Who composed Havelok for whom?

Robert Levine, Yearbook for English Studies,XXII (1992), pp. 95-104.

Lessons learned in attempting to determine who made up the audience for medieval fabliaux have not been transferred to the problem of who made up the audience for Middle English romances. Havelok in particular has generated a confused and confusing discussion, partly because those who have speculated on the problem tend to rely on the questionable hypothesis that in the Middle Ages aristocrats and bourgeois -- or aristocrats and peasants -- had antithetical tastes in literature. In addition, they fail to consider other comparable medieval texts, of the thirteenth and earlier centuries, particularly in their representations of the lower classes and of violence.

John Halverson, for example, finds Havelok "entirely and essentially middle-class," while the promotion of Grim's sons from fishermen to barons is an articulation of "... a peasant fantasy of class ambition and resentment." [John Halverson, "Havelok the Dane and Society," Chaucer Review 6 (1971) 142-151; pp. 149-150)] As additional evidence he offers the fact that noble usurpers fall to a far more ignominious death in the English than in the French version. The implication of a relationship between tolerance for violence and social class is misleading, particularly in the light of the work done on fabliaux by Per Nykrog and, more recently, by R. Howard Bloch (Per Nykrog, Les fabliaux., Geneva, 1973, pp. xxxviii ff. (R. Howard Bloch, The Scandal of the Fabliaux, Chicago, 1986). Nykrog, in fact, insists that categorically clear distinctions among literary genres did not exist in the thirteenth century (An extension of the intuition offered by Ernst Curtius, in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, New York, 1963, p. 424).

Nevertheless, critics continue to judge Havelok on the basis of an expressed or implied difference in aesthetic taste between social classes, as John Ganim demonstrates in his attempt to describe and classify the stylized violence in the poem:

Even in the frequent scenes of violence in the poem the horror of what is being described is very often mitigated by an exaggerated scale and an enthusiastic, uncritical tone...the blood, gore, and torture of some of these scenes suggest to the audience not naturalism, but a rather naive fantasy world not unlike a modern cartoon or western (John M. Ganim, Style and Consciousness in Middle English Literature, Princeton 1983, p. 30).

Some readers, however, might not find such qualities in the scene in which Godard replies to the request for food made by Havelok's sisters by slitting their throats:

Godard herde here wa,

Theroffe yaf he nouth a stra,

But tok the maydens bothe samen,

Also it were up-on hiis gamen --

Also he wold with hem leyke,

That weren for hunger grene and bleike.

Of bothen he karf on two here throtes,

And sithen, hem al to grotes. (ll. 465-472)

(Thomas J. Garbaty, Medieval English Literature, Lexington, 1984, p. 194)

In addition, the version of this scene that Havelok later offers to Grim's sons bears no clear resemblance to a cartoon:

For y saw that fule fend

Mine sistres slo with hise hend;

First he shar a-two here throtes,

And sithen hem al to grotes... (ll. 1412-15)

Nor does the later passage in which Ubbe repeats the scene in an abbreviated version (2040-2045).

However, the scene that is likely to generate the most discomfort for modern readers is the one in which Godard is flayed alive. A virtuoso of violence, the poet provides the slitting of Godard's toe, a comparison of the victim's skin to cloth, and then the sound of intolerable pain:

Sket cam a ladde with a knif,

And bigan rith at the to

For to ritte, and for to flo,

So it were goun or gore,

And he bigan for to rore

That men mithe thethen a mile

Here him rore, that fule file. (2314-2320)

Godard's bellowing in no way impedes the flayer, who carries out his task as relentlessly as Godard had carried out his earlier work with the knife:

The ladde ne let no with forthi,

They he cried 'merci! merci!" --

That he ne flow him everilk del

With knif mad of grunden stel. (2321-2324)

Godard's body is then placed on a horse, in a supremely humiliating position, and finally hanged:

Thei garte bringe the mere sone,

Skabbed and ful ivele o bone,

And bunden him rith at hire tayl

With a rop of an old seyl,

And drowen him unto the galwes,

Nouth bi the gate, but over the falwes,

And heng him thore bi the hals:

