Gaimar, the Prose Brut and the Making of English History

1Medieval England has been described by Bernard Guenée, and with good reason, as a country where the passion for history was "fort vive"1. But it had not always been so. As James Campbell observes,

"The learned men of Anglo-Saxon England had left their country very ill-provided with histories... It is virtually certain that for large areas of Anglo-Saxon history the inquirer of c.1100 had no sources apart from Bede or the wretched annals of one or more versions of the [Anglo-Saxon] Chronicle".

2The English passion for history was, in effect, a creation of the twelfth century. In Campbell's words, "The greatest advances in the study and understanding of Anglo-Saxon history made before the nineteenth century were those of the twelfth. They were in large measure accomplished by historians working during the reigns of Henry I and Stephen: William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon and the author traditionally called Florence of Worcester, but whose name was probably John"2. Guenée called this same trio "une brillante cohorte d'érudits"·, in 1300 their work was still "au fondement même de la culture et de la conscience nationale des Anglais"3. In my view there was another early twelfth century English historian who, in his own way, was at least as influential as those three. This was Geoffrey Gaimar.

3Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis has long been recognised as one of the most remarkable and pioneering of all extant medieval historical works. Composed in about 1140, it is the earliest extant history written in French; it was composed in octosyllabic couplets, the classic verse form of the romance4. As conceived and originally executed, it was clearly a vast historical enterprise, beginning with the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece and continuingup to the accession of Henry I in 1100 AD. For the period up to the mid tenth century it comprises in large part a translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Gaimar performs the tour de force of turning the archaic prose of the Old English annals into a national history written in fashionable French verse5. From Edgar's reign (957-75) until the end of his history, Gaimar's source, or more probably sources (including, very likely, oral tradition) are unknown. But whatever his sources, what he produced was what A.R. Press has called "the earliest known and quite explicit formulation of an entirely new historiographical concept... a wholly secular and superbly self-possessed celebration of the world's delights, values and activities"6. These delights, values and activities had already, of course, been evoked in early troubadour lyrics, but in Gaimar they are fitted into an immense and entirely secular historical Framework, beginning with the Golden Fleece and ending with an evocation of the pleasures of life at the court of King Henry I. There, in Gaimar'swords, was "love and gallantry, and woodland sports and jokes, and feasts and splendour"7. Not all of Gaimar's Estoire still survives; only some 6500 lines of verse, covering the period after the arrival of the Saxons under Hengist. The now lost first part seems to have been largely based on Geoffrey of Monmouth and so it is traditionally known as L'estoire des Bretuns.8 At some stage this part was superseded by Wace’s Roman de Brut, the work which precedes the Estoire des Engleis in all four surviving manuscripts9. Given this relatively small number of manuscripts, it is not surprising that Gaimar has been regarded as having been less influential than his contemporaries who wrote in Latin: William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon and John of Worcester10. However in this paper I shall argue that Gaimar was much more influential than has generally been realised. I shall do so primarily on the basis of his direct impact on the Anglo-Saxon sections of the history of England that survives in far more manuscripts than any other, and indeed which was the first English history to be printed: the Brut.

4The prose Brut was originally composed c. 1300 in French by an anonymous author, perhaps a Londoner, probably a man. (For convenience, though there is no direct evidence of gender, I shall refer to the author as "he"). The Brut covered the centuries between the foundation of Britain by Brutus and the accession of Edward I in 1272. Many different continuations were then added and versions of it were translated into both English and then Latin. Its extraordinary success is shown by the fact that the count of extant manuscripts of all three version stands at present at more than 230: 15 Latin, more than 50 in French and 168 in English11. An English version was printed by Caxton in 1480 and then again no less than twelve times before its last printing in 1528. The Brut became "the nearest equivalent in medieval England to the Grandes Chroniques in France... and judging by the surviving number of copies it appears to have enjoyed a wider circulation in England than the Grandes Chroniques were to do in their own country"12. No other single work can give us a better idea of how English men and women in the fourteenth, fïfteenth and early sixteenth centuries viewed their past.

