Part IV: Arthur in Medieval English Literature
15
The English Brut Tradition
Simply descriptive as it may appear, the title of this part of this volume – “Arthur in Medieval English Literature” – poses a number of questions. What is “English”? What is “literature”? The limitations of modern assumptions about and answers to such questions have of course had their effects everywhere in the study of the past and its artifacts: in modern Arthurian studies until the end of the twentieth century, they had the effect of rendering the Brut tradition nearly invisible.
Not long ago English medieval drama was still characterized as “pre-Shakespearean,” as if it did little more than pave the way for the real thing yet to come. In this sense, Thomas Malory is the Shakespeare of the Arthurian matter of England. Particularly in the wake of Victorian medievalism, Malory’s solemn and leisurely retelling of Arthurian stories, in accessible yet appealingly archaic language, became something of a received version: prior Arthurian works, with a few exceptions, tended to be relegated to the status of source or analogue, the chronicle of wasted time that prefigured and made possible Malory’s beautiful fifteenth-century fantasy.
Most of the medieval English audience for Arthurian matter would have been perplexed at this state of affairs. Their Arthurian world was far from the romance world of Lancelot and Guinevere, with its tournaments, adventure, magic, lovesickness, and the Grail quest; their Arthur was a figure of history, and their Arthurian tradition was first and foremost the Brut tradition.
Geoffrey of Monmouth: Enter Brutus
What constitutes this neglected tradition? The term Brut derives from the name of Brutus, a close descendant of Aeneas, who after exile from Italy arrives at an unknown island, exterminates the race of giants inhabiting it, and names the place “Britannia” after himself: this is the British foundation story given full form by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Latin Historia Regum Britanniae, composed in the 1130s. Working from several known sources, such as Bede and Gildas, claiming to be using “a certain very ancient book written in the English language” (quendam Britannici sermonis librum uetustissimum) lent by a Walter of Oxford, and almost certainly drawing extensively on his own imagination, Geoffrey provided a king-by-king account of the British from their glorious Trojan origins to their ruination at the hands of invading Saxons (Thorpe 1966: 51; Wright 1985: 1). Their last king, Cadwallader, flees in exile, just as their founder Brutus had come. In between comes the story of the great British warrior king Arthur, not only capable of driving out the Saxons but on the verge of conquering Rome itself when he is undone by the treachery of his kinsman and regent Mordred. Arthur’s life takes up about a fifth of the entire text: it is the heart of Geoffrey’s work and the root from which all subsequent Arthurian literature springs (see chapter 3).
The Historia Regum Britanniae was immediately both popular and controversial, dismissed as a pack of lies by other twelfth-century Latin historiographers such as William of Newburgh and Gerald of Wales but eagerly embraced by English and Continental audiences: over 200 manuscripts of Geoffrey’s history survive, and it was still being copied in the fifteenth century (Crick 1989). Small wonder, really. Geoffrey offered his readers an exciting and instructive British past, a narrative allegedly grounded in an ancient, authentic source, the alternative to which was acknowledgment of near-total ignorance of what had happened in England before the Saxons came.
Within a few years, Geoffrey Gaimar was composing a now-lost French Galfridian (i.e. in the tradition of Geoffrey of Monmouth) history of the Britons, and by the 1150s Wace, a cleric from Jersey seeking, and sometimes finding, the patronage of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, was putting the Historia into French verse in his Roman de Brut. The vernacular Brut tradition took hold.
A Brut, then, is a narrative based in, though not necessarily sedulously imitative of or limited to, the Galfridian version of British history: contemporary book lists and wills show that this was a widely used term for such works in both Latin and vernacular languages (Matheson 1998: 9–10; Marvin 2006: 3–4). Flourishing in Anglo-Norman French, Middle English, Welsh, and Latin, the Brut, or “chronicle,” tradition was to become not only the dominant Arthurian tradition but the dominant historiographic tradition of late-medieval England and Wales. The Prose Brut chronicle, which began with an Anglo-Norman Galfridian account of Britain, carried the narrative up to the death of Henry III in 1272, and then, with continuations and translations, into the fifteenth century. With some 250 surviving manuscripts in a number of languages, the Prose Brut was the most popular secular vernacular work of the late Middle Ages in England (Matheson 1999: 1–8; Marvin 2006: 1–15). It was the first published Arthurian work in England and the first published history of England: William Caxton printed it as the Chronicles of England in 1480, five years before his edition of Malory. It went through thirteen different editions in the early days of print (Matheson 1999: xxxiii–xxxvi). Its matter persisted in later histories such as Holinshed’s Chronicles, and it influenced works up to Spenser’s Faerie Queene and beyond.
