (cantigas de tear, ‘chansons de toile’), or to just plain fretting for the absent lover serving in the king’s army or in ‘the king’s boats’, and whose return is much too tardy. References to the Matter of Britain sound far more natural in the mouth of aristocratic poets, or of jograls and troubadours, regular attendees of Peninsular courts composing in the first person. Although in medieval Iberia there were female singers/performers, perhaps of their own compositions, the soldadeiras, the identified authors of the cantigas de amigo are all male obeying the convention of speaking for a woman. This was a most narcissistic activity, as these men were representing in their poems what they supposed, or believed, their lovers to feel about them. References or connections with Arthurian material can be found in cantigas de amor, cantigas d’escarnho e mal dizer, cantigas de Santa Maria and a few lais. There is a noticeable effort to use each allusion, in a more or less developed form, to highlight or complement the focal emotion, situation, or character in each poem. Some of them betray a close familiarity of the author with Arthurian themes and romances, others reflect an acquaintance that could have been acquired by oral tradition. The suitability of each allusion to the genre and theme of the poem in which it is inserted, reflects the vigor of Galician-Portuguese poetry and the ease with which it adopted and adapted new currents and fashions to Peninsular taste. Occasionally, there are even poetical debates on the skill with which the fashion for the Matter of Britain, the cantares de Cornoalha (songs of Cornwall), is made use of by 6

H.L. Sharrer, ‘La materia de Bretaña en la poesía gallego-portuguesa’, in Actas del I Congresso de la Associación Hispánica de Literatura Medieval (Barcelona, 1988), pp. 561–9 (p. 562).

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Peninsular poets, as is the case in one of the cantigas d’escarnho to be analyzed later. For the moment, and in short, it is worth noting that two cantigas de amor, by King Dinis and Alfonso X respectively, invoke Tristan and Isolt as icons of the deepest love. The examples in the cantigas d’escarnho relate to the Breton cycle, Merlin and the Bleating Beast. The six lais are purported to have been written by characters belonging either to Arthurian romances – Tristan, Lancelot – or to Peninsular re-creations, such as Amadis de Gaula. Finally, in two Cantigas de Santa Maria the name of Arthur either serves to define a geographical space or becomes a simile for the Virgin’s ascension. Interestingly, in both cases Arthur’s Briton identity is stated. This is important because Peninsular authors seem to be divided between the fictional reality of the romances and the historico-geographical reality of their own experience. The Alfonsine period, corresponding roughly to the reign of Alfonso X and spanning from 1245 to 1280, is considered the Golden Age of Galician-Portuguese lyrical poetry.7 This is also the period of open reception of Provençal currents and the flourishing of the cantiga de amor.8 It is difficult to know exactly when the legend of Arthur was introduced in the western kingdoms of the Peninsula. W.J. Entwistle suggests a date after 1170, following the marriage of Alfonso VIII of León to Eleanor, daughter of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, assuming that the bride brought in her trousseau a copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae.9 Entwistle’s supposition is based on the fact that the Anales Toledanos Primeros, written after Alfonso VIII’s wedding, give for Arthur’s death the same date as Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia. Diego Catalán Menéndez Pidal disagrees, observing that the same date already appeared in the Anales NavarroAragoneses, which have a closing date of 1196. In any case, the documentary evidence points to the latter half of the twelfth century. The first references to the Breton cycle in Galician-Portuguese poetry, however, date from the Alfonsine period; therefore, from the second half of the thirteenth century. Gonçalo Eanes do Vinhal (c.1225–80) was a poet of the court of Afonso III of Portugal, who from 1256 joined the court of Alfonso X of León and Castile. In his last years, however, he sided with the Infante D. Sancho in the civil strife against his father. Gonçalo Eanes do Vinhal died c.1280 fighting against the Moors in Granada, still at the side of D. Sancho.10 In a cantiga d’escarnho in the Cancioneiro da Vaticana (CV 1007), he satirizes someone he addresses as ‘Maestre’ (Master) for persistently writing ‘cantares de Cornoalha’ (songs of Cornwall) to the exclusion of all other themes. In doing so, the ‘Maestre’, who has been identified as a certain Nicolás, a physician in the court of Alfonso X and a graduate of Montpellier, is also

7

Natália Correia, Cantares dos Trovadores Galego-Portugueses, 3rd edn (Lisbon, 1998), p. 27; Jacinto do Prado Coelho, ed., Dicionário de Literatura Portuguesa, Brasileira, Galega e de Estilística Literária, 3rd edn (Porto, 1976), ‘Lirismo, Época Medieval,’ p. 537. 8 Tavani, A Poesia Lírica, pp. 21–4. 9 W.J. Entwistle, The Arthurian Legend in the Literatures of the Spanish Peninsula (London, 1925; repr. 1975), pp. 35–37. 10 António Resende de Oliveira, Depois do Espectáculo Trovadoresco: a estrutura dos cancioneiros peninsulares e as recolhas dos séculos XIII e XIV (Lisbon, 1994), pp. 353–4; Tavani, A Poesia Lírica, p. 289.

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committing the offence of aping the poetry of the same Gonçalo Eanes do Vinhal and of Pedro Agudo: Maestre, tôdolos vossos cantares, já què filhan sempre de mia razon e outrossi ar filhan ami son; E non seguides (i), ontre milhares, Senon aquestes de Cornoalha; Mais estes seguides ben, sen falha, E non trobades per tantos logares.11 (Master, considering that all your songs/ always follow my own style,/ they really belong to me (and not to you);/ from all the songs you could imitate,/ the only ones you chose are these of the Matière de Bretagne,/ but those you copy really well, without a fault./ It is a pity you don’t travel much as a troubadour [and so your effort is wasted]).

The greatest crime of all, however, is being incapable of writing decent poetry. Unfortunately, it has not been possible to establish a precise date of composition for this poem. Nevertheless, besides the information about the genres in which the ‘Maestre’ composed – ‘D’amor e d’escarnh’, cantigas de amor and cantigas d’escarnho, all of them with themes from the Breton cycle – the criticism directed at the would-be poet also sheds some light on its author. Gonçalo Eanes do Vinhal is likely to have composed many poems inspired by the Breton cycle, ‘cantares de Cornoalha’, because that is the main bone of contention with his plagiarist.12 Alternatively, Gonçalo Eanes may have been responsible for introducing the new literary fashion into Peninsular lyrical poetry, which could explain why he became sufficiently upset with his imitator to address to him the above satire. Unfortunately, once again, there are no extant ‘cantares de Cornoalha’ either by Gonçalo Eanes do Vinhal or Master Nicolás. There is, however, a cantiga d’escarnho, by another contemporary poet, who gives to the object of his obscene satire a nickname resembling that of Arthurian characters. Martim Soares was a Portuguese troubadour who also attended the court of Alfonso X, thus rubbing shoulders with major poets such as Pero da Ponte, Afons’ Eanes do Coton, Johan Soarez Coelho, Pai Soarez de Taveirós and Rui Gomez de Briteiros.13 António Resende de Oliveira estimates that he may have died c.1260, which makes him the earliest poet alluding to Arthurian romances, albeit indirectly. In his cantiga d’escarnho in the Cancioneiro da Vaticana (CV 977), also recorded in the Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional (CBN 1369), he speaks disparagingly of a cleric by the name of Caralhote:

11 Manuel Rodrigues Lapa, ed., Cantigas d’escarnho e de mal dizer dos cancioneiros gaelo-portugueses

(Lisbon, 1963), p. 270. Unless indicated otherwise all working translations are provided by the present author. 12 Jean-Marie D’Heur, ‘Gonçal’ Eanes do Vinhal, ses “chansons de Cornouaille” et le respect de l’art poétique’, in Mélanges de Langues et de Littératures Romanes, ed. Germán Colón and Robert Kopp (Bern and Liège, 1976), pp. 185–94. 13 Tavani, A Poesia Lírica, p. 305.

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éa donzela jaz (preto d)aqui, que foi ogano un clérigo servir e non lhi soube da terra sair: e a dona cavalgou e colheu (i) Don Caralhote nas mãos; e ten, Poi-lo á preso, ca está mui ben, E non quer d’el as mãos abrir.14 (A young woman who lives nearby,/ had this year the services of a clergyman,/ but they parted in bad terms;/ so the lady rode back to fetch him./ She caught Dom Caralhote in her hands, and still has him there./ She is very happy ever since she made him her prisoner/ and refuses to let him go.)

Jean-Marie D’Heur believes that the author found his source of inspiration in Caradoc, a character from an episode of the second part of the Vulgate Cycle Prose Lancelot.15 The name or nickname of Caralhote, however, derives also from an obscene word meaning the male organ to which was given the ending ‘-ote’ reminiscent of Lançarote, the medieval Portuguese equivalent of Lancelot. For this reason, and also because the woman in the poem grabs Caralhote, or his manhood, as the innuendo implies, making him her prisoner, M. Machado, the editor of the Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional, has also interpreted Martim Soares’ satire as a parody of the French Arthurian romance. It is not possible to tell whether Martim Soares actually knew the Livre de Lancelot del Lac in a French or a Hispanic version. In either case, this satirical poem bears witness to a very early acquaintance with the Arthurian romance in the Peninsula – perhaps the earliest of which there is proof. The poem ends with the lines: [. . .] e meteu-o logu’ en un cárcel atal, u uitos presos jouveran assaz; e nunca dí, tan fort’ e preso jaz, [ten] como saia, [a] meos # de morrer. (. . . and she threw him immediately into such a dungeon/ where many other prisoners lay before;/ and there he lies so securely locked/ that he can find no escape other than through death.)

The reference to the ‘carcel’ (dungeon), figuratively the woman’s vagina as a prison, the fact that Caralhote was imprisoned by a woman, and that he cannot escape her other than by death, is also reminiscent of Merlin’s end. That is in fact the subject of another cantiga d’escarnho, though by Estevam da Guarda, a poet belonging already to the post-Alfonsine or Dionisian period. Estevam da Guarda was a privy secretary of King Dinis of Portugal. After the king’s death he served his son, Dom Pedro, Count of Barcelos, probably residing in his private court in Lalim,

14 Lapa, Cantigas d’escarnho, p. 443. 15 Jean-Marie D ‘Heur, ‘De Caradoc à Caralhote – sur une pièce obscure de Martim Soares et son origine

française présumée’, Marche Romane, 23:2–4 and 24:1–2 (1973–4):251–64. See also ‘Le Livre de Lancelot del Lac’, in The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, ed. H. Oskar Sommer, 8 vols. (Washington, DC, 1908–1916), IV, 2:88–113.

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where the count continued to offer the patronage that Afonso IV, King Dinis’ successor, seemed unable or unwilling to provide. Estevam da Guarda mocks the anguished love of Martin Vasques, drawing a parallel between his fate and Merlin’s in El Baladro del sabio Merlín, a Spanish version of the Merlin branch of the Post-Vulgate Roman du Graal: Com’ aveeo # a Merlin de morrer Per seu gran saber, que el foi mostrar A tal molher, que o soub’ enganar, por esa guisa se foi cofonder Martin Vasquez, per quanto lh’ eu oí Que o ten mort’ éa molher assi, A que mostrou por seu mal seu saber.16 (How should Merlin come to die!/ It was because of his great knowledge, which he revealed/ to a woman who knew how to trick him./ In that same manner was fooled/f. . .d/ Martin Vasquez, because I heard him say/ that he is being killed by a woman like that,/ to whom, for his misfortune, he showed his knowledge.)

This satire works also as a parody of poets who in their cantigas de amor are constantly vowing to die of love for their beloved. Martin Vasques is caught by the inescapable fate of dying of love. He dies if he is out of the sight of his lover, because he cannot bear her absence, and he dies also if he hands himself over to her. Martin Vasques will be another Merlin, an exemplum for all those who allow themselves to fall prey to women’s whims and craving for knowledge and power. Martin Vasques’ demise will not even be short of the loud shriek he is deemed to let out, realizing, as the great sage did, that he had been incarcerated by the deceptive arts of a woman: Atal morte de qual morreu Merlin, U dará vozes, fazendo sa fin, Ca non pod’el tal mort’ estraecer.17 (He will have a death such as Merlin’s./ Then he will let out a terrible shriek, as he ends his life,/ and he cannot be surprised to meet such death.)

Merlin and his final shriek, the baladro of the Castilian translations and expansions of the Merlin branch of the Post-Vulgate Cycle, enthralled the imagination of Castilian poets, as attested by many references in the Cancionero de Baena in the mid-fifteenth century. Interestingly, the detail of Merlin’s shriek does not appear in the extant Galician-Portuguese fragments. Was Estevam da Guarda inspired by direct access to the Castilian Baladro del sabio Merlín, or by oral transmission? He was King Dinis’ advisor on Iberian policy, but he was also one of the poets more closely circumscribed to the Portuguese court. Merlin’s prophecies were another favourite theme amongst Peninsular poets. The Castilian poem of Alfonso Onceno attributes to Merlin the ‘profeçia de España’ (the prophecy of Spain), a forecast of the victory won by Alfonso XI of Castile and 16 Lapa, Cantigas d’escarnho, p. 198. 17 Lapa, Cantigas d’escarnho, p. 199.

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Afonso IV of Portugal over the Moors at the battle by the River Salado. Curiously, in the poem, Merlin is said to have confided this prophecy to an anachronistic Castilian friend, a certain Don Antonio. This crossing of fiction and reality, sometimes even the reality of the gospels, became a common feature in Peninsular interpretations of the Arthurian legend in its many forms. The combination of fiction and reality often shows a deliberate satirical intention, as noted in Estevam da Guarda’s poem above. Occasionally, the poet may use the world of fiction to highlight the ludicrous nature of the situation before him. Such an example can be found in a cantiga d’escarnho by Fernando Esquio recorded in the Canconeiro da Biblioteca Nacional (CBN 1607) as well as in the Cancioneiro da Vaticana (CV 1140). The exquisite irony brings together the logic of a riddle with the humour of a nonsense poem. Fernando Esquio was a member of the Galician nobility. As a poet, he belongs to the post-Alfonsine period, stretching from the last quarter of the thirteenth century to the first quarter of the fourteenth. Not much is known about him, but his cantiga d’escarnho vents his frustration at the lack of means of ‘un infante’ (a great lord), who promised him a horse to go on a military campaign, perhaps ‘a May horse’, but who did not deliver. Wondering whether this animal could be the Bleating Beast, which the lord might still be expecting to be brought to him from Britain, as no one has seen it yet, Fernando Esquio is really telling the audience that his lord defaulted on his promise out of penury: Disse un infante ante sa companha Que me daria besta na fronteira, E non será já murzela nen veira, Nen branca, nen vermelha, nem castanha; Pois amarela nen parda non for, a pran será a Besta Ladrador, que lh’adurán do reino de Bretanha.18 (Before going on campaign,/ a nobleman told me that he would give me a horse when we reached the border./ But this horse can’t be black, nor silver,/ nor white, nor red, nor brown;/ and if it is neither yellow nor gray,/ perhaps it is the Bleating Beast,/ which he is having brought from the kingdom of Britain.)

Fernando Esquio develops the satire in almost riddle form describing his hypothetical horse through the negative: E tal besta como m’el á mandada Non foi omen que lhe visse as semelhas Nem ten rostro, nen olhos, nen orelhas; Nen é gorda, nen magra, nen delgada. (And a beast such as the one he has sent me,/ no one has ever seen the like./ It has no face, nor eyes, nor ears;/ it is neither fat, nor thin, nor slender.)

It is, in fact, a non-existent horse, which will require an equally non-existent squire who needs no pay, no food, no clothing, etc. 18 Lapa, Cantigas d’escarnho, p. 239.

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The above cantiga d’escarnho shows that Fernando Esquio was familiar with the Post-Vulgate Quest of the Holy Grail, whether in its Portuguese or Castilian version it is impossible to say. His distinction between fiction and reality is clear, but it is his skilful use of Arthurian fiction that makes his and his lord’s real penury all the more poignant. Graça Videira Lopes, in A Sátira nos Cancioneiros Medievais GalegoPortugueses, groups this poem with many other cantigas d’escarnho venting criticism on the high nobility.19 Alfonso X, on the other hand, uses Arthurian references to define the geographical space where two of the miracles described in the Cantigas de Santa Maria took place. The wool merchants in cantiga 35 wished to go to ‘Bretanna, a que pobrou o rei Brutus’ (‘Britain, the one settled by King Brutus’).20 After being saved by the Virgin from a corsair attack, and to their great relief, the merchants finally sighted the port of Dover, ‘Dovra, a que pobrou rey Artur’ (‘Dover, the one settled by King Arthur’). In cantiga 419, describing the ascension of the Virgin, St Thomas announces the happening through a deliciously anachronistic simile: [. . .] | mais sei eu que nenllur achar nona podedes | quant’ o Breton Artur, ca eu a vi na nuve | sobir, e me chamou.21 (But I know that you can find her nowhere/ any more than you can find the Breton Arthur,/ because I saw her ascending on a cloud and she spoke to me.)

Regardless of the problems presented by the association between Arthur and Dover, as remarked by H.L. Sharrer,22 both cantigas connect King Arthur with Britain. The connection is sufficiently clear to Alfonso X’s audience to serve as a point of reference, which could derive from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae. The same applies to the allusion to Brutus’s peopling of Britain, a section of Geoffrey’s Historia included in Alfonso X’s General historia. There is another interesting detail. The above reply by St Thomas and the circumstances in which the Virgin gave him her belt before ascending to Heaven, seem to mirror Giflet’s words on lifting the lid of Arthur’s tomb to find only his helmet: ‘em vão me trabalharei de perguntar como rei Artur morreu. Verdadeiramente este é o rei aventuroso, cuja morte ne# ué homem nom saberá’ (I will labor in vain asking how king Arthur died. In truth, he is the adventurous king of whose death no man will ever know).23 That being the case, this could be evidence of a very early translation of the Demanda do Santo Graal in Alfonso X’s court. In a third cantiga de Santa Maria, Merlin is presented as a defender of the Virgin’s honour on a mission to convert Scottish Jews to Christianity. The main hurdle is the question of Incarnation. This is a problem focused also in the Liuro de Josep abaramatia, a Galician-Portuguese translation of the Estoire del Saint Graal from the Post-Vulgate Cycle, but which differs somewhat from the translation into Castilian. In this Galician-Portuguese version of the Liuro de Josep abaramatia, the 19 20 21 22 23

Graça Videira Lopes, A Sátira nos Cancioneiros Medievais Galego-Portugueses (Lisbon, 1994), p. 254. Walter Mettmann, ed., Cantigas de Santa Maria, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1986), I, 146. Hereafter CSM in text. Mettmann, ed., Cantigas de Santa Maria, III, 344. Sharrer, ‘La materia de Bretaña’, p. 563. Augusto Magne, ed., A Demanda do Santo Graal, 3 vols. (Rio de Janeiro: 1944), II, 368.

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process of immaculate conception is explained through the simile of the beam of light, whereby the Holy Spirit penetrated the Virgin Mary in the same way that a beam of light can penetrate through a stained glass pane without damaging it. This explanation obtains the required effect by converting many Jews. In Alfonso X’s poem, however, both Merlin and the Virgin have to resort to more drastic measures. In answer to Merlin’s plea, the Virgin shows Caiaphas the Jew a measure of her supernatural powers by allowing his child to be born with the head facing backwards.24 Clearing any doubts regarding Merlin’s wisdom and mythical agency before the Virgin, and dispelling any disbelief regarding the extraordinary condition of the Jew’s child, Alfonso X opens his cantiga in a narrative tone confirming twice over that he had actually been told the story of this miracle: E daquest’ oy# contar Que aveo # a Merlin Que ss’ ouve de rezõar Con un judeu alfaqui(n) Que en tod’ Escoça par, Como disseron a mi(n), De saber non avia.25 (And I heard/ about what happened with Merlin/ when he engaged on a discussion/ with an imam Jew (sic),/ who, in the whole of Scotland,/ so I was told,/ could not be matched in wisdom.)

The romance of Tristan, however, and his love for Isolt became Peninsular favourites, perhaps because of the deeply sentimental nature of its central theme, which gave rise to the Peninsular sentimental romance. There is a very close relation of suitability between the story of Tristan and Isolt and the emotions expressed in the cantigas de amor. The couple are iconic misfortunate lovers, forced to hide their doomed love, to endure periods of separation, and hopeless of achieving happiness through marriage. Both Alfonso X and his grandson King Dinis of Portugal composed cantigas de amor vowing that their love and suffering for the sake of their respective ladies far surpassed the love and pain shared by Tristan and Isolt. Alfonso X is distraught by the separation from his lady: E, pois que o deus assy quis Que eu ssõo tam alongado De vos, muy bem seede fiiz, Que nunca eu ssen cuydado En uiuerey, ca ia Paris D amor non foy tam coitado, Nen Tristam; Nunca soffreron Tal affam;

24 Mettmann, ed., Cantigas de Santa Maria, II, 32. 25 Mettmann, ed., Cantigas de Santa Maria, II, 30; for further connections between Caiaphas the Jew and

Arthurian romances see Sharrer, ‘La materia de Bretaña’, pp. 563–4; see also Mário Martins, ‘Merlin numa Cantiga de Santa Maria’, in Estudos de Cultura Medieval 3 (Lisbon, 1983), pp. 45–9.

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Nen am, Quantos som Nem seeram.26 (It was God who commanded itNow I’m gone from you, my love But believe That, without sorrow, never again shall I love. Paris and Tristan were never so grieved By love. No one now No one tomorrow No one has ever suffered such hurt.)

The cause of the poet’s distress is being unable to see his lover, a common theme in cantigas de amor, which in this poem is associated with the equally common theme of dying of love. These commonplaces were frequently satirized in cantigas d’escarnho, as observed above. King Dinis, on the other hand, focuses on other commonplaces – the secrecy of love, as required by the cantigas de amor, the disdain of his lady, and being driven insane by the power of his passion. Like Alfonso X, Dinis’ love also surpasses that of famous lovers such as Floire and Blanchefleur, Tristan and Isolt: [. . .] Pero, senhor, quero-vos eu tal bem. Qual maior poss’, e o mais encoberto Que eu poss’: e sei de Brancafrol Que lhi nom houve Flores tal amor Qual vos eu hei: e pero sõo certo Que mi queredes peior d’outra rem, Pero, senhor, quero-vos eu tal bem Qual maior poss’; e o mui namorado Tristam sei bem que nom amou Iseu Quant’eu vos amo, eso certo sei eu; E com tod’esto sei, mao pecado, que mi queredes peior d’outra rem, Pero, senhor, quero-vos eu tal bem27 (. . . but, lady I wish you great happiness, The greatest I can, and the most secretly guarded that I can, and I know that Flore did not love Blanchefleur with a love as great as the one I have for you; yet I am certain that you love me less than you do anybody else, but, lady I wish you great happiness,

26 Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional, II, 322. Hereafter CBN in text. Trans. Raymond J. Cormier,

Beacons-A Publication of the American Translators Association’s Literary Division, ed. Anne Cordero (Alexandria, VA, 1996), pp. 54–5. 27 D. Dinis, Cancioneiro, ed. Nuno Júdice (Lisbon, 1997), p. 35. Trans. Frede Jersen, Medieval GalicianPortuguese Poetry (New York & London, 1992) p.71.

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The greatest I can, and know that Tristan, though deeply in love, did not love Isolt as much as I do you, this I am certain of; yet in spite of all this, I know, to my misfortune, that you love me less than you do anybody else, but, lady I wish you great happiness,)

More than the spirit of adventure, it was the models of love presented by the Arthurian romances that captivated the imagination of Galician-Portuguese poets. Those models combined with the conventions of Galician-Portuguese lyrical expression, especially in the cantigas de amor, led to the rise of the sentimental romance, which is quintessentially Peninsular. Amadis, the hero of the romance of Amadis de Gaula, is a lover who faints for the love of Oriana. Their love is steadfast, faithful, and blessed by matrimony, though contracted and conducted in secrecy for the most part of the romance. The Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional contains six lais da Bretanha (Breton lays), all of paramount importance for the history of Portuguese Arthurian literature. They are all related to specific sections of the French romances and three of them are either translations or adaptations of poems from French into Galician-Portuguese. Their respective introductions claim them to be the work of characters from French Arthurian romances, including Tristan, ‘Don Tristan’ himself. As part of the adaptation process, three of those compositions or lais became cantigas de amor, which attests the popularity of Arthurian romances in medieval Portugal and their full integration into the Peninsular ars poetica. This process of transformation was applied to the Lai de Hélys (CBN 1), and the two lais in the Cancioneiro attributed to ‘Don Tristan, o Namorado’ (CBN 3 and 4), all deriving from the French Tristan en prose.28 Their themes are typical of cantigas de amor. The introduction to the Lais de Elis in the Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional explains that ‘Elis o Baço [. . .] went to Great Britain, currently known as England, to fight Tristan because he had killed his father in battle’. On seeing Queen Isolt of Cornwall at the Joyeuse Guarde, and struck by her great beauty, he dedicated this lai to her. Even here one can note the preoccupation of relating the fictional space to a contemporary geographical space. The development of the lai combines perfectly the situation in the romance with the typical themes of a cantiga de amor. Elis reflects on the honour he gained from the moment he dedicated service to Isolt, curses the hour that he saw her, making him a prisoner of such passion, despairs of ever receiving any acknowledgment from her and curses the one who has her in his power, meaning Tristan. Tristan’s lais are even more typical cantigas de amor. In three stanzas each, he speaks of the painful separation from his lady and his disloyalty for daring to live when she is away. The theme of death is introduced as a punishment for the crime of leaving Isolt, and Tristan closes the poem regretting having been born. The second lai by Tristan (CBN 4) is more condensed. It is essentially a lament, ‘lais de choro’, cursing the hour he saw his lady and pleading with her to take mercy or he will be killed by the pain of his passion.

28 Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional, I, 33–5 and 38–9. See also Sharrer, ‘La materia de Bretaña,’ pp.

565–6.

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The other two lais deriving from French Arthurian romances (CBN 2 and 5) are bailadas, though the first in the compilation is also a cantiga d’escarnho. Its authorship is attributed to four young ladies from the days of King Arthur, who rejoice with the defeat of Morhout of Ireland who can no longer enslave other knights’ female companions. Morhout committed these villainous deeds as acts of revenge for his father’s death on account of a damsel, as explained in the introduction to the poem. There is no direct source for the second bailada. H.L. Sharrer finds possible origins in the Vulgate Lancelot del Lac and in the Post-Vulgate La Folie Lancelot.29 The introduction to the poem informs us that this lai was dedicated by a group of damsels to Lancelot in the Isle of Joie, when Guenevere found him with the daughter of King Pelles and barred him from her presence. The theme of the poem, however, is a joyous celebration of Lancelot as the best man and the best knight ever created by God.30 The structure of the lai with three stanzas ending with a refrain further stresses its hybrid genre as also a bailada. The lai attributed to Joam de Lobeyra (CBN 228) has become a landmark in Portuguese literature. It is the only extant textual evidence of a presumed lost Galician-Portuguese version of the romance of Amadis de Gaula, perhaps the original one.31 It is also a cantiga de amor composed in jest by Amadis and dedicated to the little princess Leonoreta. This is another piece of evidence of how the spirit of the Arthurian romances was perfectly adopted and adapted to Galician-Portuguese canons. Senhor genta, mi(n) tormenta voss’amor em guisa tal que tormenta que eu senta outra non m’e ben, nen mal, mays la vossa m’e mortal: Le(o)noreta, Fin rosetta bella sobre toda fror, fin roseta, non me metta en tal coi(ta) voss’amor!32 (Lovely lady, you torment me with your love in such a way my mind, tormented, can’t remember other loves from other days: your love’s fatal, I’m afraid. 29 30 31 32

Sharrer, ‘La materia de Bretaña,’ p. 566. Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional, I, 40–1. F. Costa Marques, Amadis de Gaula (Coimbra, 1972), pp. 12–14. Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional, I, 395. Trans. Richard Zenith, 113 Galician-Portuguese Troubadour Poems (Manchester, 1995), p. 169.

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Leonorette, fine rosette, lovelier than any flower; fine rosette, do not let me fall too far into your power!)

This ‘lais da Bretanha’ also follows many of the thematic conventions of the cantiga de amor: the torment of love, the state of madness, and death caused by the extreme sentiment of longing – ‘e deseio/ tan sobeyo,/ mataria hþu leom’ (‘and such excessive desire would have killed a lion’) says Amadis jokingly in the following stanza. Finally, what conclusions can be taken from the evidence presented above? What concept of the Arthurian universe is reflected in Galician-Portuguese poetry? Arthur is a historical character who reigned over Britain. Britain was peopled by Brutus and corresponds to contemporary England. Nevertheless, there is also a mythical Britain inhabited by a fictional beast, whose hypothetical existence can amuse people’s imagination in moments of anguished disappointment. Arthur disappeared in mysterious conditions, no one knows where he is to be found, nor will anyone ever know of his death. He is a revered hero whose disappearance is worthy of being compared to the ascension of the Virgin into Heaven. The Arthurian universe of the Peninsular poets is anachronistic. Arthur is cited by biblical characters and Merlin converts Jews in Scotland. Merlin is a character of extremes. He is the son of a devil, but also a defender of the Christian faith. He has exceptional persuasive power over the Virgin Mary, perhaps because his wisdom is without compare. His prophecies, especially those regarding Peninsular events, bring him out of the world of fiction and lend him a degree of actuality, especially when he anachronistically confides in medieval Castilians. Nevertheless, Merlin is also a parodied symbol of man’s folly and weakness before the charms, whims, or plain sexual desires of women. This is the case especially amongst later poets of the cancioneiros. Tristan and Isolt are the icons of steadfast love, although two royal poets are certain of surpassing them, so deep is their passion for their respective ladies, or their dedication to poetical convention. Tristan himself is an acknowledged poet of the cancioneiros, expressing his longing for the beloved in impassioned cantigas de amor. Young ladies of the Arthurian world are happy, carefree and innocent maidens who celebrate their joy with bailadas. Their songs scorn defeated villains and praise the worthiest knights, thus performing the judicious task of punishing the bad and rewarding the good. Grown women, on the other hand, are paradoxical beings. They are either ethereal, unattainable ladies, in whose service men can gain honour, or they are beasts of prey, ready to encage men, in their thirst for power through knowledge, or for plain sexual pleasure. In any case, women cause men to suffer, even die, either through the pains of distant, unrequited love, or through imprisonment and deception. Ladies do not tolerate unfaithful lovers, but damsels are obfuscated by the chivalric deeds of knights, irrespective of their peccadilloes and infidelity to other women. Male heroes in general are wise, honourable, and strive to serve and be worthy of their ladies. They are also deeply emotional and sentimental. Male villains are vengeful and kidnap ladies from worthy knights to enslave them in Ireland.

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In 1988 H.L. Sharrer expressed the wish to publish a comprehensive study including an edition of all the extant Galician-Portuguese lyrical poetry with Arthurian references.33 I can only reiterate the same wish and pay H.L. Sharrer homage for his valuable contribution to the study of Portuguese Arthurian literature. This study is merely a beginning, a recognition of the many references to the Arthurian world found in Galician-Portuguese poetry, but it does not take into account the underlying knowledge of the stories developed in the Arthurian romances, mostly of the Post-Vulgate Cycle, translated into Galician-Portuguese. It also does not take into account the knowledge transmitted through the oral tradition. I have resisted the temptation of referring to the poems as texts composed by an author. Many of these texts were created to be sung or recited, and not to be enjoyed in written form. In medieval Western Iberia there were many other poems circulating in oral transmission, but which are now lost and may never have achieved written form. In any case, the network of references and allusions above, no matter how small, imply a complex Arthurian universe shared by generations of poets spanning over a century.

33 Sharrer, ‘La materia de Bretaña’, p. 568.

12 The Lost Beginning of The Jeaste of Syr Gaweyne and the Collation of Bodleian Library MS Douce 261 MALDWYN MILLS

Neither the text missing from The Jeaste of Syr Gaweyne can be recovered nor the collation of MS Douce 261 ascertained by the usual means (that is, by comparison with a printed exemplar, and from the physical state of the manuscript, respectively). But, by conjunction, what evidence there is points to the loss of seventy-four lines of text from Gaweyne and to a collation of nine quires of eight leaves, plus one leaf inserted immediately before the ninth. The longest of the surviving copies of the text known as The Jeaste of Syr Gawayne but more logically titled simply Gaweyne1 is the manuscript fragment of 541 lines that is contained on fols.15r–25v of Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 261.2 Here it is preceded by The hystorye of the valyaunte knyght Syr Isenbras (fols. 1r–7v) and The tretyse of Syr Degore (fols. 8r–14v), and followed by Syr Eglamoure of Artoys (fols. 26r–48v), which carries the date 1564 within its large ornamental tailpiece. Like its formally exact counterpart, London, British Library MS Egerton 3132A,3 this little book is one of the most attractive collections of romances to have survived; it is written in an italic hand with thirty-two lines to the full page, reduced to thirty-one on five occasions (generally in conjunction with a large initial capital); to between six and twenty-four on three others (which, as the final pages of their items, carry varyingly elaborate tailpieces), and to anything between six and twelve on twenty-one others (where the page is dominated by one of the large coloured illustrations that are the most distinctive and attractive feature of the manuscript).4

1

2 3

4

For which see M. Mills, ‘Generic Titles In Bodleian Library MS Douce 261 and British Library MS Egerton 3132A’, in The Matter of Identity in Medieval Romance, ed. P. Hardman (Cambridge, UK, 2002), p. 133. The most recent edition is that of T.A. Hahn, in Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, 1995), pp. 393–418. Which is entirely taken up with a text – for once complete – of the metrical Roberte the Deuyll. Only a single, very fragmentary copy of Pynson’s print of this romance has survived, and this is quite without illustration. See A short-title catalogue of books printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English books printed abroad, 1475–1640, compiled by A.W. Pollard and G.R. Redgrave; rev. & enl. W.A. Jackson, F.S. Ferguson, and Katharine F. Pantzer (London, 1976–91), 21071.5. Hereafter STC. Discussed in Mills, ‘The Illustrations of British Library MS Egerton 3132A and Bodleian Library MS Douce 261’, in Essays and Poems Presented to Daniel Huws, ed. T. Jones and E.B. Fryde (Aberystwyth, 1994), pp. 307–27.

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But visually appealing as these texts are, they are all to varying degrees incomplete; perhaps, as in the Auchinleck MS, the pictures were to blame by proving irresistible to later handlers of the collection. They themselves are presumably lost forever (though, as we shall see, it is sometimes possible to make informed guesses about their subject matter), but the text lost with them can, much more often than not, be recovered from printed copies virtually identical with those that served as exemplars for E[dward] B[anyster], the compiler and scribe of both the Douce and Egerton manuscripts, whose initials appear on fol. 25v within the tailpiece to Gaweyne.5 This last text, however, is the exception to the rule, the only one for which no complete printed version has survived. All that we have are three fragments (STC 11691a. 3, 5, and 7), none as substantial as Banyster’s transcript, and none offering a single line of the lost introductory section (henceforth [Gaweyne]). The longest of the three, Lambeth Palace Library, Z 240 l. 23, starts at line 291 of Douce; the Westminster Abbey Library text in Fragment Box 10 in that library, at line 299; that of British Library, Harley 5927/32, at line 489. Since the Gaweyne fragment differs from its companions in Douce in having no internal lacunae, it would at first appear that these three printed fragments have nothing to offer the reader beyond a series of (mostly unremarkable) variant readings.6 But in fact the Westminster fragment, while extremely tattered and limited in scope, offers one piece of evidence that is of real importance to any attempt at calculating the line-length of [Gaweyne]. This is the signature B that is preserved – together with the running title ‘Gaw[e]yn’ on what is left of the recto of its first leaf. In its full form this second gathering would have contained the equivalent of lines 291–541, and since this printed fragment, like the other two that we have, would have offered thirty-three lines to the page, these 251 lines of text, together with the printer’s colophon on the final page, could have been comfortably accommodated on a gathering of four leaves (33 x 7 + 20). Gathering A, however, must have been larger than this, since it had to accommodate the 290 lines that have survived only in the Douce text (which would have taken up very nearly nine pages in themselves), plus the whole of [Gaweyne] together with its title-page. The evidence of comparable prints of mixed quires7 suggests that it must have been either of six leaves or of eight; if the first it would have contained 363 lines after the title-page; if the second, 495. If we deduct from these figures the 290 lines that have been preserved in Douce then [Gaweyne] would have been of either 73 or 205 lines, and to make a reasoned choice between them we must try to see how each would fit into the collation that we can establish for Douce as a whole. This is easier said than done. There are no catchwords and signatures at all, and the binding is too tight for the limits of the individual gatherings to be perceived. But we do have other guidance, most importantly a number of minute paper stubs, both single and double, to suggest the loss of a leaf and two leaves (possibly a bifolium), respectively, and varying lengths of binding thread, which predominantly – though 5 6 7

For this identification see M.C. Seymour, ‘MSS. Douce 261 and Egerton 3132A and Edward Banyster’, in Bodleian Library Record 10 (1980): 162–5. The only one that is at all striking is the Lambeth fragment’s ‘And mykell worse than I wende’ for the Douce reading ‘Whereuer that he wende’ at line 316. In particular, the de Worde print of Degore (STC 6470) which the signatures show to be made up of three quires of eight, four and six leaves respectively.

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not quite always – imply the centre of a gathering (whether the central bifolium has been lost or not). As far back as 1972 P.R. Robinson had noted that fols. 26–48 of Douce (gatherings G–J in the diagram, which constitute the whole of its text of Eglamoure) ‘seem to be in quires of eight’8 and this is certainly correct; lengths of binding thread are clearly apparent between the fourth and fifth leaves of each of these gatherings, that is, between fols. 28 and 29; 36 and 37, and 44 and 45, with a single leaf lost at the head of the first, immediately before fol. 26; this would have carried the title-illustration to Eglamoure on its recto. What Miss Robinson did not however mention was that a second leaf – shown by a comparison with the prints to have contained forty-two lines of text, and thus of necessity illustrated – has dropped out between the second and third of these three gatherings. We can only conclude that the compiler realized that without this addition it would be difficult to fit into the remaining eight leaves the last third of Eglamoure, together with at least two illustrations and a suitably imposing tailpiece. A further sign of his desire to save space in this part of the manuscript may be the representation of the abduction of Degrabell by the griffin, not as a full-scale illustration, but (uniquely) in the righthand margin of fol. 40r. By doing so he gained space for between twenty and twenty-six extra lines of text. Immediately before these three gatherings of eight leaves (G, H and J in the diagram) a fourth (gathering F; fols. 18–25) is attested by the binding thread visible between fols. 21 and 22; this contains, with no internal loss of material, the second and larger part of Gawayne. Before this, however, everything is much more fragmentary and ambiguous until – as we continue to work backwards through the manuscript – we come to the very beginning of it, with its text of Isenbras, of which a little less than half of the whole remains (gathering A) . This begins with the only title-illustration in the collection to have survived, and takes up seven leaves, with a gap in the text between fols. 3 and 4, and a vestigial stub which suggests that a single leaf has been lost. This is confirmed by a comparison with Copland’s print – which Banyster reproduces with great fidelity, omissions and all9 – which shows that exactly forty lines of text have been lost; here again, one of the faces of the leaf must have carried an illustration. The whole of the rest of Isenbras, together with an even more substantial first part of Degore, is completely lacking; in conformity with [Gaweyne], these substantial lost components will be designated [Isenbras] and [Degore] respectively. A comparison with the prints shows that the first of these (gathering B) lacks 444 lines of Copland’s text; the second (gathering C), 414 lines of de Worde’s. Each could have been accommodated on a gathering of eight leaves, and the example of Eglamoure, the best preserved of the four texts of Douce, suggests that each could have contained between two and four full-scale illustrations, together with an ornate 8

9

P.R. Robinson, ‘A Study of Some Aspects of the Transmission of English Verse Texts in Late Mediaeval Manuscripts’ (unpub. B. Litt. Thesis, University of Oxford, 1972), p. 216. No attempt at suggesting the limits of the quires is made in the entry for Douce 261 in G. Guddat-Figge, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Middle English Romances (Munich, 1976), pp. 265–6. See the variants given for lines 105, 107, 109–20, 357 and 423–4 in the edition of J. Zupitza and G. Schleich (Berlin, 1901). The likely dependence of Banyster’s transcripts on Copland’s prints is discussed in A.S.G. Edwards, ‘William Copland and the Identity of Printed Middle English Romance’, in Hardman, The Matter of Identity, pp. 145–6.

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tailpiece on the final verso of [Isenbras], beneath a greater or lesser amount of text, and with a title-illustration taking up the whole of the first recto of [Degore]. [Isenbras] is the more ambivalent here, since it could have had either two or three illustrations within the text, while [Degore] must certainly have had three.10 Of all the illustrations lost from these two gatherings there is only one of which we can infer the subject-matter with certainty. This had appeared at a point near the end of [Degore] and would have represented the hero’s fight with a dragon. Our reason for confidence here is the fact that the de Worde print contains in-text illustrations of its own in the form of woodcuts,11 five of them in all, of which the last three in their alleged, if not always their obvious subject-matter – for they were clearly used because they were available, not because they were relevant12 – exactly parallel the three that appear in the Douce Degore. It is thus reasonable to assume that the first two of them were also broadly replicated, the first within [Degore], the second within an internal lacuna in Degore itself. With the woodcuts and associated captions to guide us, we may be confident that the first would have shown the hero’s fight with the dragon, the second, his fight with his grandfather in a tournament. This second illustration would have appeared on a leaf now missing between fols.8 and 9 (its original presence there is further established by the fact that only forty lines have been lost), while the earlier picture of the dragon-fight must have appeared on the last opening of the lost gathering C. Moving forwards through the manuscript, we find that the gathering following these (gathering D) has kept its original limits (present fols. 8 and 11), but has lost a good deal of material between them. Its centre was originally the bifolium of which a double stub has survived between present fols. 9 and 10; comparison with the prints shows that 127 lines have been lost with these two leaves; they must therefore have carried no illustrations, and had thirty-one lines instead of thirty-two on one of their four faces. Also missing is the leaf between fols. 8 and 9, of which the illustration already suggested by the example of de Worde’s Degore is confirmed by the fact that it had contained only forty lines of text, and a second between fols. 10 and 11, which, since it would have contained sixty–four lines of text, could not have been illustrated. Appropriately, the last gathering to be considered in our progress though the manuscript is the crucial E, containing as it does the final three leaves of Degore, the first three leaves of Gaweyne, and between them, of course, the elusive [Gaweyne] itself. It is bounded by the present fols. 12 and 17, and a minute stub is perceptible between fols. 14 and 15 (on the recto of which last Gaweyne begins). This stub cannot be taken quite literally, since it would then reduce [Gaweyne] to a single leaf 10 Two illustrations would fit comfortably into the 444 lines of [Isenbras], since we could then have thir-

teen pages without illustrations (416 lines altogether), two illustrated pages containing ten lines each, and eight lines above the tailpiece. But twelve pages of text alone would (just) have allowed three of the remaining pages to be illustrated if each of them had the (maximum) number of twelve lines beneath them, and twenty-four lines above the tailpiece. If so, this text would have been closer in general appearance to Roberte than to any of its companion romances in Douce. 11 Although no other surviving print of Degore contains woodcuts, those of King and Copland (STC 6472 and 6472.5) preserve the section headings that serve as captions to the woodcuts in de Worde’s text. These two prints are at some points textually closer to Banyster’s than is de Worde’s – see, for example, the variants recorded by G. Schleich for line 627 of his Sire Degarre (Heidelberg, 1929), p. 97. 12 For some striking discrepancies between text and woodcuts, see Mills, ‘Illustrations’, pp. 309–10.

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that would leave room only for a title-illustration backed by a mere thirty-two lines of text, and this would neither accommodate even the smaller of the line-lengths suggested by the Westminster fragment, nor make up a complete gathering of eight leaves with what we have. Two leaves not one must be missing, comprising a titleillustration, two full pages of text, and one illustrated page. This would fit comfortably into the lower of the two estimates of lost lines suggested earlier (73 and 205), and this figure requires only minimal adjustment to 74 to make an exact fit with the defective stanza that now stands at the head of Gaweyne.13 We have next to ask whether any significant help in filling in the narrative content of these lines is provided by any surviving Middle English or Old French texts. And, as it happens, we have one of each of these: Gaweyne itself for some retrospectively significant narrative detail, and the much earlier First Continuation of Chrétien’s Perceval,14 which offers two widely separated and – in most of the manuscript copies – widely divergent accounts of what is essentially the same story as Gaweyne, with the first told by the narrator, the second by the hero himself.15 These two accounts are very similar in length, and only a little longer than the English romance would have been in its complete form; this last combines features from both of them in its own narrative.16 As might have been expected, Gaweyne itself offers relatively little that reflects detail already mentioned, and most of this is topographical and commonplace. It suggests, unsurprisingly, that [Gaweyne] must have begun with an account of the hero’s departure from Arthur and his court to mirror his laconic return to both in lines 529–30, and that there would have been descriptions of his progress through a wooded valley (lines 84, 9l, 96 and 319) and up the side of a mountain (lines 52, 151, 179, 217, 234) before coming upon the fateful tent (lines 13, 239, 392), meeting with the heroine of the romance, and – for all her warnings of danger from her kinsmen (line 1: compare 395–406) – beginning his courtship of her. None of this is spectacular, and most disappointing of all is the excessive brevity of his return to Arthur: . . . he to the courte came home All hys aduentures he shewed the kinge, That with those foure knyghtes he had fyghtynge. (529–31) 13 With the exception of the anomalous lines 533–5 (‘And after that tyme they neuer mette more/ (Full

gladde were those knightes therfore)/ So there was made the ende’), the romance is composed in stanzas of six lines throughout. Lines 1–4 represent the last four lines of one of these. 14 Most particularly in Volume II of The Continuations of the Old French Perceval of Chretien de Troyes: The First Continuation, ed. W. Roach and R. H. Ivy (Philadelphia, 1950); here the text given in full is that of Edinburgh, NLS MS 19.1.5, which represents what Roach defined as the Long Redaction of the romance. The recent Première Continuation de Perceval, ed. C.-A. van Coolput-Storms (Paris, 1993), gives the text of London, BL MS Additional 36614, which belongs to Roach’s Short Redaction. 15 These differences are not present in the London text, but very marked in the Edinburgh one. They are discussed by R.E. Bennett, ‘The Sources of The Jeaste of Syr Gawayne’, JEGP 33 (1934): 57–63 (where he labelled the two accounts ‘the Seduction’ and ‘the Rape’) and by Pierre Gallais, L’imaginaire d’un romancier français de la fin du XIIe siècle, 4 vols (Amsterdam, 1988–9), pp. 26–31, 63–70, 2259–83 (where the labels are ‘version flirt’ and ‘version viol’). See also Coolput-Storms, Continuation, pp. 23–5. 16 As in Gawain’s own version of events, all the lady’s kinsfolk confront him while he is still in the tent with her; as in the narrator’s, it is her father not her brother who first challenges him. But neither version provides him with as many immediate opponents as the four encountered in Gaweyne; the first has two (with a third held to have been killed by Gawain earlier), the second, three.

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with its failure to tell us whether the court was relatively formal and static or held in the field of war or hunting, and to give any hint of the hero’s motives in leaving it. At the other end of the fragment, however, a clue to these motives has been found in a remark of Gaweyne’s own: And sayde, ‘I dreede no threte – I haue founde youe here in my chase’

(1–2)

T.A. Hahn has tentatively interpreted the second line to mean that at the very beginning of the romance, ‘Gawain may have been part of an Arthurian hunt, as in Ragnelle, Carlisle, Awntyrs, Avowyng and other romances.’17 This is certainly plausible in itself, but as we have seen nothing is said about his rejoining any such hunt on his return, and the notion of Gaweyne as a huntsman does not agree with some statements made near the end of the fragment: an allusion to the ‘haburgeons’ of both Gawain and Brandles in line 450, and the later moment when, lacking a horse and ‘armed passynge heauy’ the hero finds himself obliged to shed his armour before he can hope to make his way back to Arthur’s court (493–502).18 It is also contradicted by the representation of the hero as a knight in full armour in every one of the five illustrations in which he appears (which would of course have been the work of someone familiar with the lost early pages). By contrast, the idea of a Gawain in full armour arises quite naturally out of the beginning of both versions of the story in the ‘Long’ redaction of the First Continuation. For what we find in these is an initial scene of war, not hunting, with Arthur besieging his rebellious vassal Brun de Branlant, and Gawain, neglecting to arm himself properly, receiving a wound that not only puts him out of action for several months, but will much later (in the narrator’s version) break open when he is fighting with Bran de Liz (E 6536–44).19 This wound also provides the excuse, in the same version, for his departure from the camp (which, he assures Arthur, is not to seek fresh combats but to see if he is now strong enough to bear arms again (E 6127–39)).Up to the point at which he rides away from Arthur, the differences between the two French versions are very largely of scale, with the narrator’s account (= E 5941–6151) very much longer than Gawain’s own (= E 13611–667), but after this they diverge more radically in the Long Redaction (in particular). For while the narrator has Gawain vow never to return until he has heard of a marvel or found an adventure (E 6194–7), Gawain himself tells of a meeting with a hermit that

17 Hahn, Sir Gawain, p. 393. 18 A familiar romance theme is that of a huntsman-knight who is taken at a disadvantage by a fully armed

opponent – Chrétien’s Erec is the obvious example. Only if the animal hunted was known to be dangerous in itself were the preparations for the hunt likely to be more warlike, as when Arthur and his companions arm themselves before seeking out the boar of Inglewood forest (The Avowing of King Arthur, ed. R. Dahood, Garland Medieval Texts (New York and London, 1984), p. 53, lines 77–8). 19 This is not mentioned at the corresponding point in Gawain’s own account in the ‘Long’ version of the breaking off of the combat. Here again he is getting the worst of it, but this time craftily suggests that it would be better for Bran de Liz himself to resume the fighting later, at Arthur’s court or his own; if not nobody would ever believe that he could have conquered the invincible Gawain (E. 14191–223). This does in fact happen: when Gawain accidentally comes to Bran’s castle in the company of Arthur and a number of his knights, the combat is resumed, but stopped by Arthur, and the antagonists are finally reconciled (E. 13389–5050).

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is followed by a (very) temporary resolve to lead a better life (E 13671–708). Immediately after both these resolutions, he comes upon the tent. Some of this material can be dismissed out of hand as the model for any narrative developments in [Gaweyne]: most of all the meeting with the hermit and subsequent thoughts of repentance in Gawain’s own account. The serious wounding of the hero also seems unlikely to have been mentioned there, since nothing is said about it at any point in Gaweyne, and it would in any case have depended upon an initial scene of battle or siege to which, as to any scene of hunting, there is no hint of a return at the end of the English romance. What is more likely to have been stated in [Gaweyne] is the hero’s determination to seek out marvels or adventures (though this would hardly have filled up much of the available space), followed by a meeting with a character who supplied specific directions or general advice (and so corresponded loosely to Arthur in both of the French accounts, and to the hermit in the second of them), but there does not seem space, in a total of seventy-four lines, for this to have led to any intermediate adventure, even a short one. Much depends, of course, on how long he took to get away from the court, and how much space was taken up by the preliminary exchange with the lady, of whose own words nothing remains at this point. Like the narrative as a whole, she appears as a fusion of her prototypes in the contrasting French accounts, though less extreme than either.20 The text of Gaweyn is also relevant to the question of the order in which the romances of the Douce and Egerton manuscripts were likely to have been transcribed. As a whole, the evidence here is ambiguous, most of all when we try to determine the likely starting-point of the whole process. From some points of view, Roberte could seem to have been the first romance to be transcribed; it has a slightly more primitive look than the others, with the italic hand a little more uneven than elsewhere. What is more, where direct comparison can be made between its illustrations and those of Douce, the latter look firmer and more competent; see especially the pictures of marriages, achieved and aborted, on Egerton fols. 21v and 22v, and Douce 9v and 44r. On the other hand the close connection of the pictures in Degore with the woodcuts of de Worde’s print suggests that it was this (or another equally elaborated21) that gave the first impetus to the relatively dense illustration of the manuscripts; as noted earlier, Banyster seems even to have improved on his model by adding two extra pictures in [Degore] (where the print had four consecutive openings without woodcuts). Things are more straightforward at the other end of the process of copying. One of the many intriguing things about the text of Gaweyne is the fact that it is the tailpiece to this romance that carries Banyster’s initials (fol. 25v), and not the more imposing one to Eglamoure (fol. 48v), which, as the final item in the collection, they would have transformed into a genuine colophon. This suggests that Gaweyne was originally intended as the final item, but that a print of Eglamoure subsequently came to hand, and was copied on to three additional quires. This strengthens the idea, probable in itself, that Banyster had transcribed his

20 Bennett notes that ‘the maiden, while not forced, as in The Rape, is not represented as unprotesting and

willing from the first as she is in The Seduction’ (‘Sources’, p. 61). 21 An alternative model for the in-text illustration of a romance of modest dimensions could have been

found in the prose version of Roberte; each of the two de Worde copies that have survived (STC 21070 and 21071) has eight woodcuts after the title-page.

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Proposed collation for Bodleian Library MS Douce 261

prints as they came to hand, and not waited until he had assembled a sufficient number of them to make a satisfactory book (which in its original form would have been of seventy-three leaves).22 Finally a word should be said about the appended diagram, my ‘Proposed Collation’. Its particular format has been chosen in preference to the usual end-on way of representing the quires of a manuscript in order to demonstrate the scale and density of the illustrations, and to situate these more clearly within the relevant openings; they are set much nearer the relevant parts of the text than are the wood22 See also Edwards, ‘William Copland’, p. 146.

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Degore.23

cuts in de Worde’s In order to fit into a vertical page, the proportions of the leaves themselves have been distorted: the actual dimensions of these in both manuscripts are 187 x 135mm. Leaves and illustrations that have survived are defined by continuous lines; those that have not, by broken ones; where an illustration was certainly present on either the recto or verso of one of the lost leaves the shaded rectangle representing it of necessity stretches across the recto and verso of that leaf. In the two gatherings now completely lost (B and C), the only illustration recorded in this way is the one corresponding to the first of the five woodcuts in the de Worde print.

23 Since these last are all set at the beginning of the episode concerned, immediately after its descriptive

heading. The (quite inappropriate) woodcut beneath the caption ‘How syr Degore fought with his fader & how his fader knewe hym by the broken swerde’ appears at a point in the text almost forty lines earlier than its counterpart on fol. 13v of Douce, above lines describing the preparations for combat, and not the combat (as in de Worde’s print) or the moment of recognition itself (as in Banyster’s transcript).

13 Enide’s See-through Dress ROGER MIDDLETON

Some scribes, poets and translators knew that Enide’s dress was worn through at the elbows; others tantalize us with holes in the sides. When Chrétien de Troyes wrote Erec et Enide in about 1180 his heroine did not have a see-through dress, but in less than ten years Enide had acquired one that she retained, in some quarters at least, for the next several centuries. Scribes and translators, and in recent times, editors and critics have all conspired, as decorously as possible, to make her attraction more visible. How much and what part of Enide can be seen is almost entirely in the mind, but it begins with the spelling and pronunciation of a single word, and indeed turns upon the presence of a single letter. There are problems relating to changes in the pronunciation of Old French in the late twelfth century, and there are problems of textual criticism, but in the end what we are faced with is an exercise in temptation.1 The passage that we need to discuss involves the first appearance of Enide and her first meeting with Erec:

400

405

410

1 2

Li vavasors sa feme apele Et la fille qui mout fu bele, Qui an un ovreor ovroient; Mes ne sai quel oevre feisoient. La dame s’an est fors issue, Et sa fille qui fu vestue D’une chemise par panz lee, Deliëe, blanche et ridee. Un blanc chainse ot vestu dessus; N’avoit robe ne mains ne plus. Mes tant estoit li chainses viez Que as cotes estoit perciez. Povre estoit la robe defors, Mes dessoz estoit biaus li cors. (Erec et Enide, ed. Foerster, 397–410)2

The vavasour calls his wife and his daughter who was very beautiful who were working in a workroom, but I do not know what work they were doing. The lady came out of the room with her daughter who was dressed in a chemise with a wide skirt of fine material, white and pleated. Over that she had put on a white chainse; she had no other clothes. But the chainse was so old that it was in holes at the elbows. The clothes were poor on the outside, but the body beneath was beautiful.

An earlier version of this essay was read at a conference of the Society for French Studies at Oxford in 1984. Christian von Troyes, Sämtliche Werke III: Erec und Enide, ed. Wendelin Foerster (Halle, 1890). All translations are my own, and are designed to correspond as closely as possible to the originals.

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What Enide is wearing here is typical aristocratic dress of the second half of the twelfth century. The chemise was an undergarment, usually of fine white linen, often loosely cut and pleated, but without decoration. The chainse was an overgarment, again usually of white linen, often with embroidery or other decoration at the yoke and the hem. There is nothing improper in her being seen dressed in a chainse, but it is a sign of her poverty that she is not wearing a bliaut, a richly coloured overgarment of expensive fabric, usually silk. When Enide comes to Arthur’s court, Guinevere provides her with just such a bliaut that she puts on instead of the chainse, but she does not change the chemise (Foerster 1634–50). From this it seems that Chrétien regarded the chainse and bliaut as alternative overgarments, and Eunice Goddard insists that this was always so. However, there is also evidence (cited by Joan Evans) that the bliaut could be worn over the chainse, and that it was deliberately cut shorter, and with a wide opening at the neck, so that the embroidery of the chainse could be seen.3 The word robe does not refer to any particular garment, but to the whole set of clothes that someone might wear. For outdoors, or on ceremonial occasions, one would expect a mantel. For Enide’s formal presentation at Arthur’s court, Guinevere provides a new mantel to go with the new bliaut, the two together being described as a robe. We should not expect Enide to wear a mantle in this domestic environment. The crucial line in this description is 408, and the crucial word is the one printed here as cotes (the plural of cote from Latin CUBITUM, meaning ‘elbow’). Thus, in the text adopted by Foerster, the line means that the chainse had holes at the elbows, and at the literal level this is indeed what the narrative requires. However, other versions contrive to make the holes in the sides, thereby raising our hopes of catching a glimpse of the beautiful body beneath. In point of fact the form cotes does not appear in any of the seven surviving manuscripts. Most witnesses have coutes (a thirteenth-century spelling for the same word): these are B (BnF, fr. 1376), V (BnF, fr. 24403) and E (BnF, fr. 1420). The same meaning is conveyed by P (BnF, fr. 375) with the dialect spelling keutes, and it is important to realize that this is not a textual variant. The use of k instead of c, and of eu instead of ou, is standard practice for Picard scribes, so it is no surprise that a manuscript written in Arras at the end of the thirteenth century has many such forms that have no implications for the textual tradition. Two other manuscripts almost certainly share a reading, though strictly speaking we cannot be sure of this: H (BnF, fr. 1450) has costes and C (BnF, fr. 794, the ‘copie de Guiot’) has costez. In theory, either spelling could represent the plural of either coste or costé (in which the acute accent is a purely modern convention), and there is no guarantee that both scribes had the same intention. The feminine coste is from Latin COSTAM (meaning ‘rib’ or ‘side’), whilst the masculine costé is from Latin COSTATUM, originally an adjective (meaning ‘ribbed’ or ‘having ribs’) but later apparently used as a noun (meaning ‘side’). In practice, for contexts such as the one under discussion, Old French usage favours costé, and this expectation would be much reinforced by a plural with z rather than s. In Early Old French the derivative 3

Eunice Rathbone Goddard, Women’s Costume in French Texts of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Baltimore and Paris, 1927), pp. 69–75; Joan Evans, Dress in Mediaeval France (Oxford, 1952), pp. 5–6.

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of COSTATUM was costet (attested in the Oxford manuscript of the Chanson de Roland and elsewhere). By 1100 the final phoneme had already been reduced to the fricative [j] and by Chrétien’s day this had been lost altogether (hence the spelling coste). The plural of costet originally maintained the consonant group [ts] invariably represented in spelling by z, resulting in costez. With the reduction of the consonant group from [ts] to [s] in the course of the twelfth century, some scribes adopted the spelling costes whilst others persisted with costez. By the time that the ‘copie de Guiot’ was being made in the 1220s, the pronunciation of this final phoneme was in fact either zero, [s] or [z] according to context.4 The situation is further complicated by the fact that Guiot often prefers to write z at the end of words (whatever his pronunciation may have been), and this feature of his spelling has been used to argue that his costez may not be what it seems. There are two other occurrences of the plural of costé in Erec et Enide where we could hope to compare the spelling of the two scribes, but one of them (1477) is in a line that is missing from H, and the other (4369) is a case where both scribes use the spelling costes (common enough in H, but a unique example for Guiot).5 In his critical edition Foerster uses the spelling costez for this line, and does not even record costes as a variant for either H or C (Foerster 4395). On many occasions coste and costé are distinguished by gender, metre or rhyme, but where there is no such guide anyone reading aloud must decide whether to make the final syllable a close [e] or a schwa, and a modern editor must decide whether to add the acute accent. However, given that the meaning of the two words is virtually identical (except where coste means ‘rib’) scribes and readers (and even editors) may make arbitrary decisions without affecting the interpretation of the text and without affecting the transmission of the written forms. Thus, for the purposes of establishing the manuscript tradition, the costes of H and the costez of C may be taken as equivalent. Neither the theoretical difficulty of deciding upon the underlying word nor the choice of final s or z is significant when the important contrast is with the form coutes (dialect keutes) that is to be found in E(P)BV. The seventh manuscript A (Chantilly, Musée Condé MS 472) has a different form for the whole line: Que partot estoit depecies. In principle, these manuscript readings can be found in the critical apparatus of Foerster’s edition, but there are two small errors that have misled the unwary. In giving the sigla for the reading coutes the apparatus has BAE instead of BVE. This will not have influenced Foerster in the construction of his critical text, because he was perfectly well aware that this was not the form in A, for which he gives the separate reading partoit. Although the true reading of A is partot, the presence or

4 5

Pierre Fouché, Phonétique historique du français, 3 vols. (Paris, 1952–61), p. 780, citing Chrétien’s rhymes; Glanville Price, The French Language: Present and Past (London, 1971), section 3.8.4. Information on the forms employed by Guiot is derived from Marie-Louise Ollier, Lexique et concordance de Chrétien de Troyes d’après la copie Guiot avec introduction, index et rimaire: traitement informatique par Serge Lusignan, Charles Doutrelepont et Bernard Derval (Montreal and Paris, 1986). For Guiot’s usage all references are to Les Romans de Chrétien de Troyes édités d’après la copie de Guiot (Bibl. nat., fr. 794) in the series Classiques français du moyen âge: Erec et Enide, ed. Mario Roques (Paris, 1952); Cligés, ed. Alexandre Micha (Paris, 1957); Le Chevalier de la Charrete, ed. Mario Roques (Paris, 1958); Le Chevalier au Lion (Yvain), ed. Mario Roques (Paris, 1960); Le Conte du Graal (Perceval), ed. Félix Lecoy, 2 vols. (Paris, 1972–5). I have not studied the practice of H outside the text of Erec et Enide, nor that of Guiot outside the five Chrétien romances.

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absence of the i does not affect the meaning, nor the status of this variant for the textual tradition. Given that he was producing a critical edition Foerster’s decision to employ the spelling cotes despite the lack of manuscript authority is impeccable. His view of the manuscript relations is expressed by a stemma of two main branches: the a branch being represented by H and C, and the b branch being represented firstly by P and B, and secondly by a subsidiary branch (g) consisting principally of V and A but also including E, that has sporadic connections with the other two branches in different parts of the text (Foerster, p. iv).

In line 408 there is no difficulty in rejecting the a reading (HC) because it is easy to show that it gives the wrong meaning. A later passage describing the same white chainse makes it clear that the holes are indeed at the elbows: Povretez li a fet user Cest blanc chainse, tant que as cotes An sont andeus les manches rotes. (Foerster 1568–70)

Poverty has caused her to wear out this white shift until at the elbows both sleeves are in holes.

This could hardly be more explicit: the reference to the fact that it is the two sleeves that have holes in them is supported by a rhyme that prohibits both costes and costés, so it is no surprise that all manuscripts have cotes. The rhyme would not prevent a scribe from writing coutes once the relevant change in pronunciation had taken place, but scribes are generally reluctant to make changes of spelling at the rhyme position, doubtless because they are keen to preserve the rhyme for the eye as well as for the ear, and it is not always appropriate to change both words of the pair. No doubt the unanimity in this later passage will have influenced Foerster in his choice of spelling, but he would not have needed reminding that cotes was the expected form for this word at the time that Erec et Enide was being written (and

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even more so at the time that Foerster supposed it to have been written, c.1160). Once it is established that the meaning required is ‘elbows’ there is little doubt that Chrétien (or his scribe) would have written cotes. That was the normal spelling of the time, and it remained the preferred spelling at the rhyme position for another hundred and fifty years or more. The other consideration that would have weighed with Foerster is that cotes is the form that will best explain the divided tradition. Either coutes or the dialect form keutes can arise through a simple modernization of the spelling to accord with a current or local pronunciation (Fouché, pp. 208 and 306–10). Similarly, costes can arise through the addition of a false s once the preconsonantal [s] of coste and costé is lost from pronunciation in the late twelfth century (Fouché, p. 861). The meaning required prevents costes/costez from being the original, and deriving this form from coutes is more complex than deriving it from cotes (though not impossible if there were evidence that required it). For an editor of Foerster’s school all of this is textual criticism of the most basic kind; there could hardly be a case in which the solution is more obvious. The evidence from the reading in A is rather different. No doubt Foerster dismissed it out of hand on the basis of his stemma. Firstly, all other manuscripts agree on the form of the line except for the spelling of a single word, and this alone would be sufficient to reject it. Secondly, the reading of g (the ancestor of A) must be coutes since this is the reading of its ancestor b (established by the agreement of P and B) and of its other two descendants (V and E). Consequently, the reading of A must have arisen between g and A itself, and must therefore be secondary. However, it is worth noting that the text of A is to be rejected on these stemmatic grounds, not because it has a meaning that is prohibited by lines 1568–70; a chainse that is partot depecies (‘completely tattered’) may have holes wherever you like. The stemmatic argument is not affected by the small error in Foerster’s critical apparatus that gives the reading as partoit instead of partot, for the difference does not change the word that is represented. However, the form without i that is actually in the manuscript does reveal a syllable that is of interest to the tradition, because it suggests a plausible explanation of how the A reading may have arisen. If we were to suppose a first stage in which a scribe wrote par cotes for as cotes (possibly to avoid the hiatus between Que and as) we should have the line *Que par cotes estoit perciez. However, given that scribes were often not very careful about the separation of words, a second copyist may then have been faced with *parcotes (or even *parcot es) whose last syllable es was immediately followed by the identical first syllable of estoit. No one who has ever tried to read a thirteenth-century manuscript needs reminding how difficult it is to distinguish c from t by form alone, or how easy it is for identical syllables to coalesce, so a scribe might read *parcotes estoit (or even *parcotesestoit or *parcot esestoit) as *partot estoit. Having done so, he (or a later copyist) would find himself short of a syllable, so that perciez might become depeciez in order to fit both the metre and the supposed meaning, not to mention the image of this beautiful woman in a dress that was incapable of covering her. Of course, this is no more than speculation, but it takes account of what has been corrupted and of what has remained intact. Curiously enough, although the line as a whole is clearly an error there is just one syllable where the reading of A is alone in preserving the original text. The two letter group ot, without the intrusion of either s

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or u, stands as a further witness to the form cotes that Foerster correctly believed to have been in the original. The difference between the text adopted by Foerster in 1890 and that given by Mario Roques in his edition of 1952 is symptomatic of the principles followed by these two editors. Where Foerster was preparing a critical edition and attempting to return as closely as possible to the text that Chrétien wrote, Roques had abandoned all hope of recovering Chrétien’s text and set out to publish the version of one particular manuscript, the ‘copie de Guiot’ (C). Determined to keep faith with his chosen witness, Roques prints: et tant estoit li chainses viez que as costez estoit perciez: (Erec et Enide, ed. Roques, 407–8)

However, he is perfectly well aware of the later passage, and interprets his text accordingly: Costez apparaît comme une erreur pour cotes (coutes et keutes dans d’autres manuscrits, mais costes dans R [his siglum for BnF, fr. 1450 = H]); ce peut être une mauvaise graphie: l’addition de s devant une consonne se rencontre ailleurs dans le ms. de Guiot et aussi z pour s final (voir INTRODUCTION, p. xxxvi et xlvii). Le v. 1549 [=Foerster 1569] atteste du moins pour cette forme la valeur de «coudes». (Erec et Enide, ed. Roques, p. 214)

This explanation may not be entirely impossible, but it certainly stretches our credulity to the limit. It could have been given some support by three cases where Guiot writes coste for Old French coute (from Latin CULCITUM) meaning ‘mattress’ or ‘couch’ (Erec et Enide 693; Perceval 667 and 7449). One possible influence here is that an earlier spelling of this word was colte, so Guiot’s spellings may be no more than careless readings of l as long s (facilitated by a similarity of pronunciation by the time he was writing, given that both preconsonantal [l] and preconsonantal [s] had then been effaced). At one time the ou in coute from earlier colte had represented a diphthong [ou] or [ow], brought about by the vocalization of the preconsonantal [l] in the late eleventh century; in the course of the twelfth century the diphthong had been reduced to [u], but the spelling remained (Fouché, p. 858). In contrast to this, the ou in coute from earlier cote was a spelling adopted in the later twelfth century to represent the [u] that had developed from a raising of close [o], but this difference of origin had ceased to be relevant long before Guiot was at work in the 1220s (Fouché, pp. 208 and 308). In further contrast, the form coste originally had an open []], but with the effacement of preconsonantal [s] this was raised to close [o]. It is likely that Guiot’s pronunciation made no distinction between coute (from CUBITUM) and coute (from CULCITAM), and perhaps little distinction between them and coste (from COSTAM). This could cause him to choose a spelling more appropriate for one of these when he was intending to represent another. However, for that to be relevant, his spelling costez must represent coste (with final schwa) not costé (with final close [e]). Whatever the quality of the vowel may be in the first syllable, and whatever confusion may result for the forms that have schwa in the second syllable, the word costé in all its possible pronunciations has always been distinguished by the close [e]. In reality, however, the evidence shows that the chances of Guiot intending his

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costez to end with schwa are very slim. All other examples of costez in Guiot’s copies of Chrétien’s romances mean ‘sides’ and are presumed by editors (including Roques) to represent the masculine costé (from COSTATUM). The meaning is clear in all cases, but some examples are not formally distinguishable from coste, other than by the use of the z that is under discussion (Erec et Enide 1477; Cligés 5965; Perceval 6923); other examples are guaranteed by the rhyme (Yvain 832; Perceval 2218 and 8274). There is also the one spelling costes with this meaning (Erec et Enide 4369 ‘par les costés [sic Roques] et par les flans’), and ten examples of the same word in the singular (Erec et Enide 717, 939, 3605 and 3619; Lancelot 525, 2394, 4713 and 5943; Yvain 4523; Perceval 8143). Seven of these occurrences (four singulars and three plurals) are at the end of a line where both rhyme and metre guarantee the value of the e as close [e] not schwa. All but one of the singulars are distinguished by specific indication of masculine gender, and the one case where the gender is not apparent (Lancelot 4713) is at the rhyme. There are also twelve examples of coste (from COSTAM) also meaning ‘side’ (or sometimes, more specifically, ‘rib’). Eight occurrences are four examples of the phrase coste a coste, all confirmed by the rhyme (Lancelot 1505; Perceval 1535, 7993 and 8039). Three others are guaranteed by specific indication of feminine gender, all with specialized meanings (Cligés 5818; Yvain 3455; Perceval 7929). The last is in Godefroi de Leigni’s contribution to Lancelot (6562). In contrast to this, Guiot’s spelling for the Old French development from Latin CUBITUM (masculine in gender, meaning ‘elbow’) is consistently cote, apart from two examples of the alternative development code (Yvain 5195, ‘as codes’ despite rhyming with ‘derotes’; Perceval 4287 ‘antre le code et l’essele’).6 There are six examples of cote at the rhyme (Erec et Enide 980 and 1549; Lancelot 1138 and 3586; Yvain 5356; Perceval 3082). The only other example is Lancelot 1141 (that has created interesting difficulties for translators). In his note to line 408 (quoted above) Roques says that there are examples of z for final s in the Guiot manuscript, and he refers to pages of his introduction. Although these pages do not in fact deal with the matter in hand (p. xxxvi is concerned with Chrétien’s rhymes between -s and -z, and p. xlvii gives examples of -s for -z, not -z for -s), it is indeed the case that Guiot does use z for final s – but not after schwa. His practice can be determined by using the index of forms in reverse alphabetical order provided by Ollier, and whatever the phonetic value of the z might 6

The two spellings, with a choice of d or t, represent two parallel developments from the same Latin root. The difference seems to have been caused by some speakers resisting the syncope of the proparoxyton until after the voicing of intervocalic consonants. The most common development was for the syncope to occur early and to produce the consonant group [-bt-], which was eventually reduced to [t] giving cote. However, in some words (e.g. TEPIDUM) or for some speakers (in the case of CUBITUM) the syncope was delayed; the voicing of intervocalic consonants then produced the forms *TEBIDU and *CUBIDU (the final -M having long since disappeared); the plosive [b] passed through the usual development from stop to fricative, at first bilabial [b] then labio-dental [v], before syncope resulted in the consonant group [-vd-]. When this was reduced to [d] the words were represented in Old French spelling as tiede and code. Diphthongization of the tonic vowel (in tiede but not in code) is dependent upon it being free at the relevant time; the early Romance diphthongization of open vowels (such as the open [e] from TEPIDUM) no doubt occurred before syncope closed the syllable, whereas the close [o] from CUBITUM was presumably blocked before the later diphthongization of the close vowels (a phenomenon restricted to French). Throughout Old French, code existed side by side with the more common cote, and eventually became the dominant form to give Modern French coude (cf. Fouché, pp. 470–1).

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be in other examples there is a strong presumption that the combination ez consistently represents a syllable with close [e]. The weight of all the verbal forms with this ending would be difficult to ignore. It is also true, as Roques says in his note, that Guiot does occasionally have an unexpected s before a consonant, and the fact that preconsonantal [s] had been dropped from pronunciation by the time that Guiot was writing facilitates such a procedure. In the introduction to his edition Roques refers to this s as being ‘de valeur phonétique incertaine’ adding in a footnote: ‘Avant de disparaître, s devant consonne s’est conservé un temps à l’état de souffle ouvrant et allongeant la voyelle précédente, et les graphies de Guiot peuvent indiquer la perception hésitante d’un phénomène de ce genre, normal ou non’ (p. xlvi). If by ‘ouvrant’ Roques means that the breathing (Fouché, p. 861, note b) maintained the existing degree of opening, and that it was not until this remnant of the [s] disappeared that the vowel underwent closure, then so be it. Whether Guiot’s insertion of s into the spelling of words that never had [s] in pronunciation can be related to this is quite another matter. In any event, it will hardly do for costez. What happened was that the loss of [s] went hand in hand with a lengthening and a closing of the vowel, so that in the case of coste the open []] became close [o]. This is an early example of the phenomenon, now general in French, of a preference for close vowels in open syllables and for open vowels in closed syllables (Price, 4.13.1–2). The problem for Guiot’s costez is that the vowel of cote had already closed from [o] to [u], as is attested by the spelling coute that was already common by this time, and we can hardly allow that the s was intended to be a conservative denial of what had already taken place. Only if Guiot’s use of this s were erratic or misinformed would his spelling costez mean ‘elbows’, and Roques’ further claim that ‘le v. 1549 atteste du moins pour cette forme la valeur de «coudes»’ is entirely misguided. What lines 1548–50 (Foerster 1568–70) tell us is the meaning of the text for Chrétien; they provide no information whatsoever with regard to the meaning of the form for Guiot. Given that Guiot consistently distinguished between cote, coste and costé in exactly the ways that we should expect, there seems little reason to allow Roques’ special pleading for line 408. We may safely assume that for Guiot, for the scribe of H, for their readers and for their listeners, Enide’s dress had holes at the sides, and therefore offered the prospect of revealing much more interesting parts than her elbows. The final point that emerges from this review of the variants is that none of the scribes reproduced a form that is ambiguous. If the presumption is, as it surely must be, that the original form was cotes then at some point in each line of transmission a scribe has interpreted his exemplar in a particular way and produced a text to suit. These changes were not necessarily made by the scribes of the extant manuscripts, for once introduced the unambiguous forms with the spellings of the day would be resistant to change. Scribes were prepared to copy their exemplars as they stood when cotes was at the rhyme, but not in line 408. Once there has been a change in the pronunciation of preconsonantal [s], a scribe who encounters cotes cannot be sure whether this is a traditional spelling of the word for elbows or a new spelling of the word for sides. He can clarify the situation in one of two ways, either by adopting the new spelling for ‘elbows’ that reflects the closing of [o] to [u], or by insisting on the old spelling for ‘sides’. Even the scribes who ended by introducing an error into the text were not making mistakes of copying in the ordinary sense. In the Middle Ages it was in the very nature of the process that every scribe should to

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some extent impose his own spelling system upon the text, and just as the scribe of P can write his Picard keutes, so the other scribes can spell the word represented by cotes in their own way. The error is not in failing to reproduce the form, but in making an incorrect identification of the word that lies behind it. The scribes who have the correct meaning with coutes and those who have the error with costes have all followed the same procedure, and it is not hard to imagine that a scribe might even regard it as part of his professional task to make clear what was previously obscure. However, scribes were not the only people in the Middle Ages who needed to form a judgement on the meaning of Chrétien’s text. Readers, translators and other authors were in the same situation and divided into the same two groups, some understanding that the chainse had holes in the elbows and some supposing (or fantasizing) that the holes were in the sides. In the first group is Raoul de Houdenc whose Meraugis de Portlesguez was probably written in the first decade of the thirteenth century. In this text, that has many obvious debts to Chrétien’s romances, Raoul specifies conditions for winning a sparrowhawk that are clearly intended to remind his audience of Enide’s appearance when Erec first saw her: Sus une lance de sapin Sera uns esperviers muëz Qui ja n’iert pris ne remuëz Devant la que cele le preigne Qui par veüe lor apreigne Qu’ele soit plus bele que totes; Se la robe ert perciee as cotes, Por tant que se fust la plus bele, N’i avra il ja damoisele Qui ait l’espervier se li non. (Meraugis 176–85)7

On a lance of fir will be a moulted sparrowhawk that will not be taken or moved until it is claimed by the lady who visibly demonstrates that she is more beautiful than all. Even if her dress were in holes at the elbows, as long as she was the most beautiful, there would never be any maiden to obtain the sparrowhawk other than her.

