Jottings on Beowulf and fragmentation of the body/nation

As I've not posted anything in a while, here's a note-form version of something I'm working on at the moment. This is the seminar paper I delivered a couple of weeks ago, and which I am currently working on expanding into a full-length paper (c. 20-22 pages, if I can keep it down to that length!). I'm keeping it in note form, because I am, sadly, beginning to get a little chary of copyright on the internet.

Not that I expect to publish this. I am not going to make my first major analytical publication on Beowulf.

A - General outline: Fragmentation or unity of the body as reflective of (and a site for exploring anxieties about) that of the nation.

- Lerer calls beowulf ‘a poem of the body’ (723). [1] Poem’s focus on the physical deeds and prowess of the warrior body often excludes the use of ornamentation, weaponry or armour. Every conflict with a monstrous opponent results in not merely the death of one party but in the fragmentation or destruction of their body: Grendel rends and eats his victims, Beowulf relies on muscle rather than weapon and tears off Grendel’s arm, Grendel’s mother tears off Aeschere’s head and discards it far from civilisation, Beowulf kills Grendel’s mother and cuts off Grendel’s head then displays head and arm as tokens of his victory. He cleaves the dragon in two; the sea monsters try to make a feast of him, but he scatters their bodies on the shore. All of the most dramatic moments of conflict with an outside force, Lerer concludes, draw attention to the maintenance of the intact body of the victor over the broken body of the defeated.

B - ‘Nation’ (for this purpose) as defined not by maps or land but as the people and culture.

- Spatial imaginaire, but not the physical boundaries on which Michelet[2] focusses. Not particularly useful for Beowulf (partly for reasons Hiatt points out, but also simply because the rest of the land is not very interesting, with the partial exception of its coast-boundaries).

- Instead, nation is centred on / symbolised by the vivid image of the hall and the bodies within - as Michelet does point out, it is the hall in each instance (whether human or monstrous) that is under the threat of invasion. The invasions into the hall (by Grendel or the dragon) lead to a breakdown in unified social function (Michelet 79).

- Within the hall, imagery is centred on the body and the cultural actions of the body, esp. re. gift-giving (and the throne, the centred position of the leader, is a particular point of threat from both Grendel and dragon). Proximity to the central figure as crucial element in ordered and functioning social space - cf movements of queen within hall bearing cup to guests, etc. (May not be spatial centre if one were to draw a floor plan, but is imagined/conceptual centre.) The absent leader provides space for his replacement with Grendel (Hroðgar leaves the hall in the night, Michelet 92). (note that the den of dragon and Grendel provide a negative image of this)

- Image of nation therefore as the body (esp. that of the leader) within the communal space.

- But centre and boundaries are defined against each other: centre implies boundaries, boundaries necessitate centre (Michelet 10, then 24). Anxiety about definition and establishment of secure boundaries, the point where in becomes out, us becomes them, at which they touch by necessity, the point farthest from centre. How do we define the boundaries? ... monsters!

C - Jeffrey Cohen’s work on the idea of the giant in Anglo-Saxon literature/mythology[3] as a starting point from which to examine the nature of the threat presented by Grendel and his mother. [Firstly: giant tears and eats, is a threat to the body, but also, in its violent exaggerated human form, a threat to unified society] Especially:

- The giant as inhabiter / transgressor of boundaries, of both society and human bodies. Cohen 1-2 re. giant as psychological and cultural delineator of boundaries - extend this to spatially, to the temporal boundaries of beginnings and endings, and also culturally taboo-boundaries like cannibalism: in each instance the physical body and its physical effects are important.

- The giant as originary or causative, particularly in their body, inhabiting some distant past on which the present is built. The broken body of the giant provides origins (cf Gog/Magog, who are thrown into the sea as the dragon is) (p. 9 for Ymir). The giants’ violent acts and boundary-breaking, the damage they visit on bodies and landscape (17), form the origin both of cultures (imaged in the body) and cultural space.

D - Fragmentation of that body

- By consumption or mutilation.

- Maintenance of the intact body = success, vs. consequences of defeat = dismembered body (Grendel, Aescere’s head, etc) - see Seth Lerer. What is at stake in the conflicts, then, is unity vs fragmentation, as conceived in terms of the body.

- He does not point out, however, that each conflict (even Beowulf vs. sea monsters) has one party transgressing the boundaries of the other’s space - one enters to the other and the result is a dismembered body within a violated space. The space itself often shows signs of this violence - the blood bubbling to the surface of the mere is an irrefutable sign of the violence within, and is read as such, although Hrodhgar’s men misread the results of that violence. Crossing the boundary is a defining moment that, like the passage of the Rubicon, commits the intruder to a battle for control of the integrity of the space and the body. Attention is thus drawn to the boundaries and the moment of breaking them.

- Therefore the body (society or the body of its leader) defined / celebrated by challenge to it.

E. Grendel and his mother inhabit and transgress the boundaries of body and nation and thus help to delineate them (Michelet 94-5). The image of the broken body of the giant + intact body of hero (alive or celebrated in his tomb) provides origin, projected back into the past?

- Cohen: fragments of Grendel’s body are elevated as symbols of “a public validation of the control and acceptance of structured society whose antitheses Grendel represents” (24). So the fragments are not only a result of victory, but a sign of it, signalling triumph over the other and a society (and heroic body) whose unity has been affirmed.

- Michelet points out that “The demon’s footsteps provide the spatial transition between the two places” (Heorot and the mere) (80) & treading the grounds defines the limited (107-08). He does not point out that Grendel’s footprints are not merely impressions in the dirt, but marked in blood, signs of the damage to his body and his consequent defeat. Cannot break the boundaries of his space until his body is broken - and once he does, Beowulf breaks his body again.

