Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700-1400

Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 Catherin...

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Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400

Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400

Catherine A.M. Clarke

For Mum and Dad

Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

Abbreviations

xi

Introduction

1

Chapter One: The Edenic Island

7

Chapter Two: Re-making the locus amoenus in Anglo-Saxon England

36

Chapter Three: Local Landscapes as Mirrors for England

67

Chapter Four: The Delightful City

90

Epilogue: Disruptions and Continuities

130

Bibliography

141

Index

153

Acknowledgements

This book began as a doctoral thesis on landscape imagery and pastoral motifs in Old English poetry, completed at King’s College London with AHRB funding. I am grateful to both of my supervisors: to Clare Lees for guiding my thesis to completion, and to Jane Roberts for all her help and support during my PhD research and far beyond. As the project developed I have been fortunate to beneﬁt from the generous assistance of many colleagues. I received an award from the Lynne Grundy Trust which helped me clear some time to work on initial plans and proposals. Michael Lapidge kindly provided translations from his forthcoming Byrhtferth of Ramsey: The Lives of Oswald and Ecgwine (Oxford Medieval Texts), and I am grateful to Nicholas Zair for his unpublished translations of De Laude Cestrie. Janet Fairweather and Alexander Rumble also allowed me to work with their translations (of the Liber Eliensis and Winchester New Minster Charter, respectively) before they were published. For their help in sourcing the Bede image for the jacket of this volume, I would like to thank Helen Barber at Boydell & Brewer, Matti Kilpiö at the University of Helsinki, and Vladimir Zaitsev and Vera Pryanishnikova at the National Library of Russia, St Petersburg. It is not possible to acknowledge here all those who have aided and inﬂuenced the development of this book. They include Edward James, John Hines and Helen Barr, and my PhD examiners Malcolm Godden and Eamonn O Carragain. Caroline Palmer at Boydell & Brewer has been the most cheerful, friendly and helpful editor I could have hoped for. I would like to offer particular thanks to Helen Cooper, who acted as reader for the publishers and whose comments and suggestions from the earliest proposal to the ﬁnal manuscript have been inspiring, stimulating – and sometimes helpfully corrective. I feel extremely lucky to have beneﬁted from her expert advice and her generous encouragement. I am also grateful to my colleagues at University College Oxford, Jon Mee and Tiffany Stern, for their support, friendship and sense of humour which helped me manage the completion of this book alongside the demands of teaching. At home, Peter’s patience, understanding and willingness to share in my medieval enthusiasms have my heartfelt thanks. Finally, I want to thank Paul Vetch, of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London, for his enormous help with the typesetting and production of this book. I could not have managed

x

Acknowledgements

without his skill, imagination and accompanying wit. I acknowledge that any mistakes or inaccuracies in this present work are the result of my own errors and misapprehensions. The author and publishers are grateful to all the institutions listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publishers will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

Abbreviations

ASE

Anglo-Saxon England

CSEL

Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum

EETS

Early English Text Society

OS

Ordinary Series

EH

Bede, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969)

MGH

Monumenta Germaniae Historica

PL

Patrologia Latina

RS

Rolls Series

Introduction

This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the ofﬁce of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house Against the envy of less happier lands; This blessèd plot, this earth, this realm, this England… 1

These lines, from John of Gaunt’s speech in Richard II, represent one of the most enduring and emotive visions of England in literature. Already in 1600, they were included in Robert Allott’s anthology Englands Parnassus, 2 and they continue to resonate in modern English political rhetoric, historiography and popular culture. The image of the paradisal, pastoral island re-surfaces in texts from Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’ to Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ and Winston Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples. As in Richard II itself, the image is often used in dialectic with perceived contemporary betrayal or corruption of England’s Edenic nature. Yet the powerful ideal of England as perfect pastoral outlives speciﬁc political contexts or satirical functions. The concept of ‘this other Eden’ binds together Christian resonance and privilege, ideals of cultivation and pleasure, and colonialist fantasies of a national identity and unity created and endorsed by the island’s bounds. Studies of this rhetoric of English nationhood tend to begin with the Renaissance, often selecting Shakespeare as a point of origin. Gillian Beer writes that ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II provided the initiating communal self-description, alluringly emblematic

1 2

Shakespeare, Richard II, Act 2, Scene 1, lines 42–50 in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (London, 1997). Although the lines were misattributed to Michael Drayton. See Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. Andrew Gurr (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 221–4.

2

Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400

and topographical at once’. 3 Yet exploitation of the pastoral island landscape of Britain is already an established and powerful tradition in the medieval discourse of nationhood and production of national identity. Early Modern ideas and representations of England grow out of this medieval tradition. This study explores literary landscapes and the idea of England in medieval English texts across Latin and the vernacular from 700 to 1400. It will focus on those symbolic landscapes which become most associated with ideological formulations of English space and identity – in particular the delightful pastoral landscape and the locus amoenus or ‘delightful place’. Ernst Robert Curtius, discussing classical and medieval Latin literary traditions, deﬁnes the locus amoenus as: a beautiful, shaded natural site. Its minimum ingredients comprise a tree (or several trees), a meadow, and a spring or brook. Birdsong and ﬂowers may be added. The most elaborate examples also add a breeze. 4

This deﬁnition, however, is rather narrow and limited, excluding adaptations of the locus amoenus topos in the medieval vernaculars and even many examples of the pastoral pleasance in medieval Latin literature. This study will adopt a more ﬂexible deﬁnition of the literary locus amoenus which admits the features of its continual reappropriation in different literary and cultural contexts in the medieval period. The term locus amoenus will be used here to refer to any literary landscape of delight which is formed self-consciously out of conventional rhetorical elements or motifs. These conventions may change and adapt according to the context, language and genre of a text, yet they are always primarily pastoral and foreground natural beauty, fertility, delight and order. Within the wider literary pastoral tradition the locus amoenus stands out as a rhetorical set-piece: a focal point of landscape description and often of literary references and allusions in a text. Constantly re-shaped and invested with new meanings, the locus amoenus is one of the most signiﬁcant rhetorical ﬁgures in medieval European literature. The delightful pastoral place or garden re-surfaces in hagiography, lyric, romance, dream vision and drama. This study focuses speciﬁcally on the appropriation of pastoral or locus amoenus topoi in texts which participate in the production of an English national identity. These texts re-negotiate the classical locus amoenus, shaping an English pastoral tradition within the idioms of the early vernacular or the conventions of speciﬁc Latin genres. In particular, this English tradition prioritises motifs of pastoral enclosure and containment. Such imagery links descriptions of the island of Britain itself, celebrations of local island or hill sites, and representations of English saintly retreats and the monastic cloister. Motifs of pastoral enclosure are even appropriated in literary formulations of the medieval English city space. These symbolic pastoral

3

4

Gillian Beer, ‘The island and the aeroplane: the case of Virginia Woolf’, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London, 1990), pp. 256–90, p. 269. See also Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (Cambridge, 1996). Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (London, 1953), p. 195.

Introduction

3

landscapes gather a range of cultural associations into the production of English identity in the medieval period. This study does not attempt to be a comprehensive account of all literary uses of pastoral or the locus amoenus in medieval English literature. Rather, it concentrates speciﬁcally on these symbolic pastoral landscapes and their role in the fashioning of English national and cultural identity. The book does not offer a continuous linear account of this literary and ideological tradition, but focuses instead on speciﬁc appropriations of this English pastoral rhetoric in speciﬁc historical and cultural contexts. This allows an exploration of the ways in which an individual text selects from and manipulates tradition, as well as its interaction with contemporary politics. Strikingly, many of these texts show a self-conscious sense of participation in an English pastoral tradition. Bede’s image of the Edenic ‘Albion’ forms a point of reference or allusion for many later works, and texts often make claims about their English source materials or literary heritage. Across the long period covered by this book, both Latin and vernacular literatures participate in the conventions and traditions of symbolic literary landscape. Integral to this exploration of idealised landscapes in medieval English literature is an investigation of emergent ideas of England, Englishness and national identity in the medieval period. This focus inevitably opens up a series of controversies or potential difﬁculties, which should be acknowledged and addressed here. First, the very possibility of any coherent national identity or nationalist consciousness before the eighteenth century would be challenged by many historians and theorists. Benedict Anderson’s inﬂuential Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, for example, is typical in looking for the origins of modern national identity in the eighteenth century and later. 5 Increasingly, however, focus is shifting to the Renaissance as a crucial period for the development of ideas of nationhood and nationalism. 6 Beginning its discussion even earlier, Adrian Hastings’s book The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism looks back to Bede and Alfred as crucial in the formation of English national identity. 7 Recently, the volume Imagining a Medieval English Nation has collected essays on ideas of England and English identity in medieval texts. 8 Unlike many studies of later periods, this collection does not prioritise diachronic study of English national identity and nationalism, nor does it privilege connections with modernity. Rather, the essays included seek to explore perceptions of England and English identity within medieval contexts and parameters. The editor, Kathy Lavezzo, notes that there is no monolithic, rigid idea of ‘national identity’ in medieval England.

5 6

7 8

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983). See also Ernest Geller, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, 1983). See for example Liah Greenﬁeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992) and Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood. The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1992). Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, 1997), see particularly pp. 26–39. Kathy Lavezzo, ed., Imagining a Medieval English Nation (Minneapolis, 2004).

4

Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 [W]hile the volume suggests how a discourse of English identity may be located in the medieval period, it also afﬁrms that what constituted ‘England’ during the Middle Ages was hardly ﬁxed. The Middle Ages did not see the birth of a uniﬁed English community, but instead witnessed the construction of multiple, contingent, and conﬂicting ‘Englands’, each geared toward the respective needs of different social groups (monarchic, Lollard, monastic, etc.) engaged in national discourses. 9

This study, too, will acknowledge and explore the ways in which ‘England’ is reimagined by different communities and in different historical contexts. This study does argue for continuities between medieval representations and ideas of England and Early Modern or modern discourses of national identity. Yet the emergent traditions of medieval literature are clearly different from the developed and examined modern ideologies of national identity or nationalism. There is, however, a strong association between land and identity in even the earliest English texts. Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica may announce itself as an ethnic history of ‘the English Church and People’, yet it begins and ends with references to the island of Britain. The island landscape provides the bounds for Bede’s historical focus, as well as a powerful imperative to unity and the ideal of a single Christian nation. 10 In the late Old English poem The Battle of Maldon, the warrior Byrhtnoth vows that he will defend ‘folc and foldan’ (‘people and land’) against the Danish invaders. This alliterative formula binds together the English people and their landscape, paralleling the emotive concepts of ‘eþel (‘homeland’) and ‘eard’ (‘territory’) which Byrhtnoth also swears to protect. 11 Charters and documents of the late Anglo-Saxon kings of Wessex assert their right to rule the whole island of Britain – a kingdom apparently justiﬁed by God and by nature. 12 These are the most basic formulations of national identity based on territory and topography: this study will explore the more complex uses of landscape imagery to represent ideals, heritages and aspirations. A second problem related to this discussion of landscape and national identity is the question of ideology and terminology, and more speciﬁcally the use of ‘England’ or ‘English’ as opposed to ‘Britain’ or ‘British’. Looking back to the image of the delightful island in Richard II, Philip Schwyzer has commented delicately on its ‘topographical slippage’ and the implied encroachment of England up to all the island’s edges. 13 This study will look speciﬁcally at representations of landscape and ideas of England in texts produced by medieval English authors or within medieval English communities. Often, these writers do conﬂate ‘England’ with ‘the island’ and even ‘Britain’, eliding differences or divisions within its bounds. As a rule, this study will employ the same terminology as each text under discussion (however 9 10 11 12

13

Lavezzo, Imagining a Medieval English Nation, ‘Introduction’, pp. vii–xxxiv, p. xix. See Chapter One, p. 17. See D.G. Scragg, ed., The Battle of Maldon (Manchester, 1984), lines 52–4. See for example, in the Regularis Concordia, Edgar’s claim to rule all the peoples ‘dwelling within the bounds of the island of Britain’. Thomas Symons, ed. and trans., Regularis Concordia (London, 1953), p. 1. Philip Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge, 2004), p. 4.

Introduction

5

problematic), examining the tensions within vocabulary and ideology where appropriate. This study begins with Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and its seminal description of Britain as the Edenic island. Although later medieval texts and modern critics look back to Bede as authoritative point of origin, his description of Britain is already a complex and fraught nexus of intertextualities. In particular, the relationship of the text to The Ruin of Britain by Gildas is ambivalent and evasive. Whilst using Gildas as a source of geographical detail, Bede radically re-makes the semiotics of the delightful island, casting it not as a symbol of loss and reproach but as an image of destiny and aspiration. Bede also re-writes Britain as the idealised, commodiﬁed, colonial landscape. Landscape imagery and myths of cultivation are central to the ideology and representational vocabulary of the Ecclesiastical History. The Edenic vision is restored during periods of peace and order, whilst conﬂict and rebellion allow the wilderness landscape to encroach. Beyond the History, Bede’s Life of St Cuthbert exploits the same system of landscape imagery. Cuthbert’s cultivation of the island of Farne becomes a symbolic performance of national destiny and identity, gathering a wider resonance and importance for this local saint. The inﬂuence of Bede is seen in other early Anglo-Latin texts which exploit the same symbolic potential of landscape and cultivation. The second chapter examines representations of the locus amoenus in early English vernacular poetry. Despite critical assumptions about the lack of delightful landscapes in Old English, poems within the tenth-century Exeter Book do include set-piece locus amoenus descriptions. Indeed, even some of the ‘typical’ grim, hostile landscapes of Old English poetry can be re-read as self-conscious inversions of the locus amoenus topos, reﬂecting a conﬁdence and creativity with Latin literary conventions. This chapter explores the literary sources, analogues and associations of the locus amoenus in Old English poetry, and examines the cultural politics of re-making pastoral conventions within the idioms of the English vernacular. The conﬁdent appropriation and transformation of Latin literary conventions in poems such as The Phoenix and Guthlac A makes a powerful statement about English cultural heritage, ownership and power. The reception of these poems in the context of the tenthcentury Benedictine Reform adds another resonance to their pastoral imagery. Key documents of the reforms portray England as a renewed, restored locus amoenus purged from corruption. As the Old English poetry appropriates and exploits Latin literary conventions, so the politics and rhetoric of the Benedictine Reform appropriate continental models to formulate an ideology of Englishness. Chapter Three looks at twelfth- and thirteenth-century texts from regional monastic houses, exploring how areas marginalised from the centres of AngloNorman power exploit the symbolic potential of their local landscapes. Having enjoyed particular political importance and patronage in the late Anglo-Saxon period, the monasteries of Glastonbury, Ely and Ramsey are forced to re-formulate their roles in Anglo-Norman England, and to re-negotiate the relationships between local abbey and national power and prestige. The ‘island’ settings of these monastic houses are mythologised in chronicle and panegyric texts and celebrated as perfect pastoral landscapes. These idealising texts function in complex relationship with the huge

6

Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400

programmes of land reclamation, drainage and defence undertaken by these abbeys at this time. More fundamentally, though, the exploitation and mythologisation of their pastoral island settings enables these monastic houses to claim a status emblematic of England itself and to assert a role in the ongoing fashioning of national image and identity. The fourth chapter explores the city as a parallel to the delightful enclosure of the pastoral locus amoenus. The discussion focuses on representations of English cities in Anglo-Latin texts from the twelfth century (William Fitz Stephen’s description of London and Lucian’s De Laude Cestrie) and the fourteenth century (Gower’s Vox Clamantis, Maidstone’s Concordia and a short poem from a Glastonbury manuscript editorially titled The Stores of the Cities). The diachronic focus of the chapter allows discussion of the differences between writing about the city in the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, and draws together a range of themes which have emerged throughout the course of the study. The twelfth-century texts participate conﬁdently in traditions of literary pastoral and urban encomium, and present the city as a coherent meaningful and symbolic space, whereas the fourteenth-century texts present the city as multiplicitous, contested and the product of rhetorical performance and representation. Ultimately, in The Stores of the Cities the elements of urban encomium disintegrate into cacophonous fragments. However, although fourteenth-century texts are more self-conscious about their uneasy negotiations or evasions of the city, this chapter also considers the absences and elisions which already underlie Anglo-Latin urban encomium in the twelfth century. A ﬁnal section suggests some further continuities which extend beyond the main scope of this study, and acknowledges some discontinuities within the period discussed. In particular, this section focuses on ways in which the island locus amoenus image is problematised or subverted by writers with immediate experience of the conﬂicts and divisions within its bounds, such as Laȝamon and Robert of Gloucester. Through subtle narrative focalisations and ironic adjustments, the locus amoenus of English literary convention is revealed to be constructed over the historical realities of violence, invasion and conquest. Looking ahead, this concluding section also makes connections with work on representations of English landscape and ideas of national identity in the Renaissance. Rather than new inventions or beginnings, Early Modern exploitations of England’s pastoral landscape, its symbolic potentials and the island locus amoenus image can be seen as revivals, reappropriations and re-makings of medieval traditions.

1 The Edenic Island

Bede’s Ecclesiastical History is in many ways the obvious place to begin a study of symbolic landscapes and the idea of England in medieval English literature. The opening description of Britannia announces the potent image of the idealised, Edenic island, and forms a primary source or perceived point of origin to which many later medieval texts – and even modern scholars – allude. Bede’s representation of the Edenic island is hugely inﬂuential for the production of English identity in the medieval period and beyond, yet this iconic description is itself complicated and problematic. Far from being a true point of origin, it manipulates textual allusion, plays with source materials and historiographic traditions, and unsettles the established semiotics of the island image. As twenty-ﬁrst-century audiences, we are also becoming less conﬁdent about how to read Bede. Re-appraised in the context of current critical interests such as the dynamics of intertextuality or the discourses of colonialism, the description of Britannia seems less honest and more evasive about its own textual and national politics. Since Bede’s description is so central to this study as a whole, a substantial portion is included here for close analysis. Brittania Oceani insula, cui quondam Albion nomen fuit, inter septentrionem et occidentem locata est, Germaniae Galliae Hispaniae, maximis Europae partibus, multo interuallo aduersa... Opima frugibus atque arboribus insula, et alendis / apta pecoribus ac iumentis, uineas etiam quibusdam in locis germinans, sed et auium ferax terra marique generis diuersi, ﬂuuiis quoque multum piscosis ac fontibus praeclara copiosis; et quidem praecipue issicio abundat et anguilla. Capiuntur autem saepissime et uituli marini et delﬁnes nec non et ballenae, exceptis uariorum generibus concyliorum, in quibus sunt et musculae, quibus inclusam saepe margaritam omnis quidem coloris optimam inueniunt, id est et rubicundi et purpurei et hyacinthini et prasini sed maxime candidi. Sunt et cocleae satis superque abundantes, quibus tinctura coccinei coloris conﬁcitur, cuius rubor pulcherrimus nullo umquam solis ardore, nulla ualet pluuiarum iniuria pallescere, sed quo uetustior eo solet esse uenustior. Habet fontes salinarum, habet et fontes calidos, et ex eis ﬂuuios balnearum calidarum omni aetati et sexui per distincta loca iuxta suum cuique modum accommodos. Aqua enim, sanctus Basilius dicit, feruidam qualitatem recipit,

8

Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 cum per certa quaedam metalla transcurrit, et ﬁt non solum calida sed et ardens. Quae etiam uenis metallorum, aeris ferri plumbi et argenti, fecunda gignit et lapidem gagatem plurimum optimumque; est autem nigrogemmeus, et ardens igni admotus, incensus serpentes fugat, adtritu calefactus adplicita detinet aeque ut sucinum. Erat et cuiutatibus quondam XX et VIII nobilissimis insignita, praeter castella innumera quae et ipsa muris, turribus, portis ac seris erant instructa ﬁrmissimis. Et quia prope sub ipso septentrionali uertice mundi iacet, lucidas aestate noctes habet, ita ut medio saepe tempore noctis in quaestionem ueniat intuentibus, utrum crepusculum adhuc permaneat uespertinum an iam / aduenerit matutinum… Britain, once called Albion, is an island of the ocean and lies to the north-west, being opposite Germany, Gaul, and Spain, which form the greater part of Europe, though at a considerable distance from them... [Further geographical description]. The island is rich in crops and trees, and has good pasturage for cattle and beasts of burden. It also produces vines in certain districts, and has plenty of both land- and waterfowl of various kinds. It is remarkable too for its rivers, which abound in ﬁsh, particularly salmon and eels, and for copious springs. Seals as well as dolphins are frequently captured and even whales; besides these there are various kinds of shellﬁsh, among which are mussels, and enclosed in these there are often found excellent pearls of every colour, red and purple, violet and green, but mostly white. There is also a great abundance of whelks, from which a scarlet-coloured dye is made, a most beautiful red which neither fades through the heat of the sun nor exposure to the rain; indeed the older it is the more beautiful it becomes. The land possesses salt springs and warm springs and from them ﬂow rivers which supply hot baths, suitable for all ages and both sexes, in separate places and adapted to the needs of each. For water, as St. Basil says, acquires the quality of heat when it passes through certain metals, so that it not only becomes warm but even scalding hot. The land also has rich veins of metal, copper, iron, lead and silver. It produces a great deal of excellent jet, which is glossy black and burns when put into the ﬁre and, when kindled, it drives away serpents; when it is warmed by rubbing it attracts whatever is applied to it, just as amber does. The country was once famous for its twenty-eight noble cities as well as innumerable fortiﬁed places equally well guarded by the strongest of walls and towers, gates and locks. Because Britain lies almost under the North Pole, it has short nights in summer, so that often at midnight it is hard for those who are watching to say whether it is evening twilight which still lingers, or whether morning has come… 1

This landscape is a locus amoenus in the broadest sense of a delightful pastoral place. Where the classical locus amoenus was a place of pure ease and otium, removed from the concerns of labour and productivity, the primary focus here is on the fertility and fruitfulness of the land. This is not an untouched, virgin natural landscape but a place of delight and plenty, ordered by man and appraised in terms of its usefulness and its provision of resources. This sense of order is reinforced by the catalogue structure of the passage – a feature typical of writing within the Latin locus amoenus 1

EH, Book I, Chapter 1, pp. 14–17.

The Edenic Island

9

tradition – which reads almost as an inventory of the island’s natural wealth. There is a sense here that two factors combine to make the island a delightful place: the natural beauty and fertility of the land as appointed by God and existing ab origine, and its cultivation and use by human inhabitants. In the St Petersburg manuscript of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (Russian National Library MS Lat Q.V.I. 18, dated to around 750), the historiated initial B which opens the text provides a further reinforcement of this delightful pastoral scene. While the body of this letter B is decorated with interlace designs, the spaces within each of its two ﬁelds are ﬁlled with details of branching, blooming plants. Meyer Schapiro notes that this is one of the earliest uses of a new form of historiated initial in insular manuscript art, remarking on the distinction between the earlier (sixth- and seventh-century) practice of decoration of the body of the letter itself, and this emergent eighth-century style in which the initial becomes ‘the enclosing frame of a scene, a ﬁgure, or a decorative pattern’. 2 The earliest examples of this kind of initial occur in manuscripts produced at Canterbury and Jarrow, Bede’s own monastic house and the scriptorium which produced the St Petersburg manuscript. 3 In the case of the opening initial B of the St Petersburg manuscript, the foliate designs are clearly independent from the letter-form itself, presented instead as images within its two enclosed ﬁelds. The form of this initial can therefore be aligned with these new, developing practices of historiation in which the letter functions as a space within which to display a thematic motif or narrative moment. Here, the historiated B forms a window through which we may glimpse Bede’s pastoral locus amoenus. Schapiro also notes that the foliate decoration itself is highly unusual and probably unique, drawing together a diverse range of features which reﬂect the inﬂuences of early medieval French, Italian, Byzantine and other eastern art, as well as typical Northumbrian elements. 4 Just as the opening chapter of the History, as we shall see, appropriates and synthesises a diverse range of sources and cultural associations, so this ﬁrst initial announces an impressive breadth of cultural contact and appropriation. Clearly, Bede’s vivid vision of an Edenic, idealised Britannia has inspired the illuminator of the St Petersburg manuscript to bold creative innovation. Bede’s decision to begin his History with this celebration of the natural beauty of the island has been read by many critics as a self-conscious attempt to write an English ‘Genesis’. 5 In his commentary, John Wallace-Hadrill justiﬁes and expands this idea, arguing that the ﬁrst chapters form ‘a vital and highly contrived prelude’. Their subject is Britain in what has been called her pre-Fall state, the Fall itself, and its immediate consequences… Bede starts with a geographical evocation derived from well-known sources but what is in his mind is the paradisal setting 2 3 4 5

Meyer Schapiro, ‘The decoration of the Leningrad manuscript of Bede’, Scriptorium 12 (1958), 191–207, p. 192. Schapiro, ‘The decoration of the Leningrad manuscript’, p. 191. Ibid., pp. 193–97. See Calvin B. Kendall, ‘Imitation and the Venerable Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica’, in Saints, Scholars, and Heroes, ed. Margot H. King and Wesley M. Stevens, 2 vols (Collegeville, Minnesota, 1979), vol. 1, pp. 161–90.

10

Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 at the beginning of Genesis. It is, by imitatio, a creation scene, indicative of the abundance, richness and variety of animate and inanimate nature in Britain and Ireland; and these contrast sharply with the natural descriptions elsewhere in the History. 6

In some ways the ‘creation scene’ of Bede’s prologue mirrors the other key story of origins in the History: the account of the poet Cædmon. Where Cædmon’s ﬁrst poetic composition is a celebration of God the creator, Bede begins his History with an appropriate narrative of creation and fall. 7 The Edenic nature of Bede’s island is further reinforced by the evocation of its remoteness, recalling the inaccessibility traditionally associated with the terrestrial paradise. Bede notes Britain’s location ‘prope sub ipso septentrionali uertice mundi’ (‘almost under the North Pole’). Early medieval conﬂation and confusion of the earthly paradise with the ‘Fortunate Isles’ tradition might further strengthen this Edenic association. 8 As Wallace-Hadrill observes, the other representations of nature in the early chapters of the Ecclesiastical History contrast strikingly with this initial idealised landscape. As conﬂict and religious rebellion encroach on the island, the natural world becomes a place of wilderness, hostility and exile. The importance and function of such landscape imagery will be a major focus for this discussion. Yet the ﬁrst chapters of the History provide more than a narrative of fall and loss: beyond nostalgia and elegy, they create a powerful image of aspiration and destiny. These opening chapters establish a strong representational system based on the imagery of place and landscape. At the centre of this is the image of the delightful, idealised island: a symbol of heritage, destiny and aspiration which has the potential to be realised in English history. Several more recent studies of the Ecclesiastical History have sought to challenge a reading which places the island locus amoenus image as central to Bede’s idea of England and key to the ideology of the text as a whole. A number of critics have suggested that the description of Britain (and the subsequent description of Ireland) should rather be seen as a rhetorical set-piece which opens the text with a display of literary brilliance and playfulness, but which is not integral or meaningful to the History as a whole. In the 1997 Jarrow Lecture, Roger Ray refers to the tradition of the geographical prologue in Roman historiographical writing. Drawing on the earlier work of Peter Wiseman, Ray summarises this Latin tradition: The purpose of ‘geographical description’ for the historian was, in theory, to set the scene for the action; more often, perhaps, the author aimed to entertain his audience by writing up such passages for their own sake. The temptation was not just to include mythical stories and marvels of distant places. There was also the set-piece description of dramatic and picturesque scenery, the ‘purple patch’ 6 7

8

J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. A Historical Commentary (Oxford, 1988), p. 6. Allen Frantzen develops this interesting parallel, arguing that the Cædmon episode is ‘a story whose author uses a character as a counterpart.’ See Allen J. Frantzen, Desire for Origins (New Brunswick, 1990), pp. 138–44. For the confusion of these traditions, see N. Blake, ed., The Phoenix (Exeter, 1990), p. 15.

The Edenic Island

11

which historians no less than poets stitched in to give their works illusory brilliance. 9

Ray discusses the possibility that Bede was inﬂuenced by such a tradition, arguing that the prologue was written ‘as much, though probably more, for pleasure than for information…[to] hook the reader with verbal display in order to prepare him for a history decked out in literary appeal’. 10 Certainly, it is essential to Bede’s description of Britain that pleasing rhetoric mirrors the pleasant island landscape and that the experience of reading the text is also an experience of pleasure. Yet Ray’s pointedly reductive reading of the geographical prologue perhaps reveals more about current critical anxiety and discomfort with the Ecclesiastical History, and the need to re-claim Bede for current critical values and perspectives. An appealing reading by Henry Mayr-Harting is even more sceptical of the thematic seriousness of the prologue. Mayr-Harting looks in particular at the description of Ireland which follows that of Britain. The passage reads: Hibernia autem et latitudine sui status et salubritate ac serenitate aerum multum Brittaniae praestat, ita ut raro ibi nix plus quam triduana remaneat; nemo propter hiemem aut faena secet aestate aut stabula fabricet iumentis; nullum ibi reptile uideri soleat, nullus uiuere serpens ualeat. Nam saepe illo de Brittania adlati serpentes, mox ut proximante terris nauigio odore aeris illius adtacti fuerint, intereunt; quin potius omina pene quae de eadem insula / sunt contra uenenum ualent. Denique uidimus, quibusdam a serpente percussis, rasa folia codicum qui de Hibernia fuerant, et ipsam rasuram aquae inmissam ac potui datam talibus protinus totam uim ueneni grassantis, totum inﬂate corporis absumsisse ac sedasse tumorem. Diues lactis et mellis insula nex uinearum expers, piscium uolucrumque sed et ceruorum caprearumque uenatu insignis. Ireland is broader than Britain, is healthier and has a much milder climate, so that snow rarely lasts there for more than three days. Hay is never cut in summer for winter use nor are stables built for their beasts. No reptile is found there nor could a serpent survive; for although serpents have often been brought from Britain, as soon as the ship approaches land they are affected by scent of the air and quickly perish. In fact almost everything that the island produces is efﬁcacious against poison. For instance we have seen how, in the case of people suffering from snake-bite, the leaves of manuscripts of Ireland were scraped, and the scrapings put in water and given to the sufferer to drink. These scrapings at once absorbed the whole violence of the spreading poison and assuaged the swelling. The island abounds in milk and honey, nor does it lack vines, ﬁsh and birds. It is also noted for the hunting of stags and roedeer. 11

9 10 11

Roger Ray, ‘Bede, Rhetoric and the Creation of Christian Latin Culture’ (Jarrow Lecture, 1997), pp. 13–14. Ray, ‘Bede, Rhetoric and the Creation of Christian Latin Culture’, p. 14. EH, Book I, Chapter 1, pp. 18–21.

12

Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400

Where the earlier description of Britain’s beauty and fertility bears connotations of a Promised Land appointed for God’s chosen people, Ireland is depicted even more explicitly as a country ‘Diues lactis et mellis’ (‘ﬂowing with milk and honey’). The qualities attributed to Ireland reﬂect its status as a holy land: the charmed climate, the scented air which kills serpents (reminiscent of the fragrances associated with saints and paradise), and the proliﬁc production of miracles. It may be Bede’s own regard for the Irish origins of Northumbrian Christianity and monasticism which motivates this encomium. However, Henry Mayr-Harting suggests that we should read this description as light-hearted parody rather than earnest panegyric. Inevitably, this reading refracts our interpretation of Bede’s Edenic Britannia, and unsettles certainties about how to approach the prologue as a whole. The appearance of naiveté here is very deceptive indeed. First of all Bede takes his cue from Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies which was the standard encyclopaedia of knowledge available in his day. Under Ireland Isidore observed that this island had no snakes, few birds and no bees. He then went on to say, in a passage which must have been well known to many of Bede’s audience, that if dust or pebbles from Ireland were sprinkled in a bee-hive, the swarms deserted their honey-combs. Bede’s passage is evidently a witty parody of this sort of nonsense… The whole of this passage seems to imply, on Bede’s part, that there will be more serious stuff in the way of miracles later, but meanwhile the reader need not feel, already in the ﬁrst chapter, that his author is a dull dog. 12

Henry Mayr-Harting and Roger Ray both offer radical re-readings of the opening of the Ecclesiastical History which minimise the signiﬁcance and seriousness of its locus amoenus imagery. These readings ﬁt within contemporary scholarly reaction against the solemn veneration of Bede by nineteenth- and earlier twentieth-century critics, and are symptomatic of the increasing tendency to read the prologue as intertext rather than point of origin. Roger Ray regards the description of Britain as a piece of light-hearted rhetorical showmanship and allusion. Henry Mayr-Harting refuses to read the description of Ireland as a textual origin or Genesis, interpreting it instead as a satiric comment on previous sources and traditions – a parodic footnote to earlier texts. Although this chapter will argue for the intrinsic importance of the initial locus amoenus description to the representational system and ideology of the Ecclesiastical History as a whole, Ray and Mayr-Harting call attention to interesting problems in dealing with the opening chapter. Both discussions question the seriousness of the passage, both refer to the presence of illusion and deception, and both are deliberately wary of being ‘taken in’ by Bede’s rhetoric. It is worth exploring further some of the strategies of illusion and dissemblance in this passage, particularly with reference to Bede’s use of source materials. Chapter 1 of the Ecclesiastical History clearly makes an overt display of certain source materials and allusions which serve to authorise and elevate the text. The historical and geographical prologue recalls the preface to Orosius’s Histories against 12

Henry Mayr-Harting, The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England (London, 1972), p. 50.

The Edenic Island

13

the Pagans or the introduction to Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks. As Colgrave and Mynors note in their edition, the ﬁrst paragraph includes ‘a mosaic of quotations from Pliny’s Natural History, Gildas’s Ruin of Britain, Solinus’s Polyhistor and Orosius’. 13 The only explicit textual reference is to the discussion of water in the Hexameron of St Basil the Great, a treatise on the six days of creation and another subtle reinforcement of the Genesis theme for the alert and literate medieval reader. Bede deliberately crafts this introductory passage according to the model of late antique and early medieval historiographical texts. His imitation of the conventions of the historical and geographical prologue aligns his work with a ‘canon’ of authoritative texts and demands that the History be taken seriously. A key source for this opening chapter, yet one which is not named and with which the text has an ambivalent relationship, is the Ruin of Britain by Gildas. Gildas provides much of the basic geographical detail here: the measurement of the island as eight hundred by two hundred miles, the twenty-eight cities, as well as the prominence of rivers and waterways. The Ruin of Britain is also an important source or analogue for the island locus amoenus motif itself, yet Bede chooses to re-write the image in a new and very different way. It seems that, although the prologue of the History appropriates so much factual material and key imagery from Gildas, it also seeks to obscure its close relationship to the Ruin of Britain. There may be a deliberate strategy here to exclude from the opening chapter echoes of Gildas’s text, which would otherwise undermine the sense of literary genesis and origin so fundamental to Bede’s work. Evidently, there are huge tensions inherent in the use of source materials in this prologue. Bede appropriates authority and status from a range of literary allusions and historiographical conventions, yet he also dissociates his text from this one key source which encroaches too closely on his own scope and subject. Bede’s use of Gildas in the Ecclesiastical History as a whole reveals much about his concerns and priorities. In particular, a comparison between the geographical prologue to the Ecclesiastical History and the Ruin of Britain shows the ways Bede consciously selects from and re-invents literary traditions, and the ways in which he appropriates and re-makes the image and politics of the island locus amoenus. For Gildas, far more straightforwardly and unequivocally than for Bede, the island locus amoenus is an image of delight and innocence before fall and ruin. As with Bede, Gildas’s description of the island combines natural beauty with fertility and usefulness for man. For comparison, the passage is reproduced here. Brittannia insula in extremo ferme orbis limite circium occidentemque versus divina, ut dicitur, statera terrae totius ponderatrice librata ab Africo boriali propensius tensa axi, octingentorum in longo milium, ducentorum in lato spatium, exceptis diversorum prolixioribus promontoriorum tractibus, quae arcuatis oceani sinibus ambiuntur, tenens, cuius diffusiore et, ut ita dicam, intransmeabili undique circulo absque meridianae freto plagae, quo ad Galliam Belgicam navigatur, vallata, duorum ostiis nobilium ﬂuminum Tamesis ac Sabrinae veluti brachiis, per quae eidem olim transmarinae deliciae ratibus 13

EH, p. 14, n.

14

Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 vehebantur, aliorumque minorum meliorata, bis denis bisque quaternis civitatibus ac nonnullis castellis, murorum turrium serratarum portarum domorum, quarum culmina minaci proceritate porrecta in edito forti compage pangebantur, munitionibus non improbabiliter instructis decorata; campis late pansis collibusque amoeno situ locatis, praepollenti culturae aptis, montibus alternandis animalium pastibus maxime convenientibus, quorum diversorum colorum ﬂores humanis gressibus pulsati non indecentem ceu picturam eisdem imprimebant, electa veluti sponsa monilibus diversis ornata, fontibus lucidis crebris undis niveas veluti glareas pellentibus, pernitidisque rivis leni murmure serpentibus ipsorumque in ripis accubantibus suavis soporis pignus praetendentibus, et lacubus frigidum aquae torrentem vivae exundantibus irrigua. The island of Britain lies virtually at the end of the world, towards the west and north-west. Poised in the divine scales that (we are told) weigh the whole earth, it stretches from the south-west towards the northern pole. It has a length of eight hundred miles, a width of two hundred: leaving out of account the various large headlands that jut out between the curving ocean bays. It is fortiﬁed on all sides by a vast and more or less uncrossable ring of sea, apart from the straits on the south where one can cross to Belgic Gaul; but it has the beneﬁt of the estuaries of a number of streams, and especially two splendid rivers, the Thames and the Severn, arms of the sea along which luxuries from overseas used to be brought by ship. It is ornamented with twenty-eight cities and a number of castles, and well equipped with fortiﬁcations – walls, castellated towers, gates and houses, whose sturdily built roofs reared menacingly skyward. Like a chosen bride arrayed in a variety of jewellery, the island is decorated with wide plains and agreeably set hills, excellent for vigorous agriculture, and mountains especially suited to varying the pasture for animals. Flowers of different hues underfoot made them a delightful picture. To water it, the island has clear fountains, whose constant ﬂow drives before it pebbles white as snow, and brilliant rivers that glide with gentle murmur, guaranteeing sweet sleep for those who lie on their banks, and lakes ﬂowing over with a cold rush of living water. 14

A comparison of the representations of the island in Gildas and Bede will reveal some central ideological and political differences. However, the key contrast between these passages stems from the different function of the locus amoenus image itself. The island locus amoenus description in Gildas is just as much a rhetorical setpiece as that in Bede’s prologue to the Ecclesiastical History. The landscape includes many typical features of the locus amoenus, such as fertile ﬁelds, ﬂowers, and ﬂowing water. The sense of rhetorical display and artiﬁce even resonates in Gildas’s choice of vocabulary: the colourful ﬂowers he describes make the ﬁelds ‘non indecentem… picturam’ (‘a delightful picture’). The language here recalls the technical vocabulary of rhetorical art, using words to paint a verbal ‘picture’ of a scene. The litotical wording of the Latin ‘non indecentem’ (literally ‘not unpleasing’) may also reﬂect a 14

Gildas, The Ruin of Britain, ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom (London, 1978); text, pp. 89– 90; translation, pp. 16–17.

The Edenic Island

15

wry consciousness of the painstakingly conventional literary pleasance being evoked. Notably, Gildas’s Britain does seem less a place of labour and production than that represented by Bede. Although we are told of agriculture and grazing, the description does not foreground human cultivation and technology to the same extent, and the passage creates an impression of pastoral repose. Gildas’s Britain is perhaps more fully a pre-Lapsarian Eden untainted by labour or effort. In common with Bede, the Edenic connotations of the island are reinforced by its remoteness and inaccessibility ‘in extreme ferme orbis limite circium’ (‘virtually at the end of the world’). A key aspect of Gildas’s representation, not present in Bede, is the feminine metaphor of the island as bride, presented to us as ‘electa veluti sponsa monilibus diversis ornata’ (‘like a chosen bride arrayed in a variety of jewellery’). In some ways, this image fulﬁls a similar function to the connotations of the delightful island as Promised Land in Bede: the image of the bride again suggests destiny and the sense of the ‘betrothal’ of the land to God’s chosen people. Yet Gildas’s image of the bride foregrounds more strongly the idea of a virgin, unspoilt land, and anticipates the text’s wider narrative of possession, rape and ruin. Gildas uses the image of the paradisal, unsullied island in contrast to the sinfulness and fall of its inhabitants, investing the island locus amoenus with an unequivocally reproachful, punitive meaning. It is a symbol of what has been lost and may never be recovered, and ﬁts within Gildas’s purpose of warning, reproach and condemnation of the Britons and their sins. Crucially, Bede transforms the image of the delightful island, discarding the feminine metaphor and freeing the locus amoenus from the negative implications of Gildas’s representation. In Bede, as we have seen, the island locus amoenus is an image of balanced duality, representing not only nostalgia and loss but also aspiration and hope. Unlike Gildas, Bede allows the image of the locus amoenus to re-surface in shadows and echoes throughout the Ecclesiastical History and his other works, hinting at the possibilities for future realisation of the past ideal. Bede chooses to use the same island locus amoenus image as Gildas, but represents it in very different terms and invests it with new meaning. The prologue to Bede’s History can be seen as a selfconscious re-appropriation and re-invention of the island locus amoenus and its semiotics. Of course, on one crucial level, Bede and Gildas are writers with very different perspectives. Writing within British Wales, Gildas is recording the invasion and colonisation of the island by outsiders, whereas Bede is writing the ﬁrst historical text which identiﬁes the Anglo-Saxon settlers with their new territory. The differences between their representations of the island draw our attention to the different perceptions of landscape between coloniser and colonised. Gildas’s description of the island carries from the start an implicit awareness of violence, conﬂict and contestation. Gildas refers in the past tense to the trade and communication which used to be borne on the island’s rivers (‘vehebantur’), establishing a sense of destruction and loss. His description of the cities of the island also foregrounds their defences and fortiﬁcations. …aliorumque minorum meliorata, bis denis bisque quaternis civitatibus ac nonnullis castellis, murorum turrium serratarum portarum domorum, quarum

16

Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 culmina minaci proceritate porrecta in edito forti compage pangebatur, munitionibus non improbabiliter instructis decorata… It is ornamented with twenty-eight cities and a number of castles, and well equipped with fortiﬁcation – walls, castellated towers, gates and houses, whose sturdily built roofs reared menacingly skyward.

Despite the ostensible use of ‘ornamentation’ and ‘decoration’ (‘meliorata’, ‘decorata’), Gildas’s description builds conﬂict and aggression into the landscape. Bede’s account of the cities, though borrowing Gildas, lingers proportionately less on fortiﬁcation and defence. More generally, Bede’s initial representation of the island excludes the violence and conﬂict of its recent history. 15 Bede’s Britannia is typical of the landscape of ‘colonial fantasy’, 16 the ‘privileged landscape’ which is ‘designed to hide whatever deﬁles’. 17 Even the arduous necessities of human labour are obscured in his description of this fertile, productive island with its inventory of natural wealth. The lack of reference to any speciﬁc population group further elides the idea of invasion or conﬂict, casting the island as the waiting inheritance of the AngloSaxons. Despite their different backgrounds and allegiances, both Bede and Gildas use the image of the island as a powerful symbol for internal unity, though once again each writer develops the implications of this in different ways. Before looking again at the two descriptions of Britain, as well as later uses of the island image in the two texts, Gillian Beer’s discussion of the island image in English text and ideology provides a useful theoretical framework. The identiﬁcation of England with the island is already, and from the start, a ﬁction. It is a ﬁction, but an unwavering one among English writers and other English people, that England occupies the land up to the margins of every shore. The island has seemed the perfect form in English cultural imagining, as the city was to the Greeks. Defensive, secure, compacted, even paradisal – a safe place; a safe place too from which to set out on predations and from which to launch the building of an empire. 18

For Beer, the image of the island is the ideal representation and conﬂation of identity and territory. Like many later writers, Bede often conﬂates the island of Britannia with the kingdom(s) of the English, whereas Gildas can imagine the whole of Britain as (at least the onetime) territory of the Britons. However, despite these differences in terms of identity and politics, Bede and Gildas share many similarities in their use of the island image to evoke a sense of unity. Although the delightful island of natural 15

16 17 18

The only possible hint of this may be the brief aside ‘quondam Albion nomen fuit’ (‘once called Albion’) in the opening sentence, which implies the change of power and ‘ownership’ through the island’s changing name. Michelle R. Warren, History on the Edge. Excalibur and the Borders of Britain 1100–1300 (Minneapolis, 2000), p. 3. Jonathan Smith, ‘The Lie that Blinds: Destablizing the Text of Landscape’, in Place / Culture / Representation, ed. James Duncan and David Ley (London, 1993), pp. 78–92, p. 85. Beer, ‘The island and the aeroplane’, p. 269.

The Edenic Island

17

unity, homogeneity and integrity may only exist in the realm of the imagination, it plays a powerful role in the ideologies of these texts. In the Ecclesiastical History, the image of the island allows Bede simultaneously to write about disparate groups of people and cultures (the prologue itself refers to the ﬁve different languages of Britain) whilst inventing a mythology of unity and shared identity. Although Bede clearly writes about different kingdoms co-existing or competing within the bounds of the island, the island of Britain itself remains an idea which draws together peoples and cultures – as well as the scope of Bede’s own history – through a topographical imperative. 19 For Bede, the power of the island image may be connected to the ideal of a uniﬁed church in Britain, and is certainly a powerful imperative for the internal colonialism of religion. The image of the island allows Bede to tolerate difference within its bounds and to create a myth of unity and shared (Christian) destiny authorised by geography. Interestingly, around the time of the composition and early transmission of the History, the church at Canterbury still articulates its power in terms of rule over the whole island of Britain – the ideal of one complete see of Britannia rather than one comprising several kingdoms, or deﬁned in terms of peoples. For example, in 680 Theodore is termed ‘archiepiscopus Britanniae’ (‘archbishop of Britain’), and his successor Berhtwald is described around 705 as the father of the churches ‘quae ampla Britannia… retinet’ (‘which wide Britain holds’). 20 The uniﬁcation of the island in one rule and one religion recurs as a sign of ideal kingship in the Ecclesiastical History (and, of course, becomes a convention in later Anglo-Saxon charters and political documents). Oswald of Northumbria, for example, is the paradigm of good kingship, uniting secular and sacred power and uniting all the peoples of the island under his rule. The History tells us that, through the guidance of Bishop Aidan: …rex Oswald cum ea, cui praeerat, gente Anglorum institutus, non solum / incognita progenitoribus suis regna caelorum sperare didicit, sed et regna terrarum plus quam ulli maiorum suorum ab eodem uno Deo, qui fecit caelum et terram, consecutus est; denique omnes nationes et prouincias Brittaniae, quae in quattor linguas, id est Brettonum Pictorum Scottorum et Anglorum, diuisae sunt, in dicione accepit. King Oswald, together with the people over which he ruled, learned to hope for those heavenly realms which were unknown to their forefathers; and also Oswald gained from the one God who made heaven and earth greater earthly realms than any of his ancestors had possessed. In fact, he held under his sway all the peoples and kingdoms of Britain, divided among the speakers of four different languages, British, Pictish, Irish and English. 21

19

20 21

Indeed, at the end of the History, Bede nuances his deﬁnition of the work to refer to his ‘historia ecclesiastica Britanniarum, et maxime gentis Anglorum’ (‘the ecclesiastical history of Britain, and the English people in particular’). He also refers to it as ‘Historiam Ecclesiasticam nostrae insulae ac gentis’ (‘the history of the church of our island and race’). Nicholas Brooks, ‘Bede and the English’ (Jarrow Lecture, 1999), p. 19 and p. 33, n. EH, Book III, Chapter 6, pp. 230, 231.

