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Introduction: the Scrap-Heap of History 1 NOTES Introduction: The Scrap-Heap of History 1 . Patrick Sims-Williams provides an incisive overview of the construction of some of these stereotypes in “The Visionary Celt: The Construction of an Ethnic Preconception,” Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 11 (1996): 71–96. 2 . William Shakespeare, Henry V , 3rd Arden ed., ed. T. W. Craig (London: Routledge, 1995), IV:7, lines 94–118. 3 . Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature and Other Essays (New York: Dutton, 1976), p. 384. 4 . See Megan S. Lloyd, “Speak It in Welsh”: Wales and the Welsh Language in Shakespeare (Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Lexington Books, 2008). 5 . Even the subversive force of Fluellen’s unfavorable comparison of Henry to Alexander the Great is humorously undercut by the Welshman’s insis- tence on the Hellenistic conqueror’s epithet: the “pig.” See Shakespeare, Henry V , IV: vii; David Quint, “ ‘Alexander the Pig’: Shakespeare on History and Poetry,” boundary 2 10 (1982): 49–67, and esp. 60, shows persuasively how Fluellen’s attempts at historical analysis and panegyric undercut themselves, rendering him ludicrous. For a larger discussion of the representation of the Welsh in Elizabethan texts, see Peter Roberts, “Tudor Wales, National Identity, and the British Inheritance,” in British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1536–1707 , ed. Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 8–42. 6 . William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1 , 3.1. ed. David Bevington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 7 . See R. R. Davies, The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dwr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 8 . Simon Meecham-Jones speaks of these developments as “conscious processes of historical falsification and linguistic distortion.” See his essay, “Where Was Wales? The Erasure of Wales in Medieval English Culture,” in Authority and Subjugation in Writing of Medieval Wales , ed. Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 47. 182 NOTES 9 . William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum , Vol. 1, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson, and M. Winterbottom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 150. 10 . See, for instance, Charles Homer Haskins, The Normans in European History (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1915); David Charles Douglas, The Norman Achievement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); J. O. Prestwich, “War and Finance in the Anglo-Norman State,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , 5th series, 4 (1954): 19–43; and, more recently, Eleanor Searle, Predatory Kinship and the Creation of Norman Power, 840–1066 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 11 . For a recent example, see C. Warren Hollister, “Anglo-Norman Political Culture and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance,” in Anglo- Norman Political Culture and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance: Proceedings of the Borchard Conference on Anglo- Norman History, 1995 , ed. C. Warren Hollister (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1997), pp. 1–16. 12 . For a full account of the battle and its aftermath, see J. E. Lloyd, A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest , Vol. 2 (London: Longmans, 1939), pp. 384–388; and Kari Maund, The Welsh Kings (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus, 2000), pp. 78–82. 13 . The Welsh victor at Mynydd Carn, Rhys ap Tewdwr, king of Deheubarth, agreed to pay William I a tribute of £ 40 per year. See Roger Turvey, The Welsh Princes: 1063–1283 (London: Longman, 2002), pp. 68–70, for an analysis of William’s expedition. 14 . As R. R. Davies points out in Domination and Conquest: The Experience of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, 1100–1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 3: “The Anglo-Normans did not set out self-consciously on a conquest of ‘Wales’ or ‘Ireland’ as such . they were not informed by national ambitions or national animus; few of them could have guessed at, or cared about, what they might—or might not—achieve.” 15 . Rees Davies provides a valuable outline of early Norman colonization in Wales in The Age of Conquest: Wales, 1063–1415 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 27–32. 16 . Lynn Nelson, The Normans in South Wales, 1070–1172 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966), pp. 180–182. 17 . Michelle R. Warren, History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 4. 18 . See Cory James Rushton, “Malory’s Divided Wales,” in Authority and Subjugation in Writing of Medieval Wales , ed. Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones (New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 2008), pp. 175–189. 19 . Brut y Tywysogyon, or The Chronicle of the Princes: Red Book of Hergest Version , ed. and trans. Thomas Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1955), pp. 78–79. 