- Walkers in the wasteland: with their feet, especially the bloody footprints, they mark out and define the boundaries of civilisation.

In expanding this to a proper paper, I'd like to explore further the idea of temporal boundaries - the beginning and ending of nations / things / memory / knowledge. Beowulf and Wiglaf are the last of their people, Beowulf says, and this is signalled by the breakdown of society after Beowulf dies, as if his death and the sundering of social ties shown by the earls’ failure to help him signal the actual end of the Geats as a whole. Beowulf’s body, however, remains: he says that his cairn is to be a signal to later generations, or later ages, far into the future. But there is very little human history, only a few generations back, as if the past can only be accessed by the monsters.

Drawing again on Cohen: the hilt of the sword that Beowulf takes from the mere depicts the giants before the flood, which is where they’re usually found, in some legendary but foundational long-ago. They build, yes, and old stone ruins are often referred to semi-metaphorically in Anglo-Saxon poetry as ‘the work of giants’ (Cohen 11), but other landscape features are also attributed to them. They and their brute strength are used to explain the presence of mountains, lakes, ancient cities, broken rocks, changes wrought long ago before the human nation arrived. In Germanic cosmogonies they predate the material universe, which is fashioned from the corpse of one of them (7).

So giants are originary or causative, particularly in their body, inhabiting some distant past on which the present is built. The broken body of the giant provides origins - Gogmagog is dashed into a thousand pieces and thrown into the sea so that Brutus can found Britain. The dragon, incidentally, meets the same fate - but I don't think we can equate the dragon and the Grendelkin so easily. He seems to me to be a very different creature, especially in terms of how he relates to the beginnings and endings of human civilisations.

Grendel’s fragments possibly provide, for the poem’s audience, a similar imaginative origin in the defeat of the previous inhabitants of the land. The giants’ violent acts and boundary-breaking, the damage they visit on bodies and landscape (Cohen 17), form the origin both of cultures (imaged in the body) and cultural space, but they also demarcate a boundary in time that cannot be crossed by human knowledge: once again, they demarcate the unknowable.



[1] Seth Lerer, ‘Grendel’s Glove’, English Literary History 61 (1994): 721-751. (The glove Grendel wears – ie, the monster as symbolised by his hand and his mouth, Beowulf’s removal of these; Norse traditions of giants’ gloves; Beowulf is ‘a poem of the body’, and victory results in destruction of the body of the defeated.)
[2] Fabienne Michelet, Creation, Migration and Conquest: Imaginary Geography and Sense of Space in Old English Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. (Anglo-Saxon conceptions of space; Grendel’s mere and the dragon’s den compared and contrasted to Heorot, Beowulf’s hall, Beowulf’s cairn; demarcations of land boundaries in Beowulf.)
[3] Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Old English Literature and the Work of Giants’, Comitatus 24 (1993): 1-32. (Figure of the giant in Old English literature; debts to Germanic and Latin/Old Testament traditions; psychological function of the monster; figure of Grendel within this tradition.)

The unseen butterfly; or, Thoughts on the space between the literal and the allegorical

This is a reflection written for the end of our Mediaeval Body course. It takes for granted a certain definition of 'the mediaeval body', and refers implicitly and explicitly to the class readings over the course of the semester. Consequently, there's no explanation of these references in the course of the essay, and, except for direct quotes (and a reference to The Book of Vices and Virtues, which wasn't on the reading list), nothing is footnoted. To make this more comprehensible for a blog post, I've added a separate set of footnotes, explaining the references. The numbered footnotes are in the original reflection; the lettered ones are just for this post.

The reflection is a response to a quote from Michael Camille: "In this period long before the Cartesian split between mind and body there was much more of a continuum between the two. The body was the receptor and receptable of sensation and crucial in the process of cognition. All knowledge, even that of the divine, had to be channelled through the body."

The Unseen Butterfly

The Book of Vices and Virtues describes the liar as “a butre-flye, þat lyueþ by þe aier and haþ no þing in hire guttes but wynd, and at euery colour þat sche seþ sche chaungeþ hire owne”.¹ It is not an isolated image: Lorens d’Orleans’ carefully explicated catalogue of the seven deadly sins is full of references to sinners not merely as animalistic, but almost literally as animals. The lines between what is literal and observable in the world and the allegorical understanding of the literal can be seen to shift and blur in the late mediæval period, sited most strongly on the symbolic interpretation of the body. Camille’s understanding of the body as “receptor and receptable of sensation and crucial in the process of cognition” and of the consequent necessity of channelling “all knowledge, even that of the divine”² through the body is particularly relevant here. The most potent and challenging ideas in the mediæval world, as well as ideas trivial and comic, could be expressed and understood most powerfully – most viscerally – when located on the physical body. Over and over, mediæval writings demonstrate the need to literalise the abstract, in particular to experience it through the body in order to make it understood, to own it or perhaps even to control it.

