L’enor d’Engleterre

Just as the Brutieu amplify the First Variant’s Welsh orientation, Wace’s Roman de Brut accentuates the Historia’s Norman perspectives on Insular history. Part of this Norman ideology actually derives from the First Variant, which provides significant portions of the French text.¹¹ In all likelihood, then, Wace translated from a hybrid text that included both vulgate and variant material (like the one edited by Jacob Hammer). The hybrid Latin Historia itself witnesses postcolonial accommodations to ambivalence while also denying them. When translated into French, this hybridity performs the attraction of native cultures for colonizing minds. The translated text also captures the ideological complicity of colonial subjects on both sides of the struggle for power. The close relation between Welsh and Norman historical visions thus goes well beyond the accidents of textual transmission. Each profits in its own way from the legitimation of violent territorial expansion; each draws ideological force from the presentation of history itself as an object of conquest. Wace’s Roman de Brut thus places tools of resistance in the service of domination during what was actually a period of violent jurisdictional negotiation in the Norman duchy (between 1144 and 1155).

Wace himself (like Geoffrey, the Welsh redactors, Laʒamon, the Otho redactor, and Robert) wrote from a border culture. In the midst of the Roman de Rou (translated from the Gesta Normannorum ducum), Wace identifies himself as a Channel Islander from Jersey, “qui est en mer vers Occident, / al fieu de Normendie apent” (which is in the sea toward the west, dependent on the fief of Normandy) (ll. 5303–4). From upper Normandy, Jersey indeed lies to the west, just south of the larger island Guernsey; in the twelfth century both were tenurially attached to Normandy. A Continental perspective on the Channel Islands surfaces clearly in the Roman de Brut when Wace describes Guernsey as “[u]n isle vers soleil culchant” (an island toward the setting sun) (l. 14189), even though Cadwallo is sailing east from Britain at the time. Wace thus views his insular origin from the Continental shore, casting the islands as both near and far. The Channel Islands in fact constitute an insular border that touches all of the aquatic passages between Brittany, Normandy, Cornwall, and southern England. Wace himself manifests an acute awareness of the precarious transit between shores with sea-faring metaphors and vivid descriptions of stormy seas.¹² John Le Patourel, also a native of the Channel Islands, has presented the islands’ border perspective in some detail while tracing the confluence of Briton, Norman, English, and Angevin influences (3–38, 435–61). Wace likewise suggests the simultaneous insularity and permeability of life along these navigable borders.

Although Wace’s perspective remains slightly offshore, he writes from the Continental side of the border, describing an early move to Caen, a period of study in France, and a return to Caen to write.¹³ This itinerary, somewhat like Geoffrey’s, passes through metropolitan centers of academic and political power (either Chartres or Paris).¹⁴ While Wace’s stay in France evokes French royal dominion, Caen itself is closely associated with the Insular monarchy through the burial of William the Conqueror, the birth of Robert earl of Gloucester (Geoffrey’s patron), and the abbeys’ Insular landholdings.¹⁵ The coastal location in fact placed Caen at the center of ducal and royal itineraries. On the Norman coast, then, Wace lived between domination and the dominated, in a region disputed by neighboring kings and conquered in his lifetime by an Angevin count.

Despite this apparent formula for multiple partialities, Wace banishes ambivalence by affirming an immutable barrier between the known and the unknown. He frequently repeats the formula “ne sai” (I don’t know) in order to explain the absence of descriptive or explanatory information, most spectacularly in the triple anaphora “ne jo n’ai mie” (I don’t have any idea at all).¹⁶ Throughout his account of Arthur’s reign, Wace takes special care to circumscribe the limits of the knowable by excluding doubtful fables, difficult prophecy, and conjectural biography.¹⁷ By repeatedly exposing the boundary between truth and fables, Wace mobilizes a discourse of objectivity that ratifies each ruler’s legitimacy. In one sense, the difference between the known and the unknown coincides with the difference between what one possesses and what one does not. Thus by representing the bounds of historical knowledge, Wace identifies a colonizing vision that denies partialities and ambiguities: historiography dominates information. Indeed, Wace describes his written achievements as conquest in the Roman de Rou when he notes that the difficult work of translation becomes easy if his “enging” revives and “quant je cuit conquester” (when I believe I conquer) (1:60, ll. 1357–59).¹⁸ These are the same values—craft and force—that Wace ascribes to successful rulers in the Roman de Brut. The hero and the historian thus both seek the material gain of conquester.¹⁹ Moreover, as Hanning points out, engin collocates chivalric and poetic craft.²⁰ Even though Wace ultimately loses his battle with history in the Roman de Rou,²¹ the symmetry between historical conquerors and the historiography of conquest effaces the difference between deeds and their textualization. Wace thereby legitimates domination as a cultural activity that eradicates doubt and ambiguity. Successful narration thus redounds to the honor of the hero, and his historian.

The Roman de Brut’s prologue announces an already triumphant possession of Briton territory by eliminating the descriptio of Britain. Instead, Wace offers comprehensive knowledge of Insular succession to anyone who understands French:

Ki vult oïr e vult saveir

De rei en rei e d’eir en eir

Ki cil furent e dunt il vindrent

Ki Engleterre primes tindrent,

Quels reis i ad en ordre eü,

Ki anceis e ki puis i fu,

Maistre Wace l’ad translaté

Ki en conte la verité. (ll. 1–8)

[Whoever wants to hear and wants to know, from king to king and from heir to heir, who they were and from where they came, those who first held England, which kings there have been in order, who was first and who next, Master Wace has translated it, who recounts the truth of it.]

Presenting a past that seems to have no history, this introduction outlines a genealogy of generic kings, never identifying their ethnic or geographic origins. The narrative thus records the succession of royal tenants who have “held” England rather than the history of a particular kinship group. Wace promises to follow the line of inheritance from heir to heir, in proper order, but does not refer to any particular time period. Although the kings and heirs remain anonymous and achronic, the name of their land (England) and their historian (Wace) orient the orderly succession toward the present: from this perspective, the narrative could easily encompass the twelfth century. Historiographically, then, the Insular landscape always already belongs to the Francophones who desire its history. Wace captures the permanence of historiography by linking Marius’s stone, sign of military triumph, to his own triumphant control of historical knowledge through the vocabulary of witness (“testemonie”).²² Wace and the stone both convey immovable history; they each testify reliably to historical truth. The Roman de Brut, like this stone called Vestinaire, offers an absolute memory, unaffected by time or language.

Many critics have held that Wace staked out this territory of true history specifically for Henry II; Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann even calls “King Arthur” a “literary name” for Henry II.²³ Henry did spend his formative youth at the court of his uncle, Geoffrey’s patron Robert of Gloucester, and Wace was definitely writing the Roman de Rou for Henry between 1160 and 1174. And the Roman de Brut does support royal allegory: Henry made the Britons’ jurisdictional challenges his own; he could see himself in every Briton who successfully conquered the monarchy from a rival relative, and Stephen of Blois in every usurping cousin. Yet Wace probably began work on the Roman de Brut in 1150 or 1151,²⁴ when Henry’s kingship was far from assured. Whether or not Henry had anything to do with the Roman de Brut (and nothing links him directly to the text),²⁵ his political, military, and literary activities in the 1150s provide a compelling context for Wace’s legitimations of force. After inheriting Normandy from his father Geoffrey of Anjou in 1149, Henry focused his attention on conquering the kingship. He forced Stephen to sign a treaty recognizing him as heir in 1153, but his succession remained precarious right up to Stephen’s death (which was unexpected).²⁶ After Henry acceded to the throne in December 1154, he continued to consolidate his territorial control. He immediately asserted firm lordship over Norman magnates; he was planning to conquer Ireland by the end of 1155; he sought to subdue Brittany in 1156; he campaigned in Wales in 1157 and 1158.²⁷ This aggressive itinerary justifies Rita Lejeune’s judgment that Henry was too busy with battle to bother with literature, and perhaps even M. Dominica Legge’s more categorical judgment that “Henry II never had much use for vernacular literature of any kind.”²⁸ Yet while Wace wrote, Henry pursued an almost continuous program of conquest: the Roman de Brut legitimates and glorifies similar efforts by Briton kings.

Henry passed through Caen in 1154, and at least twice more between 1156 and 1161,²⁹ all occasions on which Wace may have caught his attention. The nature of Henry’s interest, if indeed there was any, is partly revealed in the other works dedicated to him between 1153 and 1155—Osbert of Clare’s panegyrical poem, Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum, and Aelred of Rievaulx’s genealogy of English kings.³⁰ While Osbert praised Henry himself and Henry of Huntingdon provided an English history initially completed around 1130, Aelred set out specifically to prove Henry’s place in English history.³¹ After addressing Henry as lord of Normandy, Aquitaine, and Anjou (711), Aelred follows praise of Henry with admiration for David of Scotland, reminding Henry that he received knighthood from the Scottish king. Aelred proceeds to use the history of the English kings to demonstrate Henry’s ties to Scotland, making the key figure Henry’s great-grandmother Maud (716), just as Robert of Gloucester will make her the hero of the English kunde more than a century later. Following the matrilineal line to Edward and then all the way to Adam, Aelred extends the network of Henry’s family obligations through customary Norman “linkage.” Aelred’s genealogy, just like Robert of Gloucester’s, exploits the full range of available kinship to argue a specific point of identity. In this sense, the matrilineal line does not embarrass or signify loss;³² instead, it provides Aelred with a compelling argument in favor of Henry’s obligations to his recently orphaned Scottish cousins, Malcolm and William.³³

Henry himself incarnates a matrix of ethnic identities (all implicated in the Historia); he is identified at least partially with each of them at one time or another. As Wace embarked on the Roman de Rou in the 1160s, for example, Aelred dedicated his “Vita et miracula Edwardi regis” to Henry, pointing out that he descends from Edward and forms the cornerstone (“lapidum angularem”) where English and Norman histories meet (738). With John of Marmoutier’s dedication of an abbreviated Angevin history,³⁴ Henry’s historiographic associations cover nearly all of his genealogical shadows. Finally, perhaps by chance, Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Chronique des dues de Normandie culminates with a genealogy of Angevin counts, tracing their royal history d’eir en eir in order to explain the great honor that Geoffrey Plantagenêt brought to Henry’s mother Matilda (ll. 41837–936). Together, these narratives portray Henry as triply royal (from English, Norman, and Angevin heritage), and as cousin to the Scottish and French royal families. From this perspective, the Roman de Brut grafts together several genealogical branches, all redounding to the greater glory of Henry’s territorial expansion.

