1. There is no evidence that Layamon used Bede's Ecclesiastical History as a
source, although he claims to have--in an English version--at Brut 16-28. There he also
claims to have used another book, co-authored by St. Albin and Augustine of Canterbury. I see no
need to regard "Albin" as an error for either Alcuin or Alban. The imaginary book
seems to be based on a misunderstanding of Bede's preface, in which he acknowledges the
research assistance of Abbot Albinus of Canterbury in assembling materials about the Church in
that diocese and its suffragan sees. A reference to the accomplishments in that region of the
"discipulis beati papae Gregorii . . . [preserved in] vel monimentis literarum vel seniorum
traditione"
might have been misread to suggest a joint literary enterprise, although Augustine, who lived
three or four generations before Albinus, is not named in the preface. (He was, of course, the
chief of the discipuli Gregorii who evangelized Kent.) See Baedae Opera
Historica, I (London 1962), 4-7. At Roman de Brut, vv. 7-8 Wace announces that he
has translated truthfully from his (unnamed) source(s)--rather unimaginative when one considers
Geoffrey's claim to have translated the Historia from a book in the language of the ancient
Britons.
page 30
2. Layamon, as we shall see below, compresses, expands, and deletes passages from the
Roman. In addition, he often turns what is narrative or indirect speech in Wace into
lengthy "epic" speeches of the sort familiar to readers of the Iliad and
Beowulf.
3. An extensive discussion of Layamon's versification may be found in S.K. Brehe,
"'Rhythmical Alliteration': Ælfric's Prose and Layamon's Metre," in The
Text and Tradition of Layamon's Brut, ed. Françoise Le Saux (Cambridge, 1994), pp.
65-87. See also Thomas Cable, "Layamon's Brut and the Misreading of Old English
Meter," Language and Civilization: A Concerted Profusion of Essays and Studies in
Honor of Otto Hirsch, ed. Claudia Blank 2 vols. (Frankfurt, 1992), 1:173-82.
4. Beowulf is certainly the earliest English epic, but it is hardly the English
national epic. Most of the action takes place among the Danes, whose contribution to
English history begins only in the ninth century. The poem's hero, a Geat, is from a tribe quite
removed from any connection with specifically English history or legend.
5. Lucy Perry sums matters up quite nicely in "Origins and Originality: Reading
Lawman's Brut and the Rejection of British Library MS. Cotton Otho C.xiii,"
Arthuriana 10 (2000), 69-71.
6. See the "Introduction" to Lawman's Brut, or Hystoria
Brutonum, ed. and trans. W.R.J. Barron and C.S. Weinberg (New York, 1995), p. ix.
7. See Françoise Le Saux, Layamon's Brut: The Poem and Its
Sources (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 1-13, esp. p. 10.
8. All references to Wace, inserted parenthetically in my text, are to the edition and
translation by Judith Weiss, Roman de Brut: A History of the British (Exeter, 1999).
9. All line references to Layamon, inserted parenthetically in my text, are to the edition
and
translation of Lawman's Brut (New York 1995) by Barron and Weinberg. Unless
otherwise indicated, translations from the Middle English are taken from the same edition.
10. This was the explanation of the discrepancy offered by Frederic Madden, Layamon's
first editor. See Daniel Donoghue, "Layamon's Ambivalence," Speculum 65
(1990), 563.
11. Judith Weiss, "Introduction" to Roman de Brut, p. xx.
12. I discuss below Layamon's observation that Britain has repeatedly been invaded and
conquered by uncuðe folc (Brut 3543): "strangers,"
"foreigners," or "aliens."
13. For a discussion of the traditional roles of women in Germanic epic, see Jane
Chance, Woman as Hero in Old English Literature (Syracuse, 1986), pp. 1-6.
