Broken Lines Genealogical Literature in Medieval Britain and France by Raluca L. Radulescu Edward Donald Kennedy

BROKEN LINES
MEDIEVAL TEXTS AND CULTURES OF NORTHERN EUROPE
Editorial Board under the auspices of the

Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Hull
Wendy Scase, Chair, University of Birmingham

Adrian P. Tudor, Secretary, University of Hull
John H. Arnold, Birkbeck College, University of London

Julia Barrow, University of Nottingham
Lesley A. Coote, University of Hull
David Crouch, University of Hull
Alan Deighton, University of Hull
Alan Hindley, University of Hull
Judith Jesch, University of Nottingham
Advisory Board
Andrew Ayton, University of Hull

David Bagchi, University of Hull
Elaine C. Block, Misericordia International
Keith Busby, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Olle Ferm, Stockholm University
W im Hüsken, Stedelijke Musea Mechelen
Gerhard Jaritz, Central European University, Budapest
Peter Meredith, University of Leeds
Veronica O’Mara, University of Hull
Nigel F. Palmer, St Edmund Hall, Oxford
Brigitte Schludermann, University of Hull
Michel Zink, Collège de France, Membre de l’Institut
Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of this book
V O LU M E 16
BROKEN LINES
Genealogical Literature in Late-Medieval Britain
and France
edited by
Raluca L. Radulescu and Edward Donald Kennedy
H
F
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Broken lines : genealogical literature in late-medieval Britain and France. – (Medieval texts
and cultures of Northern Europe ; 16)
1. Genealogical literature – England – History – To 1500 2. Genealogical literature –
France – History – To 1500 3. Great Britain – History – Medieval period, 1066–1485
– Sources 4. France – History – Medieval period, 987–1515 – Sources
I. Radulescu, Raluca, 1974– II. Kennedy, Edward Donald
929.3'41'09024
ISBN-13: 9782503524856
© 2008, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
D/2008/0095/113
ISBN: 978-2-503-52485-6
Printed in the E.U. on acid-free paper

For Pierre
and
for Pat and Stephen
C ONTENTS
Acknowledgements ix
Contributors xi
Introduction 1
RALUCA L. RADULESCU AND EDWARD DONALD KENNEDY
Genealogy in Insular Romance 7

RALUCA L. RADULESCU
Prophecy, Genealogy, and History in Medieval English Political Discourse 27

LESLEY COOTE
A New Pattern for English History: 45

The First Genealogical Rolls of the Kings of England
OLIVIER DE LABORDERIE
Genealogies of Noble Families in Anglo-Norman 63

JOHN SPENCE
Genealogies in Medieval France 79

MARIGOLD ANNE NORBYE
Genealogy in Monastic Chronicles in England 103

EMILIA JAMROZIAK
Genealogy Rewritten: Inheriting the Legendary in Insular Historiography 123
MATTHEW FISHER
Genealogy and Gentility: Social Status in Provincial England 143

JON DENTON
The Antiquity of Scottish Civilization: 159

King-lists and Genealogical Chronicles
EDWARD DONALD KENNEDY
Genealogical Narratives and Kingship in Medieval Wales 175

NIA M. W. POWELL
Case Studies
Narrative, Lineage, and Succession 205

in the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut Chronicle
JULIA MARVIN
Genealogy and Women in the Prose Brut, 221

Especially the Middle English Common Version and its Continuations
LISTER M. MATHESON
Genealogy and John Hardyng’s Verse Chronicle 259

SARAH L. PEVERLEY
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
T
he editors thank Linda Jones, Research Administrator in the College of
Arts and Humanities, Bangor University, for her invaluable help in bring-
ing this book to successful completion, and Einion Wyn Thomas,
Archivist, Bangor University, for generously providing the cover image. The
contributors’ continuing support and the useful advice provided by the anonymous
readers and Simon Forde at Brepols all contributed to the smooth running of the
project through its final stages.
C ONTRIBUTORS
Lesley Coote is Lecturer in English and Film Studies at the University of Hull.
Her main research interest is in the field of prophecy, politics, and culture,
particularly the culture of medieval England. She is the author of Prophecy and
Public Affairs in Later Medieval England (2000) and has written (and co-written)
several articles on this subject. A committed educationalist, she has also written on
teaching medieval literature through film and has produced a ‘student-friendly’
edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Her current field of interest includes the
re-presentation of medieval subjects on film; her latest production is an article on
Arthurian film for Studies in Medievalism, co-written with her late colleague Brian
Levy, for whose memorial volume she has produced an article on monstrosity and
humour in Richard Coeur de Lyon.
Olivier de Laborderie finished his doctoral thesis, ‘“Ligne de reis”: culture histo-
rique, représentation du pouvoir royal et construction de la mémoire nationale en
Angleterre à travers les généalogies royales en rouleau du milieu du XIIIe siècle au
début du XVe siècle’, under the supervision of Jacques Le Goff at the EHESS in
Paris in 2002. His publications include ‘L’image de Richard Coeur de Lion dans
La vie et la mort du roi Jean de William Shakespeare’, in Richard Coeur de Lion in
History and Myth, ed. by Janet L. Nelson (1992); ‘Richard the Lionheart and the
Birth of a National Cult of St George in England’, Nottingham Mediaeval Studies,
39 (1995), and ‘Les généalogies des rois d’Angleterre sur rouleaux manuscrits
(milieu XIIIe siècle – début XVe siècle)’, in La généalogie entre science et passion, ed.
by Tiphaine Barthelemy and Marie-Claude Pingaud (1997). He has also published
articles on illumination and its significance in royal genealogies of the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries in England.
xii Contributors
Jon Denton completed his doctoral thesis, ‘The East-Midland Gentleman,

1400–1530’, in 2005 and has published on gentry culture in the fifteenth century.
He has taught medieval history at the universities of Keele and Nottingham Trent
and is currently teaching at Hymers College in Hull. His research interests include
the social and political history of the late Middle Ages, and he is currently working
on the relationship between coats of arms and manorial lordship.
Matthew Fisher is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California,
Los Angeles. His research focuses on thirteenth- and early-fourteenth-century
insular historiography, hagiography, and romance in its multilingual manuscript
contexts. He is an adjunct editor for the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive and is
currently working on a book about derivative textuality and scribal authorship.
Emilia Jamroziak is Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Leeds. Her
work focuses on the relationships between monastic houses, particularly Cister-
cian, and their broader social context in northern England, Scotland, and the Baltic
region. She has published Rievaulx Abbey and its Social Context 1132–1300: Mem-
ory, Locality and Network (2005) and has co-edited (with Janet Burton) Religious
and Laity in Western Europe 1000–1400: Interaction, Negotiation and Power (2006).
Edward Donald Kennedy is a professor in the Department of English and Com-
parative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He wrote
Chronicles and Other Historical Writing (vol. VIII of A Manual of Writings in Mid-
dle English 1050–1500, gen. ed. Albert E. Hartung (1989)) and edited King Arthur:
A Casebook (1996; repr. 2002). He is editor of Studies in Philology and has written
numerous articles on Arthurian subjects and chronicles. He is subject editor for
medieval chronicles produced in England and Scotland for the forthcoming Brill
Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle and is co-editing, with Dan Embree and
Kathleen Daly, some short medieval and early-modern Scottish Chronicles.
Julia Marvin is Associate Professor in the Program of Liberal Studies and Fellow
of the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame. She studies historical
writing and literature of late-medieval England, with particular interest in Anglo-
Norman, manuscript studies, and the prose Brut tradition. She has published The
Oldest Anglo-Norman Prose ‘Brut’ Chronicle: An Edition and Translation (2006),
‘The Unassuming Reader: F. W. Maitland and the Editing of Anglo-Norman’, in
The Book Unbound (2004), and articles in Arthurian Literature, The Medieval
Chronicle, and Studies in Philology. She is now working on a book on the manu-
scripts of the Anglo-Norman prose Brut.
Contributors xiii
Lister M. Matheson is Professor of Medieval Studies at Michigan State University

and an International Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast. He has published The
Prose ‘Brut’: The Development of a Middle English Chronicle (1998), Death and
Dissent: Two Fifteenth-Century English Chronicles (1999), and (as general editor)
Popular and Practical Science of Medieval England (2004), as well as numerous arti-
cles on medieval English chronicles and other texts. He has also been an associate
editor of the Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor).
Marigold Anne Norbye is a part-time lecturer at University College London
(UCL) and also teaches palaeography at courses run by the University of London.
After postgraduate studies at UCL and the École des Chartes in Paris, she com-
pleted her doctoral thesis in 2004 on a fifteenth-century French genealogical
chronicle, A tous nobles qui aiment beaux faits et bonnes histoires. She has published
articles based on her thesis in Journal of Medieval History (2007), Nottingham
Mediaeval Studies (2007), and The Medieval Chronicle (2008). Forthcoming
articles include ‘Roll or Codex? The Manifold Forms of a Fifteenth-Century
French Genealogical Chronicle’ (work in progress). She is also preparing an edition
of three textual versions of A tous nobles for the Société de l’histoire de France, of
which she is a member.
Sarah L. Peverley teaches in the School of English at the University of Liverpool.
Her research interests lie in the relationship between literature, history, and polit-
ical discourse, in reception history, and in the production and dissemination of
manuscripts. She has published articles on the reception of John Hardyng’s Chron-
icle, the depiction of kingship and governance in fifteenth-century chronicles,
scribal editing, and the political consciousness of late-medieval writers in England.
She is currently co-editing an edition of the first version of Hardyng’s Chronicle for
TEAMS Middle English Texts and is at work on a new edition of the second
version for Boydell and Brewer’s Medieval Chronicles Series.
Nia M. W. Powell is a lecturer in the School of History, Welsh History and
Archaeology at the University of Bangor. Her main research interests are in early-
modern Wales, particularly its economic and social structure, and she has pub-
lished work on urban development, urban demography, and the Welsh upland
economy. She has also published on aspects of Welsh legal history and cultural
history, including a study of female poets during the medieval and early-modern
periods. She was recently director of an ESRC research project on Records of Lay
Taxation in Wales 1291–1689. Recent publications include ‘Do Numbers Count?
Towns in Early Modern Wales’, Urban History, 32 (2005), ‘Urban Population in
Early Modern Wales Revisited’, Welsh History Review, 23 (2007), and ‘“Near the
xiv Contributors
margin of existence”? Upland Prosperity in Wales during the Early Modern

Period’, Studia Celtica, 41 (2007).
Raluca L. Radulescu is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Literature and Director of the
Centre for Medieval Studies at Bangor University, UK. She has written a mono-
graph, The Gentry Context for Malory’s Morte Darthur (2003), and initiated and
co-edited three collections of essays: (with K. S. Whetter) Reviewing Le Morte
Darthur: Texts and Contexts, Characters and Themes (2005), (with Alison
Truelove) Gentry Culture in Late Medieval England (2005), and (with W. Marx)
Readers and Writers of the Brut Chronicle, special issue, Trivium (2006). She has
also written and published articles on Arthurian romance, medieval chronicles
(including genealogy), and related topics. She is currently co-editing (with Cory
Rushton) a Companion to Medieval English Popular Romance and writing a mono-
graph on the topic of spiritual journeys in medieval literature.
John Spence completed his doctoral thesis, ‘Re-imagining History in Anglo-
Norman Prose Chronicles’, at Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 2006. He has
published articles on Anglo-Norman prose chronicles in Reading Medieval Studies
(2006) and English Manuscript Studies (2006). He works as a civil servant for the
Welsh Assembly Government.
INTRODUCTION
Raluca L. Radulescu and Edward Donald Kennedy
I
n the eleventh century Adalbero, bishop of Laon, wrote in his Carmen ad
Rotbertum Regem (Robert the Pious of France, 996–1031) that ‘Stemmata
nobilium descendunt sanguine regum’ (the line of descent of nobles is from the
blood of kings), a statement which encapsulates a common medieval view of the
connections between the genealogical descent of those in power.1 Issues of succes-
sion and inheritance were essential in maintaining order in society, and associated
regulations appeared early in the Middle Ages and developed through the feudal
system.2 Royal genealogies formed part of a larger discourse about power and the
basis for political authority, regularly enforced; and these became important later
to other nobles and members of the gentry. Genealogy was an essential principle
in establishing nobility and ensuing privileges enjoyed by the upper classes. The
present collection explores the influence of genealogy on the structure of a variety
of narratives, including the most popular secular forms — romance, prophecy, and
historical writing — and its appeal to those in society who derived both knowledge
and power from its use. The importance of genealogy in such diverse genres cannot
be underestimated, and its relevance to the shaping of national and local histories
will become apparent in the following chapters.
Starting with the biblical tradition of listing long lineages of the prophets and
ending with Jesus Christ’s descent, there was a perceived unbroken continuity in
1
Adalbéron de Laon, Poème au roi Robert, ed. by Claude Carozzi (Paris: Les Belles Lettres,
1979), p. 2, line 34.
2
For an assessment of this development, see David Crouch, The Birth of Nobility: Constructing
Aristocracy in England and France 900–1300 (Harlow: Longman, 2005), which contains a reassess-
ment of Georges Duby, Hommes et structures du Moyen Âge (Paris: Mouton Éditeur, 1973) and
other studies.
2 Raluca L. Radulescu and Edward Donald Kennedy
the narrative of genealogical lines from Creation to the beginning of the Christian
era. Christ’s lineage could be traced back to the ancient line of biblical prophets,
which reinforced his predestined position in the divine plan for human salvation.
In the Bible Christ is described as ‘the son of David, the son of Abraham’, and his
lineage is traced back through the lineage of ‘Joseph the husband of Mary’; how-
ever, early Christian writers, including Eusebius, Ambrose, and Jerome, described
his lineage from Jesse through David to Mary.3 By the twelfth century genealogy
became an aid to the teaching of history, Peter of Poitiers’s Compendium historiae
in genealogia Christi being the most typical example.4 His work functioned as one
of the main sources for the development of the genealogies produced in subsequent
centuries across Europe. Based on an abbreviated biblical history, the Compendium
was accompanied by a diagrammatic chart that had the purpose of illustrating the
descent of all the prophets from Adam and Eve through roundels linked by lines
of descent. A roll format was usually used for teaching purposes, since the reading
of the text would be facilitated in the chronological arrangement of the text from
top to bottom.
Some of the most effective and appealing genealogies produced for European
royal houses consisted of brief explanatory texts; in these cases the visual impact of
the line of descent was given precedence. The model became so popular across
Europe that in the next few centuries pedigrees and chronicle rolls were produced
in great numbers. Apart from teaching aids, genealogies, whether in roll format or
not, formalized the recording of royal genealogy and helped shaped a vision of
national history. As Francis Ingledew has noted:
Genealogical textuality in family, regnal, and national histories expressed and stimulated
a class-interested historical consciousness. The possession of territory and power came to
3
Matthew 1. 1–16; R . Howard Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology
of the French Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 87.
4
For a discussion of the development and function of genealogical chronicles in England, see
W. H. Monroe, ‘Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Century Illustrated Genealogical Manuscripts
in Roll and Codex: Peter of Poitiers’ Compendium, Universal Histories and Chronicles of the
Kings of England’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London, Courtauld Institute of Art,
London, 1990) and Olivier de Laborderie (see reference in ‘A New Pattern for English History:
The First Genealogical Rolls of the Kings of England’, in this volume, pp. 45–61). For further
examples of studies focusing on genealogies in Scotland and France, see the chapters by Marigold
Anne Norbye, ‘Genealogies in Medieval France’, and Edward Donald Kennedy, ‘The Antiquity
of Scottish Civilization: King-lists and Genealogical Chronicles’, in this volume, pp. 79–101 and
159–74.
INTRODUCTION 3
correlate distinctively with ownership of time; time came to constitute space — family and
national land — as home, an inalienable and permanent private and public territory.5
Historical writing in England, Scotland, and France incorporated myth and legend
in an effort to trace back the glorious ancestors of the various nations. In this sense
such texts may be said to reflect what Gabrielle Spiegel has noted as a bias in the
French chronicles of Saint-Denis (which represent a group of texts that developed
over centuries and provided the basis for the historiography of a nation). Spiegel
writes, ‘the overall tendency of the chronicles [. . .] was to assimilate past and pres-
ent into a continuous stream of tradition and to see in this very continuity a form
of legitimation’.6 Anglo-Norman, English, and Scottish chronicles, prophecies,
ancestral romances, and the narratives tracing the history of religious houses as well
as of their noble and gentle patrons were, like the chronicles of Saint Denis, a
means of legitimating a unified view of the historical past of a nation as well as
individuals. These works thus gave strength and stability to that past and justified
certain assessments of the present. The discourse of the nation, real or imagined,
appealed to the upper classes and later to the gentry and urban gentry. The myth-
ical and prophetic elements and later overtones of these texts helped to shape the
imagined past and project a glorious future, as well as provide interpretations of the
present political situation.7 Both kings and the governing classes were interested
in romance, prophecy, and historical writing in order to shape a particular view of
their political actions and to improve their policies in light of past mistakes. The
chronicles probably influenced the actions of the kings and thus events by giving
rulers past events as exempla for them to imitate in the present.8
Historians as well as modern editors of medieval historical writing have pointed

out that political figures incorporated into their public claims the language used
in the continuations to the Middle English Brut chronicle, to take just one
5
Francis Ingledew, ‘The Book of Troy and the Genealogical Construction of History: The
Case of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae’, Speculum, 69 (1994), 665–704
(pp. 668–69).
6
Gabrielle Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), chapter ‘Political Utility in Medieval Historiog-
raphy’, p. 85.
7
See, for example, Felicity Riddy’s reassessment of the appeal of Arthurian narratives, in her
‘Reading for England: Arthurian Literature and the National Consciousness’, Bibliographical
Bulletin of the International Arthurian Society, 43 (1991), 314–32.
8
See Spiegel, Past as Text, p. 86.
4 Raluca L. Radulescu and Edward Donald Kennedy
example.9 Indeed, as Spiegel has pointed out: ‘The eternal relevance of the past for
the present made it a mode of experiencing the reality of contemporary political
life, and the examples the past offered had explanatory force in articulating the true
and correct nature of present forms of political action.’10 The function(s) of
genealogy in romances, prophecies, and historical writing can be revealed only
through careful analyses of the relationships among the variants, the patronage,
ownership, and circulation of manuscripts, and the fascinating changes introduced
in the multiple layers of additions to these texts.
The editors hope that the chapters in this book will enable readers to become
more familiar with some of the various genealogical narratives that, in Livia Visser-
Fuchs’s words, created what may be called the ‘diagrammatic backbone to the
history of a country’.11 In Raluca Radulescu’s chapter, the genealogical structure
derived from chronicles is shown to have influenced English romances involving
legendary historical figures such as Havelok the Dane, King Arthur, and Joseph of
Arimathea. Leslie Coote observes that genealogy and prophecy, both discourses of
personal and collective memory, interacted in Latin and English prophetic and
historical literature and helped form the political consciousness that later writers
of the fifteenth century would draw upon. Olivier de Laborderie discusses Anglo-
Norman genealogical rolls of the kings of England, along with some of their Latin
predecessors. These chronicles, surviving in numerous manuscripts, appear to have
been among the most widely read Anglo-Norman chronicles but are unknown to
many since most remain unedited. In providing a visual diagrammatic view of the
lineage of the royal families, they were important to those families’ claims to the
throne of England and reveal much about royal propaganda in the Middle Ages.
John Spence turns to a type of Anglo-Norman genealogical chronicle that noble
families developed in order to give themselves prestige and support their claims to
inherited property. Marigold Anne Norbye takes up the diagrammatic genealogical
chronicles concerned with the kings of France. These chronicles traced the kings’
bloodlines back to their Merovingian and Trojan ancestors and, like the royal
genealogical chronicles in England, were important vehicles of royal propaganda.
9
See, for example, An English Chronicle 1377–1461: A New Edition, ed. by W. Marx, Medieval
Chronicles, 3 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), Introduction, and John Watts, Henry VI and the
Politics of Kingship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Introduction.
10
Spiegel, Past as Text, p. 85.
11
See Livia Visser-Fuchs and Anne Sutton, Richard III’s Books: Ideals and Reality in the Life
and Library of a Medieval Prince (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), p. 135.
INTRODUCTION 5
Emilia Jamroziak discusses ways in which English monks used genealogical

information, in part to bolster the reputation of their own monasteries and in part
to preserve for future generations the genealogies of their benefactors. Matthew
Fisher points to false genealogies in the dispute arising from Edward I’s claims to
hegemony over Scotland and to an equally false genealogy that Robert Mannyng
used in the chronicle he wrote in English. Jon Denton focuses upon the English
provincial gentry and their attempts to preserve their social status through geneal-
ogies, particularly in the late Middle Ages when traditional boundaries of status
were becoming less clear and parvenu families, like the Pastons, resorted to fabri-
cated pedigrees. Edward Donald Kennedy argues that the Scottish king-lists, which
from the late thirteenth century were used as evidence of the presumed two-
thousand-year independence of the Scots, remained important even after long
chronicles of Scottish history began to be written in the late fourteenth century.
Nia Powell notes a similar interest in genealogy in medieval Wales and how there,
as in Scotland, memory of a long-standing past was important for the legitimiza-
tion of authority of the ruling dynasties but was also important for freemen and for
the structure of Welsh society.
The final chapters concern individual chronicles, the Anglo-Norman and English
prose Brut and John Hardyng’s Chronicle. Julia Marvin shows that royal genealo-
gies helped form the structure of the Anglo-Norman prose Brut. This work in its
various Anglo-Norman and English versions was one of the most popular works
written in England in the Middle Ages, and much of its purpose must have been,
Marvin argues, to use ‘the lineage of kings to undergird a broad sense of enduring
English identity’. In Lister Matheson’s essay, emphasis is placed not just on the im-
portance of genealogies in the structure of the English prose Brut, but also upon
the importance of women in the history of this chronicle, not only as owners of the
manuscripts but as characters in the chronicle — founders of dynasties and
alliances and carriers of the royal line. Sarah Peverley shows how John Hardyng
reworked the later version of his Chronicle to show both that it was a true and
reliable account and that the genealogical history of Edward IV’s entitlement to the
thrones of Britain, France, Portugal, Spain, and Jerusalem was valid.
These essays argue for the importance of genealogies in shaping chronicles and
romances and in creating propaganda, not just for rulers, but for families who
relied upon them to help give them the security they felt they needed. That many
of the diagrammatic ones have never been edited has led to their often being over-
looked and their importance and popularity underestimated. Genealogies and
genealogical chronicles, as these essays emphasize, are important, and they deserve
to be better known.
G ENEALOGY IN INSULAR R OMANCE
Raluca L. Radulescu
Men hernep gestis for to here

And romance Rede in diuers manere.1
F
rom Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, completed in the
1130s, and until the end of the fifteenth century, the boundaries between
romance and historical writing underwent constant negotiation and redefi-
nition, while their target audience and patronage, initially confined to the most
affluent and educated in society, the aristocracy, broadened to include country and
urban gentry. Given their projected audiences, the two genres share an interest in
inheritance and property, the succession of power (local and national), and the
celebration of the deeds of great ancestors. Genealogy is more than a recognizable
concern in both chronicles and romances: it appears to function as an organizing
principle in these narratives, one which guides the audience’s attention to crises of
succession as well as their resolution.
Conflicts of power, male protagonists of the Fair Unknown type, and ‘desirable
heiresses’2 are commonly used in medieval romance to construct narratives with
happy endings, which in many instances consist in reconciling potentially disruptive
elements in the genealogy of a family. Although on the whole generated through
the impulse of recording historical fact, hence chronological order, medieval chron-
icles contain celebrations of the deeds of a great hero/king or leader described in
much the same language and style as that found in chanson de geste or romances.
1
Opening lines from Cursor Mundi, from London, British Library, MS Additional 36983,
fol. 1.
2
Here I am using Helen Cooper’s term, in The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs
from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004),
passim.
8 Raluca L. Radulescu
Chronicle accounts of royal succession, and disrupted lineages in particular, also

contain biased records of violent clashes resulting from crises of inheritance and a
perceived lack of rightful or legitimate heirs. Even if they also contain similar crises,
romances dedicate considerable space to debates over the nature of kingship at
every level in society and the relationship between the ruler and the nation, thus
incorporating anxieties about succession and the rightful heir to the crown into a
larger arena of discussion and negotiation. As for genealogical concerns, romances
have the advantage of dealing with issues of succession in a fictional world, safely
distancing the reader or listener from the potentially dangerous ‘here and now’. As
Helen Cooper has pointed out, ‘Romances could provide a secular forum analo-
gous to academic debate. Their audiences expected to respond actively to them,
and the writers encouraged such a response.’3 In particular insular romances focus
more closely on debates over succession, and their possible resolutions to crises,
than their Continental counterparts, and in doing so, they reinforce the genealog-
ical design of their narratives.
Genealogy occupies an important place both in conscious manipulations of
lineages to fit political agendas of succession, so evident in medieval historical writ-
ing, and in the forum of debate provided by romances. Given the range of topics
debated in insular romance, a genre considered by critics as the focus of divergent
interests, racial conflict, gender, property, and upper class political and cultural
dominance, genealogy provides a backbone to discourses as varied as sea journeys,
spiritual development, and encounters with the fairy world. Taking as a starting
point the confluence of history, myth-making, prophecy, and romance in
Geoffrey’s Historia, and acknowledging that the corpus of insular romances and
chronicles written between c. 1100 and 1500 is vast, this chapter focuses on a small
selection of texts starting with Anglo-Norman productions and ending with an
examination of genealogy used as propaganda in English Arthurian romance at the
end of the Middle Ages. By taking a broad view of the beginning and end of the
period, this chapter suggests that, from historically aware Anglo-Norman romances
and chronicles to later escapist Arthurian romances, genealogy is the key to under-
standing these texts’ obsession with challenges to inheritance and lineage.
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae
Much recent work has focused on those particularities of Anglo-Norman chronicle

and romance writing which display a desire to smooth over crises (discontinuities)
3
Cooper, English Romance in Time, p. 13.
GENEALOGY IN INSULAR ROMANCE 9
in succession and establish coherent lineages (continuities) from Anglo-Saxon to

Norman rulers. Critics have placed emphasis on the construction of nationhood
and the complex issue of ethnicity in insular romances, seen against a multilingual
cultural and political environment from which the vernacular literature of medie-
val England gradually emerged. To start with, literary productions of the post-
Conquest period, and in particular Geoffrey’s Historia, contain attempts to present
a continuous genealogical line of British kings, despite evident problems in con-
necting not only the foundation myths of Troy to the Roman Brutus and the
British Isles, but also the more recent lineages of the Anglo-Saxon kings and the
Welsh with the newly arrived Anglo-Norman rulers. Geoffrey’s Historia, whether
one agrees or not with critics who emphasize the Orosian or the Vergilian tradi-
tions in his writing, is shaped through his paratactic style, a suitable choice for a
narrative organized chronologically and genealogically, following the succession of
British rulers and presenting the paradoxical nature of lineage in a land occupied
by peoples from different language and cultural backgrounds. The Orosian histori-
ographical tradition followed Augustine’s distinction between the City of God and
the terrestrial city and promoted a view of history as a divinely ordained sequence
of earthly rulers. The succession of different peoples/nations as great empires is also
conceived, in the Orosian tradition, as part of a divinely governed, general scheme
of universal history and featured in a number of insular chroniclers’ works, from
Gildas and Bede to William of Malmesbury, Geoffrey’s contemporary. However
it has also been argued that the Historia provides a smooth succession of historical
(and pseudo-historical) events, arranged, at least according to one critic, in a Ver-
gilian approach to history, to include ‘the genealogical, the prophetic, and the
erotic’.4 Such a design does indeed seem to provide a better understanding of the
relationship between Geoffrey’s Historia and ‘the Norman and Anglo-Norman
territorial and genealogical enterprise’, and the subsequent popularity and endur-
ing appeal of his work across Europe and over the centuries.5
The place of genealogy in Anglo-Norman historical narratives can only be
understood in light of the uneasiness felt by insular writers who had to reconcile
different agendas in their writing; as Michelle Warren puts it:
For Britain, ethnic genealogy begins with the Trojans who became the Britons. Their
descendants (Welsh and Breton) and their descendants’ conquerors (Anglo-Saxons and
4
Francis Ingledew, ‘The Book of Troy and the Genealogical Construction of History: The
Case of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae’, Speculum, 69 (1994), 665–704
(pp. 666–67).
5
Ingledew, ‘Book of Troy’, p. 669.
Normans) all actively constructed Trojan-Briton history as part of their own identity.
These genealogical constructions strategically deploy ethnic and family resemblances while
defending social and political differences. This combination maintains genealogy within
the bounds of paradox.6
In this light, the paradox of using genealogy as a backbone to otherwise rather

disruptive narratives of succession indicates Geoffrey’s deliberate reflection on
twelfth-century aristocratic concerns; as Francis Ingledew has pointed out, in the
Historia ‘British history is [. . .] systematically genealogized for the first time at the
same moment that it is first systematically imperialized’.7 This interpretation does
fit in well with many scholars’ assessment of twelfth-century anxieties, and the
political climate against which primogeniture and vertical lineages acquire ever
more importance.8
Prophecy and women’s agency in nurturing genealogical lines are two other
factors closely related to the construction of the genealogical discourse in the His-
toria. The imperial view of history that critics have found in this work is linked to
the insertion of prophetic discourse, which credits human actions with realizing
rather than making history; in Merlin, Geoffrey portrays the source of a prophetic
‘program covering centuries, reaching into Geoffrey’s own time and beyond’.9 The
presence of the erotic in the Historia, on the other hand, is signalled in Arthur’s
conception under Merlin’s spell; the parallel with the biblical account of King
David, whose lust for Bathsheba causes King David to instigate the death of Uriah
(II Samuel 11), was noted long ago. As M. Victoria Guerin has shown, ‘Uther and
Igerna’s adultery is the necessary condition for Arthur’s birth, just as David’s sin
with Bathsheba and the death of their child make possible the birth of their second
son, Solomon’.10 The moment of Arthur’s conception signals both the insertion
6
Michelle R. Warren, History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain, 1100–1300
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 9.
7
8
See David Crouch, The Birth of Nobility: Constructing Aristocracy in England and France
900–1300 (Harlow: Longman, 2005); Warren, History on the Edge, Chapter 2; Martin B.
Shichtman and Laurie A. Finke, ‘Profiting from the Past: History as Symbolic Culture in the
Historia regum Britanniae’, Arthurian Literature, 12 (1993), 1–35 (pp. 21–26); see also, by the
same authors, King Arthur and the Myth of History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004).
9
Ingledew, ‘Book of Troy’, pp. 671, 678.
10
See M. Victoria Guerin, ‘The King’s Sin: The Origins of the David-Arthur Parallel’, in The
Passing of Arthur: New Essays in Arthurian Tradition, ed. by Christopher Baswell and William
Sharpe (New York: Garland, 1988), pp. 15–30 (p. 18). An even closer analogy is to the story of
Amphytrion: while he is away, Zeus takes his appearance and impregnates his wife Alkmene. That
of the erotic ‘into the fabric of normative history as a productive, if anxious force’,
a characteristic of the Vergilian tradition,11 and of the potentially destructive role
played by women in the drama of succession: Igerna does bring an heir into the
world, but the heir is Uther’s, not her husband Gorlois’s. Merlin’s use of magic and
Igerna’s lack of control over the identity of the child’s father point to medieval
anxieties over the paternity of a child destined to inherit the royal crown.
In addition to prophecy and women’s role in maintaining lineages, Geoffrey’s
descriptions of royal courts (Arthurian or other) highlight the role played by
women in shaping history. The combination of such varied elements seems to indi-
cate, as Laura Barefield has noted, that Geoffrey did ‘experiment with historical
form, breaking from the parataxis of genealogy to subordinate romance narra-
tives’.12 It is during this process of accommodating romance and historical writing
in his narrative that Geoffrey seized the opportunity to emphasize the role of
women; not surprisingly, women and their agency in dramas of succession create
the bridge between chronicle and romance. Women are active participants in the
shaping of political agendas and manipulation of lineages as well as in the actual
writing of genealogical history: ‘Although they cannot be kings, they [women] give
birth to kings, thereby further participating in the politics of succession.’13 In the
Arthurian tradition, Merlin is the only one who can attest to Arthur’s legitimate
status in ways not available to medieval kings and nobles; on the other hand, the
Arthurian story reveals women’s role in protecting (or not) the genealogical
descent of a ruler, from the moment of conception to that of official recognition,
and beyond. It is easy to see that female audiences of both romance and chronicle
took as much pride in their role as nurturers of a lineage as their male counterparts
would in defending it, while tracing back a lineage and recognizing the importance
of ancestors in the shaping of national history would appeal to both genders in
equal measure. Indeed, the very presence of women in narratives of succession,
whether romance or historical, is likely to have influenced responses to the agency
of women in such texts:
In medieval chronicles and the texts derived from them, women are essential to the produc-
tion of story and of text. At a minimum, they are often literally included in the paradigms
night her husband returns and also has intercourse with her. She then gives birth to twins, one a
normal child, the other Hercules. I owe this reference to Prof. E. D. Kennedy.
11
12
Laura D. Barefield, Gender and History in Medieval English Romance and Chronicle (New
York: Peter Lang, 2003), p. 13.
13
Barefield, Gender and History, p. 47.
of succession [. . .]. In this way, their necessity to dynastic succession is acknowledged, but
once included in the text, women gain authority in a variety of ways. They enable the
narration of patriarchy; thus, their actions can also easily destroy it, and they show how
fragile and contingent such a vision of history and social stability may be.14
The role of women in nurturing and shaping lineages provides a link to the writing
and reading of insular romances, and the authority female characters acquire in the
process has been examined in a number of recent studies.15 Women’s agency is also
amply evident in the narrative of the Anglo-Norman and the Middle English prose
Brut, both of which draw upon Geoffrey’s Historia, in episodes that combine the
potentially dangerous effect of uncontrolled erotic desire in the nurturing of a pure
lineage, such as the one about Estrilde, wife of Edelwolde, later of Edgar, and the
later medieval story of Isabel, Edward II’s queen; both episodes are discussed by
another contributor to this volume.16
Genealogy in Insular Romances
It is generally agreed that romances reflect upper-class concerns; in Susan Crane’s

words, ‘broadly speaking, medieval romances are secular fictions of nobility’.17 In
this sense romances fulfil the expectation they would tackle the issue of social iden-
tity, even though they are not designed to respond to real-life crises but rather pro-
vide arenas of discussion where delicate issues may be assessed and debated. From
this perspective romances are not ‘co-extensive with the contemporary world’ in
the way that chronicles claim to be, but rather ‘reshape and meditate on the world’.18
In this respect, Anglo-Norman culture and writing display a fundamental concern
with establishing a distinct voice from the Continental tradition, which is nowhere
more evident than in insular romances. As Rosalind Field has stated:
14
Barefield, Gender and History, p. 8.
15
See, for example, Rosamund Allen, ‘Female Perspectives in Romance and History’, in
Romance in Medieval England, ed. by M. Mills and others (Cambridge: Brewer, 1991), pp. 133–47;
Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2003), especially Chapter 4; Barefield, Gender and History,
Chapter 2, on Nicholas Trevet’s chronicle.
16
See Lister Matheson, ‘Genealogy and Women in the Prose Brut, Especially the Middle
English Common Version and its Continuation’, in this volume, pp. 229, 234–35.
17
Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle
English Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 10.
18
Crane, Insular Romance, p. 11.
The coincidence (if such it is) of the development of romance as a dominant narrative form
and the need to smooth over the historical disjunction of the Conquest, leads to the devel-
opment of a romance past which is importantly different from that of the romans courtois
of Chrétien and his followers: one in which place is precise and important, in which values
are outward-looking and non-exclusive, and in which events relate to the present not as
models but as precedents. It is largely non-escapist and persuades not by its truth to
personal experience and emotion but by its resemblance to external encounters with
authority, geography, warfare or social relationships; for this reason its plausibility is such
that we can be persuaded of its historicity.19
That insular romances are more concerned with historical issues, and as a result
sacrifice some of the emotional appeal one encounters in Continental productions,
is nowhere more obvious than in the group of texts with Anglo-Norman antece-
dents, which focus on heroes with memorable stories of genealogical importance:
Horn, Havelok, Bevis of Hampton, Guy of Warwick, Waldef, and Fulk fitz Warin.
The preoccupation of the romances of Guy and Bevis with lineage and ancestry has
led critics to call them ‘ancestral romances’ or ‘roman généalogique’.20 Whether the
patronage of particular local families may be determined with more or less accuracy
is less relevant to the present discussion than these texts’ overall interest in gene-
alogy, inheritance, and the process through which rightful rulers are instated or
reinstated. Crane contends that the predominant concerns of these romances are
‘feudal reinstatement and translating love motifs into terms of family stability and
continuity’, which in turn show how this ‘literature accommodates fundamental
Anglo-Norman baronial concerns’.21 However, the localized appeal immediately
evident in relation to the romances of Havelok, Bevis, Guy, and Fulk does carry
other, broader implications in the discussion about shaping the concept of the
nation; these romances may be said to contain the elements most appropriately
found in genealogical narratives that attempt to weave a seamless structure out of
disjointed elements. Indeed, a close relationship may be observed between Anglo-
Norman chroniclers and their writing, on the one hand, and authors of insular
romances; as Crane points out:
William the Conqueror’s claim to the throne gave political impetus to works relating pre-
Conquest history to Norman rule. The royal asseveration that the Conquest was legal, and
that continuity characterized insular life despite the Conquest, encouraged chroniclers to
19
Rosalind Field, ‘Romance as History, History as Romance’, in Romance in Medieval England,
ed. by Mills and others, pp. 163–73 (p. 169).
20
Crane, Insular Romance, p. 16 and references there; M. Dominica Legge, Anglo-Norman
Literature and its Background (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963; repr. 1971), pp. 139–75.
21
discover English heroes and to present them as ‘antecessores’ for the Normans. By this
alchemy even historical figures such as Waldef and Hereward who opposed the very Con-
quest itself receive praise and generate pride in the chronicles.22
Horn and Havelok are heroes of such a group of Matter of England romances
which focus on regional and national identity and shaping the nation — all of
which are representative of the urge to consolidate the passage of dominion from
pre- to post-Conquest England.23 These are texts that manifest a concern with
both establishing the parameters by which the English nation is to be conceptual-
ized and merging genealogical concerns which would otherwise appear as divergent
— thus to ensure continuity. The two heroes have been discussed in recent studies
primarily from the point of view of the romance authors’ ability to construct the
image of the English nation through the seemingly smooth and unproblematic
union of native British/Anglo-Saxon lineage(s) and foreign ones. Another ap-
proach to these texts has brought attention to the ‘quality of rule’ rather than royal
inheritance, in what Field called the popular motif of ‘the king-over-the-water’.24
According to Field, the popularity of romances focusing on the destinies of the
heroes Horn, Havelok, Bevis, Guy, Protheselaus, Waldef, and Fulk appears to be
justified by a matching (and manifest) tendency in insular historiography after
1100 to prefer ‘legendary constructions [. . .] according to which lands are always
regained, never conquered’.25 In this way insular romances actually respond to de-
mands to assimilate the heroes of other lands into narratives about native leaders,
in an effort to explain conquest as a natural merging of the best families from each
nation, rather than as a colonial enterprise, with winners and losers.
The romance of Horn survives in three very different versions: the Anglo-
Norman Romance of Horn and the Middle English King Horn and Horn Child and
Maiden Rimnild; there is also a later reworking known under the title King Pontus
and Sidoine.26 The first was composed in the twelfth century, perhaps around the
22
23
See Diane Speed, ‘The Construction of the Nation in the Medieval English Romance’, in
Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. by Carol M. Meale (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1994), pp.
135–57.
24
Rosalind Field, ‘The King Over the Water: Exile-and-Return Revisited’, in Cultural Encoun-
ters in the Romance of Medieval England, ed. by C. Saunders (Cambridge: Brewer, 2005), pp. 41–53.
25
Field, ‘King Over the Water’, p. 49.
26
For details, see Charles W. Dunn, ‘Romances Derived from English Legends’, in A Manual
of the Writings in Middle English 1050–1500, vol. I, gen. ed. J. Burke Severs (New Haven: Connec-
ticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1967), pp. 17–37 (pp. 17–22).
1170s, while scholars agree that King Horn belongs more firmly in the thirteenth;
Horn Child, which survives only in the Auchinleck manuscript, and in fragmentary
form, may be dated to the first decades of the fourteenth century.27 The storyline
in all variants tells of the young Horn who is exiled from his native country after
his father’s death and later grows into a mature hero who conquers his enemies and
regains his inheritance while in the process he wins, loses, and wins back a king’s
daughter, and a new crown in addition to his own. Whether analysed as a story about
patrimony or nation-building, the Middle English versions of the Horn romance
present a series of features that point to its place in the genesis of romance as a nar-
rative of succession. In particular, the abundance of references to Anglo-Norman
social and political realities anchor the variants further into the shared cultural
environment in which questions of identity, social status, and inheritance would
be amply debated. Crane has pointed out that the theme of family continuity is
‘given natural force’ in King Horn, and that the main character’s ‘dynastic purpose
also informs his courtship’ of his chosen lady.28 Moreover, as much recent research
has shown, the discourse of succession is highlighted in the narrative’s appeal to the
relationship between ruler and the ruled, who acknowledge and support the right
to inheritance on the basis of the ruler’s natural qualities. Another variant, Horn
Child and Maiden Rimnild, promises its readers a story about ‘our elders þat were
| Whilom in þis lond’ and about kingship in ‘al Ingelond’.29 This version, although
considered by critics to be inferior to King Horn, contains localized references to
Yorkshire and seems to draw on chronicle accounts of a Danish incursion.30 This
variant is found in the Auchinleck manuscript, the miscellany now widely recog-
nized to indicate medieval audiences’ interest in the concept of nationhood.31
27
For a summary of recent criticism, and a new investigation of Horn Child, see Matthew
Holford, ‘History and Politics in Horn Child and Maiden Rimnild’, RES, n.s., 57 (2006), 149–68.
28
29
Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild, ed. by Maldwyn Mills, Middle English Texts, 20 (Heidel-
berg: Winter, 1988), lines 5–6 and 9.
30
Mills, Introduction to Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild, p. 63.
31
Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature and National Identity,
1290–1340 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 109–41; Robert Rouse, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon
England in Middle English Romance (Cambridge: Brewer, 2005), pp. 52–69; see also Phillipa
Hardman, ‘Compiling the Nation: Fifteenth-Century Miscellany Manuscripts’, in Nation, Court,
and Culture: New Essays on Fifteenth-Century English Poetry, ed. by Helen Cooney (Dublin: Four
Courts, 2001), pp. 50–69, for a discussion of the similarities between the construction of the nation
in the Auchinleck and in miscellanies produced a century later.
Unsurprisingly, the Auchinleck also contains romances focusing on three out of

