Outlaw: Wilderness and Exile in Old and Middle

THE ‘BESTLI’ OUTLAW: WILDERNESS AND EXILE IN OLD AND MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Sarah Michelle Haughey August 2011 © 2011 Sarah Michelle Haughey THE ‘BESTLI’ OUTLAW: WILDERNESS AND EXILE IN OLD AND MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE Sarah Michelle Haughey, Ph. D. Cornell University 2011 This dissertation, The ‘Bestli’ Outlaw: Wilderness and Exile in Old and Middle English Literature explores the reasons for the survival of the beast-like outlaw, a transgressive figure who highlights tensions in normative definitions of human and natural, which came to represent both the fears and the desires of a people in a state of constant negotiation with the land they inhabited. Although the outlaw’s shelter in the wilderness changed dramatically from the dense and menacing forests of Anglo-Saxon England to the bright, known, and mapped greenwood of the late outlaw romances and ballads, the outlaw remained strongly animalistic, other, and liminal, in strong contrast to premodern notions of what it meant to be human and civilized. I argue that outlaw narratives become particularly popular and poignant at moments of national political and ecological crisis—as they did during the Viking attacks of the Anglo-Saxon period, the epoch of intense natural change following the Norman Conquest, and the beginning of the market revolution at the end of the Middle Ages. Figures like the Anglo-Saxon resistance fighter Hereward, the exiled Marcher lord Fulk Fitz Waryn, and the brutal yet courtly Gamelyn and Robin Hood, represent a lost England imagined as pristine and forested. At the same time, their brutality points to a deep literary ambivalence towards the wilderness and the animal. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Sarah Harlan-Haughey is a fourth-generation Montanan, born in Missoula to a family of farmers, musicians, and artists. She earned her undergraduate degrees in English and Spanish Literature at the University of Montana, and her Master‟s and Doctoral degrees in Medieval Literature at Cornell University. She is the CLAS Honors Preceptor of Medieval English at the University of Maine. iii Dedicated to all the heroic (and, of course, wild) men in my life. I love you all: John, David, Bruce, Dale, David, Robert, Stephen, Jim, and in memoriam James, Walter, and Dusty, giants among men. Most of all, to my dear husband Justin, without whose support I would never have survived this process. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation could never have been written without the inspiration and help of my brilliant committee members—Thomas D. Hill, Andrew Galloway, Samantha Zacher, and Joseph Harris. Thanks also to Ashby Kinch of the University of Montana, for giving me a safe place to think about this project. I will always remember fondly the friendship and helpful criticisms of my colleagues in writing groups both formal and otherwise—a shout out to Melissa Winders, Thomas McSweeney, Benjamin Glaser, and Eliza Buhrer. Thanks as well to Stephanie Contino and Thomas McSweeney for their eleventh-hour editing help. I also have to thank the Ithaca Coffee Company, for many coffee-fueled hours of time for writing. And again, without the love and support of my family, I am nothing. Thank you Justin, Karen, John, Kathleen, David, Mariana, Pearl, Karen, Tim, Eric, and all my aunts, uncles, and cousins, the best family a girl could have. v TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Abbreviations vii x Preface viii 2 1. Introduction 1 8 2. The Bestli Outlaw in Medieval England 23 3. The Wolfish Exile in Anglo-Saxon England 58 4. A Close Reading of Two Anglo-Saxon Poems of Animal exile, Daniel and Andreas 115 5. Hereward: Tracing the Outlaw‟s Life Cycle 156 6. Frontier Fauvism in the Fable of Fulk fitz Waryn 204 7. The Menace in the Greenwood 272 262 8. Concluding Remarks 346 337 Appendix 350 341 References 353 3 vi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS FFW Fouke Le Fitz Waryn GH Gesta Herewardi GRH Gest of Robin Hood HDE Histoire Des Engleis HRB Historia Regum Britanneae vii PREFACE Fowles in the frith, The fisshes in the flood, And I mon waxe wood Much sorwe I walke with For beste of boon and blood.1 That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees —Those dying generations—at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unaging intellect.2 Laurence Buell, in The Environmental Imagination, discusses one of the problems with a human-centered literary criticism: “When an author undertakes to imagine someone else‟s imagination of a tree, while sitting, Bartleby-like, in