Abstract
The representation of Wales in Medieval English culture was created as, and has remained, a discourse shaped from the repetition of (often artful) forgettings and historical errors, repeated to sustain complex and sometimes mutually contradictory ideological agendas. In the medieval period, these forgettings and errors had become crystallized into a consensus of accepted, albeit contradictory, propositions, significantly derived and certainly sustained by the texts of three of the most talented and influential mythmakers of the medieval period—Gildas, Bede, and Geoffrey of Monmouth. The four central elements of this consensus might be classified as the discourse of Britishness, the discourse of authority, the discourse of peripherality, and the discourse of unequal value.2 To varying degrees, the application of these four premises has determined both the constitutional status of Wales within Britain following the arrival of the Angles and Saxons, and the level of social and cultural respect accorded to Wales within British life ever since. The crucial importance of studying how such premises were formulated and promoted in the medieval period to describe the status of Wales as a conquered and colonized subject lies in the continuing persistence of these discourses, through a combination of intellectual inertia and the embedding of privilege, to the point where they have become all but invisible, but remain potent.
L’oubli et, je dirais même, l’erreur historique sont un facteur essentiel de la création d’une nation.1
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Notes
Ernest Renan, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” (Lecture at the Sorbonne, Paris, 1882), quoted in Ernest Gellner, Culture, Identity and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 6.
See W. A. Davenport, “Sex, Ghosts and Dreams: Walter Map (1135?–1210?) and Gerald of Wales (1146–1223),” in Writers of the Reign of Henry II, ed. Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 133–50.
The most substantial survey of this question is offered in The Arthur of the Welsh: The Arthurian legend in Medieval Welsh Literature, ed. Rachel Bromwich, A. O. H. Jarman, and Brynley Roberts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991).
Stephen Knight, review of Oliver Padel, Arthur in Medieval Welsh Literature (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), in Speculum 78 (2003): 241–42. Knight’s insistence that the figure of Arthur be read as “a construction of Latin discourse” offers a difference of emphasis rather than a contradiction of Padel, who concludes that Arthur enjoys “a place … hardly a major one” in Welsh heroic legend (Padel, Arthur in Medieval Welsh Literature, 60).
Michelle R. Warren, History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain 1100–1300, Medieval Cultures 22 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), xi.
Carpenter and Colls both raise the possibility that “such a conquest was [not] necessarily inevitable,” though without suggesting how the consequences of English ambition and overwhelming military superiority might have been averted; see David Carpenter, The Struggle for Mastery Britain 1066–1284, Penguin History of Britain, vol. 3 (London: Allen Lane Penguin, 2003), 525; Robert Colls, Identity of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 35–36.
R. W. Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe Vol. II: The Heroic Age (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 171. The importance of Southern’s analysis of post-Conquest historiography has been acknowledged by Michelle A. Warren: “As R. W. Southern first suggested, the cultural traumas of Norman colonization focused attention on the near and distant past, as both dominant and dominated groups defended their collective identities and sought therapeutic cures for alienation in history” (Warren, History on the Edge, xi).
Judith Weiss, “Thomas and the Earl: Literary and Historical Contexts for the Romance of Horn,” in Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Romance, ed. Rosalind Field (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), 1–14, at 1–6; see also M. Dominica Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and Its Background (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 99. If Weiss and Legge are correct in their suggestion that the romance was first presented in Dublin in 1170, in the presence of Henry II and an expeditionary force of Normans from West Wales who have in recent years been described as “Cambro-Normans,” that may explain the otherwise unexpected use of a (presumably) recognizable Welsh narrative model.
John Gower, Prologue to the Confessio Amantis, line 24, in The Works of John Gower: The English Works, ed. G. C. Macaulay, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), 1: 2, p. 2
Two harsh accounts of Chaucer’s attitude to the non-English inhabitants of Britain are offered by Cohen and Bowers: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Postcolonialism,” in Chaucer an Oxford Guide, ed. Steve Ellis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 448–62; John M. Bowers, “Chaucer after Smithfield: From Postcolonial Writer to Imperialist Author,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 53–66.
Simon Meecham-Jones, “English Gaufride and British Chaucer?” forthcoming.
Piers Plowman, Passus XV, lines 441–45; see William Langland: The Vision of Piers Plowman (B Text), ed. A. V. C. Schmidt, Everyman’s Library (London: Dent, 1978), 191.
Emily Steiner offers a reading of Passus XV as an exercise in “radical historiography” in which English history is shaped to offer a model of “historical exemplarity”; Emily Steiner, “Radical Historiography: Langland, Trevisa, and the Polychronicon,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 27 (2005): 171–212. One price to be paid, though, for this “definition of Englishness” is the need to obscure the distinct history of England’s neighbor.
London, British Library MS Harley 978, fol. 107; see C. L. Kingsford, ed. and trans., The Song of Lewes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1890).