the above-mentioned local heroes, in addition to historical texts, like The Battle
Abbey Roll and a version of the Anonymous Short Metrical Chronicle (under the
title Liber Regum Anglie).32 The process by which the genealogy of local and na-
tional heroes and history are shaped can be traced not only in the chronicles of the
land, but also in the imaginary lineages retold in romance narratives. As Matthew
Holford has recently pointed out, ‘In these texts [Horn, Bevis, Guy, and Havelok]
England serves as an established focus for the loyalties and emotions of both
characters and audience, something to be threatened and fought for’.33
In the Horn Child version the impulse towards shaping lineages and heritage
leads the author to create an imagined imperial view of English supremacy in the
British Isles and beyond, perhaps perceived by medieval audiences as a symbolic
continuation of both Arthur’s rule and of the Anglo-Normans’ conquest; Holford
notes that ‘Horn Child suggests a vision of English supremacy in Britain which
responds to contemporary crisis with an idealized account of an English king’s
achievements in the British Isles’.34 That medieval audiences responded to such
appeals to the notion of national history and genealogical descent is evident in the
composition of miscellanies like the Auchinleck, but also in the design of another,
often-cited example, that of a fifteenth-century miscellany, Oxford, Bodleian
Library, MS Digby 185.35 The manuscript, commissioned and owned by the gentry
family of Sir William Hopton of Swillington, in Yorkshire, contains the romance
version of Horn known as King Pontus and Sidoine alongside a copy of the Middle
English Brut chronicle. The positioning of the family heraldic devices at particular
points in the narrative of the Brut corresponds to the desire to portray the family’s
presence in historical events of national importance. The romance included in this
miscellany may have functioned as educational material for the Hopton children
and adults — not only in the traditional sense (providing appropriate models of
manners and a general cultural background), but also in reflecting their interest in
the mechanisms by which genealogy and inheritance are negotiated and interpreted.
32
The Auchinleck Manuscript: National Library of Scotland Advocates MS 19.2.1, introd. by
Derek Pearsall and I. C. Cunningham (London: Scolar Press, 1977).
33
Holford, ‘History and Politics’, p. 157.
34
Holford, ‘History and Politics’, p. 161.
35
See Carol M. Meale, ‘The Politics of Book Ownership: The Hopton Family and Bodleian
Library, Digby MS 185’, in Prestige, Authority and Power in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts,
ed. by Felicity Riddy (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2000), pp. 103–31.
Another hero whose story relates to genealogical concerns is Havelok; Havelok

the Dane is a late thirteenth-century romance that focuses on royal succession and
the political instability caused in a country by the absence of a male heir.36 Athel-
wold, king of England, dies without a male heir and leaves his reign as an in-
heritance to his daughter Goldeborw and her future husband, who, in romance
fashion, has to be the ‘heste’ (tallest) man in the land. Athelwold’s treacherous
guardian, Godric, rushes to marry Goldeborw to one such man, who turns out to
be Havelok, the unknowing son of a(nother) king.37 As G. V. Smithers has pointed
out, this is more than just another romance on the theme of kingship. It focuses on
a number of related themes, among which the interest in ‘the lawful right of
succession to a kingdom’ and ‘the importance of law and order in feudal England
of the thirteenth century’38 are of most relevance to my present discussion. Thorlac
Turville-Petre has rightly pointed out that medieval audiences would have read this
romance as if it were a historical text, even if its factual content puzzled them. The
insular chroniclers Rauf de Boun and Robert Mannyng refer to the story in
relation to Grimsby in Lincolnshire, the place traditionally associated with the
romance through the name of the fisherman who saves Havelok from an early
death.39 The survival of a medieval seal on which Havelok presents a large ring to
Goldeborw above which is displayed a crown further attests to the impact of the
story on medieval audiences as an episode in real history, with a direct correlation
to audiences’ interest in genealogy and royal succession.40
Havelok also appears in Geoffrey Gaimar’s L’estoire des Engleis, written around
1135, in which the story is set in ancient times, during the reign of King Constan-
tine, King Arthur’s nephew; but it also makes an appearance in both Anglo-
Norman and Middle English versions of the Brut chronicles.41 In the latter
36
Dunn, ‘Romances Derived from English Legends’, pp. 22–25.
37
All references to this text will be taken from Havelok, ed. by G. V. Smithers (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1987) and cited parenthetically in the text.
38
Smithers, Introduction to Havelok, p. lix.
39
Turville-Petre, England the Nation, p. 144.
40
Turville-Petre, England the Nation, p. 154; see also the discussion in Havelok, ed. by
Smithers, Appendix B, pp. 160–67.
41
For a discussion of the plots, similarities, and differences between these versions, see Smithers,
Introduction to Havelok, pp. xvi–lii. See also Michael Faletra, ‘The Ends of Romance: Dreaming the
Nation in the Middle English Havelok’, Exemplaria, 17 (2005), 347–80; Julia Marvin, ‘Sources and
Analogues of the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut Chronicle: New Findings’, in Readers and Writers of
the Prose Brut, ed. by William Marx and Raluca Radulescu, special issue, Trivium, 36 (2006), 1–31.
Goldeborw is said to have been ‘þe riht heire of þis lande’ (a close translation of the
Anglo-Norman prose Brut ‘fu dreit heir de ceste terre’).42 The fact that chroniclers
struggled to incorporate Havelok’s story and lineage into the chronology of British
kings attests to a double tendency: to integrate popular romance material into
historical narratives, and to fit in with a more general tendency to smooth over the
passage of dominion from Anglo-Saxon to Danish rule. Indeed, Turville-Petre
points out that Havelok may be interpreted as a piece of revisionist writing, which
reinterprets the Viking period of English history in light of issues such as justice
and rightful inheritance. If Athelwold represents the Anglo-Saxon king Edmund,
then we can read a correspondence between Godrich in the romance and Edric, the
historical character: ‘The Danes under Cnut (now recast as Havelok) establish
peace and justice once again, not by conquest or treachery, but by just succession.’43
Thus Havelok embodies the principle of rightful heir to the English crown,
through his wife, Goldeborw. The Middle English romance author’s insistence on
Goldeborw’s right is indicative of his full engagement with the issues of genea-
logical descent and ensuing anxieties over the continuation of the English royal
line. As Smithers pointed out, this emphasizes by repetition the trend encountered
in the other variants:
Goldeborw is three times described as (þe) riht(e) eir ‘the lawful heir’ to England, and three
times as the eir, and Havelok once as þe rihte eir (2235), and five times simply as the eir, of
Birkabeyn. But Gaimar applies the phrase five times, and the noun alone (once, 68) only
to Havelok, apart from naming him and Goldeborw (i.e. Argentille) in conjunction as eir
. . . dreiturier (pl.) to England (809). The Lai calls Havelok dreiz eir to Denmark four
times, and reproduces from Gaimar the expression eir . . . dreiturier (1101) for him and his
wife. [. . .] But the author of Havelok underlines it by repetition, and thus implies that he
regards it as important.44
This comparison between the variants of the story shows that Havelok manifests
a distinct interest in the mechanisms by which inheritance is maintained in the
right hands. The lines that best encapsulate the interest in lineage and the
42
The Brut or The Chronicles of England, ed. by Friedrich W. D. Brie, EETS OS, 131, 136
(London: Oxford University Press, 1906–08), I, 26; The Oldest Anglo-Norman Prose ‘Brut’
Chronicle: An Edition and Translation, ed. and trans. by Julia Marvin (Woodbridge: Boydell and
Brewer, 2006), p. 100.
43
Turville-Petre, England the Nation, p. 153.
44
Smithers, Introduction to Havelok, p. lvii; the lines in Havelok are, for Goldeborw, 289,
2540, 2770, and 110, 1096, 2806, and for Havelok, 410, 607, 1268, 2158, 2302. Other references
to editions used for Gaimar and Lai de Havelok are mentioned in ibid., p. lvii, nn. 84 and 85.
unbroken genealogical line focus closely on Goldeborw’s right to the crown, recog-
nized and supported by the whole nation:
Þan þe Englishe men þat sawe,
Þat þei wisten, heye and lawe,
Þat Goldeboru þat was so fayr
Was of Engeland rith eyr,
And þat þe king hire hauede wedded,
And haueden bens amen bedded,
He comen alle to crie ‘merci’
Vnto þe king at one cri,
And beden him sone manrede and oth
Þat he ne sholden, for lef ne loth,
Neueremore ageyn him go
Ne ride, for wel ne for wo. (lines 2767–78)
The debate over the nature of rightful claim to the royal crown is further pres-
ent, in typical romance fashion, in the flame and glow observed on Havelok by his
wife at night, of which the hero himself is unaware. While one can agree that such
elements show that the narrative ‘preserves an older conception of theocratic
lordship’,45 the implications are far-reaching: evident signs of kingship help identify
the rightful heir in ways not always available in medieval England. The romance
medium favours the (almost) magical resolution of otherwise complex problems
of succession, and Goldeborw’s genealogical line may continue uninterrupted, as
her future husband is entitled to become king.
The female heir also signals women’s agency in ensuring continuity; her pres-
ence, in Field’s words, ‘moves the emphasis from simple success in battle to success
through negotiation’, a feature which brings light even more on to the place of
female characters in the shaping of a genealogical line as well as the presence of the
community in the inheritance debate:
exile and return is a tale-type by which the rightful heir comes into his own, tyranny is
identified and overthrown, and the community of the realm claims its place as an active
agent in the drama of succession.46
Apart from the community interest in rightful inheritance presented in these texts,
the outside community, that of the readers of romances like Horn and Havelok,
seems to have found the concern with succession appealing. Marginalia in a
fifteenth-century manuscript of the Middle English Brut contained in London,
45
46
Field, ‘King Over the Water’, p. 51.
British Library, MS Additional 12030 indicates an attentive reader’s interest in

Havelok’s story, and his or her careful reading of romance as chronicle; the fol-
lowing correction in the episode equivalent to the story of Havelok reads: ‘this
Cuthelagh shuld be Havelock’.47
Insofar as they tackle issues of nationhood, romances like Horn and Havelok
provide a fertile ground for genealogical debate, itself linked to the foundation of
dynasties, shaping the future of nations, and justifying rightful inheritance of a land
far away. Michael Faletra’s recent review of older studies identifies romance as the
primary source of investigation with respect to the shaping of the medieval English
nation; in his words:
Romances [. . .] insofar as they are understood as fictionalizations of the past rather than
as reflecting historical truths, are uniquely able both to avoid the constraints of contem-
porary historiographies and to open up a discursive space for the expression of England as
a nation.48
Faletra draws attention to the mechanisms through which the debate over the
shaping of national identity can be channelled, and the fact that medieval romance
offers the perfect medium for the expression of delicate political issues. In ro-
mances authors and audiences tackle topics in a medium free of the constraints
usually present in political reality.
There are several ways in which romances can appeal to readers’ perceptions of
the past; in particular, by recasting events distant in time and place in familiar terms
(a recognizable geography, local heroes), the authors of insular romances manage
to create what Robert Rouse has called ‘a national “inscape”’, or, in other words,
‘a metaphor for the communal store of legend, myth and story’. By anchoring the
romance narratives into English landscapes, Rouse argues, a community will
make sense of its history and surroundings, [this inscape] makes real the history of England
in the places and objects that are readily available as tangible witnesses to the events they
signify. Through the anchoring of their ‘historical’ narratives of Anglo-Saxon England in
the landscape, the Matter of England romances emphasise the continuity of English history
in the visible and the knowable: the place-names, memorials, towns and cities of England
itself.49
47
See Tamar Drukker, ‘I Read Therefore I Write: Readers’ Marginalia in Some Brut Manu-
scripts’, in Readers and Writers of the Prose Brut, ed. by Marx and Radulescu, pp. 97–130 (p. 111).
48
Faletra, ‘Ends of Romance’, p. 353.
49
Rouse, Idea of Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 91–92.
The process by which insular romances render crises of succession relevant to their
readers is firmly grounded in the perception of romance narratives as places of
debate and negotiation, both of the past and of the present. The trajectories of
heroes like Guy of Warwick or Fulk fitz Warin, whose exploits help articulate the
discourse about ancestry and contested inheritance respectively, are equally rele-
vant to the discussion about genealogy, though not discussed in this chapter.50
English Arthurian Romance at the End of the Middle Ages
Arthurian romances written in England are similarly concerned with genealogy,

the continuation of lineages, not only with regard to King Arthur’s own right to
the English crown through Uther Pendragon and later Arthur’s heirless status, but
also in the spiritual legacy of the Grail keepers, in whose line Lancelot and his son
Galahad are placed.51 Throughout the Middle Ages Arthur was used by English
kings to claim descent from the oldest common royal line, as portrayed in Geof-
frey’s Historia and subsequent versions of the Brut chronicles. Imperialist desire
also motivated the same kings to claim dominance over Scotland, Ireland, and
further afield, and may even explain Henry II’s enthusiastic approach to the discov-
eries of the tomb of Arthur and Guenevere by the monks at Glastonbury.52 The
growth of the popularity of Arthurian romance and its late flourishing in Sir
Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur and partly in John Hardyng’s Chronicle attest
to the continuous interest medieval audiences manifested in issues of genealogy
and inheritance related to the English kings’ claim to rule Wales and Scotland, but
also in spiritual matters, given the precedence claimed by fifteenth-century prelates
over Rome through the myth of the Grail keepers.53
50
For a recent reassessment of the Guy of Warwick romance tradition, see the essays contained
in Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor, ed. by Alison Wiggins and Rosalind Field (Cambridge:
Brewer, 2007).
51
For Middle English Arthurian romances, see Helaine Newstead, ‘Arthurian Legends’, in
Manual of the Writings in Middle English, I, 38–79.
52
For a brief overview of the political uses of the Arthurian myth by English kings during the
Middle Ages, see James P. Carley, ‘Arthur in English History’, in The Arthur of the English, ed. by
W. R. J. Barron (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), pp. 47–57.
53
For a full account of the growing use of the legend of Joseph of Arimathea, and the way his
cult was conflated with that of the patron saint of Glastonbury Abbey, see Valerie Lagorio, ‘The
Evolving Legend of St Joseph of Glastonbury’, Speculum, 46 (1971), 209–31. This article also
provides a thorough analysis of the political importance of the cult in the later part of the fifteenth
Although the history of Arthur’s place in insular debates over genealogical

descent cannot be summarized in the present chapter, its literary development in
insular romance, and in particular its relevance in relation to genealogical concerns,
needs to be addressed. As pointed out in various recent studies, the figure of Arthur
was invoked at crucial points in history, when the right to the English crown was
contested. The Anglo-Norman kings’ interest in allying their lineage with the
family of Arthur, thus claiming a right to dominance over Wales, was behind some
of the most enduring narratives written during that period: Geoffrey’s Historia
inherited by the chronicle writers Wace and Layamon. The interest of the
anonymous Brut chronicle authors in the Arthurian material can only be under-
stood as the product of their heavy reliance on the popularity of the themes already
covered by Geoffrey, among which genealogy features prominently.54
Once present in the Historia, Arthur seems to have been inserted in the fabric
of history and would not be displaced for centuries to come, despite doubts over
his historicity even among Geoffrey’s contemporaries. From the twelfth century
to the end of the fifteenth, Arthur’s crucial place in the narrative of the nation, in-
cluding his firm role in the seemingly unbroken line of (initially British, then only
English) kings, indicates a tendency to construct and perpetuate not only myth and
legend, but also the debate over what constitutes a rightful claim to the English
crown. Moreover the Arthurian story provides a series of patterns on which histo-
rical figures chose to model their behaviour, in an effort to justify their ancestry
and their own claim to a place in the royal line. The numerous pen-drawn geneal-
ogies in the margins of manuscripts of the Middle English Brut chronicle similarly
indicate noble and gentry audiences’ interest in genealogical lines of descent and
their perception of history — of their own family, and of the nation.55
Starting with Geoffrey’s Historia and continuing through the Vulgate and post-
Vulgate cycles, the story of Arthur’s claim to Britain’s throne and the association
between Arthur’s court and the Grail keepers found interested audiences on both
sides of the English Channel. By the late fifteenth century, when Sir Thomas
Malory produced his long prose romance Le Morte Darthur, Arthur had been
century. See also Edward Donald Kennedy, ‘Glastonbury’, in The Arthur of Medieval Latin
Literature, ed. by Siân Echard (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, forthcoming).
54
For an overview of this development, see Warren, History on the Edge.
55
See Drukker’s ‘I Read Therefore I Write’; Meale’s ‘The Politics of Book Ownership’; Raluca
Radulescu, ‘Gentry Readers of the Brut and Genealogical Material’, in Readers and Writers of the
Prose Brut, ed. by Marx and Radulescu, pp. 189–202; see also Matheson, ‘Genealogy and Women
in the Prose Brut’, in the present volume.
transformed into a recognizable English king whose claim to the crown was
shrouded in mystery and Merlin’s magic. Seen against the climate of political
unrest during the Wars of the Roses, when two opposing royal houses disputed
their claims to the crown, one of Malory’s sources for Arthur’s romance would find
noble and gentry readers eager to trace back the genealogy of present-day kings in
the line of the great hero.56 Arthur’s end, traditionally presented in the Arthurian
tradition as a fall from the Wheel of Fortune, encouraged readers to reconsider
women’s symbolical agency in the nurturing, shaping, and ultimately destroying
of lineages. The presence of Lady Fortune in Arthur’s dream at the end of the
Morte may be traced back to Malory’s version of this episode, the French La Mort
le roi Artu, where, as Warren has pointed out, Arthur sees Fortune as his own
mother; in the French original the text reads: ‘Fortune qui m’a esté mere jusque ci
[. . .] or m’est devenue marastre’ (Fortune who has been mother to me until this
point now has become s-mothering).57 In Warren’s words: ‘Marrastre implies both
a denatured, malevolent mother and a stepmother: in either case, Fortune turns
infanticidal, disrupting the genealogical norms that sustain dynastic success.’58
Arthur’s end at the hands of Fortune may be seen as one additional comment on
the prevalence of genealogical concerns and female agency in maintaining or de-
stroying lineages in both romance and chronicle narratives.
Another element in the Arthurian tradition which has close connections with
genealogical concerns is the lineage of the Grail keepers, descended from Joseph of
Arimathea, the mythical founder of Christianity in Britain. Initially intended to
link Uther Pendragon’s lineage to the spiritual leadership conferred on Joseph, the
story of the Grail keepers is fulfilled in the French version of the Holy Grail Quest,
where, from among Lancelot’s kin, Galahad and Bors are entrusted with the noble
mission of continuing the stewardship of the holy vessel. In Malory’s reworking of
the Grail Quest particular attention is given to Galahad’s descent and noble
ancestry from Lancelot, and Galahad’s physical resemblance to Lancelot, his father,
allows the latter to partake in the glory of his son’s success in beholding the Holy
56
For an analysis of the importance of genealogies in shaping the English gentry’s response to
Malory’s Morte, see Raluca L. Radulescu, The Gentry Context for Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cam-
bridge: Brewer, 2003), especially Chapter 2. For an investigation of fifteenth-century political uses
of the Arthurian myth, including royal genealogies, see Jonathan Hughes, Arthurian Myths and
Alchemy: The Kingship of Edward IV (Stroud: Sutton, 2002).
57
La Mort le roi Artu, ed. by Jean Frappier (Geneva: Droz, 1964), p. 247 (Warren’s translation,
p. 197).
58
Warren, History on the Edge, p. 197.
Grail openly.59 Genealogical concerns are evident in Malory’s version of the Grail
story; similarly, a concern with connecting ‘the beginning of Christian history with
Britain and Arthurian lore’ may be identified in late medieval readers’ annotations
in the margins of a Middle English Brut chronicle. Although the story of Joseph
does not feature in most versions of the Brut, an attentive reader added a passage
in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 50, which states that Joseph came over to
Britain and was buried at Glastonbury (fol. 14v ).60 The descent of the English
Church from Joseph acquired political value in the fifteenth century, as Valerie
Lagorio has amply demonstrated,61 and the reader of this chronicle seems to have
been aware of both romance and current versions of the politicized myth. Further
evidence of readers’ interest in the genealogy of the Grail keepers comes from the
only surviving copy of the translations made by Henry Lovelich, the London
skinner, of the Holy Grail and Merlin. As Meale has pointed out, the name of ‘anne
hamptoun’ appears on folio 39r of this manuscript, now Cambridge, Corpus
Christi College, MS 80, and ‘the same hand appears to have been responsible for
glossing passages highlighting the ancestors of Lancelot’.62
Conclusions
It is not possible to summarize even partially in a brief chapter the elements that
attest to the presence of genealogical concerns in insular romance and chronicle
productions from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. However, the present
attempt at identifying some of the threads that link narratives separated by time,
language, and genre shows that a sense of continuity emerges, a continuity of
59
For a recent review of Malory’s reworking of the story, see Raluca L. Radulescu, ‘Malory and
the Grail?’, in A Companion to Arthurian Literature, ed. by H. Fulton (Maldon, MA: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2009), pp. 326–39, and Radulescu, ‘Malory’s Lancelot and the Key to Salvation’,
Arthurian Literature, 25 (2008), 93–118.
60
Drukker, ‘I Read Therefore I Write’, p. 107. See also Kennedy, ‘Glastonbury’.
61
See Lagorio, ‘Evolving Legend of St Joseph’.
62
Carol M. Meale, ‘“ . . . alle the bokes that I haue of latyn, englisch, and frensch”: Laywomen
and their Books in Late Medieval England’, in Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500, ed.
by Carol M. Meale, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 128–58 (p. 141).
Meale also notes further annotations on fols 54r and 87r, corresponding to Henry Lovelich’s Merlin,
Parts III and IV, ed. by E. A. Kock, EETS ES, 28, 30 (London: Early English Text Society, 1877,
1878), pp. 90, 347: Meale, ‘“ . . . alle the bokes that I haue of latyn, englisch, and frensch”’, p. 154,
n. 67.
lineages relevant to the shaping of a national as well as individual consciousness.

(Almost always) somehow anchored in recognizable events and places, insular
romances provide a fertile ground for the exploration of crises of succession and
inheritance, and their resolutions.63 With the passage of time, and changes in
outlook, the realm of fantasy, or ‘empire of magic’ (as Geraldine Heng has called
it) present in medieval insular romance makes room for its successor, Edmund
Spenser’s allegorical Faerie Queene, with its own political agenda and genealogical
concerns.64
63
For another assessment of genealogies in romance, see Matthew Giancarlo, ‘Speculative
Genealogies’, in Middle English, ed. by Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp.
252–68. This article became available at too late a stage to be discussed in the present chapter.
64
Andrew King, The Faerie Queene and Middle English Romance: The Matter of Just Memory
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). I would like to thank Peter Field for useful suggestions on an
earlier draft of this chapter.
P ROPHECY, G ENEALOGY, AND H ISTORY
IN M EDIEVAL E NGLISH P OLITICAL D ISCOURSE
Lesley Coote
There was once a thing called chivalry; men knew it, felt it, explained it to each other and
practised it.1
O
ne of the most persistent problems in the interpretation of medieval texts,
whether literary, aural, or visual, is that of perception. As David Crouch
has concluded — in company with the late (great) Michael Camille —
unless we can ‘see’ with the eyes of their contemporaries, an understanding of these
materials on their own terms will elude us. What Crouch says about chivalry is also
true of genealogy, and of prophecy, in the Middle Ages. These two closely related
discourses acted as lenses through which medieval people, in particular those with
any form of patronage, familial connections, or power, viewed their world.
According to surviving evidence from the English Middle Ages, prophecy and
genealogy may be seen to interact in three main ways.2 In a few cases, prophecies
1
David Crouch, The Birth of Nobility: Constructing Aristocracy in England and France
900–1300 (Harlow: Longman, 2005), p. 7.
2
By ‘prophecy’ I understand text (mostly literary, although sometimes pictorial/visual) written
in the future tense but referring to past events. These appear to predict the future, but are actually
referring to the past in such a way as to comment upon the present and to elicit a future response
from contemporary readers, thus affecting the course of future events. See Julia Marvin, ‘Arthur
Authorized: The Prophecies of the Prose Brut Chronicle’, Arthurian Literature, 22 (2005), 84–99.
I refer not to theologically contextualized, biblical prophecies, but to ‘political’ prophecies, referred
to (following Keith Thomas’s terminology) as ‘ancient prophecies’ by Tim Thornton, Prophecy,
Politics and the People in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2006), pp.
1–2; see also Lesley Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs in Later Medieval England (Woodbridge:
York Medieval Press, 2000), pp. 13–42, and originally Rupert Taylor, The Political Prophecy in
England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1911), pp. 1–7. I have interpreted the term
28 Lesley Coote
have been inserted into genealogies. The incidence of this, somewhat surprisingly,
is rare in surviving manuscripts, as is the existence of genealogical and prophetic
texts sometimes in close proximity. Finally, there is an ideological interplay, even
intertextuality, between genealogy and prophecy, which is evident in the dynastic
content of prophetic texts and in the (understood) prophetic agenda of genealogy.
This relates particularly to royal genealogy and dynasty from the Norman Con-
quest. The association becomes so frequent from the end of the twelfth century
onwards that it appears to have been widespread, if not ubiquitous, in medieval
English political culture.
Genealogy and prophecy are both discourses of history, or more accurately dis-
courses of memory, both personal and collective. Collective memory is here under-
stood according to the ideas of French philosopher Maurice Halbwachs, as applied
by film historians to cinematic depictions of the Vietnam War in the 1980s.3 Indi-
vidual memory is fragmented and incomplete. It seeks completion, but is com-
pleted not psychologically, from inside the self, in a Freudian manner, but outside
the self, in company with others. John Storey compares this to members of a family
or group sitting around a photograph album, each ‘remembering’ characters, ob-
jects, places, and events (and their signification for that individual) as prompted by
the images on display. These provisional memories are then confirmed, challenged,
or denied by other members of the group, and stories are retold. In this way ‘collec-
tive’ memories are formed by negotiation — they are ‘revised, updated, reorga-
nised, retold’.4 It is my contention that this is how the pictorial or diagrammatic
genealogy functioned for the individual and the group in medieval England. In an
age before portraiture and photographs, the genealogy is an object around which
similar activity, similar negotiation, could occur. Such texts, therefore, functioned
as sites around which power relations were negotiated, a fact which accords well
with Crouch’s view of kinship as related to opportunity and patronage (mobile,
mutable organs of power) rather than the more stable (if still periodically at risk)
power represented by the possession and inheritance of landed estates.
‘genealogy’ in its widest sense, referring to a whole series of texts, or sections of texts, prophetic in
nature, which relate to the family as lineage or dynasty, rather than confining myself to those texts
(diagrammatic or pictorial) usually understood in generic terms as ‘genealogies’.
3
John Storey, ‘The Articulation of Memory and Desire: from Vietnam to the War in the
Persian Gulf’, in Memory and Popular Film, ed. by Peter Grainge (Manchester: Manchester Uni-
versity Press, 2003), pp. 99–119, citing Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (New York:
Harper and Row, 1980).
4
Storey, ‘Articulation of Memory and Desire’, p. 103.
PROPHECY, GENEALOGY, AND HISTORY 29
Kin might be inclined for reasons of blood to offer employment and assistance to a relative
and to have rich and noble cousins gave a man a degree of honour, especially if they
acknowledged him. But kin did not have any active role in transmitting and disposing of
property amongst its group.5
The genealogical text functioned both as a ‘site of memory’ and as one of the
materials of which memories are made. It shared this function with texts such as
family/personal histories, family romances, and prophecies.
Camille has demonstrated something similar happening in the illuminated bor-
ders of manuscripts such as the Luttrell Psalter (London, British Library, MS Addi-
tional 42130).6 In the Psalter’s illuminated borders, the world is presented as a
carefully constructed landscape, rather than the environment of ‘real life’ which it
was formerly taken to represent. Unlike environment, landscape is subjective and
tends towards building a self-image of the beholder.7 Thus, the border images
reveal a landscape of ownership, land, property, and the means of production (a
locked mill, hunting and agricultural animals, ploughs, and the labour of Sir
Geoffrey’s villeins).8 Prominently featured are the owner’s kinship connections,
represented in images of his immediate family, and even more strikingly in the
representation of their coats of arms (Luttrell, Sutton, and Scrope). Images which
were formerly believed to represent ‘real life’ have been shown by Camille to
represent political events and figures (Edward II’s wars against the Scots, a repre-
sentation of the death of Thomas of Lancaster which places him in parallel to Saint
Thomas of Canterbury, Edward II and III and their queens, a cross of Eleanor of
Aquitaine) in which Sir Geoffrey had taken part, or in which his family might be
said to have had some form of interest; they were near neighbours and supporters
of Thomas of Lancaster, for example, and Sir Geoffrey had taken part in Edward’s
5
Crouch, Birth of Nobility, pp. 121–22. After the first two ‘waves’ of land grants from
William I, opportunities for the acquisition of new lands by this means dwindled: see Judith Green,
The Aristocracy of Norman England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
6
Michael Camille, Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval
England (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), also Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of
Medieval Art, 3rd edn (London: Reaktion Books, 2003). The manuscript can be viewed online:
<http://www.bl.uk/collections/treasures/luttrell/luttrell_broadband.htm>.
7
Camille, Mirror in Parchment, pp. 107–40; also Robert Liddiard, Landscapes of Lordship:
Norman Castles and the Countryside in Medieval Norfolk, 1066–1200 (Oxford: Archaeopress,
2000), and Liddiard, Castles in Context: Power, Symbolism and Landscape 1066–1500 (Maccles-
field: Windgather Press, 2005); Oliver H. Creighton, Castles and Landscapes: Power, Community
and Fortification in Medieval England (London: Equinox, 2005).
8
Camille, Image on the Edge, pp. 108–20.
30 Lesley Coote
ill-fated Scots campaign. The images also have a metaphysical content, representing
Sir Geoffrey’s secular and spiritual anxieties: Geoffrey’s concern for the fate of his
soul, his desire for ownership of part of the kingdom of heaven, brings the heavenly
realms into his geography of memory.
The Psalter is a presentation of materials of, and for, memory. This memory is
personal in that it represents the patron’s self image, as negotiated by himself and
the artists (and maybe other members of his family/friendship/patronage circle),
but it is also collective. The volume was intended to, and in fact did, pass on Sir
Geoffrey’s death to his son Andrew, who thereby inherited an important set of
materials from which to complete his own generation’s ‘memories’ of his father,
and of his family’s story. On Andrew Luttrell’s participation in the famous
Scrope–Grosvenor case, Camille muses:
Would the son have recalled where the bird-bodied herald announces with the sound of
the divine trumpet Psalm 88 v. 25: In nomine meo exaltabitur cornu eius (In my name shall
his horn be exalted)? This literally states how Geoffrey had taken over or appropriated the
Scrope arms as his own.9
By extension, it is possible to suggest that what is represented in the Luttrell Psalter

in pictorial/textual form is paralleled by the written materials in apparently ‘per-
sonal’ histories such as Sir Thomas Grey’s Scalacronica, and in the collections of
texts, usually referred to as ‘household’ or ‘commonplace’ books, which contain
historical, prophetic, and administrative information. Although such collections
would undoubtedly have been intended for practical uses, it may be that at least
some of the compilers had an eye to their future use as materials for collectively
remembering both their owner and the family’s history.10 Many of the prophecies
copied into these manuscripts have a dynastic focus, indicating the wide extent to
which the ruling, Plantagenet, dynasty had become associated with Englishmen’s
9
The Scrope–Grosvenor case of 1387 was a contest over the right to possess and display the
same ancient coat of arms. It was eagerly contested, very famous in its own time, Geoffrey Chaucer
was among those who gave evidence — and Scrope won. Camille, Mirror in Parchment, p. 65.
10
Examples include Cambridge, University Library, MS Dd XIV 2 (Nicholas Bishop, wealthy
burgess of Oxford, c. 1432); Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lyell 35 (Reginald Andrew, from a
Hampshire family associated with Winchester College, c. 1475–91); London, Society of Anti-
quaries, MS 101 (Wigston family, wealthy Staple merchants of Leicester and Coventry, c. 1480);
Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS 228 (owner unknown, Richmond, Yorks.); Lincoln, Cathe-
dral Library, MS 91 (Robert Thornton, gentleman of Ryedale, Yorks., mid-fifteenth century). See
Julia Boffey and John Thompson, ‘Anthologies and Miscellanies’, in Book Production and Pub-
lishing in Britain 1375–1475, ed. by Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), pp. 279–315. All of these manuscripts contain political prophecies.
(and women’s) collective memories of their own and their families’ history. This
was a function of the ideological interplay between discourses of genealogy and of
prophecy, in evidence from the mid-twelfth century onwards.
Prophecy and genealogy can be seen to come together in this way in the short
text arbor fertilis/viridis, Edward the Confessor’s prophecy of the green tree. The
prophecy first appears in written form as part of the Life of Edward the Confessor
compiled for his widow Edith in 1066/7:
Tunc [. . .] quasi arbor uiridis succiditur in medio et pars abscissa deportetur a stipite trium
iugerum spatio, cum sine quolibet adminiculo suo iterum connexa trunco, coeperit et
floribus pubescere et fructus protrudere ex coalescentis succi amore pristine, tunc demum
poterit sperari tallium malorum remissio.
[when a green tree, if cut down in the middle of its trunk, and the part of it cut off carried
the space of three furlongs from the stock, shall be joined again to its trunk, by itself and
without any help, and begin once more to push leaves and bear fruit from the old love of
its uniting sap, then at last can a remission of these great ills [the forthcoming invasion by
William of Normandy] be hoped for.]11
There is no mention of genealogy in this prophecy, and it is, in its context, not
necessarily dynastic.12 On his deathbed, King Edward dreams that he meets two
monks from Normandy, where he spent his childhood. He is informed that the
kingdom of England will fall, and there will be great suffering in the land, due to
the corruption of its leaders, in particular members of the higher clergy such as
Stigand, the simonaic Archbishop of Canterbury. In the situation immediately
after the Conquest, Edward, the last ruler about whose English descent there could
be no doubt, endorses the seizure of power by William of Normandy, who thus
becomes Edward’s spiritual son and heir. For Edith, the prophecy may have
provided a rationalization of the disaster which had befallen her family (she was
daughter to Earl Godwin, sister of King Harold), but for England’s new rulers it
became justification for what was, in effect, a massive land grab.
Arbor viridis was reproduced, without any change of emphasis, in the Lives of
the Confessor by William of Malmesbury and Osbert de Clare. In 1161/2 the
theologian/historian Ailred of Rievaulx produced another Life, in which the
emphasis was changed completely. Ailred says that the tree flourished in health
when the Empress Matilda sprang from the disjointed branches. Her son, now
11
Vita Aedwardi regis: The Life of King Edward, ed. and trans. by Frank Barlow (London:
T. Nelson, 1962), pp. 116–19.
12
The ‘three-branched tree’ is a motif occurring a century later, from Celtic sources, in
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Prophetiae Merlini. See below (pp. 35–37).
32 Lesley Coote
Henry II, had brought the consolation which was despaired of in the prophecy.13
Ailred wrote in the wake of a civil war, and his purpose was clearly political — he
was writing in the service of the Angevin king. Applying the theological method-
ology of hermeneutic interpretation to a secular subject, he reinterpreted the
prophecy in genealogical terms. The tree qua tree has become a metaphorical,
genealogical ‘tree’. Bloodline was one of Henry II’s most useful claims to the
English throne; his mother Matilda was the daughter of Henry I (the Conqueror’s
son) and Edith/Matilda, the great-niece of Edgar Aetheling, nephew of Edward the
Confessor, and blood descendant of the line of King Alfred. Ailred had also
compiled a genealogy of Henry II, in which he stressed the King’s Anglo-Saxon
ancestry. In Ailred’s account, not only has the tree reunited, it has blossomed and
borne the fruit of the Angevin dynasty. The Life was written, or re-presented, in
celebration of the recent canonization of Edward, which took place in 1161, rein-
forcing the Angevin Henry’s ‘genealogical’ credentials in relation to the kingdom
he had ruled since 1154.
How far did Ailred’s view become part of the political nation’s collective mem-
ory? It is all very well to produce materials for the renegotiation or reconstitution
of collective memories among England’s politically aware, but the possibility re-
mains that they may not compete successfully with other available interpretations.
However, manuscript sources from the twelfth century onwards show that the
green tree prophecy became very frequently ‘attached’ both to the Historia regum
Britanniae and to the closely related text which became known as the Prophecia
aquile (Prophecy of the Eagle). Both of these prophecies are dynastic.14 The latter
speaks of a deliverer referred to as the Eagle’s Chick, who saves the land from a
corrupt, tyrannical White King. Under Henry II and his sons the Chick, in the
context of Ailred’s green tree interpretation, was easy to interpret as Henry II,
saving England from the (perceived) chaos of the reign of Stephen.15 The same
prophecies recur in close association, and in association with Geoffrey’s Historia,
throughout the Middle Ages, the White King being associated with tyrannical
kingship (of Charles I) as late as the seventeenth century.16 The change which
13
Vita Aedwardi regis, ed. and trans. by Barlow, p. 131.
14
Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, pp. 61–62.
15
For Henry’s interest in not admitting that Stephen had consolidated his government in the
latter years of his reign, see Graeme White, Restoration and Reform 1153–1165: Recovery from Civil
War in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 1–17.
16
Medieval examples include Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 313, pt II (thirteenth
century) and MS 404 (Bury St Edmunds, c. 1380); Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O 1 17 (early
occurred in the twelfth century can be seen to have affected the collective political
consciousness (and effectively altered collective political memories) of English
people for centuries to come.
Memory is made, not only by remembering, but also by forgetting. Following
the idea, derived from Michel Foucault, that power produces reality, film historians
have noted that this remembering and forgetting creates ‘narrative paradigms’ (in
the case of cinema, myths such as ‘the Vietnam war was betrayal’ or ‘a white Amer-
ican experience’).17 Twelfth-century historical reimagining sought to, and suc-
ceeded in, producing its own narrative paradigms, involving the forgetting of other,
less comfortable, ‘truths’. The first, and arguably the most important, of these
paradigms is the acceptance that ‘the dynasty is one with the land, and the king is,
therefore, English’. Henry II was not, in fact, the Eagle’s Chick. The Eagle (Holy
Roman Emperor) had been his mother’s first husband, whilst Henry was the son
of her second husband, Geoffrey of Anjou. The text was actually an import from the
wars between the emperors and the popes and had no real relevance for English
politics at all. It was, throughout the Middle Ages, an inconvenient fact that most
Kings of England had far more French (and, on occasions, Spanish) blood in their
veins than either English or Norman. In prophecy, as in genealogy, this has been
neatly side-stepped, whereas the aristocracy could be seen as ‘foreign’ as late as the
thirteenth century.18
A second paradigm implies that ‘history is an English-centred experience’.
Henry II and his sons ruled large tracts of Western Europe, from Hadrian’s Wall
to the Pyrenees, and England had no more, in fact frequently less, importance for
them than any other part of their dominions. In the fourteenth and fifteenth cen-
turies, a succession of Kings of England regarded the realm of France as their family
fourteenth century); Dublin, Trinity College, MS 514 (late thirteenth/early fourteenth century);
Oxford, Jesus College, MS 2 (fifteenth century). More manuscripts and variations are listed by Julia
Crick in Historia regum Britannie, vol. IV : Dissemination and Reception in the Later Middle Ages
(Cambridge: Brewer, 1991), pp. 65–66. For the seventeenth century and later, see Thornton,
Prophecy, Politics and the People, pp. 53–144, and for association with the deposition of Richard
II, see Helen Fulton, ‘Arthurian Prophecy and the Deposition of Richard II’, Arthurian Literature,
22 (2005), 84–99.
17
Storey, ‘Articulation of Memory and Desire’, pp. 107–13.
18
Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature and National Identity,
1290–1340 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 16. The great nobility of the realm were, of course,
prepared to offer the throne to the Dauphin of France as an alternative to King John or his infant
son Henry in 1216: had Louis’s invasion succeeded, dynastic prophecies might have been employed
to make him an Englishman, too.
34 Lesley Coote
possession, rightfully theirs as head of the Plantagenet family. Their English subjects
regarded France as an ‘English’ possession, and what was essentially a family conflict
over inheritance became a matter of English national prestige. By this means, a
significant reversal of the first paradigm was effected: the king who had been French,
but was now English, became also French, but in subordination to his Englishness.
Fourteenth-century prophecies such as Anglia transmittet demonstrate this:
Anglia transmittet leopardum lilia galli
qui pede calcabit cancrum cum fratre superbo
ungues diripient leopardi gallica regna.
[England will send the Leopard, Lilies of Gaul, who will grind underfoot the Crab and his
proud brother; the Claws of the Leopard will tear apart the gallic kingdom.]19
This prophecy, which recurs frequently among prophetic texts in fifteenth-century

manuscripts, also illustrates a third narrative paradigm associated with dynastic
prophecies: ‘the English have a special relationship with God, mediated through
the dynasty’. When the king acts, the people of England are acting through him, as
well as the king acting on their behalf. They possess, and are possessed by, the
dynasty. As the dynasty represents England, this is a discursive way of the subject
possessing his/her country, through language. In an age when the monarch was a
very personal presence, indeed an absolute necessity, in the deciding of policy and
the guarantee of law and justice, the distance between king and subject — and for
many, the mediating presence of the great aristocracy of the realm — could be
collectively forgotten. ‘Remembering’ the past in this way made the king’s subjects
perceive their own power (if illusive) in the present. It is not difficult to see that
narrative paradigms such as this not only had benefits for lesser mortals, but very
great benefits for their rulers — hence their ubiquity and their longevity in
medieval political discourse.
19
My translation from Eulogium historiarum sive temporis, ed. by Frank S. Haydon, 3 vols,
Rolls Series, 9 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts, 1858–65), II, 419–20.
Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, pp. 112–15. Manuscripts include Cambridge, Corpus Christi
College, MSS 138 (c. 1350) and 404 (c. 1380); Cambridge, University Library, MS Gg IV 25
(second half of fifteenth century); Dublin, Trinity College, MSS 172 (second half of fourteenth
century) and 516 (1461–c. 1474); London, British Library, MSS Arundel 57 (1340) and 66 (late
fifteenth century), MSS Cotton Claudius B VII (first half of fourteenth century), Titus D VII
(second half of fourteenth century), Titus D XIX (early fifteenth century), and Vespasian E VII
(1461–80); Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS 228 (late fifteenth century); Oxford, Bodleian
Library, MSS Bodley 302 (second half of fourteenth century), Digby 186 (fifteenth century), Digby
196 (1453–61), Fairfax 20 (1344–52), and Hatton 56 (c. 1453); Cambridge, Corpus Christi
College, MS 55 (end of fourteenth century).
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, completed by 1139 and