Datheit how recke! he was fals. (2325-2332)

The detailed, enthusiastic description of the punishment meted out to Godard is disturbing, and certainly must have disturbed thirteenth-century listeners and readers, but these passages do not clearly show the naiveté of a cartoon or western. Dante eagerly and proudly provides equally horrible detail in Inferno xxv, and again, with greater horror, in his depiction of Ugelino and Roger in Inferno xxx. Certainly Ovid's description of the flaying of Marsysas in book six of the Metamorphoses matches the Middle English passage shock for shock, in spite of the fact that it was not composed for the pleasure of members of the Roman lower classes:

clamanti cutis est summos direpta per artus,

nec quicquam nisi vulnus erat; cruor undique manat,

detectique patent nervi, trepidaeque sine ulla

pelle micant venae; salientia viscera possis

et perlucentes numerare in pectore fibras. (ll. 387-391)

(Ovid, Metamorphoses, London, 1916, vol. I.)

Ovid's lines may be more highly stylized than those of the Middle English poet, but a medieval translator and allegorizer of the Metamorphoses, too fastidious to transmit the details of the flaying to an audience of fourteenth-century Christians, at this point in his translation merely offers:

Phebus fist Marsie escorcier.

(ovide moralisé, ed. by C. De Boer, Amsterdam, 1915-1938, 5 volumes, vol. 6, p. 331, l. 1967)

An example from another, later romance, the decapitation of Bertilak in Gawain and the Green Knight may serve as a graphic example of violence clearly not fabricated exclusively for the amusement of the lower classes:

Gawan gripped to his ax, and gederes hit on hy3t,

the kay fot on the folde he before sette,

let hit doun li3tly on the naked,

that the scharpe of the schalk schyndered the bones,

And schrank thur3 the schuire grece, and schade hit in twynne,

That the bit of the broun stel bot on the grounde.

The fayre hed fro the halce hit to the erthe,

that fele hit foyned wyth her fete, there hit forth roled;

the blod brayd fro the body, that blykked on the grene...

(ed. J.R.R. Tolkien and E.V. Gordon, revised by Norman Davis, Oxford, 1968, second edition (ll. 421-429)

To argue that the taste for violence displayed in Havelok reflects a lower-class taste seems to have been at least partially provoked by the common assumption that French texts were produced in thirteenth-century England for members of the nobility and English texts for hoi polloi; furthermore, the surviving earlier versions of the Havelock story are in French, and they do not contain violence comparable to that found in the English version(See the early part of L'Estoire des Engleis by Gaimar, ed., Alexander Bell, Oxford, 1960, and Le Lai d'Haveloc le Danois, ed. T.D. Hardy and C.T. Martin, London, 1888 (RS 91.1). However, neither language nor class provides a reliable indicator of taste, as a brief look at representations of brutality in historical works written for ecclesiastics and aristocrats in the thirteenth century and earlier will demonstrate.

For example, a proposed model for the treacherous Godard, Simon de Montfort was the subject of a Latin poem, composed neither by nor for peasants or burghers. Predominantly trochaic, the poem dwells lovingly and rhythmically on amputation and emasculation, fabricating for Baron Simon a martyr-like death, partially derived from a tradition of holy violence that can be traced at least as far back as Prudentius [See W.J. Henderson, "Violence in Prudentius' Peristephanon, in Akroterion. 28 (1983) 84-92; and R. Levine, "Prudentius's Romanus: the rhetorician as hero, martyr and saint," forthcoming in Rhetorica 8 (1991)].

Salve, Symon Montis-fortis,

totius flos militiae,

duras poenas passus mortis,

protector gentis Angliae.

sunt de sanctis inaudita,

cunctis passis in hac vita,

quemquam passum talia;

manus, pedes amputari,

caput, corpus vulnerari,

abscidi virilia.

(As printed in F.J.E. Raby, Christian Latin Poetry, Oxford, 1927, pp. 377-378)

Perhaps the meter and rhyme dilute the horror of the act being described, as Wordsworth suggests when he speaks of the pharmakon of verse in the "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads":

... from the tendency of meter to divest language in a certain degree of its reality, and thus to throw a sort of half consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole composition, there can be little doubt but that more pathetic situations and sentiments, that is, those which have a greater proportion of pain connected with them, may be endured in metrical composition, especially in rhythm, than in prose (William Wordsworth: The Poems, ed. John O. Hayden, New Haven, 1977, p. 885)

Nevertheless, meter and rhyme are present in Havelok too.

