John P. Brennan
Indiana University Purdue Fort Wayne

   In spite of Layamon's claim to have based his Brut in part on books by Bede, Albinus and Augustine, it is well known that his narrative is drawn--as its title suggests--almost entirely from his fourth putative source, the Roman de Brut of his clerical predecessor Wace.1 Thus he follows Wace in chronicling the dynastic history of the kings of Britain from the founder Brutus to Cadwallader, the last British king to rule the island. Like Wace, Layamon devotes about a quarter of his poem to the career of Arthur, the leader who nearly succeeded in preventing the Anglo-Saxon conquest. Layamon, however, was not content merely to translate his Norman-French original, itself rather freely adapted from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae.2

   That Wace's Roman is 14,866 octosyllabic verses long, while Brut encompasses over 16,000 lines, tells only part of the story, for Layamon's alliterative verses are often equivalent to a whole couplet in Wace. Moreover, Layamon's style, which mimics the rhythms of Old English alliterative prose and echoes the language of Anglo-Saxon heroic verse, is itself an indication that the Middle English poet is using Wace's narrative for his own purpose.3 What that purpose might be has long been a subject of critical discussion. It is my (not entirely original) contention that Layamon's poem turns the legendary dynastic history of Britain into the national epic of England.4

   The Middle English Brut survives in two manuscript copies, British Library Cotton Caligula A.ix (C), and BL Cotton Otho C.xiii (O). The C version, discussed in this essay, has been dated as early as 1200-25 and as late as 1275-1300. The shorter and much revised O version, which mod-

   Looking at some of the places where Layamon severely modifies Wace's narrative will enable us to see more clearly the English poet's thematic concerns. A neat illustration of Layamon's procedure appears in a comparison of how the two poets deal with the death of Arthur after the final battle with Modred. Wace tells us:

   Layamon's treatment of this passage is quite interesting. Arthur first makes a death speech in which he entrusts the realm to Constantin son of Cador, and then he announces that he will go to Avalon to be healed by Argante, after which he will return, presumably not very long afterward, and "dwell with the Britons in great contentment" (14282).9 Then appear the two women, who carry him into their boat and sail away--one hopes (but Layamon does not specify) to Avalon. The poet-narrator's comment follows:

    Even moreso than Wace, he makes the Britons' vain hope for Arthur's return a sad assuagement of their grief, and he locates the origin of those hopes in Arthur's own valiant "I shall return." Furthermore, he divides Merlin's prophecy into two parts. The first--not one that would seem to require much of a 'seer'--simply predicts that the "Bruttes" will mourn for their great leader. The second changes the "prophecy" into one that depends less upon magic than upon a concept of historical probability: not Arthur, but "an Arthur" will come "cum" not "cumen liðe," and not to help the "Bruttes" but rather Angeln to fulste, "to aid the English." This last phrase might very well confuse the reader who expects to

   The change to "Angeln" from the earlier reference to the "Bruttes" is not a clumsy slip from the quill of a rustic English clergyman unaccustomed to the ethnic nuances of a more sophisticated Norman-French romancer, nor is it due to a careless copyist.10 Indeed his most recent translator has observed that it is Wace who seems to have difficulty with the concept of a Britain geographically more extensive than the territory of England.11 By making the first part of Merlin's prophecy a simple prediction of British grief and hope at the time of Arthur's passing, and the second part a reinterpretation in the present of the narrator, Layamon in effect transfers the hopes of the ancient Britons to the contemporary English, who--at least as the narrator represents them--yearn for an Arthur to restore the kingship now in "alien" hands.12

   Indeed, Layamon does seem more attentive than Wace to ethnographic niceties. In the first era of Saxon settlement in Britain, after Hengest and Horsa have helped Vortigern repel a Pictish invasion and Hengest has been allowed to settle in Lindsay, the Saxon chieftain's daughter Ronwen arrives among a large contingent of his kinfolk and followers. Vortigern is invited to visit his new baron's estate, and Ronwen (his future bride), appears among the symposiasts:

   Vortigern, who cannot understand the Saxon language, asks someone to explain the young woman's behavior and speech. Keredic, a good interpreter and the first of the Briton "ki soul le language as Saissuns,", &qout;to know the Saxon tongue" (6960), is able to explain that Ronwen has saluted Vortigern as King. He continues:

   Layamon elaborates upon this scene with delightful tact and detail. In Wace, Ronwen's appearance is sudden and apparently unmotivated by anything more than a desire to join the party. In Layamon, perhaps because the English poet was more conscious of dynastic politics, Hengest orchestrates Rouwenne's approach to his future son-in-law. The princess, "fairest alre þinge,", who bears a golden bowl full of wine, is brought before Vortigern. Kneeling before him, Rouwenne adresses the king:

Vortigern, however, cannot understand English, and he must turn to his latimer Ceredic for an explanation:

Upon hearing this explanation, Vortigern, who "cuðe . . . nan Ænglisc," exhorts Rouwenne in "Bruttisc" to drink the wine; she readily complies.