famously dedicated to both sides in the civil war between Stephen and Matilda,
married discourses of prophecy and genealogy. At its centre, literally, is the
Prophetiae Merlini, a collection of Celtic prophecies produced independently by
Geoffrey in 1135 and dedicated to Alexander, bishop of Lincoln (also patron of
Henry of Huntingdon, whose Historia Anglorum, like Ailred’s work, stressed
Henry II’s Anglo-Saxon heritage).20 Merlin’s prophecy is related by Geoffrey to the
dynasty of Aurelius Ambrosius, whose most famous representative is the prophetic
Boar of Cornwall, King Arthur. Their story, to the death of Cadwallader, last of
the line, takes up over half of Geoffrey’s ‘historical’ epic. Ultimately, an angelic
voice predicts that the heirs of Cadwallader will return to Britain, to destroy the
‘foreigners’ and reunite the whole island under one rule. The prophecy itself is not
necessarily couched in dynastic terms; it is its position at the heart of the Historia’s
narrative which powerfully makes the connection between the dynasty, the land, and
the British people, in political and in racial terms. The Prophecy also circulated widely
as a text independently from the Historia, and reference was frequently made to its
narrative in prophetic texts. The name of one of its characters, Sextus, became at-
tached to the great ruler of the returning dynasty and was central to later prophecies
such as ter tria lustra, by which the seizure or award of the Holy Roman Empire,
and the reconquest of the Holy Land, was added to Sextus’s list of achievements.21
The epistemology of collective memory is evidenced in the historiographical
works of Ralph de Diceto, successively Archdeacon and then Dean of St Paul’s,
20
Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed. and trans. by Diana Greenway, Oxford
Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Alexander of Lincoln was himself a great dynast,
nephew of Bishop Roger of Salisbury and brother of Bishop Nigel of Ely: for his relationship with
Henry, and his artistic patronage at Lincoln Cathedral, see Phillip Lindley, ‘The Lincoln CD-ROM
Project’, in History and Images: Towards a New Iconology, ed. by Axel Bolvig and Phillip Lindley,
Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, 5 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 138–64.
21
Ter tria lustra tenent cum semi tempora Sexti [. . .]
Multa capit medio volutans sub fine secundi
Orbem subvertet, reliquo clerumque reducet
Ad statum primum semi renovat loca sancta.
[The times of Sextus will endure for three times three lustres and a half [. . .] in the middle he will
conquer much, turning towards the end of the second; in the remainder he will conquer the world,
he will lead the clergy back to their original state; in the half he will renew the holy places.] (My
translation from Cambridge, Gonville and Caius, MS 249/277, fol. 182 (third quarter of fifteenth
century, before 1468).)
36 Lesley Coote
London in the late twelfth century.22 Ralph utilized Ailred’s genealogy of Henry II
but augmented this, in his Abbreviationes chronicorum, with genealogies of the
counts of Anjou. The comital line contained no kings, but Ralph wished to stress
the kinglike qualities which Henry had inherited through the paternal line — an
instance of virtu, as in contemporary romances, being transmitted by blood.23 In
his Ymagines historiarum, Ralph utilizes Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Prophetiae Mer-
lini at three ‘key’ moments of contemporary dynastic history. The first is the cap-
ture of the King of Scots by Henry II at Richmond in 1174.24 Citing the line,
‘Dabitur maxillis eius frenum quod in armorico sinu fabricabitur’ (in her jaws will
be given a bit made in the bay of Armorica), Ralph claims that it refers to Rich-
mond, which had belonged since the Conquest to the counts of Britanny (Ar-
morica).25 This passage is reinterpreted later to refer to forced concessions made by
Henry to his son Richard, when Henry was also forced to do homage to Philip
Augustus of France for his French possessions.26 The next line of the prophecy
runs, ‘Deaurabit illud aquila rupti federis et tercia nidificatione gaudebit’ (The
Eagle of the broken covenant will paint it with gold and will rejoice in her third
nesting). Ralph applies this line to the investiture of Richard with the duchy of
Normandy on his father’s death in 1189 and his subsequent journey to receive the
crown of England. The Eagle, says Ralph, refers to Eleanor of Aquitaine, an em-
press due to the extent of her kingdom over France and England, and one who had
been a victim of bad faith on account of her divorce from her first husband and her
incarceration by her second. Her first son, William, had died in childhood, her
second son, Henry, had died before his father, and now she rejoiced in the eleva-
tion of her third son, Richard, to rule in his father’s Angevin, Norman, and English
possessions.27 The events thus interpreted as divinely preordained are all related to
the transfer of rule, of the possession of land, although they are linked to the
22
The Historical Works of Master Ralph de Diceto, Dean of London, ed. by William Stubbs,
Rolls Series, 2 vols (London: Trübner, 1876).
23
Leah Shopkow, History and Community: Norman History Writing in the Eleventh and
Twelfth Centuries (Washington DC : Catholic University of America Press, 1997), pp. 148–49.
24
Historical Works of Master Ralph de Diceto, ed. by Stubbs, I, 384.
25
Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britannie, vol. I: Bern, Bürgerbibliotek, MS 568, ed.
by Neil Wright (Cambridge: Brewer, 1984), p. 387. The whole passage refers to Albania (Scotland
in prophetic terminology) and her allies making war on her neighbours.
26
Historical Works of Master Ralph de Diceto, ed. by Stubbs, II, 64. The date was 28 June 1189.
27
Historical Works of Master Ralph de Diceto, ed. by Stubbs, II, 67. Ralph notes that the divorce
was on grounds of consanguinity. He ‘forgets’ to mention Eleanor and Henry’s complicity.
genealogical information which Ralph also provides.28 Ralph de Diceto not only
understood how historical memory works, he also demonstrates this in his provi-
sion of marginalia and supplementary material. Marginal symbols are used to desig-
nate a selection of topics which Ralph considered to be most important, including
the Norman and Angevin kings of England, the counts of Anjou, and the anoint-
ing of kings. He then provided a selection of additional material, designated Opus-
cula, or ‘little works’, by Stubbs. These materials include royal genealogies and king-
lists, as well as historical extracts, extracts from Geoffrey of Monmouth, and the
Prophetiae Merlini.29 This ‘filing system’ as Shopkow describes it, reveals Ralph’s
understanding of how history is ‘remembered’ (and ‘forgotten’). As Dean of St
Paul’s, Ralph occupied an important position, dealing with many powerful figures
in the political world, both ecclesiastical and secular. The arrangement of his work
has less to do with his administrative functions than with his need to understand
people and deal with them diplomatically. Put simply, Ralph understood his audi-
ence’s thought processes.30 He did not just select, record, and narrate history, he
aimed to determine how his material would be used in the making of future
collective memories. In his symbols and his Opuscula, he sought to provide
materials for memory and instructions on how they should be ‘read’.31
Did those who used such discourses in respect of national affairs make similar use
of prophecy and genealogy in their own — more localized — interests? There is
28
His supplementary material, the Opuscula, includes also a genealogy of William the Lion,
King of Scotland.
29
The symbols do not correspond exactly to the Opuscula: this may indicate that they never
did, or that not all the materials are extant. Alternatively, Ralph may have selected according to the
purpose of any particular manuscript or the circumstances of writing. Shopkow, History and
Community, pp. 144–45.
30
In twenty-first-century terms, he might be said to have understood ‘spin’.
31
In this, it would appear, he enjoyed considerable success. His own copy of the Abbreviationes,
Ymagines, and Opuscula (London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 8) was used by Edward I to bolster
his claims to sovereignty over Scotland. Another copy (London, British Library, MS Additional
400007) travelled to St Mary’s, York; another copy was later made for Oseney Abbey, Oxford
(London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A 9), and another for St Mary Overy, Southwark
(London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian A XXII). London, British Library, MS Cotton
Otho D VII is now fragmentary, but appears to have contained Opuscula, and to have belonged to
the priory of Lewes, whilst London, British Library, MS Cotton Claudius E VIII ended up in
Winchester. London, British Library, MS Royal 13 E VI was copied at St Albans and was used by
Roger of Wendover, Matthew Paris, and Thomas Walsingham, although this volume does not
contain the Opuscula.
38 Lesley Coote
very little evidence to demonstrate that they did, with one very notable exception.
The tale of Fouke FitzWaryn’s outlawry was originally written as an English
vernacular verse romance in the thirteenth century, although the only extant
version is an Anglo-Norman prose romance in the fourteenth-century, London,
British Library, MS Harley 2253.32 The action centres on the struggle over the pos-
session of Blanche Lande, identified as Whittington, on the Anglo-Welsh border
in Shropshire, and its castle of Blancheville. Fouke III, hero of the romance, was
outlawed in 1200, perhaps for killing his rival, Morys of Powys. The story tells how
William the Bastard (William I) went to subdue the Welsh marches, taking with
him Payn Peverel, ancestor of the Peveril family, who granted Whittington to the
FitzWaryns. At the Blanche Lande, Payn fights the Devil, who has been holding
the town, committing atrocities there. Payn defeats the Devil, who prophesies to
his conqueror with his last breath:
From your sleeve will issue the wolf who will do wonders, who will have sharp teeth and
be known by all. He will be so strong and fierce that he will drive the boar out of Blanche
Lande, so great will be his power. The leopard will chase the wolf and threaten it with its
tail. The wolf will leave the woods and the hills and dwell in the water with the fish. He
will cross the sea and circle this entire island. Finally he will overcome the leopard with his
cunning and his skill. Then he will come to this plain and make his home in the water.33
The Wolf is easily identifiable as wolf’s head, or outlaw, a reference to Fouke, and
the Leopard was usually understood as the King of England in political prophecies.
Fouke goes on to fulfil the terms of the prophecy (which was ex eventu, or written
after the event) by thwarting King John and regaining the possession of Whitting-
ton which John had awarded to Morys of Powys’s sons. At the end of the story,
when Fouke and his family have been re-established in their place in society, the
prophecy is reiterated, in order to emphasize its importance:
Merlin says that in Britain the Great a wolf will come from Blanche Lande. It will have
twelve sharp teeth, six below and six above. It will have such a fierce look that it will chase
the leopard away from Blanche Lande, such strength and power will it have. But we know
that Merlin said this about Fouke FitzWaryn [. . .].
The wolf came from this land, as the wise Merlin said, and we have recognized the
twelve sharp teeth by his shield. He carried a shield indented, as the heralds devised. On the
32
For more on this, see Studies in the Harley Manuscript: The Scribes, Contents, and Social
Contexts of British Library MS Harley 2253, ed. by Suzanne Fein, TEAMS (Kalamazoo: Medieval
Institute Publications, 2000).
33
Two Medieval Outlaws: Eustace the Monk and Fouke FitzWaryn, trans. by Glyn S. Burgess
(Cambridge: Brewer, 1997), p. 135.
shield are twelve teeth gules and argent. By the leopard King John can be recognized and
well understood, for he bore on his own shield the leopards of beaten gold.34
The context is similar to that of the original arbor viridis; the prophecy is being
used to justify the seizure of another man’s land and possessions by an invader.
Something more is going on, however. As the FitzWaryns are not tenants-in-chief,
Blanche Lande has been granted to them by another vassal family, in this case the
Peverils of Castleton. First of all, then, Payn Peverel, the Peveril ancestor, ‘wins’ the
Blanche Lande from the Devil, whom he defeats in combat. This presents Payn as
worthy. The motif is then repeated when Waryn of Metz, the FitzWaryn ancestor,
‘wins’ Blanche Lande in a tournament, along with the hand of Melette, niece of
William Peverel (son of the now-dead Payn). The family’s collective memory is
thus re-rehearsed, with a prominent genealogical element, supported by prophecy.
As with the green tree, the violence and plain theft of the post-Conquest years have
been ‘forgotten’, as have the Welsh, who also had a claim to the land. This is en-
hanced and supported by the story of Payn’s fight with the Devil, a triumph of
chivalry and virtue over evil, which portrays him as a liberator rather than an
occupier. Payn had absolutely no claim to this land, apart from conquest, and there
were others who did. The romance element calls upon reward for virtue and valour,
and a gift from divine grace, whilst the prophecy of Merlin ‘demonstrates’ that the
FitzWaryns, and their lords the Peverils, had a right to land, town, and castle
deriving from a source which predated the Saxon, let alone the Norman, conquest.
This conveniently, and brilliantly, removes the land’s pre-Conquest English
owners from the equation altogether; they can be so much more easily ‘forgotten’.
The fact that the family’s land, and therefore their power, has been granted by
grace of God and by forces outside human control overrides the power of the
monarch as grantor. William the Bastard makes the original grant to Payn and his
successors, but the King himself is acting out a preordained part in a narrative over
the outcome of which, ultimately, he has no control — it has, in Lacanian terms,
‘always already’ happened. Whittington has been the family’s possession since
before ‘English’ history existed. The Norman Conquest and the King’s grant are
in ‘reality’ the enactment of God’s will, a means to an inevitable end. The appropri-
ation of prophecy in this way for family purposes could, conceivably, be dangerous,
in that no ruler would be prepared to accept such a negation of their sovereign
power to make grants of the land in their possession. What is true for the ruler
cannot be also true for his subjects. It may be significant that the Peverils and the
FitzWaryns were Marcher lords, their lands and castles on the border between
34
Two Medieval Outlaws, trans. by Burgess, pp. 182–83.
40 Lesley Coote
England and Wales. The link between prophecy and family would have been desir-
able and useful in relation to their neighbours, the princes of Wales (in whose
vernacular culture the interaction between prophecy and family/dynasty was deep
rooted), and would also strengthen their position in contested, border areas where
their authority represented the king’s own. This may also have been true of the
Northern border, where the Percy family, earls of Northumberland and lords of
Holderness, had a keen interest in political prophecy and the family. Richard of
Gloucester (later Richard III) may have adopted his prophetic Boar badge in re-
sponse not only to his own political beliefs, but also to a localized culture in which
this form of political discourse was embedded.35 Away from the border country, it
may have been just too unwise for a subject to lay claim to a prophetic genealogy.
Alison Allan has indicated the genesis of a ‘genealogy industry’ in the reign of
Henry VI (1422–61, 1469–71). This was allied to an increase in literacy, liquid
capital, and leisure among the ‘middle’ strata of society. Standardized genealogical
trees were produced for clients with enough money to buy and enough leisure to
spend time perusing them.36 Allan maintains that the documents were taken out
and pored over in the company of friends and family — just like the photograph
album of Storey’s example. There was, of course, no such thing as ‘mass production’
in the modern sense of the term, but sufficient work appears to have been pro-
duced to provide evidence of a commercial imperative behind the production.
The genealogies which readers perused and commented upon at leisure were
carefully arranged. Henry IV (1399–1413) and Richard II (1377–99) were de-
picted side-by-side, like brothers, to encourage the ‘forgetting’ of the fact that
35
Lesley Coote and Tim Thornton, ‘Richard, Son of Richard: Richard III and Political
Prophecy’, Historical Research, 73 (2000), 323–30. Henry Percy, fourth Earl of Northumberland,
Richard’s ‘neighbour’ in the North, was the owner of MS Cotton Vespasian E VII, which contains
many prophetic texts, some highlighting the symbol of the Crescent Moon, the badge of Percy. For
the Cottonian manuscript, see Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, pp. 225–26, and Jonathan
Hughes, Arthurian Myths and Alchemy: The Kingship of Edward IV (Stroud: Sutton, 2002), pp.
122–61. Tim Thornton gives the example of the Cholmondeley family from Vale Royal, Cheshire,
and their association with the Nixon prophecies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Thorn-
ton, Prophecy, Politics and the People, pp. 114–22.
36
Alison Allan, ‘Yorkist Propaganda: Pedigree, Prophecy and the “British History” in the
Reign of Edward IV’, in Patronage, Pedigree and Power in Later Medieval England, ed. by Charles
Ross (Gloucester: Sutton, 1979), pp. 171–92. Other factors in book production were involved,
such as the introduction of paper (cheaper than parchment), the development of more efficient
working practices among scribes, and the increasing entrepreneurial role of stationers: Book
Production and Publishing, ed. by Griffiths and Pearsall, passim; G. Pollard, ‘The Company of
Stationers before 1557’, The Library, 4th series, 18 (1937), 1–37.
Richard had been deposed by Henry and probably murdered on his orders. A
similar strategy was employed in order to show Henry VI’s descent not only from
Brutus, but also from Saint Louis — a descent which made him, according to the
genealogists and the prophets, rightful King of France as well as England. This
claim was based on the marriage of his father Henry V and Catherine of Valois,
younger daughter of Charles VI of France, in 1420. According to the Treaty of
Troyes which accompanied the marriage, Henry and his heirs would succeed to
Charles’s kingdom on his death. Both men had died in 1422, and now that right
passed to Henry VI. What was ‘forgotten’ was the existence of Charles’s other chil-
dren, notably his eldest surviving son, now ‘Charles VII’ to his French supporters.37
This genealogy was supported by prophecies, many of which circulated during
Henry’s reign, exhibiting the narrative paradigm that ‘history is England-centred’.
In Oxford, King’s College, MS 43, the prophecy arbor fertilis (i.e. viridis) is placed
within a genealogy, glossed with the explanation that both the prophecy and the
genealogy represent Henry VI’s right to the French throne. The marriage of
Henry I and Edith has been neatly replaced by the marriage of Henry V and Cath-
erine, and the meaning of the bloodlines altered to suit present purposes. This is
a rare example of such usage of a prophecy in a medieval English genealogy.
The abundance of prophecies at the time is evidenced by the large number of
anthologies, additions, and marginalia in surviving fifteenth-century manuscripts.38
Many prophecies were dynastic. The Prophecy of Bridlington is a fourteenth-
century production from Bridlington Priory, in East Yorkshire. The text, which
had acquired a prestigious commentary from the Augustinian John Erghome some-
time between 1361 and 1372, had a strong genealogical and dynastic component.39
It foretold a great ruler who would conquer France and fulfil the ‘Sextus’ agenda.
For Erghome, this was the future rule of the Black Prince, eldest son of Edward III,
but the fact that this hero was the blood successor of Edward III had particular
resonance in the fifteenth century, when the heads of the Yorkist and Lancastrian
37
B. J. H. Rowe, ‘Henry VI’s Claim to France in Picture and Poem’, The Library, 4th series,
13 (1932), 77–88; Ralph Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI, 2nd edn (Stroud: Sutton, 1998),
pp. 217–28.
38
If the surviving copies of the Brut (Last Kings of the English) and the Historia regum Bri-
tannie (Prophecies of Merlin) are added, the total rises into the hundreds. See also the essays con-
tained in Readers and Writers of the Prose Brut, ed. by William Marx and Raluca Radulescu, special
issue, Trivium, 36 (2006).
39
It should now be accepted, although it frequently is not, that Erghome cannot have written
the prophetic verses himself. Arthur G. Rigg, ‘John of Bridlington’s Prophecy: A New Look’,
Speculum, 63 (1988), 596–613; Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, pp. 138–40.
42 Lesley Coote
branches of the Plantagenet family claimed the English throne through their
descent from Edward.40
The text frequently referred to by historians as The Last Kings of the English,
contained in the 1333 version of the Brut chronicle and its continuations, was a
very useful prophecy in the reign of Henry VI.41 Using animal imagery ultimately
derived from the Prophetiae Merlini to comment upon kings from Henry III to
Edward III, this text claimed that a great future ruler would be a Boar from Wind-
sor — a successor to Arthur, the Boar of Cornwall. The text proved extremely
influential. Many must have been aware of it, from their knowledge of the Brut,
available in the vernacular. Henry VI, probably by his prophecy-conscious father’s
contrivance, was also born at Windsor, thus making the Boar image fit him, too.
A passage from the prophecy states that the Boar ‘shal gete as miche as his ancestres
deden; & er pat he bene dede he shal bere iij crones’,42 an idea which gained a hold
on the political imagination when applied to Henry’s ‘Saint Louis’ genealogy.
Henry would wear the crown of England and France, and also of Scotland; as a
prophetic letter allegedly sent by Henry to the Sultan of Syria announces, he is
harry by þo grace of god kyng of Inglond and of France lord of Ierlond prynce of Walys
lord of Gyan and Gasquyn Erle of Derby Duke of Cornwayle Erle of Chester Duke of
Lancaster and conqueror of Scotland.43
Henry’s opponents also used prophecy and genealogy. A poem celebrating
Richard, duke of York’s triumphant return from Ireland (in the early September
of 1460), in a less than successful bid to claim the English throne, employs pro-
phetic imagery derived from the Prophecies of Merlin and its avatars in order to
introduce Richard’s illustrious offspring:
Of hym shall come an egil stowte
An aventurous bird full fayr of flight
and in many betels he shall fight
In unknowene landes with many bold knyght
All cristendom to him shall lowte.44
40
Richard, duke of York, was descended from Edward’s third son Lionel, duke of Clarence
(female line), whilst Henry IV, V, and VI were descended from Edward’s fourth son, John of Gaunt
(male line).
41
The Brut, or the Chronicles of England, ed. by Friedrich W. D. Brie, 2 vols, EETS OS, 131,
136 (London: Early English Text Society, 1906–08), I, 73–75.
42
The Brut, ed. by Brie, I, 74–75.
43
Aberdeen, University Library, MS 123, fol. 121r.
44
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 56, fol. 9v . In an embarrassing scene at Westminster,
York was forced to withdraw for lack of support. He did, however, succeed in gaining agreement
Most people would know that ‘eagle’ was an imperial image in prophecy, some would
know that it was one of York’s family badges, and a considerable number of others
would know that a self-proclaimed deliverer whose antecedents came over the sea
bore a resemblance to the hero of the Prophecy of the Eagle, and to other ‘eagle’
characters (such as the eagle of the broken covenant — and did Henry VI not break
a treaty with York and his sons, leading to York’s death?) in the Prophetiae Merlini.45
After his father’s execution in 1460, prophecy and genealogy featured heavily
in Edward of York’s campaign to oust Henry VI, which succeeded in 1461. Despite
his genealogical claims and the weakness of King Henry, Edward’s cause was funda-
mentally weak in that he was seeking to dethrone a crowned and anointed king, so
every possible means of propaganda support had to be utilized. The basis for Ed-
ward’s claim, his superior bloodline, was set out in the magnificent genealogy made
to commemorate his coronation as Edward IV in 1461.46 What is interesting about
the document is that it also highlights, in text and image, Edward’s claim to the
Boar’s three crowns, in this case England, France, and Spain, to which the family
of York claimed an entitlement.47 The ‘three crowns’ claim is also represented
pictorially, with a genealogy, in London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian
E VII.48 These are exceptions: most genealogies produced in Edward IV’s reign
simply add Yorkist roundels to what might be described as the standard format.
The ultimate in prophetic ‘overload’ is represented by the text frequently named
by scribes as The King Who Will Find the Holy Cross. This simply provides a list of
prophets and the names or titles of the prophetic hero they foretell, culminating
in the revelation that his name, according to Mahomet, is Edward.49 A prophetic
for his ultimate succession to the throne on the death of Henry VI; see Griffiths, Reign of King
Henry VI, pp. 854–82.
45
25 October 1460: Griffiths, Reign of King Henry VI, pp. 868–69.
46
Philadelphia, Free Library, MS E 201; also London, British Library, MS Additional 18286 A;
see Hughes, Arthurian Myths and Alchemy, pp. 128–40.
47
See Anthony Goodman and David Morgan, ‘The Yorkist Claim to the Throne of Castile’,
Journal of Medieval History, 11 (1985), 61–69. Edward also claimed to be more ‘British’ than
Henry, as one of his Mortimer ancestors had married into the family of Llewellyn the Great.
48
Fols 70 and 71.
49
Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 249/227; Cambridge, Trinity College, MS
R 3 21; Cambridge, University Library, MS Gg IV 25; Dublin, Trinity College, MS 516; London,
British Library, MS Cotton Cleopatra D III, MS Harley 1337; London, College of Arms, Arundel
MS 29; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 56, MS Lyell 35; Oxford, University College, MS
XCVII.
44 Lesley Coote
propaganda tract from the years 1469–71, when Edward was forced to flee to the
Continent and reinvade the realm due to the (temporary) reinstatement of
Henry VI, utilizes Geoffrey of Monmouth:
Item this lord with his children eyres that were drevyn of this lond be owre lawis of con-
quest. Contrys to goddis lawis yet god hath done as the Aungell seyd [. . .] the seyd Relikes
and Eyres of Cadwalladrus bodi from Rome by the Pope is power. And blessyth all those
that holpith in his right [. . .]. And the lod schall be called Bretayn a gen dowtles. Amen.50
The author is referring to the closing narrative of the Historia regum Britanniae,
in which Cadwallader is told by the angelic voice that his heirs will return to rule
Britain. The reference is somewhat imprecise — the original ‘Relikes’ were holy
relics which the King was taking with him on his final pilgrimage to Rome. Here
they seem to refer to King Edward and his children, as the remnants of the British
line. As with the Eagle verses, the Holy Cross text, and others, it is the impression
of accuracy which is important. This appears to be less an indication that the
writer/editor did not know the works referred to (although this may have been the
case), and more that the audience sought was a wide one. This wider audience
would be aware of the general content, or of selected areas of the original source
text, but their knowledge probably went no further than that.
What all these examples demonstrate is that by the middle of the fifteenth cen-
tury the development begun in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had resulted
in collective memories which were saturated in discourses of genealogy, prophecy,
and history. These memories, including their ‘forgettings’, were in part formed by
groups of people — families, friends, acquaintances, neighbours, patrons — sitting
around a genealogical tree. In this situation they would rehearse their own knowl-
edge of, and participation in, the history connected with the document. This
would include prophecies, the remembrances of personages, living and dead, maybe
quotations from the Bible or from romance, and other narratives which they con-
sidered to be appropriate to the debate, the renegotiation of memory, arising from
what they saw on the page. These discourses were allowed to blend together to
form a political consciousness permeating all levels of literate society. It was on
these discourses that rulers and claimants post-1399 found it both easy and
desirable to draw, in order to stimulate the renegotiation of collective memories,
and thus of power relations, on a national scale.
50
Norwich, Norfolk Record Office, MS Bradfer–Lawrence Xa/15, verso of front wrapper.
A N EW P ATTERN FOR E NGLISH H ISTORY: T HE F IRST
G ENEALOGICAL R OLLS OF THE K INGS OF E NGLAND
Olivier de Laborderie
I
n the last three decades of the thirteenth century a new kind of anonymous
historical narrative, written primarily in Anglo-Norman prose and entirely de-
voted to national history, appeared in England; its originality lay in the use of
the roll format with the layout of the text around a central — and often illustrated
— genealogical diagram.1 Unlike the genealogical rolls of the kings of England
produced in the fifteenth century,2 those written between the end of Henry III’s
1
My doctoral thesis is a study of these rolls: ‘“Ligne de reis”: culture historique, représentation
du pouvoir royal et construction de la mémoire nationale en Angleterre à travers les généalogies
royals en rouleau du milieu du XIIIe siècle au début du XV e siècle’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Paris,
EHESS, 2002).
2
The fifteenth-century genealogical rolls have been studied by Alison Allan in her doctoral
thesis, ‘Political Propaganda Employed by the House of York in England in the Mid-Fifteenth
Century, 1450–1471’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Wales (Swansea), 1981), and in
her two articles, ‘Yorkist Propaganda: Pedigree, Prophecy and the “British History” in the Reign
of Edward IV’, in Patronage, Pedigree and Power in Later Medieval England, ed. by Charles Ross
(Gloucester: Sutton, 1979), pp. 171–92, and ‘Royal Propaganda and the Proclamations of Ed-
ward IV’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 59 (1986), 146–54. Ralph A. Griffiths has
also examined these rolls in his ‘The Sense of Dynasty in the Reign of Henry VI’, in Patronage,
Pedigree and Power, ed. by Ross, pp. 13–36, and ‘The Crown and the Royal Family in Later
Medieval England’, in Kings and Nobles in the Late Middle Ages: A Tribute to Charles Ross, ed. by
Ralph A. Griffiths and James Sherborne (Gloucester: Allan Sutton, 1986), pp. 15–26; and by Syd-
ney Anglo, ‘The “British History” in Early Tudor Propaganda, with an Appendix of Manuscript
Pedigrees of the Kings of England, Henry VI to Henry VIII’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library,
44 (1961), 17–48. Also see Edward Donald Kennedy, Chronicles and Other Historical Writing, vol.
VIII of A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050–1500, gen. ed. Albert E. Hartung (New
Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1989), pp. 2674–79, 2888–91.
46 Olivier de Laborderie
reign and the end of that of Henry V have not been accorded much attention by
historians until recently. However, three of them were edited as long ago as 1872
by the antiquarian Thomas Wright, who quite rightly considered them ‘feudal
manuals of English history’.3 This lack of interest can be explained partly by the
fact that their number was long underestimated, but in fact it is primarily due to
their historical value having been underrated. During the last thirty years, some
historians of Anglo-Norman literature, especially Ruth Dean and Diana Tyson,4
and some art historians, particularly William Monroe,5 have looked into them
more carefully. However, none of them really studied the texts themselves, and no
historian took much interest in their possible political meaning. Moreover, the
only roll to have been exhibited several times, especially in the superb 1987 Age of
Chivalry exhibition in London,6 is Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley Roll 3, un-
doubtedly one of the most beautiful, but nonetheless an atypical example for a
number of reasons. Firstly, it contains a long pictorial narrative of the Trojan War
and of the arrival of Brutus and his companions in Albion; secondly, it presents the
succession of the British and English kings not in the usual form, of a descending
genealogical ‘tree’, but in horizontal rows of unconnected roundels.
In From Memory to Written Record, Michael Clanchy, who mentioned the rolls
when discussing lay literacy, suggested that they would constitute interesting ma-
terial for medievalists who wish to explore historical culture in medieval England
and seek a better understanding of how literate men and women in England saw
3
Feudal Manuals of English History, ed. by Thomas Wright (London: J. Mayer, 1872).
4
Ruth J. Dean with Maureen B. M. Boulton, Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and
Manuscripts, Anglo-Norman Text Society Occasional Publications Series, 3 (London: Anglo-
Norman Text Society, 1999); Diana B. Tyson, ‘Handlist of Manuscripts Containing the French
Prose Brut Chronicle’, Scriptorium, 48 (1994), 333–44; Tyson, ‘The Old-French Brut Rolls in the
London College of Arms’, in Guerres, voyages et quêtes au Moyen Âge: mélanges offerts à Jean-Claude
Faucon, ed. by Alain Labbé, Daniel W. Lacroix, and Danielle Quéruel (Paris: Champion, 2000),
pp. 421–27; and Tyson, ‘The Manuscript Tradition of Old French Prose Brut Rolls’, Scriptorium,
55 (2001), 107–18.
5
W. H. Monroe, ‘Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Century Illustrated Genealogical Manu-
scripts in Roll and Codex: Peter of Poitiers’ Compendium, Universal Histories and Chronicles of
the Kings of England’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London, Courtauld Institute of
Art, 1990), and Monroe, ‘Two Medieval Genealogical Roll-Chronicles in the Bodleian Library’,
Bodleian Library Record, 10 (1981), 215–21.
6
Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England, 1200–1400, ed. by Jonathan Alexander and Paul
Binski (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson / Royal Academy of Arts, 1987), pp. 200–01.
A NEW PATTERN FOR ENGLISH HISTORY 47
their monarchy and their own past.7 As Bernard Guenée has repeatedly emphasized,
historical culture and political mentalities are inseparably linked,8 so that the anal-
ysis of historiography and historical culture is one of the best ways to understand
not only common political thought, but even, to some degree, political behaviour.
The way people saw their past inevitably conditioned, consciously or not, their
behaviour, especially when confronted with a major political crisis. From this point
of view, such documents as these historical digests — apparently devoid of interest
and even boring — can constitute a precious source for what Jacques Le Goff
suggested calling ‘political historical anthropology’ of the Middle Ages.9
A New and Expanding Historical Literature
If one is interested in historical culture — and not only in historical writing — it

is essential to try to estimate the impact of a historical work. The best way to do it,
even if it is inevitably imperfect, is to take into account the number of surviving
manuscripts of the historical work studied. From this point of view, a major work
written by a great historian preserved in only one manuscript is less significant —
except if it was very influential — than an anonymous, ordinary, and barren his-
torical digest which has been preserved in some twenty manuscripts. The quantity
of manuscripts is more important here than the quality of the work.10
During the research for my thesis, I found forty genealogical rolls of the kings
of England produced between the last year of the reign of Henry III (at the earliest)
and the death of Henry V in 1422. According to Bernard Guenée’s model,11 the
number of extant manuscripts indicates the popularity of the historical text con-
tained in them. It was, of course, far less popular than the three ‘best-sellers’ of
medieval English historical literature, Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum,
7
Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307, 2nd edn (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1993), plate 13.
8
Bernard Guenée, Histoire et culture historique dans l’Occident medieval, 2nd edn (Paris:
Aubier-Montaigne, 1991), pp. 332–56; see also Guenée, Politique et histoire au Moyen Âge: recueil
d’articles sur l’histoire politique et l’historiographie médiévale (1965–1981) (Paris: Publications de
la Sorbonne, 1981), for instance pp. 195–96, 341, 369.
9
Jacques Le Goff, ‘Is Politics Still the Backbone of History?’, Daedalus (Winter 1971), 1–19,
reprinted in French translation in L’Imaginaire médieval (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), pp. 333–49.
10
Guenée, Histoire et culture historique, pp. 248–58.
11
Guenée, Histoire et culture historique, p. 255.
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, and the Anglo-Norman and

English versions of the prose Brut (respectively 160, at least 215, and about 230
manuscripts), or even Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, among the most successful
works in fourteenth-century English historical literature.12 But the genealogical
narrative contained in the rolls survives in more manuscripts than almost any other
known contemporary historical work (that is to say written between 1250 and
1350), written either in Latin (Flores Historiarum, Nicholas Trevet’s Annales Sex
Regum Angliae), in Anglo-Norman (Peter of Langtoft’s verse chronicle, Nicholas
Trevet’s Cronicles), or in Middle English (Robert of Gloucester’s verse chronicle):
none of these works is preserved in more than twenty manuscripts. The only
comparable near-contemporary competitor is the Anglo-Norman prose Brut, but
this title actually covers some very different (in length and sometimes content) and
not always related texts; to date it is still difficult to evaluate the success of the Brut
(stricto sensu) before the mid-fourteenth century.13
Like the Brut, the genealogical rolls do not represent, strictly speaking, a single
historical work, but rather a historical genre. Even if we leave aside five rolls which
significantly differ from the most common type in content as well as in design (but
were nonetheless certainly influenced by it), there are still thirty-five which belong
to the same family and reproduce, at least in part, the same genealogical diagram
and the same commentary (with inevitable variants). What is more, most of these
genealogical rolls were produced during a short period of time: at least thirty-one
out of the forty were produced between 1271 and 1327; thirty-two, possibly thirty-
three, before the mid-fourteenth century. Such an increase in numbers seems to
indicate a surge of interest in this type of narrative and its accompanying display.
Consequently, it can be argued that the genealogical narrative in these rolls
enjoyed a short-lived success, but such an assertion has to be qualified. The genea-
logical rolls obviously did not share the enduring popularity of the Brut during the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: only one translation of the genealogical narra-
tive survives in Middle English, and it represents a very late and much abridged
version of the Anglo-Norman original. Clearly this first generation of rolls went
out of fashion during the second quarter of the fourteenth century, in spite of a
brief and limited revival at the very end of the fourteenth century and during the
early decades of the fifteenth (seven or eight rolls were made between 1397 and
12
Around 120 manuscripts; see John Taylor, The Universal Chronicle of Ranulf Higden
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966).
13
Tyson, ‘Handlist’; The Oldest Anglo-Norman Prose ‘Brut’ Chronicle: An Edition and Trans-
lation, ed. and trans. by Julia Marvin (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), Chapter 1.
1422). One reason for this fluctuation in production levels might be the political
shock caused by Edward II’s deposition in 1327. But their decline is probably also
due to the fact that these rolls no longer fulfilled the literate public’s aspirations for
a lively and colourful account of national history. Many continuations (of variable
length) or other texts were later added onto several of those rolls, in some cases well
into the fifteenth century (see London, British Library, MS Additional 29504 and
Cambridge University Library, MS Dd III 58 for instance), which shows that they
were not discarded by their owners. These rolls clearly influenced new kinds of
royal pedigrees produced during the reigns of Henry VI and Edward IV.
Another way to assess the extent of the rolls’ success is to try to determine their
spatial and social diffusion. Even though few details about their geographical ori-
gins survive, and on the basis of such scarce linguistic evidence as displayed in the
narrative, the rolls appear to have enjoyed widespread dissemination, particularly
in northern and eastern parts of England.14 In any case, they were not confined to
a specific region, unlike the Flores Historiarum (south of England) or Langtoft’s
chronicle (north of England). We know that one or perhaps two rolls were in
Norwich in the early fourteenth century;15 another was in York and its twin-roll
was certainly made somewhere in Yorkshire;16 another was probably made in Dur-
ham;17 another could be linked with Hailes Abbey;18 some other rolls were appar-
ently made in London or Westminster, since they refer extensively to London
events (as does London, British Library, Harley Roll C. 10) or were decorated by
artists active in the London-Westminster area (for instance Oxford, Bodleian
Library, MS Broxbourne 112 3 and London, British Library, Cotton Roll XV 7).19
14
This conclusion is drawn following the method used for the manuscripts of Peter of
Langtoft’s chronicle by Jean-Claude Thiolier, Pierre de Langtoft: le règne d’Édouard Ier (Créteil:
Université de Paris XII, 1989), I, 39, 45, 81, 90, 94, 105, 125; Thiolier relies on the different
regional spellings of some English place-names, for instance those ending with -beri, -biri, or -buri.
15
London, British Library, MS Additional 30079 (ex dono of Ralph of Fretenham, see note 20
below) and London, British Library, Harley Roll C. 7 (unusual account of the 1272 Norwich
disorders).
16
See Monroe, ‘Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Century Illustrated Genealogical Manu-
scripts’, pp. 332–33.
17
London, British Library, MS Additional 29504, where there are several unusual references
to St Cuthbert and to the bishops of Durham.
18
Cambridge, Emmanuel College, MS 232, which mentions its foundation by Richard of
Cornwall and the burial of Richard and his wife Sanchia in the abbey.
19
See Monroe, ‘Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Century Illustrated Genealogical Manu-
scripts’, pp. 320–21.
With regard to the audience for these rolls, it may safely be said it was a large
one. Once again, little information is available about the owners of the rolls, except
for some that belonged to religious communities at some point (cathedral priories,
abbeys).20 Apart from London, British Library, MS Additional 47170 (which was
in the Benedictine abbey of Peterborough in the second quarter of the fourteenth
century, but could have been originally made for a lay owner elsewhere) and Cam-
bridge, Emmanuel College, MS 232 (which could have belonged to the Cistercian
abbey of Hailes), both written in Anglo-Norman, the other rolls possessed by
religious communities were written in Latin and are not, in this respect, represen-
tative of the whole corpus (twenty-eight rolls are in Anglo-Norman, compared
with only ten in Latin and two in Middle English). It would be an exaggeration to
consider Anglo-Norman works as intended exclusively for a lay audience, but it
seems likely that most Anglo-Norman rolls had a lay readership. That appears to
be corroborated by the kind of texts that were sometimes copied on the verso of the
rolls, which generally denote lay (and even aristocratic) tastes: short rolls of arms,
treatises on heraldry or chess, the Anglo-Norman romance of Amadas et Ydoine,
an account of the battle of Evesham, and so on.21 This impression is confirmed by
the fact that the commentary in these rolls contains a celebration of chivalric values
and emphasis placed on the ‘barnage’, and also by the importance given to military
events in all the continuations. The rolls display a wide range of decoration, from
those without even a single decorated letter or rubricated paragraph-marks to those
that are copiously and richly illustrated (with the use of gold leaf) and were, no
doubt, luxury manuscripts. Most owners were probably members of the aristocracy,
and the manuscripts belonged to a whole range of its members, from country
gentry to peers, possibly including the king himself. As the text contains unex-
pected praise for Aethelfled, King Alfred’s daughter, presented as the model for all
laywomen, it may be said that the owners and readers of these rolls could be women
20
For instance, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley Roll 3 belonged to St Mary’s Abbey, at York,
at the beginning of the fourteenth century (see Monroe, ‘Two Medieval Genealogical Roll-
Chronicles’, p. 221); BL, MS Additional 30079 was at the cathedral priory of Norwich at the same
time (see Neil Ripley Ker, Books, Collectors and Libraries: Studies in the Medieval Heritage (Lon-
don: Hambledon Press, 1985), pp. 250 and 256); and London, British Library, MS Additional
47170 was in the Benedictine abbey of Peterborough in the first half of the fourteenth century
(Neil Ripley Ker, Medieval Libraries of Great Britain: A List of Surviving Books, 2nd edn (London:
Royal Historical Society, 1964), p. 151).
21
For different examples, see Olivier de Laborderie, John R. Maddicott, and David A. Car-
penter, ‘The Last Hours of Simon de Montfort: A New Account’, English Historical Review, 115
(2000), 378–412, especially p. 383, n. 1.
as well as men. In short, the genealogical rolls probably reached a wider audience
than most other contemporary historical works and perhaps functioned as a sort
of first standard history of England among political elites before the success of the
Anglo-Norman and then Middle English prose Brut.
An Innovative Design for a Short Guide to English History
The main reason for this success is undoubtedly the unusual design of these short
guides to English history. And the credit for it has to be given to the great historian
of St Albans Abbey, Matthew Paris. The earliest model for all the genealogical rolls
was the Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi written and designed by Peter of
Poitiers at the University of Paris in the late twelfth century in order to help students
of theology memorize biblical history.22 Poitiers’s compendium enjoyed widespread
popularity in France, Italy, and England from the beginning of the thirteenth
century onwards. Matthew Paris was apparently the first historian to adapt this
model not only to secular history but to a single royal genealogy (there were already
some universal chronicles in several columns derived from the Compendium model
in the first half of the thirteenth century). In France this kind of transposition did
not occur before the end of the thirteenth century with the Chronique abrégée
written in Latin by Guillaume de Nangis (who soon translated it into French) and,
some decades later, with the Gesta regum Francorum of Yves de Saint-Denis and
the Arbor genealogiae regum Francorum of Bernard Gui.23 Matthew Paris may have
been a conservative historian, full of prejudices, but he certainly was skilful,
inventive, and aware of the importance of images. Nobody before him had thought
of presenting English history in the form of a genealogical diagram together with
a short commentary. It is not at all certain that the final version of this genealogy
by Matthew Paris has come down to us, but at least five ‘prototypes’ of genealogical
chronicles, still unpublished, have been preserved, four in separate autograph
manuscripts and one copied by his friend John of Wallingford.24 All of them were
22
See Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, L’ombre des ancêtres: essai sur l’imaginaire médiéval de la
parenté (Paris: Fayard, 2000), pp. 121–37; Germain Butaud and Valérie Piétri, Les Enjeux de la
généalogie(XIIe– XVIIIe siècle): pouvoir et identité (Paris: Autrement, 2006), pp. 31–41.
23
For these different French royal genealogies, see Colette Beaune, Le miroir du pouvoir (Paris:
Hervas, 1989), pp. 146–50.
24
Matthew Paris’s genealogies are preserved in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 26,
fol. IV v and fol. VIIIr–v; Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 16, fol. IIIr–v; and London, British
written before 1259, and none of them is the direct model of the genealogical rolls
produced from 1271 onwards (either in Latin or in Anglo-Norman). Nonetheless,
they already share many features with the later rolls. In particular, Matthew Paris
was the first to combine a circular diagram of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy (three
such diagrams were already drawn in other manuscripts of the first half of the thir-
teenth century) with a genealogy of the kings of England. He was also the first to
use a genealogical diagram to shed light on the royal Anglo-Saxon origins of the
Plantagenet dynasty through Edith/Mathilda, Henry I’s wife, and her mother, St
Margaret, wife of King Malcolm III of Scotland. This had been emphasized as early
as 1154 by Ailred of Rievaulx in his Genealogia regum Anglorum, which was dedi-
cated to the future Henry II, but not in genealogical form. Matthew Paris was also
one of the first to use a series of pictures (with captions or not) of kings in majesty
(enthroned, with various symbols of kingship) as a way of summarizing English
history. Finally, he was the first to use symbols and emblems as a means of identifi-
cation of the different kings, transposing to the depiction of kings a device that had
long been in use in the visual arts for the depiction of saints.25
Apart from textual divergences, some important differences remain between
Matthew Paris’s royal genealogies and later genealogical rolls. First, Matthew’s all
begin with King Alfred, as is the case in only three genealogical rolls, all in Latin:
Princeton University Library, MS 57, Cambridge, University Library, MS Dd III 59,
and one of the two genealogies copied on BL, Harley Roll C. 7. All other
genealogical rolls begin with Egbert or — in a later modification — with Brutus.
Secondly, they are all in Latin, whereas three quarters of the genealogical rolls are
in Anglo-Norman. Thirdly, the ancestry of William the Conqueror is never shown.
Finally, only some medallions are illustrated, whereas sixteen out of the forty
genealogical rolls have all the royal medallions illustrated, even the children’s
medallions (except in the Princeton roll).26
However, it is not inconceivable that Matthew Paris himself illustrated and
translated at some point one or the other of his Latin genealogies, making some
modifications in the process. We know that he wrote some works in Anglo-
Library, MS Cotton Claudius D VI, fols 5v and 10v –12r. John of Wallingford’s genealogy is pre-
served in London, British Library, MS Cotton Julius D VII, fols 46v –59v .
25
For all these innovations, see Suzanne Lewis, The Art of Matthew Paris in the ‘Chronica
Majora’ (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1987).
26
A ‘standard’ illustrated roll had between 120 and 130 illustrated medallions; see for instance
Alixe Bovey, The Chaworth Roll: A Fourteenth-Century Genealogy of the Kings of England (London:
Sam Fogg, 2005), pp. 6–7.
Norman, especially saints’ lives. In particular, he has been generally credited with
the authorship of La Estoire de Seint Aedward le Rei, a work dedicated to Eleanor
of Provence, Henry III’s wife. Indeed, in two of his Latin genealogies he alludes to
such a book, which seems to strengthen this hypothesis.27 Thus Matthew may have
written an Anglo-Norman genealogy as a sort of appendix to the Estoire, and later
on, between Henry III’s death in 1272 and her own in 1291, Henry’s widow took
the initiative in commissioning the copying and distribution of Anglo-Norman
rolls in the royal circle. We know that Eleanor remained influential, especially in
family matters, even after she entered the convent of Amesbury (linked with the
French abbey of Fontevraud). And she set herself up as the guardian of the memory
of her late husband, whose canonization she hoped for.28 Indeed, one Anglo-
Norman continuation, in London, British Library, MS Royal 14 B VI, mentions
that she became a nun at Amesbury and spent the rest of her life there; four other
continuations mention that her granddaughter Mary (to whom Nicholas Trevet
later dedicated his Anglo-Norman Cronicles) was also a nun there (one of them,
Cambridge, University Library, MS Oo VII 32, even contains an addition that
states that she led a saintly life there). This could be one of the ways the genea-
logical rolls (particularly Anglo-Norman ones) were disseminated during the first
half of Edward I’s reign.
Be that as it may, the success of the genealogical rolls is due less to particular
circumstances (even if some were clearly prompted by Scottish affairs after the
Norham conference of 1292) than to their intrinsic qualities: concision, clarity, in-
tensive use of visual aids, reliability of the information (mainly borrowed, through
Matthew Paris, from Bede, Henry of Huntingdon, William of Malmesbury, Ailred
of Rievaulx, Ralph de Diceto, and Roger of Wendover), and finally, in the case of
illustrated rolls, attractiveness of the presentation. All these characteristics were
particularly appropriate for a work probably intended, first and foremost, for ‘lay-
men of restricted literacy’.29 These ‘aides-mémoire’ of English history filled a gap
in historical literature and satisfied the enduring passion of English people for
national history at a time of growing literacy. However, their function was not just
27
Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 26, fol. 8r, and BL, MS Cotton Claudius D VI,
v
fol. 11 .
28
David A. Carpenter, The Reign of Henry III (London: Hambledon, 1996), pp. 423–24, and
Margaret Howell, Eleanor of Provence: Queenship in Thirteenth-Century England (Oxford: Black-
well, 1998), pp. 298–306.
29
Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, p. 142; and Jean-Philippe Genet, La genèse de
l’État moderne: culture et société politique en Angleterre (Paris: PUF, 2003), pp. 113–17 and 348–54.
didactic, and they were certainly not school textbooks intended for display on
classroom walls as has sometimes been assumed. More importantly, they contrib-
uted to shaping the perception of the monarchy and of the national past.
An Ambiguous Representation of Kingship
Generally, royal genealogies aimed at strengthening dynastic consciousness and at

