The Case of the Missing Twelfth Century in English Literary History

Periodization and Politics: The Case of the Missing Twelfth Century in English Literary History

Linda Georgianna

or several years I have been at work on a narrative literary history F of medieval England from the beginnings to 1350. The project, to be published as the first volume of a new Oxford English Literary History, intrigued me in part because it requires the theorizing of a period in which an event as seemingly cataclysmic as the Norman Conquest falls not at the beginning, as in current Middle English studies, nor at the end, as in Anglo-Saxon studies, but in the middle. To me the project was an opportunity to pursue new lines of inquiry, particularly in eleventh- and twelfth-century studies, but to Oxford University Press it was simply the necessary result of a prior decision to figure the years 1350 – 1550 as a period that could borrow some cultural capital from the term early modern. Medievalist Nancy Partner once joked that if we wanted the medieval period to get more respect, we should call it “the Really Early Modern,” and Oxford has done just that with the former Late Middle Ages. But putting the origin of the modern at Chaucer’s birth left six hundred years never considered a period at all. The press invited me to take on the project because I had done work on both sides of the Conquest, having written on Beowulf and on the early-thirteenth- century Ancrene Wisse. Flattered by the invitation, I accepted, but in try- ing to work out a proposal, I realized the great flaw in Oxford’s logic and in mine: I had written on both sides of 1066, but, like most medieval- ists, I had never considered the space in between. Once I did, I saw that a huge job lay ahead and enlisted Anglo-Saxonist Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe to coauthor the volume. We produced a proposal for a book of fourteen chapters, each focusing on five or six key texts, with no

Modern Language Quarterly 64:2, June 2003. © 2003 University of Washington. 154 MLQ ❙ June 2003 claim to being encyclopedic. We would choose the texts so as to empha- size the complexities of early England’s multilingual cultures, and we would stress the cultural work that these texts had done in their own time and later in literary history. The questions we would ask of each text were not what is it or who wrote it but what was it for and what did it do. The proposal was sent to five readers, whose responses, while gen- erally favorable, were instructive. Of my plan to write one chapter on nineteenth-century constructions of the Norman Conquest and three on the twelfth century, one reader asked how much there was to say about “the deadest century for English literature of any from the sev- enth to the twentieth,” while another fumed about “all of this tedious and unnecessary theorizing” about the history of our discipline. But by then it was too late. We had come to see that to reconfigure what had never been a period, we had to look at why it had never been one, and that examination revealed that the foundation of our discipline in nineteenth-century nationalist historiography was itself responsible for a literary history in which the Conquest had assumed mythic propor- tions. In the process, “Englishness” had come to be defined in such a way that the twelfth century had to be erased. Thus I began with a chapter on the role of the Conquest in English literary history, and I will lay out the chapter’s argument here before turning to a single case study from the project itself.1 The English Middle Ages has long been split into two fields, neatly divided by a single day, 14 October 1066, when King Harold was killed at Hastings and William the Bastard effectively became William rex Anglorum. That few contemporary sources described the event paved the way for the mythic treatment of the battle, especially in the nine-

1 The chapter, “Coming to Terms with the Norman Conquest: Nationalism and English Literary History,” ﬁrst appeared in Literature and the Nation, ed. Brook Thomas (Tübingen: Narr, 1998), 33 – 53.

