Mark Faulkner, ‘Rewriting English Literary History 1042-1215’, Literature Compass 9 (2012), 275-291. Postprint
Rewriting English Literary History 1042-1215
Abstract
The last ten years have seen a swathe of revisionary scholarship on the afterlife of Old English texts in the twelfth century. This article places this research beside work on the earliest Middle English texts and contemporary writing in Latin and French to suggest that the time is now ripe for a new, synthetic literary history of the period. In particular, the article identifies three key aspects of post-Conquest literary culture which have been neglected because they chafe against the conventional paradigms of literary history, with its expectation of a literature national, monolingual and constantly original. The twelfth- century norms, by contrast, were regionalism, multilingualism, and the habitual recycling of older texts. Medievalists must insist these differences should inform wider discussions about the form and purpose of literary history in the twenty-first century.
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Mark Faulkner, ‘Rewriting English Literary History 1042-1215’, Literature Compass 9 (2012), 275-291. Postprint
1066, as Sellars’ and Yeatman’s brilliant parody of textbook history recognised, was the one date in English history every schoolboy knew, a shorthand cipher for a canonical series of dramatic and mostly negative changes which followed inevitably from the Norman Conquest.1 Yet while today’s historians have begun to ask whether the date still matters (Bates ‘1066’; see also Chibnall Debate on the Norman Conquest; Thomas Norman Conquest; Garnett; as well as van Houts ‘Memory of 1066’; Otter on the date’s significance to medieval writers), for literary histories like David Wallace’s Cambridge History of Medieval Literature, 1066 remains ‘a solid bookend of English history’ (Wallace xxi; see also Chism et al.), keeping Old and Middle English literature securely apart. While Anglo-Saxonists of the last ten years have problematised this periodisation by demonstrating that ‘Old’ English texts continued to be read long after the arrival of William and his troops, this is yet to be reflected in literary histories.2 Though the value of writing literary history has itself been questioned in recent years, its defenders have emphasised its role in signalling the consolidation of a field of study (Hutcheon; see also Perkins Theoretical Issues; Is Literary History Possible?; Brown; and the other essays collected by Hutcheon and Valdés). Traditionally, the principal task of literary history is to explain where, why, and how authors wrote the texts they did (Valdés 95). This is a particularly arduous task for the long twelfth century. Post-Conquest Britain was a tri-, even multilingual, society with a literature to match. For this survey at least, it is axiomatic that English literature comprises all texts written in Britain regardless of the language in which they are inscribed.3 Despite this inclusive definition, the article focuses principally on texts actually composed in English, partly for reasons of space, but also because these English language texts offer the most vigorous challenge to the paradigmatic methodologies of literary history. The start- and end-points of this study of English literature in the long twelfth century have been chosen provocatively as a challenge to canonical periodisations. They do not purport to mark definitive watersheds in English literary history. Beginning in 1042 with the accession of the Normandy-raised Edward the Confessor emphasises that English contacts with Normandy predated the Conquest (Musset ‘Apports anglais’; Lewis), contacts which gave a European outlook to much eleventh-century English writing (Tyler ‘Fictions of
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Mark Faulkner, ‘Rewriting English Literary History 1042-1215’, Literature Compass 9 (2012), 275-291. Postprint
Family’; ‘Talking about History’; ‘Vita Ædwardi’; ‘OE to OF’; van Houts ‘Flemish Contribution’). The article elects to end in 1215 with the Fourth Lateran Council which introduced mandatory auricular confession and (literary history holds) gave special impetus to the production of vernacular religious texts (Watson 828; Millett ‘Ancrene Wisse Group’ esp. 9-13) even though the extensive twelfth-century interest in English language homilies challenges any attempt to treat it as an originary moment. The period between 1066 and 1200, or indeed 1042 and 1215, has typically been described as transitional, witnessing, on the one hand, the gradual death of the Old English tradition, and, on the other, its mutation into early Middle English literature (Georgianna ‘Coming to Terms’; Georgianna ‘Periodization and Politics’; Cannon ‘Between the Old and the Middle’). Mid-twentieth-century literary histories were generally Whig in tone and emphasised continuity (Chambers; Wilson Sawles Warde v-xxx; Lost Literature; on the