18

Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400

The juxtaposition in the passage of the ‘regna caelorum’ which Oswald aspires to, and the ‘regna terrarum’ which he rules, suggests that the united island is a reﬂection of heavenly peace and unity. There is a glimpse here of the potential to recover the paradisal island described at the beginning of the History. For both Bede and Gildas, the water surrounding the island is an important device in the evocation of island unity and integrity. A modern understanding of the island concept is based on a dichotomy between land and sea, within and without, inclusion and exclusion. To a large extent, this dichotomy is also exploited by Bede and Gildas, though Gildas relies more heavily on the sea as boundary and deﬁnition of territory. In an essay entitled ‘Gildas’s Geographical Perpsective: Some Problems’, Neil Wright examines Gildas’s use of the terms Britannia, insula, and transmarinus. 22 Gildas uses Britannia and insula consistently and interchangeably to refer to the whole island. He also uses transmarinus or transmarinae consistently to refer to peoples (usually invaders) from overseas. However, Wright highlights Gildas’s account of an attack on Britain by ‘duabus gentibus transmarinis uehementer saeuis, Scottorum a circio, Pictorum ab aquilone’ (‘two extremely savage races from over the waters, the Irish from the west and the Picts from the north’). 23 Clearly there is no problem with referring to the Scots (from Ireland) as ‘overseas’ (‘transmarinis’), but Gildas’s identiﬁcation of the Picts as an enemy from overseas is more puzzling. Wright considers various possible myths which might have led Gildas to view the Picts as originating overseas, and the possibility that his geography may be mistaken – he may believe the Picts to come from an island located to the north of Britain. However, none of these explanations is persuasive and the use of ‘transmarinis’ here seems to be a deliberate extension of Gildas’s island–sea rhetoric which deﬁnes self and other, native and enemy. Gildas’s ambiguous use of transmarinus leads to problems in the Ecclesiastical History when Bede uses the Ruin of Britain as source material. For example, when writing about these same Irish and Pictish raids, Bede sees reason to clarify both the term transmarinus and the name Britannia itself. Bede writes that ‘Britannia in parte Brettonum’ (‘Britain, or the British part of it’) 24 experienced attack, reﬂecting the potential strain of using the term ‘Britain’ for the whole island when it can also mean the speciﬁc territory of the Britons. Bede’s scrupulous use of terminology acknowledges the possible gulf, in reality, between the island as a whole and its internal territories and factions. Bede goes on to explain that: Transmarinus autem dicimus has gentes non quod extra Brittaniam essent positae, sed quia a parte Brettonum errant remotae, duobus sinibus maris interiacentibus…

22 23 24

Neil Wright, ‘Gildas’s geographical perspective: some problems’, in Gildas: New Approaches, ed. Michael Lapidge and David Dumville (Woodbridge, 1984), pp. 85–106. EH, Book I, Chapter 12, pp. 40, 41. Ibid.

The Edenic Island

19

We call them [the Irish and Picts] races from over the waters, not because they dwelt outside Britain, but because they were separated from the Britons by two wide and long arms of the sea… 25

Bede still represents water as a natural boundary, but takes care not to push this island rhetoric to the point of inaccuracy. The sea which surrounds the island does seem to have a rather different meaning for Gildas and Bede overall, and contributes to a key contrast between their uses of the island image. For Gildas the island is a defensive form with the connotations of a fortress, whereas for Bede the water surrounding the land suggests the potential for communication and contact. Looking again at their initial descriptions of the island, Gildas emphasises the role of the sea as fortiﬁcation, referring to it as ‘intransmeabili’ (‘uncrossable’), although the construction ‘ut ita dicam’ (an idiom close to ‘it may be said’) suggests the precedence here of ideology over geographical reality. As already noted, Gildas describes the Thames and the Severn as waterways ‘per quae eidem olim transmarinae deliciae ratibus vehebantur’ (‘along which luxuries from overseas used to be brought by ship’). For him the rivers bear only the memory of trade and communication. In Bede’s prologue, the focus is on ports, points of crossing and speciﬁcally calculated distances for travel. Although separate from Europe, Britain is described in terms of its location relative to the continent. Although it would be simplistic to point too clear a contrast, it does seem important for Bede to represent Britain as separate, but not severed from the continent. The possibility presented by the sea for contact with Europe certainly ﬁts with Bede’s political agenda for close afﬁnity with the continental church and Rome. Where Gildas’s island is defensive and inward-looking, the island status of Bede’s Britain maintains the opportunity for allegiance and integration beyond its boundaries. Gillian Beer notes that modern English texts of Empire often claim for the island the peculiar privilege of bordering with every other country in the world – an interesting justiﬁcation for overseas expansion and colonialism. 26 Perhaps, in a similar way, the island functions for Bede as a perfect emblem for the opportunities of cultural contact and appropriation. This contact and communication with other cultures is not unequivocally positive for Bede, however. For example, he writes that the coming of the Arian Heresy …quasi uia pestilentiae trans Oceanum patefacta, non mara, omnis se lues hereseos cuiusque insulae noui semper aliquid audire gaudenti et nihil certi ﬁrmiter obtinenti infudit. …quickly opened the way for every foul heresy from across the Ocean to pour into an island which always delights in hearing something new and holds ﬁrmly to no sure belief. 27

25 26 27

EH, Book I, Chapter 12, pp. 40, 41. Beer, ‘The island and the aeroplane’, p. 272. EH, Book I, Chapter 8, pp. 34–7.

20

Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400

The use of the verb infundo (‘to pour into’) here introduces a water metaphor for this abstract, intellectual inﬂuence, a subtle inference of the seaborne corruption which Bede sees inﬁltrating the island. The opening descriptions of both Bede and Gildas reveal water to be an integral part of the island, and a key aspect of its delightful landscape. Both writers draw our attention to the water within the island as much as the water which deﬁnes its boundaries. Gildas names the ‘nobilium ﬂuminum’ (‘noble rivers’) of the Thames and Severn, and also makes reference to estuaries and streams. The water within his island locus amoenus contributes to the sense of untainted purity: the land is adorned with ‘fontibus lucidis’ (‘clear fountains’) which ﬂow over ‘niveas… glareas’ (‘snowwhite pebbles’), ‘pernitidisque rivis’ (‘brilliant rivers’), and ‘lacubus frigidum aquae torrentem vivae exundantibus irrigua’ (‘lakes ﬂowing over with a cold rush of living water’). The impression of freshness and almost baptismal cleanness is strong. Bede also focuses on the water within the island, but chooses once again to link it more speciﬁcally to human technologies and produce. The waterways of the island are notable for their copious ﬁsh, pearls and dye-producing whelks. Bede also describes the ‘fontes salinarum… et fonts calidos’ (‘salt springs and warm springs’), transformed from natural phenomena into constructs of human technology and artiﬁce. The centrality of water to these descriptions of the island resonates with the etymology of ealond (island) in the Old English vernacular. Whereas the Latin insula is generally agreed to derive from ‘land in itself’ or a similar construction, Old English ealond embraces the two elements of water (ea) and land (lond). Contrary to the false etymologies of the eighteenth century and onwards, insula and ealond are not etymologically linked and represent quite different conceptualisations of the island, the relationship of land to water and the idea of enclosure. While the Latin focuses only on the land, the Old English term gives equal importance to the water and does not necessarily imply dichotomy or opposition. For example, the ealond of the later Old English poem The Phoenix is not necessarily an island but a watery locus amoenus traceried with rivers and streams. 28 Britain, as described by both Gildas and Bede, is penetrated by waterways and abundant with springs and fountains. Obviously, it is not justiﬁable to look to Old English etymology to support a reading of Gildas, and Bede chooses to write in Latin. However, the associations and connotations of ealond would certainly have been available to readers of Bede (and Gildas) in the Anglo-Saxon period and may well have had implications for their conceptualisation of the island. Indeed, ealond translates insula throughout the West Saxon version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. 29 Everywhere, water pervades the island locus amoenus. The description of natural springs made into heated baths in Bede’s prologue is symptomatic of his transformation of the idyllic locus amoenus into a celebration of human cultivation and technology. For both Bede and Gildas, the presence of awe28 29

See Chapter Two, p. 44. See Thomas Miller, ed. and trans., The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, EETS OS 95, 96, 110, 111 (London, 1890–1898), for example Book I, Chapter 1, p. 24.

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inspiring cities in the island is another important aspect of the encomium, yet perhaps puzzling within the conventions of an essentially pastoral locus amoenus. Gildas refers to the twenty-eight ‘noble cities’ of the land with their fortiﬁcations: …bis denis bisque quaternis civitatibus ac nonnullis castellis, murorum turrium serratarum portarum domorum, quarum culmina minaci proceritate porrecta in edito forti compage pangebatur, munitionibus non improbabiliter instructis decorata. It is ornamented with twenty-eight cities and a number of castles, and well equipped with fortiﬁcations – walls, castellated towers, gates and houses, whose sturdily built roofs rear menacingly skyward.

Bede, using Gildas as source, also refers to the twenty-eight cities as a source of former fame. Erat et ciuitatibus quondam XX et VIII nobilissimis insignita, praetor castella unnumera quae et ipsa muris, turribus, portis ac seris errant instructis ﬁrmissimis. The country was once famous for its twenty-eight noble cities as well as innumerable fortiﬁed places equally well guarded by the strongest of walls and towers, gates and locks.

These descriptions recall the parallels which Gillian Beer draws between city and island as perfect forms and mirrors of each other. 30 The noble citadels described by Gildas and Bede subtly underline the aesthetics and politics of enclosure which are central to the island locus amoenus. For Bede, they also initiate a concatenation of enclosed, delightful spaces which resonate with the opening island image. Both Gildas and Bede provide hints that the ordered, cultivated space of the urban enclosure will become an important representational parallel to the pastoral locus amoenus. For Bede in particular, the contrasting effects of peace and order versus conﬂict and chaos are enacted on both the pastoral and urban landscapes. This comparison of Bede and Gildas helps to reveal the ways in which Bede selects from available sources and traditions, highlighting those resonances of the island locus amoenus image which he chooses to exploit, as well as the connotations which he chooses to exclude from his description of Britannia. Although intertextual associations inevitably gather around the island locus amoenus image, Bede seeks to reshape this emblem and to re-make its meaning and politics. As we have seen, Bede’s island is a space of delightful enclosure, a locus amoenus in terms of both natural beauty and human use. It is a paradisal, Edenic place, but not merely evocative of nostalgia, loss and fall. As a kind of Promised Land, it also represents aspiration and destiny for the peoples of Britannia. Just as the image of the Edenic island symbolises the privileged heritage of the English people, so Bede’s appropriation of literary models in the prologue – historical, biblical, rhetorical – asserts an English cultural heritage and afﬁliation. Where Gildas uses the island locus amoenus image as 30

Beer, ‘The island and the aeroplane’, p. 269.

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reproachful and punitive, Bede’s delightful landscape is one of possibility and potential which resurfaces throughout his work. The image of the delightful island is not merely a rhetorical showpiece designed to provide an attractive opening to Bede’s History. Indeed, the Ecclesiastical History ends with a recapitulation of this motif. Celebrating the growth of true religion in Britain, Bede declares: In cuius regno perpetuo exultet terra, et congratulante in ﬁde eius Brittaniae, laetentur insulae multae et conﬁteantur memoriae sanctitatis eius. Let the earth rejoice in His perpetual kingdom and let Britain rejoice in his faith and let the multitude of isles be glad and give thanks at the remembrance of His holiness. 31

The quotation from Psalm 96 (‘laetant insulae multae’) once again invests Britain with the status of a chosen land where God’s plan for salvation will be enacted, appropriating the Psalm as a kind of national prophesy or benediction. The reference to ‘many islands’ might suggest a metaphorical archipelago of Christian nations in which Britain is included. However, we may also look for these ‘many islands’ within Britain, where the national myth of the struggle to recover the ideal, Edenic land is performed and celebrated in local sites and by local saints and heroes. Bede’s Edenic island is not merely a rhetorical ‘purple patch’ grafted onto the beginning of the History, but a seminal image which develops throughout the text. The ﬁrst chapters of the Ecclesiastical History establish a representational system which uses the imagery of place and landscape to contrast periods of conﬂict and sinfulness with moments of peace and religious obedience. In the opening chapters of the Ecclesiastical History, rule and ownership of Britannia shift between natives, settlers and invaders. A series of narratives of invasion or persecution and displacement establishes associations between different kinds of landscape and power or powerlessness. A clear dichotomy emerges between the city and the cultivated rural landscape as places of power and order, and the wildernesses at the margins of the island as a place for the dispossessed and exiled. At times of conﬂict and religious corruption, the delightful spaces of the city and the pastoral landscape recede entirely from the History and the wilderness seems to encroach even on the language of the text itself. For example, Bede tells us that, during Roman persecution, British Christians had hidden themselves in the wild. At ubi turbo persecutionis quieuit, progressi in publicum ﬁdeles Christi, qui se tempore discriminis siluis ac desertis abditisue speluncis occulerant, renouant ecclesias ad solum usque destructas… When the storm of persecution had ceased, the faithful Christians who in time of danger had hidden themselves in woods and deserts and secret caverns came out of hiding. They rebuilt the churches which had been razed to the ground… 32 31 32

EH, Book V, Chapter 23, pp. 560, 561. EH, Book I, Chapter 8, pp. 34, 35.

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On the one hand, this passage describes the wilderness landscapes represented by ‘siluis ac desertis abditisue speluncis’ (‘woods and deserts and secret caverns’). The ﬁgurative language even associates the religious persecution itself with the hostility of the wilderness landscape: it is a ‘turbo’ (‘storm’). In contrast to the wilderness, and its symbolic indication of dispossession and powerlessness, the churches which the Christians afterwards rebuild (‘renouant’) are the ultimate emblem of the human ability to construct and cultivate an ordered, meaningful space. Church buildings are also very much public expressions of cultural and religious power. Interestingly, this passage represents the wilderness as a hidden place, beyond sight, whereas the Christians’ regaining of power constitutes a re-entry into an open, public space. During their persecution, the Christians hide themselves literally ‘beyond eyes’ (‘se… occulerant’) in concealed places including secret caverns (‘abditisue speluncis’).Their return to freedom involves leaving these places and a re-entry ‘in publicum’ (literally ‘into the open’ or ‘into public’). So this passage also subtly suggests a polarisation between the wilderness as a place of concealment and hiding, and the cultivated space as public and visual. Later, Bede gives an account of the famine which occurs whilst the barbarian tribes are attacking Britain. …multos eorum coegit uictas infestis praedonibus dare manus, alios uero numquam; quin potius conﬁdentes in diuinum, ubi humanum cessabat, auxilium de ipsis montibus speluncis ac saltibus continue rebellabant… It compelled many of them to surrender to the plundering foe; others, trusting in divine aid when human help failed them, would never give in but continued their resistance, hiding in mountains, caves and forests. 33

Here we glimpse the traditional desert landscape of outlawry and rebellion. The wilderness is clearly a space beyond human control and jurisdiction, and retreat there is an act of religious faith (‘conﬁdentes in diuinum’) as well as of desperation. Bede’s account of the pagan Saxon attacks offers the fullest exposition of this landscape imagery. Bede tells us that, during Saxon incursions: Ruebant aediﬁcia publica simul et priuata, passim sacerdotes inter altaria trucidabantur, praesules cum populis sine ullo respectu honoris ferro partier et ﬂammis absumebantur, nec erat qui crudeliter interemtos sepulturae traderet. Itaque nonnulli de miserandis reliquiis in montibus conprehensi aceruatim iugulabantur; alii fame confecti procedentes manus hostibus dabant, pro accipiendis alimentorum subsidiis aeternum subituri seruitium, si tamen non continuo trucidarentur; alii transmarinas regiones dolentes pete/bant; alii perstantes in patria trepidi pauperem uitam in montibus siluis uel rupibus arduis suspecta semper mente agebant. Public and private buildings fell in ruins, priests were everywhere slain at their altars, prelates and people alike perished by sword and ﬁre regardless of rank, and there was no one left to bury those who had died a cruel death. Some of the miserable remnant were captured in the mountains and butchered 33

EH, Book I, Chapter 14, pp. 46–8.

24

Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 indiscriminately; other, exhausted by hunger, came forward and submitted themselves to the enemy, ready to accept perpetual slavery for the sake of food, provided only they escaped being killed on the spot: some ﬂed sorrowfully to lands beyond the sea, while others remained in their own land and led a wretched existence, always in fear and dread, among the mountains and woods and precipitous rocks. 34

This passage represents the destruction of all aspects of Bede’s island locus amoenus. The only landscape imagined here is one of wilderness and hostility – the delightful pastoral island has disappeared from view. Paralleling the loss of the cultivated natural landscape, the ordered space of the city is also thrown into chaos (‘ruebant aediﬁcia publica simul et priuata’). Bede’s focus moves completely away from the image of the delightful island to a vision of ruin, disorder and wilderness. Even the enclosure and integrity of the island itself collapse here: its boundaries are unnaturally transgressed as enemies invade and native Britons ﬂee ‘transmarinas regiones’ (‘to regions beyond the sea’). These examples might suggest that Bede is creating a symbolic vocabulary of martyrdom which aligns the wilderness landscape with the righteous suffering of persecuted Christians. There are undeniably overtones here of saintly exile and passion. Yet Bede does not only reserve the wilderness for righteous exiles. The leaders of the Pelagian heresy are also exiled to the wilderness, and more speciﬁcally to the hostile places between borders and rules. …omniumque sententia prauitatis auctores, qui erant expulsi insula, sacerdotibus adducuntur ad mediterranea deferendi, ut et regio absolutione et illi emendatione fruerentur. The teachers of the heresy, who had been expelled from the island, were brought by common consent before the bishops, who banished them into the marchlands, so that the country might be rid of them and they might be rid of their error. 35

The wilderness spaces of the marches – conventionally hostile and haunted in Old English vernacular tradition – are deemed appropriate and ﬁtting for the spiritual perversion and monstrosity of the heretic Whether exile into the wild is a just punishment, as in the case of the Pelagian leaders, or unjust martyrdom, as in the case of the British Christians, the wilderness landscape surfaces in Bede’s text at times of conﬂict and disorder. Conversely, images of order, cultivation and the locus amoenus surface at moments of peace and justice, hinting at the potential to realise the promise of the Edenic island through righteousness and true religion. For example, when the bishops

34 35

EH, Book I, Chapter 15, pp. 52, 53. EH, Book I, Chapter 21, pp. 66, 67. The edition notes: ‘I have interpreted mediterranea to mean the land between two adjoining territories, the traditional no-man’s-land haunted by monsters and evil men, as, for example, the monster Grendel in Beowulf.’

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Germanus of Auxerre and Lupus of Troyes arrive in Britain to preach and to correct the Pelagian heresy, order is restored. Interea Brittaniarum insulam apostolici sacerdotes raptim opinione praedicatione uirtutibus impleuerunt, diuinusque per eos sermo cotidie non solum in ecclesiis uerum etiam per triuia, per rura praedicabatur… In the meantime the island of Britain was soon ﬁlled with the fame of the preaching and the miracles of these apostolic bishops. They preached the word of God daily not only in the churches but also in the streets and in the ﬁelds… 36

Now, rather than a landscape of woods, mountains and caves, the landscape of Britain is restored to a series of cultivated, ordered spaces. The poised, balanced rhetoric of the text itself reﬂects the return to order, paralleling the cultivated spaces of church, street and ﬁeld (‘in ecclesiis… per triuia, per rura’). Perhaps the most striking use of the locus amoenus image in these early chapters is the narrative of Alban’s martyrdom. Occurring in the midst of Bede’s account of Roman persecution and the exile of Romano-British Christians, this episode offers a sharp contrast. Through Alban, God’s power is enacted on the landscape and we see martyrdom envisioned as a performance of heaven. As the saint approaches his place of execution, God causes the waters of the river to dry up and provide a path for him. Then Alban reaches the hill-top execution site: qui oportune laetus gratia decentissima quingentis fere passibus ab harena situs est, uariis herbarum ﬂoribus depictus, immo usquequaque uestitus; in quo nihil repente arduum, nihil praeceps, nihil abruptum, quem lateribus longe lateque deductum in modum aequoris Natura conplanat, dignum uidelicet eum pro insita sibi specie uenustatis iam olim reddens, qui beati martyris cruore dicaretur. / In huius ergo uertice sanctus Albanus dari sibi a Deo aquam rogauit, statimque incluso meatu ante pedes eius fons perennis exortus est, ut omnes agnoscerent etiam torrentem martyri obsequium detulisse. [which] lay about ﬁve hundred paces from the arena, and, as was ﬁtting, it was fair, shining and beautiful, adorned, indeed clothed, on all sides with wild ﬂowers of every kind; nowhere was it steep or precipitous or sheer but Nature had provided it with wide, long-sloping sides stretching smoothly down to the level of the plain. In fact its natural beauty had long ﬁtted it as a place to be hallowed by the blood of a blessed martyr. When he reached the top of the hill, St Alban asked God to give him water and at once a perpetual spring bubbled up, conﬁned within its channel and at his very feet, so that all could see that even the stream rendered service to the martyr. 37

The place is an archetypal locus amoenus: green and bright, adorned with ﬂowers and without any rough or harsh features. The landscape is deﬁned by its conventional pastoral elements, and also by the absence of harshness emphasised in the three 36 37

EH, Book I, Chapter 17, pp. 56, 57. EH, Book I, Chapter 7, pp. 32, 33.

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repeated uses of ‘nihil’. Alban’s calling forth of the spring adds another conventional feature of the locus amoenus, and reinforces the implicit parallels between Alban’s delightful place of martyrdom and the initial description of Britannia itself with its streams and fountains. Interestingly, the topography of the site also recalls that of an island: Alban has to cross over water to reach it, and it is raised up over the surrounding area. Hills and islands share symbolism and are often interchangeable in later English iconography. 38 Alban’s name itself is a near-pun with ‘Albion’, the ancient name for Britain invoked by Bede at the beginning of the Ecclesiastical History, further promoting a reading of Alban’s story as metonym for national destiny. Alban’s martyrdom allows the recovery, if only for a moment, of the paradisal locus amoenus as described at the beginning of the History – an enactment of the heavenly on earth, and of the ideal Britannia. Echoes of the locus amoenus recur elsewhere in the Ecclesiastical History, notably in the vision of Dryhthelm. Dryhthelm’s otherworldly journey reveals the horrors of two hells, as well as two delightful places: the interim paradise and the true heaven. The paradisal landscapes of Dryhthelm’s vision are enclosed and inaccessible, yet we glimpse a beautiful locus amoenus: campus... latissimus ac laetissimus, tantaque ﬂagrantia uernantium ﬂosculorum plenus, ut omnem mox fetorem tenebrosi fornacis, qui me peruaserat, effugerat admirandi huius suauitas odoris. a very broad and pleasant plain, full of such a fragrance of growing ﬂowers that the marvellous sweeteness of the scent quickly dispelled the foul stench of the gloomy furnace which had hung around me. 39

After the opening representation of the Edenic Britannia which dominates the History, the description of heaven itself here seems to be a mirror and recapitulation of the idealised island. Dryhthelm is denied entry into these paradisal landscapes until after death, but the Ecclesiastical History continually hints at the possibility of realising the heavenly on earth and, more importantly, on English soil. When Oswald’s Christian Saxon army defeats the British pagans at Heavenﬁeld in 642, Bede notes the name of the place in both Latin and English. ‘This place is called in English Heavenﬁeld, and in Latin Caelestis campus, a name which it certainly received in days of old as an omen of future happenings’ (‘Vocantur locus ille lingua Anglorum Hefenfeld, quod dici potest latine Caelestis campus, quod certo utique praesagio futurorum antiquitus nomen accepit’). 40 The place of battle and suffering is transformed into an image of heaven, recalling both the paradisal plains of Dryhthelm’s vision and the Edenic image of Britannia which opens the History. Clearly, the narratives of speciﬁc individuals and places can be seen as microcosmic performances of the myth central to the Ecclesiastical History: the aspiration to re-discover and recover an ideal, unfallen state through faith and struggle. 38 39 40

See the discussion of monastic ‘hill’ and ‘island’ sites in Chapter Three of this study. EH, Book V, Chapter 12, pp. 492, 493. EH, Book III, Chapter 2, pp. 216, 217.

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The use of landscape imagery to symbolise the ideals of spiritual aspiration and cultivation extends beyond the Ecclesiastical History into Bede’s other work, and on into other early Anglo-Latin texts inﬂuenced by this Bedan iconography. Bede’s prose Life of St Cuthbert demonstrates once again the symbolic power of landscape imagery and its function within an English mythology, and is again highly inﬂuential in the early transmission of these ideas and images of England. Bede’s Life of St Cuthbert has frequently been seen as an English response to the early hagiographies of the North African ‘Desert Fathers’, such as Athanasius’s Life of St Antony, known to Western European audiences through the Latin translation of Evagrius. 41 Cuthbert seeks a similar experience of asceticism and self-imposed exile in a hostile wilderness environment, and, again in keeping with the ‘Antonian’ tradition, achieves an inner spiritual transformation which is mirrored in the changing landscape of his retreat. The Life of St Cuthbert clearly ﬁts within these broader hagiographic traditions, and is in many ways a highly conventional and formulaic account of an eremetic life. Yet the Life also gathers more speciﬁc resonances and valencies within the context of Bede’s representational systems. Bede gives more attention to the role of natural landscape in Cuthbert’s story than does the author of the anonymous prose Life and it is certainly no coincidence that Cuthbert’s retreat is an island. Farne is the ﬁrst example we will encounter of one of the localised ‘insulae multae’ which enable a microcosmic performance and realisation of the aspiration for Britannia as a whole. Cuthbert makes his dwelling in a hostile, chaotic landscape, yet his cultivation of the place restores it to a locus amoenus. In the Life of St Cuthbert, we see the re-making of Antonian hagiographic conventions within a speciﬁcally English and Bedan mythology. A close examination of relevant chapters from the Life will recapitulate and reinforce many of the images and motifs which are central to the Ecclesiastical History. In Chapter XVII of the Life, Bede tells us that Cuthbert leaves the monastery at Lindisfarne to seek out a more solitary existence. At postquam in eodem monasterio multa annorum curricula expleuit, tandem diu concupita, quaesita, ac petita solitudinis secreta, comitante praefati abbatis sui simul et fratrum gratia multum laetabundus adiit. Now after he had completed many years in that same monastery, he joyfully entered into the remote solitudes which he had long desired, sought, and prayed for, with the good will of that same abbot and also of the brethren. 42

For Bede, there is a delicate balance to be maintained between solitary asceticism and community: it is signiﬁcant that Cuthbert’s retreat is explicitly approved by those at Lindisfarne, and that he removes himself from monastery life in controlled stages. First, Cuthbert moves to a place at the edge of the monastery (‘ad locum quendam qui in exterioribus eius cellae partibus secretior apparet’), 43 and only later to the 41 42 43

Evagrius, Vita sancti Antonii, auctore sancto Athanasio interprete Evagrio, PL 73, cols 125–70. Bede, Life of St Cuthbert in Bertram Colgrave, ed. and trans., Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert (Cambridge, 1940), Chapter XVII, pp. 214, 215. Ibid., Chapter XVII, p. 214.

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remote island of Farne. Cuthbert’s retreat is also detailed geographically by Bede – ﬁrst to the ‘half-island’ (‘semiinsula’) of Lindisfarne, and then to the true island of Farne. Farne is beyond human habitation and cultivation, ‘remote from mankind’ (‘remotiorem ab hominibus’) and a place of fear. Nullus hanc facile ante famulum Domini Cuthbertum solus ualebat inhabitare colonus, propter uidelicet demorantium ibi phantasias demonum. No one had been able to dwell alone undisturbed upon this island before Cuthbert the servant of the Lord, on account of the phantoms of demons who dwelt there. 44

The landscape of Farne, and Cuthbert’s experiences there, are characterised by duality and contradiction. Although this is a place of demonic hauntings, physical hardship and inhospitable remoteness, the island is also clearly a place of spiritual desire and pleasure. Cuthbert’s eremeticism is described as ‘otium’, 45 intersecting with the classical pastoral concept of restful retreat and contemplative leisure. Bede emphasises the spiritual eagerness and desire with which Cuthbert enters the solitary life. Yet the island is also a site for spiritual struggle and testing. Cuthbert enters Farne as a conventional ‘miles Christi’. Verum intrante eam milite Christe, armato galea salutis, scuto ﬁdei, et gladio spiritus quod est uerbum Dei, omnia tela nequissimi ignea extincta et ipse nequissimus cum omni satellitum suorum turba porro fugatus est hostis. When the soldier of Christ entered, armed with the ‘helmet of salvation, the shield of faith, and the sword of the spirit which is the word of God, all the ﬁery darts of the wicked one’ were quenched, and the wicked foe himself was driven far away together with the whole crowd of his satellites. 46

Bede uses the Biblical commonplace of Ephesians 6:16–17 to depict Cuthbert as the archetypal soldier of God armed with spiritual weapons. Indeed, it seems that in this chapter Bede self-consciously imitates a series of literary conventions and idioms, presenting a concatenation of instantly recognisable generic set-pieces. Moving ﬁrst from the language of retreat and rest, with its resonances in classical as well as patristic and monastic traditions, Bede then offers a conventional rhetorical outline of the solider of Christ. The martial image of the ‘miles Christi’ then links to an epicheroic vision of Cuthbert as the warrior-founder of Farne. Bede then goes on to imitate the genre of epic and foundation myth. Qui uidelicet miles Christi ut deuicta tyrannorum acie monarcha terrae quam adierat factus est, condidit ciuitatem suo aptam imperio, et domos in hac aeque ciuitati congruas erexit.

44 45 46

Bede, Life of St Cuthbert, Chapter XVII, pp. 214, 215. Ibid. Translated by Colgrave as ‘repose’. Ibid.

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This solider of Christ, as soon as he had become monarch of the land he had entered and had overcome the army of the usurpers, built a city ﬁtted for his rule, and in it houses equally suited to the city. 47

Although this passage verges on mock-heroic for the modern reader, it seems that Bede is appropriating a series of authorising literary models to portray Cuthbert’s settlement of Farne. This series of high rhetorical styles celebrates Cuthbert’s achievement from all angles and places beyond attack the legitimacy and authority of his actions. This may be a particular concern for Bede, whose careful account of the decorum of Cuthbert’s retreat suggests an implicit contrast with the practice of other contemporary ascetics. While the image of Cuthbert as an Aeneas-like founder of a city on Farne may now seem exaggerated and almost comical, it raises again the parallels between city and island (the two ‘perfect forms’ discussed by Gillian Beer) which were suggested in the opening chapter of the Ecclesiastical History. Bede’s ‘ciuitas’ need not be translated as ‘city’, but it certainly conveys the sense of a fortiﬁed enclosure. The island is the perfect space for Cuthbert’s eremetic life, and the ‘city’ within reinforces images of enclosure, defence and stronghold. The concentric enclosed, defended spaces of the island, the city and Cuthbert’s own body underline his saintly integrity and chastity. When Cuthbert ﬁrst settles on Farne it is the opposite of a locus amoenus: an uncultivated, hostile and gruelling natural environment. It is Cuthbert’s spiritual triumph, enacted on the landscape of Farne, which transforms it into a space of delightful order and cultivation. Firstly, Cuthbert brings forth a spring where the island has been only hard and stony rock. 48 As with St Alban in the Ecclesiastical History, this is a conventional saintly act which reinforces Cuthbert’s holiness. However, it is not a single saintly action, but a narrative event which allows the beginning of Cuthbert’s cultivation of the once-barren land. Next, Cuthbert sows a crop of barley, which miraculously ﬂourishes. Allatumque ordeum dum ultra omne tempus serendi, ultra omnem spem fructiﬁcandi terrae commendaret, mox abundanter exortum fecit fructum copiosum. The barley was brought long after the proper time for sowing it, and when there seemed no hope of any harvest, yet when he put it in the ground, it soon sprang up and brought forth a very abundant crop. 49

After taming the landscape itself, Cuthbert is then faced with the rebellion of its wild creatures. Birds take barley from the crop and straw from the thatch of his house, but are successfully admonished by Cuthbert. Ultimately, the birds nest obediently in the island, an ‘example of reformation’ (‘exemplum correctionis’) and another element of Cuthbert’s tamed, ordered natural environment. 50 Bede’s Life of St Cuthbert, and the 47 48 49 50

Bede, Life of St Cuthbert, Chapter XVII, pp. 214–17. Ibid., Chapter XVIII, pp. 217–19. Ibid., Chapter XVIII, pp. 220, 221. Ibid., Chapter XX, pp. 224, 225.

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Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400

very similar anonymous prose Life, centre around this narrative of settlement and cultivation. The transformation of Cuthbert’s retreat from hostile wilderness into an ordered locus amoenus allows us to see the interior spiritual transformation which he achieves. Although never explicitly stated, the parallel between Cuthbert’s island and the island of Britain as a whole is fundamental to the saint’s emblematic status and the resonance of his cult beyond Lindisfarne. Beyond the Life of St Cuthbert and the Ecclesiastical History, this Bedan iconography and mythology is evident in a range of other early Anglo-Latin texts, suggesting both the inﬂuence of Bede’s work and the ability of other writers to appropriate and adapt the symbolic landscapes of classical pastoral and Antonian hagiography for English contexts and agendas. Beyond Bede, Alcuin’s poem The Bishops, Kings and Saints of York, written in the later eighth century, adopts this same symbolic vocabulary of landscape and cultivation, synthesising it with pastoral panegyric conventions inherited from Venantius Fortunatus and continental Latin tradition. Alcuin celebrates Cuthbert’s role in the conversion of the English, representing his teaching as ‘loca fructiferis implens inculta virectis’ (‘ﬁlling the wastelands with ﬂowering greenness’). 51 Again, Cuthbert’s spiritual transformation and cultivation is envisioned through the natural landscape. The saintliness of Wilfrid of York is also depicted through pastoral topoi, and his spiritual power is enacted on the landscape. With Wilfrid’s conversion of the South Saxons: descendit pluvia telluribus aura serena, et terris rediit specimen viridantibus arvis: ﬂorigero campi montesque ornantur amictu. Frugifer agricolis laetantibus inditur annus, inque Deum carnes cunctorum cordaque vivum exultaverunt, cecinit sicut antea David, certius aeternis inhiantes pectore donis, quo sumpsere prius sibimet terrene per Illum. …a breeze settled with a calm shower on the earth, the ﬁelds grew green, and a beauty returned to the land: the plains and the meadows were arrayed in a ﬂowering mantle. To the farmers’ delight the harvest was fruitful, in ﬂesh and at heart, all men rejoiced in the living God, even as David has sung in times past, yearning more ﬁrmly at heart for eternal gifts, since they had taken earth’s bounty from Him before. 52

Wilfrid’s spiritual cultivation of the South Saxons restores the English landscape to a perfect pastoral locus amoenus. The allusion to David here looks back in particular to the pastoral imagery of the Old Testament Psalms, and again implies a parallel

51 52

Alcuin, The Bishops, Kings and Saints of York, ed. and trans. Peter Godman (Oxford, 1982), lines 652–3. Ibid., lines 598–605.

The Edenic Island

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between God’s goodness to the Israelites and his protection of the English in their own Promised Land. 53 In Felix’s Latin prose Life of St Guthlac the central narrative is once again the settlement and cultivation of a wilderness island space into a delightful place. Like Bede, Felix also presents a symbolic, polarised landscape of hostile, untamed wasteland transformed into a locus amoenus. Allusions and quotations in the Life of St Guthlac show the close inﬂuence of Bede’s Life of St Cuthbert, but the text’s representation of place and saintliness also ﬁts within the broader developing mythology of English landscape and spiritual identity. The Life of St Guthlac depicts even more clearly than Bede’s Cuthbert a conventional locus amoenus, and this element of the hagiography is expanded and developed still further in the Old English poem Guthlac A. As with Bede’s Cuthbert, Felix’s Guthlac seeks a ‘desert’ retreat in the Antonian monastic tradition. Guthlac’s retreat at Crowland in the fenland is described as situated within ‘inmensae magnitudinis aterrima palus’ (‘a most dismal fen of immense size’), 54 a desolate wilderness: …nunc stagnis, nunc ﬂactris, interdum nigris fusi vaporis lacticibus, necnon et crebis insularum nemorumque intervenientibus ﬂexuosis rivigarum anfractibus, ab austro in aquilonem mare tenus longissimo tractu protenditur. …now consisting of marshes, now of bogs, sometimes of black waters overhung by fog, sometimes studded with wooded islands, and traversed by the windings of tortuous streams. 55

The fens here are twice described as ‘inculta’, beyond human cultivation or order. 56 Tatwine, the local man who takes Guthlac to the island of Crowland, reveals the nature of the place. …ecce quidam de illic adstantibus nomine Tatwine se scisse aliam insulam in abditis remotioris heremi partibus conﬁtebatur, quam multi inhabitare temtantes propter incognita heremi monstra et diversam formarum terrores reprobaverant. …a certain man among those standing by, whose name was Tatwine, declared that he knew a certain island in the more remote and hidden parts of that desert; many had attempted to dwell there, but had rejected it on account of the unknown portents of the desert and its terrors of various shapes. 57

The text then speciﬁcally alludes to The Life of St Cuthbert, employing Bede’s description of the haunted island and changing only the saint’s name.

53 54 55 56 57

Interestingly, the pseudonym later adopted by Alcuin at the Carolingian court is ‘Albinus’ – another possible word-play with ‘Albion’ and association of individual with national identity. Felix’s Life of St Guthlac, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge, 1956), Chapter XXIV, pp. 86, 87. All references to Felix’s Life of St Guthlac hereafter will be taken from this edition. Ibid., Chapter XXIV, pp. 86, 87. Ibid., Chapter XXV, pp. 88, 89. Ibid.

32

Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 Nullus hanc ante famulum Christi Guthlacum solus habitare colonus valebat, propter videlicet illic demorantium fantasias demonum… No settler had been able to dwell alone in the place before Guthlac the servant of Christ, on account of the phantoms of demons which haunted it. 58

Felix uses both the terms insula and tumulus to describe Crowland, though insula is used consistently in these initial descriptions. The concept of Crowland as a tumulus or burial mound attests to its raised topographical formation and also hints at the possible reasons for the demonic presences. Felix’s description of Guthlac’s arrival at Crowland has, like the similar scene in Bede’s Cuthbert, connotations of epic heroism as well as hagiographic convention. Guthlac and Tatwine travel ‘per invia lustra’ (‘through trackless bogs’) 59 – an echo of Virgil’s Aeneid, Book IV, line 151. In the Aeneid, this journey through the natural wilderness occurs as Aeneas and Dido set out on a hunting expedition which takes them ‘in montis atque invia lustra’ (‘through mountains and trackless bogs’). 60 The literary allusion appropriately aligns Guthlac, the founder of the Crowland retreat, with the heroic ﬁgure of Aeneas. 61 Book IV of the Aeneid offers another appropriate resonance in its presentation of a hero displaying triumph and control over the natural landscape – in this case through the formal rituals and pleasures of the hunt, although the subsequent storm and its disastrous consequences hint at the potential duality of the natural landscape for both delight and danger. Essentially, the echo of the Aeneid here invests Guthlac with the stature of an epic hero, and subtly suggests his eagerness to begin his saintly ‘hunt’ and combat with the demons. Like Bede, Felix’s description of the transformation of the island is sparing and succinct, yet the selection of key vocabulary clearly signals participation in a series of literary idioms. Most crucially, Guthlac’s transformed island retreat becomes every bit the Virgilian pastoral locus amoenus. Although later chapters of the hagiography return to narrate in detail Guthlac’s struggles and battles with the demons, Chapter XXV functions as a crucial pivotal section, which condenses a powerful juxtaposition of Guthlac’s settlement of the island, its initial wildness and hostility, and its transformation into a delightful place. The chapter sets up expectations of conﬂict and suffering, yet ultimately describes Guthlac’s settlement of the retreat in idyllic terms.

58 59 60

61

Felix’s Life of St Guthlac, Chapter XXV, pp. 88, 89. Ibid. See Virgil, Virgil: Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I-VI, ed. and trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1935), pp. 406. My translation, echoing Colgrave’s translation of Felix. Interestingly, George Henderson has discussed another possible link between Guthlac and Aeneas. Later Guthlac iconography depicts a sow and piglets waiting at Crowland as Guthlac arrives, recalling the sow and piglets which Aeneas ﬁnds on his arrival at the site of Rome. See George Henderson, ‘The Imagery of Guthlac of Crowland’, in England in the Thirteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1984 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. W.M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, 1985), pp. 76–94, p. 87, n. The sow and piglets motif also occurs in Glastonbury Abbey foundation myths. See Antonia Gransden, Legends, Tradition and History in Medieval England (London, 1992), p. 172.

The Edenic Island

33

…vir Dei Guthlac, contempto hoste, caelesti auxilio adiutus, inter umbrosa solitudinis nemora solus habitare coepit. Contigit enim, divina dispensante gratia, ut aestivis temporibus, die quo missa sancti Bartholomei venerari debet, insulam Crugland beatus Guthlac devenisset, qui in sancti Bartholomei auxiliis, cum omni ﬁducia heremum habitare coeperat. Igitur, adamato illius loci abdito situ velut a Deo sibi donato, omnes dies vitae suae illic degere directa mente devoverat. …Guthlac, the man of God, despising the enemy, began by divine aid to dwell alone among the shady groves of this solitude. For it happened through the dispensation of divine grace that the blessed Guthlac reached the island of Crowland in the summer time, on the day on which the feast of St Bartholomew is due to be celebrated. So he began to inhabit the desert with complete conﬁdence in the help of St Bartholomew. He loved the remoteness of the spot seeing that God had given it him, and vowed with righteous purpose to spend all the days of his life there. 62

The various elements of this passage clearly aspire to the classical locus amoenus. The ‘umbrosa solitudinis’ recall the ‘umbra’ so central to the archetypal pastoral idyll. 63 The verb adamo again depicts the saint’s retreat as a place of desire and pleasure – the preﬁx ad- foregrounding the sense of momentum and transformation as Guthlac begins to love the island site. Guthlac’s summertime arrival at Crowland contributes to the impression of a locus amoenus, and the spiritual patronage of St Bartholomew adds another key element of the pastoral idyll: friendship. Again, as with Bede’s description of Cuthbert’s retreat, this is not a fully realised, explicit locus amoenus. Yet the impression created is clear and convincing, and the choice of vocabulary deliberately intersects with classical pastoral tradition. Later, in Chapter XXXVIII, Felix narrates the episode of Guthlac speaking to the jackdaws – another echo of both Cuthbert and Anthony. The birds and ﬁsh come to Guthlac ‘veluti ad pastorem’ (‘as if to a shepherd’) in the ‘incultae solitudinis’ (‘untamed wilderness’). 64 The image of Guthlac as a shepherd of course draws together classical pastoral and Christian vocabulary and tradition. The hagiography centres around the contrast between Guthlac’s cultivated island garden and the surrounding wilderness of the fens. Chapter XXV places this imagery of contrast and transformation at the heart of the text. Like Bede’s Life of Cuthbert and Evagrius’s Life of St Antony itself, Felix’s Life of St Guthlac is often read as a symbolic, allegorical text in which the exterior transformation of landscape represents the interior spiritual transformation of the individual. As with the wild coastline of Northumbria, the hostile landscape of the fens can be seen as a recognisable, English version of the Antonian desert. Guthlac’s retreat and transformation of the island represent a realisation of the heavenly on earth, the puriﬁcation of the individual soul, and the symbolic restoration of a 62 63 64

Felix’s Life of St Guthlac, Chapter XXV, pp. 88, 89. For example, see the opening of Virgil’s Eclogues, which sets the pastoral scene with a reference to ‘umbra’. Virgil: Eclogues, ed. and trans. Fairclough, pp. 2, 3. Felix’s Life of St Guthlac, Chapter XXXVIII, pp. 120, 121.

34

Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400

‘natural’, unfallen, Edenic existence. However, as an English text, the Life of St Guthlac also has another powerful symbolic meaning. Its central narrative of the settlement, purging and cultivation of an island functions as a micorocosm or mirror for the challenges for the English nation and the island of Britannia as a whole. This narrative allegorises the complex politics of religious conversion and cultivation, yet can also be seen as a mythologisation of the very real challenges of land reclamation, settlement and cultivation in Anglo-Saxon England. Already at the time of Felix, the fens were undergoing settlement, land reclamation and defence. 65 Studies of AngloSaxon place names suggest that the sufﬁx land in the name Crowland may well indicate the status of the island as reclaimed land. 66 Narratives such as those of Guthlac and Cuthbert may also provide a spiritual rhetoric and mythology for the practicalities and economic realities of early English landscape management. 67 So, this central narrative of settlement, cultivation and transformation has many resonances and meanings: some universal to Western European literary and religious traditions, others very much speciﬁc to English concerns and ideologies. The image of the delightful island and metaphorical uses of landscape are central to the representation and mythologisation of England and English identity in these early Anglo-Latin texts. The cultivation of hostile, wilderness landscape into a locus amoenus functions as a metaphor for spiritual conversion and cultivation, and for the establishment of peace and order. Bede’s seminal description of Britannia provides a neat beginning for the island locus amoenus in medieval English literature and has a clear inﬂuence over many of the texts discussed later in this study. Yet Bede’s English ‘Genesis’ is deceptive, and achieves much of its power not through invention, but through the appropriation of existing cultural traditions and conventions: historiographical, literary and religious. In particular, Bede’s relationship to Gildas’s Ruin of Britain is signiﬁcant. Although Gildas provides much factual detail for the Ecclesiastical History, Bede radically re-fashions the island locus amoenus image into one of aspiration and destiny, rather than loss and reproach. The early chapters of the History then establish an awareness of the island’s dual potential as a delightful, ordered place, or as a place of wilderness and chaos. Throughout the History, glimpses of the locus amoenus in England emphasise the possibility of realising the ideal through Christian faith and obedience. Bede’s Life of St Cuthbert and Felix’s Life of St Guthlac show how this representational ideology resonates in contemporary hagiography. The wilderness retreats of these saints ﬁt within an Antonian tradition, 65

66

67

John Hines comments that Guthlac’s ‘occupation of the promontory in the Fens around the beginning of the eighth century was not the egregious act his hagiographical life-records would suggest’ and that, ‘in the Middle Saxon Period, there is archaeological evidence for the reorganization of settlement in this area and a greater exploitation of the Fens.’ See John Hines, Voices in the Past: English Literature and Archaeology (Cambridge, 2004), p. 67 and also pp. 68–9. Margaret Gelling suggests that ‘land may have been one of the terms used in place-names to denote new settlements of the Anglo-Saxon period in areas colonized or reclaimed in response to an increasing need for arable.’ Margaret Gelling, Place-Names in the Landscape (London, 2000), p. 245. Chapter Three of this study will look particularly at the use of island locus amoenus imagery to promote and celebrate the land reclamation and defence strategies of major English monastic houses in the fens and south-west levels.

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yet their transformed island dwellings echo Bede’s mythology, and function as mirrors for England itself. They are perhaps examples of the ‘insulae multae’ to which Bede alludes at the end of the Ecclesiastical History and which provide microcosmic performances of national aspiration and destiny. This chapter has identiﬁed many themes and possibilities which will be explored further throughout this study. In particular, later chapters will return to parallels between the delightful enclosed spaces of island and city, uses of the island image to link national and local cults and ideologies, and the tensions inherent in making an English mythology based on cultural imitation and appropriation. Beginning with Bede gives us the ideal exposition of the English locus amoenus, but also opens up the problems and questions which will recur throughout this study.

2 Re-making the locus amoenus in Anglo-Saxon England

The possibility of a literary pastoral tradition in the early English vernacular has received little critical attention, and has often been explicitly denied. The locus amoenus or conventional delightful landscape has generally been perceived primarily as a feature of Latin literary tradition, and critical assumptions about the difference or otherness of the English vernacular have perpetuated this view. Critical discussion of landscape imagery in Old English is often based upon a distinction between Latin and vernacular traditions, as well as a perceived contrast between poetic traditions of ‘Saxon’ and ‘Celtic’ origin. In Landscapes and Seasons of the Medieval World, Derek Pearsall and Elizabeth Salter make the typical distinction. The ossiﬁcation of classical landscape in Byzantine, Carolingian and Romanesque painting may be compared… with the formalization of the locus amoenus in the Latin poetry of the period. The insigniﬁcance of landscape, in any form, in the native vernaculars reinforces the generalization about the sophisticated and particular provenance of a taste for landscape. There is no ‘taste for landscape’ in Old English poetry, for instance, and no ‘feeling for nature’ though there is an awareness of its grim realities. 1

Helen Cooper’s important study Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance (Ipswich, 1977) does not include vernacular poetry until the later medieval period. Jennifer Neville’s study, Representations of the Natural World in Old English Poetry (Cambridge, 1999) is typical in its interpretation of the natural world in the vernacular as a direct opposition to the culture and community of human society. Neville focuses on Old English texts which describe the cultivation and control of nature as a ‘battle’ against a threatening, encroaching ‘Other’, and is typical in asserting a further difference between representations of nature in Anglo-Saxon and ‘Celtic’ vernacular literatures. The accepted view of literary landscapes in Old English as hostile, threatening and grim is also supported by Andy Orchard’s examination of the Beowulf Manuscript,

1

Derek Pearsall and Elizabeth Salter, Landscapes and Seasons of the Medieval World (London, 1973), p. 41.