Since Raoul has put the crucial phrase as cotes in the rhyme position we can be sure that he means ‘elbows’, and we can assume that this reflects his understanding of the relevant passage in Erec et Enide. Taking the opposite view was Hartmann von Aue, whose translation of Chrétien’s Erec et Enide into Middle High German can hardly be much later than 1190, and may be several years earlier. Consequently, the French manuscript that he used was almost certainly copied in Chrétien’s own lifetime, and perhaps within only a year or so of the writing of Erec et Enide itself (in about 1180).8 The relationship of Hartmann’s text to the manuscript tradition of Chrétien’s poem has been investigated by Michel Huby.9 As it happens Huby discusses the passage with which we are concerned:

7 8

9

Raoul von Houdenc, Sämtliche Werke I: Meraugis von Portlesguez, ed. Mathias Friedwagner (Halle, 1897). This is not the place to discuss the complexities of dating Erec et Enide in the absence of reliable evidence. One of several considerations that colour my own view is that the narrative makes better sense if Erec can be wearing a closed helm, supposed to have been introduced c.1180, but it would be foolish to suppose that this is decisive. Michel Huby, L’Adaptation des romans courtois en Allemagne (Paris, 1968).

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Chrétien 407–08 – Hartmann 324–325. Chrétien décrit les vêtements de la jeune fille du vavasseur: «Mes tant estoit li chainses viez Que as cotes estoit perciez.» Le mot «cotes» a subi de grandes transformations: BAE écrivent coutes, P écrit keutes, C costez, H costes et A partoit. Hartmann reprend cette description en l’ordonnant de façon différente: il traduit chainse par robe, sans doute sous l’influence de Chrétien qui dit: «N’avoit robe ne mains ne plus.» (v. 406) En outre il ne fixe pas une partie du corps, mais concordant avec A, il écrit: «der roc was grüener varwe, gezerret begarwe». Le sens de «begarwe» ne laisse aucun doute sur la parenté avec A. (L’Adaptation des romans courtois, pp. 70–1)

In reproducing the two errors from Foerster’s critical apparatus, Huby gives two different readings for A: the one that correctly belongs to V, as well as the form partoit (correctly partot) on which he bases his conclusion. He is also unaware that Leitzmann’s edition of the German text uses reconstructed twelfth-century spelling, whereas the sole surviving manuscript is of the sixteenth century with spellings of that time; for the crucial word the Ambras manuscript actually has the form beygarbe, for which begarwe is indeed the appropriate reconstruction. However, none of this affects the underlying argument, and the conclusion that ‘le sens de «begarwe» ne laisse aucun doute sur la parenté avec A’ is of fundamental importance. For some reason Huby does not strengthen his case by pointing out that depecies (also unique to A) corresponds to Hartmann’s gezerret much better than its rival perciez. Indeed, partot depecies is a perfect match for gezerret begarwe. The problem with this conclusion is that it is not amenable to compromise. If it is true that Hartmann’s exemplar had the text of A, then this defines a location on the stemma that is not compatible with any other possibility. The reason for this is that there is good reason for believing that V and A derive from a common ancestor. This was the conclusion of Foerster in 1890, and it was also the conclusion of Alexandre Micha who provides evidence that is virtually irrefutable.10 Micha’s views are represented by a stemma to which there are various technical objections, but which is likely to be reliable enough for the particular manuscript relations in which we are interested (Micha, p. 94). For his part, Huby accepts Micha’s stemma and reproduces it in his own work (p. 69), though in doing so he accidentally omits the line of affiliation that goes from E to g´ (the ancestor of V and A). Now, since V has the reading coutes (a fact perhaps obscured by Foerster’s misprint of the siglum) and since it shares that reading (and the reading perciez) with E (whose affiliation may have been obscured by the misprint in the stemma), the only available conclusion is that the reading partot depecies was not in the common ancestor of VAE. This is also reinforced by the fact that P and B (the other two manuscripts most closely related to VA) also share the same reading of coutes (though it is not entirely clear whether Huby realizes that keutes in P is merely a dialect spelling, and not a genuine variant). The 10 Alexandre Micha, La Tradition manuscrite des romans de Chrétien de Troyes (Paris, 1939), pp. 80–3.

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further importance of the reading shared by EPBV is that it gives the meaning required (as established by lines 1568–70), even if this is not strictly speaking the correct reading (that was the unattested cotes). The isolation of A could not be clearer, and indeed this is effectively a restatement of the argument already elaborated in connection with Foerster’s choice of text for his edition. Thus, if there really were ‘no doubt’ that Hartmann’s exemplar (copied before 1190) had the erroneous text that is exclusive to A, then we should be obliged to conclude that its ancestor g´ (that passed the correct text to V) had been written earlier than the introduction of the error, and that all the ancestors of g´ were even earlier (very close indeed to the date of composition). But this involves all the ancestors of the b and g branches of Micha’s stemma, with the consequence that all those errors that led Micha to postulate these ancestors must have already occurred by that same early date. This would have important implications for the speed with which an Old French text might be corrupted, were it not for the fact that the whole prospect is almost certainly illusory. What we need to know is whether Hartmann could have had any reasons of his own for tearing Enite’s dress, and indeed not only the dress but the chemise as well. In quoting only lines 324–5, Huby misdirects our attention; the passage as a whole is more revealing: der megede lîp was lobelich. der roc was grüener varwe, gezerret begarwe, abehaere über al. dar under was ir hemde sal und ouch zebrochen eteswâ: sô schein diu lîch dâ durch wîz alsam ein swan. man saget daz nie kint gewan einen lîp sô gar dem wunsche gelîch: und waere si gewesen rîch, sô gebraeste niht ir lîbe ze lobelîchem wîbe. ir lîp schein durch ir salwe wât

The maiden’s body was praiseworthy. Her dress was green of colour completely tattered, threadbare all over. Beneath it her chemise was dirty and also torn in places. Thus her body showed [or shone] through it, white like a swan. They say that no one was ever given a body so closely matching the ideal. And if she had been rich her body would have lacked nothing to make her a praiseworthy woman. Her body showed [or shone] through her dirty clothes

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alsam diu lilje, dâ si stât under swarzen dornen wîz. (Erec 323–38)11

like the lily, as it stands white amongst black thorns.

Now that we have seen the effect of the holes in the dress and the chemise, it is rather less certain that Hartmann would have needed a particular form of the text to imagine such a scene. In all probability the same vision was indeed before the eyes of the scribe of A, but also before the eyes of Guiot and of the scribe of H. For when it comes to essentials, a dress with holes in the sides is quite as good as one that is completely tattered; in fact, it is rather better because it focuses on the area of most interest. This point is not lost upon fashion designers of our own day, and it was not lost upon Marie de France who is responsible for the dress of this type in the lay of Lanval (which may or may not be earlier than Erec et Enide): Ele iert vestue en itel guise: De chainsil blanc e de chemise, Que tuz les costez li pareient, Que de deus parz laciez esteient. (Lanval 559–62)12

She was dressed in this way: In a white chainse and chemise, that revealed all her sides for both garments were open-laced.

This ‘designer dress’ has been made deliberately to produce a calculated effect within the narrative, and Marie de France seems to be fully aware of what is needed. The vocabulary that it shares with Erec et Enide is unlikely to be coincidental, because to be dressed in a chainse rather than a bliaut on such an occasion is something of an oddity. (The reading chainsil retained by Ewert can be defended as a lectio difficilior, but is probably an error; chainsil is a type of material not a garment, and other manuscripts have the expected reading chainse.) Such clothing is better motivated in Erec et Enide (by the father’s poverty), which might suggest that Marie is the borrower, especially since she has forgone the additional effect that might have been created by making the dress richly coloured, of expensive material and with even more expensive decoration (like the bliaut given to Enide by Guinevere). Whether supposing her to have used Chrétien’s text would also imply that she had a manuscript with costez would be an even more delicate point. Probably not, since Marie is quite capable of imagining such a scene for herself, and it is no great leap to realize that sides are more exciting than elbows. One of the assumptions in Marie’s description is that the chemise is just as open at the sides as the chainse, and this is precisely what Hartmann achieves for Enite. It is characteristic of Hartmann to think through the logic of certain situations presented by his source, and to shape his text accordingly. What he has realized here is that there is nothing to be gained from a tattered dress if the chemise beneath can frustrate any glimpses that we might catch. Making sure that there are holes in the chemise is the necessary prelude to his saying that her body can be seen, and the fact that Hartmann puts the state of the dress to this explicit use indicates that he did indeed have a motivation of his own.

11 Hartmann von Aue, Erec, ed. Albert Leitzmann, revised by Ludwig Wolff, 6th edn by Christoph

Cormeau and Kurt Gärtner (Tübingen, 1985). 12 Marie de France, Lais, ed. Alfred Ewert (Oxford, 1944).

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Another writer who describes the dress as tattered, but who does not draw our attention to the consequences, is the author of Gereint, the Welsh adaptation of Chrétien’s Erec et Enide, composed in the first half of the thirteenth century, perhaps quite close to the time when Guiot was copying the French texts in the 1220s. The Welsh text describes the dress of Enid’s mother (which Chrétien does not mention) as ‘old and tattered’, and Enid’s own dress as ‘very old and beginning to be tattered’: Ac yn y lloft y gwelei gohenwreic yn eisted ar obennyd, a hen dillat atueiledic o bali amdanei . . . A morwyn a ged gyr y llaw, a chrys a llenlliein ymdanei gohen yn dechreu atueilaw. And in the room he saw a very old woman sitting on a cushion, wearing old tattered garments of silk brocade . . . And a maiden was to be found close beside her, wearing a chemise and a chainse, very old and beginning to be tattered. (Gereint, ed. Thomson, 197–201)13

This raises several points of translation, and the difficulty of knowing what Enid is wearing is discussed by Thomson in his edition (pp. 74–5). In Modern Welsh, crys (the spelling chrys is the result of lenition) means ‘a (man’s) shirt’, but in Middle Welsh it could also be a woman’s garment (usually translated as ‘shift’), so although we may not know exactly what the garment was, the uncertainty is only a matter of detail. This is not so for llenlliein, where the most common translation ‘mantle’ is just an attempt to make the best of it. It is the word llen by itself that means ‘mantle’ whilst the word lliein means ‘linen’. Thus llenlliein might mean ‘linen mantle’ (if there were such things), but if that was the author’s intention a better formulation would be llen o lliein (‘mantle of linen’), to parallel the attested forms such as llen o bali (‘mantle of silk brocade’). The solution to the problem is almost certainly that the Welsh author was attempting to reflect the Old French words chemise and chainse that he found in his manuscript of Chrétien’s poem. That crys could translate chemise is supported by the fact that the Latin versions of the Welsh Laws render it by camisia. In his note Thomson mentions Latin Laws (Redaction A), 144, 11–13 (corresponding to Llyfr Blegywryd, 62, 9–12).14 There are further examples of the same provision in other redactions at Latin Laws: (B) 221, 24; (D) 342, 23; (E) 470, 23. More decisive, however, since it does not occur in a list of other garments that might be confused, is Latin Laws: (A) 144, 9; (B) 224, 11; (E) 473, 2 (Llyfr Blegywryd, 61, 28). The consistency of this equation between crys and camisia is also supported by examples referring to the man’s garment at Latin Laws: (A) 117, 17; (B) 205, 33; (D) 328, 21; (E) 445, 21 (Llyfr Blegywryd, 22, 7). The fact that llenlliein occurs only in Gereint, and only in the phrase crys a llenlliein, is important. It appears first in the passage under discussion and then again (Thomson 362) when Gereint insists that Enid should continue to wear the same garments until she reaches Arthur’s court, corresponding to Erec’s equivalent insistence that Enide should remain ‘An blanc chainse et an sa chemise’ (Foerster 1382). The fact that the word does not occur elsewhere suggests that it was not in common use for a known

13 Ystorya Gereint uab Erbin, ed. Robert L. Thomson (Dublin, 1997). 14 Hywel David Emmanuel, The Latin Texts of the Welsh Laws (Cardiff, 1967); Llyfr Blegywryd, ed.

Stephen J. Williams and J. Enoch Powell (Cardiff, 1942).

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garment, so the clue to its meaning is likely to be in the fact that both attested occurrences refer to one particular garment worn by Enid. This directs us towards the equivalent two contexts in the French version of the same story, and to the conclusion that if crys can be chemise, then it is chainse that will explain llenlliein. A Welsh author, writing some thirty years or more later than Chrétien, could well have been rather hazy on the subject of what was meant by chainse. By that time both language and fashion had moved on, and although he knew (or had deduced from its colour) that the garment was made of linen, even though Chrétien does not explicitly say so, he may have been rather uncertain about its exact nature. His only other reference to it (503) is simply as llieinwisc (‘linen garment’), which could refer to either chainse or chemise. When he needs a contrast between the two, creating a word for the purpose allows the author to avoid the difficulty of what the garment really was by leaving his readers as uncertain as himself. The other point of translation is in the use of ‘tattered’ to describe the dresses of mother and daughter. The Welsh word is not identical in both cases, but the two forms are from the same root (meaning ‘to fall to pieces’). The usual translation for Enid’s dress is ‘growing threadbare’, but that is misleading for our present purposes. The phrase hen dillat atueiledic (‘old tattered garments’) referring to the mother’s clothes had already been used (188) for those of the white-haired old man who turns out to be Enid’s father, and is later used (460–1) for those of the whole family. In addition, a parallel phrase hen llys atueiledic had already been used (182–3) to describe the ‘old dilapidated court’ in which the family was living. It is not clear exactly how we should understand atueiledic and its cognate atueilaw when applied to clothes, but ‘tattered’ seems more suitable than ‘threadbare’ (provided that we understand this to mean that the clothes are worn out through age, not ripped deliberately). For the same passage, the Norse Erex saga, probably written in the second quarter of the thirteenth century, a little later than Gereint, says ‘old and torn’ (slitnum). By coincidence, this corresponds to Hartmann’s gezerret (though not his begarwe), whilst the rendering of chainse by lijnkyrtli (‘linen dress’) is a similar expedient to the Welsh llenlliein. As usual the saga writer wastes little time on the details: Maerinn var j einum lijnkyrtli fornum og slit[n]um, enn þo eigi ad sijdur var allur hennar lijkami suo frijdur, ad Erex þottist aungua slijka sied hafa. The girl was in an old and torn linen dress, but nevertheless all her body was so lovely that Erex thought he had not seen any such girl. (Erex saga, ed. Blaisdell, pp. 10–11)15

The one author who takes a clear stand against such impropriety is Tennyson. Working from Lady Charlotte Guest’s English translation of Gereint, he shows Enid’s poverty by robing her in ‘faded silk’ (‘The Marriage of Geraint’, 366).16 Presumably, even when Hartmann and the Norwegian translator describe the dress as torn they mean torn by accident as a result of the material being so old, and in this respect they ally themselves with the author of Gereint. However, it should 15 Erex saga Artuskappa, ed. Foster W. Blaisdell (Copenhagen, 1965). 16 The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London, 1969), pp. 1525–50.

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not be forgotten that there was a scholarly tradition in which some dresses were torn more deliberately. A twelfth-century example cited by Claude Luttrell is to be found in Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus: Sed tamen in partes uestem diffibulat istam In variis scissura locis. (Anticlaudianus, I. 313–14)17

Yet this robe is pulled apart by being torn in various places.

Luttrell (p. 20) translates ‘but rents here and there split this dress in parts’ (presumably taking scissura as the subject of diffibulat, and treating it as a collective). In his translation of Anticlaudianus, Sheridan takes a less flexible view of diffibulat, suggesting ‘yet she [sc. Prudentia] unclasps this robe to rend it apart in various places’ (p. 58), but this is unnecessarily narrow. It is true that in Classical usage diffibulare is not attested with any meaning other than ‘unclasp’ or ‘unbuckle’, but this could well be a consequence of the fact that there are very few surviving examples. Its root fibulare had a meaning that went beyond its derivation from fibula (‘peg’ or ‘bolt’, hence ‘clasp’) to include any form of joining together. There is no difficulty in accepting that in the Middle Ages its derivative diffibulare can mean ‘to pull apart’ (there being other examples in the works of Alan of Lille). In quoting this passage Luttrell’s purpose was to demonstrate that Chrétien had borrowed his description directly from Anticlaudianus, which would mean that Erec et Enide could be no earlier than 1185. For the French text Luttrell used the edition by Mario Roques (with the reading costez). He does not translate it, but says (p. 19) that the chainse ‘is worn out and has holes’ and later refers to the clothing’s ‘tattered state’ (p. 20). Given these general comments and the comparison with Anticlaudianus it looks as though he is taking costez in its most obvious sense of ‘sides’ (ignoring Roques’ note). However, since this meaning is the result of a scribal error there is nothing here that can help us with the dating of the text. Nevertheless, the comparison with Anticlaudianus is not without its relevance, and even more to the point is an earlier work by Alan of Lille in which he had already used the same motif. In De Planctu naturae we read: In qua parte tunica, suarum partium passa dissidium, suarum iniuriam contumelias demonstrabat. In this section the tunic had suffered a tearing of its parts and showed the effects of injuries and insults. (De Planctu naturae, ed. Häring, II, 234–5)18

On both occasions Alan will have had in mind the well-known passage in Boethius: Eandem tamen uestem uiolentorum quorumdam sciderant manus et particulas quas quisque potuit abstulerat.

17 Claude Luttrell, The Creation of the First Arthurian Romance: A Quest (London, 1974); Alain de Lille,

Anticlaudianus, ed. R. Bossuat (Paris, 1955); Alan of Lille, Anticlaudianus or The Good and Perfect Man, trans. with commentary by James J. Sheridan (Toronto, 1973). 18 Alan of Lille, De Planctu naturae, ed. Nikolaus M. Häring, Studi medievali, serie terza, 19.2 (1978), 797–879.

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Her dress had been torn by the hands of violent men who had each carried off such pieces as he could get. (Consolation of Philosophy, I, pr. 1, 22–4)19

The purpose of the torn dress for Alan of Lille and for Boethius was to show the damage that had been done by thoughtless or even malicious actions. Since the figures who wear these dresses are abstractions such as Prudence, Nature and Philosophy the damage also is of an abstract and moral sort; there is no thought given to the visual consequences. The passage in Boethius was well known in the twelfth century, and may even have been familiar to those who were not acquainted with its source because it found its way into the public iconography of the cathedrals. There are examples at Laon and Sens.20 Whether Hartmann von Aue and the other translators knew this topos we can only guess, but it seems quite likely that Chrétien did. In Perceval the hero meets a young woman in a dress more torn than any we have yet seen: 3715

3720

3725

3730

3735

3740

3745

Et une pucele ot desus, Ainc tant chetive ne vit nus. Neporoec bele et gente fust Assez, se bien li esteüst, Mais si malement li estoit Qu’en la roube qu’ele vestoit, N’avoit plaine palme de sain, Ains li saloient fors de[l] sain Les mameles par les routures. A neus et a grosses costures De lius en lius ert atachie; Et sa chars paroit dehachie Ausi com s’il fust fait de jarse, Que ele avoit crevee et arse De caut, de halle et de gelee. Desliie et desaffublee Estoit, si li paroit la face, Ou il ot mainte laide trache, Que ses lermes sanz prendre fin I avoient fait maint chemin; Et jusqu’el sain li avaloient Et par desoz sa roube aloient Jusques sor les jenols colant. Assez pooit avoir dolant Le cuer qui tant mesaise avoit. Tantost com Perchevax le voit, Si vient vers li grant aleüre; Et ele estraint sa vesteüre Entor li por sa char covrir, Mais lors convint pertruis ovrir; Que quant ele en .i. liu se coevre, .I. pertruis clot et .c. en oevre. (Perceval, ed. Busby, 3715–46)21

And there was a maiden on [the palfrey], more wretched than anyone ever saw. Yet she would have been very beautiful and attractive if all had been well with her; but she was in such a poor state that of the clothes that she wore there was not a hand’s breadth intact. Rather, from the bodice her breasts protruded through the holes. It was held together in places with knots and large stitches; And her flesh looked scarrified as if it had been done with a lancet, cracked and burnt as it was by heat, sunburn and frost. Her hair was loose and uncovered, so that her face could be seen, upon which there were many ugly traces where her endless tears had made many a track; and they were running down her front and flowing on over her clothes all the way to her knees. Anyone in such a plight would have the heaviest of hearts. As soon as Perceval sees her, he comes towards her at a swift pace; And she pulls her clothing tightly around herself to cover her flesh, but she could not help opening holes; because when she covers herself in one place, she closes one hole and opens a hundred more.

19 Boethius, The Theological Tractates; The Consolation of Philosophy, ed. and trans. H.F. Stewart and

E.K. Rand, Loeb Classical Library (London and Cambridge, MA,1918). 20 Emile Mâle, L’Art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France, 8th edn (Paris, 1948), pp. 89–92. 21 Chrétien de Troyes, Le Roman de Perceval ou Le Conte du Graal, ed. Keith Busby (Tübingen, 1993).

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By the simple device of translating selectively and out of order we can soon produce a piece of pure Hollywood: And she wraps her dress around herself to cover her flesh, but this only makes another opening. When she covers herself in one place she closes one gap only to make a hundred more, for the dress she was wearing did not have a hand’s breadth intact, and her breasts showed through the holes in it. (3741–6; 3720–3)

It is hard to believe that Chrétien was wholly unaware of this erotic possibility, but the complete passage as Chrétien wrote it paints a less alluring picture. Lines 3726–9 in particular create a very different impression. There is little doubt that Chrétien’s main purpose here was to make a moral point similar to that of Boethius. The sorry state of this maiden is intended to reflect upon Perceval, for he is the person responsible (albeit indirectly) for bringing her to such a pass. It turns out that this is the maiden whom he had treated so inconsiderately when he first met her in the tent, and these are the consequences of his misguided behaviour. The fact that the point is a moral one, and not merely a realistic piece of narrative, is brought home to the attentive reader by the fact that counting the time allotted to Perceval’s adventures the maiden has passed through all this devastating weather to be reduced to her present condition in less than a fortnight. Thus, in Perceval the dress has become tattered through the rigours of the life that the maiden has been forced to lead rather than by simple wear. It is true that the description is not erotically motivated but that does not mean that such a possibility should be ignored. In any event the effect was not lost upon Wolfram von Eschenbach when he came to rework Chrétien’s text in the first decade of the thirteenth century. His much longer account contains several invitations to use the imagination, and at least one example that contains more than just a hint: al weinde diu frouwe reit, daz si begôz ir brüstelîn. als sie gedraet solden sîn, diu stuonden blanc hôch sinewel: jane wart nie draehsel sô snel der si gedraet hete baz. swie minneclîch diu frouwe saz, si muose in doch erbarmen. mit henden und mit armen begunde si sich deckens vor Parzivâl dem recken. (Parzival 258, 24–259, 4)22

The lady rode weeping, so that she sprinkled her breasts. As though they had been turned on a lathe, they stood high, white and round: no turner was ever so adroit that he could have made them shapelier. The woman was so lovely as she sat there, that he could not help feeling pity for her. With her hands and arms he tried to cover herself when faced with doughty Parzival.

Wolfram’s introduction of numerous erotic suggestions into an episode that is still trying to make the same moral point as his original produces a slightly confused result, but it shows very well how these various elements could coexist in the mind of at least one reader of Chrétien’s text. It also seems that the erotic possibility did not escape the Welsh author of Peredur, probably writing no more than thirty years later than Wolfram. He too was adapting Chrétien’s Perceval, but he does not use the motif of the see-through dress 22 Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, ed. Karl Lachmann, 6th edn (Berlin and Leipzig, 1926).

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in his description of the maiden that Peredur had met in the tent. He transfers it to the description of the maiden who corresponds to Chrétien’s Blanchefleur. The plight of the tent maiden is indicated, as also in the French original, by the state of her horse, described very briefly in the Welsh (WM, 138, 9) as march achul gochwys (‘a thin, sweating horse’), but whereas Chrétien enters into more details and goes on to describe the maiden herself, the Welsh author simply says that she told Peredur of her plight. The earlier description of the other maiden, however, presents in miniature a picture very similar to that found in Wolfram’s Parzival: Diheu oed ganthaw na welsei dremynt kymryt eiroet a hi ar arall. Henwisc o bali twll ymdanei, a uuassei da. Yn y gwelit y chnawt trwyddaw, gwynach oed no blawt y crissant gwynhaf. He was certain that he had never seen such beauty in anyone else. She was wearing an old garment of torn silk brocade that had once been good. Where her flesh might be seen through it, it was whiter than flowers of the whitest crystal. (Peredur, WM 133, 28)23

The rather curious choice of the comparison with ‘flowers of whitest crystal’ was probably influenced by the knowledge that the name of this maiden in the French original was Blanchefleur. The specific mention of the flesh that can be seen through the holes in the dress corresponds to the later passage in the author’s French source, but the explanation for the holes (subsumed in the adjective ‘old’) is more in keeping with the passage in Gereint or Erec et Enide. From the literary point of view, Peredur has the advantage over Parzival that it separates the scholarly dress, torn to convey the most moral of lessons, from the poetic dress made transparent for our delight. The consequence of all this for the textual criticism of Erec et Enide, and for relating the foreign versions to the stemma of French manuscripts, is to make plain that the notion of a see-through dress is sufficiently familiar, and in one of its manifestations sufficiently attractive, for it to have occurred to scribes and authors independently. We can draw no textual conclusions from the similarities. Hartmann certainly did not need the reading of A in order to produce his text; the reading of CH would have been stimulus enough, but even Chrétien’s original cotes could have been his starting-point. Just as Wolfram conflated the two motifs by introducing the erotic into the midst of the moral lesson, so perhaps Hartmann, the writer of Erex saga, and the scribe of A could have been influenced by some learned reminiscence when choosing words like gezerret and depecies. It is also clear that a correct interpretation of Chrétien’s text in this passage is impossible without the textual criticism that can reject the readings costes/costez and partot depecies, but the more interesting point is what follows from the rejection of coutes. After all, coutes is in one sense correct, in that it is the word required by the later narrative. Yet it is not the original reading nor in the end does it have the right meaning. The original reading cotes has a value that the alternative spelling coutes does not possess. It has the value of being a temptation. It is all very well to say that the meaning of line 408 is guaranteed by lines 1568–70, but that is not the case on a first 23 The White Book Mabinogion, ed. J. Gwenogvryn Evans (Pwllheli, 1907), cols. 117–78.

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reading of the romance, when we should have to wait about an hour before being enlightened. It is not even necessarily the case on subsequent readings, because even setting aside the possibility that we might fail to understand the significance of the later passage, a delightful prospect once glimpsed cannot be so easily eradicated from the imagination – even when it is contradicted by the facts. Thus a reader or listener who has once been misled by cotes, or simply been aware of its potential ambiguity, does not return to the text in quite the same frame of mind as the reader or listener who has never seen anything more than elbows. The extent to which cotes is genuinely ambiguous for readers and listeners at the supposed time of composition (about 1180) turns upon the exact dating of the various changes of pronunciation that had certainly created a potential for ambiguity by the time that Guiot was copying the earliest surviving manuscript in the 1220s. In cote the close [o] had probably become [u] before the middle of the twelfth century (Fouché, pp. 208 and 308), many years before the loss of preconsonantal [s] in coste resulted in the closing of open []] to close [o]. So there is no possibility of the two words being homophones in 1180, not to mention that the more likely costé preserved the further distinction of its final close [e]. However, even for listeners, the potential for ambiguity does not in fact depend upon the identity of the spoken forms. In natural speech the speaker knows what word is intended and adopts the pronunciation required, but in reading aloud from a written text the situation is somewhat different. Once the preconsonantal [s] is eliminated from pronunciation a reader does not know whether the spelling cotes is the traditional spelling for ‘elbows’ or a new phonetic spelling for ‘sides’ (representing either costes or costés). It was common practice in the twelfth century for people reading privately to pronounce the words aloud, so anyone reading the text, whether privately or to an audience, would be faced with choosing a pronunciation. Thus, if the written form were ambiguous, not all readers would make the same decision, nor would the same reader necessarily make the same decision on different occasions. Indeed, whether in private or in a public performance, a reader might hesitate, try one pronunciation, think better of it, make a correction, or even openly admit to not knowing which word was intended. There is less scope for a listener to misunderstand what has been heard, because even a difference of dialect or individual pronunciation would not have produced forms that were homophones. On the other hand, we should not entirely discount the effects of ambient noise, lack of attention, or even hypercorrection. For, if the context were enough to suggest an alternative interpretation, a listener would be quite at liberty to suppose that the reader had made a mistake. This being so, the effective ambiguity of the form cotes depends upon the presumption that preconsonantal [s] had been lost before 1180. Some authorities attribute this development to the thirteenth century, and it may not have been completed until then, but there is evidence that it was well advanced by 1200 (Fouché, p. 861). It would be unwise to be categorical about how general the phenomenon was by 1180, but given that changes of this sort often take a long time to become universal it seems probable that there was enough uncertainty to suit our purposes. If it is granted that the form cotes could have given rise to ambiguity at the time

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of writing, and in the last resort a double entendre does not have to be exact to have its effect, the question is whether the consequences for later scribes and translators were purely accidental or whether this was a device consciously contrived by Chrétien himself. By its nature this is not a question that can be resolved, but there are one or two curiosities that make it seem a rather strange sort of accident. What, for example, is the purpose of the couplet 409–10 that immediately follows the line with cotes? Mes tant estoit li chainses viez Que as cotes estoit perciez. Povre estoit la robe defors, Mes dessoz estoit biaus li cors.

But the chainse was so old that it was in holes at the [. . .] The clothes were poor on the outside, but the body beneath was beautiful.

The description of Enide that follows these lines does not refer at all to the body that is underneath the clothes (robe), but confines itself entirely to her face. This is not shyness on Chrétien’s part because it is quite conventional for twelfth-century descriptions to mention the breasts in portraits of this kind, as well as in scenes like that in Perceval. We have already seen how Wolfram has confused his description of the maiden’s distress by adding the erotic motif more suitable for the portrait, but the motif itself is traditional. Alan of Lille had used it in De Planctu naturae (II, 27), and so had Chrétien himself in Philomena (161–2).24 There is nothing to prevent Chrétien from describing the ‘body beneath’ but he declines to do so. In consequence, the couplet 409–10 seems to attach itself to the lines that precede it rather than those that follow, and the use of ‘cors’ and ‘dessoz’ seems to invite the interpretation costes rather than coutes. Furthermore, accidental or not, the temptation soon makes a second appearance. When the young couple are on their way to Arthur’s court Chrétien uses Erec’s admiration of Enide to describe the body that he had previously avoided. This is in effect the missing second half of the traditional portrait begun in the earlier passage, and this time there is no doubt about costez: Tot remire jusqu’a la hanche, Le manton et la gorge blanche, Flans et costez et braz et mains. (Erec et Enide, ed. Foerster, 1495–7)

He looks at everything down to her hips, the chin and the white neck, flanks and sides and arms and hands.

Are we supposed to assume that Erec can actually see the ‘flans et costez’ that he admires? Or does he have to rely upon his imagination? Even the lines that finally disappoint us by establishing that her chainse had its holes at the elbows are immediately followed by Enide being led away to a private room where she takes off her chainse before putting on the magnificent robes that Guinevere has chosen for her. In this chanbre a recelee (‘secluded/hidden room’), accompanied only by two maids, she undresses modestly concealed from prying eyes – except ours, of course, since Chrétien effectively allows us to enter the room with her. He then specifically draws our attention to the fact that she takes off the chainse before putting on the new bliaut. It is true that she does not take off the chemise, though since Chrétien does not mention it at all, he leaves it to us to 24 Chrétien de Troyes, Philomena, ed. C. de Boer (Paris, 1909).

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remember that she was in fact wearing one. In making arrangements for the discarded chainse to be given for charity, Enide shows her proper sense of religious and social duty, and in putting on the magnificent bliaut given to her by Guinevere she is raised symbolically to the status that she deserves. However, Chrétien need not have described what happened in the chanbre a recelee, and he need not have drawn attention to what she had to take off. We could just as easily have stayed with Guinevere, and seen nothing of Enide until she returned newly clothed; it is only what she puts on that needs to be described. Given that Chrétien is not above teasing his audience in a whole variety of ways, he may be teasing us here at least twice. Firstly, with the ambiguous cotes of line 408, he tantalizes us with the mere possibility of a see-through dress, but although he gives us the opportunity to tease ourselves with this prospect he fails to follow through with what we were expecting. Then later (at line 1569), when we have forgotten all about it, he teases us again with a second cotes that is ambiguous for only a split second, before being clarified by the following line. This may be enough to revive the earlier memory, but its immediate denial reveals that it was all in our imagination, and that we had fallen into a trap. This must remain a speculation, of course, but an intriguing one. Or is it too masculine a point of view? The psychology of Chrétien, Hartmann and the scribes might be illuminated by these considerations, but how would they apply to a mixed or predominantly female audience? Difficulties of this sort have never prevented men or women from writing overtly erotic literature, and they did not prevent Marie de France from achieving a calculated effect in Lanval, which may even have been the source of Chrétien’s temptation. It could certainly have been a particular reminiscence for Chrétien’s audience, either from the beginning if Lanval was early enough, or in due course once Lanval became known. However, there is perhaps a different piquancy for a female audience when the eroticism is not in the fabric of the text itself, but merely glimpsed through the text to exist only in the imagination.

14 A Note on the Percy Folio Grene Knight DOUGLAS GRAY

This note attempts to defend the Grene Knight from the charge that it is no more than a wretched version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. For a long time the Grene Knight in the Percy Folio manuscript did not excite much critical interest. The general view was that it is (a) of poor literary quality, and (and partly because) (b) it was simply derived from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – of which ‘it appears to be a condensed version . . . with none of the literary distinction that marks its model’, ‘evidently a debased and contaminated version of Gawain itself’, etc.1 Recently, it has received more sympathetic treatment in the good editions of Diane Speed and Thomas Hahn, and in a perceptive short study by Gillian Rogers.2 It presents a number of difficulties and problems. This note will attempt to address some of these, even though in many cases it has to be admitted that a definite answer is not possible. It would be more than rash to attempt to claim that it can compete with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in terms of literary distinction, but there are a number of points that might be made in its defence. It is unfortunate, if not exactly unfair, that it is usually judged against its distinguished ‘model’. It deserves at least to be considered in its own right. And considered as a poem meant to be listened to, in performance, rather than read and scrutinized on the page. One intractable problem is that it exists in a late and corrupt text, and that we know next to nothing about its transmission. It is often said or assumed that it is directly derived from the alliterative poem. This is certainly arguable, but a different emphasis and alternative theories are also possible. A number of scholars have allowed the possibility of intermediary versions and of contamination. Thus Diane Speed says that it is ‘clear that that romance [Gawain], or a closely related version of it, must be the ultimate source of the Folio poem. There are nevertheless consider1

2

A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050–1500, fasc. 1, ed. J. Burke Severs (New Haven, 1967), p. 37; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. J.R.R. Tolkien and E.V. Gordon, 2nd edn rev. Norman Davis (Oxford, 1967), p. xix. Thomas Hahn, ed., Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales TEAMS (Kalamazoo, MI, 1995), pp. 309–35, from which my quotations are taken; Diane Speed, ed., Medieval English Romances, 2 vols. (Sydney, 1987); Gillian Rogers, ‘The Grene Knight’, in D. Brewer and J. Gibson, ed., A Companion to the Gawain-Poet (Cambridge, UK, 1997), pp. 365–71. The poem also appears in J.W. Hales and F.J. Furnivall, ed., Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript, 3 vols. (London, 1867–8), and F. Madden, ed., Syr Gawayne (London, 1839).

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able differences between the two works, and there could well have been one or more intermediary versions’, and speculates interestingly that ‘the earlier work was probably recast at some stage from the memory of a performance heard rather than from the sight of a written text’.3 The similarities and differences (clearly set out by Mabel Day4 and others) suggest on the one hand that the alliterative poem ‘or a closely related version of it’ is indeed the ‘ultimate source of the Folio poem’, but on the other that a different version or versions of the story may have been present in the course of transmission. That the names of two characters – Sir Bredbeddle5 and Agostes – are so strikingly different is curious. Such ‘changes’ could have been made by an original reviser working exclusively from a text of Gawain but it seems more likely that another text or at least late popular ‘tradition’ is the reason. Similar questions are raised by larger and more significant differences in the structure of the story: the motifs of the Green Knight’s challenge (the challenge rather than the temptation is emphasized), a sharing of winnings rather than an exchange of winnings, and the ending with both Gawain and his challenger returning to Arthur’s court. Moreover, it is very striking that in the Percy Folio version we are told about the scheme of the challenge at the beginning of the story – so that there is none of the uncertainty and mystery it has in Gawain until its revelation at the end, and the entry of the challenger to the Arthurian court is not so dramatically sudden and unannounced. It is possible to argue that this change may be part of a process of abbreviation or revision, but is it likely that someone retelling the story of Gawain for a simpler audience would choose to revise its narrative pattern in such a radical way? Might it not be more likely that another version of the story is responsible for it as in the case of Chestre’s Sir Launfal, which uses both the earlier ME version of the French and the lai of Graelent? Given the possibility that an ‘intermediary’ version, or versions, existed,6 might it not also be possible that the line of descent from Gawain to the Percy Folio Grene Knight was not a straightforwardly linear one (Gawain—X—(Y)—Grene Knight), but rather a more complex ‘stemma’ perhaps involving ‘contamination’? This of course must remain speculative. I yield to a temptation to speculate further, that, perhaps, one or more of the so-called intermediaries (or their ancestors) may actually go back to before Gawain, and may even have been a ‘source’ for it. In that case some of the apparent changes and ‘abbreviations’ of the Grene Knight might actu3 4

5 6

Speed, 1, p. 234. Mabel Day, in the Introduction to Sir I. Gollancz, ed., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, EETS 210 (London, 1940), pp. xxxviii–xxxix; G.L. Kittredge, A Study of Gawain and the Green Knight (Cambridge, MA, 1916), pp. 282–9. Sir Bredbeddle also appears in King Arthur and King Cornwall. Other evidence for ‘intermediaries’ otherwise consists only of hints. Possibly one is ‘the Grene Knyght’ owned by John Paston II; this might be a version of the Percy Folio romance (see Hahn, pp. 13–14), but it might be Gawain or a version of it: see Ad Putter, An Introduction to the Gawain-Poet (London, 1996), p. 36). Stories of Gawain certainly formed a continuing part of popular romance (as the Percy Folio itself demonstrates). Before then we have at the end of the fifteenth century Humfrey Newton in Cheshire, who seems to have been still in touch with the old alliterative tradition (R.H. Robbins, ‘A Gawain Epigone’, MLN 9 (1943): 361–6). Later, there is Captain Cox’s mysterious ‘Syr Gawyn’ (Hahn pp. 14–15). Interestingly, a number of poems in the Percy Folio are associated with a branch of the Stanley family, another branch of which has been plausibly linked to Gawain: see Edward Wilson, ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Stanley family of Stanley, Shoreton, and Hooton’, RES 30 (1979): 308–16 (315n.).

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versions).7

ally be survivals of an earlier version (or Might this also suggest something to us about the Gawain-poet’s ‘sources’ and his use of them? In the discussion of the question of at what point the ‘challenge’ and the ‘temptation’ were brought together, opinion has shifted from Kittredge’s single hypothetical French romance to the view that the two stories were boldly and imaginatively combined by the author of Gawain himself. However, if we acknowledge that we do not possess all the texts available to the Gawain-poet, it is not unreasonable to ask if the two stories were always so separate.8 Could it be that the Gawain-poet knew among a number of French (and perhaps English) romances an ‘ancestor’ of the Grene Knight which was a more straightforward narrative of Gawain’s challenge and temptation story – perhaps a Breton lay? This might explain some of the unusual aspects of Gawain. The Grene Knight shows that the story can be told, without digression and without much interest in characterization or moral dilemmas, in about 600 lines as a single ‘adventure’ concerned with the supernatural and with love. Could it be that the Gawain-poet set about expanding such a lay (he still calls it a lay), and expanding it not by putting in new adventures as Chestre did, but by elaborating circumstances, emotions, settings and conversations? Possibly it was he who, sensing (like modern readers of the Grene Knight) a loss of potential suspense and mystery in a clear step by step explanatory narrative, changed the ‘order’ and (much more dramatically) caused the Green Knight to appear as from nowhere to deliver his challenge – but still felt obliged to provide an ‘explanation’ at the end (where it sounds rather like something out of a detective story: ‘it was the butler that did it’). But it must remain at best a very remote possibility – or simply a totally unconvincing speculation. I return to the safer, but no less difficult task of endeavouring to show that the Percy Folio romance makes its own kind of sense. The following notes attempt to do this without too much repetition of the obvious point about its literary inferiority to the alliterative romance, but insisting that it deserves to be treated as a poem in its own right. Like other popular romances its style (when read on the page) often seems general and somewhat bland – but not always. It attempts to provide its own ‘circumstances’, sometimes in allusion, as in that to the founding of the order of the Bath, and, most obviously, in its topographical references, though these present some puzzles (and perhaps muddles). The story is set in a kind of ‘border country’ in Cumbria, and Lancashire and Cheshire to the south. As in other popular Gawain romances, Arthur holds court at Carlisle. The lines that follow (86–7) seem problematic, if they are to be read as referring to Arthur. No one has identified ‘a castle of Flatting’ – possibly the name has been corrupted – but as it stands the phrase might well refer to an area rather than to a specific castle. It has also been pointed out that the Forest of Delamere is not near Carlisle, but is in Cheshire. These lines

7

8

Long ago J.R. Hulbert, ‘Sir Gawayn and the Grene Kny
t’, Modern Philology 13 (1915–16): 433–62, 689–730, expressed the view that most of the differences indicated that the Grene Knight was more primitive and that it went back to some earlier form of Gawain (pp. 461–2). For a possible hint in the early tradition (Cuchulainn and Blathnát), see the discussion in Hulbert, pp. 437–8, cf. the story of Cuchulainn’s lovesickness for Fand. A story of a fairy-mistress sending an emissary to lure a lover could easily be attached to a figure like Gawain.For what follows, note the discussion in Elizabeth Archibald, ‘The Breton Lay in Middle English: Genre, Transmission, and the Franklin’s Tale’, in Medieval Insular Romance: Translation and Innovation, ed. Judith Weiss, Jennifer Fellows, and Morgan Dickson (Cambridge, UK, 2000), pp. 55–70.

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come after a description of the Green Knight riding out, and a possible solution might be to take ‘his dwelling’ to refer to him (the ‘he’ of the following line) rather than to ‘our king’ in the preceding line: this strongly adversative reading looks awkward on the page, but could be clear in performance – and would make sense of his journey, from Delamere to Carlisle.9 Sir Bredbeddle’s dwelling would then be on the edge of the Wirral, that ‘wilderness’ noted for its outlaws, which is mentioned in Gawain, and is also in the country of the Stanleys, with which family the alliterative poem has been associated. At the end of the romance, when the Green Knight requests Gawain to take him back to Arthur’s court there is another topographical reference (494): they fare to ‘the castle of Hutton’. Furnivall’s suggestion that this is Hutton in Somerset is based on the view that the ‘west countrye’ of this poem is that perceived in the south of England. But this is not the only sense of the phrase, and a more northerly Hutton would fit better.10 It is a common name, and there are a number of contenders, including Hatton in Cheshire; Hooton, a Stanley house, also in Cheshire; Hutton south of Preston, further north in Lancashire; or Hutton-inthe-forest, northwest of Penrith in Cumbria (which has a hall built around a fourteenth-century pele tower, and nearby at Eamont a henge called Arthur’s Round Table), well on the way to Carlisle, and at the edge of Inglewood forest – where, as Madden remarked, ‘the whole of the territory hereabout was romance-ground’.11 The romance’s chronological hints (they stayed there overnight, and left early on the next day) are not precise enough to help. It does, however, sound as if the author had a specific place in mind. Like other popular romances the diction is highly formulaic, with ‘tags’ that are sometimes reminiscent of Sir Thopas. Most of these, however, would be less offensive to the ear than they are to the eye. It can be argued too that sometimes the formulaic diction is rather well used – as in the description of Sir Gawain’s journey (if we can put its celebrated equivalent in Gawain out of our minds) in lines 271–88, where the knight is a splendid figure (‘when he rode over the mold,/ His geere glistered as gold’), and where the repetition of ‘furley(s)’ gives a simple emphasis. As so often in this poem there are some unusual and puzzling features here too: not all of the diction is ‘formulaic’ and ‘popular’. Words like ‘aliens’ (allyaunce, 7) or ‘transpose’ (441) do not sound typical of popular romance. Even ‘noveltyes’ (417) sounds a little clerkly, and ‘conceale’ (478), the dictionaries suggest, is not a usual word in this kind of writing. This might possibly suggest contact with a more literary tradition at some point in the transmission. These words are not derived from Gawain: and indeed the heavy presence of Norse vocabulary so prominent in that romance no longer appears (with the exception of ‘kayred’ (117), though older words like pa. t. ‘frend’ (250) are found). Descriptions are usually rather general, but sometimes a detail is singled out for dramatic effect, as in ll. 319–21, where we hear a nice understatement – ‘as shee sate att her supper, evermore the Ladye clere/ Sir Gawaine shee looked upon’, or at 446 9 Cf. the rather loose syntax in ll. 213–15, where ‘him’ = Gawain. 10 See Wilson, pp. 314–15, Hahn, p. 334. The court’s threat to ‘bren all the west’ (1. 246), although they

have not been told that Bredbeddle’s dwelling is there, suggests that they assume he comes from an area associated with magic and fairyland (in Launfal the hero rides ‘towards the west’ which is the home of the fairy Tryamour). 11 Madden, p. 354, quoted by Hahn, p. 354.

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the blowing of the horn as Gawain approaches the Green Chapel. This too is unexplained, and perhaps suggests a mysterious foreshadowing of the ‘whetting’ which he is soon to hear and a hint of a coming disaster. The detail is not treated in the sophisticated way it is in Malory’s story of Balin and Balan, but it would be effective in performance. If these examples come from the world of romance, perhaps the ‘poore child’ who is summoned by the lord of the castle in l. 305 may suggest the actual world of minstrels and country houses (cf. the reference to St Martin, l. 325). Similarly, the use of direct speech is sparing and simple, but often very effective. There are examples of direct and forceful speech – from Agostes to Bredbeddle (58–60), or in Sir Bredbeddle’s words to the porter (94–6), or in his formal challenge to the court (132–50). There is some variation as, for instance, in the excited report the porter gives of the arrival of the Green Knight (101–5), or in the ‘mighty words’ with which the crabbed Sir Kay delivers his ‘gab’ (157–8). The narrative technique is straightforward, delighting in action, deeds and scenes (when the Green Knight rode out, ‘that was a jolly sight to seene’) rather than in private emotion. The traditionally close relationship between teller and audience is suggested by the calls for attention and the inclusive formulae (‘our king’, ‘our queen’). It is brief and direct, and has none of the Gawain-poet’s delight in digression, but curiously it has its own kind of simple expansiveness, which creates quite a different tempo and balance. The narrative is strictly controlled with formal transitions (as at the end of the first fit, ll. 255–8). These sometimes seem abrupt on the page (‘Now of King Arthur noe more I mell,/ But of a venterous knight I will you tell’, 37–8), but the sudden switch from the splendid feasting at Carlisle to the emergence of a challenger could be impressive in oral delivery, as would the rapid shift from temptation to hunt (404–5), and the even more sudden transition to Bredbeddle’s return and Gawain’s welcome (410–11), a brief scene that quietly emphasizes the challenge to come and sets up a possible tension in their relationship. The narrative pattern of the romance means that the larger suspense found in Gawain is not possible. And the author’s aim is to tell an exciting story clearly and directly rather than to seek suspense for its own sake. The narrator’s voice is quick to explain points or remind his audience of them. We are reminded (253–4) that Sir Bredbeddle knows of his wife’s secret love, and it is pointed out (337) when Sir Bredbeddle speaks with ‘words that were soe smooth’ that had Gawain known the truth he would not have told all. Any tension there is arises from event and action. And action is characteristically direct: the ‘olde witche’ brings her daughter to Gawain’s bed – there is nothing of the tantalizing mysteriousness of the arrival (and the motivation) of the lady in the alliterative romance. The Green Knight is often criticized for lacking Gawain’s air of magic and mystery (a rare and brief exception, perhaps, is the knight’s meeting with the lord of the castle ‘in the twylight’ (295)). It may well be that the author lacked the rhetorical skills to produce such heightened effects, but equally it may be the product of a different tradition of romance narrative, in which (as in many ballads) the intrusion of the supernatural is simply accepted without fuss as if it is part of ‘ordinary life’. Often, no doubt, narrators could rely on their hearers to invest a line with appropriate emotion; thus, when Sir Bredbeddle announces that he is going hunting, his phrase ‘I will into yonder forrest/ Under the greenwood tree’ might suggest the mysterious forest of the outlaw

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ballads. When the Green Knight arrives at Arthur’s court we certainly miss the general awestruck reaction found in Gawain, but the porter’s startled reaction to this ‘marvelous groome’ is nicely homely (‘In lifes dayes old or younge,/ Such a sight I have not seene!’), and the episode serves as a useful narrative ‘delay’ which increases the excitement of the scene. His challenge (as he stands ‘in his stirrups stretchinge’) is polite, and the king’s reaction is very courteous – the challenger is generously invited to sit down to dinner, where he behaves ‘like a knight’. Interestingly, at the beginning of his speech to the king he seems to suggest a rather general challenge like that at the beginning of the ballad ‘the Boy and the Mantle’.12 As he continues, the specific challenge is made clear to the king and the knights, although they remain ignorant (as the audience does not ) of the true purpose of his mission. The structure of the romance is notable for its balance. Like Gawain it begins and ends in Arthur’s court, but instead of the turmoil and the ‘ferlyes’ of Britain mentioned in the alliterative romance, the Grene Knight stresses instead (after the ‘aliens’ have been driven out) stability, order and equality in the establishment of the Round Table. Arthur’s court seems to be associated with stability (with the ungenerous Kay a carefully contained and ‘licensed’ figure?); Sir Bredbeddle the challenger from outside (‘in the west countrye’) seems to be gathered in at the end. The description of its lavish feasting at the beginning of the poem makes a fine background for the introduction of a challenger and a plot from outside. The story’s contenders, Gawain and Bredbeddle (who, when not ‘transposed’, is ‘a man of mickele might/ And lord of great bewtye’) are presented in parallel (each with a journey, and a little arming scene). Sir Bredbeddle dominates the action of the first Fit, but Gawain gradually reveals himself as hero (164–74, 265–77) – his appearance on horseback seems to be slightly more splendid than Bredbeddle’s (74ff). Repetitions (as that of Bredbeddle’s ‘fauchion’ (77, 451)) suggest some care in composition. Yet in the midst of this apparent striving for narrative balance and order there are some loose ends. Readers and hearers alike might wish to know more about Agostes and her daughter, who disappear after the temptation has failed (though supernatural testers are sometimes abruptly ‘out of the story’ in romances). Even Sir Bredbeddle, arriving at the court with heart ‘blyth and light’ in the company of Gawain, leaves some unanswered questions behind him. Perhaps the happy but slightly vague ending does not wish us to ask questions. And there are places where the romance has been accused, with some justification, of lacking focus or precision. As usual, these stand out more starkly when they are compared with their equivalents in Gawain. The most obvious case is the accusation of Gawain by the Green Knight at the end of their (quite tense) confrontation: ‘thou was not leele/ When thou didst the lace conceale. . . .’ Earlier, the romance has drawn our attention to this – ‘Ever privilye he held the lace:/ that was all the villanye that ever was/ Prooved by Sir Gawaine the gay’ – a remark that blends apology and amelioration, with the suggestion that it is Gawain’s only recorded fault. It may well be that a shift from an exchange of winnings to a sharing of winnings has caused a muddle here. I hesitate to say once again that this is more noticeable to a reader than a hearer. It could be

12 F.J. Child, ed., The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (New York, 1884–98), no. 29.

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argued also that on the Green Knight’s interpretation of sharing (‘thou hadst the halfe dale/ Of my venerye’) Gawain should have given up part of the kisses and of the lace. Certainly a writer with a greater interest in casuistry and moral dilemmas would have made this clear. This romance does not seem unduly worried by it. The Green Knight speaks with some severity – he who might have won the crown of courtesy has now lost his ‘thre points’. However he says that Gawain would do him ‘no villanye’ when he rejected his wife, and his request to be taken to Arthur’s court seems to be both a final act of satisfaction and a restoration of fellowship. In this unelaborated version of the story religion does not play any significant role (there is no confession scene); Gawain’s rejection of the lady is on the grounds that it would be shameful to harm a gentle knight to whom he is indebted. The romance has a homely morality based on simple ideas of ‘manhood’ (a word used a number of times), courage (the phrase ‘venterous knight’ is also repeated), and ‘courtesy’ (the Green Knight’s ‘forgiveness’ of Gawain seems to be a simple example of courtesy matching courtesy). The Grene Knight aims primarily at entertaining its audience rather than making them think about moral questions. Not anxiety but cheerfulness is central (as the king says, ‘mirth is best at meele’). Not in any way demanding, ‘this little storye’ is told with some spirit and enthusiasm, and with its own humble art.

15 ‘False Friends’ in the Works of the Gawain-Poet AD PUTTER

This chapter deals with a number of textual problems in the works of the Gawain-poet. I focus on so-called ‘false friends’, words which look reassuringly like familiar modern words but which are used in an unfamiliar sense, or are actually different lexical items altogether. I discuss six examples in detail: all of these set a trap for unsuspecting readers. Studying the text of the Gawain-poet’s works in the many available editions occasionally makes one despair of the possibility of progress.1 Some of the finest philological minds have pored over the textual cruces, hapax legomena and loci desperati of British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x, but for the most part the old problems have refused to go away. Editors make up their minds, as they must, but often there are as many solutions as there are editions. A depressing example is Cleanness 433–4, lines which describe Noah’s Ark adrift on the seas: Al wat
wasted þat þer wonyed þe worlde wythinne, Þat euer flote, oþer flwe, oþer on fote
ede. That ro
ly wat
þe remnaunt þat þe rac dryue
þat alle gendre
so joyst wern ioyned wythinne. (431–4)

Depending on whom you choose to believe, this either means ‘so that it was fortunate (ro
ly: cf. Old English row, Old Icelandic rolligr ‘mild’) for the remnant that the storm drives, that all species, so lodged (joyst), were united within’ (Andrew and Waldron); or it means ‘All that remained was that troubled vessel (ro
ly = ‘rough’,

1

Citations are taken from the following editions: Pearl, ed. E.V. Gordon (Oxford, 1974); Cleanness, ed. J.J. Anderson (Manchester, 1977); Patience, ed. J.J. Anderson (Manchester, 1969); Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. J.R.R. Tolkien and E.V. Gordon, rev. Norman Davis (Oxford, 1967). Reference will also be made to the following editions: Early English Alliterative Poems, ed. Richard Morris, EETS OS 1 (London, 1864); Purity, ed. Robert J. Menner (New Haven, CT, 1920); Patience, ed. Sir Israel Gollancz, Select Early English Poems in Alliterative Verse I (London, 1924); The Pearl Poems: An Omnibus Edition, ed. William Vantuono, 2 vols. (New York, 1984); Patience, ed. J.A. Burrow and Thorlac Turville-Petre, in A Book of Middle English, 2nd rev. edn (Oxford, 1996); The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, ed. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron (Exeter, 2002). To save space I shall refer to these editions by the surname of the editor(s).

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used substantivally) which the storm drives, in which all species were so tightly (joyst = juste) packed together’ (Anderson); or it means ‘So that it was rough going for what remained (of the Ark), which was driven by the storm, within which (i.e. the Ark) all species were so fortunately (joyst is past participle of joisen2) united’ (my preferred reading at the time of writing); or possibly it means none of these things, since ro
ly could be an error for rwly ‘pitiful’ (Morris); ioyned could also be ‘enjoined, ordered’; joyst could be a past participle of justen (from Old French juster), ‘join tightly’ (see MED justen, sense 3); and the antecedent of þat (434) could be rac, so that the line could be translated: ‘So that it was rough-going for the survivors, who were driven by the storm cloud, within which (i.e. the storm cloud) all species, thus crammed together, were mixed up.’ All solutions require special pleading, some perhaps more so than others. Contra the translation I have just given, ME justen normally yields the past participle just (not joyst).3 Contra Andrew and Waldron, there is no dictionary evidence for the existence of a Middle English word ro
ly meaning ‘fortunate’, and I am unable to verify their assertion that joyst is an adjective meaning ‘lodged’ (they give no derivation). Is there really an English verb meaning ‘to lodge’ of which joyst could be the past participle, and if so what is it? (Middle English gesten and gestenen have the right sense but none of their recorded past participles looks remotely like joyst). Contra Anderson, the spelling joyst for juste, which is not found elsewhere in Middle English, is curious (though see note 3), but more curious still, in my view, is the interpretation of ro
li as a substantival adjective. Alliterative poets, the Gawain-poet especially, certainly liked using adjectives absolutely for concrete nouns,4 but not arbitrarily. What guided them was their awareness that many things have some essential feature that virtually defines them. The linguistic consequence of this is that some adjectives and nouns are traditionally associated (a sword is sharp, the sun is bright, fine tableware is silver, plants are green), and, further, that the noun can be elided altogether if it is deducible from the adjective with which the noun is typically collocated. So the Gawain-poet can conjure up a sword simply by saying þe scharp (Gawain 424), the sun by saying þe schene (Patience 440), fine tableware by saying þe sylueren (Gawain 124), and vegetation by saying þe grene.5 But þat ro
ly surely cannot conjure up a troubled vessel, except in the mind of a desperate editor. Contra my current preference, remnant usually means ‘survivors’, and ioyst means ‘joyful’ rather than ‘fortunate’ 2

3

4 5

This explanation of joist as a past participle of joisen is due to O.F. Emerson, ‘Middle English Clannesse’, PMLA 34 (1919): 494–522. Emerson proposed the sense ‘joyful’, which does not fit the context; the sense ‘fortunate, blessed’ is well attested in Old French, though not in Middle English. See Destruction of Troy, ed. G.A. Panton and D. Donaldson, EETS OS 39 and 59 (London, 1869–74): [Jason] ‘Unjoynis the Jamnys þat iuste were togedur’ (939). It might be noted, however, that in Middle English can represent the cultured pronunciation [ü] for OF . Thus in John Audelay’s poems (ed. Ella Keats Whiting, EETS OS 184 (London, 1931), also written in a West Midland dialect), we find endoyre, 2.338 (for endure) and froyt, 15.89 (for fruit). The explanation for this spelling is that French [üi] had been monothongized to to [ü] in Anglo-Norman, which meant that ui (and its variant forms uy and oy) and u began to be used interchangeably. See Karl Brunner, An Outline of Middle English Grammar, trans. G.K.W. Johnston (Oxford, 1963), pp. 4, 31. See J.P. Oakden, Alliterative Poetry in Middle English (Manchester, 1935), pp. 394–99. A fine artistic departure from this usage is the poet’s absolute use of grene (green colour, green man, green anything) when he describes the Green Knight (e.g. 157, 167, 189, 464). Precisely because it is not licensed by any established collocation, this use of grene accentuates the Green Knight’s weirdness, while ‘grammaticalizing’ the poet’s point that greenness is his ‘normal’ and defining characteristic.

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in the few places where it is used in Middle English. In short, no satisfactory solution to these lines has thus far been proposed, and, despite their advantages, modern editors have got no further with them than Richard Morris, the first editor of the poem. The same is true for many other textual conundrums of Cotton Nero A.x. In the course of preparing a new edition of the Gawain-poet’s works for Penguin, I have duly attempted to solve these conundrums, but, with very few exceptions, the work has been fruitless (and dull). Some progress of a less spectacular kind, however, is still to be made if we concentrate, not on words that have caused previous editors a great deal of trouble (joyst, ro
ly, etc.), but on words that have given editors no trouble because they look very familiar. But, as everyone knows, the familiarity of Middle English words can be deceiving, be it because the medieval sense is not the modern one (as is notoriously the case with the words nice and sad) or because the modern look-alike word is a different lexical item altogether. Two examples of the second case are Troilus and Criseyde 5.1050: ‘Men seyn – I not – that she yaf him her herte’ (not = ne wot) – and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 776: ‘Now bone hostel’, coþe the burne, ‘I beseche yow yette!’ (yette = ‘grant’).6 It is not to be supposed that experienced editors are immune to the influence of ‘false friends’, as they are aptly called. Eugène Vinaver, for example, was seduced by a false friend into thinking that Malory’s sentence ‘Now all the douseperys, bothe deukes and other, and the peerys of Parys towne, are fledde into the Low Countrey towarde Roone’7 meant that the Roman nobility had moved ‘into the Low Countries towards the Rhine’. The error went undetected until Peter Field demonstrated that Roon referred to Rouen and that the phrase ‘Low Countries’ is a ‘false friend’ that should be decapitalized: low countrey refers to low-lying land (in this case the lowlands along the banks of the Seine).8 Like Vinaver, the editors of the Gawain-poet’s works have not always been vigilant when faced with the reassuring familarity of a false friend. In a review of Andrew and Waldron’s latest edition of Poems of the Pearl Manuscript,9 I noted a couple of false friends with deceptive medieval senses. In Gawain 1143 (describing the hunters with their dogs), þay chastysed does not mean that the hunters ‘scolded’ the dogs (in the modern sense of chastise and rebuke) but that they ‘kept them in 6

7 8

9

The existence of a verb yet(te) opens up Patience 432 to two interpretations: ‘Herk, renk, is þis ry
t so ronkly to wrath/ For any dede þat I haf don oþer demed þe
et?’ Editors gloss ‘For any deed that I have done to you or decreed for you up to now’ but the line could also mean: ‘For any deed that I have done or decided you should receive’. In either case, the manuscript reading
et is unlikely to reflect the poet’s spelling, which was probably yette, since the poet avoided ending his lines on a stressed syllable. Note the spelling at Cleanness 867b (concerning Lot’s daughters): ‘for alle men
ette’. For the poet’s avoidance of masculine line endings, see Ad Putter and Myra Stokes, ‘Spelling, Grammar, and Metre in the Works of the Gawain-Poet’ in Medieval English Measures, ed. Ruth Kennedy, Parergon 18 (2000): 77–95. The quotation is taken from the unrevised edition: Sir Thomas Malory, Works, ed. Eugène Vinaver, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1973), I.206.1. P.J.C. Field, ‘Malory’s Place-Names: Roone and the Low Country’, Notes and Queries 230 (1985): 452–3, repr. in his Malory: Texts and Sources (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 189–90. It might be added in support of Field that, as a toponym, ‘Low Countries’ would appear to be post-medieval. In 1530, Palsgrave, in his Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse, (facsimile repr. Geneva, 1972), revealingly translates lowe contree as plat pais. The first use of the phrase as a toponym is given by OED as 1548 (s.v. Low-country). Notes and Queries 248 (2003): 461–2.

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check’;10

in Cleanness 11, ‘þay (i.e. priests) hondel þer His aune body and vsen hit boþe’, use does not mean ‘use’ in the modern sense but ‘consume, eat’.11 In both cases, correct glosses of these false friends can be found in rival editions of the Gawain-poet’s works. However, the deceptions practised by false friends are occasionally so inconspicuous that they can dupe a whole host of editors. In this essay I should like to consider some words which, I suspect, are false friends, and which, if my suspicions are justified, have conned most, if not all, of the Gawain-poet’s editors. (1) Patience contains a remarkably realistic passage describing the departure of the ship on which Jonah is hoping to escape from God’s annoying dictates. The ship, the poet specifies, is a ‘cog’ (152), the most common type of cargo ship in Northern Europe in the fourteenth century: Þay layden in on ladde-borde and þe lofe wynnes. Þe blyþe breþe at her bak þe bosum he fyndes. (Patience 106–7)

Andrew and Waldron translate these lines as follows: ‘They put in (their oars) on the larboard side and gain the luff (i.e. the advantage of the wind). The happy (favourable) wind behind them finds the swelling sail.’ One reason for being suspicious of this translation is the fact that the supposed object (i.e. oars) of the verb layden in is not expressed, yet all editors, except for Burrow and Turville-Petre, have assumed that the verb can be translated literally as ‘laid in’, no doubt encouraged by the parallel offered by Havelok 718–19, which is duly cited by Anderson in his note to Patience 106: And sone dede he leyn in an ore And drou him to þe heye se.12

However, in these lines from Havelok there lurk a couple of false friends, which G.V. Smithers has unmasked in his erudite edition of the romance. In the first place, an ore does not here mean ‘an oar’, but rather on ore = to the side of the rudder, to starboard. And secondly, leyn in does not mean ‘lay in’ but ‘to set a course (to)’. We are dealing with a nautical idiom, calqued on the Old Norse phrased verb leggja inn, which is used either absolutely or with the object ‘ship’, and which means ‘to lay a ship’s course, proceed to sea’.13 Smithers provides a couple of Old Norse examples, including the following one from Njáls Saga: hann lagði skip sín inn á sundit (‘he

10 Ferdinand Mossé warned against this particular false friend in his Handbook of Middle English, trans.

James Walker (Baltimore, 1952), p. 383. The Gawain-poet was, like Malory, fully versed in hunting jargon; and, as Peter Field recognizes, hunting enthusiasts make life difficult for their editors, who need ‘the fullest knowledge of recondite matters’: P.J.C. Field, ‘Hunting, Hawking, and Textual Criticism in Malory’s Morte Darthur’, in Arthurian and Other Studies Presented to Shunichi Noguchi, ed. Takashi Suzuki and Tsuyoshi Mukai (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 95–105, repr. in Malory: Texts and Sources, pp. 103–14. 11 See the authoritative note by T.F. Simmons, The Lay Folk’s Mass Book, EETS 71 (London, 1979), pp. 380–2. The word is glossed correctly by Anderson in his edition of Cleanness. 12 Havelok, ed. G.V. Smithers (Oxford, 1987). 13 Icelandic–English Dictionary, ed. Richard Cleasby (Oxford, 1975), s.v. leggja, sense 6.

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set course towards the fjord’). Note that leggja inn takes the preposition á (comparable with the preposition on taken by ‘lay in’ in both Patience and Havelok). In the case of Patience, this interpretation of lay in is much more convincing, because it makes the description of the ship’s departure utterly realistic, in keeping with the passage as a whole. To sail away in a cog, sailors would not row but simply unfurl and adjust the sail, if necessary turning the ship to the wind by pushing the rudder over.14 Hence, cogs carried oars for emergencies only, as the experts tell us, and, indeed, as the Gawain-poet himself confirms when, later on in Patience, he deems it necessary to explain why the sailors resort to rowing: Haþeles hy
ed in haste with ores ful longe, Syn her sayl wat
hem aslypped, on syde
to rowe . . .

(Patience 217–18)

Patience 106 thus means: ‘they set course to larboard and win the luff’. (2) In the following passage, Jonah tumbles into the belly of the whale: He glydes in by þe giles, þur
glaymande glette [glaymande = adhering, sticky] Relande in by a rop, a rode þat him þou
t, Ay hele ouer hed hourlande aboute . . . (Patience 269–71)

The word rode should be treated with caution by editors of Middle English texts, since it is not always what it seems. The editors of the Gawain-poet are not its only victims. In his Life of Saint Katherine, recently edited by Karen Winstead,15 John Capgrave says of Katherine (before her conversion to Christianity) that ‘She knowyth not yet the rode,/ She knowyth not Christ, she hath not herd His lore’ (II, 14–15); Winstead draws our attention to ‘a crucifixion pun: rode means both way and cross’. In the case of rode at Patience 270, both Andrew and Waldron and Anderson gloss rode as ‘road’, derived from Old English rñd. One would like to believe the editors. The alleged pun in St Katherine would be clever, and so would the comparison of the whale’s gut to a ‘road’ leading into the whale’s belly. But the sense ‘road’ for rode is anachronistic: it enters the English language much later, around 1600 according to OED (see road sb. sense 6). If rode did mean ‘road’, it would have to be a variant form of the word rod, also spelt rode, meaning ‘track, footpath’ (OED s.v. rod sb.2 and Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, s.v. rod n.1). But rod is emphatically not the same word as road. It does not derive from Old English rñd, but is of obscure origin, perhaps due to the reanalysis of *fot-trod as fot-rod. What is more, the word rod is exclusively attested in Scots. In Middle English rode basically means ‘horse-riding’ (as in Old English), or it refers to a sheltered place near the shore where ships can ‘ride’ at anchor, a ‘roadstead’. Elsewhere in Cotton Nero A.x, rode represents Modern English ‘rood’, but the senses ‘rood’, ‘riding’ or ‘roadstead’ do not fit the passage from Patience.16 In short, rode at Patience 269 is much more of a problem than the standard editions acknowledge. 14 See Ian Friel, The Good Ship: Ships, Shipbuilding and Technology in England 1200–1520 (London,

1995), p. 93, and Gillian Hutchinson, Medieval Ships and Shipping (Leicester, 1994), pp. 15–64, 183–90. 15 John Capgrave, Life of Saint Katherine, ed. Karen A. Winstead, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, MI, 1999). 16 But see Vantuono, who thinks that the sense ‘rood’ is apt.

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The best solution may be the one indicated by Sir Israel Gollancz in his edition of 1913. If the history of editing the Gawain-poet were really one of progress, this old edition should be useless by now, but Gollancz, because of his vast experience (and his knowledge of German scholarship), knew things about the Gawain-poet’s lexis and metre which scholars are only just beginning to rediscover. For example, Gollancz’s lists of suggested emendations in his editions of fourteenth-century alliterative poems shows that he knew perfectly well that b-verses must end on one unstressed syllable and must contain one long dip (a long dip being a sequence of two or more unstressed syllables).17 This rule solves the problem of whether glaymande in þur
glaymande glette at Patience 269b should be transcribed as one word (a present participial adjective), or as the noun glaym with the conjunction ande (as in the text printed by Andrew and Waldron). Andrew and Waldron are wrong, since the metre requires a long dip, and so glaymande must be trisyllabic.18 Moreover, in line 270 Gollancz guarded against the false friend road, glossing rode as ‘rood-length’ (6 to 8 yards). Rode, on this interpretation, is a measure of length (‘a rood’, synonymous with ‘rod’; see ME rode n.5 sense 5); in the Gawain-poet’s day it was the standard width of a medieval townhouse.19 In support of Gollancz, it may be noted that the word seems to be used in a similarly hyperbolic sense in the rhymed alliterative poem Rauf Coilyear. In the following lines, the hero receives a blow so great that he staggers back a long way: The kene knicht in that steid stakkerit sturely The length of ane rude braid he gart him remufe.

(860–1)20

(The bold knight in that place staggered violently; he made him move back by the length of a rood-breadth.)

The parallel is not perfect, since in Patience 270 ‘the length of’ is not expressed, but it may nevertheless provide some evidence that Gollancz may have been right when he construed Patience 270 as ‘Reeling in through a gut that seemed to him (as long as) a rod’. (3) When in Cleanness the animals have disembarked, they all return to their natural habitats: Herttes to the hy
e heþe, hare
to gorste
, And lyounes and lebardes to þe lake ryftes.

[ryftes = caverns] (Cleanness 535–6)

17 The discovery of the rule that the b-verse should contain one long dip has been credited to Hoyt Duggan

and Thomas Cable, but some of the credit should go to Karl Luick, who, long ago, seems to have thought that that b-verses with two long dips and b-verses without a long dip were irregular, and he excluded such patterns from his list of Middle English b-verse types: ‘Die Englische Stabreimzeile im XIV, XV und XVI Jahrhundert’, Anglia 9 (1889): 392–443, 553–618 (404). 18 Cf. Hoyt Duggan: ‘Final -e and the rhythmic structure of the b-verse in Middle English Alliterative Poetry’, Modern Philology 86 (1988): 119–45 (143). 19 See Brian Paul Hindle, Medieval Town Plans, Shire Archaeology (Risborough, 1990), pp. 52–3. 20 The Taill of Rauf Coilyear: A Scottish Metrical Romance of the Fifteenth Century, ed. William Hand Browne (Baltimore, 1903). For different interpretations of ‘rude braid’ see the note in the edition by Alan Lupack, Three Middle English Charlemagne Romances, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, MI, 1990).

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Where do the lions and leopards go? They are off to ‘the lakes’ (Morris), to their ‘lakeside dens’ (Andrew and Waldron) or to the ‘river valleys’ (Anderson). Evidently, all these editors have been seduced by the false friend lake. In Middle English, however, the word lake has two quite distinct senses, the first an expanse of water (MED lake n.1 senses 1 and 2), the second a pit or a den (ibid. sense 3). The latter sense, as Menner noted, is the operative one here; it goes back to Latin lacus (‘pit, den’), which in the Vulgate Bible is used for a lion’s den. Note, for example, Daniel 6.7, ‘in lacum leonum’, duly translated in the Wycliffite Bible as ‘into the lake of lyouns’. Lake in Cleanness has the sense ‘den’. In the nominal phrase lake ryftes, lake can either be construed as an s-less genitive (‘the caverns of their den’) or as an attributive noun in a compound (‘their den-caverns’).21 (4) When Lot is confronted by the Sodomites, the angels get him back to the safety of his house: . . . þe
onge men so
epe
ornen þeroute Wapped open þe wyket and wonnen hym tylle, And by þe honde
hym hent and horyed hym withinne, And steken þe
ates ston-harde with stalworth barre
. (Cleanness 881–4)

Line 883 seems simple: ‘They took him by the hands and hurried him inside’; horyed is Modern English ‘hurry’ according to the OED and all of the Gawain-poet’s editors, with the single exception of Vantuono. The problem, however, is that hurry does not appear to be a medieval word at all. Leaving aside Cleanness 883, the next attested usage is Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis 904: ‘A second fear . . . Which madly hurries her she knows not whither’. Venus and Adonis is dated by OED to 1592. It seems to me much more likely that horyen represents ME herien ‘pull’ (Modern English harry). The spelling with is also found in Cursor Mundi 1446 (Göttingen MS); the form may be authentic but is perhaps best explained as due to the common scribal confusion of e and o.22 (5) The apples that grow near the Dead Sea are treacherous. They look attractive on the outside but are rotten inside: Al so red and so ripe and rychely hwed As any dome my
t deuice, of dayntyes oute; Bot quen hit is brused oþer broken oþer byten in twynne, No worldes goud hit wythinne, bot wyndowande askes. (Cleanness 1045–8)

The gloss ‘bruised’ for brused offered by Menner, Anderson, and Andrew and Waldron is not really precise enough. To reveal the ashes inside, the apple needs to be broken, not bruised. While it is true that ‘bruise’ is the primary sense of Old English brysan, the sense here is influenced by French brisier, Anglo-Norman bruser, ‘break’ (see the headnote to bruise vb. in OED). This hypothesis is 21 Cf. Tauno Mustanoja, A Middle English Grammar (Helsinki, 1959), p. 72: ‘The interesting question

whether the first member of combinations like chirche dore, dore bem, helle houndes, and sterre lyht is to be understood simply as an s-less genitive or whether the attributive use of the nominative must also be taken into consideration . . . has not been elucidated in a fully satisfactory way so far’. 22 Elsewhere in Cleanness this confusion is responsible for such scribal errors as þre for þro (590) and þo for þe (1547).

