Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2016 “Þe Inglis in seruage”: Textual Englishness, 1175 – 1330 Joseph Richard Wingenbach Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Wingenbach, Joseph Richard, "“Þe Inglis in seruage”: Textual Englishness, 1175 – 1330" (2016). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 844. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/844 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. “ÞE INGLIS IN SERUAGE”: TEXTUAL ENGLISHNESS, 1175 – 1330 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State Univeristy and Agricultural and Mechanical in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Joseph Wingenbach B.A., Randolph-Macon College, 2002 M.A., Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2007 May 2016 This is study is dedicated to the memory of Lisi Oliver: advisor, mentor, and friend. ii Table of Contents Abstract ……………………………………………………………………………………..... iv Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………….. 1 Chapter I. “Wher beth they biforn us weren”: Old English Epic Poetry and Middle English Romance ………………….......................................................................................… 47 II.“Ne may non ryhtwis king [ben] vnder Criste seoluen, bute-if he beo in boke ilered”: The Ingenious Compilator of the Proverbs of Alfred ………………..........……….... 143 III.The Castle and the Stump: The Owl and the Nightingale and English Identity....... 172 IV.The Anglicization of Boeve of Haumton ………………………........……………. 215 V.“Þe Inglis in seruage”: The Rise and Fall of the Anglo-Saxon Kings in Robert Mannyng’s Chronicle ...……………………………………………………………... 246 Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………………… 282 Vita ………………………………………………………………………………………….. 291 iii Abstract For some time, scholars who study English identity formation in the literature produced between the Norman Conquest and the Hundred Years War have addressed the manifold ways English writers imagined and reconstructed the Anglo-Saxon past as a golden era free of the taint of foreign domination. I find the cultural memory of pre-Conquest England to be only a fraction of what constituted literary Englishness, and my research calls for a more nuanced description of English literary identity during the period in question. The hybrid critical approach I employ is a blend of historicist and structural linguistic methodologies that takes both diachronic and synchronic perspectives on the question of how Englishness was represented in literature. I argue that before the middle of the thirteenth century literary Englishness was formed through an inclusive process that included drawing on a native oral narrative tradition, a limited but identifiable engagement with the Old English textual tradition, and the translation non-English wisdom and sententia. The Proverbs of Alfred (mid 12th C.) and the Owl and the Nightingale (turn of the 13th C.) are prime examples. After the middle of the thirteenth century, for a number of sociopolitical reasons - most prominently the continued loss of continental landholding by the English crown - literary English identity begins to be drawn in contrast to a Francophone identity. This can be seen in the Matter of England (English language romances with pre-Conquest settings and heroes) as well as in other genres such chronicle writing. To illustrate this shift, I provide close readings of Bevis of Hampton and Robert Mannyng’s chronicle of English history, both of which were penned by writers who sought to correct their Anglo-Norman sources. Altogether, instead of describing literary Englishness as primarily reminiscent of the Anglo- Saxon era without any real connection to the narratives of that time, I argue that the use of the iv English language and gestures towards to the Anglo-Saxon era were the only true constants in an English identity that, into the fourteenth century, underwent continual revision. v Introduction At the beginning of the early fourteenth-century romance, Bevis of Hampton (Auchinleck MS), readers encounter a scene of admirable deception patterned on the story of Israel’s son Joseph’s sale to an officer of the Pharaoh in the book of Genesis.1 As the English romance unfolds, Bevis’s noble, elderly father is caught and killed in a usurpatious plot devised by his deceptive young wife and her lover, the Emperor of Germany. In order to remove the rightful heir to Southampton and complete the overthrow, young Bevis’s mother quickly commands her son’s own tutor, Saber, to kill him after she and the Emperor secure the throne. Instead of killing his beloved mentee, however, Saber sprinkles blood on the boy’s fine clothes and carefully tears them to make it look as if the child has been stabbed, just as Joseph’s brothers soak his coat in the blood of a goat in the Biblical exemplar.2 In the English tale it is then