Three new facts for today

Well, now that everything is handed in, I have leisure to concentrate on my own projects, and simultaneously to be less concentrated - ie, read up on all those bits and pieces of English history that I'm not too familiar with. Such as... er... everything before 1066.

So, among other things, I'm reading Christopher Brook's From Alfred to Henry III, 871-1272 (Edinburgh: T. Nelson, 1961). It's latently patriotic in style, and mildly amusing in its assumptions about our views of English history - even I know that his attitude towards Vikings are out of date, and he's far too inclined to speculate on motives and call it fact - but informative enough, and covers the span broadly enough that it gives a sense of the whole 'story', which will let me jump in at any point with more detailed studies and not feel lost.

Here are the three interesting facts I've learned this morning, over coffee and Brook:

Cnut, the first Danish king of England, married the young widow of his conquered English predecessor. So, Havelok is actually utilising bits of history to weave its non-confrontational, non-invasive story of a Danish king of England. His own entry into England is not at the head of an army, but as a harmless child, and he is raised in England and therefore presumably has some legitimacy as an inhabitant. The waves of Danish invasion/settlement are replaced by an innocuous fisherman and his family fleeing from completely unwarranted oppression to help save the rightful king of Denmark, and they completely fail to slaughter anyone or even take anyone's land - instead, they quietly build their own little village on the coast and call it Grimsby. And the innocent, fair young woman with a claim to the throne of England is incorporated into the story's justification of his rule as well - only this is the new improved version, and instead of being a widow she is the rightful heir herself, wrongfully dispossessed, and therefore a) there is no other possible male heir who could more legitimately rule England than Havelok, b) England is being OPPRESSED by an EVIL EARL and must be saved and c) Havelok is honour-bound to help his wife to her rightful inheritance, and once there - well, honey, you don't want to have to actually manage the day-to-day RULING, do you? Let me take that off your hands for you.

"William had give [his invasion of England] a coat of respectability by winning papal support. He had claimed at Rome that England was rightly his, that Harold was a perjurer and usurper.... The idea was gaining ground in papal circles that even apparently aggressive wars, if fought in a just and holy cause, could be blessed...." (87) So the Norman invasion was, in a way, a forerunner of the Crusades? It seems odd to think of a Crusade against England, and naturally there would have been enough crucial differences in motivation, propaganda and the complicity of the army to not justify calling it one. But it does sound, from this description, rather like this and possibly other similar papally sanctioned campaigns laid the grounds for the Crusading mentality. I'm going to have to study the Crusades more closely too, aren't I?

"Like all English kings of the twelfth century, [Henry I] was a feudal king in a feudal age." (163) This, of course, is the most astonishing fact of all. Though it is closely followed by the assertion that William I "had nothing of chivalry in the modern sense" (155). I am deeply shocked. This implies that he had only eleventh-century chivalric ideas. How barbaric of him.

Havelok the VIKING

In our ME reading group today (which Stephanie has already posted about), one thing struck us as so odd that we exclaimed and giggled over it even before we settled down to the serious business of eating, reading, translating, exclaiming and giggling.

We're reading Havelok[1], and due to perhaps excessive amounts of exclaiming and giggling over the year are less than halfway through. The story so far involves two noble kings (England's and Denmark's), both of whom die leaving their kingdom and baby heirs in the charge of stewards. Anyone could tell these stewards were both going to turn out to be traitorous and evil, because they have very similar names (Godrich and Goddard), indicating that, as the Trinity is mysteriously three in one, these wicked stewards are one man in two bodies. Really. Their plot purpose is identical, and the poet uses the exact same rhetoric to convince us that each is worse than Judas/Satan on several occasions.

The heirs - Havelok in Denmark and Goldeborw in England - are each dispossessed of their kingdom. Evil Danish Earl tries to have Havelok killed, but the man he hires to murder him, a fisherman called Grim, repents when he sees a golden light coming from the boy's mouth, and a golden cross on his shoulder: clear signs of royal heritage, as everyone knows[2]. Grim and his family and new adopted son therefore flee to England, where the boy shows a truly royal appetite and proceeds to apparently bring famine down by eating far too much, so Grim sends him off to Lincoln to earn his living there. He grows up and turns out to be handsome, chaste, mild-mannered (mostly), and of course very strong. When Evil English Earl notices this, he promptly marries Goldeborw off to him, because he had promised the former king to marry her to the "greatest" man in England. He is therefore in a watertight legal situation if he chooses to marry her to the man who is physically strongest, even though he appears to be a lowly peasant and she will therefore be unable to challenge for her inheritance.

Havelok and his new wife flee back to Grim's family, where she laments being given to a peasant. Never fear - the cross shows up again. Jubilation! Suddenly Havelok without explanation digs up all the memories of being a prince's son and shows a remarkable retrospective perspicacity in managing to narrate the events from his infancy from Evil Danish Earl's point of view, and they all set off for Denmark to claim his heritage.

Unfortunately, at this point a folio is missing in the manuscript, meaning that we have 160 lines of unnarrated action. When the text resumes, they appear to have reached Denmark, and Havelok is pretending to be a merchant, bargaining with Non-Evil Danish Earl for the right to conduct trade on his lands. Suddenly, to seal the bargain:

A gold ring drow he forth anon,
An hundred pund was worth þe ston (1632-3)

And this is what befuddled us. Where on earth did the cook's apprentice at Lincoln, or a poor fisherman's family, or a dispossessed princess, find a gold ring whose stone alone was worth a hundred pounds?

Upon further consideration, I have two theories.

1. They finally managed to tear that cross off his shoulder. Goldeborw was getting tired of cuddling up to it, and the angelic voice it emitted was frankly keeping her awake all night, so they melted it down and made a ring out of it.

2. Pirates. Obviously. The missing 160 lines contained pirates. Probably Viking pirates - this is mediaeval Denmark, after all. And who says you can't have a piratical sea battle in only 160 lines? Hamlet did it in fewer! Clearly they battled viking pirates and took all their treasure. In fact, they were probably ninja viking pirates. That would account for the missing folio - they were covering their tracks!

Definitely ninjas.

[1] The Lay of Havelok the Dane. Ed. Skeat, Walter W. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902.
[2] Really. Everyone knows. The cross and the light keep popping up to reveal his true lineage at crucial points in the narrative.