asserting the legitimacy of either a dynasty or an individual king, especially when
this legitimacy was dubious or questioned by some of the king’s subjects. For
instance, this was clearly the case of the many royal genealogies produced during
Edward IV’s reign. In the case of the genealogical rolls which began to spread
during the reign of Edward I, there was no obvious threat to the royal dynasty. On
the contrary, Edward I’s legitimacy was so secure that he spent almost two years
abroad before returning to England to be crowned after his father’s death. These
rolls aimed to increase the prestige of the monarchy by emphasizing the English-
ness of the kings of England since the marriage of Henry I with Edith/Mathilda.
This seems to be the main reason for their having been produced. The pictorial
display and accompanying narrative allowed the Plantagenets to appear as the
descendants — and not only the successors — of the Anglo-Saxon kings who had
reigned in England from Egbert to Edmund Ironside. The narrative represents a
sort of ‘reditus ad stirpem Edgari regis’,30 very similar to the ‘reditus regni ad
stirpem Karoli magni’ worked out on behalf of the Capetian dynasty in thirteenth-
century French historiography.31 The benefit that the Plantagenets could derive
from such a text was even greater since they had to overcome the handicap of being
the descendants of William the Conqueror, a king who was not only a usurper (if
Edgar Aetheling was regarded as the rightful heir to Edward the Confessor, which
is the case in the rolls) but also a conqueror of foreign origin.
At first sight, then, the genealogical rolls seem to celebrate the royal blood and
to present Edward I as the descendant of a long line of great and virtuous kings.
30
It is interesting to note that, in the commentary, Edgar is shown as a precursor of the great
saint of the dynasty, the childless Edward the Confessor (who obviously could not have been
presented as a genuine ancestor), and is even considered as a saint himself, though not canonized.
31
On the reditus, see Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ‘The Reditus Regni ad Stirpem Karoli Magni: A New
Look’, French Historical Studies, 7 (1971), 145–74; and, among many articles on the subject, Eliza-
beth A. R. Brown, ‘Vincent de Beauvais and the Reditus Regni Francorum ad Stirpem Caroli Impe-
ratoris’, in Vincent de Beauvais: intentions et receptions d’une œuvre encyclopédique au Moyen Âge, ed.
by Monique Paulmier-Foucart, Serge Lusignan, and Alain Nadeau (Paris: Vrin, 1990), pp. 167–96.
Indeed, most kings are portrayed in a favourable light and embody different aspects
of ideal kingship. This exaltation of kingship is even more striking in the illustrated
rolls, where the kings are depicted in full majesty in the roundels of the diagram,32
giving to each medallion the appearance of the Great Seal, the supreme expression
of royal authority. Even though it would be excessive to consider the genealogical
rolls as official histories, this characteristic could confer to them, in the readers’
eyes, the status of an authorized version of English history. This impression would
be reinforced by the use of the roll format, already adopted for numerous govern-
ment records.
To some extent these rolls reflected current royal ideology. It is certainly true
that this ideology lacked the coherence of its French counterpart,33 but this is not
a reason to deny it any role or effect. During the reigns of Henry III and Edward I,
this ideology developed along four main lines: the assertion of the sacred nature of
the royal office; the acknowledgement of the Anglo-Saxon roots of royal author-
ity;34 the appropriation of the prestige of ancient British kings such as Brutus,
Constantine, or Arthur; and the promotion of values, especially chivalric values,
shared by the king and his aristocracy. So, in more than one way, the genealogical
rolls could help enhance the prestige of the Plantagenet dynasty.
There are some aspects of form and content of the rolls which have implications
that are not so favourable to the royal dynasty. First, these apparent genealogies are
not really genealogies, in spite of their obvious design. They do not trace the story
of a single lineage, but recall all the kings who have succeeded one another from the
Heptarchy onwards, whether they belonged to the ‘legitimate’ royal line or not.
From this point of view, the choice of the roll as the physical form of these gene-
alogies seems paradoxical, since it inconveniently stressed the many breaks in the
royal succession. In a way, the roll would have been more appropriate for a history
of the French dynasty, an unbroken line from father to son since Hugues Capet.
If hereditary succession in the male line was the cornerstone of legitimacy, then all
kings of England between the death of Edmond Ironside in 1016 and the accession
of Henry II in 1154 had been usurpers, with the sole exception of Edward the
32
In one case only, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 38, the kings are portrayed in the
left and right margins, rather than in the central diagram.
33
Jean-Philippe Genet, ‘La monarchie anglaise: une image brouillée’, in Représentation, pouvoir
et royauté à la fin du Moyen Âge, ed. by Joël Blanchard (Paris: Picard, 1995), pp. 93–107.
34
See Michael Clanchy, England and its Rulers, 1066–1272, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell,
1998), pp. 163–65 and 203–05, and Paul Binski, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets: Kingship
and the Representation of Power, 1200–1400 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
Confessor. Furthermore, the Plantagenets had a lesser right to the English crown
than the kings of Scotland, who were also descended from St Margaret, but in the
male line, until the death of Alexander III in 1286. The impression of repeated
disruptions can only be strengthened when looking at the rolls which have the
genealogy of the British kings from Brutus to Cadwallader added at the beginning.
Thus the effect of the rolls was to undermine the apparent foundation of royal
legitimacy.
Second, according to the commentary in the rolls, to have royal blood was not
a sufficient guarantee that a king would meet the requirements of his office: the
three worst kings of the genealogy, Edwin (Edgar’s elder brother), William Rufus,
and John, were all the rightful heirs of their immediate predecessors,35 and yet they
failed to rule their kingdom righteously. Conversely, some usurpers such as Wil-
liam the Conqueror (in his case, the reason is obvious), Cnut, or even, at least in
some rolls, Stephen, are portrayed as good kings. Notably, in the illustrated rolls,
none of the usurpers is denied royal dignity in the images, not even Harold or the
Danish kings.36
In fact genealogical rolls function to a large extent as ‘mirrors of princes’ and
not only as historical abstracts. They offered to the reader a gallery of moral and
political models for the current king. As such they acted as a double-edged sword.
It is probably not fortuitous that we find in three rolls written between 1321 and
1327 — that are also the first rolls to represent Thomas of Lancaster, the chief
leader of the baronial opposition to Edward II — a Wheel of Fortune explicitly
warning kings against the vanity and instability of earthly power.37 Was it not a
veiled threat to Edward II, who is portrayed in all continuations that cover his
reign as having been influenced by evil counsellors and as having abused his power?
Finally, the genealogical rolls are a sort of compromise between royal ideology and
the elite’s political aspirations, an arrangement likely to satisfy both the king and
his most influential subjects. Such a compromise could help enhance the image of
English monarchy, but it exalted the royal function more than the royal blood. It was
based on the underlying assumption that the true legitimate king was the king who
exerted his power righteously and came up to his subjects’ expectations (at least
those of the ‘major et sanior pars’), guaranteeing them justice, peace, order, and
35
It is interesting to note that very few rolls mention the existence of Arthur of Brittany.
36
In some rolls even Swegn is given royal status with his own medallion placed before the
medallion of his son Cnut.
37
Bovey, Chaworth Roll, pp. 14–17 and 37.
possibly glory. Neither blood nor unction was the sole source of legitimacy.38 This
is the meaning of the passage about the way of numbering the homonymous kings,
Henry the Young King being not considered a king, in spite of blood and unction.
This unusual implicit conception of legitimacy put the emphasis on the con-
tractual link between king and subjects; the coronation oath was generally quoted
in the last two or three entries of the original commentary (for Richard I, John, and
Henry III), generally indicating whether this oath was fulfilled by the king.39
The genealogical rolls were not, strictly speaking, propaganda instruments, but
they certainly functioned as channels for royal propaganda since they embodied
much royal ideology, though presented in such a way that would be acceptable to
the readers of these rolls, who were, for a large part, members of the political elites.
This was to acknowledge that cooperation between the king and these elites was
vital to the kingdom. In this respect, such rolls were likely to reinforce the cohesion
of the political elites around the monarchy, if not the dynasty. In the rolls, the good
king is always presented as a powerful king (as was Cnut, for instance, the only king
to be compared with the great Arthur), but this power necessarily stemmed from
the support of his elites, whose confidence he needed to obtain and retain.
The Deepening of a Historical National Consciousness
One last point concerns the meaning of the genealogical rolls in the context of the
emergence of a common national history and its role in the building of a national
identity in England. The success of the genealogical rolls reflects the deepening and
widening of national consciousness among the upper classes, especially the aris-
tocracy, and in turn they played a part, even if a limited one, in this process. In a
striking formula, Guenée stresses the importance of historiography in nation-
38
We can observe the difference with the contemporary illustrated manuscripts of the Flores
Historiarum, where the scene of the crowning and unction of the king acts as a visual leitmotif at
the beginning of each reign.
39
For Richard: ‘Icesti Richard regna apres sun pere e jura a sun coronement qur les Ewangeles
que il portereit pees e honur e reverence tus les jurs de sa vie a Dieu e a Seint Eglise e a ses ordineirs,
e ceo fist-il’ (London, College of Arms, MS 3/23 B); for John: ‘Icestu Johan fist troys maners de
sermens kant il fu coroné, coe est a saver ke il ameroyt Deu e Seynte Eglise e ses ordenaries
honureyt, e si ostereyt les lays ke fussent malveyses e establireyt les bones, e droyte justice
mayntendroyt en le reaume’ (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Additional E. 14); and for Henry III:
‘Al quel corrounement il jura ke il portereit honor e pes e reverence a Deu e a Seint Eglise e a ses
ordineires, e ce fist-il noblement’ (Feudal Manuals, ed. by Wright, p. 36).
building, writing that ‘nations were made by historians’.40 Since a nation is always
an imaginary, irrational construction, history is essential to it. National identity
results in large part from the feeling of people living in a given place that they share
a common history. However, to make them realize or admit this fact, be it true or
false, they have to be convinced of its actual existence. That is where historians
have a crucial part to play. As John Gillingham has shown, a great step had been
made in the first half of the twelfth century by great historians such as Henry of
Huntingdon, William of Malmesbury, John of Worcester, or Geoffrey Gaimar,
who had established a sense of continuity in English history in spite of the upheaval
of the Norman Conquest.41 But the genealogical rolls, the first successful English
historical work to be written in vernacular prose since the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
certainly helped to popularize this view of English history.
In addition to the blood relationship between the Anglo-Saxon and the Plan-
tagenet kings, which was emphasized by the genealogical rolls but was not totally
satisfying, the main continuity factor in English history was the institution of the
monarchy itself. As the exchange between Cnut and Eadric Streona forcefully put
it (in the only dialogue of the narrative), all kings of England were ‘frères en loi’
(brothers according to the law), whatever their real blood relationship. And, by
punishing — instantly and spectacularly — Eadric for the murder of his prede-
cessor, Edmund Ironside, Cnut acted as a new David, asserting both his royal
authority and the sacred nature of the royal office. Thus a kind of spiritual relation-
ship among all the kings of England existed, whatever their origins, owing to the
fact that they had ruled over the same land. The succession of kings was the organ-
izing element in English history, and this was perfectly highlighted by the layout
of the genealogical rolls, where all the medallions of kings are aligned along what
is usually an invisible central line of succession. The first and foremost duty of any
king was to forge a national identity, as shown by the replacement of Alfred by
Egbert, the alleged unifier of the kingdoms of the Heptarchy, as the first king of the
genealogy. They had to protect national sovereignty, hence the forceful reproach
made to King John, who was accused of having, ‘of his own free will’, placed the
glorious realm of England in servitude. Finally, they had to defend the territorial
integrity of the kingdom, as revealed by the glorification of warrior-kings such as
40
Bernard Guenée, L’Occident aux XIVe et XV e siècles: les États, 5th edn (Paris: PUF, 1993),
p. 123.
41
John Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National Identity and
Political Values (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000).
Aethelred I, the victor of the battle of Ashdown against the Danes, or Edmond
Ironside, to name but two.
The main obstacle in the shaping of a national history and of a national identity
in England was the succession of peoples and kings of different origins. At a time
when the word ‘nation’ generally meant ‘race’, how could there have been a sense
of Englishness? A summary concerning the ‘four conquests of England’ which was
added in two twin-rolls (London, College of Arms, MS 20/5 and London, British
Library, MS Additional 8101) stressed that England had been populated and ruled
in turn by the Giants, the Britons, the Romans, the Saxons, and the Normans
(curiously omitting the Danes), and that each invasion had been the occasion of
bloodshed (Matthew Paris still called these invasions the ‘plagues’ of England).
Then, the only solution to shape a national history was to consider all these peoples
as successive ‘Chosen Peoples’, successive incarnations of a unique ‘Elect Nation’
which was not ethnically defined. All these peoples had been chosen by God to rule
the ‘Promised Land’ that was England (described in the prologue as the fairest of
all islands and a land blessed by God). In the crusading context, to assert their
legitimacy as rulers of the Holy Land, the Christians had worked out the concept
of the ‘terre de repromission’:42 the Holy Land had first been promised to the Jews
but it had been later ‘repromised’ to the Christians. In my opinion this concept
could explain why Englishmen might consider themselves ‘God’s people’ in spite
of all the successive invasions. This might appear as a challenge, but the end of the
prologue recalls the anecdote, first told by Bede, about Pope Gregory the Great,
who compared Englishmen to angels and concluded with this suggestive remark:
‘And certainly nowadays [en les jours que ore sunt], there is no nation in the whole
world that serves God and the blessed Church in such a courtly manner or with
such devotion.’43 Here, the word ‘Engleis’ cannot refer only to the Englishmen of
exclusively Anglo-Saxon origin; he referred to all those who had lived in England
and adopted it as their country, who were also considered English. This is why
Englishmen of continental origin could regard themselves as English and apply to
themselves the flattering comparison made centuries before by St Gregory. Taking
pride in being English, which did not exclude pride in Norman origins,44 meant
42
On this concept, see Micheline de Combarieu du Grès, ‘La “terre de repromission”’, in Terres
médiévales (Paris: Klincksieck, 1993), pp. 71–99.
43
Bovey, Chaworth Roll, p. 38 (translation by Marigold Anne Norbye).
44
Olivier de Laborderie, ‘La mémoire des origines normandes des rois d’Angleterre dans les
généalogies en rouleau des XIIIe et XIV e siècles’, in La Normandie et l’Angleterre au Moyen Âge, Actes
that anyone could consider himself/herself as English as long as s/he acknowledged

the authority of the King of England and lived in England.
Such a definition of the English nation could not be ethnic and had to be polit-
ical and, most of all, territorial; besides, both were inseparable, since it was the
utmost duty of English kings to make the frontiers of their kingdom and the
‘natural boundaries’ of this ‘Holy Island’ coincide. To understand the implicit
meaning of these genealogical rolls, then, would mean to start with the most
important element contained in them, the circular diagram of the Heptarchy
which is placed at the very beginning of the first membrane in most rolls. The
diagram apparently represents England, but the dimensions indicated in the text
in the central roundel are those traditionally assigned to Britain since Bede; this
text explicitly includes Wales and Scotland, as if the King of England had a ‘natural
right’ to rule over all Britain. At a time when Edward I was trying to conquer
Wales and to subdue Scotland, such a diagram was certainly not insignificant. And
the first sentence of the prologue — ‘England, that was formerly called Britain
[. . .]’ — insists on this point, thus equating both names and territories.
So the real foundation of the nation was the land, organized politically into a
monarchy. In a way, its possession was in itself a sign that the people or kings who
held it were God’s Elect. If the land had been so often coveted and conquered in
the past, was it not because it was so marvellous an island that it naturally aroused
a desire of conquest in all peoples, as far back as the Trojan Brutus? This allowed
the incorporation of the history of the Kings of Britain into the history of England,
as a sort of ‘Old Testament’, whilst maintaining the anachronistic diagram of the
Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy at the top of the first membrane, even though the geneal-
ogy that followed began with Brutus. The real purpose of this diagram was not so
much historical as geographical and political, since it listed, as the following com-
mentary does more fully, the shires and bishoprics which still constituted the basis
of the kingdom’s organization.
To conclude, it seems worth stressing one main point. The study of what we
could call ‘second-rate’ historical works, often the ‘by-products’ of the great Latin
historiography, offers new perspectives on the political history of medieval
England. In this respect, it does not matter if these works are anonymous, dry, even
unattractive according to modern standards, provided that they enjoyed success in
their own time. Their popularity is the very reason for their historical value. True,
du colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle, 4–7 octobre 2001, ed. by Pierre Bouet and Véronique Gazeau
(Caen: Publications du CRAHM, 2003), pp. 211–31.
they very rarely give us new information about what actually took place during a
particular reign, except in some side-texts or well-informed continuations, but they
allow us to know more precisely how people outside the restricted circles who had
first-hand access to clerical culture perceived the history of their own country and
how they rated the actions of its rulers, past and present. They are particularly
useful for trying to assess the effectiveness of royal propaganda and for defining the
different stages of the construction of an English national identity, which is obvi-
ously a continuous process. It would be absurd to try to establish the birth date of
the English nation or to consider the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century genea-
logical rolls — or any other document — as the ‘birth certificate’ of this nation, but
such rolls express the gradual growth of national feelings and the forging of a na-
tional identity among members of the lay elite, who were in great part of foreign
origin. In adopting the Anglo-Saxon — and sometimes even the British — past as
part of their own history, they went one step further in becoming Englishmen:
French-speaking Englishmen, but English nonetheless. In this respect, the genea-
logical rolls form only a small part of a rich historical literature that includes in
particular what is usually called the Anglo-Norman prose Brut — which deserves
a fuller study because it had a far-reaching influence, well beyond the end of the
Middle Ages — but also many shorter Anglo-Norman texts, sometimes very simi-
lar to the commentary found in the rolls.45 This is a largely unexplored field, and
one that would certainly be fruitful to investigate more thoroughly.46
45
Kritische Ausgabe der anglonormannischen Chroniken: Brutus, Li rei de Engleterre, Le livere
de reis de Engleterre, ed. by Christian Foltys (Berlin: Philosophische Fakultät der Freien Universität,
1962).
46
I would like to thank Prof. Jean-Philippe Genet (Université de Paris I – Panthéon-
Sorbonne) and Dr Malcolm Vale (St John’s College, Oxford) for having invited me to give a paper
about the genealogical rolls at their Franco-English seminar in May 2001 at the Maison Française
d’Oxford. That paper constitutes the bulk of the present chapter. I would like to thank also my
friends Michael Webb and Marigold Anne Norbye for re-reading and correcting this essay.
G ENEALOGIES OF N OBLE F AMILIES
IN A NGLO -N ORMAN
John Spence
F
rom the twelfth century, genealogies of noble families began to be written
in Europe. Some of these noble genealogies from twelfth- and thirteenth-
century Europe are well known and have been discussed in a number of
studies elsewhere.1 However, with a few exceptions, genealogies of English noble
families have as a whole not attracted all that much interest, despite the fact that
there is an abundance of genealogies of families from the nobility and the gentry
in later medieval England, written in Latin, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English.2
1
See Léopold Génicot, Les généalogies, Typologie des sources du Moyen Âge occidental, 15
(Turnhout: Brepols, 1975), pp. 14–24; Mise à Jour du fascicule no. 15, L. Génicot, Les généalogies,
Typologie des Sources du Moyen Âge occidental (Brepols: Turnhout, 1985); Georges Duby,
‘French Genealogical Literature’, in The Chivalrous Society, trans. by Cynthia Postan (London:
Edward Arnold, 1977), pp. 149–57; Godfried Croenen, ‘Princely and Noble Genealogies, Twelfth
to Fourteenth Century: Form and Function’, in The Medieval Chronicle, ed. by Erik Kooper
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), pp. 84–95; Jean Dunbabin, ‘Discovering a Past for the French
Aristocracy’, in The Perception of the Past in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. by Paul Magdalino
(London: Hambledon, 1992), pp. 1–14.
2
Many genealogies from late medieval England are unedited, or printed only in William
Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, ed. by John Caley, Henry Ellis, and Bulkeley Bandinel, new edn,
6 vols (London: Joseph Harding; Harding and Lepard; Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green,
1817–30; 1st edn, 1655–61). The main recent surveys of medieval England’s historical literature
discuss genealogies only in passing. Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England, 2 vols
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974–82), II (1982), c. 1307 to the early sixteenth century,
mentions a few genealogies within larger chronicles (II, 65, 312, 332, 370–71), a lost genealogy
(II, 81), and a genealogy of the Mortimer family (II, 61). John Taylor, English Historical Literature
in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), mentions this Mortimer genealogy at
64 John Spence
In this chapter, I will look here at the genealogies written in one of the two literary
vernaculars of this culture, Anglo-Norman (the dialect of Old French in use in
England from the eleventh century into the fifteenth), to consider what functions
they served and how they fulfilled these.3
Some of these genealogies in Anglo-Norman were no more than brief historical
notes. A short genealogy in Anglo-Norman which traced the ownership of certain
lands by the Paynel and Gant families, from the Norman Conquest to the mid-
thirteenth century, was preserved in a register of Croxton Abbey.4 Barlings Abbey,
which Julia Marvin has recently suggested may have produced the original Anglo-
Norman prose Brut,5 also preserved, in its register (now London, British Library,
MS Cotton Faustina B I), a genealogy in Anglo-Norman tracing the ownership of
lands through numerous families, again including the Paynels.6 Genealogies could
also be found in letters, as in the case of a letter from John Plaiz to Edward III,
pleading his rights to certain lands.7 As these examples make clear, such genealogies
were primarily concerned with establishing a claim to inherited property.
pp. 286–87, 289. The more recent survey by Chris Given-Wilson, Chronicles: The Writing of
History in Medieval England (London: Hambledon and London, 2004), gives a fuller discussion
of genealogies (pp. 79–85). Middle English genealogies fare somewhat better: the Rous Roll, the
Pageants of Richard Beauchamp, and a genealogy of the Percy family are discussed in Edward
Donald Kennedy, Chronicles and Other Historical Writing, vol. VIII of A Manual of the Writings
in Middle English 1050–1500, gen. ed. Albert E. Hartung (New Haven: Connecticut Academy
of Arts and Sciences, 1989), nos 78, 79, pp. 2707–11; no. 49, pp. 2677–78. Susan Wood, English
Monasteries and their Patrons in the Thirteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1955),
pp. 122–35, discusses a number of Latin genealogies.
3
On Anglo-Norman as a literary vernacular in England, see especially M. Dominica Legge,
Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), and Susan Crane,
‘Anglo-Norman Cultures’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. by David
Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 35–60.
4
Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, ed. by Caley, Ellis, and Bandinel, VI, 878, no. 6.
5
Julia Marvin, ‘Sources and Analogues of the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut Chronicle: New
Findings’, in Readers and Writers of the Prose Brut, ed. by William Marx and Raluca Radulescu,
special issue, Trivium, 36 (2006), 1–31 (pp. 29–31).
6
Edited in Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, ed. by Caley, Ellis, and Bandinel, VI, 917, no. 4.
On the register, see G. R. C. Davis, Medieval Cartularies of Great Britain: A Short Catalogue
(London: Longmans, Green, 1958), no. 19, p. 4.
7
Edited in Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, ed. by Caley, Ellis, and Bandinel, VI, 76–77,
no. 2. On John Plaiz, fifth Lord Plaiz, see George Edward Cockayne, The Complete Peerage of
England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, Extant, Extinct or Dormant,
rev. by Vicary Gibbs and others, 12 vols (London: St Catherine Press, 1910–59), X , 541–42.
GENEALOGIES OF NOBLE FAMILIES IN ANGLO-NORMAN 65
However, sometimes glorifying the family was also a factor. A cartulary written
for the Pedwardine family c. 1395 begins with a genealogy in Anglo-Norman trac-
ing their descent from the Croun family. While the text provides only basic genea-
logical details, it is accompanied by numerous illustrations of the coats of arms of
the earlier family members: a celebration of the family’s heraldic as well as genealog-
ical inheritance.8 Diana Tyson has suggested that a similar motive may perhaps lie
behind the design of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 98, a genealogical
roll-chronicle of British and English kings, with accompanying text based partly on
the prose Brut, which depicts the genealogies of prominent English noble families
alongside the royal line.9
Some accounts of family history in Anglo-Norman were more detailed than
these short genealogies, and I will discuss three more substantial examples: the
Genealogy of the Lords of Brecknock, the Delapre Chronicle, and the Mohun Chron-
icle. The family’s genealogy determined the basic structure of these works, and the
texts appear to have served pragmatic purposes, such as asserting the families’ own-
ership of inherited lands. However, the works also absorbed legendary material and
romance elements in order to provide a dramatic account of the family’s past.10
The Genealogy of the Lords of Brecknock
The Genealogy of the Lords of Brecknock is a short Anglo-Norman text which re-
counts the descent of the lordship of Brecknock (Brecon) from the late eleventh
century to 1232.11 The first half of the text seems to be a translation into Anglo-
8
This is transcribed in Jean-Philippe Genet, ‘Cartulaires, registres, et histoire: l’exemple anglais’,
in Le métier d’historien au moyen âge: études sur l’historiographie médiévale, ed. by Bernard Guenée
(Paris: Panthéon Sorbonne, 1977), pp. 95–138, in Appendix III, pp. 136–38 (photographs of the
genealogy are included as Plates 2–4); see also p. 127.
9
Diana B. Tyson, ‘The Adam and Eve Roll: Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 98’,
Scriptorium, 52 (1998), 301–16 (p. 308); see also Julia Marvin, ‘Narrative, Lineage, and Succession
in the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut Chronicle’, in this volume.
10
Legends and romance motifs were frequently incorporated into noble genealogies elsewhere
in medieval Europe. In twelfth-century France, for example, a history of the lords of Amboise iden-
tified King Arthur as indirectly responsible for creating the lordship, and the counts of Boulogne
acquired the ‘Knight of the Swan’ as their ancestor: see Dunbabin, ‘Discovering a Past’, pp. 9, 12,
and Nicholas L. Paul, ‘Crusade and Family Memory before 1225’ (unpublished doctoral disserta-
tion, University of Cambridge, 2005), Chapter 1, pp. 19–69.
11
Ruth J. Dean with Maureen B. M. Boulton, Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and
Manuscripts, Anglo-Norman Text Society Occasional Publications Series, 3 (London: Anglo-
66 John Spence
Norman of a passage from Giraldus Cambrensis’s Itinerarium Kambriæ.12 Giraldus

had recounted his version of the history of the lordship from Bernard de Neuf-
marché (d. between 1121 and 1125), who had captured the territory early in the
reign of William Rufus, to his grandson Mahel (d. 1165), son of Miles of Gloucester,
earl of Hereford (d. 1143).13 The Anglo-Norman genealogy then traced the
descent of the lordship further, down to the siege of Brecknock, reportedly in
1232, although the narrative loses some of its colourful character once Giraldus’s
influence disappears. It is found in only one manuscript, London, British Library,
MS Cotton Julius D X, which may have belonged to the Augustinian priory of
Lanthony Prima in Monmouthshire, or more likely to that of Lanthony Secunda
in Gloucestershire,14 as it also contains the only known copy of a Latin chronicle
of Lanthony Priory (and a copy of the life of Robert of Béthune, bishop of
Hereford, a former prior of Lanthony).15
The Genealogy bears witness to a desire for genealogical information about no-
ble families in the vernacular from the thirteenth century. (The text must post-date
1232 and is written in a late thirteenth-century Anglicana hand.) However, in pre-
serving Giraldus’s account of the early lords of Brecknock, the narrative genealogy
also retains two colourful episodes. In the first of these, Mahel, son of Bernard de
Neufmarché, beats his mother Nest’s lover; angered by this, Nest uses her reputation
for infidelity to take her revenge on Mahel, testifying that Mahel is not Bernard’s
Norman Text Society, 1999) (hereafter Dean, ANL), no. 9, p. 11. The text was edited (with several
errors) in Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, ed. by Caley, Ellis, and Bandinel, III, 263–64. There
is now a modern edition: Diana Tyson, ‘A Medieval Genealogy of the Lords of Brecknock’,
Nottingham Mediaeval Studies, 48 (2004), 1–14 (pp. 8–13).
12
As noted by Tyson, ‘Medieval Genealogy’, p. 5 and n. 17. For the corresponding passage, see
Gerald of Wales, Itinerarium Kambriæ, in Opera, ed. by J. S. Brewer, J. F. Dimock, and G. F.
Warner, 8 vols (London: HMSO, 1861–91), VI, Book 1, Chapter 2, at pp. 28–31; Gerald of
Wales, The Journey Through Wales, in The Journey Through Wales and the Description of Wales,
trans. by Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), pp. 88–91.
13
On these historical figures, see K. L. Maund, ‘Neufmarché, Bernard de’, in the Oxford Dic-
tionary of National Biography, gen. ed. H. G. C. Matthew and Brian Harrison, 60 vols (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004) (hereafter Oxford DNB), XL, 459; David Walker, ‘Miles of
Gloucester, Earl of Hereford’, Oxford DNB, XXII, 481–83.
14
N. R. Ker, Medieval Libraries of Great Britain: A List of Surviving Books, 2nd edn (London:
Offices of the Royal Historical Society, 1964), p. 108; and see further below, pp. 68.
15
Most of the Lanthony Abbey chronicle is edited in Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, ed.
by Caley, Ellis, and Bandinel, VI, 128–34; see also R . W. Hunt, ‘The Preface to the “Speculum
Ecclesiae” of Giraldus Cambrensis’, Viator, 8 (1977), 189–213 (p. 193 n. 23).
son, and Mahel is disinherited by Henry I. The Genealogy leaves out the battery of
antifeminist authorities that Giraldus goes on to cite,16 but does not let the episode
pass without some moral commentary: Henry disinherits Mahel ‘plus par volunté
qe par dreyture’ (more by will than by right),17 and gives his lands to Miles of
Gloucester. The second story concerns Miles’s youngest son, William, whose per-
secution of the Bishop of St David’s is speedily avenged by God when the castle
William is staying in catches fire. A stone falls on William’s head, and as he lies
dying he sends a message to the Bishop in which he recognizes the error of his ways:
E ben, pere esveske, cruelement se venge de mey Nostre Seynur, e ne atent pas la conversion
al pecheur mes haste la morte a perdition.18
[Father bishop, very cruelly Our Lord avenges himself on me, and does not wait for the
conversion of the sinner, but hastens death with perdition.]
The second half of the Genealogy, which shares some of its information with a
second Latin chronicle of Lanthony Priory,19 relates its information more concisely
than the first half, but continues to provide a commentary on events. Brecknock
passes into the hands of William de Briouze (Braose) III, the powerful magnate of
the Welsh and Irish Marches who fell dramatically out of favour with King John
in 1208 and fled to Ireland and then France, where he died in 1211.20 The Genealogy
describes how William (who seems here to be conflated with his father, William II)
fought a battle ‘ou esteynt ocis plus ke treys mil waleys’ (where more than three
thousand Welshmen were killed),21 but how, ten years later, ‘le rey Johan Willame
de Breuse e ses eyrs saunz acheson e par sa volunté e sanz jugement en geta de
Engletere’ (King John, without reason and by his will and without judgement, cast
William de Briouze and his heirs out of England).22 After John’s death, the Briouze
16
Gerald of Wales, Itinerarium Kambriæ, VI, Book 1, Chapter 2, p. 30; Gerald of Wales,
Journey Through Wales, trans. by Thorpe, p. 90.
17
Tyson, ‘Medieval Genealogy’, p. 8, line 12. All translations are my own.
18
Tyson, ‘Medieval Genealogy’, p. 9, lines 33–34.
19
This is printed in Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, ed. by Caley, Ellis, and Bandinel, VI,
134–35, from a transcript by the herald Robert Glover (1544–88); I am not aware of any medieval
manuscript.
20
Ralph V. Turner, ‘Briouze [Braose], William (III) de’, Oxford DNB, VII, 674–77; I. W.
Rowlands, ‘William de Braose and the Lordship of Brecon’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies,
30 (1982–83), 122–33.
21
22
68 John Spence
family manages to reclaim its inheritance in Brecknock, and William III’s grand-
son, also called William, holds the lordship until ‘fu meme celi Willame convié de
Lewylyn, seygnur de Gales, a feste e par treyson ocis’ (this same William was taken
to Llywelyn lord of Wales with ceremony, and treacherously killed).23 Llywelyn ap
Iorweth, prince of Gwynedd (also known as Llywelyn Fawr) is the villain of the
final stages of this account, and when he becomes envious of the new lord of
Brecknock, Humphrey de Bohun the sixth (son of the Earl of Hereford), Llywelyn
besieges Brecknock Castle in 1232 with the help of Earl Richard the Marshal.24
The mention of Humphrey de Bohun the sixth, and of his first wife, Eleanor de
Briouze (by whom he received the lordship of Brecknock), perhaps suggests a
context for the Genealogy: according to the second Latin chronicle of Lanthony,
Eleanor de Briouze was buried at Lanthony Secunda in Gloucester after her death
(which was between 1252 and 1264),25 as were many of the earls of Hereford
(although Humphrey the sixth was not, probably because he died while a prisoner
of the King during the Barons’ War). The Genealogy may have been produced in
Anglo-Norman for the benefit of Humphrey and Eleanor, as benefactors of
Lanthony, or for their son, Humphrey the seventh, earl of Hereford; it is certainly
evidence of the priory’s interest in the family. Another member of the Bohun
family from this era took a keen interest in Anglo-Norman historiography: Rauf
de Boun, who in 1309 wrote the Petit Bruit (an unusual chronicle of national his-
tory from Britain’s first inhabitants to the death of Edward I), was likely to have
been either the brother or son of Humphrey de Bohun the sixth.26 While the Petit
Bruit is filled with apocryphal legends and historical distortion, by contrast in the
Genealogy of the Lords of Brecknock a fairly accurate family genealogy is the spine of
23
Tyson, ‘Medieval Genealogy’, p. 11, lines 68–69. William de Briouze V was hanged by
Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, prince of Gwynedd, on 2 May 1230: see A. D. Carr, ‘Llywelyn ap Iorwerth’,
Oxford DNB, XXXIV , 180–85 (p. 185).
24
Brecknock was not besieged in 1232, but was besieged in both 1231 and 1233 by Llywelyn
ap Iorwerth, on the second occasion as an ally of Richard Marshal, earl of Pembroke, in his
1233–34 rebellion: see R. F. Walker, ‘The Supporters of Richard Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, in the
Rebellion of 1233–1234’, Welsh History Review, 17 (1994–95), 41–65; John Edward Lloyd, A
History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest, 3rd edn, 2 vols (London:
Longmans, Green, 1939; 1st edn, 1911), pp. 674 and n. 107, 679 and n. 139.
25
Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, ed. by Caley, Ellis, and Bandinel, VI, 135. For the date of
Eleanor’s death, see John Spence, ‘The Identity of Rauf de Boun, Author of the Petit Bruit’,
Reading Medieval Studies, 31 (2005), 57–76 (p. 71 n. 21).
26
See Spence, ‘Identity of Rauf de Boun’.
the text. But in the inclusion of Giraldus Cambrensis’s stories, and other accounts
of battles, murder, and wicked kings, the Genealogy of the Lords of Brecknock gives
an account of its family’s history where legendary material plays an important role
in imagining their past.
The Delapre Chronicle
Another account of a noble family’s history written in Anglo-Norman is found in