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confirmed by the corresponding description of Dead Sea apples in Mandeville’s Travels – a description that evidently lies behind Cleanness 1045–8: ‘qi les brusera ou tranchera parmy, il ne trouvera dedeins que cendres’ (‘whoever breaks them or slices them in two, he will find only ashes therein’).23 (6) In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain accepts the gift of the green girdle from Bertilac, but he makes clear that he does not do so on account of its splendour: ‘Bot your gordel’, quoth Gawayn, ‘God yow for
elde! Þat wyl I welde with guod wylle, not for þe wynne golde, Ne þe saynt, ne þe sylk, ne þe syde pendaundes, For wele ne for worchyp, ne for þe wlonk werkkez, Bot in syngne of my surfet I schal se hit ofte . . .’ (SGGK 2429–33)

The familiar sense of saynt is ‘girdle’ (cf. French ceinture); in this sense the poet uses the word earlier in his romance – ‘With sylk sayn vmbe his syde’ (589) – and it is also in this sense that editors and MED (s.v. ceint) have glossed the word at line 2431. But this sense is plainly unsatisfactory here. Gawain says he will not have the girdle on account of its many excellent qualities, which he lists: the gold, the saynt, the silk, the long pendants, etc. In context, saynt would seem to refer to some quality or aspect of the girdle. What it cannot mean is ‘girdle’, which produces nonsense: ‘I won’t have your girdle on account of the gold, the girdle, the silk . . .’ Fortunately, it is not necessary to attribute such nonsense to the poet, for a trawl through some early dictionaries reveals that ceint had a more specific sense besides ‘girdle’. Thus the Promptorium Parvulorum, an English-Latin Dictionary from 1440, contains the following entry for seint: ‘seynt or cors of a gyrdylle: Textum’.24 Textum here means ‘weave’, while cors, which is given as a synonym for seynt, is defined by OED as ‘a ribbon or band of silk (or other material) serving as a ground for ornamentation with metalwork or embroidery’ (s.v. corse sb. sense 5). Similarly, Palsgrave in his English-French Dictionary of 1530 translates seynt of a gyrdell as tissu.25 In both cases seynt refers to the fabric of the girdle. I would argue that it is in this sense of ‘fabric’ that we should understand saynt at Gawain 2431. The moral to be drawn from these instances is anticipated by the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight itself. In this story, the hero proves to be most vulnerable when he least suspects danger: when, in the comfortable surroundings of Castle Hautdesert, he is entertained by two ‘false friends’, Bertilac and the Lady of the Castle. Like Gawain, editors must be vigilant, especially when they are faced with innocent-looking words.

23 The Buke of John Maundevill, ed. G.F. Warner (London, 1889), p. 51. As this (and other passages)

show, the poet had read Mandeville’s Travels in French, probably in the so-called Insular Version (ante 1390), which represents a later version than the original ‘Continental’ French Version (dated to 1355–7). The date matters because it sets a firm terminus a quo for the composition of Cleanness. Scholars who would argue that the Cotton Nero poems could be composed as early as 1350 need to think again. The influence of Mandeville on the Gawain-poet was pointed out by Carleton Brown, ‘The Author of Pearl, Considered in the Light of His Theological Opinions’, PMLA 19 (1904): 115–53. 24 Promptorium Parvulorum, ed. A.L. Mayhew, EETS ES 102 (London, 1908). 25 For bibliographical details see note 8 above.

16 Place-Names in The Awntyrs Off Arthure: Corruption, Conjecture, Coincidence ROSAMUND ALLEN

Place-names identify The Awntyrs off Arthure with a magnate audience which is both admonished about landed wealth and celebrated in wordplay on land tenure. The mangled place-names in the 715 lines of The Awntyrs off Arthure are baffling in all four extant manuscripts. Surviving or recognizable place-names fall into four groups: (i) names of places in south-west Scotland claimed from Sir Gawain by the outsider, Galleron; (ii) names of places donated to Gawain in compensation when Galleron’s land is restored; (iii) names of places on the larger political map of Europe; (iv) names referring to the places in Cumberland where the action of the poem is set. The locations in group (iii) would be well known to the audience from the French wars. The second group refers, it seems, to the estates of the Duke of York. The names in (i) and (iv) to refer to places in Scotland and on the western march (boundary) – the debatable lands – and range from Ayr on the west coast of Scotland to Tarn Wadling, just off the old Roman road (the modern A6), nine miles north of Penrith. I have shown elsewhere how identifiable place-names link the poem to the political context of the mid-1420s.1 They allude to the deteriorating alliance of Brittany, England and Burgundy and the precariousness of relations with Scotland. The setting of the poem is the Cumberland-Westmorland border in territory strongly associated with the Neville family at this period. The mid-1420s saw a very temporary relaxation of tension on the Scotland-England border and the resolution of Gawain and Galleron’s fight suggests light-hearted self-idealization by northern magnates, against the dark background of war in France. Each of the four scribes of The Awntyrs understands the many place-names in terms of his own location. The scribe of Bodleian MS Douce 324 [D] came from

I am greatly indebted to Edward Oliver, who drew the maps, and John Marsh who allowed me to quote from his Ph.D. diss. ‘Landed Society in the Far North-West of England, c.1332–1461’ (University of Lancaster, 2001), and gratefully acknowledge help and advice in preparing this paper from Frank Millard, Jim Bolton, Linda Gowans, Peter Booth, Mark Arvanigian and Sean Cunningham. For interpretations of information supplied and use of other material I am, of course, wholly responsible. 1 ‘The Awntyrs off Arthure: Jests and jousts’, in Romance reading on the book: Essays on Medieval Narrative presented to Maldwyn Mills, ed. Jennifer Fellows et al. (Cardiff, 1996), pp. 129–42.

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north-east Derbyshire; Lincoln Cathedral MS 91 [T] was written by Robert Thornton of Ryedale in North Yorkshire; the Ireland Blackburne MS [Ir], now in Princeton Library, was compiled at Hale in North Lancashire/Cumbria; Lambeth Palace MS 491 [L], was copied in London in the dialect of Rayleigh, Essex, by a professional scribe who was supplied with material from much further north.2

The Awntyrs off Arthure: Form and Content The Awntyrs, a strange amalgam of sermon and romance, would suit a mixed audience of old and young in a gentry or elite household. In the framing narrative Arthur is hunting in Inglewood Forest in Cumberland, watched by Gawain and Guinevere from a hide situated by Tarn Wadling. When the ghost of Guinevere’s mother appears from the tarn she denounces Arthur as ‘too covetous’: having wrongfully seized lands, he will lose Britain. Her appeal for thirty trentals of masses to rescue her from punishment in hell for a broken vow,3 and her daughter’s provision of these, frame another appeal. Galleron of Galloway arrives at Arthur’s hunting pavilion the evening after the hunt, complaining that his lands (which he recites: they extend from the Firth of Clyde to the Solway Firth) have been taken by Arthur and given to Sir Gawain. When a trial by joust between Gawain and Galleron does not settle the issue, Galleron relinquishes his rights, but Arthur compensates Gawain with other lands, probably in Wales and perhaps Ireland, on condition he restore Galleron’s land. As Gawain makes formal restoration, he repeats the place-names Galleron first recited (probably verbatim, though scribal corruption makes this uncertain). Galleron, unjustly deprived of his ancestral land, proves the ghost’s accusation.4 Lands, in England, Scotland, Europe, and Wales and/or Ireland centrally negotiate the poem’s meaning. This dual warning of wrongful land appropriation by Arthur is based on the familiar tale set in Inglewood of the Loathly Lady whose brother’s land has been annexed by Arthur and given to Gawain. The loathly sister supplies the answer to her brother’s question ‘what do women love most?’, which saves Arthur’s life when he correctly answers ‘sovereignty’. Gawain defers to the ‘sovereignty’ of the loathly lady, who has claimed him as husband in recompense, by allowing her the choice of 2

3 4

Ralph Hanna III, Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts (Stanford, 1996), pp. 83, 93: the scribe’s patrons, including Thomas Clifford, the sixth earl, could have brought material to London from the north in the reign of Richard II. Clifford married Elizabeth Neville; his son inherited at the age of 8; he was ten in 1424, his estates in his mother’s keeping (Calendar of Fine Rolls 1422–30, 18 May 1424) while Ralph Neville had the keeping of the Clifford castles (Calendar of Fine Rolls, p. 75, 28 April 1424). The Cliffords held the manors of Penrith and Brougham (Map 2). Other possible channels for transmission include Robert Carlisle Jr (MP for Carlisle in 1422), a member of Lincoln’s Inn in 1420 (J.S. Roskell, The Commons in the Parliament of 1422 [Manchester, 1954], p. 161). A trental is thirty masses recited over any period from one day to a year and more. See, most recently: Jean E. Jost, ‘Margins in Middle English Romance: Culture and Characterization in The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyne and The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell’, in Albrecht Classen, ed., Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages (New York and London, 2000), pp. 133–52: at pp. 141–2, 151 (information from Linda Gowans); Christine Chism, Alliterative Revivals (Philadelphia, 2002), pp. 251–64; Patricia Clare Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia, 2001), pp. 180–89 (Ingham dates The Awntyrs to the mid-fifteenth century (p. 188).

PLACE-NAMES IN THE AWNTYRS OFF ARTHURE

183

when she is to be beautiful. Besides a permanently lovely wife, Gawain retains the land. Gower and Chaucer use the plot to explore woman’s desire to ‘have the rule’ over men (The Weddyng of Sir Gawain, 470): the men whose lives are saved in their texts stand accused of manslaughter and rape respectively. But in the (early?) fifteenth-century The Weddyng of Sir Gawain and the Percy Folio The Marriage of Sir Gawain Arthur is accused of land seizure, and, because he correctly answers the brother’s question, the land is not restored. The ugly lady is the adverse face of inheritance, the heiress who takes land and title from her ancestral home to her incoming spouse. The lovely lady is the face she presents to her new family, often more recently ennobled than her own. Both Gower and Chaucer read against against the narrative’s grain, as does The Awntyrs. The loathly lady of the original becomes the ghost of Guinevere’s mother, but powerless to choose her own fate because she is dead. Her beautiful counterpart is Galleron’s escort, who is only there to support her man. Both the ghost and the unnamed consort are deeply involved with land. Both Gawain and Galleron either gain or regain territory: the deprived and enraged brother of The Wedding/Marriage has been airbrushed out in this version, and there is only an off-stage wedding. Sir Galleron’s joust with Gawain for his land in the second section of the poem is in fact the main strand of the Loathly Lady folk tale, and Galleron’s complaint ‘You have given my lands with great wrong to Sir Gawain’ (421–2) exactly repeats the brother’s complaint in The Wedding of Sir Gawain.5 Woman’s self-realization is not explored in The Awntyrs, though paradoxically it may have been written for a female patron, Joan Neville. Guinevere’s mother broke a solemn vow known only to herself and Guinevere (204–5); Joan’s mother, Catherine Swynford probably committed adultery when she conceived Joan and her three elder brothers by her lover, John of Gaunt.6 An adulterous female revenant influences The Awntyrs. This is St Gregory’s hideous mother, who appears to him pleading for masses as he says his papal mass, but returns in celestial beauty once he has recited a trental for her soul. The ghost of The Awntyrs also asks for trentals, but their effect is never revealed.7 The Awntyrs inverts and subverts the folktale of the Loathly Lady and The Trentals of St Gregory, but in contrast to Gower’s and Chaucer’s versions of the folktale, its primary subject is male, not female status. It is the loathly lady who loses out, and Galleron does get his lands back. But in contrast to The Wedding, Arthur is not saved but will lose his life, the ghost warns. Arthur himself was the reason for Galleron’s complaint: he created friction between a Scot and an Englishman, an echo of Edward I’s precipitation of England and Scotland into three hundred years’ discord when, in 1296, he selected Balliol as king in order to gain control in the affairs of Scotland.

5

6

7

Weddding, lines 58–9. Peter Field claims that Malory wrote The Wedding (‘Malory and The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell’, Archiv 219 [1982], reprinted in Malory: Texts and Sources [Cambridge: Brewer, 1998], pp. 284–94). Malory adopts from The Awntyrs the character Galleron, who dies in the attack on Guinevere’s bedroom. The Wedding and The Awntyrs poets may independently re-work an already existing text. Frank Millard suggests (private communication) that the ‘solempne avowe’ (205) broken by Guinevere’s mother may refer to the sworn declaration of John of Gaunt and Catherine Swynford (Papal Letters, IV, 1362–1444, p. 545, no. 181) that she was not married when they became lovers. Unlike Gregory’s mother the ghost is not changed into celestial beauty.

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The Place-Names These are, or are conjectured to be, as follows: (i) Lands Galleron claims 419, 679

OF CO[M]NOK AND CAR[RIK]E CONYNGHAUM AND KILE

In 420, 678 and 681 the territory is itemized. Here the north-western poet is not well supported by scribes from further east and south. Analysis of the variants suggests this emendation of the lines in question (the emendations are discussed below): 418 420 678

ÞE GRETTEST OF GALWEY OF GREUES AND G[Y]LLES OF LO[NRIK] OF L[EVE]NAX OF LO[WTHER] HILLES AL LONDES AND LITHES FRO L[OCH]ER T[IL] AYRE

ÞE L[EVE]NA[X] AND L[ONRI]K [AND] LO[W]THER [H]IL[L]E[S] (ii) Lands Gawain gets in compensation 667 668 669

WITH [CERFFILI] CASTELL[E] CURNELLED SO CLENE EKE [ULSTER HALL] TO HAFE AND TO HOLDE

[WARKWORTH] AND WATERFORD WAL[LED] I WENE

(iii) Lands in Europe 274 276

FRAUNCE HAF YE F[EL]LY WITH YOUR FIGHT WONN[E] BRETAYNE [AND] BURGOYNE [IS BOTH] TO YOU BO[U]N

(274/6).

(iv) Local places in Cumberland 3, 690 709 2 475 337

CARLISLE

(3, 690)

INGLEWOOD TARN WADLING PLUMPTON lawn/launde RANDOLF SETE HALL

(i) Lands Galleron claims 419 and 679 are identifiable from manuscript evidence: Cumnock Carrick Cunningham Kyle

419 679 419 679 419 679 419 679

connok DL Connok D om D carlele D Conyngham D Conynghaum D kyle D Kile D

trs = transposed order in the list.

Cummake (trs) Ir Cummake (trs) Ir Carrake (trs) Ir Carrake (trs) Ir Conyngame Ir Conyngame Ir Kile Ir Kile Ir

Konynge T Commoke T Carryke T Carrike T comaym T Conyghame T Kylle T Kylle

Cunnok L Careyke L Carrok L Coynham L Conyngham L kylle L kylle L

185

PLACE-NAMES IN THE AWNTYRS OFF ARTHURE

closely.8

Galleron’s very explicit claim to his lands identifies the territory There is little scribal variation. Douce omits or corrupts Carrick both times, Thornton corrupts Cumnock in 419, but gets it right in 679; Ir spells Carrick as Carrake and L as Carrok. The territory thus surveyed comprises: the earldom of Lennox, the lordship of Stewartry, the Black Douglas lands of Bothwell, the lordship of Galloway (east of Wigtown), the old earldom of Wigtown (the Rhins of Galloway) and the earldom of Carrick, with the baronies of Cunningham and Kyle in Ayrshire, Cumnock lying at the eastern edge (see Map 1). The titular earl of Carrick from 1404 became James I of Scotland in 1406 shortly after being captured by the English at sea. In 1424 James I was finally released from his long imprisonment in England after marrying Joan Neville’s niece Jane in Southwark and sent north in March, travelling to Scotland via Durham where he held court for the first time. Galloway is some way to the south of Ayrshire. The earl of Galloway, Archibald Douglas, fourth earl of Wigtown, died in 1424; the lordship was held not by the fifth earl himself (though he claimed the title), but by his mother, James I’s sister, an intervention by James to divide the Douglas patrimony.9 James was earl of Carrick, head of the house of Stewart and lord of Renfrew, Cunningham and Kyle – in a sense James could be termed Lord of Galloway too.10 Though the identification of Ayrshire itself is undisputed, the other place-names defining Galleron’s territory in lines 418/20 and 681 are more uncertain. The manuscript evidence on which the emendations above are based is as follows. Galloway Lonrik=Lanark

418 420 681 Levenax=Lennox 420 681 Lowther 420 681 Locher 678 Ayre 678

Galwey DIr lomond D lemmok † D losex D loynak D loyan D þe loþer † þe lile D lauer D to layre DIrTL

Lonwik Ir (line om Ir) Lannax Ir (line om Ir) Laudoune Ir (line om Ir) Logher Ir

Galowaye T Lomonde T lowpynge † T lenay T lebynge T Lowthyane T leveastre Ile T Lowyke T

Galawey L lomound L (L rewrites)§ leynanx L (L rewrites) lewans L (L rewrites)§ lowyk L

† word order transposed § L rewrites 681 using 685 as its source. The rhyme for 677, 679, 681, 683 is either -ile (as in DIr) or -ille (as in L); T has gyle:Kylle:Ile:om).

Galloway and not Galway in Ireland is clearly right, though the spelling of D and Ir seems to be right for the metre. Because 679 essentially repeats 419, I assume that 681 should repeat Galleron’s list in 420. Where readings vary in 420, 678 and 681, emendation cannot be based on majority readings because T and L are a genetic pair, with which D is often in agreement in readings where all three can be shown to be wrong in comparison with Ir. Thus Lomond (DTL) is probably wrong, perhaps influenced by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britannie. Ir lacks 681, L rewrites, and D and T guess freehand: 681 was probably already irretrievably corrupted in the common ancestor of all the extant copies and could not be reconstructed from the already damaged DTL 420. 8 For further discussion of the dating, see Allen, ‘Jests and jousts’, pp. 131–7. 9 Michael Brown, James I (Edinburgh, 1994), pp. 28, 32. 10 Allen, ‘Jests and jousts’, pp. 133–4.

Map 1. The Lands Galleron Claims

PLACE-NAMES IN THE AWNTYRS OFF ARTHURE

187

Lonrik and Levenax are the older forms of Lanark and Lennox. Lanark is geographically closer to Kyle than Loch Lomond, which lies to the north of the Firth of Clyde, but within the earldom of Lennox, a source of political tensions in Scotland in 1424–5.11 Lonwik Ir 420 closely resembles the older spelling of Lanark; lemmok D 681 could be a homoeograph (similar writing) of Lo[n]nrik, assuming e/o error, or, like most of these corrupted place-names, simply a homoeophone (a similar sounding word).12 678 Lowyke TL seems to anticipate ‘Lanark’ for 681, where T substitutes the homoeograph lowpynge (preceded by a deleted first attempt). The Lennox is retrievable from all witnesses in 420 and from none in 681. D, Ir and L all present a form ending in -x in 420, where leynanx L looks like a corruption of Levenax with v/y confusion, further corrupted as lenay T (or, alternatively, a TL reading was half corrected by L). 681 loynak D is explicable as a corruption of Lennox, with e/o confusion and an element of mishearing at an earlier stage of transmission; 681 lebynge T could be partly explained as v/b confusion (*levyn-). Lowther is conjectural: Loudon (Ir: Laudoune) and Lothian (T) are possible,13 but these recognizable names might have been substituted by scribes because they were famous (Loudon Hill was the site of a battle in 1307, but pl. ‘hills’ Ir is wrong), or because they were close to Edinburgh (Lothian). Loudon, however, is a recorded phonetic spelling for Lothian, and Lau- Ir could be a rationalization of an original *Lowdian: Lothian ‘appears in Gaelic as Loudin’, reflecting the vernacular Scots pronunciation, and Lowdiane/Lowdyan/Lowdiane are fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury versions of the surname Lothian.14 (Conversely, Lowthyane T 420, a genuine form for Lothian (Lowthiane, 1445, Louthiane 1472),15 could be a back-spelling for Loudon.) Both T and L (allowing for e/o confusion in either direction) have a first syllable in Low-/Lew-, and it is probable that the original had a place-name here which began Lowth-. If not Lothian, a possible reading is Lowther. The Lowther Hills in Lanarkshire, south-east of Kyle, would form an eastern boundary to Galleron’s territory, they are plural, have ‘th’, resemble both Lowthyane T 420 and loþer D 681 and, assuming y/þ confusion, loyan D 420. But ‘Lowther’ does not scan, where Lothian/Lowdian would! However, the Scottish and Northumbrian family name Lauder (from Lauder in Berwickshire, with a variant form Lawt(h)er), is recorded as Lawedir, 1298 and Lawadir, 1334, and by analogy an authorial form *Lowether for Lowther is perhaps conceivable. The first syllable of leveastre T suggests that T transposes the names in 681:

11 James I executed the earl of Lennox and two of his sons and appropriated the Lennox in 1425. 12 Piers Plowman: The A-Version, ed. George Kane (London, 1960), p. 113. The poem is short and topical

and easily memorized before being written down after performing or auditing a recital: a ‘homoeophone’ (my term) would be a memorially supplied substitution. 13 Several of these are upland boundaries; Linda Gowans suggests the Lomond Hills (to the north-east of the other places claimed by Galleron) rather than the Loch. But as Galleron also claims the Lennox, ‘Loch Lomond’ may be right. 14 George F. Black, The Surnames of Scotland their origin, meaning, and history (New York, 1946), s.v. Lothian. 15 The current surname Lowden derives from Loudoun (sic) in Cunningham, and, as Louden in Fife, perhaps from Lothian (Surnames of Scotland, ibid.).

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lowpynge (p/þ confusion) should correspond to the third name in the line (Lowther/ Lothian) while leveastre looks like a version of Levenax.16 The three place-names in 420 and 681 are therefore probably Lanark, Lennox and possibly Lowther or Lothian.17 The remaining names to consider are those in 678 and the readings þe lile D and (leveastre) Ile T in 681. Locher 678 is suggested by Logher Ir. Lowyk(e) TL possibly anticipates 681 where Lonwik is a probable reading, reflecting 420 Ir; lauer D looks like an auditory approximation to Logher.18 This could represent Lugar (east of Ayrshire) or Lochar (Moss), in Dumfries, a dangerous barrier to be negotiated on the route from England. The reading to Layre 678 T is clearly a corruption of til Ayre. Lastly, 681 Ile T and lile D, the only two witnesses for this line, could be right. James I held the Smaller Cumbrae island in the Firth of Clyde (see Map 1), suggesting ‘l’Isle’ as a correct reading, but the rhyme scheme in this stanza is not secure: DIr rhyme on -ile in 677, 679, 681 and 683, while L rhymes on -ille, and T has the mixed rhyme 677 gyle: 679 Kylle: 681 Ile and lacks 683 and 685 through eye-skip from 682a to 685b. Rhyme on -ille is insecure: L alone reads grylle for gile in 677 to accommodate it and thus for withouten gile, ‘in all good faith’ presents ‘without ill-feeling’, the former more probable as a restitution formula. The rhyme in 681 should be on -ile. Ir abandoned and L omitted 681, making up a line based on 685. T wrote leveastre hille Ile, cancelled hille Ile and wrote Iles; he had earlier in the line deleted an attempt at lowpynge. Just possibly leveastre Ile T might be a corruption of *Levedy Isle: Lady Isle is a small island off the Ayrshire coast near Troon.19 Only D has þe lile, its near agreement with T perhaps no more than an inherited error from DTL, the common ancestor. If any island is intended, Gawain is describing Galleron’s lands from the perspective of the western coastal boundary and the south-eastern limit (if Lochar Moss is intended) whereas Galleron in 418–420 used the northern and eastern limits. The bounds of Galleron’s lands as he and Gawain name them encircle Ayrshire and Galloway, moving north either from Lochar Moss or the Lowther (or Lothian) Hills through South Lanarkshire to Lennox (? Lomond) as the outer limits (Map 1). Such places would be familiar from trading and raiding over the border and the Solway Firth.20 (ii) Lands which Gawain gets in compensation Between lines 665 and 669 Arthur cedes Gawain land in Wales (666) and specifically Glamorgan (665), with two baronies in Brittany (670), on condition he restore Galleron’s lands. There has been no agreement on what the four place-names in 667–9 denote, and the emendations proposed are very conjectural. The manuscripts read: 16 The jingling readings Lonwik and Lannax 420 Ir may be echoed distantly in 681 T and D. 17 Hanna, Pursuing History, reads ‘Lonrik, Lennex and Loudon’ in 420, but reads with D in 681. 18 Helen Phillips associates the form with Laversdale, west of Carlisle, and Laver in Fife (The Awntyrs off

Arthure at the Terne Wathelyne, Lancaster Modern Spelling Texts 1 (University of Lancaster, 1988). 19 I thank Linda Gowans for pointing this out. 20 Apart from authorized travel by pilgrims and merchants, the inhabitants of the marches of both realms

‘daily commit armed incursion, robberies, pillages, prizes of prisoners, cattle raids, raids on goods, and other acts of war’, as John duke of Lancaster complained in 1406 (Cynthia Neville, Violence, Custom and Law: the Anglo-Scottish Border Lands in the Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh, 1998), p. 104).

PLACE-NAMES IN THE AWNTYRS OFF ARTHURE

Caerphilly 667 Ulster hall (?) holy L Warkworth 669 Waterford 669

Criffones D kirfir Ir 668 Vlsturhalle D hulkers home Ir

189

Gryffons T cuntres & L husters haulle T Hulster al

wayford D Wayifforthe Ir Wayfurthe T wayteford L Waterforde D Waturforth Ir Wakfelde T watirford L

Hanna follows D. Andrew Breeze has confirmed that Ir kirfir is Cerffili/Caerphilly, held by the Despensers.21 Ralph Neville’s daughter Eleanor had been married to Richard lord le Despenser, who died under age in 1414 (she later married Henry, second lord Percy).22 Caerphilly had been in the dower of Constance (d.1416), daughter of Edward III’s son Edmund de Langley, married to Thomas, lord Despenser, father of Eleanor Neville’s first husband, and aunt of Richard of York, Ralph Neville’s ward, who is discussed below. On Thomas’s death she lived with Thomas Holland, earl of Kent (d.1408), her stepmother’s nephew. His daughter Elizabeth had been married to Ralph Neville’s eldest son, John (their son Ralph, Neville’s heir and still a minor, was thus ‘the earl’s grandson of Kent’, cf. The Awntyrs 482). The Welsh names therefore reflect marriage connections of the Neville family, often with scandalous aspects which would merit the ghost’s strictures. The two/three Irish names also have Neville connections, particularly with Ralph’s ward, Richard of York, though Breeze believes that D Vlstur Halle in 668 is Oysterlew, in South Wales, held by Humphrey, duke of Gloucester.23 As Richard of York was lord of Ulster, there could be justification for reading ‘Ulster’ here, though ‘Ulster’ 668 D, like ‘Wakefield’ (669 T), may be a substitution of a familiar name, especially as each is unique in its occurrence.24 Ir too has a place-name, presumably ‘Holker Hall’, which may reflect the scribe’s familiarity with Cartmel Priory in Furness and its environs, close to the scribe’s origin in Hale in north Lancashire. Warkworth, conjectural, suggested by the first element in Wakfelde T (in transposed order) and the final element in Wayifforthe IrT, was the birthplace of Ralph Neville’s heiress great-grandmother.25 Breeze reads ‘Wexford’, held by Talbot who married Ralph Neville’s niece.26 Waterford in 669 (DIrL) does not have an obvious connection with Richard of York, but with Wexford it had important trade links with Chester and Bristol and these names could be original. Textual analysis yields no certainty about Gawain’s compensatory lands in 667–9, except perhaps ‘Caerphilly’ 667. T and Ir may substitute familiar placenames with similar forms in 668 and 669, while ‘Wayford’ and ‘Waterford’ DLIr 21 ‘The Awntyrs off Arthure: Caerphilly, Oysterlow, and Wexford’, Arthuriana 9:4 (1999): 63–8. 22 Richard Neville’s son Richard (Warwick the ‘Kingmaker’) became lord of Glamorgan (cf. 665) when

23 24 25 26

he inherited most of his father-in-law Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick’s lands in 1449. Beauchamp’s wife Isabella (md 1423) was widow of another Richard Beauchamp, earl of Worcester (d. 1422), and sister of Richard lord le Despenser to whom Caerphilly had passed. ‘Caerphilly’, 66–7. Richard of York became earl of Ulster in 1425 with his Mortimer inheritance, and if correct ‘Ulster’ would be another pointer to the date of The Awntyrs. DNB, s.n. Neville, Ralph. Warkworth was a Percy stronghold. Another possibility is Wark, which came into the Neville family by mutual exchange with the Montagues in 1397. ‘Caerphilly’, 65–6. Breeze rejects Hanna’s ‘Wathford’ for Wayford, preferring ‘Wexford’ via a recorded early form Waysford. Wexford and Waterford were in open rebellion in 1448, perhaps influencing scribes.

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669 could be a reduplicative coupling perhaps already substituted in the exclusive common ancestor of all the extant manuscripts. Either the poet or the scribes intended Gawain’s new holdings to echo the lands and family network of the young Richard, duke of York. (iii) Lands in Europe The political context of the European place-names in the Ghost’s harangue does not contradict the dating of 1424–5 for the Galleron episode suggested by the identifiable Scottish names and their association with James I. The ghost declares that France has been conquered by Arthur and Brittany and Burgundy are both in his allegiance (274/6), alluding to Arthur’s fight with Frollo of France (275). The specific reference to Brittany and Burgundy does not derive from Arthur’s conquests and the defeat of Frollo in the alliterative Morte Arthure (3345, 3404, 4208). I have shown elsewhere that it refers to a fragile alliance between Brittany, Burgundy and England, made in April 1423 and already endangered by June 1424 when dukes John of Bedford and Philip of Burgundy appealed for papal arbitration because Humphrey of Gloucester’s marriage to Jacqueline of Hainault threatened Burgundy’s territorial ambition.27 The truce was broken in December 1425. Whoever wrote the ghost’s warning in The Awntyrs was deeply conscious of the deaths since 1415 of many of the nobility of France, Burgundy and Scotland, especially in the Battle of Verneuil in 1424 where over 7,000 French and Scots were killed, the Scots being almost annihilated. The famous and successful English captain Thomas Montacute, earl of Salisbury, father of Richard Neville’s wife Alice, was at Verneuil and still in France in 1424. But the ghost, moaning ‘There is no lord[e] on lyue in þat l[e]de l[eft]’ (‘there is no lord among that people (the French) left alive’, 279), warns of the loss of Brittany (285): Arthur’s gift to Gawain of two baronies in Brittany in 670 will prove worthless.28 The regent in France from 1422 was John duke of Bedford, well known in the north of England. He held the barony of Kendal in Westmorland until 1435 and had been warden of the East March from 1403 to 1414. (iv) Local place-names in Cumberland The place-names in Scotland and on the continent help date and hence politicize the meaning of The Awntyrs off Arthure. But the poem is set in a precisely identified location in Cumberland: Carlisle (3, 690), Inglewood (709), Tarn Wadling (2), Plumpton Lawn (475) and Randolfe/Randil Sete Hall (337). Tarn Wadling was a legendary small lake now drained, just east of High Hesket off the Roman road from Scotland;29 it was likely an ancient halting point for drovers using the route between England and Scotland.30 It is nine miles north of Penrith, and nine south of Carlisle (see Map 2) and near Plumpton, where Galleron 27 For more detailed discussion of the continental references see ‘Jests and jousts ’, pp. 135–7. 28 ‘Bretayne’ is Britain (unusually at this date) in 708, and presumably Gawain is ‘from Britain’ (297, if

not Burgundy, 30), but must mean ‘Brittany’ in 670. 29 Out of scale on the Gough Map. Gervase of Tilbury (Otia Imperialia, III, 69) refers to the tarn as

Laikibrait (French ‘Lai-ki-brait’, ‘lake that cries’, R.C. Cox, ‘Tarn Wadling and Gervase of Tilbury’s “Laikibrait” ’ Folklore 85 (1974), 128–31); bells rang there at seven every morning. 30 The Woodland Trust, who manage the site: private communication.

PLACE-NAMES IN THE AWNTYRS OFF ARTHURE

Map 2. North-West England

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and Gawain joust. The tarn was in the manor of Armathwaite, held by Sir John Skelton MP, who had fought against the earl of Douglas at Homildon Hill in 1402.31 Skeltons, like the Lowthers, were members of the Neville affinity.32 Plumpton was held by the Hutton family for many generations. Arthur came to Carlisle to hunt in Inglewood (3, 690) and retires to Randolfe Sete Hall for the night.33 Inglewood was the largest of the royal forests. As warden of the forests north of Trent, Richard Neville had jurisdiction over Inglewood, including Tarn Wadling. Neville’s base was Penrith, which Ralph Neville gave to his wife Joan (perhaps in dower). Opinions vary on the date of Penrith Castle, but John Marsh thinks it was begun by Ralph Neville soon after he was given a life tenure of Penrith (later altered to tenure in tail) in 1397; the castle is referred to in a deed of 1412.34 Joan Neville granted Penrith to Richard, her eldest son, who used its revenues (it was well populated) in many of his transactions.35 The tenants of the manor of Penrith were the Dacres and the Cliffords, the latter family being the possible suppliers of material for scribe L.36 In 1399 Ralph Neville was permitted to negotiate a deal with the Scots: Penrith was to be spared attack in return for similar immunity for Dumfries (burned by the English in 1415 in retaliation for Douglas’s attack on Penrith the same year).37 This region was controlled by the warden of the West March, who since 1420 was also Richard Neville (then aged 20). The warden was based at Carlisle castle, and though Richard was a notorious absentee, there is evidence that he was present at Carlisle in 1424–5 because a record of that date refers to his ordering of a consignment of eels to be sent to Carlisle.38 As March Warden, with the warden of the East March, his brother-in-law Henry Percy, and with representatives from England and Scotland, Richard would enact march law on the Days of March. The English Crown finally conceded the reinstatement of these in 1424 (as John duke of

31 For Skelton see Roskell, Commons, pp. 215–16. Skelton had been lessee for life of the purpresture of

32 33

34 35 36 37

38

Armathwaite in Inglewood since 1387, though Armathwaite Castle may be mid-fifteenth century. He was knight of the shire for Cumberland in 1422, served several times as sheriff, and on various local commissions including the commission for peace in Cumberland from 1420 to 1437. Sir John later married into the Tilliol family of Torpenhow, tenants of the Nevilles (Roskell, Commons, pp. 73, 84, 88). One of his sons worked for Humphrey duke of Gloucester, Joan Neville’s half brother. Tarn ‘Wadalyne’ still belonged to Armathwaite Castle and produced excellent carp in the eighteenth century (William Hutchinson, The History and Antiquities of Cumberland, 2 vols. [Carlisle: G. Jollie, 1794], II, 491); in 1407 Sir John Skelton was granted several closes in Inglewood Forest (Roskell, Commons, pp. 215–16). John Marsh, ‘Landed Society’, pp. 84, 258; a Skelton was a Neville retainer in 1453 (ibid., p. 83). Randolf occurs in several local place-names. Philippa Neville’s son Randolph was later Lord Dacre (Henry Summerson, Medieval Carlisle: the City and Borders, 2 vols. [Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1993], II, p. 444). John Marsh, ‘Landed Society’, p. 276. The rent was £400; she also granted him Middleham in Yorkshire, his main seat (R.L. Storey, The End of the House of Lancaster, 2nd edn [Gloucester, 1986] p. 112). Frank Musgrove, The North of England: History from Roman Times to the Present (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 146. Penrith was also attacked in 1345 and 1380 and Carlisle in 1388; the Eden valley to Penrith and the Inglewood closes and lawns were ‘regularly targeted’ (Marsh, ‘Landed Society’, pp. 215–16, 222. The English also attacked the Scots (Neville, Violence, Custom, Law, p. 104) and the English gentry frequently attacked each other. John Marsh, ‘Landed Society’, p. 32. Richard must have been present for duties as Justice of the Peace in Cumberland from 1421 to 1435.

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March).39

Bedford had repeatedly requested when warden of the East They were activated from June 1425 and maintained throughout the fifteenth century even in times of war. On such days representatives from the ‘debateable lands’ on either side of the border in each realm came to have grievances or injustices settled.40 For many centuries legal jousts had decided disputes in the borderlands; the custom had declined by the 1400s but still occurred and may have inspired Galleron and Gawain’s contest, though Ayrshire and its baronies of Cunninghame, Kyle and Carrick are not part of the debatable lands.41 The Audience The most likely patron or dedicatee of The Awntyrs is Joan Neville, half-sister of John, duke of Bedford, and wife of Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland.42 Joan was also the aunt of James I’s wife Jane Beaufort, whom he married in February 1424. Jane was the daughter John Beaufort, earl of Somerset (d.1410), elder brother of Joan Neville. Their four Beaufort children were legitimated before Gaunt married Catherine Swynford in February 1396.43 In November 1396 Joan Beaufort married Ralph Neville, who was created first earl of Westmorland in 1397. They had fourteen children.44 She was Ralph’s second wife, he her second husband; she had had two daughters by her first.45 39 His father, Gaunt, had met James I’s father, as earl of Carrick, at a March Day on 18 January 1378

(Goodman, John of Gaunt, p. 73). 40 Cynthia J. Neville, ‘Keeping the Peace on the Northern Marches in the Later Middle Ages’, EHR 109

(1994): 1–25, at 20–1. See also Cynthia J. Neville, Violence, Custom and Law, esp. pp. 103–106, 125. 41 Thornton from Yorkshire and the Ireland scribe from Hale, near Cartmel. N. Lancashire, best represent

42

43

44

45

Scottish place-names; the Midland scribes D and L (and Thornton) present Dorset 295, corrupted to Desese (corrected Desesde) by Ir. All present Ramsey 294, probably because of the religious house there and all locate Arthur’s death correctly in Cornwall 301, famous from legend. John’s association with the north was very strong until he left for France in 1422. In 1417, with his half-brother Thomas, duke of Exeter, and the earls of Westmorland and Northumberland, he beat back the Scots besieging Roxburgh under Archibald Douglas; Archibald fell at Verneil in 1424 (my thanks to Jim Bolton for this information). Legitimation was by papal bull in September 1396, on condition Catherine had not committed adultery, and by royal patent approved in Parliament in February 1397 (G.L. Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort: A Study of Lancastrian Ascendancy and Decline [Oxford, 1988], pp. 4, 6–7). Catherine was governess from 1376–81 to Gaunt’s two eldest children by his first wife, Blanche. ‘Beaufort’ was a long defunct title of a lost Lancastrian lordship in France (Anthony Goodman, John of Gaunt:An Exercise of Princely Power in Fourteenth-Century Europe [London, 1992], p. 363). Henry Beaufort became bishop of Lincoln, and Thomas, duke of Exeter. All four were debarred from the English throne in 1407, but genealogies produced in London in the 1430s and 1440s represent Joan and Ralph’s offspring as members of the royal house (Michael Hicks, Warwick the Kingmaker [London, 1998], p. 14). On Catherine see Jeannette Lucraft, ‘Missing from History’, History Today 52:5 (2002): 11–17. Richard Neville, eldest son of Ralph and Joan, was married by 1421 to the Montagu heiress, Alice, and inherited her father’s title earl of Salisbury in 1429 (Joel Rosenthal, Patriarchy and Families of Privi lege in Fifteenth-Century England [Philadelphia, 1991], p. 157): he secured writ of seisin for the title in February 1424, the claim contested by Sir Richard Montagu but supported by Henry Beaufort; Alice’s father died the following July (Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort, p, 183). By midsummer 1424 Joan and Ralph’s eldest son Richard Neville and his wife Alice, the Salisbury heiress, were already parents and wealthy (Calendar of Fine Rolls, 1422–1430, p. 81: 10 June 1424, Alice Neville granted a fifth part of the dower of Lucy, wife of the earl of Kent; Richard has issue by Alice; ibid., p. 79: 2 June 1424, Richard given the keeping of the properties and rents inherited by his nephew Ralph from his uncle Edmund, earl of Kent, until the boy’s majority). Her first husband was Sir Robert Ferrers of Oversley, md 1392, d. 1396. The children of Ralph Neville’s

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The probable date of 1424–5 suggested by the Scottish and European placenames was a significant year of betrothals, marriages and consequent land acquisition in the extensive Neville family network. In 1424 Jane Beaufort’s cousin Edward Neville married Elizabeth Beauchamp, and her sister Anne was betrothed to the earl of Stafford’s heir about then. Nine-year-old Cecily Neville, youngest of Joan and Ralph Neville’s children, was betrothed in or before October 1424 to thirteen-year-old Richard, duke of York, heir of his uncle the duke of York, also sole heir of his father the earl of Cambridge (executed in 1415), and sole heir from 19 January 1425 of the vast Mortimer estates. Ralph Neville had purchased Richard’s wardship and marriage in 1423;46 on Ralph’s death Joan became his guardian and petitioned for a larger maintenance.47 Richard was knighted in May1426 and summoned to court in 1428 by the duke of Gloucester.48 In October 1425 Ralph Neville died. The duke of York was lord of Ulster, Meath and Connaught, and later became the richest man in England. His castle at Sandal near Wakefield became his administrative centre, perhaps accounting for T’s reading in 669, and in 1460 he was to die in battle with the Lancastrians at Wakefield. In The Awntyrs Galleron marries the nameless lady who leads him into Arthur’s presence, and is knighted as a member of the Round Table. The poem would not be inappropriate for a magnate family marriage, betrothal or knighting celebration, or a ceremonial joust or a hunt, perhaps in Durham before James, or at Middleham or Raby. It is semi-dramatic and family members could have acted the parts. The poem is set in winter and its most likely dates of performance in its extant form are between New Year 1424 (when James I and Jane Beaufort were about to marry), and some time early in 1425 after Richard of York came into his inheritance and before Ralph’s death in October.49 The Awntyrs is a poem for and about high-status-living and its consequences. As it turned out, the ghost was right to warn her audience. Disaster befell the Nevilles two decades later.50 Perhaps the magnate connection and the fulfilment of the prophecy in line 310 of the fall of Arthur’s kingdom through a boy then still playing at the ball secured the continued popularity of The Awntyrs. In early 1425 the unfortunate Henry VI was three years old.

46

47 48 49 50

second marriage made better marriages and had better provisions his will, causing bitter dissention in the family after Joan’s death in 1440. Custody granted 13 December 1423 (Calendar of Fine Rolls 1422–30, p. 64). The instalments for the marriage were completed by Christmas 1425 (ibid.). For Richard of York’s wardship see P.A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York 1422–1460 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 1–4. Harriss claims that when Ralph died ‘York seems to have been transferred to the duke of Exeter’ (Cardinal Beaufort, p. 146). His father had married the daughter of Thomas, sixth lord Clifford (Roskell, Commons, p.189). Calendar of Patent Rolls 1422–29, p. 343. The Neville family marriages are detailed in Rosenthal, Patriarchy, pp. 151–65. The arrival of a lady leading Galleron on his expensive Frisian horse resembles the reversals of Hocktide, the week after Easter, where in game the women led men about demanding payment. The political reverberations were more far-reaching than the poet(s) could have realized: after Joan’s death in 1440 Ralph Neville’s children by his two marriages were in serious strife, and the Neville rivalry with the Percies largely ignited the Wars of the Roses. Cecily Neville lived until 1495, in a deeply pious household. Like her mother Joan, she had a keen interest in books (see Rosenthal, Patriarchy, pp. 258–346 for an account of Cecily’s regime in her later years).

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For countess Joan there would be delicate personal relevance in Guinevere’s mother’s plea for masses to expiate her broken vow. Before he died in 1399 Gaunt had made provision (1398) for a chantry in Lincoln cathedral for masses for himself and Catherine Swynford, his mistress from the early 1370s.51 Though Catherine died in 1403 in a tenement owned by Lincoln Cathedral and was buried in the cathedral, the chantry was not supplied. Joan eventually had the provision for her parents reinstated by royal licence in 1437. Three years later, she herself died and was buried, alongside her mother, in Lincoln Cathedral.52 Her mother’s unmarried state when the children were born, despite her later marriage and their legitimation just in time for Joan’s marriage to Ralph Neville, must have troubled Joan for many years.53 The sombre frame of The Awntyrs could reflect a family preoccupation with that lack of that provision for Catherine’s soul.

Play on Place-Names? The place-names in The Awntyrs signal a serious political message about Anglo-French and Anglo-Scottish relations, at a critical moment in history. But there may be a qualification of the macabre and politically ominous message of the poem. This sophisticated amalgam of folk narrative, exhortation and romance is not all doom and death; there are subtle modulations of tone: grim comedy when the ghost, clad only in snakes, toads and a rotting shroud, confronts the ‘glittering’ Guinevere (20–1), excitement of hunt and joust, modish fashions. The scribes, and presumably their readers, associated The Awntyrs with hunting. The scribes D and L also copied Dame Juliana Berners’ Boke of Hunting.54 The Neville family and affinity included many huntsmen: Richard of York’s paternal uncle Edward of York wrote a translation of Gaston Febus’s Livre du Chasse as The Master of Game; Richard Neville, like his ancestors, was chief forester north of Trent. William Hutton, who held Plumpton, was a forester. So too, briefly, was Geoffrey Lowther whose family held Warcop in Cumberland and Lowther just over the Westmorland border. Geoffrey, knight of the shire for Kent in 1422 and 1426, was in the affinity of Ralph Neville’s brother Thomas Lord Furnival; Geoffrey’s nephew Sir Robert acted as one of Ralph Neville’s executors.55 51 Goodman, John of Gaunt, p. 258, and John H. Harvey, Catherine Swynford’s Chantry Lincoln Minster

Pamphlets, 2nd ser. 6 (Lincoln, n.d.,) pp. 11–12. 52 Goodman, John of Gaunt, p. 366. The two tombs are now head to foot. On the tombs and the provision

of the chantry chapel see Harvey, Catherine Swynford’s Chantry, p. 3. (My thanks to Frank Millard for this source and related information.) 53 Goodman, John of Gaunt, pp. 362–3, who suggests that Joan was remedying a deficiency of Gaunt’s executors. 54 See Hanna, The Awntyrs off Arthure, Introduction, pp. 8–11, on the make up of the now dismembered miscellany which included Douce 324 (Bodleian Library MS 21898). The Book of Hunting is now in Bodleian Library MS 14637) and Lambeth MS 491 contains the only other extant version. 55 Geoffrey Lowther, through his connection with Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, was receiver and attorney general for parts of the duchy of Lancaster estates. His brother John ‘seems to have been tutor to Thomas lord Clifford in 1378–80’ and members of the immediate family were knights of the shire and sheriff several times (Roskell, Commons, pp. 201–203). Richard Neville’s affinity included Robert Danby, his councillor and executor and feofee and executor of members of the Neville family and their servants. Danby’s first wife was the daughter of Ralph FitzRandolph of Spennithorne, another of

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Land, chief concern of a high status audience, perhaps also provides a humorous subtext.56 The names which Galleron recites and Gawain tries to repeat (if 681 repeats 480), may not simply prove that Arthur is covetous for land. They might have an in-house amusement value too: they are remarkably similar to place-names near Tarn Wadling. Because Cumbria and Galloway were both occupied by Brythonic Celts, Irish, Saxons, and Scandinavians in turn, some names are etymologically identical, but others, looking and sounding similar, are not cognate: one may be Celtic, the other Scandinavian or Anglo-Saxon. The similarity of place-names (two Kirkoswalds, Wigton/Wigtown) would have been familiar on both sides of the border: trading continued even during war, and on Days of March English and Scots disputants met for settlement. James I, whose baronial lands so closely match Galleron’s, passed through Durham only three months before the negotiations for reinstating the Days of March were held there. Even the largely non-resident Cliffords and Nevilles would have known their own holdings. In a light-hearted gathering this auditory similarity of toponyms on either side of the border can be represented as ‘theft’ of one landowner’s territory by another: ‘He claims Carrick; Carrock is mine!’57 The similar toponyms are these:58 Scotland AYR (Inber-air 1490 = ‘Ayr mouth’, early or pre-Celtic)59 LEVENAX (LENNOX) (from R. Leven rather than leamhan ‘elm place’)60 CARRICK (Gaelic carraig ‘rock, cliff’)61 LOWTHER (cf. Old Irish lothur ‘canal’) CUMNOCK (Cunnok, 1461,

Gaelic cumin ‘shrine’) CUNNINGHAM (?OE cyning)62 KYLE (Kiil, 1179, Gaelic Caol

North-West England AIRA Air(e)y Beck (ON eyrá ‘gravel bank/stream) LEVENS (Westmlnd ‘Leofa’s headland’, Levens 1352) LEVINGTON (from R. Levyn, 1383, now R. Lyne);

Cumbrian = ? ‘smooth, fast’) CARROCK FELL (carreg ‘hill’ Carrok 1261) CASTLE CARROCK (Carok 1357, caerog ‘fortified’) LOWTHER (from R. Lowther, prob ON= ‘foamy’) CRUMMOCK WATER Crumboch 1285, Cromocke 1578, former river name = ‘crooked’, Old British) CUMWHINTON (Comquintyn 1363 ‘Quintin’s valley’) ?CARLISLE (caer + Luguvallium ‘place of the Luguvalos’)

‘a straight’) LOUDON (1330 LOWEDON,

LOUDON HILL (? From John of Loudon, 1332)

ON logi+dun = flame hill)

56

57 58

59 60 61 62

Richard’s retainers (A.J. Pollard, North-eastern England during the Wars of the Roses: Lay Society, War and Politics, 1450–1500 [Oxford, 1990], pp. 133–4). The silver ‘saltire engrailed’ (Awntyrs 307) taken from Modred’s arms in the Alliterative Morte Arthure, could have raised an eyebrow or a chuckle: the Neville coat of arms was gules a saltire argent, and the Percy arms argent a fess engrailed or. Carrock Fell was pronounced /kærik/ (J. G. Goodchild, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society (1881–2): 50–76 at 69. Scottish Place-Name derivations as in Nicolaisen, Scottish Place-Names: Their Study and Significance (London, 1976), Mike Darton, The Place-Names in Scotland (Orpington, 1994) and James B. Johnston, Place-Names of Scotland, 3rd edn (London, 1934). Cumbric was spoken in Carrick and Galloway (Nicolaisen, p. 162). Nicolaisen, Scottish Place-Names, p. 187. River Leven may derive from *limo = ‘flood’ (Darton). Nicolaisen, Scottish Place-Names, p. 45. Cunningham, ‘pail’ (Celtic, Darton), or ‘king’s homestead’ (OE), is not Bede’s ‘Incuneningum’ since Cunningham was not annexed until 750 AD (Nicolaisen, 70–71).

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Galleron’s chief markers for his territory: Carrick and Cumnock, Cunningham and Kyle, with Ayr, Lennox and Lowther/Loudon/Lothian, are exactly or closely echoed in Cumberland. Castle Carrock, held by Skelton, was a dependent manor of Gilsland (Dacre),63 and Carrock Fell lies on the borders of the Honour of Cockermouth, Percy territory,64 as does Crummock Water, a valuable fishery resource. Cunningham is similar, in sound at least, to Cumwhinton (pronounced ‘Cowinton’ in the eighteenth century, but spelled Comwhintunge in the Wetheral Priory Register),65 close to Wetheral Priory and part-held by the Skeltons; Kyle, spelled Kylle in MS T, resembles Carlill, T’s form for Carlisle, the county town and border stronghold.66 There are further similarities: Ayr resembles Aira Force and River, beside Ullswater near the seat of the barons of Greystoke; Levenax (Lennox) resembles two names: Levens, the seat in Westmorland of the Redmane family, prominent on the border and custodians of Carlisle Castle in the 1380s, and Levington (now Kirklinton), a castle strategically close to the Scottish border, held by the Dacres of Gilsland and frequently laid waste by Scottish incursions. If we read Loudon in 420 and 681 it has its equivalent in Loudon Hill in Dacre parish. If, alternatively, the reading Lowther Hills is adopted in 420 and 681, the form is identical to Lowther, the river and village of Lowther just south of Penrith, giving name and seat to the powerful and numerous Lowther family.67 Of the Scottish names in or restorable to the poem, only Lanark,68 ‘Ile/ Lile’ and Lochar seem to have no parallel in Cumbria.69 If these identical and similar place-names are not mere, if rather uncanny, coincidences, they could form a playful toponymic game in The Awntyrs, reflecting a growing if temporary optimism in the northern marches in 1424–5. France was in a very precarious state, but hopes of peace with Scotland focussed, mistakenly, on the return to Scotland of James I and his English bride, and on plans to restore law and order to the borders.70 The Awntyrs may well celebrate the Anglo-Scottish rapprochement in James and Jane’s marriage and other magnate unions of land and family.71 Whoever wrote The Awntyrs must have been closely associated with one of the northern magnate families (very likely the Nevilles) and their associated gentry families, and aware of their concern with political issues, local and national. He or she may well have been a religious. Like most magnate households, the Nevilles had a younger son educated for the church. Robert Neville, son of Joan and Ralph, 63 Philippa, Ralph Neville’s daughter by his first wife, married Thomas, lord Dacre of Gilsland, who had

been in his custody and wardship (Ernest F, Jacob, The Fifteenth Century (Oxford, 1961), p. 320. 64 Ralph Neville’s grandson Ralph was born at Cockermouth, temporarily in Neville’s hands after the

1403 Percy uprising. 65 J.E. Prescott, ed., The Register of the Priory of Wetherhal (London, 1897), p. 451. 66 The unlocated ‘Lyle’ D 681, probably ‘l’Isle’, reflects the second element of Carlisle (and also Edward

Neville’s marriage into the Lisle Beauchamp family). 67 Robert Lowther dominated the Penrith estate offices from 1405, and from 1414 till at least 1426 he was

steward of Penrith (Marsh, ‘Landed Society’, 143). 68 Lanerc, in modern Welsh llanerch ‘clear space, glade’ occurs in seven place-names in Scotland

(Nicolaisen, p. 164). 69 Lowthian 420 T occurs in the hamlet of Lowthiangill, two miles from Tarn Wadling. 70 A petition to parliament in 1421 complained that the north had suffered badly from raiding, famine,

plague and floods: the truce of 1424 was welcomed (Summerson, Medieval Carlisle, II, p. 405). 71 ‘Jests and jousts ’ (p. 137) wrongly dates Richard Neville’s marriage to 1425.

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became bishop of Salisbury in 1427 at the age of 23 (and in 1438 bishop of Durham like his great-uncle Alexander). Robert might have composed all or part of The Awntyrs as early as his twenty-first year.72 Guinevere writes to religious ‘into the west’ for masses (703): religious (part?)-authorship is probable, and Richard Neville’s seat at Middleham was forty miles to the south-east. The Awntyrs may well be a two-stage composition, which would account for its curious blend of otherworldly piety and this-worldly preoccupation with attributes of wealth.73 Possibly a woman composed or collaborated in the poem.74 A house of Benedictine Nuns at Armathwaite was very close to Tarn Wadling.75 Other local religious houses had connections with Tarn Wadling area. The Augustinian Canons of Carlisle had fishing rights in Tarn Wadling and appointed to the living at Hesket near Tarn Wadling; as Ralph Hanna has demonstrated, Augustinian Canons were strongly engaged in the production of literary works.76 A game over the naming of baronial parts would add yet another tonal colour to The Awntyrs off Arthure. True, the poem warns about landed wealth, the ease with which it is lost to the family inheritance and to the country, and the loss of one’s own salvation if it is abused. But to accentuate this view is a very one-sided, modern perspective. For its immediate audience, a play on similar place-names in The Awntyrs would signal a simultaneous celebration of status through land and name.

72 John of Bedford took up his duties on the Eastern March at the age of fourteen. 73 The metrics are more complex in the first section of The Awntyrs (confirmed by Ad Putter, private

communication). On the composition of The Awntyrs see Allen, ‘Some Sceptical Observations on the Editing of The Awntyrs off Arthure’, in Derek Pearsall, ed., Manuscripts and Texts: Editorial Problems in Later Middle English Literature (Bury St Edmunds, 1987), pp. 5–25: 23–4. 74 Ralph’s daughter Margaret was abbess of Barking; his sister and two other daughters were nuns (Rosenthal, Patriarchy, p. 173, n. 147). 75 Still commemorated in local place-names,Victoria County History of Cumberland, 2 vols., II, p. 137. The nuns claimed 216 acres north of the tarn in 1480 (ibid., p. 191). 76 ‘Augustinian Canons and Middle English Literature’, in The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths, ed. A.S.G. Edwards et al. (London, 2000), pp. 27–42. There were Austin Friars at Penrith, Franciscans and Dominicans in Carlisle, and Carmelites in Appleby.

17 Lancelot as Lover in the English Tradition before Malory ELIZABETH ARCHIBALD

The poet of the Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Malory seem to have assumed that their readers were familiar with the love story of Lancelot and Guinevere. This essay considers the available evidence for knowledge of the affair. Much attention has been paid to Malory’s French sources and his use of them, not least by Peter Field in a series of meticulous essays.1 Less attention has been paid to what Malory’s readers, and readers of earlier English Arthurian texts, may have known of such sources, and what they may or may not have expected in an Arthurian romance.2 For readers today, mention of Lancelot immediately brings to mind his doomed love affair with Guenevere, but this does not always seem to have been the case in late medieval England. The first extended treatment of the affair in Middle English, as far as we know, is the stanzaic Morte Arthur (probably written in the second half of the fourteenth century), a rather ballad-like version of the last part of their story largely derived from the Vulgate Mort Artu.3 In the opening episode of the Stanzaic Morte, Lancelot stays with the queen instead of going to the Winchester tournament, and is reproached by her, since she is afraid that they will be caught by Agravain: Knyghtes arme them bydene To the tournament to ride, With sheldes brode and helmes sheen To win grete honour and pride.

1

2

3

They have now been conveniently collected in his Malory: Texts and Sources (Cambridge, UK, 1998). The most recent overview of the Arthurian legend in England is the excellent collaborative volume The Arthur of the English, ed. W.J.R. Barron (Cardiff, 1999); multi-authored sections will be cited by title rather than by author. The Arthur of the French, ed. G.E. Burgess and K.E. Pratt, is forthcoming. One scholar who has focused on this problem is Carol M. Meale, to whose work I am much indebted. For a valuable general discussion, see Meale, ‘ “Gode men,/ Wives maydnes and alle men”: Romance and its Audiences’, in Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. Meale (Cambridge, UK,1994), pp. 209–25 (cited hereafter as ‘Romance and its Audiences’). References are taken from King Arthur’s Death: The Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure, ed. L.D. Benson (New York, 1974; reissued Exeter, 1986). See also the edition of P. F. Hissiger (The Hague, 1975); E. D. Kennedy, ‘The Stanzaic Morte Arthur: The Adaptation of a French Romance for an English Audience’, in Culture and the King, ed. M. Shichtman and J. Carley (Albany, NY, 1994), pp. 91–113; and C. Weinberg in The Arthur of the English, pp. 100–11. On Lancelot and Guenevere in the Arthurian tradition, see Lancelot and Guinevere: A Casebook, ed. L. Walters (London and New York, 1996).

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Launcelot left with the queen, And seke he lay that ilke tide; For love that was them between, He made enchesoun for to abide.

(49–56)

This is the first mention of Lancelot in the poem. ‘For love that was them between’ is a remarkably terse summary of their previous history and delicate situation, and there is not much further explanation. The poem would surely have been incomprehensible to an audience who did not already know the story of their love, as various critics have noted.4 Flora Alexander points out that readers’ knowledge of Lancelot’s fatal part in the ending of Camelot would have added irony to some of the later scenes in the poem where his return or success or safety cause great joy.5 The Stanzaic Morte was one of Malory’s major sources.6 For him the love affair is a crucial aspect of the Arthurian world: it inspires Lancelot to greater prowess, but it also causes him to fail in the Grail Quest, and it is one of the causes of the civil war and the end of Camelot. Malory makes his Lancelot rather henpecked and his Guenevere rather shrewish, but he does praise her as a ‘trew lover’, surprisingly, in the famous digression on love just before her abduction by Meliagaunt in the penultimate tale (1120.9–13). Malory’s first references to Lancelot are as oblique as those in the Stanzaic Morte, and also require previous knowledge of the story; all three are prophecies by Merlin. The first occurs when Merlin foretells that the two greatest lovers in the world will fight at the tomb of Launceor and Columbe, and then names them as Lancelot and Tristran; there is no mention of Guenevere (72.5–11). The second concerns an enchanted bed and Lancelot’s prowess as a warrior, not as a lover (91.11–14). The third occurs when Arthur announces that he wants to marry Guenevere (97.29–31): ‘Merlyon warned the kyng covertly that Gwenyver was nat holsom for hym to take to wyff. For he warned hym that Launcelot scholde love hir, and sche hym agayne’.7 The conclusion of the very brief account of Lancelot’s career and prowess at the beginning of the ‘Tale of Sir Lancelot’ also implies that the story of the affair would have been familiar to readers (253.15–19): ‘Wherefore quene Gwenyvere had hym in grete favoure aboven all othir knyghtis, and so he

4

5 6

7

Hissiger makes this point in his introduction (p. 6); he does offer an alternative explanation, that the poet ‘was simply so used to ballad style that he adapted many of its characteristics to this verse romance’, but it seems more plausible that readers did know about the affair already. The poem must have had some success, for the one extant copy was produced commercially in booklet form before it was bound into a larger collection (British Library, Harley 2252); see Weinberg in The Arthur of the English, p. 100 (citing Meale). F. Alexander, ‘ “The Treson of Launcelote du Lake”: Irony in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur’, in The Legend of Arthur in the Middle Ages, ed. P.B. Grout et al. (Cambridge, UK, 1983), pp. 15–27 (p. 24). Malory hardly mentions English sources, though he frequently refers to French books; see Field, ‘Malory’s Minor Sources’, Notes and Queries 224 (1979), 107–10, reprinted in Malory: Texts and Sources, pp. 27–31, and T. McCarthy, ‘Malory and his Sources’, in A Companion to Malory, ed. E. Archibald and A.S.G. Edwards (Cambridge, UK, 1996), pp. 75–95. All references are taken from The Works of Thomas Malory, ed. E. Vinaver, rev. P.J.C. Field, 3rd edn, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1990); pagination is continuous through the three volumes. This is an expansion of a much more obscure comment about Guenevere’s dangerous beauty in the source, the Suite du Merlin, where Lancelot is not named directly as Guenevere’s lover, and Arthur is unable to understand the warning (see Vinaver’s note). No such warning is given in an earlier English version of this scene in Of Arthour and of Merlin (early fourteenth century), ed. O.D. Macrae-Gibson, 2 vols., EETS OS 268 and 279 (London, 1973–9); see lines 3607–20.

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loved the quene agayne aboven all othir ladyes dayes of hys lyff, and for hir he dud many dedys of armys and saved her from the fyre thorow his noble chevalry.’ He gives no account of the first declarations of their love or their first kiss; no English Paul and Frances could have been led astray by his book, as Dante’s Paolo and Francesca were. According to E.D. Kennedy, ‘Malory was not free to ignore the adultery of Lancelot and Guenevere; the story was too well known, and nothing short of a denial of the love by Malory himself would have repressed it’.8 Is this really true? McCarthy notes that Lancelot is mentioned in earlier English texts as ‘a figure of gallantry’, but without much detail, and declares: ‘Indeed, certain major figures and episodes of the legend – Lancelot, Perceval, the Grail Quest, and Tristram – owe their existence in England almost entirely to Malory’s book, and the public’s lack of prior knowledge inevitably adds to the liberty of the traditional writer’.9 Helen Cooper also argues for general ignorance of the story:10 We need to consider very seriously a late-medieval population of England for the vast majority of whom Arthur was a great king supported by Gawain as his leading knight and overthrown by a usurping nephew; for whom, if they had heard of Lancelot at all, he was merely one of the minor knights; and to whom any ideas of Arthur’s incest and Lancelot’s adultery with Guenevere were either unknown, or else regarded as slanderous French fictions – as indeed they were.

James Carley, on the other hand, calls the Morte Darthur ‘a kind of encyclopaedia of the Arthurian legend as it circulated in England at the end of the Middle Ages’.11 How can we assess these diametrically opposed views? My aim in this essay is to consider the evidence for knowledge of Lancelot’s affair with Guenevere in England before Malory, and even before the Stanzaic Morte.12 Lori Walters states that ‘the depiction of Lancelot and Guenevere in fourteenthcentury England is an outgrowth of their portrayal in Latin or vernacular chronicles [. . .] where the two are not lovers, or in the French Vulgate Cycle’ (where of course they are).13 In fact, Lancelot is largely ignored by medieval English chroniclers, who generally follow Geoffrey of Monmouth’s lead in their accounts of the reign of Arthur; he is not mentioned in the very popular Brut, for instance. In the chronicle tradition it is Mordred who seduces Guenevere, and Gawain who is Arthur’s champion and top knight.14 Felicity Riddy writes of ‘the supernumerary presence to 8

9 10

11 12

13 14

E.D. Kennedy, ‘Malory’s “Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake”, the Vulgate Lancelot, and the Post-Vulgate Roman du Graal’, in Arthurian and Other Studies Presented to Shunichi Noguchi, ed. T. Suzuki and T. Mukai (Cambridge, UK, 1993), pp. 107–29 (p. 124). McCarthy, ‘Malory and his Sources’, p. 79. Helen Cooper, ‘The Lancelot-Grail Cycle in England: Malory and His Predecessors’ in A Companion to the Vulgate Cycle, ed. C. Dover (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 147–62 (p. 153). I am grateful to Prof. Cooper for allowing me to see this essay before publication (it is an expanded version of a plenary lecture given at the International Arthurian Congress in Toulouse in 1999). J. Carley, ‘Arthur in English History’, in The Arthur of the English, pp. 47–57 (p. 55). I shall not discuss Lancelot of the Laik, which was produced in Scotland in the late fifteenth century, though its declared topic is the love of Lancelot for the queen (the source is the French Prose Lancelot); see my essay ‘Lancelot of the Laik: sources, genre, reception’ in The Scots and the Medieval Arthurian Legend, ed. R. Purdie and N. Royan (forthcoming). Walters, Introduction to Lancelot and Guinevere, p. xxvii. On the chronicle tradition see R.H. Fletcher, The Arthurian Material in the Chronicles, 2nd edn, rev. R.S. Loomis (New York, 1966); E.D. Kennedy, Chronicles, vol. 8 of A Manual of the Writings in

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which he [Lancelot] is condemned in works drawn from the chronicle tradition’.15 In the Alliterative Morte Arthure, which has both chronicle and romance elements, Lancelot is mentioned several times, but nothing is said of his relations with the queen.16 He speaks out for war in the debate about the demands of the Roman envoys (368 ff), and later wounds the emperor (2073 ff), but he is not often singled out in the plot. He is merely one of many brave knights; when he dies, he is lumped together with others (he alliterates with Lot, Lionel and Lowes), and Arthur makes no special comment on his death (4262–73). Lydgate must have known the French romance tradition (he links Lancelot and Guenevere in an allusion discussed below), yet he seems to have had no difficulty in omitting Lancelot altogether in his Fall of Princes, as do his sources, Boccaccio and Premierfait; the final disaster is all the fault of Mordred (here Arthur’s cousin), and the refrain of Lydgate’s Envoy warns against the treachery of ‘unkynde blood’ (unnatural/unkind relatives).17 For English Arthurian romance-writers, the outstanding Round Table hero is usually Gawain; Lancelot is often mentioned in lists of Round Table knights, but otherwise is largely ignored.18 In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight he is one of the knights who bid farewell to Gawain as he sets out on his quest; he appears in mid-list, after Yvain, Erec, Dodinel and the Duke of Clarence, alliterating with Lionel and Lucan.19 It is interesting that he is named in the opening of Chestre’s Sir Launfal, since he is not mentioned in the French source, Marie de France’s Lanval, or in the earlier English version Sir Landevale; but he is merely named, without any further comment or description, after Percival, Gawain, Gaheris and Agravain, and before Kay and Ywain.20 It is even more interesting that Lancelot’s name has been inserted hypermetrically in a line towards the end of the poem (910), when the fairy and her retinue arrive at Arthur’s court: ‘He commaunded Launcelot du Lake to brynge hem yn fere’. Bliss pointed out that this order is given to Gawain in the earlier Sir Landevale; it is unusual to find Lancelot edging out Gawain in an English romance. Bliss argued that a scribe must have made the change, on the grounds that the poet would have been more concerned about preserving the metre. It is striking that a similar substitution occurs in another romance attributed to Chestre, Lybeaus Desconus, the English version of the Bel Inconnu, where Lancelot is mentioned

15 16 17 18 19

20

Middle English, gen. ed. A.E. Hartung (New Haven, CT, 1989); and ‘Dynastic Chronicles,’ in The Arthur of the English, pp. 11–46. On the relationship between the chronicle and romance traditions, see A. Putter, ‘Finding Time for Romance: Mediaeval Arthurian Literary History’, Medium Ævum 63.1 (1994): 1–16, and R. Radulescu, ‘ “Talkyng of Cronycles of Kinges and of other Polycez”: Fifteenth-Century Miscellanies, the Brut and the Readership of Le Morte Darthur’, Arthurian Literature 18, ed. K. Busby (Cambridge, UK, 2001): 125–41. F. Riddy, ‘John Hardyng in Search of the Grail’, in Arturus Rex: Acta Conventus Lovaniensis 1987, ed. W. van Hoecke et al., 2 vols. (Leuven, 1991), II, 419–29 (p. 424). References to the Alliterative Morte are taken from the edition by Benson in King Arthur’s Death (note 3 above); see also the edition by M. Hamel (New York, 1984). John Lydgate, The Fall of Princes, 8.2661–3206, ed. H. Bergen, 4 vols., EETS ES 121–24 (London, 1924–27), III, 898–913. See R.W. Ackerman, An Index of the Arthurian Names in Middle English (Stanford, 1952), pp. 141–2; Lancelot is mentioned in most of the Gawain poems, for instance. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, line 53, ed. J.R.R. Tolkien and E.V. Gordon, 2nd edn rev. N. Davis (Oxford, 1967). The Gawain-poet certainly knew the Vulgate Cycle, and probably the Perlesvaus; see A. Putter, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and French Arthurian Romance (Oxford, 1995). Thomas Chestre, Sir Launfal, line 15, ed. A.J. Bliss (London: 1960). I am indebted to Ad Putter for alerting me to these changes.

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several times as a great warrior. The fourth of the knights involved in the arming of the young hero is Agravain at line 221 (Cotton version), yet at 232 he is replaced by Lancelot.21 In none of these romances is there any reference to his liaison with the queen, or even a hint of it.22 When he is mentioned in non-Arthurian romances, it is usually as an exemplar of martial prowess, not as a lover (I discuss some of these allusions later in this essay). Were English poets suppressing the affair because it was scandalous, or were they unaware of it? How well known would the story of Lancelot’s love for Guenevere have been in English reading communities before the later fourteenth century, when the Stanzaic Morte was composed, or among Malory’s readers in the late fifteenth century, who may or may not have known the Stanzaic Morte? Of course, it all depends on what is meant by English audiences and readers. If they understood French, they probably did know the love story well, since the Vulgate Cycle and other French Arthurian prose texts seem to have circulated quite widely in England (though Helen Cooper has pointed out that before the fifteenth century it seems to have been the early parts of the Vulgate Cycle concerning Arthur and Merlin that most interested English writers and were most frequently translated and adapted).23 References to the later parts of the Vulgate Cycle, in which Lancelot plays a major role, and also to the Prose Tristan, have been noticed in English wills, inventories, and library catalogues, and there are allusions to Lancelot and Guenevere in a number of non-Arthurian literary texts. It seems useful to try to gather this evidence together and see what it suggests. In Christopher Dean’s valuable chronological list of allusions to the Arthurian legend in non-Arthurian texts, the paucity of references to Lancelot and Guenevere as a couple is striking; Lancelot is sometimes cited as a great knight, but very rarely as a lover.24 The first passage he cites in which they are linked as a couple is by Gower, but Helen Cooper has recently drawn attention to an earlier allusion in a version of An Anonymous Short English Metrical Chronicle preserved in the mid-fourteenth-century Auchinleck Manuscript.25 In this account of Arthur, we are told that Lancelot’s love for Guenevere caused a civil war, and that he carried her off to Nottingham, not previously identified by scholars as Joyous Gard:

21 Lybeaus Desconus, ed. M. Mills, EETS OS 261 (London, 1969); see the Introduction, p. 18, and the

22 23

24

25

note on p. 232. Lancelot is not involved in the equivalent scene in the French source, where he is mentioned less frequently than in the English poem. The queen’s promiscuity is central to the plot of Sir Launfal, but none of her lovers are named. Cooper, ‘The Cycle in England’; see also ‘Dynastic Romance’ in The Arthur of the English, pp. 71–111, and Felicity Riddy, ‘Reading for England: Arthurian Literature and National Consciousness’, BBIAS 43 (1991): 314–32. C. Dean, Arthur of England: English Attitudes to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Toronto, 1987), pp. 128–62. I discuss only a few of his references to Lancelot as a famous knight, without mention of Guenevere. He also gives a useful list of Middle English texts without Arthurian references on p. 171. An Anonymous Short English Metrical Chronicle, lines 1071–1098, ed. E. Zettl, EETS OS 196 (London, 1935). For a full discussion see Helen Cooper’s ‘Lancelot, Roger Mortimer, and The Date of The Auchinleck Manuscript’, forthcoming in the Festschrift for John Scattergood, ed. A. Fletcher. I am grateful to her for allowing me to see this essay before publication. The passage is also discussed by E.D. Kennedy in Chronicles, pp. 2622–4, and in ‘Dynastic Chronicles’ in The Arthur of the English, pp. 43–4.

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Þerafter aros wer strong Þurch þe quen in þis lond Launcelot de Lac held his wiif Forþi bitven hem ros gret striif Launcelot was a queynt man For þe quen sake he made Notingham Þe castel wiþ mani selcouþe wonder Caues mani he made þerunder Ri
t in the hard ston Chambers he made mani on Þat þe quen mi
t in wone
if þe king wald þider come Þre
ere and moneþes ten Wiþ strengþe he held Gwinore þe quen King Arthour lete forbede him His reume for to wonen in Launcelot was curteys & hende To Glastingbiri he gan wende & þe quen wiþ gret honour Þider he brou
t to king Arthour Launcelot spak wordes bold Bot he wald hir wiþ honour hold Wiþ strong wer he wald on him come Til he wer sleyn oþer ynome He seyd
if Arthour þe king Makeþ eni reproueing With bateyle strong y schal him
eld
if god wil mi liif held At Glastingbiri was made a fest . . . (1071–99)

At this point Cradoc brings a magic mantle to Arthur’s feast at Glastonbury, and no more is heard about Lancelot and Guenevere. It is curious that Lancelot’s rebellion peters out without further consequences, and that there is no mention of Mordred. Arthur’s death is also unusually peaceful: he reigns for 24 years, dies at Glastonbury and is buried there, according to his own wish: King Arthour regned here To & tventi ful
ere At Glastingburi he was ded & ybirid for so he bed. (1109–12)

There is a heavy emphasis on Glastonbury in this short passage; everything important seems to happen there.26 The civil war episode is clearly derived from the French romance tradition of Lancelot’s love for the queen. The terse style and end-stopped lines are reminiscent of King Horn, one of the earliest surviving Middle English romances. The way that the account of Lancelot’s declaration slides unheralded into direct speech at line 1097 is characteristic of ballads, and recalls similar passages in both the Stanzaic Morte and Malory. Could the chronicle passage be based on a lost English Arthurian 26 See Carley’s discussion of Glastonbury in The Arthur of the English, pp. 47–57.