5Yet although the remarkable popularity of the Brut has long been perfectly familiar to historians of England, hardly any work has been done on the original text of c. 1300. Even historians of historical literature like John Taylor and Antonia Gransden have been more interested in the more or less contemporary accounts offered by the fourteenth and fïfteenth century continuations than in the original Brut's narrative of earlier history. In that sense, like historians of politics, they have tended to study the Brut primarily as evidence for events, rather than as a work of historical literature in its own right. Unquestionably for historians looking for reliable information about the distant past the Brut had little or nothing to offer. In the damning verdict of Friedrich Brie, the German scholar who edited an English version of the Brut at the start of this century, "als Ganzes genommen hat der Brute of England so viele Fehler als es fur ein geschichtliches Werk zu besitzen möglich ist"13. So the original French prose Brut has been neglected. There is still no edition of it, despite - or perhaps because of - its 50 manuscripts14. Virtually nothing has been done on its sources since Brie's sketch15.

6Here I shall concentrate on the Brut's Anglo-Saxon history, chapters 102-127 in the English version, the most neglected chapters in a neglected work.16 Whereas the First hundred chapters have at least attracted some slight attention from the many scholars who have succumbed to the spell of Geoffrey of Monmouth and King Arthur, the Brut's account of Anglo-Saxon history has been forgotten17. What is crystal clear, however, is that the author of the Brut knew Gaimar's Estoire (either as a whole or in part) and sometimes followed it very closely indeed18. If we assume, perhaps rashly, that the whole of the Estoire was available to him, then the Brut author was extremely selective, for his narrative of Anglo-Saxon history is much shorter than Gaimar's. From first 2000 Unes of Gaimar, he took virtually nothing except the story of Haveloc the Dane. This means that he omitted nearly all of the driest part of Gaimar, the translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle annals for the seventh, eighth and early ninth centuries. On the other hand he also took nothing at all of the last 1500 lines. (See below p.166). This means that he omitted some of Gaimar's liveliest passages, so his selection cannot have been made on purely literary grounds.

7He first became really interested in the Estoire at that point where Gaimar explained the production of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. According to Gaimar, so violent and lawless were the politics of the time (eighth and ninth centuries) that people were confused and hardly knew where they stood. In an attempt to get things straight, monks and canons of abbeys kept written records which were then collected together in the form of a big book kept chained at Winchester and for which King Alfred was responsible. Here the Brut simply takes Gaimar's verse and renders it into French prose19. For the next 25 chapters Gaimar remained the dominant influence. In chapter 103 the Brut follows him in telling the story of Buem Butsecarl20. This led to the Danish invasions and the heroic résistance of "good King Alfred" (chapters 104-9). In summing up Alfred's achievement Gaimar includes a passage further re-inforcing the notion of Alfred as the progenitor of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

Nul mieldre clerc de lui n'esteit
Kar en s'enfance apris l'aveit
Il fist escrire un livre engleis
Des aventures e des leis
E des batailles de la terre
E des reis ki firent guerre
E meint livre fist il escrire,
U li bon clerc vont suvent lire21.

8Although Alfred's contribution to English literature was well known to scholars at the time - William of Malmesbury, e.g., has much to say on the subject - Gaimar is the first writer to credit the king with a key role in the making of the Chronicle itself. Here too he was emphatically followed by the Brut.

"The good king Alfred was a good clerk and had many books made. And one book he made of English, of adventures of kings and of battles that had been fought in the land"22.

9When the Brut went out of fashion in the later sixteenth century, then out with it went the notion of Alfred as the maker of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle23. Not until the later nineteenth century was Gaimar's idea revived - and presumably this was, in part at least, a consequence of the earliest printings of the relevant parts of Gaimar's text, first by Henry Petrie in 1848, then by Thomas Wright in 185024. In 1862 Thomas Hardy argued the case for Alfred, and he was then followed by two of the greatest Victorian scholars, William Stubbs and Charles Plummer. Both Hardy and Plummer acknowledged that in attributing it to Alfred's initiative they were following in Gaimar's footsteps25.

10Still following Gaimar closely, the Brut's account of Alfred's descendants culminates (chapters 112-13) with the reign of King Edgar. Of Edgar, Gaimar wrote:

Cil tint la terre cum emperere
En sun tens amendai la terre,
Partuit ert pais, n'ert nul guere.
Il sul regnot sur tuz les reis
E sur Escoz e sur Gualeis
Unc puis que Artur s'en fud alez
Nen ot nul reis tel poestez.26

11Gaimar was the first, but by no means the last, to mention Edgar in the same breath as Arthur, and it may be significant for the connexion between the two kings which he established that when Arthur's body came to be "found" later in the twelfth century, it was precisely at Glastonbury where Edgar was, in fact, buned27. The Brut retained the image of an imperial and Arthur-Iike Edgar28 - hardly surprising, given that Gaimar's comparison between Arthur and Edgar in terms of their overlordship over Scotland and Wales would have had an obvious contemporary resonance c.1300 at the time of Edward I's wars against the Welsh and Scots.