The life of Arthur is by far the longest section of the Anglo-Norman Oldest Version of the Prose Brut, and although the episode became relatively less prominent in the Middle English Bruts, with their lengthy fourteenth- and fifteenth-century continuations, annotations in manuscripts suggest that Arthur still continued to command readers’ attention. The Prose Brut may safely be considered the most widespread Arthurian work of the English Middle Ages.
Wace
To understand the modern obscurity of the Brut tradition, given its contemporary popularity, it is necessary to return to the questions of the beginning of this chapter: what is “English”? What is “literature”?
The case of Wace gives a sense of the complexities of defining medieval “Englishness.” Born in the Channel Islands, Wace spent much of his life in Caen, Normandy, and his surviving works are composed in what is known as Anglo-Norman French, also called “French of England,” or, more accurately but less commonly, “Anglo-French” – that is, the dialect of French descended from the language of the invaders of 1066, in spoken use for some generations after the Conquest, and in written use for some centuries, growing ever more distinct from Continental French in its spelling, vocabulary, and word forms. It survived longest as Law French, which was still spoken in the English courts at the time of Henry VIII, as is known from continuing complaints about its use.
Wace, then, neither lived in England nor wrote in English: why should his work be considered English? Because in his day English culture was not limited to the English language, and the realm of the kings of England was not limited to the British Isles. William the Conqueror was Duke of Normandy before he won the crown of England, and generations of his descendants spent much of their lives seeking to defend and expand their Continental holdings in Normandy and beyond. They themselves might be brought up on the Continent, speaking French, the children of French-speaking mothers, and in their dynastic alliances married to French-speaking women. It is telling that Henry I, son of William the Conqueror, had his heart buried in Rouen, France, and his body in England. It is often suggested that Henry’s great-grandson Richard Lionheart spoke no English at all, and he spent almost none of his reign in England. Even after the loss of Normandy and the other catastrophes of John’s reign, the kings of England continued to press their Continental claims, and Edward III (not to mention James I) still styled himself King of France.
To oversimplify greatly: Latin was the language of affairs of church and state. English had flourished as a written language before the Conquest but had fallen off thereafter. The Celtic languages continued to thrive in their own milieus. But French was the spoken vernacular of status among the baronial classes of the realm, a written vernacular valuable to those literate in Latin and invaluable to those who were not. A wide corpus of Anglo-Norman writing survives, imaginative, edifying, and practical – everything from tales of adventure, devotional manuals, and saints’ lives to chess manuals and recipe books (Dean 1999).
Over time, French came to serve more of the written functions that Latin had served, and it became less and less a spoken language in England, as the use of English broadened, and English itself absorbed so vast an amount of French and Latin vocabulary as to become a truly hybrid language. But only toward the end of the thirteenth century did English begin to re-emerge as a significant written language, and only in the second half of the fourteenth century and beyond would it come to prevail. In the 1150s, nothing could have been more natural for a cleric seeking to please the English court than to take Geoffrey’s Latin and put it into French. Wace’s book evidently found a receptive audience: parts of over thirty manuscripts survive, in England and on the Continent (far more than most Anglo-Norman works). And later writers gladly used Wace as a source.
It is only later notions of language and nation – the sorts of notions that led to the creation of separate departments of English and French in modern universities – that might make Wace seem any less properly English than, say, Geoffrey Chaucer (who is very likely to have written in French as well as English). But those notions have been influential in determining what has entered the scholarly and cultural canon and what has been excluded from it.
French faculties have not always been hospitable places for the study of Anglo-Norman. With its distinctive spelling and vocabulary, and its precocious abandonment of grammatical structures that were to persist longer elsewhere, Anglo-Norman could seem merely bizarre, insular in the worst sense of the word, when measured against the yardstick of Continental dialects, particularly the idealized forms of those dialects generated in the heyday of critical text editing by scholars intent on reconstituting the original, “pure” state of both language and texts that had been “corrupted” through the processes of scribal transmission. As an inferior dialect that by definition could have no “pure” state, Anglo-Norman was uncongenial, and indeed a standing challenge, to such approaches. It was shunted to the margins: the vitality of Anglo-Norman written culture was generally ignored or explained away, as were such historical inconveniences as the fact that the French literary monument, the Chanson de Roland, survives only in an Anglo-Norman manuscript.
