Here to Engelonde

Around the turn of the thirteenth century, Laʒamon (modernized as Layamon, and often called Lawman) completed a history of the Britons in English, known as Hystoria Brutonum or simply Brut. A few decades later, a man downriver (called the “Otho redactor” after the manuscript that preserves the text) produced a second Briton history in English.⁸ The Otho redactor may have revised Laʒamon’s text or worked from an exemplar similar to the source of the extant text; it is remotely possible that one “ambitious” historian wrote both.⁹ Whatever chain of events led to the two surviving texts, the Otho redactor clearly modulates the historical vision of “Laʒamon’s text.” Indeed, Elizabeth Bryan has shown that he sought to diminish Rome’s role in Insular history.¹⁰ I will therefore treat him as a distinct author. Although he has often been accused of “misunderstanding” or rejecting Laʒamon’s purpose,¹¹ I find rather that he amplifies his source’s cultural orientation, much like the First Variant redactors: he generally, although not rigorously, focuses more narrowly than Laʒamon on the present place and time.

The Brut’s first lines tell all that is known of Laʒamon’s biography:

An preost wes on leoden. Laʒamon wes ihoten.

he wes Leouenaðes sone. liðe him beo Drihten.

He wonede at Ernleʒe. at æðelen are chirechen.

vppen Seuarne staϸe. sel ϸar him ϸuhte.

on-fest Radestone. ϸer he bock radde.

(LI. 1–5)

[A priest was of the leoden, Laʒamon he was called. He was Leovenath’s son (mercy on him, by God). He lived at Areley, at a noble church upon Severn’s bank (he thought it was good there), right beside Radstone; there he read books.]

Even before readers learn the author’s name, leoden fuses his ethnicity with the landscape, for the multivalent term refers to both land and people. The geographical and genealogical fragments that follow trace the contours of Laʒamon’s leoden in Worcestershire. The church at Areley Kings still sits just north of Worcester on the Severn’s west bank, atop a prominent hill with a commanding view of the waterway. The church depended on the nearby priory at Martley, itself connected to Normandy. From Areley, then, Laʒamon could engage in a broad range of cultural contacts.¹² Indeed, the Brut’s first lines state that he traveled far and wide collecting sources (1. 14); he may even have had contact with his Welsh neighbors.¹³ Even in Worcester and the surrounding monastic libraries, he would have found a variety of historical and literary materials.¹⁴

Apart from reading books, Laʒamon probably performed devotional services. As a parish or household priest, his church may have been the site of the community meetings that Rodney Hilton describes as typical in the West Midlands (149ff). Finally, according to the Otho redactor, Laʒamon wrote his own book, for a “gode cniϸte” (good knight) (1. 3). Allen has suggested that this patron may have been William de Frise, who took over the manor at Martley in 1204.¹⁵ Whatever its patronage, if any, the Brut’s audience was clearly identified with the West Midlands and probably with the middle and lower social orders.¹⁶ In all likelihood, then, Laʒamon addressed people concerned with the local economy and likely to fear and admire the powerful magnates represented in the Brut. Laʒamon includes, for example, many details of household and manorial concern.¹⁷ Elsewhere, he laments treason, condemns fratricidal wars, and deeply regrets the human suffering caused by colonial aggression.¹⁸ Conversely, he admires common sense, and can even praise the traitorous Mordred when he sensibly tries to protect himself.¹⁹ Fundamentally, Laʒamon values a strong king, able to fight successfully against threats to his authority.²⁰ These are the values of a settled society, subject to threat from within but stabilized by law, strong leadership, and economic generosity.

After locating himself on the local landscape, Laʒamon turns to a detailed historiographical descriptio. He presents the text as the product of a multilingual translation from three books he has conquered (“biwon”) on his travels: Saint Bede’s English book, Saint Albin and Brother Austin’s (Augustine) Latin book, and a book made by Wace, a French clerk (11. 15–21). These books represent the cultural genealogy of Laʒamon’s history, as well as a radical cultural reconquest written into bookskin (“boc-felle”). Looking over this historiographical “territory” (Otter 90), Laʒamon forcefully (“ϸrumde”) sets together indigenous English, international Latin, and colonial French into English rhythmic verse. The descriptio implies a social convergence of native Anglophones, educated Latin clerks, and the ruling class of Francophones (invoked directly by the remark that a copy of Wace’s book was given to Henry’s Queen Eleanor [11. 23–28]. These books reflect the multiethnic, multilingual society of post-Conquest Britain, increasingly unified toward the end of the twelfth century by the common use of English.²¹ The textual composition itself, as Elizabeth Salter has amply demonstrated, manifests a formal hybridity shaped by English alliteration, French rhyme, and Latin rhetoric; the English itself mixes modern syntax with archaic vocabulary.²² Within this hybrid heritage, English is so “common” for Laʒamon that he never offers the conventional apology for writing in the vernacular.²³ Laʒamon in fact draws almost exclusively on Wace’s French book (which I discuss in chapter 5): he thus settles English directly and confidently in the place previously occupied by colonial ambition.

Tellingly, the Otho redactor redraws the boundaries of the Brut’s conquest of history by altering its textual genealogy. The redactor casts Albin and Augustine as independent authors and eliminates reference to Wace, so that the Brut derives from one English book and two Latin books (11. 16–19). These three saintly historians render Briton history always already English and Christian: from this perspective, the Brut does not repossess the past, it continues an established and sanctified English tradition. Indeed, working from Laʒamon’s text, the Otho redactor received an already Englished Briton history:

Feϸere he nom mid fingres. and wrot mid his honde.

and ϸe soϸe word sette togedere.

and ϸane hilke boc tock us to bisne.

(LI. 26–28)

[Feather he took with fingers, and wrote with his hand, and the true words set together, and the same book gave us for a model.]

The redactor explicitly presents the text as modeled on an already seamless English narrative, distinguishing he (Laʒamon) from us (the Otho redactor). The redactor completes the Englishing of Briton historiography by eliminating Laʒamon’s reference to Henry’s Queen Eleanor: for him, it may have evoked Henry III and his queen Eleanor of Provence, renowned and resented for bringing her French relatives to England. The redactor’s revisions thus insulate Briton history from foreign influences.

Laʒamon concludes the prologue with a request that each worthy man (“alcne æðele mon”) who reads the book and learns its runes (“leornia ϸeos runan”) pray in the name of God for the souls of his family (his father, his mother, and himself) (11. 29–35). The book’s runes, its secret or hidden meanings, can only be “learned” through repeated reading and reflection. This kind of ethical reading leads to permanent memory, or literal incorporation.²⁴ Laʒamon thus asks male readers to repeat both prayers and history, thereby maintaining the memory of the Britons and of Laʒamon himself; for Bryan, these passages invite readers into an extended community of text-makers.²⁵ Within the Brut, Aethelstan (the first English king) models ethical runing when he renames the island’s towns “on Sexisce runen” (with Saxon runes) (1. 15974). Prayer, reading, and translation all manifest English-owned history; they constitute the subjectivity of Christian Englishmen. In this way, Laʒamon proposes a pedagogy of history: by learning to repeat and create their own “Sexisce runen,” readers perpetuate a refrain that marks out the territory of English culture. Their “runing,” in the sense of private conversation, protects historical knowledge within the ever-increasing bounds of English speech. Although the Otho redactor eliminates the reference to the runes (and to Laʒamon’s parents), his text itself responds to Laʒamon’s plea for deep reading: the Otho Brut manifests an extended written “runing,” proof that the redactor learned the lessons of Laʒamon’s historiographical pedagogy.

The pedagogy of runes becomes concretely territorial when Laʒamon describes Marius’s stone. Laʒamon characterizes Marius’s decision to commemorate his victory over the Picts as “sællech” (remarkable, marvelous) and the stone itself as “sælcuð.” The stone is inscribed with “sælcuðe run-stauen” (marvelous, unusual runes)²⁶ that ally the stone with the “boc-felle” that supports Laʒamon’s own runes. The stone, which will stand until the end of the world (“ʒet he ϸer stoneð. / swa he deð al swa longe. swa ϸa woreld stondeð”), materializes the permanence of the historical memory created by readers who repeat the runes’ refrain—as indeed, we continue to do. To read the Brut is in a sense to accept a partial identification with the Christian English masculine subject, an identification that disrupts the stability of historical, religious, ethnic, and gender differences.

Some decades after Laʒamon completed his Brut, and probably around the time the Otho redactor completed his, Robert of Gloucester pioneered another kind of historical pedagogy. Robert has never been considered a pivotal figure of medieval historiography, when he has been considered at all. Literary critics and historians alike have passed over his twelve-thousand line metrical Historia rythmis Anglicanis as unremarkable verse and derivative historiography. Yet Robert succeeded where others before him had failed: he constructed a continuous vernacular account of Insular history, beginning with the Trojans and ending with events of his own day. When Wace (in the Roman de Rou) and Benoît de Sainte-Maure (in the Chronique des ducs de Normandie) attempted histories of similar scope for Henry II in the twelfth century, they barely brought their narratives out of the eleventh century. On one level, their historiographical failures witness the ongoing nature of the colonial project their narratives sustained. Even earlier, Gaimar seems to have conceived a similarly comprehensive history, from Jason and the Golden Fleece to William II. He forecloses connections to the present, however, by referring readers elsewhere for Henry I’s reign.²⁷ Robert’s post-colonial vision, by contrast, can close the book on colonial history while also addressing the present.

Even less is known of “Robert” than of “Geoffrey” or “Laʒamon.” The narrator says only that Robert, who first made the book, had great fear during the battle of Evesham (11. 11746–50). Robert was probably a clerk; in Gloucester, he could have served in one of several religious institutions. Indeed, it may not be pure fantasy to identify him with “Robert the clerk,” bailiff for 1273 and 1274.²⁸ The text now known as Robert’s may have been produced by more than one person; nonetheless, the result is ideologically consistent and clearly designed as a whole.²⁹ The narrator is very conscious of the dynamics of textual transmission, both oral and written, and often tells us what we will hear or what we have already read.³⁰

The only direct suggestion of the chronicle’s audience occurs when Robert declines to elaborate Merlin’s prophecies because they are “derk” (dark) to “simplemen” unless they are well educated (“bot we were ϸe bet in lore”) (11. 2819–21). His concern for the poor and his frequent moralizations indicate a popular rather than learned piety. Robert observes, for example, that there would be less adultery if all “luϸer holers” (evil whoremongers) were punished like Locrinus.³¹ The assenting recipients of this lesson are broadly cast as lawful, Christian Englishmen. The fact that Robert translates Latin into English also suggests popular listeners. They may have been clerks, although the chronicle’s language and politics invite the broadest possible reception. The lesson of Arviragus’s “betrayal,” for example, neatly justifies baronial revolt: mastery does not belong to a king but to the knights who shed their blood for him; a king should not be too stern with them.³² While the chronicle’s form invites a socially diverse audience, its geographical assumptions are more limited: the audience resides “here of ϸis souϸ lond” (1. 4899), probably near Gloucester. Indeed, Robert narrates the earldom’s creation at length and vividly describes the city’s walls and gates during the battles between Henry III and the barons.³³

From Gloucester, Robert takes possession of the Briton past as local English history. He conquers the past silently, never naming sources and never apologizing for writing in English. Robert did, however, work from several Latin sources, including Geoffrey of Monmouth, William of Malmesbury, and Henry of Huntingdon, precisely the sources of Saxon history that Geoffrey recommends.³⁴ Robert’s English text dismisses these Latin authorities, as well as the differences among them. He transforms the inherited shapes of English history by inserting anecdotes, moralistic conclusions, and legends throughout. His copy of the Historia probably contained elements from the First Variant, which links his narrative textually to Welsh post-colonialism.³⁵ Like the Welsh, he approaches Insular history as if his audience already owned it. He shares this proprietary vision with Wace (a predecessor who ratified colonial ambition), the Welsh translators of the Brutieu (probable contemporaries), and the Otho redactor (another probable contemporary).³⁶ The methodological similarities among these historians witness the intimate resemblances generated by colonial contacts, their differences the radical disruptions of those same contacts.

Unlike his contemporaries and predecessors, Robert makes explicit the analogy between distant and recent conquests implied in Geoffrey’s Historia by extending the Historia’s territory into the thirteenth century. His chronicle creates a narrative inquietatione similar to Geoffrey’s own expansion of Briton chronology. Here, the boundaries of the Briton past do not stand stille but take on an entirely new Anglicanis shape. By writing toward the present, and in English, Robert communicates both the measurable distance of historical events and their direct connection to the present. By comparing Robert of Gloucester with Laʒamon, rather than with his successor and northern compatriot Robert Manning, as Thorlac Turville-Petre has done, this English past acquires distinct regional contours—not the regionalism of “core values”³⁷ but an identity shaped in intimate contact with England’s western edge.

The most striking sign of post-colonial settlement in English versions of Briton history is the pervasive use of deictic references to this land (ϸis lond, ϸis kine-londe) and here. Transitioning from Rome to Britain, for example, Laʒamon concludes: “ϸus hit ferde ϸære. wurs hit ferde here” (Thus it fared there, worse it fared here) (1. 5583); Robert remarks that the Trojans “come here to englelond” (1. 475). These practices imply an audience grounded on English soil, thoroughly identified with the topography and history surrounding the place of narration. Here thus refers to both the land and the book. The continuity of identification is strongest in Robert’s case, since events in Brutus’s time occur in the same places as those of the 1260s. Nonetheless, Laʒamon and Robert settle the Insular landscape for the English in two very different ways: where Laʒamon overlooks landscape (much like Wace), Robert devotes himself to its quantification.

Laʒamon reinforces the ambiance of English place by repeatedly pairing lond with leod, the term for people that collocates ethnicity, political association, land, and language; lond itself sometimes designates the people of the land.³⁸ Most important for patterns of boundary formation, Laʒamon reports that Brutus’s three sons divide the “leod” (1. 1053) (tellingly, the Otho redactor substitutes “londes”). By conflating land and people, Laʒamon envisions a settled English countryside that overtly dismisses the colonial pairing of gauster and gaainer (waste and win) that he inherited from Wace. Meanwhile, however, Laʒamon follows Wace in overlooking the details of Insular jurisdiction. In Laʒamon’s hands, the dismissal of the culturally charged border supports English (rather than Norman) settlement. Despite his proximity to the Severn, for example, he maintains Wace’s description of Habren’s death in the Avon River (11. 1243–53). Laʒamon also follows Wace in dismissing Geoffrey’s ambivalence toward the beautiful landscape. Diana’s description of the island as “wunsum” (winsome, winable) (1. 618) comes closest to evaluative judgment; Brutus “beholds” the contents of the landscape but does not describe them (11. 1003–8). And like Wace, Laʒamon does not have Cadwallader describe the land as he sails into exile (1. 15900). Laʒamon, however, turns Wace’s colonial possessiveness to post-colonial ends. By repeatedly describing land as held in the hond (hand)³⁹ of successful rulers, Laʒamon dismisses Wace’s feudal terminology (honor or fief), quantifying dominion (it fits in one man’s hand) and enhancing the ruler’s personal power (he holds, or beholds, the entire land).