Less stylized, and in prose, the representation of the death of Simon de Montfort in Les Grandes Chroniques, a work composed by a late thirteenth-century ecclesiastic for aristocrats (See Gabrielle Spiegel, The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-Denis, Brookline, 1978), offers the same details:

Aucun de la partie Odouart furent plain de si grant felonnie et orent en si grant haine le conte Symon, qu'il ne leur souffist pas de ce qu'il avoient ocis de pluseurs plaies, quar il firent pis, quar il li esrachierent les genitaires du cors, et puis le despecierent par pieces et lessierent le cors tout descouvert pour devourer aus oisiaus du ciel (ed. by Jules Viard. Paris, 1920-53, 10 volumes; vol. 6, p. 223).

The present state of literary criticism offers no tools that enable us to determine whether the representation of death and dismemberment is more or less bearable in Primat's prose than it is in Middle English or Medieval Latin verse.

Although he had a courtly audience in mind for his late 13th-century laisses, Pierre Langtoft's description of the capture and execution of Wallace offers graphic detail that competes well with scenes in Havelok:

Avalez est de fourches, et ouvert les ventrouns,

Le quoer et la bowel brullez en carbouns,

Et cope la teste...

Cope li fust le cors en quatre porciouns;

Chescun pende par say, en memor de ses nouns,

en lu de sa banere cels sunt ces gunfanouns.

(Pierre de Langtoft, Chronicle., RS 47 (1,2), ed. Thomas Wright, 1866)

Since distinguishing between representations of violence on the basis of social class does not seem possible in these passages, Derek Pearsall's suggestion that although Havelok offers "the genuine expression of popular consciousness," ("The Development of Middle English Romance," Medieval Studies 27 (1965) 91-116: p. 98) nevertheless, "the idea that a popular audience must of necessity be a crude one" is "nonsense," seems compelling (Ibid., p. 106). As J. Weiss has demonstrated, "The writer of Havelok, judging by his exuberant use of every kind of rhetorical device, was a consciously literary man" (Weiss, J., "Structure and characterisation in Havelok," Speculum 4 (1969), pp. 247-57; p. 257. See also G.V. Smithers, "The Style of Havelock," Medium Aevum. LVII (1988), pp. 190-218, for the striking examples in the Middle English poem of the style of medieval epic, as well as of the schemes and tropes recommended by medieval Latin rhetorical manuals).

David Staines also regards the writer of Havelok as a consciously literary man, but his attempt to harmonize the implied political agenda of the poem with its popular appeal leads to some difficulties (David Staines, "Havelok the Dane: a Thirteenth-Century Handbook for Princes," Speculum 51 (1976) 602-623) Arguing that the poem is a speculum principis, Staines first asserts that John of Salisbury and the lower classes had an affinity for each other: "The lower-class attitude to the monarchy, shaped by the general medieval concept of the true prince, finds full expression in John of Salisbury's Policraticus." Ibid, p. 613. He goes on to insist that the lower classes had more to lose at the hands of a tyrant than the barons did:

Though the barons might well support John of Salisbury's arguments in favor of tyrannicide, the lower classes, the audience of the English romance, would tend to hate the possibility of tyrannicide which, for them would mean further civil disruption. Ibid. p. 615

During the middle ages, the nobility and the lower classes certainly found themselves from time to time on the same side, sometimes in opposition to the king, sometimes in opposition to ecclesiastical authority, but which group was more strongly committed to its position seems a moot question.

