Everyday Saints and the Art of Narrative in the South English Legendary

Anne B. Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754632931
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351938082
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Anne Thompson here gives the fullest account and explanation to date of the diversity of the more than sixty manuscripts of the South English Legendary, a late thirteenth-century collection of lively verse lives of saints, in a southern English dialect. The importance of the SEL to hagiographic and cultural studies has been increasingly acknowledged in recent years. Without denying the legendaries' religious purpose, this book looks at the way SEL narratives reflect and address the complex, interwined tapestry"political, social, religious"of Edward I's England, while retaining a strong emphasis on the craft of story-telling. Thompson shows the SEL to be a fresh and exciting early example of popular vernacular literature. Firmly grounded in rural and small town life of the 1270s to 1290s in the west of England, it is uniquely significant for any understanding of that culture.

PART ONE
INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1
Tales of the Saints

Beginnings

The choice of a beginning is important to any enterprise, even if, as is so often the case, a beginning is accepted as a beginning after we are long past beginning and after our apprenticeship is over.¹

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.²

Once upon a time, somewhere in the west of England, sometime towards the end of the thirteenth century, someone decided to put together a collection of stories about the saints. This collection was so popular with – well, we really have no idea with whom – but someone, apparently, as over sixty manuscript copies of it had been made by the end of the fifteenth century. In the face of so much uncertainty, what can be said about the ‘South English Legendary’? Is it possible, or even desirable, to generalize about a collection whose textual history is so exceedingly complex that Manfred Görlach, the author of a book-length study of that history, acknowledges at the outset the impossibility of resolving all the difficulties?³ My answer is a cautious yes; however, long before I knew anything about the difficulties, I had fallen in love with the collection itself. My training as an academic began in the 1960s and the imperial serenity of the institution which trained me, along with my own ignorance, meant that it took me some time to realize that what I was being taught was in fact a version of the new criticism – a way of reading, in other words, and not, as I thought at the time, truth itself. Less naive now, I remain – by temperament as well as training – a passionate close reader of texts, and it was very much in that spirit that I had my first encounter with the text.

In the late 1980s, following a trip to San Francisco for the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, I visited my father in Grass Valley, California, having brought with me for unknown reasons a copy of the D’Evelyn–Mill edition of the South English Legendary. Naturally I began to read with some of the knowledge garnered from my career as a teacher of and writer on medieval literature. I knew, for instance, that a legendary was by definition a collection of lives of the saints. The word comes from the Latin legenda (‘something read’) and refers to the reading out in church of a saint’s life on their feast days. However, I knew almost nothing about this particular text, beyond the religious and narrative nature of its contents, and the rhyming couplets which characterized its form. The two relatively slim brown volumes which make up this edition contain no introduction and only the briefest of forewords, followed by a statement of editorial practice and a table of contents. This lack of a full-scale scholarly apparatus (deferred to a separate volume, as I later learned) acted as a further incentive simply to begin reading and that is what I did.

And so, as anachronistic as it may be to treat a medieval legendary like any other book one might pick up and read on impulse, I want to make use of a fiction which approximates my own initial response, deferring until the conclusion of this introduction a description of the topics addressed in the rest of the book. It is my hope that in this way the reader may be induced to share some of the excitement and curiosity which led me, ultimately, to undertake this study – and so I begin by quoting the opening words of the text:

Nou bloweþ þe niwe frut, þat late bygan to springe,

Þat to is kunde eritage mankunne schal bringe;

Þis nywe frut of wan ich speke is oure Cristendom,

Þat late was an eorþe ysouwe, & later forþ it com. (Prologue, II. 1–4)⁴

[Now blooms the new fruit that lately began to grow,

The fruit that will bring mankind to its true inheritance;

This new fruit that I speak of is our Christendom,

That was so lately sown on earth and afterwards came forth.]

In this passage the poet identifies himself both as a speaking voice and as ‘I,’ establishing additionally the convention of an audience with whom he allies himself by means of the word ‘oure.’ A new fruit has sprung up and is now blooming, a fruit which is subsequently said to represent the birth of Christendom. Though God’s activity took place over a thousand years earlier, the words ‘now’ and ‘late,’ and the rapid movement between tenses, vividly evoke the poet’s own time as well, suggesting an elision of past and present.

So hard and luþer was þe lond on wan it ssolde sprynge,

Þat wel vnneþe eny more me my3te þer on bringe.

God him was þe gardiner þat gan ferst þe sed souwe,

Þat was lesus Godes sone þat þare fore aly3te louwe. (Prologue, II. 5–8)

[So hard and wicked was the ground on which it should spring up,

That scarcely could men bring it forth any longer.

