Abstract
In the absence of national language legislation in many Anglophone nations until very recently, it has been popular discourses linking nation and gender at first in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that have informed and reflected the monolingualist features of modern English. Most certainly fixed by the early nineteenth century, that belief in English language superiority offers an explanation for why modern histories of medieval origin as destined triumph of the language have been more in the making than any protectionist national language policies. In part at the expense of other languages, confidence in English has invited a celebration of its past; clearly, this self-congratulation had not also necessitated political guarantees of its future. In idealizing or rationalizing why Anglophones were more likely to borrow from other languages rather than acquire fluency in them, popular constructions of contact in the history of English could in many ways simply trump traditions often vexed by Chaucer’s French. But if linguistic nationalism could effectively recuperate the late-medieval history of English exposure to French by reading that intimate contact through the modern virtue of borrowing words from other languages, with what attitudes toward contact did late-medieval writers interpret the beginnings of their far less self-confident English?
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Note
The titles of these works appear in Latin on the grave monument Gower likely designed himself. On Gower’s multilingual style, see Tim William Machan, “Medieval Multilingualism and Gower’s Literary Practice,” Studies in Philology 103.1 (2006): 1–25.
R.F. Yeager, “Politics and the French Language in England during the Hundred Years’ War: The Case of John Gower” in Inscribing the Hundred Years’ War in French and English Cultures, ed. Denise N. Baker (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), pp. 127–57.
G.C. MacCauly, ed. The Complete works of John Gower. Volume 2. The Confessio Amantis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899–1902), p. 2.
On textual approaches to language contact in the poem, see: Siân Echard, “With Carmen’s help: Latin Authorities in the Confessio Amantis,” Studies in Philology 95.1 (1998): 1–40
Robert F. Yeager, “English, Latin, and the Text as ‘Other’: the Page as Sign in the Work of John Gower,” TEXT (Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship) 3 (1987): 251 [251-67].
Siân Echard and Clare Fanger, trans., The Latin Verses in the “Confessio Amantis”: An Annotated Translation (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1991), pp. 2–3.
Julia Marvin, ed. and trans., The Oldest Anglo-Norman Prose Brut Chronicle. An Edition and Translation (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), p. 134–5.
On classical traditions in Gower’s Latin, see A.G. Rigg and Edward S. Moore, “The Latin Works: Politics, Lament, and Praise” in A Companion to Gower, ed. Siân Echard (Cambridge, D.S. Brewer: 2004), pp. 153–64.
see R.F. Yeager, “‘Oure englisshe’ and Everyone’s Latin: The Fascilicus Morum and Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” South Atlantic Monthly 46.4 (1981): 41–53.
Derek Pearsall argues “Latin is the means by which Gower’s poem is turned into a Book.” “Gower’s Latin in the Confessio Amantis,” in Latin and Vernacular: Studies in Late-Medieval Texts and Manuscripts, ed. A.J. Minnis (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1989) p. 23 [13-25].
Medievalists have already examined how medieval communities similarly constitute themselves in terms of narrations of the past. For studies in medieval constructions of origin, consult: Nicholas Howe, Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)
Hugh A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History. Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1982).
For a discussion of unsuccessful attempts to prove Welsh texts were the likely inspiration for this source, see Robert Hanning, The Vision of History in Early Britain: From Gildas to Geoffrey of Monmouth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966).
see Neil Wright, “Geoffrey of Monmouth and Gildas,” Arthurian Literature 2 (1982): 1–33
James Campbell, Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (London: Hambledon Press, 1986), p. 222.
see Valerie Flint, “The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth: Parody and its Purpose. A Suggestion.” Speculum 54 (1979): 447–68.
R. William Leckie Jr. contends in his study that Geoffrey deploys Saxon history in ways which extend the dominion of British kings centuries past the arrival of the Saxons. The Passage of Dominion: Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Periodization of Insular History in the Twelfth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981).
For a discussion of Latin as the “serious” language of historical writing in this period, see Chris Given-Wilson, Chronicles. The Writing of History in Medieval England (London: Hambledon and London, 2004)
see Julia C. Crick, Historia Regum Britannie III. A Summary Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Geoffrey of Monmouth (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1989).