The Roman de Brut has been associated with Eleanor as often as Henry, largely on the basis of Laʒamon’s declaration that she received a copy of the text. Eleanor was indeed in Normandy frequently between 1154 and 1160, although not before.³⁵ It seems unlikely, however, that Eleanor commissioned the work from its inception, as Lejeune suggests,³⁶ even if it later caught her attention. Wace’s own statements in the Roman de Rou indicate an independent motivation, in which he took it upon himself to write romanz; he also emphasizes service to God instead of praising his royal benefactors.³⁷ Whatever the Roman de Brut’s path to royal readers (if it had any), its initial audience could easily have been the lesser nobility (“honorial barons” without Insular holdings)³⁸ or the lesser clergy (not trained in Latin and not otherwise likely to learn history).³⁹

A broad, mixed audience accords well with the prologue’s address to all who wish to listen and learn. Wace reinforces this inclusive pedagogy with frequent first- and second-person plurals (apelons, oez). These references open history’s lessons to an ever-expanding community, from twelfth-century royals to twentieth-century critics. Royal legitimation, then, only accounts for part of the work’s appeal.⁴⁰ The Roman de Brut also touches broader Norman ideologies. As both regional and imperial historiography, the Roman de Brut possesses land, kinship, and time by force. It proffers a record of conquest legitimated by its own success. Ultimately, the reading community is not limited by class, ethnicity, or even chronology—only by language.

For royal, aristocratic, and clerical audiences alike, Wace focuses on patterns of admirable domination with a colonizing gaze colored by the First Variant’s indigenous possession of Insular landscape. In an especially tricky historiographical and ideological maneuver, Wace’s translation of the hybrid Historia uses the First Variant’s paradigms of resistance to sustain unencumbered domination. Wace thus turns a blind eye to the Historia’s aestheticized landscapes, extending the First Variant’s logic of the realm (regne) to the feudal logic of the fief (enor, fieu). The land itself becomes a generic place, legally but not culturally meaningful; it acquires value only when possessable and agriculturally productive. As a result, territorial expansion articulates waste and gain (guaster, gaainer) as military and economic activities. Otter refers to this collocation of desirable and arable land as a central motif of twelfth-century historiography (although without discussing the Roman de Brut) (59–60); Leckie explicitly correlates military and cultural dominion in Wace’s text (115). Wace’s complicity with the Welsh is thus not merely textual: the unmeasurable regne sustains expansionism brilliantly.

Where the First Variant redactors attenuate the ambivalence associated with the imperial landscape gaze by removing aesthetic elements from the opening descriptio, Wace excises the entire passage. And when the Trojans meet the giants, in a colonial encounter often fraught with ambivalence toward the desirable native, Wace approaches the giants as he would any other civilized society: he explains that the giants of Albion made Goemagog lord (“seinnur”) because he was the strongest, and apologizes for not knowing the names of the others (ll. 1067–72). And in startling contrast to the Historia, Wace dresses both lords for the match: Corineus ties up his shirttails (“Des pans de sa cote se ceinst, / Parmi les flancs alques s’estreinst”) while Goemagog equips himself (“Goëmagog se racesma / E de lutier s’apareilla”) (ll. 1113–16). The wrestling match itself progresses in a series of bilateral descriptions that fuse the two wrestlers into a single entity (ll. 1117–68). This singularizing vision serves the aesthetic pleasure of two colonizing audiences, the Trojans and the Normans. Because both have already claimed their foreign inheritance by force (Wace follows the First Variant’s revisions), the match becomes a sport for those already in possession rather than a trope of new dominion.

When Wace does finally proffer a descriptio, he envisions monotonously generic space:

Brutus esguarda les montainnes,

Vit les valees, vit les plainnes,

Vit les mores, vit les boscages,

Vit les eues, vit les rivages,

Vit les champes, vit les praeries,

Vit les porz, vit les pescheries,

Vit sun pople multepleier,

Vit les terres bien guaainier . . .

(Ll. 1209–16)

[Brutus looked at the mountains, he saw the valleys, he saw the plains, he saw the moors, he saw the bushes, he saw the waters, he saw the rivers, he saw the fields, he saw the prairies, he saw the ports, he saw the fisheries, he saw his people multiplying, he saw the lands producing well . . .]

This landscape described in dramatic anaphoric excess is visually empty: no adjectives color the scene; only the motionless bien rustles in the distance. Since audiences cannot visualize the scene that Brutus beholds, seeing becomes a metaphor rather than an action (underscored by Wace’s claim that Brutus “sees” his people multiplying). In this passage, Brutus does not take possession with an imperial gaze, but rather quantifies his holdings with a lordly view.

Wace distances the narrative further from the island’s symbolic cartography by substituting the Avon for the Severn (ll. 1435–40). Moreover, he follows the First Variant in systematically dismissing the island in favor of the realm. This regne weakens the significance of boundary formations, so that Belinus’s roads merely mitigate the difficulties of travel across the marshy landscape (ll. 2605–10). In Wace’s expansionist historiography, the realm’s flexible measurement legitimizes new conquests and becomes synonymous with the fief. Indeed, Wace uses regne and enor interchangeably during the reigns of Leir and Belinus, and textual variants during Archgallo’s reign include regne, enor, and terre.⁴¹ The land, then, sustains crops rather than collective identity. When productive, the land becomes a valuable fief. It actually coincides with cultural value, since tenurial terminology connotes social attributes—honor (enor) and faith (fieu). From this ideological perspective, the Historia’s aestheticized landscapes give way to the colonizing pair guaster and gaainer. Each term has both military and agricultural connotations, and either can lead to new dominion: expansionist kings can lay waste (guaster) to desirable land and so gain control (gaainer); alternatively, uncultivated land (guaster) can be possessed through cultivation (gaainer). The value of arable land, then, makes conquest the admirable achievement of ambitious lords.

The description of Loegicia establishes the effects of guaste in preparation for Brutus’s gain. While the Historia’s Loegecia mirrors Britain’s beautiful landscape, Wace portrays agricultural devastation:

Home ne feme n’i troverent;

Tut unt trové le païs guast

Ke n’i aveit ki gaainast.

Utlage l’orent tut guasté,

Chacied la gent, l’aveir porté.

Tute esteit la terre guastine. . . .

Guaste unt trovee une cité

E un temple d’antiquité.

(Ll. 622–34)

[They didn’t find man or woman there, they found the whole country wasted because there was no one to gain from it. Pirates had completely wasted it, chased away the people, carried off the goods. The land was completely wasted. . . . They found a wasted city and a temple of antiquity.]

With four different forms of guast, this landscape bears the marks of conquest as a scar. With the contrasting rhyme guast/gaainast, Wace introduces the conquering pair; soon after, Brutus celebrates victory over the Poitevins, happy with his “gaain” and with “[t]utes les terres . . . guastees” (l. 933). As in the Historia, Loegecia presages future destructions of Britain, but for Wace devastations are periodic, not permanent—periods between crops rather than devastating ethnic judgments. The promised island, unlike Loegecia, is “abitable,” “delitable,” and “bone . . . a cultiver” (ll. 681–85), and so looks like the desirable fief it will become.

Throughout the rest of the Roman de Brut, the colonial and agricultural values of gaainer shape a succession of admirable territorial expansions. The Spaniards’ settlement in Ireland, for example, evinces a description of agricultural opportunity; they come explicitly looking for a “lieu” (place) to hold as a “fieu.”⁴² Wace also describes the Pict settlement in positive terms because they have “aré e guaainied” a land that had been “en guastine” and “laissiee a salvagine” (left in a savage state) (ll. 5185–92); later they are again given fields “desertee” to cultivate (ll. 7941–45).⁴³ Maximianus’s description of Armorica also presents the land as “gaainable” and “delitable.” The rest of the description recalls Brutus’s generic topographic catalog; Maximianus concludes by describing the enfeoffment and gain he proposes for the conquered land (ll. 5918–25). Here and elsewhere, successful cultivation coincides with successful dominion. Indeed, when Vortigern engages Hengist, he pointedly withholds arable land and promises to give only money and goods (“livreisuns,” “soldees,” and “duns”) (ll. 6811–12): the Saxons have not yet gaainie anything.

Wace’s conception of the enor supported by terre bone a gaainer reorients the end of the Britons’ dominion significantly. After Gormund’s conquest, Wace does not lament the disinherited Britons so much as the impoverished land:

Dunc pristrent la terre a destruire;

Deus, quel dolur e quel injuire

De bone terre e de gentil,

Que turné est a tel issil!

(Ll. 13473–76)

[Then they took the land to destroy it. God, what pain and what injury, that good and gentle land is turned to such ruin.]

In the end, agricultural disaster rather than foreign conquest or divine retribution forces the Britons to abandon the land:

En sun tens fud falte de blé

E de la falte vint chierté,

E de la chierté vint famine. . . .

Ovoc cele mesaventure

Revint une altre altresi dure;

Mortalité fud grant de gent

Par air corrompu e par vent. . . .

Cil ki porent fuïr fuïrent,

Lur fieus e lur meisuns guerpirent,

Tant pur la grant chierté de ble,

Tant pur la grant mortalité.

(Ll. 14661–96)

[In his [Cadwallo’s] time there was a failure of wheat and from the failure came shortage, and from the shortage came famine.... With this misfortune came another just as hard: mortality was great among the people because of corrupted air and wind.... Those who could flee fled, their fiefs and their houses they abandoned, as much for the great shortage of wheat as for the great mortality.]