the Delapre Chronicle. This text is apparently preserved only in Oxford, Bodleian
Library, MS Dugdale 18, a transcript in William Dugdale’s hand, according to whom
it was taken ‘Ex pervetusto codice MS. pergamenaceo’ (from a very old manuscript
book).27 The modern name for the chronicle was taken from its apparent place of
origin, as the earls of Huntingdon were patrons of the nunnery of Delapre in
Northampton, and the chronicle gives an account of how lands in ‘Hardingesthorn’
(Hardingstone, where the nunnery was located) were given to the nunnery by Earl
David of Huntingdon (d. 1153), and although these were taken out of the hands
of the nunnery for a while, they were eventually restored to it.28 The Delapre
Chronicle was dated by N. Denholm-Young, who edited parts of it, to c. 1237 on the
basis of the two passages which conclude the two sections of the Delapre Chronicle
stating that the earldom of Huntingdon was held of the King of Scotland, not of
the King of England.29 These statements indicate that this chronicle was probably
produced by Delapre Abbey as part of a (largely successful) attempt to secure the
lands of the earldom for King Alexander II of Scotland after the death of John le
Scot, earl of Huntingdon and Chester, in 1237.30 As indicated by the discussion of
Hardingstone, this claim was connected to the nunnery’s own claim over disputed
lands, a dispute with William de Vieuxpont (‘William de Wespund’) which had first
arisen in 1219 but which flared up again in 1236 and was still a live issue in 1253:31
27
Bodl. MS Dugdale 18, fol. 27r, col. 2.
28
Bodl. MS Dugdale 18, fol. 29r, cols 1–2.
29
N. Denholm-Young, ‘An Early Thirteenth-Century Anglo-Norman MS’, Bodleian Quar-
terly Record, 6 (1929–31), 225–30 (p. 225).
30
See R. Stewart Brown, ‘The End of the Norman Earldom of Chester’, English Historical
Review, 35 (1920), 26–51 (p. 47); Curia Regis Rolls of the Reign of Henry III, vol. XVI: 21 to 26
Henry III (1237–1242), ed. by L. C. Hector (London: HMSO, 1979), no. 18, p. 6.
31
For the legal background to this passage, see The Victoria History of the Counties of England:
Northamptonshire, ed. by W. Ryland, D. Adkins, and others, 5 vols, in progress (Folkestone:
70 John Spence
thus, the extant version of the Delapre Chronicle was produced to aid the nunnery’s
patrons, but also out of the nunnery’s self-interest.
As extant, the first section of the chronicle gives an account of the lives of
Siward and Waltheof, earls of Huntingdon and Northumbria in the eleventh
century. This section contains much of the same material as the Latin Vita et Passio
Sancti Waldevi, which was written at Crowland Abbey where Waltheof’s body was
buried and where the Earl was regarded as a saint in the twelfth and early thir-
teenth centuries.32 Denholm-Young believed that for this first section there was a
‘probability that the Latin was taken from the French (though not from the MS.
whence Dugdale derived his transcript)’,33 and this assertion seems plausible. How-
ever, the extant Vita Waldevi was perhaps written earlier than the extant Delapre
Chronicle.34 The second, independent section of the Delapre Chronicle describes
part of the history of Delapre Abbey.
The surviving transcript of the Delapre Chronicle begins with a lengthy account
of the life of Siward, earl of Northumbria (d. 1055), who may also have been Earl
of Huntingdon.35 The narrative dealing with Siward is replete with Scandinavian
and Anglo-Saxon narrative motifs and legendary material. Denholm-Young notes
a reference in the Delapre Chronicle (which is not in the Vita Waldevi) to ‘les
lyveres as Engleys, que est en Notynghamsyre, que Richard le Chauntour de Not-
yngham eut, que counte sa vie et ces feetz’ (the books of the English, which are in
Nottinghamshire, which Richard the Cantor of Nottingham had, which recount
his [i.e. Siward’s] life and deeds).36 These ‘lyveres as Engleys’ may have been the
original source for the section of the Anglo-Norman text which dealt with Siward.
Dawsons of Pall Mall; Woodbridge: Boydell, 1902–), IV , 255 and nn. 6–11; K. J. Stringer, Earl
David of Huntingdon 1152–1219: A Study in Anglo-Scottish History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1985), pp. 144–45, 306 n. 116.
32
The Latin work is edited in Vita et Passio Waldevi Comitis, in Chroniques anglo-normandes,
ed. by Francisque Michel, 3 vols (Rouen: Edouard Frère, 1836–40), II, 99–142. On the Vita and
the cult of Waltheof at the abbey, see Carl Watkins, ‘The Cult of Earl Waltheof at Crowland’,
Hagiographica, 3 (1996), 95–111.
33
Denholm-Young, ‘Early Thirteenth-Century Anglo-Norman MS’, p. 226.
34
Watkins, ‘Cult of Earl Waltheof’, pp. 96–97, suggests a date of c. 1219 for the composition
of the Vita Waldevi.
35
See Cockayne, Complete Peerage, rev. by Gibbs and others, VI, 638.
36
Bodl. MS Dugdale 18, fol. 27r , col. 2, quoted also in Denholm-Young, ‘Early Thirteenth-
Century Anglo-Norman MS’, p. 228.
The genealogy of Siward’s ancestors, which survives in full in the Latin Vita
Waldevi, but of which only the end is preserved in the extant Anglo-Norman
fragment, identifies his father as ‘cont Beern qi l’uris aveit engendré en la fille au
plus haut homme de Denemarche’ (Earl Beern, whom the bear had engendered on
the daughter of the most noble man in Denmark).37 Tracing the ancestry of a
warrior hero to a bear was a widespread motif, but was especially popular in Danish
literature.38 The early adventures of Siward, who fights a dragon in the Orkneys
and meets a man there who gives him a banner named ‘Ravenlaundeye’, also
incorporate recurring motifs from Scandinavian literature.39 The second incident
is particularly similar to an episode from the Orkneyinga-Saga which involved the
Orkney Jarl Sigurð Digre: it may have been transferred from Sigurð to Siward due
to the similarity between their names.40
After Siward arrives in England, he kills Tosti, earl of Huntingdon, an enemy
of Edward the Confessor, who gives him the earldom as a reward. On the Con-
fessor’s behalf, Siward battles Norwegians and Scots, before falling ill and dying in
his armour at York, in an episode which also appears in Henry of Huntingdon’s
Historia Anglorum.41 The possibility that these episodes are based on a narrative in
Old English involving the historical Siward’s later life has also been suggested,
though this is not certain.42
37
Denholm-Young, ‘Early Thirteenth-Century Anglo-Norman MS’, p. 227.
38
Axel Olrik, ‘Siward Digri of Northumberland: A Viking-Saga of the Danes in England’,
Saga-Book of the Viking Club, 6 (1908–09), 212–37 (pp. 213, 218–20, 233–37); see also C. E.
Wright, The Cultivation of Saga in Anglo-Saxon England (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1939), pp.
127–33 (p. 133).
39
Bodl. MS Dugdale 18, fol. 27r, col. 2 – 27v , col. 1; the name of the banner is given correctly
on fol. 27v , col. 2. On this section, see Olrik, ‘Siward Digri of Northumberland’, pp. 220–25.
40
Bodl. MS Dugdale 18, fol. 27 v , col. 1: see A. H. Smith, ‘The Early Literary Relations of
England and Scandinavia’, Saga-Book of the Viking Society for Northern Research (formerly the Saga
Book of the Viking Club), 11 (1936), 215–32 (pp. 224–26). For the relevant passage, see Orkneyinga
Saga, ed. by Finnbogi Guðmundsson, Íslensk fornrit, 34 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag,
1965), Chapter 11, pp. 24–25; Orkneyinga Saga: The History of the Earls of Orkney, trans. by
Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards (London: Hogarth Press, 1978), Chapter 11, p. 38. However,
the name of the banner also resembles one mentioned in traditions concerning the sons of Ragnar
Lothbrog: see R. M. Wilson, The Lost Literature of Medieval England, 2nd edn (London:
Methuen, 1970; 1st edn, 1952), pp. 36–38.
41
Bodl. MS Dugdale 18, fol. 27v , cols 1–2; cf. Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed.
and trans. by Diana Greenway, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 378.
42
Wright, Cultivation of Saga, pp. 127–32, argues for the existence of a lost Anglo-Saxon
Siwards Saga. Diana Greenway is more cautious: see Historia Anglorum, p. 378 n. 129. Wright
72 John Spence
The rest of the first part of the chronicle contains a less sensational history of
Siward’s descendants and the Earls of Huntingdon down to the mid-thirteenth
century. The account of the life of Siward’s son, the Earl Waltheof, is brief and, as
noted above, while the account of Siward corresponds closely with that in the
Latin Vita Waldevi, the two works differ substantially in their account of Wal-
theof. The Vita Waldevi expands on Orderic Vitalis’s description of Waltheof’s life
and death to portray the Earl as a martyr, excusing his involvement in the 1075
rebellion alongside Earl Ralph and Earl Roger of Hereford, and even describes the
miracles for which Waltheof was posthumously responsible.43 The emphasis in the
Anglo-Norman chronicle could hardly be more different. Waltheof is relatively
unimportant in the Delapre Chronicle: we are told that he succeeded Siward,
Et quant le Roy William le Bastard vint si la terre conquere, et il se combati as Engleis, et
a[ ]les venqui, [i ne] fu pas le Conte Waldef. Et quant le Roy William eust la terre appesee,
se accorda a luy le Conte Waldef, et ly Roy luy laißa sa terre.
Et pur ceo qu’il n’avoit este a [la] bataille, et il estoit le plus riche homme et le plus
vaillaunt de la terre, luy dona la Contesse Ivete, sa niece.44
[And when King William Bastard came to conquer the land, and he fought with the
English, and defeated them, Earl Waltheof was not there. And when King William had
pacified the land, he reconciled himself with Earl Waltheof, and the King allowed him to
keep his land.
And because he had not been at the Battle [i.e. of Hastings], and he was the richest
man in the country, and the most worthy, he gave to him Countess Judith, his niece.]
The Delapre Chronicle follows this with a long exposition of the rights and priv-
ileges which William granted Waltheof over his land. When the Delapre Chronicle
returns to deal with the end of Waltheof’s life, it is as succinct and circumspect as
it can be about this well-known episode:
Apres ceo le Conte Waldef par l’encusement de sa femme rettez fu et ateint ove moultz des
autres Barons d’Engleterre de la trayson le Roy William; et par jugement de la court le Roy
a Wynchestre fu decolle et a Croyland enselevy.45
appears to have been unaware of the research into the similarities with the earlier Scandinavian
material by Smith and Olrik. For a recent discussion of Scandinavian motifs in the literature of
medieval England, see Scott Kleinman, ‘Animal Imagery and Oral Discourse in Havelok’s First
Fight’, Viator, 35 (2004), 311–27.
43
Vita et Passio Waldevi Comitis, ed. by Michel, at pp. 111–23 (life and death), 131–42
(miracles); Watkins, ‘Cult of Earl Waltheof’, pp. 96–97.
44
Bodl. MS Dugdale 18, fols 27 v, col. 2 – 28 r, col. 1 (my emendations in square brackets).
45
[After this, Earl Waltheof, by the accusation of his wife, was found guilty and attainted of
treason against King William together with many other English barons; and by the
judgment of the King’s court at Winchester, he was beheaded, and is buried at Croyland.]
There is no celebration of Waltheof’s death as a martyrdom here; it does not even

appear that significant, since he is arrested and attainted alongside ‘moultz des
autres’ (many others). If Denholm-Young is right that the extant text was written
in 1237 to support King Alexander II of Scotland’s claim to the earldom of Hun-
tingdon in Henry III’s council,46 the author would surely not have wished to draw
attention to Waltheof’s importance as an opponent of the English king. The cir-
cumstances would also help to explain the inclusion of the detailed information on
Waltheof’s rights over his lands.
It is striking that this chronicle of a noble family, written in Anglo-Norman,
should trace their insular roots back before the Norman Conquest: the Mohun
Chronicle’s family history apparently began at the Conquest, while the Genealogy
of the Lords of Brecknock begins during the reign of William Rufus.47 However,
Waltheof was one of the most prominent noblemen of English descent during
William the Conqueror’s reign, while his father Siward was of equal importance
during Edward the Confessor’s. Including this ancestry surely enhanced the pres-
tige of the family.
The account of the earls of Huntingdon which follows more closely resembles
the Genealogy of the Lords of Brecknock in its colourful and lively retelling of the
complex history of the earldom. Waltheof’s eldest daughter, Maud (d. 1130/1131),
married twice: the first time to Simon de Seintliz I (d. c. 1111), and after his death
to David I of Scotland, later King of Scotland (d. 1153): both men held the earldom
of Huntingdon as a result.48 For the rest of the twelfth century, the earldom passed
back and forth between the descendants of Simon de Seintliz I and the Scottish royal
family, depending on the state of the relationship between England and Scotland.49
The Delapre Chronicle traces this complex sequence of events in an engaging
manner. It begins by relating how William I had originally intended to marry Wal-
theof’s widow to Simon de Seintliz, but she rejected him for a very personal reason:
‘pour ce qu’il estoit clop’ (because he was lame).50 King William ‘de ceo se corrousa’
(grew angry at this) and gave Simon the earldom of Huntingdon that had been her
46
See above, p. 69.
47
See below, pp. 75–77, and above, p. 65.
48
Cockayne, Complete Peerage, rev. by Gibbs and others, VI, 640–42.
49
Cockayne, Complete Peerage, rev. by Gibbs and others, VI, 642–46.
50
74 John Spence
dowry, forcing her and her daughters into hiding ‘par le mareys de Ely’ (among the
marshes of Ely) until ‘talent prist al Conte Symon de femme prendre’ (Earl Simon
felt the desire to take a wife).51 Asking his retinue for advice, he is advised that he
should marry
la fille as Engleis a ly la terre avoit este que le Roy ly avoist done: car si peraventure les
Engleis eussent la seigneurie de la terre, la terre luy remansist del don le Roy. Et ißy espousa
Mahud le einvez, et de cele terre feffa ces quaraunte chivaliers.52
[the daughter of the Englishman whose land it had been that the King had given him. For
if by chance the English had the lordship of the land, the land would remain with him by
the King’s gift. And thus he married Mahud the eldest, and from this land he enfeoffed
these forty knights.]
Simon I is a pious man: he twice goes on crusade, dying en route the second
time. He and Maud have three children, but after his death, David, brother of King
Alexander I of Scotland and of Henry I’s wife Matilda, asks Henry if he can marry
Simon’s widow Maud, ‘Et le Roy par le requeste la Royne luy dona, et il la espousa,
et issy out il la femme et la terre et la garde des enfans’ (and the King, at the request
of the Queen, gave [her] to him, and he married her. And thus he had the wife and
the land and the wardship of the children).53 David, who soon becomes King of
Scotland, sends Simon de Seintliz II (d. 1153) (Simon I’s son) to his great-uncle’s
household in Normandy, because of which ‘le Roy Henry se corrusa moult’ (King
Henry grew very angry),54 not wanting Simon II to become earl. Simon II only
manages to reclaim his inheritance after Henry I’s death.
When Simon II dies, his son Simon III is still a minor, and he becomes a ward
of Henry II. Henry, however, gives the earldom of Huntingdon to King Mal-
colm IV of Scotland (d. 1165). After Malcolm’s death, King William the Lion in-
herits the earldom of Huntingdon, but loses it after he sides with Henry the Young
King in the rebellion of 1173–74. Simon III (d. 1184) finally gains possession of
the earldom again after English forces besiege the castle at Huntingdon, and the
restoration is described enthusiastically by the Delapre Chronicle:
Et le Conte Simon alla a +ces, terres, et feffa ces chivaliers, et rendi ces hommes leurs
services, rendi les terres a ses hommes a qui les Escoz les eurent toleites, si out et tint le
honour de Huntingdon tount son vivant.55
51
52
53
54
55
Bodl. MS Dugdale 18, fol. 28v, cols 1–2.
[And Earl Simon went to these lands, and enfeoffed his knights, and gave these men their
recompense, gave the lands to his men from whom the Scots had taken them, and had and
held the honour of Huntingdon his whole life.]
This restoration is a return to the status quo, but after Simon III dies without an
heir, Henry II reinstates William the Lion as Earl of Huntingdon, and William im-
mediately resigns the honour in favour of his brother David (d. 1219),
Et tout ißi, et en ceste maniere, vindrent ceulx d’Escoce a le Honour de Huntingdon par
defalte que le Conte Simon n’avoit heir de sei. Et par ceste raison tenent les heirs le Conte
David del Roy d’Escoce, et nient del Roy d’Angleterre.56
[And just so, and in this way, those of Scotland came to the honour of Huntingdon by the
lack that Earl Simon did not have an heir of his own body. And for this reason the heirs of
Earl David hold [the earldom] of the King of Scotland, and not of the King of England.]
Like the Genealogy of the Lords of Brecknock, the family history of the Earls of
Huntingdon in the Delapre Chronicle is one in which, despite the periodic inter-
vention of angry kings and interruptions to the inheritance through deaths and an
absence of direct male heirs, a line can clearly be traced back to the first earl,
Siward. Siward’s deeds as a warrior at the beginning of the narrative demonstrate
meanwhile the military importance of the earls of Huntingdon to England. The
legends and the colourful narrative as a whole are deployed in the service of specific
land claims of urgent relevance to the family and the abbey.57
The Mohun Chronicle
Written about a hundred years after these two works, the Mohun Chronicle is the
latest example of such a full genealogical narrative in Anglo-Norman.58 The ac-
count of the family was, however, only one part of a larger work which, as described
in its prologue, was to have contained histories of the emperors, popes, archbishops
of Canterbury, kings of England, and kings of France before proceeding to describe
how the Mohuns arrived during the Norman Conquest and their subsequent
56
Bodl. MS Dugdale 18, fol. 28v , col. 2.
57
This aspect of family history is discussed in relation to twelfth-century French noble families
in Dunbabin, ‘Discovering a Past’, pp. 8–14.
58
The Mohun Chronicle is edited and translated in full in John Spence, ‘Re-imagining History
in Anglo-Norman Prose Chronicles’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Cambridge,
2006), Appendix A, pp. 250–352. Key earlier studies of the text are cited in Dean, ANL, no. 65,
pp. 42–43.
76 John Spence
family history.59 Unfortunately, the unique medieval manuscript of the chronicle

breaks off in the middle of the history of the popes. Only two fragments of the
family history have been preserved, in transcripts by sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century antiquaries.
The first of these fragments recounts William de Moion I’s arrival with William
the Conqueror. The Mohun Chronicle promises in its prologue to describe
coment la noble lignage des Mohuns vint odve William, Conquerour d’Engleterre, et
combien des grandz seignurs William le Moion le veil aveit a sa retenance a donqes; et puis
del decent des Mohuns jusqes a cesti jour.
[how the noble family of the Mohuns came with William, Conqueror of England, and
how many great lords William the Mohun the elder had in his retinue then; and then the
line of descent of the Mohuns to this day.]60
The fragment itself, which is preserved in several later transcripts,61 tells how when
William, duke of Normandy, arrived in England in 1066, he did not defeat King
Harold on his own:
vint ovesque luy monsieur William de Moion le veil, le plus noble de tout l’oste. Cist
William de Moion avoit de sa retenaunce en l’ost tous les grauntz seignurs [apres] nomez,
si come il est escript en le liver des conquerours.
[Sir William de Moion the elder came with him, the noblest man in the whole army. This
William had, in his retinue in the army, all the great knights named below, as it is written
in the book of the conquerors.]62
The Mohun Chronicle goes on to provide a list of fifty-seven names, including

some of the more distinguished nobles from William’s army. The Mohun Chron-
icle, however, takes some liberties with its evidence, picking up on two lines from
the list of William the Conqueror’s companions in the twelfth-century Roman de
Rou by Wace, ‘Li viel Willame de Moion | out ovoc lui maint compaignon’
(William de Mohun the elder had many companions with him).63 From these lines
the chronicler leaps to the unwarranted conclusion that the fifty-seven names
which follow in Wace’s Rou refer to these companions.64 For this author, the
59
Mohun Chronicle, lines 1–52: Spence, ‘Re-imagining History’, Appendix A, pp. 283–87.
60
Mohun Chronicle, lines 45–47: Spence, ‘Re-imagining History’, Appendix A, pp. 285–87.
61
Spence, ‘Re-imagining History’, Appendix A, pp. 262–66.
62
Mohun Chronicle, Extract I, lines 5–7: Spence, ‘Re-imagining History’, Appendix A, p. 332.
63
Le Roman de Rou de Wace, ed. by A. J. Holden, 3 vols, Société des Anciens Textes Français
(Paris: Picard, 1970–73), part 3, lines 8487–88.
64
Spence, ‘Re-imagining History’, Appendix A, pp. 269, 331, 340–50.
Norman Conquest provided an ideal opportunity to glorify the family whose

history he was recording: a moment of military prowess and dramatic change
which led to the founding of a great dynasty.
Seen alongside the account of Siward in the Delapre Chronicle, it is clear that
part of the appeal of this passage in the Mohun Chronicle is its celebration of the
extraordinary — indeed, incredible — importance and prowess of the family’s
founder, who both won the land which the family has inherited and proved
himself, and by extension his family, invaluable to the monarchy.
The second surviving fragment of the Mohun Chronicle appears to be part of a
larger description of Reynold de Mohun II’s founding of the Cistercian abbey of
Newenham in the thirteenth century. In this passage, Reynold travels to the papal
court at Lyons to seek papal confirmation of the new foundation. Not only does
Reynold secure the papal bull, he is also elected the ‘plus valiant et [. . .] plus
honorable home qui puit estre trovez en la deste courte’ (most valiant and most
honourable man who could be found in the said court), and the pope makes him
‘le Counte de Est, ceo est, Somerset’ (the Earl of Est, that is, Somerset), giving him
an annual allowance of two hundred marks from papal revenues to help him sus-
tain the title.65 Whatever the rest of this narrative described, securing an earldom
from God’s representative on Earth was surely a high point in the Mohun family’s
fortunes. And it is no coincidence that this occurs when Reynold is founding
Newenham Abbey: there is strong evidence that the Mohun Chronicle was written
for the family by the Abbot of Newenham.66
Collectively, the three works discussed above demonstrate that in later medieval
England, genealogies were indeed repositories for information, for example to
support claims to inherited land — although notably, these were not only the
family’s lands but also those of the religious institutions they supported. However,
in their fullest forms they also served to enhance the family’s prestige, situating
their families in the context of national history, providing a moral commentary on
the actions and treatment of the families’ ancestors, and incorporating legendary
and romance elements into their accounts. They also served to provide a narrative
to accompany the establishment of the family whose rise they chronicled. The
multifaceted purposes of England’s noble genealogies persisted long after Anglo-
Norman fell out of use as a language of record in the early fifteenth century.
65
Spence, ‘Re-imagining History’, Appendix A, p. 338.
66
Spence, ‘Re-imagining History’, Appendix A, pp. 274–78.
G ENEALOGIES IN M EDIEVAL F RANCE
Marigold Anne Norbye
W
hen discussing ‘genealogies’ in France or elsewhere, one immediately
encounters the issue of defining what is meant by a genealogy. Léopold
Génicot, in the series Typologie des sources, limited the term to ‘une
œuvre indépendante, écrite ou dessinée pour faire connaitre la filiation d’une
famille ou d’un individu’ (an independent work, written or drawn to make known
the lineage of a family or an individual).1 He made a distinction between genealogy
and two literary genres close to it: lists or catalogues of kings, concerned with trans-
mission of power rather than bloodlines, and chronicles or annals, primarily in-
volved in narrating events. Georges Duby had a similar conception of genealogies:
when he discussed French genealogical literature, he concentrated on the ‘écrits
proprement généalogiques, c’est à dire qui dressent le tableau d’une parenté’
(strictly genealogical writings, which provide a picture of a family group).2 He too
excluded chronicles and lists of rulers from his study. However, Gabrielle Spiegel
postulated that genealogy went beyond the literary genre as studied by Duby; it
provided both a ‘perceptual grid’ through which historians viewed the past and a
narrative structure to historical literature.3
1
Léopold Génicot, Les généalogies, Typologie des sources du Moyen Âge occidental, 15
(Turnhout: Brepols, 1975), p. 11. Translations throughout this chapter are my own.
2
Georges Duby, ‘Remarques sur la littérature généalogique en France aux XIe et XIIe siècles’,
reprinted in Georges Duby, Hommes et structures du Moyen Âge (Paris: Mouton Éditeur, 1973),
pp. 287–98 (p. 288).
3
Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ‘Genealogy: Form and Function in Medieval Historiography’, in The
Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1997), pp. 99–110 (p. 105).
80 Marigold Anne Norbye
One chapter would hardly do justice to the entire subject of genealogies in

medieval France, especially if broadly defined. As Spiegel pointed out, the narrative
structure itself of numerous historical works was essentially genealogical, and hence
one could potentially include most French chronicles in a study of French
genealogies. I propose therefore to focus on one type of French genealogical work:
the genealogical diagram, in particular the kind accompanied by text, usually in the
form of an abridged chronicle following a genealogical structure. Furthermore, I
will concentrate on those works concerned with the kings of France, since royal
genealogies went beyond the depiction of a particular family, linking as they did the
fate of a dynasty with the fate of France itself.
The Message and Role of Genealogical Diagrams
I define as a ‘genealogical diagram’ any arrangement of genealogical information

which is not in straight text form. The most common examples are columns of
medallions containing names and sometimes information about individuals, and
genealogical ‘trees’ usually constructed in a variation of a circle and line diagram.
In both cases, the author has sought a visual means of conveying genealogical infor-
mation which goes beyond straight textual narrative or simple enumeration in a list.
The arrangement of information in medallions is often little more than presentation
of data in tabular form; the creation of a tree, on the other hand, is a complex
operation which can give important clues as to the opinions and bias of the author.
Genealogical diagrams can be studied from two angles: for their content, and
for the way they are constructed and presented. Firstly, like any other form of his-
torical literature, they can be quarried for the information they contain, and for
what this information tells us about the knowledge, preoccupations, and priorities
of their authors and audiences. Even a basic list of kings, whether in straight text
form or in some diagrammatic format, reveals whom the medieval author con-
sidered to be legitimate kings of France and whom he might have left out.4 Due to
4
Bernard Guenée, ‘Les généalogies entre l’histoire et la politique: la fierté d’être Capétien, en
France, au Moyen Age’, Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 33 (1978), 450–77 (p. 450);
reprinted in Bernard Guenée, Politique et histoire au Moyen Âge: recueil d’articles sur l’histoire
politique et l’historiographie médiévale (1956–1981) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1981), pp.
341–68 (p. 341), comments that ‘Le fait d’inscrire ou de retenir le nom d’un évèque ou d’un roi
dans le catalogue est un acte politique qui reconnaît sa légitimité’ (the very fact of writing down or
maintaining the name of a bishop or of a king in the catalogue is a political act that acknowledges
his legitimacy).
GENEALOGIES IN MEDIEVAL FRANCE 81
various factors, there never was a fully standardized list of kings. Opinions differed
as to whether certain rulers were legitimate kings, and regal lists varied accordingly.
For example, the first Capetian, Hugues Capet, was considered a usurper and thus
denied regal status by some. Various factors made for numerous variations in lists
of kings and led to subtle distinctions as to what made a legitimate king: bloodline
and birth, coronation and anointing, or effective rule and power.
Such distinctions were not just of academic interest; they informed contem-
porary debates on kingship and the transmission of power.5 In theory, the French
kings were elected, but in effect for generations each dynasty managed to impose
as successors the closest male heir, using family heredity as the main vector for
transmission. From the thirteenth century onwards, increasing stress was laid in
official circles on the bloodline of the French kings, with ingenious links being
made between the three royal dynasties so as to show that the current incumbent
of the throne was related by blood all the way back to his Merovingian predeces-
sors, and hence back to their mythical Trojan forebears.
The Grandes Chroniques de France, written in the late thirteenth century and
the basis of much history writing for the rest of the Middle Ages, were produced
in the abbey of Saint-Denis which was very close to royal circles at the time, and re-
flected official ideology on royal succession.6 In these chronicles, a mythical Blitilde
appeared, supposedly a daughter of the Merovingian king Clotaire I; she was
shown to be a direct ancestress of Pippin, the first Carolingian king. As for the link
between Carolingians and Capetians, it was provided by a prophecy saying that the
Carolingians would regain the throne (reditus regni ad stirpem Karoli Magni) after
seven generations: conveniently, at that stage a Capetian king (Philippe II Auguste)
married a noblewoman of Carolingian ascent, Isabelle of Hainault, so that their
son was considered by the chroniclers as the fulfilment of that prophecy.7 As it
5
On these matters, see among many others Colette Beaune, The Birth of an Ideology: Myths
and Symbols of Nation in Late-Medieval France, trans. by Susan Ross Huston (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1991), and Andrew W. Lewis, Royal Succession in Capetian France: Studies on
Familial Order and the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
6
See for example Gabrielle M. Spiegel, The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-Denis: A Survey
(Brookline, MA: Classical Folia Editions, 1978), or Bernard Guenée, ‘Les Grandes Chroniques de
France: le roman aux roys (1274–1518)’, in Les Lieux de mémoire, vol. II: La Nation, ed. by Pierre
Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), pp. 189–214.
7
On the appearance of the reditus, see among others Elizabeth A. R. Brown, ‘La généalogie
capétienne dans l’historiographie du Moyen Age: Philippe le Bel, le reniement du reditus et la
création d’une ascendance carolingienne pour Hugues Capet’, in Religion et culture autour de l’an
mil: royaume Capétien et Lotharingie. Actes du colloque Hugues Capet, 987–1987. La France de l’An
happened, most previous Capetian kings, including the usurping founder Hugues
himself, had Carolingian blood in them through their mothers, but this particular
link was the one favoured by the Saint-Denis historians and others.
An aspect of regal succession that became particularly sensitive in the late Mid-
dle Ages was that of illegitimacy: Was it acceptable to have a king of dubious birth?
How did one represent rulers who found themselves in that situation?8 Another
thorny issue, after the French had rejected the claims of Edward III of England to
the throne of France through his mother, was the ability of women to become
queens in their own right or to pass on an entitlement to the crown to their
descendants.9 Thus the information on kings and their relatives contained in both
chronicles and basic regal lists can be revelatory of the opinions held by their
authors and their circles concerning all these issues.
The same applies to genealogical diagrams. However, such diagrams add further
dimensions not conveyed by straight text: their layout and formatting, the links (or
lack thereof) between the persons listed therein, and other elements such as colour
coding or pictorial components can all reinforce the message given by the content
about the author’s views on heredity, principles of succession, and transmission of
power. Even value judgements on individuals can be incorporated in the design of
a diagram, as we shall see below. The second angle of study of a genealogical
diagram is thus that of its physical appearance, and the correlation between its
contents and how they are visually displayed.
Survey of Genealogical Diagrams
The positioning of genealogical diagrams within medieval manuscripts varies.

There are two places where they are found: in a separate position, before or after
other material, or integrated within or alongside a text. In the latter case, the text
is usually a brief chronicle written following a genealogical structure, to which most
chronicles of the kings of France tended to adhere. The accompanying diagram is
Mil, ed. by Dominique Iogna-Prat and Jean-Charles Picard (Paris: Picard, 1990), pp. 199–214 (pp.
200–02).
8
Sanford Zale, ‘Bastards or Kings or Both? Louis III and Carloman in Late-Medieval French
Historiography’, Comitatus, 29 (1998), 95–112, gives an example of this debate.
9
A recent contribution to this much-studied issue is Craig Taylor, ‘The Salic Law, French
Queenship and the Defence of Women in the Late Middle Ages’, French Historical Studies, 29
(2006), 543–64.
usually a genealogical tree, positioned in parallel with the text. In many cases, the
tree appears to have been drawn first or in careful conjunction with the writing of
the text, as the text often wraps itself around the tree. In such cases, the text was
either composed specifically to accompany the tree, or the tree was explicitly
inserted to illustrate a point made in the text.
The development of the use of trees throughout the Middle Ages as a means of
displaying information, both for genealogical purposes and for expressing other
types of relationship (e.g. the organization of knowledge), has been exhaustively
explored by Christiane Klapisch-Zuber in L’ombre des ancêtres.10 There were many
experiments made in an attempt to convey information in a particular way,
reflected in the wide variety of trees and diagrams that survive. The period from
1030 to the end of the twelfth century was particularly ‘fertile en inventions’ as
different formulas were tried out.11 In the early days, genealogical trees were often
simple sketches formed by flexible lines (‘lignes souples’) linking names.12 The
twelfth century saw the emergence of genealogical diagrams based on a network of
straight lines and medallions, which had originally been used in religious contexts.13
Diagrams, however basic, have many advantages when showing family ramifica-
tions: whereas straight textual narrative has to describe relationships consecutively,
diagrams can be read going up or down the lines of affinity, with the collateral lines
visible in parallel, enabling the reader to embrace the family network at a glance,
in a ‘lecture synchrone’.14
Among the first genealogical diagrams of royal or noble families produced in
France were simple sketches of the genealogies of the counts of Anjou dating from
1066–80 and originating in the monastery of Saint-Aubin in Angers where
chronicles of the Angevin dynasty were being written.15 Around the same period
10
Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, L’ombre des ancêtres: essai sur l’imaginaire médiéval de la parenté
(Paris: Fayard, 2000). Inevitably, as I am dealing with the same case studies as Mme Klapisch-Zuber,
and have examined in detail the manuscripts under discussion, there is some overlap between my
observations and hers, in particular when describing the manuscripts. I am indebted to her,
however, for much background information and her insightful interpretations of the evidence.
Thus, parts of my introductions to many case studies are effectively summaries of her work;
references to the relevant sections of her book will be made at the beginning of each entry.
11
Klapisch-Zuber, L’ombre des ancêtres, p. 117.
12
13
14
15
Klapisch-Zuber, L’ombre des ancêtres, pp. 92–93.
(1060–75) at this monastery, three pages of royal genealogies were composed

which were placed at the end of the annals of Saint-Aubin.16 The genealogies con-
tain the names of the kings of France, as well as some of their younger sons, linked
by curved lines. The names of some queens occasionally appear near those of their
offspring. Alongside the later Merovingians, one finds a parallel genealogy of those
who held the real power in the land, the Pippinid mayors of the palace, forefathers
to the Carolingians. After the final Carolingians, the diagram shows the Robertian
ancestors of the Capetian dynasty, several of whom had usurped the throne from
the Carolingian Charles the Simple. Brief historical or biographical notes appear
alongside certain kings, fitting around the shape of the diagram. Produced in a
provincial area at a time when central royal power was still weak, the text contains
several comments that are highly critical of the Robertian and Capetian usur-
pations.17 Although the text is extremely brief and selective, this early example
demonstrates how an author could combine historical commentary and genea-
logical diagram into an integrated whole.
Just over a century later, around 1200, another royal genealogical diagram was
produced, also as a complement to a historical text, with brief textual annotations
within the tree. This was the tree that appears in a manuscript of the Karolinus by
Gilles de Paris.18 Gilles wrote the Karolinus, a poem about the great feats of Charle-
magne, for the future Louis VIII, as moral instruction to the young prince, encourag-
ing him to imitate the virtues of his predecessor. Unlike historians later in the same
century, who went out of their way to prove the Capetians’ Carolingian ancestry
through use of the reditus myth or other means, Gilles did not set out to show Louis
as a blood relative of Charlemagne, but it can be interpreted that he assumed that
this was the case.19 Having edified him with the tale of Charlemagne, he provided
his reader with genealogical diagrams which would enable him to see the personages
16
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France (henceforth: BnF), MS lat. 4955. Klapisch-Zuber,
L’ombre des ancêtres, pp. 93–94; illustration plate 12.
17
Both Hugues Capet and his grandfather Robert I are qualified as ‘tyrants’ (fol. 102r).
18
BnF, MS lat. 6191. Klapisch-Zuber, L’ombre des ancêtres, pp. 163–66; illustration plate 22.
M. L. Colker, ‘The “Karolinus” of Egidius Parisiensis’, Traditio, 29 (1973), 199–325. Andrew W.
Lewis, ‘Dynastic Structures and Capetian Throne-Right: The Views of Giles of Paris’, Traditio, 33
(1977), 225–52. Elizabeth A. R. Brown, ‘La notion de la légitimité et la prophécie à la cour de
Philippe Auguste’, in La France de Philippe Auguste: Actes du colloque international organisé par le
C.N.R.S. (Paris, 29 septembre – 4 octobre 1980), ed. by Robert-Henri Bautier (Paris: CNRS, 1982),
pp. 77–110 (pp. 81–82).
19
Lewis, ‘Dynastic Structures’, pp. 240–41, 246–47.
mentioned in the poem (Charlemagne and his predecessors) as well as Charlemagne’s

successors all the way down to Louis himself.20 He also incorporated a few saints
in the drawings. As well as making brief historical notes in the paragraphs inserted
around the diagram, Gilles used a complex system of colour coding to differentiate
the status of the various persons in the tree, which will be discussed later on (p. 98).
There is much scholarly debate as to whether or not the manuscript that survives
was the presentation copy to Prince Louis.21 Be that as it may, the diagram itself
was only copied into one other manuscript, without the colour coding or the main
Karolinus poem; it obviously did not receive a wide dissemination.
The fate of a contemporary genealogy, also composed around 1200, was very
different. Its author, Pierre de Poitiers, a theology teacher in Paris in the late twelfth
century, made the most ground-breaking use of all the possibilities of a diagram.22
His predecessor, Peter Comestor, had summed up and commented on the historical
events of the Old Testament in his Scholastic History. Pierre de Poitiers devised a
teaching aid in the form of figures to help students memorize the main points of
his book. The resulting Compendium was subsequently added at the end of numer-
ous copies of Comestor’s work, with the original author’s name often getting lost
in the process. Pierre’s diagrams, mostly concentrating on lineages (in the form of
medallions linked by lines) or lines of succession, were accompanied by brief para-
graphs containing the basic narrative elements linked to each biblical character,
and their strong didactic function is stressed by Pierre himself in his preamble.
It is most likely that Pierre’s original was conceived for a roll rather than a
codex, as its layout is ideally suited to a scroll where one keeps unrolling the
genealogical tree in a continuous flow.23 The genealogical tree fills the centre, with
the text in narrow columns on either side.24 Pierre also introduced parallel lines in
20
Lewis, ‘Dynastic Structures’, pp. 228 and 244, n. 81, argues that Gilles was the author of the
genealogy.
21
Colker, ‘The “Karolinus”’, pp. 218–19.
22
Klapisch-Zuber devotes a chapter and a half to Pierre de Poitiers, L’ombre des ancêtres,
pp. 121–46. See also Philip S. Moore, The Works of Peter of Poitiers, Master in Theology and
Chancellor of Paris (1193–1205) (Notre Dame: Catholic University of America, 1936); Friedrich
Stegmüller, Repertorium biblicum Medii Aevi. Commentaria. Auctores, vol. IV (Madrid: Consejo
Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1954), pp. 362–70.
23
Klapisch-Zuber, L’ombre des ancêtres, pp. 127–34, on the graphical devices and the roll
format.
24
See for example BnF, MS lat. 14435, or Klapisch-Zuber, L’ombre des ancêtres, plate 19. Full
study in W. H. Monroe, ‘Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Century Illustrated Genealogical
Manuscripts in Roll and Codex: Peter of Poitiers’ Compendium, Universal Histories and
the left and right margins, such as the successions of Old Testament high priests
or the rulers of the land of Israel. This layout thus enabled parallel histories to be
narrated simultaneously, within a unifying framework, reflecting the theological
underpinning of the work: mankind’s progress through various ages towards
salvation via Jesus Christ. A roll was the best means of showing this unfolding of
history, but codex was the main format for manuscript books, and there are more
surviving copies of Pierre’s Compendium in codex form than in rolls.
Later authors added extra elements to the Compendium, turning it into a uni-
versal chronicle with non-biblical historical events and dynasties being placed in
parallel with the biblical elements. The narrative was prolonged beyond biblical
times, with parallel successions of popes and Roman emperors (followed by
Western emperors from Charlemagne onwards). Some universal chronicles started
to include other dynastic genealogies, such as the kings of France or the kings of
England, or both. The late thirteenth-century genealogical rolls of the kings of En-
gland discussed elsewhere in this book by Olivier de Laborderie owe a direct debt
to Pierre de Poitiers or to universal chronicles grafted onto his Compendium.25
In the mid-fourteenth century, the Franciscan friar Giovanni da Udine
( Johannes de Utino) produced a universal chronicle, the Compilatio librorum
historialum totius biblie, based on the Pierre de Poitiers model, in a roll with close
integration between text and image.26 In 1460, an abridged translation into French
was made by Jean Miélot, scribe and translator to the dukes of Burgundy.27 The
Chronicles of the Kings of England’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London,