14. Barron and Weinberg, rather unadvisedly, I think, translate þa ilki
leoden as "foreigners." The Middle English noun leoden (Old English leod)
denotes a gens--a people or an ethnic unit, or the territory they
page 31
inhabit. It clearly has the former sense in this instance. Many gentes dwell in foreign lands,
of course, but for Layamon Britain itself is populated by a number of different gentes, one
of them the Saxon migrants from foreign parts. The Middle English adjective ilke (Old
English ilca) means simply "(the) same." See notes 12 above and 29 below.
15. I adapt this formulation from remarks made by Eric G. Stanley at the Layamon 2000
International Conference, King's College, London, 7 August 2000.
16. "Interea volente deo purgare familiam suam et tanta malorum labe infectam auditu
tantum tribulationies emendare. . . . (God, meanwhile, wished to purge his family, and to cleanse
it from such an infection of evil by the mere news of trouble). De excidio Britonum, 22, in
Gildas, The Ruin of Britain and Other Works, ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom
(London, 1978), pp. 25, 96. In the "Historical Introduction" to this Volume, John Morris rightly
observes that De excidio "was not written as history" (p. 1).
17. Nicholas Howe, Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England (New
Haven, 1989), pp. 49-71.
18. Howe, Migration and Mythmaking,pp. 8-49.
19. Jumping ahead in his chronological narrative, Geoffrey tells this story, of the change
of New Troy's name by King Lud, in connection with the founding of Troia Nova by Brutus. See
Historia Regum Britanniae, ed. Acton Griscom (London, 1929), 1, xvii-xviii, pp. 251-52.
In this he is
followed by Wace, who adds the different versions of the name "London"
(Roman, vv. 121-46), and a general comment about how foreign invaders have
destroyed old places in Britain or renamed them. Layamon moves the excursus to its proper place
in the chronicle (Brut, ll. 3528-55).
20. Michael Swanton, English Literature before Chaucer (New York, 1987), p.
178.
21. J.S.P. Tatlock thought that Layamon was "highly intelligent, [and] had high
poetic gifts," and that "his sure-handed transformation of [the Roman de Brut] into a
different medium shows a man of real powers." See The Legendary History of Britain:
Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae and its Early Vernacular Versions
(Berkeley, 1950), p. 489. However, "Lawman shows almost no classical culture" (p.
493), and he was "a man of small reading" (p. 497) with only a "general
knowledge" of continental European geography (pp. 499-500). Tatlock does not say
directly that Layamon was a rude, unlettered genius "warbling his native wood-notes
wild," but the romantic stereotype is implied in the contrast between "high
powers" and "small reading." Critics of Tatlock's time generally endorsed this
view, as in Dorothy Everett's judicious if dated essay "Layamon and the Earliest Middle
English Alliterative Verse," in Essays in Middle English Literature, ed. Patricia
Kean (Oxford, 1959), pp. 23-45, esp. 33-34.
page 32
22. The locus classicus is at Book XXI, chapter 7, of Malory's Morte
Darthur: "Many men say that there yx wryteen uppon the tumbe thys HIC IACET
ARTHURUS, REX QUONDAM REXQUE FUTURUS." See The Works of Thomas
Malory, ed. Eugene Vinaver, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1948), 3, 1242. By the late nineteenth century
Irish nationalists spoke scornfully of Irish loyalists as "West Britons." In James
Joyce's "The Dead," for example, the nationalist Molly Ivors taunts the anglophone
and anglophile Gabrial Conroy as being a "West Briton." See Dubliners; Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Robert Scholes (New York, 1967), p. 139-41.
23. Speaking of the British State after 1800, Tom Nairn has commented that
"absorption, not federation, had always been the principle of its development as early as the
period of Norman feudalism." See The Break-Up of Britain, 2nd. ed. (London,
1981), p. 12. Later, Nairn cites with approval Ernest Gellner's observation that the multinational
state was normal for much of human history, and points out that the unitary national state has
become the norm only since about 1800 (pp. 317-18). Thus the centrifugal forces that split most
of Ireland off from the United Kingdom, and have more recently led to limited self-rule for
Scotland and Wales, are the product of modern ethnic nationalisms, very different social
formations from the national consciousness that can be observed in English/British culture after
the thirteenth century.
