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Article Excerpt
Scholars writing about the Prose Brut (1) used to be concerned mainly with the value of its various continuations as a primary source for later medieval English history. 'Even historians of historical literature', remarks John Gillingham, 'have tended to study the Brut primarily as evidence for events, rather than as a work of historical literature in its own right.' (2) In the last couple of decades, however, the emphasis has begun to shift to its place in the development of English historiography, and commentators have drawn attention to the key role of this popular work--after the Wycliffte Bible the most frequently copied text of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries--in expressing and shaping English people's perception of themselves as a nation. From the late fourteenth century until at least the second quarter of the sixteenth, the Prose Brutwas the standard account of English history. As Lister Matheson observes, 'it occupied a central position in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century historical writing and was a major influence in shaping national consciousness in medieval and post-medieval England.' (3)
Originally composed in French during the reign of Edward I (1272-1307), the Prose Brut circulated widely in successive versions of the French text before it was translated into English in the later fourteenth century. The textual and bibliographical history of the work as a whole is not a subject for the faint-hearted, and a simplified summary may be helpful as a way of clarifying the relationship of the original version, with which this article is mainly concerned, to its descendants. (4) The three main versions of the French text survive in fifty known manuscripts: these are the original version, and the somewhat misleadingly named 'Short Version' and 'Long Version'. (5) The first version relates the history of England from the fall of Troy to the death of Henry III in 1272. (6) The Short Version was composed at some time in the second quarter of the fourteenth century, and took the history of England up to 1333, thus including the reigns of Edward I and Edward II (1307-27), and the first few years of Edward III] At the same time or soon after, a prologue was supplied, telling how Albion took its name from its settlement by the banished princess Albine and her sisters, who gave birth to the race of giants inhabiting the island before Brutus. The process of supplementation and revision reached its final stage in a revised 'edition' of the Short Version ending with the victory of the English over the Scots at Halidon Hill in 1333. The compiler of this latest version made numerous changes, among the more substantial of which were the rewriting of the prologue and a revised account of Edward II's reign, deposition, and death. In the later fourteenth century this 'Long Version' was translated from the French to form the English Prose Brut. Supplemented by numerous continuations, the English version survives in over 180 known manuscripts and thirteen late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century printed editions. There are also twenty known manuscripts containing a Latin translation. (8)
The Prose Brut's account of English history from the coming of Brutus to the Norman Conquest is based mainly on Wace's Roman de Brut and Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis. The French Brut tradition in England therefore spans more than two hundred years, from the middle of the twelfth century to the 'Long Version' of the Prose Brut in the latter half of the fourteenth. The work had already reached its final, most elaborate form before it was translated into English. The English translation itself went on to enjoy an impressively long career. It occupies an important place in the cultural history of England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and there is still much work to be done on its role in English political thought and national self-perception in these periods. (9) To choose only one example, the new lease of life that the English Brut gave to the fiction of England's ancient British heritage must surely be connected with the fashion among fifteenth-century kings for the construction of elaborate Welsh and 'British' genealogies. (10) Both developments, in turn, need to be considered in the light of English policy regarding Wales. However, it is only in such specific historical contexts that it makes sense to give any particular emphasis to the English Prose Brut. Otherwise, to privilege the English translation by making it the main object of attention - as if it were some authoritative final version that sums up or supersedes the long and varied tradition preceding it--is to introduce serious distortions to the picture as a whole. These are particularly apparent in attempts to discuss the 'national' character of the Prose Brut in terms of the English translation alone. (11) Relating the story of the land and the nation from their remote beginnings until the recent past, the work in its various versions tells its readers who they are and where they came from. It is at once the expression of a historically constructed sense of national identity and a focus and stimulus for national feeling. However, with the single exception of the English language itself, all the features that make the Prose Brut an English national narrative are already present in the French versions--some of them having been there, indeed, since the time of Wace and Gaimar. It is quite misleading to give particular prominence to the fact of English translation in this respect. The French Prose Brut is no less 'English' than its English-language successor. Anglo-Norman French continued to play a significant role in English society in the later Middle Ages. (12) While we can only speculate as to where, when, why, and by whom the original version of the Prose Brut was produced, it is striking that this remarkable work, which dominated English national historiography for some two hundred years, should not only have been first composed in French, but should have undergone major revision and augmentation in that language, achieving wide distribution in manuscript before it was eventually translated into English.