R. R. Davies, Lordship and Society in the March of Wales 1282–1400 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 2.
Cantref the basic Welsh territorial administrative unit; see A. D. Carr, Medieval Wales (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), x.
The Text of the Book of Llan Dâv, ed. J. Gwenogvryn Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1893); E. D. Jones, “The Book of Llandaff,” National Library of Wales Journal 4 (1945–46): 123–57; Wendy Davies, “St Mary’s Worcester and the Liber Landavensis,” Journal of the Society of Archivists 4 (1972): 459–85; Wendy Davies, “Liber Landavensis: Its Construction and Credibility,” English Historical Record 88 (1973): 335–51; Wendy Davies, “Braint Teilo,” Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 26 (1975): 123–37; Wendy Davies, An Early Welsh Microcosm, Studies in History 9 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978); Wendy Davies, The Llandaff Charters (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 1979).
Domesday Book, Vol. 17, Herefordshire, ed. Frank and Caroline Thorn (Chichester: Phillimore, 1983), 181a.
Llinos Beverley Smith, “The Welsh and English Languages in Late-Medieval Wales,” in Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, ed. D. A. Trotter (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 7–21, at 12.
The contents of the manuscript are described by Daniel Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press and National Library of Wales, 2000), 82–83.
See Malcolm Thurlby, The Herefordshire School of Romanesque Sculpture (Logaston: Logaston Press, 1999).
Raymond Williams, “Marxism, Poetry, Wales,” interview with Poetry Wales 1977, repr. in Who Speaks for Wales? Nation, Culture, Identity, ed. Daniel Williams (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), 81–94, at 87.
E. J. Dobson, The Origins of Ancrene Wisse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 115–16.
A. T. E. Matonis, “The Harley Lyrics: English and Welsh Convergences,” Modern Philology 86.1 (1988): 1–21.
For example, Patricia Clare Ingham, Sovereign Fantasie: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Sylvia Federico, New Troy: Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
Ipomedon, poème de Hue de Rotelande (fin du XIIe siècle), ed. A. J. Holden, Bibliothèque Française et Romane, serie B: 17 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1979).
Introduction, Boundaries in Medieval Romance, ed. Neil Cartlidge (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 6–7.
At what point English people ceased to differentiate between the “Norman” elite and the English people has been a subject of much debate. Gillingham, Ian Short, and Hugh Thomas each suggest that the distinction is not considered meaningful by the middle decades of the twelfth century; see John Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000); Ian Short, “Tam Angli quam Franci: Self-Definition in Anglo-Norman England,” Anglo-Norman Studies 18 (1995): 153–75; Hugh M. Thomas, The English and the Normans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Chibnall offers a similar judgment: “Only in the later eleventh and early twelfth centuries was it possible to consider the colonisation and settlement as a movement of the ‘Norman people.’ By conquering England they had taken part in an enterprise that was to change their character and help to form a new ‘English people’”; Marjorie Chibnall, The Normans (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 86. An alternative reading is offered by Elaine Treharne, who argues that critics should reconsider “the obfuscation of the English and their literary output … by those historiographers of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries whose allegiance was to the Normans”; Elaine Treharne, “Periodization and Categorization: The Silence of (the) English in the Twelfth Century,” in New Medieval Literatures 8, ed. Rita Copeland, Wendy Scase, and David Wallace (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007): 248–75, at 254.
A full bibliography of the “Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle” is provided by Shepherd in his introduction to Turpines Story; see Stephen H. A. Shepherd, Turpines Story a Middle English Translation of the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle, EETS os 322 (2004), lvii–lix.
Robert A. Rouse, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005); Allen Frantzen and John D. Niles, Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997).
George Owen, A Description of Pembrokeshire, ed. H. Owen (London: Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1892).
G. W. S. Barrow, Feudal Britain (London: Edward Arnold, 1967), 366.
Kate Roberts, Traed Mewn Cyffion (Llandysul: Gomer Press, 2001); Kate Roberts, Feet in Chains, trans. John Idris Jones (Bridgend: Seren, 2002).
R. S. Loomis, Celtic Myth and Arthurian Romance (New York: Columbia Press, 1927); R. S. Loomis, ed., Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959).
Marvin L. Colker, Galteri de Castellione Alexandreis (Padua: In aedibus Antenoreis, 1978), Alexandreis 9: 542, 249.
Translation from R. Telfryn Pritchard, Walter of Châtillon the Alexandreis (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1986), 214.
John Davies, The History of Wales (London: Allen Lane Penguin, 1993), 106.
Chibnall, Normans, 65.