Robert, for his part, takes post-colonial quantification literally, with an expanded descriptio of England (drawn from Geoffrey, Bede, and others). Over nearly two hundred lines, Robert seeks to prove the thesis of the first line, “Englond his a wel god lond” (England is a very good land), by naming and counting rivers, islands, towns, kingdoms, bishoprics, archbishoprics, shires, natural resources, marvels, and roads. The enumeration of the island’s topographical and governmental structures performs a complete English settlement before the very first word of Trojans or Britons: Englelonde literally comes before Bruteine (which refers only to Brutus’s era).⁴⁰ The very first events of Insular history thus take place on recognizably English land, and the first building projects create recognizably English architecture: the Trojans find the prologue’s landscape (11. 470–89); Lucius founds its episcopal sees (11. 1659–73); ships move along a Severn that flows from the origins of Insular time (11. 11610–16). Robert thus creates a pedagogy of history, not as a refrain of runes but as a counting of facts. Ultimately, the quantification of Insular space belongs to the domain of writing, for the descriptio concludes: “ϸat englelond is londe best. as his is iwrite” (England is the best land, as it is written) (1. 189). As Englelond becomes a text inseparable from the Historia rythmis Anglicanis, Insular history becomes post-colonial.

The wrestling match between Corineus and Goemagog offers a powerful early representation of post-colonial settlement. Laʒamon offers the most eroticized encounter in the tradition, as the two giants meet “breoste wið breoste” (breast against breast) (1. 939), and struggle so hard against each other that in their leaning, they seem about to lie down (1. 942). The critical blow comes when Goemagog pushes Corineus over backward with “his breoste” (1. 951). With the breast as weapon, the match begins and nearly ends in the erogenous zone. The encounter’s heightened eroticism seems to recognize and admit the native’s desirability. In the process, Goemagog ceases to embody the boundary between indigenous and colonizing desire. Robert likewise weakens the natives’ difference by referring to them as “vorbriode men” (1. 490): although “disfigured,” they are still more human than monster.

The absence of colonial boundary issues surfaces vividly as Corineus heaves the evil giant breast over the cliff. Whereas Wace maintains Geoffrey’s portrayal of the bloodstained water (11. 1165–66), Laʒamon’s Goemagog never reaches the ground: “ϸat al ϸe feond to-barst. ær he to folde come. / & ϸus ϸe hæʒe scaðe. ferde to helle” (The fiend burst before he came to the ground, and thus the great miscreant went to hell) (11. 962–63). For both Geoffrey and Wace, the native’s destruction in the border between land and sea constitutes the Insular boundary as a site of colonial domination: the vanishing bones of Laʒamon’s Goemagog, by contrast, signify the border’s invisibility. Civilization here is not founded on the destruction of the almost-same, but on the elimination of the settler’s own disruptive side. In Laʒamon’s Brut, Goemagog’s expulsion indeed goes right to the heart of the Trojan psyche, for his defeat makes Brutus’s men all happy “on heora breost-ϸunke” (in their breasts) (1. 969). As the evil breast vanishes without a trace, the settlers’ breasts fill with goodness; they become the leod of the lond. Robert likewise weakens Goemagog’s relation to boundaries, as the body is only dismembered among the rocks without mention of stains (11. 524–25): here, Goemagog becomes the disfigured man that he already was.

Following the wrestling match, Laʒamon adapts Wace’s colonial vision with post-colonial confidence, displacing boundaries in numerous ways. Architecture, for example, does not represent the progression toward stability that it does in Geoffrey’s Historia since Laʒamon does not invest in the thematics of navigable waterways. In the case of Belinus’s roads, Geoffrey establishes a vivid image of stable jurisdiction independent from navigable water, and Wace (following the First Variant) describes a pragmatic solution to difficult travel across marshy land. Laʒamon, however, does not explain the motive: he has Belinus simply invent the law of peace for the roads, literally “laid on them” as a final surface (“ϸa leide ϸa king heom laʒen on”) (1. 2415). The roads, then, do not solve legal or transit problems; rather, they create the possibility of legal use and easy travel (Laʒamon calls the one from Southhampton “swiðe hendi” [very handy] [1. 2412]). Robert weakens the roads’ significance even further by merely noting in the descriptio that they are useful remnants of “ϸe olde kinges” that allow travel throughout the land (11. 169–79). Not only does he not identify Belinus as their architect, he subsequently skips over his reign entirely (11. 1015–18). Since he narrates both Leir and Gurguit reigns in expanded form, “abbreviation” alone cannot account for this radical revision of regnal chronology. Robert’s post-colonial gaze purposefully overlooks one of the emblematic reigns of Briton colonialism, sidestepping the imperial theme and the boundary pressures that attend it.

The representations of Belinus’s gate and Hengist’s castle also elide relations between architecture and borders. For Geoffrey, both structures engage the dynamics of the edge, facilitating passages from shore to land; Wace attenuates but does not eliminate these engagements. Laʒamon, however, merely reports that the gate was made and named (11. 3020–21); Robert never mentions it. Laʒamon’s Hengist, moreover, looks for a “brædne fæld” (broad field) and builds his castle in a “fæire uelde” (fair plain).⁴¹ Distanced from the shore, the castle founds Hengist’s settlement without reference to colonial processes. Likewise, Robert does not site Hengist’s building at the shore; he notes the two current pronunciations, “ϸuongcaster” or “tangcaster,” but offers no etymology (11. 2497–502). From this perspective, nothing at all comes between this first Saxon building and the English present.

Stonehenge, finally, captures English settlement marvelously. Laʒamon’s Merlin refers to the stones’ medicinal properties in the present tense, without mentioning their history; when the Britons are in sight of the Giants’ Ring (“Eotinde Ring”), Merlin incites their ardor by telling them that it came from Africa.⁴² Never, though, does Laʒamon refer to the giants themselves, their history or cultural practices. Africa, moreover, is Gormund’s land, who gave England to the Saxons:⁴³ it thus suggests already an English alliance. With this geographic detail, Laʒamon thus severs the stones from one branch of colonial history (the giants’) and attaches them vaguely to another (the English). Since the Otho redactor excises the reference to Africa, the Ring appears even more strongly always already here. When Merlin installs the stones, both redactors possess these ancient objects as English by naming them “Stanhenge” in the present tense (1. 8732). Later, when Aurelius is on the verge of death, he asks to be buried at “Stanhenge”: pronounced by Arthur’s uncle, Stonehenge moves English into Briton history. The monument’s durability (frequently referenced) enshrines the durability of the English themselves.⁴⁴

In Robert’s history, the stones also sign the permanence of English dominion. The “noble stones” are identified as “ϸe treche of geans” (the dance of giants), a crafty and artful structure (“quointe,” “art”) (11. 3062–63). Since the men of Albion have not been called giants, the stones are not related to original settlement. Their quointise, moreover, associates them with laudable conquest and other crafty maneuvers. Merlin extends their marvelousness by practicing “ginnes,” “quointise,” and “enchanterie” to move them (11. 3106, 3109, 3124). When they are set up in England (about 480 years after Christ [1. 3112]), Robert concludes: “ϸus was stonheng uerst ymad” (1. 3126). The absence of etymology blocks the memory of the stones’ pre-English identity. Since their conquest completes the marvels mentioned in the prologue, they mark progress toward the familiar present.

In the Brut, Arthur’s Round Table represents a portable version of the Giants’ Ring’s colonial English architecture.⁴⁵ In a sequence greatly altered from Wace, Laʒamon establishes the Table as a hegemonic force of peace and law. The episode begins at a celebratory dinner, where a bloody fight over social and political precedence breaks out among the international guests. The fight itself explicitly engages ethnic troubles, as does its resolution, effected by a foreign hostage (1. 11376). Arthur seals the peace by punishing all the kin of the man who started the fight and enumerating a detailed litany of threats against future disturbances; he seals the peace with a universal swearing on relics. Arthur thus effects a juridical solution to international discord, secured by both God and lethal force. The Table itself is crafted by one of Arthur’s itinerant imperial subjects, a carpenter who heard about the fight while overseas. Meeting Arthur in Cornwall, the craftsman proposes a circular table for sixteen hundred knights, to be seated facing each other around the inside and outside of the structure. Moreover, Arthur can take the table with him when he travels; he thus need never fear competitive social strife, anywhere in the world (11. 11425–43). This mobile architectural innovation forms a round boundary that encompasses social and ethnic differences; it encircles people of all origins within an English collectivity that can be taken anywhere. Arthur’s Round Table thus signifies the moment when the violence of group boundary formation cedes to the peace of boundless hegemony.

Despite visions of an Insular landscape fully settled by the English, Laʒamon and Robert both maintain Briton legitimacy, even beyond the First Variant’s aspirations. Laʒamon’s Cadwallader grants his last possessions to Ivor and Iny, “inc Walisc lond. ϸat ʒet stond a mire hond” (in Welshland, that yet stands in their hand) (1. 16056). Cadwallader claims to have maintained legal title to this land, and he asks his heirs to defend it as long as they can. According to Laʒamon, they succeed admirably:

Ϸæs Bruttes an ælc ende. foren to Walisce londe.

and heore laʒen leofeden. & heore leodene ϸæuwen.

And ʒet wunieð ϸære. swa heo doð auere-mære.

&. Ænglisce kinges. walden ϸas londes.

&. Bruttes hit loseden. ϸis lond and ϸas leoden.

ϸat næuere seoððen mære. kings neoren here.

Ϸa ʒet ne com ϸæs ilke dæi. beo heonne-uorð alse hit mæi.

i-wurðe ϸet i-wurðe. i-wurðe Godes wille.

Amen.

(LI. 16088–96)

[The Britons from every edge came to Welsh lands, and their laws they loved and their customs kept, and they still live there, as they will do for ever more. And English kings hold the land, and the Britons lost it, this land and those living in it, so that never since then have they been kings here. That hasn’t come yet, that actual day. Be henceforth as it may; come what comes, come God’s will. Amen.]

The Britons’ immutable culture ensures that they can recover their dominion as prophesied, whenever that day might come. Their right to the land transcends their current territorial restriction. As Laʒamon returns to his initial Christian refrain, the potential for territorial recovery rests with God. This conclusion maintains the Britons outside of English settlement, while also overlooking the beginnings and ends of English dominion. This paradoxical vision, founded on postcolonial grounds, accommodates difference without assimilation and tacitly legitimates English settlement.

Robert expands the suggestion of Welsh recovery with a detailed measurement of the lands they will rule. After Cadwallader’s withdrawal to Rome (and without mentioning Ivor and Iny), Robert reminds readers of the restoration prophecies:

Ac as ϸe angel sede er. & Merlin biuore.

Hii ssolleϸ ʒut keuery moche lond. ϸat hii abbeϸ y lore.

Al walis &. al ϸe march. & al middel lond ywis.

Ϸat is al ϸat bituene temese. & humber is.

Al est toward londone. ϸis me ssal ʒut yse.

Ac vpe godes wille it is. Wanne it ssal be.

(LI. 5132–37)

[But as the angel said once and Merlin before, they shall yet recover much land that they had previously—all Wales and all the March, and all the Midlands for sure (that is, all that is between the Thames and the Humber, all east toward London). This men shall yet see, but it is up to God’s will when it shall be.]

Robert’s precise measurement, laid across the lands of his prologue, clearly locates Welsh dominion within English territory. Just as in Laʒamon’s Brut, God’s judgment determines English dominion and Welsh expansion. As the narrative moves beyond the bounds of Geoffrey’s Historia, the presence of Welsh princes testifies to their enduring cultural and territorial potential: “light and hardy” Welshmen fight alongside Robert earl of Gloucester at the battle of Lincoln; Llywelyn harries English lands and loses many footmen while assisting Simon of Montfort.⁴⁶ These interventions hold out the possibility of real territorial gain.

If Robert and Laʒamon both maintain the reality of Welsh territorial rights, they also present the island as always already unified—occasionally conquered but impossible to divide. Laʒamon adopts Wace’s regne (the First Variant’s regnum) as a general quantification of the whole island; Robert turns Geoffrey’s totam insulam a mari usque ad mare into a two-hundred-line calculation, and never measures again. Post-colonial historians of a long colonial history, neither writer takes possession of the landscape, for it has always endured as English land.

Unified, unbounded land sustains the flexible boundaries that Laʒamon and Robert need to turn the Britons into English ancestors. In their chronicles, this land, belonging to us, legitimates the transition from Briton to Saxon dominion.⁴⁷ Moreover, they follow the First Variant redactors in claiming admirable predecessors as “ours” and casting the undesirables as “them.” Constructing a continuous leod and kunde (kin-group), Laʒamon and Robert bind the Britons, Angles, and Saxons to the thirteenth-century English. As historians, they patrol the borders of English identity by manipulating representations of force, genealogy, and Christianity. In their hands, then, the boundaries of “English” expand like the thong that encompasses Hengist’s first castle to include all of the island’s legitimate inhabitants. These postcolonial strategies take history away from Norman colonizing desire. By conflating past and present, they telescope historical distance and keep the boundaries between groups on the move.

The English occupy these Briton histories from the very beginning. Laʒamon, for example, proposes to tell the story of “Engle. ϸa æðelæn” (the noble English) (1. 7). This Englishing of Briton history has created ethnic conflict for some modern critics, who prefer to transfer the nobility to “England.”⁴⁸ Engle, however, deftly effaces the disparate origins of the island’s peoples and blocks the perception of historical difference. The island itself provides the basis of continuity, a fact first recognized by the Otho redactor, who emended the controversial line to “Engelond ϸe ristnesse” (the richness of England). The change publicizes the identity of the people with the land implied throughout the Brut. Robert, for his part, begins with a lengthy portrait of English ethnic beauty (“veireste men in ϸe world”) and purity (11. 180–89). Brutus looks like the first of these fair men when he is introduced a few lines later as “ϸe verste man. ϸat louerd was in englelond. as ich ʒoW telle can” (the first man who was lord in England, as I can tell you) (11. 214–15). With these opening maneuvers, all three writers cast the Britons as the admirable predecessors of the English.

