WACE TO LAȜAMON VIA WALDEF

JUDITH WEISS

It has long been recognized that Wace’s Roman de Brut, especially its Arthurian section, had a great influence on subsequent romances written in both France and Britain.1 But its importance for Anglo-Norman romance has been less well charted; this had to wait until 1963 when Dominica Legge, in Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background discussed Waldef (c. 1200-10) and mentioned briefly the reference to the Norman historiographer at the start of the poem.2 Holden’s edition of Waldef and an article by Rosalind Field have subsequently set matters straight.3 Extending their discussions, I intend to argue in this article that an important part of Waldef is concerned with issues raised in Wace’s Brut which concern dangerous ambition and overweening power used to

1 See, for example, La Partie Arthurienne du Roman de Brut, eds I.D.O. Arnold and M.M. Pelan, Paris, 1962, 35-36. 2 Le Roman de Waldef, ed. A.J. Holden, Cologny-Geneva, 1984, ll. 18-24; M. Dominica Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and Its Background, Oxford, 1963, 145. Legge paid more attention, however, to Wace’s influence upon saints’ lives. 3 Waldef, 27-28; Rosalind Field, “Waldef and the Matter of/with England”, in Medieval Insular Romance: Translation and Innovation, eds Judith Weiss, Jennifer Fellows and Morgan Dickson, Woodbridge, 2000, remarks upon “the extensive, pervasive influence of Wace’s Brut”, 29. She comments again upon the influence of the Brut when discussing Fouke Fitzwarin and the Folie Tristan d’Oxford, in “Romance in England, 1066-1400”, Chapter 6 of The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace, Cambridge, 1999, 158. 542 Judith Weiss secure conquest by force majeure but without justice or right. Moreover I believe it is possible that Laȝamon was familiar with Waldef and drew upon it in two episodes of his own Brut. The likelihood that Laȝamon knew and used other Anglo-Norman romances as well as Wace’s Roman has been barely considered but it is strong. From at least the mid-twelfth century there was a two-way traffic between insular romance and insular historiography: Gaimar’s story of Haveloc in his Estoire des Engleis is used by the Lai d’Haveloc;4 the story of the Roman de Horn is intertwined with that of Hereward;5 Wace and his predecessor Geoffrey of Monmouth both leave their mark on Gui de Warewic.6 G.J. Visser thought that “Laȝamon must of course also have perused other Norman works”; Françoise Le Saux agrees in the same general terms: “Traces of French works other than the Roman de Brut could therefore conceivably be found in the English Brut ... Laȝamon thus appears to have been well-informed of the literary achievements of his Anglo-Norman masters.”7 But the only Anglo-Norman text Le Saux discusses is Thomas’s Tristan.8 It is possible critics have thought that Laȝamon would not have drawn on insular romance because such narratives are largely non-Arthurian, but insular romance was in fact very

4 On this, see Rosalind Field, “Patterns of Availability and Demand in Middle English Translation de romanz”, in The Exploitations of Medieval Romance, eds Laura Ashe, Ivana Djordjević and Judith Weiss, Cambridge, 2010, 78. 5 See Judith Weiss, “Thomas and the Earl: Literary and Historical Contexts for the Romance of Horn”, in Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Romance, ed. Rosalind Field, Cambridge, 1999, 1-13. 6 See “Boeve de Haumtone” and “Gui de Warewic”: Two Anglo-Norman Romances, trans. Judith Weiss, French of England Translation Series 3, Tempe, Arizona, 2008, 14. 7 Françoise H.M. Le Saux, Laȝamon’s Brut: The Poem and Its Sources, Arthurian Studies 19, Cambridge, 1989, 73, 92. Le Saux quotes Visser’s comment from his Laȝamon: An Attempt at Vindication, Assen, 1935, 92. 8 Ibid., 84-93.