Imagining
a M e d ie va l
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
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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.
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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 development of nationalism, locating the earliest expressions of English national
identity in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and tracing the factors that influenced 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
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, representing 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 irreconcilable 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 misrepresenting 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 fashions of their parents and grandparents and instead to emphasize their
attachment to European culture. Derek Pearsall is surely right in his perception 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).
341
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 collective 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 Ricardians a corrective to constructions of national identity that rely on foundation myths such as Brutus the Trojan and heroes of dubious authenticity 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
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
343
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 commentaries on Virgil; and Langaberde is the ancestor of the Lombards according 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 misleading 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 succeeds 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
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 treacherous; 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 heritage. 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 calling 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 Froissart 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
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Thorlac Turville-Petre
Claire Sponsler’s essay in this volume). In a similar spirit the Gawainpoet 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 pilgrims 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
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Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. Ed. Larry D. Benson et al. Boston: Houghton
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Gower, John. Confessio Amantis. In The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay,
vols 2–3. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901.
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Lindley, Arthur. “Pinning Gawain Down: The Misediting of Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 96 (1997): 26–42.
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in Comedy and Convention.” Modern Philology 62 (1965): 189–206.
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1340. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.