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Arthur, Richard I, Charlemagne, and the Auchinleck Manuscript: Constructing English National Identity in Early Middle English

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Arthur, Richard I, Charlemagne, and the Auchinleck Manuscript: Constructing English National Identity in Early Middle English Arthur, Richard I, Charlemagne, and the Auchinleck Manuscript: Constructing English National Identity In Early Middle English Larissa Tracy Early Middle English, Volume 1, Number 1, 2019, pp. 83-88 (Article) Published by Arc Humanities Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/731653 [ Access provided at 25 Sep 2021 19:09 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] ARTHUR, RICHARD I, CHARLEMAGNE, AND THE AUCHINLECK MANUSCRIPT: CONSTRUCTING ENGLISH NATIONAL IDENTITY IN EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH LARISSA TRACY Auchinleck manuscript (ca. 1330), Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Adv. MS 19.2.1, includes a stunning array of EarlyThe Middleearly English four textsTeen fromT hhagiography­cenTury to romance, from Matter of Britain and England to Matter of France, celebrating heroes like Arthur, Richard I, and Charlemagne.1 These three seemingly disparate heroes—one legendary and British, one real but hardly admirable and mostly French, and one laudable but very distant and very French—are brought together in a narrative endeavour that promotes the development of early Middle English in favour of Anglo-Norman or Continental French and creates competing Sowdone of Babylone (Sultan of Babylon) that echo the Auchinleck Roland and Vernagu and Otuel, Afigures Knight of attempt English tonational shape identity.Charlemagne Later intoMiddle a hero English who romances could still like appeal the to an audi- ence that no longer had strong cultural or linguistic ties to the French. Texts like the Alliterative Morte Arthure, grounded in the tradition of the Auchinleck Of Arthure and of Merlin, focus on a reshaped and rehabilitated English King Arthur, while the Auchinleck King Richard, which differs greatly from the later Richard Coer de Lyon, creates a valor- ous and noble portrait of a historical English king who spent more time and money abroad and preferred France to England. The Auchinleck manuscript provides a tem- plate for reading Arthur and Richard as “English” and engages in a process of appropria- tion that legitimizes an English identity distinct from that of France rooted in the use of Middle English as its literary language. The Auchinleck brings together narratives of several prominent heroes whose sto- ries are situated in England: Guy of Warwick (who appears in three pieces: The Specu- lum, a set of stanzas, and a set of couplets), Tristrem, Orfeo, Arthur and Merlin, Bevis of 1 This paper forms the basis of two chapters in my monograph, England’s Medieval Literary Heroes: Law, Literature, and National Identity, which is nearing completion. I also address some of this material in my forthcoming chapter “Charlemagne, King Arthur, and Contested National Identity in ‘English’ Romances,” in Cross-Cultural Charlemagne: Envisioning Empire in Medieval Europe, ed. Jace Stuckey (Leiden: Brill), and in “Creating Literary Heroes: Nostalgia, National Identity and the Idea of Justice,” delivered as part of a workshop on nostalgia at St. John’s College, Oxford, June 21–22, 2017. I am grateful to the governing body of St. John’s College, Oxford for the Visiting Scholarship which gave me the opportunity to work in the Bodleian and St. John’s Library (July–August 2016), as well as Stewart Tiley and Ruth Ogden at St. John’s and Martin Kauffmann at the Bodleian, for giving me access to select manuscripts. My deep gratitude goes to Kathleen Doyle for allowing me to see London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A X, and Ulrike Hogg who gave me access to the Auchinleck Manuscript. 84 larissa Tracy Hampton, Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild, and King Richard I. It also includes romances and lais from the Anglo-Norman tradition like Lay le Freine and Floris and Blancheflour. There are hagiographical accounts of saints like Katherine and Margaret, Pope Gregory, and the Purgatory of St. Patrick, as well as religious treatises like Þe Desputisoun Bitven þe Bodi and þe Soule and The Harrowing of Hell. Among these texts are also short his- The Battle Abbey Roll) and the history of England after it (The Anonymous Short English Metrical Chronicle). It is a rich compen- diumtorical of works literary that tastes record and both genres the with Conquest content ( that bridges the gap between the Anglo- In its collection of these romances and religious texts, the Auchinleck is very much Norman Conquest and the development of Middle English as a literary language. which contains the earliest version of the South English Legendary (hereafter SEL) as welllike theas the early only to Middlemid­fourteenth English texts­century of Havelok Oxford, the Bodleian Dane and Library, King Horn. MS Laud I am misc. currently 108, in the process of evaluating manuscript evidence, particularly the scribal decoration and any connections that might tie their composition to the same region. As A. S. G