Amusing examples of the trope, and of the twists of logic needed to deploy it, can be found, for example, in Bernard Bolingbroke Woodward’s History of Wales, a highly detailed and extensive history dedicated to the purpose that “Wales may receive into her heart, such good as her subjugation by England was intended to convey to her”; Bernard Bolingbroke Woodward, The History of Wales from the Earliest Times, to Its Final Incorporation with the Kingdom of England (London: Virtue, 1853), 586. Though it is (presumably) inconceivable that critics or historians could seek to revive (without careful qualification) the imagery of pacification, it is still current in the descriptions of military analysts. Asprey uses the “pacification of Wales” as an example in his account of guerrilla warfare; Robert B. Asprey, War in the Shadows: The Classic History of Guerilla Warfare from Ancient Persia to the Present (London: Little Brown and Company 1994), 39–43.
Edmund Burke, Speech on Conciliation with America, ed. Hammond Lamont (Boston: Athenaeum Press, 1903), 42–46.
J. G. Edwards, “The Battle of Maes Madog and the Welsh Campaign of 1294–5,” English Historical Review 153 (1924): 1–12, at 12.
Gesta Stephani, ed. and trans. K. R. Potter, rev. R. H. C. Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), Book I, Chap. 7, 14–15.
The forfeiture of Owain’s lands is described more thoroughly in Brut y Tywysogion, ed. Thomas Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1955), 34.
The Letters of John of Salisbury, in Two Volumes, ed. W. J. Millor and C. N. L. Brooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 2: 106–9. In their translation, Millor and Brooke rendered Britones as “Welsh” which, though it might avoid some misunderstanding, distorts the nuance of John’s very conscious choice of word. It is, at best, a backhanded compliment by John, since their success is compared to the biblical example of latrunculos et seruos abiectos [petty thieves and low slaves] who rose against Solomon.
Pryce, “British or Welsh?” 116, 796. An alternative reading of the change is offered by Michael Richter, “The Political and Institutional Background to National Consciousness in Medieval Wales,” in Nationality and the Pursuit of National Independence, ed. T. W. Moody, Historical Studies 11 (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1978): 37–55.
The crucial role of the church in encouraging English expansionism is highlighted by Chibnall and Flanagan; Marjorie Chibnall, Anglo-Norman England, 1066–1166 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); Marie Therese Flanagan, Irish Society, Anglo-Norman Settlers, Angevin Kingship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
“Second generation” in the sense that it draws heavily on the model of William of Malmesbury’s Gesta; see William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum: The History of the English Kings, ed. and trans. R. A. B. Mynors, rev. R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998–99).
Potter and Davis, eds., Gesta Stephani, Book I, Chap. 7; The Chronicles of John of Worcester Vol. II, ed. R. R. Darlington and P. McGurk (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). William of Newburgh, Historia rerum Anglicarum, The History of English Affairs, Book I, ed. with trans. and commentary by P. G. Walsh and M. J. Kennedy (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1988); Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum: The History of the English People, ed. and trans. Diana Greenway (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
Dumville has convincingly shown that the identification of the author of the Historia Brittonum with the figure of Nennius, which appears in some (though not the earliest) of the texts must be discounted. However, since medieval writers believed the Historia to be the work of Nennius, the term Pseudo-Nennius to describe the author has been coined. D. N. Dumville, “‘Nennius’ and the Historia Brittonum,” Studia Celtica 10.11 (1975–76): 315–22; D. N. Dumville, “The Corpus Christi ‘Nennius,”’ Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 25 (1974): 369–80.
The nature of Angevin literature as a literature of justification is discussed in Simon Meecham-Jones, Introduction, in Meecham-Jones and Kennedy, Writers of Reign of Henry II, 1–24, at 11–22. A valuable study of the theme of exile in the romances is provided by Rosalind Field, “The King Over the Water: Exile-and-Return Revisited,” in Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England, ed. Corinne Saunders (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), 41–54.
Bartlett characterizes the process as a crucial element of the “aristocratic diaspora” across Europe from the tenth to the thirteenth century; Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (London: Allen Lane Penguin, 1994), 24–59.
R. R. Davies, Domination and Conquest: The Experience of Ireland, Scotland and Wales 1100–1300, Wiles Lectures 1988 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 4.
R. R. Davies, The King of England and the Prince of Wales, 1277–84: Law, Politics and Power (Cambridge: Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, 2003), 13.
Paul Strohm, Sir John Oldcastle: Another Ill-Framed Knight, The William Matthews Lectures (London: Birkbeck College London, 1997), 14.
Christopher Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 71.
Christopher Baswell, “King Edward and the Cripple,” in Chaucer and the Challenges of Medievalism: Studies in Honor of H. A. Kelly, ed. Donka Minkova and Theresa Tinkle (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003), 15–29, at 21.
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Meecham-Jones, S. (2008). Where Was Wales? The Erasure of Wales in Medieval English Culture. In: Kennedy, R., Meecham-Jones, S. (eds) Authority and Subjugation in Writing of Medieval Wales. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230614932_3
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