Linda Georgianna is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is author of The Solitary Self: Individuality in the Ancrene Wisse(1981) and coauthor, with Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, of the first volume of the new Oxford English Lit- erary History (forthcoming). Georgianna ❙ Periodization and Politics 155 teenth century, when modern medieval studies was born and English national identity seemed to hang in the balance. Earlier constructions of the Battle of Hastings as a great dividing point had centered on the myth of the Norman yoke as depicted by Christopher Hill: “Before 1066, the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants [of England] lived as free and equal citizens, governing themselves through representative institutions. The Norman Conquest deprived them of this liberty and established the tyranny of an alien king and landlords. But the people did not forget the rights they lost [and] fought continuously to recover them.”2 The myth of lost rights cut in various ways in eighteenth-century politics, but in the nineteenth century it was too prone to a radical reading, and by itself it failed to deal with what came to be seen as the fundamental problem, namely, that the Battle of Hastings looked like an English defeat, and, at a time when England’s imperial claims depended on her image as unconquerable, defeat could not be tolerated. Nationalist historians thus developed the “Whig interpretation of history,” which stresses above all the continuity of the British past and its steady progress toward modern liberty and representative institutions. As J. W. Burrow puts it: “In Whig history, there are no irrevocable losses. The long run com- pensates for all.”3 The construction of the long view of British history became the nineteenth-century national project, a massive attempt by historians, churchmen, novelists, and essayists to “reverse the Conquest,” as Clare A. Simmons puts it, to transform an incomprehensible defeat into a providential comedy, what a maiden in a Charlotte Yonge novel calls “that delightful Norman Conquest.”4 In Whig history, the Anglo-Saxon past assumed gigantic propor- tions as the moment in time when the English national identity was formed and fixed. In light of the developing grand narrative that fea- tured Englishness as a specifically Anglo-Saxon identity, reinterpreting

2 Christopher Hill, “The Norman Yoke,” in Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London: Secker and Warburg, 1958), 57. 3 J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 195. See also Herbert Butterﬁeld’s classic The Whig Interpretation of History (London: Bell and Sons, 1931). 4 Charlotte Yonge, Abbeychurch; or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit, quoted in Clare A. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 60. 156 MLQ ❙ June 2003 the Norman Conquest took on great urgency. The intellectual battle to reverse it was pursued with all of the fervor of the original battle at Has- tings, but this time, fought in print alone and with little opposition, it was a battle England could not lose. The documentary enthusiasm of nineteenth-century scholars has never been matched. At ﬁrst the province of antiquarian societies, the study of English history, particularly medieval history, came of age as a professional discipline during this period, witnessing the production of hundreds of editions of medieval texts and culminating in the massive Rolls Series, begun by an act of Parliament in 1857 in response to sim- ilar nationalist projects under way abroad.5 While the unprecedented production of primary materials made the medieval past more available than ever before, the interpretation of these texts fed a growing national consciousness crafted by a diverse group of self-described patriots, including professional scholars such as John Mitchell Kemble and William Stubbs; popular historians, especially Sharon Turner and Edward A. Freeman; and novelists, above all Walter Scott.6 Though widely differ- ing in style and genre, these authors’ works together helped create an apparently seamless narrative of English national destiny in which the dry facts of the Conquest were neutralized by the massive context constructed for them. Freeman’s History of the Norman Conquest, for all of its scholarly attention to detail, could only conclude with the ideological premise with which it began, namely, that “William came not to defeat, or to found, but to continue”—to continue, that is, the progressive development of a perfectible, free, Anglo-Saxon nation.7

5 Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians, and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1836–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). On the making of the Rolls Series see David Knowles, Great Historical Enterprises: Problems in Monastic History (London: Nelson, 1963), 100 – 134. 6 See John Mitchell Kemble, The Saxons in England: A History of the English Com- monwealth till the Period of the Norman Conquest, 2 vols. (London: Printed for Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1849); William Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England in Its Origins and Development, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1873 – 78); Sharon Turner, The History of the Anglo-Saxons, from Their First Appearance above the Elbe, to the Death of Egbert: With a Map of Their Ancient Territory, 3 vols. (London: Cadell, Davies, 1799 – 1805); Edward A. Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest of England: Its Causes and Its Results, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1867 – 79); and Walter Scott, Ivan- hoe (Edinburgh: Nelson and Sons, 1819). 7 Cited in G. O. Sayles, The Medieval Foundations of England, 2d ed. (London: Methuen, 1961), 277. Georgianna ❙ Periodization and Politics 157