Anglo-Norman fared no better in faculties of English. In the nineteenth century, as a scientifically oriented university structure took form, rigorous study of the history of the English language and Anglo-Saxon literature was at the academic forefront (and certainly much-needed, too). This was the time of the foundation of the Early English Text Society, meant both to provide scholarly editions of medieval works in English and to generate data for what became the Oxford English Dictionary. Its beautifully chosen emblem is the ninth-century Alfred Jewel, a gem with a portrait of Christ, now housed in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, perhaps the handle of a pointer meant to help in reading, possibly commissioned by Alfred the Great himself – both a great Anglo-Saxon warrior king and a great patron of learning, who fostered the production of important texts in English. This was the past – pious, heroic, and learned – to be recovered and celebrated.
Anglo-Norman could seem positively tawdry by comparison, a reminder of England’s own history as colonized rather than colonizer, and easy to dismiss as an affectation of the aristocratic classes who had neither the education to use Latin nor the earthy authenticity to use English. The single best-known medieval reference to Anglo-Norman is probably Chaucer’s slighting account of the pretentious Prioress as a speaker of French “after the scole of Stratford atte Bowe, / For Frenssh of Parys was to hire unknowe” (General Prologue 125–6). The Anglo-Norman Text Society was not founded until 1937, and one of the reasons suggested for the production of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary was “to avoid the need for printing texts of which the only interest lay in the vocabulary” (Rothwell 1977–92: General Preface, ix). Its emblem is nothing more than a monogram.
The very idea that there could be a large body of works of which the only interest lay in the vocabulary suggests both how interesting the members of the society found vocabulary and what a limited view even they took of the potential value of Anglo-Norman texts. This is by no means to suggest that most or all Anglo-Norman works (any more than most or all works of any given language, time, or place) are works of genius, or works appealing to modern sensibilities. It is to say that the tendency to consider Anglo-Norman only as an unusual linguistic phenomenon, and to balkanize the study of medieval English literary culture along linguistic boundaries, has led to unnecessarily narrow and distorted understandings, and incomplete, oversimplified narratives of development (Busby 1993; Marvin 2004). Nowhere is this more obviously the case than in Arthurian studies, where neglected works offer the opportunity to form a richer and better-grounded idea of medieval Arthurian traditions as contemporary audiences knew and experienced them, and to reach a clearer view of the significance of Arthurian narrative for English self-understanding and self-representation.
With consideration of Wace’s form arises the question “What is ‘literature”? – another issue on which modern and medieval thinking may differ drastically and confusingly. Why would Wace choose to translate Geoffrey’s history in verse rather than prose? In a time in which poetry is not especially popular, and brief, dense, highly subjective lyric poems predominate, it is easy to think of verse as more artful and difficult than prose, and not at all an appropriate medium for narrative or factual information. But in the Middle Ages (and well beyond), prose could be no less artful than verse, and both lyric and narrative verse were admired and widely practiced.
The ultimate origins of western poetry lie in oral performance, with memorization the oldest means of transmission, and written preservation a later development. Established as norms, the conventions of orality persisted long after writing and written transmission became common, and long after the memorized performance of book-length works had in all likelihood lapsed. In the scribal culture of the western Middle Ages, memorization was a valued art and an important part of education, with versification a tremendous help, both for purposes of retaining needed information and for purposes of performance. Especially in earlier periods, verse was a favored form for all kinds of practical and scientific works such as geographies, calendrical works, bestiaries, medical texts, and histories. To write in vernacular verse was not to make matters difficult or obscure, but appealing, accessible, and memorable – and at least in the twelfth century, the form of verse as such did not imply fictionality.
It must also be remembered that medieval reading, especially in the households and institutions that constituted the main audience for vernacular writing, was not necessarily a quiet, private activity. Although annotations show that some readers studied these texts with pen in hand, books were also read aloud in group settings, so that those who did not possess the skill of reading (a skill that not so many people needed in everyday life) were nevertheless a fundamental part of the audience for written works. Medieval narrative manuscripts are often broken up into sections marked with headings and/or large initials, episodic, easy to locate, and of a length to be heard at one sitting: these works were composed at least as much to be heard by listeners as to be seen by readers. They remained aural in practice long after orality of composition had become a literary conceit.