Whig model, see Butterfield) on the strength of the fourteenth-century alliterative revival and presumed connections between the Katherine Group and Old English prose, but both arguments are now discredited (Hanna ‘Alliterative Poetry’; Bethurum; Millett ‘Continuity of Old English Prose’; ‘Katherine Group and Alliterative Tradition’; ‘Discontinuity of English Prose’). Other critics have emphasised the discontinuity of the period. Christopher Cannon began his recent monograph with a chapter melodramatically entitled ‘The Loss of Literature: 1066’ where he finds ‘sudden silencing is not the exception, but the rule’ (Cannon Grounds 19). To thus advocate rupture is to ignore the substantial evidence that English was an important literary language in the trilingual twelfth century. By contrast, disproportionately to emphasise the very limited continuities so far traced between Old and Early Middle English texts (cautiously surveyed by Frankis ‘La3amon's English Sources’; Morrison ‘Orm's English Sources’; ‘Reminiscence of Wulfstan’; ‘Continuité et innovation littéraire’), as scholars like Chambers did, does nothing to explain why the latter appear, or choose to appear, ‘profound[ly] isolat[ed] from immediate models and examples, from any local precedent for the writing of English’ (Cannon Grounds 2). Consequently recent studies by Seth Lerer, Thomas Hahn and Elaine Treharne have traced a delicate balance of continuity and innovation, with Treharne arguing for a post-colonial approach to the twelfth century which sees English surviving against the odds as ‘a literature of resistance’ (Lerer; Hahn; Treharne ‘Categorization, Periodization’ 269).4 Any future literary history will need to
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Mark Faulkner, ‘Rewriting English Literary History 1042-1215’, Literature Compass 9 (2012), 275-291. Postprint emphasise the ever-dynamic efforts of twelfth-century writers to define the English vernacular with and against the other literary languages of a multilingual Britain. The first stage in rewriting the literary history of the long twelfth century is necessarily to assemble the corpus of English literature extant from between 1042 and 1215 (literature is here taken to encompass anything recorded in writing). Texts in Latin, the most prestigious literary language of the period, are inventoried in Richard Sharpe’s Handlist (see also Rigg History); texts in French in Ruth Dean’s Anglo-Norman Literature (a new edition of which is promised by Daron Burrows; see also Woledge and Clive). Twelfth-century Anglo- Norman literature, precocious in comparison with French writing on the continent (Short ‘Patrons and Polyglots’; ‘Language and Literature’; Howlett), is receiving ever-increasing attention thanks to Jocelyn Wogan-Browne’s French of England project (Watson and Wogan-Browne; Wogan-Browne et al.; also Ingram). Alongside Latin, French and English were spoken a range of other languages including Welsh, Cornish, Old Norse and Flemish, which occasionally penetrate the written record.5 There is no comparable handlist of English language texts from the long twelfth century.6 This is due to a variety of factors, including the impermeable boundaries habitually erected between ‘Old’ and ‘Middle’ English, the tendency to treat twelfth-century homilies as debased copies of older works rather than texts in their own right, the difficulties attendant on dating works securely. Collections of early Middle English writing have typically anthologised only a very narrow selection of texts composed during this period (Hall; Dickins and Wilson; Bennett and Smithers; Gray), but, a decade after the publication of Swan and Treharne’s field-defining Rewriting Old English, any new literary history must also take into account earlier English texts copied, remediated and revised during the long twelfth century. The following survey, though not exhaustive, is the first to incorporate such works alongside new compositions. Verse is distinguished from prose in the confidence that there are significant formal differences between the media, despite the existence of a number of interstitial texts (though cf. Savage). To judge from surviving manuscripts, English verse was substantially less widely read than prose in this period as earlier. Nonetheless, Henry of Huntingdon judged the earlier the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle poems worthy of translation for inclusion in his Historia anglorum, registering that Brunanburh was in verse (Rigg ‘Metrical Experiments’; Greenway v. 19), and
