The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance (Studies in Medieval Romance)

The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance

As the point of origin, both real and imagined, of English law and group identity, the Anglo-Saxon past was important in the construction of a post-Conquest English society that was both aware of, and placed great stock in, its Anglo-Saxon heritage; yet its depiction in post-Conquest literature has been very little studied. This book examines a wide range of sources [legal and historiographical as well as literary] in order to reveal a ‘social construction’ of Anglo-Saxon England that held a significant place in the literary and cultural imagination of the post-Conquest English. Using a variety of texts, but the Matter of England romances in particular, the author argues that they show a continued interest in the Anglo-Saxon past, from the localised East Sussex legend of King Alfred that underlies the twelfth-century Proverbs of Alfred, to the institutional interest in the Guy of Warwick narrative exhibited by the community of St Swithun’s Priory in Winchester during the fifteenth century; they are part of a continued cultural remembrance that encompasses chronicles, folk memories, and literature. Dr ROBERT ROUSE teaches in the Department of English, University of Nottingham.

Studies in Medieval Romance ISSN 1479–9308

Series Editors Corinne Saunders Roger Dalrymple

This series aims to provide a forum for critical studies of the medieval romance, a genre that plays a crucial role in literary history, reflects medieval secular concerns, and raises complex questions regarding medieval reading and writing, social structures, human relationships, and the psyche. The scope of the series extends from the early Middle Ages into the Renaissance period, and although its main focus is on English literature, comparative studies are welcomed. Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to one of the addresses given below; all submissions will receive prompt and informed consideration. Dr Corinne Saunders, Department of English, University of Durham, Durham, DH1 3AY Boydell & Brewer Limited, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 3DF

Already published Volume I: The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance, Carol F. Heffernan, 2003 Volume II: Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England, edited by Corinne Saunders, 2005

The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance

ROBERT ALLEN ROUSE

D. S. BREWER

© Robert Allen Rouse 2005 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Robert Allen Rouse to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published 2005 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge

ISBN 1 84384 041 3

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydell.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data Rouse, Robert Allen, 1971– The idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English romance / Robert Allen Rouse. p. cm. – (Studies in medieval romance, ISSN 1479–9308) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–84384–041–3 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Romances, English – History and criticism. 2. English literature – Middle English, 1100–1500 – History and criticism. 3. Great Britain – History – Anglo-Saxon period, 449–1066 – Historiography. 4. Literature and history – England – History – To 1500. 5. Anglo-Saxons in literature. 6. England – In literature. I. Title. II. Series. PR327.R68 2005 821'.033093242 – dc22 2004022269

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wiltshire

Contents Acknowledgments

vii

1

Anglo-Saxonism: The Remembrance and Re-Imagining of the Anglo-Saxon Past

1

2

Remembering Alfred in the Twelfth Century

11

3

The Romance of the Anglo-Saxon Past

52

4

The Romance of English Identity

70

5

In his time were gode lawes: Romance and the English Legal Past

93

6

Literary Terrains and Textual Landscapes: The Importance of the Anglo-Saxon Past in Late-Medieval Winchester

134

Conclusion

157

Bibliography

161

Index

177

For

Neil and Bernice and Karen

‘. . . love doth hold my hand, and makes me write’.

Acknowledgments

Many different people have influenced the writing of this book – some knowingly and others not so – and it is here that I finally have the chance to thank them for their help, support, friendship, and scholarly fellowship. This book began its life as far from medieval England, in a geographical sense, as it is possible to travel. As a graduate student working at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, I began to formulate some of the central questions that this book addresses: how were the Anglo-Saxons remembered after the conquest, and why? In these initial investigations I was encouraged by two of the most generous and inspiring of teachers, Stephanie Hollis and Michael Wright. It was within Auckland’s community of medieval scholars that I developed my passion for our subject. The majority of the research for the book was a product of my doctoral studies at the University of Bristol, in which I was fortunate enough to receive the generous support of a University of Bristol Scholarship and an ORS award. My doctoral supervisor, Ad Putter, must be thanked for his profound and far-reaching influence upon the study, without which this would have been a very different kind of book. The Department of English and the Centre for Medieval Studies at Bristol provided me with both research facilities and a welcoming community of medieval scholars in which to write. My thanks must go to Elizabeth Archibald, John Burrow, Myra Stokes, and the many other Bristol medievalists who contributed to my wonderful and profitable time there. Of especial note is Cory Rushton, who has taken on the various roles of colleague, scholarly collaborator, travel companion, devil’s advocate, and most importantly, friend. Various sections of this book have stemmed from a number of papers delivered at the Medieval Romance Conferences (Durham 2002 and University College Dublin 2004), the British Branch of the International Arthurian Society (Bristol 2001), the International Medieval Conference at Kalamazoo (2001 and 2002), and the International Medieval Congress at Leeds (2001 and 2003). My thanks are due to the many scholars who posed probing questions and provided profitable leads during these conferences. All writers rely heavily upon their relationship with their publishers, and I owe a great debt to Caroline Palmer, Editorial Director of Boydell & Brewer, who has encouraged me in the writing of this book since a very early stage in its conception. Also to be thanked is Corinne J. Saunders in her role as general editor of the series in which this book finds itself, Studies in Medieval Romance. To the many dear and valued friends that I have made among the medivii

Acknowledgments evalist community I owe my thanks for the way in which they have welcomed me into the community of medieval scholars, both in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Finally, I owe the greatest debt of all to Karen Higginson, for whose selfless patience and love I remain eternally grateful.

viii

Anglo-Saxonism

1 Anglo-Saxonism: The Remembrance and Re-Imagining of the Anglo-Saxon Past

T

HE Norman Conquest brought about the assimilation of England into the burgeoning Norman Empire and the destruction of a ruling elite, producing what some scholars have viewed as a cultural watershed. John Gillingham has written that ‘the devastating experience of 1066 had meant that the correspondence between a kingdom and a people, a community of tradition, custom, law and descent . . . no longer applied in England’.1 The extent to which this ‘community of tradition, custom, law and descent’ was displaced under Norman rule is a much-debated issue, but the conquest is generally agreed to have been the end of what we now call Anglo-Saxon England. This is not to say, however, that Anglo-Saxon England ceased to be vital as a cultural construct in post-conquest England. The remembrance and re-imagining of Anglo-Saxon England in the post-conquest period is part of an ongoing cultural process that began from the first moment that William stood among the slain Anglo-Saxon nobles after the battle of Hastings. The focus of this study is the remembrance of Anglo-Saxon England in the literature of post-conquest England and its appropriation for various social and ideological purposes. In the post-conquest representation of the pre-conquest English past the Anglo-Saxon era is characterised by two distinct periods: the period of the arrival of the pagan Saxons,2 and the period of the Christianised Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. This study is concerned with the representation of the later period. Central to my approach to this process of remembrance are two concepts 1

2

John Gillingham, ‘Henry of Huntingdon and the Twelfth-Century Revival of the English Nation’, ed. Simon Forde, Lesley Johnson and Alan V. Murray, Leeds Texts and Monographs, 14 (Leeds: Leeds Studies in English, 1995), pp. 75–102 (p. 128). The post-conquest representation of the invading pagan Saxons in such texts as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Brittaniae and La
amon’s Brut has been the subject of much scholarly interest, which has examined the religious and onomastic transformation of the Saxons into the English. For a discussion of this debate, see I. J. Kirby, ‘Angles and Saxons in La
amon’s Brut’, Studia Neophilologica, 36 (1964), 51–62; N. Wright, ‘Angles and Saxons in La
amon’s Brut: A Reassessment’, in The Text and Tradition of La amon’s ‘Brut’, ed. F. Le Saux (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 171–82; and Carole Weinberg, ‘Victor and Victim: A View of the Anglo-Saxon Past in La
amon’s Brut’, in Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 22–38.

1

The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance that call for further explanation: Anglo-Saxonism, and the idea of Anglo-Saxon England. Allen Frantzen and John Niles define Anglo-Saxonism as both a cultural process and the critical methodology utilised to understand and describe this process: The term Anglo-Saxonism is used here to denote the process through which a self-conscious national and racial identity first came into being among the early peoples of the region that we now call England and how, over time, through both scholarly and popular promptings, that identity was transformed into an originary myth available to a wide range of political and social interests.3

Frantzen and Niles trace the use of the term ‘Anglo-Saxonism’ from its first appearance in scholarly discourse in 1981, when Reginald Horsman used the term to discuss American racialism in the form of mid-nineteenth-century assertions of the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon ‘race’.4 The use of AngloSaxonism in a medieval context was developed in Hugh A. MacDougall’s Racial Myth in English History.5 MacDougall, in discussing the competition between the rival Trojan and Teutonic origin myths in Britain, defined Anglo-Saxonism as a discourse of power, in which the Anglo-Saxon past was utilised to represent the political and social needs of various communities in post-conquest England. These initial publications were followed over the next ten years by a number of important studies. Carl T. Berkhout and Milton McC. Gatch’s Anglo-Saxon Scholarship: The First Three Centuries, Clare A. Simmons’ Reversing the Conquest, and Allen Frantzen’s influential Desire for Origins have all made important contributions to the further development of this nascent field.6 However, up until the early 1990s, this scholarly interest had been primarily concentrated upon the discussion of early modern and Victorian Anglo-Saxonism. This situation changed in 1997 with the publication of the most influential contribution to the field thus far. Allen Frantzen and John Niles, in their Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, presented a collection of papers that illustrate a number of differing approaches to the understanding of Anglo-Saxonism. Stemming from a conference on AngloSaxonism held at Berkeley in 1994, this volume marked the beginning of a 3

4 5 6

Allen Frantzen and John D. Niles, ‘Anglo-Saxonism and Medievalism’, in Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, ed. Allen Frantzen and John D. Niles (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), pp. 1–14 (p. 1). Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). Hugh A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1982). Carl T. Berkhout and Milton McC. Gatch (eds), Anglo-Saxon Scholarship: The First Three Centuries (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982); Clare A. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Allen Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990).

2

Anglo-Saxonism serious intention to formalise the study of Anglo-Saxon England as a cultural construction. The studies contained in this volume extend the definition of Anglo-Saxonism to include the generation of ‘a self-conscious national and racial identity’ amongst the Anglo-Saxons themselves, and established the framework for a continuous history of Anglo-Saxon England as a concept – as an idea. This approach to the understanding of the medieval past, in terms of how that past has been historically and culturally constructed, is part of the wider critical mode of medievalism. Frantzen and Niles construct their notion of Anglo-Saxonism by means of a comparison with the discipline of medievalism. Medievalism, concerns itself with the study of the reception of the Middle Ages in the post-medieval period.7 In their discussion of medievalism, Frantzen and Niles make certain criticisms in regard to the treatment of both Anglo-Saxon studies and Anglo-Saxonists themselves by the dominant scholars working in the area.8 They consider the field of medievalism to be remiss in the lack of critical attention that it has paid to Anglo-Saxon England: The virtual exclusion of Anglo-Saxon England from . . . these volumes . . . deserves notice as evidence of one aspect of medievalism itself: namely, the struggle of scholars to allow competing voices from the past to be heard. The conception of the Middle Ages as something that begins in about the year 1200 . . . is something that Anglo-Saxonists have long had to contend with, seeing that Anglo-Saxon England is clearly part of whatever we mean by Medieval England.9

In the context of their criticism of the temporal range of medievalism, Frantzen and Niles attempt to define Anglo-Saxonism as a field of research that accommodates a study of later representations of Anglo-Saxon England in parallel to medievalism. Niles argues that one key tenet of this Anglo-Saxonism is the observation that Anglo-Saxon England is, in his view, a rhetorical trope. When most scholars think of the past, they imagine a concrete thing, a real historical past about which facts can be determined through painstaking historical research.10 But in reality, what they are in search of is the logos of the past,

7

Studies in Medievalism, initially edited by Leslie J. Workman, and more recently by T. A. Shippey, has been chiefly responsible for establishing and defining the field of medievalism since its inception in 1979. 8 Frantzen and Niles, p. 10. 9 Ibid., p. 11. This essentially post-conquest construction of the medieval (especially in regard to England) is paralleled by the construction of the medieval English past outside of the academy. The ‘marginal’ nature of Anglo-Saxon studies in both the academy and in popular conceptions of English history is discussed by T. A. Shippey in ‘The Undeveloped Image: Anglo-Saxon in Popular Consciousness from Turner to Tolkien’, in Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons, pp. 215–36. 10 John D. Niles, ‘Appropriations: A Concept of Culture’, in Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, ed. Allen Frantzen and John D. Niles (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), pp. 202–28 (p. 208).

3

The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance real events that can be imagined as having produced the historical artefacts and textual sources that remain as primary historical evidence. Niles argues, however, that a more useful way of considering the past is to see it for what it truly is, as a creation of language. Some readers, myself included, may well consider this post-structuralist view of the nature of history (and of the text) to be extreme in its emphasis on the ‘textuality’ of history. By downplaying the ‘sense of the real’ that is at the centre of positivist criticism, Niles is risking the marginalisation of Anglo-Saxonism as a discipline. A more useful approach is to acknowledge that both positivist and deconstructionist paradigms have valid points to make in terms of understanding how texts, and indeed the past, work. 11 Niles goes on to argue that the realisation that Anglo-Saxon England is a construction of language – an idea, not a thing – makes it possible to begin to come to terms with the true power of the past. Some ideas, owing to their flexible applicability, are more enduring than mere things, and this allows us to examine how a particular idea has developed over the centuries since the Anglo-Saxon period ended. Niles observes that: It is this rhetorical trope to which I would like to call attention, for recognising it as a trope leads to the discovery that as far as present-day people are concerned, Anglo-Saxon England is nothing other than what it has been perceived to be by historically grounded human beings, from the time of the Anglo-Saxons to the present moment. It is an idea, not a thing.12

Niles is at pains to emphasise that by calling Anglo-Saxon England an idea, he is in no way denying its influence: ‘the power of ideas – their reality, in a sense that medieval philosophy understood – should never be underestimated’.13 Ideas, however, are extremely mutable. In the last fifty years our understanding – our idea – of Anglo-Saxon England has been shaped and reshaped by numerous discoveries, scholarly arguments and reinterpreted texts. In a similar fashion, notions of what Anglo-Saxon England was, and what it stood for, have changed continuously over the past thousand years. These changes, or as Niles terms them, appropriations, are part of a cultural process that continues to this day. That Anglo-Saxon England is essentially an idea is a useful concept, and one that can be reconciled with a positivist understanding of the past: ideas are, after all, most often anchored in a sense of a physical reality. Texts are ultimately based upon ‘the “real” [that] can be said to exist independently of our representations of it’.14 The fascination is in the construction of the past within the text, and the processes and discourses that are encoded within this

11 For a survey of the constructionalist vs deconstructionalist approaches to history, see Alan

Munslow, Deconstructing History (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 18–26. 12 Niles, p. 209. 13 Ibid., p. 209. 14 Patrick Joyce, ‘History and Postmodernism’, Past and Present, 133 (1991), 204–9 (p. 208).

4

Anglo-Saxonism construction. This process is the attraction for Niles: ‘If Anglo-Saxon England is not out there but in here, as a feature of consciousness, then the process by which an idea of such magnitude came into being is worth knowing about.’15 The realisation that there is such a process at work in the construction of the Anglo-Saxon past is an important one in attempting to understand how perceptions of the past are produced. Niles describes this process of continual appropriation thus: Could a full history of Anglo-Saxonism be written, it would read as the story of a series of appropriations of greater or lesser magnitude. In such a narrative, what would be of significance would not be Anglo-Saxon England ‘as it was’, whatever that lost object of desire may have been. Instead, it would be the idea of Anglo-Saxon England, as that idea had been formed, transformed, consigned to oblivion, or reconceived anew during each successive era since the time of the Anglo-Saxons themselves. Like the idea of Greece, which has been reconstituted again and again to serve various ideological interests, the idea of early England has survived triumphantly because, like any symbolic construction, it has been able to convey forcefully a wide range of social meanings. 16

This concept of a continual refashioning of what Anglo-Saxon England represents lies at the heart of my approach. Through an examination of the representation of Anglo-Saxon England in a selection of Middle English literary texts, I demonstrate how the idea of Anglo-Saxon England was constructed and perceived by post-conquest society. Where my approach differs from that of Frantzen and Niles, however, is in the definition of appropriation. For the past is not simply created by language in an entirely subjective manner, as Niles contends: rather, the past is constructed on the basis of memories, places, events, and people that have left an imprint upon the reality of the present. That names and places remain relatively unchanged in post-conquest England suggests a more complex process of appropriation than the one suggested by Niles. The nature of this process, and the importance of names, places, and traditions, are some of the issues that I will examine. Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity does not attempt to cover the field of Anglo-Saxonism in a systematic way. It is necessarily a selective volume, whose stated goal is to ‘stimulate thought in certain finite directions, not to address every relevant issue’.17 These directions exclude a number of areas of interest that may be considered to be important to the study of Anglo-Saxonism. The study of King Alfred’s medieval reputation, for example, has been left largely untouched,18 as is the significant develop-

15 16 17 18

Niles, p. 209. Ibid., p. 208. Frantzen and Niles, p. 10. Simon Keynes has sought to redress this neglect by providing an invaluable overview of Alfred’s

5

The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance ment of Anglo-Saxonism in the British colonial sphere during the nineteenth century. There is furthermore a surprising silence regarding the Middle English period. Until recently, Christine Franzen’s The Tremulous Hand of Worcester: A Study of Old English in the Thirteenth Century stood as one of the few studies to have considered the role of the Anglo-Saxon past in Middle English literary culture.19 Franzen examines the revival in the use of Old English manuscripts under Bishop Wulfstan in the twelfth century, and attempts to come to terms with the reasons for this revival. Although not specifically a study of the cultural reasons underlying this expression of interest in the Anglo-Saxon past, Franzen is aware of the implications of this phenomenon, and highlights the importance of further research in this area.20 A more recent volume of essays has further addressed the lack of attention paid to the Middle English period. Stemming from a conference held at the University of Manchester in 1995, Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century represents a substantial addition to the corpus of studies of Anglo-Saxonism in post-conquest England. Donald Scragg introduces the essays by noting that ‘Although there has been much scholarly interest in recent decades in the agendas of antiquarians, linguists, and political and ecclesiastical historians writing about this period, those of creative artists have been largely ignored.’21 This collection seeks to address this lack, including twelve essays that range from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries. The lack of studies of Anglo-Saxonism in the post-conquest Middle Ages is also addressed by the collection, despite Scragg’s contention that ‘few of the authors of the Middle Ages had an interest in the Anglo-Saxon period’.22 Four of the twelve essays address the question of the remembrance of the Anglo-Saxon past within Middle English literary culture: Carole Weinberg examines La
amon’s view of the Anglo-Saxons, Sarah Mitchell addresses the remembrance of the pre-conquest past in Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle, Jill Frederick discusses the connection between Anglo-Saxon saints and post-conquest English identity in the South English Legendary, and John Frankis considers the development of the legend of King Ælle from Bede to Chaucer.23 However, despite these studies, there remains much to be said about the

19 20

21 22 23

posthumous career (‘The Cult of King Alfred the Great’, Anglo-Saxon England, 28 (1999), 225–356). Christine Franzen, The Tremulous Hand of Worcester: A Study of Old English in the Thirteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). The complex situation surrounding the continued use of Old English in the post-conquest period is addressed in Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century, ed. Mary Swan and Elaine M. Treharne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Donald Scragg, ‘Introduction – The Anglo-Saxons: Fact and Fiction’, in Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century, pp. 1–21 (p. 1). Ibid., p. 7. Weinberg, ‘Victor and Victim’, pp. 22–38; Sarah Mitchell, ‘Kings, Constitution and Crisis: “Robert of Gloucester” and the Anglo-Saxon Remedy’, pp. 39–56; Jill Frederick, ‘The South English Legendary: Anglo-Saxon Saints and National Identity’, pp. 57–73; John Frankis, ‘King

6

Anglo-Saxonism remembrance of the Anglo-Saxon past in medieval England. Frantzen and Niles note the relative lack of scholarship dealing with the Middle English period. Like Scragg, they conjecture that the explanation for this lies in the fact that later-medieval England was not interested in the Anglo-Saxons: Prior to the Renaissance, the Anglo-Saxon period had rested in relative obscurity thanks in part to the influence of one historian with important Norman ties, Geoffrey of Monmouth. In his Historia Regum Brittaniae Geoffrey systematically distorted and effaced Anglo-Saxon history, characterizing the English as little more than a band of cutthroats and intruders who had interrupted the providential flow of history from the ancient British past to a new glorious age that was soon to unfold . . . But by the time of the Renaissance, new versions of the past had begun to paint the Anglo-Saxons in a better light.24

We may wonder, however, whether the Anglo-Saxon past was indeed depicted in these terms during the period between the conquest and the Renaissance rediscovery of the Anglo-Saxon past. Was the Galfridian image of this ‘band of cutthroats and intruders’ as dominant as Frantzen and Niles suggest, or were there other, more sympathetic Anglo-Saxon pasts being remembered during these years? What Frantzen and Niles have described, in effect, is a cultural Dark Age in the history of the depiction of the Anglo-Saxon past. As medievalists we are well used to dealing with conceptions and misconceptions of notional dark ages. We are also, and I think rightly so, suspicious of claims of cultural interruption and caesurae. An important concern of this study is to question the extent to which the Anglo-Saxon past was condemned to ‘relative obscurity’ during the Middle English period. Many different aspects of Anglo-Saxon England were appropriated in the centuries after that conquest. Certain aspects of this cultural appropriation, such as the continuing currency of the Anglo-Saxon saints’ cults25 and the influence of the Anglo-Saxon law codes on Norman and Angevin lawmaking,26 have received a good deal of attention in recent years. The focus of this study of post-conquest Anglo-Saxonism will be towards literary texts. Many of these texts exist on the margins of the medieval canon, and as

Ælle and the Conversion of the English: The Development of a Legend from Bede to Chaucer’, pp. 74–92. 24 Frantzen and Niles, p. 7. 25 The issue of the continued currency of Anglo-Saxon saints’ cults in the post-conquest period has seen much attention over the past few decades. For one such recent treatment, see Paul Anthony Hayward, ‘Translation-Narratives in Post-Conquest Hagiography and English Resistance to the Norman Conquest’, Anglo-Norman Studies, 21 (1999), 67–93. 26 Patrick Wormald discusses the influence of Old English law-codes on the development of English law in his The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, 2 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999).

7

The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance such, may allow insights into the many and varied constructions of the past that were present, often simultaneously, in medieval England. It might seem, to the student of Middle English literature, that Donald Scragg’s assertion that ‘few of the authors of the Middle Ages had an interest in the Anglo-Saxon period’ is indeed true. The major canonical Middle English authors do seem much more preoccupied with classical or Arthurian pasts than with the pre-conquest past of their own island. However, when we look beyond these authors into the realms of more popular literature of the period, we find an extensive and enduring interest in the deeds and actions of the figures of England’s Anglo-Saxon past. Chapter 2 introduces a number of the themes that will be important in this book. A study of the cultural and ideological context of the Proverbs of Alfred, this chapter examines the way in which this early Middle English collection of sententiae reconstructs the Anglo-Saxon world of King Alfred. Often overlooked as a mere collection of proverbial wisdom, the text can also be regarded as an expression of the social ideology of a re-imagined Anglo-Saxon society. Furthermore, the Proverbs is located in a highly specific geographical context, raising questions regarding the connection between places and narratives that will prove to be important in understanding the way that the Anglo-Saxon past is materialised in Middle English literary culture. The text’s explicit connection with Seaford in East Sussex illuminates not only the development of the text, but also provides a concrete social and geographical context for its origin and contemporary reception. The importance of the personal names found in the Proverbs elicits a contextual reading that is suggestive of the text’s contemporary relevance to the late-twelfth-century milieu of its production. The use of memorable historical places and names to construct the Anglo-Saxon past is a literary strategy that is also utilised by the Matter of England romances of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. These romances, set within a less concrete construction of the pre-conquest English past, are expressions of a later-medieval Anglo-Saxonism that stands at a further remove from the past of the Proverbs, although they make use of many of the same modes of representation. Chapter 3 examines the function of the Matter of England romances as historical narratives, and investigates how these narratives operated alongside the dominant medieval historiographical mode of the chronicle. The integration of romances such as Guy of Warwick into the chronicle record is revealing of how their contemporary audiences understood these representations of the Anglo-Saxon past. As in the Proverbs, geographic and toponymic details play an important role in these texts. The heroes of the Matter of England romances are intimately associated with place: Guy with Warwick, Beues with Hamtoun, and Havelock with Lincoln (and the Danelaw). The relationship between places and the past, both within the text and without it, becomes an important theme in this study. As Diane Speed has 8

Anglo-Saxonism pointed out, the land not only encodes history, but also holds an intimate connection with identity.27 Chapter 4 examines how the Matter of England romances construct a ‘sense of Englishness’ that takes account of the complicated array of regional and supra-national group identities that were present in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. That this Englishness is being constructed in relation to the Anglo-Saxon past is an intriguing element of this process, and is suggestive of the role that this past may have played in the creation of Englishness. Chapter 5 further develops the connection between the Anglo-Saxon period and law that is identified in the chapter on the Proverbs of Alfred. The association between pre-conquest England and English law is found in numerous sources: law-codes, chronicles, and romances. This chapter examines the use of law within the Matter of England romances in the context of what Anthony Musson has identified as the widespread reputation that Anglo-Saxon England had during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as a ‘golden age’ of English law.28 Law seems to be an important concern of these romances, a point that is made by Susan Crane when she notes ‘the preoccupation with law and custom that characterizes the romances of English heroes’.29 Beginning with a re-reading of Havelok the Dane through a comparative legal lens, the importance of the gode lawes (Havelok the Dane, 28)30 and the corresponding national grith (Havelok the Dane, 61) are analysed in the context of both the romance itself and of the wider reputation of the Anglo-Saxon law. The importance of the correlation between law and security is examined further in a contexualisation of the motif of the safety of the king’s roads. The study of law within the romances also leads back to notions of Englishness: law is one of four categories of ethnic difference (the others being descent, customs, and language) outlined by the ninth-century canonist Regino of Prüm.31 The reliance upon law marks out England, and the English, from their continental and insular neighbours: Havelok constructs an English legal identity against that of the Danes, while in Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild we see England constructed against Wales, traditionally seen as a legal vacuum. Englishness is further defined in these romances through identification with certain legal institutions and characteristics, in particular the oath and trial by combat. The final chapter (Chapter 6) returns once more to the theme of place, and discusses how the Guy of Warwick narrative became an important part of the

27 Diane Speed, ‘The Construction of the Nation in Medieval Romance’, in Readings in Medieval

English Romance, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 135–57 (p. 147). 28 Anthony Musson, ‘Appealing to the Past: Perceptions of Law in Late-Medieval England’, in his

Expectations of the Law in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2001), pp. 165–79 (p. 178). 29 Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle-English Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 87. 30 Havelok the Dane, ed. G. V. Smithers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987). 31 Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), p. 197.