Thus the decisive conquest was not the Norman of the eleventh century but the Saxon of the sixth, which explains the outpouring of works devoted to the Anglo-Saxons and their “commonwealth,” beginning with Turner’s influential History of the Anglo-Saxons, which stimu- lated both Anglo-Saxon studies as an academic discipline and the immensely popular Ivanhoe of Scott, who names “Mr. Turner” in his pref- ace. However complex Scott’s ethnic sympathies in that novel actually are, his fiction was read as a historical depiction of the twelfth-century Norman yoke, subjecting a pure Saxon race, born to be free, to an alien race of tyrants. Though set in the 1190s, Scott’s novel keeps constantly in view the violent history of conquest, as Simmons has shown (76–93). Ivanhoe’s fiercely Anglo-Saxon father, Cedric, is named for Cerdic (sic), legendary founder of the West Saxon line of kings; Athelstane, for the first Anglo-Saxon king to unite all England; and Rowena, for the Saxon princess Renwein, Hengist’s beguiling daughter. Scott collapses the interval between Conquest and 1190 in other ways as well: Cedric claims that his father dined with Harold Godwinson before the battle at Stam- ford Bridge, which would make Cedric at least one hundred, while Ulrica, the Anglo-Saxon madwoman taken by invading Normans as a young concubine, must be even older. While historians ridiculed Scott for his errors of fact, they rarely objected to the effects of this trick of abridg- ment, which all but eliminated the twelfth century. On the contrary, Freeman and Stubbs reproduced in their ostentatiously scholarly studies Scott’s patterning of history, which exactly suited their own grand narratives of continuity of an English people increasingly construed as racially pure.8 The institutional division of medieval studies at 1066 is both a product of and a contributor to the ideology of a transhistorical Anglo- Saxon Englishness. The split, which produced two scholarly communi- ties with little contact between them, has been justified on linguistic grounds: the production of English-language texts dropped off rapidly

8 See Hugh A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1982); Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); and Asa Briggs, “Saxons, Normans, and Vic- torians,” in 1066 Commemoration Lectures (London: Historical Association, 1976), 89–112. 158 MLQ ❙ June 2003 for over a century after the Conquest, and when the language returned to literary use, it appeared much changed. But such changes have themselves long been explained in the familiar terms of the Norman yoke. Thus for R. W. Chambers, the fate of the language itself drives a strongly nationalist argument. He treats the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as a national epic, written by “English patriots” in a language embodying “the English spirit” nearly “strangled” by the Conquest: “This strangling of English prose was a national disaster. . . . Of course, the Conqueror did not [come] with any deliberate intention of destroying the English nationality and the English language, but it was an inevitable conse- quence of the Conquest that both were nearly destroyed.”9 The suppo- sitions of this argument still haunt English literary history. In spite of overwhelming evidence that post-Conquest England rapidly became a complex culture operating in Latin, French, and English, our literary histories insist on following the thread only of the last, and arguably least important, language.10 Moreover, Middle English literature is typically said to begin around 1200, about the time Ivanhoe is said to end. Thus English literary histories reproduce Scott’s time trick. When they do attempt to bridge the Conquest, they typically leap from Anglo- Saxon works of the tenth century to the early Middle English poem The Owl and the Nightingale, composed around 1200. So J. A. W. Bennett opens the Middle English volume of Oxford’s current History of English Literature with this sentence: “As the story of Anglo-Saxon literature opens with a masterpiece—‘The Dream of the Rood’—that found no parallel in three hundred years, so, when in the late twelfth century English has its renascence, the ﬁrst poet to be heard spoke in assured tones and showed a delicate humour, a rich humanity, and a sensitivity