Angles and Britons alike are evicted by bad air and bad crops. The empty “terre guast” (ll. 14707–12), however, soon looks like “terre . . . bone guaainier” (l. 14727) to the Angles’ overseas relatives. Their labor cultivates and conquers the land as legitimately as Brutus’s or Arthur’s. The Welsh themselves are disinherited (“forsligni”) and lose their lands (“enor”) (ll. 14849–54). Meanwhile, English agricultural success maintains the land as available and desirable for whoever can overpower them and establish a new “eritage” for their own “lignage” (as the Normans did). By grounding identity in the control of the regne as fief and focusing on agricultural productivity, Wace feudalizes the First Variant’s regnum, making it legitimately available to the strongest hand. He thereby legitimates any conquest (gaain) that sustains cultivation (gaain). And while Geoffrey’s Britons derive their identity from Britain, even when in exile, Wace’s Britons derive theirs from the possession of land in general: once disinherited, they exist no more. Each successive passage of dominion takes place in a novels lieus that effaces prior claims. The new place redounds to the honor of the conquering group—and the memory of the old only to the historian.

With the fief at the center of history, the quality of the heirs becomes the most important aspect of identity—quality defined as the ability to enforce and expand inheritance claims. Wace thus emphasizes the difference between the strong and the weak at the expense of ethnic dynamics, turning the First Variant’s ideological pair us/them into winner/loser. And as in the First Variant, de facto demonstrations reign over de jure legitimations: possession is the greater part of valor. The value of the enor itself transcends the mechanisms of its transmission, so that force, craft (engin), and genealogy all legitimize inheritance equally. Marriages also facilitate territorial expansion, and subsume the problem of ethnic intermingling. Ultimately, eritage foregrounds immediate kinship relations (parenté), so that the narrative tells the history of the land’s tenants (“ki tindrent”) with little ethnic partiality. From the perspective of Britain’s Norman owners, then, the Roman de Brut recounts how the stronger legitimately overpowered the weaker.

Norman historiography in general often justifies force and chronicles the laudable achievement of territorial expansion.⁴⁴ Like Brennius, for example, Rollo and William the Bastard had to “cunquere sun heritage” (l. 2653); like Uther, the fathers of men who defended their lands during Stephen’s reign rejoiced to have “eirs bien conqueranz” (l. 8396); like Loth in Norway, Henry II had to conquer his “dreit . . . par force” (ll. 9831–32). Force thus dominates the discourse of legitimacy in Wace’s narrative: degenerate men fail to seize their inherited lands; weak men honor their betters by submitting; sons who lose their fathers’ lands bring shame to their family.⁴⁵ Gormund embodies the admirable extreme of this ideology by renouncing his inheritance in favor of his younger brother and vowing to rule only what he himself has conquered (ll. 13391–400). The prestige of territorial success sustains colonial visions by establishing relative cultural worth according to military achievement. This triumphant vision of colonial expansion dismisses ethnic legitimation and shapes mimicry into flattery: Wace praises Marius because he honors the Romans by learning their culture, Coilus because he imitates Roman law and custom perfectly, and Gawain for his Roman upbringing; conversely, he criticizes the Britons who defy the conquering Romans as “fiers e orguillus” (proud and prideful).⁴⁶ The praiseworthy mimic men perform an idealized colonial subjectivity because they successfully assimilate the value of the dominating power.

In Normandy, the nesting eagles of Loch Lomond readily capture the value of force in creating collective unity. The image of the eagles assembling to fight whenever invasion threatens the island (ll. 9435–40) resonates with Dudo of Saint-Quentin’s aviary allegory. There, Rollo dreams that birds of many different kinds nest together without contention (“sine discretione generum et specierum”), each with one red wing. A Christian interpreter informs Rollo that the red wings represent warriors’ shields, the different species the different origins of those who will serve (“homines diversarum”), and the nests the cities they will build (146–47). Searle comments that this founding scene of Normanitas captures the essence of the Norman polity, made of different groups united by choice in common aggressive cause (65, 244). Wace’s eagles, birds of a single species, displace the multiple origins signified in Dudo’s allegory; they portray the unifying effects of collective domination. Indeed, Wace turns the Historia’s acquatic marvels of ethnic separation into extreme “merveille” (ll. 9537–86), diffusing their allegorical force by conjuring strangeness. Like Laʒamon and Robert of Gloucester, then, Wace assumes collective unity while overlooking ethnic difference.

The logic of unifying force reorients all significant conflicts over dominion in the Roman de Brut, displacing ethnic legitimation and giving freedom a feudal turn. Caesar, for example, recognizes that Belinus and Brennius won dominion over Rome, but since Rome is now stronger, the tenancy must change (l. 3880). Cassibellanus in turn defends the freedom (“franchise”) of the fief, claiming that no ancestor has ever done homage for Britain (ll. 3943–60). Roman strength subsequently establishes their legitimate dominion over the island, which Wace ratifies by remarking after the Britons’ rebellion that Rome recovered “sa dreiture” (its right) (l. 5044). In conflicts over jurisdiction, then, strength matters more than any other quality, and everyone eventually meets their match: those who win one day lose the next (ll. 8867–68). Indeed, Wace’s battle descriptions model generic conflict, most dramatically in an anaphor of indefinite pronouns during the war between Arthur and Lucius: “Les uns ferir, les uns buter, / Les uns venir, les uns turner, / Les uns chaeir, les uns ester” (Some strike, some pillage, some arrive, some turn, some fall, some remain) (ll. 12566–68). Wace catalogs here ordinary acts of war, without attributing them to anyone in particular. The description mirrors his overall approach to force as an autonomous value, independent of legal or social identity.

Wace complicates the role of force by also valuing engin, a term of quintessentially ambivalent success in twelfth-century heroic discourse.⁴⁷ Whereas courtly ideology denigrates engin as unheroic and dishonorable, Wace admires crafty rulers. In his hands, all the meanings of engin contribute directly to conquest: engin is a fabricated instrument of war, an intellectual perspicuity, and a deceitful manipulation. Together with force, engin counters the First Variant’s libertate; it prepares the ground for Robert of Gloucester’s post-colonial quointise. Wace’s admiration of effective engin surfaces from the very beginning of the Roman de Brut. As soon as Brutus has conquered his reputation (“los conquesté”) (l. 162), the Trojans begin to fight the Greeks: they defend a castle with mangonels built by “engigneors” (ll. 329–31); when Brutus plans to trick the Greeks in their sleep, the narrator interjects approvingly: “Boisdie e engin deit l’en faire / Pur destrure sun adversaire” (Tricks and craftiness one must do to destroy one’s adversary) (ll. 363–64).⁴⁸ The aphorism presents an exemplary truth about the imperative to dominate through all available means. Wace later admires Dunvallo’s ingenious (“enginnus”) use of trickery to consolidate his dominion (l. 2245) and Cador’s use of “grant veisdie” against the Saxons (ll. 9374). Clever cunning can also accomplish treachery, as when Brennius plots to attack Belinus; Belinus, however, knows how to answer with equal trickery: “Veisdie fist contre veisdie.”⁴⁹ A similar contest of wits is played out between Hamo and Arviragus (ll. 4931–84). Numerous pairings of force and engin activate all of engin’s senses simultaneously: Vortigern’s diviners advise him to build a tower that will not be taken “par force” or “par engin” (ll. 7321–22); Gormund sends burning sparrows flying into Cirencester (ll. 13579–606); Arthur kills Dinabuc ingeniously with his sword (“engiegnus”) (l. 11530). All of these crafty strategies evince the narrator’s admiration rather than condemnation.

Conquest and craft come together in Belinus’s gate, erected with “merveillus engin” (l. 3212) to commemorate his successful expansion of the regne. The association of engin, architecture, and conquest is strongest, however, in the importation of the Giants’ Ring. When Aurelius asks how the stones could possibly be moved, Merlin’s reply expands on the aphorism Wace used with Brutus:

Reis, dist Merlin, dune ne sez tu

Que engin surmunte vertu.

Bone est force e engin mielz valt;

La valt engin u force falt.

Engin e art funt mainte chose

Que force comencer nen ose.

Engin puet les pieres muveir

E par engin les poez aveir.

(Ll. 8057–64)

[“King,” said Merlin, “don’t you know that engin surmounts vertu? Force is good and engin worth more; engin works there where force fails. Engin and art do many things that force doesn’t dare begin. Engin can move the stones and by engin you can have them.”]

The expedition to remove the stones from Ireland underscores the relationship between force and clever manipulation, as Aurelius fights the Irish and Merlin crafts the stones (“les piere enginnereit”) (ll. 8088–92). Wace, however, does not make Merlin master of superior “machinaciones,” but, following the First Variant, a master of magic spells as he utters some kind of “oreisun” (incantation) that Wace does not know.⁵⁰ Stonehenge thus stands for the collocation of brilliant architectural achievement and superlative military strategy. Credit for this achievement passes easily from the Britons to the Normans as Wace identifies the stones’ various names:

Bretun les suelent en bretanz

Apeler carole as gaianz,

Stanhenges unt nun en engleis,

Pieres pendues en franceis.

(Ll. 8175–78)

[The Britons used to call them Giants’ Ring in Briton, they have the name Stonehenge in English, Hung Stones in French.]

The succession of names and languages traces the history of Britain’s tenants, heirs to the stones’ own colonial origins. As a monument to clever force, then, Stonehenge commemorates the achievements of whoever currently dominates the land.

Force and engin both facilitate expansionism. In the process, they sideline ethnic concerns by establishing a colonial boundary between winners and losers. Wace reinforces this boundary by turning the earliest Trojan scenes away from ethnicity and toward family structures. Exploiting the ambiguity of the Latin “prosapia” (race or family),⁵¹ Wace implies that Brutus finds several Trojan families (“lignages”) in Greece:

De cels de Troie iluenc trove

Tute la lignee Eleni,

Un des fiz al rei Priami,

A d’altres lignages asez

Ke l’on aveit enchaitivez;

E mult i out de sun lignage,

Mais tenu erent en servage.

Brutus trova sun parenté.

