Albion (15 page)

In the fourteenth century the language once more became an instrument of power and force, in one of those explosions of range and energy which occur in the interaction of various elements that on their own would precipitate no great movement; the next such galvanic charge would take place in the last two decades of the sixteenth century. At the parliament of 1337 a French ambassador spoke “in English, in order to be understood of all folk.” When Thomas Usk composed a
Testament of Love
in 1385 he wrote that “Treuly, the understanding of Englishmen wol not strecche to the privy termes in Frenche, what-so-ever we bosten of straunge language . . . let us shewe our fantasyes in such wordes as we lerneden of our dames tonge.” The invocation of “dames” here may suggest the matrilinear bonds of native English, but again it has recourse to the notion of the maternal land itself. That sense of identity is reassembled in another verse history of the period where

Here may men rede whoso can Hu Inglond first bigan Men mow it finde in Englische As the Brout it telleth ywis

It is important to recognise that the spread of the language was itself accompanied by, and cannot be distinguished from, the extension of historical consciousness. There also came with it a strong sense of exclusiveness:

Selden was for ani chance Praised Inglis tong in France

writes the anonymous author of
Cursor Mundi
with a suspicion of wounded pride. In 1352 a history in Latin by Ranulph Higden, a monk of Chester, complained that English children felt obliged to “leave their own language, and to learn their lessons . . . in French, as they have since the Normans first came to England. Also gentlemen’s children are forced to speak French from the time they are rocked in their cradles . . . and rustic men wish to liken themselves to gentlemen, and seek with great eagerness to speak French, in order to be more respected.”
⁷
No more than thirty years later Higden’s history was translated by a Cornishman, John of Trevisa, who appended the following remarks: “Thys manner was moch y-used tofore the furste moreyne, an ys sith then somdel ychanged . . . so that now, the yer of oure Lord a thousand three hundred foure score and fyue . . . in al the gramer scoles of Engelond children leveth Frensch and construeth and lurneth an Englysch. . . . Also gentil men habbeth now moche yleft for to teche here children Frensch.” The only unusual word in this passage, “moreyne,” signifies plague and refers to the Black Death of 1349, which dramatically reduced the native population. A sense of mortality, or of dwindling numbers, may also encourage a sense of identity, threatened or otherwise. It is nevertheless true that by the last year of the fourteenth century English had more or less supplanted French. A book of
Travels
has a prologue which explains that it is translated “out of Frensch into Englyssch, that every man of my nacioun may understonde it.” There is also an intimation here of a democratic and egalitarian temper which the use of the old language—one might say, the liberties of the native language—might encourage. Thus Robert Mannyng, in his
Chronicle
, declares that he has written in “symple speeche”:

Bot for the luf of symple men That strange Inglis can not ken

The author of
Of Arthour and of Merlin
vouchsafes similar sentiments when he admits that:

Of Freynsch no Latin nil-y tel more Ac on Inglisch ichil tel ther-fore; Riyt is that Inglische understond That was born in Inglond

Even when writing poetry in French, John Gower dedicated his work to the English nation of the fourteenth century: “O gentile Engletere, a toi j’escrits.” The public events of the period confirm this new dispensation. In 1356 the mayor and aldermen of London decided that the proceedings in the sheriff ’s courts were to be conducted in English; it is both the context of Chaucer and the explanation for the fact that eleven out of the twenty-five extant Arthurian manuscripts were copied or distributed in the capital. From a very early period London was a center of national consciousness. The oldest legal document written in the vernacular is dated 1376, and the first parlimentary document in English survives from 1378; the Lord Chancellor opened the parliamentary session of 1363 in his native tongue, and from that session emerged the Statute of Pleadings, in which the king ordained that all pleas “shall be pleaded, shown, defended, answered, debated and judged in the English tongue.”
⁸
The same latitude was not advanced to the students of Oxford, however, where Latin remained the common language; any scholar heard to converse in English was, on a second offense, to be exiled to a corner of the room where he was obliged to eat alone. Yet we can say that by the fourteenth century a body of work had emerged, written in the English language and celebrating English tradition. Thus Robert of Gloucester, in his chronicle of 1300, sets out to assert that “Engelond is ryght a mery lond, of all others on west the best.”