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37

which approaches ‘nature’ as a potentially monstrous Other to be contained and circumscribed in texts, or as a test of heroic mastery. 2 However, despite this often rigid critical distinction between Latin and vernacular tradition, it seems that Old English poetry can reﬂect knowledge and exploitation of the literary locus amoenus – even in its representation of the most grim and horriﬁc landscape. Hugh Magennis has related the haunted mere in Beowulf to the apocryphal Visio S. Pauli, aligning the Old English description with depictions of hell in Latin visionary literature. Magennis identiﬁes this as the tradition of the ‘inverted locus amoenus’: the home of the Grendelkin parodies the stock image of the delightful place just as their actions parody the roles and obligations of Hrothgar’s Hall community. 3 Hrothgar’s description of the mere certainly correlates ironically with many standard features of the locus amoenus. The Grendelkin: warigeað wulfhleoþu, windige næssas, frecne fengelad, ðær fyrgenstream niþer gewiteð, under næssa genipu ﬂod under foldan. Nis þæt feor heonon milgemearces, þæt se mere standeð; ofer þæm hongiað hrinde bearwas, wudu wyrtum fæst wæter oferhelmað. 4 ...haunt wolf-slopes, windy headlands, perilous fen-paths, where the mountainstream runs downwards under the shadow of the cliffs, the ﬂood goes underground. It is not many miles distant from here where the mere lies; above it hang frost-covered groves, woods fastened by the roots overshadow the water.

Here the running water, trees and shade of the pastoral idyll are corrupted into a hideous and deadly landscape. The close proximity of the mere to Hrothgar’s Hall reinforces a sense of the ever-present encroachment of the wilderness and the monstrous. The passage also suggests an ironic allusion to the locus amoenus of Psalm 42 (‘as the hart pants for running waters’), going on to tell us that the hunted hart: aldor on ofre,

ær he feorh seleð, ær he in wille... 5

would rather give up its life and being on the bank before it would go in...

The description ends with the litotical summary statement ‘nis þæt heoru stow’ (‘It is not a pleasant place’) – a witty reference to the locus amoenus tradition from which

2 3

4 5

Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies. Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript (Cambridge, 1995). Hugh Magennis, Images of Community in Old English Poetry (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 138–42. See also Donald K. Fry, ‘The Cliff of Death in Old English Poetry’, in Comparative Research in Oral Traditions: A Memorial for Milman Parry, ed. John Miles Foley (Columbus, 1987), pp. 213–33. George Jack, ed., Beowulf. A Student Edition (Oxford, 1994), lines 1358–64. All further quotations from Beowulf will be taken from this edition. Ibid., lines 1370b–1372a.

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Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400

the passage derives its grotesque parodic power. 6 The description of the haunted mere in Beowulf may appear to corroborate the common critical argument that Old English poetry does not represent nature as pleasant or delightful. Yet this sophisticated and self-consciously referential passage raises the possibility that literary landscapes in Old English can at least show awareness of and engagement with Latin pastoral traditions. Beyond the Old English texts or passages examined by Neville, Orchard and Magennis, there is further evidence for a vernacular literary tradition of the delightful landscape. Much recent critical attention has focused on the Junius Manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius XI), including representations of landscape in the poems which deal with narratives and themes from the ﬁrst books of the biblical Old Testament. Discussions of the two Genesis poems (Genesis A and Genesis B) in particular show an increasing tendency to identify motifs speciﬁc to an Old English literary landscape tradition, and to treat features and idioms of the vernacular more sympathetically. In his 1978 edition of Genesis A, A.N. Doane presents this poem as a re-telling of biblical material through traditional Old English, ‘Germanic’ literary idioms. 7 Doane perceives Old English poetic traditions responding to the challenges of new material. Germanic alliterative poetry had been developing for hundreds of years before Genesis A was composed and had evolved its own highly elaborate techniques and vocabulary. It had developed in a certain pre-Christian cultural environment to meet certain limited cultural demands. While working within this fully-ﬂedged poetic-linguistic system, the poet of Genesis A was deriving his statements, content and meaning from sources external to his verse tradition and developing them according to demands entirely alien to it… Thereby rose a confrontation of styles, a gap between source and product. 8

Doane goes on to suggest that: The poet must have been aware of the deﬁciencies of his style for rendering a text expressed in a style so alien to his own… Certainly nothing in the native rhetoric could match the syntactical resources which the Vulgate offered… 9

For Doane, the relation of the Old English poetic style to the biblical source is one of both difference and deﬁcit: the vernacular idiom lacks the vocabulary and rhetoric to articulate fully the ‘beauty’ of the original. 10 His reading of Genesis A measures and evaluates the poem in terms of its ﬁdelity to a rigid notion of ‘source’ – the biblical book from which the text derives its editorial title. Doane also characterises the Old English language and literature in narrow, inﬂexible terms: his references to literary ‘evolution’ and ‘development’ are in the past tense, and leave little room for any acknowledgement of the possibilities of cultural exchange and the reception of new 6 7 8 9 10

Beowulf, line 1372b. A.N. Doane, ed., Genesis A. A New Edition (Madison, Wisconsin, 1978), p. 70. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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39

idioms and conventions into the vernacular. Doane’s argument does not focus speciﬁcally on representations of landscape in Genesis A, yet it is symptomatic of a reading which prioritises a distinct, native tradition in Old English, different from biblical or classical sources and models. Ananya Kabir’s recent discussion of Genesis A is more sympathetic to the idioms of Old English, rejecting previous assumptions that the poem can be evaluated against the style and content of the biblical source. Yet Kabir still uses Genesis A as evidence of a distinctively English literary response to and transmission of biblical material. In her book Paradise, Death and Doomsday in Anglo-Saxon Literature, Kabir identiﬁes traditional ‘English’ features in the representations of the delightful places of heaven and Eden. 11 For Kabir, the representation of delightful places in Genesis A is a deliberate participation in an English vernacular literary tradition, rather than a failure to imitate or equal biblical and Christian Latin sources. Referring to the description of Eden in the poem, Kabir argues that: While Scripture provides the descriptive outline of this passage, the vocabulary employed to evoke the beauty of Eden relies on neither apocryphal or Christian Latin descriptive tradition, even though both traditions were probably available to the poet. 12

In her reading of Genesis A, Kabir identiﬁes as key features of the ideal landscape in Old English ‘an adjective of greenness, light or space, and a noun denoting an open area of vegetation.’ 13 She refers to these conventions as ‘a vernacular equivalent of the locus amoenus’ – a parallel and essentially independent literary tradition. 14 Although these central motifs clearly resonate with classical pastoral description, Kabir asserts some important differences. For example, she claims that ‘in Anglo-Saxon England… there is scarcely one description of an “enclosed garden” as an ideal landscape’. 15 While the topos of the enclosed garden certainly does not occur in Genesis A, I shall argue later in this chapter that enclosure is an important feature of the delightful landscape in Old English poetry. Kabir’s key features of the vernacular locus amoenus do clearly recur throughout Genesis A. Central to the imagery and vocabulary used for the delightful places of Genesis A is a blurring or conﬂation of organic and pastoral imagery with ideas of brightness, light and splendour. For example, after the rebel angels have been expelled from heaven, the poem tells us that: Him on laste setl wuldorspedum welig wide stodan gifum growende on godes rice,

11 12 13 14 15

Ananya Kabir, Paradise, Death and Doomsday in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 143–4. Ibid., p. 143. Ibid., p. 144. Ibid. Ibid., p. 8.

40

Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 beorht and geblædfæst,

buendra leas… 16

In their wake, thrones stood widely across God’s kingdom, endowed with glorious riches, growing in gifts, bright and prosperous, lacking occupiers.

In this passage the delightful space of heaven is evoked through vocabulary with connotations of ﬂourishing nature, as well as brightness and glory. The thrones of heaven are ‘growende’, like plants or trees, and the adverbial ‘wide’ (line 87) suggests heaven as a broad, open expanse. The thrones are also ‘beorht’ – a term which certainly denotes brightness, but which overlaps with the idea of greenness and natural verdure in Old English. 17 Later in the poem, before the description of creation, we are told that, before God’s intervention: Folde wæs þa gyta græs ungrene; garsecg þeahte sweart synnihte, side and wide, wonne wægas. 18 The ground was then still ungreen, without grass; far and wide black sinister night hid the ocean, the dark waves.

This passage occurs just before God’s creation of light in the darkness, the poem emphasising the division of ‘leoht wið þeostrum’ (‘light from the darkness’, line 127b). The statement ‘folde wæs þa gyta / græs ungrene’ seems to refer as much to the absence of light as to the absence of greenness and nature. The later description of the prelapsarian earth as ‘ælgrene’ (‘all-green’, line 197) suggests that this new creation is modelled upon heaven and is similarly bright and delightful. Like heaven, Eden is described as a ‘rumne grund’ (‘gentle landscape’, line 213), a spacious and hospitable natural expanse. Although Kabir’s key features of the vernacular locus amoenus are based on a close and sympathetic analysis of the Old English material, her notion of a resolutely English, independent literary tradition is problematic. As current studies and projects focus increasingly on the range of classical and late antique sources and models available to Anglo-Saxon writers, 19 it becomes ever more compelling to read English vernacular poetry within the framework of multiple traditions and inﬂuences, and ever more difﬁcult to argue for a discrete and independent vernacular literary heritage. The Old English literary locus amoenus clearly does have its own stock elements and central conventions. However, these appear in many cases to be selected, imitated and nuanced from a wide range of other cultural and literary 16 17 18 19

Genesis A, lines 86b–89, in George Philip Krapp, ed., The Junius Manuscript (London and New York, 1931). For a relevant discussion of colour / brightness terminology in Old English, see Peter Lucas, ed., Exodus (Exeter, 1994), p. 115, n. Krapp, ed., Genesis A, lines 116b–119a. For example, see the Fontes Anglo-Saxonici Project , or, with particular reference to the poems of the Junius Manuscript, see Paul Remley, Old English Biblical Verse (Cambridge, 1996).

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traditions. This chapter will focus on literary pastoral tradition and representations of the locus amoenus in Old English poetry. Latin literary conventions are re-made within the poetic idioms of the vernacular, allowing us to examine the dynamics of cultural reception and exchange in the Anglo-Saxon period. In particular, this chapter will explore the cultural politics of appropriating Latin literary conventions in vernacular poetry, and the powerful statement this makes about English cultural ownership, authority and aspiration. A close examination of the locus amoenus in Old English poetry reveals the ways in which active selection from other cultural traditions plays a central role in the invention and promotion of English self-image and identity. This discussion will focus on texts from the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book, a codex of vernacular poetry produced around 970 (though many of its constituent poems were composed earlier). Several poems within the Exeter Book feature representations or transformations of the conventional literary locus amoenus. In particular, The Phoenix and Guthlac A reﬂect different processes of re-making the locus amoenus in Old English, and scholarship on these poems is representative of typical assumptions and problems in dealing with the early English vernacular. Moving beyond close analysis of these texts to the context of their tenth-century transmission and reception, the Benedictine monastic reforms offer an important interpretative framework. The locus amoenus plays a central role within the reforming rhetoric and ideology of revival, renewal and Englishness. The locus amoenus imagery of the Exeter Book poems, and their strategies of literary translation and appropriation, gather new resonances and political implications in this speciﬁc cultural context. In the Exeter Book, one poem stands out most clearly for its representation of the locus amoenus. The Phoenix is an allegorical poem which describes a paradisal ‘iglond’ (‘island’, line 9a) on earth as the setting for the death and resurrection of the mythical phoenix bird – an emblem for Christ. The delightful place is described ﬁrst in terms of the absence of any negative elements, recalling the conventional descriptions of heaven in Old English homilies. 20 Then the place is realised more fully as a wooded, verdant grove, clearly incorporating features of the classical, Latin locus amoenus. Is þæt æþele lond blostmum geblowen. Beorgas þær ne muntas steape ne stondað, ne stanclifu heah hliﬁað, swa her mid us, ne dene ne dalu ne dunscrafu, hlæwas ne hlincas, ne þær hleonað oo unsmeþes wiht, ac se æþela feld wynnum geblowen… wridað under wolcnum …Smylte is se sigewong: sunbearo lixeð, wæstmas ne dreosað, wuduholt wynlic, beorhte blede, ac þa beamas a

20

For example, see Vercelli Homily IX in D.G. Scragg, ed., The Vercelli Homilies and Related Texts, EETS OS 300 (Oxford, 1992), p. 178.

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Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 grene stondaþ,

swa him God bibead. 21

That noble land is blooming with blossoms. No mountains or steep hills stand there, nor do rocky cliffs tower high, as they do here with us, nor are there ravines or crevices nor hill-caves, nor barrows nor earth-banks, nor is a patch of rough ground ever raised up, but the noble plain ﬂourishes under the skies, blooming with joys... That victory-ﬁeld is serene, the sunny grove shines, the delightful wood; the fruits do not drop, those bright crops, but the trees stand forever green, just as God commanded them.

Here we see a paralleling of greenness and brightness familiar from what Kabir calls the vernacular locus amoenus tradition. There is also the conventional English feature of the open, expansive place (for example, the element ‘-wong’ or ‘ﬁeld, plain’ in ‘Sigewong’, line 33). Yet the description includes further detail about the absence of harsh landscape, the beauty of trees with their blossoms, leaves and fruits, and the perfect immutability of the idealised natural environment. The place is also characterised by synaesthetic elements including the ‘fægestrum… stencum’ (line 81b ‘fairest fragrances’) familiar from hagiographic tradition as a sign of blessedness. In contrast to readings of the Old English Genesis poems as authentically ‘Germanic’ and ‘vernacular’, The Phoenix is often regarded as an anomalous Old English poem, and its description of the ideal landscape is dismissed as imitation of an unfamiliar Latin idiom. The ﬁrst half of The Phoenix (380 lines) is indeed based upon the 170 lines of Lactantius’s Latin poem, the Carmen de ave phoenice. The ‘æþelast londa’ (‘noblest of lands’, line 2) of the Old English poem is translation of Lactantius’s locus amoenus into the English vernacular. S.A.J. Bradley is typical in his evaluation of the poem. Lactantius had retold the phoenix-legend in distinguished verse composed according to the rules of the classical schools of Latin rhetoric: as a result, some elegant description of nature, different from the sombre landscapes of native tradition, was transposed into English poetry when the Carmen was paraphrased. 22

However, this seemingly straightforward literary ‘transposition’ or ‘paraphrase’ deserves further investigation. The very fact that the Carmen de ave phoenice was selected by the Old English poet as a literary source for re-working in the vernacular suggests its interest and appeal for an Anglo-Saxon audience. The Old English poem expands the locus amoenus section of the Lactantius from thirty to eighty-ﬁve lines, reﬂecting an indulgence and delight in the descriptive set-piece which cannot be equated with the mechanical transposition of a wholly alien literary tradition. Indeed, a close reading of the poem suggests that The Phoenix is far more than simply a response to a foreign literary tradition, but rather a self-conscious and assured

21 22

Blake, ed., The Phoenix, lines 20–36. All references to The Phoenix hereafter will be taken from this edition. S.A.J. Bradley, Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London, 1982), pp. 284–5.

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integration of Latin and Anglo-Saxon features into the shaping of an English locus amoenus. Towards the end of the poem’s initial description of the locus amoenus, the unchanging beauty and verdure of the grove is recapitulated. Sindon þa bearwas bledum gehongne, wlitigum wæstmum. Þær no woniað o halge under heofonum holtes frætwe, ne feallað þær on foldan fealwe blostman, wudubeama wlite, ac þær wrætlice telgan gehladene, on þam treowum symle ofett edniwe in ealle tid grene stondaþ, on þam græswonge gehroden hyhtlice Haliges meahtum beorhtast bearwa. No gebrocen weorþeð Þær se halga stenc holt on hiwe. wunaþ geond wynlond. 23 The groves are hung with fruits, with delightful crops. There the wood’s ornaments, holy under the heavens, never fade, nor do the pale blossoms, the beauty of the trees, fall there onto the ground. Instead there, like a work of art, the branches on the trees are forever laden with fresh fruit, for all time, and the brightest of groves, beautifully adorned by God’s power, stands green on the grassy plain. The colour of the wood is never spoiled. There the holy fragrance is present throughout the land of delight. 24

This passage returns to features of the locus amoenus introduced earlier in the poem, including the fruitfulness of the grove, the grassy expanse (‘græswonge’, line 78a) and the holy fragrance (‘halga stenc’, line 81b). The recurrent use of the element wong in The Phoenix, together with the repeated parallelism of colour and brightness terminology, demonstrates the assimilation of those features considered authentically ‘vernacular’ into this representation of the locus amoenus. The text here, as throughout the poem, is characterised by intensive poetic variation and non-linear structures. The comment that the fruits hang on the trees ‘wrætlice’ (‘like a work of art’, line 75b) emphasises the grove as the product of God’s own craft and contrivance, yet at the same time it suggests a self-consciousness about the poet’s own artfulness and rhetorical contrivance to realise the locus amoenus in poetry. The artfully non-linear language and poetic variation of The Phoenix again show the incorporation of vernacular literary techniques and idioms into the Old English realisation of the locus amoenus. Andrew Patenall has commented on the way many passages in The Phoenix are shaped around the recurrence of certain words, noting, for example, the uses of wong in lines 13 to 20 of the poem. Patenall interprets the recurrence of these words in terms of the ‘serpentine’ interlace conventions of insular 23 24

The Phoenix, lines 71–82b. I borrow the phrase ‘like a work of art’ from Bradley’s translation of this poem. See Bradley, AngloSaxon Poetry, p. 285.

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Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400

art. 25 Certainly these non-linear, contrived structures could be aligned more generally with the ‘complex artiﬁcial order’ of Old English poetry, and conventional uses of incremental repetition or incremental pattern. 26 In The Phoenix, the circling of the text around recurrent words and images contributes to the impression of the eternal, unchanging nature of the locus amoenus. Yet within these overall serpentine and interlace structures are more speciﬁc uses of artiﬁcial word order. In lines 71 to 80, the depiction of the delightful grove is structured by rhetorical use of syntactic envelope pattern. The description is enclosed within the repeated forms of bearo (‘grove’): ‘bearwas’ (line 71) and ‘bearwa’ (line 80). Earlier in the poem, the description of the ‘æþelast londa’ is rounded off by the phrases ‘þæt is wynsum wong’ (‘that is a delightful place’, line 13a) and ‘ac se wong seomað / eadig ond onsund’ (‘but the ﬁeld remains, blessed and unscathed’ lines 19–20a). These envelope structures might also be compared with the framing uses of the verb ‘geblowen’ in lines 21a and 27b of the poem (cited above). All these uses of envelope pattern draw attention to the descriptions as ‘set-pieces’ of rhetorical art, and suggest that a sense of ‘enclosure’ may indeed be part of the Old English conception and representation of the delightful place. 27 The uses of envelope pattern in The Phoenix also mirror rhetorically the enclosure of this paradisal space as an ‘iglond’ traversed and encircled with rivers. The description of the earthly paradise as a land enclosed by water comes directly from Lactantius, 28 but is by no means unique to the Carmen de ave phoenice. This image of the delightful island offers another point of intersection between the apparently alien foreign literary tradition represented by Lactantius, and speciﬁcally English interests and ideologies. The island locus amoenus of the earthly paradise appeals particularly to the English envisioning of pastoral enclosure and containment through the form of the island, and resonates with the idealised image of England or Britannia itself. The politics and representational ideologies of the tenth-century Benedictine monastic reforms in England, discussed later in this chapter, also strengthen a reading of the paradisal ‘iglond’ of The Phoenix in relation to the island nation. It is clearly to be expected that an Old English translation of a Latin poem would re-shape the source material through vernacular idioms and conventions. The process of translation is always a meeting and exchange of traditions, rather than simply a one-way borrowing. The Phoenix shows the ability of the Old English poet to select and exploit motifs from Latin and vernacular traditions, and demonstrates the capacity of Old English poetic resources to portray the locus amoenus in a distinctive way. The Phoenix appropriates conventions of the locus amoenus from Latin literary tradition, yet asserts its cultural ownership of them through their re-making in the 25

26 27 28

Andrew J.G. Patenall, ‘The Image of the Worm: Some Literary Implications of Serpentine Decoration’, in The Anglo-Saxons. Synthesis and Achievement, ed. J. Douglas Woods and David A.E. Pelteret (Waterloo, Ontario, 1985), pp. 105–16. See for example John Leyerle, ‘The Interlace Structure of Beowulf ’, University of Toronto Quarterly 37 (1967), 1–17, p. 4. See Catherine A.M. Clarke, ‘Envelope Pattern and the Locus Amoenus in Old English Verse’, Notes and Queries 248 (2003), 263–4. See lines 13–14 in Blake, ed., The Phoenix, p. 92.

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English vernacular. The Old English poem Guthlac A presents a very different case. This poem includes a striking locus amoenus description, yet no speciﬁc Latin source has ever been identiﬁed. 29 Guthlac A is the ﬁrst of two poems about Saint Guthlac in the Exeter Book, but has consistently attracted greater critical speculation and controversy than the second, Guthlac B. The two poems are now recognised as quite distinct, each using different source material and focusing on different aspects of the saint’s life. Guthlac B is a poetic version of the saint’s death, whereas Guthlac A presents a wider exploration of a range of themes and episodes in the saint’s life. It is generally agreed that the major source of Guthlac B is Felix’s Latin prose Life of St Guthlac. However, as Jane Roberts, editor of the two Exeter Book Guthlac poems, observes: Whereas the main source for Guthlac B is plainly Felix, it is unlikely that a recognisable single source will ever be found for Guthlac A, a situation shared, it must be remembered, with some of the most admired Old English poems. 30

Roberts’ apologia for Guthlac A has been made necessary by a critical tendency to regard its differences from Felix as failures or inaccuracies. Certainly, early scholarship on the poem which compared it with Felix ensured that Guthlac A ‘never had a good press’. 31 The most inﬂuential of these early studies of the poem is probably Liebermann’s ‘Über ostenglische Geschichstquellen des 12, 13, 14. Jarhunderts, besonders den falschen Inguld’ (1892). 32 However, many of the parallels which Liebermann claims between Guthlac A and Felix are now disputed. 33 G.H. Gerould’s 1917 study, ‘The Old English Poems on St Guthlac and their Latin Source’, looks beyond Felix’s hagiography to consider possible sources and analogues in patristic texts such as Gregory of Tours’ Vitae Patrum and Lactantius’s De Ira Dei. 34 This study opened the way for a much wider search for sources, analogues and literary traditions feeding into the poem. The passage of Guthlac A which has attracted particular critical discussion and controversy, and which is most relevant to this study, is the short section often referred to as the ‘return to the beorg’. Guthlac has fought against attacking demons to regain control over his fenland retreat – the beorg – and this section, near the end of the poem, describes the transformation of this place from a site of suffering and conﬂict to a place of triumph. Bartholomew, Guthlac’s spiritual mentor, commands the devils to carry Guthlac gently to ‘þam onwillan eorðan dæle’ (‘that desired part of the earth’, line 728) where he will now enjoy victory.

29

30 31 32 33 34

Jane Roberts refers to the passage as ‘a striking use of the locus amoenus topos’. Jane Roberts, ‘Guthlac A: Sources and Source Hunting’, in Medieval English Studies presented to George Kane, ed. Edward Donald Kennedy et al. (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 1–18, p. 8. Roberts, ‘Guthlac A: Sources and Source Hunting’, p. 2. L.K. Shook, ‘The Burial Mound in Guthlac A’, Modern Philology 58 (1960), 1–10, p. 2. Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde 18 (1892), 225–67. See Roberts, ‘Guthlac A: Sources and Source Hunting’, p. 7. Modern Language Notes 32 (1917), 77–89.

46

Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 Sigehreðig cwom bytla to þam beorge. Hine bletsadon monge mægwlitas, meaglum reordum, tacnum cyðdon treofugla tuddor, eadges eftcyme. Oft he him æte heold, þonne hy him hungrige ymb hond ﬂugon grædum gifre, geoce gefegon. Swa þæt milde mod wið moncynnes dreamum gedælde, dryhtne þeowde, siþþan he þas woruld forhogde. genom him to wildeorum wynne, Smolt wæs se sigewong ond sele niwe, fæger fugla reord, folde geblowen; Guþlac moste geacas gear budon. eadig ond onmod eardes brucan. Stod se grene wong in godes wære; hæfde se heorde, se þe of heofonum cwom, feondas afyrde. 35 Triumphant, the founder came to that hill. The many families and young of tree-birds blessed him with loud voices and made known with these signs the return of the blessed man. Often he held out food for them, then they, hungry, would ﬂy around his hand, eager and greedy, glad of his help. Thus that gentle spirit distanced itself from the pleasures of mankind and served the lord, he took pleasure in wild creatures, after he had rejected this world. The victoryﬁeld was serene and newly pleasant, the song of birds was beautiful, the land blossomed, cuckoos announced the new year. Guthlac, blessed and resolute, was allowed to enjoy his dwelling. The green plain stood in God’s protection; the shepherd – the one who had come from the heavens – had driven away the enemies.

Here Guthlac’s beorg displays stock features of the classical locus amoenus, as well as elements which Ananya Kabir associates with vernacular tradition, such as greenness and the open ‘wong’. With reference to this passage, Kabir has noted the way the description is ‘bracketed off by the statements smolt wæs se sigewong and stod se grene wong’ – a typical device of rhetorical enclosure in Old English representations of the delightful place. 36 Indeed, Kabir has referred to this passage as ‘a vernacular equivalent of the locus amoenus’. 37 Yet the ‘return to the beorg’ has presented greater difﬁculties for many scholars. The nature of the beorg itself has been the focus of particular critical debate. The wooded grove described in this passage is obviously not typical fenland topography, and early studies of the poem found as another shortcoming in Guthlac A that the poet ‘appeared to neither know nor to care very 35 36 37

Guthlac A, lines 732–48, in Bernard J. Muir, ed., The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry (Exeter, 1994). Kabir, Paradise Death and Doomsday, pp. 144–5. For other examples of this device of rhetorical enclosure in Old English, see the discussion of The Phoenix, above. Ibid., p. 144.

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much about the geography of the Fens’. 38 Criticism of the poem has increasingly moved away from this rather naïve reading, and the beorg is now generally regarded as an allegorical feature – a symbolic, literary landscape – rather than as any attempt to depict accurately the geography of the early medieval fens. An exchange of articles in the 1960s and 1970s suggested different possible interpretations of the topographical feature itself, as well as different symbolic readings. In his 1960 article, Shook identiﬁes the beorg with Felix’s tumulus and argues that we should interpret this feature as a burial mound. However, Shook emphasises that the physical reality of Guthlac’s landscape in Guthlac A is of minimal importance, and that we should recognise the symbolic connotations of the beorg. Shook observes that: The barrow has come, for [Guthlac] and for his poem, to stand for all that is signiﬁcant in the spiritual life of the good Christian: grace, struggle, the Will of God, temporal perseverance, and eternal salvation. His use of the barrow removes it from the category of a mere geographical appendage to a religious theme and makes it the center of the poem as poem. 39

Paul Reichardt’s study of 1974 links the beorg more speciﬁcally to the Christian tradition of the ‘holy hill’ or ‘mount of saintliness’. Reichardt asserts that the beorg is as much a symbol of interior spiritual achievement as a geographical location in the fens of Crowland. 40

In his 1978 article, Karl Wentersdorf suggests a more speciﬁc reading of the beorg as ‘a latter-day Calvary’. 41 Wentersdorf’s reading also hints at the poem as national myth or propaganda, resonating with the discussion of local saints and national ideologies in Chapter One of this study. He argues that the narrative represents not merely the faithful Christian’s spiritual war against his personal demons but also the unremitting campaign by the Church to suppress the lingering remnants of heathendom in England. 42

Generally, discussions of the beorg in Guthlac A have moved away from argument over its exact topographical status, and towards the alignment of the poetic depiction of the beorg with a range of literary traditions. The ‘return to the beorg’ passage ﬁts uneasily with many conventional critical assumptions about the scope and potential of Old English poetry, and the possibility of the representation of the locus amoenus in the vernacular. Cited at the beginning of this chapter, Jennifer Neville’s study Representations of the Natural World in Old English Poetry is typical of many approaches to nature and 38 39 40 41 42

Shook, ‘The Burial Mound in Guthlac A’, p. 2. Ibid., p. 10. Paul F. Reichardt, ‘Guthlac A and the landscape of Spiritual Perfection’, Neophilologus 56 (1974), 331–8, p. 335. Karl P. Wentersdorf, ‘Guthlac A: The Battle for the Beorg’, Neophilologus 62 (1978), 135–42, p. 142. Ibid., p. 136.

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landscape imagery in Old English. Yet her comments on Guthlac A are puzzling, given the prominence and centrality of the pastoral ‘return to the beorg’ as the climax of the poem. Jennifer Neville asserts that: If Guthlac had been commemorated by an Irish poet, it appears likely that the poem would have contained the kind of detailed praise of birds and plants expressed in ‘Manchan’s Wish’. Guthlac, however, contains almost no description of the land, water, vegetation and animal life that help to make the saint’s home so pleasant for him. Old English poets appear not to have been inspired to use the representation of the natural world in the same way as Irish poets, even when describing similar circumstances of comfort and joy. Instead, Old English poets reserve the representation of the natural world for use as a force to oppose and test their saints’ resolve and powers of resistance. 43

The natural landscape in Guthlac A is clearly a place of dual potential, for suffering and testing, yet also for pleasure and delight. The devils which tempt Guthlac play on a fear of the wilderness landscape as a place beyond the boundaries of the communal and human, warning him that he will starve …gif þu gewitest ana from eþele. 44

swa wilde deor

…if you go off alone, like the wild animals, from your homeland.

Yet this is part of Guthlac’s testing, and his spiritual triumph realises the potential of the natural landscape as a pastoral idyll and a new eþel (‘homeland’). The rigid contrast which Neville maintains between Old English and ‘Celtic’ representations of nature is common. The hostile natural environments of well-known poems such as The Wanderer and The Seafarer or Beowulf are typically used to deﬁne attitudes to nature in Old English. There are some exceptions to this tendency to construct an opposition between depictions of nature in ‘Celtic’ and Old English literature. The earlier study by P.L. Henry, The Early English and Celtic Lyric, associates imagery of nature, exile and mourning in Old English with traditions in Old Irish and Welsh poetry. 45 Sarah Lynn Higley’s recent study Between Languages. The Uncooperative Text in Early Welsh and Old English Nature Poetry seeks to collapse perceived boundaries and to explore Old English and early Welsh ‘nature poetry’ in the context of cultural afﬁnity and exchange. 46 Claes Schaar’s reading of the nature imagery in the ‘return to the beorg’ passage of Guthlac A stands out as particularly anomalous, both in comparison with usual approaches to this poem and with critical attitudes to the heritage of nature imagery in Old English in general. Schaar argues that the description of the springtime beorg contains the only ‘Germanic’ features in an otherwise Celtic-inﬂuenced poem. 43 44 45 46

Neville, Representations of the Natural World, p. 7. Guthlac A, lines 276–277a. P.L. Henry, The Early English and Celtic Lyric (London, 1966). Sarah Lynn Higley, Between Languages. The Uncooperative Text in Early Welsh and Old English Nature Poetry (University Park, Pennsylvania, 1993).

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Guthlac A contains no clear Anglo-Saxonisms; perhaps the portrayal of the blossoming plain and the song of birds and cuckoos lines 742–48a, is a specimen of vernacular landscape poetry. 47

Readings of Guthlac A which attempt to extrapolate ‘Celtic’ or ‘Anglo-Saxon’ features in the representation of nature are hugely problematic, and usually offer sound evidence only of critical assumptions about the difference and otherness of Old English vernacular poetry. Many studies also continue to approach Old English poetry without the same assumptions of literariness, sophistication and intertextuality which are typically brought to early medieval Latin texts. As E.G. Stanley reminds us, this attitude reﬂects ‘a lingering notion that the Old English poets were “sons of nature”, part of the “Gothick” conception of the Dark Ages’. 48 Some approaches to Guthlac A and its ‘return to the beorg’ passage have sought to align it with wider literary traditions and conventions across vernacular and Latin literatures. The inﬂuential 1926 study by Benjamin Kurtz, ‘From St Antony to St Guthlac’ opens up the possibilities for comparison with other hagiographic traditions and motifs. 49 Kurtz’s study focuses primarily on Felix’s Life of St Guthlac and its structural and thematic similarities to the Evagrian Life of St Antony. However, when Kurtz comes to comment on the Old English Guthlac A, he distances himself from the controversy over its connections with Felix. Kurtz argues that Guthlac A shows marked differences from the Latin Antonian tradition, and goes on to emphasise that Guthlac A, then, is not another document in the realization of the Antonian tradition of biography. It is a poetic vision, new and northern, of the saintly anchorite as a greatly performing, never hesitating champion of the Almighty Over-Lord. 50

Implicit in Kurtz’s description of Guthlac A here is the alignment of the poem with ‘Germanic heroic’ traditions which continues to inform many studies. Yet although Kurtz initially emphasises this distinction of Guthlac A from Latin hagiographic conventions, he ultimately concludes that both Guthlac A and Guthlac B are ‘poetic transformations of the Antonian tradition’. 51 The poems re-make ‘Antonian’ themes and conventions within an Old English cultural and poetic idiom. Nuancing Kurtz’s ideas, Rosemary Woolf’s essay ‘Saints’ Lives’ examines the ‘return to the beorg’ as representative of traditions received from eastern saints’ lives into insular hagiography. She compares the passage to ‘traditional Latin ascetic lives’ in which ‘the desert retreat of a solitary would seem more like a ﬁeld of paradise than a ﬁeld of battle’. Woolf notes that:

47 48 49 50 51

Claes Schaar, Critical Studies in the Cynewulf Group (Lund, 1949), p. 41. E.G. Stanley, ‘Old English Poetic Diction and the Interpretation of The Wanderer, The Seafarer and The Penitent’s Prayer’, Anglia 73 (1955), 413–66, p. 427. B.J. Kurtz, ‘From St Antony to St Guthlac’, University of California Publications in Modern Philology 12 (1926), 103–46. Ibid., p. 145. Ibid., p. 146.

50

Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 there is a touch of this kind of sentiment at the end of Guthlac A, when Guthlac sigehreðig (triumphant) after his ﬁnal battle against the devils returns, and the birds show by signs their delight at eadges eftcyme (return of the blessed man), and feed from his hand. Gentleness and holiness of disposition are most commonly indicated in the eastern saints’ lives by this return to a paradisal relationship between man and the animals. 52

So, like Kurtz, Rosemary Woolf does relate Guthlac A to ‘Antonian’ traditions. However, she qualiﬁes the validity of her observation by noting that ‘the passage is too short and too abruptly introduced for it to carry full weight or to be in proportion to the rest’. 53 Again, Woolf’s reading of this passage is informed by a typical assumption that Old English poetry does not traditionally represent nature as pleasant or delightful: a passage such as the ‘return to the beorg’ is therefore dismissed as anomalous. However, it is the very ‘abruptness’ and ‘brevity’ of this passage which may suggest that it signals a participation in an established, recognisable and familiar literary tradition. The ‘return to the beorg’ passage of Guthlac A, though relatively brief, selects key pastoral features which call up a range of conventional hagiographic, monastic and panegyric associations. Parallels are clear between Guthlac A and Anglo-Latin hagiography such as Bede’s Life of St Cuthbert and, of course, Felix’s Life of St Guthlac. Although neither can be established as a deﬁnite source for the Old English poem, the text obviously participates in similar English hagiographic traditions. Where Bede tells us that Cuthbert ‘ciuitatem… erexit’ (‘built a city’) on Farne, 54 Guthlac is a ‘bytla’ (builder, line 733a), establishing his dwelling-place on the beorg. The importance of the saint’s relationship with birds and animals in the poem resonates strongly with both Bede and Felix, placing it ﬁrmly within traditions of insular hagiography. Where Felix describes Guthlac as enjoying his hermitage among pastoral ‘umbrosa solitudinis’ (‘shady groves of solitude’), 55 the beorg of Guthlac A has similar stock features of a locus amoenus: a grove of trees, springtime, birdsong, verdure – even though these are hardly realistic features of a site within the ﬂoods of the early medieval fens. Felix refers to Guthlac as like a shepherd in the wild landscape, further reinforcing pastoral parallels. 56 In the ‘return to the beorg’ passage of Guthlac A, Guthlac’s spiritual guardian, Bartholomew, is ‘se heorde’ (‘the shepherd’) who protects the saint and defends his dwelling, again drawing upon pastoral associations across both secular and religious traditions. As Kurtz and Woolf note, the hagiographic paradigm of a locus amoenus created in the wilderness stretches back to Evagrius, Athanasius and beyond. Yet, as discussed in Chapter One, the dialectic between hostile, wilderness landscape and the ordered, cultivated landscape of the locus amoenus permeates key early Anglo-Latin works such as Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and provides the basis for 52 53 54 55 56

Rosemary Woolf, ‘Saints’ Lives’, in Continuations and Beginnings: Studies in Old English Literature, ed. E.G. Stanley (London, 1966), pp. 37–66, p. 57. Woolf, ‘Saints’ Lives’, p. 57. Bede, Life of St Cuthbert, Chapter XVII, pp. 214–17. Felix’s Life of St Guthlac, Chapter XXV, pp. 88, 89. Ibid., Chapter XXXVIII, pp. 120, 21.

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a powerful ideology of English potential. Like Bede’s Cuthbert or Felix’s Guthlac, Guthlac A offers a similar localised enactment of this English mythology which conﬂates cultivation of the land with spiritual cultivation and the triumph of order. As noted above, Wentersdorf’s reading of Guthlac A as a symbolic conversion myth or performance of national aspiration resonates here. The poem itself makes explicit the national resonance of this local exemplum, telling us that Guthlac ‘mongum wearð / bysen on Brytene’ (lines 174b–75a ‘became an example to many in Britain’). The beorg itself, a raised mound or island feature in the fen marshland or ﬂoods, is a powerful emblem or metonym for the island nation. As in Bede or Felix, the ‘return to the beorg’ passage of Guthlac A also functions symbolically as a representation of the monastic life and the locus amoenus of the cell or cloister. Thus the apparently solitary saint Guthlac can become an exemplum for cenobitic monks, and can reinforce the value of communal monasticism. 57 Symbolic parallels between cloister and locus amoenus are consistently drawn in early medieval texts. In a letter to Charlemagne, advocating that English monastic learning be shared with France, Alcuin writes that: …qui excipiant inde nobis necessaria quæquæ et revehant in Frantiam ﬂores Britanniæ; ut non sit tantummodo in Euborica hortus conclusus, sed in Turonica emissiones paradise cum pomorum fructibus. 58 We must bring the ﬂowers of England to France in order that the school of York be no longer merely garden enclosed: the fruits of Paradise will also be able to be plucked in the school of Tours. 59

Here Alcuin envisions the enclosure of the cloister as a pastoral hortus conclusus. In a roughly contemporary Irish poem, written in the margins of a St Gall manuscript of Priscian’s De institutione grammatica, the stock features of the locus amoenus are used to provide a symbolic setting for the monastic cloister or scriptorium. Dom-farcai ﬁdbaidæ fál, fom-chain loíd luin – lúad nad cél; húas mo lebrán, ind línech, fom-chain trírech inna n-én. Fomm-chain coí menn – medair mass – hi mbrot glass de dindgnaib doss. Debrád! nom-choimmdiu coíma, caín-scríbaimm fo foída ross.

57

58 59

For further discussion of the promotion of the cenobitic life in Guthlac A, see Christopher A. Jones, ‘Envisioning the Cenobium in the Old English Guthlac A’, Mediaeval Studies 57 (1995), 259–91. W. Gundlach, ed., Epistolæ Merowingici et Karolini Ævi, MGH (Berlin, 1892), p. 177. Translation from Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, trans. Catharine Misrahi (New York, 1982), p. 42.

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Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 A wall of forest looms above and sweetly the blackbird sings; all the birds make melody over me and my book and things. There sings to me the cuckoo from bush-citadels in grey hood. God’s doom! May the Lord protect me writing well, under the great wood. 60

This lyric shares many features with the locus amoenus of Guthlac A, including the use of the cuckoo as a motif of pleasure or pastoral delight which is generally regarded as more typical of ‘Celtic’ or continental Latin traditions than Old English. 61 Although the St Gall lyric reﬂects the envisioning of the cloister as a symbolic garden of learning or locus amoenus, the evidence of early medieval ground-plans from the St Gall monastery reminds us that the early medieval cloister would literally have been a pastoral grove. 62 Discussing the St Gall plan as the paradigm of the ideal monastery, Peter Levi urges us to remember that the cloister was not an empty space, but was planted with trees. 63 Again, in the ‘return to the beorg’ passage of Guthlac A the fundamental monastic performance of the heavenly within the world is clear. Alvin A. Lee comments that ‘the mythical connotations of a return to Paradise surrounding Guthlac’s resurrection are unmistakable’. 64 So, the locus amoenus of Guthlac A functions as a powerful symbol for the monastic cloister and the shared mythology or symbolic performance of the cenobitic life. 65 The resonances of the locus amoenus in Guthlac A with traditions in insular hagiography and representations of the monastic life are clear. Yet the poem draws upon pastoral motifs which are equally central to the Latin panegyric conventions of early medieval Europe. Most speciﬁcally, the description of Guthlac’s return to the beorg recalls the stock devices and motifs of pastoral encomia, praise of patrons or founders, and celebrations of cultural or religious revival. Guthlac the ‘bytla’ (‘builder’, or, more metaphorically, ‘founder’ of the beorg dwelling) is represented through the same pastoral panegyric conventions as a secular patron or benefactor. Once again, it seems that Old English poetry is able to exploit a range of relevant pastoral associations and resonances across vernacular and Latin poetics. As always, with such a lack of clear evidence about the poem’s date or place of composition, it is problematic to speculate about authorial intention. Yet the parallels between Guthlac 60 61 62 63 64 65

Text and loose translation from J. Carney, ed. and trans., Medieval Irish Lyrics (Dublin, 1967), pp. 22–3. By contrast, see the mournful cuckoo as a harbinger of sorrow in The Seafarer, lines 53–5 (Muir, ed., The Exeter Anthology). References to The Seafarer hereafter will be taken from this edition. Jane Brown, The Pursuit of Paradise (London, 1999), pp. 52–3. Peter Levi, The Frontiers of Paradise (London, 1987), p. 147. Alvin A. Lee, The Guest-Hall of Eden, pp. 107–8. Christopher Jones (‘Envisioning the Cenobium’) explores other aspects of the poem which present Guthlac as the exemplary monk and which reinforce the ideals and practices of cenobitic monasticism.

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the triumphant saint and the patron-ﬁgures of Merovingian, Carolingian and AngloLatin panegyric would certainly have been available to a literate tenth-century AngloSaxon audience. In poetry of the Carolingian court, the locus amoenus is used to represent the triumph and ﬂowering of the new empire. In his ‘Elegy’ to the Palace School at Aachen, Alcuin depicts the effects of Charlemagne’s protection and benefaction through stock pastoral motifs. Undique te cingit ramis resonantibus arbos, Silvula ﬂorigeris semper onusta comis. Prata salutiferis ﬂorebunt omnia et herbis, Quas medici quaerit dextra salutis ope. Flumina te cingunt ﬂorentibus undique ripis, Retia piscator qua sua tendit ovans. Pomiferis redolent ramis tua claustra per hortos, Lilia cum rosulis candida mixta rubris. Omne genus volucrum matutinas personat odas Atque creatorem laudat in ore deum. Trees with rustling boughs surround you [the school] on all sides, a little wood always lush with blooming foliage. All the meadows will blossom with medicinal herbs that are sought for healing by the doctor’s hand. Rivers encircle you, their banks all a-ﬂower, where the ﬁsherman joyously casts his nets. Throughout your enclosed gardens apple-boughs smell sweetly, and white lilies are mingled with little red roses. Every kind of bird brings forth its morning tune praising in its song God the creator. 66

The pastoral imagery here is deliberately charged with Christian and monastic resonance. The passage includes a reference to lilies and roses, symbolic of Christ and the Virgin, the evangelistic allegory of the ﬁsherman casting his nets, monastic images of agriculture and herbal medicine, and motifs of enclosure in the gardens and encircling rivers. Here Alcuin adapts and manipulates the conventional features of the locus amoenus to allude speciﬁcally to Charlemagne’s patronage of learning and religion. As Peter Godman observes, like the beorg of Guthlac A, this pastoral setting is literary and symbolic, rather than realistic. That the site of Aachen was in certain respects bucolic is hardly germane to this point: the conventional images of ‘nature poetry’ contribute… to evoke a locus amoenus, an idealised landscape. 67

66 67

Text and translation from Peter Godman, Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, pp. 124–5. Godman, Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, p. 18.

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Pastoral imagery of springtime and renewal is central to the Carolingian representational ideology of cultural, religious and dynastic renovatio or revival, and pervades poetry of the court. Theodulf writes: Ver venit ecce novum, cum quom felicia cuncta Teque, tuosque adeant, rex, tribuente deo. En renovatur ovans aeternis legibus annus Et sua nunc mater germina promit humus. Silvae fronde virent, ornantur ﬂoribus arva… Behold, a new spring has come and with it may all happiness attend you and your subjects, my king, by God’s grace. The seasons are joyously renewed according to eternal laws, and mother earth now brings forth her seeds. The woods are green with leaves, the ﬁelds are lovely with ﬂowers… 68

The blossoming, blooming springtime locus amoenus represents the achievement of an ideal enabled by benevolent patronage. This celebration of a great new era also recalls Virgil’s fourth, ‘Messianic’ Eclogue, further magnifying and mystifying Charlemagne’s powers of renewal and transformation. 69 The ‘return to the beorg’ passage of Guthlac A also places particular emphasis on springtime and renewal. Smolt wæs se sigewong ond sele niwe, fæger fuglas reord, folde geblowen; geacas gear budon… 70 The victory-ﬁeld was serene and newly pleasant, the song of birds was beautiful, the land blossomed, cuckoos announced the new year.

The site is pleasant ‘niwe’, the ﬁelds ‘geblowen’ and the cuckoo announces the turn of the year, the spring. Whereas in insular tradition, the cuckoo is conventionally a bird of melancholy and mourning, here it is a harbinger of delight and hope. 71 In Guthlac A, the motif of the cuckoo recalls the use of the bird as a metonym or emblem for springtime in continental Latin poetry such as the Conﬂictus Veris et Hiemis, attributed to Alcuin. Et veniet cuculus, pastorum dulcis amicus! 68 69 70 71

Godman, Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, pp. 152–3. Virgil: Eclogues, pp. 28–33. Guthlac A, lines 742–4a. See The Seafarer, lines 53–5a. Swylc geac monað geomran reorde, singeð sumeres weard, sorge beodeð bitter in breosthord. (Likewise the cuckoo gives a warning with its mournful voice, summer’s guardian sings and announces sorrow, bitter in the heart.) See also the discussion of the cuckoo as motif of mourning in insular tradition in Henry, The Early English and Celtic Lyric, pp. 75–7, and above, p. 52.