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ballad or romance? It is striking that so much space is given here to the Lancelot-Guenevere affair in a chronicle which generally deals briskly with each reign. It seems significant that this account occurs only in the Auchinleck version of the chronicle. The Auchinleck Manuscript contains a notable number of romances (only one is strictly Arthurian, Of Arthour and of Merlin, though Sir Tristrem is also included).27 Was the chronicle expanded to include a crucial episode from the French Arthurian romance tradition in order to satisfy a particular patron interested in romance, or to attract buyers of this sort? There is considerable scholarly debate about the patron or readership for this manuscript: suggestions include ‘the merchant élite of London’ (Pearsall), ‘an audience drawn from the ranks of rural gentry’ (Coss), and a woman such as ‘a wealthy merchant’s wife’ (Riddy).28 The chronicler apparently saw no need to mention the way the affair began, its length, or indeed who Lancelot was; does this imply that he expected his audience to know about Lancelot and his affair with the queen, or was he ill-informed himself? Does this strange digression fill the need for a version of the traditional story of Guenevere’s abduction? Is it a garbled variant of the standard chronicle ending of Arthur’s story, in which Mordred usurps both throne and queen, composed by someone with only very vague knowledge of Lancelot and the Arthurian world? This seems unlikely, though the absence of Mordred and the civil war, and Arthur’s peaceful death, are a surprising divergence from the usual plot of both the chronicle and the romance tradition. It might be argued that Lancelot’s love for the queen was not a popular topic in England because it shows the great Arthur cuckolded by a Frenchman. Helen Cooper discusses the parallels between the chronicle account and an historical incident in 1330, when Edward III and his mother Isabella were staying in Nottingham Castle and the king had Isabella’s lover Mortimer dragged from her bedchamber there.29 But it is important to note that Lancelot is described positively in the chronicle as ‘queynt’and ‘curteys and hende’.30 According to E.D. Kennedy, ‘the author makes him as sinister a threat to Arthur’s kingdom as Mordred’.31 This claim seems to me unjustified. There is no explicit criticism of Lancelot, but rather praise for him; and no connection is made between his abduction of the queen and the final fall of Camelot (which is not presented here as a tragedy). Another unusual account of Lancelot is found in the chronicle of John Hardyng, written in the third quarter of the fifteenth century and used by Malory.32 Although Hardyng’s approach is generally that of the earlier chroniclers, he seems to have 27 See the facsimile edition, The Auchinleck Manuscript, National Library of Scotland Advocates’ MS

28 29 30

31 32

19.2.1, with introduction by D. Pearsall and I.C. Cunningham (London, 1979); and R. Hanna III, ‘Reconsidering the Auchinleck Manuscript’, in New Directions in Later Medieval Manuscript Studies: Essays from the 1998 Harvard Conference, ed. D. Pearsall (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 71–91. The views of these three critics are discussed by Meale, ‘Romance and its Audiences’, pp. 212–13 (full references are given there); see also D. Burnley’s comments in The Arthur of the English, pp. 88–9. Cooper cites the account in Chronicon Galfridi le Baker de Swynbroke, ed. E.M. Thompson (Oxford, 1889), pp. 45–6. ‘queynt’ can mean ‘wise’ or ‘skilled’, but also ‘crafty’ or ‘deceptive’, according to the Middle English Dictionary. A more positive meaning seems preferable here in view of the undoubtedly complimentary phrase that follows. See Cooper’s comments on these lines. Kennedy, Chronicles, p. 2623. I refer to the second and shorter version of the Chronicle, ed. Henry Ellis (London, 1812); the Grail section is chs. 76–8, pp. 131–8. See E.D. Kennedy, ‘Malory and his English Sources’, in Aspects of Malory, ed. T. Takamiya and D. Brewer (Cambridge, UK, 1981), pp. 27–55, and ‘John Hardyng and the

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known at least part of the Vulgate Cycle, since he includes a very abbreviated Grail Quest; Kennedy argues that Hardyng intended it to enhance the reputation of Camelot, rather than to undermine it.33 The Grail section begins with the unexpected arrival at court of Galahad, as in the French Vulgate Queste – but Lancelot is mentioned only as having begotten Galahad ‘in very clean spousage, on Pelles daughter’ (ch. 78, p. 131). ‘Very clean spousage’? Does this decision to make Galahad legitimate preclude an affair between Lancelot and Guenevere? Apparently it does; Lancelot plays no part in Hardyng’s Grail Quest, and Riddy explains that his experiences are of no interest if he is not the queen’s lover.34 At the end of the Grail section he does appear in a list of Round Table knights present at a feast, but simply as a name, between Perceval and Kay (ch. 78, p. 137). At the end of the war between Arthur and Mordred, we are told that all the Round Table knights are dead, except for Lancelot (ch. 84, p. 146). He follows Arthur in pursuit of Mordred, and arrives at Glastonbury after Arthur’s death and burial there (ch. 84, p. 147). Geryn tells him how Arthur died, and they live there together piously as priests, praying at the tomb, wearing hair shirts, fasting and doing penance. This passage is evidently derived from the ending of the Vulgate Mort Artu, in which Lancelot and the survivors of his fellowship become hermits at Arthur’s tomb (though Hardyng omits the French account of Lancelot’s own saintly death). Surely Lancelot’s reappearance after Arthur’s death, his devotion to Arthur’s memory, his penitence and the strong religious tone of Hardyng’s ending would make very little sense to anyone who knew nothing at all about Lancelot and his love for Guenevere, even though Hardyng makes her the lover of Mordred according to the chronicle tradition. Merely being the father of Galahad would hardly qualify Lancelot for his important final role, or explain his pious and penitent behaviour. Hardyng seems to feel the need to make him more morally acceptable by omitting all reference to his love for the queen – but what is much more striking is his decision to mention Lancelot at all, and then to make him so visible at the very end of Arthur’s story as chief mourner. This could be taken as an indication that Lancelot was so well established in the English Arthurian tradition by the mid-fifteenth century that Hardyng did not feel able to leave him out, though he did not feel obliged to present him as Guenevere’s lover. Dean’s earliest allusion to Lancelot and Guenevere as lovers occurs at the end of Gower’s Confessio amantis (late fourteenth-century), in Cupid’s dance.35 Tristan is there with Isolde, Lancelot with Guenevere, and Galehaut with his lady, along with many classical lovers: Ther was Tristram, which was believed With bele Ysolde, and Lancelot Stod with Gunnore, and Galahot With his ladi, and as me thoghte, Grail’, Arthurian Literature 8, ed. R. Barber (Cambridge, UK, 1989), pp. 185–206; and Riddy, ‘John Hardyng’ (note 15 above). 33 Kennedy, ‘John Hardyng’, p. 203. McCarthy speculates that part of the appeal of Hardyng’s chronicle for Malory may have been that it ‘encouraged him to distance himself from the more overtly literary approach of his French sources, with their concern for amorous intrigue and private motivation’ (‘Malory and his Sources’, p. 76). 34 Riddy, ‘John Hardyng’, p. 426.

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I syh wher Jason with him broghte His love, which that Creusa hihte.

This passage might be taken as somewhat critical: all these lovers are doomed, and at the end of the poem the narrator rejects the court of Cupid and Venus and the pursuit of earthly love. Dean’s next allusion to Lancelot and Guenevere as lovers comes from Lydgate’s Reson and Sensuallyte (written about 1406–12), where the narrator and a beautiful maiden play chess on a board even more beautiful than the one on which Lancelot and Guenivere played together.36 The intertextual reference here seems to be to an episode of the Prose Lancelot in which Lancelot encounters a magic chessboard made of gold and precious stones where the pieces move by themseslves (as in Alice through the Looking Glass).37 Lancelot beats the board, like a Grandmaster today beating a chess computer, and sends it to Guenevere, who is not so lucky (they do not actually play together). This is not a central episode in the Lancelot, so it is interesting that Lydgate assumes that his readers will recognize it; of course, he is following his French source, and the iconic names of Lancelot and Guinevere may simply be used to emphasize the magnificence of the board (‘fit for a queen’) without any more specific significance. Chess is often associated with lovers in medieval art and literature; Tristan and Isolde are sometimes depicted playing on the voyage from Ireland when they drink the fatal potion. In the English tradition they are invoked more often than Lancelot and Guenevere in lists of famous lovers (for instance, their images are embroidered on the magic cloth in Emaré).38 Lancelot and Guenevere appear next to them in Gower’s list, but this is a fairly rare occurrence. Were Lancelot and Guinevere considered shocking and deplorable, as adulterers who contributed to the fall of Camelot and of England’s greatest king? It is sometimes argued that English audiences did not want to hear stories of adultery (see Cooper’s comment cited above). McCarthy declares (in relation to Malory) that ‘English Arthurian literature was not a vehicle for amorous investigation’.39 Tristan and Isolde were adulterers too, of course, but they seem to have been much more popular, at least as examples of overwhelming love, if not as protagonists of extended narratives.40 Their story was recounted at length in England as early as the mid-twelfth century, when Thomas composed his influential Anglo-Norman Tristan, and Marie de France clearly expected her readers to know it well enough to understand her short lay Chevrefeuil, which celebrates a brief but idyllic encounter between the lovers. The French Prose Tristan was read in England, and was used by Malory. Although the only surviving 35 Confessio Amantis, 8.2500–5, ed. G.C. Macaulay, in The English Writings of John Gower, 2 vols.,

EETS ES 81–2 (London, 1900–1). 36 Lydgate, Reson and Sensuallyte, lines 6021–6, ed. E. Sieper, 2 vols., EETS ES 84 and 89 (London,

37

38 39 40

1901–3). In this poem based on an early fourteenth-century French source, Evrard de Conty’s Les Echecs amoureux, the narrator is beaten at chess by a beautiful young girl and hopes for a return match, but instead is given a long lecture by Pallas on the need to find a useful and serious aim in life. Lancelot is also mentioned earlier at line 3755, in connection with perilous beds. See Lancelot, 83.9–11, ed. A. Micha, 9 vols. (Geneva, 1978–83), IV, 291–96; there is a splendid illustration of this episode in Pierpont Morgan Library MS Fr. 805, fol. 253r. I am indebted for these references to Prof. Norris Lacy. Emaré, lines 133–44, ed. Edith Rickert, EETS ES 99 (London, 1908). McCarthy, ‘Malory and his Sources’, p. 93. See Dean, Arthur of England, pp. 158–9.

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English romance devoted to Tristan is Sir Tristrem (preserved in the Auchinleck Manuscript), their love affair seems to have been well known. Scenes from their story are more common in medieval English art than any other Arthurian episodes, and appear very early (in the form of the thirteenth-century Chertsey tiles);41 and there are many literary references to them as famous lovers. Tristan and Isolde appear in a puzzling allusion to Guenevere in the fourteenth-century Parliament of the Three Ages, in which her affair with Lancelot may or may not be implied. She appears among the lovers ‘prowdeste in presse that paramours loueden’ cited by Elde as examples of inevitable mortality:42 And sir Tristrem the trewe, full triste of hym-selven, And Ysoute his awnn lufe, in erthe are thay bothe. Whare es now Dame Dido was qwene of Cartage? Dame Cand[ac]e the comly was called qwene of Babyloyne? Penelopie that was price and pas[sed] alle othere, And Dame Gaynore the gaye, nowe grauen are thay bothen; And othere moo than I may mene, or any man elles.

This poet certainly knows about Lancelot, who appears earlier at the beginning of the list of Arthur’s knights: ‘there was Sir Launcelot full lusty in armes’ (T 474). He is the first knight named after Arthur, ahead of Gawain, Ywain, etc. (but after a reference to Galahad in relation to the Siege Perilous). Yet Guenevere is mentioned alone. Before her come many pairs of lovers, including Tristan and Isolde. What is the taxonomic principle in use in this passage? The four women who are mentioned without a lover are all queens. Dido and Candace had doomed love affairs with famous heroes (Aeneas and Alexander), but Penelope was invoked in the Middle Ages, as in antiquity, as a faithful wife. Is Guenevere cited here as the lover of Lancelot or as Arthur’s queen? It seems more likely that she is here as a lover, in spite of the absence of Lancelot. The juxtaposition with Penelope is suggestive, and paramours can be used of love for a spouse; but Guenevere is consistently associated with adultery in both the chronicle and the romance tradition, and paramours is more often applied to passionate desire than to conjugal devotion.43 It is hard to imagine Guenevere being used as the epitome of a faithful and loving wife on a par with Penelope (who must surely be named here with approval), but on the other hand the positioning of her name in this passage is puzzling, as is the absence of Lancelot. In the Canterbury Tales, Guenevere is never mentioned, but there is a clear assumption that readers will know a good deal about Lancelot the lover, and that they will be able to read between the lines in brief and apparently positive allusions to him.44 In the ‘Squire’s Tale’ Lancelot is cited as the unique expert on amorous

41 See R.S. Loomis, The Arthurian Legends in Medieval Art (London, 1938), pp. 44–8; Alison Stones,

‘Arthurian Art after Loomis’, in Arturus Rex, ed. van Hoecke, II, 21–78 (pp. 27–30); and Julia Walworth, ‘Tristan and Medieval Art’, in Tristan and Isolde: A Casebook, ed. Joan Tasker Grimbert (London, 2002), pp. 255–90 (especially pp. 261 and 279). 42 The Parlement of the Three Ages, lines 624–30 (T), ed. M.Y. Offord, EETS OS 246 (London, 1959). 43 See the Middle English Dictionary, s.v. par amour (adv. phr), senses a and b. 44 All references to Chaucer are to the Riverside Chaucer, ed. L.D. Benson, 3rd edn (Boston, 1987).

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behaviour in a scene where a strange knight is dancing with the princess Canace at a feast, and everyone is having a good time: Who koude telle yow the forme of daunces So unkouthe, and swiche fresshe contenaunces, Swich subtil lookyng and dissymulynges For drede of jalouse meenes aperceyvynges? No man but Launcelot, and he is deed. (5.283–7)

No one could describe the scene but Lancelot – but he is mentioned only to be summarily dismissed. This passage seems to be a classic case of damning with faint praise. Vincent DiMarco is puzzled by it: ‘Lancelot was famous as the lover of Guenevere in Arthurian romance, but there is no apparent basis (other than the idea that a perfect knight is also a perfect courtier) for the narrative skill the Squire here attributes to him’.45 But surely this allusion is ironic: the link with Lancelot is not narrative skill or even amorous expertise but the situation, the sidelong glances and deception and anxiety that are an inevitable part of a secret love affair at court. Although Guenevere is not named here (nor indeed anywhere else in Chaucer), she is evoked by the context: Lancelot’s knowledge of dissimulation and sidelong glances must be connected to his love for her. Chaucer seems to have had it in for Lancelot – and indeed for the Arthurian legend in general. By insisting that Lancelot is dead, Chaucer draws attention away from the ephemeral pleasure of love to the inevitable closure of death. He may be implying that the pleasure offered by the world of romance (in the literary sense) can only be ephemeral, and also mocking belief in the Arthurian legend, as he does in the opening of the ‘Wife of Bath’s Tale’. This reading of the ‘Squire’s Tale’ reference as ironic is supported by the well-known passage in the ‘Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ where the narrator invokes the name of Lancelot to assure his audience of the authenticity of his story, but with tongue very much in cheek: Now every wys man, let him herkne me: This storie is al-so trewe, I undertake, As is the book of Launcelot de Lake, That wommen holde in ful gret reverence.

(7.3210–13)

The ‘Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ is of course a beast fable, and it contains many parodies of romance rhetoric and conventions; Chauntecleer the cock has just spent a happy night of lust with Pertelote, and has spoken lyrically to her of the joys of love in the spring sunshine, but now he is about to meet his comeuppance in the form of the fox. The reference to female enthusiasm for the story of Lancelot could imply that men are not so keen either on the book or on Lancelot (the phrasing is ambiguous), or that women are foolish and have lowbrow literary tastes (and fancy Lancelot) – or it could imply all of the above.46 The narrator is presumably thinking of an Arthurian text such as the Prose Lancelot in which love is as prominent as martial prowess, or 45 Note on line 287 in the Riverside Chaucer, p. 893. 46 According to A.C. Spearing, ‘we must recognize in Chaucer, wherever we look, a contempt for

romance of all kinds’; see his Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge, UK, 1985), p. 36. On women and romance see Riddy, ‘Reading for England’, pp. 328–9.

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even more so; such texts are not to be taken seriously by sensible men. But this passage also indicates that the story of Lancelot circulated quite widely. Gower also refers to reading stories about Lancelot, though in a more positive context – or so it seems at first. Book 4 of the Confessio is devoted to Sloth, and Genius is reminding Amans that prowess is crucial for knights and brings success in love: For if thou wolt the bokes rede Of Lancelot and othre mo, Ther might thou sen hou it was tho Of armes, for thei wolde atteigne To love . . . (CA 4.2034–8)

Lancelot is invoked here as an example of love as a stimulus to prowess, but without any reference to Guenevere, and only very briefly. Gower goes on to speak at much greater length about Hercules, perhaps because of the problem that the stimulus for Lancelot’s feats is adulterous love. Although this allusion cannot be taken as wholehearted approval of the value of reading romances and of Lancelot, since the poem does end with the narrator’s rejection of earthly love, it does imply that stories about Lancelot are familiar and readily available. A similar endorsement is given quite sincerely, it seems, in the unexpected context of Hoccleve’s ‘To Sir John Oldcastle’, written in 1415.47 Oldcastle had been imprisoned as a Lollard, but had escaped from the Tower and was on the run. Hoccleve urges him to give up his heretical beliefs and turn to safer reading matter: Bewar Oldcastel & for Crystes sake Clymbe no more in holy writ so hie! Rede the storie of Lancelot de lake Or Vegece of the aart of Chivalrie The seege of Troie or Thebes thee applie To thyng that may to thordre of knyght longe! To thy correccioun now haste and hie For thow haast been out of ioynt al to longe. (193–7)

Here the Lancelot story is presented as a safe alternative to heretical texts, and also as a model of good knighthood comparable to Vegetius. The sort of reading matter approved by Hoccleve could indeed be found in the libraries of fifteenth-century English knights: Sir John Fastolf owned copies of Vegetius and a Liber de Roy Artour, and so did the Pastons.48 What books about Lancelot are Gower and Chaucer and Hoccleve referring to? French ones, presumably, versions of the Vulgate Lancelot and Mort Artu, and conceivably also Chrétien’s Charete, if Derek Brewer is right that it was known in 47 Thomas Hoccleve, The Minor Poems, ed. F. J. Furnivall and I. Gollancz, EETS ES 61 and 73, rev. A.I.

Doyle and J. Mitchell (London, 1970), pp. 8–24. 48 See H.S. Bennett, The Pastons and their England, 2nd edn (Cambridge, UK, 1932), pp. 111 and 261,

and K. Cherewatuk, ‘ “Gentyl” Audiences and “grete bookes”: Chivalric Manuals and the Morte Darthur’, in Arthurian Literature 15, ed. J. Carley and F. Riddy (Cambridge, UK, 1997), pp. 205–216 (pp. 209–10). M.C. Seymour draws attention to the Fastolf parallel in his notes on the poem in Selections from Hoccleve (Oxford, 1981).

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Chaucer.49

England, and to There is a good deal of evidence for the circulation of the later parts of the Vulgate Cycle (the Lancelot, Queste and Mort Artu) as well as the Prose Tristan – and perhaps the Post-Vulgate Cycle too.50 It is not possible to tell from titles such as Merlin which version of the text is intended; and in some cases a single volume may have contained several discrete romances. The list that follows is not intended to be comprehensive, but it gives some sense of the availability of Lancelot material in French Arthurian prose texts in England from the late thirteenth to the fifteenth century.51 In 1268 William de Beauchamp left a Lancelot to his daughter Joan. In the early 1270s when Edward I went crusading, he took with him a book of French Arthurian romances, including a Tristan which was used by Rusticiano da Pisa for his Italian translation. Edward II’s queen Isabella owned a Grail, a volume ‘de gestis Arthuri’, and one of ‘Tristram & Isolda’ (when the English spelling Tristram is used, it is not clear if the text is in French or English).52 In 1380 Elizabeth de Zouche mentioned in her will books about Lancelot and Tristan. Isabella Duchess of York’s will of 1392 includes a Lancelot bequeathed to her son Edward. Richard II inherited ‘une romance de Roy Arthure’ (possibly the same as Queen Isabella’s) and texts of the Queste and the Mort Artu. Thomas Duke of Gloucester owned two texts of the Merlin, and a French Lancelot. In 1412 Elizabeth Darcy’s will includes the bequest to Philip Darcy of a Lanselake. The will of Thomas Arnold, monk of St Augustine’s, Canterbury, mentions a Lancelot and a Grail text. Simon Burley and Elisabeth Day 49 D. Brewer, ‘Chaucer and Chrétien and Arthurian Romance’, in Chaucer and Middle English Studies in

Honor of Rossell Hope Robbins, ed. B. Rowland (London, 1974), pp. 255–9. See also K. Busby, ‘Chrétien de Troyes English’d’, Neophilologus 71.4 (1987): 596–612; P.J.C. Field, ‘Malory and Chrétien de Troyes’, Reading Medieval Studies 17 (1991): 19–30, repr. in Malory: Texts and Sources, pp. 236–45; ‘The Romance Tradition’ in The Arthur of the English, pp. 55–70 (p. 69); and R. Field, ‘Romance in England, 1066–1400’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. D. Wallace (Cambridge, UK, 1999), pp. 152–76 (p. 163). 50 On the Post-Vulgate Cycle or Roman du Graal see F. Bogdanow, The Romance of the Grail (Manchester, 1966); I discuss it further later in this essay. Since Malory had access to at least part of the Post-Vulgate Cycle (the Suite du Merlin), it seems plausible that it was known earlier in England. He also used the Perlesvaus, which may also have been known to the Gawain–poet; but it is not named in the wills and library catalogues discussed here. 51 A number of critics have cited and discussed the evidence that follows, and many of them cite the same references. See R.M. Wilson, The Lost Literature of Medieval England, 2nd rev. edn (London, 1970), pp. 107–8; V.J. Scattergood, ‘Literary Culture at the Court of Richard II’, in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Scattergood and J.W. Sherborne (London, 1983), pp. 29–43; A. Putter, ‘Narrative Technique and Chivalric Ethos in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 6–15; S. Cavanaugh, ‘A Study of Books Privately Owned 1300–1450’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis (Philadelphia, 1990); C.M. Meale, ‘Manuscripts, Readers and Patrons in Fifteenth-Century England: Sir Thomas Malory and Arthurian Romance’, Arthurian Literature 4, ed. R. Barber (Cambridge, UK, 1985), pp. 93–126 (see especially pp. 101–5 and 124–6); Meale, ‘Patrons, Book Buyers and Owners: Book Production and Social Status’, in Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375–1475, ed. J. Griffiths and D. Pearsall (Cambridge, UK, 1989), pp. 201–38; Riddy, ‘Reading for England’, pp. 327–8; Meale, ‘Romance and its Audiences’, pp. 221–4; C. Meale, ‘ “. . . alle the bokes that I haue of latyn, englisch, and frensch”: laywomen and their books in late medieval England’, in Women and Literature in Britain 1150–1500, ed. Meale, 2nd edn (Cambridge, UK, 1996), pp. 128–58 (pp. 139–41), cited hereafter as ‘Laywomen and their books’; C. Revard, ‘Courtly Romances in the Privy Wardrobe’, in The Court and Cultural Diversity: Selected Papers from the Eighth Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, ed. E. Mullaly and J. Thompson (Cambridge, UK, 1997), pp. 297–308; R. Field, ‘Romance in England’, pp. 163–4. 52 She also sent copies of the Lancelot and the Grail as presents to the king of France; see Susan Cavanaugh, ‘Royal Books: King John to Richard II’, The Library, 6th series, 10 (1988): 304–16 (310).

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both owned Lancelots. In 1426 the Duke of Exeter left a Tristram to his sister Joan Beaufort. Thomas Hebbeden bequeathed a French Lancelot to Isabella Eure in 1435. In 1450 Sir John Fastolf listed a Liber de Roy Artour among his books, and Sir John Paston owned one too. In 1481/2 Sir Richard Roos left a volume containing the Estoire, the Queste and the Mort Artu to his niece Alianore Hawte, and she in turn left it to Elizabeth Woodville, wife of Edward IV. To these might be added the texts used by translators of Vulgate Cycle texts, such as Lovelich and the anonymous adapters of the Prose Merlin, Of Arthour and Of Merlin, and the Stanzaic Morte, and also Malory, of course. There were also a number of Arthurian manuscripts in monastery libraries.53 Penwortham in Lancashire had a Mort Artu in 1392; Peterborough had a Tristram; Canterbury had a Lancelot (specified as being in French), a Grail book, and a liber del Rex Artus. In 1305 Guy Beauchamp, Count of Warwick, donated ‘un volum en lequel est le premier livere de Launcelot’ and ‘un volum de la mort le Roy Arthur et de Mordret’ along with many other romances and religious texts to Bordesley Abbey; he stipulated that they should never be sold and that his heirs should have access to them.54 If he was not alone in giving books to a monastery to be used as a sort of lending library, another possible source for the author of the Stanzaic Morte and for Malory emerges. This list, which is certainly not exhaustive, does suggest that quite a lot of French Arthurian romance was read in later medieval England: Carol Meale remarks that ‘the popularity, and widespread circulation, of Arthurian texts is self-evident’.55 A striking number of the Lancelot texts mentioned above either belonged to or were left to women; this may offer support for Chaucer’s comment about Lancelot’s popularity with women.56 Of course, we have very limited information about the ownership and transmission of books, and for every person who owned an Arthurian text, many other people could have borrowed it or heard it read aloud. Fragments of texts such as the Prose Tristan and the Post-Vulgate texts are still being discovered. As Schmolke-Hasselmann notes, ‘the relatively small number of manuscripts known about today is no proof of a lack of popularity’.57 Further, as Larry Benson points out, there was no need to read a complete cycle in order to know what was in it.58 This brings us back to the original problem. It seems that much of the reading public (relatively speaking) had access to French Arthurian texts and so must have known the story of Lancelot’s and Guenevere’s affair, yet there are few allusions to it, and even fewer accounts of it, in Middle English texts. Cooper is probably quite right in arguing that the story was not generally well known in England. Robert Mannyng of Brunne complains several times in his Chronicle of England, completed in 1338, that Arthur is well known in every land,

53 See M. Blaess, ‘Les Manuscrits français dans les monastères anglais au moyen âge’, Romania 94

(1973): 321–58. 54 M. Blaess, ‘L’Abbaye de Bordesley et les livres de Guy de Beauchamp’, Romania 78 (1957): 511–18;

55 56 57 58

she speculates that Guy may have been getting rid of old texts, or ones that no longer interested him – but he clearly assumed that they would be of interest to his heirs. See Meale, ‘Laywomen and their books’, p. 140. See Meale, ‘Laywomen and their books’, p. 139. Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann, The Evolution of Arthurian Romance: The Verse Tradition from Chrétien to Froissart, trans. Margaret and Roger Middleton (Cambridge, UK, 1998), p. 222. L.D. Benson, Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge, MA, 1976), p. 8.

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but that most of the books about him available in England are written in French: ‘in France men wrote and
it write;/ here haf we of him bot lite’.59 It is possible that some early Arthurian romances have been lost, but not very likely.60 Arthurian material was not the first choice of the early romance writers, it seems, whether they wrote in Anglo-Norman or English.61 While there was clearly a lasting readership for French Arthurian romances, it seems that those writing in English chose at first to concentrate on the more ‘historical’ aspects of the legend, and on Arthur and Merlin and the beginning of Arthur’s reign rather than the tragic ending. For those who read only in English, then, knowledge of the Lancelot and Guenevere love story might well have been limited (though the account in the Short Metrical Chronicle shows that at least one chronicler writing in English both knew it and thought it significant). For those who read French, various versions of the story were available, offering differing approaches and attitudes to the lovers. French continued to be spoken and read in England throughout the later Middle Ages, in spite of the increasing use of English.62 By the late fourteenth century, Chaucer and Gower clearly expected readers of their English texts to appreciate both direct and oblique references to the love story, and there were also numerous allusions to Lancelot alone as a great knight. Evidently he had some degree of name recognition with Middle English readers, even if he was not always admired. It is worth noting that the name Lancelot and variants such as Lance and Lancelin were used in England from the thirteenth century on.63 English writers do not seem to have been quick to criticize Lancelot for adultery, or even to discuss his lovelife. Guenevere is treated more harshly for

59 Robert Mannyng of Brunne, The Chronicle, lines 10415–18, ed. Idelle Sullens (Binghamton, NY,

60

61

62

63

1996); he repeats this point at 10765–72, adding this time that the French texts are in prose. See L. Johnson, ‘Robert Mannyng’s History of Arthurian Literature’, in Church and Chronicle in the Middle Ages: Essays presented to John Taylor, ed. I. Wood and G.A. Loud (London, 1991), pp. 129–47. See Wilson, Lost Literature, p. 104. It is interesting, though in no way conclusive, that there is no reference to Lancelot in the enigmatic list of French titles of lays and romances preserved in a manuscript now in the collection of Shrewsbury School, MS 7, though Arthur, Merlin and Tristan are all mentioned in it. See E. Archibald, ‘The Breton Lay in Middle English: Genre, Transmission and the Franklin’s Tale’, in Medieval Insular Romance: Translation and Innovation, ed. J. Weiss et al. (Cambridge, UK, 2000), pp. 55–70 (pp. 59–64). Schmolke-Hasselmann has argued that ‘the French Arthurian verse romances were composed predominantly for a French-speaking public in England’, and that these French verse romances ‘made it possible to continue the tradition of Arthurian literature in England without any major hiatus, even if eventually in a different language and less refined’; see The Evolution of Arthurian Romance, pp. 228 and 287. But other critics have emphasized the lack of interest of the Anglo-Normans outside the royal circle in Arthurian material; see S. Crane, Insular Romance (Berkeley, 1986); ‘The Romance Tradition’, in The Arthur of the English, pp. 59–70; and R. Field, ‘Romance in England’, esp. pp. 161–4 and 171. French Arthurian material was still being read in England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Henry VIII’s library at Richmond Palace included a three-volume edition of the Lancelot printed in Paris in 1495 or 1504 (it probably contained the Queste and the Mort Artu); see The Libraries of Henry VIII, ed. J. Carley (London, 2000), p. 13 (no. 36). Vinaver discovered a marginal note by a sixteenth-century reader referring to Malory’s version in the copy of the Suite du Merlin in Cambridge University Library MS Add. 7071, fol. 189r; see his edition of Malory, p. 1280 and Plate IV. This manuscript must have been much read, for some pages were replaced by new copies; see Meale, ‘Patrons, Book Buyers and Owners’, p. 207. See The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names, ed. E.G. Withycombe, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1977). Tristan appeared first in 1189, and Gawain (quite commonly used) in 1273; Percival was apparently rarer, and did not appear till 1373.

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her lust in the English Sir Launfal than in the earlier French Lanval, but Chestre does not name Lancelot as her lover. Accounts of their affair were available in both religious and secular libraries, but there seems to have been little desire to retell the story in detail in Middle English, though a number of writers assume that their readers will have some knowledge of it. Dean’s list of allusions shows that Lancelot and Guenevere did not spring to the minds of English poets as prominent examples of famous lovers (though Tristan and Isolde did). The only two Middle English narratives to deal with the affair in any detail are the Stanzaic Morte and Malory’s Morte Darthur. But on the other hand, on the occasions when Lancelot and Guenevere are mentioned as a couple, there is little hostile comment about them. The passage in the Short Metrical Chronicle is surprisingly noncommittal about their affair and the civil war caused by it. Chaucer’s hostility seems to be the exception rather than the rule, and may be aimed more at romance as a genre than at the love affair in particular. The lack of hostility to the lovers in English writers can be shown by comparison with their treatment in the French Post-Vulgate Cycle or Roman du Graal, in which the focus is much more on Arthur than on Lancelot and there is little sympathy for the affair.64 In the Post-Vulgate Queste, Lancelot has a terrifying dream in which he sees Guenevere in a stinking pit of fire, sitting naked in a chair of fire and lamenting; she reproaches him for causing her such torment through his love. Then he sees his parents, who urge him to abandon his sinful love for the queen, which will doom him to damnation.65 Could this episode have influenced the Stanzaic Morte poet (or his source) in composing the final interview between Guenevere and Lancelot where she criticizes their love, and expresses her remorse and her hope of salvation? We cannot know – but in any case the existence of this romance which takes such a harsh view of the love affair offers a striking contrast to English attitudes to it. Lancelot’s love for Guenevere is central to the Stanzaic Morte and Malory, even though both authors were also clearly committed to presenting Arthur as positively as possible. In the Stanzaic Morte Lancelot is treated with considerable sympathy; everyone in the poem praises him for his courtesy. He is not criticized for the death of the Fair Maid of Astolat as strongly as in the French source, the Mort Artu. More importantly, the Stanzaic poet either invented or chose to include the powerful and emotional scene of Lancelot and Guenevere’s last interview (3622–729), which is not found in the Vulgate tradition (except in a rather different form in one manuscript, where it is more sentimental and much less effective).66 This interview does draw attention to the sinfulness of the affair and Lancelot’s guilt; but it is followed by his pious death, which redeems him. The final stanza links Lancelot to Arthur

64 See Kennedy, ‘Malory’s “Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake” ’, pp. 111–19; he argues persuasively

that Malory could well have known more of the Post-Vulgate Cycle than the first part, the Suite du Merlin, which he definitely used for his ‘Tale of King Arthur’. 65 Part of this episode survives in French, part only in Portuguese; see La Version post-Vulgate de la Queste del Saint Graal et de la Mort Artu, troisième partie du Roman du Graal, 4 vols. in 5 parts, ed. F. Bogdanow, SATF (Paris, 1991–2000), II, 275–80. It is translated in Lancelot-Grail: the Old French Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation, gen. ed. N. Lacy, 5 vols. (New York, 1993–6), V, 171–2. 66 This version is printed by J. Frappier in an appendix to his edition of the Mort Artu, 3rd edn (Geneva, 1964), pp. 264–6; see also Kennedy, ‘The Stanzaic Morte Arthur’, pp. 102–4, and F. Riddy, Sir Thomas Malory (Leiden, 1987), p. 155.

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and Guenevere without any hostility, and makes it clear that he is as important a protagonist as they are: Of Launcelot du Lake tell I no more, But thus beleve these ermites seven. And yet is Arthur buried there, And Queen Gaynor, as I you neven, With monkes that are right of lore; They rede and sing with milde steven: ‘Jesu, that suffred woundes sore, Graunt us all the bliss of heven!’ (3962–9)

This would have been the place to lay all the blame for the Götterdämmerung on Lancelot, had the poet wanted to, but clearly that was not his intention. When the lovers blame themselves, the poet is noticeably silent. The lack of comment on the plot and on possible morals is striking. The Stanzaic Morte is not a particularly sophisticated text; it is hard to believe that the poet was bravely defying convention or charting new territory in presenting Lancelot as the lover of the queen and as a hero, flawed but still admirable. Much the same could be said of Malory. He is certainly concerned to tell the story of Arthur, but he allows Lancelot to dominate the story and to overshadow the king. Many critics have suggested that he disapproves of the love affair, but this is surely because it impedes Lancelot’s chivalric career, not because he is a treacherous foreign adulterer; it is Guenevere who is frequently presented here in a negative light, not Lancelot. We do not know whether the Stanzaic poet or Malory wrote on commission, but they both presumably thought that there was an eager audience for the story of how Lancelot’s and Guenevere’s love affair contributed to the end of Camelot, an audience sufficiently aware of the earlier stages of the story to be able to follow and enjoy the later episodes and to be fairly sympathetic towards the lovers. Even if they were writing largely for their own amusement, it is striking that Caxton, the canny commercial publisher, was prepared to print a tale which he presents as filling a gap in Arthur’s story for English readers, but which in fact fills a gap in Lancelot’s, even though Lancelot is not mentioned in Caxton’s preface. Whether or not patriotic English gentlemen were really pressing him to produce a book about Arthur, he must have been confident that they would be willing to read about Lancelot too, and not just the martial Lancelot but also the amorous Lancelot. Felicity Riddy argues that in contrast to the Geoffrey of Monmouth tradition, ‘Malory’s interests look rather freakish’ (she is referring to his inclusion of the Lancelot-Guenevere love affair, and the story of Tristram).67 His choices were certainly unusual, but ‘freakish’ seems too strong. Not every reader in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries admired Lancelot, of course, but quite a lot of them seem to have known about his love life. McCarthy cannot be right in his argument that it was Malory who introduced English readers to heroes such as Lancelot and Percival; Kennedy may go too far when he says that Malory could not have omitted Lancelot’s love story, but it was certainly quite widely known. In terms of the broader Arthurian tradition, Catherine

67 Riddy, ‘Reading for England’, p. 331.

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Batt and Rosalind Field remark that ‘Authors and audiences of English romance as well as French recognize a “horizon of expectation” which enables the elaborate play of allusiveness and intertextuality, but it may be used to quite different ends.’68 Chaucer assumes that his audience will recognize and appreciate jibes at Lancelot as a lover and a hero who appeals to women, whereas the Stanzaic poet and Malory assume that their audiences will appreciate praise for Lancelot and his loyalty to his lady. Chaucer really does want to damn Lancelot with faint praise; when he says in the ‘Squire’s Tale’ that Lancelot is dead, he is trying hard to bury his literary reputation. The Stanzaic poet and Malory show us Lancelot’s actual burial, but like Shakespeare’s Antony, their real intention is to praise him.69

68 ‘The Romance Tradition’, in The Arthur of the English, pp. 58–70 (p. 70). 69 An earlier version of this essay was presented to the meeting of the International Arthurian Society

organized by Peter Field at Bangor in 2002. I am grateful to my colleague Ad Putter for his useful comments on this version. An important essay on the circulation of Arthurian manuscripts has just been published, too late for inclusion in my discussion: Roger Middleton, ‘Manuscripts of the LancelotGrail Cycle in England and Wales: Some Books and their Owners’, in A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, ed. Dover, pp. 219–35.

18 Malory and Middle English Verse Romance: The Case of Sir Tristrem PHILLIPA HARDMAN

Might Malory have used the Middle English metrical romance Sir Tristrem alongside the French Prose Tristan in composing his ‘Book of Sir Tristram de Lyones’? There are some episodes in the early part of Malory’s book where details unaccounted for in the French source could have been influenced by Sir Tristrem; while larger-scale concerns shared by the two English texts are absent from the French. Malory’s use of English metrical romances to supplement his French prose sources in compiling the Morte Darthur is well documented. The most striking example, of course, is his reworking of the anonymous alliterative Morte Arthure in ‘The Noble Tale of King Arthur and the Emperor Lucius’, but the case for his use of the stanzaic Middle English Le Morte Arthur alongside the French prose texts in the last two books of his Arthurian compilation is equally convincing.1 Less attention has been paid to the possibility that Malory may have drawn upon the Middle English verse romance known as Sir Tristrem in ‘The Book of Sir Tristram de Lyones’, his adaptation of the French Prose Tristan, and it is the evidence for this that I propose to examine.2 Sir Walter Scott, the first editor of the metrical Tristan romance that survives in a unique but incomplete fourteenth-century copy in the Auchinleck MS (National Library of Scotland, Advocates MS 19.2.1), gave the text its modern name, Sir Tristrem.3 Scott’s enthusiasm for the romance arose from his assumption that it was the work of the Scottish poet Thomas the Rhymer, but without such a claim on their interest, Sir Tristrem has been poorly received by modern readers. The reviewer of a recent edition of the poem expresses the majority opinion: ‘Any reader who has sat down in friendly fashion to read through the fourteenth-century Sir Tristrem cannot 1 2 3

See The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugène Vinaver, 3rd edn, rev. P.J.C. Field, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1990), pp. 1585–96, 1615–28. A connection between Sir Tristrem and Malory’s Book of Sir Tristram was suggested by H. Oskar Sommer in a letter to the Academy, no. 122, 4 January 1890: 11. Sir Tristrem: A Metrical Romance of the Thirteenth Century by Thomas of Erceldoune, Called the Rhymer, ed. Walter Scott, 2nd edn (Edinburgh, 1806). The title chosen supports Scott’s belief that this is the text referred to as ‘Sir Tristrem’ by Robert Manning of Brunne in his Chronicle; but what survives of the title given to the text in the Auchinleck MS suggests it was possibly ‘Tristrem and Ysoude’ (see my article, ‘The True Romance of Tristrem and Ysoude’, in Cultural Encounters in Medieval English Romance, ed. Corinne J. Saunders, forthcoming).

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attribute the quickly ensuing disappointment to a “bad press” begun by Bédier’; it is, he maintains, a ‘rather incoherent poem’.4 It seems possible, then, that the low esteem in which it is held could have discouraged scholars from considering whether Malory might have consulted this Middle English metrical romance in conjunction with the French prose text, as he is believed to have done in the case of the stanzaic Le Morte Arthur. The first striking feature of Malory’s adaptation of the Prose Tristan is that he omits the lengthy genealogy of the hero with which it begins. Instead, the book opens in both the Winchester MS and Caxton’s edition with a descriptive incipit: ‘Here begynnyth the fyrste boke of Syr Trystrams de Lyones and who was his fadir and hys modyr and how he was borne and fostyrd and how he was made knyght of Kynge Marke of Cornuayle’ (Caxton omits the last five words). While these lines simply summarize the contents of the first few folios, they also bear a resemblance to the opening stanza of Sir Tristrem: Þer herd y rede in roune, Who Tristrem gat and bare; Who was king wiþ croun, And who him fosterd
are. (3–6)5

The ‘Book of Sir Tristram’ is the only one of the books that make up the Morte Darthur to begin with an integral incipit (as distinct from the reference to following material that occurs in the explicit to several books). If Malory knew the English romance, its brief, even riddling introductory lines might well have prompted him to provide this succinct indication that his version of the Tristan material begins not with the additions of the French prose text but with the originary events shared with the earlier poetic tradition. The possibility that Malory knew and drew upon Sir Tristrem is supported by re-examining the problematic episode in which Tristram sails to Ireland to be cured of his wound and adopts the pseudonym Tramtrist (384.19–392.32).6 On hearing of Tristram’s arrival, the king sends for him and asks his name, to which he replies: ‘I am of the contrey of Lyones, and my name is Tramtryste’ (384.27), and he maintains this disguised identity until challenged by the king to reveal ‘who was thy fadir and what is thy name, and also yf thou slewe sir Marhalte’ (390.31). In the passage between these two lines, Malory refers to his hero sometimes as Tristram and sometimes as Tramtrist. The disguised name is used consistently from the first mention until the incident with the squire Ebes le Renownys who recognizes and salutes

4

5 6

Craig R. Davis, review of Lancelot of the Laik and Sir Tristrem, ed. Alan Lupack, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, MI, 1994), in Speculum 71.4 (October 1996): 121–3 (p. 122). Lupack, perhaps taking a hint from Scott’s quotation on the title page of his edition from Chaucer’s Sir Thopas, reads the romance as a conscious parody. I prefer to follow Scott’s emphasis on the elliptical narrative style and the conspicuous difficulty of the rhyme scheme selected, to see this as a copy of a text aimed at a sophisticated audience to whom the story of Tristan is already well known. Sir Tristrem: Die englische Version der Tristan-Sage, ed. Eugen Kölbing (1882; repr. Hildesheim, 1985). All quotations are by line number from this edition. All references are to The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Vinaver, 3rd edn, rev. Field, by page and line number.

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Tristram and has to be made to promise not to reveal his true name (386.29–387.9). Thereafter, the two names are used more or less alternately. The puzzle in relation to the French prose source is that this adoption of a false name, which is in any case found in only one of the numerous manuscripts, occurs at a later stage of the episode, after the tournament in which Tristan is the unknown victor. The king asks the victorious knight his name, and while in other manuscripts of the Prose Tristan he simply excuses himself and maintains his anonymity, in BnF, fr. 103, ‘Quant Tristan ouy ce, si oult paour d’estre recogneu, si dit: “Sire, sachiés que j’ay a nom Tanstris” ’ (fol. 42). In the corresponding passage of Malory’s version, the hero’s fear of discovery is not the issue: the point is that the anonymous white knight is identified as the visitor, Tramtryste, and the whole court ‘undirstood that hit was sir Tramtryste that smote downe sir Palamydes, and than was he muche made of’ (389.10–11). Eugène Vinaver offers the precedent of BnF, fr. 103 as an explanation for Malory’s inclusion of the pseudonym device and also for his inconsistency over the Tristram/Tramtris name in the earlier pages of the episode: ‘In MS. B.N. fr. 103 Tantris occurs for the first time in the passage which corresponds to Malory’s p. 389, ll. 10–12 . . .; before this the French text always refers to the hero as Tristan. It was no doubt because Malory’s immediate source was similar in this respect to MS. B.N. fr. 103 that he found it difficult to use Tristram’s assumed name consistently in the early part of the story’ (p. 1456).7 However, this is not the only possible explanation. In his monograph Le Roman de Tristan et Iseut (1925), Vinaver quotes – only to dismiss (p. 36) – H. Oskar Sommer’s suggestion of a direct link between Malory’s version and Sir Tristrem, in which the hero, just as in Malory, adopts his inverted false name upon arrival in Ireland. The queen asks his name and he replies: ‘Mi nam is Tramtris’ (1216). In both English texts there is an obvious connection between his awareness of the danger of his situation in Ireland, as the slayer of the queen’s brother, and his immediate self-protective name-changing strategy. It is of course possible that Malory’s knowledge of this narrative device was derived directly from the early French poetic Tristan tradition; but there is a further similarity shared by the two English texts. The episode in the metrical romance shows the same peculiarity as Malory’s version in referring to the hero both as Tristrem and as Tramtris during his stay in Ireland, until the narrative explicitly reverts to his real name as he departs: ‘Now hat he Tristrem trewe/ And fareþ ouer þe flod’ (1303–4).8 Moreover, the inconsistency follows a similar pattern in the two texts: both exclusively use the name Tramtris in the passages concerning the hero’s interaction with the king’s daughter Isode/Ysoude, and this similarity may be significant, for it is in this part of the episode that Sir Tristrem provides a parallel for another detail in which Malory diverges from the French prose source.

7 8

Vinaver here summarizes the argument he made at greater length in his monograph Le Roman de Tristan et Iseut dans l’oeuvre de Thomas Malory (Paris, 1925), pp. 35–40. Although the extant remains of Thomas’s Tristran do not include this section, the Old Norse Tristrams saga ok Isöndar, described by Peter Jorgensen as ‘a workman-like translation of the Anglo-Norman text’ (Norse Romance: The Tristan Legend, ed. Marianne E. Kalinke, Arthurian Archives 3 (Cambridge, UK, 1999), p. 26), preserves the episode and has no inconsistency in the use of the two names.

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Malory builds upon Tristram’s reputation as a superlative harper to create a plausible vignette of intimacy leading to love: ‘And therefore sir Tramtryste kyste grete love to La Beale Isode, for she was at that tyme the fayrest lady and maydyn of the worlde. And there Tramtryste lerned hir to harpe and she began to have a grete fantasy unto hym’ (385.6–9). In Sir Tristrem, the hero’s harping and his musical skill are firmly established early on (287–92, 551–72), and his teaching Ysoude to play is narrated at length in the Tramtrist episode: ‘Sir Tramtris hir gan lere/ . . ./ Ysoude he dede vnderstand,/ What alle playes were/ In lay’ (1259–85). Tristrem endlessly speaks Ysoude’s praises, specifically in terms of love: ‘Hou sche was bri
t and schene,/ Of loue was non so trewe’ (1330–1), ‘Hou sche was gent and fre,/ Of loue was non so wise’ (1341–2). It is thus easy to see how, if he was acquainted with this metrical romance, Malory could have used its resources to produce his own innovative reshaping of the French prose text in his account of the growth of love between Tristram and Isode before Tristram is motivated, as in the Prose Tristan, by jealous rivalry with Palomydes. While Malory was no doubt following in general a French prose text resembling BnF, fr. 103, he may have known the English verse Sir Tristrem and have chosen to recall and use its fuller version of the Tramtris episode at this point in his translation and abridgement. A further parallel may be seen in the detail that Malory adds to the episode of Tristram’s battle as the champion of King Angwysh of Ireland against Sir Blamour de Ganys, when Tristram scrupulously imposes an extra condition upon King Angwysh before consenting to take the battle: ‘that ye shall swere unto me that ye ar in the ryght’ (407.24). In Sir Tristrem the hero is characteristically assured of this requirement before every engagement; for example, when he agrees to champion King Mark against Moraunt: Þo seyd þe king in lede: ‘No was it neuer his Wiþ ri
t!’ Tristrem seyd ‘Ywis, Y wil defende it as kni
t!’

(986–90)

Again, a recollection of the verse romance could have given Malory an opportunity to add a supplementary detail to the construction of his hero’s scrupulous chivalric standards. It may also be that Malory was remembering Sir Tristrem when he changed the account of Mark’s welcoming Tristram back to court by omitting the deceptive intent stressed in the French source: ‘Whan sir Trystrames com to the kynge he was wellcom, and no rehersall was made, and than there was game and play’ (427.20–2). In the verse romance Mark is full of contrition and welcomes Tristrem sincerely in a similar formulation: ‘Þer was ioie and blis,/ And welcom Tristrem trewe’ (2166–7). Beyond these cases of specific local parallels between the two English texts, they share larger-scale similarities of interest. The concern described by Vinaver as Malory’s desire ‘for a more elaborate and more sympathetic treatment of sentiment’ (p. 1444), by which he means portraying what might be seen as natural effects of passionate love and affection between Tristram and Isode, can be associated with the conclusion Malory gives to his ‘Book of Sir Tristram de Lyones’, leaving the lovers happily established at Joyous Garde in what has often been described as domestic

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bliss. Everything points to Malory’s having attempted to align their love story with the pattern successfully achieved in ‘The Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkney’, even adding a scene in which the lovers exchange rings (392.17–18). Although he cannot provide the resolution of a wedding, it is notable that Malory’s wording at the crucial moment of their drinking the love potion gives Tristram and Isode’s bonding the overtones of a marriage ceremony: ‘But by that drynke was in their bodyes they loved aythir other so well that never hir love departed, for well nother for woo . . . the whyche love never departed dayes of their lyff’ (412.21–5). In Sir Tristrem, at the same moment, the effect of the love potion is described in words with very similar overtones: ‘Her love mi
t no man tvin/ Til her endingday’ (1671–2), and the scene is developed to include the dog Hodain drinking the dregs of the potion and sharing in the love bond as a symbol of (typically) marital faithful love.9 Both English recastings of the Tristan story can thus be seen to have given the central love relationship a colouring of marriage.10 Even more marked is the stress laid in both English texts on the hero’s education. While Malory follows the Prose Tristan in his account of Tristram’s acquiring ‘nurture’ in France, he elaborates upon it with a description of the youth’s skills in music and hunting: Trystrams lerned to be an harper passyng all other, . . . in harpynge and on instrumentys of musyke in his youthe he applied hym for to lerne. And . . . he laboured in huntynge and in hawkynge – never jantylman more that ever we herde rede of. And as the booke seyth, he began good mesures of blowynge of beestes of venery and beestes of chaace and all maner of vermaynes, and all the tearmys we have yet of hawkynge and huntynge. (375.12–20)

This strikingly recalls the corresponding passage in Sir Tristrem: He [the foster-father] tau
t him ich a lede Of ich maner of glewe And euerich playing þede, Old lawes and newe; On hunting oft he
ede, To swiche a lawe he drewe Al þus; More he couþe of veneri, Þan couþe Manerious. (289–97)11

9

See J.M. Steadman, ‘Chaucer’s “Whelp”: A Symbol of Marital Fidelity’, Notes and Queries 201 (1956): 374–5. 10 In Sir Tristrem the liaison of Gauhardin and Brengwain is uniquely represented as a formal betrothal: ‘Gauhardine treuþe pli
t/ Brengwain to wiue weld’ (3134–5). See also James I. Wimsatt’s observation that in Malory’s version of the Segwarydes episode ‘the status of marriage is a big gainer’ by comparison with the Prose Tristan, in ‘Segwarydes’ Wife and Competing Perspectives within Malory’s Tale of Sir Tristram and Its Model, the Prose Tristan’, in Retelling Tales: Essays in Honor of Russell Peck, ed. Thomas Hahn and Alan Lupack (Cambridge, UK, 1997), pp. 321–40 (p. 331). 11 The corresponding section of the Old Norse Tristrams saga makes no mention of hunting at this point. Corinne J. Saunders draws attention to the importance of hunting in the early Tristan tradition including Sir Tristrem in ‘Malory’s Book of Huntynge: the Tristram Section of the Morte Darthur’, Medium Ævum 62 (1993): 271–85 (273–4).

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Tristrem’s education and his life as a henchman at Mark’s court are described in unusual length and detail in Sir Tristrem. His demonstration of the proper way to break the deer (441–539) is precipitated by his surprise at seeing Mark’s huntsmen butchering them like farm animals: he teaches them the ‘ri
t’ custom, taught him by his foster-father, ‘Þe best blower of horn/ And king of venery’ (535–6). The lengthy episode of Tristrem’s reunion with his foster-father at Mark’s court (573–715) centres on the contrast between the favoured youth who carves before the king, wearing a robe of conspicuously rich cloth (599–603), and the unrecognizable nobleman in torn clothes, turned away by the porter and the usher as a ‘Cherl’ (620, 633), and unknown even by Tristrem (650–3) – only after being bathed, shaved, and richly dressed does he appear as ‘Rohaud of noble kinne’ (683–93), and participate in the courtly rituals of the table, honoured by King Mark. What connects these episodes is their concern with social distinctions, with the knowledge and customs that distinguish those of noble birth. In the passages added by Malory in praise of Tristram as best of musicians and ‘begynner’ of hunting (375.12–22, 571.29–32, 682.25–683.4), his concern is equally with difference.12 The value of Tristram’s invention of the ‘goodly tearmys that jantylmen have and use’ is in enabling ‘men of worshyp’ to differentiate ‘a jantylman frome a yoman and a yoman frome a vylayne’ (375.24–8); while Arthur, focusing on Tristram’s pre-eminence in hunting, hawking and music in his speech of welcome, invokes these achievements as proofs in his construction of Tristram as the epitome of gentle knighthood: ‘one of the beste knyghtes and the jentyllyst of the worlde and the man of moste worship’ (571.27–9). Thus, despite their great differences in form and source material, and the century and a half separating their probable dates of composition, both medieval English versions of the Tristan legend, Sir Tristrem and Malory’s ‘Book of Sir Tristram de Lyones’, can be seen to refashion their materials in similar ways, validating the central love relationship as far as possible by symbolic association with the bond of marriage, and giving marked prominence to the theme of gentle birth and the means by which it is expressed and maintained in noble customs. Taking into account both these larger-scale similarities and the details where Malory agrees with the metrical romance rather than his French prose source, there seems to be a case for adding Sir Tristrem to the Middle English poems already accepted as having influenced Malory in the complex process of composing the Morte Darthur.

12 On the significance of the hunting theme in Malory, see Saunders, ‘Malory’s Book of Huntynge’.

19 Sir Thomas Malory’s (French) Romance and (English) Chronicle EDWARD DONALD KENNEDY

Although Malory mentions rather disparagingly an English source only once, cites his ‘Frensshe book’ at least seventy times, and conceals his indebtedness to English works, he imitated the style of the English prose chronicles and probably hoped his book would be a substitute for the Arthurian story that English readers knew primarily from those chronicles. And somme Englysshe bookes maken mencyon that they [Lancelot’s companions] wente never oute of Englond after the deth of syr Launcelot – but that was but favour of makers. For the Frensshe book maketh mencyon – and is auctorysed – that [they] . . . wente into the Holy Lande, thereas Jesu Cryst was quycke and deed.1

Although Malory cites his ‘Frensshe book’ as the source for what he tells us about the final destination of Lancelot’s knights, these details do not appear in his French sources or in any of the English ones either, and he is here trying, as he often does, to conceal his addition of information not in his sources, information that in this case may have been suggested by some non-Arthurian work, or that may, as Peter Field suggests, have had a biographical origin.2 The quotation is of interest not just because it is an instance of Malory’s adding material to his adaptation of the Arthurian stories but also because it reveals much about his attitude toward his English and his French sources. Malory had read a number of English Arthurian romances and used two English romances (the alliterative Morte Arthure and the stanzaic Morte Arthur) as major sources and the chronicle of John Hardyng as a minor source,3 but the reference above, appearing in the concluding paragraph of Morte Darthur, is the only time he mentions possible English sources, and it is dismissive: the information in ‘somme Englysshe bookes’ is but the ‘favour of makers’, which can be translated as the ‘bias of authors’; the ‘auctorysed’ work, which Malory obviously prefers, and 1 2

3

The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. E. Vinaver, 3rd edn, rev., P.J.C. Field, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1990), 3.1260. For a possible English romance source see my ‘Malory and His English Sources’, in Aspects of Malory, ed. T. Takamiya and D. Brewer (Cambridge, UK, 1981), pp. 27–55 [38]. For biography, see P.J.C. Field, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory (Cambridge, UK, 1993), p. 82. See R.H. Wilson, ‘Malory’s Early Knowledge of Arthurian Romance’, Texas Studies in English 29 (1950): 33–50; and my ‘Malory and His English Sources’, cited in n. 2.

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to which he refers at least seventy times in the course of Morte Darthur, is his ‘Frensshe book’.4 This final paragraph is addressed to a particular community of readers, many of whom would have been unable to read French and all of whom would have been accustomed to read works written in English. This is the same community that Caxton would shortly thereafter address in his publications. The book they had just finished reading, Malory reminds them, offers a more authoritative account of the Arthurian story than the English ones that most of them would have known. This final statement is important to Malory’s whole book, for it points to older English works that his readers knew and older French works that had, until the completion of Morte Darthur, been inaccessible to many of them. Peter Field’s first book, Romance and Chronicle, like Mark Lambert’s later book and Shunici Noguchi’s earlier article, emphasizes the stylistic similarities between Malory’s work and other types of fifteenth-century English writing such as the personal letter and the prose chronicle.5 Since many of the same stylistic features appear in personal letters, it seems likely that Malory’s style is similar to that of everyday speech, combined with a sense of formality appropriate to a work concerned with upper-class characters.6 Moreover, as Derek Brewer has persuasively argued, Malory’s style is that of colloquial narratives of the type associated with what Brewer calls the ‘archaic mind’.7 However, Malory’s addition to his account of geographical details that were not in his French sources (the possibility that the sword in the stone may have appeared at St Paul’s Cathedral, the identification of Camelot with Winchester, the names of the counties that sided with Mordred, to cite just a few examples) suggests that he may have been deliberately imitating the style of one type of colloquial narrative, the English prose chronicle. In fact, the addition of geographical locations often missing from his French sources suggests that he would have realized that such details would have been missed by the many English readers who were accustomed to them in the version of the Arthurian story found in chronicles. These would include, for example, those at the court of Edward IV who, Richard Barber points out, frequently talked of the ‘cronycles of kinges’.8 Malory probably wanted to produce a work that would replace the chronicle accounts that are largely ignored now but that were the primary source of the Arthurian story to English readers of the fifteenth century. The modern conception of the Arthurian story as the account of the love triangle of Lancelot, Guenevere and Arthur resulted from the popularity of Malory’s Morte Darthur, particularly after its rediscovery in the early nineteenth century, and from the many adaptations of the story by authors from then to the present. It is easy to forget that prior to Malory, in England the prevailing conception of the Arthurian

4 5

6 7 8

R.H. Wilson, ‘Malory’s “French Book” Again’, Comparative Literature 2 (1950): 172–81 [173]. Field, Romance and Chronicle: A Study of Malory’s Prose Style (London, 1971); Lambert, Malory: Style and Vision in Le Morte Darthur (New Haven, CT, 1975): Noguchi, ‘The Paradox of the Character of Malory’s Language’, Hiroshima Studies in English Language and Literature, 13.2 (1967): 115–34. See D.S. Brewer, ed., Malory: The ‘Morte Darthur’: Parts Seven and Eight (London, 1968), pp. 12–19. D.S. Brewer, ‘Malory: The Traditional Writer and the Archaic Mind’, Arthurian Literature 1 (1981): pp. 94–120. See R. Barber, ‘Malory’s Le Morte Darthur and Court Culture under Edward IV’, Arthurian Literature 12 (1993): 133–55 [137].

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story would have been far different to those who could read only English (as well as to some in England who read French and Latin). So far as we know, before Malory’s Morte Darthur the story of Lancelot’s love for Guenevere had been adapted only once into English, in an anonymous metrical romance known as the stanzaic Morte Arthur, and although Malory used it as one of his English sources, its survival in a single manuscript suggests that it may not have circulated widely. The version of the story that would have been best known in England was derived from the twelfth-century chronicle account that Geoffrey of Monmouth invented (either in the original sense of ‘invent’ as ‘find’ or, as is more likely, its modern sense). Geoffrey’s story, that begins with Arthur’s conception through the machinations of Merlin and that tells of Arthur’s conquest of most of Rome and ends with Arthur having to return home to fight his treacherous nephew Mordred, had circulated widely in Britain and on the Continent and had been incorporated into other chronicles in Latin, French, and English that told the whole history of Britain and England from earliest times to the present. While many writers on the Continent appear to have dismissed the story as ‘fable’ (to use Boccaccio’s description of it)9 and to have ignored it as part of the history of their countries, the English took the story seriously as the history of the island that they had inherited from the British. Although by Malory’s time, as Caxton tells us, many in England believed ‘that there was no suche Arthur and that alle suche bookes as been maad of hym ben but fayned and fables’,10 others continued to accept as historical truth what is now known as the legendary history of Britain. Some of the chronicles were widely circulated, particularly the prose Brut of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which survives in about fifty Anglo-Norman manuscripts and in its English version in at least 174 manuscripts.11 Some of the thirteenth-century French prose Arthurian romances that were Malory’s primary sources (the Vulgate Cycle, the Post-Vulgate Roman du Graal, the Tristan en prose, the Perlesvaus), were also enormously popular (120 manuscripts and one editio princeps of 1488 of the French prose Lancelot, 88 manuscripts, including fragments, of the prose Tristan, 41 of the prose Merlin, 51 of the Quête del

9

See my ‘Generic Intertextuality in the English Alliterative Morte Arthure: The Italian Connection’, Text and Intertext in Medieval Arthurian Literature, ed. N.J. Lacy (New York, 1996), pp. 41–56 [46]. 10 ‘Caxton’s Preface’, in Works, I.cliv. 11 For recent lists of the Anglo-Norman and Middle English manuscripts see L.M. Matheson, The ‘Prose Brut’: The Development of a Middle English Chronicle, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies (Tempe, AZ, 1998), pp. xvii–xxxii; R.J. Dean with the collaboration of M.B.M. Boulton, Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts (London, 1999), pp. 1–51; E.D. Kennedy, Chronicles and Other Historical Writing, vol. 8 of A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, gen. ed. A.E. Hartung (New Haven, CT, 1989), pp. 2818–21. In an e-mail communication of May 29, 2003 Julia Marvin suggested that there are 49–53 surviving Anglo-Norman Prose Brut texts depending on how one classifies some of the manuscripts. The varying numbers of English manuscripts in Matheson’s book and my own also results primarily from disagreements over what should be classified as a Prose Brut chronicle. I classify as separate chronicles, for example, some of the manuscripts that Matheson lists as ‘peculiar texts and versions’. Since the publication of my list of 172 manuscripts in 1989, one new manuscript of the English prose Brut has turned up, Brogyntyn 8 on deposit in the National Library of Wales, and part of one of the manuscripts I had included among town chronicles, The Bristowe Chronicle (no. 20 in my list), Matheson appropriately includes among the Brut chronicles. On the popularity of these chronicles, see F. Riddy, ‘Reading for England: Arthurian Literature and National Consciousness’, BBIAS 43 (1991): 314–32.

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Saint Graal, and 46 of the Mort Artu).12 They were read in England as well as on the Continent and influenced many English writers including the authors of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the alliterative Morte Arthure. A few authors, like the author of the metrical Of Arthour and of Merlin (ca. 1250) and Herry Lovelich, a skinner of London, wrote verse translations of the French Vulgate Merlin and, in the case of Lovelich, the French Estoire del Saint Graal as well, and there was also a close anonymous fifteenth-century prose translation of the Vulgate Merlin. These translations of the Merlin and the Estoire, however, were related to the chronicle tradition and did not include the Lancelot-Guenevere story. By Malory’s time, the French prose romances would have been known to fewer than even the minority that could read them in the earlier Middle Ages. John Gower was the last English poet to compose any significant work in Anglo-Norman, and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it is easy to find references to the inability of even the upper classes to understand French.13 Throughout the fifteenth century, there was ever more emphasis upon English, and knowledge of French, Douglas Kibbee observes, gradually ‘retreated to the narrow confines of its role as an aristocratic accomplishment’.14 The literate English population’s familiarity with the Arthurian story would have come primarily from English metrical romances and various English chronicles. Although the English chronicles occasionally added details that indicated the authors knew the French romances (such as the brief introduction of Lancelot into the Auchinleck manuscript of the Short Metrical Chronicle or details from the romances added to the prose Brut chronicle in Lambeth Palace Library MS 84), and one chronicler, John Hardyng, drew on them to the extent that he even added a much abbreviated version of Galahad’s Grail quest to the English chronicle material, the chronicle version of the Arthurian story remained essentially distinct from the romances.15 Although Robert Mannyng mentions when the events in the verse romances and the events in the prose romances would have taken place,16 his narrative essentially followed the story initiated by Geoffrey of Monmouth. 12 See Field, ‘Malory and the French Prose Lancelot’ and ‘The French Prose Tristan: A Note on Some

13 14

15

16

Manuscripts, a List of Printed Texts, and Two Correlations with Malory’s Morte Darthur’, both in Field, Malory: Texts and Sources (Cambridge, UK, 1998), pp. 199–223, [200], pp. 261–75 [262] ; R. Trachsler, Clôtures du cycle arthurien: étude et textes (Geneva, 1996), pp. 559–64. Trachsler lists just 97 manuscripts of the Prose Lancelot, although of the 120 Lancelot manuscripts that Field lists, eleven are usually classified as Prose Tristan manuscripts which include interpolations from the Lancelot. Trachsler excludes these, and this helps account for the smaller number of Lancelot manuscripts that he lists. See R. Berndt, ‘The Period of the Final Decline of French in Medieval England (Fourteenth and Early Fifteenth Centuries)’, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 20 (1972): 341–69. D.A. Kibbee, ‘For to speke frenche trewely’: The French Language in England, 1000–1600: Its Status, Description, and Instruction, Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science 60 (Amsterdam, 1991), p. 62. On the Short Metrical Chronicle and Hardyng, see my Chronicles and Other Historical Writing, pp. 2622–4, 2644–7; on the Lambeth Manuscript, see L.M. Matheson, ‘The Arthurian Stories of Lambeth Palace Library MS 84’, Arthurian Literature 5 (1985), pp. 70–91. On the Arthurian material in the Auchinleck version of the Short Metrical Chronicle, see T. Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340 (Oxford, 1996), p. 111. The British Library MS Royal 12 c.xii version of this chronicle has recently been edited with a new name, The Abridged English Metrical Brut, ed. U. O’Farrell-Tate, Middle English Texts 32 (Heidelberg, 2002). This version, however, does not include the reference to Lancelot. See A. Putter, ‘Finding Time for Romance: Mediaeval Arthurian Literary History,’ Medium Ævum 63

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Because of greater literacy in the late fifteenth century many wanted to make available in English works that had previously been known only to those who could read French or Latin.17 Malory is sometimes compared to Continental fifteenthcentury writers, like Michot Gonnot or Ulrich Füetrer, who compiled one-volume condensations of the huge romances.18 Malory, however, was not, like Gonnot, just rewriting and condensing the French romances; he was more like Füetrer, who was making French works available in another language, and in doing so Malory was following the lead of others in England who were trying to make more works available to a people whose language and literature were generally considered impoverished since English had so long been a language of the lower classes. While it is difficult today to think of Malory’s Morte Darthur as having resulted from the same impetus as such generally forgotten romances as Caxton’s Charles the Grete or the verse and prose versions of the story of Alexander the Great, Malory, like the authors of these works, would have been attempting to produce a version of works that previously had been available only to those who could read French. He was, however, taking more of a risk in producing an English version of the French Arthurian romances than were authors of stories about Charlemagne or Alexander. Arthur, as known through the chronicles, had become a national hero, accepted by many English as if he were one of their own rather than a Celtic enemy of the Saxons. On the one hand, Malory was appealing to those who knew the French versions of the stories but was offering a different version based upon his wide reading in both English and French romance. On the other, he was presenting a version of the Arthurian story that would have been new to those who could not read French. In the latter case, he must have had doubts about how the mingling of knightly adventures and a love story would have appealed to those who would have been familiar with the epic chronicle account of Arthur’s conquest of Europe. There had been various metrical romances, like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell, which told of adventures of Arthur’s knights, but his was the first account outside of the chronicles that attempted to tell the whole story of Arthur from his birth to his death and that did so by drawing upon versions of the story in which the French Lancelot, not Arthur, was the chief character. He was the first to offer an English version of the whole life of Arthur that mingled chronicle and romance. As I have suggested elsewhere, Caxton, who had published two editions of the prose Brut a few years before his edition of Malory, probably had doubts about how

(1994): 1–16; L. Johnson, ‘Robert Mannyng’s History of Arthurian Literature’, Church and Chronicle in the Middle Ages, ed. I. Wood and G.A. Loud (London, 1991): 129–47. 17 This can be illustrated by the large number of chronicles that were translated into or written in English. The chapter on chronicles in J.E. Wells, Manual of the Writings in Middle English (New Haven, CT, 1916), which covered literature to 1400, included nine chronicles written in English, with a tenth one added in the ninth supplement (1951). My revision of this, which covered chronicles in English to 1500, included 115 works. See my Chronicles and Other Historical Writing, pp. 2597–8. 18 See the entries on Gonnot and Füetrer in The New Arthurian Encyclopedia, ed. N.J. Lacy (New York, 1991), for Gonnot the study by C.E. Pickford, L’Évolution du roman arthurien en prose vers la fin du moyen âge d’après le manuscrit 112 du fonds français de la Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris, 1960), and for Füetrer, Bernd Bastert, ‘Late Medieval Summations: Rappoltsteiner Parzifal and Ulrich Füetrer’s Buch der Abenteuer’, The Arthur of the Germans, ed. W.H. Jackson and S.A. Ranawake (Cardiff, 2000), pp. 166–80.

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the book would have been received,19 and his defensive prologue stresses the importance of having available in English the ‘noble hystorye . . . of the moost renomed Crysten kyng’ Arthur ‘whyche ought moost to be remembred emonge us Englysshemen tofore al other Crysten kynges’.20 How this version would be received by English readers, however, must have been a concern to Caxton and before him to Malory. Ruth Morse has pointed to the difficulties in trying to associate Malory’s book with today’s recognized genres. She observes that if we could have seen what Malory’s original manuscript looked like, we might have a better idea of how he expected his readers to understand it. Although the Winchester MS is just a copy, she observes that it ‘looks more like a French prose romance or an English or French prose history than anything else’ and she writes that ‘we assume that we know what a fiction looked like, while Malory might have wanted to ally his text to non-fiction works’.21 This is an astute observation about the nature of what Malory was probably attempting, and one could suggest that the non-fiction works to which he would have wanted to ally his book were the prose chronicles, notably the prose Brut. Morse points out that Malory never refers to his book as a history, but she cites several instances in which his characters refer to chronicles: Arthur mentions what he has ‘founde in the cronycles of this londe’ concerning earlier British conquests of Rome; after the Grail Quest Arthur orders clerks to ‘cronycle of the hyghe adventures of the good knyghtes’; Lancelot laments that the fickleness of Fortune ‘may be preved by many olde cronycles, as of noble Ector of Troy and Alysaunder’ and fears that ‘aftir my dayes that men shall cronycle upon me that I was fleamed oute of thys londe’.22 These suggest that chronicles were on Malory’s mind as he was writing his book, and he might have been concerned about the relation of his work to the Arthurian story of the chronicles, which, like the stories of Ector and Alexander, illustrated the fickleness of Fortune that Lancelot laments. That Malory was aware of the potential problems the French material might cause can be seen in his pruning of his French sources. His first tale, ‘The Tale of King Arthur’, was based on the Merlin of the Post-Vulgate Roman du Graal, but he omitted the early part concerning Merlin and began with the story of the conception of Arthur. He also appears to have known other romances in the Post-Vulgate Roman, and as I have suggested elsewhere, this cycle, with its brief section about Lancelot, probably suggested writing a short ‘Tale of Sir Launcelot’, adapted from the earlier Vulgate Cycle, so that the story of Lancelot would not dominate what was to be a series of tales concerning the rise and fall of Arthur.23 Moreover, the parts of the Vulgate Lancelot that Malory chose not to adapt would suggest that he had in mind the tastes of English readers who were accustomed to

19 See my ‘Caxton, Malory, Arthurian Chronicles, and French Romances: Intertextual Complexities’, in

20 21 22 23

‘And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche’: Essays on Medieval English presented to Professor Matsuji Tajima on his Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Y. Iyeiri and M. Connolly (Tokyo, 2002), pp. 217–36. ‘Caxton’s Preface’ in Works, I.cxliii. R. Morse, ‘Back to the Future: Malory’s Genres’, Arthuriana 7.3 (1997): 100–23 [107]. Works, I.188, II.1036, III. 1201, 1203. All are cited by Morse, ‘Back to the Future’, 101. See my ‘Malory’s “Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake”, the Vulgate Lancelot, and the Post-Vulgate Roman du Graal’, Arthurian and Other Studies presented to Shunichi Noguchi, ed. T. Suzuki and T. Mukai (Cambridge, UK, 1993), pp. 107–29.

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the heroic, often idealized king found in works like Hardyng’s chronicle, which he knew, and in Lydgate’s Fall of Princes and the prose Brut, both of which he may have known.24 He omitted sections of the Vulgate Lancelot that gave a decidedly negative picture of Arthur: the part in which Arthur is too weak to defend his kingdom from Galehot and the wise man’s stern lecture to him about his failings as king; the Camille episode in which Arthur, duped by the Saxons, is captured in bed with Camille, an infidelity on the part of the king that occurs before the consummation of the Lancelot-Guenevere affair; the false Guenevere episode in which Arthur almost has the real Guenevere scalped and her hands skinned, after which she would have been dragged through the town and burnt at the stake because he believes that she is not his queen. On the other hand, Malory, in his first tale, had retained other failings of Arthur that were unknown in the English tradition, such as the begetting of Mordred through the incestuous relationship with his half-sister and the attempt to have Mordred destroyed by drowning all of the children in the kingdom that were born at the time of Mordred’s birth.25 Here, he may have originally intended to follow the Post-Vulgate Roman and have had the intention of adding punishment for sin as a cause for Arthur’s fall,26 although he did not follow through with this, possibly because of concern for how English readers might react to it. His inclusion of the chronicle story of Arthur’s Roman war, adapted from the English alliterative Morte Arthure, was in all likelihood added to his account because of the expectations English readers would have had, since this story was central to the chronicle tradition. In his adaptation of this part of the book Malory changed the account found in the alliterative Morte Arthure from a tragedy depicting, like the chronicles, the destruction of Arthur’s kingdom, to an account that ends in triumph with Arthur crowned Roman emperor. Malory took the coronation from Hardyng’s chronicle, but in Hardyng, as in the other chronicles, there is the tragic ending immediately after the conquest of Rome. Vinaver’s belief that Malory’s second tale was the first of the tales to be written has not found many adherents; and Robert Wilson suggested a cogent reason for the location of the story of Arthur’s Roman campaign as the second tale. According to Wilson, Malory probably placed the story of the Roman campaign where he did because there is a brief account of the Roman war in the Vulgate Merlin, a romance that Malory had once read even though he used the Merlin from the Post-Vulgate Roman du Graal as the source for his first tale.27 The Roman war ends in the 24 See J. Withrington, ‘King Arthur as Emperor’, Notes and Queries n.s. 35 (1988): 13–15, for the possi-

bility that Malory may have been influenced by Lydgate as well as by representations of Arthur in art. There is no proof that Malory knew the Prose Brut but with so many surviving Anglo-Norman and English manuscripts attesting to its popularity, it would be surprising if he had not at some point read it. 25 Field, correctly in my opinion, finds this episode incompatible with the character of Arthur elsewhere in Malory’s book and believes that its retention is one of a few flaws in the first tale that Malory failed to revise. See his ‘Malory’s Mordred and the Morte Arthure’, Malory: Texts and Sources, pp. 89–102 [101–2]. 26 Arthur in the Mort Artu section of the Post-Vulgate Roman du Graal specifically says that God has brought him down ‘because of my deserving and my sin’ (The Post-Vulgate Death of Arthur, trans. M. Asher in Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation, gen. ed. N.J. Lacy, 5 vols. [New York, 1996], V.304). See F. Bogdanow, ‘The Evolution of the Theme of the Fall of Arthur’s Kingdom’, trans. E.D. Kennedy, in King Arthur: A Casebook, ed. E.D. Kennedy (New York, 1996; paperback New York, 2002), pp. 91–103 [94–8]. 27 Wilson, ‘Malory’s Early Knowledge’, 46–9.