The depth of Laʒamon’s vision of Insular unity can be measured in the waters of the island’s marvels. Like Wace, Laʒamon insists on the extreme marvel of the segregated fish (11. 10978–84). The normality of ethnic mingling surfaces dramatically in Laʒamon’s revision of the Severn’s spraying water. Reversing all precedent, he turns the dangerous marvel into a salvific one:

ʒif ϸer cumeð æi mon. ϸat noht ne cunne ϸer-on.

ϸat seollic to iseonne. bi ϸere sæ-stronde.

ʒif he his neb wendeð. touwærd ϸan mære.

ne beo he noht swa loh iboren. ful wel he beoð iborʒen.

ϸat water him glit bisiden. and ϸe mon ϸer wuneð softe.

after his iwille. he wuneð ϸer uul stille.

ϸat no bið he for ϸan watere. naððing idracched.

(LI. 10996–11002)

[If there come any man that knows nothing about it, that strangeness to see by the sea-strand, if he turns his face toward the mere, no matter how lowborn he is, he is very well preserved. That water will glide beside him, and the man will stay there softly, according to his will; he will stay there all still, so that in no way by the water will he be disturbed.]

For both Geoffrey and Wace, the local people must turn their backs to the spray to avoid harm. If the water rushing in represents the regular arrivals of foreign peoples, then Laʒamon’s version promotes assimilation rather than separatism. By accepting foreigners, men of all social groups remain stille and unharmed. Laʒamon goes on to eliminate the dangerous counterpoint, not mentioning what happens if the people turn away.

The Otho redactor and Robert both excise this episode, testifying to the ultimate irrelevance of its message. Indeed, Robert replaces the Mirabilia Britanniae with three new Mirabilia Anglie (so called in one manuscript): Bath’s hot waters, Stonehenge, and wind from underground (11. 151–68).⁴⁹ Robert does elaborate a novel ethnic allegory, however, when describing the natural life cycle of the eagles found among the rocks where the Scots hide from Arthur:

Hii of scapede atte laste. bi norϸe mony a myle.

Ϸet water geϸ al aboute. & ϸer inne eke beϸ.

Sixti grete roches. as men al day yseϸ.

Ϸer inne nomon ne woneϸ. ac in ech roche ϸer is.

In tyme of ʒere an ernes nest. ϸat hii bredeϸ inne ywis.

Ech is in a roche him sulf. vor hii ne mowe noʒt ney be.

Vor hom by houeϸ moche mete. & hii ne mowe noʒt wel fle.

Vor feblesse of hor brode. ac wanne hor briddes rype beϸ.

Ϸer hii findeϸ more mete. in londes aboute hii fleϸ.

(LI. 3666–74)

[They [the Scots] escaped off at last, by north many a mile. There, the water goes all about and therein also be sixty great rocks, as men say all day. Therein no man dwells, but in each rock there is, in season, an eagle’s nest that they breed in, for sure. Each is on a rock by himself, for no more may there be. They store nearby much meat, and they may not fly very well on account of the feebleness of their brood, but when their young birds are ripe, then they find more meat, in lands nearby they fly.]

The eagles’ care for their hungry broods presents the family as a model for peace and stability. While protecting their fragile eggs, the eagles never move a feather. Having used up their stores nourishing their young, they naturally fly off in search of more food. These eagles represent the social concerns of a unified kunde, rather than strife among different kundes (the Scottish birds are usually known for their screams that prophesy invasion). In place of Laʒamon’s stille, Robert imagines a seasonal and peaceful circulation of parental nurturing. In both cases, the existence of a single group and the absence of violent themes signal allegories of postcolonial settlement.

In order to embed ethnic unification in the patterns of history and turn the line of Insular rulers into “our kings,” Laʒamon and Robert mobilize several other intertwined strategies. First, as heirs to conquerors, they either neutralize or sacralize force as a means to dominion. Laʒamon’s historical pedagogy, for example, teaches us that ethnic identity does not bear on the legitimacy of dominion. Historiographically, Laʒamon overlooks the forceful origins of settlement; he judges the maintenance, rather than the establishment, of rule. From this perspective, a usurper who maintains good laws is valued more highly than a legitimate but tyrannical heir. By dismissing the importance of origins, Laʒamon can treat all predecessors as potentially admirable antecessors. Laʒamon’s relatively neutral attitudes toward force reflect the perspective of the ruled, the settled inhabitants who suffer from injustice no matter who holds the crown. The Brut in fact portrays the tradition’s most overtly coercive Brutus: he exacts Anacletus’s cooperation with a naked sword drawn across his neck (11. 343–46). Rulers throughout the Brut enforce their will by threatening their enemies as well as their subjects with eye gouging, castration, and burning—all without a word of the narrator’s disapproval. Nor does Laʒamon comment on Gormund’s declaration that he will rule no land that he has not conquered himself through battle (1. 14420). Laʒamon’s tacit legitimation of force facilitates the narrative acceptance of the English as rightful rulers, a perspective the English Brut brings to an Insular history designed to demonstrate Briton losses rather than English gains.

Robert also takes force for granted, noting that England has often been taken by strength (1. 1033) and that the weak are ever subjugated to the strong. Unlike Laʒamon, however, he pacifies some of the Historia’s more brutal representations. He eliminates Brutus’s encounter with Anacletus and replaces the exiled Saxons’ fear to disobey their elders with a gladness “for prowess” (1. 2319). More than strength, Robert values craft (quointise) as a conjunction of intellectual cunning and military prowess. Everyone from Brutus to Merlin to William the Bastard to the crusaders practices quointise.⁵⁰ Like crafte in Laʒamon’s Brut and engin in Wace’s Roman de Brut and the Arthurian prose cycle (see chapters 5 and 6), quointise turns easily from clever cunning to deceptive treason, from intelligence to siege engines. Like physical force, mental powers are neither inherently evil nor universally good.

The disruptive powers of force and cunning reorient colonial encounters so that differences between groups appear mobile instead of immutable. Laʒamon and Robert manipulate historic differences directly by revising genealogical discourses. They turn away from colonial anxieties about ethnic purity and the damages wrought by exogamy by eliminating existing genealogical arguments or, in Robert’s case, creating new ones. Laʒamon inherits from Wace an already weakened pattern of ethnic genealogy, which he then revises more than any other aspect of his source.⁵¹ Silvius, for example, emphasizes that the Trojan-Britons and the Trojan-Lombards are of the same strand (“strund”), and explains that the Trojans find the Lombard women undesirable (“laðe”) (11. 1367–68). Briton women are thus sent to Lombardy because Silvius rejects the local women, rather than the other way around, as in Geoffrey and Wace. More important, Laʒamon immediately remarks that the arrangement brought the Lombards misfortune: the brothers followed their sisters, raised an army, and conquered Germany (11. 1371–80). Laʒamon recognizes the “grief” that Trojan endogamy brought to the local inhabitants. By presenting both native and settler perspectives, Laʒamon diffuses genealogical imperatives.

Robert eradicates exogamous anxiety most deliberating in his portrayal of Brutus’s marriage to Innogen. First, Brutus is assimilated to the English, already described as the fairest men of all, when Pandrasus begins to love him for his good luck (“faire cheance”), fair body (“beste bodi”), noble genealogy (“noble kinne”), and prowess (11. 271–79). Indeed, Pandrasus admires Brutus so much that he offers him his daughter, unsolicited, along with ships, land, and the right to leave if he prefers to conquer better land (11. 280–87). Since Robert does not narrate the battle that leads to Pandrasus’s imprisonment, the entire resolution of Trojan enslavement involves little coercion. Instead, the beautiful Brutus seduces Pandrasus, eradicating all discussion of ethnic intermingling.

With Armorica’s colonization, Laʒamon stages his own direct dismissal of exogamous anxiety. He has already criticized the Britons for shamefully (“heokerliche”) refusing to give women to the Picts (1. 5011); now, he excises Conan’s speech about the necessity of endogamous marriage. Instead, Conanus articulates the problem of maintaining proper social intercourse: he orders that each craft group be sent in its own ship (that is, not mixed together with other professions) and that no men accompany the women except the sailors (11. 5902–5). Here, social segregation maintains differences among the Britons themselves, while the gender segregation suggests that men, of any ethnicity, cannot be trusted with virgins. Conanus’s instructions thus identify the issues that threaten social order, not ethnic genealogy.⁵² Moreover, the women’s strident refusals to leave the island prompt brutal coercion: Athionard threatens to kill his own daughter, and to hang the others by their nipples, if they do not board the ships (11. 5941–55). Laʒamon’s graphic portrayal of their subsequent drownings, rapes, prostitutions, and heathendoms tacitly indicts the men who would force women to leave their homeland (11. 6033–45). In Laʒamon’s vision, compulsory exile from England engenders greater tragedy than intermarriage with foreigners. In this respect, Laʒamon’s narrative of Armorican colonization purveys post-colonial judgment.

Robert takes the process a step further. He also excises Conanus’s endogamous speech, but maintains the concern for the purity of the kunde: Conanus, “our prince” (1. 2081) sends for women, that the men “miʒte make hor kunde. al clene of hor blod” (might make their kin all pure of their own blood) (1. 2014). The account of the virgin drownings follows Geoffrey’s text closely, except for the conclusion, which exposes the sexual secret of colonial compromise: “So ϸat to ϸe lasse brutaine. ϸer ne come aliue non” (so that to Brittany there came none alive) (1. 2020). Robert can speak of Briton intermarriage because he views the episode in postcolonial terms. As will become clear when Robert moves beyond Geoffrey’s Historia, it takes only one parent to maintain the English kunde.

Helen’s abduction by the giant of Mont Saint-Michel enacts virginal rape over Brittany again, this time as a violation that threatens family stability. In Laʒamon’s Brut, the old woman describes the abduction itself as a home-invasion, and the messengers wonder if the giant has taken the girl “to wife” (11. 12815, 12917–22). Although the giant clearly combines the monstrous assimilation of cannibalism with the intimate invasion of rape, Arthur treats him like any foreign knight once he has disabled him (11. 12816, 12932–35). Wounded in his phallic thigh, the giant asks for mercy and to know who is fighting; Arthur identifies himself and asks the giant to do likewise, including his people (“cunne”), his father and mother, and his “londe” (11. 13019–24). The fiend (“feond”) agrees to tell all and obey if Arthur will grant mercy. Although the giant follows chivalric protocol perfectly and wisely seeks to confirm that mercy has been granted before identifying himself, Arthur angrily orders his beheading (11. 13025–32). The scene thus mixes the desire to reintegrate the outlaw with the impulse for blood vengeance against family wrongs. The equivocation personalizes the dilemma as that of a knight and caring uncle (Laʒamon makes Helen Hoel’s daughter [1. 12924]). The displacement of colonial concerns about sexual heritage is sealed in the conclusion, where Laʒamon excises Arthur’s story about Ritho (11. 13036–67). The scene thus inflects the threat of lawless neighbors. This threat recurs and in fact defines social intercourse, enacted in the giant’s repeated, week-long rape of the old woman.⁵³ The episode performs the failure of traditional codes, settled society’s worst nightmare. Robert domesticates the dangers of sexual compromise even more clearly. First, the “giant” is a deformed (“vorbroyde”) man like the natives of Albion (11. 4191, 4194). And in this account, unlike Geoffrey’s history, Helen dies of rape, not fright: “Mid lecherye he hire slou” (with lechery he slew her) (1. 4198). In Robert’s post-colonial history, as in Laʒamon’s, rape can be spoken as a social violation without damage to the ethnic psyche.

These episodes, which for other historians engage colonial anxieties about ethnic integrity, expose Laʒamon’s and Robert’s perceptions of postcolonial identities. For them, differences recede to the edges rather than occupying the center of identity politics. Their revisions of the Britons’ most difficult relatives, the Romans, illustrate this shift of focus dramatically. Laʒamon’s Belinus and Brennius, for example, justify the first conquest of Rome as vengeance for their relative Romulus (11. 26139–70). This argument, which Laʒamon seems to have invented, turns aggressive expansion into restoration. And when Caesar arrives at the island, he never claims genealogical precedence, even though he recognizes that the Romans and Britons are of one “kunne” (11. 3620–25). Recounting what he knows of Briton history from books, he stops at Belinus’s conquest to express sadness that his elders were shamed before his birth (11. 3626–34): he resolves to conquer Britain in order to avenge his forefathers. This rhetoric, like Belinus and Brennius’s, pursues expansion as the preservation of an anterior status quo. In fact, neither Caesar nor Cassibellanus ever mentions their common ancestors by name. Caesar identifies himself briefly in his letter, and claims tribute because he has imperial eyes: “for al hit is min aʒen. ϸat ic iseo mid min æʒen” (for it is all mine again, what I see with my eyes) (1. 3647). Cassibellanus, in turn, denounces the claim as greedy, and cites their common ancestry only to underscore their respective freedom and independence; he ends by threatening that Caesar should submit to him because of previous Briton victories over Rome (11. 3653–77). Relations with Rome thus concern imperial precedence and are negotiated through force rather than genealogy. Britons do not speak of genealogy even when they marry Romans: no genealogical debate precedes Octavius’s invitation to Maximianus; Caradocus later identifies Maximianus’s nobility (“aðele cunne”) rather than his parents (11. 5699–724). By avoiding genealogical argument, Laʒamon dismisses ethnic difference.

Robert, by contrast, follows his inherited genealogies closely, including Caesar’s speech, Constantine’s conquest of Rome, and Caradocus’s invitation to Maximianus.⁵⁴ All of these arguments turn on the integrity of the kunde and the lond, categories that Robert constructs through resemblance rather than difference. Mothers, for example, repeatedly transmit the identity of the legitimate Insular kunde to their children, irrespective of the fathers’ origins. Robert thus mobilizes matrilineal descent against the Historia’s agnatic logic. In this way, he can integrate any exogamous marriage into an ethnically pure genealogy. He articulates this principle most clearly in relation to the first Pict-Scot marriages, but it applies south of the Humber as well. The Scots, first of all, are actually Israelites, led out of Egypt by Moses (11. 921–52). With this added detail, Robert establishes a firm ethnic boundary. Allowed to settle in Ireland, the Jewish-Scots agree to send women to the Picts on the condition that the children will take their name and inheritance from the mother whenever the father’s identity is in doubt, since the truth of the mother is more easily known than that of the father and family wealth must not fall “out of kunde” through misbegotten children: “In ϸis manere picars. mid scottes mengd hor blod” (in this manner the Picts mingled their blood with the Scots) (11. 980–89). The Scots thus patrol their ethnic boundary through matrilineal inheritance; they even take their name from these Scot women from Ireland (the Picts’ name is forgotten) (11. 990–96). Robert appropriates this alien matrilineal principle in his analysis of the succession disputed between Henry I and his brother Robert Curthose: Robert concludes that although Curthose was older, Henry had the best right because he was married to Maud, the “kunde eir” (heir from the kin-group) (11. 8754–57). In these and many other passages detailing marriage arrangements, Robert manipulates exogamy to keep England in the family.