9 R. W. Chambers, On the Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More and His School (London: Early English Text Society, 1932), lxxxv–lxxxvi. 10 The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), is a major exception. Yet for all its efforts to attend to “the ﬂuid, polyvocal complexities” of post-Conquest literature, reviewers have noted both the fragmentation that is inevitable in a volume with thirty-three contributors and the not-so-subtle underlying narrative of the whole, in which the English language plays the role of “vernacular hero” familiar from the old Whiggish view of Chambers (see, e.g., Sarah Stanbury, “Vernacular Heroics and the Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature,” in Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23 [2001]: 495–502). Georgianna ❙ Periodization and Politics 159 to nature that amounted to genius, and that will hardly be met with again before Marvell’s time.”11 Bennett’s insistence that the poem is an anomaly—a “miraculous” work, he calls it—and his substitution of a timeless English “genius” for the complex cultural milieu implied by the poem itself typify the treatment of post-Conquest literature in literary history, which has created the very conditions it sets out to explain. That is, the isolation of “English” writing in the post-Conquest period is largely the result of the politics of literary history, not of the period itself, which N. R. Ker calls “the greatest in the history of English book production” but which English literary history construes as all but silent. The major reason for this discrepancy is that while English literary historians count only works composed in the English language, especially poems—four, by most accounts—Ker, a paleographer, includes in his reckoning all surviving books produced in England, regardless of language or genre.12 Thus hundreds of twelfth-century works, the study of which could signiﬁcantly revise our understanding of English literary history, have been routinely ignored as not really English at all. We see as a large part of our task in the Oxford project to trouble these assumptions by focusing nearly half of our book on the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Eleventh-century studies did not even exist a few years ago, and the twelfth-century Renaissance was at home only in France. It is increasingly clear that England’s great contribution to the twelfth-century Renaissance lay in historiography, the subject of my chapter “Hidden in the Walls: Monastic Historiography in the Century after the Conquest.” The Conquest, which suddenly replaced an Anglo- Saxon warrior class with a Norman elite, both created a sharp break with the past and spurred the production of a new historiography that could mark and mend the rupture of the Conquest, a rupture all the more apparent in a kingdom with a centuries-old tradition of historiography in Latin and Old English. R. W. Southern has laid out the cen- tral role that English monasteries, the only large landholders to escape the massive land transfer triggered by the Conquest, played in creating

11 J. A. W. Bennett, Middle English Literature, ed. and completed by Douglas Gray (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 1. 12 N. R. Ker, English Manuscripts in the Century after the Norman Conquest (Oxford: Clarendon, 1960), 1. 160 MLQ ❙ June 2003 the new historiography.13 Though William had begun his conquest on the battlefield, he completed it in writing by founding, beginning with the Domesday survey, a new documentary culture that demanded written proof of holdings and rights previously accepted on oral authority.14 To protect their holdings, a new breed of monk-historians searched the archives to produce the first wave of post-Conquest history writing. But with their new historical consciousness they soon branched out in other directions, including forgery. The title of my chapter comes from an entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in which numerous documents per- taining to Peterborough Abbey are said to have been found “hidden in the walls.” The interpolated charters are all twelfth-century forgeries, but forgery in itself is proof of a new historical sensibility, since to forge an ancient document one must attend to what such documents look like.15 Their archival research also spurred the monk-historians to write ambitious rhetorical or narrative histories of England. Indeed, during this time “more history was being written than ever before or often after.”16 Here, in Latin rhetorical histories, experiments in varieties of Englishness were first constructed. I now turn to a single case study from the larger project, concerning William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum, or “Deeds of the English Kings” (1125). Though rarely mentioned in literary history, William is well known to British historians, who mined his works in the nineteenth century for evidence of “national”—that is, Anglo-Saxon— feeling. Until 1998 the standard edition of the Gesta regum Anglorum was that undertaken for the Rolls Series by Stubbs, who searched the text