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Vulgate Merlin, as it does in Malory, with Arthur’s victory over the Romans, and although Arthur is not crowned emperor, he returns home to be welcomed by his knights and Guenevere as he does in Malory’s version. In the Vulgate Merlin, the story of the Roman campaign occurs near the end of the romance and thus just before the beginning of the Vulgate Lancelot. This is where the Roman campaign occurs in Malory, as Tale II, between his ‘Tale of Arthur and Merlin’ and his brief ‘Tale of Sir Launcelot’. By incorporating the Roman campaign at this point in Morte Darthur, Malory, in a book drawn primarily from French tradition, acknowledges the English chronicle tradition but presents it between Tales I and III, in a context similar to that in which it appears in his ‘Frensshe book’. The alliterative style of this section of the Winchester version of Malory’s book, with lines such as ‘dremed how a dredfull dragon dud drenche muche of his peple’ and ‘his feete were florysshed as hit were fyne sable’,28 informed his readers that he was drawing upon English material. However, according to Field’s estimate, this tale constitutes only about 6% of Morte Darthur.29 That brevity is significant, for it told English readers that the story of the Roman campaign and Arthur’s other conquests on the Continent, which they would have known from the chronicles and would have considered the most significant part of the Arthurian story, was only a small part of the legend. The elimination of the tragic ending at this point is also a reminder that the Arthurian story was much more complex than the English had thought; the tragedy was more than a military defeat that could be attributed simply to fortune. As C.S. Lewis observed, medieval readers thought in terms of great matters, like the matter of Britain or the matter of Antiquity, and readers often realized when they were reading a romance that they were getting but a small part of the whole story.30 Thus Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde is just a piece of the story of Troy, and Chaucer, in fact, reminds his readers that if they want the whole story they should turn to others such as Homer and Dares and Dictys. Similarly, the Gawain-poet, in framing his romance with the account of the Trojans, which is told in the chronicles, and in mentioning characters like Agravain and Mador de la Porte, who appear in the Vulgate Cycle, was reminding his audience that he was giving them but a small part of the Arthurian story. Malory, in incorporating the brief story of the Roman war, is doing something similar but in reverse. Instead of writing a story that is a piece of the whole, like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory is reminding his readers that the chronicle story of Arthur’s wars on the Continent is but a small piece of a larger whole, which he himself is presenting for the first time in English. Malory’s one reference to ‘somme Englysshe bookes’ is dismissive, and his attitude toward English material might be compared to Chaucer’s attitude toward English romance: as Derek Brewer points out, many of Chaucer’s narrative techniques were indebted to the techniques of English metrical romances, and in ridiculing them in 28 Malory, Works, I.196. 29 P.J.C. Field, ‘Caxton’s Roman War’, in The Malory Debate: Essays on the Texts of ‘Le Morte Darthur’,

ed. B. Wheeler, R.L. Kindrick, and M.N. Salda (Cambridge, UK, 2000), pp. 127–67 [133]. 30 See C.S. Lewis, ‘What Chaucer Really Did to Il Filostrato’, Essays and Studies 17 (1932): 56–75, repr.

in Chaucer Criticism Vol. II: ‘Troilus and Criseyde’& the Minor Poems, ed. R. J. Schoeck and J. Taylor (Notre Dame, IN, 1961), pp. 16–33 [19–20].

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him’.31

Sir Thopas he ‘was biting the hand that fed The same could be said of Malory and his attitude toward English books, for stylistically his book is similar to what readers of English prose chronicles would have known. Field refers to the ‘chronicle verisimilitude’ of Malory’s book,32 and Shunichi Noguchi made a similar point when, arguing against R.W. Chambers’s belief that Malory’s prose was ‘but tributary to the main stream of continuous English prose’,33 he stressed his belief that Malory found the model for his style in the English chronicles. Citing a passage from Gregory’s Chronicle as an example, Noguchi writes: ‘One would be a competent reader of Malory if one could tell at once that the . . . passage from Gregory’s Chronicle, which . . . shares recognizable features of Malorian style, is not Malory’s own.’34 One could make similar a similar observation about the style of Malory’s work and that of the prose Brut. How Malory’s English style was received, and how reminiscent of the chronicles that his readers would have known, can be illustrated by a brief, embarrassing and probably generally forgotten episode in the history of the study of Malory’s book. On December 31, 1965, John Steinbeck announced in an article in a series ‘Letters to Alicia’, written for the Long Island newspaper Newsday, that he and Eugène Vinaver, on a visit to Alnwick castle in search of unknown Arthurian manuscripts, had found a manuscript that Steinbeck thought could turn out to be a major discovery relevant to the study of Malory; and although he qualified the importance of the find by noting that scholars would have to study the manuscript and it would ‘take a long time to study, compare, evaluate and place the find’, he nevertheless maintained that the manuscript was a ‘scholars’ pot of gold, and a holy grail for Arthurian researchers’: Does this seem overblown? There are two versions of Thomas Malory’s ‘Morte Darthur’, the Caxton, printed in 1484 [sic], and the manuscript, discovered at Winchester College in 1934. Now we have found what appears to be a third version, in a script very like the Winchester MS., but in a different style and in a compressed form. This may be one of the lost sources for the other two, or it may be a separate link to earlier sources as yet unknown. That may emerge from long and close study.

Although he said that the manuscript could be a lost source for Malory’s work, he went on to imply that this manuscript could be an early draft of Malory’s work: How can I make a comparison in American literary history? Well, suppose you came on a version of Washington’s Farewell Address in a shorter and different form? Imagine finding handwritten notes and suggestions from which came the Declaration of Independence or finding in Lincoln’s handwriting a longer and different version of the Gettysburg

31 D.S. Brewer, ‘The Relationship of Chaucer to the English and European Traditions’, Chaucer and

Chaucerians: Critical Studies in Middle English Literature, ed. D.S. Brewer (University, AL, 1967), pp. 1–38 [4]. 32 Field, Romance and Chronicle, 150. 33 Chambers, On the Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More and his School, EETA OS 191a (London, 1932), p. cxli. 34 Noguchi, ‘Paradox’, pp. 131–3.

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Address – there you would have an excitement comparable with this find in Alnwick castle in Northumberland.35

Whatever qualifications Steinbeck offered in the above account about whether this were Malory’s work or a ‘lost source’, the newspapers and news broadcasts both in Britain and the United States ignored them and announced that Steinbeck and Vinaver had found a new version of Malory’s book. Steinbeck’s article was reprinted in several newspapers in Britain and the United States including the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin (which ran the headline ‘Great Discovery: A Third “Morte d’Arthur” ’); and the discovery was reported in others, such as the Daily Mail (‘The New King Arthur Discovery’, January 1, 1966: 4) and the Sunday Times (‘King Arthur Quest in Stately Homes’, January 2, 1966: 3) in England and the New York Times (‘Steinbeck Find Said to Be First “Morte D’Arthur” MS’, January 2, 1966: 52) in the United States. The manuscript whose discovery Steinbeck announced turned out not to be directly related to Malory’s book, but was instead a manuscript that included as a separate unit the Arthurian section of the popular prose Brut. Furthermore, the Alnwick manuscript was not a new discovery: it had been microfilmed during World War II as a part of the American Council of Learned Societies’ project to film as many medieval British manuscripts as possible lest they be destroyed by enemy bombs, and copies had been deposited in the British Museum and the Library of Congress. According to Steinbeck’s biographer Jackson J. Benson, Steinbeck’s premature announcement of the discovery caused considerable embarrassment for Vinaver, who complained that even the Clarendon Press had offered to reset Vinaver’s forthcoming second edition of Malory ‘on the basis of the Alnwick manuscript’. Although Steinbeck wrote an apology to Vinaver and although some of the blame rests on the press for blowing the story out of all proportion and, Benson suggests, even altering Steinbeck’s account, the episode strained the friendship that had developed between Steinbeck and Vinaver,36 and the episode ended Steinbeck’s twelve-year attempt to rewrite Malory’s Morte Darthur.37 In Steinbeck’s defence, however, it is easy to see how someone familiar with Malory but unfamiliar with less well-known works of medieval British prose might have thought that the Brut represented an early version of Malory’s work, or how a creative writer like Steinbeck might think in terms of early drafts of an author’s work. Just as one might mistake Gregory’s chronicle for Malory’s work, so Steinbeck assumed the prose Brut must have been related to Malory’s book.

35 ‘Letter No. 7’ in Robert B. Harmon, John Steinbeck and ‘Newsday’ (San José, CA, 1999), p. 42. The

series of articles ‘Letters to Alicia’ were addressed to Alicia Patterson Guggenheim, owner of Newsday. 36 Jackson J. Benson, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer (New York, 1984), pp. 974–7. Also

see Harmon, John Steinbeck and ‘Newsday’, pp. 24–6. I heard of the discovery on the radio in early January 1966 shortly after returning to school after Christmas break to begin work on my dissertation on Malory’s Morte Darthur; soon after that a friend sent me a copy of the Steinbeck article that had been reprinted in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. 37 Harmon, John Steinbeck and ‘Newsday’, p. 24. The adaptation of the parts of Malory’s book that Steinbeck had completed (Tales I and III) was published after his death as The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights from the Winchester Manuscripts [sic] of Thomas Malory and Other Sources, ed. Chase Horton (New York, 1976).

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Compare, for example, these two accounts of Arthur’s death, the first from the prose Brut, the second from Malory: But so hit bifelle at the laste, þat Mordrede was slayn, and al his folc, and al þe gode chiualry þat Kyng Arthure hade gaderede and norisshede of diuerse
landes; and also þe noble Knyghtes of þe rounde table, þat so miche were preisede þrou
al þe worlde, weren þere slayn; and Arthure himself was wondede to þe deth.38 And therewith Mordred daysshed downe starke dede to the erthe. And noble kynge Arthure felle in a swoughe to the erthe, and there he sowned oftyntymys, and sir Lucan and sir Bedwere offtetymes hove hym up. And so waykly betwyxte them they lad hym to a lytyll chapell nat farre frome the see, and whan the kyng was there, [he] thought hym resonabely eased.39

The passage from the Brut consists of a few lines; the one from Malory is but the beginning of the account of Arthur’s death and covers several pages in Vinaver’s edition. Malory’s simple clauses strung together with coordinating conjunctions, his predominantly English vocabulary, and his occasional uses of alliteration for emphasis (‘Mordred daysshed downe . . . dede’) would have reminded his readers of the style of English chronicles. But Malory’s account is much more detailed. The Brut reads like a summary of Malory’s account of Arthur’s death, or, just as plausibly, as an early draft in which the author had not yet filled in the details. It could, in fact, give the impression, as it did to Steinbeck, that it was like an early draft of the Declaration of Independence or of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. In fact, Malory’s work seems in many ways like a prose chronicle (including the use of direct speech, which was typical of early historical narratives), and Malory probably hoped to write a story that would replace the hitherto popular English chronicle accounts of Arthur that had prevailed in England but that told only part of the story, and a small part at that. In all likelihood, Malory would have been pleased with Steinbeck’s mistake, for there is a good chance that he wanted his readers to recognize the similarity of his book to the chronicles. The opening lines of Morte Darthur (‘Hit befell in the dayes of Uther Pendragon, when he was kynge of all Englond and so regned . . .’)40 present, as Catherine Batt observes, a beginning in medias res, and it assumes previous knowledge.41 However, the previous knowledge that Malory here assumes, it should be stressed, is not necessarily that of French prose romances; for the part of the Post-Vulgate Merlin from which he adapts his opening lines with the account of Uther’s infatuation with Ygerne and Merlin arranging for the conception of Arthur closely follows the English chronicle accounts. He was opening with a story and characters (Uther, Ygerne, Merlin, Arthur) that would have been known to English readers who had never read the French accounts. Thus Malory at the outset meets his English readers on familiar ground. They would soon realize, however, that his account was much fuller than anything that most of them had previously encountered. 38 The Brut or the Chronicles of England, ed. F.W.D. Brie, 2 vols., EETS OS 131, 136 (1906, 1908; reprint

vol. 1, London, 1960 and vol. 2, New York, 1971), I.90. 39 Malory, Works, III.1237. 40 Malory, Works, I.7. 41 C. Batt, Malory’s ‘Morte Darthur’: Remaking Arthurian Tradition (New York, 2002), p. 55.

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Malory, by indicating in his final paragraph that his last book was drawn upon the more prestigious French book, was being less than honest with his readers. In the final pages of his book he had turned away from the account in the French Mort Artu and had drawn his conclusion from the English stanzaic Morte Arthur, itself an adaptation from the French work but with significant differences. Thus some of the parts of Malory’s final tale most memorable to readers – Arthur’s attempt to arrange a truce with Mordred, the final battle being caused by a knight drawing his sword and attempting to kill an adder, the account of the pillagers coming onto the battlefield to despoil the dead and wounded knights, the final meeting between Lancelot and Guenevere – are taken from an English book, and that is something that Malory is unwilling to acknowledge. His denigration of English Arthurian accounts and his emphasis on the French book is in part a reminder that he is presenting something different for English readers, and it is in part an appeal to snobbery, to point to the fact that his account is based on what the upper classes had been reading in French. It is similar to the appeals that Caxton made at various times to the middle-class purchasers of his publications that were based upon French sources. Malory must have been hoping that his readers would accept his Arthurian stories as a new and fuller Arthurian account, better than the one they knew because it was based, after all, not on English works, but on the French book, and it was ‘auctorysed’.

20 Romantic Self-Fashioning: Three Case Studies DAVID MILLS

This chapter explores the proposition that narrators and their characters in romance share with their readers a knowing self-awareness of the genres within which they are placed. It focuses upon three Arthurian examples – Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Malory’s stories of Sir Gareth and of the Maid of Astolat – to illustrate how writers employ such awareness to complicate and enrich the reader’s response. When a narrator sends a romance knight on a quest, he commits his hero not only to a journey but to a narrative-genre with whose conventions both knight and reader are familiar. Usually the experience will be comfortable for both, the product of a compact of author, narrator, characters, and reader, providing the hero with no opportunity for doubt, hesitation or self-questioning. But romance is at its most challenging when it scrutinizes its own conventions and confronts its characters with situations that expose the limitations of their seemingly secure codes. In this essay I want to contextualize key moments of self-questioning in three narratives – Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Malory’s tales of Sir Gareth and of The Maid of Astolat – and consider their significance for the assessment of the characters and their values.

Gawain: The Generically Disorientated Knight At lines 1846–54 the Lady in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight repeats her offer of her girdle, which Gawain has emphatically rejected at 1836–45, claiming now that it will prevent the wearer from being slain by an adversary: Then kest the knyght, and hit come to his hert Hit were a juel for the jopardé that hym jugged were, When he acheved to the chapel his chek for to fech, Myght he haf slypped to be unslayn, the sleght were noble. Thenne he thulged with hir threpe and tholed hir to speke, And ho bere on hym the belt . . . (1855–60)1

1

Quotations from J.J. Anderson (ed.), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness, Patience (London, 1996).

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By introducing the conventional device of the magical ring, here offered as a love token but accepted only for its protective properties, the Lady confirms Gawain’s view that he occupies a romance of marvels. Within this moment, Gawain reassesses his role and priorities. What the Lady hears is Gawain as ‘he thulged with hir threpe and tholed hir to speke’ (1859), but his thought-processes, which we are shown, are at odds with his words. As Bercilak will say later, he acted ‘. . . for ye lufed your lyf – the lasse I yow blame’ (2368). Gawain’s decision endorses the dominant generic affiliation of the narrative that the author has created. At the start of the poem the narrator constructs his audience in reductive terms. Despite his claim to a narrative rooted in national history, he sources the work not in the authoritative base of a written text, to which Malory refers his reader, but in something that he has heard ‘in toun’,2 and thus equates his readers with the street audience for a popular oral tale, restless and impatient: ‘If ye wyl lysten this laye bot on littel quile,/ I schal telle it astit as I in toun herde’ (30–1), and wanting only a popular tale of adventure: ‘. . . a selly in sight summe men hit holden,/ And an outtrage awenture of Arthures wonderes’ (28–9). He will, however, teasingly reverse this claim at the end by referring the readers to ‘the best boke of romaunce’ (2521) and ‘the Brutus bokes’ (2523). Incongruously, the narrator transfers this popular desire for sensationalism within the text to his kingly reader, Arthur, the patron of the romance, for he too wants ‘Of sum aventurus thyng an uncouthe tale,/ Of sum mayn mervayle that he myght trawe,/ Of alderes, of armes, of other aventurus’ (93–5). The sequencing of the text suggests that a credible tale of marvels represents Arthur’s preferred choice over the alternative, a joust in which challenger and knight set their lives at risk (96–100). Like the projected audience for the poem, he is restless, constantly moving about (88), a curiously unkingly instability which seems a mark of his immaturity: ‘so bisied him his yonge blod and his brayn wylde’ (89). His fictive author, Morgan le Fay, provides him with something that satisfies all his preferences – a marvel; an exchange of blows that risk life for life; and the substance of a romance whose narrative is completed by Gawain himself on his return (2494–500). This purports to be a romance of marvels: ‘mervayl’ recurs not merely in a weakened sense of personal response (233, 2307) but also of events that have the inherent property of the marvellous (94, 466, 718, 1197); ‘wonder’ has a similar range, also relating to inherent quality (16, 480, 1481, 2459).3 Mortal though the challenge appears to be, it is offered in the context of Christmastide as entertainment, and is repackaged in that way by Arthur himself (463–75). The narrator offers a second potential reading by ascribing the Pentangle to Gawain, a sign which seems to relate more appropriately to a Galahad than a Gawain. It therefore predicates a different genre, in which the tests are spiritual, the mode symbolic, and the goal a spiritual enlightenment veiled in sacred symbol. With an emblem that offers the potential to allegorize the shield in the manner of St Paul, and the image of the Virgin which raises his resolve (645–50), Gawain rides across a landscape reminiscent of wasteland. He now rides ‘on Godes halve, thagh hym no 2 3

See Milada Buda, ‘Early Historical Narrative and the Dynamics of Textual Reference’, Romanic Review 80.1 (1989): 1–17. See Barnet Kottler and Alan M. Markman, A Concordance to Five Middle English Poems (Pittsburgh, 1966).

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gomen thoght’ (692), and the narrator underlines this reassessment by refusing to elaborate romance material latent in the conflict of the journey as ‘to tore for to telle of the tenthe dole’ (719), obliquely reminding the reader of the conventions that he is resisting. The Grail echoes suggest the genre that Gawain is equipped to occupy, and in which he places himself. But, though constructed as a miles Christi, Gawain rides across a literal landscape towards an unspiritual goal. At the castle Gawain and the reader encounter a third variation, the temptress in the bedchamber. Gawain reads the Lady’s entry to his bedchamber in the light of generic expectations; he ‘[c]ompast in his conscience to quat that cace might/ Meve other amount – to mervayle hym thought’ (1196–7). The role now urged upon him is of the courtly knight, and specifically of the Gawain of the English romances, who uses courtesy for seduction: And of alle chievalry to chose, the chef thyng alosed Is the lel layk of luf, the lettrure of armes . . . Hit is the tytelet token and tyxt of her werkkes. (1512–13, 1515)

Gawain’s metafictional reputation as a ladies’ knight, which had preceded him to the castle (924–7), stands at odds both with his role as pentangle knight and with the romance of marvels on which he has embarked. Moreover, the genre is critically placed by the Lady’s very carnal presence which is repeatedly stressed in the scenes and implied in the first encounter when Gawain considered her ‘wener then Wenore’ (945), whose ‘yyen gray’ (82) were all we were allowed to see of her among her adornments. The Lady’s carnality comically undercuts the sophistication of the romance of courtly love to which she alludes. Dialogue here becomes a means of deferring and ultimately deflecting the sexual temptation, but also challenges the depth of feeling expressed, so that we feel no emotional engagement with the Lady’s expressed plight: ‘I may bot mourne upon molde, as may that much lovyes’ (1795). This is not Elaine of Astolat, and that ‘as’ (like) suggests a consciousness of role equivalent to Gawain’s. Believing that he has triumphed in the bed-test, Gawain is lured from his Grail-like role back to the romance of marvels. He chooses the wrong genre. Gawain consciously seeks to conform to expected generic norms but finds it difficult to identify which sub-genre of romance, if any, he has entered. That disorientation, shared by us, his readers, constitutes the game that the poet plays with us. But against these generic allusions the narrator sets a sceptical response by the court whose concern is with social community rather than cultural identity. They bring to the situation a pragmatic realism that relegates the romance fiction to the area of metafiction and exposes the practical absurdities of the genre: Warloker to haf wroght had more wyt bene, And haf dyght yonder dere a duk to have worthed. A lowande leder of ledes in londe hym wel semes, And so had better haf ben then britned to noght Hadet wyth an alvisch mon for angardes pryde. (677–81)

Their ‘wonder’ (147) comprehends fear (‘arwe’, 241) as they circle the intruder, and significantly no-one at first answers his challenge. They do not buy into Arthur’s repackaging (479–80). Although in undertaking the challenge, Gawain occupies the role of knight-hero,

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he seems to share the scepticism of the courtiers which his tardy entry into the action foreshadowed. We are made aware of the conflict between what he says and what he feels. He makes the required affirmation of faith at the outset (563–5) – ‘the knyght mad ay god chere’ (562) – as he does to the guide at the end (2126–39) which is said ‘gruchyng’ (2126), in both cases making the required rhetorical gesture with a patent lack of conviction. Hence both the challenger (455–6) and the narrator (487–90) can plausibly raise the possibility that Gawain might not undertake the quest. This practical vein combines with the amoral romance of marvels to lead to the key decision to accept the girdle and abandon the Grail role. The existence of these alternative roles enables the final generic twist. Like Malory’s Gawain, who is granted knighthood by his uncle ‘for I muste be reson ye ar my nevew, my sistirs son’ (I, 99), Gawain’s claim to nobility here rested solely upon his position as Arthur’s nephew: ‘Bot for as much as ye ar myn em, I am only to prayse,/ No bounté bot your blod I in my bodé knowe’ (356–7). His confident reliance on innate nobility springs from a limited view of his own generic pedigree. By revealing that the aged woman, Morgan, is Gawain’s aunt through Uther’s marriage to Igrayne, Bercilak retrospectively draws the narrative towards the genre of ‘the Fair Unknown’. Gawain, and the reader, had only limited knowledge, or realisation, of who he is, but at the end both have come not merely to understand Gawain’s limitations but also to recognize his fallibility. There is nothing new in claiming that romance itself is the subject of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.4 As Clare Kinney states: [The Gawain-poet] invites his readers to re-examine their assumptions about how certain commonplaces of romance should guide their understanding of his narrative – and he makes both those conventions and our assumptions concerning their significance one of the subjects of his own work.5

Romance may seem comically irrelevant and pretentious to a world that values life with its practical social function, but it ennobles the aspirations of its actor beyond the demands of personal survival.

Gareth: The defeat of fiction Sir Gareth, having successfully overcome all obstacles and released the lady Lyonesse from her oppressor, finally meets with her, and, though comically unable to recognize her, translates his courtly love into hormonally charged passion: ‘Sir Gareth myght nat ete, for his love was so hoote that he wyst nat where he was’ (I, 331),6 and the two lovers instantly decide to sleep together: ‘And so they brente bothe in hoote love that they were acorded to abate their lustys secretly’ (I, 332–3). 4

5 6

Tony Hunt, ‘Irony and Ambiguity in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 12 (1976): 1–16; Ann W. Astell, ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Study in the Rhetoric of Romance’, JEGP 84 (1985): 188–202; Clare R. Kinney, ‘The Best Book of Romance: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, UTQ 59.4 (1990): 457–73. Kinney, 458. Quotations from Sir Thomas Malory, Works, ed. E. Vinaver, rev. P.J.C. Field, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1990). References are given by volume and page number.

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This represents a turning-point in the tale, the moment at which the narrative turns back upon the romance conventions that it has deployed hitherto. Like Gawain, the opening of Malory’s ‘Tale of Sir Gareth’ realizes Arthur as the patron of romance.7 Compared with the Gawain-poet, Malory rarely uses terms such as ‘marvel’ and ‘wonder’ for the inherent quality of an event, reserving it rather for subjective response; but there are two exceptions – ‘Balin’, where the Damsel’s plight and challenge is deemed ‘a grete mervayle’ (I, 62) by Arthur; and here, where we are led to expect ‘a grete mervayle’. But whereas in Sir Gawain the adventure-loving king desires a marvel ‘at such a farand fest’ (101), Malory’s monarch restricts this custom to ‘the feste of Pentecoste in especiall afore other festys in the yere’ (I, 293). While we have no indication of the reason, the assumption is that some form of divine visitation will mark the day appropriately, whereas in Sir Gawain the context is one of secular revelry in which an ironically termed ‘Crystemas gomen’ (263) is considered fitting. What Gawain sees from the window, however, hardly qualifies for his claim that ‘here at hande commyth strange adventures’; he observes: ‘three men uppon horsebak and a dwarfe uppon foote. And so the three men alyght, and the dwarff kepte their horsis, and one of the men was hyghar than the tothir tweyne by a foote and an half’ (I, 293). The obvious, and unexplained, staginess of Gareth’s entry supported by the two men, and his modest request, though puzzling, hardly suggest ‘strange adventures’. The reference of ‘mervayle’ rapidly dwindles from the expected magic or supernatural to mere puzzlement: ‘ “That is mervayle,” sayde the kynge, “that thou knowyste nat thy name” ’ (I, 294). Whereas Morgan provided the sort of wonder that satisfies the restless young Arthur and the poem’s proposed audience, the ‘strange adventure’ in Gareth is something of an anticlimax. Gareth is clearly aware not only of what the court expects, but also of the genre into which he must write himself, and although he cannot produce a situation comparable to that presented to Balin, his attempt at self-authorship nevertheless succeeds in establishing the necessary generic reference and places him in control of his narrative in a way that never comes available to Sir Gawain. Though Kay presents a literalized and sceptical reading of the event comparable to the poet’s court, the general tenor of Gareth’s reception is favourable. Both Gawain and Lancelot recognize the innate nobility of the newcomer and support him throughout the year. Less understandable is Lyonet’s approach the following Pentecost. She refuses to answer Arthur’s reasonable question ‘What is youre lady called, and where dwellyth she?’ (I, 296), as if, to match the day, that mystery is necessary to increase the obligation to rescue a lady from oppression. It is the more inexplicable because Arthur feels unable to allow any of his knights to rescue a lady whose name they do not know. It makes the quest the natural choice for one person who is as yet un-knighted, Gareth, so that his claim that ‘hit belongyth unto me’ (I, 297) is accurate, in comparison with the belated and therefore seemingly reluctant acceptance of the Green Knight’s challenge by Gawain: ‘I beseche now with sawes sene/ This melly mot be myne’ (341–2). In effect, Lyonet has no choice in the matter. Only 7

On the possible origins of this Tale, see P.J.C. Field, chap. 19, ‘The Source of Malory’s “Tale of Gareth” ’, in Malory: Texts and Sources (Cambridge, UK, 1998), which considers the Tale within the context of the Fair Unknown convention.

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Gareth can undertake the quest, which will be his first after knighthood and hence his induction into chivalry. The ‘fair unknown’ motif develops in two ways. We are kept in ignorance of Gareth’s name and pedigree until he reveals it to Lancelot, though the narrator tantalisingly hints at the blood relationship to Gawain earlier. The further revelations of this identity to Lyonet, Lyonesse, and to the court punctuate the narrative. And in turn Gareth has to discover the identity of the lady he is to rescue. But the question of identity is also intimately bound to that of identification. For Lyonet, her champion is in the wrong genre and should have remained in the kitchen and followed the servant activities at which he had excelled: ‘there myght none caste barre nother stone to hym by two yardys’ (I, 296) or, as she colourfully puts it: ‘Hym semyth bettir to styke a swyne than to sytte afore a damesell of hyghe parage’ (I, 301). For that reason it seems inconceivable that he should, without the conventional qualifications, continue to fulfil the conditions of a genre which, to her puzzlement, seems to collude with him. Misfortune, ‘unhappynes’, can be the only explanation for his success, and ultimately he must fail. His opponents, however, who have only her claims about his lowly social standing, all accept him on his proven prowess. At last, and with surprising suddenness since in her immediately preceding speech she terms him ‘a stynkyng kytchyn knave’, Lyonet changes attitude and register and concludes that he must be nobly born. Although Gareth sets out to claim authority over his own quest, his progress follows a rising curve which, somewhat lamely, leads to the conventional but seemingly mechanical bed-test in which Sir Persaunt’s daughter is sent to test him, and to the no less mechanical battle for the lady. Gareth produces the required formula on seeing Lyonesse: ‘ “She besemyth afarre the fayryst lady that ever I lokyd uppon, and truly,” he seyde, “I aske no better quarell than now for to do batayle, for truly she shall be my lady and for hir woll I fyght” ’ (I, 321). Having freed Lyonesse from her oppressor, he is dismayed to find that she turns him away in a speech of controlled courtliness which enjoins the obligatory period of absence so that the knight can prove his loyalty: ‘Fayre curteyse knyght,’ seyde dame Lyonesse, ‘be nat displeased, nother be nat overhasty, for wete you well youre grete travayle nother your good love shall nat be loste, for I consyder your grete laboure and your hardynesse, your bounté and your goodnesse as me ought to do. And therefore go on youre way and loke that ye be of good comforte, for all shall be for your worshyp and for the best; and, pardé, a twelve-monthe woll sone be done.’ (I, 327)

The cool control of the speech, its graceful acknowledgement of the appropriate qualities of knightly service, and above all that self-conscious ‘as me ought to do’, reflect the appropriate turning-point in the genre from the quest for renown through battle to one of love through knightly service. But Lyonesse has no intention of delaying, and from the kidnapping of Gareth’s dwarf with its comic shift of tone the generic conventions are amusingly flouted. It is difficult to take seriously the picture of Gareth parading outside the castle demanding to have his dwarf back. It is still less easy to take seriously the twist in the theme of identity when Gareth fails to recognize the lady to whom he has previously vowed service. As the lovers, to the irritation of Lyonet, prepare to anticipate

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their marriage, the text supports them. The narrator comments only that because of their youth they were unable to keep their plan secret. The narrator asks us to share his amused and worldly-wise stance; in saying that because they were young they ‘had nat used suche craufftis toforne’ (I, 333), he implies that they needed practice. From this point onwards the machinery of the romance of marvels is repeatedly invoked, but repeatedly frustrated. Its author, Lyonet, already established as the guardian of generic propriety, abruptly adopts the role of wonder-worker, devising the magic knight who intervenes between the lovers. The theme of identity is given a gratuitous comic twist by the magic ring which Lyonesse gives to Gareth to disguise him in the tournament, and which also obliquely reprises the colours attached to the different knights that he defeated in the first part of the Tale. Further stock motifs – the freeing of the castle from an evil custom which is the mark of the great knight, and the sibling battle of the brothers which is halted by the timely intervention of Lyonet – continue to orientate the reader within the pattern of romance. This romance machinery never proves fully effective, for Gareth refuses to surrender control of his narrative. The magical knight assumes a grotesquely literal force by his serial dismemberment and the comic image of Lyonet diligently gathering up the pieces and reuniting them. The wounded Gareth organizes a tournament with Lyonesse ‘and all your lande’ (I, 341) as prize – the territorial addition is a tangible incentive. Gareth has no need to offer this generically conventional prize, which risks all that he desires; but the tournament is also a strategy to draw Arthur’s court to him and enables him to wrench control of the action from Lyonet, who is compelled to heal him so that he can fight. He is, in the tournament, able to call upon the assistance of the knights he has defeated previously, so that it becomes also a demonstration of his martial achievements. The device of the magic ring is undone by the mischief of his dwarf, who suddenly takes control of the narrative (‘he asked the dwarff of beste counsayle’ (I, 352)). The potential tragic reprise of the Balin narrative, the mutual slaying of two brothers, is halted by Lyonet’s intervention. The narrative remains firmly rooted in the actuality of social identity. In distributing responsibilities among them, Gareth becomes what the courtiers desired of Sir Gawain, ‘a lowande leder of ledes in londe’. The final image is not that of the knight returned from the quest but of the successful career warrior who has gained property and a wealthy and noble wife and can now retire from active campaigning to administer his estates. He exemplifies what Lancelot claims to fear but covertly desired, the settled life of the married landowner. This practical concern places the generic allusion. As Joseph R. Ruff concludes: ‘The “Tale of Sir Gareth” shows what might be accomplished by a man of high lineage who followed the precepts of knighthood with fortitude, humility and loyalty’.8 Malory offers a hero whose learning curve leads out of romance towards the social role and so endows the fantasies of the genre with comic irrelevance.

8

Joseph R. Ruff, ‘Malory’s Gareth and Fifteenth-Century Chivalry’, in Chivalric Literature, ed. L.D. Benson and John Leyerle (Kalamazoo, 1980), p. 111.

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Elaine: The Romantic Innocent Elaine, the Maid of Astolat, falls deeply in love with an unknown knight, in reality Sir Lancelot, who lodges with her father. She falls ‘so hote in love that [she] besought sir Launcelot to were uppon hym at the justis a tokyn of hers’ (II, 1068). Like Sir Gawain when offered the girdle, his first instinct is to reject the offer of a love token, but he then recognizes a practical value in the offer. Like Gawain, he moves from public refusal to public acceptance via a thought-process hidden from the hearer: ‘Than he remembird hymselff that he wolde go to the justis disgysed, and because he had never aforne borne no maner of tokyn of no damesell, he bethought hym to bere a tokyn of hers, that none of hys bloode thereby myght know hym’ (II, 1068). The personal pronouns – ‘he’ (4), ‘hym’ (2), ‘hys’ (2), ‘hymselff’, in contrast to the solitary ‘hers’ – mark the self-obsession. The thought-process is carefully documented. And it is the more remarkable because such interior insights are rare in Malory and we are not accustomed to Lancelot stopping to evaluate possibilities. What the Maiden hears, however, is: ‘ “If I graunte you that, ye may sey that I do more for youre love than ever y ded for lady or jantillwoman. . . . Fayre maydyn, I woll graunte you to were a tokyn of youres uppon myne helmet” ’ (II, 1068).What is to him a sign without meaning, a useful disguise, is defined for the Maiden as a mark of special affection. For Lancelot the meaning of signs is negotiable; for the Maid they retain their generic signification and represent a commitment to love and service. Nor is she alone in this, for it is a view shared by Arthur and the rest of the court; even Bors sounds uncertain in his defence of Lancelot to Guinevere, saying that ‘that slyeve-berynge repentes me’ (II, 1081) and half-heartedly adding: ‘I dare say he dud beare hit to none evyll entent’ (II, 1068, my italics), which highlights the gulf between intention and effect. Behind this decision lies Lancelot’s attempt to become an ‘unknown knight’, a device that he had adopted on previous occasions and which bears distant affinity to the ‘Fair Unknown’ motif. In his ‘Tale’ Lancelot asks King Bagdemagus for three knights: ‘and loke that the three knyghtes have all whyght sheldis and no picture on their shyldis, and ye shall sende me another of the same sewte; . . . And thus shall I not be knowyn what maner a knyght I am’ (I, 262). Lancelot adopts this device of concealment to ensure that challengers are not deterred by his reputation, and it becomes an amusing trick that he frequently plays upon his colleagues. So when the court learns that disguised as Sir Kay he ‘smote hem downe all wyth one spere. Than there was lawghyng and smylyng amonge them’ (I, 286). Lancelot’s ploy springs from confidence in his ability to control his own narratives and bring them to successful outcomes. He, and Malory, establish it as his personal genre, recognised by fellow knights and by the readers. But whereas previously Lancelot had adopted disguise in order to encourage others to engage with him, on this occasion the genre is subverted to duplicitous ends. The opening of the Tale is a superbly understated realisation of the potential gap between what is said and what is meant that establishes the pattern for what is to follow. Both Guinevere and Lancelot advance plausible reasons for not accompanying the court to Camelot for the great tournament but, as Felicity Riddy notes in her perceptive analysis of the Tale, the strategic placing of the phrases ‘she seyde’

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and ‘he seyde’ ‘conveys a delicate implication of ambiguity and we are left simply not knowing whether or not their stories are true; subsequent events suggest that Lancelot at least is lying’.9 The ‘hevy and passyng wroth’ of Arthur’s response suggests that he shares the general opinion that the lovers simply want time together. However, that expectation is reversed in the ensuing dialogue of Lancelot and Guinevere after the court has departed, when Guinevere suddenly seems alert to the suspicions. The icily formal exchanges of Queen and Knight, with their ‘sir’ and ‘madame’, reflect Guinevere’s fears and Lancelot’s anger, the latter understandable because previously the Queen had banished him because he paid her too little attention. Neither the Queen nor we are told of Lancelot’s plans; his claim that he ‘woll be ayenste the kynge and ayenst all hys felyship’ is read by Guinevere as a defiant act. But it becomes apparent that Lancelot is relying on the King and court recognising his familiar genre of disguised identity once he reveals himself, and therefore re-assessing their original reading of the lovers’ intentions. Lancelot’s ensuing problems are threefold. First, he assumes that those he meets know what is in his mind. His decision takes him away from the court and from Camelot, to Astolat. The setting seems invested with something of the pastoral. The castle is ‘an olde barownes place’ (II, 1066); the sense of one retired and withdrawn from the court hangs about ‘olde’. Lancelot walks ‘in a gardeyne besyde the castell’ (II, 1066). Sir Barnard, the baron, shows a transparent fatherly concern for the career of his younger son. This is a household remote from the court and its ways and bound by family solidarity. Lancelot’s resolute determination not to reveal his identity to his host until his story has reached its expected triumphant conclusion compounds the issue. Again, his confident phrase ‘if God gyff me grace to spede well at the justis’ (II, 1067) sounds more deferential than it seems in the wider context and will acquire retrospective irony. Had he revealed his identity, the Maid could perhaps have been counselled against her assurance since her father clearly knows the court by reputation. He is sufficiently informed of Gawain’s reputation, for example, to refuse to let him accompany his daughter to her chamber to see the shield of the unknown knight. Then, Lancelot is confident of his ability to write his narrative as ‘fair unknown’ as he has done often before, which is the reader’s expectation. On this occasion, however, his assumption is frustrated by unforeseen circumstances, which suggests that this narrative is driven by external forces. Lancelot’s arrival at Astolat is unplanned – Malory’s ‘hit happynd hym’ (II, 1066) to lodge there is the first hint of the effect of chance on Lancelot’s script. It is ‘by myssefortune’ (II, 1072) that Sir Bors wounds him in the tournament, though the fact that Bors is the Grail knight and Lancelot’s kinsman lends a further judgemental resonance to the claim. They arrive ‘by fortune’ (II, 1074) at the hermitage where Lancelot is to be healed. Gawain finds out the truth by similar chance: ‘hyt happened sir Gawayne at Ascolot to lodge with sir Barnarde thereas was sir Launcelot lodged’ (II, 1077). It is ‘by fortune’ (II, 1081) that Sir Lavayne meets his sister and takes her to the hermitage to be reunited with Lancelot, and ‘by fortune’ (II, 1086) that she hears the laments of Bors and Lavayne

9

Felicity Riddy, ‘Structure and Meaning in Malory’s “The Fair Maid of Astolat” ’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 12 (1976): 359.

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when Lancelot reopens his wound. Unlike the tale of Gareth, this narrative does not collaborate with its hero and does not fulfil his or our generic expectation. Thirdly, Elaine, as others have noted, is presented by Malory as less worldly-wise than her French equivalent and is driven by an obsessive and undeniable passion that, we are foretold, will lead to her death.10 Lancelot and the narrative sacrifice the young country innocent to protect the guilty secret of the court. Field has noted that her claim: ‘For and he dye, I woll appele you of hys deth!’ (II, 1086) has the legal force of a wife seeking redress for her husband: ‘The image of Lancelot as her husband has taken such firm possession of her that an acute emergency, far from dislodging it, reinforces it. Yet it is an illusion; she is living in a world that does not exist’.11 But Elaine is under no illusion that her love is reciprocated: ‘My love ys he. God wolde that I were hys love!’ (II, 1078). Her wish is shared both by Gawain (‘God graunte . . . that aythir of you may rejoyse othir, but that ys in a grete aventure’ (II, 1078)) and Bors (‘God wolde, fayre cousyn . . . that ye cowde love her, but as to that I may nat nother dare nat counceyle you’ (II, 1084)). While Lancelot sees her as a troublesome obstacle (‘by no meany[s] I can nat put her fro me’ (II, 1084)), Malory points out that: ‘There was never chylde nother wyff more mekar tyll fadir and husbande than was thys Fayre Maydyn of Ascolat; wherefore sir Bors was gretly pleased with her’ (II, 1085). The terminology here is revealing – the pairing of ‘chylde/fadir’ and ‘wyff/husbande’ combines relationships of dependence and of support, of mutual protection and love, which casts Lancelot in a poor light and earns the approval of Bors. Yet none of the court seems capable of grasping the true depth of her passion. Even Bors shrugs off the consequences with an inadequate comment: ‘ “Well”, seyde sir Bors, “she ys nat the firste that hath loste hir payne uppon you, and that ys the more pyté” ’ (II, 1084). Lancelot’s offer of a dowry, whether viewed as cynical or an act of recognised generosity, shows his lack of perception. Confronted by her father’s bald statement that ‘I cannat se but that my doughtir woll dye for youre sake’ (II, 1090), his ‘don’t blame me’ response: ‘Me repentith . . . that she lovith me as she dothe, for I was never the causer of hit . . .’ (II, 1091) ignores his responsibility in both entering her world and also providing encouragement as well as occasion for her devotion. For him the narrative is completed with his departure, though not on this occasion in triumph. Elaine’s narrative now moves to its inevitable conclusion. This is a narrative shaped partly by external force and partly by human choice. In her resolve to die the Maid presents her narrative as constructed by God Himself, who created her for the purpose of loving Lancelot and wills that she now die for that love.12 Her priest, however, takes the view that she has the choice to ‘leve such 10 See Riddy, pp. 362–4; John Michael Walsh. ‘Malory’s Charaterization of Elaine of Astolat’, Philolog-

ical Quarterly 59 (1980): 141–9. 11 P.J.C. Field, Malory: Texts and Sources, chap. 22, ‘Time and Elaine of Astolat’, p. 283, on this evidence

resolves the ambiguity of the Maid’s deathbed phrase ‘out of mesure’ as meaning ‘beyond what the virtue of mesure would allow’, rather than ‘more than anyone could measure’, accusing herself of excess. 12 Compare Elizabeth Edwards: ‘The Fair Maid is arguing for the legitimacy of her love, as the kind of love which is divinely ordained, the kind of love which leads to marriage’, in ‘The Place of Women in

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thoughtes’ (II, 1093). Her reply: ‘My belyve ys that I do none offence, thou[gh] I love an erthely man, unto God, for He fourmed me thereto, and all maner of good love comyth of God’ (II, 1093), boldly claims to be her ‘creed’ (belyve). She speaks with characteristic directness, in the tone of indignant assertiveness (‘Why sholde I leve such thoughtes?’ (II, 1093), which has marked her determined actions throughout. Her death was predicated by her own understated: ‘but yff ye woll wedde me, other to be my paramour at the leste, wyte you well, sir Launcelot, my good dayes ar done’ (II, 1090). The final act of her life marks the transformation of the love-dead Maid into a wonder for the court. No explanation is given by the Maid herself to this self-scripted closure to her life, but it reflects back upon a convention of dying for unrequited love which informed her last days. Elaine is not the sophisticated provincial lady of Sir Gawain, explicitly appealing to romance narratives for her knowledge and exemplars of courtly conduct. At one level the Maid seems to voice instructions received from elsewhere; at another, they can read as an act of self-dramatization. The effect, however, is to construct Elaine as a martyr to love, to seize the initiative from Lancelot and to bring her narrative to a fitting romance-closure. Elizabeth Edwards puts it well: ‘[Elaine] emerges from the domestic to enter, in death, the semiotics of the supernatural, as she floats downstream in a barge, with a letter in her hand. . . . Elaine, then, returns to the realm of otherness’.13 The court does not read her narrative as she intended; it is no longer interested in wonders. Significantly, the narrator points out that no-one at first even notices the mysterious barge at Westminster ‘there hit rubbed and rolled too and fro a grete whyle or ony man aspyed hit’ (II, 1095, my italics). So again it is ‘by fortune’ that the King and Queen notice it and identify it as a marvellous sign (‘and had mervayle what hit mente’ (II, 1095)). They first send Kay and two knights to investigate, then in a spirit of curiosity go down themselves to look and then take the letter and return to the palace. The reading of the explanatory texts in the court is thus at a remove from the wonder that had accompanied it. A short exchange is followed by the brief instruction by Arthur to Lancelot: ‘Sir, hit woll be youre worshyp that ye oversé that she be entered worshipfully’ (II, 1097). The concern here is with the manner (worshypfully) and with Lancelot’s honour (youre worshyp). That is the end of the matter. The funeral is briefly whisked away in a few lines. All that the Maid achieved by her public marvel, ironically, is the reconciliation of the knight for whose love she died with the married woman to save whose reputation he had engaged with Elaine initially. The issue is closed and the narrator rushes the narrative swiftly on through that winter to Christmas. The court returns to its courtly pleasures as if nothing had happened. Malory carefully assembled the discontinuous sections of the Tale of Elaine of Astolat from their various places within the Vulgate text and welded them into a coherent and thematic whole. That independent structure stands out somewhat more than was probably intended by Vinaver’s sectionalization. But its structural integrity the Morte Darthur’, in A Companion to Malory, ed. Elizabeth Archibald and A.S.G. Edwards (Cambridge, UK, 1996), p. 53. 13 Elizabeth Edwards, ‘The Place of Women in the Morte Darthur’, p. 53.

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as a tragedy remains clear within its wider context. Critics have commented that Malory did not merely produce a coherent structure. He also made a number of changes to the presentation of Elaine from his source so that the somewhat knowing and shrewd maiden of the French version becomes in Malory an innocent tragically used as a counter in the intrigues of Lancelot and Guinevere. In particular, the letter that accompanies her corpse does not accuse Lancelot, as it does in the French, but sets out the circumstances of her death and asks that Lancelot attend to her funeral. Romance conventions are here subverted. Ideally there should have been no misunderstanding; a knight who accepts a token of love from a lady should recognise the mutually agreed value of the action. The generic expectation established within the Morte should see Lancelot successfully writing and controlling his own narrative and emerging with honour, not constantly frustrated. Here he utilises his disguise for ignoble subterfuge, and control passes from him. The reader recognises an implicit judgement on Lancelot, despite the determined attempt of the narrator to mitigate the effect. Elizabeth Edwards has rightly said that ‘the heroes of romance are to an extent readers’.14 They are aware of the conventions of the genre in which they have been placed and which their narratives endorse. Those conventions become the means by which they establish their cultural identities, the beacons by which they navigate their narratives. At one level, writers – such as those considered here – who through their heroes expose the limitations, paradoxes and dangers inherent in those expectations are playing literary games with their readers, confident in their alertness to the generic conventions writers are transgressing. But the underlying effect remains serious. These questioning narratives reflect and expose our fragile dependence at all times on culturally determined habits of mind to make sense of our world, one another, and ourselves.

14 Elizabeth Edwards, The Genesis of Narrative in Malory’s Morte Darthur, Arthurian Studies 43

(Cambridge, UK, 2001), p. 35.

21 Are Further Emendations Necessary? A Note on the Definite and Indefinite Articles in the Winchester Malory YUJI NAKAO

This note provides, for future critical editions of Malory, the results of a collation of the two texts with regard to the two kinds of articles. The purpose of this short note is to present exhaustively the textual variants of the definite as against the indefinite articles that exist between the Winchester Malory (hereafter W)1 and Caxton’s Malory (hereafter C).2 First let me point out that the third edition (1990), revised by Professor P.J.C. Field, of Vinaver’s Works of Sir Thomas Malory (hereafter V–F)3 contains an emendation that is concerned with the variant readings referred to above, and which is not included in the previous editions. The passage in point reads: V–F ‘and [the] dwarffe ran by her syde’ 1212.29. The word in square brackets (italics mine) shows that it has been borrowed from C’s reading, which runs: C ‘and the4 dwerf ranne by her syde’ 832.2.5 In Vinaver’s first edition (1947), the second edition (1967), and the corrected impression of the second edition (1973), the above passage remains not emended and reads thus as it stands in W: ‘and a dwarffe ran by her syde’ 1212.29. More recently (1998), Professor Helen Cooper’s abridged and modern-spelling edition of

1 2

3 4 5

The EETS facsimile of W has been consulted: The Winchester Malory: A Facsimile, intro. N.R. Ker, EETS SS 4 (London, 1976). The Scolar facsimile of C has been consulted: Sir Thomas Malory: Le Morte D’Arthur, Printed by William Caxton, 1485, intro. Paul Needham, Pierpont Morgan Library facsimile (New York, London, 1976). The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugène Vinaver, rev. P.J.C. Field, 3rd edn, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1990). Abbreviated hereafter in this essay as V–F (Vinaver–Field edition). Here and hereafter, italics for emphasis are mine. In order to make the collation with the facsimile of C easy, the page and line references to C are, in this essay, to Sommer’s diplomatic edition of C, which follows, apart from Sommer’s errors, ‘the original impression of Caxton in every respect . . . with absolute fidelity, word for word, line for line, and page for page’ (II, p. 17 of this edition). Cf. Le Morte Darthur by Syr Thomas Malory: The Original Edition of William Caxton now Reprinted and Edited with an Introduction and Glossary, ed. H. Oskar Sommer, 3 vols. (London, 1889–1). In this essay, the long ‘∫’ found in C is replaced by ‘s’ in my quotations from C.

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HC)6

W (hereafter was published. In this edition, in addition to the above instance in V–F, at least three more of W’s definite or indefinite articles are found to have been emended,7 though silently without any emendatory marks, on the basis of C’s readings. They are: (1) HC ‘Right so came in a lady on a white palfrey’ 54.36 (cf. C ‘a’ 104.30; W ‘the’; V–F ‘the’ 103.4); (2) HC ‘And then he looked up to the window’ 147.12 (cf. C ‘the’ 242.2; W ‘a’; V–F ‘a’ 327.5); (3) HC ‘for nevermore shall one see the other of you before the dreadful day of doom’ 390.2 (cf. C ‘the other’ 709.33; W ‘another’; V–F ‘another’ 1013.30); (4) HC ‘and the dwarf ran by her side’ 499.20 (vide supra: V–F ‘[the]’ 1212.29; cf. C ‘the’ 832.2; W ‘a’). The above emendations thus newly made seem to be clearly appropriate. The relevant word ‘dwarffe’, V–F 1212.29 (‘dwarf’ HC 499.20), for example, has a contextual basis: V–F ‘So sir Launcelot sente forthe a damesel wyth a dwarff with her, requyryng kynge Arthur to leve hys warryng uppon hys londys. And so he starte uppon a palferey, and [the] dwarffe ran by her syde’ 1212.27–30. See also HC 499.18–20. If these are emended, however, there seem to be some other instances which are also recommended to be improved by C’s readings. An example in point is W’s ‘a castell’, cf. V–F 282.20 (HC 116.32) as against C’s ‘the castel’ 208.17. This word also has a contextual basis, as the following quotations indicate: V–F ‘And so sir Launcelot rode thorow many stronge contrayes, over mores and valeis, tyll by fortune he com to a fayre castell. And as he paste beyonde the castell hym thought he herde bellys rynge. . . . The meanewhyle cam a lady oute of a castell and cryed on hyghe’ 282.10–21 (HC ‘And so Sir Lancelot rode through many strange countries, over moors and valleys, till by fortune he came to a fair castle; and as he passed beyond the castle him thought he heard bells ring. . . . The meanwhile came a lady out of a castle and cried on high’ 116.23–32). The corresponding passage in C reads: C ‘The meane whyle came a lady oute of the castel and cryed on hyghe’ 208.17. The cause of textual variants with which we are concerned here is manifold. Some may have occurred through scribes’ or compositors’ errors. Aside from errors, there was certainly usage in fifteenth century English in which the two kinds of articles could have been used interchangeably without seriously affecting the meaning of a passage as a whole.8 In some instances, moreover, a little alteration of sentence structures in one text made it inevitable for a scribe or a compositor to choose the different article. Hereafter in this essay, for the convenience of those who will produce future critical editions of W, I will present the result of my collation of W with C in the context of our problem and describe it with reference to V–F. A collation of W with C as regards the two articles9 reveals that we find (A) at

6 7 8 9

Sir Thomas Malory: Le Morte Darthur. The Winchester Manuscript, ed. and abr. Helen Cooper (Oxford, 1998). Here and hereafter, this edition will be abbreviated as HC (Helen Cooper edition). The statistics in this essay include the variant readings of ‘the other’ vs. ‘another’ as well as ‘the’ vs. ‘a(n)’. See, for example, Paul Christophersen, The Articles: A Study of their Theory and Use in English (Copenhagen, 1939), pp. 139–43. The result of my collation shown here is based on my previous article: ‘The Textual Variants between the Definite and Indefinite Articles’, in Sententiae, ed. Kiyoaki Kikuchi, Masao Ichikawa, and Masaji Tajiri (Kyoto, 1995), pp. 12–20.

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least 31 pairs in which W’s ‘the’ corresponds to C’s ‘a(n)’, and (B) 24 pairs in which W’s ‘a(n)’ corresponds to C’s ‘the’. These 55 pairs can be further subdivided into the following four categories according to the information given in the apparatus criticus of V–F: 1) those in which W’s readings have been emended on the basis of C. [the category referred to as (A) above: nil; Category (B): 1 pair]. 2) those in which no information concerning C is given in the apparatus criticus. [Category (A): 8 pairs; Category (B): 6 pairs]. 3) those in which the asterisk denoting that C’s readings are superior to W’s is given; and those in which the obelisk denoting that C’s readings are inferior to W’s is given. [Category (A): 2 pairs; Category (B): nil]. 4) those in which only the fact that variant readings occur is given, without C’s readings being marked with the asterisk or the obelisk. [Category (A): 21 pairs; Category (B): 17 pairs]. First: We will begin with 1). As far as 1) (A) is concerned, no instances can be found. The solitary instance which belongs to Category 1) (B) has already been treated in the second and third paragraphs of this essay. So see again the discusion there: W ‘a’; V–F ‘[the]’ 1212.29; C ‘the’ 832.2; HC ‘the’ 499.20. Second: We will show the 8 pairs referred to as Category 2) (A) and the 6 pairs referred to as Category 2) (B) above. Needless to say, W and V–F are identical with regard to the articles concerned in these 8 and 6 cases. The 8 pairs that belong to 2) (A) are: (1) V–F ‘Ryght so com in the lady’ 103.4 (C ‘right so anone cam in a lady’ 104.30); (2) V–F ‘all the gobbettis of the hede that sir Gareth had throwe oute at the wyndow’ 335.33 (C ‘alle the goblets of the hede that syr Gareth had throwen out at a wyndowe’ 249.34); (3) V–F ‘the horse was ladde into the stable’ 353.33 (C ‘his hors was ledde in to a stable’ 264.20); (4) V–F ‘ye ar he that slewe [Marhalte] the knyght honde for honde in the ilonde for the trwayge of Cornwayle’ 401.7 (C ‘ye are he that slewe marhaus the knyght hand for hand in an Iland for the truage of Cornewaile’ 299.30); (5) V–F ‘ye overcom sir Palomydes, the good knyght, at the turnemente in Irelonde where he bete sir Gawayne and his nyne felowys’ 401.8 (C ‘ye ouercame sir Palamydes the good knyght at a turnement in an Iland / where ye bete sir Gawayne & his nyne felawes’ 299.32); (6) V–F ‘sir Sadocke rode uppon his way unto the castell that was called Lyonas’ 677.1 (C ‘sir Sadok rode vpon his way vnto a Castel that was called Lyonas’ 495.10); (7) V–F ‘they herde the horne blow’ 746.2 (C ‘they herd an horne blowe’ 542.33); (8) V–F ‘And so they cam to the abbay, and there were well resceyved’ 944.25 (C and soo came to an Abbay where they were wel receyued 667.26). The 6 pairs that belong to 2) (B) are: (1) V–F ‘his horse was lad into a stable’ 173.19 (C ‘his hors was ledde in to the stable’ 153.28); (2) V–F ‘The meanewhyle cam a lady oute of a castell’ 282.20 (C ‘The meane whyle came a lady oute of the castel’ 208.17); (3) V–F ‘he loked up to a wyndow’ 327.5 (C ‘he loked vp to the wyndow’ 242.2); (4) V–F ‘Than she yode up into a towre over a gate with tourchis ilyght’ 353.7 (C ‘Thenne she yode vp in to a toure ouer the gate with greete torche lyght’ 263.37); (5) V–F ‘there cam a damesel frome a knyght that ye fought withall at a brydge’ 471.7 (C ‘there came a damoysell from a knyghte that ye fought with all

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at the brydge’ 348.28); (6) V–F ‘he wolde have gone to the sakeryng of a masse’ 1029.22 (C ‘he wold haue gone to the sacrynge of the masse’ 719.5). As mentioned above, Professor Cooper, in HC, emends 2) (A) (1) and 2) (B) (3) on the basis of C (See HC 54.36 and HC 147.12). With regard to 2) (B) (2), I have suggested above that it is advisable for ‘a castel’ to be emended to ‘the castel’. However, my native language does not have such grammatical categories as definite and indefinite articles (so I lack the intuition for them), and I am always bewildered by the intricacy of their use in Malory’s English.10 Therefore I do not feel that I am competent to undertake the task of evaluating all the materials provided in this essay. It is better to leave the task to abler hands than mine. Third: We will discuss the two pairs that belong to 3) (A). For one of them, the reading in each version is as follows: (1) V–F ( = W) ‘I ryde now towarde my dethe for the sleynge of a knyght at the turnemente of Lonezep’ 776.2 (C ‘I ryde toward my dethe for the sleynge of a knyght at a turnement of Lone
ep’ 563.13). This variant is recorded in the apparatus criticus along with the obelisk which denotes that C’s reading is less acceptable. As ‘turnement(e)’ in this instance is a concept already mentioned, to insert the obelisk must be regarded as reasonable. The second instance that seems to fall under Category 3) (A) is: (2) V–F (= W) ‘Than was he ware where come a semely knyght rydynge ayenst hym, all in whyght, and the coverde shylde’ 568.24 (C ‘Thenne was he ware of a semely knyght came rydyng ageynst hym all in whyte / with a couerd shelde’ 420.3). C’s reading is recorded in the apparatus criticus. The description in it runs: ‘C* whyte with a couerd’. This instance is classified here under 3) (A), for convenience’ sake, but it seems to me uncertain whether the asterisk which indicates that C’s reading is superior applies only to ‘with’ or also to the indefinite article ‘a’. For 3) (B), no instances are to be found. Fourth: Here the page and line references to V–F and C for the 21 instances of 4) (A) and the 17 instances of 4) (B) will be given. As a matter of course, all the definite or indefinite articles in V–F coincide, in the following list, with those in W. The 21 pairs that belong to 4) (A) are: (1) V–F ‘the castell’ 61.18 (C ‘a castel’ 76.9); (2) V–F ‘the sege’ 70.25 (C ‘a syege’ 83.15); (3) V–F ‘the foreyste’ 80.26 (C ‘a forest’ 90.24); (4) V–F ‘the other’107.6 (C ‘another’ 107.34); (5) V–F ‘the grete foreste’ 158.24 (C ‘a grete forest’ 140.21); (6) V–F ‘the false sorseres’ 430.20 (C ‘fals a sorceresse’ 325.12); (7) V–F ‘the bettir knyght’ 557.6 (C ‘a better knyght’ 410.16); (8) V–F ‘the gardyne’ 644.15 (C ‘a gardyn’ 475.6); (9) V–F ‘the bay-wyndow’ 806.12 (C ‘a bay wyndowe’ 583.21); (10) V–F ‘the castell’ 813.25 (C ‘a Castel’ 589.30); (11) V–F ‘the abbay’ 878.33 (C ‘an Abbay’ 625.9); (12) V–F ‘the watir’ 916.24 (C ‘a water’ 652.15); (13) V–F ‘the man’ 947.25 (C ‘a man’ 670.9); (14) V–F ‘the tombe’ 963.15 (C ‘a Tombe’ 678.27); (15) V–F ‘the hygh towre’ 964.17 (C ‘an hyghe Toure’ 679.29); (16) V–F ‘the castell’ 982.14 (C ‘a Castel’ 690.4); (17) V–F ‘the fynde’ 989.7 (C ‘a fende’ 695.5); (18) V–F ‘the lytyll leved wood’ 1070.17 (C ‘a lytil leued woode’ 742.30); (19) V–F ‘the lettir’ 1096.17

10 As for the variants of ‘the’ as against zero, and ‘a(n)’ as against zero between W and C, I have collated

the two texts and made a complete list. It will be published elsewhere in the near future. As a matter of course, the variants of ‘the’ or ‘a(n)’ as against zero (e.g. V–F ‘to [a] wyndowe’ 261.6; W ‘to dwyndowe’; C ‘vnto a wyndowe’ 190.7) are not included in the statistics of this essay.

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(C ‘a letter’ 761.20); (20) V–F ‘the lady’ 1127.4 (C ‘a lady’ 778.9); (21) V–F ‘the place’ 1131.7 (C ‘a place’ 781.17). The 17 pairs that belong to 4) (B) are: (1) V–F ‘a knyght’ 32.12 (C ‘the knyghte’ 57.16); (2) V–F ‘a towre’ 81.25 (C ‘the toure’ 91.13); (3) V–F ‘a brydge’ 278.27 (C ‘the brydge’ 205.7); (4) V–F ‘A Noble Tale’ 287.27 (C ‘the noble tale’ 212.32); (5) V–F ‘a dwarff’ 297.25 (C ‘the dwarf’ 216.34); (6) V–F ‘a crosse’ 484.27 (C ‘the crosse’ 356.14); (7) V–F ‘a welle’ 492.21 (C ‘the welle’ 363.2); (8) V–F ‘a blacke shylde’ 540.7 (C ‘the black shelde’ 399.23); (9) V–F ‘a damesell’ 615.25 (C ‘the damoysel’ 455.23); (10) V–F ‘a coward’ 741.31 (C ‘the11 coward’ 539.19); (11) V–F ‘an harte of grece’ 780.4 (C ‘the herte of greese’ 566.22);12 (12) V–F ‘of so noble a name’ 780.23 (C ‘of the noble name’ 567.4); (13) V–F ‘on a morne’ 821.1 (C ‘on the morne’ 596.5); (14) V–F ‘there was leyde a table’ 918.5 (C ‘there was sette ynough vpon the table’ 653.22); (15) V–F ‘another’ 999.9 (C ‘the other’ 703.4); (16) V–F ‘another’ 1013.30 (C ‘the other’ 709.33); (17) V–F ‘another’ 1016.25 (C ‘the other’ 712.10). The list for 4) (B) contains 3 pairs of V–F (= W) ‘another’ as against C ‘the other’, one of which is emended in HC to ‘the other’ as already indicated above at the beginning of this essay: cf. HC ‘Each of you think for to do well, for nevermore shall one see the other of you before the dreadful day of doom’ 390.2 (V–F (= W) ‘another’ 1013.30; C ‘the’ 709.33). There may be others, among 38 (21+17) pairs of this group, which have to be emended. Also some pairs may be worthy of providing C’s readings with the obelisk or the asterisk in the apparatus criticus. Of course, in the cases of the obelisk, it is C’s readings that have to be emended. However, I will not be so bold here as to emend or evaluate all the variant readings. It must be left to other medievalists (preferably, whose native language is English). In my judgement, however, some pairs are worth commenting upon in the apparatus criticus. For example, W seems to offer better readings as far as 4) (A) (9), (10), (11), (16), (18), (21) and 4) (B) (3), (6) are concerned.13 I must be content here to provide future editors an exhaustive list of the variant readings concerned. I hear that Professor Field is making progress with his new edition of W, and I look forward to reading Malory in his edition.

11 This word is better interpreted as ‘thee’, though listed here provisionally. 12 In Vinaver’s previous editions, except the first, C’s reading is furnished with the obelisk (i.e. C† the

herte) in the app. crit. The obelisk, however, has been removed from V–F. The obelisk is not inserted in the first edition (1947) either. 13 I find that none of these eight cases are emended in James W. Spisak’s critical edition of C: Caxton’s Malory: A New Edition of Sir Thomas Malory‘s Le Morte Darthur, Based on the Pierpont Morgan Copy of William Caxton’s Edition of 1485, ed. James W. Spisak, based on work begun by the late William Matthews, with a Dictionary of Names and Places by Bert Dillon, 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1983).

22 Lucius’s Exhortation in Winchester and The Caxton RALPH NORRIS

The exhortation that Emperor Lucius gives to his troops in the Roman War section of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur is preserved in two very different versions in the Winchester Manuscript and the Caxton edition. This paper argues that both are abbreviations of Malory’s original version, which may be partially reconstructed. The Roman War section of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur survives in two substantially different versions: the Winchester manuscript and William Caxton’s edition.1 When Eugène Vinaver’s edition based on the Winchester manuscript first appeared, the academic world generally accepted his conclusion that William Caxton had edited and abridged Malory’s Roman War to make Book Five of the printed edition.2 This theory was later challenged by William Matthews, who observed that some passages unique to Caxton’s edition appear to be based on Malory’s sources. He therefore concluded that the version preserved in the Caxton edition was Malory’s own revision. Although detailed argument seems to have shown this theory to be untenable, the debate prompted a new look at the relationship between the two texts.3 This new look lead to the discovery of new evidence that the Winchester scribe who copied the Roman War also abbreviated the text in places and that unique readings in the Caxton edition may sometimes represent Malory’s original.4 This realization provides a way to solve many of the problems concerning the two versions of the Roman War. However, one of the persistent puzzles is the differ-

1

2 3

4

The Winchester Manuscript is now BL MS Add. 59678 and is called the Malory Manuscript by the British Library. A photographic facsimile was published as The Winchester Malory, ed. N.R. Ker, EETS (London, 1976). For Caxton’s version see Caxton’s Malory, ed. James Spisak and William Matthews, 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1983). A photographic facsimile of the Pierpont Morgan copy of Caxton’s version was published as Le Morte Darthur Printed by William Caxton 1485, intro. Paul Needham (London, 1976). This paper has greatly benefited from the helpful comments of Professor P.J.C. Field, although he was unaware that it would appear in such a volume as this. Sir Thomas Malory, The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugène Vinaver, rev. P.J.C. Field, 3rd edn, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1990), pp. xxx. For the current state of this debate, including Matthews’s article and several replies, see Bonnie Wheeler et al., ed., The Malory Debate: Essays on the Texts of Le Morte Darthur (Cambridge, 2000), especially William Matthews, ‘A Question of Texts,’ pp. 65–107, and P.J.C. Field, ‘Caxton’s Roman War,’ pp. 127–67. Field, ‘Caxton’s Roman War’, pp. 127–67.

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ence between the versions of the exhortation that Emperor Lucius gives to his troops before the final battle. In the Winchester, Lucius says, Syrs ye know well þt þe honoure & worshyp hath ever folowyd þe Romaynes and this day let hit never be loste for þe defau
te of herte for I se well by yondyr ordynaunce this day shall dye much peple & þerfore do doughtly this day & þe felde is ourys.5

The Caxton version runs, syrs I admoneste you that this day ye fyghte and acquyte yow as men/ and remembre how Rome domyneth and is chyef and hede ouer alle the erthe and vnyuersal world/ and suffre not these Bretons thys day to abyde ageynste vs/6

The Caxton text does not read like a revision or summary of the Winchester. Therefore, either at least one of the pieces must be an original composition either by a scribe or by Caxton, or both must be abbreviations of Malory’s original version. Although the corruptions that produced the two versions could have happened at any stage in the textual transmission, the considerations that apply to the Winchester scribe or to Caxton would be generally applicable to earlier scribes as well.7 The Winchester scribe’s conscious alteration of the Roman War seems to be limited to occasional abbreviation of the text. This alteration is especially evident in the opening passages of this tale, in which the Winchester text appears to be a summary of the Caxton version.8 However, this is composition of a different order from the creation of a new speech. Further, if the Winchester scribe had produced his reading working from something similar to the Caxton text, which is here some nine words shorter than in the Winchester, he would – against his usual practice – have lengthened his tale. If a scribe earlier in the tradition had wanted to expand the speech from a copy like the Caxton version, it is still hard to see why he would have rewritten it so thoroughly and yet extended it so little. Evidence, therefore, does not suggest that the Winchester reading was composed by a scribe. Caxton abbreviated his text to a far greater extent than the Winchester scribe. He abbreviated by removing description and by cutting the story to its bare essentials. However his concern to condense and modernize his Book V gave him no motive for composing an original speech for Lucius to replace an existing one once he had decided to retain that part of the story. As noted above, the Caxton version is nine words shorter than the Winchester, but even if Caxton had felt that he needed to shorten a version of the speech like that preserved in the Winchester, he could easily have done so without completely rewriting it. This argument, however, is inconclusive. Against it could be set the fact that the Caxton version of the speech contains words that do not appear in the rest of the Morte Darthur, and so do not appear have been part of Malory’s active vocabulary. It also contains a number of doublet

5 6 7

8

Winchester 84v–85r. Le Morte D’Arthur Printed by Caxton, sig. i 6r. For the possibility of earlier lost manuscripts, see Vinaver, ‘Introduction,’ Works, c–cxxvi, but see also Field, ‘The Earliest Texts of Malory’s Morte Darthur’, in Malory: Texts and Sources (Cambridge, 1998) pp. 1–13 (p. 8). Field, ‘Caxton’s Roman War’, pp. 145–8.

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phrases, which is one of the most conspicuous hallmarks of Caxton’s style.9 If Caxton did not compose the version of Lucius’s speech that appears in his edition, he still may have altered it. Such questions can often be resolved by referring to sources, but Malory’s major source for this tale, the alliterative Morte Arthure, is not as illuminating on this question as one might hope. Lucius’s address to his troops runs thus: Thynk on the myche renownn of
our reche fadyrs And the riatours of Rome þat regnede with lordez: And the renkez ouerrane all that regnede in erthe, Encrochede all Cristyndome be craftes of armes, In eueriche a viage the victorie was halden; Insette all þe Sarazenes within seuen wyntter, The parte fro the Porte Jaffe to Paradyse
atez. Thoghe a rewme be rebelle, we reke it bot lyttill; It es resone and righte the renke be restreynede. Do dresse we tharefore and byde we no langere, For dredlesse withowttyn dowtte the daye schall be ourez.10

Aside from other differences in detail, this speech is much more confident than either Malory version. The first three lines contain the same idea as the first clause of Winchester and the second clause of Caxton, but Lucius’s speech in the alliterative Morte Arthure does not contain the idea in the Winchester that many will have to die or the strong implication in both Malory versions that the Romans should be ashamed to be defeated by the Britons. In the alliterative poem, defeat is not considered: the Emperor says that the day shall be theirs ‘dredlesse withowttyn dowtte’. Lucius’s speech in the Morte Arthure, therefore, does not seem to be particularly close to either of the Malory versions. However, scholarship has shown that Malory used an array of minor sources throughout the Morte Darthur.11 In the Roman War, he supplemented his version with two minor sources: the Vulgate Suite du Merlin and Hardyng’s Chronicle, and several scholars have suggested that here Malory was probably using the Vulgate Suite du Merlin.12 In his first tale, Malory adapts the prose Merlin and its Post-Vulgate Suite, but the fact that he placed the Roman War so early in Arthur’s career and the fact that he added details here such as Arthur forbidding the young knights from harming the ambassadors suggests that he used the Vulgate continuation as a minor source.

9

Noted by Sally Shaw, ‘Caxton and Malory’, in Essays on Malory, ed. J.A.W. Bennett (Oxford, 1963), pp. 114–45 (pp. 126–7). 10 Morte Arthure, ed. Mary Hamel (New York, 1984) ll. 2033–43. 11 For an overview, see Field, ‘Malory’s Minor Sources’, in Text and Sources, pp. 27–31. 12 For Malory’s use of Hardyng, see Edward Donald Kennedy, ‘Malory’s Use of Hardyng’s Chronicle’, Notes and Queries 214 (1969): 167–70; R. H. Wilson, ‘More Borrowings by Malory from Hardyng’s Chronicle’, Notes and Queries 215 (1970): 208–10; and Kennedy ‘Malory’s English Sources’, in Aspects of Malory, ed. Toshiyuki Takamiya and Derek Brewer (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 27–46. For Malory’s use of the Vulgate Suite du Merlin, see R.H. Wilson, ‘Malory’s Early Knowledge of Arthurian Romance’, University of Texas Studies in English 29 (1950): 33–50. Additional evidence is given in Matthews ‘A Question of Texts’, pp. 81–4 and Field helpfully summarizes all the evidence in ‘Caxton’s Roman War’, p. 158.

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In the Vulgate Merlin, Lucius addresses his troops this way: gentil uassal boin conquereor fil de boin anchisor qui les grans honors & les grans terres conquistrent par lor proeces & par lor hardemens est romme li chies del monde . & sil empire ne dechiet en nostre tans ce sera honte & reproce a nous . Car preu & ientil furent uostre anchisor . & bien doiuent par droit de ientil pere ientil fil issir . vostre pere furent uaillant si deues vous ualoir por els aparoir. & chascuns de vous se doit esforcier de resambler son pere . car grant honte seroit & honte doit auoir qui pert liretage son pere & qui par maluaiste de lui le guerpist & laisse ce que ses peres conquist par sa proece . Iou ne di mie que vous soies maluais ne empiries . il furent preu & ie vous tieng a preu & a uaillant & a hardi . Et li berton [sic] nous ont tolu le chemin uers ostun13 que nous ni poons aler ne passer se par bataille non . prenes vos armes & si vous adoubes & sil nous atendent gardes quil soient bien feru & sil fuient nous les sieurons a force. si metons paine a lor orguel abatre & a destrure lor poeste & lor bubance .14

The tone of this speech is far less confident than that in the alliterative poem. Lucius feels the need to exhort his troops not to let their ancient empire fall in their time and to inspire them to emulate the deeds of their noble ancestors. In this it is closer to both Malory versions than the alliterative speech is. Also it contains the idea, which the speech in the alliterative poem lacks, that defeat by the Britons would be a disgrace for the Romans. The phrase in this version ‘est romme li chies del monde’ is echoed by ‘Rome [. . .] is chyef [. . .] ouer alle the erthe [. . .]’ in the Caxton, and together these points seem to confirm that Malory used the Vulgate Suite du Merlin as a source.15 That the Vulgate Merlin continuation influenced Malory at this point therefore seems evident, and the fact that the Caxton version retains this influence shows that Caxton did not himself write the version of Lucius’s speech that appears in his edition. Because neither version seems to have been composed by a scribe or by Caxton, both versions must be taken to be abbreviated versions of Malory’s original, which may perhaps be reconstructed. Students of Malory’s work have become used to reconstructions since Vinaver’s first edition appeared in 1947. The one proposed here is similar to an extended reconstruction of the beginning of the Roman War.16 It is also may be comparable to Vinaver’s briefer reconstruction of: My lordys seyde sir Bleoberys though my brother be beatyn and have the worse thorow myght of armys in his body I dare saye though sire Trystram hath beten his body he hath not beten his herte,

from the Winchester’s: My lordys seyde sir Bleoberys though my brother be beatyn and have the worse in his body thorow myght of armys he hath nat beatyn his harte,

and Caxton’s:

13 The city of Autun. 14 The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, ed. H. Oskar Sommer, 8 vols. (Washington, 1908–17),

II, 438. 15 Matthews, ‘A Question of Texts’, p. 83. 16 Field, ‘Caxton’s Roman War’, pp. 145–8, 159–67.