(Ll. 150–57)

[Of those of Troy he found there the whole line of Helenus (one of the sons of king Priam) and several other lineages who had been enslaved, and many of his own lineage, but they were held in servitude. Brutus had found his family.]

Enumerating at least two specific families (Helenus’s and Brutus’s), this description presents the ethnic group as a linkage between family lines. The final “parenté” can refer equally to Brutus’s own family (“sun lignage”) or to all the Trojans as a whole (“cels de Troie”). Wace soon introduces a third term, gent, which also refers both to ethnicity (Assaracus helps the Trojans because he is of their “gent” [1. 206]) and available family members (“gent” describes the Trojans who gather to fight the Greeks [11. 405, 493]). Indeed, in Latin, gens refers as much to a common descent group as to a race.⁵² Gent and parenté thus work as synonyms that conflate ethnic genealogy with kinship so that history becomes a family affair.

Once the Trojans reach the island, they celebrate their acquisition of a “novels lieus” as an “eritage” for their “lignage” (ll. 1080–84). Their identity thus depends on the acquisition of inheritable land. The subsequent division of this “eritage” establishes a model of peaceful family transmission, as Wace underscores the perfect fraternal amity that reigns among Brutus’s three sons (ll. 1289–92). Perhaps surprisingly, Wace does not mention primogeniture as a Trojan custom, even though both the Bern Historia and the First Variant preserve the reference. Although Wace does repeatedly explain that older brothers rule before younger ones because they are wiser, the choice always depends on individual qualities rather than a legal principle. In the twelfth century, partition in fact remained a normal Norman practice, recognized as such in contemporary customals.⁵³ Searle argues that unigeniture of any kind created too great a strain on family resources, since it required continual expansion if families were not to grow progressively poorer. The Roman de Brut’s flexible eritage is thus deeply compatible with Norman cultural expectations, where family wealth outweighed principles of unity.

Numerous other episodes throughout the Roman de Brut enumerate family relations in place of ethnic arguments. Membritius, for example, lists all the Greeks’ relatives who will remember their slaughter: “Lur parenz, lur uncles, lur peres, / Lur cosins, lur nevuz, lur freres, / . . . lur altres amis precains” (Their relatives, their uncles, their fathers, their cousins, their nephews, their brothers, . . . their other close friends) (ll. 531–33). Later, Arviragus underscores his responsibilities as nephew in order to dissuade Caesar from annihilating the Britons (ll. 4796–803). Even Constantine’s imperial achievement is cast as a family affair, for he is very much attached to his relatives and goes to Rome to help his mother’s uncles (ll. 5696–711). And when Arthur returns to the island after nine years on the Continent, Wace describes the homecoming as a family reunion, with daughters embracing fathers and aunts kissing nephews (ll. 10176–96). These and many other passages envision significant historical interactions through immediate family relations.

The most valuable family relations, in the Roman de Brut as in Normandy, are those formed by marriage. Marriages enhance family value because they lead directly to expanded inheritances. Wace specifies, for example, that for four years Aeneas held “La feme e l’onur” (the woman and the honor) (l. 73). Likewise, Claudius makes Arviragus “his man” by giving his daughter to him (ll. 5045–48), and Maximianus inherits England by marrying Octavius’s daughter (ll. 5871–72). Both of these marriages involve Roman inheritance, but Wace is more concerned with the fief’s integrity than with Roman dominion. Linking marriage to land acquisition, Wace has little concern for the ethnic repercussions of sexual heritage and says nothing of the value of endogamy. This approach reflects the dominant strategy of Norman kinship, whereby women brought new warriors into the family (enabling forceful expansion), drew potential rivals into the web of kinship obligation, and expanded family territory.⁵⁴ Wace in fact marvels at resistance to exogamy, claiming that he does not know “par quel felonie” (by what felony) the Lombard women refused to marry the Trojans (ll. 1576–80) and saying nothing about the Britons’ refusal to send their women to the Picts (ll. 5192–94). Most revealingly, Conanus’s antiexogamy speech turns emphatically on the tenurial rather than the ethnic problems of intermarriage:

Pur sa terre mielz guaanier,

Pur pupler e pur herbergier,

E pur sa gent asseürer,

Volt as humes femes duner.

Ne lur vult pas doner Franceises,

Ne pur force, ne pur richeises,

Ne lur lignage entremeller

Ne lur terres acomuner.

(Ll. 6005–12)

[To better gain his land, populate it and cultivate it, and to reassure his people, he wanted to give women to the men. He did not want to give them French women, not for force nor for riches, so as not to intermingle their lineage or encumber their lands.]

The marriages that Conanus envisions map out the sexual ground of healthy agriculture since they will facilitate both conquest and cultivation (“guaanier,” “peupler,” “herbergier”). Yet even though Conanus’s men stand to gain both a larger fighting contingent (“force”) and greater riches by marrying local women, Wace emphasizes that they would also incur the danger of disputed inheritance by complicating their lineage. The value of endogamy thus turns here on the fief’s integrity, not the ethnic group’s. Indeed, in Normandy marriages with “the French” posed acute problems to the regional defense of autonomy. Contrary to the Historia, then, where exogamy weakens valuable ethnic integrity, the Roman de Brut uses marriage to extend landholdings. In most cases, the advantages of predatory kinship outweigh the potential for complicated inheritance.

By identifying the native Armoricans as French, Wace exposes his blindness to the finer points of Insular ethnicity. In the Roman de Brut, the integrity of the enor, like the First Variant’s libertate, often overrides ethnic genealogy: Wace sometimes distinguishes Saxons from Angles, sometimes not; he declares that he does not know why Constantin’s Pict assassin hated him (l. 6462). This ethnic vagueness derives from, or creates, the honor of the individual strong enough to maintain and expand his landholdings. Since family leaders acquire prestige along with their conquests, successful aggression attracts admiration no matter who pursues it. Wace thus offers a superlative portrait of Caesar—“Li forz, li pruz, li conqueranz”—because he conquered more territory than anyone else, not unlike William the “bon conquereur.”⁵⁵ And Wace admires the Saxons’ beautiful physical appearance—not once but twice (ll. 6078, 6724)—and praises Hengist for looking after his personal interest: “D’avancier sei s’entremeteit / Cume chescuns fere devreit” (he set about advancing himself, as everyone should do) (ll. 6847–48). Rightful inheritance thus proceeds from strength, not from immutable law or ethnic heritage; even Arthur succeeds through strength rather than through morality or ethnicity.⁵⁶ The French equivalent of Geoffrey’s quietatione, in fact, occurs only once in the Roman de Brut (l. 3359): “quieté” represents an aberration in the inexorable project of tenurial expansion.

The structure of Insular history thus takes shape through inheritance. When land goes unclaimed, chaos reigns. Geoffrey, for example, communicates the disorder that follows the deaths of Ferrex and Porrex by describing the land’s multiple divisions: Wace, in contrast, explains that no one of their “lignage” could hold the “eritage.”⁵⁷ Similarly, when Lucius dies without heirs, Wace claims that no one of his “parenté” holds his “erité” (ll. 5271–72); Wace especially regrets Arthur’s lack of children (ll. 9657–58, 13294). Meanwhile, relations between groups turn on fee-holding arrangements.⁵⁸ The inherited fief, sometimes taken by force, thus dominates collective identity, displacing ethnic genealogy and even legal argument.

Even Christian identity is bound to the fief. Faith and fealty coexist in the term fieu, which indicates the faithful holding of land from a lord as well as faith in the Lord.⁵⁹ When Uther rejoices at his victory over Octa and refers to the Saxons, “Ki mun fieu e les voz destruient” (who destroy my faith and yours) (l. 8938), he refers indistinguishably to the Christian faith destroyed by their Pagan presence and to the fertile lands destroyed by the war. The currency of this conceptual confluence is explicit in the speech Aelred of Rievaulx attributes to Walter Espec in “De bello Standardii”: “Cur enim de victoria desperemus, cum victoria generi nostro quasi in feudam data sit ab Altissimo?” (Why then should we despair of victory, when victory has been given to our people, as if in fee, by the Highest?) (705). In the Roman de Brut, the collocation of territorial and spiritual services identifies the law of the regne with religious law, such that Pagans and Christians alike recognize that those of one law should have one king.⁶⁰ The Christian fieu implies a dramatic extension of the regne, which can expand to encompass the territorial extent of Christian populations. While Christianity attenuates ethnic difference in the service of hegemony (just as in other accounts of Briton history), it also legitimates expansionism.

As the strong legitimately overpower the weak (and the unimaginitive), dominion passes from lignage to lignage until the end of Brutus’s line and the Roman de Brut itself:

Ci falt la geste des Bretuns

E la lignee des baruns

Ki del lignage Bruti vindrent,

Ki Engleterre lunges tindrent.

(Ll. 14859–62)

[Here end the deeds of the Britons and the line of the barons who came from Brutus’s lineage, who long held England.]

Whereas Geoffrey’s conclusion demonstrates the Britons’ failure as a race, Wace has told the story of Brutus’s family. The family’s “gestes” shape history; when the last of the “lignee” loses the “demeine terre,” the story belongs to another family. Eventually, Britain falls into the strong hands of the Normans, the currant tenants of England, and the absent center of the inherited narrative pattern.

With each passage of dominion, new tenants bring new names while the land itself remains the same productive fief it has always been. As part of this spirit of timeless possession, Wace never names sources and so overlooks the origins of the Roman de Brut itself. He does, however, claim to translate, thereby eliding antecedents in order to more easily transfer the Britons’ history to their conquerors. His unambivalently colonial translation assumes and subsumes the Normans’ conquest of the island. From the confident colonial perspective of the Francophone lords of the enor of “Engleterre,” proper names and etymologies record the succession of ownership while dismissing signs of ancient, violated legitimacies. Wace thus manages to weaken the shadows of resistance and the paradoxes of linguistic border crossing that are displayed so dramatically in the Latin Historia, the Welsh Brutieu, and Laʒamon’s Brut. Robert of Gloucester will go further by not even presenting himself as a translator. Robert and Wace in fact approach language in similarly technical terms, suggesting yet another way in which the colonized and the colonizing share postcolonial tools.