Henry IV was the first English king since the eleventh century who returned to English as his native speech. He claimed the throne before the 1399 parliament in English—“he chalenged in Englyssh tunge,” as a chronicle puts it—and nine years later composed his testament in the vernacular. By the end of the fourteenth century, in fact, “English had invaded the realms of lyric and romance, of comedy and tragedy, of allegory and drama, of religion and education” so that it had become “the language, not of a conquered, but of a conquering people.”
⁹
One musical historian has noted that “this change of orientation coincides with a renaissance in the setting of English words to music”;
¹⁰
there was in court circles a resurgence of interest in English songs and carols, although their popularity in the wider country is never likely to have diminished.

The English language was also being strengthened by the new technology. In 1474 William Caxton printed a narrative of Trojan history because he had “never seen hit in our englissh tonge.” Having been born in the Weald of Kent, however, he was familiar with the “brode and rude” language of his compatriots; he also recognised how much it had changed in his own lifetime. So he decided to regularise it, and to avoid “curios” or excessively simple speech; he did not print any alliterative works, either, because they varied too much from the standard. The drive and animating force within the language was the pressure towards uniformity; only then would it acquire the strength and significance of Latin or French. It is perhaps not surprising that London, the seat of “documentary culture”
¹¹
and the common home of poets as diverse as Langland and Chaucer, should provide the conditions and the aspirations towards such a standard. We read of the “imposition of normative discourse” from the examples of monarchy and parliament, of a shift “to heavily authorised texts and stylistic uniformity” as well as “a rise in the status of literate professionals”; by 1450 there emerge “intensified ritualisations and an obsession with codes of conduct,”
¹²
some of them literary. Caxton himself was part of the merchant class of London but, perhaps more significantly, the offices of the government were settled in London and in adjacent Westminster; while the spoken dialect of London was a bewildering argot of English and foreign influences, the standard of writing became that of London heavily influenced by the central midlands. The clerkly standard, or “Chancery standard,” then became the basis of what is now known as “modern literary standard English.” There is, again, a recognisable continuity within the English imagination.

Arthur, Prince of Wales. Henry VII named his eldest son after the legendary King Arthur, in an attempt to win over the people in the west and to legitimise the Tudors’ dubious claims to the throne

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert dressed as Queen Guinevere and King Arthur, at the Bal Costumé of 12 May 1842, by Edwin Landseer

“Figure of Guinevere,” circa 1858, by William Morris, who was described as possessing a “medievalised mind and turn of thought,” like so many of his contemporaries

“Guenever.” David Jones’s illustration to the Arthurian legend takes the obsession into the twentieth century

CHAPTER 16

He Is Not Dead

There may have been
a British warrior-king named Arthur—the name itself is of Roman provenance—who flourished in the late fifth century, and who may conceivably have won a victory against the English invaders at a place known only as Mons Badonicus, but the evidence is so slight as to be practically non-existent. But how is it, then, that this spectral and fugitive tribal warrior became the central figure or figment of the English imagination whose creative life has stretched into the twenty-first century with no sign of abatement?

Those who engage in a conspiratorial theory of history believe that the legend of King Arthur was predominantly Norman in inspiration, and was designed to obscure the true and real achievements of the genuinely English King Alfred. But the stories of Arthur lie much further back. He has been equated with the primeval legends of the sun god, and compared with Hercules and Adonis. In Otranto Cathedral there is a mosaic of “Rex Arturus” in which the king rides upon a goat while wielding a phallic club; he is encircled by a zodiac, in which shape the landscape of Glastonbury itself is purported to be formed. This is suggestive but by no means conclusive; it may simply imply that, in taking over the figures of an ancient myth, the English were trying to borrow or assimilate the features of an older British earth-worship. The sleep of Arthur in the unknown region of Avalon has also been related to Plutarch’s invocation of the old British belief that the great god Cronos still sleeps upon an island surrounded by waters. This in turn has been related to the myth of the original Albion, which has been associated with the legend of Atlantis; the Druids were supposed to believe that Albion, the spirit or embodiment of the English, was an original portion of the lost continent. It is a very rich, not to say heady, brew. Any attempt to drink it will inevitably lead to numbness and disorientation.