24. In his influential Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London, 1991), Benedict Anderson argues persuasively that
nationalism as we know it today did not come into existence until the late eighteenth century at
the earliest, when the modern "press" had developed; moreover, the rise of
nationalism was dependent upon the ideological formation of European colonial imperialism.
However, it is also true that an earlier, different, and also historically conditioned national
consciousness preceded the modern formations. A Pan-British or even pan-Insular sense of
national identity, with the English at the apex of several "sub-nations" was certainly
being promoted by English elites by the time Shakespeare staged Henry V in the late
sixteenth century. See Hugh A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History (Montreal
1982), pp. 31-50. In Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the
Tradition (New Brunswick and London, 1990), Allen J. Frantzen has shown that the creation
of "Anglo-Saxon" (studies) in the sixteenth century was heavily invested with the
desire to rediscover the "original" English Church and nation. On specifically
medieval ideas of nationality, and the difficulties of interpretation in the subject, the following
should be consulted: Robert W. Hanning, The Vision of History in Early Britain: From Gildas
to Geoffrey of Monmouth (New York, 1966)
page 33
and Stephen J. Harris, "Bede, Social Practice, and the Problem with Foreigners,"
Essays in Medieval Studies 13 (1998), 97-107, with its copious and useful annotation ((link). Harris,
incidentally,
goes further with his author than I do in this essay: he concludes that Bede distinguishes the
Anglians--and their church--from the "other" Anglo-Saxons. Without making too
much of it, I will note that Layamon's old parish of Arely Kings, in the diocese of Worcester, lies
in Anglian Mercia, not all that far from the border with the West Saxon kingdom that had taken
the "high kingship" of Britain from Mercia in the ninth century.
25. See Donoghue, "Layamon's Ambivalence," p. 556, and his references.
26. Donoghue, "Layamon's Ambivalence," pp. 558-61.
27. Ian Kirby some years ago proposed that "Layamon systematically distinguishes
the Saxons from the English, in "Angles and Saxons in Lawman's Brut," Studia
Neophilologica 26 (1964), 51-62. Neil Wright, however, has more recently produced
convincing evidence that Layamon does not adhere to this distinction until "toward the end
of the poem," and that he bases his distinction upon religion: the Saxons are pagan and the
English are Christian. See "Angles and Saxons in Layamon's Brut: A
Reassessment," Text and Tradition, ed. Le Saux, pp. 169-70. In the same Volume,
James Noble argues that the distinction is valid, and that it depends upon the Saxons' status as
invaders as opposed to the lawful immigrants, the "Ænglis" who accepted
"stewardship" of Britain after the great waves of plague during Cadwallader's reign;
see "Layamon's 'Ambivalence' Reconsidered," Text and Tradition, pp.
181-82. My argument is not affected by Wright's analysis, since I, like Noble, regard the
opposition of Saxons and Angles as something that develops over the course of the narrative, not
as one that informs it from the very beginning. Wright's unpacking of the opposition early in the
poem, I think, increases its importance to the final state toward which the narrative moves. In
saying this I do not endorse the view that Brut is an expression of Layamon's patriotism,
found, for example, in C.S. Lewis's "Introduction" to Selections From Layamon's
Brut, ed. G.L. Brook (Oxford, 1963), pp. xii-xiii.
28. The definitive discussion of this topic is Eric G. Stanley, "Layamon's
Antiquarian Sentiments," Medium Ævum 38 (1969),
23-37.
29. Claude Calame, "Narrating the Foundation of a City: The Symbolic Birth of
Cyrene," Approaches to Greek Myth, ed. Lowell Edmunds (Baltimore, 1990), p.
281.
30. I wish to thank the following individuals for their comments and suggestions, which
have greatly improved this essay: Allen J. Frantzen, James Noble, Herbert Pilch, SuzAnne Runge,
Eric Stanley, Kenneth Tiller, Jane Zatta, and an anonymous reader for Essays in Medieval
Studies. The flaws that remain, of course, are my sole responsibility.