Wace brings more emphatic attention to his own translation process than any other historian. Outside of the well-known opening and closing passages, he often refers to himself as translator in relation to details about names and places that he has found “written” or “while reading” and that have been said or recorded in “l’estorie.”⁶¹ Wace, like Robert of Gloucester, reinforces his authority by citing personal experience (l. 7608) and oral reports (ll. 9595, 10209). All of these anonymous references alienate historical information from the means of its transmission, with translation as the last step in a neutral process.⁶² This silent dismissal of meaning from the transmission process collapses the differences between languages and sources from an implied position of superiority. Wace locates himself dramatically at the origin of knowledge when he presents the narrative as a record of his own historical testimony: “Mais puis i sorst une discorde, / Ço testimonie e ço recorde / Ki cest romanz fist, Maistre Wace” (But then there began a disagreement, this witnesses and records the one who made this romanz [French translation], Master Wace) (ll. 3821–23). By manipulating the display of translated knowledge, Wace establishes his name as the sign of historiographic mastery, possessing history as conquerors do the land. This historiographical stance replicates the dynamics of a colonial gaze: it overlooks origins that might challenge the legitimacy of the present. The imposed strength of this gaze patrols the limits of memory and eradicates the faint ghosts of past differences.

If Wace himself dominates through linguistic mastery, so do many of his historical characters. Multilingualism in particular dramatically facilitates colonial domination in several instances. Wace portrays secondlanguage proficiency as an admired tool of expansion, not as a threat to group integrity like some other historians. Hamo and Uther’s assassins, for example, are multilingual rather than merely bilingual (ll. 4946, 8970). Their linguistic skills thus do not target the Britons specifically, but can attack a range of enemies. Wace’s admiration for such skills shows clearly in his extended description of Vortigern’s personal translator, named and known as the first Briton to learn the Saxon language (ll. 6957–80). Wace’s positive rather than menacing portrayal of multilingualism resonates with the linguistic values that Searle adduces in Norman culture in general, where Norse and French bilingualism contributed to cultural cohesion rather than fragmentation (242–43). Wace’s application of linguistic prowess ultimately reflects his own linguistic capacities, frequently displayed in the trilingual presentation of Briton, English, and French names. The Roman de Brut thus manifests a colonial linguistics, where translation constitutes an expansionist technology. Since superlative learning of all kinds repeatedly derives from Rome, multilingualism functions as a specifically imperial technology.

Wace’s deployment of proper names and etymologies reflects this confident possession of colonial dominion. Whereas Geoffrey’s names nourish the ghosts of Briton sovereignty, Wace takes possession for the Normans almost nonchalantly. Emptied of most of its cultural significance, language designates place transparently and neutrally. Wace expresses this principle most succinctly after giving the Briton and English names for Walbrook: “Li nom del son diversefient / Mais une chose senefient” (The names diversify in their sounds but they signify one thing) (ll. 5567–68). Names thus only reflect changes of ownership (usually after forceful conquest); their history records the succession of tenure without judging legitimacy and without ambivalence. Wace’s etymologies thus confirm the narrative’s historiographical arguments rather than introducing troubling alternative chronologies. In other words, Wace transfers history to the present more than he recuperates the past. The strength of Wace’s presentist perspective leads him to refer almost interchangeably to Bretaine and Engleterre, a practice that invites audiences to identify with the Insular past and regard it as their own.⁶³ To strengthen this identification, Wace regularly concludes etymologies with an inclusive apelum (we name), assuming collective and contemporary Francophone usage.

The perspective of present Norman dominion directly shapes the island’s etymology. Like Geoffrey, Wace combines retrospection and prospection in these extended passages of linguistic description. Wace, however, moves the narrative confidently to the present as he traces tenurial history: Brutus displaces “Albion” with “Bretaine” (ll. 1175–78), and the Angles install “Engletere” (ll. 1192–98). Engletere, however, already implies the passage of dominion from the English to the Normans.⁶⁴ The second, lengthier etymology makes clear that new names reflect legitimate new dominion, without lamenting or condemning the old:

Pur un lignage dunt cil furent

Ki la terre primes reçurent

Se firent Engleis apeler

Pur lur orine remenbrer,

E Englelande unt apelee

La terre ki lur ert dunee.

Tant dit Engleterre en franceis

Cum dit Englelande en engleis;

Terre a Engleis, ço dit li nuns,

Ço en est l’espositiuns.

(Ll. 13643–52)

[Because of a lineage of which they were who first received the land, they called themselves English to remember their origins, and England they called the land that was given to them. Angleterre says the same thing in French as England does in English, “land of the English” says the name, that’s the explanation of it.]

Like Brutus, these English have found a “novels lieu” for their “lignage.” As the French “Engleterre” attests, the Normans have subsequently acted just like the English and kept their preferred customs and language in a new place (ll. 13653–62). Wace might have noted, as he did in the evolution of Cornwall (ll. 1187–88), that the first part of the French name remains the same (Englelande is only partly translated in Engleterre), but he passes over in silence this trace of cultural and tenurial accommodation. Instead, he presents the new inhabitants as colonial lords who refuse assimilation. English possession is secured with a further lengthy translation lesson from “gualeis” (Welsh) to “engleis” — mediated of course by French. The conflation of temporal orders in the whole passage identifies the perspective of present French usage, where the difference between Bruteine and Englelonde can only be seen retrospectively in relation to Engletere. Once again, French remains the unnamed authority.

London’s etymology follows the same historiographic path as England. Wace proceeds from Brutus’s naming (“Troie Nove”) (l. 1224) to Lud’s (“Kaerlu”) (l. 1231) to the English and French: “Londenê en engleis dist l’um / E nus or Lundres l’apelum” (London in English one says, and we now call it Londres) (ll. 1237–38). Brutus’s intention “ses anceisors remembrer” (to remember his ancestors) (l. 1223) looks altogether quaint as Wace narrates the multiple erasures of historic forms. Wace concludes by summarizing, rather dispassionately, the coercive processes that led to present French practice:

Par plusurs granz destruiemenz

Que unt fait alienes genz

Ki la terre une sovent eüe,

Sovent prise, sovent perdue,

Sunt viles e les contrees

Tutes or altrement nomees

Qui le anceisor nes nomerent

Ki premierement les fondrent.

(Ll. 1239–46)

[By several great destructions that alien peoples have done who have often had, often taken, often lost, the land, are towns and countries all now differently named than the ancestors named them who first founded them.]

Wace does not judge this succession of foreign conquests or the onomastic interventions that coincide with the arrival of new conquerors. Since the land does not signify an immutable cultural identity, names identify ownership and dominion neutrally. Like the prologue, this summary remains silent on the cultural identities of the successive winners and losers. Two lines added after line 1230 in several manuscripts heighten the impression that translation does not affect ontology: “Urbs est latins, citez romanz, / Cestre est angleis, Kaer bretanz” (Urbs is Latin, cité romance, city is English, kaer Briton). Although the original Briton names have been lost through several linguistic dismissals, Wace’s etymologies do not recuperate defeated legitimacies: they remember old forms only in order to complete history’s linear progression and thereby the historian’s conquest of the past.

When Lud makes the change already announced, Wace reviews London’s etymology again, making explicit the role of foreign languages in the linguistic evolution: “Londoïn” arises because “sunt estrange home venud, / Ki le language ne saveient” (foreign men had come who didn’t know the language) (ll. 3762–63); English and Saxons “recorumperent le nun” (corrupted the name again) to produce “Lundene” (ll. 3765–67); Normans and French produce “Londres” because they did not know English, “Ainz distrent si com dire pourent” (and so they said it the way they could) (l. 3772). In each case, the linguistic changes result from the pronunciation difficulties created by colonial contact. This process preserves traces of several languages for the astute multilingual observer, but Wace consistently abstains from judging relative legitimacy:

Par remuemenz e par changes

Des languages as gens estanges,

Ki la terre unt sovent prise,

Sunt li nun des viles changied,

U acreü u acurcied;

Mult en purreit l’on trover poi,

Si come jo entent e oi,

Qui ait tenu entierement

Le nun qu’ele out premierement.

(Ll. 3775–84)

[By movements and changes of the languages of foreign peoples who have often taken the land are the names of the towns changed, either lengthened or shortened. Very few can be found, so I understand and hear, that have entirely kept the name they first had.]

Wace emphasizes the names’ form (either longer or shorter) rather than their cultural content. He recognizes force as the origin of change and identifies the partial remnants of older forms. Nonetheless, the words’ practical functions override cultural memory. The foreigners, the legitimacy of whose presence is never questioned, simply pronounce the unfamiliar sounds as best they can.

Elsewhere, Wace focuses almost entirely on phonetic calculation. Describing the evolution of Caerleon, for example, he instructs his audience on phonetic erosion:

Pur Kaerusc fud Karlion,

Li dreiz fust Kaerlegion,

Mais genz estranges unt le nom

Abregied par subtractiun:

De Legion Liun unt fait

E de Kaer unt e retrait

E pur tut unt Karlion dit

Si unt fait le nun plus petit.

(Ll. 3195–204)

[For Kaerusc was Karlion; the proper name was Kaerlegion, but foreign people abridged the name by subtraction: from legion they made leon and from kaer they took away e and altogether they said Karlion. Thus they made the name smaller.]

Wace draws no moral lesson from these changes, nor does he judge the results in cultural terms: Karlion is simply smaller than Kaerlegion (a term not used in the Historia). Wace gives similarly precise and neutral accounts of Bade (ll. 1633–36) and Cernel (ll. 13791–803).⁶⁵ In each case, “corruption” seems used neutrally, the way modern linguists use “erosion”: it accounts for phonetic change in the absence of conquest or direct intervention. Thus when Wace says that Trinovent, Kaerlu, and Eborac have been “corrupted,” he describes rather than judges.⁶⁶ Wace states his etymological neutrality succinctly when he apostrophizes (after the naming of Hampton for Hamo) that sometimes a very minor event gives rise to a name that endures a long time (ll. 5001–4). Nowhere does Wace lament the loss of original forms.