Courtauld Institute of Art, 1990). There is no modern critical edition of the Compendium, just an
early printed version produced by Ulrich Zwingli: M. Petri Pictaviensis Galli Genealogia et
chronologia sanctorum patrum . . . continuata est ab Hulderico Zvinglio juniore . . . (Basel, 1592).
25
See also Olivier de Laborderie, ‘“Ligne de reis”: culture historique, représentation du pouvoir
royal et construction de la mémoire nationale en Angleterre à travers les généalogies royales en
rouleau du milieu du XIIIe siècle au début du XV e siècle’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Paris, EHESS,
2002), p. 408.
26
BnF, MS nouvelle acquisition latine 2577. Klapisch-Zuber, L’ombre des ancêtres, pp. 146–47;
illustration plate 20. See also Friedrich Stegmüller, Repertorium biblicum Medii Aevi. Commentaria.
Auctores, vol. III (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1951), pp. 437–38
( Johannes de Utino); Norbert Ott, ‘Johannes de Utino’, in Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters:
Verfasser Lexikon, vol. IV (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1983), cols 785–88.
27
BnF, MS fr. 17001, fols 36v –98r. Adrian Wilson and Joyce Lancaster Wilson, A Medieval
Mirror (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 70, stated that this manuscript was a
workbook by the author, with another copy in Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, MS II 239. Nathalie
Hurel, ‘Les chroniques universelles en rouleau (1457–1521): une source pour l’iconographie
surviving manuscripts of Miélot’s work are in codex form. Like some other copyists
of Giovanni’s work, Miélot put the genealogical drawings on separate pages. His
trees do not resemble Giovanni’s diagrams, and are drawn using different prin-
ciples, which are discussed further below (p. 100).28
Also based on the principles of the Compendium, and possibly inspired by rolls
of Giovanni da Udine’s Compilatio such as the one found in the Bibliothèque na-
tionale de France, is a universal chronicle in French in roll format that first emerges
at the very beginning of the fifteenth century and is then developed further in the
mid-fifteenth century, being copied numerous times in the second half of the
century, and as late as the sixteenth century. It calls itself ‘genealogie de la bible’ but
it is not the only work with that title. It contains within it a version of a genea-
logical chronicle of the kings of France named A tous nobles which is discussed in
more detail below (p. 92); in my study of A tous nobles, I called this universal
chronicle ‘version H’, as it was first studied in detail by the art historian Nathalie
Hurel.29 Lisa Fagin Davis is currently working on it and calls it Chronique Anonyme
religieuse’, Revue d’Histoire de l’Église de France, 80, 205 (1994), 303–14 (pp. 312–13), posited
Miélot’s work as a possible source for the universal roll chronicles discussed in the next paragraph.
As the prototypes of these chronicles date from the early fifteenth century, this is unlikely.
28
Miélot was proud of his work as compiler of genealogies and translator, and included a lively
defence of his activities when translating Boccaccio’s reflections on poetry found in his Genealogie
deorum gentilium. See Gianni Mombello, ‘Per la fortuna del Boccaccio in Francia: Jean Miélot
traduttore di due capitoli della Genologia’, in Studi sul Boccaccio, ed. by Vittore Branca (Florence:
Sansoni, 1963–), I (1963), 415–44 (pp. 428–29), and Anne Schoysman, ‘Jean Miélot, Jean Boccace
et les généalogies: notes sur le ms. BNF, f. fr. 17001’, in ‘Pour acquerir honneur et pris’: mélanges de
moyen français offerts à Giuseppe Di Stefano, ed. by Maria Colombo Timelli and Claudio Galderisi
(Montreal: CERES, 2004), pp. 483–89 (pp. 486–87).
29
See Marigold Anne Norbye, ‘Genealogies and Dynastic Awareness in the Hundred Years
War: The Evidence of A tous nobles qui aiment beaux faits et bonnes histoires’, Journal of Medieval
History, 33 (2007), 297–319, for an introduction and list of manuscripts. Lisa Fagin Davis,
‘Scrolling through History: La chronique universelle, Boston Public Library MS Pb. Med. 32’, in
Secular Sacred 11th –16th Century Works from the Boston Public Library and the Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston, ed. by Nancy Netzer (Boston: McMullen Museum of Art, 2006), pp. 43–50 and plate
16, examines a typical example. Klapisch-Zuber, L’ombre des ancêtres, refers to Hurel’s work on p.
147, and indirectly on p. 193 (n. 13 p. 379); the incomplete roll that she discusses on p. 192 is a
copy of the same chronicle. Many of the rolls listed by François Fossier, ‘Chroniques universelles
en forme de rouleau à la fin du Moyen Âge’, Bulletin de la Société Nationale des Antiquaires de
France (1980–81), 163–83 (pp. 173–74, n. 6), are also copies of this chronicle. See also Christiane
Raynaud, ‘Mythologie politique et histoire dans la chronologie universelle d’Orléans (ms. 470)’,
Razo: Cahiers du Centre d’Études Médiévales de Nice, 12 (1992), 113–45; reprinted in Christiane
Raynaud, Images et pouvoirs au Moyen Age (Paris: Le Léopard d'Or, 1993) pp. 235–66.
Universelle à la mort de Charles VII.30 This universal chronicle was divided into two
rolls in its early fifteenth-century prototype. The first roll covered the Old Testa-
ment and was similar to other universal chronicles based on the Compendium. The
second roll contained the Christian era and had four columns: successions of
popes, lines of Roman emperors down to Holy Roman Emperors, and genealogies
of the kings of France and of England starting from their mythical Trojan ances-
tors.31 Within the column of the kings of England, there is a temporary inter-
ruption where the Frankish kings of Jerusalem are inserted.32
Around 1457, this work was taken up again: the A tous nobles text and tree were
updated to the end of the reign of Charles VI (who died in 1422), and the entire
chronicle copied into one roll. All subsequent extant copies (more than twenty of
them) follow the same layout and were given similar, though not identical, illustra-
tive programmes (usually about sixty illuminated miniatures in large medallions).
The text remained essentially the same, but with numerous variants. Moreover, the
column concerning the kings of France was regularly updated and expanded to
cover more recent events. Similarly, the genealogical tree had extra generations of
the French royal family added on. These rolls, like Pierre de Poitiers’s original
work, were an effective way of displaying parallel threads of history and showed a
close integration between the text and the image, with the text literally wrapping
itself around the drawings. However, it should be noted that in the Christian era
section at least, there was no temporal concordance between the four columns; for
example, the entry on Charlemagne as emperor is usually some distance away from
that on Charlemagne as King of France.
A roll is an effective way of showing the continuous line of a dynasty or succes-
sion of rulers, providing a visual counterpoint to any ideology of uninterrupted
transmission of power (e.g. the popes as successors of Saint Peter, the French kings
as descendants of the Trojans). However, a roll is also in practice quite unwieldy,
especially in the size reached by these universal chronicles, which tended to be
between ten and fifteen metres long. Such rolls were not handy quick reference
works; they were more likely to function as objects of display. The culmination of
30
Name of the entry written by Lisa Fagin Davis in Encyclopedia of Medieval Chronicles, ed.
by Graeme Dunphy (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).
31
Klapisch-Zuber, L’ombre des ancêtres, discusses the significance of the order of the columns
and the role of mythical ancestors on pp. 149 and 192–93.
32
Oliver Pickering, ‘The Crusades in Leeds University Library’s Genealogical History Roll’,
in From Clermont to Jerusalem. The Crusades and Crusader Societies 1095–1500, ed. by Alan V.
Murray (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 251–66.
these rolls is found in a remodelled and updated sixteenth-century copy that is

thirty-three metres long; as Klapisch-Zuber commented, this magnificent specimen
marked both ‘le triomphe et l’impasse’ (the triumph and the dead end) of this
genre.33 Despite this, the roll format was so well suited to universal chronicles that
even some early printers used it.34
In parallel with this evolution of universal chronicles, other experiments with
genealogical diagrams had been taking place in France since the time of Pierre de
Poitiers. Girardus de Arvernia (also known as de Antwerpia; d. 1288) wrote his
own universal chronicle before 1272, the Historia figuralis, for which he then
produced an abridged version, the Abbreviatio figuralis historie, where he also drew
genealogical figures in the left- and right-hand margins.35 Klapisch-Zuber notes
that his circle and line diagrams do not serve to break up the text, as in Pierre de
Poitiers, but are subordinate to the text and are used rather to frame it. An original
feature is that, from the foundation of the Cluniac order in 909 or 910, the text
was articulated around the rule of each Abbot of Cluny. The lines of the marginal
diagrams were henceforth organized so as to frame each entry, with a new set of
medallions for popes, emperors, and kings appearing for each abbot.
No other significant innovations concerning genealogical diagrams alongside
text appear in France during the thirteenth century, despite it seeing the emergence
of the greatest genealogical chronicle of them all, the Grandes Chroniques de
France. None of the great French historians of the period used diagrams, even
though dynastic and genealogical chronicles flourished from now on, in a climate
of competing dynasties and construction of national identities.36 The only excep-
tion was Guillaume de Nangis, the first continuator of the Grandes Chroniques and
respected chronicler in his own right, who drew a rather clumsy diagram in the
margin of the copy of the Latin version of his Chronique abrégée des rois de France
dedicated to Philippe III.37
In the early fourteenth century, another manuscript made for a king (composed
at the request of Philippe IV (1285–1314), actually presented to his son Philippe V
33
Klapisch-Zuber, L’ombre des ancêtres, p. 149. The roll concerned is Paris, Bibliothèque
Sainte-Geneviève, MS 523 (and not 522 as indicated in Klapisch-Zuber, p. 372).
34
35
BnF, MS lat. 4910. Klapisch-Zuber, L’ombre des ancêtres, pp. 150–52; illustration plate 21.
See also Léopold Delisle, ‘Le chroniqueur Girard d’Auvergne ou d’Anvers’, Journal des savants, 25
(1900), 232–42 and 285–94.
36
37
BnF, MS lat. 6184. Klapisch-Zuber, L’ombre des ancêtres, pp. 168–71, illustration plate 23.
after he was crowned in 1317) contained some more elaborate genealogical dia-
grams.38 The work was about the life and miracles of Saint Denis and was written
by Yves, a monk of the abbey of Saint-Denis, which, ever since the composition of
the Grandes Chroniques de France half a century before, had become the produc-
tion centre of royal historiography. The third section of this Vie et miracles de saint
Denis related the miracles wrought by the saint for and through the kings of
France. This led the author to record various historical facts related to the kings,
and here he produced genealogical diagrams at those points in his narrative where
it was clearly necessary to show the family relationships between the protagonists
of his story. In two places in particular, he produced a carefully constructed dia-
gram to support his argument, when painstakingly demonstrating the blood links
that he argued existed among the three royal dynasties, in every case through royal
women.39 Starting off from a small medallion of a king placed at the beginning of
a paragraph, he would draw lines from this point and link it to further medallions,
each of which initiated a brief explanatory sentence or paragraph. With Yves, we
have the clearest instance of diagrams being used to reinforce the ideology ex-
pounded in the work. Yves explicitly stated that women were able to inherit or
transmit rights, citing a biblical example (Numbers 27. 8).40 He also downplayed
the reditus, the idea — stressed in the Grandes Chroniques — that Carolingians
would ‘return’ to the throne after seven generations of Capetians: as far as he was
concerned, the first Capetian king already had Carolingian blood in his veins.41
Elizabeth Brown has argued that Philippe IV rejected the idea of reditus because
of his antipathy to the belief that the Carolingians were superior to the
38
BnF, MS lat. 13836; copy in BnF, MS lat. 5286. Scholars disagree on which of these copies
came first; see latest bibliography in Elizabeth A. R. Brown, ‘Paris and Paradise: The View from
Saint-Denis’, in The Four Modes of Seeing, ed. by Evelyn Staudinger Lane, Elizabeth Carson Pastan,
and Ellen M. Shortell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 419–64; I thank Professor Brown for
sending me an advance copy and for her advice on Yves. Klapisch-Zuber, L’ombre des ancêtres, pp.
172–74; illustration plate 24.
39
Colette Beaune, Les manuscrits des rois de France au Moyen Âge: Le Miroir du Pouvoir (Paris:
Bibliothèque de l’Image, 1997), pp. 147–48, provides illustrations of the two main diagrams and
analyses their contents. Anne D. Hedeman, The Royal Image: Illustrations of the Grandes chroniques
de France, 1274–1422 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 35, comments on one
of these diagrams; illustration p. 36.
40
BnF, MS lat. 13836, fol. 76v. Full transcription in Brown, ‘La généalogie capétienne’, pp.
210–11.
41
BnF, MS lat. 13836, fol. 90v . Transcription in Brown, ‘La généalogie capétienne’, p. 214.
Capetians.42 However, within a generation, starting with Philippe V’s accession to

the throne to the detriment of his niece who arguably had a stronger claim to it,
any arguments in favour of female succession became dangerously controversial.
Yves himself carefully stated that the arguments used in Hugues’s case were not
universally applicable.43
At the same time, far from this historiographical centre close to royal circles,
down in the south of France, a Dominican scholar, Bernard Gui, was producing a
vast corpus of erudite works, including a universal chronicle with a catalogue of
popes, a brief chronicle of the kings of France, catalogues of Roman emperors, kings
of France, counts of Toulouse, and various church dignitaries, and other lists and
information packs concerning ecclesiastical matters. Regarding the kings of France,
not only did he write the chronicle (Reges francorum) but also a list of their names
(Nomina regum francorum) and a genealogical tree (Arbor genealogie regum Fran-
corum).44 For the latter, he drew diagrams to include all kings from their mythical
Trojan ancestors down to the current monarch, with information on wives and
younger children in the side branches wherever that was available. Moreover, he
added a few saints as well, positioning them alongside the kings of whom they were
contemporaries. Around the tree, which was placed firmly in the middle of the
page, he put brief paragraphs of text taken from his Reges francorum, allocating a
number to each king. He implicitly expressed his vision of dynastic legitimacy by
not giving a number to those kings whom he did not consider part of the royal
succession, mainly those who died without sons, or who were illegitimate in some
way (bastard sons of kings, or usurpers from other families).45 The only usurper to
get a number is Pippin, the first Carolingian; Bernard Gui did refer to his
‘accession’ rather than ‘succession’, but stressed that the Franks and the Pope had
42
Brown, ‘La généalogie capétienne’, pp. 203–06.
43
Brown, ‘La généalogie capétienne’, p. 208.
44
List of most manuscripts in Léopold Delisle, ‘Notice sur les manuscrits de Bernard Gui’,
Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Nationale et autres bibliothèques, 27 (1879),
254–58 (Arbor). Klapisch-Zuber, L’ombre des ancêtres, pp. 174–76; illustration plate 25. Beaune,
Les manuscrits, p. 149: illustration and brief commentary. On the author, see Bernard Gui et son
monde, Cahiers de Fanjeaux, 16 (Toulouse: Edouart Privat, 1981).
45
On his vision of the monarchy, see Anne-Marie Lamarrigue, Bernard Gui (1261–1331): un
historien et sa méthode (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000), pp. 435–65, as well as Anne-Marie
Lamarrigue, ‘La rédaction d’un catalogue des rois de France: Guillaume de Nangis et Bernard Gui’,
in Saint-Denis et la royauté: études offertes à Bernard Guénée, Actes du colloque ‘Saint-Denis et la
royauté’ du 2 au 4 mai 1996, ed. by Françoise Autrand, Claude Gauvard, and Jean-Marie Moeglin
(Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999), pp. 481–92.
chosen him.46 As for the other dynastic usurper, Hugues Capet, Bernard Gui
denied him full regal status, but in the Reges francorum, he related the prophecy
about the reditus which implicitly condoned the change of dynasty as part of a
divine plan.47 Bernard Gui was a painstaking scholar, who continued revising and
updating his works all his life. Thus there are five editions of the Arbor genealogie,
produced between 1313 and 1331. After his death, others continued updating his
work in certain manuscripts; one copy of his first edition (whose narrative stopped
in 1307) was brought up to date by successive scribes until the reign of Charles VII
(1422–61).48 Tantalizingly, when referring to his sources, in some editions of his
work he evoked genealogical trees, including at least one in roll format.49
In the early fifteenth century, another text with a genealogical tree emerged,
anonymously this time: the short chronicle of the kings of France mentioned
above, A tous nobles, named after the first words of its prologue.50 It is not clear
whether this work was originally written as part of the universal chronicle in which
it is often found embedded, or whether the compiler of the universal chronicle
used an existing stand-alone text of A tous nobles and incorporated it into his work.
What is certain is that A tous nobles was a popular work, which survives in more
than sixty manuscripts; more than twenty textual versions have been identified,
showing how the text was constantly remodelled and updated throughout the
century. Of the versions discovered so far, all but four are accompanied by a
46
BnF, MS lat. 4989, fol. 83v . Lamarrigue, Bernard Gui, p. 441.
47
Lamarrigue, Bernard Gui, pp. 444–45.
48
BnF, MS nouvelle acquisition latine 1171, fols 137v–150r.
49
Lamarrigue, Bernard Gui, p. 294.
50
Klapisch-Zuber, L’ombre des ancêtres, does not identify A tous nobles as such, but briefly
discusses two versions of it on pp. 191–92 (two copies held in Princeton University Library, MS
56 and Princeton University Art Museum, MS y1932–32, versions P and H) and a copy of another
version (BnF, MS fr. 4991, version 5) on p. 247. For a general introduction to A tous nobles, see my
article ‘Genealogies and Dynastic Awareness’. See also Marigold Anne Norbye, ‘A Popular Example
of “National Literature” in the Hundred Years War: A tous nobles qui aiment beaux faits et bonnes
histoires’, Nottingham Mediaeval Studies, 51 (2007), 121–42, and Marigold Anne Norbye, ‘A tous
nobles qui aiment beaux faits et bonnes histoires: The Multiple Transformations of a
Fifteenth-Century French Genealogical Chronicle’, in The Medieval Chronicle, vol. V , ed. by Erik
Kooper (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), pp. 175–96. Other scholars who have worked on A tous
nobles are Sanford C. Zale, ‘Unofficial Histories of France in the Late Middle Ages’ (unpublished
doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 1994) and, from an art historian’s perspective, Camille
Serchuk, ‘Picturing France in the Fifteenth Century: The Map in BNF, MS Fr. 4991’, Imago
Mundi, 58 (2006), 133–49.
genealogical tree, and the trees themselves vary in content, so that each version of
text corresponds to a separate version of the tree. Most trees contain at the very
least the kings, some queens, and many royal children; a few go down selected cadet
lines for several generations; some insert additional roundels containing saints;
many have medallions commemorating royal ecclesiastical foundations. Seven
versions form part of a universal chronicle. The other versions exist as a stand-alone
chronicle or, in two cases, in conjunction with the genealogy of the kings of
England found in the universal chronicle. The tree appears in a variety of forms,
but is always closely linked to the text, most often in the shape of a circle and line
diagram around which the text has to fit. A tous nobles was an example of the lively
unofficial historiographical culture of the fifteenth century, a time when the Hun-
dred Years War had made questions of royal succession and national sovereignty
burning issues, and when the literate classes were avid readers — and writers — of
history, polemical literature, heraldry, and genealogy.51
Genealogical diagrams can also make their appearance at the beginning or at
the end of a historical text, as a discrete entity. In these cases it can be debatable
whether the diagram was composed by the author of the text as a complementary
element or whether it was created separately as a piece of additional information.
What is certain is that chronicles were often copied into manuscripts that con-
tained other historical, religious, or useful material of various kinds. Records of
French kings, whether in plain list form or as genealogical diagrams, naturally fitted
into such collections of historical and religious information, which provided a
useful reference book for the reader.
Some of the works discussed above can be seen to fit into such a pattern: the
Saint-Aubin genealogies are placed at the end of the monastic annals; Gilles de
Paris produced his diagrams as part of a set of additional information appended to
his main didactic poem; Bernard Gui composed his trees as a supplement to the
other historical and ecclesiastical works co-located in his manuscripts. Although
valid and informative in their own right, all these genealogies fit into a particular
context, as complements to other works.
A simpler form of genealogical diagram is found in some but not all manuscripts
of another historical work, the so-called chronicle of the minstrel (‘ménestrel’) of
Alphonse de Poitiers.52 Sometime between 1250 and 1270, the anonymous author
51
Nicole Pons, ‘Mémoire nobiliaire et clivages politiques: le témoignage d’une courte chronique
chevaleresque (1403–1442)’, Journal des Savants (juillet-décembre 2002), 299–348 (p. 316).
52
Paul Meyer, Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque nationale et autres
bibliothèques, vol. XXXII, part 2 (Paris, 1888), pp. 37–81.
translated the Historia regum Francorum (also known as the Gesta francorum usque
ad annum 1214) into French for Alphonse, younger brother of Louis IX, extended
it to cover the reign of Louis IX (1226–70), and added a dedicatory prologue for
his patron. In some copies, the chronicle has been continued by later writers.
Several manuscripts contain what is in effect a list of kings arranged into some form
of table, with the kings’ names (and sometimes additional data) encased in
roundels.53 In most copies, the roundels are organized in several columns that could
be read individually from top to bottom, but the details of the layout differ. The
textual contents of the roundels vary too, with some copies having more informa-
tion than others. These tables are usually found just before the main text; in one
case, they are placed at the end. It would seem that early in the life of the chronicle
(perhaps even in the original copy for Alphonse de Poitiers) someone decided to
produce an accompanying genealogical table. Individual scribes then used their
discretion as to whether to include it or not and used their initiative to amend it
when they did.
The role of genealogical diagrams as an element of useful reference information
among others is confirmed by their presence in other manuscripts where they ac-
company not historical texts, but late medieval polemical literature or legal formu-
laries. There remains a logical connection between the contents of such literature,
often focused on genealogically contentious issues such as the claim of the English
kings to the French crown, and a diagram containing information on the lineage
of the French kings. Once again, the genealogical figure had its place as part of a
dossier of reference material.
For example, in a fifteenth-century manuscript of a collection of polemical texts
by Jean Juvénal des Ursins, written in the context of the Hundred Years War when
the kings of England were claiming the crown of France through Edward III’s
French mother, one finds a page with a genealogical tree showing Louis IX as
ancestor of three branches: the kings of England, the kings of France, and Jeanne,
the daughter of the last direct Capetian king who was denied her father’s crown.54
This diagram could be a useful reference to anyone reading the debates on the
French succession discussed in the polemical treatises (e.g. Audite celi (1435) after
which the tree is placed).
53
Examples in BnF, MSS fr. 13565 (pp. 201–03), fr. 5700 (fols 1r–4v ), and fr. 4961 (fols 1r–2r),
and London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian A VI (fols 1v–4r).
54
BnF, MS fr. 5038, fol. 45v . The manuscript dates from the 1460s according to Peter S. Lewis,
Écrits politiques de Jean Juvénal des Ursins, Société de l’Histoire de France, I (Paris: C. Klincksieck,
1978), p. 47.
Genealogical diagrams were found in another fifteenth-century manuscript

concerned with the question of English claims to the French throne: the so-called
Formulary of Odart Morchesne (composed in 1427), a large compilation of formu-
laic letters, diplomatic exchanges, and other documents put together as a reference
book for royal chancery clerks.55 One copy of this book contains two sets of genea-
logical information, probably an extra appendix, copied by the same scribe who
followed it with another useful piece of knowledge: a list of all the top nobility of
France. There are five pages of roundels containing brief information about each
King of France (name, relationship with previous king, initial year, and length of
reign), arranged in columns in a manner reminiscent of Alphonse de Poitiers’s
chronicle tables.56 These genealogies are followed by a one-page extract of the
Traité contre les Anglais by the polemist Jean de Montreuil (which inspired Jean
Juvénal’s Audite celi mentioned above) arguing that Edward III had no right to the
throne.57 Opposite this text is a useful genealogical diagram, in circle and line
format, showing the relevant branches of the descendants of Louis IX embroiled
in the succession debate and how Edward was but one of several potential candi-
dates to the throne. This small tree enabled the reader to understand at a glance the
convoluted argument exposed on the facing page and illustrates how the use of
such a graphical device could help to expound and clarify a complex idea.
Uses of Graphical Devices
Genealogical trees were rarely neutral in the way they were laid out; they usually
sought to bring out certain points, such as the continuity or the pre-eminence of
a certain lineage.58 Gert Melville has shown the complexity of some of these trees
55
The formulary itself has been edited by Olivier Guyotjeannin and Serge Lusignan, Le
formulaire d’Odart Morchesne dans la version du ms BNF fr. 5024 (Paris: Ecole des Chartes, 2005).
I was alerted to the existence of the genealogical tables by an advance copy, kindly provided by the
author, of Nicole Pons, ‘La défense du pouvoir royal dans la seconde moitié du XV e siècle: l’héritage
de Jean de Montreuil’, in La société politique à la fin du XV e siècle dans les royaumes ibériques et en
Europe occidentale: élites, peuple, sujets?, ed. by Vincent Challet and others (Valladolid: Universidad
de Valladolid; Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2006), pp. 65–87.
56
BnF, MS fr. 14371, fols 285r–287r. Due to an error of calculation early on in the sequence,
probably by the author of the original captions, most of the dates are incorrect.
57
BnF, MS fr. 14371, fol. 287v ; the genealogy is on fol. 288r.
58
The same observation can be made about purely textual genealogies. As Godfried Croenen
remarked about princely and noble genealogies, ‘every author of a genealogy had to make very
and their graphical devices.59 They often combined two concepts: the transmission
of power (e.g. a succession of kings or emperors) and the lineage of a dynasty (e.g.
the Carolingians). The point of many trees was to demonstrate the suitability or
the legitimacy of certain families in relation to the line of power and rule. Thus
certain prestigious ancestors (male or female) with direct or indirect royal
connections would be highlighted by those families aspiring to power. The use of
graphical devices, such as using thicker or coloured lines for the lineages one chose
to stress, was an effective and subtle means of conveying a message without needing
to state it explicitly in words.
The usefulness of graphical figures to illustrate a point was well understood by
those who used them, as both Klapisch-Zuber and Melville have shown. Several
authors who used genealogical drawings to accompany their text made explicit
reference to the tree, often at the end of a passage discussing genealogical matters.
Thus the prologue of A tous nobles states that ‘vous nommeray de hoir en hoir ceulx
qui ont regné, et quelles lignees ilz ont eues, lesquelles s’ensuivent selon l’arbre qui
le demonstre et enseigne par figure’ (I will name from heir to heir those who have
reigned, and which lineage they had, which follow according to the tree that shows
and teaches it by figures).60 Yves de Saint-Denis, after a lengthy paragraph where
he set out to prove that Hugues Capet was of Carolingian ascent and therefore not
a usurper, stated: ‘Hec autem que diximus de descensu istius Hugonis de progenie
Karoli, in arbore sequenti plenius declarantur’ (What we have said about the
descent of this Hugo from the race of Charlemagne is declared more in full in the
following tree).61
specific choices as to the particular starting points and filiations he wanted to use as links’: Godfried
Croenen, ‘Princely and Noble Genealogies, Twelfth to Fourteenth Century: Form and Function’,
in The Medieval Chronicle, Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on the Medieval
Chronicle, Driebergen/Utrecht, 13–16 July 1996, ed. by Erik Kooper (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999),
pp. 84–95 (p. 85).
59
Gert Melville, ‘Geschichte in graphischer Gestalt: Beobachtungen zu einer spätmittelalter-
lichen Darstellungsweise’, in Geschichtsschreibung und Geschichtsbewusstsein im späten Mittelalter,
ed. by Hans Patze (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke, 1987), pp. 57–154, and Gert Melville, ‘Vorfahren
und Vorgänger: Spätmittelalterliche Genealogien als dynastische Legitimation zur Herrschaft’, in
Die Familie als Sozialer und Historischer Verband, ed. by Peter-Johannes Schuler (Sigmaringen: Jan
Thorbecke, 1987), pp. 203–309.
60
BnF, MS fr. 5059, fol. 2r (version 3).
61
BnF, MS lat. 13836, fol. 77v . Hugues’s supposed Carolingian ascent was based on a non-
existent daughter of Emperor Louis IV; ironically, Hugues did have Carolingian blood, through
another branch.
Some authors went further and gave a brief explanation of their method and of
the conventions they had used when designing their tree. Thus Bernard Gui stated
at the beginning of his Arbor genealogie how he would show the straight or correct
line (recta linea) of French kings in the main tree trunk, with those whom he did
not consider as rightful kings banished to the side branches. Also on the sides
would be other personages, such as queens, other related royal families, or impor-
tant ecclesiastical figures. In subsequent paragraphs, all entries for rightful kings
were prefaced with a standard statement such as ‘in recta linea arboris descendendo
describitur’ (he is drawn as descending in the straight line of the tree). Kings who
were sidelined were described as such, and reasons were given as to why their status
was reduced.
Gui also explained further conventions used in his tree: whereas kings in the
main trunk were represented as full human figures, in the case of other descendants
of royal lineage, ‘lateraliter infra suos circulos depinguntur sola capita habentes,
dignitatem aut sanctitatem suam declarando per dyademata si sancti fuerunt, aut
per coronas regias si fuerunt reges aut regine. Si vero nullam dignitatem habuerunt
nuda capita depinguntur’ (only their heads are drawn in their medallions on the
side branches; their rank or sanctity is shown by haloes if they were saints, by regal
crowns if they were kings or queens. If indeed they had no rank, they are painted
bare headed).62 Gui’s system even included the case of the uncle of the last
Carolingian king, who was the rightful heir but unsuccessful in fighting the usurper
Hugues Capet: he is drawn bare-headed in a side medallion, with a crown shown
slipping off the outside edge of his medallion, graphically illustrating how kingship
eluded his grasp.
One copy of A tous nobles also uses headgear as a way of distinguishing between
types of personages: in BnF, MS fr. 4991, all the kings and their relatives are shown
as full-length persons. The true kings (according to the author) are wearing crowns;
those whose position is more dubious do not. For example, concerning those who
ruled during the infancy of Charles the Simple, the text calls his illegitimate half
brothers ‘bastars’ and the nobleman Eudes, elected king soon after, ‘gouverneur’;
the author’s opinion in the text is reflected by the hats, not crowns, worn by these
rulers in the drawings.63 In the most commonly found version of A tous nobles, the
universal chronicle in roll format (‘version H’), the same rulers do not appear in
the main central trunk, but in side medallions, and similar layouts are found in
many other versions.
62
BnF, MS nouvelle acquisition latine 1171, fol. 134v .
63
BnF, MS fr. 4991, fols 9v –10r.
Gilles de Paris had an even more complex system. He graded the persons in the
tree by rank and drew the boxes around their name accordingly, using combina-
tions of plain black ink and red and blue paint. He even expressed his own value
judgements by creating a category of ‘good’ kings.
reges francorum [. . .] litteris rubricatis damus intelligi ab aliis discernendos. Reginas uxores
eorum per lineas de incausto interius rubicatas [sic]. Alios reges sive eos qui de regum
prosapia descenderunt nec reges fuerunt per simplices lineas de incausto seponimus. Porro
eos qui reges fuerunt et imperatores tamquam digniores duplici colore adonio minioque
distinguimus. eos qui tamen imperatores fuerunt et non reges francorum per litteras de
adonio depromimus. Reges francorum bonos per lineas minio adoniatas [. . .] designamus.
[we have indicated [. . .] the kings of France in red letters to distinguish them from others.
The queens their wives have lines in ink coloured red inside. We have separated out other
kings or those who descended from the royal lineage but were not kings themselves by
[using] single lines in ink. Moreover, those who were both kings and emperors are
distinguished as having more status by a double colour: blue and red. Those who were
emperors but not kings of France, we have shown in blue letters. We have displayed [. . .]
good kings of France by red lines edged in blue.]64
Indeed, when examining the tree, one can find eleven different ways of drawing the
individual boxes, corresponding to thirteen types of personages, from saints to
emperors. Much careful thought had gone into distinguishing the grades of all
those shown in the tree, and the explanatory paragraph ensured that the reader
would look out for such distinctions.
In appearance, Gilles’s diagrams, and those of many others following the same
basic circle/box and line model, were a set of geometric elements laid out in a par-
ticular manner to display relationships within a lineage. We have come to call such
diagrams ‘trees’, given the way in which they branch out from a trunk, and already
in the Middle Ages, parallels with physical trees were brought out, as Klapisch-
Zuber has shown. Some of the late French genealogical trees are drawn to resemble
an actual tree, but the way in which this was done varied from author to author.
The first to adopt the conceit of a real tree was Gui. He uses the word ‘arbor’
(tree) to describe his genealogical figures, and he draws them with a central brown
trunk in which large medallions portraying kings are embedded. From this trunk
sprout branches supporting the medallions of the collateral family members and
other personages banished to the sides, as well as smaller sprigs ending in green
leaves to provide the vegetal effect. These trees are repeated on each page of the
book, and there is no continuity between them: each page shows a separate tree
64
BnF, MS lat. 6191, fol. 46v .
whose base is at the bottom and whose branches and leaves point towards the top,
as they would in real life. One loses the sense of a continuous line linking all the
kings placed on the central trunk, as the trunk on each page breaks up into leaves
at the top. Moreover, whereas strict logic would place an ancestor at the roots with
his descendants growing out of him along the trunk and branches that emerge from
it, in Gui’s trees one reads the medallions from top to bottom in the same direction
as the accompanying text. Thus, on any given page, the older generations are placed
on the upper branches and their descendants near the base of the trunk.
This was a basic problem: we read a narrative from top to bottom, so if one
starts with the ancestor at the top, his descendants will end up lower down. This
is in direct contradiction with the way a real tree grows. Medieval artists were capa-
ble of drawing a genealogy using a tree which placed the ancestor at the bottom: the
most common instance of this was the tree of Jesse, where a tree sprouts out of Jesse
the ancestor and grows upwards, with medallions indicating his descendants from
bottom to top. But the genealogies of royal families tended to reverse this order.
This may be because many of them were accompanied by text, however brief, and
it would be counter-intuitive to read a text bottom-up. Certainly Bernard Gui’s
diagrams, with their parallel text, were to be read top-down, and the dressing up of
the schematic drawing to look like a tree was an artistic conceit that added nothing
to the inner logic of the diagram.
Gui’s approach was also used by some of the authors or scribes of A tous nobles,
who dressed up their diagrams with vegetal elements to make them look like trees.
An early version, the codex BnF, MS fr. 5697, has segments of a stylized tree trunk
on most pages, with little pruned side stumps pointing upwards. A later version,
the roll Tours, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 1039, has a realistic tree trunk run-
ning all the way down the scroll and a luxuriant set of foliage at the very top. The
scribe of another version, found in BnF, MS fr. 4991, adopted the conceit of a
climbing rose bush for his ‘tree’. He was using a codex rather than a roll, but
created a sense of continuity by making the tree horizontal rather than vertical, so
that the main trunk could continue over the page with the reader’s eye following
it naturally as the page was turned. Thanks to this horizontal disposition, the roots
are on the left and the sprouts on the right, so that there is a correlation between
the logical order of the lineage and the way a natural plant would grow, which there
is not in the other versions.65 In the one-page diagram in BnF, MS fr. 5038, accom-
panying the treatises by Jean Juvénal des Ursins, a realistic vegetal tree is drawn and
65
Melville, ‘Geschichte in graphischer Gestalt’, pp. 91–92, illustration p. 138, mentions this
example. See also Klapisch-Zuber, L’ombre des ancêtres, p. 247.
medallions placed on its trunk and branches, but again with the ancestor at the top
and the most recent descendants at the bottom.
One author was aware of the discrepancy between the natural orientation of a
tree (trunk below, crown above) and the logical layout of a genealogical diagram on
a page that is normally read from top to bottom.66 This was Boccaccio, according
to Jean Miélot.67 Having explained the vocabulary of the twelve degrees of gene-
rations, Miélot states that: ‘Selon Jehan Boccace [. . .], ung arbre de genealogie doit
estre ung arbre renversé, la racine dessus envers le ciel, et le tronc et les branches ou
rainceaulx doivent tyrer en bas’68 (According to Boccaccio [. . .], a genealogical tree
should be an inverted tree, with the roots facing the sky, and the trunk and the
branches or twigs should point downwards).69 Miélot applies these principles in his
own genealogical diagrams that are indeed fashioned to look like upside down trees,
with a tuft of roots at the top. This does make for a rather strange impression and,
ultimately, the idea was not widely adopted: indeed most genealogical diagrams
dressed up to resemble a vegetal tree, down to this day, show the plant with its
roots at the bottom, irrespective of the order of lineage represented within it.
Conclusion
This survey of works containing genealogies in the form of diagrams, usually in

conjunction with some kind of text, long or short, shows how from the eleventh
century onwards, authors intent on imparting genealogical information did not
66
There is a full discussion on the philosophical and practical implications of a tree’s orienta-
tion in Klapisch-Zuber, L’ombre des ancêtres, pp. 229–50, an entire chapter on the arbor conversa
(inverted tree); see in particular pp. 235–42, on Boccaccio’s predecessors.
67
Klapisch-Zuber, L’ombre des ancêtres, pp. 242–45, on Boccaccio’s trees.
68
BnF, MS fr. 17001, fol. 32r. A published transcription of the entire passage can be found in
Mombello, ‘Per la fortuna del Boccaccio in Francia’, pp. 432–33.
69
Giovanni Boccaccio, [Peri genealogias] deorum: libri quindecim cum annotationibus Iacobi
Micylli (Basel, 1532), first page of the Tabula following the Index, confirms this: ‘in arbore [. . .]
ponitur in culmine [ancestor’s name], versa in caelum radice, [. . .] et in ramis et in frondibus ab eo
descendentibus’ (in the tree [. . .], at the top is placed [ancestor’s name], with the roots towards the
sky, [. . .] and his descendants in the branches and leaves). This layout is seen in the trees
accompanying the text later on. Same quote in Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogie deorum gentilium,
ed. by Vittorio Zaccaria, in Tutte le opere, ed. by Vittore Branca, vols VII– VIII, tome 1 (Milano:
Mondadori, 1998), p. 68, and a similar quote p. 60, section 47; unfortunately, this modern edition
does not show the actual trees.
necessarily limit themselves to writing text; they could use diagrams instead or as
well. The issues that emerge from genealogical chronicles, some of them discussed
elsewhere in this book, can also be encountered within this more graphical format:
the authors’ vision of history and its religious or philosophical framework; argu-
ments concerning transmission of power and dynastic rights; the concept of blood
lines and their purity; the place of individuals within a family context; the relation-
ship between the history of a family and that of the society or country in which it
operated; the role of genealogies in defining and developing an identity for the
family, and in the case of rulers’ genealogies, in contributing to a sense of common
identity within the territories ruled by the dynasty; the part that the construction
and updating of genealogical trees played in creating and maintaining the memory
of a family. Each genealogical diagram was a careful construct, both intellectually
and physically, reflecting in its content and layout the author’s choices and
ideology, which were sometimes expounded further in the accompanying text. The
few pointers about the status of Hugues Capet — usurper or legitimate king? —
within the royal genealogies surveyed in this chapter are just a hint of the riches
that lie within these often modest works. Most of them would repay further study
as witnesses of the historiographical culture of their times. As such, they mirrored
and moulded their authors’ and audiences’ perceptions of the past and of the
families that helped shape it. More broadly, they tackled the perennial questions
of identity and origins, matters that are as relevant to us today as they were to the
people of medieval France.
G ENEALOGY IN M ONASTIC C HRONICLES IN E NGLAND
Emilia Jamroziak
E
nglish monastic chronicles form part of the broader tradition of record
keeping by monastic communities. By the late medieval period there were
a number of genres and well-established traditions that monastic writers
could draw upon, among them annals, deeds of abbots, histories, cartularies, and
registers. Many of the chronicles were created primarily for the internal consump-
tion of the monastic communities, sometimes for broader audiences within the
order or for a specific ecclesiastical superior or lay patron. This narrow perspective
has traditionally led to a rather dismissive attitude to such works: normally the
broad geographical horizon and range of political and national news is taken to
indicate the quality of a chronicle. The more focused chronicles are on the internal
matters of their home institutions, the more dismissive modern historians tended
to be and sometimes still are. Authors of the late medieval texts discussed here were
monks or canons, usually recruited from the local area, some had university
education, usually legal, but on the whole little is known about the lives of the
fourteenth-century monastic chroniclers and not much more about those active
in the fifteenth century.1
In this context, a genealogical perspective was traditionally seen as an expression
of a rather narrow view and of the increasingly insular concerns of monastic chron-
iclers in the later Middle Ages. The texts discussed here are not the most well-
known chronicles such as those from Bridlington and Lanercost, which provide
important information about the Anglo-Scottish wars of the fourteenth century
and national politics, but many ‘home chronicles’, cartularies, and other sources,
1
John Taylor, English Historical Literature in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1987), pp. 8–12.
104 Emilia Jamroziak
which often do not display conventional highly literary qualities. Thus the aim of
this chapter is not to present a comprehensive catalogue of all known monastic
chronicles with genealogical themes, but rather a critical assessment of key texts
against the background of the relationship of the monastic houses with their
patrons and the broader world. As a result, the discussion includes chronicles from
monastic houses (Benedictine, Cistercian, Augustinian), but not mendicant houses
as they functioned in a very different urban environment.
The reasons for the tradition of dismissive attitudes towards more narrowly
focused monastic chronicles are linked to the nature of historical scholarship. For
social and, above all, political historians, monastic chronicles represent sources
which are harvested for information about events, contemporary perceptions, and
interpretations of these events, as well as corroboration of information from other
documentary sources. The criterion of ‘usefulness for national history’ reappears
frequently in the literature.2 The history of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century En-
gland is full of significant events and processes that left their mark in the chronicles
— internal and external wars (the Anglo-Scottish, the Hundred Years War, the
Wars of the Roses), depositions (of Edward II and Richard II), the growth of the
power of Parliament, changes in the political elites, the Peasants’ Revolt, and the
emergence of heretical groups. The chronicles that focused primarily on the past
of their own institutions are far less useful for a historical enquiry that is concerned
with national history and broader social and political questions. This is com-
pounded by the views (which are becoming less prevalent now) about the crisis of
late medieval monasticism, its intellectual, social, and economic insularity, which
is allegedly manifested by parochial and inward-looking chronicles.3
The most conventional understanding of genealogy is that of family lineage
traced back from a particular ancestor. For the monastic authors, however, gene-
alogy had broader meanings. On the one hand it was linked to an interest in the
2
For example, see the comment on the Wigmore chronicle in Taylor, English Historical
Literature, p. 288. See also Barrie Dobson, ‘Contrasting Chronicles: Historical Writing at York and
Durham at the Close of the Middle Ages’, in Church and Chronicle in the Middle Ages: Essays
Presented to John Taylor, ed. by Ian Wood and G. A. Loud (London: Hambledon, 1991), pp.
201–18 (pp. 201–03).
3
There is a significant growth in the literature that opposes this view, especially in relation to
Benedictine houses; see, for example, James G. Clark, A Monastic Renaissance at St Albans: Thomas
Walsingham and his Circle c. 1350–1440 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004); Julian M. Luxford, The
Art and Architecture of English Benedictine Monasteries, 1300–1540: A Patronage History (Wood-
bridge: Boydell, 2005).
GENEALOGY IN MONASTIC CHRONICLES IN ENGLAND 105
illustrious past of their own monastic houses, which can be understood as insti-
tutional genealogy, myths of origins, and foundation narratives. On the other, it
meant the intentional preservation of the real or fictitious genealogies of patrons’
families and/or most important benefactors and ‘protectors’. Although the new
monastic orders of the twelfth century had an explicit programme of redefining
their connections with the lay world, which included new forms of commemora-
tion, by the fourteenth century Cistercians in particular were far more involved in
various forms of ritual as well as written forms of commemorating and remember-
ing their patrons. This mentality was also expressed in the growing number of
monastic cartularies produced in Benedictine, Augustinian, and Cistercian houses
that included foundation chronicles with strong genealogical themes (e.g. St Peter’s
Gloucester, Aldgate, Vale Royal). In many ways such texts blended institutional
genealogy with that of key lay people in their history.
Thus the fourteenth century was a period of particularly active production of
monastic chronicles in both ‘old’ Benedictine monasteries (e.g. Tewkesbury, St
Swithun’s and Hyde in Winchester) and ‘younger’ Cistercian houses (e.g. Meaux).
There were more chronicles written outside the monastic context by secular clergy
or even laymen (Robert of Avesbury, Adam Murimuth, the English prose Brut
chronicles). However, St Albans remained an important centre of monastic history
writing (Thomas Walsingham). In the fifteenth century we can observe another
wave of interest in the myths of origins and institutional past among many old
Benedictine communities (e.g. Durham, Westminster).
The definition of ‘chronicle’ is not an easy one as the boundaries of this genre
are blurred. Antonia Gransden uses it in a relatively narrow sense of ‘general, seri-
ous historical writings’, which excludes important local chronicles such as ‘Chron-
icle of Battle Abbey’ and the ‘Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond’ and histories
written with an explicitly entertaining agenda.4 Gabrielle M. Spiegel in her discus-
sion of the medieval chronicle does not give rigid boundaries of the genre and
stresses the presence of various rhetorical and literary devices in these types of texts
such as genealogy and romance.5
Elizabeth Freeman distinguishes two major functions in monastic history
writing. The first one is to preserve a desirable version of institutional history and
communal memory, and the second is to record genealogy and the legitimatization
4
Antonia Gransden, ‘The Chronicles of Medieval England and Scotland’, in Gransden,
Legends, Traditions and History in Medieval England (London: Hambledon, 1992), p. 199.
5
Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ‘Theory into Practice: Reading Medieval Chronicles’, in The Medieval
Chronicle, ed. by Erik Kooper (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), pp. 1–12 (pp. 4–5).
of origins. She identifies them in relation to the twelfth-century English Cistercian