9

The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance urban mythology and geography of Winchester in the late Middle Ages. Drawing on Paul Strohm’s work regarding the narrative nature of urban geographies, the chapter examines the importance of the Guy legend in the construction of Winchester’s material and cultural heritage. An association with the Guy legend seems to have been of particular importance to the community of St Swithun’s in Winchester, who took a determined interest in the memorialisation of the narrative and the preservation of Guy’s arms and armour. This book seeks to examine some of the many and varied constructions of the Anglo-Saxon past that were present in Middle English literary culture, while at the same time emphasising the connections and continuities that exist between these texts. In doing so, this study makes no claims to provide a comprehensive survey of Middle English images of the Anglo-Saxon past, but seeks to identify some of the more significant cultural discourses and literary strategies that are involved in the process of remembering the pre-conquest past. I hope to show that such cultural relicts as names, places, and legal traditions provide a demonstrable engagement with the ‘sense of the real’. The process of re-imagining Anglo-Saxon England is thus more complex than Niles implies: it is shaped not merely by the needs of the present, but also by the persistence of the past, in landscape, place-names, and folk memories. Rather than existing as arbitrarily constructed individual ‘appropriations’, texts such as The Proverbs of Alfred and the Matter of England romances are more usefully understood as part of a wider imaginative remembrance of the Anglo-Saxon period.

10

Remembering Alfred in the Twelfth Century

2 Remembering Alfred in the Twelfth Century

T

HE dominant textual mode of history in England during the first half of the twelfth century was that of the monastic chronicle.1 Chroniclers such as William of Malmesbury and John of Worcester constructed a view of the Anglo-Saxon past that played an important social and political function by representing England as a once-virtuous kingdom that had fallen from God’s grace, and which had been healed by Henry I’s marriage to Edith (renamed Matilda after the marriage), niece of Edgar Atheling and grand-niece of Edward the Confessor.2 Henry’s restoration of the ancient line of Wessex lent a weight of genealogical legitimacy to his rule.3 The justification of the Conquest seems to have been one of the major reasons for the Anglo-Norman interest in the pre-Conquest past during the first half of the twelfth century. The politically informed Anglo-Saxon past that had been produced by the chroniclers became for future historians a model of the Anglo-Saxon past. However, this version of the pre-Conquest past was one that was soon challenged. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, whether intended as a parody or not,4 and despite the condemnation and criticism that his text received from other chroniclers, had a dramatic effect upon the conception of the English past after it appeared. From the time of King Stephen, England’s Anglo-Saxon past suffered in comparison with the Arthurian myth. Anxious both to unite his kingdom under a single historical myth and to provide his nation with Trojan descent, Henry II was an active partici1

2

3

4

On the twelfth-century chroniclers and their reconstruction of the Anglo-Saxon past, see James Campbell, ‘Some Twelfth-Century Views of the Anglo-Saxon Past’, in his Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (London: Hambledon, 1986), pp. 209–28. Matilda, daughter of King Malcolm of Scotland and his queen Margaret, sister of Edgar Aetheling, was a woman ‘descended from the stock of King Alfred’ (Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. Marjorie Chibnall, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969–80), V, pp. 298–9). Orderic saw this marriage back into the Anglo-Saxon royal line as further legitimising Henry’s rule. Thea Summerfield observes that ‘by his marriage to a woman whose “ancestry stretched back to the West Saxon Cerdic” (Marjorie Chibnall, The Empress Matilda: Queen Consort, Queen Mother and Lady of the English (London: Blackwell, 1991), p. 7) Henry I . . . established a connection by blood with the old English royal house, and consolidated his own position and that of all future rulers’ (The Matter of Kings’ Lives (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), p. 181). Valerie Flint (among others) has argued for a parodic reading of Geoffrey’s Historia Regum (‘The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth: Parody and its Purpose’, Speculum, 54.3 (1979), 447–68).

11

The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance pant in this refashioning of the past. His close association with the discovery of Arthur’s grave at Glastonbury (thus reminding the Welsh that their Arthur was indeed safely dead and buried), and his naming of his first son Arthur (as an English Rex Futurus), lent a royal seal of approval to an English Arthurian history.5 This, then, was the literary state of the Anglo-Saxon past in the mid-twelfth century: a debate that had seen shifts in royal support for differing versions of the past as political expediency demanded. However, the remembrance of the past was not restricted exclusively to monastic literati and royal mythographers. At the same time that the Anglo-Norman monastic chroniclers were producing their Latin histories, the pre-conquest past was being remembered and reinvented in the memory of the English themselves. In the twelfth-century Proverbs of Alfred, we find an example of what James Campbell is referring to when he observes that ‘clearly, by early in Stephen’s reign interest in Anglo-Saxon history extended beyond monasteries, beyond the church and beyond the wish to preserve the memory of a lost world’.6 Seth Lerer, writing of the continuity of English literature after the Conquest, comments that texts such as the Proverbs ‘may be appreciated as creative attempts to reinvent the modes of Old English writing and imagine anew the world of Anglo-Saxon life’.7 The depiction of Anglo-Saxon society found within the poem, while not perhaps reliant upon its author’s imagination to such an extent as Lerer suggests, represents a useful example of how the pre-conquest period was remembered in English during the twelfth century. Ostensibly set in the time of King Alfred of Wessex, the Proverbs dates from the third quarter of the twelfth century.8 It is the nature of the text’s twelfth-century imagining of the Anglo-Saxon past that forms the central concern of this chapter. As one of the earliest surviving Middle English texts, the Proverbs has attracted attention from antiquarians, philologists, and historical linguists. The majority of these studies have been of a linguistic nature, analysing the dialect and historical development of the language within the manuscripts of the text. In this chapter I wish to read the Proverbs in the light of their involvement in the cultural and literary process of remembering and re-creating Anglo-Saxon England. The first five strophes of the text set the scene for the poem, locating it temporally within Alfred’s reign and geographically in the Sussex village of Seaford.9 In the main body of the poem (strophes 6–29) we find the proverbs that give the text its name. The

5

6 7 8 9

James P. Carley, ‘Arthur in English History’, in The Arthur of the English: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval English Life and Literature, ed. W. R. J. Barron (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001), pp. 47–57 (p. 48). Campbell, p. 211. Seth Lerer, ‘Old English and its Afterlife’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 7–34 (p. 10). Olaf Arngart, The Proverbs of Alfred, 2 vols (Lund: Gleerup, 1942–55), II, pp. 55–7. Following André Crépin’s terminology, I have chosen to describe the individual sections of the poem as strophes.

12

Remembering Alfred in the Twelfth Century majority of past studies have largely passed over this material, pausing only to link particular proverbs to their sources in the Bible or other works of sententiae. These wise sayings lie at the heart of the text, and play a central role in the way it constructs its representation of the Anglo-Saxon past. The Proverbs is actively engaged in constructing an image of a past society – one that embodies the social order and mores of an ideal Christian kingdom. In its construction of an image of Alfred’s time, the Proverbs appropriates the Anglo-Saxon past to represent such an ideal society. The Proverbs is also of interest as a twelfth-century cultural artefact. Through an examination of the literary, historical, and geographical context of the poem, I hope to demonstrate that the Proverbs have much to say about the cultural environment of the late twelfth century. One aspect of the text’s literary provenance is the controversial question of to what extent the text is connected with the historical King Alfred. The scholarly consensus for much of the last century has been decidedly negative regarding this proposition, but more recently there have been renewed suggestions of thematic links between the Proverbs and some of Alfred’s own writings that were known in the twelfth century. Finally, there is the question of how the Proverbs contributed to Alfred’s wider reputation during the Middle Ages. A number of texts, including the Owl and the Nightingale, make mention of Alfred’s reputation as a speaker of wisdom, and the Proverbs seem to have an important inter-textual role within this tradition.

Manuscripts and Scholarship of the Proverbs The Proverbs of Alfred survives in four manuscripts, all of which date from the thirteenth century. The oldest manuscript, Cotton Galba A. XIX (MS C), consists of three surviving folios in which are preserved some 100 or so lines of the text.10 Three extant transcripts provide further evidence of the text as it existed in C: the James, Wanley, and Spelman transcripts. The three other manuscripts of Proverbs are Maidstone Museum A.13 (MS M), Trinity College, Cambridge, B.14.39 (MS T), and Jesus College, Oxford, 29 (MS J).11 The first modern editor of the Proverbs was Thomas Wright, whose edition of the Trinity manuscript text was published in 1841, and between Wright’s edition and that of Olaf Arngart, the Proverbs were re-edited at least six times.12 In 1942 and 1955 Arngart published the two volumes of his 10 These three folios are all that remain of the manuscript that was damaged in the Cotton library fire

of 1731. 11 For a more detailed discussion of the surviving manuscripts of the Proverbs, see Arngart, The

Proverbs of Alfred, I, pp. 11–64. 12 Reliquiae Antiquae, ed. Thomas Wright (London, 1841), pp. 170–88; J. M. Kemble, The Dialogue

of Salomon and Saturn (London: Ælfric Society, 1848); Richard Morris, An Old English Miscellany, EETS OS 49 (London: Trübner, 1872); William Skeat, The Proverbs of Alfred (Oxford: Clarendon, 1907); Edv. Borgström, The Proverbs of Alfred, Re-edited from the Manuscripts with an

13

The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance edition of The Proverbs of Alfred. These two volumes, along with his pamphlet on the sources of the Proverbs, comprise the most substantial study of the text in the last sixty years.13 Arngart’s study of the text concentrates upon the textual variation between the four manuscripts, the language and dialect of the text, and the metrical properties of the poem. This was followed by the publication of a critical edition and translation in 1978.14 Arngart’s first volume of research into the Proverbs consists of a detailed comparative analysis of the extant manuscripts, in order to establish their relationship with each other, and to endeavour to determine the original readings and dialect of the manuscript archetype. The second volume, published after a hiatus of some thirteen years due to the Second World War, is an edition of the four extant manuscripts of the Proverbs.15 While Arngart’s study of the Proverbs remains the authoritative study of the linguistic nature and the genealogy of the text, for the most part it leaves aside questions of the literary and historical context of the poem. It does summarise the themes of the text, but only to the extent of providing a descriptive synopsis of the poem.16 Arngart’s study of the Proverbs represents the culmination of the previous hundred years’ interest in the text. Over the past forty years relatively few articles have addressed the Proverbs. The most recent literary study of the text, and indeed the first to address the text as a cultural record of the twelfth century, is André Crépin’s ‘Mentalités anglaises au temps d’Henri II Plantagenêt d’après les Proverbs of Alfred’.17 Crépin addresses five main issues in his study: (i) the metrical and structural nature of the text; (ii) the basis of the text’s attribution to King Alfred; (iii) the intemporalité, or timelessness, of the gnomic genre; (iv) the thematic content of the text; and (v) the likelihood of the Proverbs being connected to the historical Alfred. While much of Crépin’s article necessarily reiterates previous scholarship, it breaks new critical ground by attempting a contextual reading of the Proverbs in terms of its mid-twelfth-century origin. However, while Crépin highlights the critical possibilities of such a reading, it leaves many of the more interesting avenues of analysis unexplored.

13 14 15

16 17

Introduction, Notes and Glossary (Lund: H. Ohlsson, 1908); A. Brandl and O. Zippel, Mittelenglische Sprach- und Literaturproben, 2nd edn (Berlin: Weidmann, 1927); Joseph Hall, Selections from Early Middle English 1130–1250 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1920). For a more complete account of the editions of the Proverbs, see Arngart, The Proverbs of Alfred, II, pp. 64–8. Olaf Arngart, The Distichs of Cato and the Proverbs of Alfred (Lund: Gleerup, 1952). The Proverbs of Alfred: An Emended Text, ed. and trans. Olaf Arngart (Lund: Gleerup, 1978): this is the edition that I will be quoting from in this chapter. The Proverbs has also been edited in a number of anthologies of Middle English literature, most recently by Elaine Treharne, who edits the text of Jesus College, Oxford MS 29 (MS J) (Old and Middle English: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 358–68). Arngart, The Proverbs of Alfred, II, pp. 1–11. André Crépin, ‘Mentalités anglaises au temps d’Henri II Plantagenêt d’après les Proverbs of Alfred’, Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale, 37 (1994), 49–60.

14

Remembering Alfred in the Twelfth Century

Language, Structure and Provenance The text of the Proverbs consists of two discrete sections, of differing styles and dates of composition. The first and more substantial section (strophes 1–29) seems to have been composed around the middle of the twelfth century, between 1150 and 1165.18 This section is itself in two distinct parts: the first part (strophes 1 – 5) presents King Alfred presiding over a gathering of the chief men of his kingdom with a view to teaching them how they should live their lives and govern his realm.19 In these opening strophes, Alfred lectures the assembled dignitaries on the importance of learning, piety, honest judicial practice, and the maintenance of the social order. In the second part of the first section (strophes 6–29) Alfred goes on to recount a series of proverbial statements that illustrate the moral code by which he wishes his society to be governed. The second section, a collection of advice presented in the form of parental instruction, follows the first section in two of the four extant manuscripts, and seems to have been composed near the Fens around 1200.20 This additional section is found in both the Cotton and Trinity manuscripts of the Proverbs and seems to represent a separate narrative tradition: for this reason it is excluded from Arngart’s critical edition of the Proverbs. The fusion of these two discrete sections has implications for the history of the Proverbs as a whole, and I will discuss these when addressing the issue of the transmission of the text later in this chapter. The nature of the poetic style of the Proverbs has been a matter for debate among scholars. Arngart sums up the previous work of Schipper, Gropp, Skeat, Borgström, and others thus: The metre is a modification of the advanced type of O.E. alliterative line showing greater freedom of construction and alliteration, extended use of rhyme within the alliterative long line and, in lines which rhyme only but do not alliterate or which use alliteration merely for ornament, a transition to the rhymed couplet. Metrically the closest parallel is Layamon’s Brut.21

Donka Minkova, however, in her recent reassessment of the metre of the Proverbs, questions the notion that the metre found in the text is an ‘advanced type of O.E. alliterative line’: First, no alliterative poem from before the Conquest shows a distribution of alliterating shifts that even vaguely resembles the picture emerging from the 18 The Proverbs of Alfred: An Emended Text, p. 5. 19 The meeting of the King’s Council, known as the witenagemot, was an established part of

Anglo-Saxon royal procedure (Barbara Yorke, ‘Council, King’s’, in The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Michael Lapidge et al. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 124–5). 20 The Proverbs of Alfred: An Emended Text, p. 23. 21 Arngart, The Proverbs of Alfred, II, p. 225.

15

The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance Proverbs. Second, some of the patterns [of alliteration] found here are unattested in Old English. . . . This is not classical Old English verse. 22

Minkova questions the position of the Proverbs in relation to the history of the development of alliterative metre in Middle English, and argues that the Proverbs can most properly be seen to represent a metrical form that has much in common with the development of prosodic English in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. 23 One of the more intriguing aspects of the Proverbs is that the text positions Alfred’s council in a precise and identifiable location: At Seuorde/ seten þeines manie (1–2).24 From a range of proposed locations, the current consensus is that the Seuorde of the poem is the village of Seaford on the East Sussex coast.25 This identification, which is made by Arngart on the grounds of the rules of alliterative metre, is further supported by the dialectical features of the language. Elements of the vocabulary locate the text within Sussex, for example the inclusion of the word cliure (OE clifor), which in this spelling occurs only in the Proverbs and the Owl and the Nightingale, and is

22 Donka Minkova, ‘The Credibility of Pseudo-Alfred: Prosodic Insights into Post-Conquest

Mongrel Meter’, Modern Philology, 94 (1996), 427–54 (p. 433). 23 Minkova agrees broadly with J. P. Oakden’s conclusion that ‘The Proverbs of Alfred are thus

metrically very interesting [as] they represent a stage beyond that reached by The Departing Soul’s Address to the Body. Rhyme is struggling with alliteration, but the latter still holds the upper hand’ (J. P. Oakden, Alliterative Poetry in Middle English: the Dialectical and Metrical Survey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1930), p. 142). 24 The Proverbs of Alfred: An Emended Text, p. 8. 25 The setting for Alfred’s council is Seuorde in Jesus College MS (J); Siforde in Trinity MS (T); and Sifforde in Cotton MS (C). Arngart discusses the identification of this name, and concludes that the Jesus College manuscript (J) reading of Seuorde is the authentic one. Kemble was the first editor to identify Seuorde with Seaford in East Sussex, suggesting that the Proverbs represent ‘a collection of wise sayings which that prince delivered to his Witena gemot at Seaford’ (p. 255). This identification gained general acceptance with later editors such as Skeat. In 1931 Helen P. South proposed an alternative identification of the setting of the poem, arguing that Sifforde (MS C) was the authentic reading (The Proverbs of Alfred Studied in the Light of the Recently Discovered Maidstone Manuscript (New York: New York University Press, 1931)). She devoted the second chapter of her study of the poem to the identification of Sifforde with the town of Shefford in Berkshire (pp. 25–42). South’s methodology involved an extensive comparative examination of the forms of place-names that are found in historical records. Based on the number of name forms associated with Shefford that correspond to C’s reading of Sifforde, she concluded that this was the authentic reading of the setting of the poem. However, Arngart has demonstrated that South’s argument is unsound as it neglects two important considerations: alliteration and dialect. Arngart asserts that the place-name must alliterate with sete, and this therefore precludes the possibility of the original place-name being Shefford. The rules for Old English alliterative verse preclude [sh] from alliterating with any other sound than [sh]. While this rule was not always strictly observed in the transition from Old English to Middle English, it is followed strictly in the Proverbs. Arngart comments that ‘it is scarcely likely that the poet should have departed from the rule in the opening line, while observing it elsewhere’ (The Proverbs of Alfred, I, p. 18). Arngart notes that Shefford’s derivation from OE Sceapford would produce a [sh] sound, while the archetype reading must have had an initial [s] sound to alliterate with sete. If the C reading Sifforde were to relate to Shefford, it must be a twelfth-century method of spelling that replaces an sc- with an s-. However, Arngart demonstrates that [sh] is usually represented by <sc-> in C. Therefore, unless the case of Sifforde is an exception to this common practice observed within C, the connection between Sifforde and Shefford must be rejected.

16

Remembering Alfred in the Twelfth Century present in the dialects of Surrey and Sussex.26 On the basis of the linguistic nature of the manuscripts, Arngart concludes: On the whole then, as far as it can be ascertained, the original dialect of the Proverbs supports the localization of the poem indicated by the mention of Seuorde, Seaford, in the first line.27

Intriguingly, there also exists a historical connection between Alfred and Seaford, which was first pointed out by William Stephenson. The Vita Alfredi states that when Asser first arrived in England he met the king at a royal manor in Sussex, which was called Dene.28 Stephenson identifies this Dene with the villages of East and West Dene – two villages that lie close to Seaford. He argues that it is plausible to imagine that the author of the Proverbs may have known of the connection between Alfred and Dene and therefore placed the scene of Alfred’s speech in a location that had been associated with Alfred in his Vita. However, Stephenson’s explanation of the use of Seaford is problematic. We have no evidence that the author of the Proverbs had read the Vita, and it seems unlikely given the apparent lack of widespread knowledge of the Vita in the medieval period.29 Could the author of the Proverbs have known of this royal connection through a secondary source? While much of the historical detail from the Vita is present in twelfth-century historiographical works such as Simeon of Durham’s Historia Regum, William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum, and the Chronicon ex Chronicis of John of Worcester, the biographical details concerning Asser and Dene are not present in these later texts. In view of the seemingly limited knowledge of the ‘Asser meeting Alfred at Dene’ episode, it seems unlikely that this would have provided the basis for the relationship between Alfred and Seaford that we find expressed in the Proverbs. A less problematic explanation for the setting of the Proverbs at Seaford would be to ascribe the connection to a local oral tradition that linked Alfred to the area. Memories of Alfred meeting nearby with his court may have been preserved through local tradition and legend for the three hundred years between his reign and the production of the Proverbs. Such a tradition may have had its origins in the royal estates near Seaford. One such estate, Sutton,

26 Arngart discusses the dialectical lexicon of the text in greater detail (The Proverbs of Alfred, II, pp.

62ff). 27 Arngart, The Proverbs of Alfred, II, p. 61. 28 ‘Ibique illum in villa regia, quae dicitur Dene, primitus vidi’ (Asser’s Life of King Alfred, ed. W. H.

Stephenson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1904), p. 64). 29 Antonia Gransden notes that only one medieval writer, Gerald of Wales, mentions Asser’s Vita

Alfredi, and even this example is problematic. Although the influence of the Vita in later texts, such as the Historia Regum attributed to Simeon of Durham, attests that it was known, the extent of this knowledge is uncertain. For a more detailed account of this debate see Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England I: c. 550–c. 1307 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 47.

17

The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance is located within the Seaford parish.30 Located closer to Seaford than East Dene, Alfred’s possession of Sutton strengthens the possibility of a local tradition that associated Alfred with the area. Whatever the rationale may have been for setting the Proverbs in Seaford, it is of interest that the text situates itself in a location that has links to the historical Alfred. I will return to this geographical link later in this chapter when discussing the importance of the setting in an analysis of the possible origin of the text.

The Proverbs as a Representation of Alfred’s England The Proverbs of Alfred depicts Alfred advising his people on how to live their lives and on the tenets of his rule. Despite its pre-conquest milieu, the text is of course a twelfth-century representation of the Anglo-Saxon past. As a text that reconstructs the past, questions arise as to the nature of this representation, and as to the strategies through which this representation is constructed. The Proverbs are comprised of the wise advice with which Alfred instructs the assembled people, and by extension the English community that they represent.31 Inherent in any community is the existence of a social contract: a corpus of rules, rights, and responsibilities that govern how the members of a society interact with each other. The sententiae that make up the bulk of the poem can be understood as representing the social contract of the society that is constructed within the Proverbs. A question worth considering here is whether the image of society represented in the Proverbs is in fact an image of the Anglo-Saxon past at all, or whether it is an ahistorical utopian society (or perhaps it is both). While the relationship between the past as constructed in the text and any real Anglo-Saxon past is at best arguable, the text explicitly identifies the poem as being set within Alfred’s reign. The first five strophes of the Proverbs depict Alfred as delineating the rights and responsibilities of the king and his subjects in a lawful Christian state. As Crépin comments, ‘Ces strophes résument les circonstances du recueil, puis donnent les principes et les structures de la société politique.’32 The political structure and principles of the text construct an imagined society in which the meaning of the sententious proverbs can be understood. The society that is represented in the Proverbs is that of a lost golden age. Often useful as a trope for contrasting current societal woes with the virtues of the past, the motif of a past golden age is found throughout Western literature, and was in no way unfamiliar to the Anglo-Saxons themselves. The use of the heroic past as a golden age as

30 George Miles Cooper, ‘On the Ancient Refectory House in the Parish of West Dean’, Sussex

Archaeological Collections, 3 (1850), 13–22 (p. 21). 31 In my study of the construction of the Anglo-Saxon past in the Proverbs I will be making use of

Arngart’s critical edition: The Proverbs of Alfred: An Emended Text. 32 Crépin, p. 51.

18

Remembering Alfred in the Twelfth Century evidenced in Beowulf and other Old English poetry is commented upon by James Earl: ‘It is not exactly a reconstruction of earlier history, but a narrative representation of contemporary social concerns, energies, and ideals, projected onto the past.’33 The Proverbs seem to operate in a similar manner. The Anglo-Saxons themselves made use of more immediate pasts. King Alfred, in the prologue to his translation of Gregory the Great’s Cura Pastoralis, constructs the past in a similar manner: Ond ðe cyðan hate ðæt me com swiðe oft on gemynd, hwelce wiotan iu wæron giond Angelcynn, ægðer ge godcundra hada ge woruldcundra; ond hu gesæliglica tida ða wæron giond Angelcynn; ond hu ða kyningas ðe ðone onwald hæfdon ðæs folces Gode ond his ærendwrecum hiersumedon; ond hie ægðer ge hiora sibbe ge hiora siodu ge hiora onwald innanbordes gehioldan, ond eac ut hiora eðel rymdon. 34 And I would have it known that very often it has come to my mind what men of learning there were formerly throughout England, both in religious and secular orders; and how there were happy times then throughout England; and how the kings, who had authority over this people, obeyed God and his messengers; and how they maintained their peace, morality and authority at home but also extended their territory outside.

Where Alfred looked backwards to the glory, peace, and stability of the golden age of Bede, the Proverbs look back to Alfred’s time in a similar search for a past that was more stable and enlightened than the present. The notion of continual societal decline, in accordance with the outline of Christian theological history, makes the use of the golden age motif a common one in texts of social commentary such as the Proverbs. The first strophe of the Proverbs establishes the scene in which Alfred teaches the beliefs of this Anglo-Saxon golden age to his people. The formal setting of the poem establishes the auctoritas of the Proverbs.35 This is especially important in a collection of proverbs, with the value of the maxims being relative to the reputation of their originator. 36 At Seuorde;37 seten þeines manie. Fele biscopes; and fele boc-lerede. Erles prude; and cnihtes egeleche. þer was erl Alfrich; 33 James W. Earl, Thinking About Beowulf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 34. 34 Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson, A Guide to Old English (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp.

204–5, translated by Keynes and Lapidge, p. 124. 35 Crépin, p. 51. 36 The strophe form here follows that used in Arngart’s critical edition, The Proverbs of Alfred: An

Emended Text. 37 The semicolon stands in place of Arngart’s symbol for the punctus elevatus.