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Collibus in nostris erumpant germina laeta, Pascua sit pecori, requies et dulcis in arvis, Et virides rami praestent umbracula fessis, Uberibus plenis veniuntque ad mulctra capellae Et volucres varia Phoebum sub voce salutent! Quapropter citius cuculus nunc ecce venito! The cuckoo, sweet friend of shepherds, shall come! Let the seeds burst luxuriantly into bud on our hills, may there be pasture and sweet repose in the ﬁelds for the ﬂocks, the green boughs offer shade to the weary, and the goats come to the pail with full teats, let the birds greet Phoebus with their different songs! So come now, cuckoo, swiftly! 72

The similarities between Guthlac A and Alcuin are striking, offering a persuasive literary context in which to situate the Old English poem and to make sense of its apparently anomalous use of the cuckoo motif and exuberant locus amoenus imagery. Amongst other parallels between Guthlac A and motifs for the patron in continental Latin panegyric is the conventional topos which Peter Godman terms the ‘Orpheus comparison’. 73 In late antique pastoral, Orpheus emerges as a ﬁgure which can unite secular and Christian traditions: a type of Christ and enactor of the resurrection myth. 74 In political panegyric of the late antique and early medieval period, however, the ‘Orpheus topos’ gains a very speciﬁc meaning. The mythological ﬁgure of Orpheus is used to express the power of a patron to restore peace and order, to move and affect his subjects, and to promote spiritual or cultural concerns. The Orpheus topos is used in early medieval panegyric to reﬂect a patron’s ability to attract others to himself, and to effect cultural renewal. In a panegyric of the mid 560s to Gogo, mayor of the Austraso-Provencal royal palace, Venantius Fortunatus praises Gogo’s hospitality and his welcome and protection of foreign visitors. The poem begins: Orpheus orditas moveret dum pollice chordas verbaque percusso pectine ﬁla darent, mox resonante lyra tetigit dulcedine silvas, ad citharae cantus traxit amore feras undique miserunt vacuata cubilia dammas, deposita rabie tigris et ipsa venit. sollicitante melo nimio ﬁlomela volatu, pignora contemnens fessa cucurrit avis: 72 73

74

Godman, Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, pp. 148, 149. Peter Godman, Poets and Emperors: Frankish Politics and Carolingian Poetry (Oxford, 1987), p. 15. For a fuller discussion of other parallels between Guthlac A and early medieval Latin panegyric traditions, see Catherine A.M. Clarke, ‘The locus amoenus in Old English: Guthlac A and its cultural context’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, King’s College, London, 2002). For a survey of Orpheus in the art and literature of this period, see J.B. Friedman, Orpheus in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1970) or Celeste Marguerite Schenk, Mourning and Panegyric: The Poetics of Pastoral Ceremony (University Park, Pennsylvania, 1988), p. 59.

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Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 sed quamvis longo spatio lassaverat alas, ad votum veniens se recreavit avis. sic simulante tua captus dulcedine, Gogo, longa peregrinus regna viator adit. 75 When Orpheus began to stir the strings with his thumb, and the cords gave forth their song, as the lyre was struck, then with the resounding instrument he caressed the woods with sweetness, and drew the wild beasts in love to his lute’s song. From all sides lairs are emptied and send forth the deer; the tiger itself comes, laying aside its fury. At the seductive strain, the nightingale speeds with rapid ﬂight, the weary bird reckoning little for her brood; but though she has tired her wings over the long distance, the bird is revived, reaching her heart’s desire. Enchanted thus by your stirring sweetness, Gogo, the foreign traveller draws near the distant realm. 76

The ‘sweetness’ of Gogo’s generosity and power to ‘woo’ guests is associated with the seductive music of Orpheus. An earlier panegyric, written in the late ﬁfth century by Dracontius to the African Grammarian Felicianus, also uses the Orpheus topos to express Felicianus’s patronage of culture and the arts. Orpheum vatem renarrant ut priorum litterae cantitasse dulce carmen voce nervo pectine inter ornos propter amnes adque montes algidos… sancte pater, o magister, taliter canendus es, qui fugatas Africanae reddis urbi litteras, barbaris qui Romulidas iungis auditorio… quos capit dulcedo vestri, doctor, oris maxima. As the literature of the past relates, Orpheus the poet would sing with his voice, string and lyre a sweet poem among the ash-trees, by the rivers, and to the chill mountains… in the same way, holy father and master, you should be extolled in song, for you restore the study of literature to the African city whence it had ﬂed, combining Romans and barbarians in your lecture audience… which is enraptured, teacher, by the surpassing sweetness of your voice. 77

In this example, the ‘Orpheus comparison’ works on two levels: Dracontius himself is Orpheus, composing the poem in honour of his patron, and Felicianus is also Orpheus, having the power to tame Romans and captivate barbarians with his teaching. The imagery of both these examples draws upon classical pastoral tradition, but also resonates with Judaeo-Christian themes of Eden and paradise – in particular the description of the tamed animals in paradise in Isaiah Chapter 11. 78 There is also 75 76 77 78

Venantius Fortunatus, Carminum, in Opera Poetica, ed. Friedrich Leo, MGH (Berlin, 1881) p. 153. Venantius Fortunatus: Personal and Political Poems, trans. Judith George (Liverpool, 1995), p. 57. Text and translation from Godman, Poets and Emperors, p. 16. ‘habitat lupus cum agno et pardus cum hedo accubabit…’ (‘the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid…’).

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evidence for similar use of this Orpheus topos in early medieval England. Martin Irvine has examined a marginal note, attributed to the tenth-century Benedictine reformer Dunstan, in ‘Dunstan’s Classbook’ (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Auct. F. 4. 32). In this note, Dunstan appropriates Virgilian language and allusion to represent himself as a new Orpheus: both poet and patron, and in turn protected by Christ. 79 The Orpheus topos provides another layer of resonance for the pastoral ‘return to the beorg’ passage in Guthlac A. Obviously, the closest parallels to Guthlac’s feeding and taming of the animals are found in insular hagiographic tradition, such as Bede’s Life of St Cuthbert. Yet the representation of Guthlac in the passage may well have carried these wider associations for a literate late Anglo-Saxon audience, reinforcing the saint’s status as a patron ﬁgure with the power to build, renew and protect. Guthlac A is certainly a poem interested in ideas of patronage, and the power of the patron is enacted on several levels within the poem. Bartholomew is Guthlac’s spiritual patron, articulating their relationship in terms of friendship and kinship. When Bartholomew defends Guthlac from the devils, he announces: Is þæt min broþor mec his bysgu gehreaw. Ic þæt gefremme, þær se freond wunað on þære socne, þe ic þa sibbe wið hine nu ic his helpan mot, healdan wille, oft sceawiað. 80 þæt ge min onsynn He is my brother: his suffering grieved me. I will undertake it that while my friend (with whom I intend to keep friendship, now that I am allowed to help him) is living in this retreat, you will often see my face.

Here the vocabulary has all the complexity and sophistication of ideologies of amicitia, expressing the hierarchical patron-client relationship through the euphemism of friendship. Guthlac himself is also a powerful patron ﬁgure. Though physically removed from human and Christian community, his strength as a spiritual protector and guardian is underlined. Although Guthlac separates his dwelling from the rest of mankind, No he hine wið monna miltse gedælde, ac gesynta bæd sawla gehwylcre, on þam anade þonne he to eorðan hleor onhylde. 81 He never cut himself off from compassion towards men, but prayed for the salvation of every soul, when he bowed his face to the ground in that solitude.

79 80 81

Martin Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture. Grammatica and Literary Theory, 350–1100 (Cambridge, 1994), p. 407. Guthlac A, lines 714–18. Ibid., lines 331–334a.

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Guthlac is also an advocate for the young, impious monks against the devils’ accusations (lines 478–512). In the companion poem, Guthlac B, Guthlac’s patronage is also passed on to the young monk, Beccel. As Christopher Jones stresses, Guthlac’s power …transcends the power of the beorg, and may be sought by all who, like the poet and his audience, foster his cult. Guthlac is not just a moral example for monks; he is actively their friend, protector and patron. 82

With this emphasis on ideas and structures of patronage, it seems plausible that the text would exploit conventional representations and motifs for the patron in early medieval Latin pastoral panegyric. Certainly, these associations would have been available to an educated Anglo-Saxon audience, reinforcing the poem’s representation of Guthlac as patron, and also signalling the poem’s engagement with prestigious literary traditions beyond the English vernacular. So, Exeter Book poems like The Phoenix and Guthlac A draw upon Latin literary pastoral traditions, re-making conventions of the locus amoenus within the idioms of the English vernacular and prioritising motifs such as the delightful island which resonate with English ideologies and mythologies. These two poems show that Old English poetry does indeed have the resources to represent delightful natural landscape, problematising critical assumptions that nature in Old English must always be hostile and threatening. 83 Indeed, other Exeter Book poems such as The Wanderer and The Seafarer could be read as sophisticated versions of the inverted locus amoenus, their grim natural landscapes representing an ironic reversal of the potential beauty and pleasure of nature. For example, The Seafarer plays with a central reversal of expectations: it is life on land which is (spiritually) dangerous, and life on the stormy ocean is a blessing. When the poem describes the worldly life which must be rejected, it does so through a systematic inversion of conventional locus amoenus imagery. Bearwas blostmum nimað, byrig fægriað, wongas wlitigiað, woruld onetteð – modes fusne ealle þa gemoniað sefan to siþe, þam þe swa þenceð on ﬂodwegas feor gewitan. geomran reorde, Swylce geac monað singeð sumeres weard, sorge beodeð 84 bitter in breosthord. The groves take on blossoms, the cities grow fairer, the ﬁelds become beautiful, the world hurries onwards – all these urge the one eager of spirit and heart, the one who intends to travel far on the paths of the ocean, to set out on a journey. 82 83

84

Jones, ‘Envisioning the Cenobium’, p. 287. Beyond the Exeter Book, another striking use of the locus amoenus can be found at the beginning of the poem Judgment Day II, which uses the motif as a conventional prologue to a dream vision. See Elliott van Kirk Dobbie, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems (New York, 1942), pp. 58–67. The Seafarer, lines 48–55a.

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Likewise the cuckoo gives a warning with its mournful voice, summer’s guardian sings and announces sorrow, bitter in the heart.

Here the poem exploits the antithesis between the delight of springtime and the sombre spirit of the seafarer. The passage includes several stock features of the medieval locus amoenus: the blossoming grove paralleled with the beautiful city, the open ‘wongas’ particularly associated with English vernacular tradition, and the element of birdsong. Again, if we read this passage as a self-conscious inverted locus amoenus, conventional critical assumptions and approaches are undermined. If the mournful cuckoo here is a deliberate inversion of the usual motif of the bird as joyful herald of spring, then representations of the cuckoo in insular literature may not be so distinct from Latin traditions as usually thought. Extant uses of the cuckoo as an emblem of melancholy in Old English and early Welsh may in fact be dependent on the familiarity of Latin pastoral tradition and the usual symbolism of the bird as a harbinger of hope and renewal. Clearly, attempting to separate and distinguish Old English, ‘Celtic’ and Latin traditions and elements is problematic, and artiﬁcial in such a context of intertextuality and cultural exchange. And, fundamentally, this ‘grim’ landscape may be a sophisticated, knowing manipulation of the locus amoenus, showing not the inability of Old English to represent natural beauty, but rather the familiarity, conﬁdence and creativity of the vernacular with literary pastoral conventions. Poems such as The Phoenix, Guthlac A and The Seafarer self-consciously select and incorporate motifs which signal their participation in the pastoral traditions associated with Latin literature and culture. Motifs such as the locus amoenus are re-made and transformed within Old English vernacular poetic conventions. The cultural politics of these acts of literary and cultural appropriation and transformation are worth further exploration. What are the implications of appropriating and re-making Latin literary conventions within the English vernacular? And how might these literary politics ﬁt within the contemporary historical and cultural context of the Exeter Book? For the individual poems of the Exeter Book, suggested dates of composition vary from the eighth to the tenth centuries, and suggested provenances from Northumbria to Mercia to Wessex. 85 However, while controversy continues over the origins of its constituent poems, a late tenth-century date for the production and reception of the codex itself remains undisputed. In his study Anglo-Saxon Exeter: A Tenth-Century Cultural History, Patrick Conner has produced a radical and controversial re-appraisal of the Exeter Book. Through palaeography and codicology, Conner dates the individual booklets which form the Exeter Book itself, arguing that the booklets’ ‘sequence of copying... recapitulate[s] the [poems’ own] order of composition’. 86 Conner’s thesis is that the Exeter Book reﬂects the development and evolution of Old English poetry in the context of the tenth-century monastic reforms in England. 85

86

See for example K. Sisam, Studies in the History of Old English Literature (Oxford, 1953), pp. 97– 108. The focus of the discussion in this chapter is the dating of the Exeter Book. For discussion of the location of the Exeter Book’s production, see Chapter Three, pp. 75–6. Patrick Conner, Anglo-Saxon Exeter. A Tenth-Century Cultural History (Woodbridge, 1993), pp. 148–9.

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Conner suggests that the earliest booklet of the codex – containing amongst others the poems known as the ‘Elegies’ and the nature allegories – reﬂects the inﬂuence of Carolingian models on English poetry during Æthelstan’s reign (924–939). In the second booklet to be copied (‘Booklet II’), Conner traces the development of what he regards as monastic concerns and issues, yet he also recognises the continuing inﬂuence of Carolingian styles of composition. The poems of this booklet include the Resignation poems, Soul and Body II and the homiletic fragments. Conner identiﬁes as most recent (‘Booklet III’) the booklet containing the three Christ poems and the two Guthlac poems. Conner asserts that the poems of the Exeter Book indicate a move in English literary style and focus away from the Carolingian sources and models in the earlier poems, towards distinctly monastic and ‘English’ idioms and subject-matter in the later texts. 87 Conner’s argument is radical in that it posits not merely a sequence of copying, but also a very speciﬁc new date and sequence of composition each for the Exeter Book poems. These hypotheses have met with some criticism and contention. For example, in his 1996 article, ‘The origin and of the Exeter Book of Old English Poetry’, Richard Gameson presents a response to Conner’s research and some alternative suggestions about the dating and provenance of the codex. Although Gameson still dates the Book to the ‘mid- to third-quarter of the tenth century’ he is more cautious about forming further hypotheses, warning that ‘the origin of the Exeter Book of Old English poetry is unknown and probably unknowable.’ 88 Whatever the ongoing scholarly investigations regarding the origins of the Exeter Book, it seems unlikely that uncontested dates for the composition of individual poems will ever be known. While Conner offers very speciﬁc datings for the individual poems, and while alternative theories of late eighth- or early ninthcentury origins for several constituent texts are persuasive in many ways, we can only know with any certainty the context of the Book’s production and reception in late tenth-century southern England. Indeed, it is not necessary to claim tenth-century dates of composition for the constituent Exeter Book poems in order to acknowledge and examine how and why these texts are compiled and read in a tenth-century context. This tenth-century context, with the major political and cultural movement of the Benedictine monastic reform, can provide an illuminating interpretative framework for the poems of the Exeter Book. In particular, we can examine the resonances of pastoral and locus amoenus imagery in this contemporary setting, and the speciﬁc politics and implications of appropriating Latin literary conventions into the English vernacular. In his re-evaluation of the Exeter Book, Patrick Conner writes that: Scholars of Old English culture have not always reckoned with the overwhelming changes imposed by the Benedictine revolution, but the development of poetry in the Exeter Book suggests that it was swifter and more 87

88

Conner, Anglo-Saxon Exeter, p. 164, pp. 162-4. See also Patrick Conner, ‘Source Studies, the Old English Guthlac A and the English Benedictine Reformation’, Révue Bénédictine 103 (1993), 380– 413, p. 410. Richard Gameson, ‘The origin of the Exeter Book of Old English Poetry’, ASE 25 (1996), 135– 85, p. 161 and p. 179.

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thorough than we often imagine… If the ﬁrst booklet of the Exeter Book is a fair representation of what poets were producing in English after the Benedictine revolution, Carolingian subject-matter no longer had any place in their writings, although the techniques learned in the earlier period undoubtedly made it possible for them to create poetry of such exceedingly high quality in a very short time. 89

Of course, Conner’s arguments about the ‘development’ of English poetry in the Exeter Book are based on his hypothesis about the order of the booklets’ copying – a hypothesis which is far from universally accepted. Conner’s insistence on the radical and ‘overwhelming’ cultural changes brought by the tenth-century monastic reforms is also problematic. His terminology of ‘revolution’ obscures the fact that there was already a strong tradition and literature of Benedictine monasticism in England before the tenth century. His assertion that poems such as Guthlac A do not draw upon Carolingian material may in fact indicate that these texts are sophisticated reappropriations and re-makings of Latin literary conventions, not straightforward translations. Rather than translating any speciﬁc Latin source, Guthlac A leaves open a range of parallels and associations within vernacular and Latin literatures. 90 Conner imposes on the Exeter Book a narrative of English literary development and growing cultural autonomy. Yet this seems in tension with the evidence of the poems themselves, and with the continental inﬂuences and background of the Benedictine Reform. The tenth-century reformers do indeed exploit a rhetoric of Englishness, but their nationalistic ideology is founded on cultural and literary appropriation. The context of the tenth-century Benedictine Reforms must be, however, central to our understanding of the reception (if not the composition) of the Exeter Book poems, and the compilation of the codex. Crucially, the image of the locus amoenus is integral to the rhetoric and ideology of the Benedictine Reforms, and functions as an idealised image for renewal and revival. Indeed, texts associated with the Reform envision England itself as a restored and renewed locus amoenus. Beyond this, the appropriation and re-making of Latin cultural symbols and literary conventions in Anglo-Saxon texts make a powerful statement about English cultural ownership, power and aspiration. The Winchester New Minster Charter of 966 is a key document of the Benedictine Reform and shapes the paradigm of reforming ideology and vocabulary in the tenth century. Where the Regularis Concordia of 970 prescribes actual rules and practices for the new Benedictine monasteries in England, the New Minster Charter announces the ideology and mythology of the entire project. In a number of ways, the Charter identiﬁes itself as more than simply a legal document, but rather as a ‘manifesto’ of the reform theology, ideology and politics. The Charter is written throughout in gold letters, and the frontispiece includes gold uncial letters 89 90

Conner, Anglo-Saxon Exeter, p. 164. This might be considered typical of the complex ‘hermeneutic style’ in late Old English, which offers no interpretative rubric or closure, yet makes available a complex range of literary associations and symbolisms. See Michael Lapidge’s seminal article on the (Latin) hermeneutic style, ‘The Hermeneutic Style in Tenth-Century Anglo-Latin Literature’, ASE 4 (1975), 67–111. On Old English, see for example Nancy Jean Speirs, ‘Hermeneutic Sensibility and the Old English Exodus, (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto, 1992).

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on a blue/purple ground. 91 The Carolingian heritage of the title page decoration is well recognised. 92 The combination of gold on blue or purple also alludes to the conventional colours of heaven in medieval iconography, providing a visual connection between Edgar’s reforms and the heavenly politics which the Charter’s Proem outlines. The very existence of the lengthy Proem to the Charter announces the text as more than simply a conventional, functional legal document. The Charter’s Proem provides a mythic Christian background and heritage for Edgar’s re-foundation of the Minster, and most especially his expulsion of the secular clerics and their replacement with regular monks. The Proem draws a parallel between God’s expulsion of the fallen angels from heaven, and his subsequent creation of mankind to take their place, and Edgar’s expulsion of the corrupt secular canons from Winchester (and the nation as a whole). 93 The Proem gives an account of the creation and fall of the angels, stating that: Qui coaeterno uidelicet uerbo quaedam ex nichilo edidit. quaedam ex informi subtilis artifex propagauit materia. Angelica quippe creatura ut informis materia. nullis rebus existentibus diuinitus formata. luculento resplendit uultu. Male pro dolor libero utens arbitrio. contumaci arrogans fastu. creatori uniuersitatis famulari dedignans. semetipsum creatori equiperans. aeternis baratri incendiis cum suis complicibus demersus iugi merito cruciatur miseria. 94 He, through the co-eternal Word, so to speak, formed certain things ‘out of nothing’ and, like a ﬁne craftsman, created certain other things out of shapeless matter. An angelic creation indeed, as shapeless matter given shape by divine inﬂuence when no [other] things existed, it was resplendent with a bright countenance. Alas, making bad use of its free will, assuming with stubborn arrogance, disdaining to serve the Creator of the Universe, placing itself equal to the Creator, it plunged into the eternal ﬁres of the Abyss with its confederates, and is deservedly tormented with perpetual misery. 95

After narrating the creation of Man to ﬁll the places left empty by the fallen angels, the Charter goes on to present later events in Christian history as a continuation of this fundamental cycle of benevolent establishment, punitive expulsion and eventual replacement or restoration. We are reminded that 91 92 93

94 95

Charters of the New Minster, Winchester, ed. Sean Miller (Oxford, 2001), p. 105. See for example Richard Gameson, ‘Ælfric and the Perception of Script and Picture in AngloSaxon England’, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Art and Archaeology 5 (1992), 85–101, p. 87. The ‘replacement doctrine’ surrounding this interpretation of the expulsion of the angels and the creation of man is explored by David Johnson in ‘The Fall of Lucifer in Genesis A and Two AngloLatin Royal Charters’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 97 (1998), 500–21, p. 511. Miller, Charters of the New Minster, Charter 23, p. 96. Alexander Rumble, Property and Piety in Early Winchester (Winchester Studies, vol. 4, part iii, Oxford, 2002), pp. 74–5.

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Qui paradisiacae uoluptatis amenitate locatus. nullius rei patiebatur dispendium. sed ei totius mundi ad uotum subpeditabat facultas. 96 Man, having been placed in the delight of paradisiac beauty, endured the lack of no thing, but the abundance of the whole world supplied everything he required. 97

The Proem then describes man’s unfallen state through a conventional list of the absence of evils or sufferings, and the presence of pleasures. However, Adam and Eve …paradisi eliminati metis im presentis uitae erumna miserrimi deciuntur. 98 …are banished from the bounds of Paradise and cast down, most wretched, into the distress of this present life. 99

The Charter then moves on to Christ’s incarnation, death and resurrection, which permits the liberation of man from death and the restoration of paradise. Yet this is not represented as the ﬁnal or conclusive event in this pattern of expulsion and replacement. Immediately after its account of Christ’s triumph over death, the Charter places the heading ‘De beniuolo Regis meditamine’ (‘Concerning the king’s benevolent design’) and sets forth Edgar’s intentions for the re-foundation of the Minster. Edgar’s role mirrors that of God as he expels the unworthy canons and replaces them with monks. The politics of the Charter’s Proem are clear. As David Johnson summarises, the Charter provides: an implicit deﬁnition of the purpose and ordering principles which underlie ‘reformed’ monasticism. Man once lived pure and sinless in paradise; the renunciations and the discipline which the reformed monks accept are part of a program which will recreate paradise on earth – the well-known theme of the paradisus claustralis. Thus the account of the fall of the angels and the prelapsarian glory of Adam are immediately relevant to the foundation and ordering of the monastery… The establishment of this monastery is not thus a random act of generosity but the fulﬁlment of Christian history in England in Edgar’s reign. 100

As Johnson’s summary makes clear, this is a project which involves both the religious reformers and the West Saxon monarchy, and which has important nationalistic implications. The paradise which will be re-made on earth will be speciﬁcally re-made in England, under a West Saxon royal dynasty. In addition to this main narrative of paradise, expulsion and restoration, the Charter also develops another central theme of imagery and vocabulary. Organic, pastoral imagery pervades the text: for example, Adam ‘ﬂorebat’ (‘ﬂourished’) in paradise, but after his fall ‘mors inoleuit’ (‘death implanted itself’). 101 After expelling 96 Miller, Charters of the New Minster, p. 96. 97 Rumble, Property and Piety, p. 76. 98 Miller, Charters of the New Minster, p. 97. 99 Rumble, Property and Piety, p. 78. 100 Johnson, ‘The Fall of Lucifer’, p. 514. 101

Miller, Charters of the New Minster, pp. 96, 97.

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the rebel angels, the Charter tells us that God did not wish to leave heaven lacking ‘cultore’, the Latin cultor implying not merely ‘inhabitant’ but carrying the agrarian connotations of ‘cultivator’. 102 This imagery is even more explicit in Edgar’s statement of intention. Edgar announces that: Talibus igitur exhortatus doctrinis quibus nos Dominus per prophetam clementer ammonuit. agens Christo faciente in terris quod ipse iuste egit in celis. extricans uidelicet Domini cultura criminum spurcitias. uirtutum semina sedulous agricola inserui. 103 Exhorted therefore by such teachings by which the Lord has kindly admonished us through the Prophet, effecting on earth at Christ’s doing what He himself has justly effected in Heaven, namely, clearing the ﬁlth of evil deeds from the Lord’s ploughland, as a diligent farmer, I have inserted the seeds of virtues. 104

Edgar imitates the examples of God and Christ, and, through agricultural vocabulary (‘cultura’, ‘agricola’), fashions himself as the new cultivator of England. The Benedictine re-foundations will make a new paradise in England, appropriating the locus amoenus as a central symbol in the reform ideology. As seen in this document, the Benedictine Reform also centres around systems and celebrations of patronage, resonating with the valorisation of the patron-ﬁgure in the Old English Guthlac A. Despite the nationalistic rhetoric of the Benedictine Reforms in England, the new monastic ideologies and practices are based on models from the continent. The central reform ﬁgures all visited important monastic sites in mainland Europe. 105 As Douglas Dales summarises: Throughout the heyday of the ﬂowering of the tenth century, English contacts with the continent remained strong, and inﬂuences were exerted in both directions. The impact of Carolingian art forms and ideas was fundamental to the whole revival of Christian culture in the tenth century, on both sides of the channel. 106

The inﬂuence of Carolingian models is nowhere more evident than in the iconography of the Benedictional of Æthelwold, another prestigious manuscript closely associated with the monastic reforms in England. For example, in the illustration to ‘The Entry into Jerusalem’, springtime buds, blossoms and foliage burst out all over the picture – including the frame itself. In his study, Robert Deshman comments on this conventional use of springtime imagery to represent renewal and the triumph of a ruler. He also argues that the iconography of the 102 Miller, Charters of the New Minster, 103 Ibid., p. 98. 104 Rumble, Property and Piety, p. 80. 105

p. 96.

See D.A. Bullough, ‘The Continental Background of the Reform’, in Tenth-Century Studies: Essays in Commemoration of the Millennium of the Council of Winchester and ‘Regularis Concordia’, ed. David Parsons (London, 1975), pp. 20–36. 106 Douglas Dales, Dunstan: Saint and Statesman (Cambridge, 1988), p. 73.

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Benedictional is just one expression of a coherent representational system also reﬂected in the rhetoric of the New Minster Charter. Across text and visual art, images of planting, cultivating and blooming are consistent. 107 Deshman also discusses the inﬂuence of continental iconographic styles in the codex. Replacing [earlier Anglo-Saxon styles of ornament] were the more mediterranean styles from abroad that seem to have carried ideological connotations of the reformed Continental religious practices that Æthelwold and the other monastic leaders introduced into Britain. 108

So, in the art of the Benedictional we see the deliberate appropriation of continental models with their associations of reformed monastic practice and the cultural heritage of Carolingian renovatio. Once again, this provides a parallel to the appropriation of continental Latin pastoral conventions in Old English poems such as The Phoenix, Guthlac A and The Seafarer. A central tension and paradox here is that the cultural self-assertion of late tenth-century England is based to such an extent on borrowing from the continent and from Latin traditions. Although this borrowing has often been seen as a weakness, the conﬁdent ownership and appropriation of continental models in Anglo-Saxon iconography and literature in fact makes a strong, selfconscious statement about the status, heritage and power of English culture. The imagery of The Phoenix and Guthlac A generates speciﬁc associations and implications in this late tenth-century context. The ﬂourishing, blossoming locus amoenus so central to both poems resonates with the Benedictine representational vocabulary of renewal and revival. The delightful ‘iglond’ of The Phoenix offers an even stronger potential parallel with the re-cultivated, re-made island nation. The representation of Guthlac in Guthlac A participates in insular hagiographic traditions, yet also has parallels in Latin panegyric conventions. In particular, the poem includes motifs associated with the patron ﬁgure and celebrations of patronage – again, crucial concepts within the politics and structures of the Benedictine Reform. These interpretations of locus amoenus imagery within the poems would certainly have been possible for a literate tenth-century audience. The literary locus amoenus in these Old English poems has both a stronger political potential and a wider range of available cultural associations for a late Anglo-Saxon audience than has previously been recognised. Contrary to conventional critical assumptions, the Old English vernacular can and does represent delightful natural landscapes. In the Exeter Book poems The Phoenix and Guthlac A, and beyond, we can ﬁnd striking, formulaic examples of the literary locus amoenus. Even those texts which are most frequently cited as examples of the hostile natural world in Old English, such as The Seafarer and the haunted mere in Beowulf, can be re-read as sophisticated, self-conscious inversions of locus amoenus traditions. Preconceptions about the narrow cultural background of Old English have limited the search for sources, analogues and contexts for vernacular texts. Yet this study has shown that there are equally convincing parallels and resonances in 107 Robert 108

Deshman, The Benedictional of Æthelwold (Princeton, 1995), p. 199. Ibid., p. 252.

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continental Latin pastoral. Representations of the locus amoenus in Old English are dependent on borrowing from Latin literary traditions and conventions – hagiographic, monastic and panegyric. Yet these acts of appropriation and transformation in the English vernacular form an implicit assertion of the conﬁdence, ownership and power of English culture, language and literature. The tenth-century Benedictine Reform provides an important context for the production, transmission and reception of the Exeter Book. Whilst The Phoenix and Guthlac A re-make the literary locus amoenus in the English vernacular, the representational ideology of the Benedictine Reform centres on re-making a spiritual and cultural locus amoenus in England. The monastic reforms re-model English culture as both heir and renovator of continental religious and literary traditions. Similarly, the vernacular literature of this period appropriates and re-shapes inherited Latin motifs and models. Patrick Conner argues that in the late tenth century ‘the new English monasticism has won the battle for control of cultural symbols’. 109 The locus amoenus is among the most powerful of these symbols, and functions once again as a key image in the invention and promotion of English national and cultural identity.

109

Conner, Anglo-Saxon Exeter, p. 149.

3 Local Landscapes as Mirrors for England

In the new political and cultural context of Anglo-Norman England, regional centres re-negotiate power systems and hierarchies and re-assert their claims to a place at the heart of notions of English identity, culture and power. This chapter will explore the ways in which the literature produced by regional monastic houses in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries represents local landscape as locus amoenus and mirror for the nation as a whole. Through these literary strategies, regional monastic houses claim a powerful role in the fashioning of national identity. Thorlac Turville-Petre’s study, England the Nation, offers an exploration of the relationships between regional communities and national constructs of power and identity in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Turville-Petre acknowledges the challenges faced by areas situated away from London and the centres of Anglo-Norman power. The region recognizes the dangers of its isolation. It takes pride in commemorating its own history, myths, and customs. Yet local afﬁliations and interests all have to be interpreted against the image that the nation has constructed of itself, because the region has a strong urge to identify with the nation that confers on it cultural signiﬁcance, military and political power, a framework of legal rights, and international prestige. 1

Turville-Petre looks, for example, at the Middle English romance Havelok the Dane which seeks to remind an English audience of the past prestige and importance of Lincolnshire and Anglo-Danish relations, and which makes a claim for the reincorporation of the north-east region into notions of English history and national identity. 2 He emphasises the ways in which ‘local communities expressed their regional distinctiveness but at the same time demanded to be included in the image the nation had constructed of itself’. 3 The texts which will form the central focus of 1 2 3

Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation. Language, Literature, and National Identity 1290–1340 (Oxford, 1996), p. 142. Ibid., Chapter Five, ‘Nation and Region’. Ibid., p. 143.

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this chapter provide similar evidence of the complex political and cultural relationships between nation and region. However, they show more than simply regional resistance against exclusion from national constructions of identity, history and authority. Rather, the monastic texts explored in this chapter demonstrate the striking success of local communities in asserting a status emblematic of the nation as a whole and claiming an active role in the continuing production of national identity and image. The central texts in this chapter are associated with monastic houses in the areas known today as the Somerset Levels and the East Anglian fenland. In particular, this chapter will focus on texts produced by or for the monasteries of Glastonbury, Ely and Ramsey. Although these houses all enjoyed wealth, power and special royal patronage in the late Anglo-Saxon period, the centuries after the Conquest present challenges in terms of the re-making of community identity and the re-formulation of political and cultural allegiances. In the panegyric and chronicle texts associated with these monasteries, local landscapes become central to the fashioning of monastic identity and its connection to images of the nation. All these communities celebrate their sites as island loci amoeni set in watery, wilderness contexts. Anglo-Latin texts transform the realities of topography and monastic land management into allegories of spiritual cultivation and triumph, and a mirror for national mythologies of English place and destiny. The texts from Glastonbury, Ely and Ramsey draw prestige from Anglo-Saxon sources, precedents and traditions, but also formulate a new symbolic discourse of authority based on territory rather than history. The idealised, symbolic pastoral landscape links local and national claims and identities and afﬁrms continuing traditions of England as locus amoenus. For Glastonbury, the centuries after the Norman Conquest presented a crisis for the abbey’s prestige and power. Problems included ﬂuctuating royal favour and patronage, as well as the devastating ﬁre of 1184 which completely destroyed the main monastic buildings. 4 A great deal of scholarship has focused on the appropriation and exploitation of Arthurian mythology by Glastonbury as a strategy to re-build the monastery’s prestige and to re-assert its status as a centre for pilgrimage. 5 The mythologisation of landscape is obviously integral to these claims to Arthurian heritage and identity, but the importance of landscape in panegyric and chronicle texts from Glastonbury goes far beyond the idea of Avalon. The topographical reality of Glastonbury’s situation as a pleasant island amid the ﬂoods and marshes of the Levels provides a consistent focus for mythologisation of the abbey’s spiritual identity and destiny. The practicalities of land reclamation and cultivation are transformed into literary allegories of spiritual work and protection. The delightful island of the abbey takes on symbolic associations from classical, biblical and patristic writings as well as English historiographical traditions which stretch back to Bede.

4 5

See Gransden, Legends, Traditions and History, p. 155. See for example James P. Carley, ed., Glastonbury Abbey and the Arthurian Tradition (Cambridge, 2001).

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Literary celebrations of the Glastonbury landscape begin in texts from the late Anglo-Saxon period. In the ﬁrst Latin Vita of St Dunstan, written around AD1000, the Benedictine monastery at Glastonbury is presented as an island locus amoenus. Erat autem quaedam regalis in conﬁnio ejusdem praefatis viri insula, antiquo vicinorum vocabulo Glæstonia nuncupata, latis locorum dimensa sinibus piscosis aquis stagneisque circumducta ﬂuminibus, et plurimis humanae indigenitae apta usibus, atque sacris, quod maximum est, Dei dicata muneribus. 6 There was within the realm of King Æthelstan a certain royal island known locally from ancient times as Glastonbury. It is spread wide with numerous inlets, surrounded by lakes and full of ﬁsh and rivers, suitable for human use, and, what is more important, endowed by God with sacred gifts. 7

This passage exploits the actual topography of Glastonbury as an island in the marshes to reﬂect its status as a place ‘set apart’ in terms of status and prestige. The description of Glastonbury’s natural advantages – rivers, ﬁsh, fertility – and the sense of its divine appointment and blessing recall Bede’s description of the Edenic ‘Albion’ in the Ecclesiastical History. In this passage of the Vita, the juxtaposition of references to Glastonbury and the English kingdom as a whole encourages the association of the two islands as loci amoeni endowed by God with beauty and ‘sacred gifts’. In the later Middle Ages, the proliferation of chronicle and panegyric texts associated with Glastonbury seeks to establish a sense of history, heritage and identity for the abbey, reviving the image of the monastic locus amoenus and giving increasing symbolic importance to the local landscape. Quite apart from any speciﬁc English ideological or nationalistic connotations, the monastic landscape gathers a wide range of symbolic associations in medieval texts and traditions. The ideas of the monastic life as a performance of ‘the heavenly’ within the world, and of the monastic space as an enclosed realisation of paradise have been very fully explored by scholars such as Peter Levi, Jean Leclercq and Mary Carruthers. Just as the performance of liturgy allows participation in speciﬁc moments of salvation history, so the symbolic monastic space allows monks to inhabit the spiritual places of paradise, Sion and the heavenly Jerusalem. Jean Leclercq notes that the mountain of the return is the symbol of the monastic mystery, and for every Christian who becomes a monk, it is as if he always lived in this blessed spot. It is there that he can be united to the real Holy City. 8

The raised island site of Glastonbury clearly resonates with the ‘mountain of the return’ and its fertile, pleasant landscape makes it an image of Eden or paradise. Texts from Glastonbury in the post-Conquest period exploit these Judaeo-Christian associations, but also look beyond them to classical literary precedents and to speciﬁcally English sources and traditions. Chronicle texts look back to Anglo-Saxon 6 7 8

‘Auctore B’ in Memorials of Saint Dunstan, ed. William Stubbs, RS 63 (London, 1874), pp. 6–7. Gransden, Legends, Traditions and History, p. 159. Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, p. 55. See also pp. 59–62.

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heritage to assert the connections of the abbey to a prestigious past. Indeed, many texts from Glastonbury urge us to regard them as the faithful transmission of preConquest history and tradition. However, as Lesley Abrams observes in Anglo-Saxon Glastonbury: Church and Endowment: [L]iterature which bears on the pre-Conquest community is only extant after ca. AD 1000, and the narrative and annalistic material from which so much of the history of Anglo-Saxon England is derived offers only occasional fragments of information on Glastonbury. Secondly, the burgeoning there in the late middle ages of a fertile imaginative literature has cast a shadow over anything written about the house by its supporters. Glastonbury’s monks clearly had historical pretensions but no qualms about invention. 9

The focus of this study is exactly these representational strategies and the selfconscious fashioning of Glastonbury identity and history in this period. Texts from Glastonbury in this period may offer little in terms of reliable historical evidence, yet they reveal the ways in which writers selected from available literary traditions and sources to celebrate the abbey’s importance. In particular, they show a conscious revival and continuation of locus amoenus imagery which links Glastonbury to AngloSaxon traditions and to visions of England the nation. The scarcity of sources for Glastonbury is a problem, but those available do show a strong continuity of tradition and mythologising strategy. As a founder ﬁgure in the abbey’s history, Saint Dunstan provides a strong link to the Anglo-Saxon past in the post-Conquest period. The early twelfth-century Vita Dunstani by William of Malmesbury attempts to consolidate the ownership of Dunstan’s cult by Glastonbury (despite an ongoing dispute with Canterbury over possession of relics), beginning the text with a speciﬁc dedication to the abbey and monks. William has been described as ‘the champion of Glastonbury’ and this Vita can certainly be read as a re-assertion of Glastonbury’s importance in the problematic century after the Conquest. The association of Dunstan and the tenth-century English monastic reforms with Glastonbury Abbey is a key strategy for William of Malmesbury in asserting the abbey’s originatory role for religion and monasticism in England. Indeed, William adds to the Dunstan tradition a vision originally narrated in Wulftsan’s Vita Æthelwoldi which underlines the importance of Glastonbury as a centre and emblem for monasticism across the nation. Dunstan dreams of a giant tree which is hung with monastic cowls. Visus est sibi videre infra septa monasterii arborem patulis ramis omnem Angliam obumbrantem. Ramos omnem monachilibus tunicis onustos in summo culmine unam latitudine sui caeteras obvelantem. Dunstanus, visionis subtilitatem discernere impotens, ducem uenerandæ ut videbatur canitiei presbyterum consulendum putavit. Ille remotis ambagibus dilucide omnia prosecutus est. ‘Arbor’, ait, ‘est hæc insula; major cuculla est Ethelwoldi monachi tui religiosa gratia. Cæteræ sunt multorum monachorum animæ quas 9

Lesley Abrams, Anglo-Saxon Glastonbury: Church and Endowment (Woodbridge, 1996), p. 1.

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ille contra diabolum religionis suæ velo, et quodam justitiæ defendet umbraculo.’ 10 He dreamed that he saw, within the monastery precinct [of Glastonbury], a tree that shaded all England with its spreading branches. All the branches were laden with monks’ tunics; but one of them, at the very top, shrouded the rest, so wide was it. Dunstan was unable to solve the riddle of this vision, and thought it best to consult his guide, a priest with (as it seemed in the dream) venerable grey hair. His clear exposition went through every detail, leaving no uncertainty. ‘The tree,’ he said, ‘is this island. The largest cowl is the religious grace of your monk Æthelwold. The rest are the souls of many monks which he will defend against the Devil with the veil of his religion and a kind of umbrella of justice.’ 11

In the Vita Æthelwoldi, this vision functions as a straightforward panegyric to Æthelwold and the monastic reform movement. Yet in William of Malmesbury’s Vita Dunstani, the vision becomes as much a panegyric to Glastonbury itself as a celebration of Æthelwold or wider English monasticism. William foregrounds the polysemous potential of the dream, referring to Dunstan’s difﬁculty in interpreting ‘uisionis subtilitatem’ (‘the riddle of this vision’). William then adds the short phrase (not found in Wulfstan) which precedes the dream-guide’s gloss. ‘Ille remotis ambagibus dilucide omnia prosectus est’ (‘His clear exposition went through every detail, leaving no uncertainty’). The Latin ambages might even suggest more speciﬁcally ‘enigma’ or ‘puzzle’. Far from ruling out any potential ambiguity in the vision, this added statement invites in expectations of polysemy. The identiﬁcation of ‘haec insula’ as ‘this island’ is certainly ambiguous, suggesting the island of Glastonbury itself as well as the island of Britain in general. The metaphor of the tree for the nation is conventional in medieval literature, often occurring in the dreams of royal ﬁgures and appearing for example in King Edward’s vision in the thirteenthcentury Life of Edward the Confessor and in Robert of Gloucester’s Metrical Chronicle. 12 Yet the image of the ﬂourishing tree is also a speciﬁc symbol for Glastonbury in the abbey’s traditions. The later (fourteenth-century) Glastonbury Chronicle’s account of the original foundation of the abbey by Patrick and Benignus includes the motif of the wooden staff which branches and ﬂowers at the abbey site. 13 So, the image of the tree again recalls both Glastonbury and England. The vision is 10

11 12 13

‘Auctore Willelmo Malmesberiensi’, in Memorials of Saint Dunstan, ed. Stubbs, pp. 272–3. For the version in the Vita Æthelwoldi, see Wulfstan of Winchester, The Life of St Æthelwold, ed. Michael Lapidge and Michael Winterbottom (Oxford, 1991), p. 57. William of Malmesbury, Vita Dunstani, ed. M. Winterbottom, trans. R.M. Thomson (Oxford, 2002), p. 207. See Turville-Petre, England the Nation, p. 93. James P. Carley, ed. and David Townsend, trans., The Chronicle of Glastonbury Abbey: An Edition, Translation and Study of John of Glastonbury’s Cronica sive Antiquitates Glastoniensis Ecclesie (Woodbridge, 1985), p. 69. Another foundation myth associated with Glastonbury Abbey recalls that of Crowland discussed in Chapter One. A tradition tells that the sign that the island should be the site of a monastery is the presence of pigs – recalling iconographic traditions of Guthlac’s arrival at Crowland and the myth of Aeneas and the foundation of Rome. See Gransden, Legends, Tradition and History in Medieval England, p. 172.

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embedded in a section of William’s Vita which explicitly eulogises Glastonbury, presenting the abbey as the root and origin of all religion in England. This context again reinforces a reading which interprets the dream as a celebration of Glastonbury itself. This vision is also included in the later Cronica sive Antiquitates Glastoniensis Ecclesie or Glastonbury Chronicle of John of Glastonbury (c. 1350). The Chronicle uses William of Malmesbury as a major source and presents a closely similar version of this vision and its gloss. Arbor hec quam uides, abba Dunstane, situm designat huius insule; magna autem cuculla, que huius arbores summitate erigitur, ipsa est monachi tui Ethelwoldi, qui in hoc monasterio deuote Christo famulatur, relique uero cuculle, quibus hii rami uidentur honusti, multitudinem designat monachorum qui eius erudicione sunt instruendi in hac regione ad omnipotentis Dei seruicium congregandi, eiusque ducatu preuenturi sunt ad gloriam regni celorum et ad societatem cum Christo regnancium spirituum beatorum. This tree which you see, Abbot Dunstan, represents your island; the great cowl which is put in the top of that tree is that of your monk, Æthelwold, who devoutly serves Christ in his monastery. The other cowls with which these branches seem laden represent the multitude of monks who will be instructed by his erudition and gathered from everywhere in this region to serve almighty God, and who will arrive by Æthelwold’s guidance at the glory of the kingdom of heaven and the society of the blessed spirits who reign with Christ. 14

This version preserves the polysemous potential of ‘insula’ and ‘arbor’, and also adds the ambiguous reference to the monks who will be gathered from ‘hac regione’. This again might allude to both the national monastic community gathered by the Benedictine Reform and the local community collected at Glastonbury. The accounts of Dunstan’s dream presented by William of Malmesbury and John of Glastonbury offer a version of history which traces English monasticism and religion back through the tenth century, Dunstan and Glastonbury, and which establishes the island of Glastonbury as metonym or emblem for the island nation. Dunstan’s dream in William of Malmesbury and the Glastonbury Chronicle offers us an organic image of the island nation / abbey which seems to grow out of the pastoral monastic landscape. The compendious Glastonbury Chronicle devotes considerable attention throughout to the landscape of the abbey and its subsidiary houses. In some ways, this is a careful catalogue designed to record and codify ownership. Yet the Chronicle also offers a celebration of the pastoral locus amoenus landscape and an exploitation of its symbolic associations. The main site of Glastonbury itself is presented in verse as an island locus amoenus set amid the ﬂood waters of the Somerset Levels. In huius insule laudem quidam metricus sic cecinit: Insula pomorum que fortunata vocatur, 14

Carley, ed., The Chronicle, pp. 128, 129.

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Ex re nomen habet, quia per se singula profert. Non opus est illi sulcantibus aura colonis, Omnis abest cultus nisi quem natura ministrat, Ultro fecundas segetes producit et uvas, Nataque poma suis precioso germine siluis. Omnia gignit humus, uice graminis ultro redundans. Annis centenis et vltra viuitur illic. Hec nova Ierusalem fuit, hec ﬁdei quoque lima, Hec tumulus sanctus, hec scala poli celebratur. Vix luit inferni penas hic qui tumulatur. In praise of this island a certain poet sang thus: The island of apples, which is called fortunate, is truly named, for it brings forth all things of its own accord. It needs no farmers to till the ﬁelds, and there is no cultivation save that which nature provides. It freely brings forth fertile stalks and grapes, and apples born of precious seed in its forests. The earth nourishes all things, as bounteous as tended land; one lives there a hundred years or more. This was the new Jerusalem, the faith’s reﬁnement, a holy hill, celebrated as the ladder of heaven. He scarcely pays the penalties of hell who lies buried there. 15

The references to apples in this poem are, of course, an allusion to the tradition of Glastonbury as Avalon, the Celtic ‘Insula pomorum’ or ‘island of apples’. The image of a garden of apples is also obviously charged with connotations in Judaeo-Christian tradition, and here Glastonbury is clearly represented as an Edenic place where human labour and effort are unnecessary. The last lines of this verse celebrate the different symbolic possibilities of Glastonbury – the symbolic multiplicity and power of its landscape. Its raised setting clearly resonates with traditions of the ‘mountain of the return’ as discussed by Leclercq: Glastonbury recalls both a pastoral Eden or the iconic ‘tumulus sanctus’, and also the impressive structures and ediﬁces of the ‘nova Ierusalem’. Here again we see the parallelism of the enclosed locus amoenus spaces of garden, city and cloister. The Edenic, naturally beautiful and fertile landscape of Glastonbury, with its special position close to God, also resonates with traditions of England the nation and the island locus amoenus stretching back to Bede and beyond. Elsewhere, the Chronicle lists the qualities of other ‘islands’ within the Twelve Hides of Glastonbury. Andredsey (also called Nyland) and Martinsey (also called Marchey) appear in the list as follows: Post hec insula de Andredsey ceteras situ loci amenitate antecellens, cum terris, boscis, pratis et moris largissimis. Deinde Martinsey cum terris, pratis et pascuis ad eam spectantibus. After these [other islands], the island of Nyland, which excels the others in its pleasant location, with its lands, woods, meadows and very large moors. Then Marchey, with the lands, meadows and pastures which belong to it. 16 15 16

Carley, ed., The Chronicle, pp. 12, 13. Ibid., pp. 16, 17.