It would be more useful to ask who was interested in producing and distributing "peasant fantasies." Often enough during the middle ages, aristocrats and ecclesiastics were both suppliers and consumers of such stories. For example, in the sixth-century, Gregory of Tours, both prelate and patrician, tells the story of a peasant who kills two soldiers of indeterminate rank, thereby saving mules belonging to the church of Saint Martin of Tours [ed. B. Krusch, MGH, Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum, vol. 2, Hanover, 1888, VII.21]. From the perspective of an aristocratic ecclesiastic, then, a vilain is virtuous when he saves the priest from the warrior. In a tale told by Richer, a late tenth-century Carolingian partisan, and ruthless fabricator of argumenta if not fabula, [Isidore of Seville (I.XLIV.5) provides the following distinction among these terms:

Nam historiae sunt res verae quae factae sunt; argumenta sunt quae etsi facta non sunt, fieri tamen possunt; fabulae vero sunt quae nec factae sunt nec fieri possunt; quia contra naturam sunt.]

Ingo, king Odo's standard-bearer, and a mere mediocris, helps the king win a battle against the pirates. However, when the pirate leader undergoes what seems to be a hypocritical baptism, Ingo kills him, bringing upon himself the wrath of the king [Richer, Historia, ed. by Robert Latouche, Paris 1930, vol. 1, pp. 26ff].

The humble agaso promptly proceeds to defend himself successfully, incidentally producing a defense that follows the rules for conquestio as described in the rhetorical manuals [See Hans-Henning Kort~m, Richer von Saint-Remi, Stuttgart, 1985, pp. 99-101]. Rewarded with a title, land and a wife, Ingo unfortunately dies soon after his gentrification, of a disease described with elaborate, and apparently professional competence, by Richer.

In the twelfth century, Frederick Barbarossa' uncle, Otto of Freising, tells the story of a common soldier, a strator, who climbs the citadel of a besieged town, fights heroically, escapes from the enemy, and spurns promotion.[The Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa, MGH XX, Hanover, 1868, 400-401 (pp.136-137 of C.C. Mierow's translation NY 1953)]. Neither Gregory nor Otto shows signs in his work of sympathy for the lower classes. Both, however, were engaged in factional disputes among aristocrats and ecclesiastics.

Encomium of the lower-class occasionally results in rhetorically elaborate routines. In one of the most vividly imagined scenes in Graindour de Douai's late twelfth-century Chanson d'Antioche, the first Crusader to climb Antioch's walls makes much of his social insignificance. When Robert of Flanders swears by his wife and children to lead the climb, Fulker of Flanders dramatically puts his hands on Robert, insisting on taking his place (ll. 6060ff.). When Robert again starts up the ladder, again Fulker holds him back, pleading that,

on the basis of their differences in rank, fortune, domestic responsibilities, and general significance, less will be lost:

"Sire Robert de Flandres, prudon, ne t'esmarir,

Plus vaillans quens de toi ne puet armes baillir,

Cou ert molt grans damages, s'il t'i convient morir.

Car tu as molt grant terre, bels sire, a mainbornir,

Si as fame et enfans, Dex te laist reveir!

De moi n'ert nus damages s'il m'i convient morir,

Car jo n'ai que doner ne ne ruis nient tolir.

Lai me monter premiers, el nom de Saint Espir!

Se jo muir, moi qu'en caut! ce ert por Deu servir!

Mil mellors a en l'ost et plus font a cierir. [Chanson d'Antioche, ed. Suzanne Duparc-Quioc, Paris, 1977-78, ll. 6074-83]

Fulker is not only brave, but a fine Christian rhetorician, imagining his ascent of the wall as an ascent to salvation:

Dex! si com ce est voirs et nos bien le creon,

Si me laisies monter a me salvation

Et garissies Francois de mort et de prison,

Que nos puissons conquerre le vile et le donjon.

(ll. 6123-26)

Fulker leads the Crusaders up and over the wall, asking for nothing in return.

Praise of the lower classes often functions as blame of some other group. In his Life of Saint Thomas, for example, Garnier de Pont Saint Maxence finds Henry II's attempt to increase the nobility's power over the church intolerable; the poet's rage leads him to compose a five-line stanza of monorhymed hexameters

that looks like a radically democratic statement:

Fiz a vilain ne fust en nul liu ordenex

Sens l'asens sun seignur, de qui terre il fust nez,

E deus a sun servise nus a tuz apelez!