19

The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance of þare la
e swiðe wis. And ec Alfred; engle herde. Engle derling; on engelonde he was king. Hem he gan leren; swo
e mu
en iheren. Hu hi here lif; leden scolden. Alfred he was on Englelond; an king wel swiðe strong. He was king and clerc; wel he luuede Godes werc. He was wis on his word; and war on his werke. He was þe wiseste man; þat was on Englelonde an.38

Alfred addresses a meeting of the chief men of his kingdom for the purpose of teaching them how they should conduct their lives and instructing them as to how they should govern. The composition of this gathering includes both religious and civil leaders: Fele biscopes/ and fele boc-lerede/ Erles prude/ and cnihtes egeleche. Singled out for attention within this meeting are erl Alfrich and the king himself. I will return to the intriguing figure of Alfrich later in this chapter, but for the moment it is of interest that he seems to occupy a position of importance second only here to Alfred. The last sixteen lines of the strophe consist of a portrait of Alfred himself. He is described as being both king and clerc, a construction that is reinforced in strophes two and three by the exhortations that a king must be educated and able to instruct in both temporal and spiritual matters. This dual role of the king is noted by Crépin who compares it to Wulfstan’s use of Cristes gespeliga, Christ’s preacher, to describe the king in a version of the Institutes of Polity.39 Alfred is described as an exemplary example of the mixed life: He was king and clerc/ wel he luuede Godes werc/ He was wis on his word/ and war on his werke/ He was þe wiseste man/ þat was on Englelonde an. The king’s actions (werke) and words are equally important. His ability in both word and action, and his devotion to the work of God, result in his wisdom and renown.40 Establishing the instructional role of the king is also vital 38 The Proverbs of Alfred: An Emended Text, p. 8, strophe 1. Arngart translates thus: ‘At Seaford sat

at council many thanes, many bishops and many book-learned men, proud earls and valiant knights. There were earl Alfrich, very learned in the law, and also Alfred, the protector and darling of the English; he was king of England. He taught them, as you may hear, how they were to lead their lives. Alfred was a very strong king of England, he was king and scholar, he loved well godly works. He was wise in his words and prudent in action. He was one [of] the wisest man [men] that was in England’ (The Proverbs of Alfred: An Emended Text, p. 24). 39 Crépin, p. 57. 40 The alliterative collocation between ‘words’ and ‘works’ is evident in Old English poetry, as seen

20

Remembering Alfred in the Twelfth Century within the Proverbs: Alfred is presented as a teacher. He teaches his gathered nobles not only how they should govern their lands, but also how they should lead their lives: Hem he gan leren/ swo e mu en iheren/ Hu hi here lif/ leden scolden. In this manner the governance of one’s own life is presented as a pre-requisite for social governance. In the second strophe we first hear the voice of Alfred. He asks his people to listen to him, so that he may instruct them to live in a manner that will benefit them in this world and also prepare them for the next. Þus cwað Alfred; engle frofre. ‘Wolde
e nu, leden; lesten eure louerde. He ou wolde wissien; wisliche þinges. Hu
e mihten werldes; wurðscipes welden. And ec eure saule; samnen to Criste.’ Wise weren þe cweðen; þe saide þe king Alfred. ‘Mildeliche ic munie; mine leue frend. Arme and edie; lede liui
inde. Þat
e alle adreden; ure drihten Crist. Luuien hine and likien; for he is loured of lif. He is one god; ouer alle godnesse. He is one gleaw; ouer alle gleawnesse. He is one blisse; ouer alle bliðnesse. He is one manne; mildest maister. He is one folce; fader and frofre. He is one rihtwis; and swo riche king. Þat him ne scal ben wane; noht of his wille.

in Beowulf, lines 287b–9b: ‘Æghwæþres sceal/ scearp scyldwiga/ gescad witan/ worda ond worca/ se þe wel þenceð’ (Beowulf, ed. George Jack (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), p. 45). For a more complete analysis of alliterative collocations in early Middle English alliterative verse, see Oakden.

21

The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance Hwo hine her on werlde; wurðien ðencheþ.’41

The dual nature of Alfred’s teachings is emphasised here. Success, both worldly and spiritual, is promised to those who listen and follow his advice. This duality represents the need for a wise man to live well in this world, but to also remember to prepare his soul for the next. The repetition of the devotional formula He is one god . . . He is one gleaw . . . He is one blisse . . . reinforces Christ’s primacy in the hierarchical social order of the text. Ultimately, as the final four lines tell us, all worldly prosperity depends upon the worship of Christ. Strophes two through five continue the discussion of the roles of the different members of this hierarchical society. Crépin points out that ‘La deuxième strophe pose la pierre angulaire: le Christ-roi, de qui dépend toute prospérité. Les strophes 3, 4, et 5 examinent par ordre hiérarchique les devoirs – du roi (str. 3), des comtes et barons (str. 4), des chevaliers (str. 5).’42 The primacy of Christ as the cornerstone, la pierre angulaire, of the society constructed in the Proverbs reinforces the image of the earthly king, Alfred, as being modelled on the construction of Christ in the text. Christ too is fader and frofre to his people, as Alfred is engle frofre.43 The second highest position in the hierarchy is that of the king, subject only to Christ. In this third strophe, Alfred defines how a king should rule: Þus cwað Alfred; engle frofre. ‘Ne mai non riht king; ben under Criste seluen. Bute
if he be; boc-ilered. And he his writes; wel icunne. 41 The Proverbs of Alfred: An Emended Text, p. 8. ‘Thus quoth Alfred, the joy of the English, “If you

now, my people, would listen to your lord, he would show you truly how you could enjoy worldly honour and also gather your souls to Christ.” Wise were the sayings that King Alfred pronounced. “Mildly I admonish my dear friends, poor and rich, anybody alive, that you all fear our Lord Christ, love him and cherish him, for he is the lord of life. He alone is good beyond all goodness; he alone is wise beyond all wisdom; he alone is bliss beyond all joy; he alone is the most gracious lord of mankind; he alone is the father and the comforter of peoples; he alone is righteous and so mighty a king that he shall lack nothing of his desire whoever thinks to worship him here in this world” ’ (The Proverbs of Alfred: An Emended Text, p. 24). 42 Crépin, p. 51. 43 Crépin highlights the use of the term Engle frofre (comforter to the English) in the text, and makes the comparison with Beowulf line 14a, where Scyld is given folce to frofre (p. 57). Bishop Wulfstan also uses this terminology in his Institutes of Polity, where he designates the king as folces frofer (K. Jost, Wulfstanstudien, Swiss Studies in English, 23 (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1950), p. 40). It is problematic to assess the significance of this term in the Proverbs. Whether it is used to recall the Anglo-Saxon period, or whether it was a part of the Middle English dialect in which the text is written, is difficult to determine. However, it is a term that has a demonstrable association with earlier constructions of Anglo-Saxon kingship, suggesting continuity in the construction of kingship in English.

22

Remembering Alfred in the Twelfth Century And he cunne lettres; locien himseluen. Hu he scule his lond; la
elice helden.’44

Firstly, for a king to be judged riht, that is lawful, he must rule under Christ. In the hierarchical order, all virtue flows from above, and a king must rule in his rightful place. A just Christian king is also defined as one who is boc-ilered: he must be literate in order that he can read and understand his own laws, and thereby rule his kingdom through and within the constraints of the law. In order to rule la elice, the king must not merely be aware of the laws of the kingdom, but also be able to read them for himself, so that he is aware of how, and under what legal constraints, he should rule. These laws are both the laws of man and the laws of Christ. 45 This concern with the just government of the kingdom under the law is continued in strophe four. The text continues down the hierarchical scale with a discussion of the roles of the erl and the eþeling. Þus cwað Alfred. ‘þan erl and þan eþeling; iberþ under þe king. þat lond to leden; mid la
elice deden. And þe clerc and þe cniht; demen euenliche riht. For after þat man soweþ; al swilch he scal mowen. And efrilces mannes dom; To his o
ere cherreþ.’46

Here we see once more that the construction of a just Christian society relies to a large extent upon the enforcement of just laws. The erl and the eþeling rule the land under the king and according to the law. The appeal for knights and clerks to be judged equally may have been contentious. Is this an appeal

44 The Proverbs of Alfred: An Emended Text, pp. 9–10. ‘Thus quoth Alfred, the joy of the English,

“There can be no right king under Christ himself unless he is book learned, and he can well know his documents, and he can inspect records for himself how he shall rule his land lawfully” ’ (ibid., p. 24). 45 The classic exposition of the nature of medieval law is that of St Thomas Aquinas, who divides law into three types: divine or eternal law, that is the will of God; natural law, to which all reasonable men should assent; and human, or positive, law, which is that legislated by mankind. For a further discussion of the divisions of law in medieval legal thought, see John A. Alford, ‘Literature and Law in Medieval England’, PMLA, 92 (1977), 941–51 (p. 942). This concern for the lawful rule of a rightful king is addressed further in Chapter 5. 46 The Proverbs of Alfred: An Emended Text, p. 10. ‘Thus quoth Alfred, “It belongs to the earl and the atheling to govern the land under the king with lawful deeds and judge both the cleric and the knight impartially. For according as a man sows even so shall he reap, and every man’s judgement comes back to his own door” ’ (ibid., p. 24).

23

The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance for the clergy to be subject to the same law as knights, rather than canon law – one of the issues that come to the fore in Henry II’s dispute with Thomas Beckett – or is it a more general call for equal treatment of knight and clerk? Without having a clear idea of the origin of the text it is difficult to determine, although the tone of the Proverbs, and its probable clerical authorship, makes it unlikely that the text would advocate a removal of the clerical privilege to be judged under church law. Considering the admonition regarding the behaviour of knights in strophe five, it would seem that this is a call from the clergy for equity of judgment. The demand for equal treatment of þe clerc and þe cniht under the law is given moral impetus by the reference to the biblical proverb For after þat man soweþ/ al swilch he scal mowen.47 This agrarian proverb introduces the lowest of the ranks of the social hierarchy: the peasant. Together with the cniht and the clerc, these three groups comprise the Three Orders of society.48 After the introduction of the idea of the Three Orders at the end of the fourth strophe, it might be expected that the text would proceed to discuss the roles and responsibilities of each of the orders within a Christian society. In its tripartite construction of an ideal society, the Proverbs draws upon a structural scheme commonly linked with the ideal Christian society. The relationship of workers, fighters, and preachers is constructed in the Proverbs in terms of what each estate must do in society. Þus cwað Alfred. ‘þan cnihte bihoueð; kenliche on to fone. Uor to werien þat lond; wiþ hunger and wiþ heregong. Þat þe chirce habbe griþ; and þe churl be in friþ. Hise sedes to sowen; his medes to mowen. Hise plo
es to driuen; to use alre biliuen. Þis is þes cnihtes la
e; to locen þat hit wel fare.’49

47 Arngart attributes this proverb to Galatians vi.8, ‘Quae enim seminaverit homo, haec et metet’ (The

Proverbs of Alfred, II, p. 155). 48 For one major treatment of the idea of the Three Orders in the Middle Ages, see Georges Duby, The

Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Patrick Wormald also discusses the influence of the Three Orders on the development of English law in The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, 2 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). 49 The Proverbs of Alfred: An Emended Text, p. 10. ‘Thus quoth Alfred, “It behoves the knight boldly to go to work to guard the land from famine and from invasion, so that the church may have peace, and the churl be protected to sow his corn, to mow his meadows, to drive his ploughs for the sustenance of us all. This is the knight’s duty to look to the welfare of the country” ’ (ibid., p. 25).

24

Remembering Alfred in the Twelfth Century While the basis for the ordering of society within the Proverbs is that of the Three Orders, this does not seem to be the main emphasis of the text. Rather, we see in strophes one to four a concern primarily with the role of the ruling structure of king, erl, and eþeling. Only in strophe five do we find something that resembles the conventional medieval notion of the Three Orders. Here the social roles of the bellatores, oratores, and laboratores are defined in a manner that emphasises the functional nature of each group. Of particular concern is the proper role of the knight within society. The knight must protect the church, so that it may perform its vocation in peace, and the churl, so that he can grow food to provide for society’s needs; the strophe ends with a plea that the cnihtes la e be sufficient to compel him to keep the peace. The first five sections of the Proverbs present an ideal conception of a Christian society. The role of the king is constructed as both a pedagogue and a ruler, and thus is imagined as the font of both religious and social instruction in the poem. This instruction is to be based in both the laws of man and in the laws of God. The laws of the land are to be recorded in law books so that the enforcement of these laws can be carried out in a just and equitable manner. Those charged with enforcing these laws, both the king and the judges, must be conversant with the laws of the kingdom, and the proper rule of law will then allow the members of the three estates to fulfil their functions within the ideal Christian society. Here we have an image of the Anglo-Saxon past, or more correctly, an Anglo-Saxon past – an image of an Anglo-Saxon past that was imagined by the author of the text as embodying the social structure and regulation that was seen as central to the operating of a peaceful Christian society. However, aside from the setting, is there anything in the text that distinguishes this society from the everyday reality that would have been familiar to a twelfth-century audience? On the surface there seems little in the construction of social order in the Proverbs that differs markedly from what would have been familiar to a mid-twelfth-century audience. The most marked difference that might have been recognised by a reader contemporary with the text is that between the ideal presented in the Proverbs and the reality evident in the history of twelfth-century England. The alterity of the depiction of social order found within the text seems to owe more to the difference between the reality and the ideal of society than between the twelfth-century present and the Anglo-Saxon past.

Alfred’s Social Ideology Carolyne Larrington, in her study of Old English and Norse wisdom literature, comments that ‘the absolute value of the wisdom remains unchanged: the distilled lessons of experience constitute a uniting ideology’.50 In contrast 50 Carolyne Larrington, A Store of Common Sense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 224.

25

The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance to the long-held view of proverb collections as random collections of folk wisdom, Larrington understands such collections as texts that represent social ideology: it is a reading that is significant in understanding the way in which the Proverbs constructs its image of the Anglo-Saxon past. The sententiae in strophes 6–29 construct the moral framework – the uniting creed – of the society that Alfred envisages and addresses, and are therefore of integral importance in constructing the text’s image of the Anglo-Saxon past. Important here is how the sententious sayings in these strophes contribute to the text’s image of an Anglo-Saxon society: how do these sententiae operate within the text to create the moral structure of this imagined Alfredian society? The concerns that are raised by the wise sayings, and the remedies and advice that are offered, act to produce an image of the type of society that is being advocated by the text. 51 How should a man live his life? The Proverbs provides a body of advice that instructs the reader on how to live well in this Alfredian society. Initially, there is the realisation that life is not always easy, especially when a man is young and establishing his place in the world: Scole nefre ungman/ iven him to euele/ Þeh him his wise/ wel ne likie. A man must not despair, but must struggle against adversity, For God mai iven/ god after euele/ Wele after wrakesiþ. This notion of continuing to try to live a honourable and virtuous life despite your circumstances is continued in strophe seven: Strong hit is to rowen/ a en þe seflode/ Swo hit is to swinken/ a en uniselþe. To struggle against adversity is to spend one’s youth well, and to provide wealth and success for one’s later years. However, with this wealth comes the responsibility to use it well. The principal theme of the Proverbs is expressed in strophe 12: wealth is transitory and should be utilised for the best possible ends. Here we find a restatement of Alfred’s desire to teach his people: Lesteþ e me, lede/ and ic eu wille leren/ Wit and wisdom/ þat alle wele ouergoþ. While worldly wealth will pass away, wisdom will make a man secure in both this life and the next. The transitory nature of wealth is further explored in strophes 9 and 11. In strophe 9 the people are advised not to place great pride in their wealth, as it is only through God’s gift that they enjoy this favour: Ahte nis non eldre istren/ ac hit is Godes lone/ Þanne hit is his wille / þarof we sculen wenden. Strophe 11 continues this theme by criticising the pursuit of wealth and by warning that it is not worth incurring God’s disfavour: Mani man for his gold/ haueþ Godes

51 While the sententiae have attracted much comment from their various editors, there has been little

consideration of their function within the text: rather, the primary interest has been in identifying the sources of the maxims. Arngart has extensively examined the sources of the proverbs in his study The Distichs of Cato and the Proverbs of Alfred. Here Arngart concludes that the majority of the proverbs are drawn from the Distichs of Cato, a well-known collection of Latin proverbs that was in common use as a medieval school text for much of the Middle Ages. While I will briefly discuss the sources of a number of proverbs when they become pertinent to my argument, the sources of the individual proverbs are not the focus of this study. Rather, I see the aphorisms as a significant and integral part of the text’s construction of the Anglo-Saxon past.

26

Remembering Alfred in the Twelfth Century erre/ And for his seluer/ his saule he forleseð. In order to avoid this fate, Alfred teaches that a man should accept his lot in life, whether he is rich or poor. While wealth is not seen as the ultimate goal of life, it does have its use within the society of the Proverbs. Riches that are used unwisely are of little use to a man: Wiðuten wisdome/ is wele wel unwurð. Rather, as strophe 6 tells us, wealth should be used to gain friendship: . . . he for his wele/ nefre þe wurþere/ Bute he min of fremðe/ frend iwerche. It is not enough, however, simply to use your wealth and generosity to make friends and allies. It is also important to maintain these friendships. In strophe 25 we find the warning: Ac if þu hauest a frend todai/ and tomore en driuest hine awei/ þanne best tu one/ also þu er were/ And þanne is þi fe forloren/ and þi frend boþen. Patronage is important in both the gaining and the maintaining of friends and allies, and seen as part of the social economy that ties social groups together. The last four strophes of the Proverbs give advice on what a man should do with his riches as he grows older. In strophe 26 we find a warning against the folly of the hoarding of wealth: Ne gin þu nefre þi lif/ to narwlice leden/ Ne þine faires/ to faste helden / For þer ehte is ihed/ þer is armþe inoh. Strophe 27 adds that an aged man should share out his wealth to his friends before he dies, as they will remember him and keep his memory alive, while his heirs will soon forget him. However, not all members of a society find themselves with great wealth to utilise, wisely or otherwise. The text also addresses the question of what a man should do if he finds himself without wealth. Strophe 28 advises on the best course of action for an aged man: if þu in þin elde/ best welþes bideled . . . Þanne þonce þu þi louerd/ of alle hise lone/ And of þin o en lif/ and of þe daies liht. Life, then, is not about wealth, but about being thankful to God for whatever life delivers to you. Worldly wealth is to be viewed as a God-given gift, and the proper role of wealth in society is to create social harmony through the construction and maintenance of networks of friendship and alliance. It is not an end in itself, merely a tool to be made use of while in this life. The ephemeral nature of wealth is reinforced in the final strophe, where Alfred summarises his advice by stating: Werldes welþe/ to wurmes scal wurþen/ And elches cinnes madmes/ to mixe sculen imelten/ And ure lif/ scal litel iliesten. If wealth is to be used well to ensure the stability of society, speech is also something to be governed carefully. As the text tells us, speech is as important as action. Alfred is praised as being both wis on his word/ and war on his werke. Words are shown to be as important in this text as actions are in the pursuit of a successful Christian life. Þurh sa e man is wis/ and þurh iselþe man is gleu/ Þurh lesinge man is loð/ and þurh leþere wrenches unwurþ. Here, in strophe 24, we find the definition of what makes a man both wise and good, or hateful and worthless: the words and deeds with which he interacts with his society. This concept of socially defined virtue is born from a need for security, as he who makes many friends through his life can sikerliche/ seli sitten/ And ek faren ouer londe/ hwider-so beþ þi luste. How a man 27

The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance expresses himself in social settings is thus of great importance, and this is reflected in the advice given by Alfred in the text. The predominant tone of this advice is prudential and cautionary. In strophe 18 we are advised never to divulge the full extent of our thoughts, as those to whom a man relates this information may one day use it against him. Words are seen as powerful, and dangerous in the wrong hands: For oft tunge brekeþ bon/ þeh he self nabbe non. Therefore a man should avoid arguing with drunkards, fools, and those who would misuse what he has said. The threat of information passing into the hands of those who would use it against you is expressed in strophe 13: if þu hauest sore e/ ne sei e þu hit noht þan are e/ Sei e hit þine sadelbo e/ and rid te singinde. A man should keep his troubles to himself. Here we again witness the suspicion that seems to characterise the advice about speech that we find in the Proverbs – speech is dangerous, and must be husbanded as prudently as wealth. A man must not only be careful with his own words, but must also be aware that others may misuse words for their own reasons. Not all men speak the truth, as not all men follow the precepts of society. A man should take everything he hears with a degree of caution, because an enemy will not give prior warning before he tricks you: Nele he þe keþen/ hwanne he þe wile bikechen. Not only are the words of men deceiving but so are many other things in life. Mani appel is briht wiðuten/ and bitter wiðinnen/ Swo is mani brede/ on hire fader bure/ Scene under scete/ and þeh he is scondful/ Swo is manu gadeling/ godelice on horse/ Wlonc bi glede/ and unwurð at need. Companions at arms, the closest of friends, can prove untrustworthy. Women too are unworthy of trust, and as strophe 16 advises, a man should not chose a wife for beauty alone, nor for the wealth that she may bring to his estate. Rather he should lerne hire keste before agreeing to any match, as an ill-considered choice of wife will haunt a man for his entire life: Wo is him þat euel wif/ bringeð to his cotlif. Alfred then states that once a man has chosen a wife, he must learn how to handle her. A woman must be kept busy in order to keep her from idleness and pride, although this will not always be effective because ofte museð þe cat/ after hire moder. Despite this, a man must endeavour to master his wife, or he will never again be his wordes loured. To this end, it is important that a man should never reveal too much of his thoughts to his wife – especially when drunk. Wurþ þu nefre swo wod/ ne swo windrunken/ Þat efre segge þu þine wife/ alle þine wille. This once again reinforces the need for prudence in speech. A woman, we are told is word-wod/ and haueþ tunge to swift/ Þeh he wel wolde/ ne mai he hi nowhit welden. In addition to the warnings about the untrustworthiness of women in general, a man should not place too much weight on the words of his wife. A woman will often seek to beguile a man through tears or complaint, and will not always have her husband’s interests at heart. This warning is supported in the text by reference to Solomon’s warning against the evil counsels of women: Salomon hit haueþ ised/ þat he can wel euelne red/ Þe hire red fole eð/ he bringeþ hine to sore e/ uor hit seiþ in þe leð/ as cuenes forteþ/ Hit is ifern 28

Remembering Alfred in the Twelfth Century ised/ þat cold red is cuene red.52 Despite the misogynist nature of the advice regarding women that we find in the Proverbs, the text does recognise the worth of a woman who proves herself to be supportive and trustworthy: I ne segge hit noht biþan/ þat god þing is god wimman/ Þe man þe hi mai cnowen/ and ichesen ouer oþre. The trick, it seems, is in the choosing. In Alfred’s society, wealth and women must be managed, and so must children. It is the responsibility of members of a society to raise their children to adhere to the social contract. Children must be taught to be well mannered while they are young, and then they shall be a credit to their father when they are older. If however a man fails in this duty of care, his children will not respect him or obey him: For betere is bern unboren/ þanne unibeten (strophe 14). The judicious handling of wealth, family, and speech is the primary focus of the advice given by Alfred to his community. However, the text also harbours other concerns. We have already seen a warning against a man getting so drunk that he tells his wife his thoughts, and in strophe 15 we find a more general call for moderation in drink. Moderate drinking is nothing to be frowned on, but he þat drinkeþ/ and desi eþ þeramong/ Swo þat he fordrunken/ desi inde wercheþ shall sleep little that night but shall sleep long the next day. That the warning is against drinking to excess, rather than against drinking per se, can be seen as illustrative of a society in which the consumption of alcohol is viewed as an important act of social cohesion. This then is the advice that Alfred gives to his people, and as a whole it comprises a social code of conduct that allows the members of this society to live their lives in a wise and pious manner. That a man should live a life that is beneficial to both his body and his soul is important because, as Alfred cautions in strophe 10, Drihten hit one wot/ du eðe loured/ Hwanne we ure lif/ leten sculen. The immediacy of death and the uncertainty of life that resonate through this strophe remind us of the ultimate purpose of the advice in the text – to allow the recipient to live a life that will allow them to werldes/ wurðscipes welden and at the same time to eure saule / samnen to Criste. The text is concerned with the right way to live on earth, but ultimately returns to the advice of Solomon: Wis is þat her wel doþ/ he cumeþ þar he lyen foþ/ On his liues ende/ he hit scal auinde. What does this say of the text’s Anglo-Saxonism? How does this text function as a mediation of the Anglo-Saxon past? In reconstructing this Alfredian society as an idealised image of contemporary society, the Proverbs utilises the past for that most common of purposes – to comment upon the present. That the Anglo-Saxon past is the locus of this idealised society seems to indi-

52 Here we find the authority of the proverb regarding women’s advice founded in both Scripture and

in Germanic oral wisdom. Arngart attributes the source of cold red is cuene red as being ‘definitely of Scandinavian origin’ (Arngart, The Distichs of Cato and the Proverbs of Alfred, p. 100). He provides as a parallel the Old Norse proverb ‘Kold eru kvenna ráð’ (women’s counsel is cold) from Njálssaga (Arngart, The Proverbs of Alfred, II, p. 182).

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The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance cate that the Anglo-Saxon period was still remembered fondly by sections of twelfth-century English society. The Anglo-Saxon past is conflated in this text with a just Christian society, one that enjoys peace and stability despite the innate wickedness of man. By following a social code based on wise and cautious advice, the Anglo-Saxons are viewed as having been able to deal with the untrustworthiness of others and the misfortunes of life. The construction of Anglo-Saxon England in the Proverbs is one that owes more to the idea of an ideal past than to any kind of accurate historical remembrance. After all, the Anglo-Saxon period was no less violent and racked with discord than was twelfth-century England. The imagined Anglo-Saxon world of the Proverbs is constructed through the articulation of wisdom that was still current in the twelfth century, thus highlighting the text’s function as a mirror for social organisation and behaviour for its twelfth- and thirteenth-century audience. However, despite having little grounding in historical fact, the text retains its significance, as it is illustrative of how Anglo-Saxon society was imagined to have been.

The Genesis of the Proverbs The Proverbs present a highly structured view of an imagined Anglo-Saxon society; but why was this image of the past produced, who produced it, and what discourses underlie the production of the text? The historical and geographical context of the poem may aid us in trying to answer these questions. The text is anonymous, and so it is difficult to talk with any degree of certainty regarding notions of authorship. It may be more useful to look for the text’s point of origin in a particular geographical area or societal group. In a text of this nature, questions of genesis and social context are inevitably intertwined. In attempting to identify the origin of the Proverbs, it is useful to consider what can be determined about the likely source of the text from the evidence within the poem. From the text we can determine that the author of the Proverbs will have been literate in English and may possibly have been a monk. Both his dialect and his knowledge of the local tradition connecting Alfred and Seaford make it likely that he was either writing in, or had close ties with, the East Sussex region. Finally, it is likely that he had some knowledge of Latin, owing to his familiarity with the Distichs of Cato. The fact that the text is written in English has to be taken into account in any discussion of its origin. On first impression, the use of English might seem to suggest a purely oral origin for the text, but Arngart’s analysis of the sources of the Proverbs show that much of their content is based on the Latin Distichs of Cato.53 The Proverbs seem to represent some kind of fusion of the 53 While versions of the Distichs did exist in English, Arngart points to the Latin tradition as being the

source of the proverbial material in the Proverbs.