Antonia Gransden argues that “Geoffrey was a romance writer masquerading as a historian. No historian today would object to him if he had avowedly written a historical novel (like Sir Walter Scott) or a romance-epic (like Malory).” Historical Writing in England c. 550–1307 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 202.
See Hanning, The Vision of History in Early Britain from Gildas to Geoffrey of Monmouth and Partner, Serious Entertainments. The Writing of History in Twelfth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).
see also Nancy Partner, ed., Writing Medieval History (New York: Hodder Arnold, 2005).
Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britannie, ed. Neil Wright (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985), pp. 91–2
Neil Wright, ed., The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, vol. 2. The First Variant Version: A Critical Edition (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985), p. lxii.
see Michelle Warren, History on the Edge. Excalibur and the Borders of Britain 1100–1300 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 60–70.
Warren remarks that Geoffrey “signals the Saxons’ impending colonization [..] in Saxon speech.” History on the Edge, p. 49. Rather than discussing the diglossia colonization produces, Margaret Bridges focuses on thematic links between women and medieval cultural contact in Beowulf as well as Brut treatments of the Hengist episode which this chapter discusses. See Margaret Bridges, “The King, the Foreigner, and the Lady with the Mead Cup: Variations on a Theme of Cross-Cultural Contact,” Multilingua 18.2-3 (1999): 185–207.
The Saxon sympathies of the Bern manuscript seem clear too, Wright argues, in the finality it ascribes to Arthur’s death by recording “unequivocally that the national hero was dead” rather than simply recovering from his wounds in Avalon (§ 179). Wright, The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Vol. 1. Bern, Burgerbibliothek, M.S. 568 (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1984), p. lix.
see Helmut Nickel, “About Saxon Rebellion and the Massacre at Amesbury,” Arthuriana 16.1 (2006): 65–70.
The earliest verse redactions of the vulgate version mention rather than depict the signal. Gaimar’s L’Estoire des Engleis occludes “The Knight of the Long Knives” and restricts the single code-switch in this history to Latin, corpus domini. Anglo-Norman Text Society 14–16, ed. Alexander Bell (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1960), l. 6330.
Neil Wright, ed. and trans., The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Vol. V. Gesta Regum Britannie (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985), ll. 393–4.
Henry of Huntingdon’s Latin Historia Anglorum does not dramatize the “adventus Saxonum in Angliam,” referred to as De Adventu Anglorum in the incipit of the second book, as a matter of language contact. Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum. The History of the English People, ed. and trans. Diana Greenaway (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), ii.3, p. 85.
Wace, Roman de Brut. A History of the British, ed. and trans. Judith Weiss (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999), ll. 6959–60.
E.G. Stanley, “Lazamon’s Antiquarian Sentiments,” Medium Aevum 38 (1969): 23–37.
see Derek Pearsall, Old and Middle English Poetry. Volume 1 (London: Routledge, 1977), p. 80.
Lazamon, Brut or Hystoria Britonum, eds. and trans. W.R.J. Barron and S.C. Weinberg (Harlow: Longman Group, 1995), ll. 16–21.
On Lazamon developing the Saxon treachery at Amesbury as a leitmotif in at least six other occurrences in the poem, see James Noble, “Lazamon’s ‘Ambivalence’ Reconsidered,” in The Text and Tradition of Layamon’s Brut. Arthurian Studies 33, ed. Françoise Le Saux (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer 1994), pp. 173–4 [171-82].
Carole Weinberg, “Latin Marginal Glosses in the Caligula Manuscript,” in The Text and Tradition of Layamon’s Brut, p. 115 [103-20]. On Lazamon’s Norse affiliations, see Scott Kleinman, “The Æðelen of Engle: Constructing Ethnic and Regional Identities in Lazamon’s Brut,” Exemplaria 16.1 (2004): 95–130.
For the earliest argument supporting Lazamon’s distinction between Saxons before and after the donation of Gormund (ll. 14668–83 (C)), see J.J. Kirby, “Angles and Saxons in Lazamon’s Brut,” Studia Neophilologica 36 (1964): 51–62
see Noble, “Lazamon’s ‘Ambivalence’ Reconsidered,” pp. 181–2; and Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 86.