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Mark Faulkner, ‘Rewriting English Literary History 1042-1215’, Literature Compass 9 (2012), 275-291. Postprint the late Abingdon, Worcester and Peterborough Chronicles found room for a number of new poems, the most substantial an ambivalent obituary for William the Conqueror in 1087.7 The vernacular text of Cædmon’s Hymn was copied in manuscripts of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica through the twelfth century and beyond, as was Bede’s Death Song embedded in the Latin of the Epistola Cuthberti de obitu Bedae (Dobbie Manuscripts; O'Donnell). Poems like The Grave, Instructions for Christians, the Worcester Fragments and the metrical charm Against a Wen make structural use of both alliteration and rhyme and are usually considered post-Conquest compositions; the encomium urbis Durham is more classical in its form, but was perhaps not composed until 1100 (Kendall). Similarly metrically heterogenous is The Proverbs of Alfred. The topical Durham and Chronicle poems aside, these poems are predominantly religious, as are the Poema Morale and the extraordinarily-ambitious Orrmulum, both in septenaries (on which metre, see Solopova). The three English poems Godric (d. 1170) miraculously learnt stand at the head of the fledgling genre of the religious lyric (Brown English Lyrics). English poetry evidently continued also to circulate orally, since one of Aldhelm’s vernacular poems was still heard in William of Malmesbury’s day and Gerald of Wales was able to quote and analyse sample lines of Old English alliterative verse (Winterbottom and Thomson v.190.3-4; Thorpe 240-2). Scraps of such verse, for example the lines on St Kenelm attributed to John de Cella, abbot of Saint Albans (1195-1214), are occasionally recorded in Latin texts or on flyleaves (Wilson Lost Literature 159-87).8 This corpus of verse is dwarfed by the English prose which survives from the long twelfth century, though, unlike the verse, the prose is frequently adapted from earlier texts. Homilies are dominant, with one scholar counting 122 such texts for the period 1100-1225 alone (Greenfield 284). Some of these homilies, such as the translation of Ralph d’Escures’ sermon for the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, were undoubtedly composed after the Conquest (Treharne ‘Life of English’), but many are based on earlier models, with difficult content and outdated lexis or syntax replaced whenever the homilist’s meaning was liable to be misunderstood (Swan ‘Old English Made New’; Treharne ‘Life and Times’; Faulkner ‘Archaism, Belatedness, Modernisation’). While it is recognised that copying these texts was a pragmatic imperative, not an exercise in archival preservation (Treharne ‘English in the post-Conquest Period’ 404; pace Hahn 72n24), there been little agreement on their likely readership, with scholars variously suggesting monastic pueri or conversi, members of the
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Mark Faulkner, ‘Rewriting English Literary History 1042-1215’, Literature Compass 9 (2012), 275-291. Postprint lower clergy with little Latin and no French, viri idonei employed to preach vicariously on behalf of the cathedral clergy and secular vowesses (Treharne ‘Reading from the Margins’ 353-4; Fischer ‘Vocabulary of Very Late Old English’ 31; Millett ‘Pastoral Context’ esp. 52-60; Swan ‘Imagining a Readership’). Ælfric was generally preferred to Wulfstan (Wilcox), and there is an overall tendency to simplify the homilies and make them more accessible (Richards ‘Cotton Vespasian A. xxii’ 98; Millar and Nicholls 434; Treharne ‘Making their Presence Felt’ 411). With a few notable exceptions, such as Coleman’s lost Old English Life of Wulfstan, the putatively post-Conquest lives of Nicholas, Giles and Margaret and the extensive hagiographical element in CUL Ii. 1. 33 (Orchard; Treharne OE Life of St Nicholas; Clayton and Magennis; Traxel; also Proud), these homilies address the needs of the temporale rather than the sanctorale, with a particular focus on Lent and its aftermath (Treharne ‘Making their Presence Felt’ 419). This strongly suggests the majority of texts were copied with an eye to the spiritual needs of the laity, and there is considerable anecdotal evidence that twelfth-century prelates considered preaching in English necessary (e. g. Wilson ‘English and French’ 48-9). To judge from the surviving manuscripts, ‘Old’ English sermons became obsolete only with the arrival of the friars and thematic preaching (Millett ‘Change and Continuity’ 234); their longevity can perhaps best be explained by inferring that linguistic and doctrinal anxieties beset twelfth-century preachers considering composing new homilies. The West-Saxon translation of the Gospels was also copied twice in the long twelfth century (Fischer ‘Hatton MS’; Liuzza ‘Scribal Habit’; Nevanlinna); comparable efforts on the continent became implicated in heresies such as Waldensianism (Lambert 2002 esp. 81-2). Other religious texts produced include two copies of the Old English Benedictine Rule, one explicitly for the use of nuns, and three glossed psalters, including the famous trilingual Eadwine Psalter (Gibson, Heslop and Pfaff; see also Rector on contemporary Anglo-Norman translations). To judge from the Latin, French and English glosses added to several copies of Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary (Menzer), the twelfth-century classroom was trilingual; not until the thirteenth century was English proscribed in favour of French (Orme 74; more generally Hunt). This probably explains the ongoing circulation of the English translation of Cato’s Distichs, a common curriculum text (Treharne ‘Form and Function’), as well as