13 See R. W. Southern, “The Place of England in the Twelfth-Century Renais- sance,” in Medieval Humanism (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 158 – 80; and Southern, “Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing: 4. The Sense of the Past,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 23 (1973): 243 – 63. 14 See M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307, 2d ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); and Andrew Galloway, “Writing History in England,” in Cambridge History of Medieval Literature, 259–60. 15 On monastic forgeries in the post-Conquest period see Clanchy, 148 – 49, 318 – 26. The interpolated charters are printed together as an appendix in Cecily Clark, ed., The Peterborough Chronicle, 1070–1154, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 115 – 28. 16 Martin Brett, “John of Worcester and His Contemporaries,” in The Writing of History in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Richard William Southern, ed. R. H. C. Davis and J. M. Wallace-Hadrill (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), 101. Georgianna ❙ Periodization and Politics 161 for signs of “the English spirit.”17 Contemporary historians applaud William for his sophisticated archival methods. He traveled throughout the country gathering, copying, annotating, and organizing evidence. He used sources critically, comparing versions, even reconstructing lost works. It is no wonder that modern historians speak warmly of him as a pioneering colleague: he is England’s first professional historian since Bede, and he knows it: “I have this private satisfaction . . . that I have set in order the unbroken course of English history [continuam Anglorum historiam], and am since Bede the only man to do so, or at any rate the first” (5.445.5). In invoking Bede’s legacy, however, William masks his radical departures from Bede’s vision of history, in which the Anglo-Saxon adventus was divinely inspired to punish the “faithless” Celtic Britons and reward the Anglo-Saxons, God’s chosen people. Through several waves of Viking invasion, Bede’s Anglo-Saxon myth held firm, but the coming of the Normans required a profound revision of his narrative to accommodate the new peoples living in England. The Normans were relative newcomers to Europe, with a recently invented historical tradition. William the Conqueror (a.k.a. the Bas- tard) could trace his family back only a few generations, and few of his men could do better.18 These newcomers—Orderic Vitalis refers to them bitterly as men “raised from the dust”—were confronted in England with a continuous historical tradition stretching back nearly four centuries.19 For these so-called new men, attracted to and in need of the antiquity of the land they had conquered, the Conquest demanded not the suppression of English history but its revision and so created a new function for historiographical writing: to construct a continuous history

17 Willelmi Malmesbiriensis monachi, De gestis regum Anglorum libri quinque: Historiae novellae libri tres, ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols. (London: Printed for Her Majesty’s Sta- tionery Office by Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1887 – 89). My citations, to book, para- graph, and (where necessary) line, refer unless otherwise noted to the new edition, William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum/The History of the English Kings, ed. and trans. R. A. B. Mynors, completed by R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998). 18 See R. H. C. Davis, The Normans and Their Myth (London: Thames and Hud- son, 1976). 19 The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969 – 80), 6:16. 162 MLQ ❙ June 2003 able to accommodate Anglo-Saxon antiquity, the recent Norman achieve- ment, and the emerging hybrid kingdom we now conveniently call Anglo-Norman England, a term never used by a medieval writer. The task of inventing this historiography fell to twelfth-century monastic historians like William. It was not only the cultural identity of his audience that concerned William. Born of a Norman father and an Anglo-Saxon mother, he was himself a product of the cultural accommodation he seeks to explain. He refers to his parentage only rarely, as when he offers his mixed blood as a sign of his impartiality, since, as he says, the Normans have overpraised William the Conqueror, while the English have vilified him: “[I] for my part, having the blood of both nations in my veins, . . . pro- pose in my narrative to keep a middle path . . . ; thus my history will not be accused of falsehood” (3.Prol.1). In the end, however, rhetoric, not race, guarantees the truth of William’s history. When he says that he intends “to mend the broken chain of history and season the crude [native] materials with Roman salt” (1.Prol.4; my translation), William authorizes himself in two ways. First, he styles himself as a traditional monastic historian who imagines history as an orderly line or chain that historians continue and mend by filling in any gaps. It is this claim that most appeals to modern historians who read his work for information, especially concerning the Norman Conquest, the most serious gap in England’s linear history and the one to which he devotes nearly half of his history. Yet, on the whole, historians come away disappointed in the relatively small amount of information William adds to preexisting sources, and while they admire his good Latin, they fault him for his digressive style and an excess of “imagination,”20 which brings us to his second self-authorizing claim. Unlike his modern readership, William recognizes that a “continuous” line of history must always be constructed, not simply continued or followed, particularly the Anglo-Saxonist line drawn by Bede and ruptured in the recent past. Thus William’s most important claim as a historian is not that he has gathered many facts but that he will “season” [condire] his material with “Roman salt.” Romanus sal is a classical term