The functional relation between names and ownership figures prominently in Wace’s representations of Brittany and Wales. While Wace records the loss of the name Armorica, he avers that the land will never lose its current name (ll. 5949–52). In a text where names record dominion, this observation insinuates that the Bretons will not lose their ownership. The naming of Wales also foregrounds territorial possession. When Wace refers to “Guales” at the beginning and end of the narrative, he clearly identifies the queen and duke who may have given their name to the land (ll. 1276–82, 14855–58). The land thus takes its name from the rulers, and the people from the land (just like Brutus and Kamber originally). In the Latin Historia, however, the etymology addresses the people, not the land. In Wace’s version, then, the name remains rooted in the land; no judgment shadows the people. Moreover, Wace does not mention the “barbarian” option, despite its presence in the First Variant.

Whether names change through phonetic subtraction, foreigners’ mispronunciations, or new rulers’ forceful interventions, change inevitably comes. For Wace, all names are equally legitimate, since they identify true locations and current owners, not historical memory. Language in fact facilitates forgetting, a force the English manipulate when they change the form of “Sexes” (Saxon knives) to forget the dishonorable treason committed by their ancestors (ll. 7297–308). This deliberate intervention manipulates linguistic commemoration by displaying the disjuncture between language and memory. As a result, changes merely reflect successive usage de rei en rei, fulfilling the prologue’s promise to tell truthfully who was ainz and who puis. The Roman de Brut thus represents language as a mirror of conquest, not its tool. Wace imports present forms into the past, eliding origins and infusing language with established colonial authority.

Wace’s pervasive linguistic anachronism establishes a presentist relation to historical time. This universalizing presentism surfaces with the first line when Wace appeals to anyone who wants to hear and know. Throughout the narrative, aphorisms and proverbs weaken historical and cultural differences while strengthening resemblances across time.⁶⁷ The figure of Fortune also universalizes historical experience by disrupting temporal specificity. Wace’s simultaneous insistence on brevity, the clarity of succession, and annalistic references constructs a teleological progress toward the present. Moreover, his refusal of prophecy keeps the present in focus by denying the future. This combination of presentist teleology with historical timelessness sustains a vision of colonial hegemony: possession looks timeless; neither origins nor conclusions come into clear focus.

Wace refers repeatedly to the present, whereas his First Variant source minimizes references beyond the immediate historical horizon. In addition to implying the present through anachronistic names, inclusive plural verbs, and the present tense, Wace appeals directly to personal experiences. When Aurelius wants to be healed from his sickness, for example, Wace comments, “Cume chascuns de nus vuldreit” (as each of us would want) (l. 8268). And aphorisms implicate these individual experiences in patterns of universal truth, such as when Wace concludes historical episodes with comments like “Fol est qui trop en sei se fie” (Crazy is the one who trusts too much in himself) (l. 3440) or “Ne deit pas huem a buen chief traire / De faire ço qu’il ne deit faire” (A man shouldn’t apply himself to doing what he shouldn’t do) (ll. 6539–40). These affirmations declare timeless truths about human conduct rather than culturally or historically specific judgments. By implication, events from different places and times do not differ fundamentally.

Wace uses the figure of Fortune to underscore the repetitive, cyclic pattern of history, in which events from different times do in fact repeat each other. Leir is the first to lament the vagaries of Fortune:

Fortune, tant par es muable,

Tu ne puez estre une ure estable;

Nuls ne se deit en tei fier,

Tant faiz ta roe tost turner.

Mult as tost ta colur muee,

Tost iés chaete e tost levee.

(Ll. 1917–22)

[Fortune, you are so changeable, you can’t be stable for one hour. No one should have faith in you, so soon do you make your wheel turn, so soon is your color changed, soon cast down and soon raised up.]

Leir continues for twelve more lines on the changeability of Fortune. Later, Caesar appeals to Fortune as an explanation for the changed relationship between the Britons and Romans: in the past, the Britons legitimately conquered the Romans, but now “Fortune ad sa roe tornee” (Fortune has turned her wheel) (l. 3883) and Rome is the stronger; Wace repeats the image in indirect discourse as Caesar encourages his army (ll. 4665–68). Both of these passages overlook legal or historical legitimation; instead, they account for power through arbitrary patterns. As a cyclic figure, Fortune’s wheel is bound to multiple, overlapping temporal references. As a result, history on the wheel confounds stable judgments of legitimacy: as Jean Blacker has noted, defeat becomes not moral but inevitable.⁶⁸ Indeed, Wace uses the same expression of alternation to describe dice gaming as he does war: “Li un perdent, li un guaainnent” (Some lose, some gain) (l. 10562).

Alongside this temporally indeterminate past, Wace organizes a clear teleology and an ordered succession of events. Indeed, this is the paradox of presentism: while moving the present into the past, it also makes a direct line from the past to the present. In the structure of narrative time, for example, Wace seems to propel events toward the present as rapidly as possible. Ultimately, the process of battle concerns him less than its outcome. He thus skips over moments of indecision and uncertainty in order to arrive quickly at the next stable conclusion. After introducing the war between the Trojans and Poitevins, for example, Wace concludes decisively: “Briefment vus en dirrai la fin, / Vencu furent li Peitevin” (Briefly I’ll tell you the end, the Poitevins were vanquished) (ll. 919–20). Elsewhere, he queries rhetorically why he should give a long account and then announces the result. Wace’s principle of brief elides the narration of uncertainty, just like the First Variant’s breviter. These overt manipulations of historical scale, as in Robert of Gloucester’s narrative, purveys a mastery of time itself.

The results of these rapid conflicts often establish the land’s next heir. History thus proceeds decisively from heir to heir, just as the prologue promises. Moreover, Wace ratifies the First Variant’s chronology by declaring at the very moment of Brutus’s settlement that Gormund’s conquest began English dominion.⁶⁹ Leckie argues further that Wace also modifies the depiction of Aethelstan to clarify the First Variant’s chronological ambiguities (115). Leckie’s exposition of Wace’s reconciliation of the Historia with traditional English chronology astutely points out that Wace uses territorial control, rather than the establishment of government, to determine relations between peoples (113). In other words, Wace resolves the Historia’s obvious temporal dissonances by foregrounding de facto jurisdiction at the expense of de jure judgments. The result envisions continuous Anglo-Saxon unity, rather than a progression from fragmentation to unification (114–15). The clarity of the passage to English dominion suggests a parallel with the subsequent passage to Norman rule: once a new group controls the land, its leader becomes the legitimate heir. As a result of this territorial understanding of tenure, the chronological gaps and synchronisms inherited from the Latin Historia do not trouble the legitimacy of successive rulers.

The Historia’s annalistic references take on a new relation to the present when Wace declares that he completed the narrative in 1155 (l. 14865). The Historia already implies a teleological progress, since the reader can calculate the time between the present year and the deaths of Lucius, Arthur, and Cadwallader. By dating his own narrative practice, Wace fixes the point toward which all events lead and from which they are seen. Subsequent readers can calculate the distance between these events and Wace’s translation, and between the translation and the moment of reading. The closing date of 1155 thus underscores the linear movement to the present and the powerful effects of calculating time retrospectively. Moreover, it enrolls narrative itself in the annals of history.

Wace’s refusal to translate Merlin’s prophecies also keeps the focus on the present. Wace does refer to prophecies when they relate to events told within his narrative, such as Arthur’s fate and the Britons’ exile. But he reports these as things said about past events, not predictions of future events. When it comes to Geoffrey’s book of prophecies itself, Wace states:

Ne vuil sun livre translater

Quant jo nel sai interpreter;

Nule rien dire ne vuldreie

Que si ne fust cum jo dirreie.

(Ll. 7539–42)

[I don’t want to translate his book when I don’t know how to interpret it. I would not want to say anything at all unless it were as I would say.]

Wace seems most concerned to maintain the boundary that he has asserted from the beginning between the known and the unknown. Since he cannot verify the truth of the prophetic statements (precisely because they pertain to the future), they fall outside of his historiographical bounds. Moreover, should Merlin have been wrong, Wace would be responsible for disseminating false information. Just as he has noted elsewhere his ignorance about certain details, so here he excludes material that he does not know. He could, of course, report them as something he found written, as he does elsewhere with unverified material. Their ontological unverifiability, however, puts them in a different class of information, excluded by Wace’s historiographic principles as well as by his temporal perspective.

The Roman de Brut ultimately imparts an impression of timelessness within a clearly defined historiographical frame that closes in 1155. As Wace patrols the boundary between the known and the unknown, his pervasive authorial presence weakens the bounds of time. Confusion about these two related processes has fueled much of the debate about the boundary between truth and fiction in Wace’s historiographic discourse. Attention to these issues as boundary differences clarifies the firmness of knowledge bounds in relation to the weakness of temporal bounds. Both strategies propel a discourse of timeless hegemony, congenial to expansionist ideologies.

Arthur’s reign represents the high point of the family history of expansionism as well as its timeless, exemplary qualities. After Arthur recovers his inherited land from the Saxons, he enlarges his inheritance through extensive conquests, until finally losing his demeine terre to Mordred. As Shichtman has observed in his analysis of Gawain, conquest appears as the “beautiful and rightful activity of those with romantic vision” (113). This aestheticization of domination ultimately legitimates colonialist exploitation. Arthur’s sword encodes this ideology of expansion and laudable conquest, as well as the inevitability of defeat. Arthur himself, as in the First Variant, wields Caliburn as a sign of his own superlative strength.