As Laʒamon and Robert endeavor to graft the Britons onto the English family tree, they face the significant challenge of recuperating the Britons’ treacherous Saxon enemies into that same noble line. Both historians deploy the boundary between Christians and Heathens in order to disrupt the boundaries that lie among Britons, Angles, Saxons, and English. Christian alliances, as Lesley Johnson has shown, cut across both ethnic and family lines (“Reading” 151). The immutable difference between Christian and Heathen comes to coincide with the similarly intransigent opposition between us and them: we Christians can encompass any configuration of ethnic groups.

Robert sanctifies Briton history well before the Saxons arrive. The Britons, for example, defeat Caesar in the first battle “ϸoru godes grace” (1. 1146). When Christ is born, Robert praises the emperor who brought Pilate to justice for killing him (11. 1412–19). Robert proceeds to give as much attention to the Roman emperors as he does to Briton kings, until imperial history takes over completely between Claudius and Marius (11. 1538–635). Robert judges each emperor according to his treatment of Christianity. Trajan, for example, is so just that more than five hundred years later Saint Gregory brought his soul out of Hell, baptized him, and sent him to Heaven (11. 1603–17); Robert commends Adrian for killing the Jews in Jerusalem (11. 1618–24). On the opposite end of the spectrum, Nero goes completely insane (“pur gidy & wod”) (11. 1540–41) after slaying Saints Peter and Paul. He then kills his mother while trying to see the “fair chamber” of her womb where he lived before birth; he demands that his physicians make him pregnant, on pain of death (11. 1542–53). As punishment for persecuting Christian apostles, then, Nero is compelled to pervert Christ’s virgin birth. The physicians miraculously succeed, until Nero’s womb is so large and sore that he threatens to hang them if they do not induce birth (11. 1556–59). Again miraculously, the physicians succeed and Nero bears a “sori child,” “a foul frogge”: “ʒut ϸis gidie wrecche. louede ϸis foule best. / As wommon deϸ hire child” (yet this giddy wretch loved this foul beast, as a woman does her child) (11. 1560–65). Nero builds a court for the frog, called Lateran, which means frog in Roman; Robert notes that this “head church of all Christendom” has a better head now than the frog (11. 1566–75). With Lateran, then, Nero inadvertently refounds Christiandom. The “giddy wretch” goes on to set fire to the city (in an effort to recover the joyous light of Troy in flames) before finally dying a vile death at the hands of the Roman citizens, “& ϸus him vel vrecche of god. vor he ϸe apostle slou” (and thus the wrath of God fell on him, for he slew the apostles) (1. 1585). Robert’s Christian judgment of Roman history engenders this extended interpolation, whose grotesque performance of transgressive desire returns all the way to Troy.

During the reign of Marcus and Aurelius, Robert promises to tell how Pope Eleutherius brought Christianity to England for the first time (11. 1629–32). He then follows Geoffrey’s account in full, enumerating the episcopal sees that complete yet another portion of the opening descriptio (11. 1640–74). Robert immediately refers to the “luϸer emperour” Diocletian, who brought Heathenness back until Saint Augustine “unbound” it (11. 1675–77). When Robert later comes to the Diocletian persecutions themselves, he treats the martyred saints as familiar names that “you can read in church” (1. 1822); he eliminates Geoffrey’s criticism of Briton memory (where the martyrs have been forgotten because of the barbarians [“lugubri barbarorum divortio civibus adempta fuissent”] [150]). Suppressing the story of Albanus and adding references to Saints Christine, Foy, and Vincent (11. 1806–27), Robert substitutes English memory for Briton amnesia.⁵⁵ These revisions populate Briton history with legendary English saints, whose reputations endure into the present.

The arrival of the Heathen Saxons throws Briton Christianity into heightened relief. From Vortigern’s first palpitation for Ronwen, Laʒamon and Robert condemn the Saxons as Heathens instead of vilifying them as foreign settlers (“comelings”). During Vortimer’s reign, all of the English are Heathens and all of the Britons are Christians; there are so many new settlers (“uncuðe leoden,” “heaϸene hundes,” and “heϸenemen”) that it is impossible to distinguish between Christians and Heathens.⁵⁶ Robert repeats several times that marriages between Christians and Heathens are evil (“luϸer”), and wonders what happens to the children when the fathers are Christian and the mothers Heathen.⁵⁷ Laʒamon portrays both the Romans and Mordred’s supporters as Heathen hordes; Robert follows Geoffrey with a mix of Christians, Sarrasins, and Heathens.⁵⁸ Robert disperses ethnic identity directly when he owns the traitorous Saxons as ancestors (“vre faderes”) while simultaneously claiming the Briton Vortigern (the “vnkunde ssrewe”) as “vre feble king” (11. 2696–98). Subsequently, Robert observes that the Saxons should learn better than to fight Christian men (11. 3216–17). After Arthur’s death, Robert immediately portrays the land’s disintegration in Christian terms: the “luϸer heathens” burn everything and drive out the “kundemen”; Christendom is beaten all to the ground, and the relics are taken into Wales (11. 4619–53). Indeed, for Robert, Arthur’s death (“Alas ϸe gode arϸure”) leads directly to “pur heϸenesse” and the Saxons’ “clene maystrie” (full mastery) (11. 4652–56). Having thus established Christianity as the most relevant identity boundary, Laʒamon and Robert can easily represent these Saxons as noble ancestors and rightful rulers once they convert. After conversion, the English are more and more our heros, the Britons increasingly cast as them.

Although Laʒamon’s Britons reject the English as recent converts (11. 14844–64), the narrative pattern itself does not ratify this ethnocentric judgment. Laʒamon describes the contours of Edwin’s realm, for example, in terms identical to Arthur’s, inviting readers to transfer their admiration of Arthur to Edwin.⁵⁹ And when Cadwallo kills Edwin in battle, he becomes “king of the Angles” or “king of the English.”⁶⁰ Laʒamon thus appropriates Briton history for the English by making one of the last Briton kings a sovereign of the English people. From this perspective, Laʒamon’s sympathies are not reversed toward the end of the Brut, as Françoise Le Saux suggests;⁶¹ rather, they are dispersed into multiple partial identifications with Britons, English, and Christians. Penda exemplifies this multiplication, for he is a traitorous Christian Englishman sworn to serve a Christian Briton king.⁶² Cadwallader likewise embodies a border identity, for his mother is Penda’s sister Helen (herself a figure of converging identities)⁶³ and he is an English king driven out by a Saxon king, Aethelstan.⁶⁴ The narrative thus invites the audience to admire the Britons, the Angles, and the Saxons as equally worthy ancestors of the contemporary English on the basis of their “common insularity.”⁶⁵ Le Saux observes further that Laʒamon seems to be “trying to rub out the dividing line between Welsh and English.” In the end, when Laʒamon says that Aethelstan was “ϸe formeste Englisce mon. ϸe al Ængle-lond biwon” (the first English man who won all England) (1. 15944), his achievement is to be admired as the first of our kings (the Historia and the Brut y Brenhinedd record his territorial consolidation with regret). Ultimately, Briton history ends as it began—in Christian prayer for the souls of generations of English ancestors (“Amen”). The repetition of prayers, and history, preserves English dominion as a Christian refrain that echoes across the land.

Robert takes a more radical approach to the passage of dominion. Right after Arthur’s death, he excises all signs of Briton dominion—the reigns of Constantine, Aurelius Conanus, Vortiporius, and Malgo, as well as Geoffrey’s apostrophe. Instead, on a page titled in one manuscript Saxones plene Dominantes (Saxons fully Dominant), Robert names the six Saxon kingdoms and fills in their history since Hengist, with an emphasis on Wessex: Cedric (whose origins Geoffrey does not mention) was the first king of Wessex; Kinrik was king after his father, and so on: “Ac ϸe kings of westsex. lengest gonne dure. / & alle ϸe oϸere wonne to hom. as ʒe ssolle her after yhure” (But the kings of Wessex lasted longest, and won all the others to them, as you shall hear hereafter) (11. 4655–714). While this enumeration takes place in Heathen time, it also fulfills the opening descriptio and thus a recognizably English landscape. Indeed, Robert reminds us that we can read about each kingdom’s territory at the beginning of the book.

As the consolidation of Saxon dominion continues (with the enumeration of cities), Heathenness remains in all the land for about forty years until Saint Augustine’s mission (11. 4715–28). Where Geoffrey does not mention the Saxons’ actual conversion, Robert specifically names the churches they founded and the bishoprics that fulfill the descriptio (11. 4755–75). After adding a detailed account of Glastonbury’s founding (11. 4783–801), Robert maintains Christianity, rather than ethnicity, at the center of Insular identity with a savvy revision of Augustine’s encounter with the Britons. In response to Dinoot’s refusal to submit to the archbishop of Canterbury, Robert apparently invents a speech for Augustine, which prophesies the Britons’ punishment for offending the Christian faith:

ʒif ʒe nolleϸ quaϸ seint austin. mid ʒoure breϸeren in peys be.

ϸat beϸ as ʒe witeϸ wel. cristine as wel as ʒe.

& ʒif ʒe nolle englissemen. godes lawes teche.

& vorϸ mid me among hom. cristendom preche.

ʒoure fon ssolle hor poer. among ow wide reche.

& bringe ʒou to deϸe monion. & ϸat ssal be ʒoure wreche.

After seint austines day. to soϸe come al ϸis.

(LI. 4825–31)

[“If you won’t,” said Saint Augustine, “be in peace with your brethren, who are as you well know Christian as well as you, and if you won’t teach Englishmen good laws and go forth with me among them to preach Christendom, your enemies shall reach wide among you with their power and bring many of you to death and that shall be your punishment.” After Saint Augustine’s day all this came true.]

Casting the English as pastoral “brethren,” Robert eradicates all ambiguity about Augustine’s role in the monks’ massacre: he merely predicts God’s punishment. Robert notes that God does not neglect to punish the English king for the “luϸer dede”: the Britons defeat Ethelfrid and regain dominion south of the Humber (11. 4860–74).

Subsequently, Briton success derives from English Heathenness. Cadwallo defeats Edwin and then Enfrid, as the English are all turned again to Heathenness (11. 4942–45). The English themselves are soon divided along these same lines, as Penda the “heϸene due” (11. 4986, 5012) martyrs Saint Oswy of the “cristinemen” (11. 4975, 5011) (Robert does not mention Cadwallo’s advisers’ description of the value of intraethnic strife). Throughout these events, Robert barely mentions Cadwallo; his son Cadwallader recognizes God’s punishment (11. 5046–69) and dies a Christian death (11. 5114–19). Robert then excises the episodes of famine, Saxon struggle, and Ivor and Iny’s resistance. Instead, he unifies the English and Saxons at the very moment they build the prologue’s towns: “Ϸe englisse ϸo & saxons. ϸat al one ϸo were. / Grete touns & castles. bigonne bulde & rere” (The English and the Saxons who were all one began to build and raise great towns and castles) (11. 5120–21).

Despite their losses, however, the Britons maintain a legitimate claim to the land, on both ethnic and religious grounds:

Here we englisse men. mowe yse some.

Mod woche riʒte we beϸ. to ϸis lond ycome.

Ac ϸe wrecche welissemen. beϸ of ϸe olde more.

In woche manere ʒe abbeϸ yhurd. hou hii it abbeϸ ylore.

Ac ϸe feble is euere bineϸe. vor hii ϸat abbeϸ miʒte.

Mid strengϸe bringeϸ ofte. ϸat wowe to ϸe riʒte.

(Ll. 5138–43)

[Here we Englishmen may see in our own mind with what right we came to this land, for the punished Welshmen are more ancient. You have heard in what manner they lost it, but the feeble is ever beneath, for they who have might with strength often bring that woe to the right.]

Robert recognizes that force created English dominion without destroying Welsh rights; he seems to believe in the prophecy of Welsh restoration. Similarly, Robert notes that Maximianus took control of Brittany, “More ϸoru strengϸe as ʒe seϸ. ϸan ϸoru riʒt dom” (more through strength as you see than through justified right) (1. 2096). Robert’s representation of warfare is in fact often fatalistic: although war causes much wo (which Robert describes in gory detail for thirteenth-century events), a divine design always justifies the results that arrive atte laste.⁶⁶ God, while allowing defeat, does not deprive the weak defeated of their historical right: “The justice of God’s vengeance . . . does not justify the actions of his agents.”⁶⁷ Robert thus legitimates English dominion by attributing Welsh feebleness to divine judgment.

Laʒamon and Robert continue to manipulate ethnic boundaries as they struggle to maintain the englisce kunde’s historiographic integrity in the wake of Danish and Norman conquests. Although Laʒamon only witnesses these conquests in etymologies, his representations minimize their import. When Hengist builds his castle, for example, Laʒamon adds the castle’s Danish name, noting that the Danes drove out the “Bruttes” (1. 7107). Blending ethnicities and centuries, Laʒamon overlooks the fact that the Saxons had already driven out the Britons when the Danes arrived. The Otho redactor is even less able or interested to designate groups, referring to those vanquished by the Danes as “cnihtes” (knights). By remembering the Danes at all, both writers return the narrative and the English to colonized experience, but only after declaring that the castle’s English name stands “nu and auere-mare” (1. 7105). Danish conquest, then, fails to disrupt the continuity of English settlement.

The Normans, by contrast, change Insular nomenclature permanently. Summarizing how conquests have modified New Troy, Laʒamon concludes that no town anywhere in Britain has its original name (11. 3549–55). The judgment is nostalgic yet not too regretful since Laʒamon’s Englishing of Briton history has demanded relative neutrality on forceful changes of dominion. Laʒamon definitely deplores the suffering caused by the Normans (1. 3548), but he remarks elsewhere that the peasants always suffer in war, no matter who causes it. Moreover, Laʒamon tacitly assimilates Normanitas to English identity by translating from Wace and by outlining Saxon institutions in Norman terms.⁶⁸ As a descendent of English colonizers, Laʒamon thus easily appropriates Norman colonization for a post-colonial England.