Edwards hasflourishing noted regarding of these two the manuscripts Laud manuscript, (and approximately parts A and B forty “are others),decorated to seethroughout if there are by of visual continuity, indicating “a more sustained and ambitious attempt to impose a senseone main of unity flourisher on the who contents.” added 2decorated Tracking initials,”the decoration which givesof the the texts manuscript helps place a degree these manuscripts within the broader geo-political context of medieval England. Joel Fredell has made a similarly compelling argument regarding the decoration of London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A X, which contains the work of the Gawain-poet, suggesting that this manuscript was compiled and decorated at a scriptorium in York or Yorkshire more 3 It was fairly common for scribes to copy a manuscript and leave spaces for the later addition of lombards, decoration, rubrication, illustrations,broadly at the and turn illuminations. of the fifteenth Several century. of the blue lombards in Auchinleck and Laud to the same Yorkshire decorating house as the Gawain manuscript, or may have regional associations.have similar red4 One­pen possible flourishing explanation to Nero (among A.x, which many) suggests for corresponding they may have scribal connections styles is that there was a greater “English” literary endeavour during the first years of Henry 2 Circulation,” in The Texts and Contexts of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108: The Shaping of EnglishA. S. G. Edwards,Vernacular “Oxford, Literature Bodleian, ed. Kimberly Library, K. MS Bell Laud and JulieMisc. Nelson 108: Contents, Couch (Leiden: Construction, Brill, 2011), and 21–30, at 28. Edwards also notes that “The most substantial attempt to impose degree of overall 3 Joel Fredell, “The Pearl-Poet in York,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 36 (2014): 1–39, at 37. Fredell: coherence on the manuscript is its decoration” (28). the Scropes; clusters of scribes and decorators indicate at least two or three separate production teams co-existing“Specific hands at the and time decorators in York” (15). are shared I am grateful among to these Dorothy manuscripts Kim for bringing for major this local to my families attention such and as to Scott Klienman for giving me access to images of the Laud manuscript for comparison. 4 I have since been able to look at the Lincoln Thornton manuscript and have observed some simi- lar initials, but complete analysis is still ongoing. I am grateful to Claire Arrand, Special Collections Librarian at the University Library, University of Lincoln, for allowing me to view the Lincoln manuscript in June 2017. 85 arThur, richard i, charlemagne, and The auchinlecK manuscriPT IV’s reign, as he pressed English claims in France—a campaign that Richard II (usurped by Henry IV) was very reluctant to pursue—promoting the production and circulation of English texts. If these manuscripts were written in a variety of places during the four- teenth century, then later gathered in the north, in a York decorating house of the kind that Fredell suggests or one like it, that may explain why manuscripts with multiple booklets in diverse hands were then uniformly decorated. The manuscripts that collect different “English” sections of the SEL—dominated by early English and insular saints— with “English” romances, or bring together a variety of “English” religious and secular texts and then decorate them uniformly, lending cohesion to an otherwise disorganized collection, may be part of a concentrated northern literary production at the behest of Henry IV or his supporters, to promote a sense of “English identity” and legitimize his reign.5 The production and provenance of the Auchinleck manuscript, which has long been placed in London, have received renewed scrutiny in Susanna Fein’s edited collec- tion, most notably by Ann Higgins who makes a convincing case for Auchinleck’s “north- ern identity.”6 The prominence of Middle English romances situating their heroes and their heroic ideals in an English context in collections like Auchinleck, Laud, and the Lincoln Thornton manuscript (Lincoln Cathedral MS 91) suggests a popular interest in revising continental literary sources for a more local audience. Regardless of its regional identity, Auchinleck is very much an English manuscript. Gail Ashton points out that “romance is a genre about nation and nation building,” argu- ing further that subdividing it into “matters of England” or “matters of nation” “imposes a coherent unity that the many historical and political disjunctures of late medieval Eng- land deny.”7 However, the Auchinleck manuscript exhibits a certain amount of cultural unity. Its narratives feature Arthur and Charlemagne, as well as Alexander and Richard, within an evolving sense of national identity that transforms matter of Britain into mat- terbut ofthe England, emphasis and on reduces English the geographical prominence locations of the French and heroic Charlemagne figures places to that Auchinleck of a petty king. Roland and Vernagu, king of France, Denmark, and England, as well as Gascony, Bayenne, and Picardy, but not as an emperor.
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