   Layamon's Rouwenne is more clearly cast in the role of the friðu-webbe, the "peace-weaver" noblewoman of Germanic epic.13 Like Hrothgar's queen Wealhtheow, Rouwenne approaches Vortiger in a ceremonial move, the ritual significance of which is heightened by the corps of retainers who conduct her before

   More importantly, Layamon is also careful to distinguish here between the English nation and their evil shadows, the Saxons, at the same time admitting the continuity between the Saxon invaders of British history and the English leode to which the poet belongs in the present. Þeos londe, the insular land in which the poet composes and in which his audience dwells, is Ænglene londe, "the land of the Angles/English." The treacherous and heathen Saxons, appropriately allied with the evil and unlucky Vortigern, bring their customs (not all of them evil) from the continental Sæxelonde. At the same time, while the Saxons also bring war and pestilence upon Britain, this friendly cultural innovation was adopted from ilke leoden, "that tribe, people, nation."14 And the Sæxisce menn, after all, spoke a language called Ænglisc as well as Sæxisc. To see Layamon's conception of British history replayed as English history, one must accept the difference between the pagan Saxon leode of Vortigern's and Arthur's era and the Christian English leode of Layamon's own time.15 One must also accept--for the purpose of reading this fiction, to be sure--the idea of a providential design to the events of history.

   Layamon's conception of such a design in the history of Britain is by no means his own creation. In fact, the whole communal narrative of the adventus saxonum had from its beginnings been fraught with this interpretation of history, derived ultimately from Gildas, the mysterious, sainted monk who wrote the De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae of 540 CE. Gildas, who unintentionally provided the first few members in the framework of the legendary history of Britain, wished only to show that his people, the Britons who had held the island since time immemorial, had been justly punished by God for their treachery, their religious backsliding, and their internal squabbles.16 This punishment had taken the form of the coming of the Saxons, who thus found themselves placed into British history, along with pestilence, as scourges of a justly angered God.17

   As Nicholas Howe has shown, the Anglo-Saxons developed Gildas's narrative into their own migration myth, changing the story to make themselves the beneficiaries of divine Providence as opposed to its mere instruments. In texts as disparate as Bede's Ecclesiastical History and the Old English verse Exodus, Howe argues, the adventus Saxonum was moved from its place at the end of British history to one at the beginning of English history. Thus the Anglo-Saxons thus became a chosen people, led out of the Egypt of continental Germanic paganism into the Promised Land of insular Christianity.18

   In the hands of Norman writers like Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace, the history of Britain from the Trojan Brutus to the last British ruler, Cadwallader, is in principle a simple dynastic history. The British dynasties that ruled the island until the Roman conquest and the later "Coming of the Saxons" were the predecessors of the Normans, the most recent conquerors of the island, and as such they were subject to the rise and fall of political fortunes. I don't know whether Geoffrey or Wace thought that either a Fukayaman or a Joachite "end of history" had arrived with the Norman conquest of England. As orthodox Christian clerics they were presumably not supposed to believe any such thing, but in any naive conception of history such a belief is probably most comfortable--and comforting. Layamon's view of history, however, afforded no such perspective.

   The perspective of Layamon is made clear in his excursus on the re-founding of London by King Lud, the last king of the Britons to rule free of the threat of foreign invasion.19 King Lud, Layamon tells us, loved London best of all his towns, so he fortified it with a great wall and ordered the most prosperous men of the realm to devote half their wealth to constructing dwellings in the city; he also heyede þæ burg and makede heo swiðe hende, "improved the city and made it quite handsome,," after making the unstronge ("lowborn" or perhaps "infirm") men move outside the walls (Brut, 3528-38). He set aside the old name of the city, Trinovant or "New Troy," the one it had held since the Trojan settlement, and named it after himself as Kaer Lud þat seoððen sculden moni mon / þennen þe king weoren dæd demen of his weorken, "so that afterwards, when the king was dead, many men would think well of his deeds," 3541-42). This British Ozymandias suffers, however, the same irony of history as his ancient Egyptian counterpart:

   In Michael Swanton's reading of this passage, "the implication is clear, that all conquerors are themselves eventually absorbed--or absorbed--and it is implicitly understood that the Norman yoke is unlikely to prove permanent."20 Swanton's is an appealing reading, but it does not, I think, work well with other parts of the text. Take for example the very final lines of the poem, which tell us that

Þæs Bruttes on ælc ende foren to Walisce lond,
and heore layen leofeden and heore leodene þæuwen;
and yet wunieð þære swa he doð, auermære.
And Ænglisce kinges walden þas londes,
And Bruttes hit loseden þis lond and þas leoden,
þat neuere seoððen mære kinges neoren here.
Þa yet ne com þæs ilke dæi, beo heonneuorð alse hit mæi;
iwurðe þæt iwurðe, iwurðe Godes wille. (16088-95)

(The Britons departed from every corner [of Britain] for Wales, and lived by their laws and the folkways of their nation; and will live there still, as they do, evermore. And English kings ruled these lands, and the Britons lost these lands and these nations, so that never again since then have they been kings here. That day has not come yet, whatever might happen in the future; what will be will be, God's will be done.) (my translation)

   This ending thus complicates the issue, for it does not even address the Norman conquest, which is a factor in Layamon's history of London's namings; from it one might conclude that the English kings who succeeded Cadwallader have not been displaced by "vncuþe folc" of Normandy. Not only that, it seems to have forgotten the prophecy of Arthur's return, which I discussed above. Yet it contains within itself a swerve, for we are told to expect the

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Britons to remain in Wales forevermore, while the penultimate line leaves open the possibility that British kings might yet regain kingship in Britain, "þis lond and þas leoden" (16090).

   Absorption of the conquerors, or their overthrow, are indeed possibilities that may be read from the history of Britain, as well as from the history that has intervened between Cadwaller's era and La3amon's. To that extent, Swanton is correct. But other grim or happy possibilities may also be read from the Brut: depopulation by war, famine, or pestilence; punishment by divine wrath; a messianic era of peace and justice after Arthur or his avatar returns; subjection to a foreign empire; and others. London may again be renamed, or not. History, for Layamon, has a providential design we may discern after the event. It does not, however, come with a set of simple rules to predict the interplay of human, natural, and divine factors, or the outcome of such. That history will continue to unfold until the final day is the sole certain prediction La3amon would let us make about the future.

   Problems of interpretation seem to multiply the more one reads the Brut. Are they due to the carelessness of a naive compiler of popular legends, likely to write down the latest thought that came into his mind, no matter if it sat ill with the idea he had expressed a hundred or three thousand lines previously.21 I think not. Such contradictions, I believe, arise from Layamon's attempt to express a theme that was, strictly speaking, not expressible on the political or the poetic language of the late twelfth century. That theme is the virtual unity of the English leode with the British lond, or if you will, of the British leode with the English lond. We know that later British nationalism was founded on this identification, so that it made sense to speak of Arthur as the once and future king of the English.22 But when Layamon wrote, such a conception was still three or four centuries in the future.23 Thus it can only appear confusedly and inchoately in a writer whose context of discourse does not match his vision.24

   Thus too the sometimes maddening "ambivalence" that Layamon, an archaizing "Anglo-Saxonist" in poetry, a priest among the English people, a critic of the Norman's evil ways, projects.25 How can it be that this writer portrays the Saxon conquerors of Britain in such a negative light? Part of the answer lies, of course in the providential history I mentioned above, which has been adduced by Donoghue to explain Layamon's ambivalence towards the Saxons.26 The rest of the answer lies in the play of ethnic identies within the Brut. Layamon decouples the Angle from the Saxon, making the heathen nation an "other" of the Christian English nation, or as I suggested above, his evil shadow.27 Thus it is possible to merge, at least partially, the Englishman with the Briton, to consider the possibility that history's ironic and unexpected turns will yet redeem the lost national identities of the island's legendary and even mythic past.

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   Layamon's ambivalence, if such it be, results in part from his desire to find a use in his own time and place for his antiquarian musings on the tales that Geoffrey and Wace passed on to him.28 To quote Claude Calame, writing of Pindar's treatment of the foundation myth of Cyrene, "historical or legendary, the past that is narratively constructed is always a function of the present."29 In these terms, we can say that Layamon reconstructed a lost English language and revised an alien myth to create a past that would be usable in the present, enabling his contemporaries to re-imagine the future. That his project had, apart from the marvelous Brut, no tangible results in his own time is not due to any shortcomings of the poet, for most often "poetry makes nothing happen." That Layamon, the English Homer, even today finds fewer readers than he deserves is surely an accident of political history, and also an accident, perhaps, of literary history.30