Prologus historiarum Britanniae

“The trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they do do don’t know what it means.” These stuttering words are spoken by the character Whiskey Sisodia, an Indian impresario living in London, in Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. Sisodia articulates here the fundamental dynamics of post-colonial subjectivity, which equivocates between memory and amnesia (the English do and don’t know their history) while hovering between the familiar and the foreign (literally, over seas).¹ The menace (hiss hiss) of the English past has taken place overseas precisely because that past has been shaped by colonial ambition. The English themselves originally came from overseas, inspiring in others the amnesia they themselves would later suffer. Indeed, Sisodia’s comment echoes the judgment leveled against the Scots in the ninth-century Historia Brittonum: they don’t know their origins (“nescientes originis sui”) (60). In both of these contexts, postcolonial amnesia witnesses the complex role of origins in colonial history. The English and the Scots have in fact both forgotten the original people of Insular history, the Britons. Nonetheless, the ghosts of colonized Britons haunt subsequent formulations of imperial Britain, casting long shadows across European historiography.

In medieval Britain, one of the key moments in the process of colonial contamination was Aethelred’s marriage to Emma of Normandy. Through their son Edward the Confessor, William of Normandy claimed to inherit the Insular monarchy, leading to overseas business that the English would rather forget. Rushdie’s own portrayal of William stages an instructive encounter of memory and amnesia within a colonial scenario. Rushdie embodies England in the aged Rosa Diamond, an apparently childless widow of eighty-eight who scans the horizon for Norman ghosts, which she defines as “[u]nfinished business” (129). In fact, Rosa prays for nothing less than “the past’s return” as she challenges the Normans to come again: “Come on, you Norman ships, she begged: let’s have you, Willie-the-Conk” (129). Rosa’s desire to confront the eleventh-century Norman conqueror expresses an English desire to de-colonize the national origin.

Rosa’s own memory is dominated by visions of the battle of Hastings: “Longbows, maces, pikes. The flaxen-Saxon boys, cut down in their sweet youth, Harold Arroweye and William with his mouth full of sand” (130). Spying something moving on the shore, she is shocked by the idea that Willie might have actually landed again: “What she said aloud in her excitement: ‘I don’t believe it!’ — ‘It isn’t true!’ — ‘He’s never here!’ On unsteady feet, with bumping chest, Rosa went for her hat, cloak, stick. While, on the winter seashore, Gibreel Farishta awoke with a mouth full of, no, not sand. Snow” (130). In this moment, Rosa and the reader encounter Gibreel as a Norman zombie, performing Rosa’s memory of William at Hastings. His mouth full of snow, not sand, only replaces one incongruity (the presence of William) with another (the presence of snow). In this moment of substitution, the Indian survivor of English colonialism (and an airplane explosion over the English Channel) occupies the place of the Norman conqueror who forcefully overcame the English. Fleetingly, Gibreel embodies the postcolonial ambitions of both English and Indian; fleetingly, time, space, and ethnicity bend around to meet themselves. The contortions amplify when Rosa takes Gibreel in and he masquerades as her dead husband, the chivalric Sir Henry. Homi Bhabha recognizes Gibreel’s dual performance as English colonizer and Indian colonized when he concludes: “He is the history that happened overseas, elsewhere” (168). Gibreel is also, however, the Norman colonizer and the English colonized, and thus the force of restless, ghostly, medieval memory.

These memories include the Britons, who occupy important narrative roles in the historiography generated from the Norman Conquest. In this book, I pursue some of their unfinished colonial business through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—a business that in some senses has barely begun, even though Britain sustained post-colonial cultures (hyphenated to indicate a chronological relation to a specific historical occupation) well before the twentieth century. Trojans, Angles, Romans, Saxons, Danes, and Normans forcibly settled the island; Anglo-Saxons in turn settled the Americas and the Indian subcontinent. Each colonial encounter has engendered new power dynamics and new narratives, including the theories called postcolonial (unhyphenated, to indicate concepts not bound to specific histories).² As some critics of postcolonialism recognize,³ the history of colonial ambition presents numerous revelatory continuities, despite changes in venue and technology. Analyses of these resemblances can qualify and quantify the unique dynamics of each meeting of unequal powers. By juxtaposing Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and the Historia Brittonum, then, I do not offer the “discovery” of a new origin of postcolonial desire or nationalist amnesia. Such a proposal would overlook the urgent politics of contemporary struggles against oppression. Rather, I propose that analogies can sharpen the contours of historical difference even as they construct points of contact across time. Postcolonial studies, for example, formulate theories of culture and identity in border communities that speak to the discontinuities of medieval boundaries, even though the legal and political mechanisms differ greatly. At the same time, certain resemblances between medieval and modern cultures dismantle the seemingly impermeable boundary that critics draw on the modern side of the Middle Ages. As medieval studies are making clear, the pre-colonial, pre-national Middle Ages imagined by postcolonial critics reinscribes the cultural homogeneity that colonial discourse analysis seeks to dismantle.⁴ My juxtaposition, which might be called a “strategic achronism,” thus claims that the familiar and the foreign (the modern and the medieval) are always already mutually contaminated and in the process of decomposition. Postcolonial criticism narrates the traumas of this process.