Beginning with Arthur’s arming, Wace portrays a king of exceptional physical force. By adding references to Arthur’s clothing and horse, Wace provides a complete pragmatic account of battle preparation: Arthur dresses, covers himself with protective gear (including Caliburn), mounts his horse, and arranges his heavier gear (the shield and the lance). The sword itself, although made in Avalon, has no extraordinary qualities: “bien fu lunge e bien fu lee” ([it] was quite long and quite broad) (l. 9280). Wace then adds to the Historia’s description of the helmet that it had belonged to Uther (l. 9288). Alongside this genealogical reminder, Wace adds the comment that when armed with the shield Pridwen, Arthur “ne sembla pas cuart ne fol” (didn’t seem cowardly or crazy) (l. 9292). When Arthur finally takes up his lance, Wace repeats the qualities of an effective weapon: “Alques fu luncs e alques leez” ([it] was pretty long and pretty broad) (l. 9299). Altogether, these descriptions identify the ordinary strength of Arthur and his weapons, along with their genealogical and divine authorizations. Wace thus concentrates responsibility for Arthur’s success in his religious faith and physical strength. Caliburn’s absence from the actual battle reinforces this portrait of heroic power (as in the First Variant). After reminding his men to remember how the Saxons have destroyed their families (“parenz,” “cusins,” “amis,” “veisins”) (ll. 9319–30), Arthur himself calls on both Mary and God and claims the first blow (l. 9342). The battle ends very quickly, however, after only four lines of general description and eight of Arthur’s own prowess (ll. 9349–56). By not describing the press of battle, Wace focuses attention on Arthur’s strength and establishes him as a giant-hero equal to an entire army.

Having established peace by expelling the Saxons, Arthur pursues conquests across the water, not to restore rights but because winter has passed: “E od le chaut revint estez, / E mer fu bele a navïer” (And with the heat summer returned, and the sea was beautiful for sailing) (ll. 9660–61). After conquering Ireland and other nearby islands, Arthur returns to Britain. As part of his efforts to establish order at home, he constructs the Round Table. This architectural innovation, which first appears in the Roman de Brut, enforces equality among Arthur’s imperial subjects. He orders the table himself in order to avoid excessive rivalries among his men, whose various regional origins are immediately identified at length (ll. 9747–74). As Schmolke-Hasselmann makes clear, equality among the knights does not serve egalitarian or democratic purposes; rather, it enhances Arthur’s control.⁷⁰ The Round Table thus forcefully domesticates the multiple and conflicting influences brought home from abroad. Constructed in the aftermath of overseas expansion, the Round Table materializes Arthur’s imperial ambitions.

After twelve years of peace, Arthur again embarks on conquest, this time to Norway and France (ll. 9799–806). Again, rather than claiming any particular ancestral rights, Arthur seeks to enlarge the family inheritance and honor those who depend on him: he seems to deserve whatever authority he can successfully assert. After his success in Norway, he proceeds with good weather and wind (“bel tens,” “bon vent”) to Denmark (ll. 9870–71). Finally, he arrives in France (whose tenurial status Wace describes with precision [11. 9905–13]). As in the Historia, Arthur triumphs over Frollo with Caliburn. Wace describes the sword in Arthur’s hand before the blow, echoing the previous description of the lance Ron: “Caliburne out, s’espee, el puin, / Qu’il out eüe en maint besuin” (Caliburn he had, his sword, in hand, which he had had in many times of need) (ll. 10083–84, 9300). Separating the name from the fatal action, Wace subtly foregrounds Arthur’s own strength in the accomplishment.

Arthur’s conquest of Paris, as well as of western France from Anjou to Lorraine (ll. 10109–12), reflects positively Henry II’s efforts to establish control over the western continent before and after his accession to the throne late in 1154. Indeed, in the Roman de Rou, Wace identifies the Norman-French border as a specific source of anxiety for the Normans when he laments the “boisdies de France” (tricks of France) designed to disinherit the Normans.⁷¹ Contrary to the jurisdictional disputes that dominated Insular politics during the early years of Henry’s reign,⁷² the Roman de Brut elides the troubling memories of historical dominion and establishes new ones unproblematically. Wace thus emphasizes the legal aspect of land redistribution by having Arthur enfeoff (“enfeufer”) Anjou and Normandy, along with Flanders and three other regions (ll. 10151–71, 10591). The Frollo episode thus defends Norman-Angevin territorial claims, at the direct expense of the French.

In a more extreme defense of Norman-Angevin boundaries, one “André” (possibly from Mont Saint-Michel) composed a short satirical account of the Frollo episode sometime between 1150 and 1200. André has an imaginary English king (and commander of drinking) named Arflet issue a charter refuting a French “fable” that apparently claims that a giant cat killed Arthur and wore the crown of England (ll. 17–36). Arflet defends his sovereignty from French ridicule by enumerating the English conquerors of France—Arthur, Brennius, Belinus, Maximianus, and Constantine (ll. 37–44). He goes on to catalog the places that Arthur conquered in France “o ses Engleis” (with his English) (ll. 61–64), including a battle with a degenerate and cowardly Frollo. In the end, Arthur places the French in his servitude, “[ou] encore est tot lor lignage” (where all their lineage is still) (l. 206). After more than a hundred lines of satiric commentary on the poverty of French culinary habits, Arflet concludes his charter by drawing a circle of challenge around Paris: he enumerates the groups (from Flanders to Gascony) that have signed the charter against the French (ll. 385–96). In the period that culminated in Philip’s conquest of Normandy in 1204, the French claim to sovereignty over “English” lands was not idle. André’s mordant exposé of French degeneracy represents an extreme version of a Norman appropriation of Briton history in response to threatened boundaries.

In the Roman de Brut, after Arthur settles his men in France, he returns to the island and celebrates his second major peace at Caerleon. When the Romans arrive to demand tribute, Wace represents the defense of Insular rights by dismissing legal principles (like the First Variant) and adopting force (rather than freedom) as the foundation of legitimacy. Lucius opens the debate with reproach for Arthur’s infringement on the powers of Rome (ll. 10651–74); he then refers to Caesar “nostre ancestre” as conqueror of Britain and to Frollo’s wrongful death (ll. 10675–86). As Arthur retires with his barons to consider a response, Cador laughs (as in the Historia) and discourses on the dangers of peace, which he says produces laziness and weakness (ll. 10737–64). Wace has Gawain reply by invoking the pleasures of peace (ll. 10763–72), first among them (even before the “drueries” of women) that “[p]lus bele e mieldre en est la terre” (the land is prettier and better for it) (l. 10768). Arthur, however, praises his barons for enabling his conquests and ridicules the Romans’ prideful claims (ll. 10779–810). He does recognize that Caesar conquered Britain, but concludes: “Mais force n’est mie dreiture / Ainz est orguil e desmesure. / L’um ne tient mie ço a dreit / Que l’um ad a force toleit” (But force is not right, rather it is pride and excess. One does not hold by right what one took by force) (ll. 10829–32). This statement combines the conclusions of Arthur and Hoel in the Historia. Arthur points out that by the same reasoning, the Britons can demand tribute from Rome because of the conquests of Belinus, Constantine, and Maximianus (ll. 10851–80). Arthur does not make this counterargument to legitimate Briton right; rather, the comparison ridicules the reasoning that tenure derives from historical precedent:

Il cleiment Bretaine, e jo Rome!

De mun cunseil est ço la sume

Que cil ait la rente e la terre

Ki purra sur l’altre conquerre.

(Ll. 10881–84)

[They claim Britain, and I Rome! This is the conclusion of my counsel: that he have the rents and the land who can conquer the other.]

The right to rents in the present depends on the demonstration of greater force in the present: arguments through precedent prove nothing. Arthur repeats the principle succinctly a few lines later: “Or ait tut ki aver le puet; / Altre dreiture n’i estuet” (Let him have all who can have it; there is no other justice) (ll. 10893–94), and again at the end: “Quant jo chalenz e il chalenge, / Ki tut purra prendre, si prenge!” (Once I challenge and he challenges, whoever can take everything, let him take it!) (ll. 10903–4). Hoel’s speech ratifies this forceful logic (ll. 10910–26), while Auguselus’s underscores the service owed by those who hold their fees and lands from Arthur, as well as the beauty of war and the need for vengeance (ll. 10958–104). Auguselus encourages further conquest after Rome, and ends with the strongest statement yet of legitimizing force: “Tut prendrum a dreit e a tort” (We’ll take everything, by right or by wrong) (l. 11035). Avoiding references to courts or history, the Arthurian response to Roman imperialism argues that claims will be defended and prosecuted solely through force.

Having landed on the Continent on his way to protect and expand the limits of his territory, Arthur hears that a giant has stolen Hoel of Brittany’s niece and carried her off to Mont Saint-Michel. As a responsible overlord, Arthur sets off to kill the giant, thereby protecting the lands of the man he had enfeoffed in Brittany. Wace turns this giant into a civilized neighbor by giving him a name, Dinabuc (l. 11317), just as he domesticated the giants of Albion by naming their lord. Moreover, the giant is not a cannibal but eats roasted pork, staining his beard and lap with the charred meat like any messy dinner guest (ll. 11482–86). Wace thus dismisses the trope of problematic assimilation, instead portraying the similarities among powerful men in general. Indeed, for a fleeting moment, Arthur appears almost cannibalistic as he asks his “buteillier” (sommelier) to cut off the giant’s head (ll. 11556–57). And when Arthur recounts his earlier fight with Ritho, Wace specifies that Arthur himself completed the coat of beards after his victory (ll. 11585–92). Wace thus breaks down the differences between Arthur, Dinabuc, and Ritho, establishing them all as legitimately ambitious lords.

Wace also domesticates the encounter by dramatizing its sexual violence. Helen has in fact been raped, and has died from the weight of the giant (ll. 11408–12), whereas she dies of fright before violation in the Historia. The nurse defends herself against the suspicion of sexual pleasure by swearing to God that she has been forced to remain; she survives the rapes because she is older, stronger, bigger, harder, hardier, and surer than Helen (ll. 11433–37). Civilizing the giant and sexualizing Helen, Wace exposes the danger of neighborly aggression against valuable daughters. These domestic threats can be spoken without damage to dominion itself. Wace is apparently the first to turn the episode toward rape; he is also alone (along with the redactor of the prose Merlin [428–31]) in overlooking cannibalism. The combination suggests a forceful dismissal of founding anxiety, consonant with a stridently colonialist discourse: sexual violence remains a threat from outlaw neighbors even after settlement, but the violence of assimilation cannot be spoken by colonial ambition.⁷³ Laʒamon, Robert, and the author of the Gesta regum Britanniae subsequently return to cannibalism while perpetuating the scene of rape on postcolonial grounds.