Robert confronts Danish and Norman colonization directly when he narrates beyond the Historia, extending the strategies that encompassed Britons within English history—Christianity and genealogical manipulation—to the contemporary period. From the eighth century to the thirteenth, Christian progress mirrors English progress, and saintliness often leads directly to political power (whether the saint is a king like Edward or a bishop like Thomas).⁶⁹ Robert also incorporates extensive accounts of the Crusades and England’s relations with the papacy.⁷⁰ Especially in the Norman period, Christian relations govern Robert’s judgment. William the Red, for example, is a good king until Lanfranc dies.⁷¹ And Robert Curthose’s rejection of the kingship of the Holy Land elicits an extended apostrophe, beginning “Awey seli Robelin. seli courtehese” (Away silly Robert, silly Curthose!) and ending “Wat was ϸi strengϸe wurϸ. & ϸi chiualerie. / Ϸo ϸou lore grace of god. ywis noʒt wurϸ a flye” (What was your strength worth, and your chivalary? Without God’s grace, surely not worth a flea!); Robert jokes that God understood Curthose’s aversion to work, and so sent him to rest in prison.⁷² Under John and Henry III, interdict and excommunication become tools of government, as those who hold against the king’s Charter are repeatedly excommunicated.⁷³ Throughout, attacks on Insular Jews reinforce the boundary of English Christianity.⁷⁴ All of these representations maintain the continuity of the Christian English kunde by aggressively opposing it to foreigners, Heathens, excommunicants, and Jews.

Ethnic genealogies require more extensive labors. Robert begins by introducing the Danes as them almost as soon as the narrative crosses the borders of Geoffrey’s narrative: the battles of Denmark were the worst “of alle oϸer” because instead of holding the land, they robbed, injured, destroyed, burned, and slew the inhabitants.⁷⁵ Anyone who defeats them is thus a hero of the kunde. Summarizing Aethelwulf’s victory a few years after the first invasions, Robert expresses the configuration of Christian English justice succinctly:

Ac vre suete louerd atte laste. ssewede is suete grace.

& sende ϸe cristine englisse men. ϸe maystrie in ϸe place.

& ϸe heϸene men of denemarch. bineϸe were echon.

Nou nas ϸer ʒut in denemarch. Cristinedom non.

(LI. 5257–61)

[But our sweet Lord at last showed his sweet grace, and sent the Christian English men the mastery of the place, and the Heathen men of Denmark were beneath, each one. There was not yet in Denmark any Christendom.]

Just as with the Britons and Saxons, the rightful group of Insular rulers are all Christian and the invaders all Heathen. Moreover, the Christian definition of legitimate kunde leads to the clearest dismissal of ethnic identity yet, as Aethelwulf’s son Alfred is crowned by the pope (“the crown is yet in this land”) as “king of englelond. of all ϸat ϸer come” (king of England, of all who come there) (1. 5330); he is in fact the first “pur king” (1. 5333). Henceforth, no “comelings” can disrupt this sanctified English kingdom, for all Insular Christians are subsumed within Englishness: post-colonial dominion rules all who live in the territory, regardless of origin.

Only sin can disrupt English dominion: despite harrying the English throughout the century, the Danes only gain dominion through the sins of Saint Edward the Martyr’s step-mother. She kills Edward to make her son Aelred king, and Saint Dunstan prophesies punishment for the crown unrightly won (11. 5905–15). The Danes in fact come, but leave when Aelred acquires formidable allies by marrying Emma of Normandy after the death of his first wife. Defense against the Danes thus becomes explicitly intertwined with access for the Normans:

& here sprong lo ϸe uerste more as of hom of normandye.

Ware ϸoru hii come in to ϸis lond. & abbeϸ ϸe maystrye.

Vor ϸe kynge adde bi ϸis emme. tuie sones ywis.

Alfred & seint edward. ϸat at westmunstre yssrined is.

& ϸoru ϸulke blode suϸϸe. william bastard com.

As ʒe ssolle her after ihure. & wan ϸis kinedom.

Ϸat poer muche of denemarch. in pes wiϸoute strif.

Was hom ywent to denemarch. ar ϸe king weddede wif.

(Ll. 5966–73)

[And here sprang the first root from men of Normandy, through which they came to this land and have the mastery. For the king had by this Emma two sons certainly, Alfred and Saint Edward (who is enshrined at Westminster), and through that blood truthfully William the Bastard came, as you shall hear hereafter, and won this kingdom. That great power of Denmark, in peace without strife, went home to Denmark before the king wedded wife.]

The Danes may be intimidated by the Normans, but Robert does not let readers think for a moment that the English are safe. And indeed, the Danes harry the English throughout Aethelred’s reign; at his death, Insular allegiance is divided between his son Edmund Ironside and the Dane Cnut.

During the Danes’ extended disruption of legitimate English rule, Robert carefully traces out—with numerous prospective and retrospective references—the ethnic complexities generated by Aethelred’s two wives (the first English, the second the Norman Emma), Emma’s two husbands (the English Aethelred and the Danish Cnut), and Cnut’s two wives (the first Danish, the second Emma). Throughout, the English line spawned by Edmund Ironside (Aethelred’s son by his English wife) remains the legitimate one. As soon as Cnut takes power, Robert summarizes the fates of Edmund’s sons, showing us immediately how “riʒt kunde” will return through Edmund’s great-granddaughter Maud when she marries Henry I (11. 6443–69). While the Danes do reign, Robert judges each king according to his Christian Englishness. Cnut, for example, makes amends not only by renouncing his illegitimate crown and making pilgrimage to Rome, but by honoring Edmund’s grave at Glastonbury and confirming all of the charters issued to the abbey by English kings (11. 6590–635). Cnut’s veneration for both God and English tradition redeem his usurpation. His son Harold, by contrast, is an evil king because he is a pure Dane who hates the English and exiles Emma (11. 6639–59); Cnut’s son by Emma, Harthecnut, chosen by both Danes and English, is not such a bad king (11. 6660–72).

After Harthecnut’s death, Robert reminds us that Saint Dunstan’s prophecy had come true: England had been “out of kunde,” in pain and sorrow, for twenty-six years (11. 6673–77). The Danish disruption is now definitively over with the accession of Saint Edward, Edmund’s “riʒt eir of kunde” (1. 6680). Indeed, it is as if those twenty-six years had never happened, since dominion returns to the English line as it existed before Cnut . . . except for Edward’s Norman uncles. As Turville-Petre points out, Robert absolves Edward himself of all responsibility for Norman oppression by casting him as a chaste saint (92–93): Edward defeats the Danes by prayer alone, and the disputed succession that leads to Norman dominion results from his chastity. All the blame falls instead on Harold son of Goodwin (Edward’s wife’s brother): Edward bequeaths England to his cousin William the Bastard, but Harold breaks his oath to William and usurps the crown (Edmund’s grandson Edward Aetheling is the real “kunde eir”). This transition out of kunde is so complicated, the grafting of families so awkward for Robert, that his resolutely linear narrative progression dissolves, such that Edward dies three times (11. 7030, 7175, 7259).

Just before his final death, Edward envisions the kunde’s restoration. On his deathbed, he describes a vision (well known from other sources)⁷⁶ of a tree struck down at its roots (11. 7228–33). Robert says the allegory was well understood at the time: the tree signifies the noble kingdom of England and the “riʒt kunde” of Aelred, Edward’s father. The family tree is struck down when Edward dies without heir; afterward, three kings of “vnkunde sede” hold the land (Harold the queen’s brother, William the Bastard, and his son William the Red). Kunde returns when William the Bastard’s other son Henry marries Maud, Edward’s niece: “&. normandie ϸoru ϸe king. &. ϸoru ϸe quene englelond. / ioyned were ϸo kundeliche. as in one monnes hond” (and Normandy through the king, and through the queen England, were joined kinfully, as in one man’s hand) (11. 7240–57). Maud emerges as the most frequently and effusively praised individual of the entire narrative, the kunde’s real hero: no tongue can tell her goodness; she was well raised, and cared heroically for leprosy victims.⁷⁷ Through Maud, Robert presents Henry II’s accession as a restoration of legitimate English kunde (11. 7100–135).

Despite this skillful pruning of Norman identity from the stock of the English family tree, Robert insists rather tendentiously (for the later thirteenth century)⁷⁸ that the Normans are “yet among us.” In the prologue, he says that the Normans won England “and shall evermore” (11. 56–50); he concludes a summary of Insular conquest with the Normans: “Atte laste hii of normandie. ϸat maisters beϸ ʒut here. / Wonne hit & holdeϸ ʒut” (At last they of Normandy, who are yet masters here, won it and hold it yet) (11. 7330–31). After the conquest, the English, like the Britons, await God’s judgment:

& ϸus was in normannes hond. ϸat lond ibroʒt iwis.

Ϸat anaunter ʒif euermo. keueringe ϸer of is.

Of ϸe normans beϸ heyemen. ϸat beϸ of englelonde.

& ϸe lowemen of saxons. as ich vnderstonde.

So ϸat ʒe seϸ in eiϸer side. wat riʒte ʒe abbeϸ ϸerto.

Ac ich vnderstonde ϸat it was. ϸoru godes wille ydo.

(LI. 7495–503)

[And thus was that land brought into the Normans’ hand, for sure, so that one wonders if there is ever any recovering from it. The Normans are the highmen of England, the lowmen the Saxons, as I understand, so that you see on either side what right you have to it. But I understand that it was done through God’s will.]

Through the Saxons, Robert mobilizes the memory of English origins, while distancing the narrator from their defeat by referring to “that land” instead of his usual “this land.” At the same time, he reminds his English audience that they maintain a legitimate claim to the land, even though God has punished them (through the Normans). The Normans’ evilness (which Robert summarizes in detail) purveys just retribution for the sins of Aethelred’s mother, “As ϸe gostes in auision. to seint edward sede” (as the ghost said to Saint Edward in his vision) (11. 7504–14). By maintaining the Normans as oppressors into the late thirteenth century, Robert draws attention to the continuity of English unity.

After the conquest, Robert maintains the English kunde by deploying all of the boundary tools at his disposal. He telescopes historical distance by calling William “our king” (1. 7985) and draws attention to the “kunde eirs” (Maud and her uncle Edward Aetheling).⁷⁹ Maud is in fact responsible for all of Henry I’s good laws; Robert refers repeatedly to the kunde’s restoration, already prophesied and narrated (11. 8730–51). After Henry’s death, Stephen of Blois cannot be the real heir because he is not related to Maud (11. 7627–29). With the birth of Maud’s grandson, Robert shifts his judgment to religious issues, introducing the infant Henry as Saint Thomas’s martyrer (1. 9095) (not unlike the Heathen Roman emperors who persecuted the popes). By making Thomas Beckett a hero of religious and legal principle, Robert overlooks his obvious identity as one of the “Normans among us.”⁸⁰ Although Henry embodies the kunde’s restoration, Thomas becomes England’s champion on religious grounds. At John’s accession, Robert judges Arthur of Brittany as a closer heir to Richard since he is the son of Richard’s older brother (John only keeps the kingdom because he murders his rival, like so many of his Briton and Saxon predecessors).⁸¹

With Henry Ill’s accession, Robert defines the English in opposition to the French, who plot to cast out “kunde englissemen” (11. 10992–1003). Yet the hero of the barons’ wars against Henry is Simon of Montfort, killed at the “murder of Evesham” where the “feebler” lost even though God remained on their side (11. 11714–64). Robert draws Simon into the kunde because he fights to resurrect the saintly origins of English identity: he defends Saint Edward’s charter of good laws, which “so ofte was igraunted er. & so ofte vndo” (so often was granted and so often undone) (1. 11019). Simon in fact exemplifies postcolonial ethnicity—a French nobleman, brother-in-law to the English king and distantly related to William the Conqueror, he galvanized English revolt against foreigners.⁸² Although Turville-Petre calls Robert’s sanctification of Simon “thoroughly tendentious” (100), J. R. Maddicott’s depiction of Simon’s shrine at Evesham evidences a broad popularity among English contemporaries discomfited by royal policy and foreign incursions (346–47, 367–68). Even though Simon reportedly considered English nobles untrustworthy,⁸³ the English in general (especially outside royal circles) considered him a hero of righteous reform. Although Robert appears to contradict himself when he vilifies the French “among us” and sanctifies a Frenchman like Simon, the representation is thoroughly consistent with a post-colonial identity politics: Robert defends the integrity of the English kunde at the cost even of ethnicity.

English identity ultimately rests on a set of converging ethnic and religious boundaries, strategically deployed in the service of the kunde so that continuity can flow even through partial disruptions. Laʒamon and Robert manipulate the representation of divine judgment in order to explain the defeat of the deserving and the successes of the undesirable. Legitimate English dominion thus derives from a sanctification of history that extends the borders of Christianity along with the repertoire of admirable ancestors. By shifting the borders around the center of English identity, Laʒamon and Robert disperse the colonized identifications they inherited; they develop postcolonial strategies of multiple partial identifications that work around colonial disruptions.

The kunde’s continuity also proceeds through language. English, like the narratives themselves, traverses the frontiers between ethnic groups and historical periods. Translation into English becomes yet another strategy for negotiating identity through colonial challenges. By the thirteenth century, in fact, English can function as an inclusive medium that addresses both monolingual Anglophones and bilingual Francophones.⁸⁴ Historiography in English thus expands both the audience and the meaning of colonial history. Although Ian Short may overestimate the Englishing of the Anglo-Normans when he affirms that the children of Wace’s audience would have been a natural audience for Laʒamon (248), English certainly reached not only a different audience but a broader one as well. At the same time, however, English is exclusive because only the English use it.⁸⁵ Linguistic exclusion converges on the religious when Robert describes the traitor who poisons Aurelius as knowing “Langage of ϸis londe. / as he were a cristineman” (1. 3157). By expressing themselves in English, then, Laʒamon, the Otho redactor, and Robert draw their listeners, of whatever ethnic origin, into the Christian English kin-group.

The significance of English, however, differs with each writer. While Laʒamon poignantly settles a French text of Norman colonial power into an English landscape, the Otho redactor revises an already English text and may have been monolingual. Robert, for his part, takes a completely different tack, translating from multiple Latin sources that he never names. Effacing the boundaries that Geoffrey drew so clearly between himself and William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon, Robert turns Geoffrey’s colonial ambivalence into a confident English occupation. Laʒamon and Robert thus dispossess French and Latin precedents and perform linguistic conquests of history. In a land imagined without borders, both proffer a history that appears always already English. The Otho redactor and Robert’s revisers, who read and write only English, witness the success of this settlement.