a cubicle with no view, small wonder that the tree seems to be nothing more than a textual function and one comes to doubt that the author could have fancied otherwise.”3 In this project, I try to imagine the creation of this body of medieval nature writing by poets and storytellers on the ground, who mean tree when they say tree; there is not such a wall separating them from the elemental forces they live with, or at least, theirs is no air-conditioned office in a university. So while their fictional outlaws may be more engaged with their environments than the poets 1 Cited from Maxwell Luria and Richard Lester Hoffman, eds., Middle English Lyrics (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1974), 55. 2 W.B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” The Collected Works of William Butler Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 191. 3 Laurence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, nature writing, and the formation of American culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 5. viii telling the story, those poets are closer to the outlaws‟ world than to ours, and their language about nature is not as distanced, in general. The commonplaces of outlawry—the greenwood, the waste, the fens, the town, the tower, are all present, and yes, they are generically recognizable, and often repeated from text to text. But yet, each landscape of each outlaw is unique, and specific to his unique characteristics and bioregion. Barry Lopez‟ essay on “Landscape and Narrative” in Crossing Open Ground, as well as Leslie Marmon Silko‟s on “Landscape, History, and Pueblo Imagination” has given voice to what I have always felt; that the way we think is fundamentally influenced by our interior understanding of the landscapes we grew up with, which we know and feel in our bones. Consider the Middle English poet‟s fowles in the frith, his fisshes in the flood—these alliterative pairs, in their telegraphic power, give a sense of great world of order, of an ecosystem, for which these coupled images are but a stand-in, and their very assonance invokes a sense of fullness and rightness. Although the invocation of landscape is succinct, it is powerful—I am reminded of another poem, which does something similar, six centuries later: The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees —Those dying generations—at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. In a few more lines, and with quite a bit more envious judgment, but in the same set of images—a network of waterways and oceans teeming with mating fish, and ix a treescape similarly coursing with avian life—W.B. Yeats summons up a whole ecosystem, and arguably, a whole island of animal activity. For in both poems, although the birds and the fishes ostensibly occupy their own specific habitats, their mention in tandem makes the audience aware of a deeper interconnectedness, of which the ambulant, thinking speaker is aware but not a part. Both speakers of both poems situate themselves as knowledgeable observers of this natural exuberance, somehow outside of the systems they are admiring. Let us turn again specifically to the Middle English poem. The speaker begins with what looks to be a rhythmic catalogue of creation, but pulls up short with an intrusive interpolation of selfhood, in a sort of shocking contrast to the flowing description he has set up of fowls and fishes: “and I mon waxe wod.” The human speaker is not happy; he is not part of a harmonious song of creation. He is mad, or he is conscious that he must go mad, which is certainly one of the most maddening feelings in the world. Waxing in Middle English is not just connected with the lunar cycle as it is in its one vestigial use in Modern English, but it does have the same sense of a sort of natural event which involves a change in state—one can wax wroth or wax wod (note the alliteration in both of these common collocations). Wood can also wax up, as a tree grows. Analogously, a child can wax to adulthood. There is a double meaning or at least a landscape pun imbedded in this deceptively simple rhyme, for the word „wod‟ sounds like the Middle English word „wood‟—and in the related literary traditions of Nebuchadnezzar, the wild man, the hermit, and the x exile, woods are associated with madness, and the homophone is strengthened by use and association. So although on the surface level the speaker means he must go mad, hidden behind that very word is his new habitat, the wood. He is in the wood now, we assume, as he observes the harmonious natural behavior of the other creatures.

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