In the press of the combat, Wace expands the Historia’s pattern of naming by having Arthur defeat Dinabuc with Caliburn (ll. 11545–48). The name draws the giant and the Mont into the sword’s logic of conquest. Unlike the Historia, where the episode iterates founding ambivalence toward the native, the Roman de Brut civilizes the giant and makes the Mont the site of a border dispute among rival lords. The Mont itself occupies the border between land and sea and between Brittany and Normandy. It presents the paradigmatic boundary problem of the shore, as it fluctuates with the tides between insular and continental topography. The stroke of the sword thus draws the boundary between civilized Brittany and the untamed sea on the far side of the Mont. Previously, the boundary lay between the Mont and the shore, and Hoel’s men could not cross it to rescue Helen: their boats were destroyed on the rocks and many drowned in the water (ll. 11305–8). Caliburn thus forcefully asserts that the Mont belongs to Arthur’s land, and implies that the resolution of this border dispute has imperial consequences. Moreover, the chapel Hoel founds to commemorate Helen’s death attributes the Mont’s religious origins to Bretons, a vision consonant with eleventh-century patronage patterns.⁷⁴ In Wace’s time, the Mont itself remained contested territory: after Henry I’s death, its inhabitants sided with Matilda and those of nearby Avranches with Stephen.⁷⁵ The appointment of Robert de Torigni as abbot in 1154 significantly strengthened the abbey’s orientation toward Normandy and ended a lengthy period of instability.⁷⁶ Several years later Guillaume de Saint-Pair affirmed the Mont’s Normanitas in his Roman du Mont Saint-Michel: identifying the local rivers, Guillaume notes that some are in Brittany and “[l]e[s] autres sunt en Normendie; / Si est le mont, je n’en dout mie” (the others are in Normandy, as is the Mont, I don’t have any doubt) (ll. 455–56). By adding the Mont to the group of victories signed by Caliburn, Wace similarly claims the island for the Normans as the most recent heirs of Arthur’s enor.

Having established his jurisdiction over the Mont, Arthur moves on to the larger contest over France. As always, “grainur dreit” (greater right) (l. 11664) rests on superior force. The repetitive rhythm of Gawain’s speech to the Romans, as well as its content, calls for forceful resolutions:

Ço te mande que rien n’i prenges

E si tu sur lui la chalenges,

Par bataille seit chalengee

E par bataille deraisnee.

Romain par bataille la pristrent

E par bataille la cunquistrent,

E il l’a par bataille eüe

E par bataille l’ad tenue;

Par bataille reseit pruvé

Kin deit aver la poësté.⁷⁷

(Ll. 11719–28)

[He orders you to take nothing, and if you challenge him for it, let it be challenged by battle and by battle defended. Romans took it by battle, and by battle conquered it. And he had it by battle and by battle held it. By battle let it be proven again who should have the dominion.]

Gawain completes his aggressive speech with aggressive action, beheading Lucius’s nephew when he suggests that the Britons speak more bravely than they act (ll. 11745–56). Whereas in the Historia Arthur remains ignorant of the ensuing battle until it is over, here he personally sends Ider to help Gawain (ll. 11928–32). When the battle begins in earnest, Arthur addresses himself “a ses nurriz, / A sus baruns e a lur fiz” (to his dependents [and] to his barons and their sons) (ll. 12395–96). He encourages his family members with a rhythmic pendant to Gawain’s bataille speech:

Vus avez vencu les Norreis,

Vus avez vencu les Daneys,

Vus avez vencu les Franceis

E tenez France sur lur peis.

Bien devez veintre les pieurs

Quant vencu avez les meillors.

(Ll. 12417–22)

[You have vanquished the Norwegians, you have vanquished the Danes, you have vanquished the French, and you hold France under their pennant. Of course you should vanquish the worst when you have vanquished the best.]

Arthur mobilizes here the memory of domination in order to inspire new imperial expansion: the vencu speech declares the bataille’s desirable outcome.

As in the First Variant, however, the Britons do not vanquish the Romans immediately and are on the verge of retreat when Arthur intervenes with a second speech. Naming himself, Arthur casts himself as the rhetorical and conceptual center of the Britons’ success: “Jo sui Arthur ki vus cundui” (I am Arthur who leads you) (ll. 12876–86). Wace makes the relation explicit when he says that Britons attacked the Romans anew “[a]s cops Arthur e as ses diz” (because of Arthur’s blows and his words) (l. 12919). And as in the Historia, Arthur himself answers his speech with the sword’s lethal action:

Calibuerne tint, mult sanglente;

Cui il ateint, mort le gravente.

Ne puis ses cops mettre en escrit;

A chascun cop un hume ocit.

(Ll. 12891–94)

[Caliburn he held, very bloody; whoever it reached, death claimed him. I can’t put his blows in writing: with each blow he killed a man.]

Wace continues to emphasize Arthur’s control rather than the sword’s autonomy: Arthur manipulates the bloody Caliburn, exerting such power that his blows cannot be written (ll. 12895–904). Reinforcing this characterization, Wace names the sword again in Arthur’s mocking speech to the decapitated king of Libya:

Puis li ad dit: “Mai aies tu

Ki ci venis armes porter

Pur Calibuerne ensanglanter.”

Cil ne dit mot, ki mort se jut.

(Ll. 12908–11)

[Then he said to him: “May you have misfortune, you who came here bearing arms to bloody Caliburn.” He said nothing, he who lay dead.]

The Historia does not name the sword here, nor in the final description of Arthur’s offensive: “De Calibuerne granz cops meist” (with Caliburn he gave great blows) (ll. 12926). These additions emphasize the sword’s bloody effects: for Wace, successful force guarantees its own legitimacy. Especially when Arthur speaks the sword’s name, taking Caliburn between his own teeth, he dominates coercive performance. Whereas the First Variant wrote Caliburn out of the decisive Roman battle, Wace expands the sword’s presence as he expands the legitimation of force.

Arthur now faces the final challenge of recovering his fieu and demeine terre from Mordred. At the first news of betrayal, Wace keeps dominion between the virile lords: he does not name the queen and attributes all of the active treachery to Mordred:

Fist Mordred altre vilainie,

Kar cuntre cristïene lei

Prist a un lit femme lu rei,

Femme sun uncle e sun seignur

Prist a guise de traïtur.

Arthur oï e de veir sot

Que Mordred fei ne li portot;

Sa terre tint, sa femme ot prise.

(Ll. 13026–33)

[Mordred did another villainy, for against Christian law he took to bed the king’s wife; the wife of his uncle and his lord he took like a traitor. Arthur heard and knew for true that Mordred did not hold faith toward him: he held his land, he had taken his wife.]

Mordred’s theft of the queen resembles the Dinabuc’s theft of Helen: both attack the family and its lands through irregular intercourse. As Arthur again overturns sexual challenge with physical force, the queen flees. Still unnamed, Wace identifies her own erotic desire as the source of betrayal:

Membra lui de la vilainie

Que pur Modred s’esteit hunie,

Lu bon rei aveit vergundé

E sun nuvou Modred amé;

Cuntre lei l’aveit espusee.

(Ll. 13207–11)

[She remembered the villainy with which she had shamed herself for Mordred: she had dishonored the good king and loved his nephew Mordred; she had married him against the law.]

Irregular intercourse dishonors the king as lord of the land, but its transgressions can be fully repaired if the lord overpowers the usurper. Adultery, then, and even bigamy, cannot permanently damage the family or the land so long as the lord is strong.

While the queen disappears into the confines of a convent (ll. 13215–22), the battle rages toward an uncertain end amid anaphoric negativity:

Ne sai dire ki mielz le fist

Ne qui perdi ne qui cunquist

Ne qui chaï ne qui estut

Ne qui ocist ne qui murut.

(Ll. 13259–62)

[I don’t know how to say who did better, nor who lost nor who conquered nor who fell nor who remained nor who killed nor who died.]

Here, even force loses its decisiveness. Everyone seems to have been destroyed but no one has won. In the end, the sword does not function as a sign of authority, but only as an instrument of war. It signifies great strength, not transcendent right. The success of that strength against multiple enemies establishes Arthur’s rightful, admirable control over vast territories. Yet when he meets a stronger force, he loses all he has gained. The most troubling aspect of this final encounter is perhaps not that Arthur loses but that no one wins. If force cannot reliably clarify rights on the battlefield, then legitimate dominion cannot in fact be established. The absence of a winner signals the depth of the cultural breakdown at the end of the Arthurian era.

In Wace’s resolutely expansionist view, coercive boundary formation leads to peace and greater wealth. Arthur’s defeat may be troubled by uncertainty, but his heir does accede to the demeine terre. In place of Geoffrey’s ambivalent equivocations on the value of force, then, Wace presents the arbitrary patterns of fate dispassionately: superior force explains and legitimizes victory; the inevitable turn of Fortune explains defeat. Ultimately, many of Wace’s historiographical strategies derive (directly or indirectly) from innovations introduced by the First Variant redactors. Wace follows the First Variant in strengthening flexible categories like the realm, but in the Roman de Brut they facilitate expansion rather than ancient legitimacy. Likewise, Wace adopts the First Variant’s legitimation of force: just as de facto arguments sustain the legal claims of those who do not control the law, they effectively create new laws for those who do. Whereas the First Variant’s pervasive valuation of force derives primarily from the ideology of liberty, in the Roman de Brut force sustains colonialist domination. Finally, where the First Variant sidelines Caliburn, Wace expands the sword’s conquering presence. The First Variant (along with the Brutieu) and the Roman de Brut thus wield similar historiographical tools as they absorb the historical effects of conquest and work toward strategic post-colonialism. Their resemblances suggest the complicity of domination with resistance, and vice versa.