chronicles and histories from Yorkshire, but they broadly apply to all medieval
monastic chronicles.6 Whilst Spiegel argues that the authors of monastic chronicles
often applied typological exegesis of biblical origin to explain history and con-
temporary events, she juxtaposes this with the genealogical themes typical for
vernacular texts of thirteenth-century France.7 However, as the evidence from the
English monastic chronicle shows, the myths of origin and genealogy are closely
intertwined.
Institutional Genealogy
The theme of institutional genealogy is implicit on many levels in the monastic

chronicles. Since these texts were not written for any one reason and were usually
borrowed from several sources — such as older narrative works, archival docu-
ments, visual evidence, and oral tradition — the genealogical elements also appear
on several levels. First, many of the monastic chronicles interwove information
about their own institutional history in the grand narrative of the Christian world
and national past. Usually the first element would be information about the foun-
dation of the monastic house itself — often associated with a powerful individual
and other significant events in the ancient past — then information about the
abbots and their deeds, both within and outside the monastic context. The amount
of detail could, of course, vary from text to text and within one chronicle. Beyond
this level we can also observe how the individual houses placed their own history in
the greater genealogy of their ‘monastic families’ of Benedictine or Cistercian orders.
Antonia Gransden’s assessment of the quality of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-
century monastic chronicles is rather bleak. Gransden singled out St Albans Abbey
as the only centre of monastic writing of any continuous significance at this stage.
However, alongside John Wheathamstead of St Albans, Gransden listed Thomas
Burton of Meaux Abbey and Thomas Elmham of St Augustine’s, Canterbury as
significant writers of both national and local history. What unites these three
works is the defensive outlook of monastic writers trying to protect their institu-
tions from a variety of external threats posed by wars, rival religious houses
6
Elizabeth Freeman, Narratives of a New Order: Cistercian Historical Writing in England,
1150–1220, Medieval Church Studies, 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), pp. 127–68.
7
Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ‘Genealogy: Form and Function in Medieval Historical Narrative’, His-
tory and Theory, 22 (1983), 43–53 (pp. 45–46).
(especially mendicants), the royal appetite for taxation, interfering and greedy bish-
ops, papal tax collectors, as well as aggressive lay neighbours and internal conflicts.
In this climate of uncertainty the chroniclers often presented strong genealogical
themes in order to bring out the magnificent past of their own institutions and
intertwining the greater scheme of national history with that of their own order.8
This was partly a morale-boosting exercise, but was also linked with the more
practical investigation of ancient property rights under threat.
The late fourteenth-century chronicle of Meaux Abbey written by Thomas
Burton provides a narrative from the foundation of that house to the period con-
temporary with the author. There is very little known about the life of Thomas
Burton before 1394, when he appeared on the list of monks at Meaux, and soon
after he is known to hold the post of bursar. In 1396 he was appointed abbot
during a disputed election. Despite the papal ruling in his favour, Burton resigned
from this post in 1399. Work on the chronicle began well before these events (c.
1388), so the first version of the chronicle was completed by the time of his elec-
tion. The second, revised version was written between 1397 and 1402. This chron-
icle itself was continued further in the fifteenth century during the abbacy of John
Hoton.9 The most striking characteristic of the text is that the narrative is orga-
nized in sections devoted to the rule of successive abbots of Meaux. The most ex-
tensive one is devoted to Burton’s predecessor William of Scarborough (1372–96).
The strongly institutional-genealogical perspective is reinforced by the inclusion
of lists, charting the properties acquired and held by various abbots, through which
the story of economic development of the house is told. The broader context of
Meaux is provided by the sections devoted to local and regional history.10 The
chronicle begins with the foundation of the house, which immediately sets the
institution as the main focus of the text. The reasons behind the creation of the
chronicle have been spelled out by Burton’s continuator who explained that it was
written ‘for the profit of his successors’.11 There is a strong defensive theme in the
8
Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England, vol. II: c. 1300 to the Early Sixteenth
Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), pp. 342–44.
9
John Taylor, ‘Burton, Thomas (d. 1437)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
(Oxford University Press, 2004) <http://0-www.oxforddnb.com.wam.leeds.ac.uk:80/view/article/
50198>; Antonia Gransden, ‘Antiquarian Studies in Fifteenth-Century England’, Antiquaries
Journal, 60 (1980), 75–97 (pp. 81–83).
10
Chronica monasterii de Melsa, a fundatione usque ad annum 1396, auctore Thomas de Burton,
ed. by Edward A. Bond, 3 vols, Rolls Series, 43 (London, 1866–68).
11
Gransden, Historical Writing, p. 357.
Meaux chronicle as Burton tried to show how the monastery held the legal and
moral high-ground in many disputes that Meaux entered. It has been suggested
that careful recording of the taxation liabilities and exemptions in the chronicle
was motivated by the great financial difficulties of the abbey.12 Typically for this
genre there are many descriptions of trials, tribulations, and successes over threats
and attacks from archbishops of York, especially Alexander Neville in the late
fourteenth century, as well as natural disasters of flood and fire. It is one of the best
English examples of ‘how the history of a corporate body could be written by an
individual with an enduring interest in its past’.13 The genealogies of lay people also
appear in the Meaux chronicle as they are closely entwined with the issue of
property and inheritance. These rights were important when it comes to grants
which they made to the abbey, and Burton provided pedigrees of several Yorkshire
families who were benefactors of Meaux as a way of strengthening the validity of
their grants.14
Care and interest in the past of his own institution are also manifest in Thomas
Burton’s compilation of documents pertinent to the history and well-being of his
monastery. His collectanea included a register of charters of Meaux Abbey, speci-
fically Cistercian documents on tithes exemptions, privileges, and papal bulls, and
many other notes and lists of properties and rents that Burton used in the writing
of his chronicle. There are also stories about foundations of sister houses such as
Fountains as well as broader events within the order, for example, the death of
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux.15 This again set Meaux not just in the context of its
own development, but also against the broader Cistercian identity. Gransden and
other authors emphasize that the genealogical element of the chronicle, especially
the foundation story of Meaux Abbey, was, very likely, modelled on a Cistercian
foundation history from another monastery in Yorkshire, possibly from Kirkstall,
Byland, or Jervaulx.16
Moving on to Benedictine examples, St Albans was, without any doubt, one of
the most vibrant centres of monastic intellectual life in the late Middle Ages. As
12
Gransden, ‘Antiquarian Studies in Fifteenth-Century England’, pp. 81–82.
13
John Taylor, Medieval Historical Writing in Yorkshire (York: St Anthony’s Press, 1961),
p. 22.
14
Gransden, Historical Writing, p. 370 n. 180.
15
Chronica monasterii de Melsa, ed. by Bond, cols 1029–30, 1042.
16
Gransden, Historical Writing, p. 361; The Foundation History of the Abbeys of Byland and
Jervaulx, ed. by Janet Burton, Borthwick Texts and Studies, 35 (York: Borthwick Institute, 2006).
many as five chronicles written in the abbey covered the history of the institution
in the period between 1327 and 1452, but these were to a large extent summaries
and transcriptions of documents from the monastic archive.17 Among them the
continuation of the thirteenth-century Gesta abbatum of Matthew Paris, written
by Thomas Walsingham in the 1390s, is the most relevant to the theme of geneal-
ogy. Walsingham first extended the narrative to 1308 and then brought it to up to
1393, charting the contemporary events of the rule of Abbot Thomas de la Mare.18
Among the genre of monastic chronicles, Gesta abbatum were the most obvious
type of text written for internal consumption. There is also evidence that they were
used as edifying reading during mealtime in the monastic refectories, as a four-
teenth-century example from Ramsey Abbey shows.19 Listening to the stories of the
achievements of the past abbots was to reinforce the sense of community and the
value of the past among the monks.
The narrative of the origins of an institution was also an important tool in
resolving conflicts and disputes concerning property or particular ‘ancient’ rights,
which such genealogies could corroborate. A foundation story of the cathedral
priory of St Swithun in Winchester written in the late thirteenth or early four-
teenth century was used to show that it was a royal foundation and the bishops of
Winchester had no patronal rights. This story was incorporated in the genea-
logically driven chronicle Historia majora ecclesiae Wintoniensis completed by
Thomas Rudborne in 1454. He elaborated on the original plot of the ancient
origins which linked the foundation of St Swithun’s to the legendary King Lucius
who granted them significant privileges in Winchester. The theme of origins went
even further in Rudborne’s chronicle, in which he explored the genealogy of Bene-
dictine monasticism going back to the beginnings of Christianity.20 As much as the
story of the past of his own community was to help defend its rights and prestige,
17
Clark, Monastic Renaissance at St Albans, pp. 10–41.
18
John Taylor, ‘Walsingham, Thomas (c.1340–c.1422)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biog-
raphy, <http://0-www.oxforddnb.com.wam.leeds.ac.uk:80/view/article/28627>; James G. Clark,
‘Thomas Walsingham Reconsidered: Books and Learning at Late-Medieval St. Albans’, Speculum,
77 (2002), 832–60 (pp. 837–38).
19
Clark, Monastic Renaissance at St Albans, p. 126.
20
Gransden, Historical Writing, pp. 396–97. Registrum Johannis de Pontissara, Episcopi Winto-
niensi, ed. by Cecil Deedes, 2 vols, Canterbury and York, 19 and 30 (London: Canterbury and
York Society, 1924), II, 609–15; Alexander R . Rumble, ‘Rudborne, Thomas (fl. 1447–1454)’,
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, <http://0-www.oxforddnb.com.wam.leeds.ac.uk:80/
view/article/24244>.
this broader theme of monastic genealogy was also undoubtedly motivated by the
desire to present St Swithun’s as an element within the illustrious Benedictine
tradition not only in England, but also in the wider area of Christendom. Whilst
Rudborne created a fictitious genealogy of his own community, he could not resist
criticizing very similar attempts by the Glastonbury Abbey community. He repu-
diated claims that Glastonbury was established by Saint Joseph of Arimathea on
the site of Avalon where King Arthur was buried. He explained that Glastonbury’s
origins were much more recent and down-to-earth as a foundation of King Ine of
Wessex (d. c. 726).21
Another Benedictine house with a genuinely long historical tradition was St
Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury, a late sixth-century royal foundation. There, in
the second decade of the fifteenth century, Thomas of Elmham wrote Speculum
Augustianum. It was a very ambitious project, never completed, in which he used
earlier chroniclers, among them Bede and Gesta pontificum of William of Malmes-
bury, and the abbey’s own chroniclers Thomas Sprott and William Thorne, as well
as a broad range of documents from the monastic archive. The opening section of
this chronicle contains an elaborate chronological table of nine columns in which
dates from 597 to 1408 correspond with the names of popes and bulls that they
issued for the abbey, archbishops of Canterbury and their privileges for St Augus-
tine’s, names of kings of Kent and then England, and finally the list of abbots of St
Augustine’s Abbey with their key charters and places of burials. This table places
this institution in the wider chronology of church and national history, whilst
having a central focus on the abbey itself. Gransden put it very eloquently that the
structure of the chronological table and the chronicle themselves were such because
‘the abbey had been endowed by kings, protected by its abbots, and often attacked
by the archbishops’.22 The chronicle is very explicit in its genealogical theme and
insists not only on the very ancient origin of the abbey, but also on its key place as
the founding mother of the Benedictine family in England: ‘Anyone of sane mind
must see that ours was the first community of monks established in England; the
21
Gransden, Historical Writing, p. 398; on the Glastonbury chronicle, see Antonia Gransden,
‘The Date and Authorship of John of Glastonbury’s Cronica sive Antiquitates Glastoniensis ecclesie’,
in Legends, Traditions and History, pp. 289–98.
22
Historia Monasterii S. Augustini Cantuariensis, ed. by Charles Hardwick, Rolls Series (Lon-
don, 1858); Richard Emms, ‘The Historical Traditions of St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury’, in
Canterbury and the Norman Conquest: Church, Saints and Scholars 1066–1109, ed. by Richard
Eales and Richard Sharpe (London: Hambledon, 1995), pp. 159–68 (pp. 166–67); Gransden,
Historical Writing, pp. 345–46.
monastery was founded from no other monastery established elsewhere in England,

but all others derived from it’, proclaims the chronicle confidently.23 This insis-
tence on particularly ancient roots could be a remark aimed at Christ Church
Priory, the competitor of St Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury.
Like Rudborne in his Historia majora ecclesiae Wintoniensis, Elmham argues
that historic evidence does not justify Glastonbury’s claim to a particularly ancient
place in the Benedictine genealogy.24 In his pursuit to secure the historic rights and
privileges of his community, Elmham copied into his text a twelfth-century forgery
of a charter of King Æthelberht of Kent. This charter was created c. 1181 in con-
nection with a dispute between St Augustine’s Abbey and Christ Church, Canter-
bury. Elmham produced a type of ‘facsimile’ of a number of eighth-century Anglo-
Saxon documents in an imitation of minuscule script and drawings of the attached
seals.25 This not only served as evidence for St Augustine’s rights, but also provided
visible proof of the illustrious pedigree of the abbey. In the past this approach led
some historians to formulate very harsh judgements as to the value of Elmham’s
chronicle and historical writing at St Augustine’s Abbey.26 Indeed if the text is used
as a source of information about events, especially of a political kind, then Specu-
lum Augustianum is of limited use. However, if the questions posed are about the
mentality of a monastic community, attitudes to its institutional past, and methods
of creating genealogies proving illustratious origins and connections, then Elm-
ham’s work provides a very fruitful case study.27
In the fifteenth century we can observe a number of monastic chronicles that
are primarily focused on the origins of their own institution and their genealogies
within the monastic orders. John Wessington, the Prior of Durham Cathedral
Priory from 1416 to 1446, was committed to the preservation of his monastery’s
rights and properties against any outside enemies. His activities as a writer and
compiler of histories of Durham Priory grew out of this commitment. Using an
earlier chronicle of Durham, Wessington composed a new history of the priory,
modestly named Libellus, from the origins at Lindisfarne to the year 1362
23
Historia Monasterii, p. 82; translation in Gransden, Historical Writing, p. 349.
24
Historia Monasterii, pp. 264–65.
25
Alfred Hiatt, The Making of Medieval Forgeries: False Documents in Fifteenth-Century
England (London: British Library, 2004), pp. 52–57.
26
Eric John, ‘The Litigation of an Exempt House: St Augustine’s, Canterbury, 1182–1237’,
Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 39 (1956–57), 390–415 (p. 415); M. Brett, The English
Church under Henry I (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 59.
27
Emms, ‘Historical Traditions’, p. 168; Hiatt, Making of Medieval Forgeries, pp. 52–57.
incorporating copies of charters, evidence from cartularies, registers, and deeds of

abbots.28 He also wrote a treatise on the origins of the Benedictine order in
England entitled ‘De fundatione monasteriorum nigrorum monachorum in regno
Angliae’, which consisted of foundation stories of forty Benedictine houses in the
country. A strongly genealogical theme is also present in another guide to the
famous Benedictine monks in Durham written by Wessington, whose images were
displayed at one of the altars in the cathedral. The explicit aim of this text was to
remind contemporaries about the illustrious origins of the order and its institu-
tional lineage.29
Another chronicle of that type was created by a monk of Westminster Abbey,
John Flete, who rose through the ranks to become the Prior in 1457. He wrote a
history of the abbey combining different genealogical genres. Flete’s work contains
four sections: the foundation story of Westminster, copies of the key charters, a list
of relics kept in the abbey and indulgences attached to them, and deeds of abbots
up to the year 1386. Akin to many other types of chronicles of this period, the
alleged origins of Westminster Abbey are very illustrious, going back to the year
184 when King Lucius founded the abbey which was destroyed during the Diocle-
tian persecution and refounded in the early seventh century by King Sebert.30 In
this way Westminster acquired a very ancient genealogy connecting it with iconic
events of Christian history and the mythical British past.
However, the foundation stories and chronicles were also occasionally connected
with particular events affecting a monastic house. The Chronicle of Bermondsey, a
Cluniac abbey, was written soon after 1432 and presented the story of the founda-
tion and its subsequent history on the basis of earlier annals from that house,
charters, and other documents.31 It has been suggested that the text was created in
connection with a visitation in 1432 by the Prior of La Charité-sur-Loire which
was the mother house of Bermondsey. Prior Thodore Douet was also Vicar-general
28
Gransden, Historical Writing, pp. 394–95; R. B. Dobson, ‘Wessington, John (c.1371–1451)’,
in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, <http://0-www.oxforddnb.com.wam.leeds.ac.uk:80/
view/article/29074>.
29
R . B. Dobson, Durham Priory 1400–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973),
pp. 381–82.
30
John Flete, The History of Westminster Abbey, ed. by J. Armitage Robinson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1909); Gransden, Historical Writing, pp. 393–94.
31
‘Annales Monasterii de Bermundeseia’, in Annales Monastici, vol. III, ed. by H. R. Luard,
Rolls Series (London, 1866), pp. 423–87.
of the Abbot of Cluny.32 The community of Bermondsey wanted to impress the

prestigious visitor and ‘inspector’ with the account of the abbey’s glorious origins
as much as to stress the privileges and properties given to the abbey by very promi-
nent people, both lay and ecclesiastical. In the section chronologically close to the
time of writing of the chronicle there is clear attention given to the triumphs of
various abbots over other monastic houses or individuals who disputed the rights
of Bermondsey to particular properties. When the abbey lost a lawsuit such in-
formation was omitted or described in a perfunctory manner to strengthen the
impression of continued success.33
The desire to create a suitably impressive story of origins, institutional gene-
alogy, and record of property led to the making of entirely forged chronicles as in
the case of Crowland Abbey. However, what is fictitious is not so much the infor-
mation — the extent of the estates described in the chronicle corresponds with the
real property of the abbey — but the creation of forged historical documents to
prove the ancient credentials of the house. David Roffe describes them as ‘innocent
forgeries’.34 The chronicle covers the years from 616 to 1500. The first part, which
deals with the period to 1089, was allegedly written by Abbot Ingulf of Crowland
(1085/6–1109). The second part, covering the events up to 1117, was also a forg-
ery, purporting to be written by Peter of Blois, a twelfth-century humanist scholar.
The three anonymous continuators brought the narrative of the history of the
abbey up to the late fifteenth century by providing sections covering 1149–1470,
1459–86, and finally October 1485–April 1486.35 There has been a fair amount
of discussion in the literature over the authorship of the chronicle. The oldest
section allegedly written by Abbot Ingulf is now attributed by David Roffe to the
late eleventh or early twelfth century. At that time many pre-Conquest founda-
tions needed written proof of their tenure and, since the surviving Anglo-Saxon
land-books were not suitable evidence, charters and chronicles incorporating
relevant information were produced. By the late fifteenth century, when the three
32
Rose Graham, ‘The Priory of La Charité-sur-Loire and the Monastery of Bermondsey’, in
Graham, English Ecclesiastical Studies (London: SPCK, 1929), p. 93.
33
‘Annales Monasterii de Bermundeseia’, pp. 447, 456, 457, 460, 467, 485, 486.
34
David Roffe, ‘The Historia Croylandensis: A Plea for Reassessment’, English Historical
Review, 110 (1995), 83–108 (p. 107).
35
Rerum Anglicarum Scriptorum Veterum, ed. by William Fulman (Oxford, 1684), pp. 1–130,
451–578; Daniel Williams, ‘The Crowland Chronicle, 616–1500’, in England in the Fifteenth
Century: Proceedings of the 1986 Harlaxton Symposium (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1987), pp. 371–90
(p. 371).
continuations were written, the alleged chronicles by Ingulf and Peter of Blois were
clearly part of the existing tradition.36 However, Alfred Hiatt places the creation
of pseudo-Ingulf much later and sees it less as a compilation of information from
Domesday and other late Anglo-Saxon documents, but more as an elaborate
exercise in creating institutional genealogy and a way of authenticating forgeries of
the Anglo-Saxon documents.37 The second continuation contains a rare voice in
defence of Richard III and hence its authorship has been the subject of much
debate.38 Leaving the issue of forgeries aside, the chronicle contains significant
narrative schemes, which were typical of this type of text and crucial for the aims
behind its creation. The stories of aggressive and devious neighbours, the support
of important and powerful friends, and detailed descriptions of legal rulings in
favour of Crowland, intertwined in the fictional early twelfth-century text, have
one purpose: the chronicle is ‘a vehicle for the claims of the monastery’.39
A glorious past, real or imaginary, is the theme that links all the texts discussed
so far and, for the purpose of this chapter, it is irrelevant whether the stories were
true or not. What matters in the investigation of genealogical themes in late
medieval monastic chronicles is why and how monks presented the origins of their
houses and how that could be linked with the broader genealogies of their monastic
order — in particular Benedictine and Cistercian.
Gransden sees the reason for this focus on the past, and abandonment by mo-
nastic communities of recording of contemporary events, partly in the popularity
of the Brut and London chronicles, and partly in the political difficulties of the
Wars of the Roses that discouraged any recording and commenting on contem-
porary events as it might potentially anger patrons and friends of the monasteries
in question.40 However this interpretation is not very convincing. It assumes, on
the one hand, a lack of knowledge on the part of the monastic community of the
political views and alliances of their patrons, whilst dissension is more likely to
36
Hiatt, Making of Medieval Forgeries, p. 38.
37
Hiatt, Making of Medieval Forgeries, pp. 40–50.
38
Roffe, ‘Historia Croylandensis’, p. 107; Williams, ‘Crowland Chronicle’, pp. 378–90; David
Baldwin, ‘The Author of the Second Continuation of the Croyland Chronicle: A Fifteenth Century
Mystery Solved?’, East Midland Historian, 4 (1994), 16–19; Alison Hanham, ‘Author! Author!
Crowland Revisited’, The Ricardian: Journal of the Richard III Society, 11 (1998), 226–38; Michael
Hicks, ‘The Second Anonymous Continuation of the Crowland Abbey Chronicle 1459–86
Revisited’, English Historical Review, 122 (2007), 349–70.
39
Williams, ‘Crowland Chronicle’, p. 378.
40
Gransden, Historical Writing, p. 388.
stimulate polemical voices than not. A fear of alienation of powerful protectors

could have been a deterrent from voicing opinions on contemporary matters, but
it is also very likely that, in periods of uncertainty, looking back to an illustrious
past was also a very powerful tool for creating a sense of cohesion in the community
and impressing supporters and potential friends.
Genealogies of Lay Patrons and Benefactors
Even more than institutional histories being harshly judged by historians, the
chronicles incorporating genealogies of patrons and similar texts have been ne-
glected and many of them remain unpublished. Chronicles and other narrative
texts incorporating patrons’ and benefactors’ genealogies were created by Augus-
tinian and Benedictine houses, and less so by the Cistercians, which probably
exemplifies the different types of relationship between patrons and different types
of monastic houses. In fact, the canons’ houses (Augustinian, Premonstratensian),
which were smaller and more dependent on their patrons, tended to be more
involved in preserving their genealogies.
A central theme of the Fundationis et Fundatorum Historia of Wigmore Abbey,
an Augustinian house in Herefordshire, was the history of the founder family, the
Mortimers, closely intertwined with that of the institution.41 The text was com-
piled, according to Chris Given-Wilson, in the late fourteenth century, with some
later additions, and combines several earlier sources. Although it opens with a
Latin translation of the early thirteenth-century account of the foundation of
Wigmore, the rest has a strong lay and genealogical focus. It opens with lists of
kings of Scotland, dukes of Cornwall, kings of South Wales, Anglo-Saxon kings of
the Heptarchy, and finally kings of England. This is followed by the Mortimer
chronicle proper that provides the narrative of the first two centuries of Mortimer
family presence in England and then the later history up to the early fifteenth cen-
tury. The aim of the volume was to glorify the Mortimer family and present them
as the rightful heirs of the English crown. The genealogical aspect of the Funda-
tionis et Fundatorum Historia strengthens this claim even more by presenting it in
41
William Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, ed. by John Caley, Henry Ellis, and Bulkeley
Bandinel, new edn, 6 vols (London: Bohn, 1846), I, 348–55; the only surviving manuscript is
Chicago, University of Chicago Library, MS 224. M. E. Griffin, ‘A Wigmore Manuscript at the
University of Chicago’, National Library of Wales Journal, 7 (1951–2), 316–25 (pp. 321–24).
the context of real and fictitious royal ancestry.42 Another chronicle composed at
Wigmore Abbey in the fourteenth century covers the years from 1340 to 1377 and
was based on the Polychronicon. It incorporated information about the Mortimer
family’s past and, like the chronicle discussed above, it goes back as far as the
legendary Kings of Britain. Gransden differentiated this text from the Fundationis
et Fundatorum Historia as having neither a clearly genealogical focus nor strong
political propaganda aims.43
The chronicle of the Premonstratensian Alnwick Abbey was written c. 1380
under the title Genealogia fundatorum et advocatorum abbatiae de Alnewyk and
commemorates the original founders and patrons, the de Vescy family, and their
successors in the barony and castle of Alnwick, the Percys (from 1309). The text
is structured around biographical information about the abbey’s patrons — births,
marriages, deaths, locations of burials, and in many cases also details of grants they
made to Alnwick.44 In this way family history is closely intertwined with that of the
monastery, and the task of commemoration is linked with the preservation of
property rights of the abbey under successive families. Another monastic house
which was under the patronage of the Percy family in the later Middle Ages was the
Benedictine Whitby Abbey. This mid-fifteenth-century chronicle was written by
Abbot Thomas Pickering (c. 1458–75) in order to provide genealogies of several
benefactor families, to glorify the patron’s family, and to provide a defence of
Henry Percy, the first Earl of Northumberland, who rebelled against King
Henry IV in 1408.45
However, genealogical texts did not commemorate just one individual or
family. Some monasteries managed a succession of successful relationships with
42
Chris Given-Wilson, ‘Chronicles of the Mortimer Family, c. 1250–c. 1450’, in Family and
Dynasty in Late Medieval England, ed. by Richard Eales and Shaun Tyas (Donington: Shaun Tyas,
2003), pp. 68–77.
43
Gransden, Historical Writing, p. 61 n. 14; John Taylor, ‘A Wigmore Chronicle, 1355–77’,
Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society: Literary and Historical Section, 9 (1964),
81–94.
44
‘Cronica Monasterii de Alnewyke’, ed. by W. Dickson, Archaeologia Aeliana, 1st series, 3
(1844), 33–44; Chris Given-Wilson, Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England
(London: Hambledon and London, 2004), pp. 83–84.
45
Gudrun Tscherpel, ‘The Political Function of History: The Past and Future of Noble
Families’, in Family and Dynasty in Late Medieval England, ed. by Eales and Tyas, pp. 87–104 (pp.
94–95); Given-Wilson, Chronicles, p. 84; Dobson, ‘Contrasting Chronicles’, p. 213. The chronicle
itself remains unpublished; it survives in one manuscript, London, British Library, MS Harley
3648, fols 245r–258v .
various patrons who were all remembered in chronicles. Tewkesbury Abbey, a

prominent Benedictine house in Gloucestershire, was refounded by Robert fitz
Hamo and his wife in 1102 and enjoyed, in turn, the patronage of several promi-
nent families. In 1218 Gilbert de Clare, earl of Hereford, inherited from his
mother the earldom of Gloucester and the patronage of the abbey. The Clares were
very much involved in the life of Tewkesbury Abbey, gave significant bequests, and
adopted it as their family mausoleum from among a broad range of monastic
houses under their patronage. In 1314 the male line of the Clares became extinct
and the patronage rights were inherited by the Despenser family. The new patrons
were closely involved in the abbey, generous just as the Clares were in the previous
century. Finally, the Nevilles inherited the patronage which they held until 1487
when the advowson was taken by the crown. This positive relationship between the
subsequent patrons resulted in their extensive commemoration practices by
Tewkesbury. The genealogies of the families were preserved to highlight their
illustrious lineages and preserve evidence of desirable connection with the abbey.46
During the period of Despenser patronage the church was remodelled as a
necropolis of the family with impressive tombs and images of the lords on the
stained-glass windows.47 The monastic chronicle went to great lengths to present
in a favourable light the notorious Hugh Despenser the Younger (d. 1326), who
was a particularly generous patron of the abbey. An armorial roll (with a short
chronicle at the back) produced in the abbey c. 1476 shows the succession from the
founders, including the legendary Oddo and Doddo, dukes of Mercia, to the sub-
sequent patrons with their coats of arms. This roll was one of the sources, together
with funerary sculpture, for the early sixteenth-century Founders’ and Benefactors’
Book of Tewkesbury Abbey. This text includes images of the abbey’s patrons from
the Clare, Despenser, and Neville families with their coats of arms and lists of their
tombs, chantry chapels established by them, and small bequests such as vestments
and liturgical vessels. The transition of the patronal rights to the crown is symbol-
ized by the coat of arms of Edward, son of Henry IV. Some of the figures hold
46
Karen Stöber, ‘Bequests and Burials: Changing Attitudes of the Laity as Patrons of English
and Welsh Monasteries’, in Religious and Laity in Western Europe 1000–1400: Interaction, Nego-
tiation, and Power, ed. by Emilia Jamroziak and Janet Burton, Europa Sacra, 2 (Turnhout: Brepols,
2006), pp. 136–46 (pp. 132–35); Michael Hicks, ‘The Later Lords: The Despencers and their
Heirs’, in Tewkesbury Abbey: History, Art and Architecture, ed. by Richard K. Morris and Ron
Shoesmith (Almeley: Logaston Press, 2003), pp. 19–30.
47
R . K. Morris, ‘Tewkesbury Abbey: The Despenser Mausoleum’, Transactions of the Bristol
and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 93 (1974), 142–55; Given-Wilson, Chronicles, p. 84.
models of churches symbolizing bequests and patronage rights.48 By the sixteenth

century these three families were no longer patrons of the abbey, yet the com-
munity wanted to preserve their genealogies as they were closely linked with the
institutional one. The illustrious lineage of these aristocrats was a reminder of their
generosity to the abbey and provided a link with the glorious origins and past of
Tewkesbury.
Cartularies with Elements of Genealogy
Cartularies were produced by monastic houses of all orders throughout the Middle
Ages. Within the tradition of record keeping they were the most widespread genre
across Europe from the early Middle Ages until the Reformation. In the territories
which remained Catholic, cartularies continued to be produced well into the eigh-
teenth century. On the most basic level, a cartulary is simply a collection of copies
of charters of grants, bulls, and other legal documents related to the landholdings
of a given house, most commonly organized topographically. However, closer in-
spection reveals a great variety of style of cartularies, techniques of editing individ-
ual entries, organizational structure, and the addition of narrative, images, and
many other elements. Cartularies were created for a variety of reasons, which are
not mutually exclusive — to preserve precious and fragile documents, to consoli-
date information about landholdings, to have a written record of tenurial rights,
to preserve information about benefactors, or to create a particular version of the
past. The shape and structure of a cartulary is very much dependent on the point
in the ‘life’ of the monastic house at which it was created. Although such cases are
not very common, cartularies created in the early stage of monastic development
(within the first hundred years of their existence) record the institution in the
making, when the creation of the estates is not yet completed and the original
benefactors and/or their relatives and witnesses are still alive. In this case such
cartularies tend to have charters copied in extenso and the entries are organized
either chronologically or by family/tenurial groupings of the donors. On the other
hand, cartularies created centuries after the foundation tend to be organized
topographically, that is according to the division of the monastic estates (granges
or manors); the entries of individual charters are heavily abbreviated with witness
48
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Top. Glouc. d. 2. Luxford, Art and Architecture, pp. 178–79;
Julian M. Luxford, ‘The Founders’ Book’, in Tewkesbury Abbey, ed. by Morris and Shoesmith, pp.
53–64; Gransden, ‘Antiquarian Studies in Fifteenth-Century England’, p. 326.
lists cut out and devotional formulae in fragmentary form. Larger and older monas-
tic houses tended to have several cartularies covering particular parts of the estates
or specific chronological accumulations of charters.
Sometimes cartularies could be related to other more narrative texts as in the
case of the chronicle of St Peter’s Abbey, Gloucester, created in the late fourteenth
or early fifteenth century, possibly by Abbot Walter Frocester (1382–1412). The
text itself is closely based on the structure and content of the earlier cartulary to
which it is attached, and incorporated an earlier, lost chronicle. The text is rela-
tively short and opens with a description of the illustrious origins of the abbey,
whilst the rest is organized mostly in sections of subsequent abbots. Achievements
and stories about key events in the abbey, such as building projects, are supple-
mented with information about deaths of important ecclesiastical figures, natural
disasters, and some local and national news. This is followed by an alphabetical list
of donations to the abbey accompanied by brief information about the donor, the
circumstance of the gift, and the extent of the property. The cartulary proper is
organized alphabetically by the location of the property, and the charters them-
selves are heavily abbreviated, without witness lists.49
Some late medieval cartularies are explicitly reflective about institutional
origins and combine chronicle-like passages with copies of charters. The cartulary
of Holy Trinity, Aldgate is such a case. The Augustinian priory was founded by
Queen Matilda, the wife of Henry I, in 1108. The cartulary makes a claim that it
was the first English foundation of this order.50 The house benefited from the gene-
rosity of high-profile lay and ecclesiastical benefactors as well as the citizens of
London. The cartulary-chronicle was written by canon Thomas of Axbridge
between 1425 and 1427 on the basis of an earlier cartulary. Therefore this text is
organized not according to the tenures of individual priors, as is typical for mo-
nastic chronicles, but topographically by parishes in which properties of Holy
Trinity are located.51 Within each section a rough chronological order is kept. The
cartulary opens with the story of the illustrious foundation by Queen Matilda with
49
Historia et Cartularium Monasterii sancti Petri Gloucestriae, vols I– III, ed. by W. H. Hart,
Rolls Series, 33 (London, 1863–67); C. N. Brooke, ‘St Peter of Gloucester and St Cadoc of
Llancarfan’, in Celt and Saxon: Studies in the Early British Border, ed. by N. K. Chadwick (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), pp. 258–322 (p. 260); Gransden, Historical Writing,
p. 391.
50
The Cartulary of Holy Trinity Aldgate, ed. by Gerald A. J. Hodgett (London: London
Record Society, 1971), p. 1.
51
Cartulary of Holy Trinity, p. 5.
the advice and support of Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury including a carefully

described initial grant. This narrative is interspaced with confirmation charters by
King Henry I and further early grants by the Queen. Sections are devoted to the
early priors up to the mid-thirteenth century — their achievements, important
connections of Holy Trinity with the royal house (such as burials), the acquisition
of relics, and events in London (such as a fire that affected the house). The remain-
ing topographical sections are built through entries consisting of summaries of
charters and other legal documents with occasional notes explaining the circum-
stances of a particular grant or dispute. As in the chronicles described in the earlier
section, the issue of the defence of rights of the monastic house is very strong here.
Axbridge copied not only charters, but also other documents such as numerous
copies of the Husting court pleas that strengthen the priory’s claims to particular
properties.52
The fourteenth-century ‘Ledger Book of Vale Royal Abbey’ is another good
example of a montage text combining a cartulary-type section with the foundation
history and copies of Cistercian privileges.53 Vale Royal Abbey was founded by
King Edward I in 1274 in Cheshire as a daughter house of Dore Abbey. After the
initial generosity of the founder, especially towards the cost of building a large
church, the royal interest diminished in the second decade following the founda-
tion. The monastic community struggled to complete extensive building projects
and seems to have had financial problems for most of its history. The abbey also
moved its location early in its history — suitably packaged as a story of a miracu-
lous discovery of a more suitable site. The origins of the abbey are presented as a
result of a miracle and a vow by King Edward who, having survived a terrible storm
at sea, fulfilled his pledge to the Virgin Mary, made at a time of danger, to found
a Cistercian house. As in many similar texts, the narrative on the history of subse-
quent abbots incorporates the theme of the struggles with the enemies of the
monastery. However, unlike many analogous volumes, the chronicle part is not
followed by a cartulary, but by a collection of ‘pleas and evidence’ incorporating
legal material (copies of pleas, fines, agreements, memoranda, and charters) relating
to the holding of particular properties by Vale Royal. The final section is devoted
52
Cartulary of Holy Trinity, p. xx.
53
The Ledger-Book of Vale Royal Abbey, ed. by John Brownbill, The Record Society for the
Publication of Original Documents relating to Lancashire and Cheshire, 68 (Edinburgh: Ballan-
tyne Press for the Record Society, 1914). The surviving manuscript is a sixteenth-century copy,
London, British Library, MS Harley 2064.
to over thirty Cistercian privileges — bulls of exemptions and other papal grants.54
The ‘Ledger Book’ is a very good example of how origin myths, anxiety over
property rights, and privileges were combined in a defensive narrative, in which
institutional genealogy was both a tool for asserting legal status of lands and for
providing a sense of Cistercian identity for the monastic community.
Conclusion
An argument that runs though almost all fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts
discussed here is the defence of property rights and status. At the centre of these
narratives are genealogical themes, origin myths, and foundation stories. An impor-
tant period, when many such chronicles were produced, was after the Norman
Conquest when many Anglo-Saxon houses needed to defend their rights — often
using evidence from their archives and writing down their origin myths that vali-
dated their property claims.55 The second period when texts which contained
explicit reflections on the institutional history were compiled can be identified,
according to Gransden, in the fifteenth century. She has described the process of
tracing the institutional history back to more or less mythical origins; deeds of the
abbots combined with gathering evidence on the property as strengthening ‘the
monasteries’ fortifications in a general way’.56
One significant aspect of the Benedictine houses’ strategy in the later Middle
Ages was the demonstration of their antique origins. This strategy was partly a
manifestation of corporate pride, but also a defensive tool; as Luxford states,
‘When a Benedictine house “marshalled its antiquity”, it did not rely solely on the
written word: art and architecture, indeed, might stand as arguments in their own
right.’57 These late medieval developments formed partly a defensive mechanism
against those who questioned the role and place of traditional monastic houses and
partly an internal self-reflection of institutions whose history stretched back hun-
dreds of years.
54
Ledger-Book of Vale Royal Abbey, ed. by Brownbill, pp. 24–182. The Cistercian privileges are
not printed in the edition as they were deemed to ‘have no special reference to Vale Royal’ by the
editor on p. 183.
55
Richard W. Southern, ‘Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing: The Sense
of the Past’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 33 (1973), 243–63 (pp. 246–56).
56
Gransden, ‘Antiquarian Studies in Fifteenth-Century England’, p. 301.
57
Luxford, Art and Architecture, p. 147.
The genealogies of lay families of benefactors and patrons included in the

