"SOUTH ENGLISH LEGENDARY" STYLE IN ROBERT OF GLOUCESTER'S "CHRONICLE"

Abstract

I Two huge momuments of later thirteenth-century literary activity, the South English Legendary (SEL), which contains principally saints' lives, and the historical chronicle that goes under the name of Robert of Gloucester, have long been known to be intimately related. They are written in the same septenary couplet metre, and are closely similar in dialect, vocabulary, phrasing, choice of rhyme words, overall narrative technique, and 'outlook': a Christian piety which places them on the side of the oppressed and suffering individual, and in opposition to corrupt and wicked lords of whatever estate. They also have numerous actual lines in common. Two short passages, the first from the Chronicle, will give an idea of the general identity of style:1 The first passage is in praise of Maud, queen of Henry I, the second in praise of St Ursula, but the poetic treatment is indistinguishable. On the basis of the similarity of style and metre Sir Frederic Madden in 1822 ascribed the authorship of the SEL to Robert of Gloucester, the name that will be used throughout this article for the author of the Chronicle.2 Most subsequent scholars have argued instead that the relationship is one of borrowing, and have assembled a corpus of passages in the two works which are textually parallel or virtually so.3 The current consensus, as summarized by Manfred Gorlach, is that Robert of Gloucester was the borrower, to the extent of having taken over more than 500 SEL lines, most significantly from the legends of the English saints Kenelm, Dunstan, AEthelwold, Edward the Elder, Alphege, Edward the Confessor, and Thomas Becket.4 As Gorlach says, Robert's borrowing procedure generally takes the form of 'revision by rephrasing, omission and condensation', but he goes on to demonstrate through an analysis of a shared passage on the madness and death of the Emperor Nero (for which see below) that the textual relationships are not always clear cut. He points out especially, as adding to the uncertainty of the situation, that 'no extant SEL MS contains all the legends used by Robert'. Gorlach's overall conclusion, however, is that Robert 'must have used a more comprehensive SEL volume than we know of'. Accepting Robert as the borrower, he believes that earlier scholars were wrong to admit 'that he might have contributed some portions of the SEL'.5 Compared to the notoriously complex textual relationships of the numerous different versions of the SEL - in effect, one for each of its many manuscripts - the textual state of Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle appears relatively simple. It survives in two versions, each represented by seven manuscripts.6 These versions are broadly identical up to the death of Henry I in AD 1135 (line 9137 of Wright's edition), but they then have wholly different continuations. The longer version carries on in considerable detail, eventually ending (in the most complete manuscript which itself ends fragmentarily)7 almost 3,000 lines later with an event in 1271. The shorter version continues for only 592 lines, quickly running over the years following the death of Stephen in 1154, and terminating with a mention of Edward I's conquest of Wales in the 1280s.8 Earlier in the narrative, however, it interpolates a total of approximately 800 lines not in the longer version, some of which Wright (p. xxx) recognized as deriving from La3amon's Brut. The unrestrained nature of this writer's comments, which extend to sardonic mockery of characters who receive their come-uppance, has led me to describe him as the 'outspoken' SEL poet. …