Textual Englishness, 1175

297 Pages·2017·1.66 MB·English

by  Joseph Richard Wingenbach

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LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School
2016
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Joseph Richard Wingenbach
Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College
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Wingenbach, Joseph Richard, "“Þe Inglis in seruage”: Textual Englishness, 1175 – 1330" (2016). LSU
Doctoral Dissertations. 844.
https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/844
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“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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
3
Why is the young hero unable to carry out the clever deception devised by his tutor and
guardian? No indication is given that the Emperor or Bevis’s mother is aware he is not dead until
he bursts into court and strikes his stepfather with his shepherd’s club. Bevis would have been
wise to retreat and mature before confronting the usurpers, but his precociousness makes his
predicament all the more dire.
Finally, whose story is this? Like Joseph, Bevis is able to find success in the face of
adversity, but both stories are those of individuals. When the English romance was written it had
been over two hundred and fifty years since an Anglo-Saxon king had been on the throne of
England. Was the original audience of the romance supposed to see, or be reminded, that the
Norman, Angevin, and Plantagenet kings were not the legitimate rulers of the land? Both stories
insinuate God will restore those who have been aggrieved. If this was the case, was it not
problematic for the Bevis-poet that the source material of his story about an English hero came
from a French writer? How is the English version of the romance different from the Anglo-
Norman text which preceded it? Is Bevis inherently more English than Boeve in the Anglo-
Norman romance?
Though this particular episode has not been extensively examined, critics who wrestle
with questions of English identity during this period would no doubt look to several key aspects
of it to highlight the Bevis-poet’s concern with English identity. First, at its core, this is a story
about the loss of patrimony to foreigners. Though Bevis’s story appears several centuries after
the Norman Conquest and maintains the opposition of Christian knight and Saracen warrior
found in the Chanson de Geste tradition, it is impossible to ignore the similarities it has to the
Conquest and to the cultural reverberations which followed and continued to gain force over
4