The notion that Wace is composing first and foremost for an audience of listeners is to be taken seriously. Reading aloud may have been one of his own duties as a clerc lisant (“reading clerk”), and his own verse is meant to be heard (Le Saux 2005: 3–5). His diction is generally structured around clear parallels and contrasts, both syntactic and sonic. With consonantal and vocalic sound play extending well beyond his rhyme words, Wace’s hallmark as a poet is the sheer pleasure he takes (and gives) in the effect of sound itself, one of the elements least translatable into modern English.
The opening lines of the Roman de Brut, composed in vigorous octosyllabic couplets, offer a sense of Wace’s approach:
Ki vult oïr e vult saveir
De rei en rei e d’eir en eir
Ki cil furent e dunt il vindrent
Ki Engleterre primes tindrent,
Quels reis i ad en ordre eü,
E qui anceis e ki puis fu,
Maistre Wace l’ad translaté
Ki en conte la verité.
(Weiss 1999: lines 1–8)
Who wishes to hear and wishes to know,
From king to king and from heir to heir,
Who they were and whence they came,
Who first held England,
What kings there were in order,
And who was ancient and who later,
Master Wace has translated it,
Who tells the truth about it.
The verse of the beginning is as orderly and confident as the account of the kings promises to be. Its parallel phrasing is both propulsive and leisurely. The repetition of ki (“who”) at the beginnings of lines and the division of the first three lines into grammatically parallel halves joined by e (“and”) lead up to the climactic full line declaring the subject of who has held England. This is the central theme, and not just the topic, of the entire work, which, like the Historia on which it is based, traces the broad rise and fall of the Britons, and not only the narrowly conceived doings of one king after another. What king would hold England, how securely, and on the basis of what claims, were scarcely topics of theoretical historical interest at the time: when Wace presented the Roman de Brut to Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1155, her husband Henry II had been on the throne for less than a year, after a period of anarchy and civil war against his predecessor Stephen that had lasted for nearly twenty years. This may suggest why Wace uses the anachronistic name of England rather than Britain in his opening.
After this first sentence, Wace launches immediately into the story of Aeneas’s flight from Troy, si cum li livres le devise (“as the book relates”) (Weiss 1999: line 9). From the start, he combines the weight of written and oral traditions: the knowledge that his audience will gain by hearing comes from a book, which a writer who gives his name and declares his truthfulness has translated, that is, “carried over,” from one medium to another – or, in this case, two media, from Geoffrey’s Latin into his own French, and from the page to the listener’s ear.
The apparent sources of the Roman’s authority – the bases on which the audience is to trust it – are complex here. It is striking that Wace does not name his source, or sources: he drew on two different versions of Geoffrey’s Historia, known as the Vulgate and the First Variant, while non-Galfridian material, including the first known reference to the Round Table, also appears in the Roman (Le Saux 2005: 85–107, 152). By giving his name Wace makes himself the guarantor of the text’s reliability, putting himself into personal, individual relationship with his patrons and audience, as well as reminding them just who deserves the credit for the translation: passing reference to “the book” appears to be a sufficient gesture toward his source material.
At first glance this may seem to be a decidedly different approach from that of Geoffrey of Monmouth. In his dedication (absent from the First Variant version), Geoffrey ponders the problem of just how little is known about the ancient British past. He invokes Gildas and Bede, thus demonstrating his credentials as a man familiar with the learned historiographic tradition, but laments the paucity of information on earlier kings whose deeds “were such that they deserve to be praised for all time” (digna eternitate laudis constarent). Now, if there are no books about these men, how can it be known that they are praiseworthy? Through oral tradition, in which “these deeds were handed joyfully down … just as if they had been committed to writing, by many peoples who had only their memory to rely on” (gesta eorum … a multis populis quasi inscripta iocunde et memoriter predicarent<ur>) (Thorpe 1966: 51; Wright 1985: 1). It would seem that oral tradition is good – but apparently not quite good enough, since Geoffrey goes on to claim that his book is not an attempt to record the stories that people tell, but nothing more or less than a translation of the ancient British book that has turned up just when needed. Its antiquity and Britishness make it authentic; its written status makes it stable. Like many other medieval writers, Geoffrey disclaims his own originality by claiming only to be translating an older text. How much the disingenuousness of Geoffrey’s source-claim is meant to be recognized by the Historia’s original audience is a matter of debate. But in the end, Wace’s bland invocation of “the book” as his source is only a less-embellished equivalent to Geoffrey’s: in both cases, the anonymous source is presented as an authority exactly because it is written – and the book now offered is presented as a wholly adequate manifestation of that source, effectively “the book” itself, beyond which the lucky audience need look no further.
