Kingship, Conquest, and Patria

Kristen Lee Over

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135474232
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

First Published in 2005. Distinctly interdisciplinary, Kingship, Conquest, andPatria brings together French and Welsh studies with literary and historical analysis, genre study with questions of medieval colonialisms and national writing. It treats eight centuries' worth of insular and continental literature, placing the 12th- and 13th-century development of Arthurian romance in a history of fraught, ambiguous relations between Capetian France, Angevin England, and native Wales. Overall, the book aims to contextualize how French Arthurian romance and Welsh rhamant, despite being products of opposing cultures in an age of conquest, collectively revise the figure of King Arthur created by earlier insular tradition. At a time when contemporary monarchies sought to curtail the autonomy of both northern French and Welsh principalities, the literary image of kingship pointedly declines in romance and rhamant, replaced by an ideal of knightly independence. A focus on the romance portrait of King Arthur is the culmination of this study: Part I provides a survey of early British Arthurian material written in Latin and Welsh; Part II presents the historical contexts in northern France and Wales out of which the genre of Arthurian romance emerged; Part III turns to literary and sociopolitical analyses of Chrétien's five romances and the three Welsh rhamantau.

PART I

Arthurian Tradition before
Chrétien de Troyes

Prior to Geoffrey of Monmouth's enormously influential Historia regum Britannia (c.1138), there are limited and often enigmatic references to Arthur. Arthur in fact proves all but absent from early Welsh poetry, and prior to the Historia far more chronicles omit than include him, so that Geoffrey's warrior-king provides the most complete medieval portrait of Arthur available as a source for both continental and insular romance. The sixth-century Welsh praise poetry ascribed to Aneirin and Taliesin frequently eulogizes warriors such as Cynon and Owein ap Urien, for example—both of whom get absorbed into later Arthurian romance—but only one stanza of this poetry mentions the name Arthur, and some recent scholarship doubts its authenticity (e. g., Sims-Williams, “Early Welsh Arthurian Poems”). In Welsh tradition, Arthur is not the national savior, not the rex quondam rexfuturus of later material. Though at least two twelfth-century historians prior to Geoffrey of Monmouth document a continental Breton belief in Arthur's eventual return,¹ the tenth-century Armes Prydein (Prophecy of Britain) foretells the coming not of Arthur but of Cynan and Cadwaladr, two leaders prophesied to expel the Saxons and deliver the whole of Britain back to the Welsh. Prior to Geoffrey of Monmouth, in other words, native insular tradition appears to have generated very few tales of Arthur and none of his eventual return. Prolific in both Welsh and Latin insular tradition, however, is a self-conscious sense of ethnic British difference and possible independence from foreign invaders, so that long prior to Geoffrey's king there exists a diverse corpus of insular material that responds to the aggression and violence of Saxon conquest with narrative accounts of British identity.

It is precisely the long history of conquest that helps distinguish the development of insular Arthurian narrative from the later romance tradition launched by the continental poet Chrétien de Troyes. To be sure, prophetic literary images of paradigmatic Welsh warriors and successful native rulers of Britain do not reflect the political reality of Wales from the sixth to the ninth centuries. Though war was common, united effort and independence from foreign influence were much less so, and already by the sixth-century age of Gildas the Saxons had successfully appropriated much of Britain.² Thus during the period of hostile invasion and colonization which followed the fifth-century departure of the Romans, the earliest Welsh hero tales and praise poetry, including the first limited literary references to Arthur, glorify the potential for British unification and independence—an image of national hope later associated almost entirely with the King Arthur of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia.

Prior to Geoffrey, however, vernacular references to Arthur as a single native ruler prove sparse, and Latin chronicles roughly contemporaneous with the period of Saxon invasion and settlement add nothing to the literary figure of Arthur. Gregory of Tours's sixth-century Historia Francorum includes no mention of Arthur, not even as one defeated. Nor does the sixth-century Welsh cleric Gildas, writing by his own account in the absence of a British leader capable of containing the Saxon onslaught. Likewise Bede, chronicling the Anglo-Saxons in Britain at a time of Saxon control, failed to write of Arthur as either friend or foe in his eighth-century Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum. Most chroniclers in the three hundred years following Bede omit Arthur from British history, as do several of Fletcher's “ambitious” historians of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.³ Yet all write of the British people and of the Island of Britain as a past and potential native whole.