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My lordys seyde sir Bleoberys though my brother be beatyn and hath the wers thorou myghte of armes I dare saye though syre Trystram hath beten his body he hath not beten his herte.17

Malory’s original version of Lucius’s speech may have looked like this: Syrs, ye know well that the honoure and worshyp hath ever folowyd the Romaynes, and remembre how Rome is chyef over alle the erthe. And this day let hit never be loste for the defaughte of herte, and suffre not these Bretons thys day to abyde ageyneste us. For I se well by yondyr ordynaunce this day shall dye much peple. And therefore do doughtly this day and the felde is ourys.18

Reconstructions such as this cannot aspire to total accuracy. For example words or phrases may well have been deleted from both versions and so be irrecoverable. However, this reconstruction follows a progression of ideas consistent with the speeches in the Morte Arthure and in the Merlin combined. The four texts are set against each other in the appendix, but the progression of ideas common to them are discussed here. ‘Syrs’ sums up the ‘gentil uassal boin conquereor fil de boin anchisor’ of the Merlin. ‘Ye know well that the honoure and worshyp hath ever folowyd the Romaynes, and remembre how Rome is chyef over alle the erthe’, parallels both the ‘les grans terres conquistrent par lor proeces & par lor hardemens est romme li chies del monde’, of the Merlin and the first seven lines of the speech in the alliterative poem. ‘And this day let hit never be loste for the defaughte of herte and suffre not these Bretons thys day to abyde ageyneste us’ corresponds to the central idea of the Merlin, which is expressed in terms of the shame that Lucius’s troops should feel if they prove themselves unworthy of their ancestors and allow their ancient empire to fall in their time. ‘For I se well by yondyr ordynaunce this day shall dye much peple’ corresponds generally to ‘Et li berton [sic] nous ont tolu le chemin uers ostun que nous ni poons aler ne passer se par bataille non’. ‘And therefore do doughtly this day and the felde is ourys’ corresponds to ‘prenes vos armes & si vous adoubes & sil nous atendent gardes quil soient bien feru & sil fuient nous les sieurons a force. si metons paine a lor orguel abatre & a destrure lor poeste & lor bubance’ and ‘Do dresse we tharefore and byde we no langere,/ For dredlesse withowttyn dowtte the daye schall be ourez’. The reconstruction thus has the same ideas in the same order as would a combination of the Merlin and the Morte Arthure. ‘I admoneste you that this day ye fyghte and acquyte yow as men’, ‘domyneth’, ‘and hede,’ and ‘and vnyuersal world’ from the Caxton are all omitted because they do not have direct parallels in either source and because admoneste, domyneth, and vnyuersal appear in Caxton’s own prose but do not occur elsewhere in the Morte Darthur.19 If Malory’s original version did resemble the reconstruction offered here, it is not clear how scribes of one tradition came to omit virtually every other clause and

17 Works, I, cxiii; however see Field, ‘The Earliest Texts of Malory’. 18 The punctuation is my own. 19 Kiyokazu Mizobata, A Concordance to Caxton’s Own Prose (Tokyo, 1990); and Tomomi Kato, A Con-

cordance to the Works of Sir Thomas Malory (Tokyo, 1974).

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another set of scribes or compositors to omit virtually the other half. Perhaps the repetition in the reconstruction may have prompted the Winchester scribe and Caxton, both of whom wished to shorten the Roman War, into a similar abbreviating reaction that took effect at different points. However that may be, it has been said that textual studies deals in probabilities, and a more probable solution to the discrepant readings is hard to see. If the above argument is sound, then the Winchester scribe must have carried his occasional efforts at abbreviation further than has been argued before, and this has implications for the text of the entire Roman War. Any new edition of this tale should not assume that the Winchester will always have the superior reading and should carefully compare the Winchester and Caxton readings with Malory’s known sources to restore Malory’s text as completely as possible.

Appendix: The Texts and Sources In the following columns, I have added modern punctuation and modernized characters and resolved abbreviations. I have also italicized key words that the Malory versions share with their sources and those that are sound-echoes typical of Malory’s style.20 Winchester

Caxton

Syrs,

syrs,

ye know well that the honoure and worshyp hath ever folowyd the Romaynes,

Morte Arthure

Thynk on the myche renownn of
our reche fadyrs, And the riatours of Rome þat regnede with lordez: And the renkez ouerrane all that and remembre how regnede in erthe, Rome domyneth and is Encrochede all chyef and hede ouer Cristyndome be alle the erthe and craftes of armes, unyuersal world, In everiche a viage the victorie was halden; Insette all þe Sarazenes within seuen wyntter, The parte fro the Porte Jaffe to Paradyse
atez.

20 See Vinaver, ‘Introduction’, Works, I, lxii.

Merlin Gentil vassal, boin conquereor, fil de boin anchisor,

qui les grans honors et les grans terres conquistrent par lor proeces et par lor hardemens est Romme li chies del monde.

LUCIUS’S EXHORTATION IN WINCHESTER AND THE CAXTON

Winchester

Caxton

Morte Arthure

And suffre not these Bretons thys day to abyde ageynste us,

Et li Breton nous ont tolu le chemin vers Ostun que nous ni poons aler ne passer se par bataille non. Prenes vos armes et si vous adoubes, et sil nous atendent gardes quil soient

for I se well by yondyr ordynaunce this day shall dye much peple,

the felde is ourys.

Merlin Et sil empire ne dechiet en nostre tans ce sera honte et reproce a nous. Car preu et jentil furent vostre anchisor, et bien doiuent par droit de jentil pere jentil fil issir. Vostre pere furent vaillant si deues vous valoir por els aparoir. Et chascuns de vous se doit esforcier de resambler son pere. Car grant honte seroit et honte doit avoir qui pert liretage son pere et que par malvaiste de lui le guerpist et laisse ce que ses peres conquist par sa proece. Jou ne di mie que vous soies malvais ne empiries. Il furent preu et je vous tieng a preu et a vaillant et a hardi.

and this day let hit never be loste for the defaughte of herte.

and therfore do doughtly this day and

259

Thoghe a rewme be rebelle, we reke it bot lyttill/ It es resone and righte the renke be restreynede./ Do dresse we tharefore and byde we no langere,/ For dredlesse withowttyn dowtte the daye schall be ourez.

bien feru et sil fuient nous les sieurons a force. Si metons paine a lor orguel abatre et a destrure lor poeste et lor bubance.

23 The Historicity of Combat in Le Morte Darthur K.S. WHETTER

Here I examine a question inspired by a conversation with Professor Field: to what extent, if any, does the presentation of combat in the Morte reflect fifteenth-century historical practice? As we all know, the identification of the Sir Thomas Malory who wrote Le Morte Darthur with Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel, Warwickshire, was for a time disputed. Professor Field’s own work has been instrumental in establishing that the evidence as we have it points firmly to the authorship of Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel, knight, thief, prison-breaker and – allegedly – rapist and attempted murderer. This Sir Thomas Malory was born between 1414 and 1418 and died in March 1471.1 When he died, Malory was buried in Greyfriars Church, Newgate. His tombstone, made of marble, attests to his being valens miles, a phrase implying some ‘distinction in arms’.2 Such an expensive tombstone and such an approbative epitaph seriously undermine the recent claim that Malory died (in likely penury) in Newgate gaol and was buried in Greyfriars as a gentleman prisoner.3 Professor Field has also argued that Malory fought at the Battle of Towton, and that his presentation of looters on the battlefield after Arthur’s last battle – looters who, unique to Malory’s version, kill the wounded before robbing them – is a reflection of Towton and of Malory’s experiences there.4 Malory also fought in the Yorkist siege of 1 2

3

4

This and the following account of Malory’s life comes from P.J.C. Field, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory, Arthurian Studies 29 (Cambridge, UK, 1993). For the epitaph see London, BL MS Cotton Vitellius F.xii, fol. 284r. The ‘distinction in arms’ quotation is from P.J.C. Field, ‘Hunting, Hawking and Textual Criticism in Malory’s Morte Darthur’, in Malory: Texts and Sources, Arthurian Studies 40 (Cambridge, UK, 1998), pp. 103–13 (p. 103, n. 3). See Anne F. Sutton, ‘Malory in Newgate: A New Document’, Library 7th series 1.3 (Sept. 2000): 243–62 (244–7, 252–3). My ‘in likely penury’ parenthesis reflects Sutton’s contradictory assessment of Malory’s financial security: at one point she speculates that he was imprisoned for debt (pp. 245, 253), but later claims he was solvent enough not only to furnish his apartment (p. 249) but even to buy and rent incunabula copies of his source materials (pp. 252–3). P.J.C. Field, ‘Malory and the Battle of Towton’, in The Social and Literary Contexts of Malory’s Morte Darthur, ed. D. Thomas Hanks, Jr, and Jessica Gentry Brogdon, Arthurian Studies 42 (Cambridge, UK, 2000), pp. 68–74; cf. his Life and Times, p. 126 and n. 2. For the looters see The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugène Vinaver, 3rd edn, rev. P.J.C. Field (Oxford, 1990), pp. 1237.29–1238.4 and n. All references to Morte Darthur are by page and line number to this edition; subsequent references will be made parenthetically in the text. Neither Field nor Vinaver observe how the most disturbing aspect of this scene, the killing of those who are not quite dead, heightens the sombre mood of the battle and of the close of the Morte.

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Bamburgh and the other northern Lancastrian castles in 1462, probably fought in France in the 1440s, and lived through the Wars of the Roses and the last twenty-five years of the Hundred Years War. He was, then, extremely familiar with at least some aspects of fifteenth-century warfare and armed combat. Given that violence, bloodshed and war are so common both to the Middle Ages and to Malory’s own life and work, it is natural to speculate to what degree, if any, the presentation of combat and warfare in Malory’s Morte Darthur accurately reflects fifteenth-century historical practice. That is the question, inspired by a conversation with Professor Field and appealing, it is hoped, both to his penchant for Malory and his penchant for historical novels, that occupies this chapter. For reasons of space, highlights from three major wars will have to be sufficient to answer this question: (i) Arthur’s war against Lott and the rebel kings in Tale I; (ii) the war with the Roman Emperor in Tale II; (iii) the civil wars which close the story in Tale VIII. One element that is immediately apparent about Arthur’s wars with the rebel kings and with the Roman Emperor is the pains Malory takes to emphasize the justness of Arthur’s cause. In the early wars, for instance, we repeatedly witness Arthur’s drawing of the sword from the stone (see pp. 12–16), and it is made clear that ‘Whoso pulleth oute this Swerd of this Stone and Anvyld is rightwys Kynge borne of all Englond’ (12.34–6). Arthur, then, is clearly the rightful king and as such those who oppose him are in the wrong. This is particularly the case since, with one notable exception, we see Arthur throughout the opening tale act in an honourable fashion. His kingship is further supported, even demanded, not only by Merlyon and the Archbishop, but by the commons, who feel ‘that it is Goddes wille that he shalle be our kynge’ (16.13–14).5 His authority is similarly strengthened by the fact that when Lott and the others refuse to acknowledge a beardless boy he often acts with the advice of Merlyon as well as of his counsellors and barons (e.g. 17.31–2; 19.32–20.28; 24.6–12). All of this serves to legitimate Arthur’s actions, including his war with Lott, just as it renders Lott and the others rebels. Malory presents these rebels as worthy and even worshipful adversaries – ‘the beste fyghtynge men and knyghtes of moste prouesse that ever y saw’ and ‘men of grete worship’ (34.34–6) – but there is no doubt that they are in the wrong. A similar emphasis on the justness of Arthur’s cause and war is found in the ‘Tale of the Noble Kynge Arthure that was Emperoure Hymself thorow dygnyté of His Hondys’, where Arthur justifies his refusal to pay homage to Rome on the basis that Rome in fact owes him obeisance since his ancestors had been emperors (188.5–14; 192.7–10; 194.21–3; 207.4–6). This concern to show Arthur’s campaigns as justifiable seems to fit well with the

5

The introduction of the commons here is original to Malory, and may be a non-partisan reflection of Londoners’ role in the election and support of various kings, from Edmund Ironside in the eleventh century to Edward IV in the fifteenth, whose reign has been dated to his election by the commons in 1461, prior even to Towton. For Malory’s non-partisan originality and some of the support for Edward see P.J.C. Field, ‘Fifteenth-Century History in Malory’s Morte Darthur’, in Texts and Sources (as in n. 2), pp. 47–71 (pp. 53–4); for the role of the commons in general and in Edward’s kingship in particular see M. McKisack, ‘London and the Succession to the Crown during the Middle Ages’, in Studies in Medieval History presented to Frederick Maurice Powicke, ed. R.W. Hunt, W.A. Pantin and R.W. Southern (Oxford, 1948), pp. 76–89 (esp. pp. 85–6). The originality and role of the commons (this time in support of Henry IV) are both suggested by Nellie Slayton Aurner, ‘Sir Thomas Malory– Historian?’, PMLA 48 (1933): 362–91 (367).

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war.6

medieval conception of the just The notion of the just war was inherited in the Middle Ages from Rome, but it was a question which engaged and was elaborated upon by medieval lawyers, philosophers, and theologians, including Augustine and Aquinas. For Aquinas, ‘bellum proprie est contra extraneos et hostes, quasi multitudinis ad multitudinem’, but Hostiensis’ (mid-thirteenth century) categorizations of the just war extended to those ‘who contumaciously opposed the judicial authority’ of the recognized authority figure.7 Hostiensis also decries as unjust those unnecessary wars fought for personal reasons and those fought ‘contra authoritatum iuris’, but accepts as just defence against wilful attackers. Hence the rebel kings’ war against Arthur is unjust, while Arthur’s defending of his realm against the Emperor, whose denunciation of Arthur seems rather aggressive, wilful and personal, especially after Arthur legitimates his refusal to acknowledge Rome’s authority, is just. It should be noted that by Aquinas’s account the conflict with the rebel kings is more an internal sedition than war proper, but it is hard to keep these categories separate in either the Morte or the Middle Ages. The Roman War, on the other hand, is clearly a war between separate nations, and since the Emperor threatens to seize the realm (48.15–18; 186.7–15), Arthur is also defending his country from invasion, another justifiable form of warfare. Here, too, Arthur seeks approval from his council before going to war (186.16–190.12 and 194.15–195.22). This includes making provisions for the rule of the country in his absence, as well as for an heir should he die in battle. Similar provisions are made when he and Gawayne depart for France in the war against Launcelot (1211.8–11). Much of Malory’s treatment here comes from the sources, but he does seem to want to emphasize Arthur’s just and noble character. Ultimately, however, what we see in Malory’s presentation of the justness of Arthur’s cause is not a fifteenth-century knight’s musings about the theological or philosophical underpinnings of legitimate conflict. The Wars of the Roses made better men than Malory question the very notion of justum bellum. Rather, what we see in Malory’s presentation of Arthur’s early wars is an intelligent man trying to come to terms with the often unjust Wars of the Roses, wars in which Malory supported first York and then Lancaster and which, by 1469–70, God had yet to make clear which was side was in the right.8 It has been claimed that, the increasing role of foot-soldiers notwithstanding, ‘the middle ages was an equestrian age of war’.9 Yet it is also true that, by the time of the Hundred Years War, the English – bowmen and knights alike – rode to battle but dismounted to fight. This clearly contrasts with Morte Darthur, where we see knights fighting predominantly on horseback and going out of their way to re-horse their fellows:

6 7

8 9

On the just war see Frederick H. Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages (London, 1975). See S. Thomae Aquinatis, Summa Theologiae, ed. Petri Caramello (Italy, 1952), IIa–IIae, q. 42, art. 1, resp.; Hostiensis, Lectura in Decretales Innocentii IV, taken from Russell, pp. 129–30. See also Philippe Contamine, War in the Middle Ages, trans. Michael Jones (Oxford, 1984), pp. 280–4. I was unable to acquire a copy of Hostiensis. I owe this observation to Cynthia Neville. Andrew Ayton, ‘Arms, Armour, and Horses’, in Medieval Warfare: A History, ed. Maurice Keen (Oxford, 1999), p. 186.

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Whan sir Kay saw sir Gryfflet on foote, he rode unto kynge Nentres and smote hym downe, and ledde his horse unto sir Gryfflette and horsed hym agayne. Also sir Kay with the same spere smote downe kynge Lotte and hurte hym passynge sore. That saw the Kynge with the Hondred Knyghtes and ran unto sir Kay and smote hym downe, and toke hys horse and gaff hym kynge Lotte, whereof he seyde gramercy. Whan sir Gryfflet saw sir Kay and sir Lucas de Butler on foote, he with a sherpe spere grete and square rode to Pynnel, a good man of armys, and smote horse and man downe, and than he toke hys horse and gaff hym unto sir Kay. (28.15–25)

This even happens in the civil war between Arthur and Launcelot when Launcelot himself re-horses Arthur (1192.11–33). This not only shows the penchant for mounted combat in the Morte, but also the greatness of character and chivalry of the major players.10 The notable exception to this predominance of mounted combat in the Morte is the final battle between Arthur and Mordred, where: the kynge gate his speare in bothe hys hondis, and ran towarde sir Mordred, cryyng and saying, “Traytoure, now ys thy dethe-day com!” And whan sir Mordred saw kynge Arthur he ran untyll hym with hys swerde drawyn in hys honde. (1237.9–13)

This bloody foot battle is Malory’s modification of the sources, in which the battle takes place on horseback, is consistent with the fifteenth-century English practice of fighting on foot, and is again likely modelled on Malory’s experience of the historical Battle of Towton.11 It must be remembered, though, that at least part of this battle is fought on horseback (see 1235.27–1236.2), so that in this instance Malory reflects both his sources and fifteenth-century military practice. It is well known that there existed in the Middle Ages a mutual literary-societal influence where both literature and life valorized strength, courage, loyalty, largesse, prowess and ‘impetuous ferocity in combat’.12 There existed also an international law of arms based on tradition, chivalry, law and theology. This ‘law of arms governed alike the conduct of soldiers towards enemies[,] . . . the discipline of armies[,] . . . rules concerning right in spoils[,] . . . and armorial disputes’.13 We see a reflection of this when Lott orders his footmen sent from the field since in protecting them the mounted knights get injured or killed. We have in fact seen very little of these footmen, either here or elsewhere in the Morte, but regardless of the precise degree of their presence or absence we see Malory focussing on the mounted combat and also illustrating the chivalrous behaviour of his principal characters, for Lott is confident that ‘thys noble kynge Arthure woll nat tarry on the footemen’ (35.10–17). There may be a further and specific historical influence beyond the law of arms here, for Lott’s speech is original to Malory, and ‘may echo the Yorkist

10 My thinking here has been inspired in part by Carol V. Kaske, ‘Malory’s Critique of Violence Before

and Just After the Oath’, 38th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, 8–11 May 2003. 11 Field, ‘Towton’, pp. 72–3. 12 Maurice Keen, ‘Introduction’, in Medieval Warfare (as in n. 9), p. 4. For the knight and chivalry see Richard Barber, The Knight and Chivalry, rev. edn (Woodbridge, 1995); for a particularly Malorian focus see Larry D. Benson, Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge, MA, 1976), pp. 137–201. 13 M.H. Keen, The Laws of War in the Late Middle Ages (London and Toronto, 1965), p. 239.

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proclamation before Northhampton that lords and knights were to be killed but the commons spared’.14 At the same time, Malory’s principal focus both with and without the authority of his sources is Arthurian chivalry, and since there is no mention in the Morte of Arthur harrying the footmen, Lott’s faith in Arthur’s chivalrous treatment of his opponents is well-founded. Arthur continues such behaviour in the Roman War by demanding that the Emperor meet him in open battle rather than raze defenceless towns and fields, for there is more worship in battle, says Arthur, than in ‘overryd[ing] maysterlesse men’ (206.12–14). Such a scorched-earth policy was common in medieval campaigns, and together with mounted raids (chevauchées) was particularly employed by the English during the Hundred Years War to emphasize the enemy’s weakness, deprive the enemy of the resources or taxes which the destroyed areas might otherwise provide, or to draw the enemy into battle and, perhaps, bypass the castles and accompanying sieges altogether. Since, in contrast to the French against the English, Arthur and his men are quite willing to engage the Emperor’s forces, Arthur’s challenge to the Emperor seems a deliberate evocation of what was both a real and a fictional chivalry. Since such actions are consonant with the portrait of Arthurian chivalry in the Morte Darthur as well as with the chivalrous behaviour promoted in the medieval law of arms, it is difficult (in this instance) to say whether Malory was inspired in any way by fifteenth-century martial tradition. It is however worth noting that Arthur’s challenge to the Emperor is only vaguely suggested by a few lines from the alliterative Morte Arthure: ‘to vnlordly he wyrkez,/ Thus letherly agaynes law to lede my pople./ . . ./ Thanne sall we rekken full rathe whatt ryghte þat he claymes,/ Thus to ryot þis rewme and raunsone the pople’.15 What is more, duels between kings or princes were often announced in the Middle Ages, and although none of them ever came to pass, the notion of fifteenth-century heads of state settling a national conflict through single combat was in no way entirely fictional.16 Thus in this instance Malory may have both literary and historical sources in mind, so that his presentation of combat both is and is not historically accurate. ‘Few campaigns were waged during the period 800–1450 without siege being laid . . . at least on[c]e’,17 and we therefore expect to see some sieges in the Morte. Such indeed is the case, including the siege of Metz in the Roman War, where Arthur – like Henry V at Caen – guarantees the safety of the women and children after the city surrenders (241.12–242.17; cf. the next siege at 242.27–243.14).18 Even more than in the corresponding scene in the alliterative Morte Arthure, which has been seen as proof of the poem’s criticism of Arthur, Arthur’s actions in Malory’s Roman War garner the reader’s respect, helping to enhance his actions and 14 Field, Life and Times, p. 124; Vinaver, ed., Works, n. to 35.8–38.38. 15 See Morte Arthure, ed. Mary Hamel, Garland Medieval Texts 9 (New York, 1984), lines 1267–8 and

1275–6; and Vinaver, ed., Works, n. to 206.13–14. 16 J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, trans. F.H. Hopman (London, 1924; repr. New York,

1985), p. 86. See also Benson, pp. 190–1. 17 R.L.C. Jones, ‘Fortifications and Sieges in Western Europe c.800–1450’, in Medieval Warfare (as in

n. 9), p. 164. 18 For Henry’s actions see Keen, Laws of War, p. 121. Henry made no such provisions for the men, and the

town and its male denizens, priests aside, were sacked and butchered. 19 Pace William Matthews, The Tragedy of Arthur (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1960), pp. 132–3, who sees

in Metz the poem’s criticism of Arthur’s ‘vaulting ambition’; Hamel, ed., Morte Arthure, n. to 3038–43,

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stature.19

heroic Since Malory creates two logical scenes out of an illogical sequence in the source,20 he could simply be correcting a confusion in the story. At the same time, the parallel between Arthur at Metz and Henry V at Caen strengthens critics’ suggestions that Malory’s presentation and characterization of Arthur in the Roman War are meant as a prose paean to Henry.21 Further, since Malory had himself participated in siege warfare, he would have known that if a town refused to surrender then the laws of war condoned ‘death without quarter’ to all citizens regardless of gender, age, or military affiliation.22 Malory may thus have viewed the wholesale sacking of a fallen or surrendered city both as something likely to happen and something to be avoided, so that, again, his experience and knowledge of war in the fifteenth century augments what he inherits from the sources. Arguably even more memorable than Metz are Arthur’s and Gawayne’s sieges of Joyous Garde and Benwick and Mordred’s siege of the Tower of London. The first two are notable in part because they testify to the dissolution of the Arthurian fellowship, as well as because of their length: respectively fifteen weeks and the better part of eight months. Mordred’s siege is much shorter, but stands out for providing the unique – albeit unsuccessful – use of cannon in Morte Darthur, for here alone we are told of ‘grete gunnes’ being ‘shotte’ (1227.23–5), and the contrast with traditional throwing engines (earlier in the sentence) makes it clear that these ‘grete gunnes’ must refer to cannon.23 This has been questioned, but much of the evidence used against the notion of cannon goes both ways, especially the arguments that cannon and traditional siege engines were long used side by side, and that medieval sources tend to refer to cannon as (inter alia) grete gunnes, magni gunnes, or gunnes grossos.24 Malory was moreover familiar with the Tower as one of his principal gaols, and would likely have witnessed, if not in fact participated in, the Yorkist siege of the Tower in July 1460.25 Both besiegers and besieged alike fired cannon during this conflict, and cannon were also instrumental in the 1464 campaign when Edward IV’s ‘greet gonnes’ helped secure victory over the Lancastrians, who had again occupied

20 21 22 23 24 25 26

for whom Metz evinces Arthur’s ‘corruption’; and John Finlayson, ed., Morte Arthure (London, 1967), p. 14 and the summary of 2352–500, for whom Metz signifies Arthur’s transition from just to unjust and aggressive combatant. As we shall see, medieval laws of war and siege condoned (as Hamel herself observes in the n. to 3053) the wholesale slaughter of a city that refused to surrender, and Arthur’s survey of Metz, the city’s attacks upon him and the preliminary assault at 2420–81 constitute declarations of siege and refusal of capitulation. Thus, however much the destruction of monasteries and hospitals in the alliterative Morte’s Metz siege offends our modern sensibilities, we cannot condemn Arthur’s actions by medieval siege conventions. What is important is that Arthur stops the destruction and guarantees the safety of the women as soon as they surrender to him. Thus the alliterative scene is (like Malory’s) more a corroboration than a condemnation of his character and heroism. I am indebted to Hubert Morgan for causing me to reconsider the importance of Metz in both the alliterative Morte and Malory’s Roman War. Vinaver, ed., Works, n. to 243.5–14. See Vinaver, ed., Works, 1367–8 and n. to 227.4–5; and Aurner (as in n. 5 above), pp. 370–3. See Keen, Laws of War, pp. 119–33 (p. 121). See also Jim Bradbury, The Medieval Siege (Woodbridge, 1992), esp. pp. 296, 317–24. Cf. Field, Life and Times, pp. 123–4 and 142; and P.J.C. Field, ed., Le Morte Darthur: The Seventh and Eighth Tales (London, 1978), n. to this scene. Dhira B. Mahoney, ‘Malory’s Great Guns’, Viator 20 (1989): 291–310 (esp. 293–302). Field, Life and Times, pp. 123–24, 142. On Edward’s ‘greet gonnes’ see Mahoney, p. 292; Bradbury, p. 292.

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North.26

Bamburgh and the We do not have any record of Malory participating in this 1464 engagement, but if he were out of prison and if he had not yet switched allegiance to Henry VI, then he may well have taken part in this set of sieges, just as he had done in its 1462 counterpart. Of course, he could also simply have heard about it after the fact, regardless of his location and allegiance. Cannon, however, were more prominent and more successful in the fifteenth than fourteenth century, and were not in use at all (at least not in the West) c.1215–35, when the Mort Artu was composed. Consequently, the cannon are Malory’s addition, for they are not in the stanzaic Morte and the corresponding section of the Mort Artu mentions only ‘engins et eschieles’. A later scene in the Mort – the one which Vinaver’s note implies is the principal source – mentions how Mordrés ‘fet giter les mangoniax et ferir granz cox’, but mangoniax clearly implies mangonels or (as Norris J. Lacy translates it) catapults, not cannon, and in this case the granz cox have to be blows from the mangonels, not from cannon.27 It thus seems that once again Malory’s presentation of warfare reflects both his sources and his surroundings. Since Malory had first-hand experience of sieges, he presumably would have known that at least until gunpowder and cannon became more prominent and effective during the 1420s to 1440s, the besieger needed to take a castle quickly by storm, force the inhabitants out and hope for victory in more open combat, or blockade and besiege a castle till it surrendered or fell; failing one of these options, the besieger would be forced to lift the siege and depart.28 Thus Gawayne and Arthur burn and waste much of the land on their way to the siege of Benwick (1211.12–7). We see a variant of this at the sieges of Joyous Garde and Benwick when Gawayne taunts Launcelot out of the castle to face him in single combat. But we also see Lyonell at Benwick advocate remaining behind walls ‘untyll they have hunger and colde, and blow on their nayles; and than lat us fresshly set uppon them and shrede hem downe as shepe in a folde’ (1211.24–7). Launcelot seems implicitly to support this, for although he sends an overture of peace to Arthur’s camp, he also acknowledges that his lands ‘be full bare for to sustayne any oste awhyle for the myghty warris that whylom made kyng Claudas uppon thys contrey’ (1212.20–2). This too is consistent with medieval warfare, for if the besiegers needed to force walls or inhabitants out, the besieged had to await the arrival of allies or the privation of their enemy. Malory’s source mentions the cold, but not the knights blowing on their hands, which is original and which could owe as much to personal experience as to imaginative augmentation of the scene as it occurs in the stanzaic Morte Arthur. The Battle of Towton, for instance, was said to be ‘bitterly cold’, and the Yorkist siege of the northern Lancastrian castles of Alnwick, Dunstanburgh and Bamburgh from late October 1462 to early January 1463 on the coast of the North Sea was also a cold campaign.29

27 See La Mort le roi Artu, ed. Jean Frappier, 3rd edn (Geneva, 1964), §142.80 and §168.4; Vinaver’s n. to

1227.25; and The Death of Arthur, trans. Norris J. Lacy, in Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation, ed. Lacy (New York and London, 1995), IV, p. 146. On the first French scene being Malory’s principal source cf. Mahoney, 307. 28 On siege tactics see Bradbury, esp. pp. 78–88; Contamine, pp. 101–15 and 200–07. 29 John Gillingham, The Wars of the Roses: Peace and Conflict in Fifteenth-Century England (Baton Rouge, 1981), pp. 133 and 145.

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We see further awareness of the offensive and defensive exigencies of the medieval siege in Gwenyvere’s anticipation of Mordred’s attack when she provisions the Tower ‘with all maner of vytayle, and well garnysshed hit with men’ (1227.18–21). Although Gwenyvere’s preparation of the Tower is abbreviated from a longer account in the Mort Artu,30 it is possible that this scene too has been at least partially influenced by Malory’s understanding or experience of fifteenth-century war. The prominence of sieges in the preceding discussion notwithstanding, a reader wading through the Morte Darthur in its entirety would never guess that ‘[s]ieges far outnumber pitched battles, naval skirmishes, mounted raids, and all other forms of warfare during’ the Middle Ages.31 Nor is it obvious from the Morte that cannon were a typical feature in sieges from the late 1300s. On the contrary, Malory’s focus in open warfare and siege alike tends to be on contests between individual knights.32 Gawayne’s battles with Launcelot at Benwick are one example. The lengthy re-horsing episode during the war with the rebel kings (cited in part above) is another. Indeed, various battles throughout the Morte are won in large part because of the prowess of one or two individuals, as when Balyn and Balan play an integral role in the defeat of Lott and the rebels as well as of King Royns (see 40.3–8; 73.21–75.11; 75.34–76.5; 76.29–31), or when Arthur defeats Emperor Lucyus in single combat, sending his body back to Rome as the tribute they had demanded of him (223.14–21, 225.14–226.8). In this, as in the predominance of mounted combat (or combat which begins mounted and only becomes a foot battle when both combatants are unhorsed), we see that Malory’s battles are dominated not by artillery, bowmen, castles or sieges, but by knights. Despite the fact that bowmen comprised three-quarters of the typical English fighting force in the fifteenth century,33 the words bowemen and crosse-bowys each appear only once in the entire Morte Darthur, while archer and archers appear twice each, none of which is during war, although three uses come in attacks on knights engaged in individual adventures.34 Footemen is used five times, four by Lott in the speech discussed above, and although some of the 137 uses of foote refer to infantry, they are very few: perhaps no more than four occasions, at 24.24, 26.17, 208.4, and 209.19. The word knyght, on the other hand, occurs 2,719 times, and knyghtes occurs 1,646 times. This focus on knights over all other aspects of the medieval army is hardly surprising given Malory’s title for the work, even if it is not the title by which the modern world knows the story: ‘The Hoole Book of Kyng Arthur and of His Noble Knyghtes of the Rounde Table, that whan they were holé togyders there was ever an Hondred and Forty’ (1260.16–19). We thus have further corroboration that ‘The technique of fighting, and more particularly of single combat, is Malory’s favourite topic’, and

30 See Vinaver, ed., Works, n. to 1227.19–20. 31 Jones, p. 164. Cf. Michael Prestwich, Armies and Warfare in the Middle Ages: The English Experience

(New Haven, CT, and London, 1996), p. 281. 32 Andrew Lynch, Malory’s Book of Arms: The Narrative of Combat in Le Morte Darthur, Arthurian

Studies 39 (Cambridge, UK, 1997), pp. 48–51. 33 Prestwich, p. 118. 34 These and the following occurrences for footemen, foote, knyght and knyghtes are taken from the word

frequency list in A Concordance to the Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Tomomi Kato (Tokyo, 1974).

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that, moreover, ‘Malory’s war is normally only a series of single “deeds” attributed to named heroes’.35 Hence, for example, the following passage: Sir Launcelot was wroth at hys grymme wordys and gurde to hym with his swerde aboven uppon hys bryght helme, that the raylyng bloode felle doune to his feete. And sir Gawayne wyth his longe swerde leyde on faste, that three amerallys deyde thorow the dynte of his hondis. And so Lovel fayled nat in the pres; he slew a kynge and a deuke that knyghtes were noble. Than the Romaynes releved. Whan they sye hir lorde so hampred they chaced and choppedde doune many of oure knyghtes good, and in that rebukyng they bare the bolde Bedwere to the colde erthe[.] . . . Yet sir Launcelot and sir Lovel rescowed hym blyve. (222.32–223.6)

Erasmus remarks how Dulce bellum inexpertis.36 Both Malory and his age were well versed in war and combat, and no doubt partly as a result of this Morte Darthur gives us many instances of the consequences of battle, as in the statement ‘“there ys harde batayle thereas kynne and frendys doth batayle ayther ayenst other”, for there may be no mercy, but mortall warre’ (1084.5–7). Other battles reveal horses covered in blood past the fetlocks (e.g. 36.19–20; 1193.33–4), or kin or comrades wounding or killing one another, sometimes through accident or mistaken identity, sometimes deliberately through dissolution of fellowship and feud. As I argue elsewhere, however, Malory also presents combat, whether on a great or small scale, as an opportunity to win worship, and the violent consequences of combat are accepted and counterbalanced because of this.37 Thematically speaking, war and combat are thus both bad and good, a place of death, but also a place to acquire honour and glory. From the brief survey offered here I would suggest that, from a historical perspective, the presentation of warfare in Morte Darthur offers another dualism typical of Malory: it both is and is not historically accurate. This is only to be expected given that Malory’s principal sources are thirteenth-century French romance combined with English materials from c.1400. Mounted knights, for instance, truly did dominate the battlefield whilst the Vulgate Cycle was being composed. Frederick II (1212–50) reputedly declared that ‘The adornment of the Empire and of our power especially lies in a multitude of knights.’38 Yet infantry had always been an important presence in medieval armies and so to some extent Malory’s sources also paint an incomplete picture. Malory likewise inherits from the sources many ahistorical aspects of war, such as the mid-rebellion tourney celebrating the arrival of kings Ban and Bors (22.20–24.12), Arthur’s fight with the Giant of Mont St Michel (198.5–205.16), or Gawayne’s adventure with Pryamus (228.20–234.24). At the same time, Malory adopts material from his sources not merely because it is in his ‘auctorysed’ French book (1260.7–8), but because, more

35 Respectively Vinaver, p. xxxiii, and Lynch, p. 49. 36 The Adages of Erasmus, selected by William Barker (Toronto, 2001), Adage IV, i, 1. 37 See my ‘Warfare and Combat in Le Morte Darthur’, in Writing War: Medieval Literary Responses to

Warfare, ed. Corinne Saunders, F.H.M. Le Saux and Neil Thomas (Cambridge, UK, 2004). This chapter is something of an addendum, and since both papers discuss Malory’s treatment of combat there is naturally some overlap between them. They are distinguished by the fact that the current subject is historical, whereas the Writing War chapter is literary and thematic in focus. 38 Quoted in Contamine, p. 67. I have been unable to locate the original.

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importantly, it supports his view of the High Order of Arthurian Chivalry. The same is true of his modifications to or departures from the source material, as for instance in the connections between Towton and the last battle, where the bloodiness of Towton serves as a tangible model for the bloody and sombre destruction of the Round Table. In France and England the fifteenth century was in fact far more violent than the thirteenth, but whatever Malory’s own experience of and attitude to warfare may be, his principal focus is more on the precarious balance between the good and bad effects of war and the worship it generates amongst its participants than in historical accuracy. This too is hardly surprising in a work of fiction which takes pains to establish unity of character and theme but makes no attempt to foreshadow the historical novel.39 We should be less concerned with any historical or narrative anomalies because Malory is neither historian nor infallible narrator. As Professor Field observes, Malory’s biggest concern is the nobility and worship of Arthur and his knights, and this he does get right.40 Yet I would suggest that an equally important concomitant of this is Malory’s concern with the tragic destruction of this noble king and fellowship, and the presence and presentation of warfare – in itself a lamentable institution – helps to illustrate this, whether that presentation holds a mirror to medieval military practice, to the French book, or to Malory’s imagination.

39 On Malory’s treatment of his characters see Robert Henry Wilson, Characterization in Malory: A

Comparison with his Sources (Chicago, 1934); Robert H. Wilson, ‘Malory’s Naming of Minor Characters’, JEGP 42 (1943): 364–85; and Robert H. Wilson, ‘Addenda on Malory’s Minor Characters’, JEGP 55 (1956): 563–87. 40 P.J.C. Field, ‘Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur’, in The Arthur of the English, ed. W.R.J. Barron, Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages 2 (Cardiff, 1999), pp. 225–46 (pp. 241–44); P.J.C. Field, ‘Author, Scribe and Reader in Malory: The Case of Harleuse and Peryne’, in Texts and Sources (as in n. 2), pp. 72–88 (pp. 87–8).

24 Personal Weapons in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur D.S. BREWER

The weapons Malory refers to vary according to his source; his dominant image of chivalry leads him to refer continuously to some weapons but to ignore others. In glossarial form, this chapter lists alphabetically all the weapons referred to in Le Morte Darthur. A close examination of Malory’s references to personal weapons in Le Morte Darthur1 has two advantages. First, it can elucidate the actual nature of the weapons referred to, which are not now always common knowledge. Secondly, from a more general literary point of view a glance at the detail makes more vivid Malory’s characteristic manner. It shows him reliant on but very independent of sources, caring little for material detail, refusing to clutter up his text with realism. Despite the frequency of armed combat in his story, which is indeed essentially about combat, he is not interested in the technical details of fighting. It is almost always general

1

The text is from The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. E. Vinaver, 3rd edn, rev. P.J.C. Field (Oxford, 1990). My debt to Vinaver and now to Professor Field is of course immense. This work could not have been done without constant reference not only to the text but to A Concordance to the Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. T. Kato (Tokyo, 1974) – in which Professor Shunichi Noguchi also receives honourable mention – and The Middle English Dictionary (MED). I record my indebtedness and gratitude to all. The present essay, written in homage to the work of Professor P.J.C. Field, is part of a larger study of armour and weaponry in Le Morte Darthur. Another segment is to be found in my ‘Hauberk and Helm in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur’, in Arthurian and Other Studies presented to Shunichi Noguchi (Cambridge, UK, 1993), pp. 89–93. Page and line references here to Malory are preceded in brackets by the number of the books into which Caxton divided his edition. Caxton’s books, though somewhat uneven, are not a bad analysis of Le Morte Darthur and enable the reader to see in a little more detail the distribution of various words. The Tristram story (Caxton Books 9, 10, 11, 12) is disproportionately long. Despite the segmentation argued for by Vinaver as evidenced in his title Works, I assume with virtually all readers that in spite of its episodic nature and some inconsistency Le Morte Darthur is one ‘whole book’. The question of the date of composition of the various component parts remains unresolved: see T. McCarthy, Reading the ‘Morte Darthur’, Arthurian Studies 20 (Cambridge, UK,1981), repr. as Introduction to the Morte Darthur (Cambridge, UK, 1990). My references to ‘early’ or ‘later’ parts of Le Morte Darthur indicate primarily their nearness to the beginning or the end of the sequence of the tales as we have it. For what it is worth, however, my impression is that the earlier parts were written first, and certainly that the last few books, Caxton 18–21, were written last. The distribution of some lexical items concerning armour (and perhaps other matters) encourages this feeling. See also P.J.C. Field, Romance and Chronicle: A Study of Malory’s Prose Style (London, 1970); E.H. Ruck, An Index of Themes and Motifs in Twelfth-Century French Arthurian Poetry (Cambridge, UK, 1991); and Aspects of Malory, ed. T. Takamiya and D. Brewer, Arthurian Studies 1 (Cambridge, UK, 1981).

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bashing.2

slashing and The importance of combat is deeper. But the references to weapons used are also symptomatic of Malory’s general approach and perhaps I should emphasize here that I find no advantage in a division between Malory the man, Malory the author, then an anonymous ‘storyteller’, then a ‘narrator’ who is assumed part of the time not to know what he is up to.3 The aim of such subdivision is to sort out the manifold inconsistencies in the narrative of Le Morte Darthur by attributing them to different expositors and the underlying assumption of such an attempt is that the work possesses an ultimately single perspective of a modern kind. It seems to me mistaken. It is as if a medieval multi-perspective painting or stainedglass window were to be looked at as if constructed according to post-Renaissance principles of (apparently) single perspective. Such a view disregards the fragmentary multiplicity of Le Morte Darthur itself deriving from multiple, and often mutually incompatible, cumulative sources. As such Le Morte Darthur is not unusual. It is characteristic of what I have elsewhere called ‘traditional literature’, as are Homer, the Bible, Shakespeare’s plays, etc.4 Le Morte Darthur in every part is influenced by its immediate source and Malory depends on the source while treating it cavalierly, as traditional authors usually do. Such unity as such works possess (and its necessity can be overrated) is otherwise achieved. Malory was not interested in the technical details of fighting and weaponry, but needs a selection of them to convey his main image of life, adventure, conflict, reconciliation, love, tragedy, narrowly focussed on his potent fantasy of a past, but still imaginatively fertile, chivalry. Thus the weapons he refers to, while absolutely solid in reference, vary according to his source. But his dominant image of chivalry leads him to refer continuously to some weapons, notably sword and spear, and pay little or no attention to others which were in fact quite common in his day, such as the mace. What follows is presented in as it were glossarial form, and all the weapons referred to in Le Morte Darthur are listed alphabetically.5 ARROW. The arrow shot from the bow was rarely a knightly weapon, though not unknown in literature (cf. BOW). Merlin in disguise as an uncouth peasant carries a bow and arrows (1) 38/8, and Tristram is wounded with an arrow shot by a ‘man’ (8) 432/31, though earlier this man is one of four strange knights. The few arrows that fly about have a certain anonymity of origin and are low class, like those the archers shoot Lancelot’s horse full of, (19) 1125/33, etc. There is a partial exception with the lady who accidentally shoots Lancelot in the buttock when she is hunting (18) 1104/26. This huntress, who traverses the wood accompanied only by her band of 2 3

4

5

Cf. Andrew Lynch, Malory’s Book of Arms, Arthurian Studies 39 (Cambridge, UK, 1997). An example is the essay by Kenneth Hodges, ‘English Knights, French Books, and Malory’s Narrator’, Fifteenth Century Studies 28, ed. Edelgard E. Dubruck and Barbara I. Gusick (Rochester, NY, and Woodbridge, UK, 2003): 148–72. As an example see Derek Brewer, ‘Retellings’, in Retelling Tales: Essays in Honor of Russell Peck, ed. Thomas Hahn and Alan Lupack (Rochester, NY, and Cambridge, UK, 1997), pp. 9–34. Also see Alistair Fowler, Renaissance Realism (Oxford, 2003). For general works on arms not specifically referred to in this chapter, see D.S. Brewer, ‘The Arming of the Warrior in European Literature and Chaucer’, in Tradition and Innovation in Chaucer (London, 1982), pp. 142–60; Companion to Medieval Arms and Armour, ed. David Nicolle (Woodbridge, 2002); David Edge and John Miles Paddock, Arms and Armour of the Medieval Knight (London, 1988); James Mann, European Arms and Armour, 2 vols. (London, 1962); H. Nickel, Arms and Armour through the Ages (London, 1971); W. Reid, The Lore of Arms (London, 1976); F. Wilkinson, Arms and Armour (London, 1978).

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maidens, is obviously a curious distant echo of Diana. She is accompanied by maidens who ‘dayly beare bowys, arrowis, hornys and wood-knyves, and many good doggis they had, bothe for the strenge and for a bate’ (18) 1104/8–10. This is the apparatus for hunting. Actually hunting is not shown as one of Tristram’s activities in Malory, though he is praised as the noble originator of the sport, and amongst all his skills, that of shooting with arrows is not included. Yet Torre’s knightly origin is revealed by, amongst other activities, his pleasure in shooting (3) 100/8, cf. BOW. BOW. The bow is the archer’s weapon, not a knight’s, except for hunting, where it is used by the lady huntress who so unfortunately wounds Lancelot (cf. ARROW). The ‘bowmen of England’ do well in battle (5) 220/29, but these are caught from the alliterative Morte Arthure,6 where interestingly they are called less specifically ‘bowmen of Bretayn’ (2095). Malory, as often indeed the author of the Morte Arthure himself, is clear that with all our faults we are Englishmen, not Britons. In this same passage ‘darts’ and crossbows are used by Romans and Saracens, the Dutchmen have ‘quarrels’ q.v. and the Romans also bows of horn (50) 220/30–4. With the exception of the bows of horn these details are slightly rearranged from a longer more detailed passage in the alliterative Morte Arthure (2095–110). The bows of horn may be a reference to ‘Turkish bows’ such as Chaucer attributes to Arcite (The Canterbury Tales I.2895), and each example may result from an assumption about ancient weapons. I have found no other references to bows made of horn and this remains an unsolved puzzle, unless Vinaver’s suggestion that it was prompted merely by a group of words alliterating on h is correct, which seems unlikely. A bow means the longbow, about 5–6 feet long, of yew or other wood, which became the famous weapon of the English in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. To use the longbow effectively requires years of practice to develop the muscular force required. It could be shot more rapidly than the CROSSBOW q.v. CLUB. An Old Norse word first recorded in English from the early thirteenth century in Layamon’s Brut. The club is associated with giants and the common people. So in Le Morte Darthur, the first reference is to the commons of Caerleon who arose with clubs and staves and slew many knights (1) 19/23–4. The giant who fights Marhaut in an early adventure has many clubs of iron and gisarmes about him (4) 175/35, and he fights with an iron club (4) 176/2. Lancelot also chops down a carl who ‘laysshed at hym with a grete club shodde with iron’ (6) 271/14–15. Lancelot then soon has to fight two giants simultaneously, well armed save their heads, and carrying ‘two horryble clubbys’ in their hands (6) 271/31. The great exponent of the club is the cannibal giant of Mont St Michel, the foulest wight that ever man saw. When Arthur speaks to him the giant catches up a ‘clubbe in his honde all of clene iron’, which is almost a direct quotation from the alliterative Morte Arthure (1105). When Arthur has conquered the giant he orders that the club shall be collected, presumably to be kept as a token of triumph. Later still in the tale of the war with Rome, enemy giants dash down knights with clubs of steel (5) 221/1. Historically, clubs in the form of the mace, with such variants as were called with facetiously grim irony ‘the Morning Star’, or ‘the Holy Water 6

Le Morte Darthur, ed. L.D. Benson in King Arthur’s Death (New York, 1974; repr. Exeter, 1986); also ed. S. Noguchi, Medieval Text Series (Tokyo, 1990).

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Sprinkler’, favoured by militant clerics forbidden to fight with the sword, were also used in battle by knights throughout the medieval period, but are never mentioned by Malory.7 The clubs he refers to are to be thought of as great iron poles when belonging to giants, who survive from folktale to be killed by heroes. The clubs of the commons were probably heavy wooden bars. CROSSBOW. This deadly weapon is mentioned only once in Le Morte Darthur (5) 220/31. In structure it is formed of a short bow held horizontally, to the centre of which is attached a strong central pillar. The bowstring is pulled back along the pillar. When the crossbow was first invented this was done by hand, but later a mechanical ratchet was used. It is a weapon attributed to ‘Romayns and Sarazens’. The crossbow is first noted in the twelfth century and was considered so unfair a weapon that the Pope forbad its use in 1139 except against the heathen. However, it soon came into general use, being slower but more powerful than the longbow, and soon provided with mechanical means for tensioning the string, while the bow itself became made of metal.8 Its arrow came to be called a ‘bolt’ (not referred to by Malory) or a QUARREL, q.v. It is this latter fact that prompts Malory to mention the crossbow itself, of his own accord, in a passage which is following the alliterative Morte Arthure The poem refers to ‘quarells’ but does not mention crossbows at all (2103). In English the earliest recorded reference to the crossbow as such is in an Inventory for Agincourt, 1415, but as an ‘arbalest’ it had long been an accepted English weapon.9 Not so apparently for Malory. Nor does he ever refer to it as an arbalest, the alternative name. The arbalest is referred to in English as early as c.1330, and was noted as such in Anglo-French earlier, ‘crossbow’ being the later term. DAGGER. The dagger, known as such in England from the fourteenth century, was the relatively short sheathed knife which a knight wore on his right side, as illustrated in many a brass or manuscript picture. From the fourteenth century it was sometimes called, with the usual facetious warrior’s irony, a ‘misericorde’, from being used to give the ‘merciful’ final death-blow to a defeated opponent. Malory does not use ‘misericorde’ but refers to the mortal function on the three occasions he uses the word ‘dagger’. First, in Arthur’s fight with the giant of Mont St Michel (5) 203/26, where the Morte Arthure gives Arthur an ‘anlace’, Malory changes the name of the weapon to ‘dagger’ but when it is plunged into the body retains the phrase ‘up to the hilts’. ‘Dagger’ was probably the more usual term, by Malory’s time, compared with the poetical and oldfashioned ‘anlace’ (which Chaucer’s Franklin carries, General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales line 357). The two other uses of ‘dagger’ refer to the treacherous King Mark who suddenly stabs his brother to death with one (9) 634/10, 637/1 (but cf. GLAIVE). When a knight is defeated and thrown to the ground in combat, and then has his helm ‘raced off’, he is often killed. Unless he is decapitated, which must be done by a sword, it is probably the dagger which is used to cut his throat, or to stab him through the eye, though Malory does not go into

7 8 9

C.H. Ffoulkes, Armour and Weapons (Oxford, 1909; repr. East Ardsley, 1973), pp. 108–109. Ffoulkes, Armour and Weapons, p. 108. Cf. R.E. Oakeshott, The Sword in the Age of Chivalry (1964, reissued 1994; repr. Woodbridge, 2002), p. 293.

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such gruesome detail. A good dagger could easily pierce mail, when impelled by a strong arm. DART. A dart is a spear or javelin thrown by hand, and in ME the word is occasionally used elsewhere of the missile for the CROSSBOW q.v. But Malory uses the word only in the plural and only twice. The first instance refers to the innately knightly Torre, whose noble origin is partly revealed by his preference for ‘shotynge, or castynge dartes’ (3) 100/8, rather than for honest labour. The second instance is the remark that the Romans and Saracens ‘shotte with dartis and with crosse-bowys’ (5) 220/31. Darts seem not to be knightly weapons in this particular instance, but Malory is following the alliterative Morte Arthure where ‘Dartes the Duchemen dalten ayaynes’ (2101). Sir Torre was no doubt doing the best he could with such rustic or low-class weapons as were available to him. The word, from French, is first recorded in English c.1330 or earlier, often used in the English metrical romances, and often associated with use of the arbalest. Chaucer refers to it as a normal weapon along with spears, arrows, swords, maces (Troilus IV.44). Malory as usual is more aristocratically selective. GISARME. The gisarme was a long-handled weapon ending with a long sharp curved blade, known from ancient times to the seventeenth century.10 The gisarme is considered by some to be similar to or identical with the pole-axe. Ashdown notes a battle with pole-axes between the fifteenth-century Earl of Warwick and Sir Pandulf Malacat, illustrated in BL Cotton MS Julius E. IV. He notes that some authorities condemned the gisarme as too cruel, but the word is copiously evidenced in MED, mostly in poems from c.1300 to c.1500 with no note of disapproval, often in a list of weapons. However, Malory’s first reference is to a giant who had many clubs of iron and gisarmes about him (4) 175/36, and his next is to the weapon of the magic knight in the tale of Gareth who frustrates Gareth’s attempts to anticipate his marriage (7) 333/26. (In the analogues to the latter scene quoted by Vinaver the intrusive knight carries an axe.) The gisarme inflicts a wound a ‘shaftmond broad’ in the thick of Gareth’s thigh. (Although the word ‘shaftmond’ derives from Old English it is first quoted from c.1400. It appears in the Morte Arthure (2546, 3843, 4232) and other romances as a measurement of distance, and its use supports P.J.C. Field’s theory of an English source for the story of Gareth.11 It is reckoned to be the distance from the tip of the extended thumb to the other side of the palm, about six inches, and is used only here by Malory.) The gisarme must have seemed to Malory an inappropriate weapon for knights. It did not fit the pattern of beginning with a joust on horseback with spears, followed by a fight on foot with swords, and a final wrestle. Nor was it a courtly French weapon. It had crude associations. In the case of the giant certainly (Vinaver, III.1363), and in the story of Gareth probably.12 Malory must have picked it up from an English source. GLAIVE. Malory uses the word seven times in the singular, once in the plural. It derives from French and means ‘spear’. Of the eight occurrences, six occur in Caxton Books 1–4, and two in Books 19 and 20 – a curious re-emergence. The word 10 C.H. Ashdown, Armour and Weapons in the Middle Ages (London, 1925), pp. 210, 320. 11 P.J.C. Field, ‘The Source of Malory’s Tale of Gareth’, in Aspects of Malory, pp. 57–70; repr. in Malory:

Texts and Sources (Cambridge, UK, 1998), pp. 246–60. 12 Field, ‘The Source of Malory’s Tale of Gareth’, Aspects of Malory, p. 67.

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may have had some exotic or treacherous association, or a primitive fierceness for Malory, though it is very frequently used simply to mean a spear in French Arthurian romance. In the tale of Balin, a ‘glaive’ is found in the hands of the Irish knight (2) 68/18 and also in the hands of the treacherous invisible knight Garlon (2) 81/10. Sir Outlake, dubious ally of Morgan le Fay, has been wounded through the thighs by a glaive, but this seems a neutral instance (4) 14/19. Torre, who is always approved of, has a glaive which he hands to his dwarf (3) 110/27, and takes into his hand to attack a knight on horseback a little later (3) 111/30. The word was perhaps picked up from Malory’s presumed source. Malory often seems to get hooked on a particular word or phrase for a time. There is nothing treacherous about Torre, and the nobility of his father, and thus his own nobility, are stressed. These early instances are balanced by the reference in the episode of the healing of Urry where King Mark is said to have slain Tristram ‘with a trencheaunte glayve’ (19) 1149/30. The murder is referred to again a little later by Lancelot as with ‘a grounden glayve’ to the heart (20) 1173/18. (‘Grounden’ occurs only once elsewhere, in ‘the grounden hede’ of a spear (5) 239/26, derived from the Morte Arthure ‘grounden spere glade to his herte’ (2972), which has clearly remained in Malory’s mind so many pages later, to give Lancelot’s speech its poetic resonance. ‘Trencheaunte’ occurs only once elsewhere, used by Gawain in the early Torre episode, when Gawain threatens to kill King Pellinor with a trenchant sword (3) 102/15. ‘Trenchant’ is a common adjective in French romance but maybe Malory uses it to emphasize the deadliness of the weapon of vengeance. Both ‘grounden’ and ‘trenchant’ seem to reinforce associations of unknightly savagery. They are mostly used in the earlier parts of Le Morte Darthur.) The stanzaic Morte Arthure13 once refers to ‘grounden glaives’ that pierce ‘rich hauberkes’ (3076–8) in a passage of what is for that poem unusually detailed reference to weapons, when Arthur lands in England to reclaim his crown and queen. ‘Grounden glaive’ has an obvious formulaic quality and alliterative resonance, which perhaps had an archaic thrill for Malory. LANCES. Malory never uses the singular form and the plural ‘launcis’ only once (5) 229/17, where if the word is not a scribal error it is caught from the corresponding passage in the Morte Arthure, 2541. Caxton rather acutely and probably correctly amended ‘launcis’ to ‘speres’, which leads Vinaver unnecessarily to insert ‘and speres’ into his version of the Winchester MS here. The word ‘launce’, derived from French, begins to be recorded in the early fourteenth century. Although first quoted from a documentary list most MED quotations are from verse and Malory may have felt the word to be more poetical than practical, and may therefore not have intended to use it. If he did use it we have an example of how, despite his magisterial handling of his sources in general, he could be influenced by minor verbal variants. But the likeliest supposition is that for whatever reason he never used the perfectly familiar word ‘lance’, and the Winchester scribe here erroneously substituted a word well known to him. Perhaps ‘spear’ seemed more authentically and archaically appropriate and English to Malory than what he may have sensed to be the more modern

13 Le Morte Arthure, ed. L.D. Benson, in King Arthur’s Death; also ed. E. Bjorkman, Alt- und

mittelenglische Texte 9 (Heidelberg, 1915).

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‘lance’, though his wide acquaintance with French sources must acquit him of narrow provincialism of taste. QUARREL. The quarrel is the bolt or arrow fired by a CROSSBOW q.v. The first reference in Le Morte Darthur is to ‘quarels shot by Douchemen’ which ‘dud much harme’ (5) 220/33. In the Morte Arthure which Malory is summarizing here it is only by implication that the ‘Douchemen’ fire them. In the second and last of Malory’s references Bors is subjected to severe tests during the night in the castle of King Pelles, among them ‘shotte of arowys and of quarellys’ many of which fell on him and hurt him in the bare places (11) 800/26–7. Here the quarrels seem simply to be an intensification of the general unpleasantness of the arrows. The word ‘quarrel’ is first recorded c.1250, implying knowledge of crossbows by that date. The word is widely evidenced in Middle English in a variety of texts, but is outside Malory’s interests, as not being a chivalric weapon. SCABBARD. The scabbard is the sheath for the sword, and the word ‘sheath’ is earlier and more general in meaning. The word ‘scabbard’ appears relatively late in English, in the early fourteenth century, derived from AF, and until the latter part of the fifteenth century was more usually in the form of ‘escauberc’ (MED). Until the various forms of ‘scabbard’ made their more specialized way, ‘sheath’ was the normal word for the object concerned, which was obviously essential in a swordbearing society. The words ‘scabbard’ and ‘sheath’ are closely entwined in Le Morte Darthur, though ‘scabbard’ appears 31 times and ‘sheath’ 12 times. Malory seems to have a slightly different feeling about each word. ‘Scabbard’ is the first to appear, when Arthur obtains the miraculous sword from the lake, the second Excalibur, whose scabbard, Merlin tells him, is more precious than the sword because it will prevent him from bleeding however badly he is wounded. Merlin several times warns Arthur to keep the scabbard well: (1) 53/3, 54/3–6, again, at the beginning of the tale of Balin (2) 78/23–5, and again (4) 125/141 prophesying its theft. Arthur rather illogically after these warnings entrusts both sword and scabbard to Morgan le Fay (2) 78/28, which seems to miss Merlin’s point, even were she not the traitress she turns out to be. However, so Arthur did, as the French book tells us, though at much greater length. Malory drastically summarizes the episode, which leads on to Morgan’s creation of an imitation Excalibur and scabbard, of which the result will be seen later. The word ‘scabbard’, associated with Excalibur, seems to have somewhat exotic associations. Before the adventure with Morgan begins, however, another magic sword and sheath start off the adventure of Balin, which tends to use the word ‘sheath’ rather than scabbard. A damsel comes wearing what Malory calls a ‘sword’ (2) 61/28, but it is evident a few lines later that the word sword also implies the sheath, for there is a test for knights as to who can draw the sword from its sheath (2) 62/4. Balin is the only knight who can, and he insists on retaining sword and sheath. The word ‘sheath’ is twice more used in the tale of Balin, and sword and sheath possess no other specific magic properties, except that while Balin wears them he incurs his own doom. After his death Merlin separates the sheath, now called ‘the scawberde’ (2) 91/31 and leaves it for Galahad to find much later. This he does, though we are not told how, and brings it empty at the beginning of the Grail story. Galahad calls it ‘the scawberte’ (13) 32, but two lines later Malory calls it ‘the sheathe’ (13) 862/34. He is not fully or self-consciously systematic in stylistic use.

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For the rest of the Grail story Malory uses the word ‘sheath’ eight more times, all in Caxton 17, of which the hero is Galahad, referring to a marvellous sheath (17) 992/25 which accompanies another magic sword adapted from the sword of David. Malory uses the word ‘scabbard’ in various spellings, first, as noted, with reference to Excalibur. Merlin values the scabbard ten times more than the sword (1) 54/3. The scabbard is not mentioned during the actual fighting with the Five Kings, but Arthur is not wounded. There follows the story of the treason of Morgan le Fay in which Excalibur and its scabbard, together with their imitations, which have no magic properties, play very important parts. After being stolen, with nearly fatal results to Arthur, Excalibur and the scabbard are recovered. Excalibur’s scabbard is only once called a sheath (4) 141/25. Morgan eventually succeeds in stealing the scabbard and hurls it ‘in the deppyst of the watir’ of a lake (4) 151/16, where it sinks ‘for hit was hevy of golde and precious stonys’ (4) 151/16–17. Vinaver notes that this description is Malory’s own addition. It is a concrete detail and supplies a touch of splendour, but Malory gives no further explanation of the scabbard’s fate, although the French does. Malory says that Arthur looked for the scabbard but could not find it (4) 151/26–7. Excalibur’s scabbard is never again referred to. Its disappearance marks a stage in the evolution of Le Morte Darthur. Furthermore, its loss allows Arthur to be fatally wounded in his ultimate encounter with Mordred. The word ‘scabbard’ appears twice later in the story of the Grail during the adventures of Galahad, referring to a splendid object, but alternating with the word ‘sheath’ (17) 987/14, 16, 22. On this scabbard is written an improbably long inscription in letters of gold and silver concerning the use of the sword within. (The impression of length is increased by Vinaver’s trick, here and elsewhere, of using capital letters without manuscript authority or telling the reader about his divagation from the manuscript.) The scabbard (or sheath) necessarily has attached to it a sword-belt which Malory always calls a girdle. He takes the girdle for granted most of the time, though it is referred to twice in the story of Balin. The exception is the story of the Grail where in Caxton Book 17, the miracle of Galahad, the girdle is mentioned no less than 15 times, single or plural. It is here highly symbolic, whether it be rich or poor. The mention of the girdle for the last time of all is when Bedyvere finally throws Excalibur into the lake, when the scabbard is not mentioned. The fact that he bound the girdle around the hilts shows that the scabbard must be there, but its magic power to preserve Arthur has been forgotten, as has the fact of its previous loss. The scabbard has attracted very little notice from the historians of armour, and Malory himself, as in this last instance, is casual about it. Yet the scabbard is not only a practical necessity. It has a certain symbolic power as an image of invulnerability, and also as that which neutralizes a sword, preventing its proper or at least aggressive use until the destined user comes. Malory is not totally consistent in his stylistic use, but in general the word ‘scabbard’ suggests more importance and splendour than the more ancient, general and commonplace ‘sheath’. Malory’s use of ‘scabbard’ also perhaps reflects the developing tendency of the language in this case at this period to use the more specialized word. SPEAR. The spear is an ancient weapon, whether used on foot or horseback, held or thrown. The word itself is of Old English origin. Malory refers to spear(s), singular or plural, over 500 times and uses the French-derived ‘lance’ only once, if at all, in the plural (see LANCES). Since ‘lance’ was well established from the early four-

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teenth century it is difficult to account for Malory’s preference for ‘spear’ save as an example of a strong sense of old-fashioned Englishness in language as well as subject-matter. The spears shown in the Bayeux Tapestry are relatively short. During the medieval period they were extended in length and consequently in weight. Malory often describes spears as great and they are used only on horseback, with two notable exceptions, first when King Mark is described as treacherously killing his cousin with a ‘glaive’ (q.v.) (though he kills Tristram with a ‘dagger’ q.v.) and second when Arthur defends himself against Mordred’s personal assault in the last battle (see below). Spears are never described as thrown (for obvious reasons of weight) though ‘darts’ which are short offensive missiles are twice noted, in early books, as thrown or shot, and are clearly unchivalrous ((3) 100/8 and (8) 220/31). Spears are only five times described as ‘sharp’ and the only other time ‘sharp’ is used is where it describes a bird’s beak (16) 956/10. The assumption in Le Morte Darthur is that spears are always sharp, whether used in ‘peace’, i.e. ‘friendly’ jousts and tournaments, or in war. The practice, found in Malory’s day and earlier, of using in tournaments blunted spears, or spears with a splayed blunt end (coronel), in friendly combat, is never referred to.14 Very near the beginning of Le Morte Darthur Malory refers to a ‘sherpe spere grete and square’ (1) 28/23, and this may stand for all. Spears are described as ‘square’ several times by Lydgate, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and so is a sword, and so are a tongue, needles and a pike by other fifteenth-century writers. In this sense ‘square’ means literally or metaphorically ground to a cutting angle or point, i.e. particularly sharp. But Lydgate (Reson and Sensualite, 5415) refers to arrows which hurt whether they be ‘square or rounde’, which refers to the sense, in which Malory’s only other use of the word ‘square’ occurs, meaning ‘four square’ – the phrase used to describe the stone from which Arthur drew the sword (1) 12/31. The word ‘sharp’ in relation to a spear might have been felt to be otiose and eventually, like the word ‘square’, was dropped by Malory as he developed his economical, non-descriptive, dramatic style. In Le Morte Darthur what else would a spear be but sharp? A spear is once ‘grim’ (5) 229/12 – not a usage caught from Morte Arthure which is being followed here and which does not use the word ‘grim’ at all. Malory is the first author recorded as using ‘grim’ of a weapon. His other nine uses of ‘grim’ referring to word, countenance, etc., occur in Caxton Books 2 to 6, then once in Book 21 (1234.33). They can be paralleled elsewhere in Middle English. Spears are carried by Tristram’s men. In unusually explicit detail Tristram is on one occasion described as having with him three squires on a journey with Le Beall Isoude, who has three gentlewomen, and no one else with them ‘but varlettes to beare their shyldis and their spearys’ (10) 727/4–5. This must have been the normal practical arrangement but Malory rarely bothers with such detail. Knights on adventures are assumed to carry their own spears, or the squires and varlets of ordinary life are ignored unless specifically called upon. A spear might be up to 16 feet long

14 R. Barber and J. Barker, Tournaments: Jousts Chivalry and Pageants in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge,

UK, 1989), p. 160; Ffoulkes, Armour and Weapons, p. 103.

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and by the fifteenth century came to weigh 30–40lb (13–18kg).15 At an earlier period spears were shorter. In the thirteenth-century non-cyclic Lancelot do Lac, which probably lies behind the Vulgate version, Lancelot is given a short, strong spear when first given his armour.16 But at (10) 738/35 Lancelot has ‘a great spear and a long’. In Chaucer spears are ‘twenty foot high’ (CT line 2607), but this may be romance hyperbole. Combat began with two knights charging each other with spears. The spear was held by the right hand, the heavy end under the armpit, and the shaft over the horse’s neck to the left, to attack the approaching opponent’s left side. (Some medieval manuscript illuminators get it wrong.17) The heavy spear of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries needed support. According to Davies,18 since the spear was so heavy it was normally carried upright by the knight, who rested the butt on a felt (hence ‘fewter’) support which was part of the saddle-bow. He argues that in a charge or joust the spear was lowered, or ‘couched’ only at the last moment. Malory uses the expression to couch spears only twice, once very early in Le Morte Darthur (1) 23/13, and again much later (19) 1057/9, and in each case it means aim the spear at the beginning of the charge. In the first book occur two other interesting references which may confirm Davies’s view. Knights settling in to a last desperate stand amended their harness and righted their shields ‘and toke newe speris and sette hem on theire thyghes, and stood stylle as hit had be a plumpe of woode’ (1) 35/32–4. They are of course on horseback. They are attacked by other knights who ‘rode on before with sperys on their thyghes and spurred their horses myghtyly’ (1) 36/13–14. Knights remaining stationary would presumably have spears upright: those charging did the same until the last moment. Malory as he became more skilled leaves such details to the reader’s imagination and concentrates on the essentials of action without concerning himself with detailed description (if we rightly assume Caxton Book 1 to have been written early in Malory’s writing career). The usual word in Malory for holding the spear in a charge is ‘fewter’ (which is the usual modern spelling, though found only once in Le Morte Darthur (2) 69/9). The fewter is defined in MED as the bracket, fixed to the right side of the breastplate in front of the arm, on which the spear was supported (a further bracket in reverse set a little behind the arm came into use in the fifteenth century to hold the butt-end of the spear down). Quotations of the word ‘fewter’ begin in MED c.1400. In Malory the word is inseparable from ‘spear’. In all spellings and grammatical forms ‘fewter’ appears 23 times, first of all in Caxton Book 4 (160/21, 164/14), when individual adventures of knight-errantry begin to be described. In the Winchester MS version of the story of the Roman war (much reduced in Caxton’s version) the word occurs seven times, of which five have ‘cast in fewter’, caught from the Morte Arthure, and all of which were cut out by Caxton, even more impatient than Malory of such detail. In Caxton Book 6 there are four instances of ‘fewter’, one of them with ‘cast’.

15 R.H.C. Davies, The Medieval Warhorse (London, 1989), pp. 22–3. 16 Lancelot do Lac, ed. E. Kennedy, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1980), p. 148. 17 See J. Alexander and P. Binski, Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England 1200–1400 (London,

1987). 18 Davies, The Medieval Warhorse, pp. 19–20.

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(Two of them are misprinted as ‘featured’ (261/21, 277/14) in Vinaver’s second edition and consequently in Kato’s Concordance, but these are corrected to the MS reading ‘feautred’ by the eagle-eyed Professor Field.) Caxton Books 8, 9, 10 have 16 instances, and then the word is dropped until two occasions in Caxton Book 20 (1193/10, 1214/31), in each case associated with Gawain. It is as if Malory recalls after a long interval the earlier, more primitive glories of adventure, as perhaps he did in his use of GLAIVE q.v. According to Blair it is incorrect to define ‘fewter’ as MED does as the lance-rest fixed to the breast-plate,19 and Malory does indeed refer simply to ‘restis’ for the lance (2) 69/9–10 (incorrect reference in MED to 67/17). Malory normally uses ‘fewter’ as a verb, but it is clearly a noun in to ‘cast (one’s) spear in fewter’ (5) 208/9, (5) 237/6, (5) 215/1, and must mean the rest fixed to the breast-plate on which to hold the spear when charging at the opponent. The main body of the spear is the truncheon, which is referred to some 15 times in the whole book, early and late. The butt of the spear is referred to only four times, once when a knight uses it to bang on and knock down a shield by way of challenge (he finishes up with the truncheon of his opponent’s spear in his body, a not unfamiliar fate suffered even by Lancelot). This is an early use (1) 47/23. The butt is used twice for a similar purpose in the tale of Gareth, and once by Tristram to prod a sleeping knight awake (10) 563/15. These rather undignified practical references all occur well within the first half of Le Morte Darthur. Use of the butt is obviously contemptuous. From the fourteenth century an iron ring was sometimes fixed round the spear to protect the hand and also perhaps to lodge against the shield when that had a circle cut from its top right corner to allow the spear to point over to the left, and also to support the spear. Malory refers to this ring once only as the ‘burre’, right at the end of Le Morte Darthur in a grisly episode. The word is of unknown origin and appears to have escaped MED but is found in OED. It was not very common. A possible origin is as a development of the sense of a ‘knob on a tree’, ultimately from burre ‘burdock’. Some later armorial writers call it a vamplate.20 Most of the fifteenth-century manuscript pictures liberally shown in Barber and Barker portray spears without a burr or vamplate, which may have been somewhat uncommon. A good illustration is found in ‘The Pageant of Richard Beauchamp’, drawn about 1450–60 in BL MS Cotton Julius E IV art.b.fol. 3.21 Both the date and the occasion of the illustration are of some interest because they suggest that Malory’s imagination and portrayal of fighting were conditioned by such tournaments as he could have seen. The burre or vamplate is on Arthur’s spear in a passage unique to Malory, relating the tragic encounter between Arthur and Mordred. Mordred runs to attack Arthur with his sword, but Arthur pierces him ‘with a foyne of his speare, thorowoute the body more than a fadom’. Mordred ‘threste hymselffe with the might that he had upp to the burre of kynge Arthurs speare’ (21) 1237/12–18. To strike an opponent so that one’s spear goes through the body ‘more than a fathom’ (i.e. 6 feet, roughly 1.8 metres) also occurs twice elsewhere, (4) 129/03, 19 C. Blair, European Armour circa 1066 to circa 1700 (London, 1958; repr. 1972), p. 61. 20 Ashdown, Armour and Weapons in the Middle Ages, p. 332. 21 Barber and Barker, Tournaments, p. 106.

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(10) 718/13, so it approaches the status of a Malorian formula, but to get as far as the burr, which was close to the hand holding the spear, would necessarily cause the spear to protrude a long way out of the body it pierced. For once Malory’s imagination fastens on a realistic concrete detail. The fight between Arthur and Mordred is also remarkable for being the only one in Malory’s work in which a knight fights on foot with a spear. It would surely have been very difficult with a 15–foot spear weighing 30–40lb. Such a spear must have been restricted to use in jousting, or perhaps in battle. In the joust knights first fight on horseback with spears and either pierce or unhorse an opponent, or the spear bursts into fragments, but sometimes a spear will last as many as four encounters. This latter is remarked on as unusual, but happens, for example, with Arthur, Lancelot and Tristram. Much the same situation seems to have been true of fifteenth-century tournaments. However it is with a spear that Arthur attacks Mordred and kills him in the stanzaic Morte Arthur. Though there is no reference to the ‘burre’ in the poem the spear goes out at his backbone, while he strikes Arthur with his sword (3390–99). Froissart has an account of knights fighting on foot with spears in 1381. One of the knights was pierced in the thigh with a spear which came out the other side a handsbreadth. This was regarded as a foul blow.22 SWORD. After the spear the sword, a word also deriving from Old English. There are well over 600 references to sword(s) in Le Morte Darthur (never spelt ‘sword’ but usually ‘swerd(e)’). After the broken spears and the unhorsing, knights go to it like rams, boars, etc., lashing, tracing, traversing, but only rarely ‘foyning’, that is, using the point, the first to do so being Gareth (7) 298/19. The word ‘foyn’ in various forms is used five times in his tale, and only 11 times in the rest of Le Morte Darthur. It is scattered sparsely through the lengthy Books 8, 9, 10, 11, then picked up again once in Book 18 and twice in the last book of all, Caxton 21 – the second time being when Arthur uses his spear on Mordred. This is the only time ‘foyn’ is used of a spear and even with the sword is rare. Once again Malory seems to gather up an old word, used much earlier in his book, then dropped for a while, in the ultimate climax. The sword is mainly a cutting instrument. Many are illustrated in Oakeshott.23 The sword is a fundamental, practical, universal, attribute of knighthood, but is better regarded as a sign than a symbol. A man is made a knight by being dubbed with a sword (though Malory’s use of the word dubbed is caught from the Morte Arthure and also has wider applications). When made a knight a man must have a sword. Lancelot owes his allegiance to Guinevere partly because she found his sword which he had lost on the day he was made a knight, else had he been shamed among all knights (18) 1058/27–30. (This incident, not in Malory’s immediate source, goes back to the earliest Lancelot prose romance.24 Malory does not refer to it directly on any other occasion.) The sword and that profoundest of attributes, a man’s honour, are indissolubly linked.25 Thus when a knight is defeated he yields up 22 Froissart, The Chronicle of Froissart, trans. Berners, ed. W.P. Ker (1901–3), III, 1834, quoted by

E. Rickert, in Chaucer’s World, ed. C.C. Olson and M.M. Crow (New York, 1948), p. 216. 23 Oakeshott, The Sword in the Age of Chivalry. 24 Le roman de Tristran en prose, ed. R.L. Curtis, I, repr. plus vol. II and vol. III (1962; Cambridge, UK,

1985). 25 On honour in Malory see my ‘The Compulsions of Honour’, in From Arabye to Engelond, ed. A.E.