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Remembering Alfred in the Twelfth Century popular tradition of Alfred’s wisdom with the content of the Distichs. As an English text, it may seem surprising that the Proverbs should have been written down at all, as English was a language that was largely out of favour in the literary world. Richard Mortimer, summarising the state of English literature in the twelfth century, notes that: There is no doubt that the century after the Norman Conquest represents the lowest point in the whole history of English literature. The language lost its prestige, and writing in it was largely confined to a few old-fashioned monasteries. The Anglo-Saxon chronicle ceased in 1154, the year of Henry II’s ascension to the throne.54

The Proverbs, probably composed during the early years of Henry II’s reign, can be seen as being a highly unusual text if this account of the state of literary production in English is correct. If the use of English as a literary language was in fact restricted to a ‘few old-fashioned monasteries’, this fact may be of use in determining the likely origin of the Proverbs.55 The Proverbs is notable for its use of names: Seaford, Alfred, and Alfrich all feature in the text. These three names operate in the text in a manner that makes them integral to an understanding of its context. The names within the text are signifiers that can be seen to refer to multiple signifieds. Seaford is at once that textual place where Alfred speaks and simultaneously a local village familiar to the conjectured original audience of the text. It exists as both past and present, tying the audience into a historical continuum that connects them with their own geo-historical environment. The other names within the text, both that of the main protagonist, Alfred, and that of Alfrich, of þare la e swiðe wis, can similarly be read as having more than a single referential field in the text. These names become important to a social contextualisation when the Proverbs are read in their role of social commentary. The range of meanings that these names may have held for a contemporary twelfth-century audience is intriguing, and I hope to demonstrate how they can affect a reading of the text and its context, and how they can aid in determining the origin of the poem. As has been discussed above, the identification of the text with Seaford in East Sussex has been well established. Arngart identifies Seuorde and comments upon the significance of the relative obscurity of Seaford in the medieval period:

54 Richard Mortimer, Angevin England, 1154–1258 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 217. 55 It is to be noted that there is an ongoing debate as to the degree to which English remained in use in

twelfth-century monastic circles. This debate, and the wider continued use of English in monasteries after the conquest, is discussed by Susan Irvine in ‘The Compilation and Use of Manuscripts Containing Old English in the Twelfth Century’, in Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century, ed. Mary Swan and Elaine M. Treharne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 41–61 (pp. 56–60). 56 Arngart, The Proverbs of Alfred, II, pp. 57–8.

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The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance Seuorde is to be identified with Seaford in East Sussex. As this was an insignificant place in the twelfth century (it is not mentioned in the Domesday Book, v. PNSx, p. 363), it is not likely to have been known outside the immediate neighbourhood, and the fact that the compiler of the Proverbs chose Seaford for the scene of the gathering described in the introductory section indicates that they were composed not too far from that place.56 There seems to be no reason not to follow Arngart’s suggestion that the poem, or at least the opening setting, is to be associated with Seaford. While the setting of a text does not necessarily correlate with its origin, in the case of the Proverbs the comparative obscurity of the setting and the corroboration of the Southern dialect features point to a text produced by a writer either dwelling in, or having originated from, the southern Sussex area near Seaford. The presence of Seaford within the text is paralleled by the naming of Guldeforde in the Owl and the Nightingale, a text that is closely linked with the Proverbs.57 In this text we find a reference to one Nicholas of Guildford, who has been assumed by many scholars to be the author of the poem.58 This use of a real place-name within the text strengthens the case for associating the Seaford of the poem with the real town of Seaford in East Sussex. That the origin of the Proverbs is to be found in a localised legend, thus linking the poem with a precise geographical area, is important for an understanding of the use of names within the text. As Arngart states, Seaford was not a well-known place in the twelfth century, and this suggests that the original composer of the poem, and perhaps the intended audience, must have been familiar with the area. The positioning of the Proverbs in an identifiable and historically significant locale is an example of the powerful connection between cultural memory, narrative, and geography. A text of this nature acts to preserve local memory within the written record, and by doing so participates in the commemoration and preservation of the past within this geographical area. Place can be seen as an important element in the construction of the past by the Proverbs, anchoring its imagined Anglo-Saxon world in the known and knowable geography of twelfth-century England. If we

57 There is a close, yet uncertain, relationship between The Owl and the Nightingale and The Prov-

erbs of Alfred. The two texts share the use of Alfred as a speaker of proverbs and are both found in MS Jesus College E. 29 (J). Neil Cartlidge notes that ‘Guldeforde is presumably Guildford in Surrey’ (The Owl and the Nightingale: Text and Translation, ed. and trans. Neil Cartlidge (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2001), p. 101). 58 Kathryn Hume, The Owl and the Nightingale: the Poem and its Critics (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1975), p. 5. Scholars have been content to treat the poem as a plea for advancement from Nicholas, although this issue is still very much under debate. Eric Stanley comments that the case for Nicholas being the author is unproven, and concludes that: ‘The most likely view is that the unknown poet sent his poem to Nicholas, his friend, esteemed by all the world for his sound judgement’ in hopes of gaining advancement (The Owl and the Nightingale (London: Thomas Nelson, 1960), pp. 20–1). Neil Cartlidge, the most recent editor of the text, suggests that ‘Nicholas’s prominence in the poem certainly demands explanation–and the simplest and most parsimonious one, it seems to me, is that he was indeed its author’ (Cartlidge, p. xiv).

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Remembering Alfred in the Twelfth Century accept that the apparent obscurity of the setting of the text restricts the likely origin of the text to a defined geographical area, then other names within the text should perhaps be analysed in the context of this locale. One of the more intriguing names within the Proverbs is that of Alfrich.59 Introduced two lines before Alfred in the text, Alfrich is described as being an erl who is very wise in the la e, and as such seems to occupy a position of privilege just underneath that of the king. Crépin questions the precise standing of Alfrich within the text.60 The Oxford English Dictionary points out that in the Anglo-Saxon period an erl (OE eorl) was a term that encompassed any member of the nobility, but under the Norman kings an erl ‘was a specific order of rank, corresponding to Count in the nobility of other European nations’.61 It seems clear that Alfrich is an important figure in the hierarchy of the text’s society. Alfrich is described as being wise in the la e, which held a range of associated meanings in the medieval period. The Oxford English Dictionary gives various medieval definitions of the term: as civil law, canon law, positive law, natural law, or simply as a term for a particular system of behaviour. 62 A possible historical origin for Alfrich is worth considering here. Crépin suggests that there is perhaps a historical confusion at work in the text: that the Alfrich of the Proverbs is the result of the author having either read or heard of Abbot Ælfric, the friend and correspondent of Wulfstan of York, who had been involved in the writing of Cnut’s laws in the early eleventh century.63 The author of the Proverbs may then have associated Ælfric and Alfred with the entire Anglo-Saxon legal corpus. While this seems to be one possible explanation for the presence of the name in the text, the range of meanings that may be attached to the name is more extensive than this. If we return to the geographical context of the Proverbs, it is possible to see the use of the name Alfrich as a mistaken local connection. A few miles to the northeast of Seaford lies the village of Alfriston. In the Dictionary of English Place Names the entry reads: Alfriston E. Sussex. Alvricestone 1086 (DB). ‘Farmstead or village of a man called Ælfric’. OE pers. name + tun.64 59 Here I will use Alfrich to refer to the figure within the Proverbs and Ælfric to refer to the historical

figure(s) who may have been the basis for the character in the text. 60 The epithet erl is considered by Crépin to be problematic, and difficult to translate. He solves this

61 62 63

64

problem by examining how modern historians have translated the term in translations of medieval diplomatic documents. He settles on using the term comte for his translation into modern French, but does not address the meaning of the term in a twelfth-century context (Crépin, p. 51). Ibid., prepared by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), sv. Earl. Ibid., sv. Law. Crépin, p. 57. Ælfric was well known in the twelfth century as a homilist, but his other writings were known primarily through anonymous inclusion in other texts (Irvine, pp. 56–60; Mary Swan, ‘Aelfric’s Catholic Homilies in the Twelfth Century’, in Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century, pp. 62–82 (pp. 81–2)). A Dictionary of English Place Names, ed. A. D. Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 6.

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The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance It is possible that there may have been a connection between this Ælfric and the Alfrich of the Proverbs. The Place-Names of Sussex records that ‘the tenant in TRE [The time of Edward the Confessor] was one Ælfric, but this is doubtless only a coincidence – the Ælfric who gave his name to the manor probably belonged to a far earlier time’.65 Perhaps, but the connection between the manor of Alfriston and the name Ælfric is further supported in the Domesday Book: Gilbert holds 1 hide from the count in Alfriston at a revenue. Ælfric held it as freehold. Land for 1 plough. 66

There seems to have been a longstanding and long-remembered connection between the landowners in Alfriston and the name Ælfric. The original name-giver of the manor, the tenant at the time of Edward the Confessor, and the freeholder in 1086, are all named Ælfric. It is possible that this was a name passed down by the landowner of the manor from father to son to celebrate their connections with the man who gave the manor its name, and perhaps one of these manorial owners had been remembered as the erl Alfrich of the Proverbs. If such a tradition existed in the Seaford area, commemorating a local manorial erl named Ælfric, this may explain why the name would be included in the Proverbs. There also seems to be a possibility of a connection between Alfriston and the author of the Proverbs – a connection that I will examine later in this chapter when discussing the possible authorship of the text. In the Proverbs, the name Alfred without doubt refers primarily to Alfred, king of Wessex from 871 until 899. Alfred’s reputation was widely known during the twelfth century through chronicles and saints’ lives, legal codes, and local legends. The name Alfred must have continued to hold associations with political power in the English imagination, and stories of his wise rule, such as the one that we find in the Proverbs, may well have been commonplace in popular memory. William of Malmesbury certainly found this to be the case, and he records for the first time a number of legendary narratives concerning the king.67 Given this background, it is an interesting question whether the name may have had any additional connotations for the local audience of the Proverbs. Given the association of the name with power and authority, there seems to be at least one possible complementary connotation that the name may have held in the Sussex area in the twelfth century. The name of Alfred, or more precisely its Normanised equivalent Alvred, appears to have been associated with the exercise of power during this period. 65 A. Mawer and F. M. Stenton, The Place-Names of Sussex, Volume I: The Rapes of Chichester,

Arundel and Bramber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929), p. 415. 66 Domesday Book: Sussex, ed. and trans. John Morris (Chichester: Phillimore, 1976), 21d. 67 Rodney M. Thompson, William of Malmesbury (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1987), pp. 16–17. William

‘did not exclusively rely upon literary sources for his historical information: oral testimony, the traditions of “seniores”, first-hand or reliable second-hand observation, monuments such as the famous Glastonbury “pyramids”, . . . ornaments, inscriptions, tombs and buildings were all grist to his mill’ (ibid., p. 17).

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Remembering Alfred in the Twelfth Century Onomastic evidence for this association exists in the form of two men, Alvred pincerna, butler of Pevensey Castle under Robert of Mortain, and his son William fitz Alvred, holder of the Pevensey lands in the time of King Stephen. Interestingly, Seaford is in close proximity to both Eastbourne and Firle, the lands assigned for the support of the warders (vigiles) of Pevensey.68 When Robert of Mortain acquired the lordship of the Rape of Pevensey in 1067, only 27 of the 52 pre-conquest burgesses remained.69 This massive exodus may be indicative of the unease that led to the exodus of important Anglo-Saxon families in the immediate aftermath of the conquest. Robert seems to have taken great advantage of this situation, acting as the archetypal absentee landlord and enriching himself and his followers through his new lands.70 Much of this activity, however, seems to have been carried out by Robert’s officials, chief among whom was his butler, Alvred. Alvred seems to have been involved in the collection of taxes for his lord: surviving records show that he received payments from the lands of Pevensey Castle, namely estates at both Eastbourne and Firle. Alvred seems to have been an important figure in the Rape of Pevensey during the late eleventh century. He held a great deal of land, and, considering Robert of Mortain’s frequent absence from the Rape, would seem to have been the pre-eminent secular figure in the area.71 What we know of Alvred is that he benefited greatly from his position as Robert’s butler (pincerna) and was in a position to act as a benefactor to a number of religious houses in both Sussex and other counties. He is recorded as gifting a chapel at his manor of Charleston72 to the Norman Abbey of Grestain, and the church of East Grinstead to Lewes Abbey.73 Furthermore, Alvred endowed St. Alban’s Abbey with the tithes of Crundel in Yorkshire, a gift that was recorded in the register of benefactors alongside portraits of Alvred and his wife.74 Of Alvred’s life and career little else is known, but it seems that he was still alive in 1102, as he appears next to his son, William, as a witness to the foundation charter of Montacute Priory in Somerset. 75 On Alvred’s death his son William seems to have inherited most of his 68 L. F. Salzmann, ‘Documents Relating to Pevensey Castle’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, 49

(1906), 1–30 (p. 2). 69 Kathleen Thompson, ‘Lords, Castellans, Constables and Dowagers: The Rape of Pevensey from

the 11th to the 13th Century’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, 137 (1999), 209–20 (p. 210). 70 Thompson, p. 210. 71 He was the most well-endowed baronial official in Pevensey, and at the time of the Domesday

72

73 74 75

survey he held estates in nine counties including Sussex, Somerset, Cornwall, and Yorkshire (J. F. A. Mason, ‘Barons and their Officials in the Later Eleventh Century’, Anglo-Norman Studies, 13 (1990), 243–62 (pp. 245–9)). A description of the chapel, still known as Alvred’s chapel in the nineteenth century, is provided in George Miles Cooper, ‘Illustrations of Wilmington Priory and Church’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, 4 (1851), 37–66 (pp. 46–7). L. F. Salzmann, ‘Some Sussex Domesday Tenants’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, 57 (1915), 162–79 (p. 163). Ibid., p. 163. MS Cotton Nero D. vii. f. 94. Salzmann, ‘Some Sussex Domesday Tenants’, p. 163.

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The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance estates.76 In 1130 he is linked once more with lands at Pevensey. The Rape of Pevensey had by now passed into the control of Gilbert of Laigle, following the loss of the Rape by Robert of Mortain’s son William, the consequence of his opposition to Henry I. The lands that once had supported the garrison of Pevensey Castle, which was now a royal castle funded by the king, seem to have passed into William’s control. William is recorded as paying £19 and 4 shillings into the treasury of Pevensey from the lands at Eastbourne and Firle.77 It seems that William must have died around 1155, as his son Richard is recorded as taking over the financial duties for the Sussex estates in 1156.78 Richard fitz William fitz Alvred79 appears to have had a turbulent career, being heavily fined and forced to forfeit control of the warder’s lands of Pevensey by Henry II in 1165.80 Richard seems to have had the family trait of longevity, as he is last recorded in 1195 paying twenty marks of silver to avoid knight service in Normandy.81 The family name of Alvred seems to have died out with the death of Richard circa 1195. His two sons, John and William, both took the surname of Montegue82 (de Monte Acuto), for reasons that are unclear.83 Alvred and his descendants were men of some considerable power in the East Sussex region, as can be seen from the extent of both their land holdings and their gifts to religious houses. Seaford, less than four miles from their estate at Charleston and their lands at Firle, would have been well known to this family. It seems unlikely that Alvred would have been unaware of the historical connections between his namesake King Alfred and the local area in which he lived and governed. It is tempting to consider the possibility that Alvred may have taken his name in order to take advantage of these connections, but there is of course no evidence for such a suggestion. It is difficult to imagine, however, that a Norman official, faced with the difficulties and challenges of governing part of the newly conquered England, would have neglected to make use of whatever political and social connotations his name may have provided him with. While it is by no means necessary for Alfred’s reputation to have been influenced by these three men, their existence provides a further possible reading of the Proverbs. The association of the name of Alfred / Alvred with 76 He is shown in the twelfth-century Northamptonshire Survey to have held the estates of Buckby,

77 78 79 80 81 82 83

Lilbourne, Yelvertoft, and Guilsborough that had been held by Alvred in 1086 (Salzmann, ‘Some Sussex Domesday Tenants’, p. 164). Thompson, p. 212. Salzmann, ‘Some Sussex Domesday Tenants’, p. 165. As witnessed in a charter given to Lewes Priory c.1170 (The Cartulary of the Priory of St. Pancras of Lewes, ed. L. F. Salzmann, vol. 38 (Lewes: Sussex Record Society, 1932), pp. 74, 130). Salzmann, ‘Some Sussex Domesday Tenants’, p. 165. Salzmann suggests that this may have been in connection with the Beckett controversy, but provides no evidence to support this suggestion. Ibid., p. 166. Richard, being at least 60 by this time, seems wisely to have abstained from the previous year’s expedition to Normandy. Not to be confused with the long-established Montagues of Montacute in Somerset. Although perhaps we can speculate that the growing distance from the Anglo-Saxon period may have made the Alvred name seem increasingly outdated and archaic.

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Remembering Alfred in the Twelfth Century power and authority may have been reinforced by the influence held in the local area by Alvred pincerna and his descendants. It is possible that the Proverbs are in part reflecting upon the virtuous rule of King Alfred in comparison to the Norman rule of Alvred’s master, or perhaps this connection had no impact on the genesis of the tradition that underlies the text. Regardless of any possible influence on the text, the association of the name Alfred with the exercise of power seems to have been present in the East Sussex region throughout the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. It may be that the Proverbs may have been written for an audience that would have been well aware of the connection between the Alvred and the Alfred names. It may even be the case that the text was written to appeal to either Alvred’s son William, or his grandson Richard. It is not inconceivable that the poem may have been produced in anticipation of, or as a result of, one of the many donations of land that the Alvred family made to religious houses during the late eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Possible Origins While it is impossible to identify any individual as the author of the Proverbs, a strong possibility is that the text is associated with a religious house.84 The reputation of Alfred seems to have been preserved in many centres of Christian learning,85 and it is not inconceivable that a writer who was native to this area may have used a local tradition regarding Alfred and Seaford. The twelfth century saw an increasing interest in Old English manuscripts. By the late twelfth century, Old English texts had been collected in a number of religious centres, through the efforts of scholars such as Beckett and Wulfstan, and many of the monasteries had an interest in the Anglo-Saxon past, as the collections of Old English manuscripts in monasteries such as Glastonbury, Crowland, and Malmesbury illustrate.86 In addition, many of the concerns articulated within the first five sections of the text can be seen to support the idea of a monastic origin of the Proverbs. The notion of the king being under the rule of the laws of man and God is one that would have been attractive to the monastic mind. In comparison with some of the criticism of the early 84 Christopher Cannon comments upon the preservation of English literary forms and culture in the

Benedictine monasteries in the century after the conquest, which suggests that the Proverbs are likely to have originated within such a monastic house (‘Monastic Productions’, in Wallace, pp. 316–48 (pp. 322–3)). 85 Elaine Treharne discusses the continued copying and editing of Alfred’s texts in the twelfth century in ‘The Production and Script of Manuscripts Containing English in the First Half of the Twelfth Century’, in Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century, ed. Mary Swan and Elaine M. Treharne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 11–40 (p. 12). 86 An example of this enthusiasm is the compilation of Anglo-Saxon laws in the Textus Roffensis. This text was compiled in 1124 at Rochester and includes Alfred’s law-code. For further discussion, see Chapter 4 below, and Patrick Wormald, ‘Laga Eadwardi: The Textus Roffensis and its Context’, Anglo-Norman Studies, 17 (1994), 243–66.

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The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance Norman kings in such sources as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a text such as the Proverbs can be seen as a monastic critique of twelfth-century kingship practices. If the text is monastic in origin, and represents a synthesis of the Distichs of Cato with a local oral tradition of Alfred holding councils in the Seaford area, then the nearby monasteries become possible sources for the text. The weight of the manuscript evidence, slender though it is, seems to support the likelihood of a monastic origin for the Proverbs, although this is by no means certain.87 The manuscript evidence that exists points to either a Cluniac or a Benedictine origin, but despite these clues, we are no closer to the source of the archetype manuscript, as the possibility of texts moving either between these orders, or from another order, cannot be discounted.88 If one accepts that 87 Brown, the first scholar to write on the Maidstone MS of the Proverbs, initially connected the

manuscript with the Cistercian house of Revesby Abbey. However, later that same year he retracted this claim and established that the manuscript was to be associated with the Cluniac Priory of St Andrew at Northampton (‘The Maidstone Text of the Proverbs of Alfred’, Modern Language Review, 21.3 (1926), 249–60). This identification allows us to place M within a particular house and order. There is also some internal evidence regarding the affiliation of T. This manuscript is one of the two manuscripts that have the addition of the section of fatherly advice. Earl R. Anderson sees a connection between the Benedictine order and the content of one of the strophes of this additional section (‘The Source of Trinity College Proverbs of Alfred, No. 31’, Notes and Queries, 222 (1997), 102–3). In an analysis of strophe 30 of the Proverbs (the first strophe of the additional section), Anderson notes that while the first part is derived from Leviticus xix.32, the second part has yet to be explained: ‘Skeat (p. 62, note to line 627), Borgstom (p. 67, note to lines 588–9) and Arngart (p. 188, note to line 591) call attention to Leviticus xix.32, ‘Thou shalt rise up before the hoary head’, as the source. . . . Clearly the author of the Alfredian proverb was familiar with Leviticus, or with a popular saying drawn from Leviticus; but this does not explain the rest of the passage – the advice to the young man to sit beside his elder, if invited, and hear his wisdom’ (p. 102). Anderson suggests that the additional details in the strophe can be accounted for by a passage in chapter 63 of the Rule of St Benedict: ‘When a senior passes by let the junior rise and make place for him to sit down; neither shall the junior presume to sit unless the senior bid him to do so’ (p. 103). Anderson views this as indicative that the author of the additional section of the Proverbs knew the Rule well. However, Anderson’s conclusions seem rather too definite given the rather general nature of the advice regarding not sitting before one’s elders. Deference to age was a common element in medieval advice literature, and it is difficult to see Anderson’s argument as making a conclusive link between the Proverbs and the Benedictine order. However, it remains possible that T was a Benedictine manuscript. Unfortunately, there exists no evidence regarding the pre-dissolution provenance of J. After the dissolution the J manuscript seems to have been in the West Midlands or Glamorganshire, but this is of course not determinative of its place of origin. 88 A conjectural textual history of the Proverbs might be outlined thus: The autograph was composed in the mid-twelfth century by a monastic author, possibly associated with a Cluniac or Benedictine monastic centre either in, or with connections to, East Sussex. The text was produced through a synthesis of a local tradition regarding Alfred and a number of proverbial sayings drawn from the Disticha Catonis, local oral culture, and the Bible. At this point the history of the text diverged, with one line of transmission heading westward, ultimately to end in Worcestershire with the production of MS J sometime between 1276 and 1279, and the other travelling north. At some time either before or after this divergence, the poem passed through Winchester, where a reference to the text seems to be recorded in the Annales de Wintonia (Annales Monastici, ed. Henry R. Luard, 5 vols (London, 1864–69), II, p. 10). The northern line of transmission produces C in the first quarter of the thirteenth century in the southern Midlands. This manuscript is the earliest that incorporates the additional ‘Father’s Advice’ section. Although the manuscript only contains fragments of strophe 30, the correlation between what survives in the manuscript and the text as found in T seems to indicate that these two manuscripts contained similar additions. Contemporary with C, M

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Remembering Alfred in the Twelfth Century in view of the relative obscurity of Seaford, the author of the Proverbs is likely to have had local connections, then a number of possibilities arise. Two of the major religious houses with influence and interest in the area of East Sussex that includes Seaford are Battle Abbey and Lewes Priory, which are Benedictine and Cluniac respectively. Both houses can be considered as potential milieux for the Proverbs. Battle Abbey was founded as a Benedictine house in 1067 by monks from Marmoutier at the direction of William I.89 As part of its establishment, Battle was granted lands with which to support itself, some of which were in East Sussex. Battle held portions of fifteen manors in Sussex.90 Recorded in the Book of Fees in 1212 we find: ‘Abbas de Bello tenet Alsiestun’ cum pertinenciis, set nescitur per quod servicium.’91 Alsiestun (Alciston) lies on the road between Seaford and Alfriston, and includes the manor of Alfriston. This hundred was formerly part of the Domesday Book hundred of Wandelmestrei, and when it was separated it comprised the manors and land belonging to Battle Abbey.92 Lewes, the major Cluniac house in the Seaford area, was the first Cluniac foundation in England, established in 1077.93 Founded by William de Warrene, and sited at the foot of the hill on which stood the Warrene castle, it became the site of the family burials. As such, Lewes was the major monastic beneficiary of the generosity of the Warrene family,94 and as we have seen, Lewes was also a beneficiary, on at least three occasions, of the Alvred family.95 Both Battle and Lewes had a familiarity with the East Sussex region that would have afforded knowledge of any local legend that associated Alfred with Seaford. Considering the information that is available, there are few conclusive answers to the questions that surround the genesis of the Proverbs of Alfred. The author of the Proverbs, possibly associated with either Battle Abbey or Lewes Priory, seems to have viewed the tale of Alfred at Seaford as worthy of preservation, embellishing the original legend with learned proverbs. The date of composition of the text, in the

89 90 91 92 93 94 95

was produced at the Cluniac Priory of St Andrew in Northampton. The text of the Proverbs found in this manuscript is not complete, lacking the first three and the last five strophes. This, unfortunately, prevents us from determining whether the additional Father’s Advice section was added to this text. The last stage of the text’s history that we can determine is the production of T in the West Midlands some time between 1253 and 1275. This manuscript also contains the additional Father’s Advice section. Although the additional sections of the T text correspond to a certain degree with those of C, other differences preclude T from being a direct descendant of C (Arngart, The Proverbs of Alfred, II, p. 64). David Knowles and R. Neville Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses: England and Wales (London: Longmans, 1971), p. 59. Neil S. Rushton, ‘Parochialization and Patterns of Patronage in 11th-Century Sussex’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, 137 (1999), 133–52 (p. 148, n. 82). The Book of Fees, ed. H. C. Maxwell Lyte, 3 vols (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1920–31), I, p. 72. Mawer and Stenton, p. 414. Brian Golding, ‘The Coming of the Cluniacs’, Anglo-Norman Studies, 3 (1980), 65–72 (p. 65). Golding, p. 72. The Cartulary of the Priory of St. Pancras of Lewes, ed. Salzmann, pp. 74, 75, 130.

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The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance third quarter of the twelfth century, places the text in a period of renewed interest in the pre-Conquest past. However, as I have suggested above, it may be that the production of the text had more to do with the attempt to gain the patronage of the Alvred family than with a sense of nostalgia for the Anglo-Saxon past. Given the information that we have about the text, it is probable that the text has its genesis originally in the form of a local legend associating Alfred with Seaford. This narrative seems to have been used as the setting for a collection of proverbs which, when presented in the form of a depiction of Anglo-Saxon society, acts as a form of social commentary. In a similar fashion to the way in which the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle uses the Anglo-Saxon past to compare the reigns of the Norman kings, the Proverbs can be read as a reaction to the ‘anarchy’ of Stephen’s reign, functioning as a prescriptive solution to society’s problems. Through the representation of a king ruling justly in an ideal Christian society, the Proverbs utilises the Anglo-Saxon past as a standard by which to measure its own turbulent time.

Connections with the Historical Alfred? The question that occurs to most first-time readers of the Proverbs is whether they have any tangible connection with the historical King Alfred. Most scholars have dismissed this possibility out of hand: The Proverbs of Alfred are ascribed to King Alfred with as much or as little reason as proverbs or maxims have been fathered on other prominent persons noted for their wisdom, for instance Solomon, Cato the Censor or Charlemagne.96

Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge broadly agreed with Arngart’s conclusions, writing somewhat wistfully: ‘Alas there is little reason to believe that any of the sayings derive from Alfred himself.’97 Robert T. Lambdin sums up the general scholarly consensus: ‘It is doubtful that Alfred is actually responsible for any of the proverbs.’98 Despite these misgivings, or perhaps in response to them, André Crépin readdresses the issue of Alfred’s possible influence on the Proverbs. He writes: Pour moi, l’attribution de ces maximes du XIIe s. au roi du IXe dépasse la simple convention d’utiliser le nom d’un roi réputé pour sa sagesse. L’esprit 96 Arngart, The Proverbs of Alfred: An Emended Text, p. 5. 97 Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, ed. and trans. Simon

Keynes and Michael Lapidge (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), p. 47. 98 Encyclopaedia of Medieval Literature, ed. Robert Thomas Lambdin and Laura Cooner Lambdin

(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000), p. 429. Lambdin unfortunately makes the misleading claim that the Proverbs are extant in only one manuscript, and fails to cite Arngart’s seminal study of the text.