The extant fragments of the Arthurian legend are themselves of sufficient interest. It seems most likely that the story of Arthur was originally Celtic in inspiration; Welsh poems of the ninth and tenth centuries already invoke Arthur as a figure of the remote past, and the
Black Book of Carmarthen
mentions the names of his knights or retinue while mysteriously suggesting that “anoeth bit bed i Arthur,” “the world’s wonder is the grave of Arthur.”
¹
This is the first surviving reference to the occluded demise of the ancient king. It suggests also the extent to which Celtic elements inform what are believed to be characteristically “English” legends. Another Celt, the historian Nennius, who wrote in Latin, refers to Arthur as “a commander in the battles” of Britons against the Saxon invaders; there are references also in the
Annales
Cambriae
compiled in the seventh or eighth century, which seem to confirm the hypothesis that Arthur was an historic if remote figure. It records, of “Year 72,” the battle of Badon in which “Arthur bore the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ on his shoulders for three days and three nights, and the Britons were the victors.”
²
It is of passing interest that Avalon, the island to which Arthur is taken in death, is a transliteration of Attalon, apple trees, or Afalxon, apples; the apple tree was also one of the sacred trees of England, and the object of ceremonial worship known as “apple-wassailing” which may have been influenced by earlier insular cults. In account books as late as the 1670s and 1680s we read of boys paid to “howl away” disease from the apple trees. It would seem that once more an ancient English rite has arcane origins.

The provenance of Arthurian stories and legends then moves to Cornwall, and to Brittany, which suggests that an oral tradition concerning the king existed among the Brythonic Celts of these regions. His fame, and the exploits increasingly attached to his name, spread across Europe perhaps because of the very generality of his achievement. One Welsh poem of the thirteenth century exemplifies his ambivalent status: “And then, lo and behold bards coming to chant song to Arthur, but no one could understand that song . . . except that it was in praise of Arthur!”
³
He hunts a boar; he fights a hag; he slays a giant; he searches for a magic cauldron; he sets tasks for his knights by which they will obtain their suit. The mosaic in Otranto Cathedral is complemented by another figure of Arthur above the north doorway of Modena Cathedral; a similar version adorns Bari Cathedral, also in Italy. Ailred of Rievaulx confessed in 1141 that the exploits of Arthur moved him to tears, while in 1113 certain canons of Laon in northern France fell into dispute with a Bodmin man who asserted that Arthur still lived. He had already become a folk memory.

In the light of Arthur’s Celtic origin it is perhaps not surprising that the first definitive or coherent account of the king should spring from the pen of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who has been described variously as of Welsh, Cornish or Breton stock. Geoffrey’s
Historia Regum Britanniae
was completed by 1138; the author was canon of St. George’s, Oxford, but his ambitions were literary rather than spiritual. He had already composed a text entitled
Prophetiae Merlini
, so it can fairly be asserted that he had an abiding passion for the earliest history of the island. Two English chroniclers, William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon, had in fact recently provided an historical digest of the Anglo-Saxons; it seems likely that Geoffrey wished to furnish a chronology of the earlier Celtic or British people, in which the Saxons would play less prominent a role. Geoffrey himself said that much of his material had been derived from “an ancient book in the British language,” but no appropriate Welsh or Celtic text has yet been discovered. The fact that no such book has been found does not preclude its existence, although many scholars believe that few documents from this early period could have provided the detail and circumstance of Geoffrey’s account.
Historia Regum Britanniae
is a more secular account of national history than most previous Latin originals, largely because the writer has chosen to emphasise the cycle of fortune rather than the providence of God. Significantly, therefore, the story of King Arthur is thereby placed in the context of an apparently authentic chronicle rather than in fable or romance.

The audience for
Historia Regum Britanniae
could scarcely have been the scattered Celtic communities in the west of the country but, rather, Anglo-Norman aristocrats and ecclesiastics as well as those few Anglo-Saxon thegns or abbots who had survived the ascendancy. The emphasis was not upon the race of Arthur, but upon the land he administered and defended; if it was a national epic, in part inspired by the cleric Geoffrey’s reading of Virgil’s
Aeneid
, it was the epic of a sacred earth or territory. It is important once more to suggest the Englishness of this sensibility. Celtic source material and Celtic longings, as well as the texture of Geoffrey’s Latin prose, are subdued by it; it is a field of force that creates its own lines of energy. One of the first pagan spells to be transmitted in Anglo-Saxon was that summoning the goddess of the earth; the earliest race of the English, from Angeln in the south of Denmark, was described by Tacitus as uniquely worshipping “Nerthus, that is Terra Mater.”