inferred that these clothes are presented as confirmation that the commanded deed has been completed. As the other part of his counterplot, Saber dresses Bevis in shabby clothing and tells him that he will be a shepherd for a fortnight. The obvious hope of Saber, now unambiguously part of the old guard, is that in moving the prince far out of his recognized setting he will escape notice until he can be taken to an unnamed “riche erl” who will teach him “of corteisie” and in whose care he will reside until he matures and can retake his patrimony (ll. 364-365).3 Diverging from the Old Testament tale, the plan works – to an extent. The breakdown occurs when the young hero, once atop a remote hill, cannot accept this position even as a temporary guise to ensure his safety. Beves was herde upon the doun He lokede homward to the toun, 1 Genesis, chapter 37. This same motif is familiar for modern readers through later folk and fairy tales such as Snow White. 2 37:31-33. 3 Four Romances of England: King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Bevis of Hampton, Athelston. Ed. Ronald B. Herzman, Graham Drake, and Eve Salisbury. TEAMS Middle English Texts ed. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999. 1 That scholde ben his; He beheld toward the tour, Trompes he herde and tabour And meche blis. "Lord," a seide, "on me thow mone! Ne was ich ones an erles sone And now am herde? Mighte ich with that emperur speke, Wel ich wolde me fader awreke For al is ferde!" (ll. 379-390) (Bevis was a herd upon the hill He looked homeward to the town, That should have been his; He beheld the tower, Trumpets he heard and tabor And great merriment. “Lord,” he said, “remember me! Was I not once an earl’s son And am now a shepherd? If I could with the emperor speak, I would avenge my father Despite all his army!) After this declaration, Bevis grabs a club and forces his way into the court, killing a porter in the process. However, he is, as Saber had pointed out earlier, not yet of age, and his intrusion neither avenges his father’s death nor restores his patrimony. Her trust in Saber lost, Bevis’s mother sells her son to Saracen traders who return with him to Ermonie which will become his adopted homeland for much of the romance. In Joseph’s story, he too is sold into servitude in a foreign land, becoming the personal servant of Potiphar the captain of the Pharaoh’s guard. This is a brief episode in Bevis’s story, and in terms of narrative structuring serves mainly to move the hero from his English homeland to the unfamiliar eastern kingdom(s) where he will, against great odds, become a knight capable of righting this egregious offense. In another sense, this passage, modeled so closely on a Biblical story of loss and recovery, sets the tone for the rest of the hero’s story. Concerning the romance’s original audience this episode conditioned 2 their expectations for what was to come. Joseph, despite his unpropitious beginning, rises to prominence as the vizier of Egypt, reconciles with his brothers, reunites with his father, and becomes an inheritor of the house of Israel along with his sons. By evoking Joseph’s story, the poet of English romance signaled that he too was telling a story of loss and recovery. For modern critics and readers interested in manifestations of English identity in the literature produced between the late twelfth and mid-fourteenth centuries this passage presents an opportunity to investigate how the poet modeled English identity for his audience. The most foundational observation to make concerning the Englishness of the romance is that it is set during the reign of King Edgar. This makes Bevis, like his father before him, an Anglo-Saxon noble. The earliest known English version of the tale, however, was penned over three hundred years after the Anglo-Saxon era came to a close. The Bevis-poet, writing at a greater remove from the setting of his tale than I would be if I chose to write about the American Revolution, takes his audience back to a point in history before the conquests of the eleventh century. Given these circumstances, Bevis’s Anglo-Saxon identity prompts some fairly specific questions. If Bevis is an English story about loss and recovery, how was the poem’s original audience to understand more recent English history in which the foreign usurpers of the crown had stayed to rule as lords and kings of the land? To what degree would the Norman Conquest have been viewed as coloring the daily lives of the poet and his audience? By the early fourteenth century was there any validity to the binary division of Norman and Saxon that some English texts claim? What purpose was served in telling the tale of an Anglo-Saxon noble who loses his patrimony and must leave England entirely to escape death at the hands of foreigners?4 4 Bevis’s mother is from Scotland and his stepfather from Germany.