40

Remembering Alfred in the Twelfth Century du roi, bien connu par ses préfaces et ses traductions, est encore à l’œuvre dans certaines strophes des Proverbs.99

Crépin sees more than a casual resemblance between Alfred’s writings and the Proverbs,100 drawing attention to the second strophe of the text, which positions Christ as the foundation of all earthly and spiritual prosperity: Le roi historique Alfred a fondé toute son idéologie politique et culturelle sur le Christ. Que se soit dans son interpretation de Boèce où Alfred remplace Dame Philosophie par la Sagesse, qui est le Christ, ou dans ses introductions et traductions des psaumes, où il privilégie la lecture christologique, ou encore dans la préface de son recueil de lois, Alfred partout pose le Christ en pierre angulaire.101

Alfred’s writings do indeed emphasise the importance and centrality of Christ to his social ideology. Alfred’s view of society appears in his writings to be one in which Christ is at the centre. However, the idea of Christ as central to medieval society is ubiquitous in the medieval period, and can hardly be used on its own to support a specific textual influence.102 Despite this, however, Crépin argues that this similarity between the Christocentric construction of society in both Alfred’s writings and the Proverbs, when viewed in conjunction with the other thematic similarities, suggests the possibility of Alfredian influence on the genesis of the Proverbs. The second important parallel that Crépin observes is the aspect of Christological centrality that links sanctity and worldly prosperity. In strophe two we find Þat him ne scal ben wane/ Hwo hine her on werlde/ wurðien ðencheþ, and Crépin associates this with the cultural ideology that Alfred lays out in his preface to the Cura Pastoralis. Alfred writes that in former days the kings assured both eternal blessedness and material prosperity. Further to this, Crépin notes that in the preface to his translation of Augustine’s Soliloquies, ‘Alfred met en parallèle le confort d’un manoir terrestre et le séjour de la beatitude éternelle.’103 This metaphor is continued throughout his translation to compare and describe the temporal and spiritual lives. In the third strophe Crépin recognises the Alfredian ideal of literacy, especially for the king. The Proverbs tell us that Ne mai non riht king/ ben under 99 Crépin, p. 59. 100 However, this resemblance does not apply to the entirety of the Proverbs. As Crépin points out:

‘La probabilité de la participation du roi historique Alfred à l’inspiration de nos Proverbs diminue à mesure que l’on s’éloigne du début.’ Unfortunately Crépin fails to explain his reasoning for this statement, deigning only to explain himself by commenting that the final strophe of the Trinity manuscript warns against people who are too tall, too short, or have red hair. Crépin regards this criticism as a caricature of the principles of moderation that he views as having been dear to the king. The initial strophes, he suggests, are more indicative of an authentic Alfredian influence (p. 57). 101 Crépin, pp. 57–8. 102 As Crépin himself admits that ‘Certes la primauté, la royauté du Christ ont imprégné toute la pensée politique de la chrétienté médiévale . . .’ (p. 58). 103 Ibid., p. 58.

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The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance Criste seluen/ Bute if he be/ boc-ilered/ And he his writes/ wel icunne/ And he cunne letters/ locien himseluen. For Crépin, this brings to mind Alfred’s command to his Bishops in the preface to the Cura Pastoralis, where he writes that it seems better to him ðætte eall sio gioguð ðe nu is on Angelcynne friora monna, ðara ðe ða speda hæbben ðæt hie ðæm befeolan mægen, sien to liornunga oðfæste, ða hwile ðe hie to nanre oðerre note ne mægen, oð ðone first ðe hie wel cunnen Englisc gewrit arædan.104

Crépin notes that this Alfredian desire for literacy is further supported in Asser’s Vita Ælfredi where Alfred is described as obliging those involved in enforcing his laws to either learn to read or to employ an assistant who is able to.105 Crépin concludes on the question of Alfredian influence in the Proverbs that: ‘les strophes initiales, en revanche, transmettent des institutions et des idées authentiquement alfrédiennes’.106 Crépin is correct in his assessment that the Proverbs of Alfred represent a conception of kingship that is not dissimilar to the one depicted in Alfred’s writings. However, the themes of Christological centrality, the correspondence between sanctity and prosperity, and the social benefits of a literate populace are far from being unique to Alfred’s social ideology. These are commonplaces within the wider discussion of the nature of Christian society that we find both in the twelfth century and in the Middle Ages in general. Regarding any authentic Alfredian influence in the Proverbs, the most that can be reasonably allowed is that the broad tenor of the text is certainly consistent with the priorities and principles expressed in Alfred’s own writings, and as such the possibility cannot be completely discounted, even though the weight of the evidence makes this unlikely.

Alfred’s Reputation in the Twelfth Century If it is unlikely that the Proverbs have any direct connection with the historical Alfred, then how does Alfred come to be represented as a speaker of wisdom? The Proverbs seem to be just one example of a popular twelfthcentury tradition that represents Alfred as a wise man type. Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge, in a discussion of Alfred’s medieval reputation, note: One of the most persistent themes was Alfred’s wisdom. His reputation in this respect may have originated in Asser’s Life, where he is called 104 Mitchell and Robinson, p. 207. ‘So that all the youth of free men now amongst the English people,

who have the means to be able to devote themselves to the study of it, may be set to study for as long as they are of no other use, until the time that they are able to read English writing well’ (Michael Swanton, Anglo-Saxon Prose (London: Everyman, 1993), p. 62). 105 Crépin, p. 58. 106 Ibid., p. 57.

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Remembering Alfred in the Twelfth Century veredicus, ‘truthful’ (chapter 13), and where references to his love of wisdom abound; but he is called ‘the wise King Alfred’107 in an alleged writ of Æthelred the Unready, which may testify to the existence of an independent and popular tradition. 108

This ‘independent and popular tradition’ raises a number of implications for our understanding of the representation of Alfred in the Proverbs. One intriguing question is whether the representation of the wise Alfred that is found in the Proverbs was solely a popular oral tradition or whether there is a textual tradition underlying the connection. In addition to the Proverbs, there are three other twelfth- and thirteenth-century texts that illustrate Alfred’s reputation for wisdom. The first of these is the additional section of the Proverbs found in the Cotton and Trinity manuscripts – a poem of a father’s advice to his son.109 Arngart considers that the last strophes of the Proverbs in these two manuscripts were originally part of a different poem that was adapted to the style of the original text, and places their composition circa 1200 in the Fenlands.110 These last strophes differ linguistically from the rest of the Proverbs, in that they contain a higher percentage of French and Norse loan words. Each of the strophes in this addition to the Proverbs begins with an address from Alfred to his ‘beloved son’.111 Elaine Tuttle Hansen discusses the widespread occurrence of this ‘parental advice’ in early cultures, and shows that it is a common form in the Anglo-Saxon literary heritage of the English.112 The existence of this Alfredian wisdom text points to the geographically widespread nature of the ‘Alfred as wise-man’ tradition. The influence of this tradition is also found in the Owl and the Nightingale. John Atkins, in his edition of the text, identifies eighteen proverbs of which eleven are attributed to King Alfred.113 These proverbs are situated within an orally framed tradition by the author through the use of formulae such as ‘For Alured King hit seide and wrot’114 and ‘Hu Alured sede on his spelle’.115 Although the proverbs found in the Owl and the Nightingale point towards a textual collection of Alfredian proverbs, the collection drawn upon by this text does not seem to have been the Proverbs of Alfred in the form in which they have survived. None of the Alfredian proverbs in the Owl and the Nightingale are found in the Proverbs. Whether the author of the Owl and the 107 ‘Se wis cing Ælfred’ (Anglo-Saxon Writs, ed. Florence E. Harmer (Manchester: Manchester Uni-

versity Press, 1952), p. 395). Keynes and Lapidge, p. 47. Arngart prints the additional text (The Proverbs of Alfred, II, pp. 128–34). The Proverbs of Alfred: An Emended Edition, p. 23. ‘Sone min so leue dere’, or ‘leue son dere’. Elaine Tuttle Hansen, The Solomon Complex (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), pp. 41–67. 113 The Owl and the Nightingale, ed. by J. W. H. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), p. lxxi. 114 Stanley, p. 56. 115 Ibid., p. 57. 108 109 110 111 112

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The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance Nightingale is referring to a different collection of Alfredian proverbs, now lost, or is attributing the proverbs to Alfred in an attempt to give them authority, their attribution to Alfred supports the existence of a more widespread tradition than is represented by the Proverbs of Alfred alone. Alfred’s twelfth-century reputation for wisdom can also be seen in Marie de France’s attribution of her source for her Fables: Le reis Alfrez, ki mult l’ama, le translata puis en engleis, e jeo l’ai rime en Franceis, si cum jol truvai, proprement.116 King Alfred, who esteemed it highly, then translated it into English, and I have rendered it, exactly as I have found it, into French verse.

Marie’s attribution of a translation of Aesop’s Fables to Alfred seems to have been the result of onomastic confusion: Mary Lou Martin suggests that Marie seems to have confused King Alfred with Alfred the Englishman, who was the translator of a twelfth-century Latin version of the Fables.117 Martin argues that this Alfred worked closely with a Jewish grammarian named Berechiah ben Natronai Ha-Nakdan to produce an Arabic-influenced Latin version of the Fables.118 Given King Alfred’s twelfth-century reputation for wisdom and for translating texts, Marie’s conflation of the two Alfreds seems understandable.119 Alfred’s sagacity is illustrated in these three texts through his knowledge of sententiae, the traditional sign of the wise man in many cultures. In the medieval period we find collections of proverbs attributed to Solomon, the original model of the biblical wise-king type, and to numerous other wise kings. Alfred’s reputation as a wise-king is further supported by comments found in two twelfth-century chronicles. In the Annals of Winchester, dated c.1150–1200 and attributed to Richard of Devises, we find written of Alfred: Eluredus in proverbiis ita enituit, ut nemo post illum amplius. 120 Alfred shone thus in proverbs, more than anyone since.

116 Marie de France, Fables of Marie de France, ed. and trans. Mary Lou Martin (Birmingham, ALA:

Summa, 1984), p. 252. 117 Ibid., p. 22. 118 A number of critics, according to Martin, have argued for the Latin text as the source of Marie’s

French verse translation, rather than her avowed English source (p. 22). 119 Dorothy Whitelock discusses William of Malmesbury’s depiction of Alfred’s exaggerated reputa-

tion as a translator in ‘William of Malmesbury on the Works of King Alfred’, in Medieval Literature and Civilisation: Studies in Memory of G. N. Garmonsway, ed. D. A. Pearsall and R. A. Waldron (London: Athlone Press, 1969), pp. 78–93 (p. 78). 120 Annales Monastici, II, p. 10.

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Remembering Alfred in the Twelfth Century This reputation is also evidenced by a comment about Alfred that is attributed to the twelfth-century Ailred of Rievaulx, in Henry Spelman’s Latin Life of Alfred: Extant parabolae ejus plurimum habentes aedificationis, sed et venustatis et jocunditatis.121 Many of his edifying proverbs, both elegant and witty, survive.

Although proverbs are traditionally associated with figures of wisdom, the textual history of Alfred’s connection with such material may aid in understanding the nature and development of his reputation in the twelfth century. While the use of biblical proverbs to reinforce a moral statement is a common literary technique for many writers of the medieval period, there seems to be a textual tradition that lies behind the association between Alfred and proverbial material. The origins of this tradition may be seen in Asser’s Life, which uses proverbs to illustrate many of Alfred’s actions. While the Life itself does not suggest a close connection between Alfred and proverbial wisdom, the stylistic use of proverbs in the Life may have contributed to the development of Alfred’s reputation. The Life uses proverbs in a number of places to indicate a Christian moral impetus for Alfred’s actions. Two examples of this usage are further developed in later texts within this textual tradition, demonstrating a strengthening of Alfred’s reputation as a wise-man type. 122 In discussing Alfred’s determination to devote half his time and wealth to the service of God, the Life uses two biblical proverbs to explain his actions. The first of these proverbs, taken from Genesis, depicts the sin that the king is attempting to avoid: Si recte offeras, recte autem non dividas, peccas.123 If thou offer aright, but dost not divide aright, thou sinnest.

In determining an appropriate strategy for dividing his time and resources, Alfred was influenced, according to the Life, by the advice of his typological predecessor Solomon: 121 H. Spelman, Life of Alfred (London, 1687), p. 98. 122 My argument here is based upon the assumption that Asser’s Life is authentic and was in fact

written by Bishop Asser in the late ninth or early tenth century. The genuineness of the Life has been the subject of much debate. The most prominent critic of the authenticity of Asser’s text in recent years has been Alfred Smyth, who has argued that the text is a tenth-century forgery produced by the Ramsey school, led by the monk Byrhtferth (Alfred the Great (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995): The Medieval Life of King Alfred the Great: A Translation and Commentary (New York: Palgrave, 2002)). However, Smyth’s arguments have not been widely accepted: in a number of articles and reviews published in the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) in 1995 and 1996, Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge systematically refuted Smyth’s primary claim that the Vita Ælfredi was a forgery, and until a more convincing case is made for a latetenth-century origin for the Life, it must be considered to be an authentic late-ninth-century source. 123 Stevenson, p. 86, translated by Keynes and Lapidge, p. 106.

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The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance Ut dixit Salomon, ‘Cor Regis in manum Domini,’ id est consilium.124 As Solomon says: ‘The heart of the king’ (that is, his wisdom) ‘is in the hand of the Lord.’

These two proverbs are used as a form of commentary in the Life, and as such it is unlikely that they would have a led a reader to imagine Alfred as the speaker of these proverbs. The manner in which proverbial material is used in the rest of the text follows the pattern of commentary set by these two examples. In addition, there seems to be little evidence that the Life itself was well known in the twelfth century. In England it seems that the Life was known to only a handful of medieval authors.125 Despite its construction of Alfred as a wise king, and its use of proverbs as commentary, it seems unlikely that the Life can be considered a direct influence in the tradition representing Alfred as a speaker of proverbs. This being the case, it is necessary to consider another source of textual influence. A stronger candidate as a possible textual influence on Alfred’s reputation for proverbial wisdom is found in the early-twelfth-century Historia Regum, traditionally attributed to Simeon of Durham. Although this chronicle includes much material based on Asser’s Life, a number of the passages involving proverbs differ from their source passages in the Life. Before discussing these alterations and their possible impact upon the development of Alfred’s reputation as veridicus, the nature and origin of the Historia needs to be considered. A large amount of the first section of the Historia, including sections drawn from the Life, has recently been attributed to the latetenth-century chronicler Byrhtferth of Ramsey. The early sections of the Historia have long been recognised as being drawn from a different source than the rest of the text; Thomas Arnold commented to this effect in his edition of 1885.126 The early 1980s saw the publication of two articles, by Michael Lapidge and Cyril Hart, both of which independently proposed Byrhtferth as the compiler of this section.127 Lapidge summarises parallel conclusions of these studies:

124 Ibid. 125 Keynes and Lapidge discuss the writers that seem to show knowledge of Asser, including

Byrhtferth of Ramsey, the anonymous author of the Encomium Emmae, John of Worcester, and the author of the Annals of St. Neots (p. 57). 126 Michael Lapidge, ‘Byrhtferth of Ramsey and the Early Sections of the Historia Regum Attributed to Simeon of Durham’, Anglo-Saxon England, 10 (1982), 97–122 (p. 97). 127 Hart states in his article: ‘I should explain that my suggested attribution of this work to Byrhtferth was in fact anticipated by Dr. Michael Lapidge, who made his discovery in 1977’ (p. 559). Lapidge’s conclusion rests upon his stylistic analysis of the Latin chronicle, while Hart comes to his conclusion through an examination of historical considerations within the text. Lapidge, ‘Byrhtferth of Ramsey’; Cyril Hart, ‘Byrhtferth’s Northumbrian Chronicle’, English Historical Review, 97 (1982), 558–82.

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Remembering Alfred in the Twelfth Century We now have serious grounds for regarding these first five sections as an historical compilation made by Byrhtferth of Ramsey, probably in the late tenth century or the early eleventh.128

The attribution of the early sections of the Historia Regum to Byrhtferth, and the confirmation of Arnold’s suspicions of a late-tenth-century date for these sections, have implications for the development of Alfred’s reputation as a speaker of proverbs. The changes in the use of the proverbs that are found in the Historia can now be dated to the late tenth century, and this seems to indicate a connection between Alfred and the speaking of proverbial wisdom at a much earlier date than the twelfth-century texts. The proverbs in the Ramsey text are more closely associated with Alfred than they are in the Life. The Ramsey text’s modified use of proverbs can be demonstrated by reference to the two examples from the Life discussed earlier. The first of these proverbs is represented in the Ramsey text as being called to mind by Alfred himself: Sæpe nominatus rex Elfredus solito suo more intra suæ mentis thalamum cœpit sagaci ingenio pertractare, et pertractando ruminare illud quod in divinis scriptum est literis. ‘Si’, inquit, ‘recte offeras, et recte non dividas, peccasti.’129 The oft-named King Alfred, in his accustomed manner within his own mind, began to meditate with keen skill upon that which is written in Divine letters. ‘If’, it is said, ‘you offer rightly and you do not divide rightly, you have sinned.’

In the Life, the proverbs are cited by Asser to show why the king acted as he did. Here, however, the proverb is associated much more closely with Alfred. From the context of the passage, it seems clear that Alfred himself remembers the proverb, rather than the author of the text. In a similar manner, the Ramsey text changes the function of the second proverb. This proverb is again represented as being more closely connected with Alfred by the Ramsey text than we find in Byrhtferth’s source. Its function is changed from external commentary to an active part of Alfred’s decision-making process. In this way the proverbs become associated much more with the person of Alfred himself, rather than remaining authorial commentary: Et illud medullitus est praemeditatus quod ait Salomon sapientissimus regum; ‘Cor sane regis in manu Domini est omnipotentis.’130 And he thought over beforehand, from the very marrow, that thing which Solomon, the wisest of kings, said: ‘The heart of the king is truly in the hand of the Lord Almighty.’ 128 Lapidge, ‘Byrhtferth of Ramsey’, p. 119. 129 Simeon of Durham, Historia Regum, ed. Thomas Arnold (1885; London: Kraus, 1965), p. 91. 130 Ibid., p. 91.

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The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance Changing the function of the proverbs sourced from the Life is not the only contribution that the Ramsey text makes to the development of Alfred’s reputation. The text also introduces a number of new proverbs into an Alfredian context. In discussing Alfred’s generous charity towards widows and orphans, the Ramsey text adds: Noverat illud scholastici, ‘Tunc est pretiosa pecunia, cum translata fuerit in alios; largiendi usu desinit possideri.’131 He knew well the saying of the wise man: ‘Then is money precious, when it has been transferred to others; in the use of bounty possession ceases.’

This is another example where Alfred is credited with knowledge of proverbial wisdom. This proverb is not found in the Life, and may be another indicator of an tenth-century tradition linking Alfred with proverbs. A further addition made by Byrhtferth is found in the section based upon chapter 30 of the Life, where Alfred quickly responds to a request for aid from his father-in-law Æthelred, ealdorman of the Gaini. In the Ramsey text this response is explained by the king’s regard for the following proverb, again crediting the king with an extensive knowledge of, and reliance upon, proverbial wisdom: Tunc incitus Elfredus rapidus cœpit præceptis exercitum congregare, illud corde tenus recordans: ‘Nunquam dives agit, qui trepidus, gemens, sese credit egentum.’132 Then Alfred, having been stirred up, gave orders to quickly assemble an army, bearing in mind the saying: ‘A rich man never acts, if, trembling and groaning, he fancies himself needy.’

The process by which Alfred becomes associated with proverbial wisdom can be documented further by the presence of a proverb in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that seems to have an Alfredian provenance.133 In the entry for 1003, the chronicler writes in MS CDE: Swa hit gecweðen is Ðonne se heretoga wacað, þonne bið eall se here swiðe gehindred.134 As it is said, ‘When the army leader weakens in resolve, then the whole army is greatly hindered.’

As Friedrich Klaeber notes, this passage is marked in red letters in MS E. Klaeber interprets this marking of the passage as indicating a quotation. This, 131 Ibid., p. 90. 132 Ibid., pp. 75–6. 133 Friedrich Klaeber, ‘An Old English Proverb’, Journal Of English and Germanic Philology, 5

(1905), 529. 134 Ibid., p. 529, trans. Dorothy Whitelock, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Revised Translation

(London: Eyre, 1961), p. 86.

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Remembering Alfred in the Twelfth Century in conjunction with the introductory phrase, swa hit gecweðen is, seems to indicate a proverbial origin for this saying. He suggests a comparison with the following passage from Alfred’s Pastoral Care: Sua eac bið se here eal idel, ðonne he on oðer folc winnan sceal, gif se heretoga dwolað.135 Furthermore the army shall be entirely ineffectual, when it must fight against other people, if the army leader falters.

Although the sense of this passage is found in Gregory’s original, Alfred’s rendering is looser and closer to oral proverbial wisdom. 136 Alfred’s reputation as a speaker of proverbs in the twelfth century is generally attributed to the influence of popular tradition. However, I have proposed here the existence of a textual tradition that suggests that the development of Alfred’s reputation for proverbs can be traced to Asser’s Life. While not denying that the primary location of this tradition seems to be found in popular tradition, I would suggest that the Ramsey author’s alterations to the proverbs that appear in Asser’s Life indicate the presence and influence of this reputation in the tenth century.

Remembering Anglo-Saxon England The Proverbs represents an image of Anglo-Saxon England that illustrates one way in which the Anglo-Saxon past was remembered during the twelfth century. A synthesis of local legend concerning Alfred and proverbial material drawn primarily from the Distichs of Cato and the Bible, the text constructs Alfred’s reign as an ideal of kingship and social order. This conception of Christian society, which has parallels with contemporary discourses on kingship such as John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, is situated within an Anglo-Saxon past that was imagined to have been more peaceful and more pious than the text’s twelfth-century present. It seems probable that the text was produced by a scribe who was associated with one of the monastic houses in East Sussex, with Lewes Priory and Battle Abbey being the most likely candidates, which perhaps suggests that the reason for the production of the text may have been a concern to record this local Alfredian legend for posterity, a historiographical trend that can be seen in many monastic houses during the twelfth century. 137 135 King Alfred’s West-Saxon version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, ed. and trans. Henry Sweet, EETS

OS 45, 50 (London: Trübner, 1871), p. 129. 136 Klaeber, p. 529. The passage in Gregory is: ‘In exploratione hostium frustra exercitus velociter

sequitur, si ab ipso duce itineris erratur’ (Gregory, Regula Pastoralis, bk 2, ch. 7, cited in Klaeber, p. 529). 137 The monks at Battle Abbey produced their Chronicle at this time, and the popularity of recording the past during this period is well attested. Elsewhere, William of Malmesbury recorded many

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The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance However, there also exists the possibility that the Proverbs may have been produced in order to appeal to the family of Alvred pincerna. If this was the case, then a more actively political appropriation of Alfred’s reputation becomes evident. Under this speculative scenario, the monastic author, familiar with the local legend concerning Alvred’s royal namesake, embellished this narrative with a series of well-known sententiae to produce a text that was designed to appeal to Alvred’s descendants in order to elicit benefactions for his institution. It is recorded that Alvred’s son and grandson both made contributions to a number of religious houses in the East Sussex region, including Lewes, and it is tempting to imagine that the Proverbs may have been produced in order to attract, or perhaps to recognise, one of these benefactions. This remains, however, speculation, as there is no conclusive contextual or manuscript evidence that the text was produced for such a purpose. The importance of place to the Proverbs should also be noted. Seaford, as the setting of the poem, seems to have been central to the remembrance of Alfred’s reputation in the East Sussex region. Landscape has been described by Homi Bhabha as a metaphor for the ‘inscape of national identity’, and as such becomes an important element of any appropriation of the past.138 This inscape, which I take to be a term for the communal knowledge of history, custom, and legend that constitutes a society’s understanding of its past, seems to be essential to an understanding of the way place works within the Proverbs. Seaford, and the Alfredian memorialised narrative that it signifies, can be understood as part of a specifically regional inscape, representative of the past as understood and remembered by the people of East Sussex. In the Proverbs, it is this regional inscape that is appropriated by the text. The construction of the Anglo-Saxon past in the text draws upon this local idea of Anglo-Saxon England and fuses it with contemporary thinking on the nature of kingship. The appropriation of place is an important element in the process of appropriation as seen in the Proverbs, and remains a powerful element in the remembrance and re-creation of the Anglo-Saxon past in the centuries to come. The Proverbs of Alfred illustrates a number of important strategies through which the Anglo-Saxon past was remembered in the post-conquest period. Important to the process are names and places: King Alfred’s name seems still to have possessed connotations of authority in the twelfth century, as evidenced by the existence of a textual tradition associating him with the speaking of wisdom. In the case of East Sussex, this reputation was complemented by a local, presumably oral, legend of his councils at Seaford. Further still, it may be significant that Alvred pincerna, the most powerful of Robert oral legends of Alfred during his travels (Whitelock, ‘William of Malmesbury on the Works of King Alfred’, p. 82). 138 Diane Speed, ‘The Construction of the Nation in Medieval Romance’, in Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 135–57 (p. 147).

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Remembering Alfred in the Twelfth Century of Mortain’s baronial officials, bore a name that was associated locally with rulership and power. In contrast to John Niles and Allen Frantzen’s postulated subjective appropriation of the past, the Anglo-Saxon past that is found in the Proverbs of Alfred is constructed from names, places, and concerns that have their origins within very real material and cultural remains. The Proverbs provides a construction of Anglo-Saxon England that belies any simple process of cultural appropriation, suggesting rather a complex interplay between local legends, textual traditions and contemporary twelfth-century concerns.