On this nationalist bias among Lazamon scholars, see Michael Donoghue, “Lazamon’s Ambivalence,” Speculum 65.3. (1990): 555–8 [537-63].
In addressing the field of Chaucer studies through a history of Chaucer reception, Stephanie Trigg has shown how his centuries-long invocation has constituted the construction and appropriation of Chaucer’s literary authority among both scholars and writers often in gestures of homosocial affinity. Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls. Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
Foundational for these fields is Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
see Jocelyn Wogan-Brown, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans, eds. The Idea of the Vernacular. An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).
Wendy Scase, “Tolkien, Philology, and ‘The Reeves’ Tale’: Towards the Cultural Move in Middle English Studies,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 24 (2002): 333 [325-34].
Likely connected with the priory at Bridlington, Pierre de Langtoft, whose writing survives exclusively in French, engaged the Brut tradition extending its narration to the reign of Edward II to which at least twenty manuscripts stand witness. On Langtoft’s omissions from Geoffrey’s Historia, see Robert Stepsis, “Pierre de Langtoft’s Chronicle: An Essay in Medieval Historiography,” Medievalia et Humanistica 3 (1972): 59 [51-73].
Pierre de Langtoft, Chronicle of Pierre de Langtoft, Vol. 1. ed. and trans. Thomas Wright (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1866–68), pp. 102–5.
On English songs in Langtoft’s chronicle as “discourse of abuse,” see Thea Summerfield, The Matter of Kings’ Lives. The Design of Past and Present in the Early Fourteenth-Century Verse Chronicles by Pierre de Langtoft and Robert Mannyng (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), p. 35.
Robert of Gloucester, The Metrical Chronicle, ed. William Aldis Wright, Roll Series 86 Vol. 1 (London: Spottiswoode, 1887), ll. 2652–9.
On the nature of second language acquisition among common law lawyers, see Paul Brand, “The Languages of Law in Later Medieval England,” in Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain. Ed. D.A. Trotter (Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 63–76.
see Mary Catherine Davidson, “Discourse Features of Code-Switching in Legal Reports in Late Medieval England,” in Opening Windows on Texts and Discourses of the Past. Pragmatics and & Beyond New Series 134, ed. Janne Skaffari, Matti Peikola, Ruth Carroll, Risto Hiltunen, and Brita Wårvik (John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam: 2005), pp. 343–51.
see William Rothwell, “Stratford atte Bowe Re-visited.” The Chaucer Review 36.2 (2001): 184–207.
On Robert of Gloucester’s legal and linguistic Anglo-Saxonism, see Sarah Mitchell, “Kings, Constitution and Crisis: ‘Robert ofGloucester’ and the Anglo-Saxon Remedy,” in Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 39–56.
Robert Mannyng of Brunne, The Chronicle, ed. Idelle Sullens, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies 153 (Binghamton: State University of New York, 1996), ll. 7739–78.
Clare A. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest. History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990).
A.G. Rigg, ed. A Book of British Kings 1200–1399 AD. Edited from British Library MSS Harley 3860, Cotton Claudius D.vii, and Harley 1808 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies, 2000), p. 4.
Diane Watt, Amoral Gower. Language, Sex, and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 25.
Whose Toungs are branches of the Latin tree, To perfect your odd Number, be not shy To take a Fourth to your society, That high Teutonick Dialect which bold Hengestus with his Saxons brought of old, Among the Britains when by knife and sword, He first of English did create the word; Nor is’t a small advantage to admit, So male a speech to mix with you, and knitt, Who by her Consonants and tougher strains Will bring more Arteries ‘mong your soft veins [..]. Cited in Elizabeth Sklar, “So Male a Speech: Linguistic Adequacy in Eighteenth-Century England”. American Speech 64.
see Peter Burke, Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 28.
Copyright information
© 2010 Mary Catherine Davidson
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Davidson, M.C. (2010). Hengist’s Tongue: A Medieval History of English. In: Medievalism, Multilingualism, and Chaucer. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-10204-0_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-10204-0_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-37139-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-10204-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)