20 See the mixed assessment of Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England, 2 vols. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974 – 82), 1:166 – 85. Georgianna ❙ Periodization and Politics 163 encompassing all of the rhetorical arts of polish and persuasion.21 Wil- liam, who was extraordinarily well read in classical philosophy, rhetoric, and history, models his ornate, balanced prose on Cicero, “king of Roman eloquence” (2.132). While he does not have De oratore, which surfaced only in the fifteenth century, he has read most of Cicero’s philosophi- cal treatises and many of the rhetorical works, including De inventione, the pseudo-Ciceronian Ad herennium, and the rare Partitiones oratoriae, a copy of which survives in his own hand. Among the historians, he is especially influenced by Virgil, whom he quotes from memory, and by Lucan and Sallust.22 William, like the ancients, views history as a branch of rhetoric, and both are closely tied to ethics, having arisen in con- nection with the oratory of the courts. For Cicero, as A. J. Woodman shows, the content of both history and judicial oratory depends chiefly on inuentio, not truth discovered in archival research but the truth invented to produce a convincing narratio. Meaningful history requires evidence, to be sure, but to be true, history requires a plausible fiction that can “accommodate” the evidence; it must be copious in convincing details of motive, intention, and circumstance. “Inuentio makes no distinction between true and probable”; modern historians who distin- guish between William’s laudable historical instincts and his regrettable imaginative excess are “simply talking a different language.”23 Further- more, the value that modern historians accord so-called analytic history is rooted not in objective claims of truth but in the fictional power of narrativity itself, which considerably closes the distance between rhetorical and more modern historiographical methods.24

21 See John O. Ward, “Some Principles of Rhetorical Historiography in the Twelfth Century,” in Classical Rhetoric and Medieval Historiography, ed. Ernst Breisach (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1985), 119. 22 On William’s reading see Rodney Thomson, William of Malmesbury (Wood- bridge: Boydell, 1987), 39–75; and M. R. James, Two Ancient English Scholars: Saint Aldhelm and William of Malmesbury (Glasgow: Jackson, Wylie, 1931). 23 A. J. Woodman, Rhetoric in Classical Historiography: Four Studies (London: Croom Helm, 1988), 87. 24 See Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 1–25; and Nancy F. Partner, “The New Corniﬁcius: Medieval History and the Artiﬁce of Words,” in Breisach, 5–60. See also Partner’s seminal study Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History in Twelfth-Century 164 MLQ ❙ June 2003

But if William’s assumption that history is made with Roman salt is not so far removed from our own assumptions, it is seriously at odds with those of earlier monastic historians such as Bede, for whom history is read as a sign of God’s intervention in worldly affairs. This secure frame allows the historian to fade into the fabric of a narrative presented as divinely ordained. William rarely cites Providence as a source of historical explanation. Instead, like Roman historiography, his history is driven by the gesta of great men, and the historian’s task is to re- create the motives and circumstances that determine outcomes. Just as history centers on the choices of great men, so historiography is driven by the judgments of historians. Without the hand of God directing the narrative, the role of the historian can come to the fore for the first time. Usually, William assumes his role confidently, as when he offers his mixed blood as a sign of his impartiality or comments on his sources and methods. He is especially confident in his numerous digressions, defending his “wandering” (pace Cicero) as providing the pleasure of variety to his narrative. He proceeds with a sense of leisure that irritates modern historians such as Stubbs, who growls, “I know no book that stands more in need of a perfect index.” William writes not to be indexed but to be savored, as his references to salt and seasoning suggest, and he is never more sure of himself than when diverting the reader from the linear thread of history. “The arrangement . . . is so puzzling and so desultory,” Stubbs grudgingly admits, “that the only defense of it must be that our author was resolutely determined that his work should not be read as a book of reference, but as a literary production that would not allow skipping” (2:133). The voice of the historian that will not allow skipping is everywhere present, not so much supporting the line of history as creating it. Yet William at times approaches his task with some anxiety, most apparently in book 2, where he narrates the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings. This is the longest book of the Gesta regum Anglorum,

