Narrative, History, and Kingship in Angevin England
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
NARRATIVE, HISTORY, AND KINGSHIP IN ANGEVIN ENGLAND Peter Raleigh A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements of for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History. Chapel Hill 2019 Approved by: Marcus Bull Brett Whalen Robert Babcock Lloyd Kramer William Purkis © 2019 Peter Raleigh ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Peter Raleigh: Narrative, History, and Kingship in Angevin England (Under the direction of Marcus Bull) This dissertation analyzes four important historiographical texts produced during the Angevin period of English history, roughly 1150-1220. It reads these texts through the lens of narratology, a modern body of theory concerned with the construction of meaning in narratives, in order to emphasize the complexity of their respective narrative projects. It argues that modern scholars of Angevin England have largely focused on these texts as sources of factual information about royal politics and war. An opportunity has thereby been missed to understand these texts as sophisticated efforts at conceptualizing Angevin kingship and its relationship to history, and to recognize the number and variety of such efforts during this period. Chapter One analyzes the use of narrative time in William of Newburgh’s Historia Anglorum to emphasize the anarchic nature of royal politics in King Stephen’s reign. Chapter Two demonstrates the cumulative impact of documents included in Roger of Howden’s Chronica, a text ordinarily regarded as lacking in narratorial rhetoric. Chapter Three demonstrates that the manuscript articulation of Richard of Devizes’ Cronicon is used to create a nuanced discussion of space and royal absence in the Angevin period. Chapter Four explores the use of narrative motivation in Gervase of Canterbury’s Gesta Regum and its engagement with questions of royal ‘character’. Together, these four close readings hint at the depth and breadth of a discourse surrounding kingship and English history that must be regarded as an essential cultural feature of the Angevin period. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………...1 CHAPTER 1: Narrative Time, the Anarchy, and the Rise of the Angevins in William of Newburgh’s Historia Anglorum..…………………………………………………34 CHAPTER 2: Thomas Becket and the Rhetoric of Narrative in Angevin Historiography……………………….……………………………………………...73 CHAPTER 3: Space, Authority, and Royal Absence in Richard of Devizes’Cronicon...…………………………………………………………………………….120 CHAPTER 4: Historical Motivation and the Loss of Normandy in Gervase of Canterbury’s Gesta Regum………………………………………………………169 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………206 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………221 iv INTRODUCTION The Angevin period of English history, spanning the reigns of Henry II (1154-89), Richard I (1189-99), and John (1199-1216), saw the production of a body of historical narrative texts with few equivalents elsewhere in medieval Europe. The extremely uneven distribution of texts like these across both time and space is among the fundamental features of the landscape of medieval studies, and the importance of this particularly dense cluster for the construction of political and other scholarly master narratives has been clear since the earliest days of the English historical profession.1 What has not always been sufficiently emphasized is the need to identify the principles according to which individual texts construct their own historical accounts, and to understand the narrative possibilities of which writers could avail themselves in memorializing the recent past. Analysis along these lines can focus attention on precise ways in which narrative texts are shaped by, and respond to, contemporary circumstances, and on the kinds of cultural preoccupations that can produce especially rich concentrations of historical narrative. This dissertation adopts the historiographical corpus of the Angevin period as the basis for such an investigation. It analyzes a core selection of narrative texts from this corpus through the lens of modern narratology, a body of theory concerned with the techniques and formal choices by which narrative texts convey meaning, to reveal some of the important ways in which Angevin- 1 For a thought-provoking effort to explain some of this unevenness in a different context, see Thomas Bisson, “Unheroed Pasts: History and Commemoration in South Frankland before the Albigensian Crusades,” Speculum 65 (1990): 281-308. Bisson’s argument that a robust written legal culture is incompatible with a strong historiographical tradition is strongly refuted by the case of England, but his suggestion that medieval historiography was frequently rooted in consolidation of dynastic authority has clear implications for this dissertation. 1 era writers exploited the potential of narrative history to imaginatively order their world and express their major concerns. Chief among these concerns were the kingship of England and the exercise of royal authority, which increasingly provided the organizing principles of Angevin historical narratives. Not only did works named for some variation of ‘Gesta Regum’, the deeds of kings, become commonplace in this period, but texts which presented their subjects straightforwardly as ‘Historia Anglorum’—the history of the English, or of England—also came to be dominated by royal and dynastic politics. Rather than accept this pronounced emphasis as ‘natural’, as earlier generations of historians often seemed to do, this dissertation emphasizes that the identification of England with its rulers, and thus of history with the practice of royal authority, is historically situated, and demands analysis as an essential element of Angevin literary and political culture.2 This identification is all the more striking in light of the profound ambivalence towards English kings and kingship that can be found in the pages of the Angevin historiographical corpus.3 This was not an ‘official’ or ‘royalist’ historiography unproblematically reflecting the political will of a few dominant figures, but a discursive space in which difficult questions about the nature and practice of English kingship were expressed and negotiated, a space in which theories about the proper exercise of power were placed in conversation with the ‘actual’ unfolding of events.4 Far 2 One of the most important discussions of medieval English historical writing to appear in recent decades, and one which directly bears on these kinds of unwritten assumptions and their long afterlife in English historiography, is Rees Davies, The Matter of Britain and the Matter of England (Oxford: Oxford University Inaugural Lecture, 1996). 3 See below, 4-6. 4 This approach to Angevin historical writing owes much to Carl Watkins, History and the Supernatural in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), who has brilliantly charted the emergence of a similar ambivalence in twelfth-century historical writing about the miraculous and the supernatural. Another hugely important and stimulating, if eclectic, study which deals with the gulf between theories of good kingship and the practice of Angevin authority is J.E.A Joliffe, Angevin Kingship (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1963); Thomas Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), argues provocatively that just such a gulf produced twelfth-century crises of authority and lordship all across Europe, including in England. 2 from being unfiltered or natural views of the past, Angevin-era historical narratives constitute a vital, urgent discourse about the kings of England and their relationship to history, animated and shaped by the need to make sense of an epoch-defining irruption of royal power. That such an irruption was intrinsically interesting, and therefore inherently worthy of historiographical scrutiny, is a prima facie plausible explanation for the proliferation of Angevin- era histories. The basic premise is a reasonably intuitive one, and has been articulated by scholars in other contexts. Peter Classen, for instance, has suggested that historical writing in the central Middle Ages tended to be spurred by a genuine preponderance of noteworthy events.5 This is certainly confirmed at a glance by the proliferation of dedicated historical works which accompanied, for instance, the First Crusade and the murder of Thomas Becket.6 It is not difficult to see how the Angevin kings could have produced such a historically charged environment: the king who built a cross-channel Empire, caused the death of an archbishop, and died at war with his sons; the king who faced down Saladin and threatened to overwhelm France; the king who lost Normandy and set his seal to Magna Carta. The explosion of Angevin historical writing, and the fascination of the resultant corpus with the kings of England, may well reflect a twelfth- and thirteenth-century sense that history was being made by these domineering men as it had rarely been made before. Yet this explanation, while clearly legitimate up to a point, carries the risk of begging the question, and of closing off what ought to remain a fruitful avenue of inquiry. There was a very great deal happening in Angevin England that might equally appear to modern historians as 5 Peter Classen, “Res Gestae, Universal History, Apocalypse: Visions of Past and Future,” in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, eds. Robert