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his sword to his conqueror, as Hew does to Uwayne. The conqueror may on occasion recognize an obligation to courtesy. Sir Hew in defeat ‘kneled adowne and yelded hym to sir Uwayne, and he of his jantylnesse resceyved his swerde and toke hym by the honde’ (4) 178/25–7. If the sword is not yielded up voluntarily the defeated knight may be killed, and prefer to be so, having lost honour in defeat. As a sword is virtually synonymous with a knight’s honour so Arthur’s right to inherit his kingdom is recognized by his ability to withdraw the sword from the stone. In general the ability to draw a sword from a scabbard is the key to a knight’s prowess, just as the ability to draw certain magic swords from their sheaths signify knights of destiny, like Balin. His refusal to give up the sword brings on his own doom – those who live by the sword may perish by it. There are a number of miraculous swords. First is Arthur’s own Excalibur, drawn from the stone, for which a scabbard is only implicitly found, but must be there, for the first time the sword is so named its brightness suddenly dazzled the enemy, and it must therefore have been previously sheathed (1) 19/20ff. In Malory this first Excalibur is forgotten in favour of the second. Arthur receives another magic sword, with scabbard, held by an arm clad in white samite protruding from a lake (10) 53/5. It is this scabbard which Merlin explains is more valuable than the sword because it confers invulnerability. Arthur’s mysteriously powerful kingship is again suggested by this episode, while the final return of Excalibur to the lake equally powerfully and mysteriously symbolises his ending (21) 1240/1–11. In this last episode we learn how richly bejewelled is the pommel and haft of Excalibur, though the story at this point neglects its magic virtue in battle, and the scabbard of invulnerability is lost. Another wondrous sword is that of Balin. As far as the story of Balin himself continues, a deep sense of destiny and almost unavoidable misfortune is created, some of it by the part the sword plays.26 After Balin’s death the sword is placed in a stone floating above the water eventually to be found, we are not told how, by Galahad (2) 91/34–6, cf. (13) 856/1–862/34. This links an early part of Le Morte Darthur with the later, but the significance of swords in the story of the Grail is less integral to their nature and more decorative and didactic. Such is the case with the account of the sword of David, elaborated by Solomon and finally given for reasons of religious symbolism a girdle of lowly hemp (17) 992/15–33. There is nothing improbable in such girdles having been in use also for practical economic reasons. Rope belts would have perished with virtually all other belts, so there is no archaeological evidence. To continue with practical matters, the sword is the main fighting weapon and only occasionally does a sword break, like the false Excalibur (4) 143/29, or that of Lancelot’s opponent (12) 818/27, whereas spears break very frequently. Swords in Malory can cut through mail, shield, helm, spear; even, once, a horse (1) 33/24–5. Mail could be penetrated and spears cut; whether plate armour could be thoroughly

Christa Canitz and Gernot R. Wieland (Ottawa, 1999), pp. 75–92, and ‘The Paradoxes of Honour in Malory’, in New Directions in Arthurian Studies, ed. Alan Lupack (Cambridge, UK, 2002), pp. 33–48. 26 For a contrary view, emphasizing the dominance of chance, see Jill Mann, ‘Knightly Combat in Le Morte Darthur’, in The New Pelican Guide to English Literature I, ed. Boris Ford, Medieval Literature. Part One. Chaucer and the Alliterative Tradition (Harmondsworth, 1982), pp. 331–9.

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sliced is very uncertain, though it could be badly dented. From the thirteenth century onwards swords became progressively more tapered than earlier swords and with more of a point. In the sixteenth century skilled swordplay was developed27 and perhaps the tracing and traversing etc. of Malory’s knights may indicate in a general way some elementary knowledge of such skill. The hilt is remarkable only in the Grail’s story’s wondrous sword. This has a marvellously made hilt which is written on at some length proclaiming itself Faith and Belief (17) 992/24, 994/4. Otherwise hilts are uncommented on and mentioned only in a practical way to a total of seven times, plus once of a dagger. The hilt is once called ‘hondils’ (1) 25/53, perhaps because of the difficulty of taking it from the hand in the lake, or attracted by the similarity of sound between ‘hond’ and ‘hondils’. The handle or grip is normally called the pommel, mentioned 14 times, though occasionally the pommel may be the knob at the end of the handle (21) 1239/6. The pommel as handle has edifying things written upon it in the case of the wondrous sword of the Grail story, where it is also of precious stone, and symbolism is all (2) 91/26, (17) 985/23. More practically, where the blade joins the pommel at the hilt is called the cross (4) 143/30, (11) 978/4. The pommel itself may be used as a weapon, as when Arthur uses the pommel of the false Excalibur to give Accolon a mighty buffet when the blade fails him (4) 143/29–144/18. This seems to be Malory’s invention, possibly a rare example of extra-literary knowledge or experience. A very full account, liberally illustrated, of medieval swords is in Oakeshot.28 WEAPON. Malory refers to a ‘grymme wepin’ (2) 84/27, the word ‘wepin’ translating the French ‘gran perche de fust’. Malory may not have fully understood the French phrase, and so used the general word, ‘weapon’. The Old French ‘perche’ has a number of meanings centring on that of a ‘rod’, while ‘fust’, also with a range of meanings, basically means a sturdy pillar usually of wood, long enough to stretch from floor to ceiling. ‘Grant perche de fust’ therefore means a ‘great wooden club’. It may be that Malory understood this, but a club whether of wood or iron is not for him a knightly weapon, though it would indeed be ‘grim’, so he uses the more general term.

27 Ffoulkes, Armour and Weapons, p. 101. 28 R. Ewart Oakeshott, Records of the Medieval Sword (Rochester, NY, and Woodbridge, UK, 1991).

25 ‘now I take uppon me the adventures to seke of holy thynges’: Lancelot and the Crisis of Arthurian Knighthood RALUCA L. RADULESCU

This chapter explores the changes Malory registers in his characterization of Lancelot in his version of the Grail story, as compared to his French source, La Queste del Saint Graal. Lancelot’s worldly ‘trappings’ become a source of anxiety and questioning, while his personal spiritual understanding of religion is shaped through tests. The character of Lancelot in Le Morte Darthur is made up of different pieces of a puzzle, corresponding to the various sources Thomas Malory worked from. Malory’s Lancelot becomes the greatest knight at King Arthur’s court – a significant change in the English tradition of Arthurian romance, in which Gawain is prominent. It is also in the Morte that Lancelot’s failure in the Grail quest is counterbalanced by his success in the episode of ‘The Healing of Sir Urry’, a development clearly designed to redeem Malory’s favourite knight from the stain of adulterous sin and disloyalty to his king, and to restore his position as best knight. The purpose of this chapter is to investigate Malory’s shift of focus from the doctrinal aspect of religion present in his French source for the Holy Grail quest to a pragmatic understanding of religious experience, exemplified through Lancelot’s performances in the quest and in the Urry episode. The ‘Tale of the Sankgreal’ (Tale VI) comes after the tales of Lancelot, Tristram and Gareth, and before the destruction of the Arthurian court. The ‘Sankgreal’ is at once a story in its own right and a cornerstone for the understanding of the Arthurian cycle as a whole. It marks an irreversible change in the history of the fellowship, since it is the first religious adventure involving most of the knights, also a test which most of them fail. Starting with the ‘Sankgreal’ the reader is made more aware of Lancelot’s role in the rise and fall of the Arthurian court; his relationship with Guenevere is condemned openly and the breakdown of the fellowship is anticipated. To this extent the ‘Sankgreal’ gives the reader a perspective on the whole history of the Round Table fellowship. ‘The Healing of Sir Urry’ is a short episode at the end of the larger ‘Tale of Lancelot and Guenevere’ (Tale VII). By the time the ‘Sankgreal’ adventure is over, Lancelot has achieved something of the mystery of the Holy Grail, partly because he has repented his love for Guenevere. Yet he has failed, like many of the other knights, because of his sinful nature. When he falls again, by returning to his love

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(while the relationship becomes public and causes trouble), ‘The Healing’ takes place, a moment in which Lancelot is re-established, once again, as the best Arthurian knight. The narrative pattern of the ‘Sankgreal’ is based on comparisons between the knights’ adventures and their personal revelations, contrasted to Galahad’s, the epitome of the perfect Christian knight, and Lancelot’s, the best sinful knight. The Grail knights, those who succeed, are presented alongside those who fail; this combination of failure and success gives a vivid and balanced account of how the knights fare in their journey of self-discovery without being aware of its implications. Compared to the ‘Sankgreal’, ‘The Healing’ (with no direct source) appears as a simplified religious test – also as Malory’s attempt at placing emphasis on the collective (Arthur and all his knights perform the required action) as well as on Lancelot’s success (in contrast with the sinful Lancelot of the quest). In my opinion there is a tripartite structure in both the ‘Sankgreal’ and ‘The Healing’: collective religious beginning, individual knights’ attempts, Lancelot vindicated. From this visual perspective the structure in the ‘Healing’ resembles a ‘triptych’: Arthur and Lancelot in the side panels, and the group picture of the knights in the middle. Having analyzed religious writings contemporary with Malory’s Morte and their impact on popular mentality, Felicity Riddy concludes that Malory’s cutting down on explanations of mystical experience and significance could be accounted for as ‘his reaction against [the] too explicit . . . literary mode’ of his French source.1 The explicitness of the French La Queste del Saint Graal comes from its didactic nature.2 Malory’s rejection of this didacticism results in his omission of ‘all unnecessary detail, be it religious or secular’.3 Beverly Kennedy argues that Malory’s treatment of the Grail story reflects fifteenth-century writers’ attempts to reconcile religion with their own experience of life.4 While in ‘The Healing of Sir Urry’ episode the knights are presented together in their attempts and failures, in the ‘Sankgreal’ the adventures are individual and the knights are aware of personal responsibility for sin. In ‘The Healing’ Malory also shows the resistance of the community to yet another instance when the knights are asked to take on a risky adventure. From the point of view of individual fame, the ‘Sankgreal’ has shown, by this stage, that most knights failed in their personal quests, covered themselves with shame for their sins and some of them even lost their lives in their Grail adventures. Malory’s ‘Healing’, on the other hand, emphasizes the return to community, to social (understood as chivalric) life and its demands. This interpretation would have appealed to Malory’s fifteenth-century

My research into Thomas Malory’s work has been inspired by the work of Peter Field. This essay is a way of thanking him for his helpful advice and patience with my errors. The ideas presented here are part of my M.Phil. thesis, ‘Religious Ideas in their Chivalric Context in Le Morte Darthur’, supervised by Dr John Anderson at the University of Manchester (1996–7). 1 Felicity Riddy, Sir Thomas Malory (Leiden, 1987), pp. 113–14. 2 La Queste del Saint Graal, ed. Albert Pauphilet (Paris, 1967). All references are to this edition, cited by page and line number. 3 See Charles Moorman, ‘ “The Tale of the Sankgreall”: Human Frailty’, in Malory’s Originality: A Critical Study of Le Morte Darthur, ed. Robert M. Lumiansky (Baltimore, 1964), pp. 184–204 (p. 189n). 4 See Beverly Kennedy, Knighthood in the Morte Darthur, 2nd edn (Cambridge, UK, 1992), pp. 241–2.

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readers, for whom the ‘Healing’ would have appeared as a successful kind of Grail quest. Achievement in both tales is equated with reputation in typical Malorian fashion. Pride, alongside chivalric ‘trappings’, seen as markers of the Arthurian knight but also, in the context of the Quest, pointers to sin, is punished in this religious testing of the Arthurian court. Perceval and Lancelot are the main characters who identify their sins and achieve the mystery of the Holy Grail partially, while the other knights miserably fail. The knights who have engaged on this Quest seem to be concerned with increasing their fame by winning against unknown opponents rather than striving to find the Holy Grail. In the initial stages of the Grail Quest, Lancelot deplores his past sins, mainly pride and adultery. When he is rebuked by a divine voice for his sins, he immediately equates the path to salvation with losing his earthly worship: ‘And so departed sore wepynge and cursed the tyme that he was bore, for than he demed never to have worship more. For tho wordis wente to hys herte, tylle that he knew wherefore he was called so’ (895.30–3; my italics).5 He also refers to his ‘old sin’ in relation to gaining chivalric worship: Than sir Launcelot wente to the crosse and founde hys helme, hys swerde, and hys horse away. And than he called hymselff a verry wrecch and moste unhappy of all knyghtes, and there he seyde, ‘My synne and my wyckednes hath brought me unto grete dishonoure! For whan I sought wordly adventures for wordely desyres I ever encheved them and had the bettir in every place, and never was I discomfite in no quarell, were hit ryght were hit wronge. And now I take uppon me the adventures to seke of holy thynges, now I se and undirstonde that myne olde synne hyndryth me and shamyth me, that I had no power to stirre nother speke whan the holy bloode appered before me.’(895.34–896.9; my italics)

In the equivalent passage in the French Queste (61.28–62.7), Lancelot’s realization of worldly glory is played down, attention being shifted towards God’s role in the conversion of the sinner. Mark Lambert singles out ‘shame’ and ‘honour’ in Malory, as opposed to the religious emphasis of the French source; according to Lambert, ‘God’s gifts to Lancelot now call for gratitude rather than investment, and indeed it is difficult to think of worship, now the most prominent of God’s gifts, as a talent to be used.’6 However, at this point, Lancelot’s reference to worldly fame is reminiscent of the content of the Round Table oath, which cautions knights against taking on battles ‘in a wrongefull quarell for no love ne for no worldis goodis’ (120.23–4). The reader is made aware of Lancelot’s sin as the result of disrespect for one of the rules of the oath, and his resolution should be to undertake the adventure of the Holy Grail in the spirit of repentance. Neither his adultery nor his love for Guenevere are mentioned. In the context of the Morte this point of conflict between chivalric worship/reputation and religious behaviour signals a crisis, which Malory acknowledges by shifting attention from the failure of earthly Arthurian chivalry (represented by Lancelot) in the Quest, to the success of his favourite knight in the

5 6

The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. E. Vinaver, rev. P.J.C. Field (Oxford, 1990). All references are to this edition, cited by page and line number. Mark Lambert, Style and Vision in Le Morte Darthur (New Haven, CT, and London, 1975), pp. 184–5.

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‘Healing’ – a sign of recognition of the importance of chivalric reputation and social values above the demands of religious doctrine. In the Morte Lancelot initiates his repentance, which marks a contrast with the French Queste. Hermits are important in both narratives, functioning as guides along the path to repentance. In both accounts Lancelot loses his worldly trappings, insignia of his fame and reputation (his horse and arms) and repents his forgetfulness of God’s ways (Works, 896.10–16; Queste, 62.8–19); Malory’s Lancelot is punished for his seeking of ‘worldly adventures for worldly desyres’. In addition, Lancelot’s gifts, although praised by a hermit as signs of God’s grace, hardly remind the reader of religious duty; in fact these gifts are a recognition of the chivalric attributes of the best knight of the fellowship: ‘Sir,’seyde the ermyte, ye ought to thanke God more than ony knyght lyvynge, for He hath caused you to have more worldly worship than ony knyght that ys now lyvynge. And for youre presumpcion to take uppon you in dedely synne for to be in Hys presence, where Hys fleyssh and Hys blood was, which caused you ye myght nat se hyt with youre worldely yen, for He woll nat appere where such synners bene but if hit be unto their grete hurte other unto their shame. And there is no knyght now lyvynge that ought to yelde God so grete thanke os ye, for He hath yevyn you beauté, bownté, semelynes, and grete strengthe over all other knyghtes. And therefore ye ar the more beholdyn unto God than ony other man to love Hym and drede Hym, for youre strengthe and your manhode woll litill avayle you and God be agaynste you.’ (896.29–897.7; my italics)7

The hermit’s guidance in the Quest is rendered ancillary in Malory; God’s ‘chivalric’ gifts to Lancelot are given precedence, to the detriment of religious penance.8 While the Queste is moralizing and didactic, leaving little freedom of interpretation, Malory’s paratactic style has the effect of ambiguity and suspense, explanations and internal conflicts being rarely allowed in the narrative. Malory displays precision of detail, in different places than his source, which points to Lancelot’s awareness of sin. The effect of French churchmen’s sermons is to make ‘our judgement of Lancelot [to be] more distanced and less sympathetic’,9 whereas Malory’s Lancelot is closer to the reader and excusable for his human behaviour and frailty. The French Lancelot is humiliated, and has long monologues; in the Morte Lancelot shows restraint, in typical Malorian fashion.10 At one point Lancelot speaks of his sin of adultery, yet even then he associates it with the Round Table rule: ‘Sir,’ seyde the good man, ‘hyde none olde synne frome me.’ ‘Truly,’ seyde sir Launcelot, ‘that were me full lothe to discover, for thys fourtene yere I have never discoverde one thynge that I have used, and that may I now wyghte my shame and my disadventure.’ And than he tolde there the good man all hys lyff, and how he had loved a quene unmesurabely and oute of mesure longe. 7 8 9

In the Queste the hermit praises him less, and starts telling the parable of the five talents (63.7–23/87). Larry D. Benson, Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1976), p. 217. Mary Hynes-Berry, ‘Malory’s Translation of Meaning: The Tale of the Sankgreal’, Studies in Philology 74 (1977): 243–57 (247). 10 In a famous speech in Tale I King Arthur places emphasis on deeds versus words: ‘he seyth but lytil but [he] doth much more’ (131.28–9), words which may be taken to represent the Malorian knights’ philosophy of life.

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‘And all my grete dedis of armys that I have done for the moste party was for the quenys sake, and for hir sake wolde I do batayle were hit ryght other wronge. And never dud I batayle all only [for] Goddis sake, but for to wynne worship and to cause me the bettir to be beloved, and litill or nought I thanked never God of hit.’ (897.10–22; my italics)

The hermit advises him to stop sinning and start a new life in God’s service. A controversial difference between the Queste and the ‘Sankgreal’ is that in the former the hermit tells Lancelot never to keep the company of the queen, whereas in the latter he seems to take into account the rigours of chivalric life, recommending that Lancelot should ‘no more com in that quenys felyship as much as [he] may forbere’. Dhira Mahoney is right to identify the error of the French Lancelot in ‘thinking the source of his valour was the Queen’, while Malory’s Lancelot is wrong in ‘believing that the source of his valour is himself’; Mahoney concludes that ‘both Lancelots have to learn that the true source is God’ and that Lancelot’s wars were wrong ‘because of their motivation by personal pride rather than the desire to serve God’.11 This interpretation is in agreement with the prescription of both the Round Table oath and the famous May passage in which Malory recommends that ‘firste reserve the honoure to God’.12 Lancelot has to return to the source of all his honour, which is the primary rule of the chivalric order, obedience to God. Benson points out that Malory’s hermit is less stern than his French original when he ‘administers the oath’. Lancelot of the ‘Sankgreal’ (as opposed to the French one) is less guilty for his return to Guenevere, for he ‘does avoid the queen’s company as much as he can’ but ‘his problem is that he cannot forbear it, for love, as Malory explains in “Lancelot and Guenevere”, is too powerful to suffer restraint’.13 One would need to consider, however, that Lancelot’s love is less sternly condemned and the whole emphasis in the ‘Sankgreal’ is shifted from the sin of lust to the sin of excessive pride in his prowess. In this context, as mentioned at the beginning of this article, religion is once again shown to be a part of the chivalric oath, for Lancelot’s promise contains his recognition of the moral side of his chivalric life which he has neglected (having undertaken ‘wrongful battles’ for ‘worldly desires’). The hermit raises the issue of the validity of the promise by pointing out that Lancelot should make sure that his ‘harte and mowth accorde’, which will be rewarded by even more worship in this world: ‘I shall ensure you ye shall have the more worship than ever ye had’ (897.29–31).14 Lambert notes how Malory changes the focus from the Queste, which is ‘the power to accomplish things’, to the

11 Dhira B. Mahoney, ‘The Truest and Holiest Tale: Malory’s Transformation of La Queste del Saint

Graal’, in Studies in Malory, ed. James W. Spisak (Kalamazoo, 1985), pp. 109–28 (p. 120). 12 The original passage has sparked a lot of critical debate, but the general opinion seems to be that Malory

emphasizes chivalric prowess above all other aspects of the Arthurian story. The passage reads: ‘lat every man of worship florysh hys herte in thys worlde: firste unto God, and nexte unto the joy of them that he promysed hys feythe unto; for there was never worshypfull man nor worshypfull woman but they loved one bettir than another; and worship in armys may never be foyled. But firste reserve the honoure to God, and secundely thy quarell muste com of thy lady’ (1155.24–30; my italics). The italicized part appears as Malory’s view of chivalric fellowship and the importance of reputation. 13 Benson, Malory’s Morte, p. 220. 14 The equivalent passage in the Queste contains a promise, but one of God’s help, rather than specific worldly fame (71.5–9).

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‘Sankgreal’, where ‘the reward for accomplishment [is] worship’.15 Appropriately, Lancelot resolves to start a new life in God’s service, yet one which places at its centre chivalric duty (albeit in a religious perspective): ‘ “Sertes,” seyde sir Launcelot, “all that ye have seyde ys trew, and frome hensforwarde I caste me, by the grace of God, never to be so wycked as I have bene but as to sew knyghthode and to do fetys of armys” ’ (898.36–899.3; my italics).16 Lancelot’s understanding of the religious demand is equivalent to a renewal of his adherence to the Round Table oath. Proof for this interpretation is contained in the episode where he is denied an adventure, and is told by a divine voice that the reason is his previous behaviour as a warrior who ‘used wronge warris with vayneglory for the pleasure of the worlde’, and his forgetfulness of God’s ways (928.35–929.2). Nevertheless in the ‘Sankgreal’ chivalry and religion do not clash, as they do in the Queste, rather religion is a component of chivalry; a knight who errs in religious terms breaks his chivalric oath, but still has worth as a knight. A knight should indeed always remember to give thanks to God for the gifts he has been given and his success in feats of arms: Lancelot is told precisely these words when he meets another hermit. The latter explains to him his dream vision of kings and knights, whose company Lancelot was prophetically forbidden; also that he should thank God for his talents, ‘for of a synner erthely thou [Lancelot] hast no pere as in knyghthode nother never shall have’ (930.14–16). Thus Lancelot’s testing, which follows the renewed advice, reminds the reader of the purpose of chivalric adventure, which is the increase of reputation. When Lancelot thinks ‘for to helpe the wayker party in incresyng of hys shevalry’ (931.24–5), an action which in other contexts is praised by King Arthur,17 he is taken prisoner and shamed, because he is seeking personal gain and thinks of his reputation. He associates shame with sin: ‘now I am shamed, and I am sure that I am more synfuller than ever I was’ (932.17–18), but also needs the explanation given by a recluse in order to understand that his sin is ‘bobbaunce and pryde of the worlde’ (933.32). Indeed Lancelot does not display interest in cultivating patience and humility, which are, according to the hermits, ‘the cornerstones of chivalry’,18 but rather continues to believe that he can accommodate the exigencies of religious testing to the chivalric demands for prowess and reputation. Lancelot’s inexperience in religious ways also makes him feel ‘weary’ of the ship in a later episode when, before he arrives at the Castle of Corbenic, he spends some time with his son Galahad. Malory is not so much interested in the saint-like knight’s model, even if he describes the adventures at length. Galahad is hardly a flesh-and-blood character; he has an even less earthly body in the Morte than in the Queste. Perceval is exceptional because he decides not to pursue the knightly vocation after the ‘Sankgreal’, but to devote his life to prayer, in a monastery, where he dies. Bors is the only one who is granted the Grail revelation and returns to the court, yet Malory subordinates his position to that of Lancelot, who is given the privilege of recording the adventures of the Grail. Thus Malory’s preference for Lancelot 15 16 17 18

Lambert, Style and Vision, p. 187. In the Queste, the words are more specifically religious (see 70.29–71.3). See Arthur’s praise of Gareth in a similar situation in Tale VII (1114.16–28). Hynes-Berry, ‘Malory’s Translation’, 249.

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appears as a statement about religion within the chivalric order, with emphasis on religion as a component of chivalry rather than governing it.19 Malory shifts interest from Lancelot’s adultery to his instability in keeping to the religious content of the chivalric order. Thus his fault is social rather than moral or spiritual; religion is part of the chivalric rule and a break with it entails a break of the chivalric oath. Within the Arthurian world Malory recreates, the rule of the chivalric order should come before personal interests. Lancelot’s fundamental fault and sin is not his disloyalty to his lord through his committing adultery with Guenevere, but his wrong way of undertaking battles for the sake of love, and his never thanking God for his success. Sandra Ihle explains this change in Malory through the different perspective which rules Morte Darthur, which focuses on morality within chivalry.20 Peter Field remarks that Malory’s ‘fundamental concern is to transmit his enthusiasm for knightliness’ and ‘life in the Morte Darthur is a moral matter, judged according to a chivalric code’.21 Malory focuses on the Round Table as the moral centre of the knights’ lives, and the moral of the fellowship includes the Christian moral.22 Thus the success Lancelot gains in Malory’s ‘Sankgreal’ is a social achievement, a rehabilitation of the concept of worldly chivalry, and a celebration of the utmost glory sinful knights may gain, as a vindication of the rules of the Round Table, which should ensure the knights’ excellence in both worldly and religious terms. Galahad, Perceval, and Bors, who behold the Grail openly, that is, perfectly, do not speak about their experiences; the first two, because they never return to the court, the last because he does not communicate the meaning of the Grail or the experience in itself, rather he tells of the adventures ‘such as befelled hym and hys three felowes’. Yet Bors’s account includes Lancelot among the Grail knights. Martin Shichtman suggests that the elect Grail knights (excluding Lancelot) ‘cannot communicate their experience of the Grail’ and they only ‘come away from it filled with insight and appreciation’, whereas Lancelot is ‘reduced to silence after his encounter with the Grail because its meaning(s) is incomprehensible to him’.23 This silence is however only temporary, since Lancelot remains the privileged narrator of the events of the Grail Quest. In the Queste Lancelot wakes up from a twenty-four day trance, following his partial vision of the Grail, and refers to the spiritual revelation, which he perceives as partial (258.6–13/264). On the other hand, Malory’s Lancelot is happy with the revelations he has been given: ‘ “Now I thanke God,” seyde sir Launcelot, “for Hys

19 The passage reads: ‘So whan sir Bors had tolde hym [the king] of the hyghe adventures of the

20 21 22 23

Sankgreall such as had befalle hym and hys three felowes, which were sir Launcelot, Percivale and sir Galahad and hymselff, than sir Launcelot tolde the adventures of the Sangreall that he had sene. And all thys was made in grete bookes and put up in almeryes at Salysbury’ (1036.16–22; my italics). Sandra Ness Ihle, Malory’s Grail Quest: Invention and Adaptation in Medieval Prose Romance (Madison, 1983), p. 145. P.J.C. Field, Romance and Chronicle (Bloomington, 1971), p. 157. See also Hynes-Berry, ‘Malory’s Translation’, 246. Martin B. Shichtman, ‘Politicizing the Ineffable: The Queste del Saint Graal and Malory’s “Tale of the Sankgreal” ’, in Culture and the King: The Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend, ed. Martin B. Shichtman, James P. Carley and Mildred Leake Day (Albany, 1994), pp. 163–79 (p. 172).

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grete mercy of that I have sene, for hit suffisith me. For, as I suppose, no man in thys worlde have lyved bettir than I have done to enchyeve that I have done” ’ (1018.3–6; my italics). Malory emphasizes Lancelot’s new understanding of the way he should live his life, and implies that Lancelot thinks that a good life and his repentance are the reason for his getting as far as he has. In the ‘Sankgreal’, as in the Queste, Lancelot does not behold the Grail in its essence; his impatience and inexperience in religious life make him miss the moment of full revelation. However, the revelations he has experienced are, in the ‘Sankgreal’, a reward for his undertaking penance in humility. The reward is the beginning of the favourable treatment that Lancelot, the sinful knight, receives in Malory’s Morte, and prepares the way for his full achievement in ‘The Healing’. The ‘Sankgreal’ and the Queste differ in emphasis on Lancelot’s relative success; moreover in the former he is called to record the adventures. When he returns to the court, in spite of the deaths of so many of the knights who had engaged on the Grail Quest (‘but many of the knyghtes of the Rounde Table were slayne and destroyed, more than halff’), ‘all the courte were passyng glad of sir Launcelot, and the kynge asked hym many tydyngis of hys sonne sir Galahad’ (1020.20–1 and 23–5). At this point Malory looks favourably at Lancelot’s achievement and avoids the negative shading of the Grail Quest. Lancelot is invested with the authority of the story, as he tells the court ‘of hys adventures that befelle hym syne he departed. And also he tolde hym [the king] of the adventures of sir Galahad, sir Percivale, and sir Bors’ (1020.26–8). He also knows more than anyone about the end of the adventure of the ‘Sankgreal’: ‘ “Now God wolde,” seyde the kynge, “that they were all three here!” “That shall never be,” seyde sir Launcelot, “for two of hem shall ye never se. But one of them shall com home agayne” ’ (1020.31–4). Lancelot’s return to Camelot marks the end of the story, were it not for the elect knights’ adventures still waiting to be told. It is a preliminary reinforcement of his position in the fellowship before the real end of the Grail Quest. Malory stresses the idea that the only Grail knight who comes back to the court after the Grail Quest, Bors, is a good friend of Lancelot, who resumes a subordinate bond of friendship with him. Lancelot may share in the glory of this knight as well, in the same way that he shares in his son’s achievement in the Quest. Lancelot is less significant than Galahad in the ‘Sankgreal’, but he is the only one alive and successful in ‘The Healing’. He is the key character who gives one of the elements of continuity to Malory’s Morte; at the same time his status as the ‘best sinful knight’ is not changed after the ‘Sankgreal’, only his Christian attitude has been put to the test. He can resume his position after the Grail Quest and Bors’s position as friend ensures that religion comes after knightly deeds. The ‘Sankgreal’ ends on a joyful note: despite the failure of so many knights in the Grail Quest, King Arthur’s court is privileged through the return of Lancelot and the companionship between him and the successful Bors. Lancelot’s partial success and privileged position are supported through the emphasis on the chivalric understanding of religion – a Malorian interpretation which is given full scope in the episode of ‘The Healing’. *

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The story of ‘The Healing of Sir Urry’ has been generally considered in critical opinion as original with Malory.24 It is the list of knights that makes the average reader as well as critic think that the episode draws on a source; familiar names and stories can be recognized among unknown incidents that are described with apparent precision. Malory’s famous ‘French book’ is mentioned several times, yet the motifs present in the story are common in other narratives and have been identified.25 Malory’s invention of a religious episode appears to conform to his desire to show religion as a collective, social experience of the Round Table knights. It also functions, as Terence McCarthy points out, as ‘a total vindication of Lancelot’, whose ‘inner virtue had become somewhat tainted by now – and Lancelot seems none too sure – but Malory obviously does not agree’.26 In fact Lancelot’s guilt has been formally stated in the ‘Sankgreal’ (in the hermits’ speeches), but the details of his repentance only mention the pricking shirt he puts on and the promise he would never fight but for good knightly reasons. There is still room for doubt in the reader’s mind whether he is the best knight of the fellowship, in God’s eyes as well as in people’s. One has the impression that Lancelot has failed in the ‘Sankgreal’; it is perplexing to find him here as a likely healer. On the other hand Malory deliberately creates the image of a partially successful Lancelot in the ‘Sankgreal’, showing the worldly achievement of the best knight. The doubt about Lancelot’s status arises out of this dilemma: after a religious story like the ‘Sankgreal’, is the reader expected to think in religious terms and condemn Lancelot, or does one take Malory’s side and conclude that it is perfectly possible for Lancelot to be considered the best knight of the world? Jill Mann observes how in the ‘Sankgreal’ Lancelot’s sinfulness is ‘not eliminated from the scene’ and notes that the ‘greater simplicity of the conversation in Malory’s version leaves this sinfulness in starker contrast to the emphasis on Lancelot’s peerless nobility’.27 Benson reveals Malory’s changes to his source in the ‘Sankgreal’, which ‘considerably soften the effect of Lancelot’s failure’.28 By omission of any clear statement on Lancelot’s true inner repentance Malory casts a veil of mystery over the development of the story and prolongs the suspense until the episode of ‘The Healing’. The test may be seen, also, as a ‘possible conflict between the movement toward distinction and the movement toward fellowship in the Round Table society’, which comes out as a presentation of ‘distinction/fellowship by way of presentation of

24 For a review of criticism see Stephen C. B. Atkinson, ‘Malory’s “Healing of Sir Urry”: Lancelot, the

Earthly Fellowship and the World of the Grail’, Studies in Philology 79 (1981): 341–52 (341). 25 Robert Kelly discusses the change of focus from compassion to humility in Lancelot when he compares

‘The Healing’ with Lancelot’s previous successful healing in ‘The Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot’. See Robert L. Kelly, ‘Wounds, Healing, and Knighthood in Malory’s Tale of Lancelot and Guenevere’, in Studies in Malory, ed. James W. Spisak (Kalamazoo, 1985), pp. 173–97. Field mentions the reference to this particular tale and draws attention to the absence of the name Urry from any other Arthurian story (Field, Commentary, Works, I. 263, reference to line 2481). Field also shows the main difference between the episodes, the one in Malory and its possible source in the Prose Lancelot, which is the mother of the wounded knight, who appears in Malory and nowhere else (Field, p. 263, reference to line 2505). 26 Terence McCarthy, An Introduction to Malory (Cambridge,UK, 1992), p. 45. 27 Jill Mann, The Narrative of Distance: The Distance of Narrative in Malory’s Morte Darthur (London, 1991), p. 15. The passage Mann is referring to is from the ‘Sankgreal’, 896–7. 28 Benson, Malory’s Morte, p. 218.

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pride/humility’.29

Lambert contrasts the pride apparent in the casting of the spell (the sorceress ‘discoverde hit in her pryde how she had worought by enchauntemente’) with the knights’ humility which reveals ‘the antithesis of the enchantress’s individual pride’ to be not individual humility alone, but ‘individual humility and pride in the group’.30 Indeed humility is the element that brings the knights together and gives them their ‘group pride’. In taking this attitude (and their lead from Arthur) they accept the levelling it implies. What has been done through individual pride (the evil spell) can be undone through collective as well as individual humility. There is tension here; in Lambert’s words, a conflict between ‘the communal theme’ (healing with humility) and the ‘evaluative motif’ (testing the knights).31 The attempt both keeps the knights together and pulls them apart; it unites them in the act (and failure), but is meant to reveal who is unique. Kennedy has reduced Arthur’s attitude at the beginning of the ‘Sankgreal’ to a rationalistic and pragmatic response which ‘makes it impossible for him [Arthur] to see that God’s grace might be essential to [his] worldly success’.32 This statement is debatable as at this stage Malory’s Arthur seems to be more concerned with the fate of the fellowship than with increasing personal fame. However, this idea, applied to Arthur’s general vision of the importance of the ‘Sankgreal’ for the Round Table fellowship, gives a view of his chief interest, which is worldly glory for his knights rather than spiritual salvation. Arthur’s attitude in ‘The Healing’ reveals his awareness of the necessity to reinforce religion as part of the chivalric code. Thus ‘The Healing’ marks a progress in the religious understanding of the chivalric code, not merely another test for Lancelot’s virtue. In the ‘Sankgreal’ Lancelot shows pride even in his repentance, for, after the hermit explains to him the meaning of his incapacity to behold the Grail openly, he says he will try to be a better man, but at the same time he never forgets his worship and fame (898.36–899.3). It appears that Lancelot’s way of becoming a better man is to become a better knight. But in ‘The Healing’ perhaps he tries a different way – by becoming less of a knight, by refusing to try to surpass the others and to stand out. As McCarthy states, ‘it is by affirming his allegiance, by following the example of all the others, that he is able to succeed’.33 ‘The Healing’ is the story of a better Lancelot, one who finds favour with God, can perform the miracle and preserve his fame. The key to Lancelot’s success at this stage is his humility; it is an attitude never encountered in this character up to this moment, especially not in the ‘Sankgreal’, where one would have expected a true penitent in the person of the adulterous knight. In the episode with the wounded knight in the ‘Sankgreal’, the 29 Lambert, Style and Vision, p. 59. 30 Lambert, Style and Vision, p. 60. 31 Lambert, Style and Vision, p. 61. Lambert draws the conclusion that ‘this humility is a very Malorian

one, a sense of belonging to the fellowship of the Round Table and ultimately to the order of knightliness itself. One acts for and takes pride in the order.’ I do agree with this statement to a certain extent, that humility is the key to keeping the knights together. However theirs is a newly found attitude. There is no evidence in this episode or elsewhere that it defines Malory’s view of knighthood. Here it is original and relevant as it shows a religious alternative for the salvation of the Round Table. Malory does not seem to be convinced that such an attitude can work more than once; he introduces a comment on Aggravain’s malicious intention to show that the harmony at Camelot is doomed. 32 Kennedy, Knighthood, p. 330. 33 McCarthy, An Introduction, p. 94.

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reader sees a miserable Lancelot who thinks of his lost worship; in ‘The Healing’ he experiences an illumination, for he is shown mercy from God when he least expects it. He is given a token of grace and should understand that he must forsake sin forever. He feels deeply moved, is overcome with emotion, but Malory pays no attention to a possible promise from Lancelot not to sin again. W.R.J. Barron looks at the whole episode and questions Lancelot’s tears (‘and ever sir Launcelote wepte, as he had bene a chylde that had bene beatyn’), whether they are ‘in relief that he is still what he was or regret for what he might have been’.34 The briefness of the episode and the rehabilitation of chivalric worship leave no room for a straightforward interpretation here, yet the main emphasis of the story is, once again, Lancelot’s worldly fame and the earthly glory of the Round Table fellowship. The two stories reflect, in the context of Malory’s Morte, a view of religion subordinated to chivalry. Thus Malory’s reworking of the Grail Quest’s religious testing in his own ‘Healing’ episode reflects a more pragmatic understanding of religious demands in chivalric life, incorporated in the Round Table oath, an interpretation that cherishes Lancelot as the best earthly knight.

34 W.R.J. Barron, English Medieval Romance (London and New York, 1987), p. 151.

26 Malory’s Language of Love HELEN COOPER

The language Malory uses to describe love draws on a long tradition of mutuality that has its thematic and syntactic roots in Anglo-French romance. It exists in interesting symbiosis in the Morte with the language of reciprocity in combat. His treatment of the story of Alisaundir is paradigmatic of his procedures. Malory is not a writer noted for his love scenes. His most moving encounters between men and women are not the moments familiar from other romances, when the man gazes on the woman and is struck by the arrow of the God of Love, or when the lovers overcome all obstacles to achieve a passionate meeting, but moments of parting or disaster: Lancelot and Guinevere taking leave of each other before he breaks out of her bedchamber through the ambush of armed men, or the scene in the nunnery when she refuses him a last kiss. His sex scenes are notable for the fact that they may well be taking place between the ‘wrong’ people – Igrayne believes Uther to be her husband, Lancelot thinks Elaine of Corbin to be Guinevere – and even when two lovers are involved, Malory shows a reticence about what actually happens that does no more than cue the reader’s imagination in ways that bypass physical detail. None the less, there are a few pairs of lovers who love both deeply and mutually, and for those Malory reserves a distinctive syntax and style that sets them apart from the other characters and encounters in his work. The context for these passages lies not in his ‘French book’, but in insular – Anglo-French and English – traditions of romance love. These are very different from any of the stereotypes of ‘courtly love’ now generally current, and they deserve a great deal more attention than they have yet received. These traditions are first formulated in one of the most influential of all the early romances, the Roman d’Eneas: a work probably written in the 1150s within the broad ambience of the Angevin court of Henry II, and which seems to have circulated equally freely on both sides of the Channel. As has often been noted, the work radically alters the balance of its Virgilian original by downgrading Dido and massively increasing the role given to Lavine, Virgil’s Lavinia, the heiress through whom Eneas acquires his territories in Italy and who becomes the founding mother of the peoples of western Europe. And it is not Eneas who falls in love with Lavine, but she with him. As she gazes on him from within the tower he is besieging, it is she who is struck by Love’s arrow; she speaks a four-hundred-line soliloquy, and then has an arrow shot to the

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feet of her beloved with a message wrapped around the shaft declaring her feelings.1 Only then does he look up and lay eyes on her. The twelfth-century continental French tradition, as represented by several of the works of Chrétien de Troyes, largely follows a model close to this. In Cligés, it is Soredamors, the heroine of the earlier generation, who is first described as falling in love, and we hear of Alexander’s reciprocal love for her only after an extended account of hers for him, including, again, a substantial soliloquy analysing her feelings. Perceval’s lady comes to his bed, shyly and ‘pres que nue’, ostensibly to ask for assistance, but they finish up in each other’s arms.2 Erec arranges his marriage to Enide through her father, but the later stages of the romance, from their wedding night forwards, are much more concerned with working out an equality of the lovers. Chrétien made a decisive break with that tradition, however, in his Chevalier de la Charrette, and for all that it was something of an aberration among his works, its opposed structure of the adoring man and idolized woman rapidly came to replace the earlier pattern of the woman’s pre-emptive passion. By early in the thirteenth century, the LancelotGuinevere model pioneered in the Charrette came to dominate continental French romance, and in due course most modern conceptions of medieval romance love. Guillaume de Lorris, in a work that set the pattern of how love ought to progress, had the male Lover of the Roman de la Rose shot through the eye by the God of Love, and Petrarch and Chaucer and innumerable other poets made such a male initiation of love and desire appear normative. But in Anglo-Norman romance and its English descendants, the love-struck and desiring Lavine and her descendants remained the typical model for the heroine.3 Even in the rare cases where the love leads to an extra-marital affair, early romance, and especially insular romance, portrays it not just as mutual but as weighted towards the woman. Thomas ‘of Britain’, author of the most famous version of Tristan, has his lovers fall in love mutually – necessarily so, since they drink the potion together – but it is Isolde who is given the first and longest response, a generous soliloquy that survives only in fragments.4 Pope Alexander III, whose papacy coincided with the rise of Angevin romance, declared mutual consent between the spouses to be the primary essential of a valid marriage; and where marriage was at issue, writers pursued that idea of mutuality keenly through giving their heroines’ feelings an emphasis that social practices did not often match. Hue de Rotelande (Hugh of Rhuddlan), who certainly knew the Eneas, has his own heroine, La Fière, fall in love with his hero Ipomedon as she gazes on him, retreat to bed, and soliloquize for 150 lines; later, two more of the notable women of the romance go 1 2

3

4

Eneas, roman du XIIe siècle, ed. J.J. Salverda de Grave, CFMA 44, 62 (Paris,1925, 1929), ll. 8047–844. Chrétien de Troyes, Les Romans de Chrétien de Troyes: II, Cligés, ed. Alexandre Micha, CFMA (Paris, 1982), 450–532 (and see also 2941–3124 on Fénice); V–VI, Le Conte du Graal (Perceval), ed. Félix Lecoy, 2 vols., CFMA (Paris, 1975), 1958–2067 (1984 quoted). See Judith Weiss, ‘The Wooing Woman in Anglo-Norman Romance’, in Romance in Medieval England, ed. Maldwyn Mills, Carol Meale and Jennifer Fellows (Cambridge, UK, 1991), pp. 149–61; and, for the later continuation of the motif, my own forthcoming The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford, 2004), chapter 5. Ed. and trans. Ian Short in Tristan: Early French Tristan Poems, ed. Norris J. Lacy, 2 vols. (Cambridge, UK, 1998), 2.176–83, especially lines 30–71. Isolde’s primacy in loving is confirmed by the 200-line soliloquy she is given in Eilhart von Oberge’s version of 1170–90 (Eilhart von Oberge’s Tristrant, translated by J.W. Thomas (Lincoln, NE, 1978), pp. 75–7 (lines 2508–719)).

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through a similar process, though not at such great length. Other Anglo-Norman and Middle English heroines (Guilliadun of Marie de France’s Eliduc, Horn’s Rimenhild, Bevis’s Josian, the early-French-based Meliors of both William of Palerne and Partonope of Blois, and a good many others) follow a similar pattern to La Fière, though somewhat more laconically. The heroes are in most cases eager to follow where the heroines lead, in a demonstration of mutual love instigated by the woman. Such a narrative pattern, with the primacy given to the woman’s desire, is not universal in English, but it is so widespread as to make it impossible that Malory should not have known of it. Ipomedon itself, whether in its Anglo-Norman form or one of its Middle English translations, may well be one of the influences behind his ‘Tale of Sir Gareth’:5 the Tale shares its disdainful damsel, its hero’s appearance at a tournament in varying colours, and its sympathy for female desire even if not for the extensiveness of its exploration of it. What is beyond doubt is that Malory frequently shapes his love-stories in accordance with this element of English romance. His Isode makes plain her feelings for Tristram long before she drinks the potion; his Lady of the Lake falls for Pelleas and makes sure he reciprocates; both Elaines frankly desire Lancelot – though in their case, reciprocation is impossible. Once both heroine and hero have fallen in love (and the process is often, though not always, simultaneous or nearly so), then early French and Anglo-Norman romance has access to a particular mimetic syntax to indicate that mutuality. There is no separation of gender roles in these passages. If the grammatical subject is singular, it may well be ‘chescun’, each, followed by ‘autre’, the other: a mutuality that flows both ways between them. If the subject is plural, embracing both lovers, they will be performing a single action in a single verb. These verbs furthermore are often prefixed by ‘s’entre-’: ‘s’entreacolent’, they embrace each other; ‘s’entrebaisent’, they kiss each other. Marie de France’s Eliduc and Guilliadun exchange rings and kiss, ‘Lur anels d’or s’entrechangerent/ E ducement s’entrebaiserent.’6 A fuller and all too memorable example, even by Hue’s salacious standards, occurs in Ipomedon, when the lovers, after long preserving their virginity for the other, are finally married: Chescun de cez ad ben gardé A autre sa virginité, Or se entreaiment tant par amur Ke il se entrefoutent tute jur.7

In another widely followed pattern, if either lover becomes the single subject of an action, a parallel sentence will follow in which the other lover is given an equivalent 5

6 7

Ipomedon: Poème de Hue de Rotelande, ed. A.J. Holden (Paris, 1979), of c.1190 (for the soliloquy, see lines 956–1098); and for all three English versions, independently translated once after 1390 and twice more in the fifteenth century, Ipomedon in drei englischen Bearbeitungen, ed. Eugen Kölbing (Breslau, 1889). For the tail-rhyme, see also Ipomadon, ed. Rhiannon Purdie, EETS 316 (2001). On Malory’s use of the story, see Larry D. Benson, Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge, MA, 1976), pp. 94–106. The couplet translation is preserved in British Library, Harley MS 2252, the commonplace book of John Colyns, which also preserves the unique surviving copy of the stanzaic Morte Arthur, the text that Malory used alongside the French Mort Artu at the end of his work. Eliduc 701–2, in Marie de France: Lais, ed. A. Ewert (Oxford, 1960). Ed. Holden, 10513–16. Did foutre, one wonders, bear less of the fabliau marking about it in the 1190s, simply being the plain word without the pussyfooting of euphemism?

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feeling or action. Jehan et Blonde, a continental French romance largely set in England and with the daughter of the earl of Oxford as its heroine, extends this syntax of mutuality over most of a hundred lines, from the lover’s vows in marriage through their wedding night.8 The language can, as in these examples, emblematize the happy ending of both the lovers and the romance; or it can occur earlier, especially at the moment when the love is first signalled as mutual. Middle English had no idiomatic equivalent to the s’entre- formulation. Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde ‘entrechaungeden hire rynges’ (III.1368), but there is no room for the reflexive pronoun, and the prefix is alien to the simpler, more Germanic forms of the language. The closest English equivalent is ‘each [verb] the other’, with its similar suppression of gender difference and roles, and that formulation becomes the norm for expressing the mutuality of desire. Chaucer elaborates on it with his simile of the woodbine embracing the tree to describe how his lovers ‘gan ech of hem in armes other wynde’ (III.1232). Most love in Chaucer, however, is malecentred, on the model now associated with Petrarchism, rather than woman-led, on the Anglo-French model, and it is the elimination of male initiative or supremacy that most encourages the language of mutuality. The rooting of Middle English metrical romances in Anglo-Norman traditions means that such frankly desiring women are much more often to be found there than in Chaucer, who draws on later French and Italian for his courtly discourse. In this alternative romance tradition, these women usually hold, in actuality or in potential, political power: they are either heiresses in waiting, like Lavine and Rimenhild, or heiresses who have already come into their inheritance, like La Fière. Their actions are comparably close to those most readily associated with male lovers, and parallelism of actions and speeches between man and lady underlines the mutuality of feeling. So there is an exchange of unspoken thoughts through the act of looking, as the Ipomadon of the English tail-rhyme version and La Fere spend a whole stanza gazing desiringly at each other. The effect is a little like the scene in Romeo and Juliet where the lovers share a sonnet as their first exchange of words, or like a duet in an opera: the vibes are made immediately recognizable to the audience in the language and its shared music. The scene opens and finishes as focalized through La Fere, but it switches to Ipomadon in the middle, as he recognizes that she loves him, and she in turn recognizes that he loves her: How so it be, this lady yenge Makythe many a love lokynge, But foly thoughte she non, And yet she thought it dyd here good; That full wele understode The chyld Ipomadon. He caste her many a lovely loke; Full well that lady undertoke That he wyth love was tane. She drede that it shuld ryse thorow chaunse

8

Jehan et Blonde de Philippe de Rémi, ed. Sylvie Lécuyer, CMFA (Paris, 1984), 4739–831.

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Sum slaunder thorow countenaunce, He lokyd so her uppon.9

Only the last three lines describe a response specific to the woman, and that concerns the fear of scandal – a matter on which social practices prescribe a gender differential, and where such pressures force a breaking of the mutual interchange of looks. Mutuality in Malory, when two characters share a verb or a simile, is probably most immediately associated with fellowship rather than love – or rather, with the homosocial exercise of prowess.10 There is indeed an abundance of such language, especially for describing combats, though the formula most widely encountered there, of a verb of aggression plus ‘together’, is very different in import from the ‘each . . . other’ formula. ‘Together’ in these combat scenes most often denotes a deliberate head-on clash, ‘each . . . other’ a consequence that may be willed by each knight individually against the other but not (in contrast to love) desired by either as an action suffered by themselves. So in the encounter of Tristram and Lancelot, where the odds are equal and neither knight is distinguished from the other, ‘they strake togedyrs wyth bryght swerdys as men that were of myght, and aythir wounded othir wondirly sore,’ over a long paragraph in Vinaver’s edition; then their squires exchange parallel comments on the equality of their prowess; and finally the combatants themselves agree to reveal their names in a ritualized exchange.11 The unbroken equivalences here are unusual; more often, an encounter will start in this fashion, but break the pattern as soon as one knight gets the upper hand: ‘Than they began to feauter there sperys, and they mette so fersly togydyrs that they smote aythir other downe, bothe horse and man. But sir Marhalte smote sir Trystrams a grete wounde in the syde with his spere’ (p. 382 [VIII.7]). But Sir Tristram recovers himself, so that ‘they hurteled togedyrs lyke rammys to beare eythir othir downe’, until Tristram in turn delivers the decisive stroke. Malory’s admiration for chivalric prowess and fellowship makes it all the more interesting that he should use the same formulations and parallelisms for heterosexual as well as homosocial bonding.12 He presents very few love-relationships in any detail, but those where he does trace the growth of love very often use closely similar syntactic patterns of mutuality, where neither lover can be distinguished from the other. Isode alone declares something of her feelings for Tristram when he is ejected from Ireland, but the very start of their full love-affair, when they drink the potion, is marked by this mutuality of action and language: ‘Than they lowghe and made good chere and eyther dranke to other frely, and they thought never drynke that ever they dranke so swete nother so good to them. But by that drynke was in 9 Ipomadon, ed. Purdie, 809–20. 10 See Jill Mann, ‘Malory: Knightly Combat in the Morte D’Arthur’, in Medieval Literature: Chaucer and

the Alliterative Tradition, ed. Boris Ford, New Pelican Guide to English Literature I.1 (Harmondsworth, 1984), pp. 331–9; and Andrew Lynch, Malory’s Book of Arms (Cambridge, UK, 1997), especially pp. 59–62. 11 The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugène Vinaver, 3rd edn, rev. P.J.C. Field (Oxford, 1990), p. 568 (Caxton X.5). All this phrasing is original to Malory. 12 So ‘having ado with’ and ‘medyll togydirs’ may, as Andrew Lynch notes, denote either fighting or a sexual encounter (Malory’s Book of Arms, p. 154).

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their bodyes they loved aythir other so well that never hir love departed’ (p. 412 [VIII.24]). When Gareth and Dame Lyones first meet, the combat pattern of shared actions breaking down as one knight gains the upper hand is reversed, with individual actions coalescing into mutuality. It is moreover ‘she’, Dame Lyones, who sets the tone for their relationship, ‘he’ who responds, until their actions coalesce with the two of them acting in concert, as ‘they’: ‘She made hym passyng good chere and he hir agayne, and they had goodly langage and lovely countenaunce’ (p. 331 [VII.21]). By the end of the evening, ‘Eythir made grete joy of other . . . And then they trouthe-plyght other to love and never to fayle whyle their lyff lastyth’ (p. 332 [VII.21–2]). Their attempts to take things further, however, are foiled by the interventions of Lynet and her magically reviving knight. Malory is always reticent about sex; here, it never quite happens. There is no known source for ‘The Tale of Sir Gareth’; Malory may well have been inventing it by a process of variation on other romances, a leading contender among them, as has been mentioned, being some version of Ipomedon. His other most notable scene of mutual falling in love does, however, have a source, and here it is possible to see him turning an original that lacks this kind of close mutuality and parallelism of syntax and language into a compelling scene where the woman once again takes the initiative and the man follows, in a passage that bonds the two of them together syntactically and rhetorically as much as in desire. This is the account of the meeting of Sir Alisaundir le Orphelin with La Beale Alys, which Malory found in his copy of the Prose Tristan.13 What he read in his ‘French book’ was as follows, beginning at the point where Aylies comes to watch what happens when Alixandre declares he will hold a strip of land against all comers : Et endementres que elle vouloit descendre si fut telle l’aventure que ung chevalier qui illecques estoit venu pour jouster a l’Orphelin Alixandre, lui laisse corre et lui vient a l’encontre, mais itelle fut l’aventure au joindre des glaives que Alixandre l’abatit a la terre entre lui et son cheval tout en un mont. Et lors il s’en passe tout oultre pour parfournir son poindre. Et quant il voulut retourner errieres, la belle damoiselle le saisit par le frain, et lui dist: – Sire chevalier, arrestez vous par amours, et si n’en faictes plus. – Qu’est ce, damoiselle? fait Alixandre, que me voulez vous? Et lors lui compte Aylies comment quatre cens chevaliers la tiennent courte de seigneur prendre, et elle les a tous envaïz encontre lui, et se il peult maintenir ce qu’il a entreprins, elle le fera seigneur de quatre journees de terre bien arentees et de long et de lez, dont il avra la seigneurie de dis mille hommes que a pié que a cheval. – Damoiselle, ce lui respont Alixandre, or sachez tout certainement que de garder ce que j’ay entreprins je feray trestout mon povoir, mais se il vient avant aucun chevalier qui l’onneur emporte par dessus moy, je ne pourray plus faire. – Sire chevalier, ce dist la damoiselle, je vous demande ung don qui moult peu vous coustera, et j’en feray autretant envers vous. – Demandez, damoiselle, fait Alixandre, car je l’ottroie.

13 The story is very much self-contained, and it moves around various texts including Les Prophecies de

Merlin. Only a small number of Tristan manuscripts contain it. Lynch also draws attention to the passage (though not its source), noting in particular Alys’s ‘quasi-military response’ to Alysaundir (ibid., pp. 153–4).

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– Or, je vous prie, fait Aylies, que vous ostez vostre heaulme et abatez vostre ventaille et je desvoloperay ma teste si du tout que vous pourrez veoir ma face tout apertement et toute nue. Lors oste l’Orphelin Alixandre son heaulme et abat sa ventaille. Et quant la damoiselle le vit le visage descouvert, tant fut il quamoisez des armes qu’il avoit portees, si dist a soy mesmes que Damedieu le forma mesmes de ses mains. Elle en eüst si grant joie que a bien petit que elle ne le court baiser devant tous. Elle fu si durement esprinse de s’amour que elle dist entre ses dens que jamais n’avra mari que lui non, se il la deigne prendre, et se il ne la reçoit a femme, elle lui donra ainçois son corps a faire sa volonté. Et lors abat sa guinple, puis dit au chevalier: – Sire chevalier, l’on me fait entendant que l’on ne treuve nulle si belle damoiselle en toute ceste contree comme je suy. Or me regardez, se Dieu vous aist, et si me dittes se il mentent ou non. Quant la damoiselle eüst ce dit, et Alixandre l’a regardé, et la vit si belle riens qu’il cuide tout certainement que toute la beaulté du siecle soit en lui seulement, bien lui fut avis que ce soit ung ange qui soit descendu du ciel. – Ha! damoiselle, fait il, l’eure soit benoiste que vous venistes ceste part, de quoy je croy tout certainement que vous estes descendue du saint Paradis, de quoy je vous diray orendroit toute ma pencee. Or sachez, dame, que je croy que le regart de la grant beaulté que je voy en vous si me fera entreprendre la jouste encontre tous voz chevaliers, si me convient a entrer en ceste aventure, dont je vous di tout vraiement que je me tieng des ore mais pour vostre chevalier, et tout ce que je de cy en avant feray si sera par l’achoison et pour l’amour de vous. Et la damoiselle respont et dist que jamais ne pencera fors en lui tant seulement, et lors s’entrecommandent a Dieu.14

The following translation is intentionally archaic, so as to reduce the difference from how the passage might have read if Malory had translated it literally: And just as she would alight, it so happened that a knight who had come thither to joust with Alexander the Orphan let run against him and encountered him, but it so happened that when their swords strake together Alexander struck him in a heap to the earth between himself and his horse. And then he was spurring so hard that he passed far beyond him. And when he was ready to turn again, the fair damsel seized him by the bridle, and said to him: ‘Sir knight, stop, for love’s sake, and do no more.’ ‘Why so, damsel?’ said Alexander, ‘What do you want of me?’ And then Aylies told him how four hundred knights were paying court to her to become her husband, and she had sent them all against him, and if he could uphold what he had undertaken, she would make him lord of very rich lands that were four days’ journey15 in length and breadth, of which he would have lordship together with ten thousand men on horse and foot. ‘Damsel,’ replied Alexander to her, ‘now know for certain that I shall do all in my power to uphold that which I have undertaken, but if it happen that some other knight bear the honour above me, I can do no more.’ ‘Sir knight,’said the damsel, ‘I ask of you a gift which will cost you little, and I shall do as much for you.’

14 Alixandre l’Orphelin, ed. C.E. Pickford (Manchester, 1951), pp. 32–4. The manuscript used as base text

for the edition represents one very close to Malory’s. 15 ‘Journees’ can mean ‘leagues’, but that would seem rather too small for what Aylies is offering.

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‘Ask, damsel,’ said Alexander, ‘for I shall grant it.’ ‘Now, I pray you,’ said Aylies, ‘ that you take off your helm and lower your aventail, and I shall unwimple my head so that as much as you can you shall see my visage openly and uncovered.’ Then Alexander the Orphan took off his helm and lowered his aventail. And when the damosel saw him with his visage uncovered, marked as he was by the armour he had borne, she said to herself that the Lord God formed him with His own hands. She had such great joy that she all but ran to kiss him before everyone. She was so tightly caught by love that she said below her breath that she would never have any husband but him, if he were willing to take her, and if he would not accept her as his wife, she would instead give him her body to do his will with. And then she unwimpled herself, and said to the knight: ‘Sir knight, men have told me that they cannot find any damsel so fair as I am in all this country. Now look on me, as may God help you, and tell me if they lie or not.’ When the damsel had said this, and Alexander had looked at her, and he saw her so beautiful that he thought indeed that all the beauty of the world was in her alone, he considered in himself that she was an angel who had come down from heaven. ‘Ah, damsel,’he said, ‘blessed be the hour when you came hither, for in truth I think that you have come down from holy Paradise, and therefore I shall at once tell you all my thought. Now know, lady, that I believe that the sight of the great beauty that I see in you will make me undertake the jousts against all your knights, if it behoves me to enter upon this adventure, and I tell you truly that I shall henceforth hold myself as your knight, and all that I shall do hereafter will be for your sake and your love.’ And the damsel answered and said that she would never think of anyone save of him alone, and then they commended each other to God.

Malory follows the sequence of actions and speeches quite closely, but there are differences of story outline as well as of style that bring the whole episode closer to the insular traditions of the active heroine who instigates a mutual love. Malory introduces Alys, herself an heiress, in a slightly different way from the French, and one that makes her more autonomous from the moment of her first introduction: she herself goes to King Arthur’s court and declares that she will marry whoever is able to overcome the knight who is holding the land where the castle of La Beale Regarde had stood (Alysaundir, that is, though she does not yet know who he is). She has her pavilion set up alongside the land where the combats will take place. So she was nat so sone there but there cam a knyght of kynge Arthurs courte that hyght sir Sagramour le Desyrous, and he profyrde to juste with sir Alysaundir. And so they encountyrd, and he brused his speare uppon sir Alysaundir. But sir Alysaundir smote hym so sore that he avoyded his arson of his sadyll to the erthe. When La Beale Alys sawe hym juste so well, she thought hym a passyng goodly knyght on horsebacke. And than she lepe oute of hir pavylyon and toke sire Alysaundir by the brydyll, and thus she seyde: ‘Fayre knyght! Of thy knyghthode, shew me thy vysayge.’ ‘That dare I well,’ seyde sir Alysaundir, ‘shew my vysayge.’ And than he put of his helme, and when she sawe his vysage she seyde, ‘A, swete Fadir Jesu! The I muste love, and never othir.’ ‘Then shewe me youre vysage,’ seyde he. And anone she unwympeled her, and whan he sawe her he seyde, ‘A, Lorde Jesu! Here have I founde my love and my lady! And therefore, fayre lady, I promyse you to be youre knyght, and none other that beryth the lyff.’ ‘Now, jantyll knyghte,’ seyde she, ‘telle me youre name.’

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305

‘Madame, my name is sir Alysaundir le Orphelyne. Now, dameselle, telle me your name,’ seyde he. ‘A, sir,’ seyde she, ‘syth ye lyst to know my name, wyte you well my name is Alys la Beale Pellaron. And whan we be more at oure hartys ease, bothe ye and I shall telle of what bloode we be com.’ So there was grete love betwyxt them. (pp. 645–6 [X.38–9])

The ‘either . . . othir’ formula is missing here in the words, but it is abundantly acted out in the syntax. Aylies is unusual for a thirteenth-century French heroine in her willingness to take the initiative; Alys is far more at home in Malory’s world of forward women. Alys’s leaping out of her pavilion to seize the bridle is altogether more decisive than Aylies’ halting the horse when it has lost all the momentum of its charge, and the exchange between herself and Alysaundir – the request to see his face, his agreement, and her declaration of her love when she sees him; his request to see her face, her compliance, and his declaration of love when he sees her; each of their requests for the other’s name – is modelled much more as a series of exact reciprocations than the French text offers. We know from the very structure of the episode, before Malory ever tells us, that ‘there was grete love betwyxt them’. Such mimetic language of reciprocation makes the lovers who participate in it exceptional in the Morte Darthur. There is no possibility of such exchanges between Lancelot and either of the Elaines, where the very point is that he cannot love them. Even when Lancelot and Elaine of Corbin are in bed together, their ‘kyssynge and clyppynge’ may, as the narrator assures us, be ‘a kyndely thynge’ – natural, in keeping with God’s principles of the created world – but in so far as they have an emotion in common, it serves only to emphasize the distance between them: ‘And wyte you well this lady was glad, and so was sir Launcelot, for he wende that he had had another in hys armys’ (p. 804 [XI.8]). More surprisingly, there is very little of such language used about the two central pairs of lovers, Tristram and Isode after their first falling in love, and Lancelot and Guinevere. Even on the one occasion when Lancelot and the queen do explicitly sleep together, in the episode of the wounded knights, the action is recounted with Lancelot as the main actor (p. 1131 [XIX.6]). Similarly, when he is taken in her chamber, his concerns are with protecting her from the consequences and with fighting his way out; she insists that she would gladly die to save him, but he is the only one who has the martial prowess to act in a way that risks just such a consequence. Only when he has killed his opponents does he return to kiss her, ‘and ayther of hem gaff othir a rynge’ (p. 1169 [XX.5]): their only mutual action in the whole work. Unlike his knights, Malory’s lovers only rarely have the narrative opportunity to lay claim to the language of reciprocity. The last sections of the work are marked by the elimination of such language from heterosexual and homosocial relationships alike. The great series of combats between Lancelot and Gawain starts in a way recognizable from the many other combats of the work, but the purpose of the episodes is to draw a distinction between them, and far more space is given to those differences than to the actions they share.16 The final encounter between Arthur and Mordred is characterized by its difference from all the preceding combats of the 16 See Works, pp. 1216–21 (XX.21–2).

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work, in that the two have no actions at all in common: nothing is done ‘together’ or by either to the other, as the king runs Mordred through the body with his spear, and he, grotesquely, shoves himself up the shaft so that he can reach to strike ‘hys fadir, kynge Arthure’ with his sword, in an act that adds parricide to treason. The final meeting of Lancelot and Guinevere is especially poignant because of the pressure of what is not happening. He seeks her out in order to marry her; but when he finds her, her request to him is that ‘for all the love that ever was betwyxt us, that thou never se me no more in the visayge’ (p. 1252 [XXI.9]): a refusal of the lover’s delight in looking at the beloved, sought in the name of love. The most he can do is to insist that he will follow her example: ‘But the same desteny that ye have takyn you to, I woll take me to, for to please Jesu, and ever for you I caste me specially to pray’ (p. 1253). It is a statement that invites a response of mutuality, but Guinevere does not give it. Instead, she expresses a doubt as to his sincerity. These lovers are not on the same wavelength; there is no sharing of a duet here. And when Lancelot asks her for a last kiss, there is no s’entrebaiser. ‘Nay,’ sayd the quene, ‘that shal I never do, but absteyne you from suche werkes.’ (p. 1253 [XXI.10])

Alys’s first words to Alisaundir were a request to see his face; Guinevere’s last prayer is a repetition to God of the request that she had made to her lover, that she will never look on him again. When Lancelot arrives just a few minutes after her death and himself gazes at her ‘vysage’, it is the face of a corpse. His last act for her body is to bury it beside Arthur’s, in a way that asserts the bond of husband and wife, lying ‘togyders’ in the grave (pp. 1255–6 [XXI.11]) – not in opposition to each other, but as any husband and wife would do in life. The sight of their corpses lying side by side impels Lancelot to acknowledge his isolation from them, not only because of the divide of death but because he sees them linked by ‘their kyndenes’ as against his own ‘unkyndenes’. The greatest of lover-knights now casts himself as the unnatural intrusion in the marriage, the third person in the marriage bed who must withdraw from it and leave the pair alone. The last communal action of the whole book is the hermit-knights’ bearing of Lancelot’s body to Joyous Garde, on the bier that had borne Guinevere: a bed that they cannot occupy together. When the procession reaches its destination, Ever his vysage was layed open and naked, that al folkes myght beholde hym; for suche was the custom in tho dayes that al men of worshyp shold so lye wyth open vysage tyl that they were buryed. (p. 1258 [XXI.13])

The private gaze of love gives way to the public contemplation of history.

27 P.J.C. Field’s Worshipful Revision of Malory: Making a Virtue of Necessity SHUNICHI NOGUCHI

A factual and critical appraisal of a ‘worshipful deed’, P.J.C. Field’s revision of Vinaver’s Malory edition. For Professor P.J.C. Field the necessity in revising Eugène Vinaver’s Winchester Malory was that of maintaining the essential character and physical format of that great edition.1 Field’s success in overcoming the difficulty immediately catches the attention of every reader: revision is strictly confined to what is factual and the tremendous number of pages of Vinaver’s second edition (1759 pp.) is increased by only nine pages, despite Field’s vast number of alterations (2850 by Field’s own count) and occasional reductions (as in 40.12, 79.1, 795.30). What is less clear but of more importance is that the act of revision, though far-reaching quantitatively and qualitatively, is performed with admirable restraint (which gives us a strong sense of the continuity of Vinaverian scholarship) and with due attention to users of Tomomi Kato’s Malory Concordance2 (the page and line allotment given there is kept almost intact by Field’s tactful adjustment of footnote spaces in his revised edition). This brief chapter focuses on what Field, in his ‘Note to the third edition’, so succinctly calls ‘the heart of the edition’, the text, or rather a suggestion for corrections and changes in the text (those published in print and those communicated to Field privately are not included here). For so he . . . wolde assayed as othir knyghtes ded (63.4) and also for he wolde asayde hys horse (1087.20), emend and read respectively he . . . wolde [a] as(s)ayed. (Vinaver and Field would have preferred to preserve the scribe’s phonetic, rather than syntactic, spellings, perhaps brought about by the combination of ‘a’, weak ‘have’, + aphetic form ‘sayde’, actually in evidence in 596.11; however, in view of the fact that (i): these are the only two occurrences of ‘wolde (sholde) + -ed form’ in Winchester Malory, and (ii) the phonetic spelling is not adopted by the scribe in 1202.5: ‘I wolde a advysed me’, and (iii), this sub-standard use is not mentioned in OED, ‘have’, v., II, 26, and MED ‘haven’v., 12c. (c), the above emendation would seem justifiable; at the same time we should consider another alternative: emendation for the first example to ‘he wolde a sayde’); for I sholde

1 2

Reference to Malory’s text in this essay is made to The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugène Vinaver, rev. P.J.C. Field, 3rd edn, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1990), by page and line numbers. See A Concordance to the Works of Sir Thomas Malory, compiled by Tomomi Kato (Tokyo, 1974).

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have clypped the and kyssed the, dispyte of quene Gwenyvere (281.20), emend and read . . . the [in] dispyte . . . (Caxton: in despyte of Quene; also see 444.2; use of prepositional phrase ‘despite of’ is not recorded in OED and MED); for ‘of youre knyghtly wordis comfortis us all . . .’(214.2), emend and read ‘youre . . . all . . .’; for and bare his shylde low for wery[nesse] (267.19), cancel emendation and read and . . . wery (see Towneley Pl. 374/ 226: Vnethes may I wag, man, for wery in youre stabill, quoted in MED, ‘weri’ n.); for ‘I shall never truste them that onys betrayeth me . . .’ (550.31), emend and read ‘I . . . betraye[d] me . . .’ (see Caxton: betrayed); for that what knyght may overcom that knyght that kepyth the pyce of erthe ‘shall have . . . londis’(645.1), punctuate and read that ‘what knyght may overcom that knyght that kepyth the pyce of erthe shall . . . londis’; for And [at] that same feste in cam sir Galahad (845.21), cancel emendation and read And that same feste . . . (see 832.7: ‘thys same feste of Pentecoste shall youre sonne . . . be made knyght . . .’); for they arose up the moste party and made such avowes as sir Gawayne hathe made (866.15), emend and read they . . . sir Gawayne ha[dd]e made (see Caxton: had made); for ‘. . . save thy new-made knyght!’ (884.18), read ‘. . . save Thy new-made knyght!’; for And by the bare tre betokenyth the worlde (967.12), emend and read And the bare tre . . . worlde (see 947.5); for sir Safyr brothir (1190.25), narrow the space and read sir Safyr brothir.

One remarkable merit of Field’s revision is connected with his treatment of those abundant asterisk-prefixed Caxtonian variants that Vinaver gives in his footnotes – Vinaver gives there not only variants which, he says, are ‘clearly preferable’ to the readings of the Winchester MS but also variants which are ‘likely to throw some light’3 on the base text, thus occasionally confusing the reader as to which is which. Field has considerably lessened the reader’s confusion by incorporating many of the former group of readings into the text.4 Our interest is whether or not Field, freed from the necessity pointed out at the outset of this essay, will more copiously adopt Caxton readings in the Malorian text he is preparing and which he will be able to call ‘his’ (he has, he nobly says in the above-mentioned ‘Note’, intended the new, third Malory edition ‘to be as far as possible Eugène Vinaver’s’). Judgement concerning the authenticity of the relevant Caxton reading will preferably involve this question: Does not the particular Caxton reading (especially when it is longer than the corresponding Winchester) occur on a page that Takako Kato calls a ‘text-lengthening’5 one (see also footnote 4), where adjustment to fill up the space was made by the printer/compositor? 3 4

5

See The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugène Vinaver, 2nd edn, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1967) I: cxxiii. See 54.9, 262.33, 330.25, 336.15, 346.18, 469.32, 508.22, 511.10, 562.35, 571.26, 579.21, 592.7, 608.29, 610.10, 623.8, 635.16, 653.1, 665.9, 720.19, 741.16, 758.6, 762.25, 780.2, 803.33, 805.22, 808.31 (‘[ende]longe’), 821.8, 823.20, 825.21, 879.31, 955.17, 958.13, 974.24, 986.5, 987.2, 1046.23, 1052.6, 23, 1057.1, 1069.17, 1076.19, 1079.21, 1131.11, 1132.19, 1147.2, 1166.26, 1169.5, 1171.22 (‘. . . weall, [and take hit in pacyence and thanke God of hit]. And . . .’; a knotty and arguable emendation that affects our understanding of the Malorian concept of terrestrial chivalry: the word ‘patience’ does not occur outside the Holy Grail section in the Winchester MS, as I pointed out in my ‘Malorian Knights: Their Humility and Patience,’ In Geardagum 10, Society for New Language Study (Denver, 1989), p. 23; I found that the Caxton reading occurs in what seems to be a ‘text-lengthening’ page, bb 2r, where the ampersand is used only once, in contrast to bb 1r, where it is used five times, and bb 8v, where it is used four times), 1188.27, 1190.25, 1191.34, 1192.12, 1195.17, 1221.12, 1238.31, 1240.7, 1242.28, 1251.31, 1253.4, and 5. See also those Caxton readings, not prefixed by asterisks, newly incorporated into Field’s text, as in 168.26, 434.29, 462.20, etc. See Takako Kato, Caxton’s Morte Darthur: the Printing Process and the Authenticity of the Text, Medium Ævum Monographs, New Series 22 (Oxford, 2002), p. 37.

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We can most clearly find Field’s textual innovation where his emendation is given a footnote prefixed by WCO2, which means that his reading entirely departs from the unanimous reading of the Winchester MS, Caxton’s edition, and Vinaver’s Oxford 2nd edition, and that, to him, in this particular passage, all thought of stemmas and collation is practically of no help: 165.24 (and cryed, emending and cryed), 347.20 (the Knyght, emending the grene knyght), 375.30 (in , emending in Cornewayle), 414.32 ( lady, emending my lady), 418.14 (sir , emending sir Launcelot), 446.30 (sir Trystramys, wyff, emending sir Trystramys wyff), 508.21 (they ode, emending they rode), 545.1 (we leve, emending we speke and leve), 3 (sir Trystram many, emending sir Trystram many), 595.31 (no feare o cowardyse, emending no feare of cowardyse: not of fere of cowardyse in Caxton), 685.6 (sir Harry Fyze Lake, emending sir Harry Fyze Lake), 690.27 (placis.’ So rode, emending placis So rode), 890.2 ( yonger, emending þer yonger), 942.16 (nde, emending wynde; see Vinaver’s reference to the French source’s ‘viande’), 946.5 ( the rak, emending & þe rak), 948.24 (ne were, emending nere were), 968.15 ( floure, emending oþer floure), 982.20 (to the castell, emending to the castell; see Vinaver’s reference to the French source’s ‘a deus liues de Corbenyc’), 1020.9 (was he a litill sory, emending was nat he a litill sory; see the French source’s ‘n’est pas petit dolenz’6), 1186.26 (many , emending many knyghtes), 1188.30 (ben brente, insomuche, emending ben brente & insomuche), 1189.18 (as good a wyll, emending as a good wyll). Due appreciation of these twenty-two emendations will be made by reference, not to the modern editions of Malory (James Spisak’s 1983 edition presents only two emendations, ‘the Reed Knyght’ and ‘thy lady’,7 and A.W. Pollard’s 1900 edition makes five silent emendations, ‘the Red Knight’, ‘Sir Harry le Fise Lake’, ‘her younger’, ‘nere’ i.e. ‘ne+were’, and ‘as good will’8), but rather to the 1865 Malory edition by Thomas Wright, who, unacquainted with modern textual criticism (A.E. Housman’s paper entitled ‘The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism’ was only published in 1921),9 performed a remarkable number of highly sensible, though silent, emendations: witness ‘the red knight’, ‘sir Tristram and his wife’, ‘we leave’, ‘sir Tristram in many’, ‘not for feare or cowardise’, ‘sir Harry le fise Lake’, ‘her younger’, ‘was he not a little sory’, ‘beene brent, in so much’, and ‘as good a will’.10 Numerically not so conspicuous yet very revealing in understanding the nature of one of the copy-texts that would have been placed in Caxton’s printing workshop is 6 7

See La Mort le Roi Artu, ed. Jean Frappier, 2nd edn (Geneva, 1956), 261.33. See Caxton’s Malory: A New Edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, Based on the Pierpont Morgan Copy of William Caxton’s Edition of 1485, ed. James W. Spisak, based on work begun by the late William Matthews, with a Dictionary of Names and Places by Bert Dillon, 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1983), p. 189.16 and p. 224.39. 8 See Le Morte Darthur: Sir Thomas Malory’s Book of King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table, ed. A.W. Pollard with Bibliographical Notes, Library of English Classics, 2 vols. (London, 1900, 1903; reprint London, 1902, 1920), I: 262, II: 99, 247, 291, and 455. 9 See A.E. Housman: Selected Prose, ed. John Carter (Cambridge, UK, 1961), p. 131. 10 See La Mort d’Arthure: The History of King Arthur and of the Knights of the Round Table. Compiled by Sir Thomas Malory, Knt, ed. Thomas Wright, 3 vols. (London, 1865), I: 289, II: 76, 155 (twice), 202, 278, III: 77, 175, 297 (twice).

