2007-05-10
Session 114: Layamon’s Brut: Historical and Political Contexts
Sponsor: International Layamon’s Brut Society
Reconsidering Layamon’s Angles and Saxons
Kenneth J. Tiller
Law and Arthur: Legal Literature in Layamon’s Brut
Scott Kleinman
Layamon’s Brut and the Barons’ War
Jennifer Miller
Two of these were the best papers I heard at the conference, so I’ll start the writeups with them. . . .
Tiller discussed continental Saxons, the sort who later produced the Sachsenspiegel, as echo for Laȝamon’s Saxons. I was too tired to follow his argument about the Saxons as Laȝamon’s ancestors, though I have a fine handout of textual excerpts—from Brook and Leslie’s edition, lines 7126-9, 7079-83, 7102-4 [sic probably for 7102-14], 7674-80, 5965-78; Wace’s Roman de Brut 6913-18, 7029-34.
Kleinman gave one of the strongest papers I’ve heard at Kalamazoo, and here I was too busy listening to write things down properly. He began by laying out the extant manuscripts that contain Old English legal codes and that were available to thirteenth-century Worcester priory: Harley 55 (A) (with glosses by the so-called Tremulous Hand), Cotton Nero E i, Cotton Claudius A iii, Corpus (Cambridge) 265, Cotton Nero A i. Kleinman argued that Laȝamon, whose name has been glossed “Lawman” for a few decades by scholars, was indeed interested in legal texts and sufficiently influenced by them to integrate bits into his history.
For lines 713-20 of the Brut, which include “i þes kinges friðe” and the rare word “deorfrið,” and lines 158-60, which play upon “hea der” and “fader,” Kleinman pointed us towards Anglo-Saxon Chronicle‘s Peterborough redaction and its verses on William the Conqueror’s death s.a. 1087. [Though Peterborough != Worcester, the E text of ASC written at Peterborough abbey is fairly closely related to Worcester’s D text.] Kleinman also discussed bleedover from Wulfstan’s legal texts, particularly re: “frið.” Very cool stuff.
Miller’s paper, also very strong, sought to resituate one of the two extant manuscripts of Laȝamon’s Brut as a pointed production meant to be circulated to readers in the know ca. 1265. [Her paper’s material was more familiar to me, and I was able to write while listening as well as (I hope) to fill in some of the gaps correctly now while typing up my notes. Note: Wace’s Roman de Brut is in Anglo-Norman; Laȝamon’s text is in English. Confusing titles. Two MSS: Caligula A ix, Otho C xiii.]
Without Laȝamon’s reference to Wace’s dedication of Roman de Brut to Eleanor of Aquitaine, one might almost think that Wace translated Laȝamon’s text, not vice versa, given the archaisms in the Caligula text. Though the Roman ends by citing 1155, the English text’s dedicatory reference takes the place of any information about Laȝamon’s own patronage, if he had any; without the ref we might not read the 1155 citation so literally.
[Miller commented on the London author of Leges Anglorum, also discussed by Ullmann, but here I definitely lost something.] Rosamund Allen wants to place Laȝamon’s text ca. 1199-1224[?], but the documentary support for this is dislocated temporally. [For one thing, both extant manuscripts were written about half a century later.] Re: that dedicatory ref, either (a) the Otho MS revises to omit Wace entirely from the prologue’s discussion of antecedent texts, or (b) Caligula is written sometime after 1250 in order to look backdated to 1215, the year of Magna Carta and next door to John’s death in 1216. The prologue’s specificity re: Wace and re: Laȝamon himself is odd—we’re told to focus upon them, and here we are still doing so….
Ca. 1265, shortly after the Barons’ War and Simon de Montfort’s defeat near Evesham [~15mi from Worcester], is when Miller would like to pin Caligula’s production. She walked us through a dense account of how Martley changed hands during the mid-thirteenth century—Martley includes Areley Kings, near which the Caligula text says Laȝamon wrote—starting with William de Frise, who died during the 1230s. William de Frise’s brother was the Hugh de Spenser who supported Simon de Montfort, and on 4 August 1265 Hugh and Roger St John fell with him, too, leading to the rise of a Worcestershire cult. Hugh’s relative John de Spenser was captured rather than killed, and he rebought Martley per the terms of the Dictum of Kenilworth. Upon John’s death Martley passed to another Hugh de Spenser, the one who with his son later interacted famously with Edward II and Isabella. The culmination of this activity: a de Spenser-inspired revitalization of an old book to suit current concerns. The Otho text, by contrast, evinces a distinct dehistoricization to suit new applications.