In both the Brut and the English Historia, the representation of translation engages the historians’ own linguistic practices. In the Brut, Alfred (England’s “deorling”) reflects Laʒamon’s historiographic strategy in that he renders a text of ultimately Briton origin into English (11. 3147–53). Since Laʒamon insists on the fact that Alfred’s English laws were first made by the Briton Marcia, Briton origins and prestigious English translation coexist comfortably, as they do in the Brut itself. The juxtaposition of original and contemporary languages strategically bypasses all other interventions in the transmission process. Laʒamon advertises the Englishness of his own translation by mobilizing archaic forms, avoiding words of French derivation, and introducing Germanic patterns.⁸⁶ Moreover, he consistently rewrites his source’s translations (unlike the Welsh translator of the Brut y Brenhinedd).⁸⁷ While the archaisms telescope historical distance by bringing the past into the present, these anachronistic translations bring the present into the past. Both strategies purvey a presentist historiography that renders the past familiar. Robert likewise speaks from the present by using England from the first line. He never even mentions that he translates and suppresses Geoffrey’s paradigmatic figures of translation, Alfred and Gildas. Robert’s pervasive presentism thus blocks the memory of translation, the technology that explicitly engages linguistic difference.

In these English-language narratives, historical Saxon speech ratifies the continuity of language, people, and dominion. Hengist’s first naming of the days of the week, for example, resembles the audience’s most recent experience of Friday.⁸⁸ Robert’s rendering of Ronwen’s toast implies an Anglophone audience most strongly, as he concludes obliquely that “[m]en ϸat knewe ϸe langage. sede wat was washail” (men who knew the language said what was washail) (1. 2517). Robert makes the continuity explicit when the Saxons betray the Britons at Amesbury: since the Saxon order to draw their knives would be perfectly understandable to the Anglophone audience, Robert must explain: “Nou ne couϸe ϸe brutons. non engliss ywys. / Ac ϸe saxons speche it was. / & ϸoru hom ycome it is” (Now the Britons didn’t understand any English, for sure, but it was the Saxons’ speech and it is come through them) (11. 2671–72). At the same time, Robert uses linguistic anachronism to Anglicize the Britons themselves: he says that Hamo was able to mimic the Britons and kill “oure king” Guiderius because he had been raised in Rome with Briton hostages and so “spac engliss” (spoke English) (11. 1444–53). These and other representations provide Britons and Saxons with English tongues, assimilating their speech to “ours.”

Etymologies bring the past into direct linguistic contact with the present and thereby further the settlement of English culture on historically Briton grounds. Since etymologies prove the durability of recognizable English forms, Laʒamon and Robert rarely use language to judge the relative legitimacy of past dominions. Laʒamon, for example, portrays language as a reflection of inevitable change, most succinctly in explaining that the Angles changed Brutaine to Ængle-lond, “for hit wes al on heore honde” (for it was all in their hand) (1. 14675). Laʒamon’s neutrality is most evident when he explains that names occasionally have frivolous origins:

Nu ϸu iherest of wuche gomen. aras ϸer ϸe to-nome.

swa doð a feole wise, to-nome ariseð.

& ofte of lutle ϸinge. ϸe longe ilaste[ð].

for nis nauere non oðer gomen. ϸat cleouieð alswa ueste.

(LI. 4679–82)

[Now you have heard from what game arose there the name; so many times do names arise, and often from a little thing, which lasts long, for there is no other game that cleaves so fast.]

The repetition of gomen emphasizes the arbitrariness of naming Hampton after Hamo, dismissing potential moral or political meanings. In this light, Laʒamon’s most frequently cited judgment—against the Normans for the renaming of London—does not seem to purvey such a strongly negative connotation. The first account portrays the changes quite neutrally: Lundin comes from “oϸer tir. &. neowe tidinde” (another dominion and new customs) (1. 1027); the French change the name to Lundres, “ϸa mid fehte heo bi-wonnen” (who with fighting won it) (1. 1030–33). Since Laʒamon portrays many forceful victories without condemnation, the passage can be read as a report of inevitable change.

The second passage reflects a less neutral version, where the customs are not simply “new” but brought by “vncuϸ folc” (foreign folk) (1. 3543); the French become specifically Normans who change all the names of “ϸissere Bruttene” “mid heore nið-craften” (this here Britain, with their tricky craft) (11. 3554, 3547). Although nið-craften is often understood to indicate evil malice,⁸⁹ Le Saux suggests that the animosity is more political than ethnic, the judgment more factual than hateful.⁹⁰ And Kenneth Tiller associates the term with the “craft of translation” (210), again returning the judgment to neutral ground. Read against the first description, Laʒamon’s approach does seem relatively calm. After all, Lud, an admired ruler, changed the city’s name even before the Normans. For Laʒamon, then, renaming is a constant process, as inevitable and unregrettable as conquest itself. Whether purposefully imposed or the result of accident, linguistic change renders the topography familiar, making it difficult for an Anglophone audience to condemn the process. Thus when the English formally call the land England (11. 14672–82), the change marks the beginning of the familiar present rather than the regretful end of the distant past (as it does in the Brut y Brenhinedd).

Laʒamon’s Englishing of Briton history concludes with his addition of a flattering etymology for the English and the attenuation of the negative one found in Wace’s text. Drawing from Bede, Laʒamon reports how Pope Gregory exclaimed that the “Ænglisce” are so fair they resemble “englen” (angels) (11. 14713–15). This addition counterbalances, and seems designed to overshadow, the English reputation for having tails. Laʒamon carefully explains that this deformity only afflicts those of Dorchester, who were punished by God for mocking Augustine; unfortunately, foreigners ignorant of the true facts mock good Englishmen who had nothing to do with the guilty persecutors (11. 14762–72). Finally, Laʒamon honors the Britons as admirable predecessors by not recording their change of name or anything suggesting barbarism. Since the vilification of the Welsh grew with English imperialist ideology,⁹¹ Laʒamon’s neutrality represents another way in which he turns Briton history away from colonial ambition and toward English settlement.

Robert’s linguistic revisions are more drastic in that he eliminates most of Geoffrey’s etymologies. Those retained usually record only the original and present names without delineating processes of change. When London is named for the first time, for example, Robert begins with the familiar present name and then identifies the first name as New Troy, leaving out the intervening forms (11. 533–34). In the second account of the naming, Robert does explain the changes, but as phonetic rather than colonial events:

Ϸe toun me clupeϸ ludestoun. ϸat is wide couϸ.

& now me clupeϸ it londone. ϸat is liʒtore in ϸe mouϸ.

& niwe troye hit het er. & nou it is so ago.

Ϸat londone it is now icluped. & worϸ euere mo.

(LI. 1029–32)

[The town was called Ludstown, that is widely known, and now it is called London, which is lighter in the mouth. And New Troy it was called before, and now it is so long ago that it is now called London, and worth ever more.]

Each line contains a different name and represents a different historical moment, but two of these four are Londone in the present. Furthermore, Ludston becomes Londone simply because it is easier to pronounce. Robert treats the change from Habren to Severn the same way: Gwendolen called the river “auerne,” but through “diuerse tonge” we call it “seuerne,” and add one letter to it “& namore iwis” (and no more, for sure) (11. 636–38). With this etymological approach, Robert divorces the ethics of conquest from the aesthetics of language: change reflects mechanical rather than cultural processes. When dominion passes from the Britons, Robert excises Geoffrey’s colonial ambivalence by noting (twice) that the land was no longer called “bruteyne” but “englelond” (11. 5125, 5144–45) and stating unequivocally that the Welsh took their name from their duke Wallo (11. 5126–28). Laʒamon and Robert are thus both comfortable with English occupation of the past and present. Even though they worked from very different sources, they arrive at similarly neutral portrayals of the relationship between language and conquest.

From this postcolonial perspective, bilingualism becomes a valuable advantage rather than a cultural threat. Laʒamon in fact reflects the cultural skills most admired in the thirteenth century when he casts himself as a trilingual narrator in the prologue.⁹² Within the narrative, Vortigern receives wise counsel from a man who “cuϸe tellen of ælche leod-spelle” (could speak the language of every land) (1. 7863). Gawain also performs admiral multilingualism. Arthur chooses him to meet Lucius because he understands both Roman and Briton;⁹³ when Gawain’s diplomacy fails, the ensuing battle enforces bilingualism at sword point: Gawain mocks the headless Marcel, saying that he would have done better to have stayed in Rome, “for ϸus we eou scullen techen. ure Bruttisce speche” (for thus we shall teach you our Briton speech) (1. 13248). Arthur later challenges Petreius with the same promise: “Nu ic ϸe wulle teche. Bruttisce spæche” (now I will teach you Briton speech) (1. 13393). In both cases, the Romans ironically lose their heads at the very moment they are invited to speak.

Robert also values bilingualism. He praises William the Bastard as a noble prince, and describes the advent of Insular bilingualism as a strength and honor:

Ϸus com lo englelond. in to normandies hond.

& ϸe normans ne couϸe spek ϸo. bote hor owe speche.

& speke french as hii dude atom. & hor children dude also teche.

So ϸat heieman of ϸis lond. ϸat of hor blod come.

Holdeϸ alle ϸulke speche. ϸat hii of home nome.

Vor bote a man conne frenss. me telϸ of him lute.

Ac lowe men holdeϸ to engliss. & to hor owe speche ʒute.

Ich wene ϸere ne beϸ in al ϸe world. contreyes none.

Ϸat ne holdeϸ to hor owe speche. bote englelond one.

Ac wel me wot uor to conne. boϸe wel it is.

Vor ϸe more ϸat a mon can. ϸe more wurϸe he is.

(Ll. 7537–47)

[Thus came England into Normandy’s hand. And the Normans could speak nothing but their own speech, and spoke French as they did at home, and their children they did also teach, so that the high men of this land who came of their blood all hold that speech that they name after themselves. And unless a man knows French, one tells of him little. But low men hold to English, and to their own speech yet. I think there are no countries in all the world that don’t hold to their own speech, but one, England. But it is good to know both very well, for the more that a man knows, the more worthy he is.]

Robert finds the preservation of French natural and its acquisition a sign of worth. As an English clerk of moderate status, he values learning for its social advantages. Indeed, he seems to presume a certain familiarity with French among his audience, for he does not translate the bishop of Hereford’s accusation to the rebel who attacks him: “Par crist he sede sir tomas. tu es Mauveis. / Meint ben te ay fet. vor he adde muche god. / ϸer biuore him ido” (By Christ, he said, sir Thomas, you are bad. I have done many good things for you, for he had done much good for him before) (11. 11119–21). Robert’s attitude reflects the prevailing social climate of the thirteenth century, when the ability to speak French had come to signify social value more than ethnic origin.⁹⁴ His conclusion, moreover, distantly echoes the explanation imagined by Alfred, England’s revered figure of nationalist translation, for the absence of translation among early Insular Christians: “woldon ðæt here ðy mara wisdom on londe wære ðy we ma geðeoda cuðon” (they would have it that more wisdom would be in the land the more languages we knew) (1:5). Robert’s comments thus assimilate the linguistic innovations wrought by recent colonization to traditional English values.

If multilingualism has its advantages, monolingualism can be fatal. Laʒamon’s Ronwen successfully deceives and poisons Vortimer because he cannot fathom her foreign speech: “Fortimer spæc Bruttisc. & Rouuenne Saxisc. / ϸan king ϸuhte gomen inoh. for hire spæche he loh” (Vortimer spoke Briton, and Ronwen Saxon. The king thought [it] game enough; for her speech, he laughed) (11. 7473–74). The Otho redactor emphasizes the point by adding that he laughed heartily (“smere”). The Britons, moreover, are massacred because they cannot understand the Saxon signal to draw knives. These deaths testify to monolingualism’s fatal consequences—not a gomen at all, but a deadly handicap, characteristic of unsuccessful colonial subjects. Laʒamon and Robert’s sources purvey colonial anxieties about traitorous linguistic mimicry where they themselves underscore the advantages of language acquisition. From postcolonial perspectives, safety and success both require proficiency in more than one language.

The English occupation of Briton history reorients temporal as well as linguistic patterns. Laʒamon and Robert both pursue a presentist historiography that occludes the perception of non-English history. Through verbal patterns, anachronism, and annalistic references, they collapse temporal differences. As a result, their chronicles lay claim to a timeless English dominion, secured by a Christian telos.

Laʒamon and Robert mingle the past with the present in a number of ways. For example, they often use present-tense verbs to indicate the continuing presence of historical artifacts: Laʒamon remarks that Tenvantius’s body “liϸ” (lies) in London, and that Cymbeline’s “liϸ” still in York; Robert multiplies these kinds of references and frequently notes the practices that endure “ʒut to ϸis day.”⁹⁵ The present also continues seamlessly into the future on Laʒamon’s repeated promises of “nu and auere-mare” (now and evermore).⁹⁶ The Otho redactor extends this process by using modern vocabulary. Robert, for his part, calls attention to history’s creation in the present by qualifying information as personal understanding (“as ich vnder stonde”) and by referring to eyewitness experience.⁹⁷ He also adds anachronistic explanations that evoke thirteenth-century social contexts, such as the fact that Hengist feared Aurelius because he had won many tournaments in France (11. 2893–901). Finally, both historians often write as if they had seen distant events with their own eyes. Robert, for example, makes himself the subject of distant rulers by referring to them as “our king.” These and other anachronisms draw the past closer to the present, creating what Le Saux calls a principle of narrative implication that effaces historical and emotional distances.⁹⁸ Presentism also draws attention to the unfinished nature of history and casts England’s current situation as an explicit consequence of the past.⁹⁹ The narrators thus imply that any thirteenth-century Englishman can see what historical persons saw, that any reader can experience the continuing presence of the past.

Laʒamon and Robert couple this presentism with a restoration of the traditional Anglo-Saxon chronology of dominion. Laʒamon not only anticipates the arrival of the Angles as soon as Brutus sets foot on the island (1. 991), he writes as if dominion passes to them with Ronwen’s toast, the first given “in Ænglene londe” (1. 7140). Moreover, as Leckie has shown, Laʒamon (following Wace, who follows the First Variant) restores English dominion to the seventh century by making Aethelstan Cadwallader’s contemporary (118). Although this chronology is as “confused” as the First Variant’s, since Aethelstan lived in the tenth century, it nonetheless stages a significant counterconquest against Geoffrey’s Briton chronology. Robert’s account of Saxon settlement, by contrast, leaves no room for confusion. When Hengist builds his castle, Robert identifies the year as 449 (1. 2539). Later, less than one hundred lines after Arthur’s death in 542, Robert enumerates the six Saxon kingdoms and fills in their history since Hengist: Kent was founded fifty-eight years after Hengist, Wessex began a little before King Arthur, and the first king of Northumberland came after Arthur in 547 (11. 4655–90). With retrospective precision, Robert enumerates the chronology of Saxon settlement such that their dominion clearly coincides with their first castle.