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The language here straddles the registers of legal document or charter and poetic panegyric. Nyland and Marchey also appear as delightful pastoral landscapes, with the emphasis ﬁrmly on natural fertility. Obscured by this panegyric to Glastonbury and the idealised descriptions of Nyland and Marchey is the onerous task of land reclamation, defence and cultivation which was a reality for Glastonbury in the Middle Ages. Although many of these island sites would indeed have enjoyed fertile, well-irrigated situations, land management and programmes to control marsh and ﬂood areas would have been a prime concern. As we shall see again in the sources from Ely and Ramsey, Glastonbury seems to represent and mythologise its delightful island setting according to two different and essentially conﬂicting metaphorical systems. The ﬁrst is the image of the island as an Edenic locus amoenus of natural beauty and fertility which needs no human labour. The second is the transformation of the delightful landscape of Glastonbury, and its careful cultivation by the monastic community, into an allegory of spiritual cultivation and a performance of monastic values and ideology. As we shall see, in the sources from Ely and Ramsey, these two related yet contradictory metaphorical uses of the island landscape are uneasily assimilated in panegyric texts. Yet the Glastonbury Chronicle focuses consistently on the image of the natural, pre-ordained locus amoenus and makes little allusion to cultivation or monastic labour. For Glastonbury, the evidence of archaeology, liturgy and palaeographical studies may suggest more about the other aspect of this dual tradition in the late Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman periods. In The Draining of the Somerset Levels, Michael Williams discusses the archaeological and documentary evidence for land management practices in the Glastonbury area in the Middle Ages. He links conditions in Glastonbury and the Somerset Levels to similar situations in the fenland. The settlement and draining of these marsh regions… provide some common themes. The inaccessibility of some of them proved to be the very reason for their utilization, because religious houses often sought defensive and secluded island sites… The medieval houses in the Levels, the Fens and the Hull valley grew into some of the largest and wealthiest properties in England, and were in the forefront of draining activity. 17

Although it would be overly simplistic to look to literary sources for a realistic account of drainage activity in this period, topography and land management were clearly such major concerns for these monastic houses that we might expect to see them refracted or transposed into literary themes and interests. Already, from discussion of the Glastonbury Chronicle, it might be possible to assert that the continual foregrounding of landscape and the recurrent celebration of beauty and fertility may be linked to an underlying pride in the achievements and triumphs of drainage and cultivation, or at the very least to an awareness of the local contrasts between managed and wilderness landscapes. In addition to the literary sources, the evidence of archaeology, codicology and liturgical studies suggests that the Anglo17

Michael Williams, The Draining of the Somerset Levels (Cambridge, 1970), p. 3.

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Saxon saint Guthlac may have been particularly culted – even appropriated – by Glastonbury Abbey in the medieval period. This hagiographic narrative of saintly cultivation, ownership and defence of a chosen island site against demonic forces and the encroachment of the wilderness seems a particularly appropriate myth for the community at Glastonbury. 18 The capacity of the Guthlac myth to provide another focus for the performance of place and monastic identity at Glastonbury is a fascinating possibility, and although the evidence must ultimately remain inconclusive, it is persuasive. The Old English poems about St Guthlac in the Exeter Book offer a series of potential connections with Glastonbury Abbey. The debates over the dating of the Exeter Book and its constituent poems were discussed earlier, in Chapter Two of this study. In relation to the focus of the current chapter, however, the question of the location(s) of the Exeter Book’s production and the Guthlac poems’ composition becomes more signiﬁcant. The Guthlac poems themselves have traditionally been associated with a Mercian, possibly Crowland origin, although other possibilities are now acknowledged. As Jane Roberts observes: Because both [Guthlac] poems deal with the life of a Crowland saint is has been thought likely that they were composed in East Mercia. The use in Guthlac A of sources and story-material strikingly different from that found in Felix’s Vita S. Guthlaci can be seen as an indication of a Crowland origin for this poem. Yet, if a non-Crowland, indeed, non-Mercian provenance were to be suggested, some western centre such as Glastonbury, Hereford or Worcester might seem as strong a contender as Crowland. 19

Beyond speculation over the origins of any individual Exeter Book poems, Richard Gameson has made a strong case that the Book itself may have been compiled at Glastonbury Abbey. Drawing on a range of codicological evidence in his search for the Book’s provenance, Gameson concludes that we would seem, therefore, to be looking for a major scriptorium in the southwest which was active in the mid- to third quarter of the tenth century, which included a talented calligrapher who was skilled in the native tradition of script, which had connections with Canterbury and whose other products seem largely to have disappeared. There can be little doubt that the place which best ﬁts the proﬁle is Glastonbury. 20

Gameson is clear that this suggestion is only a hypothesis, or informed speculation. Indeed, Patrick Conner makes an alternative case for the production of the codex at Exeter. 21 Gameson remains cautious in his conclusions about Glastonbury and makes the tentative statement that: 18 19 20 21

See the earlier discussion of the Felix’s Life of St Guthlac in Chapter One, and the Old English Guthlac poems in Chapter Two. Roberts, The Guthlac Poems, p. 71. Gameson, ‘The origin of the Exeter Book’, p. 179. Conner, Anglo-Saxon Exeter, pp. 148–64.

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Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 The hypotheses which seem most compatible with the scanty facts at our disposal are production at Glastonbury or Christ Church, Canterbury; but these, it must be stressed, are little more than educated guesses. Ironically, should the suggestion of a Glastonbury origin happen to be correct, we are unlikely ever to know for certain owing to the extreme paucity of surviving, identiﬁable Glastonbury books. 22

If the Guthlac poems were indeed composed at Glastonbury, or if the Exeter Book was compiled and copied there, then we might expect the texts to interact in some way with the speciﬁc interests and occupations of the abbey. Jane Roberts and Richard Gameson offer only tentative hypotheses, but other evidence from Glastonbury suggests that the myth of Guthlac was important at Glastonbury in the late Anglo-Saxon and early post-Conquest periods. Liturgical evidence suggests that the cult of Saint Guthlac was particularly strong at Glastonbury Abbey and its associated houses in the earlier medieval period. This has puzzled some scholars, who have failed to ﬁnd a convincing reason for the abbey’s appropriation of the saint. The Leofric Missal, a text generally assigned to ‘a continental scribe active in southwestern England in the early tenth century’, 23 and usually located more speciﬁcally as a production of Glastonbury Abbey, lists Guthlac’s name in the calendar with a high grading. In the principal litany of the Missal, Guthlac is included in the sequence of invocation: Sancte Bonefaci ora. Sancte Cudberte. Sancte Gudlace. 24 Saint Boniface pray [for us]. Saint Cuthbert. Saint Guthlac.

In his study of the Leofric Missal litanies, David Dumville comments that The sequence of Patrick-Cuthbert-Guthlac has suggested Glastonbury because it is often suggested that these saints were particularly culted there in the AngloSaxon period: but in fact only St Patrick seems to have enjoyed this status at that time. 25

Bertram Colgrave does catalogue many late West Saxon references to Guthlac’s cult, some of which link to Glastonbury. His name… appears regularly in the eleventh century West Country and South Country calendars… Another late tenth century calendar which contains his name under 11 April is also from the West Country and is now in Salisbury Cathedral library… some relics of the saint had already [by the tenth century] reached the monastery [at Glastonbury]… 26

22 23 24 25 26

Gameson, ‘The origin of the Exeter Book’, p. 179. David Dumville, Liturgy and the Ecclesiastical History of late Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge, 1992), p. 42. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., p. 43. Felix’s Life of Saint Guthlac, p. 9.

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Although there may be little extant evidence for the cult of Guthlac at Glastonbury in the Anglo-Saxon period, a range of sources certainly indicate the importance of Guthlac at Glastonbury in the centuries after the Conquest. By 1247, Glastonbury library already possessed three different Lives of St Guthlac. 27 These may have been composed before 1066, or may have been part of the promotion of Anglo-Saxon history and tradition at Glastonbury in the post-Conquest period. Henry of Blois’ later gifts of Guthlac’s relics to Glastonbury Abbey are recorded in the Cronica sive Antiquitates Glastoniensis Ecclesie, but seem to have been a contribution to an already ﬂourishing cult. 28 Several scholars have found the evidence for a strong cult of Guthlac at Glastonbury persuasive enough to seek explanations for the puzzling importance of a Mercian saint at this West Saxon monastic centre and the persistence of the cult into the later Middle Ages. James Carley suggests that In the early ninth century there was an abbot Guthlac at Glastonbury and it seems possible that in the later Middle Ages there was some confusion at Glastonbury between the two individuals. 29

However, other evidence from Glastonbury suggests that such disingenuous ‘confusion’ is more often a deliberate appropriation of cults from other monastic centres, and a political strategy for exercising ecclesiastical dominance and control over other areas. In The Royal Saints of Anglo-Saxon England, Susan J. Ridyard examines some of the strategies by which Wessex exerted control over other English areas in the late Anglo-Saxon period. She identiﬁes as key strategies the appropriation of the cults of Mercian and Anglian saints by West Saxon monastic centres, and the patronage of Mercian and Anglian houses by West Saxon monarchs and monastic reformers. In particular, the cult of a saint was a crucial part of the equipment used by the religious community in the deﬁnition of its internal relations and of its relations with external secular and ecclesiastical powers. 30

For example, she argues that: Possession of the church and lands of Ely was vested in St Æthelthryth: the ‘guardianship’ of her relics conferred ‘guardianship’ of the same church and lands. 31

Ridyard concludes that the appropriation of Mercian and East Anglian cults by West Saxon patrons such as Byrhtnoth and Æthelwold was a conscious strategy to legitimise control over Mercian and East Anglian territory. She argues that:

27 28 29 30 31

Carley, ed., The Chronicle, p. 275, n. Ibid., pp. 19, 167. Ibid., p. 275, n. Susan J. Ridyard, The Royal Saints of Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge, 1988), p. 252. Ibid., p. 191.

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Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 The adoption by West Saxon monks and West Saxon monarchy of the Ely saints may have played some part in the establishment of West Saxon dominance over the Fenland. 32

The appropriation of Guthlac’s cult at Glastonbury in the late Anglo-Saxon period may, then, ﬁt within these strategies of West Saxon expansion and annexation. This possibly less than innocent ‘confusion’ at Glastonbury of the Mercian saint Guthlac with Guthlac, early ninth-century abbot, also recalls another Glastonbury collusion with West Saxon strategies of appropriation. David Rollason notes that Glastonbury claimed to possess the relics of St Patrick but in fact the monastery’s traditions confused his cult with that of St Petroc and thus established a link with the area of Padstow, the focus of Petroc’s cult. Glastonbury also fostered the cults of the obscure Celtic saints Ruman and Kea which were associated with the area of the river Fal. Although the sources are unreliable, we may nevertheless be seeing the exploitation of relic-cults to consolidate rule over the south-west just as in the north and the Midlands. 33

The appropriation of Guthlac’s cult at late Anglo-Saxon Glastonbury seems to have been too politically desirable and to have ﬁtted too well into these strategies of exploitation and consolidation to be dismissed as mere ‘confusion’. The possible political motivations for the importance of Guthlac at Glastonbury are evident. In the association of the island of Glastonbury with the island of Britain in the early Anglo-Norman William of Malmesbury and the later Glastonbury Chronicle we have already seen the ambition of the monastery to be considered a national institution. The appropriation of Guthlac’s cult at Glastonbury would have played an important role in the acquisition of national power and authority. In the AngloSaxon period this ﬁts within West Saxon strategies of expansion and annexation, and in the Anglo-Norman period Guthlac’s cult reﬂects Glastonbury’s attempts to construct itself as a repository of pre-Conquest heritage and traditions. As stated above, it is clearly problematic to read literary texts for straightforward archaeological or environmental evidence. John Hines, for example, has cautioned that the wilderness fenland described in Felix’s Vita S. Guthlaci may be an appropriate literary landscape for hagiography, but it obscures the reality of the organised settlement and cultivation of the fens in the Anglo-Saxon period. 34 Likewise at Glastonbury, the relationship between archaeology (with its evidence of extensive land drainage and defence activity in the medieval period) and text (with its insistent focus on the natural, divinely-appointed locus amoenus) is less than straightforward. However, I would argue that the fundamental appeal of the cult of St Guthlac at Glastonbury Abbey is its provision of a powerful Christian mythology for the labours of land reclamation, cultivation and defence which were ongoing at Glastonbury in the Middle Ages. Where texts such as the Glastonbury Chronicle focus selectively on the fertility and beauty of the cultivated Levels landscape, the 32 33 34

Ridyard, The Royal Saints, p. 240. David Rollason, Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1989), p. 154. See Hines, Voices in the Past, pp. 67–9.

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persistent popularity of the Guthlac cult at Glastonbury may offer evidence of the way in which the Abbey mythologised the accompanying challenges of land management. As discussed in Chapters One and Two of this study, the Guthlac myth also offers a re-enactment of English national destiny on a small, emblematic scale. A hostile, wilderness island site is cultivated and restored to its natural Edenic state, protected by God. The Guthlac cult offers Glastonbury once again the opportunity to perform the myth of English identity, with its own island landscape as mirror for the nation. Interestingly, texts from Anglo-Norman monastic houses in the East Anglian fenland demonstrate a similar panegyric focus on landscape and cultivation, and a similar association between the local island and the island nation of England. The thirteenth-century Liber Eliensis begins with a similar description of the monastery site in the East Anglian fens. Ely is described as the largest of the local islands (‘maxima insularum’), fertile, fruitful and pleasant. 35 Conventionally, and as we have already seen in the case of Glastonbury, this panegyric includes a brief reference to the etymology of the name. The text tells us that ‘dicimus Ely anglice, id est copia anguillarum’ (‘We say Ely in English, because it is ﬁlled with eels’). 36 Thus the Old English language provides a key to understanding the special nature of this site. Apart from the straightforward reference to eels as a source of the monastery’s wealth and identity, the juxtaposition of ‘anglice’ and ‘anguillarum’ here may be an early use of the anguillae–angliae pun, which reinforces the status of Ely as a stronghold of Englishness. 37 Signiﬁcantly, the Liber Eliensis self-consciously asserts its place within an English tradition, and appropriates authority from its claim to Old English sources. In his edition, E.O. Blake observes that: The Liber Eliensis is unique among post-Conquest monastic histories in the extensive use it makes in Book II of vernacular documents. This makes it an important source for the history in pre-Conquest times of an area of England for which evidence is not plentiful. 38

However, it is important to note that no vernacular sources for Book II of the Liber Eliensis are extant. Despite the questionable veracity of the claims to the use of preConquest vernacular sources in the Liber Eliensis, the strategy of invoking AngloSaxon sources and heritage is clearly an important aspect of the fashioning of monastic identity at Ely in the Anglo-Norman period. Like Glastonbury, Ely also suffered precarious fortunes and the loss of special royal patronage in the centuries 35 36 37

38

E.O. Blake, ed., Liber Eliensis (London, 1962), p. 2. Ibid. For a later example of this pun, see Thomas Bradwardine, ‘De memoria artiﬁciale adquirenda’, ed. Mary Carruthers, Journal of Medieval Latin 2 (1992), 25–43, p. 40. ‘Si bene noveris ullum regem… ponas eum ibi et teneat in dextra sua manu anguillam se plurimum agitantem, que “Angliam” tibi dabit.’ (‘If you should know well any king… place him there and let him hold in his right hand an eel wriggling about greatly, which will give you “England”.’) Translation from Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski, eds, The Medieval Craft of Memory (Philadelphia, 2002), pp. 213–14. I am grateful to Mary Carruthers for suggesting this connection. Blake, ed., Liber Eliensis, p. ix.

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after the conquest: it was also, of course, the regional centre associated most strongly with resistance to Norman rule and the rebellion of Hereward. In his edition of the Liber Eliensis, Blake does attempt to unpick the textual history of the codex and to work back towards Old English sources. A major source of Book II of the Liber Eliensis is the early twelfth-century Libellus quorundam insignium operum beati Æthelwoldi episcope. This Libellus exists in two manuscripts: British Museum MS Cotton Vespasian A.xix, fols. 2–27v (called by Blake ‘A’) and Trinity College, Cambridge, O.2.41, fols. 1–64v (Blake’s ‘C’). Blake notes that Both manuscripts belong to the end of the twelfth century and C was probably written between April 1139 and the end of 1140. These two versions of the Libellus are, but for a few unimportant variant readings, identical. They give a brief account of the restoration of Ely, with echoes from Wulfstan’s Life of St Æthelwold, and a record of lands acquired by him on behalf of Ely and of pleas which arose from those transactions. This record, originally written in Old English, had been preserved at Ely and was translated into Latin – according to the translator’s own statement – at the instigation of Bishop Hervey, that is between 1109 and 1131, and was known as the liber de terris sancti Æðelwoldi. 39

Blake asserts that the sequence of entries in the Libellus land records, as well as some occasional comments on transactions, do strongly suggest that the Latin text represents a version of an older document most likely dating to the time of the refoundation and expansion of Ely in the late Anglo-Saxon period. 40 This argument is supported by Edward Miller in his study The Abbey and Bishopric of Ely. 41 Blake’s own detailed discussion of the dating concludes that: Taken as a whole, the Libellus provides no ﬁrm evidence of the date when the postulated Old English original could have been compiled. It could ﬁt equally well before or after the death of Æthelwold, but the probable limits are after the accession of Æthelred and before the death of Abbot Brihtnoth. 42

Despite Blake’s detailed investigation, the Old English sources remain hypothetical. However, perhaps more important than speculation over the factual accuracy of the claims of the Libellus compilator is the recognition of this strategic appeal to AngloSaxon authority. In Book II of the Ely Libellus is an Anglo-Latin panegyric to ‘Dunham’ or ‘Little Downham’ – another Ely island site reclaimed from the fens. This poem, together with other poems embedded within the Libellus text, is omitted from the Liber Eliensis (which is entirely prose). Blake includes these poems in his edition as an appendix. This poem to Downham, then, was copied in the early twelfth century and – intriguingly – is associated by the Libellus compilator with Old English source or background material. Although this poem is clearly written within the conventions of 39 40 41 42

Blake, ed., Liber Eliensis, p. xxxiv. Ibid., p. lii. Edward Miller, The Abbey and Bishopric of Ely (Cambridge, 1951), p. 4 and p. 16. Blake, ed., Liber Eliensis, pp. lii–liii.

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Anglo-Latin pastoral, its representation of idealised landscape clearly participates in the English literary tradition of the island locus amoenus. The poem reads: Esse locum memorant quem mella liquentia rorant, Dunham dixerunt, qui nomen ei posuerunt. Deliciis plenus, locus uber, letus, amenus, Uber ager gratis sat confert fertilitatis. Piscosi ﬂuvii iuxta noscuntur haberi. Stat viridis lucus, crebris venantibus aptus, Floribus est pictus, congesto cespite cinctus, Aggere terrarum claudit genus omne ferarum. Hic canit omnis avis, dum ventilat aura suavis, Pica loquax, murule, turdi, turtur, philomele Instar habent cythare, dum certant garrulitate, Regia splendescit, qua silva decora patescit, In cuius claustris loca perﬂat ventus ab austris, Copia qua residet, felix opulentia ridet. Hic loca formosa, viridaria sunt speciosa Hiisque locis nempe vilescunt Tessala Tempe. Ortus ibi crescit, qui fructus quosque capescit, Ortus Athalantiadum describitur aureus esse Et satis Hesperidum reor aurea poma fuisse, Aurea poma quidem nasci dicuntur ibidem. Aut est translatus hic qui fuit aureus ortus Aut ita res agitur, quod hic illius instar habetur. 43 ‘A place there is where liquid honey drops like dew’, So people say: its namers called it by the name Of Downham – a delightful place, rich, fertile, glad, Where ploughland freely gives fertility enough. Rivers of ﬁsh are noticed as at hand nearby. A green wood stands, convenient for frequent hunts, Adorn’d with ﬂowers and set about with bank’d up turf, Enclosing in its ramparts every kind of beast. Here, while a sweet breeze wafts around, sings every bird: The chatting magpie, blackbirds, thrushes, turtle-dove And nightingales evoke harp-music as they sing, Competing with each other in loquacity. A palace shines where beauteous woodland yields a space; Within its cloister-garths the wind blows from the south; There dwells abundance; opulence rejoicing laughs. Here is fair country: lovely are the verdant groves; Compared with here, Thessalian Tempe’s glades seem naught. A garden grows, capacious of all kinds of fruit. ‘Golden’, they call the garden of the Atlantid race; Golden enough the apples of the Hesperides, 43

Blake, ed., Liber Eliensis, Book II, Chapter ii, pp. 398–9.

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Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 So I believe, likewise: for apples, to be sure, Are said to grow, in that place yonder, all of gold. Either that once-gold garden was transported here, Or things are so contrived that this resembles it! 44

In this poem, Downham is clearly invested with all the stock attributes of the locus amoenus, from the woodland grove to ﬂowers, birdsong and a breeze. The land is seemingly fertile and fruitful without need for human intervention or cultivation (‘Uber ager gratis sat confert fertilitatis’). The idea of the singing contest between the birds is a motif popular in early medieval Latin pastoral, but also intersects with emergent vernacular literary traditions such as the slightly later English poem The Owl and the Nightingale. Central to this description is the idea of delightful enclosure: the island site of Downham itself with its ‘ramparts’ (‘terrarum’), as well as the monastic cloisters and the image of the ‘ortus’ with its strong connotations of conﬁnement and circumscription. Forms derived from claudo (‘to enclose’) appear twice, once in allusion to the rampart-like earth-banks (‘Aggere terrarum claudit’) and once in reference to the cloisters (‘claustris’). The multiple metaphorical potential and polysemy of enclosure is fully exploited in the poem: Downham is at once an island, a garden, a sacred cloister and a fortress. This enclosed, idealised space inevitably resonates with representations of the island nation, allowing the small local community at Downham to gather a wider and more powerful emblematic potential. The imagery of this poem intersects with Judaeo-Christian ideas and traditions. Downham is a place ‘quem mella liquentia rorant’ (‘where liquid honey drops like dew’), recalling the biblical Promised Land and the Bedan discourse of landscape and destiny. The description of the beautiful garden might also suggest Eden: it is seemingly untouched by human labour or effort, and yields many fruits – apples in particular. The apples may also recall the fruits of Avalon, the Arthurian ‘Island of Apples’. Yet the poem seems to prefer classical allusion to biblical sources or romance traditions. The mythological garden to which the poem explicitly compares Downham is not Eden, or the heavenly or earthly Paradise. Instead, the poem refers to the garden of the apples of the Hesperides. Indeed, the poem seems almost playfully to wrongfoot our expectations of Judaeo-Christian allusion, and introduces references which are more strikingly esoteric and learned. The ﬁnal lines of the poem play with the notion of translatio. The garden of the Hesperides has seemingly been ‘translated’ to this location in the English fenland, and the poem also achieves an ambitious ‘translation’ and appropriation of classical literature and culture into an English context. The poem may be written in Anglo-Latin, but it celebrates an English place and afﬁrms the incorporation of rareﬁed classical knowledge and learning into the English cultural canon, continuing the processes of appropriation discussed in Chapter Two. Though unstated here, the mythological associations of the garden of the Hesperides seem particularly appropriate and add a layer of complexity to this apparently straightforward panegyric. Finding and removing the golden apples of the 44

Janet Fairweather, trans., Liber Eliensis (Woodbridge, 2005), p. 490.

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Hesperides was, of course, one of the mythic labours of Hercules, and the Downham poem seems to exploit a full knowledge of this allusion. Implicit in the image of Downham as the transported garden of the Hesperides is the idea of heroic struggle and labour. The poem seems to be implicitly acknowledging and playing with the reality that the locus amoenus of Downham is a feat of human work and skill, reclaimed and defended from the marshes. As with literary celebrations of Glastonbury, the representation of the freely fertile, natural locus amoenus is in tension with the reality of monastic preoccupation with land drainage, cultivation and defence. In this poem the dykes and defences of Downham are imagined in aesthetic terms as contrived features of the stylised garden. Yet these banks carry the dual connotations of garden enclosure and fortress rampart. Floribus est pictus, congesto cespite cinctus, Aggere terrarum claudit genus omne ferarum. Adorn’d with ﬂowers and set about with bank’d up turf, Enclosing in its ramparts every kind of beast.

Implicit in the notion of enclosure is a dichotomy or polarisation: the cultivated, delightful landscape within and the hostile wilderness outside. The poem re-fashions the banks and ditches of Downham as an integral part of the garden or locus amoenus itself, exploiting the imagery of enclosure yet obscuring the practicalities of land management. Yet these realities pervade the poem and motivate this expansive panegyric to the cultivated island in the fens. The poem ends with a subtle acknowledgement that ‘res agitur’ (‘things are contrived’). Again, as with the idea of translatio, this ﬁnal reference to contrivance and ‘instar’ (‘likeness, imitation’) unites the poem’s subject and style, suggesting both the cultivated landscape and this ambitious Latin literary imitatio. As an island locus amoenus, the signiﬁcance of Downham transcends local socioeconomics and the place becomes an emblem or mirror for the nation. The celebration of Downham’s delightful island site binds it closely with constructions of English territory, identity and destiny, linking the local to the national and resisting any distancing or marginalisation of the regional from the discourse of power. The third regional focus of this chapter is Ramsey, another wealthy monastic house in the fenland. Interestingly, at Ramsey the language and imagery of mirroring and reﬂection pervade panegyric traditions and representations of the local landscape. Two manuscripts exist of the medieval ‘Ramsey Chronicle’, the earlier of which (Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MS B.333) is a thirteenth-century version and is edited by W. Dunn Macray as the Chronicon Abbatiæ Ramesiensis. A Sæc. X. usque ad an circiter 1200 (London, 1886). Book I of the Chronicle includes a description of Ramsey as a cultivated locus amoenus, reclaimed from the wilderness and adorned with natural beauty. Hæc autem insula duobus ferme millibus in longum extensa, egena latitudine paulo strictior habetur. Quæ tam alneto quidem quam arundineto cum virore calami et junci pulchre in girum coronata, multo antequam inhabitaretur arborum genere… Nunc vero longiare temporis tractu nemoribus ex parte

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Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 demolitis, terra ubere gleba arabilis cernitur et opima, fructibus et frugibus jocunda, hortis consita, pascuis opulenta, nonnullis adhuc arboribus nemorosa, et pratorum gratia verno tempore spectantibus et arridente velut depicta ﬂoribus tota insula vario coloratura colore. 45 This island extends nearly two miles in length, although it lacks somewhat in width, being a little narrower across. It is beautifully crowned all around with as much alder as reed, with green canes and bulrushes, and before it was inhabited it was full of all sorts of trees. But now, after a long period of time, the woods are mostly gone. The land is ﬁt for the plough with its rich, fertile earth; it is pleasant with crops and fruits, ﬁlled with gardens, rich with pastures, and still leafy with many trees. In springtime the meadows are delightful to behold, and the whole island seems to smile, as if embroidered with many ﬂowers.

This conventional description of Ramsey as an island locus amoenus is followed by an equally conventional exploration of the etymology of the abbey’s name. The discussion of the etymology of ‘Ramsey’ in Book I of the Chronicle is particularly creative, appropriating authority from a range of traditions. As well as the perceived Old English etymology of ‘ramm’ + ‘ig’ or ‘ram island’, the Chronicle suggests a root in ‘Ramesses’, described as a great Egyptian city. 46 Another suggestion, ‘de authoritate veterum’ (‘on the authority of the ancients’), derives Ramsey from ‘a ramis’ (‘from branches’), because of the original wooded nature of the site. 47 Inspired by this Latin etymology, the Chronicle goes on to suggest a speciﬁcally monastic interpretation of the name, based on the image of Christ the ‘true vine’ in John 15:1– 6. The monks at Ramsey have severed themselves from the ‘barren olive-tree of the world’ (‘de oleastro sterili mundanæ... abscissi’) and now choose the life of ‘good branches’ (‘boni rami’) and live as ‘ﬂourishing leaves’ (‘velut virentia folia’) of Christ’s tree at the monastery. This image of the monastic olive ﬁts within the image of the delightful wooded island, and also resonates with the enigmatic tree in Dunstan’s dream at Glastonbury. As in texts from Glastonbury and Ely, the pastoral realities of the setting of Ramsey feed into the abbey’s symbolic self-representation, becoming afﬁrmations of its chosen, divinely-appointed status. Again, pre-Conquest texts and traditions play an important role in the continuation and re-shaping of abbey identity at Ramsey in the Anglo-Norman period. For Ramsey, there is one pre-Conquest text in particular which illuminates early mythologisations of the abbey site and which can usefully inform our reading of the later Ramsey Chronicle. The poem ‘O Ramesiga cohors’, written to Ramsey Abbey by Abbo of Fleury in the late tenth century, nuances the island locus amoenus topos in a way unique to Ramsey Abbey. Its representation of the monastic island and its setting as a symbolic mirror is echoed later in the Ramsey Chronicle, and its focus on ideas of place and reﬂection can offer a valuable framework for drawing 45 46 47

W. Dunn Macray, ed., Chronicon Abbatiæ Ramesiensis, RS 83 (London, 1886), Part I, Chapter I, pp. 7–8. Ibid., Part I, Chapter II, pp. 9–10. Ibid., Part I, Chapter II, p. 9.

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together all these Anglo-Norman monastic panegyric texts. 48 The version of the poem which I reproduce here is that from the Vita Oswaldi, edited by Michael Lapidge. This difﬁcult and deliberately obscure poem presents us with a fascinating variation on the literary convention of the monastic locus amoenus, playing with the imagery of light and reﬂection to mythologise and celebrate the abbey of Ramsey and its setting. The poem exhibits Abbo’s sophisticated knowledge of astronomy, and addresses an ideal audience familiar with the constellations and their mythical connotations. Beyond the imagery of light and mirrored light in the skies and waters around Ramsey, the poem reﬂects upon its own status as panegyric and its literary participation in processes of reﬂection and mirroring. O Ramesiga cohors, amplis que claudere stagnis, purior obrizo niteris esse Deo. Vasta palus, piscosa nimis, sua dindima pandit, ut noua sint heremi claustra reperta tibi, Nam qua coruifere consurgit proditor Hidre, insula siluoso gurgite pulchra nitet; et qua splendentis se mergunt lora Bootis, pons est inde suis peruius Angligenis: qua Cynosura poli ﬁxum regit undique girum, anguillosa palus nescit habere modum. Inde refert umbras uaga lux Phebea sinistras. terra patet nullo continuata uado, Qua me sorte dedi ignotis, ignotus, alumnis: quos Christus semper saluet, honoret, amet! O noble throng of Ramsey, secluded by spreading fens, You strive to be purer than gold for God’s sake. The vast fen, abounding in ﬁsh, yields its secrets So that new conﬁnements of the wilderness may be found for you. For where the destroyer of the raven-bearing Hydra arises, There gleams an exquisite island with its woodland waters; And where the reins of gleaming Bootes sink, There is a land-bridge accessible to all the English; Where the Lesser Bear rules its ﬁxed orbit of the sky, There the eel-ﬁlled waters know no bounds. From there the sun’s unsteady light draws back its sinister shadows; The earth lies open, linked up by no shallows.

48

Abbo’s poem to Ramsey Abbey is incorporated into Book I of Byrhtferth’s Vita Oswaldi, as preserved in the London manuscript (London, British Library MS Cotton Nero E. i: HG 344). In addition, it also occurs in Andrew of Fleury’s Vita Gauzlini, and it appears in London British Library MS Additional 10792 at the end of Abbo’s Quaestiones Grammaticales. See A. GuerreauJalabert, ed., Abbo Floriacensis. Quaestiones Grammaticales (Paris, 1982). The ﬁnal line of the poem varies, occurring in the Vita Gauzlini as ‘Quos, Benedicte pater, iure tuere pares.’ See RobertHenri Bautier and Gillette Labory, eds and trans., Vie de Gauzlin, abbé de Fleury (Paris, 1969), pp. 94–7.

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Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 In this place I, a stranger, luckily gave myself over to unknown students: May Christ always save, honour and love them! 49

The multiple copying of this text suggests a sense of its literary worth and importance beyond its local connections with Ramsey, and invites us to look more closely at its qualities as a poem. Certainly, the poem provides us with excellent evidence of the strong intellectual relationships between Ramsey and the continent in the abbey’s past. Abbo’s period of stay at Ramsey Abbey dates to around 985–7, and although his references to his time in England are often ambivalent (the experience is described as his ‘exile’), 50 this poem offers an unequivocal panegyric to Ramsey. Although such a close reading of any text can inevitably entail the dangers of overinterpretation, Abbo’s poem to Ramsey seems to be a deliberate intellectual puzzle or game, challenging the reader to disentangle allusions and layers of meaning. The Latin itself is difﬁcult and typical of the late tenth-century ‘hermeneutic style’. The ostentatiously obscure vocabulary includes ‘obrizo’ in line 2 – a term for a kind of puriﬁed gold. In line 3 ‘dindima’ is appropriated from the vocabulary of classical mythology: Dindyma was a mountain in Phrygia sacred to the goddess Cybele and associated with cult and secrecy. The poem displays a real enjoyment of language for its own sake, revelling particularly in multivalency and word play. ‘Cohors’ in line 1 evokes both the company of men and the architectural structure of Ramsey Abbey – both monks and cloister – and its military connotations contribute to the impression of silvery shining which is cultivated throughout the poem. ‘Niteris’ in line 2 (from nitor, to strive) resonates with ‘nitet’ (from niteo, to shine) in line 6, setting up verbal echoes across the poem which parallel its descriptions of visual reﬂection and mirroring. As with the Liber Eliensis etymology of ‘Ely’, the poem may also include an early exploitation of the pun on Angligens–anguilla, echoing across lines 8 and 10 and suggesting an association between Englishness and these abundant fenland assets. As with the other panegyric texts associated with fenland or levels monastic houses in late Anglo-Saxon England and the post-Conquest period, Abbo’s poem to Ramsey exploits and mythologises the abbey’s topographical setting. Ramsey is presented as a cultivated island locus amoenus set amid the wilderness of the fens. The poem’s description of the island of Ramsey, ‘amplis que claudere stagnis’ (line 1), emphasises the inaccessibility of the abbey. This physical inaccessibility parallels the inaccessibility of the poem’s language, imagery and allusions, which are open only to an intended, ‘invited’ audience. In line 4 the phrase ‘ut noua sint heremi claustra reperta tibi’ has resonance both in terms of the physical landscape cultivation at Ramsey and the constant reclamation of more land from the fen marshes, and also in terms of the pursuit and reﬁnement of the Benedictine life within the abbey. Although the poem’s exploitation of landscape, and particularly the island monastery setting, is typical of many texts celebrating marshland houses, Abbo’s choice of focus and imagery is strikingly unusual. As we have seen, the monastic island locus amoenus 49 50

Text and translation from Byrhtferth of Ramsey, Byrhtferth of Ramsey: The Lives of Oswald and Ecgwine, ed. and trans. Michael Lapidge (Oxford Medieval Texts, forthcoming). For example, see A. Guerreau-Jalabert, ed., Quaestiones Grammaticales, Chapter 3.

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is conventionally described through imagery of fertility and agriculture, verdure and pastoral beauty. Abbo’s poem, however, includes little sense of a pastoral setting, and strikingly omits the visual imagery of pastoral verdure. Indeed, Abbo’s depiction of Ramsey is strikingly free of any real colour – certainly not the green of a locus amoenus – playing instead with ideas of light and shade and the shining brightness of starlight, moonlight, ﬁsh, eels and water. 51 Rather than focusing on the cultivated land at Ramsey, Abbo chooses to centre his poem on the spaces which surround the island: the wide fenland sky and the waters of the marshes. The poem focuses on a depiction of the stars visible in the night sky over Ramsey, and their reﬂections in the waters surrounding the island. The poem itself is structured around a series of couplets which balance mirrored glimpses of sky and water. Line 5, ‘Nam qua coruifere consurgit proditor Hidre’ is balanced with line 6, ‘insula siluoso gurgite pulchra nitet.’ Line 7, ‘et qua splendentis se mergunt lora Bootis’ is coupled with line 8, ‘pons est inde suis peruius Angligenis.’ And line 9, ‘qua Cynosura poli ﬁxum regit undique gyrum’ pairs with line 10, ‘anguillosa palus nescit habere modum.’ These couplets link images of the starlit sky and the waters around the abbey, creating a sense of balance or reﬂection. The constellations of Hercules (the ‘vanquisher of the raven-borne Hydra’), Bootes and the Lesser Bear (Cynosura) can all be seen together in this conﬁguration above the horizon (Hercules ‘emerging’, Bootes ‘sinking’) in the winter sky over Ramsey. So, Abbo is describing a realistically possible view of the stars from Ramsey Abbey. However, his choice of this particular conﬁguration and of these particular constellations seems to be motivated by a desire to link the imagery of the heavens with the features and values of life at the Benedictine monastery at Ramsey. The constellation Hercules is the legendary slayer of the Hydra, the constellation also known as Draco or Anguis. This constellation, representing a serpent or water snake, certainly links well with the imagery of the eelﬁlled waters around Ramsey, and Hercules is a powerful – if rather grandiose – emblem for the ‘conquest’ and exploitation of the fens and their eely abundance. Bootes is the constellation of the herdsman or shepherd – evidently appropriate in this monastic context and particularly relevant to the late Anglo-Saxon Benedictine monasticism which so prioritised imagery of the spiritual shepherd in key documents such as the Regularis Concordia. 52 Cynosura, or the Lesser Bear, has no particular mythological associations, but, as a Northern Hemisphere star which never sets, its ﬁxed orbit around the Pole made it crucial for medieval navigation. As a constellation, therefore, it would seem to have connotations of constancy and order – again, a ﬁtting symbol for life under the Benedictine monastic rule. Though these astronomical allusions are complex and often obscure, we can probably assume that Abbo’s own pupils at Ramsey would have been equipped with the background knowledge necessary to access and unravel the allusions within the poem. Abbo’s apparent choice of constellations appropriate to his subject of Ramsey is certainly a 51 52

The image of reﬁned gold in line 2 and the martial connotations of cohors in line 1 also ﬁt within this overall impression of metallic shining. For example, Edgar and his abbots follow the example of the ‘Pastorum Pastor’. Symons, Regularis Concordia, Chapter 3.

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powerful device for celebrating and elevating the status of the abbey. Night sky and fenland water appear to be mutually reﬂecting: Ramsey seems to mirror aspects of the myth and legend reﬂected in the heavens, but the heavens can also be seen to reﬂect, celebrate and immortalise aspects of the monastic life at Ramsey. Nevertheless, although the particular constellations which Abbo chooses to describe do have particular relevance in the context of a poem to an English fenland monastery, it may be that their speciﬁc associations are less important than the overall impression of classical and astronomical knowledge. The constellations, with their connotations of classical learning and authority, shine in the sky and are displayed in the waters around Ramsey, suggesting that this is a place where classical learning shines on for the English. Abbo’s poem to Ramsey clearly situates itself within several literary traditions: the monastic panegyric convention of the locus amoenus, and also the wider panegyric tradition of the text as mirror or reﬂection. Several of Abbo’s other panegyric poems also include prominent imagery of light and reﬂection to celebrate virtue, including the acrostic to Dunstan also in the Vita Oswaldi, and the poem to Emperor Otto which exploits celestial metaphors. 53 This poem to Ramsey Abbey participates in these medieval panegyric conventions involving the imagery of reﬂection, mirrors and light. Conventionally for a poem addressed to an English fenland monastery, Abbo celebrates Ramsey as an island locus amoenus in the marshes, yet we are not presented with the fertile, pastoral place typical of many other panegyric and chronicle texts. Instead, for Abbo, the locus amoenus of Ramsey is one of learning and knowledge, represented through the constellations shining in the skies above and symbolising the potential for a remote English regional monastery to function as a centre for classical renovatio. As in his more conspicuously artful acrostic poems, Abbo’s poem to Ramsey displays a complex and thorough connection of form and content. Word play and erudite puns set up aural parallels and echoes through the text, just as the poem’s couplets describe the visual ‘echoes’ of mirrored light and reﬂection between water and sky. With the imagery of reﬂection and mirroring at its very centre, Abbo’s poem draws attention to its own formal status as panegyric and links interestingly to the later Ramsey Chronicle. As discussed above, the thirteenth-century Ramsey Chronicle presents a far more conventional description of the monastic locus amoenus as a delightful pastoral space. However, the image of monastic landscape as mirror recurs in the Chronicle’s version of the abbey’s foundation. The Chronicle includes within its foundation myth an exchange between the Anglo-Saxon reformer Dunstan (appearing again as an authorising key ﬁgure of the pre-Conquest period) and the abbey benefactor Æthelwine. Dunstan speaks: 53

For the acrostic to Dunstan (‘SVMME SACER, TE SVMMA SALUS TVEATVR AMICIS!’) also in the Vita Oswaldi (Book V), see The Lives of Oswald and Ecgwine. For the text and translation of the panegyric to Otto (‘Otto ualens Caesar’), see Scott Gwara, ‘Three acrostic poems by Abbo of Fleury’, Journal of Medieval Latin 2 (1992), 203–36, pp. 228–9. These poems also recall the Carolingian tradition of ‘star mantles’ which display the constellations as a representation of royal power and authority. See Stephen C. McCluskey, Astronomies and Cultures in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 141–3.

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‘Hic est… alter Elisius, viris summo Paradiso destinatis ab æterno provisus. In hoc loco ﬁdei tuæ et devotionis speculum, O amice [Æthelwine], viventem æternæ memoriæ tuæ imaginem speculantibus exhibens, per successiva futuræ generationis sæcula resultabit.’ 54 ‘Here is a second Elysium, provided in eternity for men destined for the highest place in Paradise. In this place a mirror of your faith and devotion, O friend, reﬂecting the living image of your eternal memory, will shine back throughout the ages of successive generations.’

The monastic topoi of the ‘tumulus sanctus’ or the imitation of paradise on earth both resonate again here. Yet Dunstan’s speech presents the foundation of Ramsey more speciﬁcally as a mirror of Æthelwine’s faith and devotion, again perhaps deliberately exploiting the reﬂecting waters of the abbey’s actual topography. The Ramsey Chronicle may be consciously referring back to the heritage and authority of pre-Conquest writings such as Abbo’s poem, and this passage may represent a selfconscious participation in the same tradition as Abbo’s panegyric. It may also be that these instances are entirely independent exploitations of the symbolic potential of Ramsey’s island location. However, both texts clearly play with the idea of landscape as mirror, transforming the realities of island topography into symbolic potential. The imagery of landscape as mirror in Abbo of Fleury’s poem and in the Ramsey Chronicle offers us a useful metaphorical vocabulary and interpretative framework which can enable us to draw together the range of texts discussed in this chapter. Though spread widely in geography, the many similarities and identiﬁcations between Glastonbury, Ely and Ramsey impact upon the literature associated with these monasteries. Seeking to re-negotiate and re-fashion their identities in the postConquest period, all three houses exploit their prestigious associations with the tenthcentury Benedictine Reform and assert their crucial role in the origins and history of monasticism and religion in England. Sharing similar topographical settings as island houses within fen or marshland surroundings, all three houses exploit the symbolic potentials of landscape through their chronicle and panegyric texts. The monastic island can function as an image of the ‘tumulus sanctus’, an enclosed, cultivated paradisal space, a version of the heavenly city, and a performance of the heavenly upon earth. Even the practicalities of land drainage, reclamation and defence can be transformed into spiritual allegory and mythology. More speciﬁcally, the monastic island locus amoenus can function as metonym or emblem for the island nation, enacting and realising the mythic national destiny of cultivation and salvation. Through deliberate exploitation of puns, polysemous imagery and metaphorical associations, texts produced by or for these houses in the Anglo-Norman period continually reinforce the special, privileged potential of the monastic island locus amoenus as mirror for the nation.

54

Macray, ed., Chronicon, Part I, Chapter XIX, p. 38.

4 The Delightful City

The ‘absent city’ of later medieval English literature is now a critical commonplace. In his well-known study on Chaucer, David Wallace argues that There is no idea of a city for all the inhabitants of London to pay allegiance to; there are only conﬂicts of associational, hierarchical, and anti-associational discourses, acted out within or across the boundaries of a city wall or the fragments of a text called The Canterbury Tales. 1

The city is a key symbolic space or landscape in medieval English literary tradition, its walled structure forming an equivalent to the order, beauty and symbolism of the enclosed pastoral locus amoenus. Yet the imaginative ideal does not always map easily onto representations of real medieval cities. This chapter will focus on Anglo-Latin writing about English cities – not only London – in the later medieval period. It will concentrate in particular on two periods in which the city becomes a central literary concern: the celebration of emergent cities through formal urban encomium in the late twelfth century, and the more problematic negotiations or evasions of the city in late fourteenth-century texts. The twelfth-century texts selected for close study are William Fitz Stephen’s description of London, and a lesser-known Anglo-Latin work in praise of Chester (Luciani de Laude Cestrie). These texts participate conﬁdently in the tradition of urban encomium, and are heavily inﬂuenced by literary pastoral conventions. They celebrate the English city as locus amoenus, a delightful place invested with symbolism and the inheritor of classical and spiritual traditions and ideals. These texts seem to demonstrate a conﬁdence and optimism about the capacity of the city to signify, to be read as a coherent meaningful and symbolic space. The late fourteenth-century texts which will be examined in detail in this chapter are John Gower’s Vox Clamantis (Book I in particular), as well as Richard Maidstone’s Concordia facta inter regem et cives Londonie, and a short Anglo-Latin poem from a Glastonbury manuscript, editorially titled The Stores of the Cities. In these later texts, the potential symbolism or meaning of the city space is presented as multiplicitous, 1

David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity (Stanford, 1997), p. 179.

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ambivalent and contested. The conventions of urban encomium and the literary locus amoenus continue to be used, but with an acute awareness of rhetorical performance and representation. Ultimately, in The Stores of the Cities, the literary city unravels into an unstructured cacophony of aural fragments. As well as examining some of the differences between representations of the city in twelfth- and fourteenth-century texts, this chapter will also investigate some of the tensions and problems common to writing about the city in both early and late medieval England. Although fourteenth-century texts may be more self-conscious, and perhaps more critical, about the performances and elisions inherent in constructing the textual city, the cities written in the twelfth century by Fitz Stephen and Lucian are already latent with tensions, absences and paradoxes. Indeed, these early texts encounter many of the same problems as those negotiated in the later works of Gower, Richard Maidstone and the poem The Stores of the Cities. All these texts raise the issue of boundaries – particularly in terms of the relationship of city to suburbs and surrounding rural areas – and modify or problematise the iconic ideal of perfect enclosure. Perhaps with varying degrees of awareness and anxiety, all these texts also suppress or exclude realities of the contemporary city in favour of symbolic constructs and rhetorical tropes. Throughout this study, images of the city have recurred as parallels to the perfect order and enclosure of garden, cloister and Edenic island. As we have seen, Gillian Beer has remarked on the inherent link between island and city as perfect mirrors of each other. 2 In Gildas and Bede, the ‘twenty-eight noble cities’ of Britain represent the country’s peaceful, prosperous past just as much as its delightful natural landscape. In Bede’s prose Life of St Cuthbert, the ‘ciuitas’ which Cuthbert builds on Farne connects the rhetoric of heroic epic and civic foundation myth with the conventions of ascetic hagiography, and forms a link in the concatenation of delightful enclosed spaces: island, ‘ciuitas’, the saint’s chaste body. Similarly, iconography connected with Guthlac of Crowland depicts a sow and piglets waiting at the site of the saint’s retreat, recalling the sow and piglets which Aeneas ﬁnds on his arrival at the future site of Rome. Celebrations of monastic landscapes exploit the symbolic associations between cloister, island locus amoenus and the heavenly city of Jerusalem. In all these examples, the city is a mirror for the delightful beauty, order and enclosure of the pastoral locus amoenus landscape. A literary tradition of urban encomium extends back through medieval English literature into the Anglo-Saxon period, and includes both Latin and vernacular texts. In European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, Ernst Roberts Curtius outlines the conventions and rules of the genre as developed by late antique theory. The site had ﬁrst to be treated, then the other excellencies of the city, and not least its signiﬁcance in respect to the cultivation of the arts and sciences. In the Middle Ages this last topos is given an ecclesiastical turn. 3

2 3

Beer, ‘The island and the aeroplane’, p. 269. Curtius, European Literature, p. 157.