The observation of real butterflies has little place in Lorens d’Orleans’ allegorical depiction. Such a metaphor today would draw scepticism, because we hold the image of a literal butterfly as a separate naturalistic definition in our minds, and expect a good metaphor to mimic it. There is an echo of appropriateness in the fact that butterflies come in a variety of colours and will instinctively seek out perches against which their particular array will camouflage; but they will not change colour themselves, and neither Lorens nor his audience can possibly have seen them do so. The accepted fact of changing colour, then, was an attribute not of the observable butterfly, but one that belonged to the communal imagination. Lorens’ butterfly is an almost purely allegorical creature, appropriate to the liar because she³ feeds on air – on words – and has no power “in hire guttes” but that same air, her body mutating of necessity to suit her changing circumstances. Other animals to which he compares sinners – pigs, hyenas, mermaids – are described in similar terms. The mundane, exotic and fantastic are all colourful symbols rather than worldly creatures, creatures that inhabit the bestiary rather than pigsty or hedgerow. Lorens’ animals are not products of the literal. His pigs do not behave like mundane pigs, but recall the Gadarene swine “in tokenynge þat glotouns þat leden here lif in glotonye as swyn, þe deuel haþ power to entre wiþ-ynne hem and drenche hem in þe see, þat is to seye in helle”.⁴ They are memorable, repulsive, even amusing reminders of the effect of sin on the sinner. Conversely, the phrasing in which the traits of the animal are applied to the sinner is strikingly literal: almost invariably a metaphor, not a simile. The effect of this is to reinforce the message of inhumanity and degradation that results from each sin described, no less true for being allegorical and unobservable in the real world. The mirroring of the bestial state of mind in the bodies of the sinners thus becomes a way of observing the ‘real’ truth about sinners.

Gerald of Wales^a provides a more literal depiction of bestial human bodies. Claiming true physicality for his werewolves, ox-men, man-women, deformed children and other monsters, he repeatedly invokes his own observations as authority. Insisting on preserving the littera of his account of Ireland’s people, he nevertheless engages with the allegorical when he attributes all these deformities to the moral deficiencies of the Irish.⁵ Similarly, his accounts of individual creatures, though often sympathetic, lend themselves easily to moral allegory reminiscent of Lorens’ depiction of humans reduced by their actions to the level of beasts. He himself glosses his account of the woman who had “bestial intercourse” with a goat, for example, to say that the woman proved herself “more a beast in accepting him than he did in acting”.⁶ The real Irish thus become, via Gerald’s pen, a people whose (supposed) primitive morals and essential foreignness make them fascinating but subhuman, the monsters that live among them simultaneously result, punishment and symbol of their moral state. If Mittman^b is correct, Gerald’s History and Topography of Ireland is, on the one hand, an attempt to externalise and explore his own hybridity, and on the other to recast himself as a member of society by defining an ‘other’ far more monstrous and alien than himself. Accounting for his ambivalent attitude towards the creatures he describes, this suggests that the act of writing was for Gerald both a means to understanding his own mixed-race body and his place in the world, and to use images of the deformed body and mind to manipulate his readers’ understanding of what true otherness meant.

To turn from the sub-human to the divine: the cult of Sainte Foy^c, like that of many another saint, was primarily a practical one. Her physical presence in Conques served to answer the everyday needs of their bodies – assistance with pregnancy, healing or freedom of prisoners. The concern of her flock for their own bodies is matched by the concern they project onto the saint for her ‘body’ - the anthropomorphic jewelled reliquary containing her mortal remains. Bernard of Angers narrates stories of the man who refused to worship her image, and the girl who refused to stand up as it was carried by, together with the punishment inflicted on them by the saint “as if [they] had shown disrespect for the holy martyr herself”.⁷ Bernard’s narration of the village’s direct and practical tales is coloured by his theological education, and his anxiety to demonstrate that the cult conforms with accepted church standards. Close identification of the saint with her ‘body’ is a crucial element in defending Conques from the charge of idolatry: the image is not worshipped as an idol, but for the martyr it represents. The physical form of the statue, though valuable, is understood by the devout to be less important than what it contains and symbolises. While the literal, observable statue is for the villagers a means to access the saint and comprehend her sanctity, it also has the potential to be a distraction. Bernard eliminates this possibility by (literally) incorporating it, isolating it within the story of a man who made that mistake. The fool who wished the statue would shatter in order that he might snatch the fallen jewels becomes an example of wrongful understanding of the relationship between the observable and the mysterious. He is justly punished, bodily humiliated for concentrating on the physical body to the exclusion of the spiritual.

Mediæval attitudes towards death also show a complex interchange between literal and allegorical understandings of the body. Death as a literal experience was never far away from the susceptible body, nor was it distant as a metaphorical realm. According to Camille, “the body was not thought to be truly dead, its spirit separated from the body, until a year after burial. Only when all the flesh had left it and it was nothing, nobody, was it ‘Death’”. The body itself thus bridges an uneasy gap between life and non-existence, a gap which could be transgressed in other ways: the intercession of dead saints for the living via the physical remains of their bodies (such as Sainte Foy), the categorisation of lepers and the religious as ‘dead’ to the world, or stories in which people could walk from the ordinary world into the realm of the dead with their own fleshly feet. The metaphorical death of the leper, priest or nun was enacted on the living body to bring the symbolic as close as possible to the literal. A new monk, for example, was required to close himself for three days in a cloister as Christ did in his tomb, before joining his brothers in his new ‘life’.⁹ More dramatically, a leper’s seclusion office includes hearing mass under a black cloth “after the manner of a dead man, although by the Grace of God he yet lives in body and spirit”, and having a spadeful of earth cast on each foot by the presiding priest in a symbolic burial.¹⁰ All wore clothes physically denoting the special status of their body.¹¹ Similarly, Owein’s journey to Purgatory^d does not appear to be unnatural or impossible. The trials are difficult – many men have died attempting them – but not beyond the strength of a truly virtuous Christian who can keep his mind on his divine guide. Like the pilgrim Dante, he walks from this world into the next in his own body, insisting like Dante on the literal truth of the allegorical journey. Believing the story of either descent requires the capacity to subordinate the observed state of reality to the allegorical, but the potential for a literal interpretation strengthens the emotional effect of the story. Everyday humans do not typically stroll into Purgatory and back; but the possibility of such a literal crossing (even if fantastic) makes death seem perhaps a little more controllable, more understandable.