As Laʒamon and Robert claim Briton history for the English, they recalculate the temporal patterns inherited from their sources. Laʒamon eliminates almost all synchronic references, and facilitates the extension of Saxon dominion by eliminating the years of Arthur and Cadwallader’s deaths. He retains only the reference to Romulus and Remus (11. 1934–35) and to Lucius’s death in 160 (1. 5114). Both of these references anchor time in Rome: Romulus and Remus identify Rome’s origin (and the origin of Briton dominion there), while Lucius received the Roman evangelists who brought Christianity to Britain. Laʒamon bolsters the relation between time and Rome in his lengthy praise of Caesar, which includes the remark that Caesar made the calendar that appoints the months and the year (11. 3599–601). Here, the very possibility of temporal calculation originates with imperial ambition. Laʒamon’s restricted system of temporal references thus enhances English dominion by locating it vaguely within a recognizably imperial timeline.

Robert, by contrast, extends Geoffrey’s system of calculation. In a maneuver similar to the Welsh translators who calculate years from the Flood, Robert assembles the temporal references found in various sources into a single edifice of retrospective and prospective calculation. The ability to count becomes a measure of possession: kings possess their kingdoms because their reigns can be counted (by year, duration, and ruler’s age), and the English possess history because Robert can count out the years. Quantification begins in the prologue, with the numbering of towns. Brutus’s arrival mobilizes the origin of time itself: he reaches England’s shore in the third age since the world’s beginning, in the time of Abraham and Moses—that is, 3,083 years after the world’s creation and 1,130 years before Christ’s birth.¹⁰⁰ When Robert subsequently preserves Geoffrey’s synchronisms, he usually reinforces them with Christian annals, even before Christ’s birth.¹⁰¹ Robert dates major dynastic and religious changes with particular care. Caesar, for example, arrives exactly 60 years before Christ’s birth and 493 years after Rome’s foundation; the Saxons convert in 582 after there have been fifty emperors in Rome (since God’s birth), 150 years after they first came to England, and about 40 years after King Arthur’s death; the Battle of Hastings takes place on a Saturday in 1066 when William is 39 years old, in the 31st year of his dukedom.¹⁰² Robert’s annalistic method leads him to add numerous synchronic references, including the founding of churches, the deaths and marriages of local figures, weather, crops, and supernatural signs. All of these retrospective calculations seem to be the results of Robert’s own mathematical labors. They combine imperial and religious time, encompassing international and local events within the English timeline.

Imperial and English dominion permeate time at the level of the yearly calendar as well. After the naming of the weekdays, for example, every reference to a specific day recalls Saxon origins. And once Julius Caesar and Augustus name months after themselves,¹⁰³ every subsequent reference to July and August recalls imperial origins. Imperial counting even structures the narration of Christ’s birth: Robert explains Augustus’s census and taxation effort, juxtaposing the beginning of the numbering in Jerusalem with Christ’s birth in Bethlehem (11. 1386–404). The description, which includes a counting of shires, sounds almost exactly like Robert’s description of Domesday, William the Conqueror’s census of Insular wealth (11. 7674–85). In each case, the ability to count signifies political power.

Throughout the narrative, Robert controls historiographical time by telling us what is too long to tell, what we shall hear, and what we have already heard.¹⁰⁴ He also clearly identifies the moment when prophecies come true, be they Merlin’s, Dunstan’s, or his own predictions.¹⁰⁵ Saints and magicians thus know the future, and Robert knows their history with retrospective precision. When he admits that quantities, like Maud’s goodness, escape quantification (1. 270–74), he underscores the ordinary countability of everything else. Always measuring time in several different ways, Robert calibrates historical dominion to accurate enumeration. An accountant of history, Robert extends English dominion through the years of good weather and bad. In two very different ways, then, the one representational and the other presentational, Laʒamon and Robert lay claim to the imperial, Christian origins of English time.

Laʒamon’s Englishing of Briton history extends to his account of Arthur, as does his divestment from the ethics of force. Unlike the heroic tradition represented by Beowulf, Laʒamon diminishes as far as possible the semiotics of power inherent in the representation of armor.¹⁰⁶ In fact, compared with other Arthurian historians, Laʒamon barely engages the semiotics of swords. Although he offers the greatest number of arming descriptions (including Morvidus [11. 3215ff.] and Bedver [11. 12880ff.]), the portraits serve relatively narrow functions. When, for example, Corineus’s sword breaks, the fractured blade signifies not a fractured soul but a negligent smith (1. 780). Laʒamon’s pragmatic approach to armor emerges from his general approach to force as a tool, not a sign of legitimacy. His striking revision of Caliburn, which reduces Wace’s four namings to two, bypasses the sword in order to emphasize Arthur’s personal role as a valiant English hero in God’s service.

Laʒamon uses the first arming description to insinuate Arthur’s Englishness and establish his personal heroism. The portrait begins with a cuirass apparently invented by Laʒamon, either named Wygar or made by a crafty smith named Wygar (the reference is ambiguous).¹⁰⁷ In either case, Wygar identifies Arthur as an heir to Anglo-Saxon culture:¹⁰⁸ the cuirass literally covers Arthur’s body with English history. Having set an Anglo-Saxon tone, Laʒamon revises the rest of the portrait he inherited from Wace to enhance Arthur’s physical power. After enclosing his legs in steel armor, Arthur girds on Caliburn, wrought with marvelous craft (“wiʒelefulle craften”) in Avalon (11. 10547–48). The repetition of craft links the sword to the cuirass, made with noble craft (“aðelen crafte”). Reinforcing this emerging image of indigenous ingenuity, Laʒamon gives Arthur’s helmet an English name, Goswhit (1. 10552). He also specifies that the helmet belonged to Uther, “ϸas aðelen kinges” (1. 10551), an epithet that assimilates him to Arthur’s English armor and the noble Englishmen evoked in the prologue. Although the shield’s Briton name, Pridwen, disrupts this English portrait (1. 10554), Laʒamon concludes with a laudable image of Arthur’s strength: spear in hand, he leaps on his horse fully armed (rather than midway through the arming process, as in Wace); Laʒamon ends with a four-line meditation on Arthur’s superlative qualities (11. 10546–62). The Otho redactor subtly enhances the Englishing of Arthur’s arms by modernizing the vocabulary and excising the line that ascribes the helmet to Uther. In the absence of this reminder of Arthur’s Briton genealogy, his reputation can float more freely toward the English. Despite the elaborate presentation of Arthur’s arms and Caliburn’s great crafte, Laʒamon does not name the sword in the ensuing battle. Indeed, the lance Ron delivers the critical first blow, which Arthur celebrates with a cry to the Lord and His Mother (11. 10591–98). A greater share of heroic power thus goes to Arthur himself and to God, transcendent legitimator of the war against the Heathens.

By enhancing Arthur’s Christian identity, Laʒamon assimilates him to the noble history of the Christian English. In the confrontation with Frollo, Laʒamon continues to develop Arthur’s portrait as a servant of God. Arthur accepts Frollo’s challenge with an elaborate prayer; his men pray to both God and His Mother during the duel (11. 11842–54, 11923). Just prior to the confrontation, Laʒamon adds a second arming description, unique to his narrative (11. 11856–76). With the exception of Caliburn, every element of Arthur’s regalia is different; the generic article ænne introduces each anonymous object. Although the spear once belonged to Uther (and was made in Caermarthen by a smith named Griffin), the generic weaponry renders the armor a tool of force rather than a sign of imperial value. Although Le Saux suggests that the substitute armor signs Laʒamon’s criticism of Arthur’s expansionism,¹⁰⁹ it seems rather to evade symbolic force. Indeed, Uther’s spear (which is Laʒamon’s invention) associates the duel with Cheldric’s defeat, in which Arthur wore Uther’s helmet. Moreover, Laʒamon concludes the portrait with an even lengthier encomium to Arthur’s virtues. Once again, the Otho redactor generalizes Arthur’s reputation by modernizing vocabulary and excising Uther. During the duel, Laʒamon names the sword in action for the first and only time as Arthur delivers the fatal blow (l. 11965). In the end, Laʒamon seems more interested in Arthur’s Continental legal practices than in the legitimacy of his territorial claim or its imperial consequences.

Nine years later, back in England, the Romans demand both France’s return and England’s submission. Their arrival touches off an extensive discussion of legitimate jurisdictions. First, they claim Britain because Caesar conquered the island in battle (l. 12374). In response, Arthur focuses on self-defense, dismissing both Cador’s blood-lust and Gawain’s reasonable description of the advantages of peace. Rejecting Caesar’s claim as “unrihte,” Arthur proceeds to show how the Britons could make the same claim against the Romans (ll. 12480–516). He leaps from this hypothetical reversal to proclaim his own desire to possess Rome; he concludes by attributing victory to divine judgment:

He wilneð al. and ich wilni al. ϸaet wit beiene aʒæð.

habben hit nu and aʒe. ϸe hit æð mæʒen iwinne.

for nu we scullen cunne. wham hit Godd unne.

(Ll. 12531–33)

[He wants all, and I want all, that which each has. Have it now and forever, whoever can win it! For now we shall know to whom God gives it.]

Arthur’s stark declaration of forceful jurisdiction (strengthened by the Otho redactor, who excises God’s role) leaves no room for equivocation or ambivalence. Accordingly, Hoel and Auguselus ratify Arthur’s decision without extending the discussion of legitimation. With no possible judicial conclusion to the competing vengeance claims, armed conflict becomes unavoidable. Victory, moreover, proves legitimacy because it derives from God.

The ensuing battle takes on the same dimensions as the earlier Saxon conflict, since Laʒamon presents the Romans as Heathens rather than as Trojan cousins (ll. 13635–70). Yet during the battle, Arthur does not carry Caliburn and barely participates in the fight; he delivers more speeches than blows. Moreover, Laʒamon reduces even the speeches to a minimum and ends the battle quite suddenly (l. 13880). Like the rest of Arthur’s equipment, the sword falls into anonymity and ceases to occupy a privileged place in the narrative structure. A comparative reader expects to find the sword in action here; an Anglophone audience knowing no other version may well expect another chivalric portrait. In the absence of both, Laʒamon shifts attention away from the imperial value of force and toward its use as a tool for resolving impossible judicial dilemmas. This shift legitimates the victor’s dominion as an expression of divine will, or at least of proven superior strength.

In Laʒamon’s text, as elsewhere, Caliburn does not engage Arthur’s defeat. As with Helen and the giant of Mont Saint-Michel, Laʒamon sexualizes the concluding episode and amplifies its brutality. Guenivere’s active betrayal is presaged in the dream Laʒamon invents for Arthur: while Mordred hacks at Arthur’s hall, Guenivere pulls down the roof with her own hands (ll. 13992–94). In the dream, her punishment also equals Mordred’s: Arthur beheads Mordred and hacks up the queen “mid deore mine sweorede” (with my dear sword) (ll. 13998–4001). Although the sword is unnamed, the phrasing suggests that Arthur punishes the realm’s destruction with the emblem of its defense. The severity of the treachery forces him to exact this punishment with his left hand (his right arm broke when the hall collapsed) (ll. 13995, 13998). Once Arthur learns of the dream’s prescience, Laʒamon amplifies discussion of betrayal: the Britons clamor for Mordred and Guenievere’s death, Arthur proclaims that he will kill them both, and Gawain declares he will have Mordred hung and Guenivere torn apart by horses.¹¹⁰ As Arthur prepares to march on Mordred, Laʒamon deepens Guenivere’s betrayal: she goes personally to warn Mordred, “ϸat wæs hire leofuest monnes” (who was the dearest man to her) (l. 14101). As the battles wage on, she escapes to the convent at Caerleon, and no one hears from her again: “ϸa heo hire-seolf weore. isunken in ϸe watere” (as if she had sunk into the water) (l. 14216). This idiomatic expression for “disappearance without a trace”¹¹¹ submerges Guenivere in the aquatic origins of Britain’s misfortunes. Like a Habren or a Hamo, she drowns at the edge of legitimacy.

In the wake of Guenivere’s disappearance, Arthur also takes to the water—in a boat governed by fairies and headed for Avalon (ll. 14277–80). Arthur’s death completes Laʒamon’s Englishing of the Briton hero. He repeats the prophecy of Arthur’s return no fewer than four times—twice by Merlin, once by Arthur himself, and once by the narrator.¹¹² It may seem paradoxical, ironic, or even ambivalent of Laʒamon to champion Arthur’s possible survival, since Arthur would seem to represent a Welsh threat to the English. Laʒamon, however, does not disparage contemporary Briton beliefs in Arthur’s return because he assimilates him to English history. As Le Saux has argued, for Laʒamon the English have as much claim to Arthur as the Welsh.¹¹³ In the final version of the prophecy, the narrator even hopes that “an” Arthur will yet come to help the “Angles” (l. 14297). The phrasing clearly claims Arthur’s return as a boon to the English, that is, the Brut’s audience, settled into the English landscape and suffering from the effects of weak monarchies. The instability that reigned in varying degrees from the 1190s through Henry III’s reign could contribute to the desire for the return of strong government. By claiming Arthur for both the Britons and the English, Laʒamon extends the promise of restoration across the entire island¹¹⁴ (although it seems unlikely that he envisions an English revolt against Normans, as James Noble suggests [178–79]). The Otho redactor, by contrast, retrenches Arthur’s historic ethnicity by replacing “Anglen” with “Bruttes.” Rather than exposing the redactor’s ignorance of Laʒamon’s true purpose,¹¹⁵ the substitution indicates that he understood the runes all too well and chose to distance the narrative from the Englishing of Arthur. With this slight resistance to Laʒamon’s historiographical conquest, the redactor limits the future of Arthur’s death.