Covering some hundred kings in just under fifteen thousand lines (of which around four thousand are devoted to Arthur), the Roman’s episodes are necessarily brief. Wace spends little time describing his characters’ exteriority or explaining their interiority. He enjoys and expands scenes of spectacle such as battles and feasts; he may somewhat elaborate moments of direct discourse in Geoffrey’s text; he introduces provocative elements such as Gawain’s defense of peace and amorousness in response to Cador’s delight at the prospect of war against Rome (Weiss 1999: lines 10733–72); he shows signs of being more moralistic and less secular than Geoffrey. And in one possible signal of his own sense of the credible and edifying, he omits Geoffrey’s lengthy prophecies of Merlin. But none of this marks a “fictionalization” of Geoffrey’s Historia. Nor is the Roman de Brut a romance masquerading as history. Wace is presenting it as, and manuscript evidence suggests that its earliest audiences took it as, vernacularized history (Le Saux 2005: 85–9).
Layamon: A Landmark Account
Sometime between 1185 and 1216, Layamon, a priest of Areley Kings near Worcester, translated and expanded Wace’s Roman into English verse, in just over sixteen thousand alliterating long lines that also use internal rhyme. His Brut is huge, ambitious, and puzzling to modern scholars. Layamon acknowledges Wace (and is the one to report that Wace gave his Brut to Eleanor of Aquitaine). He also says that he used Saint Bede’s Englisca boc (“English book”) and a Latin work by Saints Albin and Augustine, combining the three books into one: if he did, the latter two have left few traces in the text, but the announcement gives the book a broad linguistic, learned, and saintly pedigree (Barron & Weinberg 1995: lines 16–28). The range of suggested dates for the poem is grounded in differing interpretations of contemporary allusions in the text. But the two surviving manuscripts are substantially later – from the second half of the thirteenth century – and very different from each other. And the language of the poem, particularly in the longer manuscript (British Library, London, Cotton Caligula A.ix), is markedly old-fashioned and very challenging to the modern reader (Le Saux 1989: 1–13).
Works that survive in a single manuscript must be accepted, more or less, as they are. When a work survives in many manuscripts, scholars have a fair amount of evidence (sometimes dauntingly much) for choosing among texts or particular readings if they want to try to identify the “original” text or have a “standard” version to discuss. But when there are only two manuscripts, scholars – and editors – can be in a bind. Which to choose? And on what basis? The complications and frustrations of such questions are themselves enough sometimes to discourage scholarship on a given work, if the “real” work is taken to be what the original author intended and wrote (virtually always a theoretical construct, since so few autograph copies survive), rather than the manuscripts that really circulated and do survive, products of the endlessly transformative processes of scribal transmission (Bryan 1999: 3–60).
Fair scholarly consensus has emerged that the two Layamon manuscripts are separately descended from another manuscript or manuscripts, that the Caligula manuscript represents a version of the text probably closer to what Layamon wrote, and that the other manuscript (British Library, London, Cotton Otho C.xiii) modernizes language and abridges content. The significance of these differences and the relative merits of the two versions are much debated. The Caligula manuscript is generally preferred (and is the one that has been translated into modern English), a conclusion perhaps helped by the fact that the Otho manuscript was terribly damaged in the fire that devastated Robert Cotton’s manuscript collection in 1731. Of such circumstances is literary history made. The question of the Caligula manuscript’s archaism remains vexed as well: if it is purposeful, what is its purpose? To strengthen the work’s resemblance to Old English poetry (assuming that Layamon had access to such a thing) and therefore make it seem more “epic” (to use an anachronistic but well-liked term)? To make it seem more like a Galfridian ancient British book and therefore more authentic and authoritative? If the latter, why should Layamon come right out and say, as he does, that he is basing his work on written sources?
Layamon’s work is thus hard to date, hard to read, hard to gauge, textually unstable, and hard for modern sensibilities to take, given its enormous length, horrific violence, and harsh vision of the world. To take one example: in Wace, when St Ursula and her retinue of eleven thousand virgins are shipwrecked and captured by wicked pagans, they are simply led off to Cologne and decapitated (Weiss 1999: lines 6073–4). But in the Caligula text, Ursula is not allowed the dignity and chastity of a quick martyrdom: the evil Melga not only rapes her, but when he is finished with her, he Zæf heo his hired-monnen sone to makien to heore (“he then gave her to his followers to use as their whore”) (Barron & Weinberg 1995: line 6040). Though the poem’s textual issues have drawn the fruitful interest of historians of English language and literature, its matter aside from its Arthurian section has received relatively little critical attention. Recent translations may help remedy that lack. For the time being, it is still the case that Layamon’s Brut, one of the unquestionable landmarks of English literature and the Brut tradition, remains basically unknown to non-specialists.