Owein also confronts the apparent paradox that all the souls he sees are fully incorporated, experiencing horrible torments visited on bodies which they ought no longer possess. This is hardly unexpected, however. Torments inflicted on some incorporeal spirit are difficult to comprehend and carry no power, and would therefore lose any relevance as an allegory. The mediæval spirit, moreover, cannot be satisfactorily separated from the body. Even at the moment of death, the moment of that very separation, it is often depicted wafting from the physical mouth in the shape of a miniature copy of the body it is departing. If the soul is the self, and the self is located in the body, soul and body are inextricable. Any torments visited on the soul must be therefore comprehended through the suffering of that body, even in Purgatory or Hell, with all its leaking fluids, piteous moans and susceptibility to pain and damage. The power of such an allegory can be seen in the accounts of holy women like Christina Mirabilis^e who underwent (or were said to undergo) these pains literally during life, enacting or experiencing in their own bodies in life what they understood to be a literal reality awaiting those bodies in death.

Here, of course, the distinctions between the allegorical and the literal blur into little more than a personal judgement call; as they must, given their overlapping nature. To a culture that believes in the physical reality of Hell, of divine intervention, of the Host changing imperceptibly but literally into flesh, the narrower tag of “observable” is nonsense. But the distinction is important, even if it serves only to demonstrate the relative unimportance of the observable in the mediæval Christian world, a world overlaid with symbolism and ordered by an invisible power. Allegory and physical reality were interdependent: literalisms in allegory served to explain what one could observe literally in the world or in one’s self. What is a real butterfly to that? There were, indeed, truths considered literal that were too mysterious to be appropriate for human observation. Paradise is one: Owein is prevented from entering the final gate because he is not ready. Transubstantiation is another, as Aquinas so painstakingly explains: though Christ is literally there, “since the way [he] exists in this sacrament totally transcends nature, his body can be seen only by God’s own mind and the blessed in heaven with whom he shares the vision. Men can know it in this life only by faith”.¹² And orthodox priests seem to have been horrified at the twelfth-century depiction of the Trinity appearing to Abraham with three heads^f – despite the fact that the metaphor it embodied was one the church itself insisted was literal.

It would be a difficult and ultimately fruitless task to try to determine just how literally any of these metaphors was believed. The answer, no doubt, would vary from person to person, culture to culture and generation to generation. Did the discrepancy between Lorens’ butterfly and the butterfly on the twig really bother anyone? Did people eye priests over sceptically and mutter mutinously that anyone could see they weren’t actually dead? Aquinas’ care to explain the exact mechanics of transubstantiation, and Bernard of Anger’s defensiveness about the possibility of worship being transferred from idea to idol, suggest that the boundaries between observation and allegory could be and sometimes were problematic. However, the beauty of allegory is that it allows – indeed, requires – belief and understanding of the world on multiple levels at once. In an era fascinated with self-exploration, the observable butterfly is of limited interest; but the allegorical butterfly provides an opportunity to explore the relationship of the physical human body to the world, and vice versa. The continuum between mind and body allowed things that were real purely in the mind – the imaginary, the allegorical, the divine – to be translated and understood through the medium of the body, in order to return them more real to the imagination. There is therefore no absolute neat division between the literal and the imagined: both frequently spilled out into the space between them in which meaning could be explored. If the three-headed Trinity had the capacity to shock the conservative with its literal embodiment of a spiritual metaphor, the fact that it existed at all shows that the space between the two extremes was at once fruitful and fascinating to the mediæval mind.

1 The book of vices and virtues: a fourteenth century English translation of the Somme le roi of Lorens d'Orleans, ed. W. Nelson Francis, Early English Text Society OS 217 (London: Oxford UP, 1942), 60

2 Michael Camille, ‘The image and the self: unwriting late medieval bodies,’ in Framing Medieval Bodies, eds. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester & New York: Manchester UP, 1994), 94.

3 Considering the treacherous mutability of the feminine body in mediæval thought, the gendering of the butterfly as feminine may well be deliberate. As the French “papillon” is masculine, the use of “elle” or “sche” is unlikely to be an accident of grammar.

4 Vices and Virtues, 47.

5 Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland, trans. John J. O’Meara (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 181.

6 Gerald of Wales, Topography, 75.

7 The Book of Sainte Foy, trans. Pamela Sheingorn (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP), 79.

8 Camille, ‘The image and the self’, 84-85.

9 Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (New York: Cornell UP), 58.

10 Peter Richards, The Medieval Leper and his Northern Heirs (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1977), 123.

11 Lorens d’Orleans extends the metaphor from the body of the priest to that of the sinner when he speaks of backbiting, saying that those who slander “þe goode holy men of religioun” who are “dede as in þis world” are themselves transformed into “þe felle and wikkede best þat men clepeþ heyene, þat goþ and delueþ vp dede bodies of folke and eteþ hem” (Vices and Virtues, 59).