However sparse, pre-Galfridian Arthurian material forms a remarkably varied body of national writing—secular Welsh poetry, native Welsh prose narrative, Latin historiography, and British-Latin hagiography—that establishes the literary tradition of Arthur to be both deep-rooted and broad in appeal long before Geoffrey combines the myth of insular British wholeness with the figure of a single dominant native king. The variety and vitality of this early material differs markedly from the portrait of Geoffrey's British champion, and so the purpose of this initial chapter is to gain some insight into the highly selective yet detailed perspective of the Arthurian sections of Geoffrey's Historia. Rather than distinguishing between Latin “histories” of nations and saints and vernacular “fictions” about Welsh heroes,⁴ what follows is a brief chronology of the most significant pre-Galfridian Arthurian material.⁵

Abstract for the chapter but web only.

Chapter One

Pre-Galfridian Latin and Vernacular Arthurian Narrative

GILDAS (C. 540)

As the oldest British account of the Saxon invasion available to later writers, the sixth-century De excidio et conquestu Britanniae, written by the Welsh monk Gildas, offers a more religious than political explanation for the fall of Roman Britain and the end to “Roman world order” (Hanning 44–62). Even so, throughout his treatise Gildas reinforces a notion of racial and ethnic difference between his own British people and the invading Saxons, constructing what I would call distinct and national identities out of a hostile and sustained clash between indigenous and foreign communities. Gildas lived and wrote in the turbulent world before newly formed Saxon kingdoms achieved stability in the late sixth century, and he interprets the defeat and invasion of his people as divine retribution for the collective sin of the British, both their “tyrannical” secular rulers and decadent clerics.¹

Arthur earns no mention in the De excidio, though the infamous liber querulus covers the period in which both Bede and Nennius later record him fighting and defeating Saxons. Stephen Knight has made much of this omission, suggesting that it would have constituted a damning insult to contemporary military leaders, and as such indicates a rift between the interests of ecclesiastical and secular powers (ALS, esp. ch. 1). Arthur's absence perhaps also begs the question of Arthur's prominence as a national figure to Romano-British churchmen of the sixth century. Gildas leaves anonymous several figures named in later histories, so that only one fifth-century Briton is named in what would be the Arthurian section of his text. That single named Briton is Ambrosius Aurelianus, through whom Gildas praises Britain's Roman past while severely criticizing his own contemporaries.² Michael Winterbottom has suggested that Gildas thus “spotlight[s] the inferiority of [Ambrosius'] living descendants,” one of whom would have been the Arthur of the Nennian history (15lnt25:3).³

Leading up to his introduction of Ambrosius, Gildas rebukes an unnamed “tyrant” and his counselors for “blindly” and “stupidly” en1isting foreign Saxon mercenaries in an insular war against the Picts and Scots:

Turn omnes consiliarii una cum superbo tyranno caecantur, adinve-nientes tale praesidium, immo excidium patriae ut ferocissimi illi nefandi nominis Saxones deo hominibusque invisi, quasi in caulas lupi, in insulam ad retundendas aquilonales gentes intromitterentur. Quo utique nihil ei usquam perniciosius nihilque amarius factum est. O altissimam sensus caliginem! o desperabilem crudamque mentis hebetudinem! Quos propensius morte, cum abessent, tremebant, sponte, ut ita dicam, sub unius tecti culmine invitabant…. (23:1–2)

Then all the members of the council, together with the proud tyrant, were struck blind; the guard—or rather the method of destruction—they devised for our land was that the ferocious Saxons (name not to be spoken!), hated by man and God, should be let into the island like wolves into the fold, to beat back the peoples of the north. Nothing more destructive, nothing more bitter has ever befallen the land. How utter the blindness of their minds! How desperate and crass the stupidity! Of their own free will they invited under the same roof a people whom they feared worse than death even in their absence….

