Kings and Kingship in British Library MS Harley 2253

Abstract

ABSTRACT British Library MS Harley 2253 contains a number of texts, in English, French, and Latin, in which historical and legendary kings feature. Like other works in the manuscript, these interact so that each text acquires meaning that it does not have if read in isolation; in certain texts the authority of kingship is undermined through the particular nature of the works' relationship. Links can be established between one of the texts and the putative connections of the compiler and scribe of the manuscript. This may have had a bearing on the way it and the other works about kings were read. Anyone who has heard of the fourteenth-century manuscript British Library MS Harley 2253 knows that it contains lyrics: in particular, the earliest surviving collection of lyrics in English on secular subject-matter. But recent writing on the manuscript has focused on the other material it contains--not just lyrics, and not just texts in English, but works in French and Latin as well, ranging from saints' lives to fabliaux, from romances to more 'practical' material. (1) The critical interest that these texts have attracted has usually been directed towards items adjacent in the manuscript, works in the same language, or those perceived as having generic affinities. (2) It is the argument of this essay that scrutiny across the codicological, linguistic, and generic boundaries of MS Harley 2253 throws further light on the interests of its compiler, and opens up interpretative possibilities for its texts that are alternative to those by which they have previously been interpreted. Isolation of the texts from their manuscript context, comparison of the texts with their sources, or association of the works with texts of the same genre: all offer strategies for analysis of the items in MS Harley 2253, but within the manuscript other associations and comparisons are suggested and invited, throwing into relief elements and aspects of the texts that may be disregarded if they are read in other contexts. Critical assumptions about the works are challenged when they are examined in this way, and so too are cultural ones about the compiler of the manuscript. The interest of MS Harley 2253 lies not only in its texts per se, but in what the interaction of those texts suggests about the milieu in which the miscellany was assembled. (3) After the lyrics, the text in MS Harley 2253 that has probably received most attention is King Horn. Unlike most of the lyrics, this work is not unique to MS Harley 2253--it survives in two earlier manuscripts also--but like the lyrics, it represents a 'first': it is usually classed as the earliest extant romance to have been composed in English. (4) If not published on its own, it has been published in the company of other romances, and it has been discussed as a romance, in the context of other romances, most influentially in Susan Crane's study Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature. (5) This is despite the fact that the rubric to the text in MS Harley 2253 describes it as a 'geste', (6) and despite the fact also that within the manuscript, there are no other texts of the same genre, in English or French, with which King Horn might be compared. It is worth pointing out here that in one of the other manuscripts in which the text is preserved, the late-thirteenth-century Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 108, King Horn is found in the company of a group of saints' lives, and it may have been viewed by the compiler and readers of this manuscript as another text of the same kind--as hagiography, rather than romance. (7) While there is no indication that the compiler of MS Harley 2253 saw it in the same light, there is no indication either that he associated it with other romance texts, or that he was interested in it as a representative of the romance genre; he was certainly not interested in associating it with other romances within his manuscript, or in prompting any other users of the manuscript to associate it with such texts. …