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Mark Faulkner, ‘Rewriting English Literary History 1042-1215’, Literature Compass 9 (2012), 275-291. Postprint vernacular dialogues like the prose Solomon and Saturn and Adrian and Ritheus. The trilinguality of the post-Conquest classroom has not always been acknowledged, but is key to understanding the place of English in twelfth-century literary culture. The booklet of prognostics now bound in the homiliary Hatton 115, and the medical and herbal texts copied in Harley 6258B and Ashmole 1431 may be mentioned here in passing as evidence of the currency of English in the (pseudo-) scientific disciplines. Translations of learned texts into English also enjoyed an audience. The twelfth- century homiliary Cotton Vespasian D. xiv contains portions of a translation of Honorius Augustodunensis’s catechetical Elucidarius, composed in Latin around 1100 (Warner 134-9, 140-3, 144-5; see also Handley). There are post-Conquest copies of the pseudo-Alfredian translations of both Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae and Augustine’s Soliloquies. Older manuscripts of the Old English Bede and Wærferth’s translation of Gregory’s Dialogues also attracted the interest of twelfth-century readers (Faulkner ‘Uses of Anglo- Saxon Manuscripts’ 144-5). The remaining prose texts are more or less archival. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle attracted substantial and sustained attention. Neither C nor D, the Abingdon and Worcester Chronicles, was compiled until the mid eleventh century, while E, the Peterborough Chronicle, and the single-leaf fragment H, both wholly or largely monolingual, and F, the Domitian Bilingual, are all post-Conquest. E, which continues until 1154, contains substantial new material. To these can be added the Caligula Annals, initially compiled in 1073, but with annals in English until 1130 (Baker 129-34). When it is also considered that the two other extant copies, A and B, attracted additions and emendations from twelfth-century scribes, and that historians from John of Worcester to Geoffrey Gaimar used the Chronicle as a source for pre-Conquest history (McGurk, Darlington and Bray; Short Geffrei Gaimar), it becomes difficult to overstate the text’s importance. Also relevant here are the great legal compendia, the Textus Roffensis and CCCC 383, as well as the substantial corpus of English vernacular documents collected, copied, adapted, composed and forged during the long twelfth century.9 The texts inventoried above constitute a substantial corpus that leaves the prejudice that the post-Conquest period was ‘the deadest century for English literature of any from from the seventh to the twentieth century’ untenable (anonymous reviewer, qtd
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Georgianna ‘Periodization and Politics’ 154), even without reference to contemporary texts in French and Latin, or to several other important English language texts which cannot be securely dated but may perhaps have been written before 1215. These include the earliest sustained prose texts to be written since Ælfric’s homilies, in the Katherine Group, Wooing Group and Ancrene Wisse, as well as long poems like Lawman’s Brut, Vices and Virtues and the Owl and the Nightingale (the last traditionally dated 1189x1216 though on unsatisfactory evidence; it may be as late as the 1280s). All in all, despite Cannon’s conviction that 1066 meant ‘the loss of literature’, a new trilingual literary history of the long twelfth century need not want for material, Latin, French or English. One of the principal tasks of this new literary history is to ask why some texts were written in English and not in French, Latin or any of the other languages available. The twelfth century saw the transition from linguistic pluralism to multilingualism, with multilingualism perhaps the norm among the educated from the 1160s.10 Even then, individual language competencies varied substantially, something not all surveys of twelfth- century multilingualism have acknowledged (e. g. Wilson ‘English and French’; Richter; Short ‘On Bilingualism’; but cf. Trotter for sophisticated analysis of the later Middle Ages). For example, Henry II apparently understood spoken English but could not himself speak it (Thorpe 123-4; discussed Richter 50-3). Continental churchmen appointed to English benifices like Peter of Blois (1125x30–1212) did not benefit from the trilingual education prevailing in England and seem to have struggled to learn a new vernacular (Richter 67). Some, perhaps including William of Longchamp, bishop of Ely (1189-97), were too snobbish to learn English (Richter 73-4). Consequently, interpreters, important in the immediate aftermath of the Conquest, remained necessary (Bullock-Davies; Tsurushima). There was a clear hierarchy of linguistic prestige with Latin at the top, French in the middle and English at the bottom; and English is often condemned as barbarous or harsh-sounding (Chibnall Orderic 6:555; also Thomas English and Normans 251, 256), though it seems to have retained considerable status as a language of authenticity.11 Conversely, English speakers’ regard for French is evident from the adoption of Anglo-Norman nicknames (Clark ‘People and Languages’). In pragmatic situations, all three languages could function complementarily (Hunt 1:434-5), though in its lack of internal dialectal variation and affinity and even contiguity with Latin, Anglo-Norman had several advantages over English (Pouzet
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‘Mapping Insular French Texts?’; Short ‘Patrons and Polyglots’ 242). Despite this complementarity, there is no evidence that English became creolised (see most recently Danchev), and nothing comparable to the disruptively interlingual late medieval macaronic documents edited by Laura Wright survives from the long twelfth century (Wright ‘Macaronic Writing’; Wright ‘Civic London Text’; Wright ‘Bills, Accounts, Inventories’). Medievalists nonetheless stand to learn much from recent work on bilingualism and language contact (e. g. Matras; Thomason etc). While the personnel changes secular and ecclesiastical attendant on the Conquest redirected patronage towards texts in French and, to a lesser extent, Latin, there indisputably remained an audience for writing in English. This is evident from the surviving manuscripts and from isolated episodes recounted in Latin and French texts, like the Miracula S. Etheldredae abbatissae where an Ely monk recalls his learned father reading English texts aloud in the early twelfth century (Richter 77). For some texts, like sermons, the choice of language was dictated by pragmatic concerns like the projected linguistic limitations of the intended audience; in other situations, where no such constraints applied, authors could chose the linguistic medium freely. Despite older arguments (e. g. Turville- Petre England the Nation), there is no need to assume that reading English texts was a marker of English ethnic allegiance (Thomas English and Normans 377-90; Ashe 94-5). While it is becoming common to conceptualise the relationship between French and English texts as antagonistic (Frankis ‘Vernacular Lives of St Giles’ 115; Treharne ‘Vernaculars of Medieval England’ 219), the relationship need not have been so, though it is curious that texts rarely seem to be in dialogue across the two languages. Writing in English was confronted with considerable challenges beyond the handicap of its limited prestige. 1042-1216 was a dramatic and perhaps traumatic period for the English language, which saw the collapse of the late West Saxon Schriftsprache, a standard language which had underpinned the wide contemporary and posthumous circulation of Ælfric’s prose (Gneuss; Gretsch ‘Winchester Vocabulary’; ‘In Search of Standard Old English’; ‘Key to Ælfric's Standard Old English’),12 and its replacement by a series of local, more or less ad hoc spelling systems, the most famous of which are ‘AB’ and the uniquely idiosyncratic orthography adopted by Orrm for his eponymous Orrmulum (Tolkien; Black; Smith; Dance ‘AB Language’; Turville-Petre ‘Studies’; Burchfield; Markus; Fulk; Anderson and Britton).13
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Unfortunately the principal and otherwise invaluable resource for studying the language during this period, the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, judged twelfth-century copies of pre-Conquest texts ‘not usable’ and was unaware of several sources of ‘spontaneously produced, up-to-date written English’ from the period (‘Preliminaries’ to Laing and Lass 4; see also comments of Faulkner ‘Archaism, Belatedness, Modernisation’). This deficiency can be supplemented with reference to careful philological studies of individual texts and manuscripts (e. g. Irvine Bodley 343 lv-lxxvii; Liuzza OE Gospels ii. 174-96; Traxel), but a comprehensive overview of twelfth-century English spelling to replace Schlemilch’s early- twentieth-century doctoral dissertation is an absolute desideratum. Moreover, while historical linguists have zealously traced the processes by which ‘Old’ English became ‘Middle’ English (Moore ‘Loss of Final n’; ‘Earliest Morphological Changes’; Malone; Marckwardt; Jones; Kitson ‘OE Dialects’; ‘When did ME Begin?’), less attention has been paid to the sociolinguistic implications of the collapse of the Schriftsprache. Space constraints mean it is only possible to treat two of the most important of these consequences in detail here: texts’ lack of national vision, and their self-conscious