12 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation, ed. Timothy McDermott (London: Eyre and Spotswood, 1989), 578.

a Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland, trans. John J. O’Meara (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982). Gerald of Wales writes of his travels in Ireland, telling of the strange ways of Ireland. Cocks crow at a different time, snakes are not poisonous, children are often deformed or weak, there are werewolves and other odd creatures, etc. He is particularly (and sympathetically) interested in the monstrous hybrids he met there – several creatures, half human and half beast, which are all the results of humans copulating with animals, because the Irish are so degenerate. He himself is half Welsh, and his mixed blood seems to have led to discrimination against him during his lifetime.

b Mittman, Asa Simon, “The Other close at hand: Gerald of Wales and the ‘Marvels of the West’”, ed. Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills, The Monstrous Middle Ages,(Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), 97-112. Mittman speculates that Gerald’s own hybridity led him to attempt to assert his essential similarity with the English by providing through his writing an example of a race far more alien than himself.

c The Book of Sainte Foy, trans. Pamela Sheingorn (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 1995). Bernard of Angers is the author of several of the documents in the Book, particularly the miracle tales in which he, a theologically educated man and a convert to the cult of Sainte Foy, tries rather defensively to justify the worship of the rich jewelled golden statue that contains her relics by recounting stories of the miracles that Sainte Foy has delivered to the community of her worshippers in the town of Conques – including punishing anyone who doesn’t treat her reliquary with due respect.

d ”The Knight Owein’s Journey through St Patrick’s Purgatory”, ed. John Shinners, Medieval Popular Religion 1000-1500: A Reader (Ontario: Broadview, 1997).

e ”The Life of Christina the Astonishing”, ed. E. Spearing, Medieval Writings on Female Spirituality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002). Christina the Astonishing really is. After leading a quiet life as a virtuous shepherdess, she dies, then subverts expectations by flying out of the coffin at her funeral and perching on the rafters of the church. After this she refuses to be normal. She regularly flits about, perches on roofs and in trees, can’t abide the smell of humans, flees into the wilderness, is chained up by her despairing family and miraculously escapes, curls herself up into a ball of flesh regardless of trifles such as bones and sinews, and feeds herself on her own milk. She also takes up throwing herself into burning ovens, drowning herself, hanging herself and inflicting lots of painful tortures on her body, all of which heal instantly, though she screams in pain. The narrator tells us that she does this because God has promised her that her pain in this life will alleviate that of souls burning in Purgatory, and allow them to ascend to heaven faster.

f A twelfth-century image of the Trinity appearing to Abraham, depicted as an enthroned angel with three heads. Reproduced in Camille, “The image and the self”, 73.

Fruitfulness!

Well, after two years of trying to reclaim back yard from couch grass and wandering jew, I now know I have a Real Vegetable Garden: I just found my first nest of earwigs in the silverbeet!

After poking at them in an irritated sort of manner with a stick, I decided to let them go free, partly because I am benevolent and seeing made me go "hooray! Thriving ecosystem and proof that my vegetables are desirable to earwigs!" and partly because I didn't have anything with which to actually kill them.

But I have about 20 enormous silverbeet plants and some nice spinach coming along, not to mention the celery, potatoes, garlic, onions, chives, cabbage, radishes, beetroot, parsley, uneradicable roquette, sage, rosemary, mint and dill - and I just found that some of that old carrot seed I threw on the garden and despaired of has taken too, for there are tiny baby carrot tops appearing between the garlics.

My thesis, fortunately, resembles the silverbeets, and not the carrots. It is complete, save for some minor editing and a few summaries of critical opinions on debatable points to go in footnotes - which is fortunate, as it's due Friday week.

This leaves me free to ponder the baby carrots of my next essay, for Mediaeval Representations (the course taken by my supervisor, over at humanities researcher). I believe it will be about the uses of speech and the voice in Troilus and Criseyde, which will allow me to use most of the interesting Canterbury Tales for comparative purposes! 5000 words of (doubtless) "bothe blysse and blunder".

Essay on Edward II

Edit: This is now the second draft of my essay on Edward II, for the course The Mediaeval Body at Melbourne University. The inspiration came from a post by Alianore, and she was also kind enough to point me to a few very useful sources - thank you!

Still a little editing and proof-reading to do, of course, but it's much tidier than it was. And, of course, I need to double-check everything to make sure I'm not entirely misrepresenting what actually happened. Since I'm not used to writing history essays (I'm usually more of a literature person), this is all an exciting and unfamiliar process for me.

To that end, those of you who have spent a good deal more time than I have studying Edward, feel free to tell me where I've gone wrong, in large ways or small!

------------------------



The rise of queer and gender criticism has led to a tendency to regard certain historical figures and events primarily from that point of view. Reinterpreting the reign of Edward II in the light of these critical views does help us to understand certain aspects of his life. However, it is possible to overstate this angle, to use suggestive phrases in the later chronicles to reconstruct the story of the barons’ objections to Gavaston and Despenser as a protest against transgressive sexual relations with the monarch. There are, in fact, very few hints that his relationships with Gavaston and Despenser were perceived as sexual in nature prior to 1326, or even the question was considered particularly important. It was not until Isabella and Mortimer invaded England that these accusations began to circulate. The propaganda used to involve the populace in deposition and the resulting popular perception of Edward used sodomy as an allegory for other kinds of transgressive behaviour. He had disrupted public order, the tiers of rank and the natural flow of the economy, largely to aid his favourites. In doing so, he had subverted the accepted social metaphor of the king as head of his country, the man as head of his wife. The graphic imagery of Edward’s body as subject and object of the realm’s disorders multiplied in the wake of his deposition to retrospectively narrate the country’s experience. His undeniable weakness as a monarch, together with depictions like Geoffrey le Baker’s chronicle and Marlowe’s play, encouraged later generations to characterise him as a sodomitical rex inutile – the perfect subject for enthusiastic re-examination by proponents of queer criticism. But whether Edward’s relationships with Gavaston and Despenser contained a sexual element is not, ultimately, historically important. What is beyond doubt is the strength of Edward’s emotional attachment to each of these men, and it is that, together with contemporary perceptions of these relationships, that had the greatest effect on events.