England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). On rhetoric and interpretation as “accommodative” arts in classical rhetorical theory see Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997). Georgianna ❙ Periodization and Politics 165 and the one most often interrupted by digressions and metacommen- tary about his narrative. When narrating England’s early history in book 1, William has deftly condensed and adjusted Bede’s narrative to accommodate a new Anglo-Norman conclusion, noting, for instance, that Germany is so called “because it is the germinating place” of both English and Norman peoples, who thus stem from the same “mother” (1.5.2). But for all of his preparation, anxiety over his role as inter- preter overtakes William as he approaches 1066. No sooner does he arrive at the reign of Edward the Confessor, whose childlessness pre- cipitated the Conquest, than he interrupts his narrative: “Since we have reached this point, I should like to warn the reader that here I perceive the course of my narrative to be somewhat in doubt because the truth of the facts is in suspense and uncertain” (2.197.4). Here he points to the limits of rhetoric when confronted with deeply conflicting views that no plausible fiction can accommodate. Uncertainty and disruption dominate his portrait of Edward, whose character simply baffles him. The accession story is cut short by a troubled account of the Godwin family (on whose military strength Edward depended), which is itself interrupted by digressions on devils, witches, saints, and popes. Twenty- seven chapters separate William’s promise to tell of Edward’s death from the actual telling. Then, in that long-delayed telling, Edward is recast as a saintly confessor who “lived an angel’s life” (Edward was in fact canonized in 1161). The gap between Edward’s sanctity and his fail- ures as a king cannot be reconciled: he is either “idle or innocent,” but William is not sure which; Edward avoids Edith’s bed, but “whether . . . out of hatred for her family . . . or from a love of chastity,” William cannot say. He is even more perplexed about Godwin’s relations with the king. Caught between competing explanations, he can only sort them into the views of “the modern English,” who defend Godwin, and the Normans, who accuse him of treachery. Unable to resolve his dilemma, he pleads to his readers: “It is these differences of opinion which . . . put my narrative at risk, since I cannot decide what precisely is the truth, either from the natural division between the two nations or because the fact is that the English are scornful of any superior and Normans cannot endure an equal” (2.198.1). Here, as so often, William’s wit saves him, but wit and logic both fail him in the rushed account of Harold’s defeat at Hastings, squeezed into 166 MLQ ❙ June 2003 a single chapter at the end of book 2. The battle itself is omitted, lost in a blur of causes that make the outcome hopelessly overdetermined: Harold’s stinginess as a lord, his men’s disloyalty, and William of Nor- mandy’s cunning are all offered at once as explanations for the sudden defeat. Then again, William of Malmesbury quickly adds, for once invoking the providential model, none of this may have mattered: “The war itself was a mere trifle; it was God’s hidden and stupendous purpose that never again should Englishmen . . . fight together in defense of their liberties.” This explanation, however, is immediately abandoned in the face of conflicting judgments: the English were cowardly in not fighting on after Hastings, but they were also “brave in the extreme” for fighting when they were outnumbered. If the English had not been brave, William reasons, the Normans, “who have my loyalty . . . for my own origins,” could claim no glory for their victory. As a piece of impar- tial historical explanation, usually William’s strength, this passage fails utterly, but it testifies eloquently to the strain of his effort to accommodate opposing explanations of the event. Where such conflicts most threaten his narrative, William pulls the reader into a series of digressions, many of which comment obliquely on his authorial doubts. In “Hidden in the Walls” I discuss many exam- ples, of which the following is the darkest: It was then [in the reign of Edward] that a portent appeared on the borders of Brittany and Normandy: a woman, or rather a pair of women, with two heads, four arms, and everything else double down to the navel; below that two legs, two feet, and everything else single. One of them laughed, ate, talked; the other cried, fasted, and said nothing. . . . In the end one died, and the other lived; the survivor carried around her dead partner for nearly three years, until the heavy weight and the smell of the corpse were too much for her also. Some people thought . . . that these women signified England and Normandy. (2.207.1–2)