Mielz valt fiz a vilain qui est prouz e senez,

Que ne fait gentilz hum failliz e debutez. [La vie de saint Thomas Becket,

ed. E. Walberg, Paris, 1964, ll. 2541-45].

Garnier's statement that a vilein is preferable to a courtier is not a categorical statement of belief, but part of his argument against infringement of ecclesiastical authority.

As part of his extensive diatribe against the behavior of courtiers at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth centuries, Walter Map portrays Earl Godwin as a late tenth-century shepherd's son, whose looks and behavior please King Edward so much that the king takes him to court with him

and eventually honors him above all others. Godwin's prodigal hospitality in his peasant's hut resembles that of Grim and his sons, though Godwin out-does them (as well as his own parents' wishes):

Pater suus unam iubet parari gallinam; ille statim tres igni apponit.

Pater unum salsi proci frustum oleribus apponi; ille tria properanter

adicit, et preter matris et patris adibet conscienciam nefrendem, id est

adolescentem et virginem suem.

His father bade him get ready one chicken; he at once set three to

roast. The father bade serve done piece of salt pork, and cabbage;

he hastily added three, and without consulting his mother or father,

served up a suckling pig, that is, a young sow [Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium, ed. and translated by M.R. James, revised by C.N.L. Brooke and

R.A.B. Mynors, Oxford, 1983, pp. 414-415].

 

Havelok and Goldboru receive similarly prodigal peasant hospitality when they arrive at the home of Grim's sons:

Ne was ther spared gos ne henne,

Ne the hende ne the drake:

Mete he deden plente make;

Ne wanted there no god mete,

Wyn and ale deden he fet,

And hem made glade and blitthe:

Weseyl ledden he fele sithe. (ll. 1241-47)

Walter Map, however, goes on to make an explicit contrast between the behavior of Godwin and that of the nobility, to the detriment of the nobility:

Quicquid enim affabilitatis, facecie, largitatis, a quovis nobili vel

eciam regis filio solet aut iuste potest expeti, totum omnibus

hilaritate plena bubulci filius exhibet. Quod quidem eo videtur

mirabilius, quo contigit insperacius. Quis enim rusticum rusticitatis

expertem crederet, et tanto virtutum odore precluem?

For all the affability, courtesy, liberality, that is or might reasonably be looked for at the hands of any noble, nay, or king's son, this son of a herdsman showed to all in full measure of open-heartedness. And this indeed seemed the more surprising in that it happened the more against expectation. Who would suppose that a rustic could be pure of rusticity and distinguished by such sweet perfume of virtues?

At this point Walter offers a far more complex analysis of character than any that can be found in Havelok, or in romance generally, revealing that Godwin was not a good man, then modulating into a defense of the principle of nobility, though still unable to suppress his admiration of parts of Godwin's character.

Characteristically, however, praise of the lower class is confined to those who perform well and without social ambition. Sometimes the virtuous vilain is rewarded, as in Havelok, sometimes he is not. As the examples above suggest, the myth of the virtuous vilain is often fabricated to register the indignation of an ecclesiastic against aristocrats, or of one faction of aristocrats against another. [For the classical model for attacking nobility of birth, see the speech Sallust composes for Marius in the Bellum Jugurthinum. Sallust, ed. J.C. Rolfe, London, 1965, p.314. As Ronald Syme points out, however, Sallust despised both the nobiles and the "people." Sallust, Berkeley, 1964, pp. 251-251]. Chaucer shows some awareness of this technique in his portrayal of Griselda in the "Clerks Tale," and in the speech that Alice of Bath provides the old hag in the "Wife of Bath's Tale." Her ability to recall Cacciaguida's denunciation of nobility of blood in Dante's Paradiso is part of Chaucer's attempt to characterize another of his tellers in the Canterbury Tales, as well as to play one of many variations on the theme of "gentilesse" that can be found throughout the Tales. A lower middle-class social climber, she deliberately and blatantly puts the aristocratic Dante's attack on an opposing faction of aristocrats into the mouth of the spokesman of her own fantasies, the old crone. [The topic of natural nobility also appealed to John Gower, in Confessio Amantis IV, ll.2204 ff.] In addition, G.M. Vogt provides more than 30 examples of passages from

medieval texts in which nobility of blood is denounced, without revolutionary implications or intentions. ["Gleanings for the History of Sentiment: Generositas Virtus non Sanguis," JEGP 24 (1925), pp. 102-23. For other exercises on the topic of natural nobility, see E.R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, New York, 1963, pp. 179-80.