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The Romance of the Anglo-Saxon Past

3 The Romance of the Anglo-Saxon Past

A

MONG the corpus of Middle English romance there are many narratives ithat purport to be historical in nature. Romances of the Arthurian world vie for attention alongside legends of antiquity and of the Carolingians. Found also within this body of ‘historical’ romances are a number of texts that concern themselves with the pre-conquest history of England – those that have been termed the Matter of England romances.1 This chapter, and the three that follow it, examine the ways that the Anglo-Saxon past is constructed in these romances and the uses for which this past is employed. Concentrating upon the Middle English romances Guy of Warwick, Beues of Hamtoun, Havelok the Dane, and Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild, this chapter seeks to address two main areas of interest: the ‘historicity’ of these texts, and their use of place in constructing the past. 2 The question of whether the Matter of England romances can be considered a form of historical narrative has been a matter of some interest in recent years. Rosalind Field and Thorlac Turville-Petre have both made significant recent contributions to the debate.3 Field has proposed that romance can be read as a form of popular historiography, while Turville-Petre’s study of the Auchinleck manuscript romances has emphasised what the organisation of a manuscript can reveal about the position of the texts that it contains within a wider historical narrative. The work of these (and other) scholars has broadened our understanding of the cultural and historical significance of these texts. No longer judged solely on the basis of their apparent literary failings, these romances of England’s past have taken on new meaning, and new

1

2

3

The ‘Matter’ of England is an often-debated and amorphous literary grouping. Here I take it to include those romances that are explicitly set prior to the Norman Conquest. For one discussion of the ‘Matter of England’, see Donald Sands (ed.), Middle English Verse Romances (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1986), pp. 4–5. Guy of Warwick, Edited from the Auchinleck MS. in the Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh, and from MS. 107 in Caius College, Cambridge, ed. J. Zupitza, EETS ES 42, 49, 59 (London: Trübner, 1883–91); Beues of Hamtoun, ed. Eugen Kölbing, EETS ES 46, 48, 65 (London: Kegan Paul, 1885–94); Havelok the Dane, ed. G. V. Smithers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987); Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild, by Maldwyn Mills (Heidelberg: Winter, 1988). Rosalind Field, ‘Romance as History and History as Romance’, in Romance in Medieval England, ed. Maldwyn Mills et al. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991), pp. 163–73; Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996).

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The Romance of the Anglo-Saxon Past importance, through an analysis of the way in which they are involved in the writing and rewriting of England’s history. In this chapter I wish to ask what role the Anglo-Saxon past, and Anglo-Saxon England itself, holds in this process of historical reconstruction. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the retelling of the Anglo-Saxon past is intimately connected with place. In a similar fashion to the Proverbs of Alfred, which anchors its narrative in Seaford, the Matter of England romances make use of precise geographical detail in their construction of the Anglo-Saxon past. This connection between place and narrative, so strong in these romances, has implications for the way these texts were understood on both a national and local level, and is an issue that I examine in the second section of this chapter. The focus in this chapter is in what the Matter of England romances may have meant to their contemporary readers (or listeners), and thus I shall have little to say about their similarities to and differences from their Anglo-Norman sources. Much valuable work on the process of translation has been done, but, as Ivana Djordjevic has emphasised, the Middle English romances rework these narratives into texts that carry their own unique cultural resonance.4 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen adds that romances such as Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hampton, Perceval of Galles, and Lybeaus Desconus continued to be copied, read, and enjoyed for several hundred years after they were first composed. Clearly, then, an argument that ties the cultural use and meaning of these narratives solely to their moment of genesis is inadequate.5

This chapter addresses the audience of the Matter of England romances in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It is to be recognised that the multiple versions of romances such as Guy of Warwick and Beues of Hamtoun necessitate multiple audiences for these texts; however, I will specifically consider the audience of the Auchinleck manuscript versions of these texts, for two important reasons: firstly, Turville-Petre’s research has identified these texts as being of interest to both the student of English identity and medieval attitudes towards the past; and secondly, that the nature of the production of the manuscript – what has been termed a London bookshop production – represents the reissuing of once regional texts in a new national, urban, and cosmopolitan context. 6 4

5 6

Ivana Djordjevic, ‘Mapping Medieval Translation’, in Medieval Insular Romance: Translation and Innovation, ed. Judith Weiss, Jennifer Fellows and Morgan Dickson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 7–23 (p. 15). Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1999), p. 91. The regional origins of these narratives, such as the attribution of the production of the Anglo-Norman Gui de Warewic to the monks of Osney Abbey (Emma Mason, ‘Legends of the Beauchamps’ Ancestors: the Use of Baronial Propaganda in Medieval England’, Journal of Medi-

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The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance

Romance as History An important question that impacts upon an understanding of how the Anglo-Saxon past was used in these romances is whether or not they were read as history. Did the audience of the Auchinleck Guy of Warwick or Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild understand these tales as historical accounts of the past or as imaginative fictions? The nature of the relationship between history and romance in the medieval period is a question that has engendered much debate. The blurring of the distinction between these two forms of narrative, created as much by the modes and purposes of medieval historiography as by modern (and post-modern) criticism, raises questions of how the past in many romances was, and should be, read. As any student of medieval historiography soon discovers, the writing of history in the Middle Ages was not solely concerned with the organisation, presentation, and interpretation of historical data; instead, ‘Medieval historiography is concerned with turning the past into a meaningful narrative, rather than with excavating some time-bound set of facts.’7 By highlighting the essentially narrative character of medieval historiography, medieval romance can be viewed as a form of history that, as Field tells us, appealed, and continues to appeal ‘to the popular mind’.8 As a form of popular history, many medieval romances can be seen to construct historical narratives that represent popular understandings of the past.9 The Matter of England romances are concerned with the representation of the pre-conquest English past, and in particular the Anglo-Saxon period. Field describes these romances as texts ‘which . . . affect a certain historicity’, and ‘which shaped perceptions of pre- and post-Conquest England’.10 The construction of Anglo-Saxon England in these texts is part of the ongoing process of the cultural appropriation of the Anglo-Saxon past. Within this context of cultural appropriation, to what extent is it possible to understand Guy, Beues, or Horn Childe as Anglo-Saxon figures? This question needs to be clarified: I am not asking whether these heroes existed as real historical personages in the Anglo-Saxon period – evidently they did not, at least in the form that the romances portray them.11 They are, from any modern analysis, eval History, 10 (1984), 25–40 (p. 31)), is evident from their dialects, their use of toponyms, and from the precise local geographies that they contain. 7 Cohen, Of Giants, p. 32. 8 Field, ‘Romance as History’, p. 173. 9 The term ‘popular’ is used here to differentiate the romance mode of history from that found in the dominant mode of medieval historiography: the chronicle. On the use of ‘popular’ in relation to the romances, see Ad Putter’s discussion in ‘A Historical Introduction’ to The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, ed. Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert (London: Longman, 2000), pp. 1–15. 10 Field, ‘Romance as History’, p. 163. 11 While Beues has no apparent historical pre-conquest lineage, it has been argued that Guy of Warwick is ultimately (albeit tenuously) based upon the historical Wigod of Wallingford, the cupbearer of Edward the Confessor (Mason, p. 31).

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The Romance of the Anglo-Saxon Past thirteenth- and fourteenth-century knights masquerading as Anglo-Saxon nobles. Rather, and perhaps more interestingly, I am asking whether they may have been understood as being Anglo-Saxon, or at least as pre-conquest English, by the late-medieval audiences of these romances. Dorothee Metlitzki, commenting upon the depiction of the Arab world in Beues of Hamtoun, concludes that ‘Sir Beues tells us what the average Englishman in hall and marketplace knew or imagined about the Saracens.’12 Given that the past is also a foreign country,13 it might therefore be reasonably argued that Beues can also inform us of what the average Englishman knew or imagined of Anglo-Saxon England. After all, as John Niles observes, ‘Anglo-Saxon England is nothing other than what it has been perceived to be by historically grounded human beings, from the time of the Anglo-Saxons to the present moment.’14 Niles makes the useful point that any representation of the Anglo-Saxon past constitutes an appropriation of Anglo-Saxon England, and thus raises questions regarding the processes that lie behind such appropriations. One commonly cited argument against claims of historicity in medieval literature is the lack of what C. S. Lewis called a ‘sense of period’ in many medieval representations of the past.15 Despite the Anglo-Saxon historical context of these romances, the world that these English heroes inhabit is essentially the world of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, albeit one that contains remnants of the twelfth-century world of their Anglo-Norman sources: Guy travels to France and to Italy to engage in tournaments, and both he and Beues travel extensively in the Saracen lands familiar to many a knight from the crusades. However, this apparent anachronistic weakness has been seen as an important strength of the medieval approach to history. Lewis argues that ‘this happy ignorance . . . gave the medieval carver or poet his power of touching into vivid life every “historical” matter he took in hand’.16 To the medieval mind, it mattered not whether figures such as Guy and Beues were authentically represented as Anglo-Saxon, even if it were possible for an

12 Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven and London: Yale

University Press, 1977), p. 120. 13 J. A. Burrow has argued for a less straightforward approach to the alterity of the past, suggesting

that that L. P. Hartley’s sententia should be rephrased as ‘The past is sometimes another country’ (‘ “Alterity” and Middle English Literature’, Review of English Studies, 50 (1999), 483–92 (p. 492)). 14 John D. Niles, ‘Appropriations: A Concept of Culture’, in Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, ed. Allen Frantzen and John D. Niles (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), pp. 202–28 (p. 209). 15 C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), pp. 182–3. Lewis’s view of a uniform medieval ‘sense of the past’ has been challenged by (amongst others) R. W. Southern (‘The Sense of the Past’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Series, 23 (1973), 243–63), Lee Patterson (Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 198), and Peter Burke (‘The Sense of Anachronism from Petrarch to Poussin’, in Time in the Medieval World, ed. by Chris Humphrey and W. M. Ormrod (York: York Medieval Press, 2001), pp. 157–73 (pp. 162–3)). 16 Lewis, p. 184.

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The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance audience to judge authenticity; what mattered was that the chronological period should be clearly indicated by the text, ideally in the form of a historical or quasi-historical monarch. That Anglo-Saxon England is represented as similar to the fourteenth-century world is characteristic of a narrative that emphasises continuity between the experiences of the fourteenth-century English and their Anglo-Saxon ancestors. This appropriation of Anglo-Saxon England acts to reinforce English ties with their pre-conquest past. The medieval attitude towards the historicity of these romances is evidenced by the way in which they are incorporated into that important vehicle of secular textual authority, the chronicle.17 One such example of the integration of romance into the historical record is the use that is made of the Guy of Warwick narrative by a number of different chronicles. Guy of Warwick is a figure who in many ways transcends his own genre. First appearing in the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman romance Gui de Warewic,18 he is integrated into chronicle historiography in the early fourteenth-century by Pierre de Langtoft.19 The process by which Guy enters the chronicles is a curious one, and seems to centre on Guy’s role as England’s saviour from the Danes in the reign of King Athelstan. According to conventional medieval accounts of Athelstan’s reign, such as William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum, the Danes invaded in great force under their leader Anlaf and were defeated in a decisive battle at Brunnanburh in AD 937 by Athelstan and his allies.20 Langtoft, aware of this narrative, relates: L’an primer ke Hilde esposez estait, Constantyn de Escose en Humbre aryvayt, Un rays paen, Anlaphe, of ly amenait; D. cc. et xv. nefs le ray Anlaphe avayt. Ly bon ray Adelstan, ke drayture amayt, Of Edmoun sun frere, dount ben s’affyait, A Bruneburge sur Humbre les feluns encountrait. Del matyn jekes al vespre la bataylle durait. Le rays Adelstan les ij. rays enchascait; Chescun en sa terre enfuaunt s’en vayt; Pur veir lur remisaille Adelstan tuait.

17 Turville-Petre discusses this process in relation to the Havelok narrative, which first makes its

appearance as chronicle history, in Gaimar’s L’Estoire des Engleis around 1135, before later finding expression in romance (England the Nation, pp. 143–55). 18 The standard edition is Gui de Warewic, ed. by Alfred Ewert (Paris: Champion, 1932). On the continued use of the Guy narrative in histories, see Helen Cooper, ‘Romance after 1400’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 670–719 (pp. 704–5). 19 Langtoft’s Chronicle has been the object of an interesting study of Englishness and the past by Thea Summerfield (The Matter of Kings’ Lives (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998)). 20 William of Malmesbury, William of Malmesbury: Gesta Regum Anglorum / The History of the English Kings, ed. R. A. B Mynors, R. M. Thompson and M. Winterbottom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 131–40.

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The Romance of the Anglo-Saxon Past The year after Hilda was espoused, Constantine of Scotland arrived in the Humber, A pagan king, Anlaf, he brought with him: Anlaf had seven hundred and fifteen ships. The good king Athelstan, who loved right, With Edmund his brother, in whom he placed great trust, Encountered the wretches at Brunnanburh on Humber. The battle lasted from morning till evening. King Athelstan put to flight the two kings; Each in flight went away to his land; In truth Athelstan slew those who remained. 21

However, this account of Athelstan’s defeat of Anlaf’s invading army was not the only one that was available to Langtoft. In the Guy narrative, Guy saves England from Anlaf’s invading Danish army by defeating the giant Colbrond in single combat at Winchester. In the light of this popular competing historical narrative, Langtoft was faced with the decision of which account to believe. Langtoft, in an apparent attempt to integrate these two competing accounts into his chronicle, seems to have solved this problem by simply adding a second invasion: Kant le rays Anlaphe avait perdu sa gent, Il mesmes à grant payne passa del thorment; Vers Danemarche s’en va al sigle et al vent. A la Paske après aryve en l’orient, Al porte de Sanwyce, of pople à talent. Colebrand vint of ly, Anlaphe avaunt se tent Tut drait à Wyncestre où Adelstan attent. Anlaphe saunz demore ly maunde apertement, Par ses messagers, ke la terre ly rend, Ou encountre Colebrand par un home la defent. Ly rays Adelstan tynt sun parlement, Ne trova chuvaler de tel hardyment, Ke of ly combaterayt pur [tut] le tenement. Adelstan priait à Deu omnipontent, Ke aider ly vousist, et Deu benignement En sounge of ly parlait, et dist ke prestement Ke al matyn troverayt un velz palmer et lent, A la porte del seu, et cely seurement Parfrait la bataille, pur Deu omnipotent, Si pur Deu ly priast; ço fu verrayment Guy de Warwik, sun livre dist coment Il tuayt Colebrand, par quai tut quitement. Anlaphe rethorna à cel fez dolent.

21 The Chronicle of Pierre de Langtoft, ed. and trans. Thomas Wright (London: Longmans, 1866), pp.

330–1.

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The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance When king Anlaf had lost his people, He himself escaped with great difficulty from the turmoil; He proceeds towards Denmark with sail and wind. At the Easter following he arrives in the east, At the port of Sandwich, with people in abundance. Colbrand came with him, Anlaf advanced Straight to Winchester where Athelstan awaits him. Anlaf without delay openly summons him, By his messengers, to give up the land to him, Or defend it by a man against Colbrand. King Athelstan holds his parliament, Found no knight of such boldness, Who would fight with him for the whole domain. Athelstan prayed to God Almighty, That he would vouchsafe to help him, and God benignly Talked to him in a dream, and told him that immediately In the morning he would find a palmer old and slow, At the south gate, and he assuredly Would perform the battle, for God Almighty, If he prayed him for God’s sake; this was truly Guy of Warwick, his book tells how 22 He slew Colbrand, whereby all quit. Anlaf returned that time in sorrow. 23

A second invasion led by Anlaf has no known precedent in either the chronicle or romance traditions, and it seems that Langtoft invented it in order to incorporate what he viewed as two equally valid historical narratives. However, Langtoft’s invention of a second invasion does not seem to have found wide favour. Later chroniclers either use the Brunnanburh tradition or the Guy narrative, but rarely both. Guy’s continued presence within the chronicle record can be seen in the Auchinleck manuscript version of the Short Metrical Chronicle. Thorlac Turville-Petre describes this account of English history, titled in the manuscript as the Liber Regum Anglie, as a text in which ‘romance-fiction and historical fact are inextricably intertwined’.24 His suggestion that this text acts as both a structural and thematic backbone through which the romances of the Auchinleck manuscript can be understood seems compelling.25 Reading the Auchinleck ‘historical’ romances within the context of the Liber Regum and

22 23 24 25

Thea Summerfield suggests this book is likely to have been a romance of Guy (p. 261, n. 45). Wright, pp. 330–3. Turville-Petre, England the Nation, p. 111. Ibid., p. 112. A parallel case of the use of a chronicle text to co-ordinate the historicising of a number of romances within a manuscript can be seen in the example of MS Bibliothèque Nationale fonds français 1450, which interpolates Chrétien de Troyes’ five Arthurian romances into Wace’s Brut (Simon Gaunt, ‘Romance and Other Genres’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. Roberta L. Krueger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 45–59 (p. 50)).

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The Romance of the Anglo-Saxon Past of the manuscript as a whole, the romances can be seen as episodes within an extensive and unified retelling of the whole of English history. As part of its summation of English history, the Liber Regum makes use of Guy’s fight with Colbrond in its rapid abridgment of the Anglo-Saxon period. Again placing the combat in Athelstan’s reign, the Liber Regum provides the bare bones of what was evidently a well-known ‘historical’ event: In Aþelstones tyme ich vnderstonde Was Gwi of Warwyk in Engelonde & for Englond dude batail With a geaunt gret sem fail Þe geaunt het Colbron He was slayn þoru Gwi his hond At Wynchestre þe batail was don 26

There is nothing too surprising here – a chronicle making use of the narrative authorised by Langtoft’s Chronicle. It is not so much the text, but rather its manuscript context, that is of interest here. Turville-Petre argues that the Guy and Colbrond interpolation in the Liber Regum, which differs from other versions of the Short Metrical Chronicle, is an indication of the historical importance placed upon Guy within the manuscript as a whole.27 Guy’s centrality to the Auchinleck manuscript – the ‘handbook of the nation’ – is made clear by the presence of his eponymous romance, the romance of his son Reinbroun, and the curious Speculum de Guy of Warwicke.28 This last text, a piece of doctrinal instruction delivered to Guy by his spiritual adviser Alcuin, seems to spring from an episode in the romance when Guy seeks out the holy man for advice on how best to live his life. This short passage in the romance is expanded in this text into a treatise on how to live the life of a good Christian in the world. The Auchinleck manuscript brings together historical, romance, and personal salvation narratives in the person of Guy. Considered as a whole, the manuscript stands as an example of the textual and intellectual co-positioning of history and romance. The historicising mode of the Auchinleck manuscript may also lie behind one of the more curious elements of historical integration to be found in the Auchinleck romances. In the Auchinleck version of Sir Orfeo, we find the classical locale of the Orpheus myth translated into an English context: This king sojournd in Traciens, That was a cité of noble defens – For Winchester was cleped tho Traciens, withouten no. (Sir Orfeo, 47–50)29 26 An Anonymous Short English Metrical Chronicle, ed. Ewald Zettl, EETS OS 196 (London: Oxford

University Press, 1935), p. 25. 27 Turville-Petre, England the Nation, p. 116. 28 Ibid., p. 112 and p. 116. 29 Sir Orfeo, ed. A. J. Bliss (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966).

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The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance This passage, which is found in the Auchinleck version of the romance but not in the two later extant versions, suggests that the association of Thrace with Winchester can perhaps be seen as a scribal alteration, in keeping with the nationalistic agenda of the Auchinleck manuscript as a whole. 30 The historicising structure found within the Auchinleck manuscript suggests that the romances of Guy, Beues, and Horn Childe were presented in this context as histories. They may not have been universally accepted as such, but in the case of this manuscript it seems unavoidable to conclude, along with Turville-Petre, that ‘the romances are to be understood, not just as entertainments but as sources of historical knowledge’.31 As such, the Matter of England romances must have provided their contemporary audiences with a sense of the place of the pre-Conquest past in England’s history. In the conception of English history evidenced by the Auchinleck manuscript, the Anglo-Saxon past is part of a seamless stream of English history that proceeds from the Trojan Brutus to the fourteenth century. Absent is the sense of the national and racial disjunction that we encounter in chroniclers such as William of Malmesbury or Robert of Gloucester. For the nationalistic agenda of the Auchinleck manuscript, the place of the Anglo-Saxon period in English history is simply that, a part of English history: an English history that is constructed in such a manner as to emphasise above all else continuity.

History and the Land This sense of continuity between the Anglo-Saxon England and the fourteenth-century England of their audiences is also seen in the emphasis upon place that is witnessed in the Matter of England romances. History is not only recorded in texts; it is also imprinted upon the landscape. Despite the passing of some three hundred years since the conquest, geography is one thing that had remained relatively constant. Places make the past real; they provide concrete connections with the world of these historical romances by encoding the narrative into a landscape familiar to the audience. Gillian R. Overing and Marijane Osborne have suggested that as critics and readers ‘we share places with the past, and we view the experience of place as a negotiative activity whereby we may extend, develop, or invent our dialogue with the past’.32 Places are utilised by the romances in similar fashion: they engage the audience with the real world of both the past and the present. The places where these figures from history once walked were still there: one could walk where

30 Sir Orfeo is preserved in three manuscripts: the Auchinleck MS (c.1330), Harley 3810 (c.1400),

and Ashmole 61 (c.1488). 31 Turville-Petre, England the Nation, p. 112. 32 Gillian R. Overing and Marijane Osborne, Landscape of Desire: Partial Stories of the Medieval

Scandinavian World (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1994), p. xiv.

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The Romance of the Anglo-Saxon Past Guy of Warwick walked, see the field where he fought Colbrond, and gaze upon his hermitage. Embodying history, places occupy an important role within the creation of social identity. Landscape has been described by Homi Bhabha as a metaphor for the ‘inscape of national identity’, and as such becomes an important element of any appropriation of the past.33 Bhabha’s notion of ‘inscape’ refers to the shared narrative geography of myth, folktale and history that allows societies to make sense of the world in which they live. Diane Speed regards ‘inscape’ as a concept that can explain the connection between national identity and the landscape that we see in the romances. This intimate connection between history and geography is one of signifier and signified: place becomes a signifier of historical narrative – the land, as much as the text, contains the past. The past is told in terms of its relationship with the land. Places both construct stories and are themselves constructed by the narratives that surround them.34 Both Guy of Warwick and Beues of Hamtoun seem to participate in this interaction between place and romance narrative. As the Guy of Warwick narrative developed, it gained a marked engagement with place during the later medieval period. In the fifteenth century, the earls of Warwick can be seen to have reconfigured the local geography of their own lands to conform to the narrative landscape of the Guy romances.35 Richard Beauchamp, the thirteenth Earl, for example, founded a chantry just north of Warwick, which was referred to as ‘Guy’s Cliff’.36 However, even before the earls of Warwick began this process of textualising their family lands, there was already an emphasis upon the significance of place present within the text. Guy begins, as do many romances, with an explanation of the moral purpose of the text: that men should listen to the deeds of they that were borne or wee (Auchinleck Guy of Warwick, 11) and be instructed by their actions.37 The romance continues, situating the tale within the local geography of Warwick and the surrounding area. References to Buckinghamshire, Oxford, Warwick, and Wallingford in the early part of the text establish the

33 Diane Speed, ‘The Construction of the Nation in Medieval Romance’, in Readings in Medieval

English Romance, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 135–57 (p. 147). 34 This relationship between place and history has not gone unnoticed by other critics. Rosalind Field

notes in the Anglo-Norman Matter of England romances the development of a romance mode ‘in which Place is precise and important’ (‘Romance as History’, p. 169). Agreeing with R. H. C. Davis, she understands this as a manifestation of the Norman and Angevin need to smooth over the disjunction of the conquest: ‘The Normans had projected themselves into the past and identified themselves with the pre-Norman history of England . . . They belonged to England as much as England belonged to them’ (R. H. C. Davis, The Normans and their Myth (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976), p. 131). The appropriation of the landscape seems to have been an important part of the Norman appropriation of the Anglo-Saxon past. 35 Mason discusses this geo-political use of the Guy of Warwick tradition (pp. 25–40), as does Cohen (Of Giants, pp. 94–5). 36 Carol Fewster, Traditionality and Genre in Middle English Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987), p. 112. 37 All quotes from Guy of Warwick are from Zupitza’s edition of the Auchinleck MS unless otherwise noted.