12The bulk (330 out of 408 lines) of Gaimar’s account of Edgar's reign is taken up with something entirely different, the story of the beautiful Elftroed and of the king's love for her. In this story we have what Press characterized as the "earliest known imaginative realization of a courtly love story", the first French romance, and one in which that notorious troublemaker, (the troubadours' bête noire), the losengier makes an appearance. When Edgar and Elftroed married it was to the intense disapproval of the most powerful holy man of tenth century England, Saint Dunstan. But their love was such says Gaimar, followed by the Brut, that they cared not a jot29.

13Gaimar's next subjects were the renewal of the struggle with the Danes in the reign of Aethelred the Unready, then the reigns of King Cnut and his sons. All this, in Gaimar's view, led to a deep hatred between Englishmen and Danes. Again the Brut (caps 115-124) simply followed Gaimar in train of thought and language30. One of Gaimar's recurring themes is the notion of an ancestral right which the Danish kings claimed to have to the throne of England. It was this theme which lay behind some of his most memorable episodes-the tale of Haveloc, vv.45-815, (used in chapters 91-2) and the tale of Buern Bocard, Osbright and Aelle, vv. 2593-2829 (used in cc. 103-4)31. It was this claim to which Gaimar alluded when he introduced the subject of King Swein's invasion:

En icel tens reis Suain vint
Pur chalengier e pur cunquerre

14The Brut caught the allusion and expanded it32. Clearly the notion of a Danish claim to the English throne was one of the most memorable features of Gaimar's history.

15Two passages, both written more than a hundred years before the Brut, lead to the same conclusion and may enable us to identify two of Gaimar's earlier readers. The first of these passages takes us to the heart of Henry II's government. According to Richard FitzNigel's account of the origins of Danegeld in the Dialogue of the Exchequer, the Danes attacking England came not only to plunder but "quia aliquid sibi de antiquo iure in eiusdem regni dominatione vendicabunt, sicut Britonum plenius narrai historia". This allusion to a work in which the Danish claim figured and was known as a "History of the Britons" suggests that Richard FitzNigel in the 1170s knew Gaimar's history in its original, complete form before its British section was replaced by Wace's version.33 The second passage was composed in the 1190s by William of Newburgh. It describes how when King Philip Augustus of France married Ingeborg of Denmark what he wanted from her as her dowry was "antiquum ius regis Dacorum in regno Anglorum".34

16The Brut (chapters 125-7) continues to follow Gaimar's narrative closely until the reconciliation between earl Godwin and King Edward the Confessor in 1052. Then no more. As already noted, Gaimar's last 1500 Unes left no impression on the Brut. In consequence the Brut's version of the Norman Conquest is entirely different from Gaimar's. Gaimar emphasises the rôle of Hereward the Wake, criticises William the Conqueror and gives us a remarkable portrait of William II (Rufus) as the model of a chivalrous king, light-hearted, brave and generous. As Sir Richard Southern noted, in Gaimar's version "the romantic and chivalrous heroes of the story were Anglo-Saxons, who faced their last crafty and treacherous enemy in William I"35. The English resistance fighter Hereward the Wake is un gentilz hom, his companions are chevalier who act que prodom et que curteis36. Antonia Gransden rightly decribed Gaimar's Estoire as a translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle "filled out with legends with the obvious intention of entertaining the nobility. It presents Anglo-Saxon history seen through the eyes of romance".37 But what can we infer about a nobility which was entertained by this kind of romance? Presumably that this was the kind of nobility which found in Gaimar a way of coming to terms with their présent situation as a francophone social élite in a country with an old English past. By 1140, in other words, the gentlemen of mid-twelfth century England, and their wives, Gaimar's patrons and his audience, thought of themselves as English, and this despite the fact that they spoke French (as well as English), and despite their French styles and manners38. With predecessors as chivalrous and courtly as Hereward and his followers, they could feel at home in England.

