Imagining a Medieval English Nation

Imagining a Medieval English Nation Kathy Lavezzo, Editor Medieval Cultures, Volume 37 University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London Copyright 2004 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Imagining a medieval English nation / Kathy Lavezzo, editor. p. cm. — (Medieval cultures ; v. 37) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8166-3734-2 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8166-3735-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1.English literature—Middle English, 1100–1500—History and criticism. 2.National characteristics, English, in literature. 3.Nationalism and literature—England—History—To 1500. 4.Nationalism in literature. 5.England—In literature.I.Lavezzo, Kathy.II.Series. PR275.N29 I43 2003 820.9'358—dc22 2003015322 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Afterword The Brutus Prologue to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight T Thorlac Turville-Petre In writing England the Nation I was concerned (I now think overconcerned) to demonstrate that the concept of national identity was available to writers in the fourteenth century. This seemed to me—as I suspect it does to everyone who knows anything about the Middle Ages—undeniable, though frequently denied by modernists who work on nationalism, who assert that it was a phenomenon that arose in the nineteenth century, or the late eighteenth, or the mid-sixteenth. More recently Adrian Hastings in The Construction of Nationhood has taken a broader look at the develop- ment of nationalism, locating the earliest expressions of English national identity in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and tracing the factors that influ- enced its unsteady growth and reformulations throughout the Middle Ages and later. The focus of England the Nation was the half-century up to 1340, and I did not emphasize sufficiently that many of the factors that lay behind passionate expressions of nationalism were quite specific to this period. Historians talk about the “crisis” of these years, referring to the continual conflict with Scotland, the threats from France, the baronial discontents of Edward I’s last years, the disastrous and humiliating reign 340 Afterword 341 of Edward II with its military defeats and civil war as well as famine and plague, and the uncertain start of Edward III’s reign under the shadow of Mortimer and Isabella. In times of fear and discontent, nationalism is able to provide reassurance to a society anxious about its identity and cohesion. The concept of nationalism waits in the wings ready to be called forward, to assume whatever shape serves the moment, repre- senting what the audience wants to see even as they know that many elements of the performance are fraudulent. Nationalism always deals in half-truths, distorting and suppressing, and it is evident that many of the writers of the early fourteenth century were aware of this as they struggled to construct a coherent concept of nationhood from irrecon- cilable materials. For example, the theme of the Norman Yoke that Robert Manning and Robert of Gloucester espoused depended upon a racial divide that had no basis in reality, and these authors, who were both reasonably good historians, were surely deliberately misrepresent- ing the situation in the interests of strengthening their image of an English identity that excluded the Normans. It would be wishful thinking to suppose that such specious constructions have little staying power. It was not because it was disreputable that the theme of English nationalism was less attractive in the later fourteenth century. A more powerful reason was that it better served the interests of sophisticated Ricardian writers to turn their backs on the fash- ions of their parents and grandparents and instead to emphasize their attachment to European culture. Derek Pearsall is surely right in his per- ception in “Chaucer and Englishness” that “of national feeling or a sense of national identity...I find little or nothing in Chaucer” (90). It is a sig- nificant absence. It indicates that the battle for English that preoccupied writers early in the century had been won, in the sense that court poets such as Chaucer could be confident that English writings would not be despised as the products of a humbler culture. There was no need for authors to repeat that they were writing in English “for the loue of Inglis lede,” even if Gower in Confessio Amantis implies surprising unease at this date in writing “A bok for Engelondes sake” (1.23); his curious observation “that fewe men endite / In oure englissh” (1.22) is perhaps motivated by a supercilious contempt for humbler scribblers. The fact was that English could now take its place as one of the established vernacular languages of literature. As Elizabeth Salter says of Chaucer: “His use of English is the triumph of internationalism” (English and International, 244). 342 Thorlac Turville-Petre As contributors to the present collection of essays demonstrate so clearly, writers became much more interested in looking at other ways of analyzing society and fashioned other kinds of community and identity. Some of these, such as the self-definition by the Lollards as a collec- tive group, were prompted by urgent considerations specific to the moment that are explored by Jill C. Havens in this volume. Andrew Galloway shows that sober historians such as Higden offered sophisticated Ricar- dians a corrective to constructions of national identity that rely on foundation myths such as Brutus the Trojan and heroes of dubious authen- ticity such as Arthur. The story of the founding of Britain in the Anglo-Norman Brut from the beginning of the fourteenth century and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from the end provides a neat illustration of the different approaches and purposes of the Ricardians from their predecessors. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account of Brutus is the text that underpinned nationalist polemics of the early fourteenth century, and so it was constantly retold, adapted, and cited as justification for the construction of the nation. It was always recounted at length in the chronicles of England, since it gave Britain an ancestry as distinguished as the Roman Empire. Like Virgil’s Aeneas, Geoffrey’s Brutus, great-grandson of Aeneas, proves his valour through a period of wandering and exile. Over several pages the chronicler who assembled the Anglo-Norman Brut retells Geoffrey’s account of how Brutus, having killed his father in a hunting accident, was expelled from Italy, and coming across another group of Trojans enslaved in Greece, released them and married the king’s daughter. Sailing on, we are told, Brutus came to an island where there was a temple of Diana, who directed him to the island of Albion as his destiny and that of his descendants. Further battles, conquests, and liberations of oppressed peoples took place before Brutus finally landed at Totnes and began the foundation of New Troy. Brutus’s descendant Arthur becomes an emblem of Englishness, both to chroniclers and to their rulers. It might be thought that the fact that he was a Briton would have been an even more damaging objection than the fact that he never existed, but both objections were commonly swept aside in the interests of scoring political points. There is a striking example of this in the Anglo-Norman Brut where the chronicler heaps scorn on Roger Mortimer for his Arthurian pretensions: “he helde a rounde table in Walys to alle men þat þider wolde come, and countre- Afterword 343 fetede þe maner and doyng of Kyng Arthurez table; but openly he failed, ffor þe noble Kny!t Arthure was þe most worþi lord of renoun þat was in al þe worlde in his tyme” (262.7–11). Robert Manning took Arthur as his model for “Englishemen,” and it was Edward I’s failure to follow Arthur’s example that demonstrated for Manning the mistakes of the last years of his reign, as I have argued elsewhere (Turville-Petre, England, 84, 101–03). In “Reading for England,” Felicity Riddy also explores this theme and shows how “Arthurian texts in a sense created a nation” (331). The concept of Englishness was constructed upon a misappropriation of a falsehood, but it became a crucial element in the self-fashioning of a national identity. To introduce his story, the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight adopted the Brutus prologue so familiar from the earlier chronicles, and at the end of the poem he refers to two distinct types of source: “þe best boke of romaunce” (2521) that supplied the story and the “Brutus bokez” (2523) that provided the frame. As line 2523 states, one function of the Brutus story is precisely to “bear witness” to the veracity of the romance, and that, of course, is a no less fraudulent use of pseudo-history than the Anglo-Norman Brut had made of it. Yet there is a rather more signif- icant function of the prologue that signals the poem as a Ricardian work as much as Chaucer’s poems, similarly designed to locate itself within a European context, and this marks Gawain off sharply from those earlier chronicles that had relied upon the same material to proclaim their Englishness.

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