Extending a self-destructive and, to Gildas, criminal invitation to a land-hungry enemy, the British condemn themselves as prey to the beasts of Germania, described variously as a barbarian wolf-pack, cubs of a savage lioness, and troops of Saxon dogs (ch 23). Political misjudgment becomes here evidence of spiritual decay, and as Saxon aid quickly turns to violent domination, Gildas writes of the “just punishment” meted out to the British who had impiously desecrated and polluted what God had originally bestowed (24:1). Gildas writes of his British people as the “latter-day Israel” (praesentem Israelem 26:1), the Chosen who eventually return to God's favor after a cycle of abrogated covenant and divine retribution. Thus the “wretched survivors” of Saxon raids, scattered and hiding in the farthest reaches of the island (25:1), swarm from their suffering “like bees”⁴ to dux Ambrosius Aurelianus, sole Romano-British survivor of the Saxon invasion, symbol of a renewed favor after prolonged affliction.⁵ “Under him,” writes Gildas, “our people regained their strength, and challenged the victors to battle. The Lord assented, and the battle went their way” (… cuius nunc temporibus nostris suboles magnopere avita bonitate degeneravit, vires capessunt, victores provocantes ad proelium: quis victoria domino annuente cessit, 25:3). Yet Gildas claims to have been born two generations later, during the time of Ambrosius' grandchildren, an age when the British had once again fallen into weakness and moral degeneration. In the year of Gildas' birth, the British defeat the Saxons for the final time at the battle of Mount Badon (26:1), the victory with which Nennius will later credit Arthur.⁶

Secular rulers as much as decadent churchmen earn reproof, but Gildas reserves special condemnation for a single ruler, Maglocunus (Maelgwn), and his appetite for the flattery of poets, accrediting their lies with the weaknesses of native rule. Gildas distinguishes between dei laudes and the lies of praecones—a disputed term often translated “poets,” rendered “criminals” by Win-terbottom—damning both Maelgwn Gwynedd and his bards for succumbing to the seduction of false earthly praise (Sims-Williams, “Gildas and Vernacular Poetry” 192n155). Known as insularis draco (the dragon of Anglesey), Maelgwn may have cleansed Britain of “many tyrants;” yet more molossi aegri (like a sick hound) he returns to his own vomit of evil, wicked sin (33:1, 34:5–6). To ecclesiasticae mebdiae (the melodious music of the church), Maelgwn instead prefers

… furciferorum [quae nihil sunt] referto mendaciis simulque spumanti flegmate proximos quosque roscidaturo, praeconum ore ritu bacchan-tium concrepante, ita ut vas dei quondam in ministerio praeparatum ver-tatur in zabuli Organum, quodque honore caelesti putabatur dignum merito proiciatur in tartan barathrum. (34:6)

… empty praises … from the mouths of criminals who grate on the hearing like raving hucksters—mouths stuffed with lies and liable to bedew bystanders with their foaming phlegm. Hence a vessel that was once being prepared for the service of God is turned into an instrument of the devil, and what was once thought worthy of heavenly honours is rightly cast into the pit of Hell.

In direct address to the Welsh leader, Gildas lists the iniquities that debase Maelgwn's success as protector of Britain (33–36). He seems tacitly to condemn secular Welsh praise poetry, and by referring to Maelgwn as insularis draco Gildas not only demonstrates a certain familiarity with the vocabulary of early Welsh poetry but also sounds a pointed echo meant to discount a genre of national praise apparently very much at odds with his own.⁷ Essential here is not only the early, strident sense of Britain as a place and a people defined against a history of foreign conquest. Equally integral to Gildas' scathing account are opposing king portraits (Ambrosius, the unnamed tyrant, Maelgwn), and the role of insular sovereignty in ultimately unifying or fragmenting his native land.

THE URIEN AND OWEIN POEMS OF TAL...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Arthurian Tradition before Chrétien de Troyes
• Part II: Conquest and National Cultural Production
• Part III: The New King Arthur of French and Welsh Romance
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index