belatedness. One of the most fruitful consequences of the theoretical deconstruction of the paradigms underpinning national literary histories has been an increased emphasis on regional literatures (Turville-Petre ‘North-East Midlands’; Beadle; Hanna ‘Yorkshire Writers’; London Literature; ‘North Yorkshire Scribes’; Barrett). In the twelfth century, the absence of a standard language like the late West Saxon Schriftsprache meant vernacular writing was more often than not addressed to local, coterie audiences, but the geographical distribution of English textual activity has not yet been mapped with precision. On the strength of the perhaps misleading ease with which extant manuscripts can be associated with Benedictine cathedrals like Canterbury and Rochester, this textual activity has sometimes been connected with the antiquarian monastic reaction to the Conquest described by Richard Southern (Clanchy 212; on Rochester see Richards Texts and Traditions; ‘Rochester Cathedral Library’) and Worcester and the West Midlands in particular have loomed deceptively large in scholars’ minds as a consequence of the distinctive but definitely sui generis activities of the Tremulous Hand (Franzen; on Worcester see Weinberg; Frankis ‘Regional Context’). However it is clear that the new religious orders, especially the
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Augustinian canons, also solicited English material (Frankis ‘Vernacular Lives of St Giles’ 112- 3; and more generally Faulkner ‘Uses of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts’ 59-64) and were involved in the composition of new texts (Hanna ‘Augustinian Canons and ME Literature’; Pouzet ‘Augustinian Canons and Insular French Books’). Nugatory information like Serlo of Bayeux’s description of Wilton as fæcunda versibus urbs (‘a city eloquent in poetry’) is available for various locations (Wright Anglo-Latin Satirical Poets ii. 233; qtd Tyler ‘OE to OF’ 174), but remains to be compiled (on Exeter, e. g., see Treharne ‘Producing a Library; Bishops and Texts’; but esp. ‘Making their Presence Felt’ 421); Anglo-Norman may have been most vigorous in the South East and Home Counties (Rothwell 259). Though Elaine Treharne has suggested the maintenance of a ‘Regularis concordia network’ into the twelfth century and Ralph Hanna has written interestingly on the exemplars used in the compilation of the Lambeth Homilies (Treharne ‘Life and Times’ 212; Hanna ‘LPL 487’; also Sisam; Millett ‘Pastoral Context’), the paths through which English texts circulated are not well known. Analysing English post-Conquest texts regionally may ultimately also help place the vast body of unprovenanced material. A consequence of the limited, local circulation of newly-composed English texts was that it compelled authors to look into the past for models, colouring their writings with a knowing belatedness that manifested itself as a stylistic veneer of archaism. This explains the Katherine Group Life of St Margaret’s striking belief it is written in ‘Old’ English (Millett and Wogan-Browne 82-5; briefly discussed Galloway ‘ME as a Foreign Language’ 99-100) and perhaps Gerald of Wales’ equally peculiar conviction that the dialect of South-West England heeded the antiquum loquendi modum (‘ancient mode of speech’) through to the late twelfth century (Thorpe 231; discussed Faulkner ‘Gerald of Wales and Standard OE’). Archaism has most often been discussed with reference to Lawman’s Brut (Stanley ‘La3amon's Antiquarian Sentiments; also Donoghue), but aspects of twelfth-century English orthography have long been considered archaic and even archaising (e. g. Cook; and more recently Lutz). This archaism perhaps explains why authors consciously or unconsciously avoided using French-derived vocabulary (compare Stanley ‘La3amon's Antiquarian Sentiments’; and Roberts ‘La3amon's Plain Words’), which is generally rare in twelfth- century English texts and becomes common only in the early thirteenth century when imitating sophisticated continental culture became increasingly fashionable (Clark ‘Studies’
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89; Richards ‘Cotton Vespasian A. xxii’; Frankis ‘Vernacular Lives of St Giles’ all note the relative absence of French lexical tokens; see also Skaffari for a recent overview of word borrowing in early Middle English). One examination of twelfth-century manuscripts of Ælfric’s homilies has argued that ‘much of the English copied and read in the twelfth century was archaic and, seemingly proud of it’ (Faulkner ‘Archaism, Belatedness, Modernisation’), and archaism might indeed be considered a defining characteristic of the English language writing of this period, even if it can be difficult to define (Cartlidge 236-7). To synopsize this article’s questions, conclusions and suggestions for the future, I want to return to the hoary problem of the effects of the Norman Conquest on language and literature. One difficulty here is the lack of