Havlock is not as complex a poem as the one fabricated by Chaucer for Alice of Bath, nor can it match the dark ironies of Walter Map's De Nugis Curialium. Nevertheless it reflects the concerns of a relatively broad social spectrum, constantly appealing to all social classes and roles, as A.C. Spearing indicates when he speaks of the "social inclusiveness" of the poem [Readings in Medieval Poetry, Cambridge, 1987, p.53].

The most obvious example of this inclusiveness is the poet's reliance, or insistence, upon the degree to which all social classes participate in the action. Early in Havelok, the poet extolls the universal appeal of Goldboru's father Aethelwold:

Hym lovede ung, him lovede holde,

Erl and barun, dreng and tayn,

Knict, bondeman, and swain,

Wydues, maydenes, prestes and clerks... (ll. 30-33)

When Aethelwold dies, earl Godric's activities are listed in comprehensive, specific political, administrative detail:

Thanne he havede taken this oth

Of erles, baruns, lef and loth,

Of knictes, cherles, fre, and thewe,

Iustices dede he maken newe,

Al Engelond to faren thorw,

Fro Dovere into Rokesborw.

Schireves he sette, bedels and greyves,

Grith-sergeans, with longe gleyves,

To yemen wilde wodes and pathes

Fro wicke men, that wolde don scathes... (ll. 260-269)

 

Goldboru's hortatory remarks to Havelok show the same rhetorical habit at work:

To the shole comen heye and lowe,

And alle that in Denemark wone,

Em and brother, fader and sone,

Erl and baroun, dreng an thayn,

Knithes and burgeus and sweyn... (ll. 1325-29)

The most specifically political use of this habit occurs when the verdict against Godard is pronounced in front of, and significantly by representatives from all levels of society:

The king dede Ubbe swithe calle

Hise erles and hise barouns alle,

Dreng and thein, burgeis and knith,

And bad he sholden demen him rith ...

He setten hem dun bi the wawe,

Riche and povere, heye and lowe,

The helde men, and ek the grom,

And made ther the rithe dom...

"We deme that he be al quic flawen..."

(ll. 2285-88; 2291-94; 2297)

The openly determined decision suggests that the ideal ruler in the ideal state clearly avoids what would later in English history be labeled Star Chamber proceedings.

The Havelok-poet's tendency to list specific classes in an attempt to provide a comprehensive glimpse of historical reality resembles that of poet-historians. Pierre de Langtoft, for example, in describing the coronation of William the Conqueror, provides such a series:

A Loundres, ad Noel, veent of graunt baudour

Le duk de Normendue, William le Conquerour;

Counte, duk, baroun, chuvaler, vavasour,

Cytayn et burgays, sergaunt, gardayn de thour,

A ly sunt venuz cum @ lur seygnur.

Pierre de Langtoft, Chronicle, RS 47 (1,2), ed. Thomas Wright, 1866.

Written for an audience for whom power was both a possibility and a habit, for whom John of Salisbury's ideas had some appeal, for whom violence was not confined to the world of stylized art, but was a fact of everyday historical reality, Havelok lays the responsibility for horror where it belonged in the thirteenth century, with the aristocrats. Like Sir Walter Scott (as Georg Lukacs describes him), the poet of Havelok is able to turn into poetry "the repellently brutal sides of aristocratic rule," as well as, "the life of the serfs and the free peasants." [Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel, Boston, 1963, pp. 55-56.

For a similar perception, see John Gillingham, "War and Chivalry in the History of William the Marshal," in Thirteenth Century England, ed. P.R. Coss and S.D. Lloyd, Woodbridge, 1987, pp. 1-13.

After this paper was published, John Finlayson, "King Horn and Havelok the Dane: A Case of Mistaken Identities," Medievalia et Humanistica 18 (1992), pp. 17-45.