With this image William undoes all of his artful preparation to per- suade us to read the joining of England and Normandy as a natural, legitimate product of germination. It comes as one in a string of super- natural portents, but William reads it not as a sign of God’s providence but as a monstrosity of nature, a doomed union that threatens his very identity as its offspring, as well as the track of his history. William quickly recovers, in part by restyling his mixed blood as a Georgianna ❙ Periodization and Politics 167 mark of his impartiality as a historian whose rhetorical skill demonstrates the possibility of cultural accommodation between hostile peoples. He distances himself from the rupture of the Conquest by a num- ber of strategies, the most successful of which is the long digression on the First Crusade that takes up most of book 4. Historians dismiss his account as a translation of an earlier source, yet its value is not as a repository of information but as a rhetorical set piece, the most sub- stantial, polished digression in the work. It allows William to carve out a place where he can stand, far beyond England and its internal divisions, in the distant, exotic East, where a newly imagined Christian nation fights a glorious battle: “As the good news spread over the whole world, it filled the hearts of Christians with a sweet wind that blew in every place, so that there was no nation so remote . . . as not to send some part of itself. . . . The ties of kindred lost their warmth, love of one’s country was worth nothing; men had God alone before their eyes.” The painful ethnic divisions of the Conquest melt away before “the good news,” which joins “English and Normans, West Franks, and Flemings, and . . . all the peoples who lie . . . between the British Ocean and the Alps” into a single northern European nation (4.348, 350). In the East, William finds a people to call his own: “nostri milites” or simply “nostri,” an “us” neither Anglo-Saxon nor Norman but European and Christian, terms that became synonymous in Crusader rhetoric. In scholarship William finds his strongest cultural tie and his hope for England. He sometimes attributes the Conquest to the decline of learning that made “a man who knew any grammar . . . a marvel and a portent to his colleagues” (3.245.3). He reserves his highest praise for the learned: Bede, Alcuin, Eadmer, Goscelin, and Henry I. The scholar, no less than the learned king, whatever his ethnicity, plays a crucial role in national affairs. William states it quite clearly in book 2 in a digression about Saint Kenelm, a ninth-century royal child martyr, said to have been secretly murdered at his sister’s instigation: Wonderful to relate, the crime so secretly committed in England came to light by divine agency in Rome. A parchment carried by a dove flut- tered down upon the altar of St. Peter’s, which being written in English characters, the Romans and men of other nationalities . . . tried in vain to read. By good luck an Englishman appeared in the nick of time, who untied the knot of language, speaking good Latin to those men of 168 MLQ ❙ June 2003

Rome, and ensured that a letter from the pope should make known to the English kings this martyr of their own nation. (2.211)

William hopes that he too has come “in the nick of time” to make known to England’s new men the history of their nation by means of his “good Latin” and Roman salt. What has changed since Kenelm’s time is the deﬁnition of an Englishman. In 1939 V. H. Galbraith wrote, “William of Malmesbury . . . breathes nationality, and in excellent Latin.” This is true if we understand a “nation,” as Galbraith did, as “any considerable group of people who believe they are one.”25 William, armed with Roman salt, sets out to create a new sense of nationality for the England of his time. His designated title, Gesta regum Anglorum— literally, “Deeds of the Kings of the English”—neatly sidesteps the question of who exactly “the English” are. In his closing remarks, however, he twice describes his subject as the history “of the English” (de gestis Anglorum [446.1] and historiam Anglorum [445.5]). Like most medieval writers, William is not particular about titles. Yet here we can sense a resolution to the question that his designated title implies. For William and the historians who follow him, the English are becoming, again, those who live in England, a hybridized people made one by their kings and their historians. William’s is but one twelfth-century voice that deserves to be heard, in part because the Gesta regum Anglorum eloquently demonstrates that Englishness is not and never was simply a given, but rather is a cultural identity permanently under construction. Similarly, our literary histories have to be reimagined periodically, not to keep the past alive for its own sake (as William Faulkner said, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past”) but to replenish the present with alternative views of itself as it continually reinvents itself. The trick of abridging the twelfth century has led to a homogenized, at times racialized story of England’s origins, and not just in ﬁction. To undo the trick and the story of nationalist continuity that it promoted, we need to return to the polyvocal com- plexity of works like the Gesta regum Anglorum, which, to Stubbs’s dis- may, will “not allow skipping.”

25 V. H. Galbraith, “Nationality and Language in Medieval England,” in Kings and Chroniclers: Essays in English Medieval History (London: Hambledon, 1982), 113, 122.