'Exile-and-return' and English Law: The Anglo-Saxon Inheritance of Insular Romance

Abstract

This article offers a new interpretation of the development of insular romance, drawing on texts and events in the pre-Conquest period to suggest a much greater degree of cultural continuity across the Conquest than has previously been recognised. One strand of recent scholarship has elucidated the prevalence of the ‘exile-and-return’ theme in twelfth- and thirteenth-century insular French romance, and the political force of this ideology. Another has discussed the tendency of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Middle English romance to construct the Anglo-Saxon past as a legal golden age, using this trope to support a strong national identity. This article suggests that both of these tropes – the exile-and-return of the king, and the idea of good English Law – are in fact not post-Conquest inventions, as has been assumed, but are rather derived from pre-Conquest events and texts. This is a part of the author's general contention that a strong English identity can be seen to have survived the Conquest, and to have been expressed in French and Latin throughout the twelfth century, before the literary revival of English. Here it is argued that the two ideas are fundamentally intertwined, are essentially English, and are a genuine inheritance from the Anglo-Saxon past, in a manner which has not previously been acknowledged.