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The genre is ﬂexible, though, and English texts before the twelfth century demonstrate a range of different uses and interpretations. Interestingly, across these early examples, pastoral images and conventions are consistently invoked to represent the delightful city space. Alcuin’s The Bishops, Kings and Saints of York, composed in the late eighth century, praises York through a catalogue of its important ecclesiastical and spiritual ﬁgures, and begins with a conventional celebration of the city’s delightful pastoral setting. 4 In Old English, the eleventh-century poem Durham offers a vernacular equivalent of the urban encomium, presenting the city as a locus amoenus set in a wilderness environment. The poem draws on English traditions of the island locus amoenus and exploits the rhetorical device of envelope pattern to reinforce the sense of the walled city as delightful enclosed space. 5 Much as the haunted mere in Beowulf can be read as an inverted locus amoenus, signalling familiarity with Latin literary traditions and conventions, so another Old English poem, The Ruin, can be seen as a self-conscious inversion of urban encomium. This Exeter Book poem describes a ruined city, yet evokes a vivid imaginative impression of its glorious past. 6 Across these early English texts we see the idealised city as a parallel to the locus amoenus: it shares delightful pastoral features, enclosure and symbolic potential. The ﬁrst text this chapter will explore in detail is William Fitz Stephen’s Descriptio Londoniæ, written in the late twelfth century. 7 Fitz Stephen had been a clerk in the service of Thomas Becket, and his description of London forms the preface to a Vita of the saint, who himself was born in the city. Fitz Stephen’s Descriptio of London, however, is copied beyond versions of the Vita and becomes a popular text in its own right. The Descriptio is representative of the ﬂowering of urban encomium in twelfthcentury England, and allows us to examine the literary conventions and the political uses of the genre in this period. In the twelfth century, a range of cultural and social conditions contribute to the re-emergence of urban encomium as a distinctive and important literary genre. 8 The post-Conquest period sees a huge expansion of English urban centres, with large-scale immigration into cities and major towns. 9 Cities, especially London, become more important as economic, social and political centres. Competition and rivalry between towns and developing civic pride promote urban encomium as a useful tool to codify, 4 5

6 7

8 9

Alcuin, The Bishops, Kings and Saints of York, see especially lines 19–34. For Durham, see Dobbie, ed., Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, p. 27. See also Margaret Schlauch, ‘An Old English encomium urbis’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 40 (1941), 14–28, and for discussion of the poem’s use of envelope pattern see Seth Lerer, ‘Old English and its Afterlife’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 7–34, p. 21. For The Ruin, see Muir, ed., The Exeter Anthology, pp. 360–1. F.M. Stenton, ‘Norman London, An Essay by Professor F.M. Stenton with a Translation of William Fitz Stephen’s Description by Professor H.E. Butler, M.A. and A Map of London Under Henry II by Marjorie B. Honeybourne, M.A., annotated by E. Jeffries Davis, M.A., F.S.A.’, Historical Association Leaﬂets, nos. 93, 94 (London, 1934), p. 25. For details of other urban encomia in this period, see Antonia Gransden, ‘Realistic observation in 12th-century England’, Speculum 47 (1972), 29–51. Gwyn A. Williams, Medieval London. From Commune to Capital (London, 1970), pp. 16–17.

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celebrate and elevate a city’s status. Clearly, in Fitz Stephen’s Descriptio, the extensive celebration of London as the place of Becket’s birth represents a calculated attempt to wrest some of the saint’s spiritual prestige back from Canterbury, the site of his martyrdom. The intensiﬁed interest in classical learning and cultural traditions in the twelfth century also inﬂuences the revival of the urban encomium genre. Antonia Gransden comments that, more generally, ‘Study of the classics… fostered an interest in cities, the centres of ancient civilization’. 10 The cities of Greece and Rome form paradigms and ideals to be emulated, and literary descriptions of cities themselves look back self-consciously to classical literary models. As we shall see, Fitz Stephen’s Descriptio is typical in its use of classical sources and traditions and its representation of London according to classical models. In addition to this, the Crusades and the expansion of trade enable greater contact with major cities beyond England and even Europe. John Ganim observes that: Fitz Stephen describes his London at the same time that reports of the great cities of the Orient begin to ﬁlter back from the Crusades and from newly active trade routes. The sense of wonder that informs Fitz Stephen’s description of his own city derives partly from these prior models: the city is described as if the narrating subject were a foreigner or a visitor to his own land, and is privileged to recount what he has seen. 11

Fitz Stephen’s description of London deliberately recalls contemporary accounts of these great cities, compiled by authors such as William of Malmesbury. 12 Through literary techniques which we as modern readers might think of as ‘de-familiarisation’, the local city of London is re-ﬁgured in the terms of these more distant, exotic cities of wonder. Obviously, this narrative mode also ﬁts within Fitz Stephen’s strategy of competition with Canterbury: he describes London through the awed voice of a pilgrim, again bolstering its claim to be a rival centre for pilgrimage. The sustained urban encomium of Fitz Stephen’s Descriptio offers us an opportunity to explore uses of this literary genre and ideas of the city in the twelfth century. Fitz Stephen announces his subject in the terms of superlative and hyperbole. Inter nobiles orbis urbes, quos fama celebrat, civitas Londoniæ, regni Anglorum sedes, una est, quæ famam sui latius diffundit, opes et merces longius transmittit, caput altius extollit. 13 Among the noble cities of the world that are celebrated by Fame, the City of London, seat of the monarchy of England, is one that spreads its fame wider, sends its wealth and wares further, and lifts its head higher than all others. 14 10 11

12 13

Gransden, ‘Realistic observation’, p. 45. John M. Ganim, ‘The Experience of Modernity in Late Medieval Literature: Urbanism, Experience and Rhetoric in Some Early Descriptions of London’, in The Performance of Middle English Culture, ed. James J. Paxson et al. (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 77–96, p. 87. See discussion of William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, below, p. 126. Auctore Willelmo Filio Stephani, Vita S. Thomæ in Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. J.C. Robertson, RS 67, 7 vols (London, 1875–1885), vol. 3, pp. 1– 154, p. 2. All further quotations from the Descriptio will be taken from this edition.

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This opening immediately invites a favourable comparison with the great cities of the classical world, biblical history or contemporary travel writing. Fitz Stephen goes on to parallel the delightful location and space of the city itself with the virtue and honour of its inhabitants. Felix est aeris salubritate, Christiana religione, ﬁrmitate munitionum, natura situs, honore civium, pudicitia matronali… 15 It is blest in the wholesomeness of its air, in its reverence for the Christian faith, in the strength of its bulwarks, the nature of its situation, the honour of its citizens, and the chastity of its maidens. 16

The parallel phrases here suggest a metaphorical connection between the physical nature of the city and its moral or spiritual worth. The salubritas or ‘wholesomeness, healthiness’ of the air is matched in the spiritual health of Christian observance in the city, and the ﬁrmitas (‘strength, steadfastness’) of its walls mirrors the honour of its citizens and the chastity of its women. Beyond the suggestions of pleasant natural setting in this opening paragraph, the Descriptio returns repeatedly to pastoral conventions to represent the delightful landscape of the city. The Thames is described in the conventional terms of urban encomium as a fruitful river, ‘maximus piscosus’ (‘teeming with ﬁsh’). 17 Pastoral elements of the city and its environs are foregrounded in the descriptions of gardens: Undique extra domos suburbanorum horti civium, arboribus consiti, spatiosi et speciosi, contigui habentur. 18 On all sides, beyond the houses, lie the gardens of the citizens that dwell in the suburbs, planted with trees, spacious and fair, adjoining one another. 19

The surrounding meadows are also described in idealised pastoral terms. Item a borea sunt agri, pascuæ, et pratorum grata planities, aquis ﬂuvialibus interﬂuis; ad quas molinorum versatiles rotæ citantur cum murmure jocoso. Proxime patet ingens foresta, saltus nemorosi, ferarum latebræ, cervorum, damarum, aprorum, et taurorum sylvestrium. Agri urbis sationales non sunt jejunæ glareæ, sed pingues Asiæ campi, ‘qui faciant lætas segetes,’ et suorum cultorum repleant horrea ‘Cerealis mergite culmi.’ 20 On the North are pasture lands and a pleasant space of ﬂat meadows, intersected by running waters, which turn revolving mill-wheels with merry din. Hard by there stretches a great forest with wooded glades and lairs of wild 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

H.E. Butler, trans., ‘The Life of Saint Thomas’, in Stenton, ‘Norman London’, pp. 26–33, p. 26. All translations of the Descriptio hereafter will be taken from this edition. Ibid., p. 2. ‘The Life of Saint Thomas’, p. 26. Descriptio, p. 3; ‘The Life of Saint Thomas’, p. 27. Descriptio, p. 3. ‘The Life of Saint Thomas’, p. 27. Descriptio, p. 3.

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beasts, deer both red and fallow, wild boars and bulls. The corn-ﬁelds are not of barren gravel, but rich Asian plains such as ‘make glad the crops’ and ﬁll the barns of their farmers ‘with sheaves of Ceres’ stalk.’ 21

Here we have a fertile, pastoral environment with an emphasis on its productivity and natural wealth. The rivers power mill wheels, the forests are richly stocked with game, and the ﬁelds produce excellent crops. The two allusions to Virgil’s Georgics (Georgic I, line 1 and II, line 517) contribute to the sense of this as a mythic landscape, as does the reference to ‘Asiæ campi’ with its connotations of Eastern lushness and perhaps even hints of the terrestrial paradise. The description of the city wells also ﬁts within the conventional urban encomium emphasis on natural riches, and resonates with literary pastoral tradition. Sunt etiam circa Londoniam ab aquilone suburbani fontes præcipui, aqua dulci, salubri, perspicua, et per claros rivo trepidante lapillos… 22 There are also round about London in the Suburbs most excellent wells, whose waters are sweet, wholesome and clear, and whose ‘runnels ripple amid pebbles bright.’ 23

Again, the wells demonstrate fertility and perhaps also resonate with hagiographic and romance tradition to suggest the mythic destiny or divine appointment of the site. In some respects, however, Fitz Stephen’s Descriptio already nuances the traditions of urban encomium and represents a new version of the ideal city. The idea of enclosure so characteristic to the literary locus amoenus and the idealised medieval city is subtly adjusted. Fitz Stephen does describe, in laudatory terms, the walls and defences on the West, North and East sides of the city, explaining that at the South the Thames has washed the former structures away. 24 Yet Fitz Stephen lavishes just as much attention and praise here on the areas of London beyond the walls, including the pastoral delights of the suburban gardens and meadows, cited above. Already, the traditional image of the walled, enclosed city locus amoenus is adjusted to embrace the growth – and sprawl – of twelfth-century London. Indeed, Fitz Stephen’s description works hard to overcome the physical and ideological division of the city walls, bringing the rural beyond the city into the urban space itself and emphasising the exchange and symbiosis between town and country. In the description of Smithﬁeld, for example, city and country meet at the livestock markets. The cattle market in particular is described in terms which bring together urban economics and rural agriculture. Parte alia stant seorsim rusticorum peculia, agrorum instrumenta, sues longis lateribus, vaccæ distentis uberibus, 21 22 23 24

‘The Life of Saint Thomas’, p. 27. Descriptio, pp. 3–4. ‘The Life of Saint Thomas’, p. 27. The quotation marks are Butler’s, though he only identiﬁes this phrase as ‘Anon., perhaps by Fitz Stephen himself’ (p. 33). Descriptio, p. 3.

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Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 ‘Corpora magna boum, lanigerumque pecus.’ Stant ibi aptæ aratris, trahis, et bigis equæ; quarundam ventres fœtibus protument; alias editi fœtus obeunt, pulli lasciviores, sequela inseperabilis. 25 In another place apart [from the horse racing] stand the wares of the countryfolk, instruments of agriculture, long-ﬂanked swine, cows with swollen udders, and ‘woolly ﬂocks and bodies huge of kine.’ Mares stand there, meet for ploughs, sledges and two-horsed carts; the bellies of some are big with young; round others move their offspring, new-born, sprightly foals, inseparable followers. 26

The city is emphatically linked to and continuous with the surrounding rural landscape and agricultural economy. In general, as John Ganim notes, Fitz Stephen organises both the city and his encomium according to seasonal festivals and cycles such as Easter (‘In feriis paschalibus’, Butler p. 10), Lent (‘Singulis diebus dominicis in quadragesima’, p. 9), Shrove Tuesday (‘Carnilevaria’, p. 9) and Winter (‘In hieme’, p. 11). Ganim argues that this system: [C]reates a rhythm of the city that is closer to the rhythms of agricultural life, of seasonality, on the one hand, and to the rhythms of the monastery, another utopian time scheme, on the other. 27

For Ganim, this deliberate connection of emergent urban culture to the established patterns of the countryside and the monastery is part of Fitz Stephen’s ‘utopianism’ and his presentation of an idealised city locus amoenus. 28 In addition, the deliberate integration of town and country in the Descriptio smooths potential tensions or perceived oppositions between developing urban culture and economics and traditional rural life. Gwyn Williams notes that, whereas other medieval towns in this period are still rooted in local agricultural economies and can be characterised as ‘semi-rural’, London is already ‘intensely urban’. 29 As London gradually disconnects itself from local rural economies to focus more on urban industry and wider trade networks, and as it annexes ever more surrounding land for its expanding suburbs, Fitz Stephen foregrounds elements of the city’s traditional symbiosis and continuity with its rural environs. It might also be argued that Fitz Stephen in fact lacks a traditional panegyric vocabulary with which to praise adequately the urban space and experience of the city, forcing the displacement of so much of this encomium onto the pastoral suburbs and farmlands beyond. Fitz Stephen’s focus on agricultural markets, bucolic scenes and games such as horse-racing, cock-ﬁghting (Chapter 13) and ice-skating (Chapter 17) emphasises connections with traditional English rural sports and pursuits. Yet the Descriptio 25 26 27 28 29

Descriptio, p. 7. ‘The Life of Saint Thomas’, p. 29. Butler only identiﬁes the quotation here as ‘a possible echo of Virgil and Ovid’ (p. 33). Ganim, ‘The Experience of Modernity’, p. 95. Ibid. Gwyn A. Williams, Medieval London. From Commune to Capital, p. 16.

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represents London through imagery and allusions drawn overwhelmingly from classical texts, and from Virgil’s Georgics in particular. 30 At the opening of the work, Fitz Stephen lists the classical precedents for his description of the city, naming Plato (The Republic) and the Jugurtha of Sallust, though as Butler notes, Fitz Stephen had not read either of these texts and in fact misunderstands the content of the Sallust. 31 The classical names are, however, important in establishing the heritage and status of Fitz Stephen’s project. The sense of England, and of London, as inheritor of classical traditions and prestige is central to Fitz Stephen’s description of the city. In Chapter 13, Fitz Stephen insists on London’s greater age than that of Rome. Urbe Roma, secundum chronicorum ﬁdem, satis antiquior est. Ab eisdem quippe patribus Trojanis hæc prius a Bruto condita est, quam illa a Remo et Romulo… 32 London, as the chroniclers have shewn, is far older than Rome. For, owing its birth to the same Trojan ancestors, it was founded by Brutus before Rome was founded by Romulus and Remus. 33

This passage then goes on to emphasise the parallels and kinship between London and ancient Rome. …unde et adhuc antiquis eisdem utuntur legibus, communibus institutis. Hæc etiam similiter illi regionibus est distincta; habet annuos pro consulibus vicecomites; habet senatoriam dignitatem; et magistratus minores; eluviones et a aquæductus in vices; ad genera causarum, deliberativæ, demonstrativæ, judicialis, loca sua, fora singula; habet sua diebus statutis comitia. 34 [From their shared origins] they both still use the ancient laws and like institutions. London like Rome is divided into wards. In place of Consuls it has Sheriffs every year; its senatorial order and lesser magistrates; sewers and conduits in its streets, and for the pleading of diverse causes, demonstrative, deliberative and judicial, it has it proper places; its separate courts. It has also its assemblies on appointed days. 35

Here Fitz Stephen stresses London’s conformity to classical traditions and values: the catalogue of phrases beginning with ‘habet’ lists the venerable distinctions which the city possesses. Beyond these comparisons with Rome, Fitz Stephen also refers brieﬂy the tradition of London as the New Troy. 36 He cites Geoffrey of Monmouth, who

30 31 32 33 34 35 36

‘The Life of Saint Thomas’, p. 33. Horace is also a key source. Descriptio, Chapter 1, p. 2; ‘The Life of Saint Thomas’, p. 26 and p. 33, n. Descriptio, Chapter 12, p. 8. ‘The Life of Saint Thomas’, p. 29–30. Descriptio, Chapter 12, p. 8. ‘The Life of Saint Thomas’, p. 30. A full exploration of the London-Trinovantum tradition in the medieval period is beyond the scope and speciﬁc interests of this chapter. For an introduction, see John Clark, ‘Trinovantum – The Evolution of a Legend’, Journal of Medieval History 7 (1981), 135–51. Sylvia Federico’s study New Troy. Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages (Minneapolis, 2003) offers an excellent

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names London as an ‘altera Troja’ (‘second Troy’), founded by Brutus. London is also given a privileged role in the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity, with the reference to Constantine, the ﬁrst Christian Roman Emperor and supposedly of London origins. 37 In the Descriptio, Fitz Stephen presents a coherent, consistent vision of London as an idealised city of wonder and as inheritor of classical traditions and prestige. The Virgilian pastoral landscape and bucolic elements represent the inherent natural superiority of London’s site, and are used to maintain prominent connections and continuities between the city and its rural, agricultural surroundings. This literary pastoral landscape, built on Latin poetic convention and conspicuous classical allusion, also presents the city as heir to ancient models and values. Through associations with Aeneas and Brutus, London’s status is further underlined. Despite the location of the Descriptio as preface to a Vita of Saint Thomas, Fitz Stephen draws inspiration and literary models not from hagiography or even from scriptural sources but from classical tradition. Here London is not a mirror for the New Jerusalem, but rather a new incarnation of Rome or Troy. Fitz Stephen’s Descriptio is relatively well known and is recognised as inﬂuential in early formulations of London’s identity and status. Far less widely known (and also less widely copied in the medieval period) is another twelfth-century use of urban encomium, from Chester in the north-west of England. The monk Lucian’s De Laude Cestrie is another example of urban encomium used to promote a city’s status and prestige. Like Fitz Stephen’s Descriptio, Lucian’s De Laude Cestrie offers a uniﬁed, coherent vision of the city as a symbolic space. Yet De Laude Cestrie employs different methods and exploits different textual and cultural authorities, constructing the city through the terms of religious iconography and allegory. Lucian, a monk at the Benedictine Abbey of St Werburgh (now Chester Cathedral), composed his prose encomium to Chester around 1195. The text includes many elements typical of early urban encomium, from detailed etymology of the town’s name to celebration of its patron saints and praise of its natural setting. Indeed, the striking topography of the town receives particular attention. Lucian exploits the dualities and tensions of the city’s location: both on the very edge of England (and formerly of the Roman Empire), and, with its busy harbour, at the centre of a network of worldwide trade networks. Lucian tells us that the city is built raised above the surrounding landscape so that ‘its position draws the gaze’ (‘positio invitat aspectum’). 38 The city’s borderland location and raised setting allow Lucian to develop a metaphor for its importance and inﬂuence.

37 38

investigation of uses of the Trojan myth in late medieval England. Chapter 1, ‘Late-FourteenthCentury London as the New Troy’ (pp. 1–28) provides a particularly relevant discussion. Descriptio, Chapter 19, p. 12; ‘The Life of Saint Thomas’, p. 32. M.V. Taylor, Extracts from the MS. Liber Luciani: De Laude Cestrie, written about the year 1195 and now in the Bodleian Library (Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 1912), p. 45. All further quotations from De Laude Cestrie will be taken from this edition. All modern English translations are from an unpublished translation of De Laude Cestrie by Nicholas Zair, used with his kind permission.

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Que in occidius Britannie posita, legionibus ex longinquo venientibus receptoria quondam ad repausandum fuit, et Romani servans limitem imperii, claves, ut ita dixerim, Hibernorum custodire suffecit. Nam contra aquilonare cornu Hibernie opposita, non tam crebro quam continue ob causas meantium et comoda mercium diversarum velis aptatis, viam aperit cursibus navium atque nautarum. Dumque orientem versus protendit intuitum, non solum Romanam ante se cathedram et imperium, verum et orbem prospicit universum, ut tanquam spectaculum proposita sint obtutibus oculorum, ‘forcia facta patrum, series longissima rerum’; et quicquid in orbe quibusque personis, locis, temporibus, bene gestum est cognoscatur, quod male actum est caveatur. 39 Situated in the West of Britain, it was once a suitable place to receive legions coming from far away, and provided a place to rest. Protecting the border of the Roman Empire, it sufﬁced to guard, as I have mentioned, the keys to the Irish. For it is placed across from the northern tip of Ireland, and continuously rather than merely frequently it is the starting point for journeys of ships and sailors, sails at the ready. It thus facilitates the journeys of travellers and the conveyance of different kinds of merchandise. But while it extends its gaze towards the East, it surveys before itself not only the Roman See and power, but also the whole world, so that as though they were a spectacle ‘the courageous deeds of our fathers, the longest series of exploits’ are laid out before its eyes; and so that anything that has been well accomplished in the world, by whichever people, wherever or at what time, is recognised, and whatever is badly done is guarded against.

Lucian transforms the remote, marginal location of Chester into a strength, and exploits the city’s raised setting to represent the scope and inﬂuence of its ‘gaze’. The city forms a link between Ireland and England, and, from its location almost at the edge of the known world it enjoys a view of the whole Roman Empire or See and indeed of the whole world. The allusion to Virgil’s Aeneid here (Book 1, line 641) comes from a description of the exploits of Dido’s ancestors, and extends the scope of Chester’s gaze into mythic history and classical learning. Thus the potentially marginal location of Chester is transformed into a privileged platform from which to view the whole world and all history. The four gates of the city also emphasise its worldwide connections and re-cast its situation as a global centre rather than a periphery. Que a ventis quattuor portas quattuor habens, a [sic] oriente prospectat Indiam, ab occidente Hiberniam, ab aquilone maiorem Normanniam (written over: Norweiam), a meridie eam (written over: Walliam) quam divina severitas, ob civiles et naturales discordias, Britannis reliquit angularem angustiam. 40 The city has four gates for the four winds; from the East it surveys India, from the West Ireland, from the North the greater land of the Northmen [or Greater Norway], from the South that country [or Wales] which divine severity left to 39 40

De Laude Cestrie, p. 45. Ibid.

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Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 the Britons as a marginal and narrow place, on account of their civil and unnatural disturbances.

Once again Chester is situated at the centre of the world, with an outlook upon each of its four corners. The reference to Wales and the Britons here sets up a tension which surfaces periodically in Lucian’s description: the similarities between the landscape and inhabitants of Chester and Wales, as well as the need to draw boundaries. The harbour of Chester is also exploited as a symbol of the city’s wide connections, and the topography of the site is represented in terms of a natural wonder. Lucian notes the beautiful river, ‘fair and full of ﬁsh’ (‘pulcrum atque piscosum’), a commonplace of urban encomium, and the ships which enter the harbour from Aquitaine, Spain, Ireland and Germany. 41 The estuary tides receive attention as a natural miracle and work of God. Preterea reumate cotidiano non cessat eam revisere maris patentissima plenitudo, quam apertis et opertis latissimis harenarum campis, indesinenter grate vel ingrate aliquid mittere vel mutuare consuevit, et suo accessu vel recessu afferre quippiam vel auferre. Unde nuper piscium copiam provincialibus attulit et piscatoribus vitam ademit. Qui avidi preter modum, aquam biberunt ultra modum et dum fretum exhaurire volunt, ﬂuctibus absorti sunt. Adhuc etiam nostros serenat obtutus speciosissimum maris litus, mirabilis Creatoris potencia, nunc existens aqua, nunc arida, ubi parente pelago Potentis imperio, quantumlibet consuetis, tamen ampla sensatis datur ammiratio, quod eodem die, eodem loco, et aptissimum iter facit Deus viatoribus ad gradiendum, et altissimum gurgitem aquatilibus ad natandum. Quod aliquis delicatus aut durus, nesciens naturam maris, credere fortasse contempneret, si non orbis astrueret, oculus comprobaret. 42 Furthermore, with its daily tide, the most patent plenty of the sea continues to visit the city which has the broadest ﬁelds of sand open and waiting. It is accustomed, pleasingly or otherwise, incessantly to lend or borrow something, and with its approach or retreat to bring something or take it away. Whereby it recently brought stocks of ﬁsh to the inhabitants, and took away the lives of ﬁshermen. Those who were greedy beyond measure drank water beyond measure and although they wanted to exhaust the sea, they have been engulfed by waves. Yet still the most beautiful seashore brightens our eyes, at the power of the wondrous Creator: now water exists, now it is dry. Where the power of the Lord causes the sea to appear, the wise, however accustomed they are to it, give plentiful admiration, because on that day, in that place, God made both a most appropriate route for travellers to walk on, and the deepest swell for seacreatures to swim in. Anyone, whether frail or hardy, who didn’t know the nature of the sea, might perhaps scorn to believe it, if the world did not demonstrate it, the eye prove it.

41 42

De Laude Cestrie, p. 46. Ibid.

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The description here is charged with biblical allusion and resonance, transforming the natural phenomenon of the tides into a divine work full of allegorical potential. The expanses of sand are referred to as ‘campis’, pointing a metaphorical link between the open shore and the delightful open ﬁelds of pastoral tradition. The capacity of the tide to ‘lend or borrow something’ (‘mittere vel mutuare’) and ‘bring something or take it away’ (‘afferre… vel auferre’) recalls the biblical formulation of God’s own power and favour in Job 1:21: ‘the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away’ (Vulgate ‘Dominus dedit Dominus abstulit’). Lucian then rationalises the deaths of ﬁshermen at sea into an unforgiving parable against greed. The focus in this passage on the wondrous tides which repeatedly transform water into dry land (and vice versa) suggests a sustained parallel with the biblical Exodus. The transformation of deep sea into a dry route ‘for travellers to walk on’ (‘viatoribus ad gradiendum’) certainly recalls the crossing of the Red Sea led by Moses. The ﬁnal sentence here pushes further the sense of the estuary tides as miracle, with Lucian insisting on the difﬁculty of believing this wonder to be true. The suggestion of the need for visual proof (‘oculus comprobaret’) perhaps resonates with the biblical story of ‘Doubting Thomas’ (John 20:24–9). The miraculous punishment delivered by the sea may initially seem to endanger the encomium and threaten the text’s praise of Chester and its inhabitants. Yet what we see here recalls the ‘wholesome air’ (‘aeris salubritate’) of Fitz Stephen’s London (see above) and underlines the capacity of the ideal landscape itself to function as a kind of moral or divine agent. In addition to the wonder of the natural harbour, Lucian also comments on the beauty and productivity of the surrounding landscape. He notes that Cestrians are ‘abundant in woods and pastures, rich in ﬂesh and cattle’ (‘silvis ac pascuis habundantes, carne ac pecore divites’). 43 This landscape links Cestrians with their neighbours, the Welsh, and Lucian remarks that ‘through the long exchange of customs, they are to a large extent similar’ (‘per longam transfusionem morum, maxima parte consimiles’). 44 Separated from the rest of England by the Forest of Lyme, Lucian observes that the city of Chester has more in common with the British area it borders. Such an acknowledgement is problematic and leads Lucian to admit a negative quality of Cestrians: that they are easily angered (‘ira faciles’), like their British neighbours. 45 So Chester becomes once again a marginal, border city, linked more with the Britons beyond England’s borders than with other cities within the kingdom. As with William Fitz Stephen’s treatment of the relations between London and its suburbs or rural environs, we see again here a modiﬁcation of the conventional enclosure of the ideal city. The boundaries of Chester in De Laude Cestrie are curiously negotiable or permeable: at times used to assert the contrast between the city and its Welsh hinterland, whilst in other passages collapsed by references to similarities, contact and exchange with Wales.

43 44 45

De Laude Cestrie, p. 65. Ibid. Ibid.

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Beyond the natural setting of Chester, Lucian describes the structure of the city itself and develops the allegorical potential of walls, streets and gates. The cruciform plan of the city’s main streets provides clear allegorical possibility. Habet etiam plateas duas equilineas et excellentes in modum benedicte cruces, per transversum sibi obvias et se transuentes, que deinceps ﬁant quattor ex duabus, capita sua consummantes in quattor portis, mistice ostendens atque magniﬁce, magni Regis inhabitantem graciam se habere, qui legem geminam novi ac veteris testamenti per misterium sancte crucis impletam ostendit, in quattuor evangelistis. 46 It [the city] has two excellent and equally straight highways, in the blessed shape of the cross; they meet each other crosswise and pierce each other, consequently making four from two, and reaching their ends in the four gates. The city thus shows itself, mystically and magniﬁcently, to have dwelling in it the grace of the great King, who showed the twin law of the New and Old Testaments fulﬁlled through the mystery of his sacred cross, by means of the four evangelists.

Here we have a vision of Chester built on the symbol of Christ’s cross and the intersecting laws of the Old and New Testaments, with the four gates out onto the world representing the evangelists. The location of the food market in the centre of the city also prompts an allegorical interpretation. Nimirum ad exemplum panis eterni de celo venientis, qui natus secundum prophetas ‘in medio orbis et umbilico terre,’ omnibus mundi nationibus pari propinquitate voluit apparere. 47 Doubtless this follows the example of the eternal bread coming from heaven, which was born, according to the prophets, ‘in the middle of the world and the navel of the earth’, and resolved to appear to every nation of the world in equal proximity.

Again, a mundane detail of city geography is transformed into a powerful symbol, with the central food market recalling Christ’s incarnation and the perception of Jerusalem as the centre or ‘navel’ of the world. Notably, however, the real functions of streets, markets and gates in the economic, commercial and social life of the city are absent from Lucian’s description. The realities of contemporary urban experiences are replaced with symbolic constructs and ideals. The four gates of the city are also associated with four churches and their patron saints. Ecce enim civitatem nostram, ut predictum est, sanctis servatoribus velut quadruplici sorte comissam, ab oriente suscepit clementia Domini precursoris,

46 47

De Laude Cestrie, pp. 46–7. Ibid., p. 47.

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ab occidente celestis potencia ianitoris, ad aquilonem vigil virginis pulcritudo, ad meridiem mira angeli claritudo. 48 For lo, as was predicted, our city was entrusted to sacred protectors, a four-fold division as it were: from the East the clemency of the Lord’s fore-runner [John the Baptist] sustained it, from the West the power of the heavenly gate-keeper [Peter], to the North the watchful beauty of the virgin [Werburgh], to the South the wonderful brightness of the angel [Michael].

In particular, St Peter is associated with the city through the symbolism and allegorical potential of its landscape. Lucian writes that: …tibi [Peter] credita est porta maris, quem marinis ﬂuctibus incumbentem maris conditor misericorditer evocavit, et ministerium tuum mirabiliter permittavit, ut succederet tibi pro captura piscium conversio populorum, et deinceps foret studio et amori pro salo aquarum salus animarum… 49 …to you [Peter] is entrusted the gate of the sea; you were dependent on the sea’s waves, and the creator of the sea compassionately summoned you, and marvellously appointed your duty, so that in place of catching ﬁsh, you took up the conversion of peoples, and hence in place of the deep sea, the salvation of souls should be your duty and desire.

The sea beyond Chester forms a symbolic link to Peter, the ﬁsherman and ﬁsher of souls, reinforcing the special connection between the city and the saint. Lucian goes on to exploit the raised setting of Chester, on its cliff or rocky outcrop, as another symbolic link with Peter. Civium sit videre, et prudenter advertat saltem literatus habitator, Domini vocem ‘tu es Petrus et super hanc petram ediﬁcabo ecclesiam meam,’ quanta verborum consequentia, quanta rerum evidentia, infra muros Cestrie magis in occiduis, et propius occidentem iuxta portam maris condita sit ecclesia Domini salvatoris, revera tanquam ﬁrmitas et fundamentum basilice Petri apostolorum principis… 50 The learned inhabitant at least should prudently attend the voice of the Lord: ‘You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church’; let it be the duty of the citizens to see how great the consequence of these words is, how great the evidence of the facts: within the walls of Chester as far to the West as possible, right next to the western gate of the sea let the church of the Lord our saviour be founded, just like the ﬁrmness and foundation of the church of Peter, leader of the apostles…

Lucian points the symbolism even more explicitly when he asserts that:

48 49 50

De Laude Cestrie, p. 49. Ibid., p. 51. Ibid.

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Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 Istis liquet et ceteris qui norunt locum et loci situm, quam iocunde luceat ibidem veritas promissorum, quomodo velut literaliter pariat et portet petra Petrum… 51 It is clear to them and to others who know the place and the area of the place, how pleasantly the truth of these promises shines there, how, almost literally, it brings forth and bears Peter with his rock…

The topography of Chester, with its surrounding sea and its high, rocky setting, becomes an explicit representation of the apostle and the foundation of the church. Lucian develops this symbolism still further to establish a privileged connection between Chester as a city of Peter, and the original city of Peter, Rome. This is clearly a strategy to elevate the status and spiritual prestige of Chester, and again to assert a wider inﬂuence and importance beyond the local area. Through a series of balanced clauses, Lucian parallels the roles of Peter in his city of Rome, and his city of Chester. Ibi magniﬁcus toti mundo, hic nobis murus a conﬁnio maligno. Ibi respondet consultis Orientalium et Grecorum, hic retundit assultus gravium emulorum. Ibi tanquam librum tenet et legit literas, hic lete subveniens eludit lanceas. 52 There he appears magniﬁcent to the whole world, here for us he is a wall against a harmful borderland. There he responds to the counsels of Orientals and Greeks, here he beats back the assaults of dangerous rivals. There it is as though he holds a book and reads letters, here he happily comes to help and frustrates lances.

Here, in the formulation of Peter’s protection which is speciﬁc to Chester, we glimpse again the concerns of a border city at the edge of England. In Rome Peter oversees a city of learning and governs doctrinal dispute, whilst in Chester Peter defends his city against more literal, martial attack. Nevertheless, the repeated comparisons here promote the sense of Chester and Rome as twin cities. Even the image of the dangerous, contested borderland works on symbolic level as a metaphor for the militant church in the world. Rome may be the centre of Peter’s church, but here in Chester Peter has a special seat, as if to protect ‘the boundary of the world’ (‘limitem mundi’, p. 52). The image of Chester as a delightful place set in a hostile border region brings us back again to the traditional ﬁgure of the locus amoenus in a wilderness setting. Through such contrasts and oppositions this passage also presents us with a clear ideological boundary between Chester and Wales, the image of the enclosed, defended city here jarring with the acknowledgements of trade, contact and afﬁnity elsewhere in the text. 53

51 52 53

De Laude Cestrie, p. 52. Ibid. For discussion of the typical contrasts and oppositions drawn between England and Wales in this period, see R.R. Davies, The First English Empire. Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093– 1343 (Oxford, 2000), especially Chapter 5, ‘“Sweet Civility” and “Barbarous Rudeness”’, pp. 113– 41.

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De Laude Cestrie is a lengthy work, and goes on to discuss the protection of other churches and their patron saints, and the signiﬁcance of their location in the city. 54 Lucian also devotes particular attention to the life of Werburgh, patron of his abbey, and to the instruction of monks and clergy in the city. The passages discussed here, however, allow a clear overview of Lucian’s strategies in representing and celebrating his home city. The natural topography of Chester is exploited as a symbolic landscape which displays the city’s spiritual identity and heritage. The layout of the urban space itself reveals truths about the Christian faith and the spiritual foundations of the city. The landscape of Chester becomes a symbolic text amenable to Lucian’s systematic spiritual exegesis. Unlike William Fitz Stephen, Lucian chooses religious authorities and allusions for his celebration of the city. Yet both of these twelfth-century urban encomia represent conﬁdent readings of the city – whether Chester or London – as a coherent, meaningful symbolic space. The physical space and landscape of the city has the potential to reveal and manifest each writer’s idea of their city: whether as inheritor of the glories of the classical world, or as a mirror for Rome and symbol of God’s church. Latent within each of these encomia, though, are tensions and elisions. The boundaries between city and suburb, or between English urban locus amoenus and Welsh wilderness, are already permeable and unstable, modifying ideals of enclosure and complicating the imagined identity of the city. And the conﬁdent symbolisms, literary allusions and historical precedents of London and Chester are often constructed at the expense of the realities of contemporary urban life and the real functions of the city space. Moving on from the ﬂowering of urban encomium in the twelfth century, this discussion will now consider descriptions of cities in selected fourteenth-century Anglo-Latin texts. Much recent work on the city, and particularly London, in this period has emphasised its ‘absence’ as idea or ideal and has focused on the problems or anxieties surrounding its textual representation. Sylvia Federico, on the other hand, has examined ways in which the idea of Troy is appropriated and exploited as a productive means of imagining and inventing London’s city identity/ies. Clearly a neat narrative of degeneration or retreat from conﬁdent symbolic representations of the city in the twelfth century to fourteenth-century imaginative evasions and failures is inadequate. By enabling comparisons with earlier Anglo-Latin city descriptions, this study will foreground the differences between literary processes of imagining and representing the city in the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, as well as acknowledging some continuities. Certainly, Gower’s Vox Clamantis, Richard Maidstone’s Concordia and The Stores of the Cities show a less conﬁdent or comfortable approach to celebrating the city and formulating its identity. Yet such absences and anxieties are not entirely new and speciﬁc to the fourteenth century. Following recent trends in Chaucer studies, and the work of David Wallace in particular, critics have looked for the ‘absent city’ in the work of John Gower. Recent essays have argued that the city of London, and the features of an urban cultural and literary milieu, are even less present in Gower’s poetry than in the work of Chaucer. 54

For example, the church of John the Baptist is located at the East, the direction of the rising sun (pp. 50, 60).

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In a recent essay, ‘London, Southwark, Westminster: Gower’s Urban Contexts’, Robert Epstein argues that Gower’s work reﬂects a life and a sphere of interests independent from those of the city and urban culture or literary politics. Epstein asserts that: While the poetry is always politically engaged… Gower himself can seem to stand at a remove, particularly from the life of the city. 55

Epstein considers Gower’s apparent lack of practical involvement in Ricardian politics and, unlike many of his literary contemporaries, his freedom from systems of royal patronage and political pressure. 56 Epstein also examines the (problematic) idea of a ‘Chaucer Circle’ and the possibility of Gower’s inclusion, concluding that there are no clear links with Gower and ‘little evidence of it in his own [i.e. Gower’s] poetry’. 57 Epstein notes a further crucial difference between Chaucer and Gower: Chaucer regularly chooses to represent poetry as the product of an urban community of voluntary association, and Gower does not. 58

A picture emerges of Gower as a writer removed from the political and literary circles of London life: living within the urban environment, yet ﬁnancially, politically and culturally independent. In summary, Epstein suggests that Gower’s uniquely urban condition, as a non-bureaucratic, non-aristocratic, privately employed professional, allowed him to develop a sense of the poet that was elevated in its autonomy, in its self-regard and in its ambition… 59

Pertinent to these arguments for Gower’s marginality, as Epstein notes, is the poet’s geographically marginal location living in the London suburb of Southwark. 60 An essay by John Hines, Nathalie Cohen and Simon Roffey characterises Southwark as a ‘social melting-pot’ of industry, prisons, prostitution, inns and hostelries, and large immigrant communities (mainly Dutch and German). 61 The essay suggests that ‘Southwark’s character was that of an alternative, and somewhat counter-cultural, suburb of the Cities of London and Westminster’. 62 Again, then, the context emerging for the production of Gower’s work is not that of the city itself, though Southwark is emphatically urban, but of a place and culture outside the city bounds.

55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

Robert Epstein, ‘London, Southwark, Westminster: Gower’s Urban Contexts’, in A Companion to Gower, ed. Sian Echard (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 43–60, p. 43. Epstein, ‘London, Southwark, Westminster’, p. 46 and p. 58. Ibid., p. 47. For the theory of a ‘Chaucer Circle’ see Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, 1989), especially p. 42. Ibid., p. 48. Ibid., p. 60. Ibid., p. 51. John Hines, Nathalie Cohen and Simon Roffey, ‘Iohannes Gower, Armiger, Poeta: Records and Memorials of his Life and Death’, in A Companion to Gower, pp. 23–42, p. 32. Hines et al., ‘Iohannes Gower’, p. 30.

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Scholars have often located Gower’s ‘best’ description of the city of London in the Prologue to the ﬁrst version of the Confessio Amantis. 63 In this well-known passage, Gower describes a meeting with King Richard in his barge on the Thames. As it bifel upon a tyde, As thing which scholde tho betyde, – Under the toun of newe Troye, Which tok of Brut his ferste joye, In Temse whan it was ﬂowende As I be bote cam rowende, So as fortune hir tyme sette, My liege lord par chaunce I mette; And so befel, as I cam nyh, Out of my bot, whan he me syh, He bad me come in to his barge. And whan I was with him at large, Amonges othre thinges seid He hath this charge unto me leid, And bad me doo my besynesse That to his hihe worthinesse, Som newe thing I sholde boke, That he himself it mihte loke After the forme of my writynge. 64

This scene picks up several key elements of London in fourteenth-century literary tradition. First, the city is referred to as ‘newe Troye’, founded by Brutus, engaging with the idea of London as ‘Trinovant’ and inheritor of the glories of the classical past. The Thames (‘Temse’) is also an important image here, functioning perhaps as a symbol for the vitality and momentum of life in the city. The passage also gives us a rare vision of Gower as the poet of royal patronage. His ‘liege lord’, Richard, requests ‘som newe thing’ to be written ‘to his hihe worthinesse’. The scene is ﬁgured in the terms of symbolic performance and pageantry as Gower climbs from his humble rowing boat onto the royal barge, resonating with the public spectacle of the Ricardian court and placing Ricardian politics and patronage at the heart of this vision of the city. 65 Frank Grady argues that Gower offers us a scene which is rhetorically ‘overdetermined’ and ‘staged’ and claims that ‘the evocation of legendary England here… works to suppress the presence of contemporary London’. 66 This passage from the Confessio Amantis offers only a brief vision of London, and one which obscures and effaces the complexities of the city through the formulaic rhetoric 63 64 65

66

See Epstein, ‘London, Southwark, Westminster’, p. 54. Confessio Amantis (First Version), Prologue, lines 35–53, in The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G.C. Macaulay, 4 vols (Oxford, 1901), vol. 2, pp. 3–4. For discussion of Ricardian pageantry, see for example Gordon Kipling, ‘Richard II’s “Sumptuous Pageants” and the Idea of the Civic Triumph’, in Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theatre, ed. David M. Bergeron (Athens, Georgia, 1985), pp. 83–103. Frank Grady, ‘Gower’s boat, Richard’s barge and the true story of the Confessio Amantis: Text and Gloss’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44 (2002), 1–15, p. 5.

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of Ricardian power and authority. Book I of Gower’s Vox Clamantis presents a far more sustained negotiation of the idea of the city and the problems of its representation. In comparison with much of Gower’s other work, and the Confessio Amantis in particular, the Vox Clamantis has suffered from critical neglect. Even in Eric Stockton’s modern English translation of Gower’s Latin works, which brings the texts to a much wider scholarly audience, their literary value is downplayed. Stockton offers something of an apologia for Gower’s Latin, writing that: The poems translated in this volume… are not the aesthetic glories of their time… Rather, these poems… are worthy of consideration after nearly six hundred years because they give copious, thoughtful comment upon an England in a time still somewhat dark, and because they also throw light upon other literature in an age rich in literature. 67

Book I of the Vox Clamantis, added after the other books were completed and before another section, the Cronica Tripertita, was appended, has often been regarded as a self-contained text which can be read independently from the rest of the work. A.G. Rigg and Edward S. Moore argue that ‘Book I of the Vox, ﬁrst called the Visio by Wickert, differs decidedly in tone and purpose from the rest of the Vox and must rightly be considered a separate work.’ 68 Book I, or the Visio, deals with the Peasants’ Revolt and march on London of 1381, before the other six books of the Vox Clamantis move on to give an account and critique of the Three Estates in English society, and contemporary social ills and corruptions. Written in the form of a dream poem, Book I presents a series of nightmarish allegorical visions which reﬂect the turmoil of the Peasants’ Revolt. Although added later, and treating a speciﬁc historical event, Book I cannot be so easily separated from the rest of the Vox Clamantis. The dream demonstrates the horror of social hierarchy turned upside down, while the rest of the work also critiques transgressions of social orders and norms. Yet Book I is distinct in its coherent, contained account of the Peasants’ Revolt, the perceived conﬂict between countryside and city, and its anxiety about the fragility of London under threat. Book I also shows a coherent system of imagery based on natural landscape and pastoral or anti-pastoral conventions. The visions of Book I of the Vox Clamantis present the city of London through a series of allegorical images: ﬁrst under attack from wild animals, then as the city of Troy besieged, and ﬁnally as a ship in danger at sea. 69 Yet, for a work so much about the city, Book I of the Vox Clamantis begins with a deﬁantly pastoral scene. This pastoral opening ﬁts within the conventions of dream vision, yet it is more than simply a discrete prologue and its rhetoric is far from politically neutral. Chapter 1 establishes an ideal, symbolic pastoral landscape which becomes destabilised and 67 68 69

Eric W. Stockton, trans., The Major Latin Works of John Gower (Washington, 1962), p. 3. All further translations from the Vox Clamantis will be taken from this edition. A.G. Rigg and Edward S. Moore, ‘The Latin Works: Politics, Lament and Praise’, in A Companion to Gower, pp. 153–64, pp. 156–7. The ship stands more speciﬁcally for the Tower of London, though this in turn is a metonym for the city, and the ship image resonates with wider ideas of the ship of state, religion etc.

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disordered as the nightmarish vision progresses. Yet even this initial locus amoenus is fraught with ambivalence, evasion and anxiety. The metrical form which Gower chooses for the Vox Clamantis deliberately looks back to the Anglo-Latin models of the past. Rigg and Moore note that In the Vox and the Visio, Gower himself was the ﬁrst to write in elegiac couplets since Henry of Avranches… Gower’s use of this meter was not innovative, but rather just the opposite; it signalled a return to classical and earlier medieval practice. 70

Gower’s choice of metrical form deliberately looks back to the last Golden Age of Anglo-Latin writing in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, imbuing Chapter 1 of the Vox Clamantis with a subtle literary nostalgia, just as it evokes a nostalgia for an Edenic ‘Golden Age’ of England. While the poetic form recalls earlier Anglo-Latin works, the locus amoenus imagery of Chapter 1 also recalls the ‘Golden Age’ of urban encomium with its pastoral vision of the city. At nearly 150 lines, Gower’s description of the locus amoenus is one of the longest in all medieval literature. It includes all the stock topoi of Latin literary tradition. The scene is of springtime beauty and fertility. Omnia tunc ﬂorent, tunc est noua temporis etas, Ludit et in pratis luxuriando pecus. Tunc fecundus ager, pecorum tunc hora creandi, Tunc renouatque suos reptile quodque iocos; Prataque pubescunt variororum ﬂore colorum, Indocilique loquax gutture cantat auis; Queque diu latuit tunc se qua tollat in auras Inuenit occultam fertilis herba viam… 71 Then everything ﬂourished, then there was a new epoch of time, and the cattle sported wantonly in the ﬁelds. Then the land was fertile, then was the hour for the herds to mate, and it was then that the reptile might renew its sports. The meadows were covered with the bloom of different ﬂowers, and the chattering bird sang with its untutored throat. Then too the teeming grass which had long lain concealed found a hidden path through which it lifted itself into the gentle breezes. 72

The springtime setting is typical of the medieval locus amoenus – the cuckoo, symbol of springtime renewal, is mentioned speciﬁcally in lines 93–4 – yet the scene here also gathers more speciﬁc allegorical and political connotations. The imagery and vocabulary insist on newness, youth and renewal: the ‘new epoch of time’ (‘noua temporis etas’), the natural world which ﬂourishes (‘ﬂorent’), the snake which renews (‘renouat’) its skin. Beyond this passage, Gower’s locus amoenus returns repeatedly to 70 71 72

Rigg and Moore, ‘The Latin Works’, p. 160. Vox Clamantis, Book I, Chapter 1, lines 35–40 in The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. Macaulay, vol. 1. All further quotations will be taken from this edition. The Major Latin Works, pp. 51–2.