Piers Gavaston: hot-headed young Gascon knight, doubtless devilishly handsome, exiled by Edward I to keep him away from the future king, recalled three months later as soon as the old king died, far preferred by Edward II to his mere wife, recipient of lavish gifts by the king (including the earldom of Cornwall), denied nothing he asked for, with a habit of swaggering about the court and giving the other earls insulting nicknames, exiled twice more at the insistence of the earls, recalled each time by Edward, finally arrested and murdered on the orders of the most powerful earl in the country, leaving his corpse unburied for years as Edward swore revenge on his dear friend’s murderers – it has all the ingredients of the best star-crossed love stories. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that the earls were acting out of homophobia or righteous defence of a neglected queen. Despite elaborately public displays of affection, in defiance of his father and the opinion of his court, contemporary records have left us no whisper of sodomy. On returning to England with his new bride early in 1308, Edward’s first action on disembarking is said to have been an enthusiastic and demonstrative greeting of Gavaston, kissing and embracing him in front of the crowd, his young wife and her royal brothers and uncles1. The same man received the most prominent role in his coronation (dressed in royal purple and pearls, “non regis sed gloriam propriam quaerens”, according to the Annales Paulini (262)), Edward’s constant attention throughout the coronation feast, and all Edward’s wedding gifts – even those from his bride’s father, the king of France (AP 262)2. Not surprisingly, Isabella’s brothers are said to have stood up, shouted angrily at Edward and stormed out of the hall. Within four months the English barons had forced Gavaston back into exile. By anyone’s standards, this is a gross failure of tact and international diplomacy, and the reactions of the French representatives and English earls are understandable even if they read the relationship as remaining emotionally within the bounds of normal male-male friendship.


Most of the evidence from the earlier part of Edward II’s reign suggests the earls’ quarrel with Gavaston was on quite different grounds – not least the insulting nicknames. The official records of the Articles against Gavaston in 1308 and the Ordinances of 1311 agree with the Vita in their assessment of Gavaston. The Articles state that he “disinherits the crown... puts discord between the king and his people, and he draws to himself the allegiance of men by as stringent an oath as does the king, thereby making himself the peer of the king and so enfeebling the crown” (English Historical Documents 526). The twentieth Ordinance accuses him of “drawing to himself royal power and dignity”, and goes into more detail about specific acts of offence, such as “causing blank charters under the great seal of the king to be sealed to the deceit and disinheritance of the king and of his crown” (EHD 532). These documents are, by their nature, unlikely to contain more than veiled allusions to a suspected sexual relationship, but that isn’t really an issue. The extensive list of objections to Gavaston shows just how destructive his relationship with Edward was perceived to be in the public sphere. There was no need for the earls to turn to the private sphere to explain the necessity to be rid of Gavaston. In fact, the first sentence of the Articles explains the political advantage of dwelling on the public, judicial failures of the king:

Homage and the oath of allegiance are more in respect of the crown than in respect of the king’s person and are more closely related to the crown than to the king’s person; and this is evident because, before the crown has descended to the person, no allegiance is due to him. (EHD 525)

Having described the objections to Gavaston and the dilemma that results when the king, as head of the judicial system, is partial and “will not right a wrong”, the articles conclude that “he cannot be judged or attainted by an action brought according to law, and therefore... the people rate him as a man attainted and adjudged, and pray the king that... he will accept and execute the award of the people” (EHD 526). In this way, the disastrous effect of Gavaston’s influence over Edward was turned to advantage, allowing “the people” (a euphemism for the barons, at this stage) to concoct distinctions between the traditional ‘two bodies’ of the king, deny the authority of his mere physical manifestation and take matters into their own hands.
Chronicle and other evidence suggests that the public perception of the situation was a simplified version of the barons’ understanding. The Vita Edwardi Secundi - almost certainly written before 1326, and so not coloured by knowledge of those events - suggests that the reason Gavaston was universally hated was twofold: arrogance, and monopolising the king’s ear (Vita 27-29). Less analytical, the Annales Paulini gives a similar picture but attributes Gavaston’s unpopularity to events such as the Wallingford tournaments, rather than breaking these events down into ongoing frictions (AP 259). Even allowing for the unmentionable nature of sodomy, it seems that at this point the barons did not need that string in their bow, with the result that there were no widely known rumours about Edward’s sexuality.


When Piers Gavaston threw his weight about, it affected the nobility. When Hugh Despenser started to throw his about, it affected all of England. More ambitious than Gavaston, more ruthless, unquestionably more cruel, Despenser “wretchedly disinherited many, forced some into exile, extorted unjust ransoms from many, [and] collected a thousand pounds’ worth of land by means of threats” (Vita 195). He was canny at accumulating money, but neither he nor Edward had the knack of spending it well. The economic distress of the country, coupled with Edward’s extravagance in spending money on himself and his friends, eventually prompted the pope to write urging financial moderation and care (Saaler 89-90). During this period, all of Edward I’s advances into Scotland were lost to the determined leadership of Robert Bruce, who also took over much of Ireland. Powicke points out the emphasis on military failures in the reasons given for Edward’s deposition. The seriousness of this in mediaeval notions of kingship is suggested by warrior-saint allegories like Lydgate’s story of St Edmund, whose virginity – ie, the preservation of the integrity of his physical body – was closely linked with his military success, and therefore his ability to maintain the analogous integrity of England (Lewis). Law and order deteriorated, even as Edward and the Despensers tightened their hold on the upper levels of society in order to maintain their position. The beginning of famine can hardly have helped. In a society whose belief system included the image of the king as figurative head of the country, and a vengeful God not averse to punishing the whole body for the sins or inadequacies of that head, the universal human instinct to blame authority figures for crises must have manifested itself even more strongly than usual.