The Return to Prose
Unlike students of language and literature, political and legal historians of England after the Conquest have never had the luxury of regarding Anglo-Norman as someone else’s problem: the legal and documentary record runs the linguistic gamut. The disciplinary boundaries hemming in historians have instead tended to be those of literary form. However natural verse may have seemed as a medium for historical narrative in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in the nineteenth century it could seem eminently ignorable, particularly when it was based on what was called Geoffrey’s “pseudo-history.” Poems might be scavenged for potentially useful information on proper names, folk customs, military tactics, and the like. But narratives by contemporaries, or better still eyewitnesses, were much to be preferred for their immediacy, and failing that, use might be made of learned Latin histories written by demonstrably judicious men, or at least men who made their leanings clear. For the kinds of history being done at that time, popular or “legendary” histories, and those many generations away from their original sources, were not particularly helpful. But the tendency to regard such works as at best irrelevant and at worst bogus led to reification of the components of medieval historical tradition then found valuable, so that one part of the contemporary picture could too easily be taken for the whole thing (see, for instance, the attitudes manifested and works included or not in Gransden 1974, 1982).
Historical poems might find a place in literature departments, though as discussed above Anglo-Norman remains to this day something of an orphan dialect. But what of prose? The next major development in the Brut tradition, the one that would ensure the vernacular currency of the Galfridian narrative well into the sixteenth century, was in prose – Anglo-Norman prose, no less. And it was overlooked both by historians as too literary (and too derivative to be of value, except in some of its continuations) and by literary scholars as too historical and literally prosaic, particularly in the canon-forming days when verse alone effectively constituted medieval vernacular literature. Thus we have the phenomenon of the Brut tradition becoming least recognized in modern scholarship at the moment of its greatest prominence in medieval culture, with the rise of the Prose Brut chronicle at the end of the thirteenth century.
The Oldest Version of the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut was in all likelihood composed during the reign of Edward I, probably in the north of England, possibly in Lincolnshire, by a writer comfortable with both Latin and French who had access to a wide range of materials of the kind found in monastic libraries. It shows every sign of having been written for a secular, baronial audience, and it may well have been commissioned by a family such as the Longespées or the de Lacys, who held the patronage of Barlings Abbey, the Latin chronicle of which is related to the Prose Brut.
The Prose Brut begins conventionally enough, with the flight of Aeneas from Troy. But in one way after another, it departs from prior tradition. Its form in prose may represent a choice to follow trends in Francophone historiography in the thirteenth century, when verse may have begun to acquire associations of fictionality (Spiegel 1993: 55–60; Damian-Grint 1999: 172–207). Its unadorned style may also represent an attempt to make the text as transparent and apparently untouched by human agency as possible. Rather than exaggerating his sources and calling attention to his labor in translating them, the writer of the Prose Brut does not mention them at all, and he does not identify himself, although his sources are many and he goes to considerable effort in translating and synthesizing them, as well as transforming them. The chronicle comes off as something like a bible of English history, a plain, authoritative account of what happened, designed for an audience not necessarily inclined to ask how that is known.
The writer bases the first part of his narrative on Wace, but he also appears to have consulted and integrated matter directly from Geoffrey of Monmouth. And when he has finished with them, he keeps the history going, adapting Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis (all surviving manuscripts of which accompany texts of Wace), a close analogue of the Praemonstratensian chronicle of Barlings, and a range of other historiographic, hagiographic, and narrative materials, including a life of Edward the Confessor and Havelok material perhaps in both French and English. The result is a concise, complete account linking the kings of England from Brut all the way to Henry III and his son Edward.
No longer is the connection between the ancient and recent past simply analogical, nor is the Prose Brut a simple retelling of past stories. Largely by selection and omission (editorial techniques also favored by his vernacular predecessors) rather than outright alteration, the writer of the Prose Brut generates both continuous narrative and as close to continuous lineage as he can, melding British, English, and Norman identity, and doing as much as possible to eliminate the grand pattern of rise and fall fundamental to the Galfridian historical vision. He goes further than Geoffrey to minimize the significance of the Roman occupation of Britain (making it an occasion to tell mostly of British repulses of the invaders); he works to present the Norman Conquest as a restoration of true lineage in the face of Harold’s usurpation of the throne; most drastically, he eliminates the ruin and exile of the Britons by the Saxons by selective omission and source-switching at the crucial moment. In its quiet way, the Prose Brut is a deeply revisionist work.