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images of youth and renewal. This is the conventional vocabulary of pastoral panegyric associated with poems in praise of new rulers or dynasties, and seems to celebrate the renewal and youthfulness brought by Richard II’s reign. Here, however, the panegyric topoi are used ironically: the promise of Richard’s young reign will be destroyed by the events of the ensuing visions. 73 Other conventional features of Gower’s locus amoenus include synaesthetic elements of fragrance (‘redolencia’, line 19) and pleasant sounds (birdsong, lines 93– 102 and the rustling breeze, lines 113–14). The description also includes a pastoral contest – a conventional motif in the literary locus amoenus tradition. Milia mille sonant volucrum velut organa cantus, Et totidem ﬂores lata per arua fragrant: Inter eos certant, ferat vtrum cantus ad aures Aut odor ad nares de bonitate magis: Lis tamen ipsa pia fuit et discordia concors, Dum meriti parilis fulsit vterque status. 74 The thousand thousands of birds sounded their melodies like organs, and a like number of ﬂowers spread their perfume across the broad ﬁelds. They vied among themselves as to whether singing brought more pleasure to the ears or fragrance to the nose. The contention was mild, however, and the disharmony harmonious, for each group shone with like worth. 75

The absence of any real discord in this pastoral contest is marked pointedly, inviting a comparison with the very real conﬂicts and contentions in the ensuing visions. Lis in particular (‘contention’, line 107) is a jarring word in this lyric context. As a technical term for a lawsuit or more speciﬁcally a plea for damages, it destabilises the pastoral idyll with a hint of the very real disputes to come. Once again, the optimism and idealism of this locus amoenus already encodes signs of the destruction which will follow. Gower’s locus amoenus is also ostentatiously classicising: the repeated uses of Ovid and catalogues of rhetorical tropes contribute to this effect, as do the consistent uses of classical personiﬁcation (for example, Aurora and Lucifer in line 4, Phoebus in line 9, Philomena in line 99, and Procne in line 101). The effect of such a lengthy locus amoenus description is almost overwhelming. The conventional pastoral tropes and allusions announce Gower’s unequivocal, self-conscious participation in a common literary tradition and his use of a public rhetorical currency. Yet the stock images and formulae of his locus amoenus seem squandered and bankrupt. As well as being the conventional setting which precedes a literary dream, this locus amoenus is already a dream of England as the idealised pastoral landscape. The locus amoenus is ﬁgured in terms which clearly resonate with traditions of England as the paradisal, pastoral island. 73

74 75

A cynical reading might suggest that the image here of the reptile changing its skin already introduces ambivalent associations which resonate with Richard’s readiness to adopt different symbolic personae and roles. Vox Clamantis, Book I, Chapter 1, lines 103–8. The Major Latin Works, p. 53.

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Ille locus solus sibi vendicat omne quod aer, Quod mare, quod tellus, nutrit habetque bonum: Hic decus est orbis, ﬂos mundi, gloria rerum, Delicias omnes, quas petit vsus, habet; Insitus arboribus, herbis plantatus, et omni Munere prepollens, que sibi poscit homo. Est alter paradisus ibi, nam quicquid habere Mens humana cupit, terra beata parit, Fontibus irriguis fecundus, semine plenus, Floribus insignis fructiferisque bonis… 76 This sole region laid claim to all that land, air and sea fostered and held good. Here was the ornament of the globe, the ﬂower of the world, the crowning glory of things, containing every delight that enjoyment seeks. It was planted with trees, sown with greenery, and surpassing in every gift which man asks for himself. It was a second Paradise there, for whatever the human mind wished to have, the blessed earth brought forth. It was teeming with ﬂowing fountains, ﬁlled with seeds, and marked with ﬂowers and fruitful good things. 77

The landscape is both a dream of Eden or the earthly Paradise, and is rooted in an actual place (England) in an actual historical moment. Gower tells us that this ‘happened in the fourth year of King Richard’ (‘Contigit vt quarto Ricardi Regis in anno’, line 1), and the rubric to Chapter 1 gives an even clearer alignment of the locus amoenus landscape with England at the beginning of Richard’s reign. Commendat insuper, secundum illud quod esse solebat, fertilitatem illius terre vbi ipse tunc fuerat, in qua, vt dicit, omnium quasi rerum delicie pariter conueniunt. 78 Moreover, in the light of what it used to be, he [the author] commends the fertility of the land where he then was. In it, as he says, delights of almost every kind join together. 79

The rubric places this locus amoenus ﬁrmly in the past (‘quod esse solebat’). Chapter 1 presents a lost landscape of peace, order and delight: an escapist, nostalgic vision of an idealised England. Preceding the dream proper, this is already a fantasy landscape of the English locus amoenus. The locus amoenus of Chapter 1 is Gower’s attempt to represent the delightful peace and order of kingdom and city before the disruption and destruction of the Revolt. Yet, although the pastoral imagery of this description does inevitably resonate with the conventions of urban encomium, Gower avoids any explicit reference to the city whatsoever in this idyllic scene. Tellingly, Gower lacks the imaginative vocabulary to describe London in its idealised, ‘unfallen’ state, and his vision of the 76 77 78 79

Vox Clamantis, Book I, Chapter 1, lines 73–82. The Major Latin Works, p. 52. From the Rubric to Vox Clamantis, Book I, Chapter 1. The Major Latin Works, p. 51.

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city before the Revolt is displaced into symbolic pastoral terms. Yet if the realities of the city or an articulation of its ideal are absent in this locus amoenus, it clearly also fails to represent the English countryside. Gower’s locus amoenus draws attention to the realities of the rural landscape through their effacement and exclusion. Just as in the monastic texts discussed in Chapter Three of this study, which efface the realities of human cultivation and effort, Gower’s locus amoenus represents the fantasy of a perfect pastoral landscape free from human labour. Fundamentally, of course, the literary locus amoenus is a landscape of sensual pleasure rather than usefulness or productivity. The fertility of Gower’s springtime landscape produces ﬂowers and beauty rather than crops and agriculture. The closest Gower’s locus amoenus comes to a utilitarian element might be the references to spices and medicinal herbs (lines 63– 70) yet these references serve rather to align the scene with the exotic delightful landscapes of classical and biblical tradition, and hardly suggest the realities of an English springtime. 80 Most strikingly, the passage insists on the absence of human labour or effort in this delightful scene. Two allusions to Ovid state this explicitly. Firstly in lines 55–6: Iam legit ingenua violas sibi compta puella Rustica, quas nullo terra serente vehit [my italics]. Now the innocent rural maiden plucked violets to deck herself out; the earth bore them, although no one had sown them [my italics]. 81

For the ‘innocent rural maiden’ the produce of the land serves a purely ornamental purpose, and the quote from Ovid’s Tristia emphatically excludes human work. 82 Again, at line 89, ‘Mulcebant zephiri natos sine semine ﬂores’ (‘Zephyrs caressed the ﬂowers brought forth unsown’), 83 the Ovidian allusion reinforces the absence of human effort. 84 Gower’s pastoral vision is the perennial urban-dweller’s fantasy of the countryside which elides the realities of labour, agriculture and production. 85 Yet read as a preface to Gower’s accounts of the monstrous uprising of rural peasants later in the Vox Clamantis, this locus amoenus makes an implicit political statement as it excises rural labour and labourers from its idealised pastoral vision. Beyond the ‘absent city’, Gower’s pastoral set-piece seems haunted by the ‘absent countryside’ of rural England. 80

81 82 83 84

85

The exotic elements include ‘Balm, spice and cassia with nard, and oil of myrrh made their abode there’ (The Major Latin Works, p. 52). (‘Balsama, pigmentum, cum nardo cassia, mirra / Cum gutta sedes hic statuere suas’, lines 69–70.) The Major Latin Works, p. 52. This allusion to the Tristia is identiﬁed in The Major Latin Works, p. 346, n. The Major Latin Works, p. 52. This allusion to the Metamorphoses is identiﬁed in The Major Latin Works, p. 346, n. A similar Ovidian allusion is employed in Chaucer’s representation of a locus amoenus free from the complications of contemporary industry and economics in his short poem The Former Age. Lines 9–10 read: ‘Yit nas the ground nat wounded with the plough, / But corn up-sprong, unsowe of mannes hond.’ See The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford, 1988), p. 650. Raymond Williams observes that ‘the rhetorical contrast between town and country life is… traditional’ and that ‘this contrast [between city and country] depends, often, on the suppression of work in the countryside’. See The Country and the City (London, 1973), pp. 46–7.

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The pastoral imagery established in Chapter 1 continues, shifting and distorting, throughout the ﬁrst chapters of Book I of the Vox Clamantis. The beast fable of the ﬁrst dream vision, in which wild animals and domestic animals turned feral represent the peasant rebellion, grows out of the preceding pastoral scene. After the beast fable section, London is imagined as Troy besieged by the army of rebels. A dextrisque nouam me tunc vidisse putabam Troiam, que vidue languida more fuit: Que solet ex muris cingi patuit sine muro, Nec potuit seras claudere porta suas. Mille lupi mixtique lupis vrsi gradientes A siluis stauunt vrbis adire domos… 86 On my right I then thought I saw New Troy, which was powerless as a widow. Ordinarily surrounded by walls, it lay exposed without any wall, and the city gate could not shut its bars. A thousand wolves and bears approaching with the wolves determined to go out of the woods to the homes of the city. 87

The ideal enclosure and containment of the city fails and the chaos of a wild, disordered countryside encroaches on the urban space. As with the representations of the city in Fitz Stephen and Lucian, boundaries are compromised and the perfect urban enclosure collapses. Gower returns to pastoral imagery in Chapter 15, in a summary of the destruction and disorder which draws on classical and biblical tropes as well as the idea of the mundus inversus or world turned upside down. Vidi nam catulos minimos agitare leonem, Nec loca tuta sibi nunc leopardus habet: Aspera grex ouium pastori cornua tendunt, Cordis et effuso sanguine tincta madent… 88 I saw the smallest whelps frighten the lion, and the leopard found no quarters safe for him then. The ﬂock of sheep pointed its sharp horns at the shepherd, and they grew wet, stained by the blood which poured from his heart. 89

This passage deliberately resonates with the apocalyptic imagery of Isaiah Chapter 11, in which the biblical prophet describes the future pastoral paradise which will be brought by the Messiah. Isaiah represents something like a mundus inversus or ‘world upside-down’, in which the weak and vulnerable no longer fear strength and ferocity. The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them… 90 86 87 88 89

Vox Clamantis, Book I, Chapter 13, lines 879–84. The Major Latin Works, pp. 69–70. Vox Clamantis, Book I, Chapter 15, lines 1301–3. The Major Latin Works, p. 78.

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However, Gower’s perversion of this familiar biblical imagery presents a monstrous inversion of natural order. Just as the peasants overcome the might of London, so in Gower’s description the lion and leopard are overcome by weaker animals. Although articulated through the familiar idioms and rhythms of a key image of the pastoral paradise, Gower’s mundus inversus here is corrupted, nightmarish and hellish. Gower goes on to describe the widespread chaos and destruction in terms of the loss of the English pastoral idyll. Frumenti spicas tribulus vastauit, et ipsas Cardo supercreuit et viciauit agros. Loth capitur, pastor rapitur, locus expoliatur… 91 The thistle destroyed the ears of grain, and the teasel grew up over them and spoiled the ﬁelds. Loot was taken, the shepherd seized, and the land pillaged. 92

Although at this point Gower is describing the destruction of the city of London by the peasants, he again appropriates pastoral imagery to articulate the transition from order to disorder. The emotive language of pastoral here, used in Chapter 1 to evoke a picture of an Edenic, idyllic England, deliberately conﬂates the city with the nation as a whole. Through the conventional language of pastoral, Gower presents a symbolic image of the land’s guardian (‘pastor’) under attack, and the country (‘locus’) in ruin. As well as the obvious biblical and classical resonances and subversions of Chapter 15, the image of Gower’s anti-paradise also engages with contemporary political rhetoric. John Ball’s sermon theme, as reported in Walsingham’s Historia Anglicana, invokes a vision of Edenic equality and natural order. Whan Adam dalf, and Eve span, Wo was thanne a gentilman? 93

In the rhetoric of the rebels, the Garden of Eden is an ideal and a symbolic aspiration with its associations of equality, the nobility of work and its absence of the urban or political. Yet, using the conventional images and rhetorical patterns of an Eden, a new Golden Age or earthly paradise, Gower makes a vision of chaos and hell. This deliberate perversion of the rhetoric of paradise draws attention to the disjunction between the rebels’ rhetoric of Eden and the actual destruction which they cause. Gower’s subversive imitation suggests that theirs is a fraudulent rhetoric and that the ‘Eden’ they pursue is monstrous and unnatural. Chapter 16 of the Vox Clamantis is often regarded as a mere bridge passage. As Gower ﬂees from the city into the countryside, this enables the narrative to move logically towards the sea and the vision of the ship. Yet in this chapter we see the fullest representation of Gower’s anti-paradise or inverted locus amoenus: the negative 90 91 92 93

Isaiah 11:6. Vox Clamantis, Book I, Chapter 15, lines 1313–15. The Major Latin Works, p. 78. James M. Dean, ed., Medieval English Political Writings (Kalamazoo, 1996), p. 140.

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mirror which answers the idealised pastoral idyll of Chapter 1. Gower writes that ‘domum propriam linquens aliena per arua / Transcurri, que feris saltibus hospes eram’ (‘abandoning my own home I ran away across alien ﬁelds and became a stranger in the wild woodlands’). 94 This is a symbolic landscape of disorder and conﬂict, characterised by forests (‘saltibus’, line 1382) and caves (‘antris’, line 1417). It is also a landscape of isolation, emphasised by Gower. Tristis eram, quia solus, egens solamine, cogor Tunc magis ignotas vt vagus ire vias: Sic loca secretos augent secreta dolores… 95 I was utterly dejected, since I was alone and was without any consolation. I was then forced, as though a wayfarer, to travel by quite unknown paths. 96

Where the locus amoenus of Chapter 1 was a public landscape constructed from familiar literary allusions and conventional rhetorical tropes, the English countryside is now disordered and formless. It cannot be ﬁgured in the same terms of shared rhetorical currency and recognisable meanings. Gower remarks that: Miserat, vt leges perderet ordo suas: Sic fugiens abii subite contagia cladis, Non ausus lese limen adire domus. 97 All beauty was lost upon me in my sadness: I did not even look at the countryside, and a fruitful garden meant nothing. 98

The loss of a public, ordered landscape recalls the hidden wildernesses of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History which signify conﬂict and persecution, or the ‘enge anpaðas, uncuð gelad’ (‘narrow paths, unknown ways’, Beowulf line 1410) of Grendel’s mere, so typical of the threatening natural landscape in the early vernacular. Here, quite literally, Gower’s landscape loses any recognisable meaning in conventional pastoral terms, yet it is still mediated by literary traditions of the desert or wilderness. At this point we have an explicit realisation of the apocalyptic wilderness within Gower will perform his prophetic role as the ‘vox clamantis’ (John 1:23). Yet in Chapter 16, Gower’s wilderness imagery does draw in literary associations and resonances, on occasions serving implicitly to destabilise the politics of Gower’s vision. We are presented with a vivid image of Gower as the exile. Copula cum foliis prebuit herba thorum… Glande famem pellens mixta quoque frondibus herba Corpus ego texi, nec manus vna mouet: Cura dolor menti fuerat, lacrimeque rigantes

94 95 96 97 98

Vox Clamantis, Book I, Chapter 16, lines 1381–2; The Major Latin Works, p. 80. Vox Clamantis, Book I, Chapter 16, lines 1457–9. The Major Latin Works, p. 81. Vox Clamantis, Book I, Chapter 16, lines 1378–80. The Major Latin Works, p. 80.

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In fundo stomachi sunt alimenta quasi. Tunc cibus herba fuit… 99 A little grass together with leaves modestly afforded me a bed under cover of cloud... Driving off hunger by means of acorns, I covered over my body with grass which had been mixed with leaves, and I did not stir a hand. Grief was my mind’s principal concern, and my freely ﬂowing tears were just like sustenance in the pit of my stomach. The grass was then my nourishment. 100

The imagery here strongly recalls the exile of a penitent in vernacular romance such as Sir Orfeo or Sir Gowther. 101 The penitential associations of the weeping exile, living in the woods and eating grass, potentially undermine the moral and political clarity of Gower’s vision, suggesting that this city-dweller is undergoing a punishment or penitence in the countryside. Perhaps even more strongly, the image of Gower eating grass during his exile recalls the biblical exile of King Nebuchadnezzar, who ‘was driven from among men, and ate grass like an ox’ in punishment for his pride and for the decadence and corruption of his city of Babylon. 102 This resonance in particular invites the potential reading that Gower is performing penitence on behalf of his city and the corruption and immorality of urban culture. As with the rhetorical density and overdetermination of his locus amoenus, there is the sense here that Gower’s appropriation of every possible image associated with the wilderness undermines textual determinacy or stability. In the Vox Clamantis, then, Gower’s vision of an ideal England (and city) is formed through the conventions of literary pastoral, and his fears for an England without order are articulated through images of an anti-pastoral, inverted paradise or wilderness landscape. As many critics have noted, Gower seems to fail to represent satisfactorily the city and his own city experience. In Book I of the Vox Clamantis the city of London appears only through the allegory of Troy and the symbol of the ship, and even in the later books Gower’s account of the Three Estates marginalises the new urban mercantile and professional classes. London before the Revolt is transﬁgured into a pastoral idyll. Yet Gower’s urban perspective underlies his use of the literary locus amoenus as a fantasy landscape of England, eliding the more complex and troubled realities of the countryside. The account of his ﬂight into the wilderness problematises the ostensibly straightforward (anti-Revolt, pro-London) politics of the dream vision by inviting associations of the decadent, corrupt city and the penitential exile. The pastoral imagery in Book I of the Vox Clamantis is jeopardised by overdetermination and polysemy, and the literary locus amoenus is devalued into a

99 Vox 100 The 101

Clamantis, Book I, Chapter 16, lines 1442–51. Major Latin Works, p. 81. See Karl Breul, ed., Sir Gowther (Oppeln, 1886) and Donald B. Sands, ed., Middle English Verse Romances (London, 1966), pp. 185–200. 102 Daniel, 4:28–33. The section on kings in Gower’s Mirour de l’Omme also included a (now lost) passage on Nebuchadnezzar, and Book V of the Confessio Amantis includes Nebuchadnezzar as an example of a sacrilegious king. See John Fisher, John Gower, Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (New York, 1964), p. 173.

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rhetorical retreat from the difﬁculties of representing the realities of kingdom, city or countryside. Richard Maidstone’s Concordia facta inter regem et cives Londonie or ‘The Reconciliation of Richard II with London’ is another late fourteenth-century text which makes a self-conscious appeal to earlier Anglo-Latin heritage and prestige. The metre of elegiac couplets chosen by Richard Maidstone follows Gower’s revival of the form, and again looks back to a Golden Age of Anglo-Latin literature. 103 The poem’s representation of London initially appears very similar to descriptions of the city in earlier Anglo-Latin urban encomium, allying itself with traditional symbols such as the New Troy or New Rome, alluding to classical and biblical precedents, and making prominent pastoral imagery and motifs. Yet analysis of the Concordia reveals a crucial shift in the use of these traditional encomium topoi. These facets of the city are presented here not as innate meanings or symbolisms, but as roles played and put on by London. Maidstone is acutely aware of performance, artiﬁce and contrivance, including his own use of rhetorical conventions and formulae as well as the city’s own performance in the pageant which the poem commemorates. Although the Concordia includes the same symbolic motifs and imagery as earlier Anglo-Latin urban encomium, here the emphasis is on the city’s performance of these ideals. In the Concordia we see a shift from conﬁdence in the city’s symbolism and inherent meaningfulness towards an awareness of rhetorical appropriation and manipulation and the capacity of the city to perform a set of expedient identities and meanings. Implicitly, through its subtly distanced, self-conscious use of the topoi of urban encomium, Maidstone’s Concordia draws attention to the gulf between the real city and its image or ideal – between the obscured, unwritten realities of London and the city’s performance of itself. Much has been written about the context of Maidstone’s poem, and the political uses of pageantry, spectacle and performance in Ricardian England. 104 The Concordia itself is written in connection with a pageant staged in London in 1392 to celebrate the resolution of a dispute between Richard II and the city. London had refused a loan of £100,000 to Richard, and the king had retaliated by moving the Chancery, the Exchequer and the Court of Common Pleas to York. Richard also imprisoned the London mayor and sheriffs. To resolve the dispute, London was forced to pay a ﬁne of £100,000 to Richard, and a royal entry into the city was staged as a public performance of reconciliation. 105 David Carlson has described Maidstone’s Concordia

103 Rigg 104

and Moore, ‘The Latin Works’, p. 160. See for example Gordon Kipling, ‘Richard II’s “Sumptuous Pageants”’; Lawrence Clopper, ‘The Engaged Spectator: Langland and Chaucer on Civic Spectacle and the Theatrum’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000), 115–39; Sheila Lindenbaum, ‘The Smithﬁeld Tournament of 1390’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 20 (1990), 1–20. 105 For a more detailed account and discussion, see Caroline Barron, ‘The Quarrel of Richard II with London 1392–7’, in The Reign of Richard II: Essays in Honour of May McKisack, ed. F.R.H. Du Boulay and Caroline Barron (London, 1971), pp. 173–201.

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as ‘an ideologically driven literary intervention, produced at a particular moment, addressing a particular political circumstance’. 106 Lynn Staley remarks that: Maidstone’s Concordia is not an account of the pageant – indeed it differs radically from other contemporary accounts of the event – but a reading of it, an interpretation of its script in terms of contemporary political language. 107

The propagandist nature of the poem is essentially royalist, though Staley has suggested that the text may offer advice and caution as well as ﬂattery, an argument to which this discussion will return. 108 Most obviously, though, Maidstone’s poem offers a version of Richard’s entry into the city which idealises the monarch, his relation to his subjects, and the city of London itself. Pastoral motifs and imagery recur throughout the poem in descriptions of the pageantry. The festive city transforms itself into a quasi-pastoral, synthetic locus amoenus. Ornat et interea se pulcre queque platea: Vestibus auratis urbs micat innumeris. Floris odoriferi specie fragrante platea, Pendula perque domos purpura nulla deest, Aurea, coccinea, bissinaque tinctaque vestis Pinxerat hic celum arte iuvante novum. Meanwhile, each city square put on its ﬁnery: The city shone with countless gilden draperies. The city squares smelled sweet with varied scented blooms, And purple buntings hung throughout in every home, Cloth stained with gold and white and cochineal dye Had here displayed a canopy with aiding skill. 109

Here the city becomes a ﬂower-ﬁlled meadow, while cloths of purple and gold mimic the colours of springtime. While gold has obvious regal connotations, the colour purple also invokes the prestige and heritage of classical rulers. Also signiﬁcant, however, is the intensity of vocabulary connected with performance, display and artiﬁce. Just before these lines, the ward of the city (‘urbis custodem miles’) calls for the best of London to ‘be displayed’ (‘fuerit promatur’, my italics), and the crowd of citizens responds by dressing itself in ﬁnery (‘preparat’). 110 In the passage cited here, the verbs ‘ornat’ (‘put on’, ‘adorned’) and ‘pinxerat’ (‘displayed’ or literally ‘painted’), the references to drapes and cloths (‘vestibus’, ‘vestis’), and the prominent reference

106

Introduction, p. 17, Richard Maidstone, Concordia (The Reconciliation of Richard II with London), ed. David R. Carlson, trans. A.G. Rigg (Kalamazoo, 2003). All text and translation of the Concordia hereafter will be taken from this edition. 107 Lynn Staley, ‘Gower, Richard II, Henry of Derby, and the Business of Making Culture’, Speculum 75 (2000), 68–96, p. 80. 108 Staley, ‘Making Culture’, pp. 80, 81, 96. 109 Concordia, lines 57–62. 110 Ibid., lines 45–56.

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to artiﬁce or craft (‘arte’, ‘with skill’) foreground the performative, synthetic nature of the scene. Later, when the king and queen reach Cheapside, Maidstone tells us that: Densa velud folia seu ﬂores, sic volat aurum, Undique virginea discuciente manu. Gold ﬂies around like leaves and blossoms, thick and fast, For everywhere a maiden’s hand spreads it around. 111

Again, the scene is of a locus amoenus re-made in the materials of the city. Gold, the symbol of city wealth and trade, plays the role of pastoral leaves and blossoms. The image even includes the maiden typical of the springtime locus amoenus scene (see Gower’s Vox Clamantis, Book I, Chapter 1, above), yet here she distributes, rather than gathers, these precious ﬂowers. At Ludgate, however, the pageant moves into a staged forest or wilderness landscape which initiates a more disturbing set of associations than the straightforward delight of the stylised locus amoenus. The wild, savage scene evoked here offers an anti-pastoral which deliberately incorporates Ricardian iconography such as the hart or deer and Richard’s patron saint John the Baptist. While ﬂowers are spread beneath their feet (line 356), the king and queen approach the scene. Ast ubi perventum fuit ad Barram cito Templi, Silva super porte tecta locata fuit! Hec, quasi desertum, tenuit genus omne ferarum, Mixtum reptilibus, vermibus, et variis. Sunt ibi spineta, sunt dumi, suntque rubeta; Fraxinus et corulus, quercus et alta pirus, Prunus, acer, pepulus, populus quoque, tilia, fagus, Ulm[u]s, lentiscus, palma, salix tremulus; Hic lupus, hic leo, pardus, et ursus, et hic monacornus, Hic elephas, castor, simia, tigris, aper, Hic onager, cervus celer, hic panteraque, dama, Hic vulpes fetens, taxus, ibique lepus. Currunt, discurrunt, pugnant, mordent, saliuntque, Ut solet ad vastum bestia seva nemus. Then soon they ﬁnally arrive at Temple Bar, And there a forest had been placed atop the gate! It had, just like a desert, every kind of beast, Including reptiles, snakes, and many other kinds. There brakes and briar-patches spread, and thorny shrubs, An ash, a hazelbush, an oak, a lofty pear, A plum, a maple, bullace, poplar, lime and beech, Elm, mastic-bush, and palm and quaking willow-tree; Wolf, lion, leopard, bear, and unicorn were there, A beaver, elephant, ape, tiger, and a boar, 111

Concordia, lines 273–4.

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Wild ass, swift deer, a panther, and a doe were there, A smelly fox, a badger, and a hare as well. They run and run around, they ﬁght and bite and leap, As savage beasts behave in desert wilderness. 112

This catalogue style is typical of Medieval Latin pastoral and once again the words ‘fuit’ (line 358), ‘quasi’ (line 359) and ‘ut’ (line 370) draw attention to the artiﬁce and contrivance of the display. Yet the dominant imagery is of savagery and brutality: a scene of nature turned wild, with the deer (‘cervus’, ‘dama’, line 367) lost and vulnerable amongst ﬁerce predators. Strikingly, Richard’s own personal emblem of the hart (as depicted on the outside of the Wilton Diptych) is included here, threatened and beleaguered, in a hostile environment. 113 This anti-pastoral interlude refers both to the conﬂict and chaos which Richard’s reconciliation with London has averted, and also to the disorder and ‘savagery’ possible in the future if the realm lacks good rule. The defenceless deer at the centre of the scene may further serve as a cautionary reminder of the potential vulnerability of Richard’s own position. In the midst of this wilderness a ﬁgure represents John the Baptist, who ‘Indicat hic digito: “Agnus et ecce dei!”’ (‘...pointed with this ﬁnger: “Look, the Lamb of God!”’). The inclusion of John the Baptist forms another link with the Ricardian iconography exempliﬁed in the Wilton Ditpych, in which John joins the ‘saints of England’, Edward and Edmund, to present Richard to the Virgin and Child. In the context of these prominent parallels with the iconography of the Wilton Diptych, a further connection is particularly relevant to the focus of this study. During cleaning and conservation of the Diptych in 1992, it was discovered that the upper orb above the ‘resurrection’ banner (carried by one of the angels surrounding Mary) included a miniature painting, one centimetre across, of an island. Nigel Saul describes the image: At the centre of the island stands a white castle with two turrets and black vertical windows. Behind it are trees set against a blue sky, and in the foreground is a brown boat in full sail with black masts sailing in a sea made of silver leaf, now tarnished to brown. 114

Saul discusses the possible Marian connections of this image and the tradition of England as ‘the Virgin’s dowry’, an idea which implicitly connects the perfect form of the island with Mary’s virginity. 115 The ‘silver sea’ of the miniature also re-introduces an image central to this study, resonating with John of Gaunt’s vision of England in Shakespeare’s Richard II. The Ricardian iconography of the Wilton Diptych, recalled by Maidstone’s Concordia in this passage, clearly reﬂects Richard’s careful production not just of his own image and identity, but also that of his island kingdom. 112 Concordia, 113

lines 357–70. For discussion of the iconography of the Wilton Diptych, see Nigel Saul, Richard II (Yale, 1997), pp. 304–307. 114 Saul, Richard II, p. 306. See also D. Gordon, ‘A New Discovery in the Wilton Diptych’, Burlington Magazine 134 (1992), 662–7. 115 Saul, Richard II, p. 307.

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As well as being Richard’s patron saint, John the Baptist is an appropriate ﬁgure to include in the wilderness scene at Ludgate. The text here offers its closest reference to the story of Christ’s Passion and its most explicit construction of Richard as a Christlike ﬁgure entering his city. Without any obvious referent for John’s pointed ﬁnger, Richard’s response in the following two lines becomes signiﬁcant: Inspicit attente rex hunc quia, quem notat iste Illius ut meminit, micior inde fuit… The king observed him closely, since, remembering The saint that was portrayed, his manner grew more mild… 116

It is Richard, therefore, who is juxtaposed with John’s exclamation of ‘Agnus et ecce dei!’, and Richard becomes ‘micior’ (‘more mild’) as he witnesses this, aligning him even more with the meekness of the Lamb. The association between Richard and Christ is apt in this context of royal pageantry. As Gordon Kipling has observed, Richard’s entry into London echoes the biblical pattern of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, which itself forms the paradigm for many medieval coronation ceremonies. 117 The triumphal entry into Jerusalem is depicted in English texts going back to the Anglo-Saxon period as a scene of pastoral renewal, and Christ’s arrival in the city is exploited as a type and image for contemporary rulers. 118 The pastoral motifs of Maidstone’s Concordia ﬁt within these traditions of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem and the festive city, ﬁguring Richard as the ideal ruler ﬁgure. Yet the associations of Christ’s entry into the city are ambivalent, and implicitly destabilise Maidstone’s panegyric. The biblical entry into Jerusalem is followed by betrayal, conﬂict, and the city’s rejection of its ‘king’. Just as with the ambivalent Troy narrative, which includes betrayal and dangerous passion as much as honour and glory, Maidstone’s typology here includes both positive and negative implications. Throughout the poem, Maidstone appropriates a huge range of authorising symbols and topoi. The text begins with a reference to the Ciceronian ideology of amicitia, constructing the poem as a gesture of friendship and Richard as the ideal amicus or ‘socius’ (line 11), the powerful, benevolent patron ﬁgure. A range of classical and biblical analogues are invoked as models for Richard’s kingship. He is compared to Solomon (line 37) in his wisdom of rule and is more honoured and revered by his subjects even than Arthur or Brutus and the ancient kings of Britain (lines 479–80). Yet the assertion that Richard rules ‘ut Salomon’ (‘just like Solomon’) is ambiguous, perhaps reminding the reader of Solomon’s tyranny and pride as much as his reputed acts of wisdom. 119 Richard’s beauty, an outward representation of his 116 Concordia, 117

lines 373–4. Kipling, ‘Richard II’s “Sumptuous Pageants”’, p. 88. As Kipling notes, Richard’s entry into the city in 1392 may also be a deliberate re-enactment and re-afﬁrmation of the 1377 coronation procession. 118 For example, see the illustration of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem in the Benedictional of Æthelwold, discussed in Chapter Two, pp. 64–5. In this image of the triumphal entry (a pattern for Edgar’s new rule and reform programme) the festive city bursts into bloom with the palm branches waved by the citizens and the spring foliage growing out of the picture’s frame. 119 See for example 1 Kings 8 and 1 Kings 10:14–22.

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inner virtue and goodness, is emphasised through comparisons with Troilus and Absalon (line 112) and Paris (line 26). Yet these comparisons are not straightforward, again inviting in ambivalent or negative connotations. Troilus, certainly to audiences after Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, might be associated with the precedence of individual, private desires and agendas over service to the city. The biblical Absalon is an archetype of the beautiful young man (2 Samuel 14:25), yet he is also associated with vanity and pride through his implied regard for his own appearance and his love of pomp and ceremony (2 Samuel 14:26 and 15:1), and with quick anger and vengeance (2 Samuel 13:28–9 and 14:30). Paris again is a model of masculine beauty, but represents youthful folly through his abduction of Helen and responsibility for the Trojan War. Lynn Staley argues that: In putting together such a set of examples, Maidstone most likely intended to instruct as well as to praise his prince, implicitly urging him to maintain control by displaying a wisdom these earlier ﬁgures did not possess. 120

Richard’s superlative beauty also renders him implicitly Christ-like, resonating with associations of beauty and divinity in medieval discourse. 121 This links to another authorising model in the Concordia: the biblical narrative of the Bridegroom’s reconciliation with his Bride. As ‘sponsus’ (line 24), Richard has been angered and has rejected his Bride, the city, but now returns to accept her love. The metaphorical dimensions here associate Richard once more with Christ and London with the New Jerusalem, the heavenly Bride. At lines 140 to 145 vocabulary and imagery of surrender and possession ﬁgure this reunion in explicitly erotic terms. 122 Clavibus his gladioque, renunciat urbs modo sponte: Vestre voluntati prompta subesse venit. Hoc rogat assidue, lacrimis madefacta deintus, Mitis ut in cameram rex velit ire suam. Non laceret, non dilaniet pulcherrima regni Menia, nam sua sunt, quicquid et exstat in hiis. With keys and sword the city gives up willingly: It comes all ready to surrender to your will. Suffused with tears within, it earnestly entreats The king to enter in his room in gentleness. Let him not rend or tear apart his realm’s fair walls, For they are his, and all that still remains inside.

The range of models associated with Richard in the Concordia suggests an attempt to appropriate any possible authorising trope or precedent. As Staley points out, these

120 Staley, 121

‘Making Culture’, p. 80. For example, in Part 7 of the Ancrene Wisse, a romance allegory represents Christ as a knight and lover, ‘of alle men feherest to bihalden’. See Geoffrey Shepherd, ed., Ancrene Wisse. Parts Six and Seven (Exeter, 2000), p. 21. 122 See further discussion in Federico, New Troy, Chapter 1.

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classical and biblical models are not without ambivalence, and they do not necessarily cohere comfortably into a consistent, uniﬁed image of the king. London itself is ﬁgured both as New Troy (‘Trenovantum’, line 11, ‘Nova Troia’, line 18, and elsewhere), as Jerusalem through the imagery of Palm Sunday and the allegory of the Bride and Bridegroom, and as Rome (‘quasi Roma’, line 73). Again, this range of comparisons appropriates authority from both classical and biblical models. The association with Rome is further strengthened by Richard’s comparison to an emperor (‘Cesar’, line 200) and the claim that he comes from an imperial lineage (‘Inclita Cesareo soboles propagate parente’, line 431). David Carlson suggests that this classical, imperial imagery also has a potential ambivalence. These parallels might tend to make Richard a Marius or a Sulla or some other antique dictator or imperator returning to Rome with an army at his back and proscriptions in prospect, though Maidstone does not take things so far. 123

As with the different representations of Richard himself in the poem, the multiple ﬁgures for London apparently celebrate the city through every available cultural association and allusion. Yet, once again, there is a sense of rhetorical overdetermination and the appropriation of authorising models without consideration for thematic or symbolic coherence. For Lynn Staley, the ambivalences and ambiguities of the poem’s imagery resonate with the possibility that John of Gaunt may have been Richard of Maidstone’s patron. 124 …if we take Elizabeth Salter’s suggestion that Gaunt could also have been Maidstone’s patron [as well as Richard], we are justiﬁed in wondering if the poem does not advise even as it proffers: ‘Troilus the bridegroom’ is an oxymoron, but kingdoms lost to folly are the lesson every prince must learn. Is it possible to recover a sense of England’s polyphony at a time before revolution became fact and necessitated its own set of images and myths that halted and sought to eradicate the conversation of this last decade of Ricardian rule? 125

The Concordia may well, of course, participate in this ‘conversation’ through a deliberate and knowing rhetorical promiscuity, which mimics and implicitly satirises the performative strategies and self-fashioning of the Ricardian court. Helen Barr summarises sharply the inherent problems of Ricardian overdetermination. Drawing on the concept of ‘suture’, derived from psychoanalytic theory and used in relation to power and society by Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Barr observes that: The insistent emphasis on making, stitching, and fabrication in artefacts which produce Richard’s regal image, the concern to layer, to say things twice, to 123 Concordia, 124

p. 22. Staley, ‘Making Culture’, p. 81. Staley builds on the suggestions of Elizabeth Salter in Fourteenth Century English Poetry: Contexts and Readings (Oxford, 1983), pp. 60–3, p. 68; ‘The Alliterative Revival I’, Modern Philology 64 (1966), 146–50; ‘The Alliterative Revival II’, Modern Philology 64 (1966), 233–7. 125 Staley, ‘Making Culture’, p. 96.

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Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 establish, not one connection, but two or more, inscribe anxiety, and expose the constructedness of the project. 126

For Richard Maidstone, the king and the city both perform so many roles that the absence of any real, ﬁxed identity is foregrounded and attention is drawn rather to strategies of representation or the ‘constructedness’ of city, king and text. Fundamentally, in the Concordia, the symbolisms and signiﬁcations of the city are revealed only as rhetorical tropes and identities ‘put on’ according to political expedience and literary convention. The pastoral city is merely a performance, synthesised out of the urban materials of money and manufactured luxuries. The apparently festive city is in fact a tense staging of celebration. In the Concordia we are left with the discontinuities and incoherences between disparate symbols and allusions, and a cacophony of rhetorical tropes and authorising models. The degeneration of the literary city into cacophony and incoherence reaches its extreme in a late fourteenth-century Anglo-Latin poem, editorially titled The Stores of the Cities. Here we ﬁnd perhaps the most radical re-working or unravelling of the urban encomium genre into parody and nonsense. The poem is included in a ﬁfteenth-century commonplace book from Glastonbury (Trinity College, Cambridge MS 0.9.38, f. 16v) and is edited and translated by A.G. Rigg in Anglia 85 (1967) 127–37. The poem appears to celebrate the properties of seven English cities, though it is deliberately fragmentary and obscure. In the manuscript, The Stores of the Cities follows the poem Quondam fuit factus festus, which Rigg describes as ‘a well-known burlesque poem… written in deliberately bad Latin’. 127 The Stores of the Cities, then, can be seen as a companion piece which similarly plays with and parodies Latin poetic conventions and transgresses literary and linguistic decorum. Based on apparent references in the poem to the London ‘Tunne’ prison (line 2), which ceased to exist in 1401, and the ‘noua stipula’ or new steeple of St Michael’s Church, Coventry (line 14), which was built in 1375, Rigg suggests a date of composition in the late fourteenth century. As the poem is not well known to literary scholars, I reproduce it in full here, with Rigg’s suggested and self-professed ‘doubtful’ translation. 128 London’: Hec sunt Londonis: pira pomusque, regia, thronus, Chepp, stupha, Coklana, dolium, leo verbaque vana, Lancea cum scutis – hec sunt staura ciuitutis. [E]borac’: Capitulum, kekus, porcus, ﬁmus, Eborecus; Nal, nel, lamprones, kele et mele, salt, salamones, Ratis cum petys – hec sunt staura ciuitetis.

126 Helen Barr, Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 2001), 127 A.G. Rigg, ‘The Stores of the Cities’, Anglia 85 (1967), 127–37, p. 127. 128

pp. 87–8.

My reproduction of Rigg’s text preserves his italics which mark expansion from manuscript abbreviations.

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Lyncoln’: Hec sunt Lincolne: bow, bolt et bellia bolne, Ad monstrum scala, rosa bryghta, nobilis ala, Et bubulus ﬂatus – hec sunt staura ciuitatis. Norwyc’: Hec sunt Norwycus: panis ordeus, halpenypykys, Clausus posticus, domus Habrahe, dryȝt quoque vicus, Flynt valles, rede thek – ciuitatis optima sunt hec. Coventr’: Contreye: mirum, sopanedula tractaque wyrum, Et carmen notum, noua stipula, pedula totum, Cardones mille – hec sunt insignia ville. Brystoll’: Hec sunt Brystollys: ladelys, doȝelys quoque bollys, Burges negones, karine, clocheriaque chevones, Webbys cum rotis – hec sunt staura ciuitotis. Cantuar’: Hec sunt Cantorum: iuga dogmata, bal baculorum, Et princes, tumba, bel, brachia sulsaque plumba, Et syserem potus – hec sunt staura ciuitotis. These are London’s: pear and apple (sceptre and orb), palace, throne, Cheapside, the Stews, Cock Lane, the ‘Tunne’, the ‘Lion’ and empty words, lance and shields – these are the stores of the city. Chapter, rubbish, pig, mud (are) York’s: awl, needle (?), lampreys, broth and meal, salt, salmon, rats with pets – these are the stores of the city. These are Lincoln’s: bow, bolt, a large bell, steps to the church, a bright rose-window, a noble aisle, and the breathing of cattle – these are the stores of the city. These are Norwich’s: barley-bread, halfpenny pies (?), the Close gate, ‘Abraham’s Hall’ and ‘Dirt Street’, ﬂint walls, red thatch – these are the best features of the city. Coventry: a marvel, soap, needles (?), and wire-drawing, and a famous legend, a new steeple, a whole pedula (?), a thousand cards – these are the distinctions of the town. These are Bristol’s: ladles, barrel-plugs, bowls, niggardly citizens, boats, belltowers and beams, webs on wheels – these are the stores of the city. These are Canterbury’s: eternal dogmas, a bundle of pilgrims’ staffs, and the primate, a tomb, bell, beer-producing grain, pickled plums and the drink sicer – these are the stores of the city. 129

Like conventional urban encomium, the poem does appear to offer us a catalogue celebrating the best features or properties of each city. Yet here the tone shifts 129

Text and translation from Rigg, ‘The Stores of the Cities’, pp. 128–9.

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between panegyric and parody, with the ironic inclusion of, for example, Bristol’s ‘Burges negones’ (‘niggardly citizens’, line 17) and York’s ‘kekus, porcus, ﬁmus’ (‘rubbish, pig, mud’, line 4). The poem presents us with incongruous juxtapositions such as Lincoln’s ‘bright rose-window, a noble aisle, and the breathing of cattle’ (line 7) or London’s ‘palace’ and ‘throne’ next to ‘Cheapside’ and ‘the Stews’ (lines 1 and 2). In the case of Canterbury, these jarring juxtapositions subvert even more strikingly the norms of urban encomium, rejecting the usual reverence for this holy city. Signs of the city’s spiritual importance as Seat of the Archbishop and pilgrimage centre collide with the far earthier images of ‘beer-producing grain, pickled plums and the drink sicer’ (lines 20–21). The predominant focus of each stanza is on the material and mercantile: the products, commodities and industry associated with each city. Bristol, for example, is associated with ‘ladles, barrel-plugs, bowls’ (line 16) while the stanza on York suggests a trade in the foodstuffs of ‘lampreys, broth and meal, salt, salmon’ (line 5). Even in the case of Canterbury, the images associated with the cathedral suggest a kind of pilgrimage industry, and the juxtaposition of the ‘bundle of pilgrims’ staffs’ or ‘bal baculorum’ (line 19) with brewing ingredients levels all to the status of civic enterprise and economics. Unlike the earlier urban encomia of William Fitz Stephen or Lucian, The Stores of the Cities focuses not on the symbolic space of the city itself, but on a chaotic inventory of its produce and exports. Rather than the spaces and rituals of power and authority, this poem inhabits the plebeian places and experiences of urban life, appropriating local, popular allusions and epithets to depict these English cities. Where Fitz Stephen’s Descriptio approached London as a visiting pilgrim, here we are plunged into local, popular culture. Of course, ironic participation in the urban encomium genre is not new to The Stores of the Cities, and even in the twelfth century we can see the growth in literary celebrations of the city paralleled with parody. Richard of Devizes’ Chronicon de rebus gestis Ricardi primi includes an inverted urban encomium in the form of an imagined warning given by a French Jew to a young man visiting England. He gives an account of each major English city in turn, cataloguing its vices, corruptions and horrors, and saving a mostly favourable appraisal only for Winchester (Richard of Devizes’ own home city). 130 Yet Devizes’ negative account of English cities is still coherent and intelligible: a systematic inversion of the positives of urban encomium. It also seems to engage with other literary accounts of cities becoming popular in the twelfth century – the reports of distant or exotic cities such as Rome, Antioch and Jerusalem, often via the Crusades. 131 Indeed, the imagined anti-encomium given by the French Jew in Richard of Devizes seems to explore playfully a central issue raised by this early ‘travel writing’: the idea of viewing a city as an outsider or visitor, and the potential difference of this outsider’s perspective. The Stores of the Cities is quite different. It is not the same systematic, coherent anti-encomium or reversal of the 130

See Richard of Devizes, The Chronicle of Richard of Devizes in the Time of King Richard the First, ed. John T. Appleby (London, 1963), pp. 64–9. 131 See for example William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum: The History of the English Kings, ed. and trans. R.A.B. Mynors et al. (Oxford, 1998), pp. 612–47.

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panegyric genre. It seems that elements of the cities are indeed praised, though tone is hard to ascertain. The poem is resolutely unstructured and incoherent, presenting verbal fragments without syntactic or thematic context. Even the punctuation and capitalisation in the text cited above is editorial and represents an uncertain interpretation. There is a temptation to look for symbolism or meaning in The Stores of the Cities where there may well be none. Of course, it is likely that some of the poem’s allusions were more intelligible to a contemporary late medieval audience, and that the popular, local references are particularly resistant to modern scholarly reconstruction. Yet the poem seems to defy interpretation and to present a deliberate cacophony of competing, incongruous and chaotic images of these important English cities. The Stores of the Cities brings us back to Wallace’s notion of the fragmentary, elusive city, or, in the words of Lee Patterson, an urban ‘discourse of fragments, discontinuities, and contradictions’. 132 In this poem we are presented only with fragments, and with incongruous, contradictory elements of each city. Indeed, the text perhaps includes its own epithet for this deﬁantly unintelligible language of the city: the ‘verba(que) vana’ or ‘empty words’ (line 2) associated in the poem with London. The Stores of the Cities responds to the kind of excesses and incoherencies of late fourteenth-century rhetoric which we have examined here in Gower and Maidstone, playing with the sense of competing, irreconcilable versions of the city, and the impossibility of reading into the city a stable, ﬁxed symbolism or meaning. In The Stores of the Cities the conventional discourse of the symbolic, meaningful city disintegrates. Yet, through its thematic and literal cacophony of aural fragments, the poem offers us an alternative, compellingly vivid, version of the urban experience. The poem allows us to overhear the discontinuities, confusions and internal contestations of the late medieval city, choosing a mode of representation very different from the traditional urban encomium. The Stores of the Cities presents an extreme reaction against the conventions of urban encomium. Yet, as already acknowledged, parody of the genre is not new in the fourteenth century but goes back to Richard of Devizes before 1200. Admittedly, though, even Richard’s satirical version of city description is an orderly response to and inversion of the urban encomium form. However, this chapter has aimed to trace fault-lines and tensions within urban encomium across the medieval period, from Fitz Stephen and Lucian in the twelfth century, to the later fourteenth-century texts. Looking back to Fitz Stephen and Lucian, these early city descriptions are themselves fraught with elisions and absences, and evasions of the realities of the urban experience. For Fitz Stephen in particular, the pastoral imagery conventional to urban encomium prevents any real description of the urban environment within the city walls, and the focus of his description is instead displaced to the surrounding suburbs, gardens and agriculture. In De Laude Cestrie, Lucian does focus more on the space within the city, yet his ambitious allegorical readings elide the real functions of streets, gates and markets in urban life and economy. Here, just as much as in 132

Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (London, 1991), p. 333.

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Gower’s Confessio Amantis, we see an insistence on an ideal version of the city which serves to ‘suppress’ or deny the realities of urban experience. Both Fitz Stephen and Lucian present problematic formulations of city identity and the relationships between urban enclosure and the landscapes and cultures beyond. For both writers, the boundaries of the city are permeable and ﬂexible, allowing contacts and afﬁnities to be exploited, but also complicating the idea of the city itself. Interestingly, a striking absence for both Fitz Stephen and Lucian is a sense of the English context of their cities and the texts which celebrate them. Each writer chooses a literary and cultural context, perhaps consonant with their choice of Latin as literary language, which avoids connection with English traditions. For Fitz Stephen, London is aligned with Rome and Troy and the prestige of antiquity; and for Lucian, Chester is a mirror for Rome, Jerusalem and the world of the bible. As well as a disavowal of English literary encomium traditions, these strategies result in a sense of cities (and their environs) disengaged or severed from the rest of the English landscape. Their connections and afﬁliations lie elsewhere: in the ancient world, in the Holy Land, or even in British Wales, yet not in their English surroundings. Underlying the inventions of urban identity in both of these encomia is a tension between the city’s cultural autonomy and its cultural alienation. The fourteenth-century texts examined in this chapter show a greater selfconsciousness about the processes of literary representation and performance, and the illusions or elisions involved in constructing an image of the city. Yet the picture cannot simply be reduced into that of a failure of faith and conﬁdence in the idea of the city. Amongst the ﬁve surviving full medieval versions of Fitz Stephen’s Descriptio, one is included in ‘a private collection of legal and political material, a late medieval common-place book of London provenance’ which is dated to some time in the 1380s. 133 The copying of the Descriptio in the late fourteenth century suggests that the text resonates with ‘a historical philosophy about London’s past and present role which may well have been more widely current among the later fourteenthcentury patriciate of the city’. 134 The text’s reference to London’s Trojan origins is certainly consonant with the rhetoric of Richard Maidstone and other writers, but the copying of the Descriptio in its entirety suggests that its representation of the city in general resonates with the London still imagined by fourteenth-century audiences. The jostling, discordant versions of the city in Gower and Maidstone may not indicate a failure of the symbolic city of urban encomium, but rather a bolder imagining of London as a ‘place of possibility’ which self-consciously permits ambivalences, contradictions and tensions. 135 As a symbolic landscape which parallels the pastoral locus amoenus, the delightful space of the city is a recurrent image in medieval English literary tradition. The Anglo-Latin texts explored in this chapter show the increasing ambivalences and 133

Hannes Kleineke, ‘Carleton’s book: William FitzStephen’s “Description of London” in a late fourteenth-century common-place book’, Historical Research 74 (2001), 117–26, p. 118. 134 Kleineke, ‘Carleton’s book’, p. 126. 135 The phrase is Sylvia Federico’s (New Troy, p. 28). Her discussion focuses on the power of the Troy myth to admit differences and ambivalences within inventions of the city.