The rebellion and subsequent call for Edward’s deposition were handled with a keen eye to public support. Isabella’s mourning weeds, her care to keep her adulterous relationship with Mortimer out of sight and to identify her cause with that of Lancaster (Thomas of Lancaster, killed in 1322 for rising against Edward and Despenser, was now widely regarded as a saint), to visit shrines as she travelled “quasi peregrinando” (AP 314), to stay on the right side of the populace and to present herself as a rejected wife anxious to save the country and set her son on his rightful throne, formed masterful and effective propaganda. It was now, as it became necessary to engage the people in the momentous business of overthrowing and deposing an inadequate king, that the metaphor of sodomy became a useful shorthand for other forms of cultural transgression. Ormrod hints that it also worked to obscure Isabella’s own contraventions of marital and gender rules – usurping royal power with her lover – by laying similar charges against Edward (Ormrod 27). The idea of Despenser subverting the proper relationship between the king and his lawful wife, first invoked by Isabella when she refused to return from France on Edward’s command (Vita 243), was repeated in various speeches and proclamations. The judgement on Hugh Despenser, for example, is a long catalogue of abuses of power, containing several references to “notre treshonurable dame la Roigne”, and the “descord” Despenser had created between her and her husband as well as “entre notre seignour le Roie et entre les autres gentz du Roialme”, to the “grant deshonur de lui et de son people” (Holmes 265-7).


Even at this time, however, the focus of criticism was not any one action of Edward or Despenser, but their disruption of the proper order. The necessity to simplify events to provoke popular sentiment led to a telescoping of blame. Financial, military and judicial failings, offences against the church and social order, were simplified to the result of “evil counsellors”. The evil counsellors were represented in the person of Hugh Despenser (and, to a lesser extent, his father), while his influence over Edward was, ultimately, sodomy. For example, Isabella’s proclamation against Despenser claimed that he had “usurped royal power against law and justice and his true allegiance... And we... have long been kept far from the goodwill of our said lord the King through the false suggestions and evil dealings of the aforesaid Hugh”3. The rabble-rousing sermons of Orleton, Stratford and Reynolds4 picked up the themes of transgression and misuse and explicitly applied them to Edward’s body – and, by extension, the metaphorical body of England. Preaching on texts like “I will put enmity between thee and the woman” [?ERC], “Vae terrae, cujus rex puer est”, “Cuius caput infirmum, caetera membra dolent”, “Caput meum doleo” and “Rex insipiens perdet populum suum”5, they emphasised Edward’s weakness, puerility and inability to properly manage or care for his “body”. Orleton went further and called Edward a “tyrant and a sodomite” (Haines King Edward 42), claiming that Edward had threatened in his rage to kill his wife if he should see her again (Mortimer “Sermons” 51). This attractively scandalous and memorable simplified the issues at stake almost to the point of parable. Its contrast with the complex precision of the official articles of deposition suggests the political necessity at this point of engaging popular opinion.


Most chronicles stress the role of the crowd in the decision to depose Edward. Valente writes that “for most contemporaries, the decision of the magnates, though perhaps of greatest weight, did not fully constitute the deposition. The approval of the rest of the assembly was certainly of practical utility, since it spread the burden of guilt, but it may have been considered legally necessary as well” (“Deposition and Abdication”, 865). This would account for the eagerness of the post-invasion propaganda to emphasise Despenser’s crimes against the country, and the king as its representative, contrasting to the tone of the articles against Gaveston which complained of specific acts that irritated the barons and reduced the king’s honour. That the chronicler of the Annales Paulini6 relates that Despenser was accused of “multis criminibus et transgressionibus erga populum regni Angliae” (AP 318) suggests that this tactic was generally successful. No calling earls childish nicknames for Hugh Despenser – he was to be a proper villain on a national scale.


The death and popular afterlife of Edward and each Despenser also reflected the political needs of the moment. The judgements on the Despensers detail very precisely the relation of punishment to crime. The relentless repetition of “E pur ceo qe vous... e pur ceo qe... e pur ceo...” in the judgement of the elder Despenser is matched by “qe vostre teste seit mene a Wynchestre... qe vous seietz pendu en une cote quartile de vos armes, et seint les armes destruz pur touz jours” (AP 318). The younger Despenser’s sentence uses the same formula at much greater length, ending chillingly, “Et pur ceo que vous fustes tot tempts desloyaut ... si enserrez vous debouwelle, et puys ils serront ars” (Holmes 265-66). It’s worth noting that this official judgement does not include castration, though some later chroniclers (most notably Froissart) state this did occur before he was disembowelled7. Whether the detail was thought up by his executioners or rumour-mongers, it was probably regarded as an appropriate punishment for his perceived sexual transgressions. Though this care to explain the relation of punishment to the crime is in no way unusual in passing sentences at the time, the emphasis on the almost allegorical significance of each act is striking. It suggests a care to be seen to visit the results of each crime back on the body of the perpetrator, to enact on him the physical manifestation of the damage he had done to society. In addition to satisfying visibly and bloodily the public drive for vengeance, this meticulous turning-back of each act against social order suggests a visible re-establishment of that order – despite the dubious legality of the executions themselves. The same popular urge to see an appropriate punishment visited on the physical body of the tyrant may be present in the various ‘anal rape’ accounts of Edward’s death that started to circulate in the 1330s, and eventually gained such currency as to still be accepted by many people today. Ian Mortimer (“Sermons of Sodomy”) argues that these stories both strengthened and vindicated people’s perceptions that Edward had in fact been a sodomite, and that this was the reason for his poor leadership. By comparison with the physical purity of the virgin St Edmund, the image of Edward’s body being sexually violated by another man functions as a metaphor for the damage he brought to his country in many different spheres. By the time Froissart narrated the events, the view seems to have been sufficiently widespread for him to cautiously attribute the younger Despenser’s castration to his sexual relationship with Edward.