The absence of a systematic alignment of Caliburn with Arthur’s imperial progress ultimately maintains a focus on tools, not theories, of force. Arthur himself resembles the giant-hero of the First Variant and the Brut y Brenhinedd more than he does Wace’s colonial lord. The absence of a clear grouping of imperial battles also suggests the random nature of history. While Geoffrey and Wace’s repeated namings give history a cyclical structure and a sense of predictability outside of a Christian telos, for Laʒamon the patterns of history and the future lie beyond human perception. He cannot judge the legitimacy of any individual conquest in terms of ethnicity or ideological value; he can only lament the inevitable destruction caused by force and admire its use as a tool of justice. Insular history thus does not legitimate the land’s present or past ownership; it only affords examples of relative strength and weakness, justice and tyranny.

Robert, unlike the Otho redactor, uses Arthur to expand English jurisdiction over the Insular past. Robert frames Arthur’s reign with Caliburn’s edge by introducing the sword into Arthur’s duel with the giant of Mont Saint-Michel and the final battle with Mordred. This pattern represents either a remarkable innovation (since the Latin sources never mention the sword at these moments) or a remarkable synthesis of French narrative (since Wace includes the giant and the Mort le roi Artu Mordred). Whatever its origin, the new pattern disperses the semiotics of the sword, very much like the French prose cycle (see chapter 6). Robert’s approach entrenches swords’ semiotic relation to boundary issues, tempering them with chivalry and drawing out their moral implications.

Robert moralizes sword blades throughout the narrative, suggesting historiographical affinities with the French prose Estoire del saint graal. Aethelstan, for example, carries a relic sword granted by God, which remains in the royal treasury; over Antioch, a flaming sword of justice appears in the sky to inspire the crusaders. The usurper Stephen of Blois has two swords, which evoke the semiotics of spiritual and temporal jurisdictions: when both swords have broken—that is, when Stephen has lost all grounds of legitimacy—he is captured. And when Thomas Beckett is murdered, the point of the sword breaks, signaling the murderers’ immorality in the blade’s fracture; the sword point is still honored at Canterbury.¹¹⁶

Robert conjoins gladial morality to authorial control when he introduces a metaphor peculiar to literature in English: narrating Arthur’s crown wearing, he avers that he could not describe the feast “ϸey my tonge were of stel” (l. 3956). The most striking example of the metaphor’s Englishness surfaces in a lament for the death of Edward I, translated from a French elegy. Where the French version asserts the difficulty that Aristotle or Virgil would have in enumerating Edward’s worth, the English translator says that he could not capture Edward’s goodness “ϸah mi tonge were mad of stel.”¹¹⁷ The elegy’s chronological proximity to Robert’s chronicle suggests that the steel of the English tongue was mined from the real struggles of vernacular expression that followed colonial conquest. Just as the translator reclaims Edward from the French, so Robert reclaims Insular history from Anglo-Norman historians. In his hands, this metaphor for poetic strength associates territorial control with narrative control: just as the kings of Robert’s Historia establish dominion over the land with the sword, Robert claims historical terrain by writing. Kings and historians both acquire their subjects forcefully.

When Robert applies his steel tongue to Arthur, he establishes the famous king’s service to Christian morality. As in Geoffrey’s Historia, the saintly Dubricius sets the Christian tone of the battle against Cheldric by inciting the men to fight for their “kunde,” the “lond folc,” and the “londes riʒt” (ll. 3597–607). Several revisions to the arming scene enhance Arthur’s ties to divine authority (ll. 3609–19). Robert diminishes the sword’s magical associations by not mentioning Avalon and by describing it as simply strong, unique only in Robert’s personal judgment (“nas nour no such ich wene”). At the same time, he increases the presence of the divine by adding a reference to Christ to the existing image of Mary. Robert subordinates Arthur’s success to God’s will more strongly when he describes him on the battlefield giving himself to God before drawing Caliburn. After the slaughter, Robert concludes: “& ϸerto nadde he oϸer help, bote god & seinte marie. / &. calibourne is gode suerd. to do such maistrie” (and thereto he had no other help but God and Saint Mary and Caliburn his good sword, to do such mastery) (ll. 3637–38). In the end, greater credit for success accrues to Mary and Christ than to magical weapons or human strength. For Robert, Caliburn captures force as an act of God.

After Arthur establishes Christian peace on the island, Robert sends him off on his overseas conquests with an exact measurement of Europe and the lands he aims to dominate (ll. 3758–64). Arriving in France, Arthur fights Frollo, slicing through his head with “sire calibourne” (l. 3841). In what is always Caliburn’s most aggressive engagement, Robert here implies that territorial expansion ennobles. The effects of the epithet “Sir” are strengthened by the fact that Robert almost always refers to Arthur as “King Arthur.” Casting Caliburn as a loyal knight, Robert joins the sword to the legitimate interests of chivalric values and ratifies a providential interpretation of knightly aggression. The valuation of chivalric force endures throughout the narrative, as Edmund Ironside meets Cnut for a duel in the midst of the Severn (ll. 6266–99) and Henry Ill’s son Edward becomes a champion of tournaments in France (much like his ancestor Hengist) (ll. 11040–45).

Arthur himself celebrates victory back in England with a “round table” in the thirteenth-century style, replete with chivalric games.¹¹⁸ The list of lords attending reproduces the outlines of the opening descriptio (ll. 3890–911), making Arthur’s dominion contiguous with contemporary England. Robert goes on to enhance the gathering’s imperial dimension by referring to Bedver and Kai as “kings” of Normandy and Anjou (ll. 3948, 3951). When the Roman messengers disrupt the celebration, Robert manifests his mastery of historical time by noting that the only tribute Arthur ever sent was Lucius’s body (ll. 4011–14). The ensuing speeches by Cador, Arthur, Hoel, and Auguselus follow Geoffrey’s Historia closely, reproducing its paradoxes of justified force and counterconquest. The paradoxes pose little ideological trouble in Robert’s narrative, however, since he has already dispersed the ethics of force. Moreover, he assimilates war to chivalry (ll. 4132), and thus to the normal, legitimate activities of King Arthur, Sir Caliburn, Prince Edward, and all other knights.

On the way to Rome, Arthur meets the giant of Mont Saint-Michel, and defeats him with “Calebourne is gode suerd” (l. 4237); his men trust him all the more for his achievement (l. 4246). With this third naming, Robert creates the expectation that the sword will accompany Arthur’s every aggressive, divinely sanctioned act. This third naming also draws the implications of Helen’s rape directly into the theme of imperial progress. For Robert, both are domestic affairs that play out in an always already post-colonial England. He makes the domestication explicitly gendered when Arthur exhorts his troops before the Roman war by reminding them of the lands of which they have made Britain “leuedy” (lady) (l. 4365). World dominion thus becomes a domestic affair played out between fair lords and ladies.

The battle itself against Lucius serves, as it does in Geoffrey’s Historia, to establish who has “betere riʒt” (“maius jus”) to France. The rhetoric of battle downplays the enemy’s otherness by referring to them as “halfmen” (like the giants who are “deformed men”) instead of women (“muliebres”).¹¹⁹ Immediately after concluding his customary speech, much shortened from Geoffrey’s Historia, Arthur enters the fray, chivalric sword in hand:

Sire calibourne is suerd. he bi gan to ssake anon.

& slou to grounde her & ϸer. ac he ne smot noʒt on.

Ϸat he ne slou him oϸer his hors. & among hom echon.

Ϸe king of lybye. & of bytynie. him sulf gan to quelle.

Mid calibourne & send, hor heϸene soule to helle.

(Ll. 4458–62)

[Sir Caliburn his sword he soon began to shake, and slew to the ground here and there, but he never smote a man that he did not slay either him or his horse, and among them both the king of Libya and of Bithynia he himself went to kill with Caliburn and send their heathen souls to hell.]

Robert begins with the chivalric sword, but ends with the destruction of Heathen souls, conjoining knightly and moral justifications. He proceeds to eliminate Geoffrey’s representation of the Romans’ successful resistance: perhaps following the First Variant, he passes directly to Morvidus of Gloucester’s definitive offensive and the Britons’ mastery of the field (ll. 4463–74). Arthur’s own action thus leads more directly to the final victory than in Geoffrey’s text, augmenting his chivalric prowess as well as the decisiveness of divine judgment. In the end, Robert judges that there has been no greater battle except the Trojan one, as Arthur reigns supreme from the west side of the world to the east (ll. 4491–95). The Trojan comparison strategically recalls the Britons’ prestigious origins at the height of Arthurian dominion.

Robert carries Arthurian prestige into the final battle against Mordred by having Arthur continue to fight with Caliburn. Prior to the battle itself, Robert suggests that Guenivere initiated the treachery by advising Mordred to crown himself king (ll. 4503–4). Able to imagine a usurping queen, Robert exhibits little anxiety over the consequences of irregular intercourse. Guenivere herself, the “luϸer quene” (l. 4537), flees in fear when she hears of Arthur’s arrival. Throughout the passage, Robert maintains a political focus that disengages the treachery from fundamental identity issues. In the course of the battle itself, political and religious legitimacy reinforce each other, as Robert (like Laʒamon) depicts Mordred’s allies as Heathens (l. 4528). The outcome, however, does not establish who has “betere riʒt”: Mordred simply has more men (l. 4563). By insisting on the practical limits of force, Robert divorces the victory from moral or legal legitimacy:

He drou calibourne is suerd. & in eyϸer side slou.

& vorte he to ϸe traytour com. made him wey god ynou.

He hente verst of is helm. & suϸϸe mid wille god.

Anne stroc he ʒef him. mid wel stourdy mod.

& ϸoru hauberc & ϸoru is coler. ϸat nere noϸing souple.

He smot of is heued as liʒtliche. as it were a scouple.

Ϸat was is laste chiualerye. ϸat vaire endede ynou.

Vor ϸat folc so ϸikke com. ϸe wule he hor louerd slou.

Aboute him in eche half. ϸat among so many fon.

He aueng deϸes wounde. & wonder nas it non.

(Ll. 4573–82)

[He drew Caliburn his sword and he slew on either side, and he made his way well enough until he came to the traitor. First he caught his helmet and then with great will he gave him one stroke with a very sturdy mind right through his hauberk and through his collar, which was not at all supple. That was his [Arthur’s] last chivalry, that ended fairly enough, for that folk came on so thickly about him on each side because he had slain their lord, that among so many foes he had death’s wound, it was no wonder.]

Robert’s realistic reasoning for Arthur’s defeat makes clear that his foes enjoy no legitimacy; the reference to chivalric values excludes providential or imperial interpretations. Set against the sword’s first naming, this final inscription carves a frame around Arthurian conquest, an imperial project that begins and ends at home. The faithful sword takes the place of Avalon (which Robert never mentions) as both origin and destination. In this pattern of events, Sir Caliburn serves as a faithful knight, attending Arthur’s role in the drama of dominion but powerless to change the course of divinely ordered events.

After the battle, Robert leaves no doubt that Arthur deserves his superlative reputation. Like every other king, however, he must take his place in the sum of historical calculation. Whereas Laʒamon affirms Arthur’s return and Geoffrey and Wace record doubts about his death, Robert is almost alone among the early Arthurian historians in recording the death with absolute certainty:

& he let hime lede in to an yle. vor to hele is wounde.

& deide as ϸe beste kniʒt. ϸat me wuste euere yfounde.

& naϸeles ϸe brutons. & ϸe cornwalisse of is kunde.

Weneϸ he be aliue ʒut. & abbeϸ him in munde.

Ϸat he be to comene ʒut. to winne aʒen ϸis lond.

& naϸeles at glastinbury. his bones suϸϸe me fond.

& ϸere at uore ϸe heye weued. amydde ϸe quer ywis.

As is bones liggeϸ. is toumbe wel vair is.

In ϸe vif hundred ʒer of grace. & vourty & tuo.

In ϸis manere in cornwaile. to deϸe he was ydo.

(Ll. 4587–96)

[And he let himself be led to an isle, for to heal his wounds, and died as the best knight that was ever found to defend. And nonetheless the Britons and the Cornish of his kin think he is alive yet, and have in their mind that he will come yet to win again this land. And nonetheless at Glastonbury men have since found his bones, and there before the high altar in the midst of the choir surely his bones lie; his tomb is very fair. In the five hundredth year of grace, and forty-two, in this manner in Cornwall, to death was he done.]

This anonymous island imparts no magical healing, just a fine burial place. Like his probable contemporary the Otho redactor, then, Robert maintains Arthur’s identity as a Briton—a dead Briton with a very rich tomb at Glastonbury, the land’s oldest religious foundation. Robert thus separates the belief in Arthur’s resurrection from the restoration of ancient Welsh rights: these rights are transcendent, and do not depend on the life of one man, no matter how superlative his qualities. Since Robert goes on to narrate Glastonbury’s foundation at the appropriate historical moment two hundred lines later, as well as the great fire of 1184 after which Arthur’s bones were discovered (l. 9852), Arthur stands out as a great king for the same reasons as Constantine and Edward the Confessor, not for any additional supernatural reason. Of course, the death does bring much sorrow to Christendom (l. 4653). Moreover, it is literally epoch-making, as Robert measures time from Arthur’s death more than once:¹²⁰ these references fix the moment in time and place and communicate the true historicity of Arthur’s demise. They also give the impression, like the London French Brut, that “[contemporary England . . . is understood as the aftermath of Arthurian England.”¹²¹ The strength of this understanding contributed to King John’s desire to murder Arthur of Brittany in 1203, lest Arthur in fact come again (ll. 10112–22). The fear of resurrection, however, afflicts only those who fail to dominate Insular space or its historical equations.

As much as a hundred years apart, the Historia Brutonum and Historia rythmis Anglicanis conquer Briton history for the English. Laʒamon, the Otho redactor, and Robert all proffer perspectives on simplemen’s culture, defining legitimacy from the perspective of the ruled. Comfortably settled into an English landscape shaped by the course of the Severn River, they pursue paradigms of continuity and invisible origins. While literally overlooking the Severn, they figuratively overlook many contested historiographical boundaries. By constructing linguistic, ethnic, and religious resemblances across conventional historical differences, they invite admiration for English successes. They figure the land itself as the material basis of these continuities. Their perspectives on how force, ethnicity, and religion affect the land inform their semiotic relation to the Arthurian period, and to instruments of war generally. Shaped by post-colonial perspectives, their narratives ultimately dismiss inherited colonial paradigms. The modern impulse to see irony or ambivalence in these English ennoblements of Briton history must thus confront the transient modes of postcolonial subjectivity. For in these narratives, we can recognize fragmented, partial, or temporary identifications that nonetheless assume the immutability of the kunde londe. To identify the “Englishness” of this land is not to discover the ancient origins of “nationalism” but rather the perennial novelty of narrative engagements with legacies of coercive contact.