We can learn much about the aims and methods of the first version's anonymous compiler by comparing the earlier parts of his account of English history with its sources in Wace and Gaimar, and examining the decisions he made at various levels from style and word choice to large-scale narrative selection and arrangement. My discussion focuses on the 'British' section, and on the way the writer managed the difficult transition between the narrative based on Wace and the beginning of English history proper as derived from Gaimar. As I hope to demonstrate, this transition is particularly significant. One of the chief innovations of the Prose Brut is that it was designed to be read as a coherent, seamless narrative in which individual parts make sense in relation to one another. The connections that hold the work together are perhaps most apparent in the way certain themes--the virtue of strong kings and the evils that arise in the absence of firm central rule, the need for kings to seek the counsel of the nobles on whose support they depend--keep recurring throughout the text. No reader, likewise, could miss the work's strong exemplary content, present in the British narrative since Geoffrey of Monmouth but if anything heightened by the compiler's editorial activities of selection and compression. The internal connections that make the Prose Brut a stylistically and ideologically coherent account of English history are such that the meanings to be drawn from any one part are a function of its relation to the work as a whole.
The Prose Brut did more than any other single work to establish the history of ancient Britain derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth as the first chapter of the history of England, promoting a historically momentous conception of English nationhood in which a key part was played by the exclusive claim to an imaginary British heritage. One of the things its compiler took over from Wace was his conception of Britain as the old name for England. The earliest version (followed by every subsequent version in French as well as the English translation) puts it beyond doubt that 'Britain' means England: E qant Brut avoit encherche tute la terre de lunge e de le, il trova une terre joniant a Bretaine en le north: e cete terre dona il a Albanac son fiz e il la fist appeler Albanie apres son noun, qui ore est appele Escoce. E Brut trova une autre pais ver le west, e cete terre dona il a Camber l'autre fiz e il la fist appeler Cambre, qu'ore est appele Gales. (13) The Prose Brut's presentation of Wace's British material as the beginning of the history of England puts into historiographical practice a connection that is already implicit in the Roman de Brut. Neither Wace's poem nor the earliest version of the Prose Brut displays Geoffrey of Monmouth's preoccupation with the whole island of Britain. (14) The overwhelming concern of the Prose Brut as it first appeared is the history and governance of England. The role of the British section is to endow the English crown and nation with a distinguished ancient past, and to supply a narrative whose events and persons form exemplary patterns of good and bad government. When the history of Edward I's reign came to be added in the fourteenth century, the accounts of the king's colonial adventures in Wales and Scotland meant that the balance shifted, and the work acquired an expansionist element. Even so, when the later narrative gets to the reign of Edward II it reverts to its primary concern, the government of England. It does not seem accidental that the most intense activity in the history of the Prose Brut's production occurred when the compilers of its temporarily competing versions grappled with the problem of producing a satisfactory account of the reign and deposition of an unsatisfactory king. (15) The Prose Brut is a pivotal text in what R. R. Davies describes as 'the dominant historiographical tradition in England', providing a signal instance of that tradition's 'essentially Anglocentric approach'. Davies's remarks might have been made with the Prose Brut specifically in mind: 'It was the making of England and the unbroken continuity of English history which commanded attention and required explanation. The rest of the British Isles was, literally and metaphorically, peripheral to this central concern.' (16)
John Taylor argues that the new history was first addressed to magnates and gentry, but that its audience soon widened to include other sections of the community such as the educated clergy and London merchants. (17) Certainly a major theme running throughout the whole work, its prominence heightened by the narrative's economy of style, is the role of the 'graundez Dengleterre' in affairs of state. At the same time, the resolute banishment from the 'British' section of the chivalric and aristocratic elements that are such a prominent feature of Wace's poem suggests that the Prose Brut was conceived in terms of a wider readership. Though we have to be careful about using terms like 'popular' or 'colloquial', analysis of the rhetoric employed by the original writer--including his choice of writing in prose--lends a measure of support to Taylor's comment that 'it was "popular" history in the sense that it embodied popular judgements and was written in a colloquial style'. (18) Taylor also cites plausible evidence for a London origin, including the work's close association with London chronicles in some of its later parts. (19)
Verse and prose
The question of who the Prose Brut might have been written for, and the kind of people who might have read it, is...
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