In general, it offers a far more optimistic vision than its predecessors and analogues, presenting a world in which it is possible for the people of Britain to go from strength to strength. But this optimism is far from grandiose; instead, it is focused on everyday virtues and dilemmas. The Prose Brut’s good kings are dutiful men, attentive to the needs of their people and respectful of their baronage. Its greedy and incontinent kings have a way of meeting nasty deaths, devoured by wolves or sea monsters or brought down by misdirected arrows. Its virtues are socially oriented ones. And the horror that it repeatedly represents, its supreme negative exemplum, is the kind of internal conflict, the triumph of fear, greed, and personal ambition, that leads to civil war. The pervasiveness of this concern, and its pertinence as compared, say, to the threat of invasion by pagans, make excellent sense in the context of the end of the thirteenth century, after the vividly remembered catastrophes of the reign of John (whom the Prose Brut represents as a monster) and the conclusion, well within living memory, of the Barons’ War against Henry III.
The Arthur of the Prose Brut is an ideal king for an audience sick at the thought of civil war, longing for order and stability. He drives out invaders, honors and rewards his barons, and turns violence beyond the shores of Britain. Unlike Wace and Layamon, the writer of the Prose Brut takes no interest in scenes of battle for their own sake: he limits himself mostly to reporting the results, sometimes with condemnation of dishonorable tactics, and sometimes with a display of sympathy for the suffering of both sides.
A famous moment in Arthur’s career as a warrior encapsulates these tendencies. In Geoffrey of Monmouth and in Wace, Arthur’s defeat of the giant of Mont-Saint-Michel, who has abducted and killed his kinswoman Eleine, forms a lengthy episode, with an extended, gory fight. The writer of the Prose Brut boils the combat down to this: e vint lendemain al geant e se combatist oue li, e oue grant peine le conquist e loccist (“and he came the next day to the giant and fought with him, and with great effort he defeated him and killed him”). The part of the story that the writer retains, and even expands, is the sad account by Eleine’s nurse of her captivity in the hands of the giant. The nurse rather than Arthur becomes the central figure of the episode, and Arthur’s killing of the giant (which may be considered the prototype for scenes of single combat in later Arthurian narratives) redresses the wrong that she, an old and common woman, has suffered (Marvin 2006: 170–73).
This Arthur is not an occasion for escape into a world of fantastic, mystical, or erotic adventure. Rather, he is a means by which the writer can propose an ideal of kingship that addresses the immediate, mundane hopes and fears of the chronicle’s audience. His story remains a tragic one, with Mordred’s treason a reminder that no king, however just and generous, can wholly safeguard himself against betrayal by his own. The enemy within is as much to be feared as the enemy without; the forces of history are not so much grand and impersonal as grounded in the choices of individuals, so that it becomes the responsibility of king and people alike to exercise self-control and honor in order to have peace.
Other late-medieval vernacular works in the Brut tradition survive, among them the Royal Brut fragment (part of another Anglo-Norman verse translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth), the Anglo-Norman verse chronicle of Peter Langtoft, the Anglo-Norman Scalacronica of Sir Thomas Gray, the Middle English verse chronicles of Robert of Gloucester and Robert Mannyng, and Castleford’s Chronicle, also in verse (see chapter 4). The only one of such works to have achieved anything like canonical status in English literature is the anonymous Alliterative Morte Arthure, which has the advantages of being strictly Arthurian in content, not gargantuan in length (just over four thousand lines), composed in verse, and a known source for Malory.
Chronicle and Romance
When one recalls the sheer popularity of the Prose Brut’s Arthurian narrative, promulgated essentially unchanged in later Anglo-Norman versions and the Middle English translations of the chronicle, it becomes clear that the question of who Arthur was for his medieval audiences is richer and more complex than standard narratives of Arthurian tradition have recognized, with their emphasis on vernacular works of enduring interest and value but relatively little contemporary influence.