After the successful conquest of 1066, Norman settlement of Britain provoked not only dramatic shifts in land tenure and the political contours of northern Europe, but also vigorous historiographical action. As R. W. Southern first suggested, the cultural trauma of Norman colonization focused attention on the near and distant past, as both dominant and dominated groups defended their collective identities and sought therapeutic cures for alienation in history. In this process, King Arthur became the most contested of all Britons. The histories of Britain that include Arthur, beginning with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s in the 1130s, narrate the long history of Insular colonialism in reaction to various contemporary pressures. In fact, the Arthurian histories made canonical by medievalist criticism all emerged from border cultures and engage the dynamics of boundary formation into the thirteenth century and across the Channel. As writers responded to disruptions in their contemporary landscapes by narrating the histories of Insular jurisdictions, Arthurian historiography took shape as a form of border writing.

I have arrived at this conclusion almost by accident. Having constructed an intractable corpus of Arthuriana from references to Excalibur in the available indexes of medieval literature, I eventually focused on narratives that recount Arthur’s complete reign in relation to the origins of Insular settlement. I resisted the critical methods (still widely practiced) that determine literary typologies from historical context. Moreover, I avoided treating the Arthurian period in narrative isolation, having discovered firsthand the interpretive fallacies that arise from excerpting. From the beginning, I have been determined that it is not possible, as Eugène Vinaver once feared, to make “too generous a use . . . of the simple virtues of Excalibur” (526). I have likewise been inspired by Angus Fletcher’s intuition that Excalibur, Dante’s beatific rose, and the eponymous Pearl of English verse “contain the cosmos of those works where they appear” (229). I discovered the shape of this cosmos while using a map to understand what it meant for Geoffrey to be “of Monmouth” and for Robert to be “of Gloucester.” Suddenly, it became clear that every text in my corpus emerged from an identifiable border region. Arthurian historiography, I will now argue, was written most often and most emphatically in relation to boundary pressures. The coercive and often violent nature of these pressures makes the sword, which began in my research as an almost random object, an engaging emblem of historiography in the border.

The itinerary of Arthurian historiography traverses the edges of the island as well as the Continent. The journey begins in the Severn River Valley, in the town of Monmouth. Probably from Oxford, Geoffrey of Monmouth manifested his ambivalent relation with colonial domination by narrating Britain’s history for Norman patrons. Almost immediately, Geoffrey’s neighbors in Wales revised his Historia regum Britanniae as they imagined a reversal of Norman domination. Meanwhile, Insular and Continental Normans could learn the Britons’ history in French from Gaimar or Wace and project their own fantasies of justified expansionism against the Insular past (Gaimar’s history, however, has not survived). By the end of the twelfth century, back on the banks of the Severn, Laʒamon was translating Wace’s history into an English landscape as if it had always belonged there. Shortly afterward, on the other side of the Channel and the French royal domain, the Arthurian prose cycle began to take shape as a vast meditation on the dangers of prestigious history, true to the ambivalent spirit of Geoffrey’s Historia. Around the Historia’s centenary anniversary, a monk in Brittany returned the Britons to their epic origins in the Gesta regum Britanniae, moralizing their fate and rejecting the prestige of coercive history. In the later years of the thirteenth century, Arthurian historiography continued to flourish in the Welsh border region where it first emerged—in revisions of Laʒamon’s English history, in Robert of Gloucester’s English translation of the Latin Historia, and in Welsh translations of revised Historiae.

This comparative journey exposes the border cultures of Arthur’s biographers and lays bare the perils of isolating his history from their landscapes. It takes place at the juncture of textual minutiae, cultural history, and ethnic psychology. The chapters that follow trace the regional, rather than chronological, contours of this journey. This method underscores the fact that border relations do not develop teleologically. Although it means occasionally discussing revisions before their sources, this regional focus opens new perspectives on processes of creation and reception. I begin with a definition of border writing through postcolonial theories, including the sword’s role as an emblem of coercive boundary formation. The first section then takes in the Insular landscape: Geoffrey between Monmouth and Oxford (chapter 2), Latin revision and Welsh translation in Wales in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (chapter 3), and English translation along the Severn in the thirteenth century (chapter 4). The second section follows Arthurian historiography across the Channel: Latin revision and French translation in Normandy in the twelfth century (chapter 5), the French prose cycle in the thirteenth century (chapter 6), and Latin revision in thirteenth-century Brittany (chapter 7). In each region, reactions to domination fail to develop neat chronological patterns from colonial celebration to post-colonial ambivalence to anti-colonial diatribe. Instead, representations of colonial history are bound to dynamic cultural processes that shape surprising resemblances and startling differences across both time and space.