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The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance narrative as being one that is at once familiar to its audience in regard to place, while unfamiliar in regard to historical setting.38 This seems to have the effect of emphasising a sense of continuity with the past, and by extension, with the future. This allies itself well with the message of the preceding moral preface: that the actions which a man performs in the present will be remembered in his locality in the future; a reminder of the importance of reputation and of keeping in mind the consequences of one’s actions. In terms of narrative technique, the situating of the narrative within well-known localities helps to immerse the audience in the world of the romance, allowing them a way to access and engage with the narrative. As Jill Frederick has observed, this technique ‘encourages its audience to make connections between the period of [the past and] that of its own’.39 The most high-profile English place in Guy of Warwick is Winchester, scene of Guy’s final battle against the champion of the invading Danish army, the giant Colbrond. Commemorated through literature, chronicle, sculpture and painting, this episode is one of the most well-remembered of the Guy narrative. It is also set in one of the most important of English cities. Winchester was King Alfred’s principal city, then Cnut’s capital, and in the post-conquest period maintained its cultural importance both through its historical position as the chief city in Wessex and the Arthurian connections that developed around it. Winchester was the object of a complex history of cultural appropriation during the medieval period, and Guy’s fight with Colbrond is an interesting aspect of that appropriation.40 An integral part of the Guy narrative, we have seen how Guy’s battle is incorporated into chronicle historiography by Pierre de Langtoft. In the romance narrative of the Anglo-Saxon past, Guy’s fight replaces Athelstan’s historical victory over Anlaf and the Scottish King Constantine at Brunnanburh. By transferring the agency of England’s salvation from Athelstan to Guy (with his conspicuously Norman name), the narrative refashions pre-conquest English history. This refashioning is also reflected in the change of place. By moving the location of the fight to a field near Winchester, the narrative appropriates what is one of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s most treasured national triumphs and moves it south from Brunnanburh.41 This transposition of the narrative seems analogous in many ways to the translation of saints’ relics. 38 These geographical locations are present in all three complete Middle English Guy of Warwick

manuscripts. 39 Jill Frederick, ‘The South England Legendary: Anglo-Saxon Saints and National Identity’, in

Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. by Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 57–73 (p. 70). 40 The literary history of Winchester, and in particular the development of its connections with the Guy of Warwick narrative, is the focus of Chapter 6. 41 Andrew Galloway describes it as ‘a clear Normanizing of a seminal instance of Anglo-Saxon heroic identity’, in his ‘Writing History in England’, in Wallace, pp. 255–83 (p. 271). The battle of Brunnanburh is the subject of an alliterative poem found in the annal for 937 in four of the seven MSS of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. AD

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The Romance of the Anglo-Saxon Past Colbrond, as a giant, is himself important in terms of landscape. In his recent study of monsters in the Middle Ages, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has termed giants ‘vast signifiers of an untamed landscape’.42 Read in the context of the Galfridian Brutus foundation myth, Colbrond can be understood as representing the primal threat that underlies a possible Danish victory: a victory that would plunge England back into a chaos similar to that which existed before Brutus slew the giants and tamed the island for men.43 The defeat of Gogmagog’s race of pre-British giants by Brutus and his followers symbolises the domestication of both untamed landscape and untamed human nature.44 Guy’s victory thus not only saves England from the Danes (and therefore for the Normans) but also rehabilitates the English landscape once more by subjecting it to the narrative revisions of the post-conquest romance mode of historiography. The appropriation of place in Guy of Warwick contributes to the construction of an Anglo-Saxon England that conforms in many ways to the world of romance, but remains anchored in familiar and known geography. This is a construction of Anglo-Saxon England that represents both the Anglo-Norman desire to project themselves into the past and the fourteenth-century appropriation of the Anglo-Saxon period as an English past – one that can accommodate the need for a past that is familiar and knowable to its audience. Beues of Hamtoun inhabits a similarly appropriated Anglo-Saxon landscape. Ostensibly set during the reign of King Edgar, Beues of Hamtoun begins with the treacherous slaying of Beues’s father Gui in a forest near Southampton. The forest, often a place for dangerous encounters and ambushes, appears to have been associated in Beues with the New Forest, which was connected with a number of historical noble deaths.45 Earl Gui is slain by the German emperor at the behest of his Scottish wife, as a result of a May–January marriage gone wrong. Beues’s mother, never named in the Auchinleck text, complains that Me lord is olde & may nou t werche / Al dai him is leuer at cherche / Þan in me bour (58–60). Unsatisfied by this marriage, she arranges for the emperor to surprise her husband while he is hunting in the forest and to slay him. Significantly, the ambush and murder of Beues’s father is situated in the very forest where two of William the Conqueror’s sons were killed: firstly, his son Richard was slain in 1081 in a hunting accident, and in 1100 William Rufus was infamously murdered by Walter Tyrell.46 The use of the New Forest as the site of a treacherous noble

42 Cohen, Of Giants, p. 33. 43 The story of the incestuous origins of the pre-Brutian giants of Albion is related in De Origine

Gigantum (Ruth Evans, ‘Gigantic Origins: An Annotated Translation of De Origine Gigantum’, Arthurian Literature, 16 (1998), 197–211. 44 Cohen, Of Giants, pp. 31–6. 45 On the dangerous nature of medieval forests see Corinne Saunders’s study The Forest of Medieval Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993). 46 Some contemporaries viewed William I’s death in the New Forest as ‘a direct judgement from God’ due to his harsh enforcement of the Forest laws (Maurice Keen, The Outlaws of Medieval

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The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance death may well have been an intentional ploy by the author of Beues to make use of the well-known historical associations of the forest. An appropriation of place is also found in the origin tale of the construction of Arundel castle in Beues. Late in the romance, after reclaiming his ancestral lands, and having been made King Edgar’s marshal, Beues hears of a horse race, and enters on his trusty horse Arondel: In somer aboute whit-sontide, When kni
tes mest an horse ride, A gret kours þar was do grede, For to saien here alþer stede . . . (Beues of Hamtoun, 3511–14)

On arriving at the site of the race, Beues discovers that two knights have stolen a march on the rest of the competitors by leaving early. Finding himself a mile behind these two riders, Beues strikes Arondel with his spurs, shakes his bridle, and entreats his steed to ride well: . . . ‘Arondel,’ queþ Beues þo, ‘For me loue go bet, go, And i schel do faire and wel For þe loue reren a castel!’ Whan Arondel herde, what he spak, Be-fore þe twei kni
tes he rak, Þat he com raþer to þe tresore, Þan hii be half and more. Beues of his palfrai ali
te & tok þe tresore anon ri
te: Wiþ þat and wiþ mor catel He made þe castel of Arondel. (Beues of Hamtoun, 3531–42)

This episode involves the narrative construction of place – in the most literal sense. The naming of Arundel Castle after Beues’s horse provides a history for the Norman castle that stretches back into the Anglo-Saxon period, once more bridging the Conquest and ensuring a sense of historical continuity.47 The raising of the castle for loue, as compared to its origin as a symbol of occupation and control, constitutes an intriguing appropriation of place. By providing Arundel with an alternative popular historical origin and folk etymology,48 the romance facilitates the integration of Roger de MontLegend, rev. edn (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977) and Charles R. Young. The Royal Forests of England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1979)). 47 Beues’s building and naming of the castle after his horse is perhaps influenced by Alexander’s building and naming of a city after his horse Bucephalus in the well-known medieval Alexander legend (The Prose Life of Alexander, ed. J. S. Westlake (London: Kegan Paul, 1913), p. 107, lines 17–27). 48 The standard modern etymological explanation for the castle’s name is given by John Guy: ‘Harundel, Arundelle, Har-hun-dell, hoarhound valley or hirondelle, a swallow’ (Castles in Sussex (Chichester: Phillimore, 1984), p. 21). The connection between the name of the castle and the swallow, one of the heraldic signs of the Arundel family, was noted as long ago as 1851 by Mark

64

The Romance of the Anglo-Saxon Past gomery’s castle into the Anglo-Saxon landscape of this romance.49 The castle becomes a part of the ‘England that has always been’, acting as both a site of memory and a reminder of the connection between the world of the audience and that of the ‘historical’ narrative of Beues’s life. The connection between place and historical memory is a powerful and enduring one, as Adam Fox observes: ‘. . . the landscape all around was a vast repository of memory. Memories of the past comprised part of that local knowledge from which people derived a sense of identity and pride based upon place.’50 In his study of the connection between oral tradition and historical understanding in early-modern English literature, Fox provides a useful framework through which to understand how the romances constructed the historical landscape of England. He notes that ‘castles seemed particularly prone to this kind of fanciful dating’. Reigate Castle in Surrey was thought to have been built by the Saxons; Devises Castle, built by Roger, Bishop of Salisbury in the twelfth century, was said, ‘upon the authority of tradition’, to have been the work of Alfred the Great; while the Norman Winchester Castle was thought to have been the work of Arthur.51 While Fox’s observations relate to a period some two hundred years or so after the Auchinleck Beues, the characteristics of the oral culture that he is describing are as applicable to the medieval period as they are to the early modern. Beues of Hamtoun’s literary construction of Arundel Castle fits into a long tradition of reconfiguring the historical landscape. Place is also important in constructing the nation. In his reading of Havelok the Dane as a narrative of the formation of England as a unified kingdom, Turville-Petre highlights the function of place within this process.52 Havelok has at its core a concern with the integration of the Danish heritage of the North-East and the East Midlands into English history, and its use of precise regional and local geographical detail illustrates that ‘though the action takes place at a time long past, the place is here’.53 As part of the narrative of England, Havelok binds its narrative intimately to the landscape. This

49

50 51 52

53

Antony Lower: ‘it is worthy of passing notice that the noble family of Arundel, who derived their name from the town, bear six swallows in their arms, and that the armorial ensign of the town itself is a swallow’ (‘Sir Bevis of Hampton and his Horse Arundel’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, 4 (1851), 31–6 (p. 36)). It is interesting to note that Arundel Castle is provided with an even more ancient provenance in the romance Of Arthour and Merlin, another romance extant in the Auchinleck manuscript, which, no doubt by no coincidence, is the romance immediately following Beues in the manuscript. The romance relates a story of Gawain and Ywain leading a force of Arthur’s knights to free Arundel Castle from an innumerable host of Saracens (Of Arthour and Merlin, ed. O. D. Macrae-Gibson, EETS OS 268 (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), lines 8248–52). Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 215. Ibid., pp. 225–6. Thorlac Turville-Petre, ‘Havelok and the History of the Nation’, in Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 121–34 (pp. 123–6); Turville-Petre, England the Nation, pp. 146–7. Turville-Petre, Havelok and the History of the Nation’, p. 125.

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The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance strengthens the effect of the narrative itself, while simultaneously reflecting the physical memorialisation of the wider Havelok tradition. Robert Mannyng writes that Men sais in Lyncoln castelle ligges it a stone / Þat Hauelok kast wele forbi euerilkone; / And it þe chapelle standes þer he weddid his wife.54 Again the Anglo-Saxon past, or in this case the Anglo-Danish, is still tangible within post-conquest England. Another of the Matter of England romances that makes use of the memorialising and historicising function of landscape is Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild.55 A late manifestation of the Horn narrative, this text ‘announces itself as one of those stories of “our elders” who once lived in this land’.56 The Horn narrative, familiar to us through both the Anglo-Norman and Middle English versions, is reworked in Horn Childe to produce a text that not only narrates the maturation process of the hero, but also one that tells the story of the unification of England as a single realm. Horn Childe begins with England divided into two kingdoms ruled by two individual kings: Y wil
ou telle of kinges tvo (Hende Haþeolf was on of þo) Þat weld al Ingelond; Fram Humber norþ þan walt he, Þat was into þe Wan See, Into his owhen hond. (Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild, 7–12)

The two kingdoms of Hatheolf and Houlac neatly mirror the political division of England prior to the unification of Northumbria with Southern England that occurred under King Edgar in AD 958. Before Edgar, already king of both Mercia and Wessex, succeeded his brother to the crown of Northumbria, there had indeed been kinges tvo, one north of and one south of the Humber River. The extensive use of northern place-names in the first section of the romance suggests a Northern origin for the romance, a possibility that is supported by the dialectical features of its language.57 The Danish invaders land in Clifland bi Teseside (54); Hatheolf summons his men to meet on Alerton More (67); after defeating the Danes the king goes hunting on Blakeowe More (110) before holding a fest at Pikering (116); and finally, the king is defeated by the Danes’ second invasion in a battle on Staines More (182). This is in contrast with the complete absence of place-names that we find once Horn has been sent Fer souþe in Inglond (253) to the court of King Houlac. The geography of the Horn Childe narrative also represents the type of local memorialisation that we encounter in Havelok and Guy of Warwick. 54 Robert Mannyng, Peter Langtoft’s Chronicle, ed. Thomas Hearne (London, 1810), p. 26. See also

The Chronicle of Robert Mannyng of Brunne, ed. Idelle Sullens (Binghamton, N.Y.: Binghamton University Press, 1996). 55 Mills identifies and maps the place-names in Horn Childe (p. 8). 56 Turville-Petre, England the Nation, p. 115. 57 Ibid., p. 114.

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The Romance of the Anglo-Saxon Past Of the site of the battle at Clifland bi Teseside, the romance tells us that Whoso goþ or rideþ þerbi, /
ete may men see þer bones ly, / Bi Seyn Sibiles Kirke (82–4).58 This may be suggestive of a wider historical tradition underlying the Horn Childe narrative, one that may have been, as with Havelok, written upon the landscape as well as in romance. In a similar fashion to Havelok, this romance narrates an important episode in the construction of England as a single unified nation. Horn Childe is sent south to King Houlac’s court for safety from the invading Danes. Once there, he is taught the principles of knighthood and governance, as befits a young prince (272–6). After negotiating the treachery of his companions Wikard and Wikel, which leads to his exile in Wales and Ireland, Horn restores his reputation in the court of King Houlac and is offered both the King’s daughter and his lands: Houlac king gan say, ‘Half mi lond ichil þe
iue Wiþ mi dou
ter, while Y liue & al after mi day.’ (Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild, 1113–16)

Horn then turns his thoughts northward towards his patrimony: Forþ, as we telle in gest, Horn lete sende est & west, His folk to batayle bede Into Norþhumberland for to fare To winne þat his fader ware, Wiþ kni
tes stiþe on stede. Wiþ erl, baroun & wiþ swain, To winne his fader lond o
ain,
if Crist him wold spede. Michel frely folk was þare Into Norþhumberland to fare, Wiþ stedes wite & broun. Horn wald for noman spare To winne al þat his fader ware, Boþe tour & toun. When Þorbrond herd þis, Þat Horn to lond ycomen is [. . .] (Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild, 1120–36)

While the Auchinleck text breaks off here, it seems evident from our expectations of the Horn narrative that Horn Childe will revenge himself upon Thorbrond, reclaim his father’s lands, and unite England under one king. Horn Childe retells an important episode from England’s Anglo-Saxon 58 Adam Fox has commented upon the surprising longevity of local remembrance of Danish

battlegrounds in local oral tradition (p. 247).

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The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance history in the guise of romance, altering the names and changing the narrative to one that is familiar to the medieval audience of the romance, but retaining the key outcome of an important stage in the creation of England as a unified state. As Havelok relates the story of the integration of the Danelaw into the English nation, Horn Childe similarly incorporates what was once Northumbria into post-conquest England. This process is transformed through the conventions of romance in a similar manner to the translation of Athelstan’s victory at Brunnanburh to Winchester that we see in Guy of Warwick: Horn Childe re-envisages King Edgar’s unification of England in a manner attractive to post-conquest readers of romance. In addition to recasting an important episode of England’s pre-Conquest past, Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild also addresses an inevitable fact of life in fourteenth-century England: regional difference.59 Turville-Petre notes that within England there were marked regional differences, and for many purposes the country could still be divided at the Humber . . . with a northern territory that had its own traditions, its great lordships with their shifting allegiances to the crown and relationships with the Scots, and where royal control was far looser than it was in the south. 60

The Anglo-Saxon past is used here to reinforce notions of English unity by historicising the Horn tale and integrating it into the Auchinleck manuscript’s narrative of England’s history. Despite having many of the characteristics of romance, the worlds constructed in these texts are grounded in known and familiar landscapes. The appropriation of place is an integral part of the representation of the Anglo-Saxon past, providing familiar ground for the remembrance and reconstruction of historical narrative. Diane Speed writes that ‘the knowable bestows authority’, and the appropriation of familiar places by these narratives allows the audience to feel in control of, and identify with, the popular historical narratives that take place in them.61 In the Middle Ages, the idea that races came and went, but that the land remained constant, was one that helped cement the disparate strands of England’s history together.62 Places, and the narratives attached to them, were constituent parts of local and national ‘inscapes’. The materialising and memorialising function of geographical place within the romances operates to incorporate these constructions of Anglo-Saxon ‘pasts’ into the English historical consciousness, re-mapping the fourteenth-century world in a manner that emphasises both the importance of, and continuity with, the pre-conquest period. In these 59 60 61 62

A concern that I will return to in Chapter 4. Turville-Petre, England the Nation, p. 7. Speed, p. 148. Christopher Cannon discusses this idea in relation to La
amon’s Brut and its use of law (‘La
amon and the Laws of Men’, English Literary History, 67 (2000), 337–63 (pp. 341–2)).

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The Romance of the Anglo-Saxon Past romances the Anglo-Saxon past can be seen to operate as an important stage for the articulation of English history and English values, which, as we shall see in the next chapter, contributed to the developing sense of Englishness that is witnessed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

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The Romance of English Identity

4 The Romance of English Identity

T

HORLAC Turville-Petre’s work has opened up a fertile area of exploration regarding the significance of the Matter of England romances in the process of national identity formation. In this chapter I hope to throw some further light upon the question of English identity in these texts, and more specifically to question the relationship between the idea of Anglo-Saxon England and the idea of England in the Matter of England romances. English identity within these romances is a complex issue; one that is complicated by ties between England and the continent, England’s insular neighbours, and regionalism within England itself. In ‘Havelok and the History of the Nation’, Turville-Petre observes that ‘the establishment and exploration of a sense of a national identity is a major preoccupation of English writers of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries: who are the English; where do they come from; what constitutes the English nation?’1 He argues that Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle (c.1300), the Anonymous Short Metrical Chronicle (post 1307), and Robert Manning’s Chronicle of 1338 all have important roles in this debate: they are concerned with shaping a sense of English identity that is based upon English history.2 Turville-Petre’s identification of a discourse of English with late thirteenth-century and early fourteenth-century literature is illustrative of a wider trend in the recent work of many literary scholars and historians.3 ‘Englishness’ has become a topic of vigorous interest over the past two decades: in 2002 the social historian Robert Colls listed some thirty major studies of Englishness in the previous twenty years, with the majority being written in the previous ten. 4 In this chapter I wish to focus on the continuing development of a sense of Englishness in the Matter of England romances. Firstly, however, it is necessary to consider the form that this Englishness takes in these texts. Can we read, in the manifestation of what Susan Crane has called ‘a wider perception

1 2 3

4

Thorlac Turville-Petre, ‘Havelok and the History of the Nation’, in Readings in Medieval Romance, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 121–34 (p. 121). Ibid., p. 121. For a discussion of this, see Derek Pearsall, ‘The Idea of Englishness in the Fifteenth Century’, in Nation, Court and Culture: New Essays on Fifteenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Helen Cooney (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), pp. 15–27 (p. 15). Robert Colls, Identity of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 5.

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The Romance of English Identity of national identity’, the beginnings of English nationalism?5 The historian Maurice Powicke certainly equates the expression of Englishness, witnessed during Edward I’s crises of the 1290s, with nationalism, declaring emphatically that ‘it was in Edward’s reign that nationalism was born’.6 However, it is impossible to discuss the idea of medieval nationalism without acknowledging a number of problematic theoretical issues. Theorists of nationalism, to a large extent, connect the origins of nationalism with the beginnings of the modern state. Benedict Anderson, in his influential study Imagined Communities, sums up the view that the Enlightenment engendered nationalism: ‘in Western Europe the eighteenth century marks . . . the dawn of the age of nationalism’.7 This view is reiterated by Ernest Gellner, who, regarding the ongoing debate between the modernists and the primordialists concerning the origins of nationalism, comes down firmly on the side of the modernists: ‘The latter [primordialists] claim ancient origins for nationalism; the former [modernists] seek its origins in the feature of the modern world. Our position on this issue is clear: nationalism is rooted in modernity.’8 However, scholars of the pre-modern world have increasingly challenged this view over recent years. In Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages, the volume’s editors note that their contributors seek to challenge Anderson’s presentation of nationalism as a modern phenomenon.9 Lesley Johnson argues for extending studies of nationalism back beyond the modern period, criticising Anderson’s understanding of medieval culture as one in which ‘the medieval past is idealised, homogenised, mythicised and made to serve as a “before the Fall” time, as a period of pre-nationalist thinking and imagining . . .’10 This is a construction of the Middle Ages that Johnson sees as reductive, and one that is far removed from the medieval world as it is envisaged by medievalists engaged in studies of nationalism. The problem, Johnson suggests (quoting Orest Ranum), ‘is not one of determining whether these [national] identities existed in the Middle Ages, but one of discerning what their components and functions were at various times’.11 This challenge is taken up in articles by Alan V. Murray, John Gillingham, and James F. 5

Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle-English Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 59. 6 Maurice Powicke, The Thirteenth Century, 1216–1307, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), p. 528. 7 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (London: Verso, 1991), p. 11. 8 Ernest Gellner, Nationalism (London: Phoenix, 1997), p. 13. 9 Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages, ed. Simon Forde, Lesley Johnson and Alan V. Murray, Leeds Texts and Monographs, 14 (Leeds: Leeds Studies in English, 1995), p. vii. Anthony D. Smith discusses the debate surrounding medieval nationalism in more depth in Nationalism and Modernism (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 170–6). 10 ‘Imagining Communities: Medieval and Modern’, in Concepts of National Identity, pp. 1–19 (p. 5). 11 Orest Ranum, ‘Introduction’, in National Consciousness, History, and Political Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Orest Ranum (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), pp. 1–19 (p. 6), cited in Johnson, p. 15.

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The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance Lydon, who address issues of medieval nationalism in Frankish Outremer, twelfth-century England, and fourteenth-century Ireland respectively.12 These historical studies have laid the groundwork for further studies of nationalism in wider medieval culture and literature. 13 Literary historians have also identified the presence of medieval nationalism. Diane Speed has argued for studies on ‘the discourse of the nation’ to be extended back beyond the traditional eighteenth- and nineteenth-century origins of the modern nation state.14 Speed suggests ‘that it could be reasonably taken back to literature of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, especially to the early romances . . .’15 A wider, and for Speed more useful, definition of the nation is articulated by Timothy Brennan, who ‘explains the nation as a myth which enables “present-day social order” by supplying “a retrospective pattern of moral values, sociological order, and magical belief”, an imaginary construct depending on “an apparatus of cultural fictions in which imaginative literature plays a decisive role” ’.16 Speed argues that the Matter of England romances play an important role in the creation of the ‘cultural fictions’ that constitute Englishness.17 The widening of the use of ‘nation’ as a critical tool has encouraged medievalists such as Geraldine Heng and Sarah Mitchell to further challenge the rigorously modern definition of nationalism, arguing that nationalist ideology is discernible in earlier literature. Heng has argued that a form of English medieval nationalism can be seen in romances such as Richard Coer de Lyon.18 She writes that ‘Medievalists agree that from the thirteenth century onward, discourses of the nation are visible and can be read with ease in medieval England . . .’19 However, Heng is at pains to point out that the medieval nationalism that she perceives is not the same as the modern one: That nation is not, of course, a modern state: among the distinguishing properties of the medieval nation – always a community of the realm,

12 Alan V. Murray, ‘Ethnic Identity in the Crusader States: The Frankish Race and the Settlement of

13

14

15 16 17 18

19

Outremer’, in Concepts of National Identity, pp. 59–74; John Gillingham, ‘Henry of Huntingdon and the Twelfth-Century Revival of the English Nation’, in Concepts of National Identity, pp. 75–102; James F. Lydon, ‘Nation and Race in Medieval Ireland’, in Concepts of National Identity, pp. 103–24. Kathy Lavezzo’s edited collection of essays on the medieval English nation illustrates the degree to which the study of nationalism has become embedded within medieval scholarship (Imagining a Medieval English Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004)). Diane Speed, ‘The Construction of the Nation in Medieval Romance’, in Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 135–57 (p. 135). cf: Homi Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990)). Speed, p. 136. Timothy Brennan, ‘The National Longing for Form’, in Nation and Narration, pp. 44–70 (p. 45), cited in Speed, p. 137. Speed, p. 145. Geraldine Heng, ‘The Romance of England: Richard Coer de Lyon, Saracen, Jews, and the Politics of Race and Nation’, in The Post-Colonial Middle Ages, ed. by Jeffery Jerome Cohen (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 135–72. Ibid., p. 150.

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The Romance of English Identity communitas regni – is the symbolizing potential of the king, whose figural status allows leveling discourses and an expressive vocabulary of unity, cohesion, and stability to be imagined, in a language functioning as the linguistic equivalent of the nation’s incipient modernity.20

Heng argues that an English narrative, written in English, concerning an important English figure, both reflects and contributes to a wider English national identity. It seems to me that her suggestion is as applicable to the Matter of England romances as it is to Richard Coer de Lyon. Sarah Mitchell, in her discussion of the nationalist agenda of Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle, identifies the Anglo-Saxon past as an important part of this ‘discourse of the nation’: It is my thesis that Robert sees this remedy [for England’s woes] as lying in the Anglo-Saxon past of the country, which he deliberately sets up for purposes of comparison with thirteenth-century England. Robert selects the Anglo-Saxon material at his disposal and treats it in a way which strengthens his polemic; this, I believe, centers upon the highly sensitive issue of the legitimacy of kingship, and such related specifics as the criteria for selecting a rightful king (and the consequences of this selection for the country), the necessity of a formal coronation, and the laws and customs that the monarch ought, once appointed, to uphold. This, I would argue, is part of his attempt to define and promote concepts of a kind of ‘cultural Englishness’ within a late thirteenth-century context, which he offers as some sort of remedy for the ills of his own day.21

Mitchell’s reading of Robert of Gloucester’s use of the Anglo-Saxon past as a period of comparison with post-conquest England is one that accords with the use to which it is put, as we have seen, in The Proverbs of Alfred, where the Anglo-Saxon past is likewise implicitly set up as a comparison with post-conquest England. Mitchell’s notion of ‘cultural Englishness’ presupposes a wider sense of England as an imagined ‘national’ community – a sense of Englishness that can also be seen in the Matter of England romances. Something akin to modern nationalist ideology is at work in these texts, and while it may not be the process of national identity formation as understood by many modern theorists of nationalism, it can certainly be understood as an example of the development of an imagined group identity. 22 Guy of Warwick and Beues of Hamtoun are, as Turville-Petre has argued, romances that are deeply concerned with the construction of Englishness. In

20 Ibid., p. 139. 21 Sarah Mitchell, ‘Kings, Constitution and Crisis: “Robert of Gloucester” and the Anglo-Saxon

Remedy’, in Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 39–56 (p. 41). 22 Heng suggests that it is Anderson’s concept of the nation as essentially an ‘imagined community’ that permits the notion of a medieval ‘nation’ (p. 150).

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The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance describing the Auchinleck manuscript as ‘a handbook of the nation’,23 Turville-Petre maintains that the manuscript’s narrative of England, written in English, ‘does not simply recognise a social need but is an expression of the very character of the manuscript, of its passion for England and its pride in being English’.24 The individual romances within the manuscript contribute to the construction of the manuscript’s idea of Englishness – as Geraldine Heng’s analysis of Richard Coer de Lyon has demonstrated. While the post-conquest figure of Richard I is one embodiment of the English nation in the Auchinleck manuscript, in pre-conquest heroes such as Guy and Beues one can see the use of the Anglo-Saxon period as an important space in which to construct Englishness. In this regard the Middle English romances differ from their Anglo-Norman antecedents: Susan Crane notes that Sir Beues of Hamtoun undertakes an important development, whose beginnings are barely discernible in Boeve, from the perception of the baronial family as a political unit owing personal allegiance to rulers on the basis of reciprocal support, to a wider perception of national identity and the importance of national interests.25

The Auchinleck manuscript, comprised as it is of regional romances that have been co-opted for a national and cosmopolitan audience,26 stands as a complex manifestation of a sense of Englishness. 27 The complication that deserves further attention, however, is that this nascent ‘nationalism‘ is found in romances that acknowledge the claims of at least two group affinities other than that of ‘English’. The first, and what from the titles of the romances appears to be the most immediate one, is that of the region or city: Warwick or Hamtoun (Southampton), for example.28 23 Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity,

24

25 26

27

28

1290–1340 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), p. 112. Phillipa Hardman discusses the national character of the Auchinleck manuscript and examines Englishness within a number of other miscellany manuscripts in ‘Compiling the Nation: Fifteenth-Century Miscellany Manuscripts’, in Nation, Court and Culture: New Essays on Fifteenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Helen Cooney (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), pp. 50–69. Turville-Petre, England the Nation, p. 138. It is interesting to note that a number of unique additions to the Auchinleck MS romances can be seen as a direct result of the redactor’s ‘Englishing’: In Beues of Hamtoun, the Auchinleck version adds St George to the dragon-slaying heroes with whom Beues is compared, along with Guy of Warwick, Lancelot, and Wade (line 2817). The Auchinleck redactor’s ‘Englishing’ of the romances even goes as far as writing a prologue to the two romances of French heroes (Roland and Vernagu and Otuel a Knight), in which he introduces their exploits but neglects to inform the reader that they are in fact French! Susan Crane, p. 59. Derek Pearsall and I. C. Cunningham suggest that the Auchinleck manuscript was produced in London for a wealthy member of the merchant classes (The Auchinleck Manuscript: National Library of Scotland Advocates’ MS. 19.2.1 (London: Scolar Press, 1977)). Pearsall has recently argued that the manifestation of Englishness before the fifteenth century does not represent a popular wave of national sentiment. Rather, he sees such texts as ‘evidence of fragmentary, sporadic, regional responses to particular circumstances’ (‘The Idea of Englishness in the Fifteenth Century’, p. 17). These titles do not seem to be editorial, and are found in both the manuscripts and in other medieval references to the romances such as the Paston letters (Ronald S. Crane, ‘The Vogue of Guy of

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The Romance of English Identity Secondly, over and above the claim of the nation came the knightly duty to God, expressed territorially in the defence of a much larger realm than the homeland, namely Christendom. This complex hierarchy of group affinities and the sense of ever-expanding ‘territories of the self’,29 from region, to country, to Christendom, informs both the action of Guy of Warwick and the differing epithets that it has for the hero, who is at the same time Gij of Warwike (157), Gij þe Englisse (3889), and Guy the Cristen (110:5).30 These different identities are in no way contradictory, and represent a complex understanding of the multiple allegiances demanded of a knight in medieval society. Of these identities it is perhaps the latter that is most important, not only because it encompasses the two other identities, but also because in the world of the romances it is the one most vividly contrasted by the Other. Speed reminds us of the important role fulfilled by the notional Other in national and group identity formation: The nation is defined and asserted essentially as a response to the challenge of the unknown, what Regis Debray explicates as the ‘twin threats of disorder and death.’ Prominent amongst particular discourses signifying nationness is what Bhabha speaks of as ‘the heimlich pleasure of the hearth, the unheimlich terror of the space and race of the Other’.31

The primary Other in the Matter of England romances is not the embodiment of a national or regional enemy (e.g. a Frenchman) but is the enemy of Christendom: the Saracen.