In medieval English culture, the Brut, or chronicle, tradition, was not peripheral. Rather, marked by both its continuity and its adaptability, it was historiographically central, textually prevalent, and by no means isolated from or opposed to romance tradition. As Ad Putter has argued, the writers of romance were so vividly aware of and indebted to chronicle tradition that they set their tales in the periods of peace following Arthur’s conquests, as reported in Geoffrey and his successors (1994). The Brut tradition presents its historical Arthur as a different kind of exemplar, addressing different kinds of concerns from those prevalent in romance, a figure no less instructive and clearly of no less interest to contemporary audiences for all that. The chronicle and romance traditions share in their durability and versatility, and in the ways they make Arthurian narrative an opportunity for societal self-examination, celebration, idealism, and the acknowledgment of the limitations of all human endeavor.
As full of violence as both traditions are, and as much as they both value prowess, peace turns out to be a shared dream of both as well: in the Brut tradition, it is the goal, however fleetingly achievable, and in the romance tradition, it is the necessary precondition for adventure. Chronicle provided writers and contemporary audiences with the imaginative space to locate and engage with romance: it can do the same for readers today.
Primary Sources
Barron, W. R. J. & Weinberg, S. C. (eds trans) (1995). Brut; or, Hystoria Brutonum. Harlow: Longman.
Brie, F. W. D. (ed.) (1906, 1908). The Brut; or, the Chronicles of England, 2 vols, o.s. 131, 136. London: Early English Text Society.
Marvin, J. (ed. trans.) (2006). The oldest Anglo-Norman Prose Brut chronicle: An edition and translation. Woodbridge: Boydell.
Thorpe, L. (trans.) (1966). Geoffrey of Monmouth. History of the kings of Britain. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Weiss, J. (ed. trans.) (1999). Wace’s Roman de Brut: A history of the British. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.
Wright, N. (ed.) (1985). Geoffrey of Monmouth. Historia Regum Britanniae, vol. I: Bern, Burgerbibliothek, MS 568. Cambridge: Brewer.
References and Further Reading
The Anglo-Norman On-Line Hub. At www.anglo-norman.net, accessed March 30, 2008.
Blacker, J. (1994). The faces of time: Portrayal of the past in Old French and Latin historical narrative of the Anglo-Norman regnum. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Bryan, E. (1999). Collaborative meaning in medieval scribal culture: The Otho Layamon. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Busby, K. (1993). “Neither flesh nor fish, nor good red herring”: The case of Anglo-Norman literature. In R. T. Pickens (ed.), Studies in honor of Hans-Erich Keller. Kalamazoo, MA: Medieval Institute Publications, pp. 399–417.
Crick, J. (1989). The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, vol. 3: A summary catalogue of the manuscripts. Cambridge: Brewer.
Damian-Grint, P. (1999). The new historians of the twelfth-century renaissance: Inventing vernacular authority. Woodbridge: Boydell.
Dean, R., with the collaboration of M. B. M. Boulton (1999). Anglo-Norman literature: A guide to texts and manuscripts. London: Anglo-Norman Text Society.
Gransden, A. (1974, 1982). Historical writing in England, 2 vols. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Hanning, R. W. (1966). The vision of history in early Britain: From Gildas to Geoffrey of Monmouth. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kennedy, E. D. (1989). Chronicles and other historical writing, Manual of the writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, vol. 8 (ed. A. Hartung). New Haven, CT: Connecticut Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Le Saux, F. H. M. (1989). Layamon’s “Brut”: The poem and its sources. Woodbridge: Brewer.
Le Saux, F. H. M. (2005). A companion to Wace. Woodbridge: Brewer.
Marvin, J. (2004). The unassuming reader: F. W. Maitland and the editing of Anglo-Norman. In S. Echard & S. Partridge (eds), The book unbound: Editing and reading medieval manuscripts and texts. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 14–36.
Marx, W. & Radulescu, R. L. (eds) (2006). Readers and writers of the Prose Brut. Trivium, 36 (special issue).
Matheson, L. M. (1998). The Prose Brut: The development of a Middle English chronicle. Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies.
Moll, R. J. (2003). Before Malory: Reading Arthur in later medieval England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Putter, A. (1994). Finding time for romance: Mediaeval Arthurian literary history. Medium Aevum, 63, 1–16.
Rothwell, W. (gen. ed.) (1977–92). Anglo-Norman dictionary. London: Modern Humanities Research Association.
Spiegel, G. M. (1993). Romancing the past: The rise of vernacular prose historiography in thirteenth-century France. Berkeley. CA: University of California Press.
Tiller, K. J. (2007). Layamon’s Brut and the Anglo-Norman vision of history. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Wickham-Crowley, K. M. (2002). Writing the future: Layamon’s prophetic history. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.