20 . Gerald of Wales, Giraldi Cambrensis Opera , Vol. VI, ed. James Dimock (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1868), p. 225n; and see H. C. Darby, “The Marches of Wales in 1086,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 11 (1986): esp. pp. 260–262. NOTES 183 21 . Gesta Stephani , ed. K. R. Potter and R. H. C. Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 14. Translation is mine. 22 . Monika Otter, Inventiones: Fiction and Referentiality in Twelfth-Century English Historical Writing (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 59–60. 23 . Davies, The Age of Conquest , p. 78. 24 . Quoted by Gerald of Wales, De Invectionibus , Giraldi Cambrensis Opera , Vol. III, ed. J. S. Brewer (London: Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1863), p. 15. 25 . Emyr Humphries, The Taliesin Tradition: A Quest for the Welsh Identity (Bridgend, Glamorgan: Seren Press, 1989), pp. 10–11, emphasizes the extent to which Welsh prophetic traditions were dedicated to preserv- ing this sense of historical continuity with the ancient Britons: “The Welsh saw themselves as the Israelites of old, the remnant of a more glorious past celebrated by a continuing poetic tradition which kept them buoyant and confident and filled them with an unquenchable expectation of a promised land.” 26 . Davies, The Age of Conquest , p. 80. 27 . Brut y Tywysogion , p. 87. 28 . Jehan Bodel, La chanson des Saisnes , ed. Annette Brasseur, Vol. 1 (Geneva: Droz, 1989), p. 2. 29 . Thomas Malory, Works , ed. Eugene Vinaver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. xiii. 30 . Marie de France, Lais, ed. A. Ewert (Oxford: Blackwell, 1945), p. xiii. 31 . Paul Ricouer, Time and Narrative , Vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), esp. 31–90; Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 5–27. White’s Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973) and Robert D. Hanning’s The Vision of History in Early Britain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966) have also been seminal in my thinking about the narrative teleologies. 32 . Jean Blacker, The Faces of Time: Portrayal of the Past in Old French and Latin Historical Narratives of the Anglo- Norman Regnum (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994); Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo- Norman and Middle English Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Otter, Inventiones , esp. pp. 1–7; Elisabeth van Houts usefully breaks down the distinctions between fiction, history, Latin, and the vernacular in “Latin and French as Languages of the Past in Normandy during the Reign of Henry II: Robert of Torigni, Stephen of Rouen, and Wace,” in Writers of the Reign of Henry II , ed. Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 53–78. 33 . J. H. Plumb, The Death of the Past , 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 40. 34 . Cf. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Press, 1979), p. 3. 184 NOTES 35 . Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 1. 36 . See The Law of Hywel Dda: Law Texts from Medieval Wales , ed. Dafydd Jenkins (Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1990). 37 . Before ever appearing in an Arthurian romance or in a Norman history like Geoffrey of Monmouth’s, most of these names appeared in Welsh texts: Arthur, Bedwyr, Kei, Gwalchmai (= Gawain), Gwenhwyfar (= Guenevere). The name Mordred, interestingly, seems to come from a Cornish form. The name Launcelot is of a difficult and highly debated etymology, and it may well be the coinage of an unknown twelfth-century raconteur. For a definitive survey of Celtic Arthurian nomenclature, see John T. Koch, “The Celtic Lands,” in Medieval Arthurian Literature: A Guide to Recent Research , ed. Norris J. Lacy (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996). See also the discussion in the Kerth/Loomis/Webster edition of Ulrich von Zatzikhoven’s Lanzelet : Lanzelet, trans. Thomas Kerth, notes by Kenneth G. T. Webster and Roger Sherman Loomis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), pp. 3–4. 38 . Rachel Bromwich, “First Transmission to England and France,” in The Arthur of the Welsh , ed. Rachel Bromwich, A. O. H. Jarman, and Brynley F. Roberts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991), pp. 276–277. 39 . Sharon Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p. 109. And see also Patrick Sims-Williams, “Did Itinerant Breton Conteurs Transmit the Mati è re de Bretagne ?” Romania 116 (1998): 72–111. 40 . For an overview and refutation of Geoffrey’s reliance on the ancient British book, see Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain , ed. Michael Faletra (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2008), pp. 14–21. 41 . See “A New Edition of John of Cornwall’s Prophetia Merlini ,” ed. Michael J Curley, Speculum 57 (1982): 217–249; Gerald of Wales, Itin. Kamb. , Opera Vol. VI, 124; and see also Ad Putter, “Gerald of Wales and the Prophet Merlin,” in Anglo- Norman Studies 31 (2008): 90–103.
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