God himself was the gardener who first sowed the seed,

That was Jesus, the son of God who therefore came down (to earth).]

God is the gardener, Christ is the seed from whom the fruit has sprung: the thought is not complex, but the language is handled with assurance and the allegory is consistently maintained. In the next few lines we learn that the ground on which the seed was sown was so hard and stony that it must be ‘ysprengd’ with the sweet rain of Christ’s blood before the seed could grow, and much more blood was needed, the blood of martyrs, in order to ‘norisschi þat swete sed.’

At line 19 the ground shifts slightly: the martyrs who formed part of the initial allegory have now become ‘oure Louerdes kny3tes.’ Instead of hard earth and gardeners there are battles and armies; Christ is a king who ordains his host, and sets up his arblasters (crossbow men), his archers, and his trumpeters. This narrative seems thicker in its details, less tied to religious imagery and more dependent on thirteenth century secular accounts of war. The king must march in front to encourage his men to remain firm, and the knights who come in the ‘rerewarde’ must maintain their lord’s right and not be cowards, else the battle will be lost.

Presently the ground shifts again, as if that word ‘knight,’ which has figured in the preceding allegorical vignette of Christ’s war, has triggered a whole different set of associations:

Men wilneþ muche to hure telle of bataille of kynge,

And of kny3tes þat hardy were, þat muchedel is lesynge. (Prologue, II. 59–60)

[Men desire greatly to hear of the battles of kings,

And of knights who were hardy, much of which is lying.]

The word ‘lying’ jumps off the page here: what began as a bland generalization has suddenly turned nasty. A neat trick. The poet has drawn the audience into his world, first with the figure of seed and fruit, then with a more extended allegory of the battle waged by Christ and his knights to save human kind; now that he has their full attention he piously reminds them that though they love stories about knights those stories are lies – interesting, since it was the poet who put thoughts about knights in their heads in the first place.

Wo so wilneþ muche to hure tales of suche þinge,

Hardi batailles he may hure here þat nis no lesinge:

Of apostles & martirs þat hardy kni3tes were

Þat studeuast were in bataille & ne fleide no3t for fere,

Þat soffrede þat luþer men al quik hare lymes totere. (Prologue, II. 61–65)

[Whoever would like to hear tales of such things,

May hear tell here of bold battles that are no lies:

Of apostles and martyrs who were brave knights

And were steadfast in battle and fled not out of fear;

Who suffered evil men to tear their living bodies.]

So the aim is song after all, for now the pleasures of true storytelling about the saints are offered as a substitute for the fictional lies about worldly knights. And, finally, we are given an outline for what will follow:

Telle ichelle bi reuwe of ham as hare dai valþ in þe 3ere;

Verst bygynneþ at 3eres day, for þat is þe uerste feste,

And fram on to oþer so areng þe wile þe 3ere wolleste. (Prologue, II. 66–68)

[I shall tell of them in order, as their feast day falls in the year;

Beginning first at New Year’s Day, for that is the first feast,

And from one to another by row, so long as the year lasts.]

This poet has an orderly mind. His stories of saints will be told in chronological order; what is more, he will begin at the beginning, with New Year’s Day, and he will keep going from one saint to the next as long as the year lasts. Two things intrigue me here: first the promise of ‘telling’ as a means of attracting an audience, and second the structuring of these opening lines (68 in all). Two embedded and conjoined narratives have led neatly up to a statement of purpose. One – God as the gardener, Christ as the seed – is lyric in tone and could also be described as a meditation on religious imagery. Offered nevertheless as a narrative which takes place in time, there is explication, but little reflection beyond the detailing of the events themselves. The other – true battles of the knights of Christ the king – grows out of the first (the seed ‘ysprengd’ by blood), takes more time to tell (36 lines as opposed to 20), and leads into the concept of ‘storytelling’ as a conscious practice, perhaps as an end in itself.

I want to think that I have found something significant here, but I have to admit that what follows next is distinctly nonnarrative in character: two brief accounts of the first holy days of the new year, Circumcision and Epiphany. Fragments of story are buried beneath a snowdrift of numbers – in the case of Circumcision there are three things to remember about this day, three names for Christ, three explanations for his circumcision. Perhaps my estimate of the poet’s interest in storytelling will have to be revised, but turning the page I am relieved to find that the next item is in fact the life of a saint, Hilary of Poitiers, and that its 94 lin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Note on transcription and translation
• Part 1 Introduction
• Part 2 The Art of Narrative
• Part 3 The Influence of Everyday Life
• Appendix: The South English Legendary
• Bibliography
• Index