In a culture where the story-telling (and theological explanation of day-to-day life) is saturated with allegory, symbolism and parable, what counted was the symbol, to be shaped by the needs of the moment. This was not necessary in the first half of his reign, when Gavaston’s sins largely consisted of stepping on barons’ toes and there was no real question of deposition. In fact, there never seems to have been much use of stories of sodomy in the upper levels of political events, among people who actually knew him. The barons, being closer to the action, seem to have seen a more detailed and nuanced version of events, and (being personally affected or irritated by him) found the real reasons sufficient to move against Gavaston. When it came to narrating reasons for objection to the populace and engaging their support, these nuances and personal experiences became secondary to rabble-rousing. Invoking common ideas of the king’s body and its relationship with his country helped to simplify, vilify, and turn real life into a parable.



Footnotes.
1 Foedera, Conventiones, Literae et cujuscumque generis Acta Publica, or Rymer’s Foedera, 1066-1383, ed. Rymer, Thomas, 1704-35; ed. Clarke et al, Records Commission, London, 1816-69, cited in Weir (29).
2 Chaplais does suggest that at this time Gavaston may have been acting more or less officially as Edward’s chamberlain, and that in this case it would be logical and respectful for Edward to give the gifts into his care (Chaplais ?).
3 Foedera, cited in Weir (30).
4 Respectively the Bishops of Hereford and Winchester, and Archbishop of Canterbury.
5 Lanercost Chronicles, Historia Roffensis, cited in Haines (169-71)
6 The Annales Paulini seem to rely largely on gossip and, being the annals of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, may be taken as more or less representative of popular opinion in London at the time.
7 Alison Weir states that “until 1326, the penalty for treason had not included castration”, and suggests that this detail was included on Isabella’s vengeful instructions (243). In fact, William Wallace had been castrated as part of the formal traitor’s execution in 1306, and Simon de Montfort was castrated posthumously as a traitor in 1265. Whether other traitors had received similar punishments since, it seems to have still been unusual enough for Froissart to comment on it, and to read it as symbolic judgement for his crimes of sodomy, “even, it was said, with the King, and this was why the King had driven away the Queen on his suggestion” (44).




Incomplete bibliography because I am too lazy to redo it for this version of the draft:

Ed. Trans. Childs, Wendy R. Vita Edwardi Secundi. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005.
Ed. Eckhardt, Caroline D. Castleford's Chronicle, or, The Boke of Brut. Oxford: EETS, 1996.
Froissart. Ed. Trans. Brereton, Geoffrey. Chronicles. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.
Holmes, G. A. "Judgement on the Younger Despenser, 1326". The English Historical Review 70 (1955): 261-267. 1955
Ed. Maxwell, Sir Herbert. Scalacronica: The Reigns of Edward I, Edward II and Edward III as recorded by Sir Thomas Gray. Glasgow, 1907.
Ed. Stubbs, William. Chronicles of the reigns of Edward I and Edward II. Rolls series 76, 1882-3.
Ed. Thompson, E. Maunde. The chronicle of Adam of Usk, A.D. 1377-1421. Felinfach: Llanerch Enterprises, 1990.

Ed. Betteridge, Tom. Sodomy in early modern Europe. New York: Manchester UP, 2002.
Chaplais, Pierre. Piers Gaveston, Edward II's Adoptive Brother. Oxford, 1994.
Ed. Cullum, P. H. and Lewis, Katherine J. Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.
Cuttino, G. P. & Lyman, T. W. "Where is Edward II?" Speculum 53 (1978), 522-3. 1978.
Ed. Dodd, Gwilym & Musson, Anthony. The Reign of Edward II: New Perspectives.
Dunham, William Huse & Wood, Charles T. "The Right to Rule in England: Depositions and the Kingdom's Authority, 1327-1485". The American Historical Review 81 (1976): 738-761. 1976.
Edwards, Kathleen. "The Political Importance of the English Bishops during the reign of Edward II". English Historical Review, 59 (1944): 311-47. 1944.
Haines, R. M. The Church and Politics in Fourteenth Century England: The Career of Adam Orleton. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1978.
Johnstone, Hilda. "The Eccentricities of Edward II". English Historical Review, 48 (1933): 264-7. 1933.
Mortimer, Ian. The greatest traitor: the life of Sir Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March, Ruler of England, 1327-1330. London: Johnathon Cape, 2003.
Mortimer, Ian. The Perfect King: the life of Edward III, father of the English nation. London: Jonathon Cape, 2006.
Mortimer, Ian. "A Note on the Deaths of Edward II". Ian Mortimer: http://www.ianmortimer.com/EdwardII/death.htm April 2008. Accessed August 2008.
Powicke, Sir Maurice. "The English Commons in Scotland in 1322 and the Deposition of Edward II". Speculum 35 (1960): 1-15. 1960.
Saaler, Mary. Edward II 1307-1327. London: The Rubicon Press, 1997.
Valente, Claire. "The Deposition and Abdication of Edward II". The English Historical Review 113 (1998): 852-881. 1998.
Valente, Claire. "The "Lament of Edward II": Religious Lyric, Political Propaganda". Speculum 77 (2002), 422-439. 2002.
Weir, Alison. Isabella: She-wolf of France. London: Ballantine Books, 1995.