The Saracen Other The representation of the Saracen in medieval literature has attracted a great deal of attention.32 Early interest concentrated upon the representation, or perhaps more correctly the misrepresentation, of Islamic culture within the

29 30

31 32

Warwick from the Close of the Middle Ages to the Romantic Revival’, PMLA, 30 (1915), 125–94 (p. 126)). A term taken from Erving Goffman (‘Territories of the Self’, in his Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order (New York: Basic Books, 1971), pp. 28–41). We find in Geoffroi de Charny’s Livre de Chevalerie a useful contemporary account of the expression of this hierarchy of identities, based on an ever-expanding territorial scale. Geoffroi outlines the honour gained by the knight in tournaments and local wars (good), foreign wars (better), and crusades (best) (The Book of Chivalry of Geoffroi de Charny: Text, Context, and Translation, ed. Richard W. Kaeuper and trans. Elspeth Kennedy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), pp. 84–103). Speed, p. 146, citing Bhabha, ‘Introduction’, in Nation and Narration, p. 2. Studies of medieval attitudes towards the Saracens and Islam in medieval literature can be found in (among others) Norman Daniel’s two studies, Heroes and Saracens: An Interpretation of the Chansons de Geste (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983) and Islam and the West: The Making of an Image, 2nd edn (1960; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1962), Lynn Tarte Ramey’s Christian, Saracen and Genre in Medieval French Literature: Imagination and Cultural Interaction in the French Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 2001), and most recently John V. Tolan’s Saracens: Islam in the Medieval Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

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The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance medieval West. Dorothee Metlitzki’s seminal study The Matter of Araby in Medieval England provides a useful summary of the ways in which images of the Saracens were constructed in Middle English. By the time of romances such as Beues of Hamtoun and The Sowdone of Babylone the Saracen can be seen to have been most often represented in one of four ways: ‘the enamored Muslim princess; the converted Saracen; the defeated emir or sultan; and the archetypal Saracen giant’.33 In recent years, critical attention has increasingly concentrated upon developing an understanding of the function of the Saracen within the process of medieval identity formation. As the antithesis of the Christian West, the image of the Saracen provides a powerful racial, cultural and religious Other during the later Middle Ages. Making use of psychoanalytic theory, scholars such as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen read medieval images of the Saracen as acting to simplify the inherent complexities of identity formation.34 By adhering to the binary paradigm of Christian as good and Saracen as evil, the oppositional model of identity formation produces a construction of identity that, while reductive, allows a clearer and less problematic definition of self and nation.35 In Guy of Warwick we find a construction of the Saracen Other that highlights the mechanisms of Christian identity construction. Travelling into the lands of the East, Guy of Warwick is depicted as encountering one of the constituent elements in the process of identity formation – the Other. This experiencing of the racial and religious Other provides for Guy himself, and vicariously for his audience, an important element in the construction of identity. Through the medium of the romance, the cultural process of Otherness is given shape in the form of the Saracen world, enabling both the literary hero and the literate audience to ‘encounter’ the Other. The cross-cultural experience as represented in the romance of Guy of Warwick produces an image typical of medieval Orientalism. In a manner analogous to the historical crusader experience, the Islamic world is characterised by hostile territorial ambition. Making use of traditional romance generic conventions such as heathen Sultans, treacherous stewards, wrongly imprisoned knights and devilish giants, the Saracen Other is constructed through contrasting archetypes of religion, honour and physical appearance. Guy’s first encounter with the Saracen world occurs after he has already established his reputation as a renowned knight. Guy’s early career, prompted 33 Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven and London: Yale

University Press, 1977), p. 161. Metlitzki provides a useful discussion and summary of the four stock Saracen types common in medieval literature (pp. 160–197). 34 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1999), pp. 132–3. Cohen further develops these ideas in his recent ‘On Saracen Enjoyment’, in his Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 188–221. 35 A more extended exploration of the strategies of identity formation in Guy of Warwick and Beues of Hamtoun can be found in: Robert Rouse, ‘Expectation vs. Experience: Encountering the Saracen Other in Middle English Romance’, The Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature, 10 (2002), 125–40.

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The Romance of English Identity largely by his desire to win the heart of Felice, the earl of Warwick’s daughter, is spent in tournaments in Normandy, Spain, and Germany, and in numerous wars in Italy and elsewhere on the continent.36 While at the Emperor Reyner’s court in Germany, Guy and his companion Herhaud encounter foreign merchants arrived from the east and bearing momentous news. The merchants tell of the dire need of Ernis, emperor of Constantinople, who is besieged by a Saracen host led by the Sultan of Coyne. This second-hand report of the siege provokes a desire to confront the Saracen Other. Equipped by the emperor with a company of one hundred German knights, the two Englishmen travel to Constantinople and put themselves at Ernis’s command. From the very start, this aventure has a markedly different tone from those that Guy has undertaken thus far. Guy wishes to aid the emperor against the sultan’s forces, who Þat lond destrud & men aqueld, / & cristendom þai han michel afeld (2853–4). Here Guy’s motive seems to be one of Christian solidarity, although Herhaud does add as a corollary: y graunt it be / Miche worþschipe it worþ to þe (2855–6). Once in Constantinople, Guy is recognised by the emperor as a powerful ally, and is soon thrown into battle against the Sultan’s forces. It is here that Guy encounters for the first time the Saracen Other – in the person of the sultan’s nephew, þe amiral Costdram (2905). This initial image of a Saracen warrior is presented in surprisingly complimentary terms: So strong he is, & of so gret mi
t, In world y wene no better kni
t; For þer nis man no kni
t non Þat wiþ wretþe dar loken him on. His armes alle avenimed beþ: Þat venim is strong so þe deþ: In þis world nis man þat he take mi
t Þat he ne schuld dye anon ri
t. (Auchinleck Guy of Warwick, 2907–14)

Costdram is a knight of great strength, without peer, upon whom other men fear to look. However, the envenomed nature of Costdram’s weapons mark him out as Other, casting doubt upon his honour and differentiating him from Christian knights such as Guy, to whom the use of such weapons is both unknown and unthinkable. Costdram here represents an image of a knightly Other, unheimlich in comparison with the normative values of Guy’s own Western conception of knighthood. Costdram’s role as a doppelgänger figure in relation to Guy is emphasised by the way in which the battle is structured. Each of Guy’s knights is involved in individual combats within the wider 36 Felice, a particularly demanding example of the romance objet d’amour, repeatedly rejects Guy’s

advances, compelling him to undertake increasingly dangerous and time-consuming journeys to win her love. It is ironic, then, that when she does finally agree to marry Guy, he has reached a stage in his life when his mind has begun to turn to more spiritual matters, and he soon leaves her to pursue a spiritual quest as a pilgrim.

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The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance mêlée, pairing off with named opponents: Herhaud slays the king of Turkey (2943), the French knight Tebaud kills Helmadan (2949), while the German Gauter strikes down Redmadan (2955). This initial encounter with the Saracen Other establishes a comparative paradigm for Guy’s subsequent experiences. While Guy and his knights see off this first assault with some ease, the Sultan’s host, and the Saracen Other that it represents, is not so easily dealt with. They are soon once more at the gates of the city. After seeing his first sortie beaten off, the Sultan personally leads the next attack, one that leads him into direct conflict with Guy. The Sultan strikes first, after which the following exchange occurs: Wiþ gret hete he smot to Gij, Opon his helme, sikerly, Þat he feld þat o quarter. To Gij he seyd a bismer: ‘Y-sestow, lord? bi Apolin, Þat was a strok of a Sarrazin!’ Gij to þe soudan smot þo, His helme no was him worþ a slo: Resares euen forþ þe breyn Helme & flesse he carf wiþ meyn. Þan he seyd to him a bismer: ‘Mahoun halp þe litel þer! Bodi & soule no nou
t þer-of No is nou
t worþ a lekes clof. Hou so it go of mi wounde, Of Mahoun þou hast litel help y-founde. Er þou scorndest me, Of mi wounde þou madest þi gle: Leche gode schal ich haue, Þat mi wounde schal to hele drawe; Þou hast a croun schauen to þe bon; Tomorwe þou mi
t sing anon. Wele þou þou
test to ben a prest, When þou of swiche a bischop order berst!’ Now biginneþ þat gret fi
t . . . (Auchinleck Guy of Warwick, 3631–55)

The sultan exalts in his blow: bi Apolin, / Þat was a strok of a Sarrazin! However, Guy returns the buffet with some interest, slicing through the sultan’s helmet and across the top of his scalp. Guy points out that Mahoun has been of little help to the sultan, and interprets this lack of martial aid as a sign of the inferiority of the Saracen religion, which, in Guy’s opinion is nou t worþ a lekes clof.37 The sultan’s lack of fortune with his blow to Guy’s 37 Mahoun (Mohammed), along with Apolin and Ternagaunt, is one of the unholy trinity of deities

commonly ascribed to Islam during the Middle Ages.

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The Romance of English Identity helmet is understood by Guy as representing the weakness of the Saracen faith, while Guy’s all-together more effective blow is given Christian meaning through Guy’s tonsorial taunt: Þou hast a croun schauen to þe bon; / Tomorwe þou mi t sing anon. / Wele þou þou test to ben a prest. Guy’s martial exegesis interprets the difference between the two sword-blows as demonstrating the relative worth of the Christian and Saracen faiths. This demonstration of Christianity’s superiority undermines the sultan’s belief in his gods, and this leads to a remarkable renunciation of the Saracen triumvirate. After retreating injured from the battle, the sultan is approached by an amiral who reports their battlefield losses. The amiral tells him that owing to their misfortune, his troops have turned away from their gods: Our godes ous hateþ, for soþe to sigge (3678). The sultan has the idols of their gods brought before him, and publicly berates them: ‘Fy, fy,’ he seyd, ‘on [þe], Apolin! Þou schalt haue wel iuel fin, & þou, Ternagaunt, also: Michel schame schal com
ou to; & þou, Mahoun, her alder lord, Þou nart nou
t worþ a tord!’ (Auchinleck Guy of Warwick, 3699–704)

He then physically attacks the idols, breaking them to pieces with a stave.38 This internal crisis of faith corresponds with the breaking of the Saracen lines, and they retreat from Constantinople once more. Amid the warfare, Guy also finds time to become embroiled in the subterfuges of the emperor’s steward, Morgadour. After repeated attempts to incriminate Guy in relation to the emperor’s daughter Clarice, the treacherous steward manipulates Guy into volunteering for the near-suicidal task of acting as an envoy to the sultan.39 Upon arriving at the Saracen camp, Guy enters the Sultan’s pavilion and addresses the sultan with the following speech: Þan seyd Gij þe Englisse,40 ‘Vnderstond to mi speche: 38 This is a common motif that is also found in, among others, the early-fourteenth-century Middle

English Otuel and Roland, where the Saracen King Garcy destroys his own idols after his champion Clarel is defeated by Otuel (Otuel and Roland, ed. M. O’Sullivan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935)). 39 The nature of Constantinople itself, as a liminal space between Orient and Occident, is particularly interesting with regard to the history of East–West contact in the Middle Ages. As the site of cultural hybridity, where cultural norms such as honour are mutable, the city operates as both the object of violent contest and the location of cultural contact. Guy’s rush to aid the emperor of Constantinople stands in stark contrast to the reality of Greco-Latin relations for much of the Middle Ages (Malcolm Barber, ‘Western Attitudes to Frankish Greece’, in Latins and Greeks in the Eastern Mediterranean after 1204, ed. B. Hamilton et al. (London: Frank Cass, 1989), pp. 111–28). 40 Guy’s Englishness is re-emphasised in the romance and is associated with his Christianity (see further, Turville-Petre, England the Nation, pp. 116–18). To my knowledge, ‘þe Englisse’ is not

79

The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance Þilke lord þat woneþ an heye, Þat al þing walt fer & neye, & in þe rode lete him pini, Al cristen men to saui, & in þe se made þe sturioun, So
if
ou alle his malisoun, & alle þilk þat ich here se, Þat mis-bileued men be; & þe at þe first, sir soudan, Cristes wreche þe come opan! Yuel fure breninde fast þe opon, & cleue þi brest doun to þi ton! For icham Gij
e mow wel se, Yuel mot
e alle y-the! Vnder-stond, treitour, mi resoun: Haue þou Cristes malisoun, & alle þilke forþ mitt te, Þat ich her about þe se. Þe heye god þat is ful of miyt Binim
ou
our limes &
our si
t! Bi me þe sent word þemperour Garioun, Þat mi
ti men haþ in his bandoun, Þurch wham þou art y-brou
t to schond, & hoteþ þe wende out of his lond.’ (Auchinleck Guy of Warwick, 3889–914)

Guy then proposes that the Saracens find themselves a champion to fight him, and that this single combat will determine who shall rule the land.41 This offer is rebuffed after the sultan discovers the envoy to be none other than Guy, the slayer of the sultan’s nephew Costdram, and the sultan orders him to be seized and thrown into his dungeon. Guy responds to this by decapitating the sultan and fleeing the camp, pursued by a host of Saracens. Guy’s first encounter with the Saracen Other constructs a cultural opposition that leaves no room for compromise or co-existence. His speech to the sultan is notable for the uncompromising attitude of religious intolerance towards the Saracens, an attitude that is characteristic of the whole romance. Guy defines himself as one of the cristen men, who have God’s grace, in opposition to the mis-bileued Saracens, highlighting the binary nature of difference in this romance’s construction of the Saracen Other. Guy’s second major encounter with the East occurs after he has returned home to England and married his liege’s daughter Felice. Once he has won the hand of his lady, Guy comes to the realisation that all his great deeds have found in conjunction with any other romance hero, which perhaps can be seen as further supporting Turville-Petre’s argument that Guy can be seen as a ‘model of the knight of England’ (ibid., p. 116). 41 A proposal that prefigures Guy’s most memorable moment–his legendary final combat with the giant Danish champion Colbrond at Winchester.

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The Romance of English Identity been for temporal ends. Seized by a spiritual passion, Guy determines to leave his newly won bride and wander the world as a pilgrim doing the Lord’s work: Y schal walk for mi sinne / Barfot bi doun & dale. / Þat ich haue wiþ mi bodi wrou t / Wiþ mi bodi it schal be bou t, / To bote me of þat bale (29: 8–12). Guy then travels to Jerusalem and Bethlehem, before eventually arriving in Antioch, where he encounters Jonas, the Christian Earl of Durras. Jonas tells him a long tale of misfortune, which has resulted in him being sent to search for Guy, so that the latter can champion the Saracen King Triamour in a judicial combat.42 Guy, moved by Jonas’s claims that King Triamour will kill his sons if he fails to find Guy, keeps his identity hidden but offers to fight in Guy’s stead (we have here the rather strange situation of Guy standing in for himself). The two then set out for Alexandria to face the combat and to save Jonas’s sons from the axe. This judicial combat, fought against the sultan’s giant champion Amoraunt, highlights two important elements of the Saracen Other: Gigantism and Honour (or the lack thereof). The first of these, the motif of the Saracen giant, is evident in the initial description of Amoraunt: Þan dede he com forþ a Sarrazine, Haue he Cristes curs & mine Wiþ boke & eke wiþ belle. Out of Egypt he was y-come, Michel & griselich was þat gome Wiþ ani god man to duelle. He is so michel & vnrede, Of his si
t a man may drede, Wiþ tong as y þe telle. As blac he is as brodes brend: He semes as it were a fende, Þat comen were out of helle. (Auchinleck Guy of Warwick, 62: 1–12)

The excess of the Saracen Other, previously alluded to in Guy’s experiences at Constantinople, is here manifested in the body of the giant Amoraunt. This avatar of bodily excess, the conquering of which is so important to the process of the physical and spiritual maturation of the romance hero, combines the Other of the Giant with the Other of the Saracen, creating a potent synthesis of these two elements of identity formation.43 The Saracen Giant embodies all 42 A long and complicated tale, in which Jonas and his sons defend Jerusalem from the Saracens, but

then make the fatal mistake of following them into their own lands where they are captured by the Saracen King Triamour. Some time later, Triamour’s son inadvertently slays the Sultan of Alexandria’s son following an argument over a game of chess, which leads to Triamour’s accusation by the sultan and his committal to the judicial duel. Triamour, faced with the prospect of fighting Armoraunt, seeks the advice of his Christian prisoners who inform him of the renown of Guy and Heraud, which leads to the king offering Jonas his freedom if he can find Guy (Guy of Warwick, Auchinleck MS, 48:1–72:12). 43 Turville-Petre notes that ‘the lengthy fight with Amoraunt is not just between a Christian and an infidel, but also between an Englishman and a foreigner’ (England the Nation, p. 118).

81

The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance those things that the romance hero by necessity approaches, but must not become: he is michel & unrede, huge and uncontrolled – an image of unrestrained masculine power, which Western heroes such as Guy must seek to control and sublimate within chivalric codes of behaviour and honour. This uncontrolled masculinity is given demonic form in the figure of the Saracen Giant, characterised by the blackness of the fiend, the Western archetypal construction of the uncontrolled nature of the African. Guy’s judicial combat with Amoraunt also provides an opportune moment to illustrate a third point of Saracen Otherness – the lack of chivalric honour possessed by the denizens of the East. After a long and fierce period of fighting, the giant Amoraunt is stricken by a great thirst and offers Guy the following bargain: ‘Ac lete me drink a litel wi
t For þi lordes loue ful of mi
t Þat þou louest wiþ wille, & y þe hot bi mi lay,
if þou haue ani þrest to-day, Þou shalt drink al þi fille.’ (Auchinleck Guy of Warwick, 114: 7–12)

Guy, constrained by the chivalric code of honour, allows his opponent time to refresh himself, and when Amoraunt has done so, their battle resumes. However, when in turn Guy requires refreshment, Amoraunt reneges on his promise and replaces it with a conditional one: he will allow his opponent to drink only once he has revealed his name to him. Sorely oppressed by both the heat and his thirst, Guy declares his name and requests once more that the giant allow him to drink. Amoraunt, upon discovering that his foe is none other than the hated Guy, again refuses to allow his adversary to slake his thirst, and attacks him in the water when Guy attempts to drink without leave. The untrustworthy nature of the Saracen comes to the fore once more in the unequal exchange of drinks, and Guy’s condemnation of the giant seems to characterise all those Saracens with whom he has experience: ‘Amoraunt,’ þan seyd Gij, ‘Þou art ful fals, sikerly, & ful-filt of tresoun. No more wil y trust to þe For no bihest þou hotest me: Þou art a fals glotoun.’ (Auchinleck Guy of Warwick, 130: 7–12)

Fals is one of the most damning condemnations used by Guy within the poem. Of the nine occurrences within the poem, eight are used to describe Guy’s traitorous enemies, and it is fitting that Amoraunt’s double falsehood receives two of these.44 44 The ninth occurrence is reserved for condemnation of the Saracen trinity.

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The Romance of English Identity Guy of Warwick constructs the Saracen Other in a manner that provides a clear contrast between East and West. This representation is materialised in the form of Amoraunt, whose untrustworthy nature is exceeded only by the demonic origin of his grossly oversized body, and who represents a religion and culture that is worthy only of martial resistance and opposition. For Guy, and his audience, the Saracen Other is defined by its binary opposition to the West, and his encounters with this Other reinforce and illustrate the difference that is expected. For the audience of Guy, the Saracen Other stands as a point of difference by which Guy’s, and their own, Englishness is defined. Guy, as Turville-Petre suggests, ‘stands as the model of the knight of England’.45 His Christianity and his sense of chivalric honour are essential components of the construction of Guy as ‘Gij þe Englisse’ (3889). For the audiences of Guy, the religious and racial Saracen Other is an important component in the construction of the idea of Englishness articulated within the Auchinleck manuscript. The English are all that the Saracens are not: Christian, honourable, trustworthy, moderate, and human. However, it is not only the lands that knights such as Guy of Warwick travel to that are significant in terms of identity formation – it is also the land from whence they travel, and to which they return: Anglo-Saxon England. These romances are explicitly set within the time of Anglo-Saxon England, and therefore raise the question of the relationship between the past, especially the pre-conquest past, and English identity in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The way in which the Anglo-Saxon England of the romances interacts with the Other of the Saracen lands raises some important questions about the way in which Anglo-Saxon England was remembered in late-medieval England. Is the England of Guy the same England as that known by its contemporary readers, and if so, how does this literary pre-conquest England contribute to the text’s narrative of identity formation? The Saracen of the East was not an image of Otherness that was widely available in England prior to the crusades, although Jasmine Kilburn has recently made the case for the limited use of the Saracen Other in Old English hagiographical writing.46 However, by the twelfth century, popularised by the chanson de gestes and the beginning of the crusades, the image of the Saracen became available to the English as an Other against which a communal Christian identity could be defined. The anachronistic use of the Saracen in the romances of Guy of Warwick and Beues of Hamtoun represents an interesting rewriting of the Anglo-Saxon past. It may be that the pre-Conquest 45 Turville-Petre, England the Nation, p. 116. 46 In ‘From “Demonic” Ethiopians to Foul “Maumes”: The Shifting Face of the “Evil” Other’, an

unpublished paper delivered at the Identity and Cultural Exchange, 600–1600 Conference held at the University of Birmingham in April 2002. Kilburn further discusses the use of the Pagan East as a pre-conquest English Other in ‘The Contrasted Other in the Old English Apocryphal Acts of Matthew, Simon and Jude’, Neophilologus, 87:1 (January 2003), 137–51 and in ‘The Figure of the Ethiopian in Old English Texts’, The Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, Manchester (forthcoming).

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The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance setting of Guy may have reinforced the sense of identification between its contemporary English audience and pre-conquest England. By making use of a similar paradigm of cultural difference, and by contrasting the pre-conquest English heroes with the Saracen Other as strongly as more recent heroes such as Richard the Lionheart, the text promotes a continuity of English identity that elides England’s own colonial experience. In this manner the religious Other of the pre-conquest English past is shown to be the same as that of the English present through comparison with a mutual Saracen Other. In showing that Anglo-Saxon identity is constructed via the Saracen Other, in the same manner that thirteenth- and fourteenth-century English Christian identity is, the romance proposes a homogeneous provenance of English identity that connects the present and the past. Anglo-Saxon England thus becomes a mythic theatre of English identity formation. Cohen has suggested that protracted, messy nearby wars in Ireland, Spain, and especially France spurred the English romancers to dream of a time when self-identity was easy to assert, because the enemy was wholly Other (dark skin, incomprehensible language, pagan culture) and therefore an unproblematic body to define oneself against.47

For the readers of Guy of Warwick this time was the Anglo-Saxon past, when the English truly knew who they were.

English Identity and the Continent The same continental wars (primarily against the French) that Cohen suggests made the Saracens an attractively simple Other also brought into focus the differences between the English and their continental neighbours. In particular, the onset of the Hundred Years War with France produced a sense of an English identity that was constructed in opposition to England’s continental enemies. Heng observes that for contemporary writers the wars against the French became seen as less a matter of internecine squabbling and more a case of national struggle: ‘For Matthew Paris . . . the struggles between England and France in the early thirteenth century assume the proportions of a contest between nations.’48 Anthony Smith also sees in this period the first stirrings of Englishness, noting that ‘some would place this development after the long-drawn-out Anglo-Scottish and Anglo-French wars that contributed most to a sense of popular national identity’.49 One might expect, given England’s wars with France, that the French may have become a useful 47 Cohen, Of Giants, p. 133. 48 Heng, p. 151. See further Turville-Petre, England the Nation, p. 3 and M. T. Clanchy, England and

Its Rulers 1066–1272: Foreign Lordship and National Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 204. 49 Anthony D. Smith, ‘National Identities: Modern and Medieval?’, in Concepts of National Identity,

pp. 21–46 (p. 35).

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The Romance of English Identity cultural Other against which the English could define themselves. However, this does not seem to be the case in the Matter of England romances. In Beues of Hamtoun, Havelok, and Horn Childe the French are absent from the narratives, while in Guy of Warwick France serves simply as a space in which Guy can win renown in tournaments and jousts. In Guy’s travels on the continent in search of chivalric glory he travels to Normandy (785), Spain (1065), and Germany (1066). In these lands Guy moves within what seems to be a unified Christian chivalric community. On the continent Guy performs well, and returns to England having pris y-wonne in euerich cuntre (1080). However, there seems to be little to differentiate Guy, as English, from any of his opponents, and his nationality does not become an issue as it does during his travels in the Saracen lands. When Guy does encounter villains, it is his superlative ability as a knight that is the root of the problem, not his national identity. One might be tempted to read Guy’s long-running enmity with the Lombards, in the form of Duke Otoun of Pavia and his nephew Bernard, as indicative of a continental Other, given the antipathy towards the Lombards in fourteenth-century London.50 However, while the Lombards may have proved to be a popular contemporary foe for Guy, their role as villains comes directly from the Anglo-Norman Gui de Warewic. There is little in the Matter of England romances that supports the use of the French (or other continentals) as a national Other for the English.51 This may be indicative of the complex nature of the group affinities that applied to knights in medieval Europe. Guy is indeed ‘a model of the knight of England’,52 but this English identity is but one element in a hierarchy of supra-national, national, and regional affinities by which the individual identity of the medieval knight is defined.

Insular Others, Regionalism and Englishness The multiple group affinities of Guy of Warwick raise the question of whether Englishness in the Matter of England romances is constructed as a homogeneous whole, or whether there are regional tensions visible within this construction. Rosalind Field has written that medieval romance operates ‘to create a history for a country, a family, a city . . .’53 This statement at once identifies the broad scope of the romance mode of narrative history, and simultaneously alerts us to the competing historiographical voices that it may 50 Claire Sponsler, ‘Alien Nation: London’s Aliens and Lydgate’s Mummings for the Mercers and

Goldsmiths’, in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 229–42 (pp.