studies of pre-Conquest Norman culture, particularly its literature Latin and vernacular, and its libraries (on Normandy before 1066, see Bates Normandy; Searle; Tabuteau; Albu). The historian Orderic Vitalis twice postulated that Norman interest in the liberal arts began only with William the Conqueror and Lanfranc of Bec (Chibnall Orderic 2:3, 251), but, though this verdict ignores much substantive literary activity such as the circle of poets around Robert, archbishop of Rouen around the millennium (Musset ‘Rouen et l'Angleterre’), its validity is difficult to assess in the absence of a handlist of pre-Conquest Norman writers and texts. Some French literature – such as the saints’ lives translated from Latin by the cleric Theobald de Vernon, who is known to have been chancellor of Rouen around 1060 (Spear 224, 263; also van Houts Gesta Normannorum Ducum 1:xxx; ‘Historiography and Hagiography’ 236n27) – seems to have been composed in pre-Conquest Normandy, but it is unclear how indebted Old French literature is to the inspiration of Old English (Howlett) and indeed how long before the Conquest the Normans, originally a Scandinavian people, first adopted French as their vernacular. Similarly, despite the foundational work of Geneviève Nortier, Norman libraries remain understudied, particularly in the pre-Conquest period (exceptions include Chibnall Orderic i. 11-23 on Saint-Évroult; Alexander on Mont St Michel; Branch on Fécamp; van Houts Gesta Normannorum Ducum i. xxii-xxxi on Jumièges). It is nevertheless possible to identify the programmatic replacement of the native secular and religious elites as one consequence of the Conquest which had profound repercussions for the English literature in the long twelfth century. This plantation, though it did not create a colonial society, introduced French as a prestige language and shifted patronage away from English texts to
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French and Latin, whilst removing the institutional support on which a standard language like the late West Saxon Schriftsprache relies. Culturally, it brought England definitively into the European mainstream, as the new prelates enthusiastically sought to keep up with the latest architectural, artistic and intellectual trends (Fernie on architecture; Kauffmann; Zarnecki, Holt and Holland on art; Webber; Gameson; Thomson on manuscripts). This Europeanization is ultimately responsible for the multilingual and polyvocal richness of English writing in the long twelfth century, most memorably traced by Elizabeth Salter. English literary history therefore reflects the ‘constant vibrancy and vitality, no matter where attention turns’ that R. N. Swanson surveyed in his undergraduate textbook The Twelfth-Century Renaissance (186), a primer which nevertheless devotes but one paragraph to English language literature: Other languages revealed different patterns of emergence rather than continuity. The emergence of English, as distinct from Anglo-Norman, from the shadows of the Norman Conquest, was a slow process. That England had a living tradition of written vernacular in the twelfth century, whose scale is inadequately revealed by surviving material, is shown by the continuation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle at Peterborough through to 1154, by the existence of an Anglo-Saxon version of the Elucidarius of Honorius Augustodunensis, and by the inclusion of works like Solomon and Saturn in twelfth century manuscripts. Such texts show that Anglo-Saxon remained a viable language used for reading, writing and composing for some generations after 1066. The Elucidarius even suggests the continuity of an ‘academic Anglo-Saxon’. By 1200 something more obviously ‘English’ had emerged, although exactly when is debated. The twelfth-century dating of The Owl and the Nightingale is now challenged, meaning that the first surviving Middle English works may derive only from the first years of the thirteenth century, in Layamon’s Brut and the peculiar Ormulum. (Swanson 174) The responsibility for this jejune account that underestimates the amount of English language writing contemporary with the twelfth-century Renaissance lies not with Swanson but with the literary scholars who have failed to do justice to the period. Recent research has made considerable progress in understanding the long twelfth century’s ‘cultural, linguistic and orthographical conditions of dizzying complexity’ (Wallace xiv), and new and compelling narrative of its literary history is now imperative. Such a revision must take due account of texts written in Latin and French as well as English, must incorporate not just
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Mark Faulkner, ‘Rewriting English Literary History 1042-1215’, Literature Compass 9 (2012), 275-291. Postprint newly composed works, but also remediated versions of older texts, and must heed the regional, localised dynamics of much post-Conquest writing.