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the fact that a significant number of the correct readings under discussion are found in de Worde’s 1498 Malory edition: N1r, 2nd column (her yonger), P3v, 2nd column (were not), B5v, 1st column (be brent/ in somoche), ibid. (as good a wylle). These would be de Worde’s own emendations; or it is more probable that they derive from what Tsuyoshi Mukai postulates as ‘the very copy-text, now lost, that Caxton used for his 1485 edition and which de Worde took over directly from his master’.11 I should like to close by examining an emendation that actually belongs to the already discussed group having the WCO2 designation – the emendation occurring in the scene of a wonderful pageant that befits this festschrift for Peter Field: ‘sir Launcelot had twelve coursers folowyng hym, and on every courser sate a yonge jantylman; and all they were arayed in whyght velvet with sa<mbu>is of golde aboute their quarters, and the horse trapped in the same wyse down to the helys . . .’ (1196.15, with footnote: WCO2 with sarpis). In his very interesting ‘Note’ justifying his emendation (based on Malory’s English source, the stanzaic Morte Arthur), Field remarks that the scribe, by inappropriately changing the base-text’s sambues to sarpis, created ‘the grotesque picture of the young gentlemen of the royal escort riding with gold neck-rings round their buttocks’, which implies that, despite Field’s rather strong phrase that immediately follows (‘the quarters are of course those of the horses’), and despite the fact that nearly all quotations, in OED and MED, of ‘quarter’ concerning the human body are connected with descriptions of the executed or dead body, the word can yet be applicable to young gentlemen who are definitely alive. The problem about Field’s emendation is that it deprives the gentlemen-horsemen of all sartorial ornaments, leaving them in mufti, and yet causes their horses to be doubly decorated – their quarters decorated with ‘sambues’, their feet ‘trapped in the same wyse down to the helys’. But in the same wise as what creatures? Probably in the same wise as the gentlemen-horsemen? Difficulties in the Vinaverian interpretation would be solved by taking the ‘horse’ (1196.16) as generic singular or as unchanged plural (see 313.32, 433.9, and 803.5, in all of which Caxton has ‘horses’) and by accepting MED’s tentative explanation of ‘quarter’ either as ‘shoulder’, neck viewed diagonally, or as ‘thigh’. I hope Peter Field, though perhaps not disposed to accept the latter interpretation, might be amused by the picture of the young horsemen, riding with gold neck-rings round their thighs.

11 See Tsuyoshi Mukai, ‘De Worde’s 1498 Morte Darthur and Caxton’s Copy-Text’, RES, New Series 51.

201 (2000): 25.

28 ‘Old Sir Thomas Malory’s Enchanting Book’: A Connecticut Yankee Reads Le Morte Darthur JANET COWEN

Twain’s archaic language in A Connecticut Yankee conflates features from several centuries, thus reflecting the novel’s composite historical setting and its concern with cultural relativity. In Mark Twain’s satirical fantasy of time travel into a fictive Arthurian past, published in 1889, Malory’s Morte Darthur figures conspicuously. Malory’s style forms the staple of the language Twain invents for the inhabitants of his imaginary sixth century. Substantial passages of Malory’s text are also quoted whole at different points of the story, in various narrative guises. The first of these is under Malory’s own name, at the opening of the frame narrative. It forms the narrator’s bedtime reading as he sits by his hotel fireside after a visit to Warwick Castle, where he had met a mysterious stranger who had confidentially claimed unaccountable personal knowledge of the sixth-century armour on display. The narrator’s reading lulls him into a comfortable reverie: ‘All that evening I sat by my fire at the Warwick Arms, steeped in a dream of the olden time, while the rain beat upon the windows, and the wind roared about the eaves and corners. From time to time I dipped into old Sir Thomas Malory’s enchanting book, and fed at its rich feast of prodigies and adventures, breathed-in the fragrance of its obsolete names, and dreamed again. Midnight being come at length, I read another tale, for a night-cap’ (p. 34).1 There follows a citation of Le Morte Darthur, Book VI, Chapter XI, recounting an adventure in which Sir Launcelot delivers a group of captive ladies from two giants, and rescues Sir Kay from an attack by three knights. The entire chapter is quoted, with the exception of two short passages of dialogue.2 It is at this point that the stranger reappears and assumes his own narrative role, coaxed into beginning his story by the comforts of a pipe, a chair and hot Scotch whisky, and then handing over his manu1 2

Quotations are taken from Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court, intro. J. Kaplan (Harmondsworth, 1971, repr. 1986). Twain used the Globe edition of Malory, edited by Sir Edward Strachey, first published in 1868, itself based on Caxton’s text. See R.H. Wilson, ‘Malory in the Connecticut Yankee’, Studies in English 27 (1948), 185–206. Wilson establishes convincingly that Twain used the index added in the reprint of 1869, but otherwise the exact impression that Twain used has not been identified, see A. Gribben, ‘ “The Master Hand of Old Malory”: Mark Twain’s Acquaintance with Le Morte D’Arthur’, English Language Notes 16 (1978): 32–40 (34).

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script ‘journal’, which forms the bulk of the novel. Within this opening sequence we may note a certain ambivalence in the evocation of the past. The narrator’s comments invest Malory’s text with the powers of imaginative nourishment and mildly intoxicating nostalgia: ‘its rich feast of prodigies and adventures [. . .] the fragrance of its obsolete names’. This appealing potency contrasts with the ambience created by the stranger’s earlier mention of these names: ‘Exactly as I would speak of my nearest personal friends or enemies, or my most familiar neighbours, he spoke of Sir Bedivere, Sir Bors de Ganis, Sir Launcelot of the Lake, Sir Galahad, and all the other great names of the Table Round – and how old, old, unspeakably old, and faded and dry and musty and ancient he came to look as he went on!’ (p. 33). The stranger is at the same time attractive and alienating. His ambiguous presence pervades the whole opening and tinges the context of the narrator’s reading of Malory: ‘As he talked along, softly, pleasantly, flowingly [. . .] he gradually wove such a spell about me that I seemed to move among the spectres and shadows and dust and mould of a grey antiquity’ (p. 33). Four further substantial passages from Malory are incorporated at later points of the book, with differing effects in each case. To assess their effect, it is useful to consider them against the background of the dialogue Twain creates for the speakers in his fictional ‘lost land’.3 As the stranger, identifying himself as a Yankee from Connecticut, and later named as Hank Morgan, begins the tale of his transposition in time, one of the first indications that he is not in his usual surroundings is his repeated failure to understand the way people talk to him, although their words themselves are recognizable: ‘Fair sir, will ye just?’ said this fellow. ‘Will I which?’ ‘Will ye try a passage of arms for land or lady or for –’ ‘What are you giving me?’I said. ‘Get along back to your circus, or I’ll report you.’(p. 37) ‘Prithee do not let me.’ ‘Let you what?’ ‘Hinder me, then, if the word please thee better.’ (p. 47)

Hank at first rationalizes his sense of cultural dissonance by assuming he is in the vicinity of a circus, or an asylum. The reader, primed by the opening passage of Malory, will readily identify his problem as the misrecognition of linguistic archaism. Such comic misunderstandings are the linguistic counterpart of the absurd practical predicaments Hank finds himself in as he struggles to adapt his modern habits and expectations to the circumstances and institutions of his new world: carrying his handkerchief in his helmet and then finding he can’t get at it when he most needs it; lighting a pipe in armour and inadvertently causing a panic which he is later able to turn to his advantage. These are among the best-remembered jokes of the novel, and seem to have been the seed from which it grew, as indicated by a

3

‘The Tale of the Lost Land’ is the caption of the original Daniel Carter Beard illustration which precedes the beginning of the stranger’s ‘manuscript’. See the photographic facsimile of the first American edition of the work: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, ed. S.F. Fishkin, K. Vonnegut, Jr, and L.J. Bludd (New York and Oxford, 1996), p. 25.

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passage in Twain’s Notebooks which also points to his reading of Malory as the catalyst of such comic disparities: Dream of being a knight errant in armor in the middle ages. Have the notions & habits of thought of the present day mixed with the necessities of that. No pockets in the armor. No way to manage certain requirements of nature. Can’t scratch. Cold in the head – can’t blow – can’t get at handkerchief, can’t use iron sleeve. Iron gets red hot in the sun – leaks in the rain, gets white with frost & freezes me solid in winter. Suffer from lice & fleas. Make disagreeable clatter when I enter church. Can’t dress or undress myself. Always getting struck by lightning. Fall down, can’t get up. See Morte DArthur.4

The reader familiar with Malory will recognize many salient markers of his language in the conversations between Hank and his Arthurian interlocutors. The question that first fazes Hank, ‘Fair sir, will ye just?’, consists of two phrases plucked straight from Malory.5 Indeed, the allusive tone has already been set by the stranger’s muttered comment on the damaged piece of armour in Warwick Castle: ‘Wit ye well, I saw it done’ (p. 34). ‘Wit ye well’ is a very frequent emphatic marker in Malory’s dialogue. (The pronoun form ‘ye’ in this phrase predominates in Caxton’s text, as opposed to ‘you’ in the Winchester manuscript.) The texture of the allusive parody of Malory is made up of function words (e.g., ‘an’ in the sense ‘if’; ‘but’ in the sense ‘only’; ‘else’; ‘full’ in the sense ‘very’; ‘right so’; ‘sith’; ‘wherefore’) and grammatical forms and structures (e.g., ‘be’ present tense plural; ‘brake’, ‘brast’ past tense singular; ‘-eth’ present tense third singular ending; ‘it liked me not’ impersonal verb; sentence negation without the auxiliary ‘do’, e.g. ‘doubt it not’), as well as familiar lexical items (e.g., ‘cheer’ in the sense ‘entertainment’; ‘damsel’; ‘lightly’ in the sense ‘easily’; ‘prowess’; ‘sooth’; ‘sped’ in the sense ‘succeeded’; ‘ween’; ‘well beseen’, etc.). Often the humour arises from a conjunction of such allusion with Hank’s own idiom: ‘how then may it be that thou’st knocked therefrom the stuffing?’ (p. 300), or from the placing of a familiar word or phrase from Malory in an unusual context, as in: ‘the words do seem to come endlong and overthwart’ (p. 173). In Malory ‘overthwarte’ (‘crosswise’), and the phrase ‘endelonge and overthwarte’ (‘everywhere’) are most frequently found in the context of the exchange of blows in combat, or of knights riding on long journeys through the country. Substituting ‘words’ as the subject produces a comic effect, especially in this situation, where the usually loquacious Demoiselle Alisande la Carteloise (‘Sandy’ to Hank) is momentarily confounded by Hank’s commercial evaluation of knight-errantry (this episode is discussed in more detail below). At each of these levels, Malory’s idiom pervades the text, but we do not have to go beyond the opening passages of dialogue to realize that the language of Twain’s Camelot is not simply a burlesque of Malory.6 It has been noted that Twain’s

4 5

6

Mark Twain’s Notebooks & Journals, general editor F. Anderson, vol. 3 (1883–1891) ed. R.P. Browning, M.B. Frank and L. Salamo (Berkeley, 1979), p. 78. The examples of Malory’s use cited in this paper have been drawn from A Concordance to the Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. T. Kato (Tokyo, 1974), with cross-checking of the Winchester and Caxton texts as necessary. The brief discussion in E. Schroth, ‘Mark Twain’s Literary Dialect in A Connecticut Yankee’, Mark

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fictional Arthurian language displays features of writers from Malory to the Elizabethans.7 In fact the chronological span is even wider. It is a pastiche yoking together features from several centuries, including Middle English forms predating Malory, though not used by Malory himself, and extending to Romantic fiction of the nineteenth century. Examples of non-Malorian Middle English forms are: ‘God shield’ (attested in OED from 1297; ‘liege’ as a noun (attested in MED from c.1400); ‘perchance’ (attested in MED from c.1350 in the form ‘par-chance’); ‘sort’ (in the sense ‘category’, first attested in Chaucer); ‘it skills not’ (in the sense ‘it makes no difference’, attested by two fifteenth-century examples in MED); ‘whenas’ (first exemplified in OED from 1423). Examples not attested until the sixteenth century are: the construction ‘a-’ followed by a verbal substantive ending in ‘-ing’, taken actively (OED first examples from Berners; Malory uses the earlier forms ‘an-’, ‘on-’, restricted to ‘on’ in Caxton’s text); ‘belike’ (OED first example 1533); ‘straightway’ (in the sense ‘immediately’, OED first example from Tindale); ‘prithee’ (OED first example ?c.1522). ‘Passage’ in the sense ‘an exchange of blows between two combatants’, the notion which is so disconcerting to Hank in the extract quoted above, is first attested in OED in 1599. Particularly notable in this group is ‘idlesse’, first attested in OED in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and apparently a consciously archaic formation both in its origin and in its subsequent history (the OED examples following Spenser are from Thomson, The Castle of Indolence, Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage). Quotation from Shakespeare is found: ‘laced with his golden blood’ (p. 163).8 It is notable that this instance strikes a serious tone. It is an expression of Hank’s shocked and compassionate reaction to the death of a page stabbed by Morgan le Fay. Quotation from Shakespeare has a visual counterpart, with a more light-hearted effect, in Beard’s illustration of the sprightly page Clarence, modelled on a photograph of the actress Sarah Bernhardt, renowned for her performance of Hamlet.9 Echoes of the Book of Common Prayer and the Authorized Version of the Bible operate ironically in Hank’s expressed abhorrence of the institutions of church and monarchy, as in the following examples: ‘It was pitiful for a person born in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to their humble and hearty outpourings of loyalty toward their King and Church and nobility’ (p. 87);10 ‘[The Church] introduced heritable ranks and aristocracies, and taught all the Christian populations of the earth to bow down to them and worship them’ (p. 89);11 ‘Thou beast without bowels of

Twain Journal 19 (1978): 26–29, tends to conflate features of Malory’s language with those found elsewhere in Middle English, and does not take account of features from later periods. 7 See D.R. Sewell, Mark Twain’s Languages: Discourse, Dialogue and Linguistic Variety (Berkeley, 1987), p. 133. 8 Cf. Macbeth, II.3.112. 9 See Samuel Langhorne Clemens, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, ed. A.R. Ensor (New York, 1982), pp. 16 and 308. 10 Cf. the General Thanksgiving in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer: ‘Father of all mercies, we thine unworthy servants do give thee most humble and hearty thanks’. 11 Cf. Exodus 20. 5; the wording resembles that in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer version of the Ten Commandments: ‘Thou shalt not bow down to them nor worship them.’

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179).12

mercy’ (p. Twain’s narrative context for this last example is the outcry of a swineherd’s wife against a priest who has taken the fattest of her pigs for tithes. In the light of such echoes it is perhaps admissible to take the reference to Hank’s appointment as the king’s second-in-command, ‘for he is become the King’s right hand, is clothed with power and authority, and his seat is upon the highest step of the throne’ (p. 75), as combining loose references to Psalm 110. 1: ‘The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool’, and Psalm 8. 5: ‘For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels: and hast crowned him with glory and honour’ (AV). Eighteenth-century hymnody has its place in the texture of allusion. When a candidate for admission to Hank’s new military academy is confounded by one of the examination questions, he prefaces his unashamed admission of ignorance with the expostulation: ‘Verily, in the all-wise and unknowable providence of God, who moveth in mysterious ways his wonders to perform’ (p. 233), words which echo the opening lines of William Cowper’s hymn, ‘God moves in a mysterious way,/ His wonders to perform’.13 Other Restoration and eighteenth-century idioms, on the contrary, contribute a touch of mannered archaic colloquialism to the text. Examples are: ‘Lackaday’ (first OED attestation 1695, Congreve) and ‘Odsbodikins’ (first OED attestation 1709). It can be no accident that these two expressions are put into the mouths of Sandy and Clarence respectively (pp. 135 and 72). A similar case is ‘La!’, which sprinkles the conversation of Clarence and Sandy (e.g., pp. 63, 114, 135, 183), and is also used by Morgan le Fay, another of the aspiring polite speakers of Arthurian society, whose talk at first charms Hank with ‘all manner of pretty graces and graciousness’ (pp. 148 and 150). Although the form ‘la’ as an emphatic interjection can be traced back to Old English, it seems that Twain’s contexts give it the colouring of the later uses, expressing what OED calls ‘a mere expression of surprise’. A broader strain of colloquialism is perhaps introduced by ‘woundily’ (e.g., pp. 111 and 218). Although MED records one example of ‘woundli’ in the sense ‘injuriously’, the form ‘woundily’ in the sense ‘excessively’ appears to be an eighteenth-century coinage, first recorded in OED from Farquhar’s Recruiting Officer, with later examples from Smollett, and, perhaps significantly for Twain’s use, in Scott’s Rob Roy, in the mouth of a non-aristocratic character. In places Twain widens both the register of his fictional language and his field of literary allusion by having Hank bowdlerise his own narrative. His disingenuous refusal to quote passages of Arthurian table-talk associates strong language particularly with eighteenth-century fiction. Commenting on his first experience of a Round Table feast, Hank observes: [M]any of the terms used in the most matter-of-fact way by this great assemblage of the first ladies and gentlemen in the land would have made a Comanche blush. Indelicacy is too mild a term to convey the idea. However, I had read ‘Tom Jones’ and ‘Roderick Random,’ and other books of that kind, and knew that the highest and first ladies and gentlemen in England had remained little or no cleaner in their talk, and in the morals and

12 Cf. Colossians 3. 12: ‘Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies’ (AV). 13 This allusion is noted in A Connecticut Yankee, ed. Ensor, p. 140, n. 9.

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conduct which such talk implies, clear up to a hundred years ago; in fact clear into our own nineteenth century. (pp. 61–2)

This observation gives the opportunity for Hank to bring in a critical comment on the idealized medievalism of Romantic fiction, as typified by the work of Scott: Suppose Sir Walter, instead of putting the conversations into the mouths of his characters, had allowed the characters to speak for themselves? We should have had talk from Rachel and Ivanhoe and the soft Lady Rowena which would embarrass a tramp in our day. (p. 62)

Elsewhere Twain speaks in overtly hostile terms of Scott’s influence: The first [Don Quixote] swept the world’s admiration for the mediæval chivalry-silliness out of existence; and the other [Ivanhoe] restored it. As far as our South is concerned, the good work done by Cervantes is pretty nearly a dead letter, so effectually has Scott’s pernicious work undermined it.14

It is significant, therefore, that Scott’s idiom colours the language of his own fictional medieval world. Twain has thus created his own artificial archaic language, which is a parodic conflation of forms from different periods, some of these forms themselves originally coined as archaisms. This composite anachronism is the linguistic counterpart of the fictional ‘sixth century’ of the novel’s setting, itself a conflation of various periods, as Twain makes clear in his preface to the work: It is not pretended that these laws and customs existed in England in the sixth century; no, it is only pretended that inasmuch as they existed in the English and other civilizations of far later times, it is safe to consider that it is no libel upon the sixth century to suppose them to have been in practice in that day also. (p. 27)

Inventive parody finds its epitome in the figure of Sandy. Sandy talks a lot. In one episode, discussed in more detail below, in order to supply Hank with the identities of a group of knights they have encountered on their travels, she tells a tale drawn out of Malory which extends over several days of their journey. On that occasion Hank allows her to finish, and discovers that the denouement reveals something to his advantage. But often she is not allowed to complete her own sentences, which have the capacity for endless self-generation produced by syntactic structures not at all typical of Malory’s prose. Some of her lengthiest utterances are ways of saying she doesn’t know something: the way to the castle where her mistress is held captive, or, in the following example, how they could possibly conduct all the freed captives home: ‘[W]end you we might do all these journeys in one so brief life as He hath appointed that created life, and thereto death likewise with the help of Adam, who by sin done through persuasion of his helpmeet, she being wrought upon and bewrayed by the beguilements of the great enemy of man, that serpent hight Satan, aforetime consecrated and set apart unto that evil work by overmastering spite and envy begotten in his heart through fell ambitions that did blight and mildew a nature erst so white and pure whenso it hove with the

14 Life on the Mississippi, ed. S.F. Fishkin, W. Morris and L. Howe (New York and Oxford, 1996), p. 470.

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shining multitudes its brethren-born in glade and shade of that fair heaven wherin all such as native be to that rich estate and –’ (p. 183)

Her point – that the task would take more than a lifetime – has actually been made in the opening clause. The sentence unfurls by hooking on to the correlative ‘so . . . as’ a series of embedded relative clauses sustained by participial constructions, drawn out in a manner capable of infinite extension. Hank’s reply seems apposite: ‘we could distribute these people around the earth in less time than it is going to take you to explain that we can’t’. The structural features of the sentence can easily be exemplified in prose of the Middle English period and later; indeed, Caxton’s own preface to Le Morte Darthur readily supplies examples: The said noble gentlemen instantly required me to imprint the history of the said noble king and conqueror king Arthur, and of his knights, with the history of the Saint Greal, and of the death and ending of the said Arthur; affirming that I ought rather to imprint his acts and noble feats, than of Godfrey of Boloine, or any of the other eight, considering that he was a man born within this realm, and king and emperor of the same; and that there be in French divers and many noble volumes of his acts, and also of his knights. To whom I answered that divers men hold opinion that there was no such Arthur, and that all such books as been made of him be but feigned and fables, because that some chronicles make of him no mention, nor remember him nothing, nor of his knights. Whereto they answered, and one in special said, that in him that should say or think that there was never such a king called Arthur, might well be aretted great folly and blindness. (cited from the Globe edition)

But it is the potential for infinite expansion which takes Sandy’s speech beyond parody. Twain might be said to have supplied Sandy with a language never really used by men – nor women neither. Significantly, Sandy’s most prodigious sentence is an apology for her inability to understand Hank’s colloquialisms – but since, she says, she is not very learned, he might make some allowance. She makes her point as follows: ‘I would I might please thee sir, and it is to me dole and sorrow that I fail, albeit sith I am but a simple damsel and taught of none, being from the cradle unbaptized in those deep waters of learning that do anoint with a sovereignty him that partaketh of that most noble sacrament, investing him with reverend state to the mental eye of the humble mortal who, by bar and lack of that great consecration seeth in his own unlearned estate but a symbol of that other sort of lack and loss which men do publish to the pitying eye with sackcloth trappings whereon the ashes of grief do lie bepowdered and bestrewn, and so, when such shall in the darkness of his mind encounter these golden phrases of high mystery, these shut-up-shops, and draw-the-game, and bank-the-fires, it is but by the grace of God that he burst not for envy of the mind that can beget, and tongue that can deliver so great and mellow-sounding miracles of speech, and if there do ensue confusion in that humbler mind, and failure to divine the meanings of those wonders, then if so be this miscomprehension is not vain but sooth and true, wit ye well it is the very substance of worshipful dear homage and may not lightly be misprized, nor had been, an ye had noted this complexion of my mood and mind and understood that that I would I could not, and that I could not I might not, nor yet nor might nor could, nor might-not nor could-not, might be by advantage turned to the desired would, and so I pray you mercy of my fault, and that ye will of your kindness and your charity forgive it, good my master and most dear lord.’ (pp. 203–4)

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Hank gets the point, and is shamed into an apology, and also into a little amateur linguistic analysis: I was gradually coming to have a mysterious and shuddering reverence for this girl; for nowadays whenever she pulled out from the station and got her train fairly started on one of those horizonless transcontinental sentences of hers, it was borne in upon me that I was standing in the awful presence of the Mother of the German Language. [. . .] She had exactly the German way: [. . .] Whenever a literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of the Atlantic with his verb in his mouth. (p. 204)

Two points can be noted here. The first is that the phrase ‘with his verb in his mouth’ does not accurately describe the sentence in question. The complexity of the sentence does not consist in the separation of the main verb from its subject. It thus seems as if one linguistic stereotype, that of the English speaker resistant to learning foreign languages, has been pulled in by the hind leg and joined to another, that of the talkative female. The second notable point is that the reference to German, inexactly applied though it may be in the context, broadens the novel’s concern with linguistic difference, with miscommunication and the limits of translation. It seems likely that we should see in this passage something of Twain’s own struggle with German, amusingly documented by him in ‘The Awful German Language’.15 Sewell has discussed the ways in which Twain’s awareness of how different languages categorize the world differently, an awareness sharpened by the experience of coming to foreign languages as an adult, is turned to humorous effect in many of his writings, but may also create a darker vision.16 Hank is repeatedly frustrated by verbal misunderstandings which reflect an inability to absorb new concepts. Communication finally breaks down when he proclaims a republic in terms meaningless to a hierarchical society, and demands surrender from opponents who cannot comprehend the power of his weapons.17 It is notable in this connection that there is very little dialogue in the final chapter of Hank’s narrative, which echoes the silence of the attack and defence, and the final fatal immobility of his small force, ‘enclosed in three walls of dead men’ (p. 404). After this final chapter comes the ‘Postscript’ added to Hank’s manuscript by Clarence, whose idiom is by now thoroughly assimilated to that of his Boss. Just as verbal difference between Hank and his Arthurian interlocutors mirrors ideological difference, so Clarence’s adoption of a modern idiom is a measure of Hank’s success with his brightest trainee. Clarence first shows his aptitude for cultural assimilation in his production of the first newspaper, a piece of ‘good Arkansas journalism’, as Hank judges it to be (p. 246). By the time Hank returns from his tour of the country in disguise with the king, he notes that Clarence is speaking ‘very modernly’ (p. 352), and from this point onwards all archaisms have disappeared from Clarence’s language, with the sole exception of his final newspaper report, which creates a particular effect discussed further below.

15 See Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad, ed. S.F. Fishkin, R. Banks and J.S. Leonard (New York and Oxford,

1996), Appendix D, esp. pp. 604–5. 16 Sewell, Mark Twain’s Languages, pp. 73–7. 17 See Sewell, Mark Twain’s Languages, pp. 134–45.

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Apart from Clarence, there is one other isolated but notable example of a character whose speech becomes progressively less marked by archaic idiom. It is in the scene where Hank and the king come across a family dying of smallpox. Only the mother is still able to speak. She tells them how the family had been brought to destitution through the unjust imprisonment of her three grown sons, with the result that the rest of the family had been unable to make a living, and had furthermore been fined for failure to meet their feudal obligations (pp. 269–70). At the beginning of the account her speech is marked by features that the reader has by this point of the book come to expect: ‘an’, ‘likewise’, ‘naught’, ‘saith’, etc., but as she continues her story these decrease, and archaisms are replaced by modern forms: ‘ago’ (not ‘since’), ‘alive’ (not ‘on live’), ‘are’ (not ‘be’), ‘has’ (not ‘hath’). Readers opening up the last page of her speech at random might almost suppose themselves to be simply at an affecting deathbed scene in a piece of nineteenthcentury fiction. Why has Twain chosen to abandon archaism at this point? Two different but compatible explanations suggest themselves. The first is that Twain is aiming here at a strong, direct effect of pathos, unclouded by the distancing effect of archaism. The second is that the woman’s language encodes as well as expresses a resistance to the oppressive social and economic structures figured in the book’s fictional Arthurian society. With her dying words she recounts how she had been cursed and ostracised for uttering blasphemies against the Church to the priest whose demand for ecclesiastical dues had brought the family to starvation. Perhaps the point is that such a view can only adequately be conveyed in a modern idiom. The same point seems to be made in a similar scene where Hank witnesses the execution of a young woman for stealing a piece of cloth to sell to feed her child (pp. 329–32). A priest in attendance tells the crowd how the woman had been caught between two laws, the law against stealing and the law of conscription: her husband had been sent to sea, so that she was reduced to a position where she must steal or starve. Interestingly, direct speech is abandoned in favour of paraphrase: Hank says he remembers all the detail of the speech, but not the exact words, and so he will change it into his own words. Here again the implication is that language and ideology are inseparable. Such a critique of justice comes from a vantage point which can only be represented in Hank’s modern idiom. Considered against the background of intermingled idiom in which Twain has contrived to place them, how do the other whole passages cited from Malory appear? The second occurs when Hank, as a newly captured prisoner, is exhibited at a gathering of the Round Table. After dinner Merlin tells the tale of how Arthur obtained his sword from the Lady of the Lake, in the words of Malory’s account (Book I, Chapter XXV).18 Hank is agreeably impressed with the story: ‘It seemed to me that this quaint lie was most simply and beautifully told’ (p. 60), but the rest of the court falls asleep with boredom. Their response is summed up in Clarence’s comment: ‘that same old weary tale that he hath told a thousand times in the same words, and that he will tell till he dieth, every time he hath gotten his barrel full and feeleth his exaggeration-mill a-working’ (p. 56). Hank’s conclusion, ‘but then I had heard it only once, and that makes a difference; it was pleasant to the others when it 18 Numbered XXIII in the Globe edition, which adjusts some discrepancies in the chapter numbering of

Caxton’s text.

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was fresh, no doubt’ (p. 60), anticipates the use made of Malory’s text at subsequent points. The next extended quotation is as a part of Hank’s plan to start a newspaper. He details a priest from one of his newly formed government departments to write a report of a tournament. The report is drawn entirely from a part of Malory’s description of the tournament arranged by Dame Lyonesse between her knights and those of Arthur (Book VII, Chapter XXVIII with some abbreviation). It is a typical example of Malory’s description of a mêlée, detached, in Twain, from the narrative context in which the tournament is the occasion for Gareth to reveal his identity and win the hand of Lyonesse. Hank’s appraisal of his trainee’s efforts is favourable: ‘Well, the priest did very well, considering. He got in all the details, and that is a good thing in a local item [. . .] Of course this novice’s report lacked whoop and crash and lurid description, and therefore wanted the true ring; but its antique wording was quaint and sweet and simple, and full of the fragrances and flavours of the time, and these little merits made up in a measure for its more important lacks’ (pp. 93–4). But on the next occasion when Hank is the auditor of a piece of Malorian narrative, his sense of ‘its important lacks’ eradicates any other reaction. This is the account that Sandy gives him of the seven knights subdued by the smoke from his pipe, and sent to Arthur’s court, on Sandy’s instructions, to yield themselves to Hank’s service (pp. 133–5). Sandy’s account extends across five chapters of the novel (pp. 136–72), and leaps over many great matters in Morgan’s castle, in a single-minded pursuit of narrative line. Her tale corresponds verbatim to one strand of Malory’s triple quest of Gawain Ywain and Marhalt.19 Hank’s objections to the tale embrace style, structure and ideology. His taste for archaism is, it seems, becoming exhausted: ‘On live. If you’ve got a fault in the world, Sandy, it is that you are a shade too archaic’ (p. 138). Formulaic epithets and incidents, freighted, in Malory’s text, with the values of a shared moral world,20 are for Hank simply the spent tokens of an impoverished style: ‘[T]he vocabulary is too limited, and so by consequence, descriptions suffer in the matter of variety; they run too much to level Saharas of fact, and not enough to picturesque detail [. . . ] the fights are all alike [. . .] they come together with great random, and a spear is brast, and one party brake his shield, and the other one goes down, horse and man, over his horse-tail and brake his neck, and then the next candidate comes randoming in, and brast his spear and the other man brast his shield, and down he goes, horse and man, over his horse-tail, and brake his neck, and then there’s another elected, and another and still another, till the material is all used up.’ (pp. 139–40)

His irritation at the circumstantial, interconnected narrative drives him to sleep: ‘But I lost the thread there, and dozed off to slumber, thinking what a pity it was that men with such superb strength – strength enabling them to stand up cased in cruelly burdensome iron and drenched with perspiration, and hack and batter and bang each other for six hours on a stretch – should not have been born at a time when they 19 Book IV, Chapters XVI–XIX, XXIV, XXV. For the detailed correspondences see Wilson, ‘Malory in

the Connecticut Yankee’, pp. 197–8. 20 On this aspect of Malory’s writing see especially P.J.C. Field, Romance and Chronicle: A Study of

Malory’s Prose Style (London, 1971), pp. 83–102, and M. Lambert, Malory: Style and Vision in Le Morte Darthur (New Haven, CT, and London, 1975), pp. 56–123.

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could put it to some useful purpose’ (p. 141). He has now assumed the somnolent position of the courtiers listening to Merlin’s tale of the sword, but his reaction bespeaks more than impatience at an over-familiar narrative, it bespeaks the interests of an entrepreneur in a commodity culture. When Sandy finally concludes her tale, undeflected by such lapses of attention or by the two-day interval spent in Morgan’s castle, Hank is momentarily gratified to realize that the duke and his six sons defeated at the culmination of Sir Marhaus’s quest are the very same knights he has now overcome himself: ‘Well, well, well – now who would ever have thought it? One whole duke and six dukelets; why, Sandy, it was an elegant haul’ (p. 172). But as he begins to compute his gains in terms of a speculative market economy, his estimate of their value drops: ‘A successful whirl in the knight-errantry line – now what is it when you blow away the nonsense and come down to the cold facts? It’s just a corner in pork, that’s all, and you can’t make anything else out of it. [. . .] And, moreover, when you come right down to the bed-rock, knight-errantry is worse than pork; for whatever happens, the pork’s left, and so somebody’s benefited, anyway; but when the market breaks, in a knight-errantry whirl, and every knight in the pool passes in his checks, what have you got for assets? Just a rubbish-pile of battered corpses and a barrel or two of busted hardware. Can you call those assets? Give me pork, every time. Am I right?’ (pp. 172–3)

This analogy is extended, at the narrative level, into one of the book’s sharpest examples of cultural dissonance. At the culmination of Hank’s own quest to rescue Sandy’s mistress, he finds that the castle containing the captive ladies is a pigsty. His strategy for handling the situation is to admit an unbridgeable perceptual gap: ‘I saw my cue. The castle was enchanted to me, not to her. It would be wasted time to argue her out of her delusion, it couldn’t be done; I must just humour it’ (pp. 177–8). The final instance of extended quotation from Malory is the account of Arthur’s death. The narrative context is Clarence’s account of the events which have taken place during Hank’s voyage abroad, a summary account based on Malory’s narrative of the wars between Arthur and Launcelot, and Mordred’s usurpation, leading up to the last battle. Clarence concludes by reading a report from the newspaper that he had been developing during Hank’s absence (pp. 383–4). The report is Malory’s text (Book XXI, Chapter IV), starting with the moment when the king looks round the battlefield and sees only two of his knights left alive, and continuing until the final fatal exchange of blows between Arthur and Mordred. Hank is highly pleased with his protégé’s work: ‘That is a good piece of war correspondence, Clarence; you are a first-rate newspaper man’ (p. 384). What accounts for this apparent shift of stylistic preference? What makes this, in Hank’s terms at least, ‘a good piece of war correspondence’, when the earlier piece of combat reporting had received only qualified praise, and Sandy’s tale, marked by the same stylistic details as the earlier tournament account, had provoked Hank’s derision? Is this in fact a further way of displaying a reductive attitude to Malory’s text, by redefining tragedy as journalism? Or does Hank’s favourable reaction anticipate the critical view found among modern commentators, that it is in Malory’s last books that his narrative and stylistic mastery is fully realized?21 Perhaps these explanations are not incompatible, for 21 So, for example: ‘Even in his early work we can see an individual style developing which foreshadows

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among the qualities that have been admired particularly in the ending of Malory’s narrative are pace and direction. Vinaver wrote: ‘The action which leads to this ending is swift, inevitable, relentless; the circle of fear and pity is complete’.22 Furthermore, the passage in question describes a single combat, not the serial action of a tournament, and although it is not ‘picturesque’, it has a close visual focus on the individual combatants, isolated against a background of destruction: ‘Then was King Arthur ware where Sir Mordred leaned upon his sword among a great heap of dead men’ (p. 383). The rhythm of the description creates tension, tracing the movement of blows given and received; the carefully placed adverbials hold the moment between the initiation of the final mutually fatal blow and its completion: And then King Arthur smote Sir Mordred under the shield, with a foin of his spear throughout the body more than fathom. And when Sir Mordred felt that he had his death’s wound, he thrust himself, with the might that he had, up to the butt of King Arthur’s spear. And right so he smote his father Arthur with his sword holden in both his hands, on the side of the head, that the sword pierced the helmet and the brain-pan, and therewithal Sir Mordred fell stark dead to the earth. (p. 384)23

Here description mimes action in a manner which is at once economical, graphic and expressive. Here we see the ingredients which create what Field has described as ‘the sometimes dignified, sometimes brisk, but always factual impression of [Malory’s] narration’.24 They also appear to satisfy, or in retrospect perhaps more than satisfy, Hank’s requirements for ‘whoop and crash and lurid description’ in a newspaper report. Modern critics have found in this passage a symbolic and mythical depth typical of only certain moments in Malory’s writing. C. David Benson calls the mutual slaying of Mordred and Arthur, ‘an Oedipal struggle’, and cites Jill Mann’s description of it as a ‘grotesque parody of knightly adventure’ which ‘mocks the family, chivalric and personal love at the centre of the Morte Darthur’.25 Mark Lambert took the view that: ‘These last tales matter for us in a way the earlier ones do not’.26 Do we, then, see in Malory’s account of Arthur’s death-wound those qualities of Malory’s writing which lend themselves to appreciation by a more ‘modern’

22 23

24 25 26

his later mastery of story-telling’, Field, Romance and Chronicle, p. 10; ‘The steady progressive movement of the style in detail is reflected in the general sequential line of the book as a whole’, Sir Thomas Malory, The Morte Darthur, Parts Seven and Eight, ed. D.S. Brewer (London, 1968), intro., p. 20. The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. E. Vinaver, 3 vols., 3rd edn rev. P.J.C. Field (Oxford, 1990), I, xcviii. Here the Globe edition correctly follows Caxton in reading ‘bur’. Wilson, ‘Malory in the Connecticut Yankee’, p. 196, suggests Twain’s reading ‘butt’, which stands in the first and subsequent editions, may be an emendation. The editor of Twain’s authorial manuscript, on the other hand, substitutes the Globe reading. Twain’s manuscript does not reproduce the passage but contains instructions to his typist to insert it, giving the page numbers of the Globe edition; see Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, ed. B.L. Stein (Berkeley, 1979), pp. 462 and 656. The typescript copy does not survive, see Gribben, ‘ “The Master Hand of Old Malory” ’, p. 34. Since Twain does not usually modernize Malory’s vocabulary, and since his quotation from the Globe edition is generally careful, the situation is difficult to determine. Romance and Chronicle, p. 73. C.D. Benson, ‘The Ending of the Morte Darthure’, in A Companion to Malory, ed. E. Archibald and A.S.G. Edwards (Cambridge, UK, 1996), p. 235. Malory: Style and Vision, p. 124.

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sensibility? And is Hank’s admiration of the passage to be accounted for in these terms? Or should we rather see in Hank’s reaction to the passage a measure of his accommodation to the world he has been seeking only to alter to his own design? Other signs of such accommodation can be noted: his admiration for the king, his final acceptance of Sandy, his delirious wish to return to his dream-world at the end of his story.27 And is Hank’s divided response a reflection of Twain’s own divided attitude to the fictional past he has adopted and recreated?28 Twain’s citations of Malory, taken all together, show an ambivalent attitude to Malory’s text, an ambivalence that is not clearly separable into the personae of Hank and the narrator who names himself as ‘M.T.’ in the ‘Final P.S.’ Outside the pages of the novel, Twain is outspoken in his antipathy to chivalric values associated with the Middle Ages, yet he also speaks admiringly of the text which inscribes such values. In a well-known letter to Mrs Fairbanks written in 1886, when he had begun writing the adventures of his Connecticut Yankee, he says he intends to ‘leave unsmirched & unbelittled the great & beautiful characters drawn by the master hand of old Malory’, and furthermore that ‘I should grieve indeed if the final disruption of the Round Table, & the extinction of its old tender & gracious friendships, & that last battle – the Battle of the Broken Hearts, it might be called – should lose their pathos & their tears through my handling’. He declares that his story ‘isn’t a satire peculiarly, it is more especially a contrast. It merely exhibits under high lights, the daily life of the [imaginary Arthurian] time & that of to-day; & necessarily the bringing them into this immediate juxtaposition emphasizes the salients of both’.29 Whether or not these remarks are disingenuous, and whether or not it was only during the course of composition that Twain’s vision, both of the Arthurian past and the nineteenth-century present, darkened,30 the novel finally presents the reader with two irreconcilably contrasted worlds. Twain does not simply reject the past in order to vindicate the present, but holds the two in tension. A verbal emblem of the conceptual gap between the two worlds is Hank’s title ‘The Boss’. In his account of how this is accorded to him, after he has declined a traditional title from the king, he relates: ‘This title fell casually from the lips of a blacksmith, one day, in a village, was caught up as a happy thought and tossed from mouth to mouth with a laugh and an affirmative vote; in ten days it had swept the Kingdom, and was become as familiar as the King’s name [. . .] This title, translated into modern speech, would be THE BOSS’ (pp. 90–1). What is notable in this account is that we have only the modern term. Twain does not attempt to simulate what fell from the lips of the blacksmith. The absence of the ‘original’ title is a significant lacuna in the fictive language of the fictive sixth century. Hank indicates there was an original term but Twain implies there could not have been. The absence signals the gap between the two worlds, the untranslatability between the two languages. 27 For further discussion of these elements of the work see L.C. Kordecki, ‘Twain’s Critique of Malory’s

Romance: Forma tractandi and A Connecticut Yankee’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 41 (1986): 329–48. 28 Kordecki, ‘Twain’s Critique of Malory’s Romance’, 331, cites a range of views on Twain’s authorial identification with the narrator. 29 Mark Twain to Mrs. Fairbanks, ed. D. Wecter (San Marino, CA, 1949), pp. 257–8. 30 See Gribben, ‘ “The Master Hand of Old Malory” ’, p. 39, for a survey of both these critical views.

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The term by which Hank is regularly addressed, ‘Sir Boss’, is thus a hybrid, a conjunction of terms not mutually translatable. It does not bridge the two worlds but straddles the gulf between them. It is the semantic counterpart of the Beard illustration of Hank’s dream, as reported in the ‘Final P.S. by M.T.’ The illustration depicts Sandy and Hank on either side of a chasm, held apart by the winged figure of Time. Sewell speaks of this illustration as an icon of ‘Mark Twain’s own incapacity to comprehend the medieval world, the unbridgeable gap [. . .] between Malory’s language and his own’.31 But this is to elide the frame and the tale. It is the argument of the present essay, and it is also more in keeping with the rest of Sewell’s own argument, that the novel shows not Twain’s own incapacity to comprehend the medieval world but his realization that linguistic differences encode incompatible and irreducible differences of experience which are at the same time inevitable and dangerous. Mutual incomprehensibility is at the same time an inevitability and a threat. Hank’s journey into the past destroys that past; Twain writes a dark vision of the present in which a nostalgic return to the past is impossible. Twain’s use of Malory’s Morte Darthur is a part of the textual history of that work. Indeed for some readers it may have been, and may still be, the only form in which Malory’s text was known (much as some readers may be familiar with The Pilgrim’s Progress only through the pages of Louisa M. Alcott’s Little Women). I hope that a fresh look at the way Twain uses Malory’s text as part of his complex, critical, witty and prophetic vision will be an appropriate tribute to a scholar who gave us the first detailed analysis of Malory’s style, whose contribution to the textual scholarship of Malory has been immense, and whose interests, in his writing and teaching, have encompassed Arthurian materials from before Malory to the present day.

31 Mark Twain’s Languages, p. 135.

P.J.C. Field: Publications BOOKS Romance and Chronicle: A Study of Sir Thomas Malory’s Prose Style. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1971. Sir Thomas Malory. Le Morte Darthur, The Seventh and Eighth Tales: An Edition. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1978. Reprinted 1982, 1984, 1986. Sir Thomas Malory. The Works. Oxford English Texts. Third Edition, ed. Eugène Vinaver, rev. P.J.C. Field. 3 volumes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1993. Paperback edition 1999. Malory: Texts and Sources. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1998. A new edition of Malory’s Morte Darthur. (In preparation.)

BOOKLETS The Last Years of Sir Thomas Malory. Manchester: The John Rylands Library, l983. Originally published in the Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library (1981–82), as below. King Arthur’s Battles: An Inaugural Lecture. Bangor: University of Wales Bangor, 1996.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO BOOKS ‘The Source of Malory’s “Tale of Gareth”.’ In Aspects of Malory, ed. T. Takamiya and Derek Brewer. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1981. Pp. 57–70. ‘Time and Elaine of Astolat.’ In Studies in Malory, ed. J.W. Spisak. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1985. Pp. 231–6. ‘Sir Thomas Malory.’ In The Arthurian Encyclopedia, ed. Norris Lacy et al. New York: Garland, 1986. Pp. 352–7. ‘Shakespeare’s King Arthur.’ In The Welsh Connection, ed. William Tydeman. Llandyssul: Gomer, 1986. Pp. 11–23. ‘A Rereading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.’ In Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism, ed. Dennis Poupard and Jelena O. Krstovic. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research Co., 1987. Reprinted from Studies in Philology (1971), as below. Extract from Romance and Chronicle (supra). In Literature Criticism 1400–1800, vol. 11, ed. James E. Person Jr and Sandra Williamson. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research Co., 1989. ‘Hunting, Hawking, and Textual Criticism in Malory’s Morte Darthur.’ In Arthurian and Other Studies presented to Shunichi Noguchi, ed. Takashi Suzuki and Tsuyoshi Mukai. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1993. Pp. 95–105. ‘Author, Scribe, and Reader: The Case of Harleuse and Peryne.’ In Noble and Joyous

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Histories: English Romances 1375–1650, ed. Eiléan Ní Cuilleanáin and J.D. Pheifer. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1993. Pp. 137–55. ‘Fifteenth-Century History in Malory’s Morte Darthur.’ In The Formation of Culture in Medieval Britain: Celtic, Latin, and Norman Influences on English Music, Literature, History, and Art, ed. Françoise le Saux. [Memorial Essays for Constance Bullock-Davies.] Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 1995. Pp. 39–70. ‘Biography and Documents.’ In The Malory Companion, ed. Elizabeth Archibald and A.S.G. Edwards. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1996. Pp. 115–30. ‘Malory’s Mordred and the Morte Arthure.’ In Romance Reading on the Book: Essays on Medieval Narrative presented to Maldwyn Mills, ed. Jennifer Fellows, Rosalind Field, Gillian Rogers, and Judith Weiss. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996. Pp. 77–93. ‘Malory.’ Chapter 7 in The Arthur of the English: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval English Life and Literature, ed. W.R.J. Barron. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999. Pp. 225–46, 360–3. ‘Caxton’s Roman War.’ The Malory Debate: Essays on the Texts of Le Morte Darthur, ed. Bonnie Wheeler, Robert L. Kindrick, and Michael Salda. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000. Pp. 127–67. Reprinted with minor revisions from Arthuriana 1995 as below. ‘Malory and the Battle of Towton.’ Social and Literary Contexts of Malory’s Morte Darthur, ed. D. Thomas Hanks Jr. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000. Pp. 68–74. ‘Malory and His Audience.’ New Directions in Arthurian Studies, ed. Alan Lupack. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002. Pp. 21–32. Introduction to Le Morte Darthur: The Seventh and Eighth Tales (above). In Literature Criticism, vol. 88, ed. Michael L. LaBlank. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research Co., 2003. Pp. 183–98. ‘De Worde and Malory.’ The Medieval Book and a Modern Collector: Essays in Honour of Toshiyuki Takamiya. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2004. In press. ‘Malory, Sir Thomas.’ The New Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Colin Matthew. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Forthcoming, September 2004. ‘Malory, Sir Robert, Prior of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem.’ The New Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Colin Matthew. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Forthcoming September 2004. (With Dr J.K.B. Withrington.) An edition of the analogues of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale. Part of a replacement, ed. Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel and sponsored by the New Chaucer Society, of Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ed. W.F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster. Publication in Vol. 2, in 2004. In press.

ACADEMIC JOURNAL ESSAYS ‘Marvell and The Rape of the Lock.’ Notes & Queries, 212 (1967): 408–9. ‘Description and Narration in Malory.’ Speculum, 43 (1968): 476–86. ‘Four Functions of Malory’s Minor Characters.’ Medium Ævum, 37 (1968): 37–45. ‘Authoritative Echo in Dryden.’ Durham University Journal, 62 (1970): 137–51. ‘Chaucer’s Merchant and the Sin against Nature.’ Notes & Queries, 215 (1970): 84–6. ‘Dryden and Rochester.’ Notes & Queries, 215 (1970): 259–60. (With Miss M.A. Muir.) ‘French Words and Phrases in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur.’ Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 72 (1971): 483–500. ‘A Rereading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.’ Studies in Philology, 68 (1971): 255–69. ‘Malory’s Morte Arthure, and the King of Wales.’ Notes & Queries, 217 (1972): 285–86. ‘Sir Thomas Malory, M.P.’ Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 47 (1974): 24–35. ‘Utopia, the Emperor Constantine, and Pythagoras.’ Moreana, 12 (1975): 21–3.

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‘Sir Robert Malory, Prior of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem in England (1432–1439/40).’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 28 (1977): 249–64. ‘The Winchester Round Table.’ Notes & Queries, 223 (1978): 204. ‘Thomas Malory: The Hutton Documents.’ Medium Ævum, 48 (1979): 213–39. ‘Malory’s Minor Sources.’ Notes & Queries, 224 (1979): 107–10. ‘Thomas Malory and the Warwick Retinue Roll.’ Midland History, 5 (1979–80): 20–30. (With Miss M.C. Chudley) ‘A Source for Spenser’s House of Busirane Episode.’ Notes & Queries, 225 (1980): 304–6. ‘The Last Years of Sir Thomas Malory.’ Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, 64 (1981–82): 433–56. ‘Malory and The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell.’ Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 219 (1982): 374–81. ‘Malory’s Place-Names: Roone and the Low Country.’ Notes & Queries, 230 (1985): 452–53. ‘An Array of Mortes.’ Avalon to Camelot, 2.2 (1986): 9–10. ‘Malory’s Place-Names: Westminster Bridge and Virvyn.’ Notes & Queries, 232 (1987): 292–5. ‘The French Prose Tristan: A Note on Some Manuscripts, a List of Printed Texts, and Two Correlations with Malory’s Morte Darthur.’ Bibliographical Bulletin of the International Arthurian Society, 41 (1989): 269–87. ‘Malory and Chrétien de Troyes.’ Reading Medieval Studies, 17 (1991): 19–30. ‘A New Episode from the Livre d’Artus.’ Bibliographical Bulletin of the International Arthurian Society, 43 (1991): 253–56. (With Miss L.A. Clark.) ‘The Amsterdam University Fragment of the Old French Prose Merlin.’ Medium Ævum, 61 (1992): 275–84. (With Dr Gillian Rogers.) ‘Malory’s Trapdoor, and the Name Estorause.’ Notes & Queries, 238 (1993): 23–5. ‘Malory and the French Prose Lancelot.’ Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, 75 (1993): 79–102. ‘The Earliest Texts of Le Morte Darthur.’ Poetica (Tokyo), 37 (1993): 18–31. ‘Malory and Perlesvaus.’ Medium Ævum, 62 (1993): 259–69. ‘‘Above Rubies’: Malory and Morte Arthure 2559–61.’ Notes & Queries, 240 (1995): 29–30. ‘Caxton’s Roman War.’ Arthuriana, 5.2 (1995): 31–73. ‘The Empire of Lucius Iberius.’ Studies in Bibliography 49 (1996): 106–28. ‘Nennius and His History.’ Studia Celtica 30 (1996): 159–65. ‘Balin and the Dolorous Stroke.’ A Ful Noble Knight 1.2 (1999): 1–3. ‘Malory’s Own Marginalia.’ Medium Ævum 70.2 (2001): 226–39. ‘The Ending of Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale.’ Medium Ævum 71.2 (2002): 302–06. ‘Malory’s Sir Phelot and the Problems of Minor Sources.’ BBSIA 54 (2002): 345–61. ‘Malory and His Scribes.’ Arthuriana, 14.1 (2004): 31–42.

ELECTRONIC PUBLICATION The Historical Arthur: A Bibliography. University of Rochester, Camelot Project Bibliographies, general editor Alan J. Lupack. http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/acpbibs/ hisarth.htm On line 15 April 1999. ‘Gildas and the City of the Legions.’ The Heroic Age, 1.1 http://members.aol.com/ heroicage1/homepage.html On line June 1999.

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REVIEW ARTICLES Alistair Fox, Thomas More: History and Providence (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982); Elizabeth McCutcheon, My Dear Peter: The ‘Ars Poetica’ and Hermeneutics for More’s ‘Utopia’ (Angers: Moreanum, 1983); George M. Logan, The Meaning of More’s ‘Utopia’ (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983). In Prose Studies, 7 (1984): 261–2. Middle English Romances, ed. Stephen Shepherd, Norton Critical Editions (New York: Norton, 1995) and The Birth of Romance: An Anthology, ed. Judith Weiss (London: J.M. Dent, 1992). In Review of English Studies, 48 (1997): 221–3.

REVIEWS The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugène Vinaver, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967 [1968]). In Studia Neophilologica, 41 (1969): 180–4. Elizabeth Pochoda, Arthurian Propaganda (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1971). In Review of English Studies, n.s. 23 (1972): 466–8. Robert K. Stone, Middle English Prose Style (The Hague: Mouton, 1970). In Speculum, 48 (1973): 182–5. Larry D. Benson, Malory’s ‘Morte Darthur’ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976). In Medium Ævum, 46 (1977): 339–43. Mark Lambert, Malory: Style and Vision in ‘Le Morte Darthur’ (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975). In Medium Ævum, 46 (1977): 339–43. Walter Hilton, Of Angels’ Song, ed. T. Takamiya (Tokyo, 1977). In Fourteenth-Century English Mystics Newsletter, 5.2 (1979): 36–38. Charlotte C. Morse, The Pattern of Judgement in ‘The Queste’ and ‘Cleanness’ (Columbia, Miss.: Missouri University Press, 1978). In Review of English Studies, 31 (1980): 69–71. W.R.J. Barron, Trawthe and Treason: The Sin of Gawain Reconsidered (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980). In Medium Ævum, 52 (1983): 136–7. The Arthurian Bibliography, I: Author Listing, ed. C.E. Pickford and Rex Last (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1981). In Medium Ævum, 53 (1984): 138–9. Arthurian Literature I (1981). In Medium Ævum, 53 (1984): 139–40. Arthurian Literature II (1982). In Notes & Queries, 229 (1984): 254–5. The Arthurian Bibliography, II: Subject Index, ed. C.E. Pickford et al. (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1983). In Medium Ævum, 54 (1985): 346–7. Caxton’s Malory, ed. James Spisak et al, 2 vols (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1983). In The Library, 6th series, 7 (1985): 366–9. Sandra Ness Ihle, Malory’s Grail Quest (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983). In Review of English Studies, 36 (1985): 410–12. The Legend of King Arthur in the Middle Ages: Essays presented to A.H. Diverres, ed. P.B. Grout et al. (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1983). In Review of English Studies, 36 (1985): 410–12. Rosemary Morris, The Character of King Arthur in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1982). In Medium Ævum, 54 (1985): 323–4. Arthurian Literature III (1983). In Review of English Studies, 37 (1986): 134. Arthurian Literature IV (1985). In Notes & Queries, 231 (1986): 531–2. J.M. Gray, Thro’ the Vision of the Night (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1980). In Medium Ævum, 55 (1986): 306. Janel M. Mueller, The Native Tongue and the Word: Developments in English Prose Style

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1380–1580 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, l984). In Prose Studies, 9 (1986): 531–2. Muriel Whitaker, Arthur’s Kingdom of Adventure (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1984). In Medium Ævum, 55 (1986): 304. Arthurian Literature V (1985). In Review of English Studies, 38 (1987): 276–7. Arthurian Literature VI (1986). In Review of English Studies, 39 (1988): 152–3. The Changing Face of Arthurian Romance: Essays on Arthurian Prose Romances in Memory of Cedric Pickford, ed. Alison Adams, A.H. Diverres, K. Stern, and K. Varty (Cambridge: The Boydell Press, 1986). In Medium Ævum, 58 (1989): 313–14. C. Dean, Arthur of England: English Attitudes to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987). In Review of English Studies, 40 (1989): 544–5. Malory: The Critical Heritage, ed. M.J. Parins (London: Routledge, 1988). In Notes & Queries, 234 (1989): 496–7. Felicity Riddy, Sir Thomas Malory (Leiden: Brill, 1987). In Medium Ævum, 58 (1989): 160. Arthurian Literature VII (1987). In Review of English Studies, 41 (1990): 290–1. Barry Gaines, Sir Thomas Malory: An Anecdotal Bibliography of Editions 1485–1985 (New York: A.M.S. Press, 1990). In Notes & Queries, 236 (1991): 527. La
amon’s Arthur: The Arthurian Section of La
amon’s Brut (Lines 9229–14297), ed. and trans. W.R.J. Barron and S.C. Weinberg (Harlow: Longman, 1989). In Notes and Queries, 236 (1991): 97–8. Françoise Le Saux, Layamon’s ‘Brut’: the Poem and its Sources (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 1989). In Review of English Studies, 42 (1991): 560–1. J.R. Simpson, Return to Camelot (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 1989). In Modern Language Review, 87 (1992): 686–7. The Romance of Merlin: An Anthology, ed. Peter Goodrich (New York: Garland, 1990). In Yearbook of English Studies, 23 (1993): 311–12. Julia C. Crick, The ‘Historia regum Britannie’ of Geoffrey of Monmouth, IV: Dissemination and Reception in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1991). In Review of English Studies, 45 (1994): 243–4. Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur: Tales Seven and Eight, ed. Greg Waite (Otago: University of Otago Press, 1994). In Parergon, 13 (1995–6): 184–5. Arthurian Literature XII (1993). In Modern Language Review, 91 (1996): 184–5. Corinne Saunders, The Forest of Medieval Romance (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1993). In Review of English Studies, 47 (1996): 72–3. King Arthur: A Casebook, ed. Edward Donald Kennedy (New York: Garland, 1996). In Review of English Studies, 48 (1997): 518–19. Andrew Lynch. Malory’s Book of Arms: The Narrative of Combat in ‘Le Morte Darthur’ (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997). In Arthuriana, 8.1 (1998): 93–5. Sir Thomas Malory. Le Morte Darthur: The Winchester Manuscript, ed. Helen Cooper. Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). In Notes & Queries, 243 (1998): 491–2. Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, The Two Versions of Malory’s ‘Morte Darthur’ (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995). In Review of English Studies, 49 (1998): 119–20. Siân Echard. Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). In Review of English Studies, 50 (1999): 505–6. Anthony Emery. Greater Medieval Houses of England and Wales 1300–1500. Vol. I: Northern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). In Arthuriana, 9.1 (1999): 154–5. Malcolm Hebron. The Medieval Siege: Theme and Image in Middle English Romance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). In Review of English Studies, 50 (1999): 75–6.

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Prose Merlin, ed. John Conlee. TEAMS Middle English Texts (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998). In Arthuriana 9.4 (1999): 121–2. The Arthurian Bibliography, III: 1978–1992, ed. Caroline Palmer (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1998). In Review of English Studies, 51 (2000): 267–8. Robin Hood: An Anthology of Texts and Criticism, ed. Stephen Knight (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1999). In Review of English Studies, 51 (2000): 657–8. King Arthur’s Round Table: An Archaeological Investigation, ed. Martin Biddle (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2000). In Medium Ævum, 70.2 (2001): 306–7. Dafydd ap Gwylim. His Poems, tr. Gwyn Thomas. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001. In Medium Ævum, 71 (2002): 174. Blood Red Roses: The Archaeology of a Mass Grave from the Battle of Towton A.D. 1461, ed. Veronica Fiorato, Anthea Boylston, and Christopher Knüsel. Oxford: Oxbow, 2000. In Arthuriana, 13.1 (2003): 113–14.

Notes on Contributors ROSAMUND ALLEN (Queen Mary, University of London) teaches and publishes on Arthurian topics, Middle English romances and textual interpretation. She has published an edition of King Horn, and modern English versions of Richard Rolle’s English Writings and La
amon’s Brut, and has made a number of recordings of Old English and Middle English texts. ELIZABETH ARCHIBALD is Reader in English Literature at the University of Bristol. She has published widely on medieval literature, including studies of Apollonius of Tyre (1991) and the incest theme in medieval literature (2001), and A Companion to Malory, co-edited with A.S.G. Edwards (1996). FANNI BOGDANOW is Emeritus Professor at the University of Manchester. She is editor of the five-volume edition of La Version Post-Vulgate de la Queste del Saint Graal et de la Mort Artu, Troisième Partie du Roman du Graal and of the Vulgate Queste. In 1999 she was awarded Le Prix Excalibur for her contribution to Arthurian scholarship. DEREK BREWER has been a lifelong reader and student of Malory. He is a graduate of Magdalen College, Oxford, with an interval as an infantry officer 1942–5 in the British Army, and has worked in universities in Birmingham, Japan and Cambridge, with many visits to the United States. His first publication on Malory was the modernized edition of the last part of Le Morte Darthur, first published in 1968 and still in print. He has published a number of articles on ‘Honour’ and other matters in Malory as well as on other English authors, especially Chaucer. He was Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 1977–90 and is now Emeritus Professor of Cambridge University. GEOFFREY BROMILEY has recently retired from a post in the School of Modern European Languages at the University of Durham. He has written extensively on the Tristan legend and his publications include Thomas’s ‘Tristan’ and the ‘Folie Tristan d’Oxford’. He is an Honorary President of the British Branch of the International Arthurian Society. HELEN COOPER is a Tutorial Fellow of University College, Oxford. Her books include the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the Morte Darthur. JANET COWEN has recently retired from the post of Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, King’s College London. Her research interests are in later Middle English, especially Chaucer, Malory and drama. Her publications include Chaucer and Fifteenth-Century Poetry, ed. with Julia Boffey (1991); and The Legend of Good Women, ed. with George Kane (1995). ROSALIND FIELD (no relation to Peter) is Senior Lecturer in English at Royal Holloway, University of London. She contributed the chapter on ‘Romance in England 1066–1400’ to the Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (1999). LINDA GOWANS is an independent scholar who has published work on medieval French and modern Gaelic Arthurian texts. DOUGLAS GRAY retired as J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language at Oxford in 1997. He has written a number of books and articles on medieval literature, and has been a friend and admirer of Peter Field and his work from the time when Peter was a research student at Oxford. PHILLIPA HARDMAN is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Reading. She has edited The Heege Manuscript: A Facsimile of NLS MS Adv. 19.3.1 (2000) and The Matter

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of Identity in Medieval Romance (2002), and has written articles on late medieval English literature and its manuscript context. AMÉLIA P. HUTCHINSON (University of Georgia) was born in Portugal where she obtained her first degree in English and German Philology and developed her first interest for Arthurian Studies. She has been living in the USA since 1996. In 1975 she was appointed Lectora in Portuguese at the University of Manchester, UK. Since then, she has developed parallel careers as a medievalist and as a specialist in Portuguese Language Studies. Her publications include a Portuguese grammar for speakers of English and many articles on Arthurian Studies. EDWARD DONALD KENNEDY is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His work includes Chronicles and Other Historical Writing, vol. 8 of A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, gen. ed. Albert E. Hartung (New Haven, CT, 1989), King Arthur: A Casebook (New York, 1996), and numerous articles and reviews, primarily on Arthurian subjects and chronicles. He is editor of Studies in Philology. ELSPETH MARY KENNEDY was born in Newbury, Berks, England. In 1940–4, she worked for British Military Intelligence. From 1945 to 1947, she studied at Somerville College, Oxford, and she was awarded an Oxford D.Phil. in 1951. A Lecturer in the French department, University of Manchester, 1954–66, she then became Tutorial Fellow of St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and University Lecturer 1966–87. She served as President of the International Arthurian Society 1987–90, and in 1994 was awarded Le Prix Excalibur for her contribution to Arthurian scholarship. Her publications include Lancelot do Lac: the Non-cyclic Old French Romance (1980); Lancelot and the Grail (1986); The Book of Chivalry of Geoffroi de Charny: Text, Context and Translation, with Richard W. Kaeuper (1996) as well as a large number of articles, including ‘The Scribe as Editor’ in Mélanges Jean Frappier (1970). NORRIS J. LACY is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of French and Medieval Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He is author or editor of some twenty-five books, the majority of them Arthurian, including The Craft of Chrétien de Troyes, The Arthurian Encyclopedia, and (as general editor and one of nine translators) the multi-volume Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation. He is a past president of the International Arthurian Society and has been decorated by the French government as a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques. FRANÇOISE H.M. LE SAUX is Director of the Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Reading (England). She works predominantly on medieval vernacular translations of the Galfridian material, especially Wace and La
amon. MARGARET LOCHERBIE-CAMERON is Senior Lecturer and former Head of Department of the Department of English, University of Wales, Bangor. Her teaching interests are Old and Middle English, and Children’s Fiction, and she has published essays in both areas. ROGER MIDDLETON was a Lecturer in French at the University of Nottingham until early retirement in 1995. He has published on several subjects, including Erec et Enide, Gereint, medievalism in the eighteenth century, and the manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes. Now working in Oxford, his present interests are mainly in the history and ownership of manuscripts, particularly those of the Lancelot-Grail cycle. ARTHUR DAVID MILLS is Emeritus Professor and Honorary Senior Fellow in the School of English, University of Liverpool. He has edited the Chester Mystery Plays for EETS (1974, 1983) and written numerous books and articles on medieval drama, including Recycling the Cycle (1999). He is currently co-editing the drama-records of Cheshire for the REED series. In the wider field of medieval literature he has published studies of Piers Plowman, Thomas Hoccleve, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. MALDWYN MILLS was educated at the University of Cardiff and Jesus College, Oxford,

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and has worked predominantly in the field of medieval romance. He is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Aberystwyth. YUJI NAKAO is Professor Emeritus at Nagoya University. He currently teaches at Chubu University. His recent publications include ‘On Affirmative Disjunctive Connectives in the Two Versions of Malory’, Synchronic and Diachronic Studies on Language (Nagoya, 2000) and ‘Musings on the Reviser of Book v in Caxton’s Malory’, in The Malory Debate (Cambridge, UK, 2000) among others. SHUNICHI NOGUCHI was born in 1933, educated at Hiroshima University and Birmingham University (a British Council scholar), and appointed to Emeritus Professor at Osaka University of Education in 1998. RALPH NORRIS is a doctoral candidate at the University of Wales, Bangor under the direction of P.J.C. Field. His dissertation is an attempt to form an accurate picture of the minor sources of Malory’s Morte Darthur. He is also an occasional English Instructor at Atlanta’s Kennesaw State University. AD PUTTER is Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies and Reader in English Literature at the University of Bristol. He is the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and French Arthurian Romance (1995) and An Introduction to the Gawain-Poet (1996), and co-editor of The Spirit of Medieval Popular Romance (2000). He is collaborating on a new edition of the Gawain-poet and on a metrical study of alliterative verse. RALUCA L. RADULESCU is Research Associate at the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Her recent publications include The Gentry Context for Malory’s Morte Darthur (2003) and articles on the Brut chronicle, fifteenthcentury genealogical rolls, and the reception of Arthurian romance. JANE H.M. TAYLOR was formerly Fellow in Medieval French at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and is now Principal of Collingwood College and Professor of Modern European Languages at the University of Durham. She was President of the International Arthurian Society from 1999 to 2002, and has written extensively on matters Arthurian. Her most recent book was on The Poetry of François Villon (Cambridge, UK, 2001), and she is currently working on a book on the circulation of lyric poetry at the end of the Middle Ages. NEIL E. THOMAS is Reader in German at the University of Durham and has been British Branch President of the International Arthurian Society (2001–03). His book Diu Crône and the Medieval Arthurian Cycle appeared in 2002. He has written further monographs on the post-classical German romances, Gottfried’s Tristan and the Nibelungenlied. Recently he completed a second book on Wigalois. BONNIE WHEELER directs the Medieval Studies Program at Southern Methodist University. She is the editor of the journal Arthuriana. She has edited or co-edited several Arthurian books, including The Malory Debate: The Texts of Le Morte Darthur (2000). K. S. WHETTER pursued both his Master’s and Doctoral dissertations under Peter Field’s direction. He is currently Assistant Professor of English at Acadia University, Nova Scotia. He has written a biography of Malory for Chadwyck-Healey and published on Arthurian matters in BBIAS and RMS, and Writing War (Cambridge, UK, 2004). ANDREA M.L. WILLIAMS was educated at the Universities of Adelaide and Oxford. She has been a lecturer in the French Department at Exeter University since 1992, specializing in Medieval Literature, Iconography, and the reworking of medieval themes in contemporary French novels and cinema. She has recently published The Adventures of the Holy Grail: a Study of La Queste del Saint Graal (Oxford, 2001).

Tabula Gratulatoria Manabu Agari Shuichi Aita Rosamund Allen Taijiro Amazawa Elizabeth Archibald Lucie Armitt Dorsey Armstrong Richard Barber Jane Bliss Fanni Bogdanow J.G. Bradbury D.S. Brewer Geoffrey Bromiley Mark Burgess Karen Cherewatuk Michael Cichon Helen Cooper Janet Cowen Roger Dahood John and Lisa Doherty Stephanie Cain Van D’Elden Rosalind Field Yuri Fuwa Linda Gowans Tony Grand Douglas Gray Mary Hamel D. Thomas Hanks, Jr Phillipa Hardman Christina Hardyment Norman D.Hinton, Emeritus Professor, University of Illinois/Springfield Don Hoffman Freda Humble Tony Hunt Amélia P. Hutchinson Sandra Ihle and Douglas Kelly Sanae Ikeda Tadahiro Ikegami David R. Jones Marc P. Kaiser Takako Kato Edward Donald Kennedy Elspeth Kennedy

Norris Lacy Françoise H.M. Le Saux Margaret Locherbie-Cameron Dr I.C. Lovecy Andrew Lynch John K. Matthews Professor Terence McCarthy Roger Middleton Arthur David Mills Maldwyn Mills Kiyokazu Mizobata Tsuyoshi Mukai Yuji Nakao Daniel P. Nastali Akiko Nii Shunichi Noguchi Ralph Norris Patricia A. O’Neill Dr Eithne O’Sharkey Caroline Palmer Karen Pratt Ad Putter Raluca L. Radulescu Samantha Rayner Felicity Riddy Dr Gillian Rogers Cory Rushton Corinne Saunders William Snell Dr Diane Speed William Stallsmith Ceri Sullivan Masaji Tajiri Toshiyuki Takamiya Jane H.M. Taylor Neil E.Thomas Michael Twomey Yoko Wada Ronald Waldron Bonnie Wheeler K.S. Whetter Andrea M.L. Williams Dr John Withrington

University of Salford Department of English, University of Wales, Bangor

ARTHURIAN STUDIES I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI

XVII

XVIII XIX XX XXI XXII XXIII

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ASPECTS OF MALORY, edited by Toshiyuki Takamiya and Derek Brewer THE ALLITERATIVE MORTE ARTHURE: A Reassessment of the Poem, edited by Karl Heinz Göller THE ARTHURIAN BIBLIOGRAPHY, I: Author Listing, edited by C. E. Pickford and R. W. Last THE CHARACTER OF KING ARTHUR IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE, Rosemary Morris PERCEVAL: The Story of the Grail, by Chrétien de Troyes, translated by Nigel Bryant THE ARTHURIAN BIBLIOGRAPHY, II: Subject Index, edited by C. E. Pickford and R. W. Last THE LEGEND OF ARTHUR IN THE MIDDLE AGES, edited by P. B. Grout, R. A. Lodge, C. E. Pickford and E. K. C. Varty THE ROMANCE OF YDER, edited and translated by Alison Adams THE RETURN OF KING ARTHUR, Beverly Taylor and Elisabeth Brewer ARTHUR’S KINGDOM OF ADVENTURE: The World of Malory’s Morte Darthur, Muriel Whitaker KNIGHTHOOD IN THE MORTE DARTHUR, Beverly Kennedy LE ROMAN DE TRISTAN EN PROSE, tome I, edited by Renée L. Curtis LE ROMAN DE TRISTAN EN PROSE, tome II, edited by Renée L. Curtis LE ROMAN DE TRISTAN EN PROSE, tome III, edited by Renée L. Curtis LOVE’S MASKS: Identity, Intertextuality, and Meaning in the Old French Tristan Poems, Merritt R. Blakeslee THE CHANGING FACE OF ARTHURIAN ROMANCE: Essays on Arthurian Prose Romances in memory of Cedric E. Pickford, edited by Alison Adams, Armel H. Diverres, Karen Stern and Kenneth Varty REWARDS AND PUNISHMENTS IN THE ARTHURIAN ROMANCES AND LYRIC POETRY OF MEDIEVAL FRANCE: Essays presented to Kenneth Varty on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, edited by Peter V. Davies and Angus J. Kennedy CEI AND THE ARTHURIAN LEGEND, Linda Gowans LA
AMON’S BRUT: The Poem and its Sources, Françoise H. M. Le Saux READING THE MORTE DARTHUR, Terence McCarthy, reprinted as AN INTRODUCTION TO MALORY CAMELOT REGAINED: The Arthurian Revival and Tennyson, 1800–1849, Roger Simpson THE LEGENDS OF KING ARTHUR IN ART, Muriel Whitaker GOTTFRIED VON STRASSBURG AND THE MEDIEVAL TRISTAN LEGEND: Papers from an Anglo-North American symposium, edited with an introduction by Adrian Stevens and Roy Wisbey ARTHURIAN POETS: CHARLES WILLIAMS, edited and introduced by David Llewellyn Dodds AN INDEX OF THEMES AND MOTIFS IN TWELFTH-CENTURY FRENCH ARTHURIAN POETRY, E. H. Ruck CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES AND THE GERMAN MIDDLE AGES: Papers from an international symposium, edited with an introduction by Martin H. Jones and Roy Wisbey

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SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT: Sources and Analogues, compiled by Elisabeth Brewer CLIGÉS by Chrétien de Troyes, edited by Stewart Gregory and Claude Luttrell THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SIR THOMAS MALORY, P. J. C. Field T. H. WHITE’S THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING, Elisabeth Brewer ARTHURIAN BIBLIOGRAPHY, III: 1978–1992, Author Listing and Subject Index, compiled by Caroline Palmer ARTHURIAN POETS: JOHN MASEFIELD, edited and introduced by David Llewellyn Dodds THE TEXT AND TRADITION OF LA
AMON’S BRUT, edited by Françoise Le Saux CHIVALRY IN TWELFTH-CENTURY GERMANY: The Works of Hartmann von Aue, W. H. Jackson THE TWO VERSIONS OF MALORY’S MORTE DARTHUR: Multiple Negation and the Editing of the Text, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade RECONSTRUCTING CAMELOT: French Romantic Medievalism and the Arthurian Tradition, Michael Glencross A COMPANION TO MALORY, edited by Elizabeth Archibald and A. S. G. Edwards A COMPANION TO THE GAWAIN-POET, edited by Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson MALORY’S BOOK OF ARMS: The Narrative of Combat in Le Morte Darthur, Andrew Lynch MALORY: TEXTS AND SOURCES, P. J. C. Field KING ARTHUR IN AMERICA, Alan Lupack and Barbara Tepa Lupack THE SOCIAL AND LITERARY CONTEXTS OF MALORY’S MORTE DARTHUR, edited by D. Thomas Hanks Jr THE GENESIS OF NARRATIVE IN MALORY’S MORTE DARTHUR, Elizabeth Edwards GLASTONBURY ABBEY AND THE ARTHURIAN TRADITION, edited by James P. Carley THE KNIGHT WITHOUT THE SWORD: A Social Landscape of Malorian Chivalry, Hyonjin Kim ULRICH VON ZATZIKHOVEN’S LANZELET: Narrative Style and Entertainment, Nicola McLelland THE MALORY DEBATE: Essays on the Texts of Le Morte Darthur, edited by Bonnie Wheeler, Robert L. Kindrick and Michael N. Salda MERLIN AND THE GRAIL: Joseph of Arimathea, Merlin, Perceval: The Trilogy of Arthurian romances attributed to Robert de Boron, translated by Nigel Bryant ARTHURIAN BIBLIOGRAPHY IV: 1993–1998, Author Listing and Subject Index, compiled by Elaine Barber DIU CRÔNE AND THE MEDIEVAL ARTHURIAN CYCLE, Neil Thomas KING ARTHUR IN MUSIC, edited by Richard Barber THE BOOK OF LANCELOT: The Middle Dutch Lancelot Compilation and the Medieval Tradition of Narrative Cycles, Bart Besamusca A COMPANION TO THE LANCELOT-GRAIL CYCLE, edited by Carol Dover THE GENTRY CONTEXT FOR MALORY’S MORTE DARTHUR, Raluca L. Radulescu PARZIVAL, WITH TITUREL AND THE LOVE LYRICS, translated by Cyril Edwards