Imagining a Medieval English Nation

Kathy Lavezzo, Editor

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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

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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 significant 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 significant 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. The treatment of the episode in Gawain has of course none of the detail of the chronicles; the poet could safely assume the details would have been well known to his audience, and yet it should be noted that, for all its familiarity, the story has changed. The focus is not upon Brutus wandering as an exile from country to country, conquering, negotiating, liberating, searching for his divinely ordained homeland. Instead, the Trojan descendants of Aeneas are dispersed throughout Europe. Their tale consists not of battles, but instead of establishing, settling, building, and naming; the verbs are “biges” (9), “neuenes” (10), “bigynnes” (11), “lyftes vp” (12), and “settez” (14). It is fitting that the epithet used of Brutus, “Felix” (13), was that applied to founders of cities (Silverstein, “Sir Gawain,” 196–202), for that is what is being emphasized here. Apart from Brutus, Aeneas’s “highe kynde” as listed in Gawain are not figures from Geoffrey’s story: Romulus and his founding of Rome is briefly 344 Thorlac Turville-Petre

mentioned much later in Geoffrey’s account; Ticius might reflect Wace’s Turnus, ruler of Tuscany, or be a corruption of the Tirius of com- mentaries on Virgil; and Langaberde is the ancestor of the Lombards ac- cording to Nennius (194–96). These are the Trojans, we read, who are the founders of Europe, called “þe west iles” (Sir Gawain, 7). The utter destruction described in the first two lines is balanced by the account of reconstruction in the following lines 5–15. Any conflict and damage that the European settlements involved is underplayed, as the Trojans become “patrounes” (6). The word is often translated “overlords,” but this is mis- leading if it excludes the modern sense of “patron.” The entry for patron in OED explains that the Latin patronus “had the senses of protector and defender of his clients (viz. of individuals, of cities, or provinces),” and that the technical Latin sense of the word is relevant here is reinforced by its alliteration with the equally Latin and technical “prouinces.” MED’s citations for patroun support the senses “protector, benefactor, patron of a church, patron saint,” but MED perhaps misleads slightly by splitting the word into two separate entries dependent on sense, listing under patron(e citations in the sense of “model of behaviour” and other meanings that have been taken over by our modern form pattern. For the Gawain-poet the civilizing Trojans were patrons to their contemporaries and patterns to his fourteenth-century readers. Yet the poet’s word “depreced” in the same line seems to strike a conflicting note, since it apparently has to do with pressing down and hence subjugating. The word is used twice elsewhere in the poem in different senses, once at that crucial moment when the lady almost suc- ceeds in bringing Gawain to the point, as she “depresed hym so þikke” (1770), pushed him so hard. In the other instance Gawain asks the lady to “deprece your prysoun” (1219), which editors gloss as a separate word, cited only here by MED, meaning “release” (from French de(s)presser, “free from pressure,” rather than depresser). Editors are obliged to choose and therefore to make over-precise, but users of language do not distinguish words sharply in this way. Most speakers of English are surprised to discover that lexicographers distinguish two adjectives “light”; the two ranges of meaning might well alert them to the existence of separate words, but they are not so perceived, and therefore ambiguity, accidental or deliberate, is always a possibility. So, too, with “depreced” in line 6. It seems to me that the word is deliberately ambiguous here: did the Trojans, in becoming patrons of European provinces, win domination Afterword 345 by conflict or free peoples from their enslavement? In fact they did both in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account, with Brutus releasing the Trojan exiles in Greece from “thraldom and bondage,” and shortly afterwards destroying the land of Gascony (Anglo-Norman Brut, 6.20, 8.18). Arthur Lindley has urged us not “to restrict the play of meanings in the text” of Gawain and to be more receptive to the ambiguities of the vocabulary of the poem (“Pinning Gawain Down,” 26–42), and ambiguity is undeniably a feature of this opening stanza. Who are these Trojans? Noble or treach- erous; oppressors or liberators; bringers of bliss or of blunder? Where the earlier chroniclers had used the Brutus story to assert the uniqueness of England, the Gawain-poet adopts it in order to stress the very opposite. Through the noble Trojan ancestry that the English share with other Europeans, English culture claims an international heri- tage. Geographically, it has to be admitted, Britain is something of an outpost, “fer ouer þe French flod” (13), but its people were civilized by the same distinguished race, “hyghe kynde,” as other provinces in Europe. As a result of this, Brutus and his descendants Arthur and Gawain can represent a court culture that is international, not one that is specifically English, a culture that they share with the French across the water. When Bertilac is showing off his good manners to Gawain, the poet calls them “Frenkysch fare” (1116), a metaphor no doubt, but one that still carries within it the sense that manners are part of a shared culture, so that Bertilac in his Cheshire palace would be equally at home in the courts of France. The poet’s only use of the word “English” is itself significant, since he reports that the “Englych” call the pentangle “þe endles knot” (629). These supposed English may call it so in their ignorance (even if there is no other record of them doing so); the poet, by four times call- ing it the “pentaungel,” aligns himself with educated people who have at their fingertips the correct technical expressions: “þe pure pentaungel wyth þe peple called / with lore” (664–65). For Manning “English” was associated with an aggressive patriotism; for the Gawain-poet it becomes a mark of a cultural chauvinism, the very opposite of the international values that Gawain signifies with his pentangle and that should become the pattern for modern Englishmen. The poet’s contemporary Jean Frois- sart is the most striking example of this internationalism fostered by his constant travels to aristocratic patrons across Europe, recounting the experiences that united his English and French exemplars of chivalry and praising chivalric conduct even-handedly wherever he finds it (see 346 Thorlac Turville-Petre

Claire Sponsler’s essay in this volume). In a similar spirit the Gawain- poet was interested in analyzing the virtues of those knightly values that overrode the conflicts between European nations. Chaucer sets his poem on the road to Canterbury to which his pil- grims head “from every shires ende / Of Engelond” (Canterbury Tales, I.15–16); Gawain travels north through Logres across the Dee and into the Wirral. Neither poet could have written as he did without a strong consciousness of English identity, of the nation’s history, geography, and language, but for neither of them was national identity a topic that they were concerned to dignify with their attention. They were more interested in claiming a place for themselves in the world of European culture.

References

Anglo-Norman Brut (Middle English translation): The Brut, or the Chronicles of England. Part 1. Ed. Friedrich W. D. Brie, EETS o. s. 131. London: Oxford University Press, 1906. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. Ed. Larry D. Benson et al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. Gower, John. Confessio Amantis. In The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, vols 2–3. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901. Hastings, Adrian. The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism. Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Lindley, Arthur. “Pinning Gawain Down: The Misediting of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 96 (1997): 26–42. Middle English Dictionary. Ed. Hans Kurath et al. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952–2001. Pearsall, Derek. “Chaucer and Englishness.” Proceedings of the British Academy 101 (1999): 77–99. Riddy, Felicity. “Reading for England: Arthurian Literature and National Consciousness.” Bibliographical Bulletin of the International Arthurian Society 43 (1991): 314–32. Salter, Elizabeth. English and International: Studies in the Literature, Art and Patronage of Medieval England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Silverstein, Theodore. “Sir Gawain, Dear Brutus, and Britain’s Fortunate Founding: A Study in Comedy and Convention.” Modern Philology 62 (1965): 189–206. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. ed. J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon. Revised by Norman Davis. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Turville-Petre, Thorlac. England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290– 1340. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.