17In a sense then Gaimar was part of the process by which people in the twelfth century recovered their English past. One part of this movement has been beautifully analysed by Southern. As he pointed out, William of Malmesbury, John of Worcester and Eadmer of Canterbury were Benedictines writing primarily for a learned and monastic audience which wanted to preserve or recover its old place in a new world39. But the movement for the recovery of the past was more than just a monastic one. Henry of Huntingdon, archdeacon, canon of Lincoln, dedicated his history to a bishop of Lincoln who was deeply immersed in secular matters40. Even more explicitly secular in outlook was Gaimar, writing in the vernacular and for the lay élite, women as well as men. In the remarkable épilogue to his history, he tells us that it was commissioned by Constance, wife of Ralf FitzGilbert, and he then mentions seven other contemporaries: King Henry I, Queen Adeliza, Robert earl of Gloucester, Walter Espec, lord of Helmsley, a poet called David, Walter archdeacon of Oxford, and Nicholas de Trailly, a canon of York41. If we consider this list and then add to it an Augustinian canon (William of Newburgh) and a senior government official (Richard FitzNigel, treasurer of England and later bishop of London), it all suggests that Gaimar appealed to a cross-section of landowning society, both lay and clerical, officials, courtiers and magnates.

18If this is correct then Gaimar appealed to exactly the same kind of audience as that which was to possess copies of and /or read the Brut42. This is, anyway, one implication of the way the Brut responded to Gaimar, took over Wholesale so much of Gaimar's text and so many of his value judgements. This means that this kind of audience already existed in England somewhat earlier-perhaps as much as 150 years earlier-than is sometimes supposed or implied by students of the genre of vernacular history43. In other respects 1300 was, of course, different. By 1300 the traumas of the Norman Conquest were very ancient history; the need to come to terms with them was long since gone. The Brut never even mentions Hereward. It présents the Conqueror in a very positive light, as a lord who treated the English with generosity; by contrast his son Rufus appears as a wicked and destructive king44. By 1300 there was evidently no need to challenge what was by then a well-established and venerable monastic view of these two kings.

19If we stand back and look at the Brut's Anglo-Saxon history as a whole, we can see that its basic pattern as well as some of its most characteristic touches are derived from Gaimar. Both Gaimar and the Brut present the early Anglo-Saxon centuries as an anarchic period of violence and lawlessness. Here, for example, is Gaimar on late eighth and early ninth century conditions.

En icel tens tel ert la lei
Ki force aveit si feiseit guerre
A sun veisin tolit sa terre45.

20To judge by the language used by William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon when commenting on early Anglo-Saxon history, Gaimar's was the natural reaction of a twelfth-century reader of some of the early entries in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle46. But the Brut had not read the Chronicle and his perception of the flavour of those centuries came straight from Gaimar. "It befell so that ail the kings in that time that were in the land... every one warred upon each other; and they that were mightiest took the land of them were most feeble". Since the Brut used these phrases twice over, once in chapter 96 and then again in chapter 102, Gaimar's perception of early Anglo-Saxon history had clearly made a deep impression47. In chapter 102 he used it, as Gaimar had, to introduce the notion of Alfred as the maker of the Chronicle, and hence of the principal narrative of English history from the 730s (after Bede) until the mid-twelfth century.

21After Alfred's reign, in place of the previous anarchic struggle between a number of small kingdoms, both Gaimar and the Brut assume the existence of a united English people, a kingdom of England. Their main theme becomes the struggle for control of that kingdom between Alfred's descendants and the Danes. Thus in a double sense King Alfred is presented as a pivotal figure in the making of English history. This is not how he had been perceived by historians writing before Gaimar. For William of Malmesbury, for example, great though Alfred was, he was neither the maker of the Chronicle nor was his reign the pivot of Anglo-Saxon history48. But what the Brut, the most popular and unreliable of late medieval English histories, read into Gaimar was precisely that: in Anglo-Saxon history, in both senses of the word, Alfred was the key figure. This is also, of course, the basic pattern of Anglo-Saxon history as seen by many of the most reliable of twentieth-century historians! Gaimar and one of his readers have a lot to answer for. Their version of Anglo-Saxon history proved to be one which was found memorable and has been remembered down the centuries49. History, after all, in the words of 1066 and All That, "is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself'50. When the Brut was translated into English, it became the first known history to be written in English prose after the mid-twelfth century demise of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Since Gaimar's Estoire was itself in large part a translation of the Chronicle, Gaimar and the French prose Brut constitute important links in a remarkable historiographical chain which stretches all the way from the court of King Alfred to the printing shop of William Caxton-and beyond.