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1 Thanks are due to Jenifer Ní Ghrádaigh and Laura Ashe for reading drafts of this article, and to the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments. 2 Following in the tracks of the newly completed Production and Use of English Manuscripts, 1060 to 1220 (Da Rold et al.), several recently funded projects do however promise a substantive twelfth-century component. These include the Early English Laws project, the Electronic Ælfric project, the Manuscript Innovation in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance project at Leiden and the Digipal project at King’s College London. 3 This conflation is not as problematic as it may appear: while Britain and England were never geographically coterminous, the twelfth-century elites considered themselves to be English but inhabitants of Britain (Thomas English and Normans 264-5). 4 The applicability of post-colonial theory to medieval literature has been much discussed (Dagenais and Greer; Holsinger; also West on the Norman Conquest specifically). 5 Examples include the Cornish redaction of Ælfric’s Glossary in London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian A. xiv, fols. 7-10r (Jackson 60-1) and the Old Norse inscription on the Pennington Tympanum from Furness, Cumbria (Townend 193-4; also Dance Words Derived from ON; Pons-Sanz). 6 One must generally go back to the manuscripts, inventoried for the early period by Ker and for the later by Laing. Cameron’s corpus of ‘Old’ English texts is also invaluable, but there is no equivalent for ‘Middle’ English texts, beyond overarching resources like the Manual of Writings in Middle English and Index of Middle English Verse which by virtue of their scope cannot always be relied upon. 7 Six of the seventeen passages printed by Plummer as verse are relevant here: 1057D, 1065CD, 1067E/1076D, 1086E, 1104E. These are respectively poems on the deaths of Edward the Atheling and Edward the Confessor, a couplet on Margaret of Scotland’s reluctance to marry Malcolm, two short metrical passages in a prose account of the rebellion of Ralph de Gael, the poem on the death of the Conqueror mentioned above and a couplet lamenting Henry I’s misrule (see further Bredehoft 72-118). There is some disagreement about whether all these passages are in fact verse. 8 Cambridge, Pembroke College, 82, fol. 1r (discussed Wilson Lost Literature 99-100). Similar inferences about the oral circulation of English verse are drawn by Bredehoft (Early English Metre 110-20). 9 William the Conqueror began to use Latin for his writs in 1070. Older documents issued in English were generally preserved in their original language when copied into cartularies. Isolated vernacular post-Conquest documents are inventoried by Pelteret. The earliest extant document in French is from 1140, and it was not before 1170 that such documents became common (Clanchy 218-20). 10 To judge from the disappearance of the formula angli et franci from documents (Sharpe ‘Peoples and Languages’); the glosses in Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary suggest trilingualism became common somewhat earlier. 11 A phenomenon which warrents study: the basic material would include the spurious English sources claimed by twelfth-century texts like the romance Waldef (Holden lls. 1-59) and the vernacular diplomata forged after the Conquest. Compare Frankis’ observation, ‘Anglo-Saxon England was in some way different, romantic and exciting’ (‘Views of Anglo-Saxon England’ 228). 12 Linguists generally agree that the Schriftsprache collapsed during the course of the twelfth century, but have failed to emphasise that the speed of its collapse must have varied regionally (Bauer 203; Clark ‘Domesday Book’ 320; Roberts ‘Disappearance of Old English’ 38; but cf. Irvine ‘Linguistic Peculiarities’ 241; Millett ‘Pastoral Context’ 62-3; Hanna ‘LPL 487’ 83). 13 A contemporary Scandinavian analogue is the Icelandic First Grammatical Treatise, composed in the second quarter of the twelfth century (Haugar).
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