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anxieties in representations of the city across the later medieval period. Yet even in the twelfth-century texts, representation of the city is based on absences and tensions. What the texts discussed in this chapter do show, perhaps, is an increasing selfconsciousness about literary representation and elision which undermines any conﬁdent writing of the city. The texts of Gower and Richard Maidstone may also reveal signs of a deeper crisis or anxiety over the processes and uses of representation and performance in Ricardian England. In the fourteenth century, the tropes and conventions of English literary pastoral and panegyric traditions are verging on cliché and bankruptcy.

Epilogue Disruptions and Continuities

This study has traced continuities and traditions through medieval English literary representations of ideal, symbolic landscapes and their association with ideas of England. Certain images have emerged as central: the Edenic island with its perfect enclosure, the green pastoral landscape and its paradisal resonances, and the potentially symbolic space of the city as a parallel locus amoenus. Particular ideologies and literary strategies have also emerged repeatedly in the periods and texts examined by the study. Through descriptions of English landscapes in terms which recall Eden, Paradise or the Promised Land (or the cities of Jerusalem, Rome or Troy), England appropriates a powerful cultural heritage – and destiny – which encompasses spiritual and classical authority and prestige. Yet the centrality of biblical and classical models and Latin literary conventions to these formulations of English landscape and identity raises a central tension: the dependence of these ideas of Englishness on cultural appropriation or usurpation. Alongside evidence of continuities and intertextualities, this study has also explored the re-appropriations, re-directions and reactions inherent to any literary tradition. By focusing on selected texts in their contexts, chapters have examined the speciﬁc uses of traditional imagery and ideas in speciﬁc cultural contexts and by speciﬁc authors, audiences or communities. Bede’s description of ‘Albion’ in the Ecclesiastical History works to persuade us of its newness and originatory status, the tenth-century Benedictine reformers appropriate pastoral imagery and the prestige of Latin literary tradition to support their ‘new’ English religious and cultural ambitions, and monastic houses in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries claim the tropes of idealised, symbolic landscape in a re-invention of local identity and relevance. This ﬁnal section will suggest some further continuities and connections which move beyond the main scope of this study, making links with texts outside the period covered here and with other areas of literary and cultural studies. This section will also acknowledge some discontinuities and disruptions to the representational and ideological tradition for which this study has argued. In particular, it will examine how the image of England as delightful pastoral island is problematised or subverted by medieval English writers conscious of internal conﬂict and division. Associations

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between the literary locus amoenus and the idea of England are far less comfortable for authors with experience of the internal borders, tensions and conﬂicts of the island. Several uses of landscape imagery by writers from marginal or border areas of Britain have already been discussed in earlier chapters. Indeed, the earliest use of the delightful island image examined in this study is that in Gildas’s Ruin of Britain (written in South Wales), in which the locus amoenus functions as a symbol of loss and reproach. Gildas imagines the island as a ‘chosen bride’ (‘electa… sponsa’), establishing a contrast between the perfect, virgin landscape and invasion or incursion as an act of deﬁlement or rape. The pastoral island locus amoenus described by Gildas is a preface to his accounts of the Britons’ sinfulness and unworthiness, and as an image of a paradise lost it works within Gildas’s strategies of reproach and punishment. Lucian’s representation of Chester as a city locus amoenus in De Laude Cestrie is also complicated by an awareness of conﬂicts and differences within the island. The location of Chester near the Welsh border, separated from the rest of England by the Forest of Lyme, presents a series of unresolved tensions and ambiguities. Lucian implies that both the natural landscape of Chester and the character of its citizens show afﬁnities with Wales and the Welsh. [S]ilvis ac pascuis habundantes, carne ac pecore divites, Britonibus ex uno latere conﬁnes, et per longam transfusionem morum, maxima parte consimiles. 1 Abundant in woods and pastures, rich in ﬂesh and cattle, they are neighbours to the Britons on one side, and, through the long exchange of customs, they are to a large extent similar.

Yet the role of St Peter as patron of Chester is speciﬁcally formulated as that of protector of a frontier city, suggesting opposition and conﬂict with the Britons, rather than contact and exchange. Peter is ‘a wall against a harmful borderland’ (‘murus a conﬁnio maligno’), and he ‘beats back the assaults of dangerous rivals’ (‘retundit assultus gravium emulorum’). 2 Lucian struggles with the implications of the topographical separation of Chester from the rest of England, and the problems of admitting afﬁnity and allegiance with Wales. Texts in the English vernacular, too, can show an awareness of the borders and divisions within Britain which problematise the image of the island locus amoenus. In the thirteenth century the chroniclers Laȝamon and Robert of Gloucester both produce historical accounts of Britain which betray anxieties about internal division and the darker potentials of the island locus amoenus image. This acute awareness may again be inﬂuenced by the writers’ own experience of living in a contested territory – in this case the border region of the Severn River. In her recent study, however, Michelle Warren has argued that the works of Laȝamon and Robert of Gloucester demonstrate a conﬁdent sense of English identity and belonging to the landscape. Despite the Severn being ‘England’s most contentious edge’, Warren asserts that:

1 2

De Laude Cestrie, p. 65. Ibid., p. 52.

132

Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 Comfortably settled into an English landscape shaped by the course of the Severn River, [Laȝamon and Robert of Gloucester] pursue paradigms of continuity and invisible origins. 3

Yet a closer analysis of selected passages in Laȝamon and Robert of Gloucester reveals a less comfortable relationship between author, history and the island landscape. In the very ﬁrst lines of the Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, an image is established of the delightful, enclosed island locus amoenus. Yet even in this opening celebration of the island’s integrity, enclosure and natural defences, the possibility of internal conﬂict and division is foregrounded. Engelond his a wel god lond . ich wene ech londe best . Iset in þe on ende of þe . worlde as al in þe west . Þe see geþ him al aboute . he stond as in an yle . Of fon hii dorre þe lasse doute . bote hit be þorȝ gyle . Of folc of þe sulue lond . as me haþ iseye ȝwile . 4 England is a very good land – the best of any land, I think. Set in one end of the world, right in the west, The sea goes all around it, it stands as if in an island. They need little fear of enemies there – unless it’s through the guile Of people of the same land, as has been seen before.

England is announced here as a superlative ‘lond’, perfectly enclosed by the sea. ‘Engelond’ is apparently conﬂated with the entire island, leaving no room for other nations or territories, and the opening line promotes an easy panegyric association between English land and English people. Conventionally, the second line emphasises the island’s special inaccessibility and separateness at the western edge of the world. Yet if the ﬁrst three lines elide the diversities and divisions within the island, lines 4 and 5 make them the central focus of the description. Line 4 divides sharply with the conjunction ‘bote’ (‘unless’), emphatically undercutting the conﬁdent ‘Of fon hii dorre þe lasse doute’. The reference here to conquest through cunning or ‘gyle’ may initially recall Bede’s inﬂuential account of the coming of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes to Britain at Vortigern’s invitation, ‘ostensibly to ﬁght on behalf of the country, but their real intention was to conquer it’. 5 Yet line 5 makes this ‘gyle’ more speciﬁc and more monstrous: the unnatural attacks from ‘folc of þe sulue lond’. The island locus amoenus image, then, displays a striking duality or ambivalence. Although represented as almost impregnable to foreign invasion, the delightful island is susceptible to far more shameful subversions from within.

3 4

5

Warren, History on the Edge, p. 83, p. 128. Robert of Gloucester, The Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, ed. William Aldis Wright (London, 1887), vol. 1, p. 1. Punctuation as in Wright’s edition. All further quotations from the Metrical Chronicle will be taken from this edition. ‘quasi pro patria pugnatura, re autem uera hanc expugnatura suscepit.’ EH, Book I, Chapter 15, pp. 50, 51. The Metrical Chronicle refers to this traditional account of the Saxon invasion in lines 48–50.

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Lines 9 to 20 offer the same celebration of the island locus amoenus, once again undercut by a brief aside. These lines form a catalogue of the land’s many assets. Plente me may in engelond . of alle gode ise . Bote volc hit vorgulte . oþer ȝeres þe worse be . Vor engelonde is vol inoȝ . of frut / & ek of tren . Of wodes & of parkes . þat ioye hit is to sen . Of foweles & of bestes . of wilde & tame also . Of salt ﬁchȝ & eke verss . of vaire ruiers þer to . Of wellen swete & colde inouȝ . of lesen & of mede . Of seluer or & of gold . of tyn & eke of lede . Of stel of yre & of bras . of god corn gret won . Of wit & of wolle god . betere ne may be non . Wateres he haþ ek inouȝ… 6 Plenty of all good things can be seen in England, Unless the people have forfeited it, or there are bad years. For England is full enough of fruit and also of trees, Of woods and of parks that it is a joy to see, Of birds and of beasts – both wild and tame – Of salt ﬁsh and also fresh, of fair rivers as well, Of sweet, cold wells, of pastures and of meadows, Of silver ore and of gold, of tin and also of lead, Of steel and of iron and of brass, of good corn in great quantity, Of wheat and of good wool, of which there is no better, It also has enough waters…

The repeated, list-like line structures here read like an inventory of the island’s stock. Whilst clearly a fertile, productive locus amoenus, the land is commodiﬁed as a valuable possession potentially to be claimed or fought over. In the ﬁrst line quoted, the bivalency of ‘gode’ underlines this duality: the noun may either denote the ‘good things’ integral to this delightful island, or may construct them as ‘goods’ which await ownership and trade. More explicitly, of course, the next line punctures the straightforward panegyric tone of the passage. The ‘[ȝ]eres þe worse’ may be unavoidable, but the reference to the possible loss of the land’s natural wealth by ‘people [who] forfeited it’ (‘volc hit vorgulte’) is an explicit moral reprobation. As in Gildas’s Ruin of Britain, the delightful pastoral island has the potential to function as a punitive symbol of what may not be achieved by its unworthy inhabitants. Elsewhere in this introductory section, references to conﬂict and contestation of the island undermine any straightforward panegyric. At line 43, the text reminds us that ‘Engelond haþ ibe inome & iwerred ilome’ (‘England has been conquered and fought over often’), before going on to list successive invasions. In lines 180 to 185, the celebration of the purity of the English race is thrown into question by the catalogues of different invading peoples which surround it in the text: Rome, Picts, Scots, English, Saxons, Danes and Normans listed in lines 44 to 55 and the Trojan 6

Metrical Chronicle, lines 9–20, vol. 1, p. 2.

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origins of the British from line 210. Most relevant to the focus of this study, though, is the Chronicle’s opening use of the delightful island image, and its subversion by references to internal conﬂict and the land’s valuable, contested assets. In Laȝamon’s Brut, too, the conventional image of the island locus amoenus is re-worked and adjusted to acknowledge the realities of conquest and violence. The Brut begins with a Proem which seems to present the author, Laȝamon, rooted ﬁrmly and comfortably in an idealised English pastoral landscape. The ﬁrst ﬁve lines, cited here from the Caligula text, form a localised, domesticised version of the initiating locus amoenus description typical of Medieval English historiographical tradition. An preost wes on leoden, Laȝamon wes ihoten; he wes Leouenaðes sone – liðe him beo Drihten! He wonede at Ernleȝe, at æðelen are chirechen vppen Seuarne staþe – sel þar him þuhte – onfest Radestone; þer he bock radde. 7 There was a priest in the land, he was called Laȝamon; he was Leovenath’s son – may the Lord be merciful to him! He lived at Areley, by a noble church on the bank of the Severn – it seemed pleasant to him there – close to Redstone; there he read books.

As Michelle Warren notes, leoden in the ﬁrst line is a ‘multivalent term [which] refers to both land and people’, conﬂating the English people with their territory. These opening lines certainly allude to locus amoenus conventions: the River Severn becomes a conventional feature of the idealised landscape, and the text suggests the traditional parallels between pastoral idyll and spiritual retreat (here the church at Areley). The explicit statement that ‘sel þar him þuhte’ completes the delightful scene. This opening passage can seem touchingly personal, and interestingly this private, domestic locus amoenus is the closest the Brut comes at any point to a straightforward, unambiguous delightful landscape. There is perhaps a tension in the Brut between small scale and large: between Laȝamon’s own experience of his delightful local landscape and the wider map of Britain upon which conﬂicts and conquests are played out. After this disarmingly and unconventionally intimate opening description, it is around one thousand lines before the Brut offers us anything like a conventional account of the delightful island landscape. Yet here the description is focalised through the eyes of Brutus, surveying the land which he intends to colonise. Brutus hine biþohte and þis folc biheold, biheold he þa muntes, feire and muchele, biheold he þa medewan þat weoren swiðe mære, biheold he þa wateres and þa wilde deor, 7

Laȝamon, Brut, ed. and trans. W.R.J. Barron and S.C. Weinberg (Harlow, 1995), lines 1–5, p. 2. All further quotations from the Brut will be taken from this edition.

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biheold he þa ﬁsches, biheold he þa fuȝeles, biheold he þa leswa and þene leoﬂiche wode, biheold he þene wode hu he bleou, biheold he þat corn hu hit greu; al he iseih on leoden þat him leof was on heorten. 8 Brutus reﬂected and beheld this people, he beheld the mountains, fair and great, he beheld the meadows which were so wide, he beheld the waters and the wild animals, he beheld the ﬁsh, he beheld the birds, he beheld the pastures and the lovely woods, he beheld how the wood blossomed, he beheld how the corn grew; everything he saw in the nation brought joy to his heart.

Through the assessing, evaluating eyes of Brutus, the landscape becomes a catalogue of advantages or assets similar to the ‘inventory’ of Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle. We have here a series of elements of the delightful pastoral landscape, yet seen through Brutus’s gaze they become commodities, potential possessions. The verb bihealdan itself is associated with healdan, ‘to hold, own’, and reinforces this act of seeing or ‘beholding’ as an act of appropriation. There is also a possible use of the rhetorical envelope pattern in this passage – a frequent feature of locus amoenus descriptions in the English vernacular. 9 Thematic rather than linguistic, the description of Brutus’s vision begins and ends with references to ‘folc’ and ‘leoden’. In the ﬁrst line of the passage here, Brutus looks upon his ‘folc’ or ‘people’, but by the end of the description both ‘people’ and ‘land’ have been conﬂated into the multivalent ‘leoden’. At one other point in the Brut we have a passage of description which recalls the literary conventions of the locus amoenus and the idealised landscape of England. In the well-known narrative of the battle of Badon Hill, Arthur makes a speech to the Saxon leaders Colgrim and Baldulf. Arthur ﬁrst points the difference between himself and Colgrim with the assertion ‘Ich am wulf and he is gat’ (‘I am the wolf and he is the goat’, l. 10636), then continues: ‘ȝurstendæi wes Baldulf cnihten alre baldest; nu he stant on hulle and Auene bihaldeð, hu ligeð i þan stræme stelene ﬁsces; mid sweorde bigeorede heore sund is awemmed; heore scalen wleoteð swulc gold-faȝe sceldes; þer ﬂeoteð heore spiten swulc hit spæren weoren. Þis beoð seolcuðe þing isiȝen to þissen londe, swulche deor an hulle, swulche ﬁsces in wælle!...’ 10 ‘Yesterday Baldulf was the boldest of all men; now he stands on the hill and looks at the Avon, 8 9 10

Brut, lines 1002–9, p. 54. See Chapter Two, p. 44, p. 46. Brut, lines 10638–45, p. 548.

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Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 at how steel ﬁsh lie in the stream; weighed down with swords their swimming is hampered; their scales gleam like gold-adorned shields; their ﬁns ﬂoat there as if they were spears. This is a wondrous thing to be seen in this land. such beasts on the hill, such ﬁsh in the water!...’

Here again the description of the landscape is focalised, this time through the eyes of Colgrim, as Arthur refracts the island locus amoenus through the gaze of the wretched, defeated invader. A reading of this passage as a self-consciously inverted locus amoenus seems compelling. The description alludes to locus amoenus conventions with its pastoral features, the river typical of idyllic scenes, and the references to the animals and ﬁsh produced by the land. The tone of exclamation and wonder, particularly in the last two lines cited (ll. 10644–10645), is also characteristic of locus amoenus descriptions in the panegyric tradition. Yet this is an ironic version of the locus amoenus, with the central features of the delightful pastoral landscape formed out of violence, conﬂict and death. The shimmering ﬁsh in the river are in fact the grotesque bodies of dead warriors in their armour, and the animals on the hill are the humiliated Saxon leaders and army. Arthur’s focalisation of the description through Colgrim’s eyes suggests that it is speciﬁcally for the defeated, for the losers in battle, that the locus amoenus is inverted into a landscape of horror. Yet in its wider context within the Brut this description works to remind the audience that the idealised literary locus amoenus of England is constructed over the historical realities of conquest, invasion and conﬂict. The representations of the delightful island in Robert of Gloucester and Laȝamon, which acknowledge the realities of invasion, conquest and internal division, bring us back to John of Gaunt’s celebration of ‘this England’ in Richard II. In Shakespeare’s formulation of the island locus amoenus, the perfection and integrity of the island contrast with the shameful conﬂicts and treacheries within its bounds. The lines which follow Gaunt’s celebration of the island are often excised from popular tradition or recollections of this scene, yet they reveal the true function of the island locus amoenus image within the play. This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land, Dear for her reputation throughout the world, Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it, Like to a tenement or pelting farm. England, bound in with the triumphant sea Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame, With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds, That England that was wont to conquer others Hath made a shameful conquest of itself. 11

11

Shakespeare, Richard II, Act II, Scene 1, lines 57–66.

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These lines make clear the subversion of the island locus amoenus from within. The punning use of ‘dear’ in these lines also creates an ambivalence similar to that in Robert of Gloucester or Laȝamon. The ‘dear’ or ‘beloved’ land is also ‘dear’ in the sense of ‘valuable’, foregrounding the possibility for this idealised landscape to become little more than a contested commodity. In many ways, the function of the delightful island image in Richard II recalls Gildas’s description of the island a thousand years previously. The island locus amoenus works as a symbol of loss, shame and reproach. This study has begun and ended with references to Shakespeare in a conscious effort to connect with work on representations of England or Britain and formulations of national identity in the Early Modern period. Elizabethan England, in particular, has received critical attention as a context within which ideologies and discourses of English national identity are invented and developed. Much critical discussion has focused in particular on representations of the island landscape itself in this period, exploring ways in which the image of the delightful, pastoral locus amoenus is associated with ideas of Englishness. Rather than seeking beginnings or origins in the English Renaissance, this study has argued that similar associations between idealised landscape and ideas of national identity can be traced through medieval literary traditions. Representations of English landscape and identity in the Renaissance, then, are not new inventions or beginnings, but exciting continuities, revivals and re-appropriations. The revival of interest in literary pastoral tradition in the English Renaissance has often been linked to a new consciousness of national identity and new English cultural ambitions. Helen Cooper describes Elizabethan pastoral as ‘a fashion – almost a craze’, but one which ‘was also deeply involved in the central issues of life and society’ and intensely self-conscious about its capacity to deal with serious concerns. 12 A comprehensive overview of the extensive work on literary pastoral in the English Renaissance is beyond the scope and speciﬁc interests of this study. Yet some critical discussions do connect pertinently with the themes of idealised landscape and ideas of England which have been traced in medieval texts. For example, Andrew Hadﬁeld’s study Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance examines literary uses of the idealised pastoral landscape to explore ideas of England and Englishness. Hadﬁeld notes that the landscape of Sidney’s Old Arcadia, for example, can be read both as England itself and as an idealised alternative. Hadﬁeld suggests that, at the beginning of The Old Arcadia: The peacefulness of Arcadia corresponds to ‘our soft peace’ of Astrophil and Stella, Sonnet 8; the ﬂourishing of poetry contrasts to England’s neglect of literature described in [Sidney’s] Apologie [for Poetrie]. The ﬁction of Arcadia describes both an ideal and a real England, demanding that the reader make the

12

Cooper, Pastoral, p. 144.

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Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 effort to distinguish between the two types of representation: The Old Arcadia is a Utopian work. 13

Hadﬁeld argues that, in both the Old and New Arcadia, ‘the reader is invited to compare Arcadia to Elizabeth’s England’. 14 The idealised Arcadian landscape symbolises the England of ideal and aspiration, yet also points the present shortcomings of Elizabeth’s kingdom. In his book An Empire Nowhere: England, America and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest, Jeffrey Knapp has explored ideas of England in the Renaissance which resonate strongly with the themes of this study. Knapp explores representations of England which foreground its paradisal, Elysian, utopian potential, identifying ‘otherworldliness as an approved national trait’ in this period. 15 Knapp argues that ideas of England’s special ‘otherworldliness’, often represented through idealisations of its landscape, are crucial to a sense of English identity in the sixteenth century. These tropes are later transferred to representations of America, which in the seventeenth century becomes a new imaginative ‘otherworld’ and takes England’s former place. 16 Knapp explores a range of topoi which associate idealised aspects of England’s landscape with notions of national identity. Firstly, the image of the island itself has crucial symbolic potential, representing the nation’s self-reliance, integrity and natural fortiﬁcation. 17 The iconography of the Hilliard Medal (around 1580– 1590) associates the impregnable island with the Virgin Queen, its portrait of the monarch on the obverse and depiction of an island on the reverse asserting a clear symbolic link. 18 The island is set in a wide sea, with distant ships, and a laurel tree (symbol of invincibility) at its centre. The inscription here reads ‘Non ipsa pericula tangunt’ (‘Not even dangers can touch’) while the portrait side reads ‘Ditior in toto non alter circulus orbe’ (‘There is no richer circle in all the world’), pointing again the parallel between Elizabeth’s regal orb and the perfect enclosure of her island territory. The problems of divisions and conﬂicts within the bounds of the island are of course utterly denied by this rhetoric and iconography. While the Hilliard Medal certainly represents a new appropriation of the island image to represent Elizabeth’s strength and authority, parallels with the miniature island depicted on the fourteenth-century Wilton Diptych are clear. 19 The traditional idea of the island as ‘Virgin’s dowry’ has been shifted to align the kingdom with a new earthly (rather than heavenly) Virgin Queen. Knapp also discusses representations of England as Elyisum (or, rather, ‘Elizium’) which exploit traditions of the idealised pastoral English landscape for the purposes of political panegyric. Just as the idealised landscape is derived from Elizabeth’s ideal 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Andrew Hadﬁeld, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge, 1994), p. 155. Hadﬁeld, Literature, Politics and National Identity, p. 163. Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest (Berkeley, 1992), p. 248. Ibid., pp. 256–7. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 63. See Chapter Four, p. 120.

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rule, so even the name ‘Elizium’ is derived from her own. An Epigram by John Weever (1599) is typical: If that Elizium be no fained thing, Whereof the poets wont so much to sing; Then are those fair ﬁelds in this faerie land, Which fair Eliza rules with awful hand. 20

As well as the pun on Eliza – Elizium, this verse also plays with ‘fair’ and ‘faerie’, implying the otherworldliness of England’s beautiful landscape. Knapp’s study is useful in examining the dominance and power of what he terms ‘otherworld’ topoi in relation to England, independent from (and earlier than) the imaginative impact of the exploration and colonisation of America. With an awareness of the medieval precedents and traditions in representations or idealisations of England, the speciﬁc appropriation and manipulation of conventional images to relate to the political context of Elizabeth’s rule is even more apparent. In Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales, Philip Schwyzer offers an alternative reading of the island locus amoenus in Richard II, arguing that this idealised landscape represents a link speciﬁcally with the British past and with the speciﬁcally British heritage celebrated by writers in the English Renaissance. Schwyzer argues that for the ideal of the island as ‘fortress… Against the envy of less happier lands’ we must look back to the ancient Britons, rather than the Anglo-Saxons who were conquered by both Danes and Normans. Schwyzer continues: …for examples of foreign invaders effectively repelled we must turn to the eras of Cassivellanus and King Arthur. Similarly, if England was ever ‘wont to conquer others’, the reference is more probably to Arthur’s fabled conquests in Europe and beyond than to the futile efforts of later English kings to defend their inherited territories in France. Finally, who are the ‘happy breed’ who call this island theirs? Gaunt is not, in all probability, thinking of the racial stock of the Anglo-Saxons, who were held in remarkably low esteem in the Elizabethan era. 21

Uncomfortable references to the Anglo-Saxons in works such as Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland certainly support Schwyzer’s suggestion that an idealised past is more to be associated with British heritage. 22 Yet the speciﬁcity of Schwyzer’s reading of John of Gaunt’s speech as a celebration of the island’s British past is perhaps reductive. It does demonstrate once again, however, how the symbolisms and associations of the island locus amoenus can be re-ﬁgured in changing cultural and 20 21 22

See Knapp, An Empire Nowhere, p. 84. See Also Cooper, Pastoral, pp. 211–213. Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism and Memory, p. 5. For example, the claim by Eudoxus that ‘the English were, at ﬁrst, as stoute and warlike a people as ever the Irish, and yet you see are now brought unto that civillity, that no nation in the world excelleth them in all goodly conversation, and all the studies of knowledge and humanitie’. Edmund Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland. From the ﬁrst printed edition (1633), ed. Andrew Hadﬁeld and Willy Maley (Oxford, 1997), p. 21.

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political contexts. Claire McEachern’s study The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590– 1612 again refers to Gaunt’s speech in Richard II as a seminal formulation of the island locus amoenus and national identity. McEachern argues that, in the Jacobean period, this traditional image of national unity based on natural topography becomes increasingly problematic. Forced, with James’ accession, to acknowledge the cultural (and even geographical) differences inhabiting the British island, the vocabulary of homogeneity and integrity becomes painfully anachronistic, unable any longer to mask internal difference by exporting it. 23

Yet, while differences within the bounds of the island are acknowledged, the natural enclosure of geography still offers a powerful imperative for the ideal of a united kingdom of Britain. These studies of landscape imagery and ideas of England (or Britain) in the Early Modern period reveal strong continuities with medieval traditions, as well as conscious re-appropriations or re-workings and new sets of political and cultural negotiations. Despite the range of continuities which this book has identiﬁed – across medieval texts, genres and traditions as well as on into Early Modern rhetoric and iconography – the locus amoenus can never be regarded as a ﬁxed, consensus vision of England and English identity. Instead, as we have seen, the images of enclosed locus amoenus, ‘other Eden’ or ‘green and pleasant land’ offer a traditional, emotive symbolic vocabulary which can be used to make different versions of England according to the agendas, aspirations and anxieties of different communities. The chronological focus of this book, 700 to 1400, imposes practical margins on a potentially enormous subject. Yet, of course, the images and ideas investigated here continue well beyond such an articiﬁcal limit. Indeed, the continuing ubiquity of these topoi in present-day media, culture and society indicates their ongoing power as images of aspiration or nostalgia and popular formulations of England or Englishness. Just as in the medieval texts examined in this study, exploitation of these tropes today – whether by political party, popular history or regional tourist board – demonstrates the processes of appropriation and the uses of tradition to authorise new visions or ideas of England.

23

McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, p. 194.

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Index

Abbo of Fleury 84–8 poem to Ramsey 84–8 other panegyric 88 Alban, Saint 25–6, 29 Albion 7–8, 130 Alcuin 30–1, 51, 53, 54–5, 92 Bishops, Kings and Saints of York, The 30–1, 92 Conﬂictus Veris et Hiemis 54–5 Elegy to Aachen 53 letter to Charlemagne 51 America 139 Anderson, Benedict 3 Anti-pastoral 119–21 See also Locus amoenus; Parody; Pastoral Antony, Saint 27, 49 Athanasius 27, 49, 50 Avalon 68, 73, 82 Battle of Maldon, The 4 Bede 4, 5, 7–26, 27–30, 50, 73, 91, 115, 130, 132 and n. Ecclesiastical History 4, 5, 7–26, 73, 115, 130, 132 and n. Leningrad MS 9 Life of St Cuthbert 5, 27–30, 51, 91 West Saxon Version of Ecclesiastical History 20 See also Ecclesiastical History, Bede; England; Island; Locus amoenus;

Symbolic landscape Beer, Gillian 1, 16, 19, 91 Benedictine Reform 5, 41, 59–61, 63–5, 65–6 as context for Exeter Book 59–61, 65–6 See also Regularis Concordia; Winchester New Minster Charter; Benedictional of Æthelwold Benedictional of Æthelwold 64–5, 121 n. Beowulf 37–8, 65, 115 Birds and animals 29, 33, 50, 59, 81–2 See also Cuckoo Border writing 6, 99–100, 101, 130–2, 132–4 See also De Laude Cestrie, Lucian; Gildas; Laȝamon; Robert of Gloucester; Wales Bride 15, 122–3 city as 122–3 island as 15 See also Virginity Britannia 7, 8, 15–16, 17, 18 See of, 17 territory of Britons 18 Britons 15, 16, 17, 18, 134, 139–40 See also Britannia; Wales Brut, Laȝamon 6, 131–2, 134–6 colonialism in 135 locus amoenus in 134, 135–6 See also Border writing; Locus amoenus; Parody

154 Carolingian Pastoral 53–5, 60 Cædmon 10, 10 n. ‘Celtic’ literature 36, 48–50 Chaucer 90, 105–6, 112 n. Canterbury Tales 90 Former Age, The 112 n. Chester 98, 99–100, 101, 104, 128, 131 See also Border writing; De Laude Cestrie, Lucian; Lucian; Cities; Urban encomium; Wales Cities 6, 16, 20–1, 29, 59, 90, 91, 92–3, 95, 96, 105–6, 113, 122–3 ‘absent city’ 90, 105–6 as loci amoeni 6, 59, 90–2 as parallel form to island 16, 21, 29 socio-economic development of 92–3 See also Chester; Concordia, Maidstone; De Laude Cestrie, Lucian; Description of London, Fitz Stephen; London; Jerusalem; Rome; Troy; Urban encomium; Vox Clamantis, Gower Civil conﬂict 15, 99–100, 132–3, 136–7 Colonialism 1, 15–16, 17, 133–4, 134–5 Concordia, Maidstone 6, 90, 117–24 anti-pastoral 119–21 context and politics 117–8, 123–4 locus amoenus in 118 ‘triumphal entry’ 121–3 See also Cities; Locus amoenus; London; Maidstone, Richard; Urban encomium; Conner, Patrick 59–61, 66, 75 Cooper, Helen 36, 137 Cuckoo 46, 52 and n., 54 and n., 55, 59, 109 motif in Latin pastoral 52, 54, 55, 109 motif in Old English 46, 52 n., 54 and n., 59 Cultivation 22–3, 24–5, 27, 29–30, 31, 34 See also Land defence; Symbolic landscape Cultural appropriation 9, 65–6, 82 Curtius, Ernst Robert 2, 91

Index Cuthbert See Bede De Laude Cestrie, Lucian 6, 90, 98–105, 128 mirror for Jerusalem 104, 128 mirror for Rome 104, 128 representation of Wales 101, 104, 105 symbolic landscape 98–105 See also Border writing; Chester; Jerusalem; Lucian; Rome; Urban encomium; Wales Description of London, Fitz Stephen 6, 90, 92, 93–8, 128 copying in fourteenth century 128 emphasis on suburbs 95–7, 105 London as heir of Rome 97–8, 128 London as locus amoenus 94–5 London as New Troy 98, 128 use of Virgil 95, 97 See Also Cities; Locus amoenus; London; Rome; Troy, Urban encomium Desert 27 See also Wilderness Downham poem 80–3 birds in 82 enclosure imagery 82 land defence in 82–3 locus amoenus in 82–3 Promised Land imagery in 82 See also Fens; Land defence; Liber Eliensis; locus amoenus; Promised Land Dryhthelm 26 Dunstan 57, 69, 70–2 See also ‘Dunstan’s Classbook’; Glastonbury; Tree; Vita Dunstani Auctore B; Vita Dunstani, William of Malmesbury ‘Dunstan’s Classbook’ 57 See also ‘Orpheus topos’ Durham 92 Ealond (iglond) 20, 41, 65

Index See also Island Early Modern Period, connections with 6, 136–40 Ecclesiastical History, Bede 4, 5, 7–26, 73, 115, 132 and n. idea of the island 16–22, 26, 27 locus amoenus imagery 8, 9, 10, 12, 21, 25–6 sources 7, 12–13, 15, 21–2 symbolic landscape 10, 12, 22–6 Eden 1, 10, 15, 21, 40, 73, 111, 114, 130 England / Britain as 1, 10, 15, 21, 111, 114, 130 See also Locus amoenus; Heaven; Paradise Edgar, King 62–4, 121 n. See also Benedictine Reform; Benedictional of Æthelwold; Winchester New Minster Charter Elizabeth I 137, 138, 139 See also Virginity Ely 5, 68, 74, 79 and n. See also Fens; Island monasteries; Land defence; Liber Eliensis Elysium 89, 138–9 Enclosure 2, 16, 21, 29, 39, 43–4, 46, 82, 90, 91, 92 n., 95, 105, 132 as feature of ideal city 29, 90, 92 n., 131 as feature of Old English locus amoenus 39, 43–4, 46, 92 n. problematised in city descriptions 91, 95, 105 England 1–2, 3–4, 16, 137 conﬂated with Britain 4, 16 See also Britannia; Locus amoenus; Nationhood, theory of Envelope pattern 43–4, 46, 92 and n. Evagrius See Athanasius; Antony Exeter Book 41, 59–61, 66, 75–6 dating 59–61 provenance 75–6 See also Guthlac A; Phoenix, The Felix, Life of St Guthlac 31–5, 45, 49

155 Fens 31–2, 34 and n., 46–7, 74, 78, 82–3 in hagiography 31–2, 34, 46–7 settlement of 34 and n., 74, 78 See also Ely; Land defence Fitz Stephen, William 6, 90, 92, 93–8 See also Description of London, Fitz Stephen ‘Fortunate Isles’ 10 Foundation myths 32 n., 71 and n., 88– 9, 91 Crowland 32 n. Farne 91 Glastonbury 71 and n. Ramsey 88–9 Rome 71 n. Gameson, Richard 60, 75–6 Genesis A 38–41 Gildas 5, 13–22, 131 See also Border writing; Ruin of Britain, Gildas; Wales Glastonbury 5, 68–79 cult of Dunstan 70–1 cult of Guthlac 74–9 in post-Conquest period 68 land defence 74–5, 78–9 provenance of Exeter Book 75–6 provenance of Guthlac A 75 symbolic landscape 69–70, 72–4 See also Avalon; Glastonbury Chronicle; Island monasteries; Land defence; Symbolic landscape Glastonbury Chronicle 71, 72–4 Gower 6, 90, 105–17 ‘absent city’ in 105–6 Confessio Amantis 107 Southwark context 106 Vox Clamantis 6, 90, 105, 108–17 See also Cities; Locus amoenus; London; Urban encomium; Vox Clamantis, Gower Greenness 39, 40, 42, 46, 87 Guthlac See Felix, Life of St Guthlac; Guthlac A; Guthlac B

156 Guthlac A 5, 31, 41, 45–58, 60, 75 as monastic text 51 and n., 52, 58 dating 60 locus amoenus in 45 and n., 46, 50 parallels with Latin pastoral 53–7 patronage in 55–8 provenance 75 sources 45, 48–50 symbolic landscape 47–8 See also Felix, Life of St Guthlac; Fens; Glastonbury; Guthlac B; Locus amoenus Guthlac B 45 Hadﬁeld, Andrew 137–8 Hagiography 25–6, 27–30, 31–4, 45–58 Antony 27 Cuthbert 27–30 Dunstan 70–1 Guthlac 31–4, 45–58 polarised landscape in 27, 28, 30, 48 symbolic landscape in 27–30 See also Dunstan; Felix, Life of St Guthlac; Guthlac A; Life of St Cuthbert, Bede; Polarised landscape; Symbolic Landscape; Hastings, Adrian 3 Havelok the Dane 67 Heaven 17–18, 26, 39–40, 41 n. in Dryhthelm’s vision 26 in Genesis A 39–40 in Old English homilies 41 n. See also Locus amoenus; Paradise Hesperides, Garden of the 82–3 Hilliard Medal 138 Iglond See Ealond (iglond) Ireland 10–12 as Promised Land 12 See also Promised Land Isaiah 56, 113 parody of 113 Island 1, 4, 8, 10, 14–20, 27–8, 32, 34, 41, 44, 51, 65, 120, 132–3, 138, 140

Index and virginity 15, 120, 138 as bride 15 as locus amoenus 8, 10, 14, 34, 132–3 idea of England as 1, 4, 16 image of unity 16–18, 18–20, 140 saintly retreat 27–8, 32, 51 See also Britannia; England; Island monasteries; Locus amoenus Island monasteries 5, 68, 69, 79 See also Ely; Fens; Glastonbury; Land defence; Ramsey; Symbolic landscape Jerusalem 102, 128 See also Chester; Jerusalem, New Jerusalem, New 73, 122 See also Jerusalem; London John Ball’s sermon theme 114 John the Baptist 115, 119–20 Gower as 115 in Maidstone, Concordia 119–20 on Wilton Diptych 120 Kabir, Ananya 39–40, 46 Knapp, Jeffrey 138–9 Lactantius See Phoenix, The Laȝamon 6, 131–2, 134–6 See also Border writing; Brut, Laȝamon; Locus amoenus; Parody Land defence 6, 34 and n., 68, 74–5, 78– 9, 82–3 at Glastonbury 74–5, 78–9 historical evidence 34 and n., 74, 78 in Downham poem 82–3 See also Ely; Fens; Glastonbury; Island monasteries; Ramsey Lavezzo, Kathy, 3–4 Liber Eliensis 79–83 Downham poem 80–3 etymology of Ely 79 and n. sources 79–80 See also Downham poem, Ely Locus amoenus 2, 5, 6, 8, 10, 13, 14, 21,

Index 25–6, 27, 29, 31–4, 36–7, 39–44, 46, 51–2, 58–9, 65–6, 73, 81, 83–4, 85, 88, 89, 90–1, 94–5, 109–13, 118, 132, 133, 134, 135, 140 city as 6, 90–1, 94–5, 109–13, 118 cloister / monastery as 51–2, 69, 73 definition 2 domestic version of 134 enclosure 2, 39, 44, 46, 73, 82, 91, 92, 95 England as 8, 10, 13, 14, 21, 34, 89, 131, 140 heaven as 26 in hagiography 27, 29, 31–4 in Old English poetry 5, 36–7, 39–44, 46, 58–9 parodies of 37, 58–9, 65, 135 See also Eden; Heaven; Island; Paradise; Parody; Pastoral London 90, 91, 92, 93–8, 105–6, 107, 113, 117–18, 122, 123, 128 ‘absent city’ 90, 105–6 as New Jerusalem 122 as New Rome 97–8, 123 as New Troy 97–8, 97 n., 105, 107, 113, 123, 128 quarrel with Richard II 117–18 socio-economic development of 91, 92–3 See also Cities; Jerusalem; Rome; Troy; Urban encomium Lucian 6, 90, 98–105, 128 See also Border writing; Chester; Cities; De Laude Cestrie, Lucian; Urban encomium; Wales Maidstone, Richard 6, 90, 117–24 See also Concordia, Maidstone; Locus amoenus; London; Richard II; Urban encomium Mayr-Harting, Henry 11–12 McEachern, Claire 140 Metrical Chronicle, Robert of Gloucester 6, 132–4, 136 civil conﬂict in 132–3

157 colonialism 133–4 locus amoenus in 132–3 use of Bede 132 and n. See also Border writing; Civil conﬂict; Colonialism; Robert of Gloucester Mirror imagery 85–8, 88–9 Monastic literature 5 See also Abbo of Fleury; Ely; Glastonbury; Glastonbury Chronicle; Guthlac A; Island monasteries; Liber Eliensis; Ramsey; Ramsey Chronicle; Regularis Concordia Nationhood, theory of 3–4, 137 Nebuchadnezzar 116 Neville, Jennifer 36, 47–8 Orchard, Andy 36–7 ‘Orpheus topos’ 55–7 Dracontius 56 ‘Dunstan’s Classbook’ 57 Guthlac A 55, 57 Venantius Fortunatus 56 Oswald of Northumbria 17–18, 26 Otium 8, 28 Ovid 96 n., 112 and n. Panegyric 30, 52–6, 68–9 Paradise 26, 111, 130 See also Eden; Heaven; Locus amoenus Parody 12, 37–8, 58–9, 65, 92, 113, 126–7, 135–6 of Isaiah 113 of locus amoenus 12, 37–8, 58–9, 65, 135–6 of urban encomium 92, 126–7 Pastoral, literary 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 28, 30, 33, 36–8, 39, 52–6, 62–4, 65–6, 72, 82–3, 88, 90, 91, 92, 94–7, 109, 110, 114, 116, 118, 119–20, 128–9, 130, 131, 134, 135, 137–40 anti-pastoral 119–20 in hagiography 28, 33 in Latin panegyric 30, 52–6

158 in monastic texts 72, 82–3, 88 in Old English 36–8, 39, 65–6 in Renaissance 137–40 in representations of cities 90, 91, 92, 94–7, 109, 110, 114, 116, 118, 128–9 See also Locus amoenus; Symbolic landscape Patterson, Lee 127 Pearsall, Derek and Elizabeth Salter 37 Peasants’ Revolt 108, 111–12, 113, 114, 116 Phoenix, The 5, 20, 41–4 envelope pattern in 43–4 and 44 n. island in 44 use of Lactantius 42–3, 44 See also Ealond; Envelope pattern; Locus amoenus Polarised landscapes 22–5, 27, 29–30, 31–3, 50–1, 92, 104 in Bede, Ecclesiastical History 22–5 in city descriptions 92, 104 in hagiography 27, 29–30, 31–3, 50–1 See also Symbolic landscape; Locus amoenus; Wilderness Promised Land 12, 21, 30–1, 82, 130 England as 21, 30–1 in Downham poem 82 Ireland as 12 Psalm 96 22, 35 Ramsey 5, 68, 74, 83–9 Abbo poem to 84–8 as locus amoenus 83–4, 88–9 land defence 74 symbolic landscape 84–8, 89 See also Abbo of Fleury; Fens; Island monasteries; Land defence; Locus amoenus; Ramsey Chronicle Ramsey Chronicle 83–4, 88–9 description of Ramsey 83–4 etymology of Ramsey 84 foundation myth 88–9 Ray, Roger 10–11, 12 Regularis Concordia 4 n., 61, 87 n.

Index Renaissance See Early Modern Period, connections with Retreat, saintly 27–8, 31–4, 45, 48–51 Richard II 110 and n., 111, 120–3 hart emblem 120 in Maidstone, Concordia 120–3 quarrel with London 117–18 See also Concordia, Maidstone; Wilton Diptych Richard II, Shakespeare 1, 120, 136–7, 139 Richard of Devizes 126 and n., 127 Rivers and springs 13, 15, 19, 20, 25, 29 as features of the delightful island 13, 15, 19, 20 brought forth by saints 25, 29 See also Ecclesiastical History, Bede; Ruin of Britain, Gildas Robert of Gloucester 6, 132–4, 136 See also Border writing; Civil conﬂict; Colonialism; Metrical Chronicle, Robert of Gloucester Rome 97–8, 104, 128, 130 Chester as mirror for 104, 128 London as heir of 97–8, 128 See also Cities; De Laude Cestrie, Lucian; London; Description of London, Fitz Stephen Ruin, The 92 Ruin of Britain, Gildas 5, 13–22, 131 bride image 15 idea of the island 15, 16, 18–19, 20 locus amoenus imagery 14–15 source for Bede, Ecclesiastical History 13–14 See also Border writing; Wales Schwyzer, Philip 4, 139–40 Sea 18–20 See also Ecclesiastical History, Bede; Gildas; Island; ‘Silver sea’ Seafarer, The 52 n., 54 n., 58–9, 65 Shakespeare, William See Richard II, Shakespeare

Index Shepherd image 33, 50, 87, 114 Sidney, Philip 137–8 ‘Silver sea’ 1, 120 in Richard II 1 on Wilton Diptych 120 See also Richard II, Shakespeare; Wilton Diptych Sir Gowther 116 Sir Orfeo 116 Spenser, Edmund 139 and n. St Gall 51–2 Irish poem in manuscript 51–2 monastery plan 52 Stockton, Eric 108 Stores of the Cities, The 6, 90, 124–7 inﬂuence of travel writing 126 parody of urban encomium 126–9 plebeian culture 126 Symbolic landscape 10, 15, 22–6, 27–30, 30–1, 31–4, 47–8, 68, 69, 72–4, 79, 82–3, 84–8, 89, 90, 98, 99–101, 102– 4, 108, 111, 114, 117 in hagiography 27–30, 30–1, 31–4 in monastic texts 68, 69, 72–4, 79, 82–3, 84–88, 89 in representations of cities 90, 98, 99– 101, 102–4, 108, 111, 114, 117 See also De Laude Cestrie, Lucian; Glastonbury Chronicle; Guthlac A; Liber Eliensis; Locus amoenus; Pastoral; Polarised landscapes; Ramsey Theodulf 55 Tree 70–2 as image for nation 71 in Dunstan’s dream 70–2 Troy 97–8, 97 n., 105, 107, 113, 123, 128, 134 London as New Troy 97–8, 97 n., 105, 107, 113, 123, 128 Trojan origins of British 134 See also Description of London, Fitz Stephen; London Turville-Petre, Thorlac 67

159 Umbra 33, 50 Urban encomium 6, 91–3, 109, 117, 126–9 deﬁnition 91–2 development 91–3, 109, 117 inﬂuences 93, 126 parody of 92, 126–7 pastoral conventions 92 tensions within 127–9 See also Cities; Concordia, Maidstone; De Laude Cestrie, Lucian; Description of London, Fitz Stephen; Stores of the Cities, The Virgil 32, 54, 95, 96 n., 97, 98 Aeneid 32, 99 Georgics 95, 97 ‘Messianic’ Eclogue 54 Virginity 15, 120, 138 and island image 15, 120, 138 Elizabeth I 138 Virgin Mary 120 See also Bride Vita Dunstani, Auctore B 69 See also Dunstan; Vita Dunstani, William of Malmesbury Vita Dunstani, William of Malmesbury 70–1 See also Dunstan; Vita Dunstani Auctore B Vox Clamantis, Gower 6, 90, 105, 108– 17 ‘absent countryside’ in 112–13 contents 108 locus amoenus in 109–13 wilderness imagery 113–16 See also Gower; London; Peasants’ Revolt Wales 15, 99–100, 101, 104 and n., 105, 131 See also Border writing; Britons; Civil conﬂict; De Laude Cestrie, Lucian; Gildas Wallace, David 90, 127

160 Wallace-Hadrill, John 9–10 Wanderer, The 58 Warren, Michelle 16, 132, 134 Wilderness 22–4, 27, 29, 50, 113–16, 120 in Gower, Vox Clamantis 113–16 in hagiography 22–4, 27, 29, 50 See also Polarised landscapes; Symbolic landscape

Index William of Malmesbury 71–2, 93 and n., 126 n. Gesta Regum Anglorum 93 and n., 126 n. Vita Dunstani 70–1 Wilton Diptych 120, 138 See also Richard II; ‘Silver sea’ Winchester New Minster Charter 61–5 pastoral imagery 62–4 See also Benedictine Reform; Edgar, King