It is of particular interest, too, that the histories of Arthur are implicated in decline and failure; at the highest point of the king’s power, after he has conquered the Romans in continental Europe and is about to march on Rome itself, he is undone by the treachery of Mordred and dies in battle against him at Camblam in Cornwall. The story of Arthur has always been striated with sensations of loss and of transitoriness, which may well account for its central place within the English imagination; the native sensibility is touched with melancholy, as we have seen, and the sad fate of Arthur and his kingdom corresponds to that national mood. There is something, too, of determination and endurance within this dominant sensation. Some men say that Arthur will rise again; we must endure our going hence. It is the kind of stoicism which has been seen as characteristic of Anglo-Saxon poetry, perhaps nowhere better expressed than in “The Battle of Maldon” where the most famous Saxon or English cry has been rendered—“Courage must be the firmer, heart the bolder, spirit must be the greater, as our strength grows less.” That combination of bravery and fatalism, endurance and understatement, is the defining mood of Arthurian legend.

So Geoffrey’s narrative became the representative national epic; it was immediately popular, with more than two hundred Latin manuscripts still extant, and was employed as source material until well into the eighteenth century. Here, too, in lucid and readily accessible form are national myths of another kind; Geoffrey relates the history of King Lear and his three daughters, of Cymbeline, of Merlin and the removal of Stonehenge from Ireland to Salisbury Plain.

Within seventy years
Historia Regum Britanniae
was translated into French verse by a monk from Jersey, Robert Wace, whose
Roman de Brut
first introduced the “Round Table” as an image of true chivalry. A French narrative poem,
Erec et Eride
by Chrétien de Troyes, which has been described by an historian of French literature as the “first Arthurian romance,”
⁴
was written soon afterwards. The poem was adapted into shorter verses, or
lais,
by Marie de France who, paradoxically, lived in England and “was writing for a French-speaking Norman audience.”
⁵
Once more it is the land or territory, and only by indirection the race or tribe, which is being celebrated.

Certainly this is the concept introduced by Layamon’s
Brut
, the first translation into English of Wace and the first work in the English language to describe King Arthur himself. In the opening lines Layamon declares that “
Layamon
gon lithen, wide yond thas leode
,” Layamon travelled widely through this land, and would tell of the leaders of England. This has led some scholars to suggest that “the true hero of the Brut is the land itself.”
⁶
It may be of some significance, therefore, that it is also the first surviving long poem in Middle English and that it uses what seems to be a deliberately ornate and “poetic” alliterative line as an echo of old song. The use of a long accentual line and the employment of alliteration suggest, in other words, that one of Layamon’s principal models was the verse of the English past.

Layamon himself was a twelfth-century priest at Areley Regis in Worcestershire, not far removed from the great monastic libraries of the west midlands. In this colder climate the romance of the Anglo-Norman poets does not intrude, and there have been many attempts to distinguish Wace’s
Roman de Brut
in French from Layamon’s
Brut
in Middle English. That great literary scholar C. S. Lewis, who was himself half in love with the Anglo-Saxon past of this country, has described Layamon’s work as graver and more sombre than that of Wace. It possesses the hardness and gravity of the Old English sensibility, which we may perhaps now term the English sensibility itself. A light-hearted description of a spiral staircase in a tower, in the French of Wace’s poem, is transformed by Layamon’s interpolation so that it becomes “
An
ald stanene weorc; stithe men hit wurhten
,” “it was an old stone work; hard men made it.” Old stone elicits a strong response in the poetry of the English; it is perhaps part of the antiquarian persuasion, and it suggests the presence of the past which is so much an aspect of the native inheritance.

Layamon, too, is more susceptible to wonders and supernatural events than his French counterpart; he introduces “
aelvene
” or “
ylfes
,” or the “little people” of British provenance. Engravings from the sixteenth century show men walking into the caves of the “brownies” as they were known on account of their swarthy complexions; as late as the seventeenth century people could be suspected of witchery merely for having had dealings with these strange prehistoric folk of the moors. Here once more we may see one of the sources, and earliest examples, of that later English taste for ghost stories and for “horror”; as Bacon once concluded, “the thing is ancient but the word is late.” The native tendency is indeed as ancient as
Beowulf
, as enduring as the Gothic novel, and has not faded yet.

Another element of Layamon’s
Brut
, quite distinct from any French version, dwells in the elusive English notion of reticence or embarrassment. When Merlin reveals the secret of transporting the monoliths of Stonehenge:

Thus seiden Maerlin and seoththen he saet stille alse theh he wolde of worlden iwiten

“Thus said Merlin and then he sat still, as though he would go out of the world.” Similarly, when young Arthur is acclaimed as king:

Arthur saet ful stille

and then spoke a few cryptic words. This brevity or understatement, fading into silence, seems characteristic; it is present also in English medieval illumination where the pomp and circumstance of the continental courts are quite missing.