chronicles reflect on the relationship of these people with the monastic houses and
played an important role alongside other means of commemoration. These texts
were only one of the elements forming key links between monasteries of all orders
and lay people in the later Middle Ages — burials, chantries, hospitality, and other
practices — that bound the interests of monastic communities with those of their
patrons and benefactors.
It is striking how institutional histories and patrons’ genealogies were inter-
woven. History is often told through a line of royal or aristocratic succession and
of monastic offices. This serves the purpose of emphasizing continuity and legiti-
macy and linking together the institution with genealogical (patrons) and bio-
graphical (great abbots) patterns. In this way chronicle narratives can insert a
monastery within the continuous blood-line that anchors it to the symbols of
power and authority. The theme of continuous attention to genealogical continu-
ity is central to many secular chronicles that focus on the history of the kingdoms
or cities (especially London), and provides a link between the discussion of mo-
nastic chronicles in this chapter with other texts discussed in this volume.58
58
I would like to thank Prof. Wendy Childs and Prof. Chris Given-Wilson for their very
generous comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this chapter. The work greatly benefited
from their advice; all remaining errors are my own.
G ENEALOGY R EWRITTEN : INHERITING
THE L EGENDARY IN INSULAR H ISTORIOGRAPHY
Matthew Fisher
A
ll too commonly, history writing is viewed as the site where genealogies are
recorded, reported, constructed, or revised, but not as a node in the dis-
course of interconnectedness that genealogies describe. Yet genealogies are
themselves historiographical narratives, the passing of time depicted in the lines of
diagrams or the verbs of birth and death, and thus are inherently ideological and
rhetorical constructions. As such, genealogies, whether conveyed in narrative texts
or diagrams, deserve the same processes of textual scrutiny as more conventional
historiographical texts. Beyond a complex and unstable relationship to the his-
torical, genealogical texts participate in a sophisticated dialogue with the densely
entangled multilingual insular historiographies of the late thirteenth and early
fourteenth centuries. During this period, historiography itself became increasingly
subject not only to contestation and revision, but, more significantly, to recon-
textualization and reinterpretation. At the end of the thirteenth century,
Edward I’s deployment of the processes of composing historiography to shape
English and Scottish political relations was part of a larger historical moment in
which the hitherto ethnically determined narratives of insular history, and the
accompanying genealogical inconsistencies, were elevated to a central role on the
highest of political stages. There, a series of attempts were made to decouple
historiography from its ethnically charged foundations, and to create for the island
a genealogy of historical and political English overlordship, unaffected by the
discontinuities inscribed by earlier history writing.
An early fourteenth-century manuscript neatly captures some of the resistance
to the reimagining of political genealogy taking place not through historical revi-
sion, but through historiographical reinterpretation. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS
Rawlinson D. 329 contains several historiographical texts, including the Anglo-
124 Matthew Fisher
Norman Des Grantz Geanz, the Short Version of the Anglo-Norman prose Brut
(supplemented by portions of Li Rei de Engletere), and what Ruth Dean has la-
belled a ‘Scottish Chronicle’.1 A small quarto volume, the codex is better decorated
than many contemporary historiographical manuscripts but remains on the whole
a plain and functional book, written in a single column featuring regular red and
blue capitals, in a hand of the first half of the fourteenth century, perhaps
1330–40.2 Dean’s ‘Scottish Chronicle’ is, in fact, an Anglo-Norman excerpt of Ed-
ward I’s letter to Pope Boniface VIII, sent in May 1301, concerning the aftermath
of Scotland’s ‘Great Cause’, the contest over the Scottish throne. Preceding the
historiographical texts, however, is a series of ten half-page illuminations of the
kings of England from William the Conqueror to Edward II.3 These illuminations
rest upon genealogical diagrams consisting of linked roundels inscribed with each
ruler’s offspring or, in place of those visual genealogies for three of the kings, Latin
verses celebrating their reigns.4 The texts contained in the codex reshape the
1
Bodl., MS Rawlinson D. 329 contains a series of illuminations on fols 2r–7r. Des Grantz
Geanz and the ‘Latin linking passage’ occupy fols 8r–12 r; the Anglo-Norman Brut fols 12r–121v;
Dean’s ‘Scottish Chronicle’, fols 123r–130r. See Ruth J. Dean, with Maureen B. M. Boulton, Anglo-
Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts, Anglo-Norman Text Society Occasional
Publications Series, 3 (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1999), p. 21; Lister M. Matheson,
The Prose ‘Brut’: The Development of a Middle English Chronicle (Tempe: Medieval and
Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998), pp. xix, 33–34; Christian Foltys, Kritische Ausgabe der
anglonormannischen Chroniken (Berlin: E. Reuter Gesellschaft, 1962), p. 17; and Georgine
Brereton, Des Grantz Geanz (Oxford: Publications for the Study of Medieval Languages and
Literature, 1937), pp. viii–ix.
2
I am grateful to Ralph Hanna for his opinion on the date of the codex, conveyed informally
in the Bodleian Library in Spring 2001. Dean dates the codex to s. xiv 2/3 , Anglo-Norman Literature,
p. 22. Brereton dates it ‘Fourteenth century (after 1333)’, Des Grantz Geanz, p. ix, as the prose Brut
in the manuscript extends to that year.
3
Bodl. MS Rawlinson D. 329, fols 2r–7r. The king portraits and a series of accompanying Latin
couplets and longer verses are found in at least five other manuscripts, some of which also replicate
the genealogical diagrams precisely, and in some instances even recall each other iconographically.
See London, British Library, MS Additional 62451, MS Cotton Claudius D II, and MS Royal
20 A II; London, Inner Temple Library, MS Petyt 511, vol. 19; and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS
Laud Misc. 637. The unedited verses begin, ‘Dux Normannorum Willelmus vi validorum | Rex est
Anglorum bello conquestor eorum’ (William, Duke of the Normans by force of might | is King of
the English, their Conqueror by war). The verses are also found in the final folios of Cambridge,
Corpus Christi College, MS 139, beginning fol. 179v, although I have not yet had the opportunity
to examine the codex.
4
William Rufus, Stephen, and Richard I have twenty-four-line Latin verses in place of the
roundels found beneath the other kings. See Bodl. MS Rawlinson D. 329: fol. 2r, William the
GENEALOGY REWRITTEN 125
historiographical tradition previously predicated upon ethnic, political, and nar-

rative disjunctions between the Welsh, English, Normans, and Scots. In opposition
to this model, the codex constructs a seamless textual whole that validates a total-
izing view of the entire island under English rule. Indeed, the codex is part of a
sudden surge of historiographical texts written or copied in the 1330s, including
the Chronicle of Robert Mannyng, that obsessively worked and reworked what
would seem to be old subjects: the legal manoeuvrings of the Scottish and the
English in the first years of the fourteenth century. Rather than rendered irrelevant
by thirty years of intermittent war and signal victories on both sides (Bannock-
burn, Halidon Hill), the questions of inheritance and sovereignty addressed by the
texts and the codex seem all the more pressing. One later reader of the manuscript
clearly recognized the codex’s implicit ideological agenda, and emphatically re-
jected it by literally de-facing all of the illuminated kings of England. The kings
with their faces scratched away sit in a markedly less authoritative relationship to
the genealogical roundels below them and to the historiographical narratives that
follow. The competing political and legal agendas, and the uses to which history
writing and genealogy were put, remained contested in the 1330s, although the
context of the debates had shifted from codex, to papal adjudication, to battle-
fields, and back to the leaves of manuscripts.
In 1291 and again in 1301, Edward I famously sought historiographical justifi-
cation for his expansionist impulses, sending out requests to English monasteries
and cathedrals for textual materials touching on the status of Scotland and
England.5 Commonly referred to as Edward’s ‘appeal to history’, it might be better
thought of as an appeal to historiography, an invitation to uncover documents and
narratives with the expectation they might be transformed into legal arguments
and new narratives. The ‘Scottish Question’, brought about by the death of Alex-
ander III in 1286 and the death of his heir the Maid of Norway in 1290, provided
the context for the shifting grounds and stages upon which historiography found
Conqueror; fol. 2v, William Rufus; fol. 3r, Henry I; fol. 3v, Stephen; fol. 4r, Henry II; fol. 4v,
Richard I; fol. 5r , John; fol. 5v , Henry III; fol. 6r, Edward I; fol. 6v , Edward II (diagram only, lacks
portrait); fol. 7r, Edward II or Edward III (portrait only, roundels are blank).
5
For the surviving responses to the two inquests, see Francis Palgrave, Documents and Records
Illustrating the History of Scotland and Transactions Between the Crowns of Scotland and England
(London, 1837), pp. 56–137. The literature on the Scottish Question is vast. See R. James Gold-
stein, The Matter of Scotland (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), p. 58, and E. L. G.
Stones and Grant G. Simpson, Edward I and the Throne of Scotland, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1978), I, 139.
126 Matthew Fisher
itself.6 The materials that do survive — some of the returns themselves from the
inquests, the Great Rolls of John of Caen and Andrew Tange, and supplementary
chronicle evidence — were ultimately deployed in two distinct circumstances:
during the Great Cause itself, and again in 1301, when some of the core legal issues
surrounding the question of Scottish sovereignty were raised in letters and lawyers
sent to the court of Pope Boniface VIII.7
The very vagueness of Edward’s inquest, asking abbots for ‘regnum nostrum et
regimen Scocie qualitercumque contingencia’ (‘everything that he finds touching
in any way our realm and the rule of Scotland’), ensured a wide variety of re-
sponses.8 Of the surviving records from the 1291 inquest, replies range from a few
bare excerpts from annals, to extensive compilations that draw on narrative ma-
terials stretching back to the Anglo-Saxon past, and occasionally to versions of
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s legendary history of Brutus’s conquest of the island and
its division amongst his three sons, Locrinus, Camber, and Albanactus.9 Among
6
See also Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1174–1328, ed. and trans. by E. L. G. Stones (1965; repr.,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), and E. L. G. Stones, ‘The Appeal to History in Anglo-Scottish
Relations between 1291 and 1401’, Archives, 41 (1969), 11–21 and 80–83.
7
In addition to the Latin original of the letter and the Anglo-Norman version in Bodl. MS
Rawlinson D. 329, a version of Edward I’s response to Boniface VIII also survives in Anglo-
Norman verse, which circulated along with two other related letters in three manuscripts; all three
are ascribed in one mid-fourteenth-century manuscript to the Augustinian chronicler Piers Lang-
toft. The ascription is elsewhere unattested and should be considered as a rhetorical gesture rather
than a definitive identification. See the partial edition of Langtoft’s Chronicle, Piers Langtoft, Édi-
tion Critique et Commentée de Pierre de Langtoft: Le Règne D’Édouard Ier, ed. by J. C. Thiolier
(Paris: Université de Paris XII, 1989). The letters survive in London, British Library, MS Royal
20 A XI, Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College, MS 43, and Thiolier’s manuscript ‘R’, now Princeton
University Library, MS Taylor Medieval 12. See Thiolier, pp. 445–83, and Dean, Anglo-Norman
Literature, pp. 45–46. There also survives a later Middle English adaptation of the letter to Boni-
face. The text is edited in Feudal Manuals of English History, ed. by Thomas Wright (London:
J. Mayer, 1872), pp. 154–70. Although Wright does not provide the shelfmark for the edited roll,
it is London, British Library, Lansdowne Roll 4. See Edward Donald Kennedy, Chronicles and
Other Historical Writing, vol. VIII of A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050–1500, gen.
ed. Albert E. Hartung (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1989), pp.
2678–79, 2891.
8
Stones and Simpson, Edward I and the Throne of Scotland, I, 139, translating Edward I’s letter
of 8 March 1291, to the Abbot of Evesham.
9
Guenée notes of the outlines of the historiographical textual tradition attested by the replies,
‘Le fait en tous cas qu’à la fin du XIIIe siècle encore, sur 23 réponses écrites conservées, six copient
tout naturellement Guillaume de Malmesbury, quatre l’historien de Worcester, et deux Henri de
Huntingdon, prouve assez que ces trois historiens étaient à l’origine d’une tradition historique
the responses, from some thirty-six monasteries and convents and nine secular
cathedral chapters, the most common historical starting point for the surviving
records is the reign of Edward the Elder, in 899.10 This is a very odd terminus a quo
for a narrative of English sovereignty over Scotland and warrants consideration
both with regards to the reign of Edward the Elder and to the textual transforma-
tions implicit in establishing this terminus. Although the implied terms of the
inquest led to the pre-selection of relevant materials, 899 is nonetheless quite an
unusual beginning compared to those of universal chronicles extending back to the
Creation, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s Alfredian genealogy, the chronicles of Bede
and his successors commencing with the Roman conquest of Britain, or even Geof-
frey of Monmouth’s account of the Trojan War.
The 1301 letter from Edward I to Pope Boniface VIII is a response to an earlier
bull of Boniface, Scimus fili (1299), which claimed on rather tenuous grounds that
Scotland belonged to the Church as a vassal of the papacy.11 Edward’s response to
Boniface’s rather audacious claim survives in two forms. In what seems to have
been the original version, the letter laid out the case for English overlordship over
Scotland beginning with the reign of Edward the Elder, a claim thus extending
from Edward to Edward, as it were.12 As an informal report to Edward concerning
the Scottish reply to the letter in the papal court attests, the version actually de-
livered to Boniface VIII was revised and instead began with Brutus and his three
sons.13 Edward I’s letter to Boniface crafts a narrative of historical continuity
nationale durable’, in B. Guenée, ‘L’Enquête historique ordonnée par Édouard Ier, roi d’Angleterre,
en 1291’, Académie des Inscriptions & Belles-Letters: Comptes Rendus, November–December
(1975), 572–84 (p. 580). Thus, for example, the record from the Abbey of Faversham begins with
Brutus, although, intriguingly, Palgrave, Documents and Records, notes that, ‘several lines [are]
defaced’, p. 92.
10
See Palgrave, Documents and Records, pp. 56–137. See also F. T. Wainwright, ‘The Submis-
sion to Edward the Elder’, History, 37 (1952), 114–30. See also Anglo-Scottish Relations, ed. and
trans. by Stones, p. 197: ‘Edward, known as the elder, son of Alfred, king of England, had subject
and subordinate to him, as lord superior, the kings of the Scots, the Cumbrians, and the Strathclyde
Welsh.’
11
See Anglo-Scottish Relations, ed. and trans. by Stones, pp. 162–63: ‘ab antiquis temporibus
regnum Scocie pleno jure pertinuit et adhuc pertinere dinoscitur ad ecclesiam supradictam’ (‘from
ancient times the realm of Scotland belonged rightfully, and is known still to belong, to the Roman
church’).
12
See Anglo-Scottish Relations, ed. and trans. by Stones, p. 196.
13
Edward’s letter is preserved in the Close Rolls. A ‘draft’ version of the letter, in Anglo-
Norman, is preserved in the Public Record Office and begins its historical narrative with the reign
128 Matthew Fisher
through the careful assemblage of discontinuous and, indeed, contradictory

sources. After a brief preamble, the letter makes its primary claim:
Altissimus inspector cordium nostre scrinio memorie indelebili stilo novit inscribi, quod
antecessores et progenitores nostri reges Anglie jure superioris et directi dominii ab
antiquissimis retro temporibus regno Scocie et ipsius regibus in temporalibus.
[The All-Highest, to whom all hearts are open, will testify how it is graven upon the tablets
of our memory with an indelible mark, that our predecessors and progenitors, the kings of
England, by right of lordship and dominion, possessed, from the most ancient times, the
suzerainty of the realm of Scotland and its kings in temporal matters.]14
In order to demonstrate this dominion extending back to most ancient times, the
letter initiates a historical narrative that touches upon a carefully selected, and care-
fully slanted, series of historical milestones that demonstrate English sovereignty,
beginning ‘sub temporibus itaque Ely et Samuelis prophete’ (‘In the days of Eli and
Samuel the prophet’).15 The synchronism is drawn directly from Geoffrey of Mon-
mouth’s Historia regum Britanniae and introduces brief accounts of conquering
British heroes who exercised power over Scotland: Brutus and his three sons, Belin
and Brenin, and Arthur.16 It is a remarkable turn to legendary history to claim
Scottish subjection as a matter of historical record. Still more remarkably, less than
twenty years after the 1284 conquest of Wales, the eponymic founder and symbolic
apotheoses of Welsh political power could be appropriated for Edward’s cause.17
Insular historiography was from the outset driven by the political imperatives
of ethnicity. If Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum can be read as a ‘vita of
the English nation’, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia is a similarly political vita,
reconstituting the Anglo-Saxon and Norman conquests of the British (Welsh) as
of Edward the Elder; a Latin text beginning at the same point was interpolated in the Chronicle of
Walter of Guisborough (which extends to 1312). See The Chronicle of Walter of Guisborough, ed.
by Harry Rothwell, Camden Series, 89 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1957), pp. 232–34. See
also Anglo-Scottish Relations, ed. and trans. by Stones, p. 192.
14
Anglo-Scottish Relations, ed. and trans. by Stones, pp. 192–93.
15
16
See Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britanniae, ed. by Acton Griscom (London:
Longmans, Green, 1929). Compare the instances in Historia regum, I. xviii and II. vi. See also Laura
Keeler, Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Late Latin Chroniclers (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1946).
17
Note the Latin couplet that appears written above the illumination of Edward I in Bodl. MS
Rawlinson D. 329, ‘Wallensem Scotum rex Edwardus spoliauit | Eos petens totum sibi quod Brutus
populauit’ (Edward despoiled Wales and Scotland, wresting to himself all that Brutus settled),
translation mine.
an anomalous, if lengthy, interregnum.18 Indeed, the historiographical tradition in

the twelfth century was shaped by the competing historical models of Bede and
Geoffrey of Monmouth. The great Latin chronicles of William of Malmesbury and
Henry of Huntingdon worked to modify the Bedan articulation of providential
English history to accommodate the Norman Conquest. Henry of Huntingdon’s
paradigmatic ‘Five Plagues’ narrates the sequence of ethnically determined con-
quest of the island: the Romans, Picts, English, Danish, and Normans. The para-
digm must be understood not simply as a convenient schema for the transitions of
power in insular history, but as a model that subsumes history, in particular sover-
eignty, to an economy of Christian salvation, ethnic sin, and temporal power.19
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia attacks the Bedan model of English history,
but it does so in complex and numerous ways. Most obviously, of course, it entirely
avoids touching upon the history Bede narrates, instead generating a lengthy
account of British kings and victories both secular and ecclesiastical that precede
English history. Despite the lack of chronological overlap, the two texts, and the
two textual traditions they spawn, are fundamentally incompatible. The Bedan
ideological position adapted by William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon
argues for a divine imprimatur for Norman political power; the Galfridian stance
claims for the British ab initio primacy, and prophesies the return of British rule
over the island (thereby encouraging the Welsh insurgency of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, ended only by the Edwardian conquest).20 Edward’s letter to
Boniface was not the first time Bedan English and Galfridian British history were
forcibly yoked together: Alfred of Beverly, in the twelfth century, attempted the
matter, and Richard I seems to have been the first English king to associate himself
with the emphatically British King Arthur.21 Nonetheless, the attempt to articulate
18
The phrase is Jennifer Miller’s, and I am greatly indebted to her work and to her forthcoming
book, Lahamon’s ‘Brut’ and English Historiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
19
See Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed. and trans. by Diana Greenway (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1996), i. 4. 14. See also Robert W. Hanning, The Vision of History in Early
Britain: From Gildas to Geoffrey of Monmouth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966).
20
See R. R. Davies, The First English Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Note
Davies’s observation, ‘The third challenge implied in Geoffrey’s text lay in its conception of the
political order. The Historia assumes throughout a single Britain ruled by a succession of single
kings’ (p. 40). See also John Gillingham, ‘The Context and Purposes of the History of the Kings of
Britain’, Anglo-Norman Studies, 13 (1990), 99–118.
21
The well-known article by R. S. Loomis, although groundbreaking, should be assessed cau-
tiously. See R. S. Loomis, ‘Edward I, Arthurian Enthusiast’, Speculum, 28 (1953), 114–27. See also
130 Matthew Fisher
an ideologically and literarily viable conjunction of the two traditions was made
repeatedly in the vernacular chronicles of Robert of Gloucester, Piers Langtoft, and
Robert Mannyng, all of which are very roughly contemporary with Edward I’s
letter, and ultimately the sequence became the ‘standard’ version of English
history.22 But the violence done to the historiographical tradition to accomplish
this standardization is significant and required extensive textual appropriation and
reinterpretation.
The letter from Edward I to Boniface, in commencing with the story of Brutus
and his three sons, avails itself precisely of the Galfridian methodology of interpo-
lating a narrative bearing a contested ideological agenda into an uncontested
chronological and narrative space. The unsent original version of the letter, begin-
ning with Edward the Elder, also situates itself very particularly. Edward the Elder
was the son of King Alfred, who represented an imaginative apotheosis of pre-
Conquest English kingship and was associated with developments in English
language, learning, culture, legal sophistication, and political power.23 For Edward
I’s purposes in arguing English overlordship, the submission of the Scottish (along
with the Northumbrians and Strathclyde Britons) to Edward the Elder in 920
enabled the construction of a sequence of Scottish submissions to English kings,
again, from Edward to Edward.24 More significantly, though, it is very precisely
Edward the Elder’s lack of a substantive reputation, particularly in comparison to
that of his father, that makes him a noteworthy starting point.25 In the letter, the
The Arthur of the English, ed. by W. R. J. Barron (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), and
Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England, 2 vols (1974–82; repr., London: Routledge,
1996), I, 212. See also Gillingham, ‘Context and Purposes’, p. 103, and n. 23, identifying Roger of
Howden’s Gesta Regis Ricardi as claiming Arthur’s sword, Caliburn, for Richard I.
22
The various versions of the Anglo-Norman and then Middle English prose Bruts, and the
incredibly wide circulation of the two texts, sealed the conjoined narrative’s hold on the English
historical imagination.
23
Although Alfred’s reputation as a pivotal English king was a medieval phenomenon stem-
ming from Asser’s ninth-century vita, for a sign that the appeal of his kingship has not disappeared,
consider the surprisingly enthusiastic account of Alfred’s career in Alfred Smyth, King Alfred the
Great (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
24
See Michael R. Davidson, ‘The (Non) Submission of the Northern Kings in 920’, in Edward
the Elder, ed. by N. I. Higham and D. H. Hill (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 200–11.
25
See Nick Higham’s observation in ‘Edward the Elder’s Reputation’, in Edward the Elder, ed.
by Higham and Hill, pp. 1–11; ‘Edward’s reputation suffered consistently from comparison with
his father’s literary exploits in medieval commentaries’ (p. 2). Higham notes the dismissive com-
mentaries of John of Worcester, William of Malmesbury, Matthew Paris, Roger of Hoveden, and
reign of Edward the Elder marks both a historical moment of English sovereignty
over Scotland and an attempt to undermine the contemporary historiographical
model of ethnic destiny and political power. By omitting Alfred and diminishing
the ethnically English aspect of English history, the unsent version of the letter
narrates the succession of English and Norman kings decoupled from the crises of
conquest and translatio imperii. Regardless of its British or English beginning, the
rhetorical skill of the letter culminates in a delightfully understated Conquest,
‘Item Willelmus dictus bastardus rex Anglie, cognatus dicti Edwardi, a Malcolmo
rege Scotorum [. . .] homagium cepit’ (‘Furthermore, William, styled the Bastard,
king of England, a kinsman of the said Edward, received homage from Malcolm,
king of Scots’).26 If legendary British history was placed in the service of Edward I’s
political agenda, so too was English history; together they formed a history not of
a particular people, but of the island itself, and a continuous genealogical account
of kingship stretching back from Edward to the most distant past.
How far back the narrative of history might usefully be pursued is a question with
striking theoretical parallels in Edward I’s court. Throughout Edward I’s reign,
legislation and legal battles rose over the ‘limits of legal memory’.27 These limits can
be understood as both textual and temporal: what were the standards for docu-
mentary evidence attesting to privileges or the possession of land, and how far into
the past could such documents and narratives be relied upon to accurately repre-
sent the past? The question of legal memory was taken up in two contexts: in the
so-called Quo Warranto campaign of 1278–94, and in legislation concerning seisin
and the ownership of land in the Statute of Westminster I (1275). Quo Warranto
writs ask a question, challenging the recipient to justify in court by what right
privileges or franchises were held that would otherwise be the king’s. One particularly
notable by-product of the campaign was the reversal of the conventional processes
of producing evidence. That is, in response to the writ, the burden of proof fell to
Ranulph Higden, amongst other chroniclers. Note William of Malmesbury’s observation, ‘All this
might be rightly set to Edward’s credit, but the chief prize of victory, in my judgment, is due to his
father’, in Gesta regum Anglorum, ed. and trans. by R. A. B. Mynors, completed by R . M. Thomson
and M. Winterbottom, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998–99), II, 125.
26
27
See P. Brand, ‘“Time Out of Mind”: The Knowledge and Use of the Eleventh- and Twelfth-
Century Past in Thirteenth-Century Litigation’, Anglo-Norman Studies, 16 (1993), 37–54;
Donald W. Sutherland, Quo Warranto Proceedings in the Reign of Edward I, 1278–1294 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1963); Michael Prestwich, Edward I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997),
pp. 258–72, 346–47.
132 Matthew Fisher
the defendant, rather than the king and his officers, thus neatly upending the more
typical relationships amongst parties.28 Indeed, even the specifics as to which privi-
leges the writ challenged were for the defendant to enumerate and justify, a situa-
tion which might swiftly devolve into the Kafkaesque. The famous story of Earl
Warenne waving his rusty sword in court, claiming to hold his lands by right of an
object charged as a symbolic guarantee of the past, has been retold so frequently
that the details need not be rehearsed here. As Clanchy points out concerning the
technical and legal inaccuracies of the story, ‘Edward I’s quo warranto prosecutions
did not demand warrants for “lands” but for franchises’.29 After years of legal un-
certainty, the Statute of Quo Warranto (1290) fixed 1189 and the coronation of
Richard I as the most ancient terminus for any claims made to a privilege in court.30
Continuous possession of a privilege or franchise since in or before 1189 was
sufficient to answer the legal challenge of Quo Warranto writs, thereby delineating
the temporal limit before which documentary evidence was not innately valid.31
In order to respond to a Quo Warranto writ, a defendant must become a his-
torian and a genealogist, describing the moment and circumstances under which
a privilege was acquired and tracing the legal and lawful inheritance and transfer-
ence of that right from generation to generation. Only continuous exercise of a
privilege was acceptable proof; otherwise privileges reverted to the king by default.
Quo Warranto writs created the need for defendants to generate consistent his-
torical narratives rhetorically crafted to accomplish a specific purpose: in a word,
28
Sutherland, Quo Warranto Proceedings: ‘Quo warranto is a prerogative writ [. . .] only the
king can use it’ (p. 8).
29
Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307, 2nd edn
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 36.
30
Specifically, ‘touz ceux qi cleiment avoir quite possession des fraunchises avant le temps le Roi
Richard saunz interrupcion [. . .] bien se joient de cele possession’ (‘All those which claim to have
quiet possession of any Franchise before the time of King Richard, without Interruption [. . .] shall
well enjoy their possession’), Statutes of the Realm, ed. and trans. by A. Luders and others, 11 vols
(London, 1810–28), I, 107. See also Sutherland, Quo Warranto Proceedings, pp. 93–96, quoting
the summary of the 1290 Statute of Quo Warranto. Sutherland’s edited text varies slightly from the
version printed in Statutes of the Realm.
31
In 1287 the Abbot of Bury St Edmunds produced a charter supposedly granted by King
Cnut to the abbey, a case resolved by the Statute three years later. See Sutherland, Quo Warranto
Proceedings, p. 115n. See also Alfred Hiatt, The Making of Medieval Forgeries: False Documents in
Fifteenth-Century England (London: British Library, 2004). Ultimately, grants issued before 1189
required reconfirmation by the king. The Statute avoided addressing the legitimacy of ancient
claims to franchises by offering new grants not confirming but reissuing the same franchises. See
Sutherland, Quo Warranto Proceedings, pp. 92–93.
historiography. It is notable that Edward’s letter to Boniface offers, through its

carefully constructed historiographical narrative, the assertion of continuous Scot-
tish subjection and English overlordship — a privilege, of sorts, held without inter-
ruption by the kings of England, although one extending long before the temporal
limits set by the Statute.
Land claims are distinct from the types of privileges and franchises covered by
Quo Warranto proceedings, but the appeal to history remains integral. Oddly, the
two legal situations seem to have been at theoretical odds. In 1237 the first legisla-
tion limiting the dates from which seisin could be claimed was enacted, and it set
the reign of Henry II as the legal terminus a quo, although there were exceptions
granted extending to Henry I’s death in 1135. Stephen’s reign, from 1135–54,
more commonly referred to as the Anarchy, was pointedly excluded from this and
all subsequent legislation.32 Forty years later, section 39 of the Statute of Westmin-
ster (1275), ‘barred any claim to land or to advowsons made on the basis of a seisin
older than the reign of King Richard I’.33 Although conceptually the political as-
pect of sovereignty and the territorial possession inherent in seisin are complexly
entangled, Edward I’s claims to Scotland — as both a political unity and a territory
— necessarily were asserted in the distant history that his laws pointedly excluded.
After the Statute of Westminster, only one person is known to have made a claim
to land based on deeds dating not only before the reign of Richard I, but to the
Anarchy itself — Edward I, in 1279. As Brand notes, ‘the clerk left a blank where
the descent of the right from the king’s “ancestor” to himself would normally have
been recorded’.34 The blank indicates the formulaic and systematic requirement
that individuals defending land claims must exhibit genealogical knowledge, and
directly link themselves with the ancestor upon whose seisin a claim was based. The
scribal blank left by the clerk processing the claim of Edward I (to the advowson
of a Hampshire church) reflects very precisely the genealogical discontinuities in
32
Brand, ‘“Time out of Mind”’, p. 40.
33
Brand, ‘“Time out of Mind”’, p. 39, citing Statutes of the Realm, ed. by Luders and others,
I, 36, ‘Etpur ceo qe le tens est mult passe puis qe les briefs desuz nomeez furent autre feiz limitez;
Purveu est qe conte de decente, en le brief de dreit, qe nul ne seit oy por demaunder la seisine son
auncestre de plus lointein seisine qe del tens le Rey Richard, oncle le piere le Rey qe ore est’ (‘And
Forasmuch as it is long time passed since the Writs undernamed were limited; It is Provided, That
in conveying a Descent in a Writ of Right, none shall presume to declare of the Seisin of his Ances-
tor further, or beyond the time of King Richard, Uncle to King Henry, Father to the King that
now is’).
34
Brand, ‘“Time out of Mind”’, p. 41.
134 Matthew Fisher
the royal line. Consider, for example, the elaborate genealogical diagrams found in
London, British Library, MS Royal 13 A XVIII, written in a mid-fourteenth-
century hand.35 The complicated diagram traces the royal line from Henry I to
Richard I across fols 155v –156r, consisting of linked roundels inscribed with kings
and their offspring, surrounded by oddly shaped blocks of text conforming to the
spaces available between the parts of the diagram. The lines connecting ancestors
and descendants extend across openings and, in the case of recto folios, extend to
the far edge, thus visually implying continuity with the equivalent lines extending
from the edge of versos. Henry I and Stephen are distinctly not visually connected
on fol. 155v, and the line connecting Henry I to Henry II, and then continuing to
Richard I and John (on fol. 156r), visually prioritizes Richard I as the rightmost
king. Richard occupies a roundel smaller than that of Henry II, but one noticeably
larger than that of John. The emphasis given Richard marks him as an endpoint of
sorts and visually diminishes the line extending from John’s roundel to the edge of
fol. 156r, and thus, by implication, to Henry III on the next folio.36 By the early
fourteenth century, the genealogical discontinuities of Stephen’s reign and the
Anarchy were, for the most part, legally resolved. This resolution depended upon
inscribing the limits of legal memory safely after Richard I’s uncontested suc-
cession. Methodologically, historiography could not adopt the law’s convenient
solution. But the genealogical diagram in MS Royal 13 A XVIII is instructive:
reinterpretation of the narrative of history, accomplished visually or otherwise,
35
See BL, MS Royal 13 A XVIII, fols 150v –157v . The diagram discussed here is across the
opening of fols 155v –156r . See also versions of the text in London, British Library, MSS Royal
14 B V (before 1300) and 14 B VI (s. xiv1/4 ) and MSS Additional 30079, 8101, and 29502. See also
Alison Allan, ‘Yorkist Propaganda: Pedigree, Prophecy and the “British History” in the Reign of
Edward IV’, in Patronage, Pedigree and Power in Later Medieval England, ed. by Charles Ross
(Gloucester: Sutton, 1979), pp. 171–92.
36
Stephen’s historiographically problematic reign, and the accompanying genealogical difficul-
ties, were partially resolved by the severe and ongoing criticism of his kingship. In his Feudal
Manuals, Wright printed the text of a roll formerly in the possession of Joseph Mayer of Liverpool;
the roll is not part of the Mayer collection now housed at the Walker Art Gallery, nor those manu-
scripts at Liverpool University Library. See Dean, Anglo-Norman Literature, pp. 8–9, and N. R.
Ker, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), III, 224.
Wright’s text attests to Stephen’s continued reputation as a poor king, ‘Iceti Estene, ki fu fiz à Ele,
la ducheise, regna à tort e encontre leal serment, e retint la coroune tut la tens de sa vie en guerre
e en traval’ (This Stephen who was son of Ela the duchess, reigned wrongfully, and contrary to loyal
oath, and retained the crown all the time of his life in war and labour), p. 29. See also C. M.
Kauffman, ‘An Early Sixteenth-Century Genealogy of Anglo-Saxon Kings’, Journal of the Warburg
and Courtauld Institutes, 47 (1984), 209–16, esp. p. 210 n.11.
could resolve the blank space that a scribe was forced to leave in Edward’s claim to
Stephen’s rights.
The awkward transition from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s British history to
Bede’s English history left a similar blank in the historiographical record. The two
narratives don’t connect smoothly, but once constructed, the patina of continuity
is more compelling than the fitful conquests and awkward gaps of ‘history’. Before
the letter to Boniface VIII was written, the monks and clerics who responded to the
inquests of 1291 and 1301 had first to collect materials on the status of England
and Scotland. Particularly as the majority of the responses to the 1291 inquest
began with the reign of Edward the Elder in 899, it is clear that the compilers anti-
cipated both the reception and the deployment of the materials they assembled
from chronicles and annals. Despite the unspecific nature of Edward’s request,
those responding to the inquest readily perceived the project at hand was to justify
and ground English overlordship and Scottish subjection. To accomplish this, the
chronicles and annals employed became texts plundered in the service of an agenda
wholly distinct from the texts’ original arguments. As the context for these ma-
terials changed from the ecclesiastical libraries housing the original sources, to the
political stage upon which the letter would feature, the availability of excerpted and
compiled historiographical texts to interpretations contrary to those crafted by
complete narratives became a more pressing issue. Historiography was transformed
into a ‘source text’ but, at the same time, any use made of the returns to the in-
quests would similarly be open to acts of textual and ideological restructuring.
Edward’s letter to Boniface, in availing itself of historiography extending well
outside the limits of legal memory, indeed ‘ab antiquissimis retro temporibus’, was
crafted to resist precisely the cycle of reinterpretation and textual repurposing, a
cycle that enabled the antithetical texts of Bede and Geoffrey of Monmouth to be
brought together in the service of a new ideological project.
No formal text of the Scottish reply to Edward’s letter to Boniface survives in any
contemporary manuscript, but there is an ‘informal report’ of the arguments of-
fered against the letter, and two texts connected to the Scottish case presented in
the papal curia.37 In addition to presenting a number of legal arguments countering
37
See Anglo-Scottish Relations, ed. and trans. by Stones, pp. 220–35. See also R. James Gold-
stein, ‘The Scottish Mission to Boniface VIII in 1301: A Reconsideration of the Context of the
Instructiones and Processus’, Scottish Historical Review, 70 (1991), 1–15, and Walter Bower, Scoti-
chronicon, gen. ed. D. E. R. Watt, vol. VI (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1991), pp. xx–xxi,
168–89. Note that the arguments found in the texts ascribed to Baldred Bisset stand in an uncer-
tain relationship to the oral arguments made by the Scottish delegation to Boniface VIII.
136 Matthew Fisher
those of the letter, and contesting various misleading statements, the Scottish reply
both condemns historiography as a genre and proceeds to ‘correct’ the letter’s his-
torical narrative.38 Although the Scottish reply concedes Brutus’s division of the
island amongst his three sons, it carefully construes the matter not as the founda-
tion of a pattern of rule over the entire island, but instead as the island’s division
into separate but equal kingdoms. This is followed by the introduction of the
eponymous Scota, daughter of Pharaoh, who along with her son Erk and her hus-
band Gayl (whence ‘Argyll’) rules Scotland.39 Under Scota, the Scottish remove
themselves from the British and English historiographical tradition:
achaceront les Bretons, et de cel temps les Escotz come gentz noveux et de novel noun ne
communerent ove les Bretons mais les pursuirent touz jours come lour enemis, et se
menerent par diverses lieux et coustumes et par diverse lange.
[they drove out the Britons, and from that time the Scots, as a new race and possessing a
new name, had nothing to do with the Britons, but pursued them daily as their enemies,
and were distinguished from them by different ranks and customs, and by a different
language.]40
The appropriation of the Galfridian methodology of interpolation, of exploiting

textual silence as the implicit authorization for historiographical innovation, is
significant. Moreover, despite conceding Arthur’s conquest of Denmark, France,
Norway, and Scotland, the reply emphatically reinscribes the discontinuities of
historiography, and in particular the divisions of ethnic conquest and providential
Bedan history. The Scottish reply notes that following the rule of the British
Arthur, ‘Et dient que les Britons puis furent en getetz par les Saxoneis, et puis les
Saxoneis par les Danois, et puis les Danois par les Saxoneis’ (‘They say that the
38
Anglo-Scottish Relations, ed. and trans. by Stones, pp. 222–24: ‘Again, they say that the old
chronicles that you use as evidence of your right could not assist you [. . .] because it is notorious
that these same old chronicles are utterly made naught and of no avail by other subsequent
documents of greater significance.’
39
Scota’s role as an eponymic figure for Scotland was not a new development, although the
details vary significantly in different accounts. For more on Scota, see Dauvit Broun, ‘The Birth of
Scottish History’, Scottish Historical Review, 76 (1997), 4–22, M. Dominica Legge, ‘La Piere
D’Escoce’, Scottish Historical Review, 38 (1959), 109–13, and John Bannerman, ‘The King’s Poet
and the Inauguration of Alexander III’, Scottish Historical Review 68 (1989), 120–49. Although
the first instance of Scota’s appearance is uncertain, her name and eponymic status (ignoring the
confusion of ‘Scoti’ as denoting an Irish or Scottish people) predate the 1249 poetic recitation at
Alexander III’s inauguration and goes back at least as far as Nennius’s Historia.
40
Anglo-Scottish Relations, ed. and trans. by Stones, pp. 226–27. Note that the language echoes
an almost textbook definition of a medieval natio: gens, terra, and lingua.
Britons were then expelled by the Saxons, and then the Saxons by the Danes, and
then the Danes by the Saxons’).41 The Scottish reply thus contests not only history,
but the attempt in Edward I’s letter to isolate itself from its constitutive historio-
graphical traditions. The combination of the Bedan and Galfridian traditions
found in the letter was not yet resistant to reinterpretation that foregrounded the
discontinuities of ethnic genealogies of political power and sovereignty.
Some thirty years after Edward’s inquests and the adjudications of Boniface VIII,
a new text re-employed pre-emptive interpolation into the historiographical rec-
ord, introducing Albina, eponymous founder of Albion and precursor to Brutus.42
The narrative of Des Grantz Geanz — although there are, in fact, numerous vari-
ants of the story — relates how Albina and her thirty sisters take possession of, and
civilize, the wholly uninhabited island.43 Likely composed sometime in the early
1330s, the Anglo-Norman poem quickly served as a prologue to the Short Version
of the Anglo-Norman prose Brut in some sixteen manuscripts, and from there en-
tered the Middle English prose Brut tradition.44 Although dismissed by one critic
as not ‘framed as a direct contribution to the Anglo-Scottish dispute’, Des Grantz
Geanz is very much a contribution to the dispute taking place historiographically,
offering a radical disruption of the terms of the English/Scottish dispute’s historio-
graphical roots.45 Albina, as a supplementary eponymous figure in the contest for
claims to primacy and sovereignty, very precisely undermines Brutus’s obvious
geographic, ethnic, and linguistic signification and the Galfridian project endorsing
British political power. The poem presents an abortive foundation myth: Albina
and her sisters reproduce with demons, leaving behind only monstrous offspring,
who fail to construct any form of political society or exert sovereignty over the
island. The remnants of these giants are then eradicated by Brutus and his Trojans
41
42
See Brereton, Des Grantz Geanz, and James P. Carley and Julia Crick, ‘Constructing Albion’s
Past: An Annotated Edition of De origine gigantum’, Arthurian Literature, 13 (1995), 41–114.
43
After long neglect, the story in its various textual incarnations has enjoyed significant recent
critical attention and is the subject of forthcoming work by, amongst others, Jocelyn Wogan-
Browne, Christopher Baswell, and Margaret Lamont, in connection with The French of England
project at Fordham University and the University of York. See also Lesley Johnson, ‘Return to
Albion’, Arthurian Literature, 13 (1995), 19–40, and Julia Marvin, ‘Albine and Isabelle: Regicidal
Queens and the Historical Imagination of the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut Chronicles’, Arthurian
Literature, 18 (2001), 143–91.
44
See Dean, Anglo-Norman Literature, pp. 24–30, and Matheson, Prose ‘Brut’, pp. 47–51.
45
See Carley and Crick, ‘Constructing Albion’s Past’, pp. 59–60.
138 Matthew Fisher
in Historia regum Britanniae. The poem thus inserts itself seamlessly into the
historiographical tradition.46 In addition to directly engaging with Geoffrey of
Monmouth’s narrative, Des Grantz Geanz replicates the providential Bedan model
of history, the generative cycle of spiritual and political economies in which
conquest is the punishment for sin. The sinful, however, are not the British or the
English, but rather the monstrous giants, sin made incarnate, and emphatically not
human.47 The Albina legend functions to rewrite the prehistory of the island not
as a map of competing ethnicities, but as a unified geographical and political whole.
To accomplish this, the poem subverts the contradictory models of Bedan and
Galfridian historiography by eliminating the teleological claims of ethnic
historiography.
Critical attention on Des Grantz Geanz has largely focused upon various dis-
ruptive aspects of the poem: female rebellion, the abuse of power, transgressive
female sexuality, and challenges to male political society. Yet the poem not only
becomes appended to historiographical texts (amongst others, the Anglo-Norman
and Middle English prose Bruts), but itself contributes very specifically to the his-
toriographical tradition.48 Des Grantz Geanz manages at once to reinterpret the
foundational terms of insular historiography, whilst embedding itself firmly within
the tradition’s textual genealogy. Albina and her thirty sisters civilize the island,
performatively enacting their rightful claims to the uninhabited island in a passage
replete with legal language. Albina herself claims seisin over the island, ‘Car jeo fu
la premereine, | Q’en la terre prist seysine, | Al issir de la marine’ (‘For I was the first
to take seisin in the land when we came out of the sea’).49 Albina and her sisters
cultivate the Edenic wilderness and impose an identity on the island through the
46
Geoffrey notes the island was originally, ‘a nemine exceptis paucis hominibus gigantibus
inhabitabatur’ (‘uninhabited except for a few giants’), Historia regum Britanniae, I. xvi. 249.
Translations from the Historia are supplied from Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings
of Britain, trans. by Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 72. The so-called ‘Latin
linking passage’ joining Des Grantz Geanz and the prose Brut closely echoes Geoffrey’s text,
suggesting the passage’s author was familiar with the Historia.
47
See Jeffrey J. Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1999).
48
A Latin version of the Albina story, edited by Carley and Crick as ‘De origine gigantum’,
accompanies Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia in six manuscripts. See Carley and Crick,
‘Constructing Albion’s Past’, pp. 76–77, and Julia Crick, The Historia regum Brittaniae of Geoffrey
of Monmouth III: A Summary Catalogue of the Manuscripts (Cambridge: Brewer, 1989), no. 98.
49
Brereton, Des Grantz Geanz, p. 18, lines 332–34.
linguistic imperialism of the naming process, an act inscribed into the space left at
the outset of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica and its famous beginning, ‘Britain, once
called Albion’.50 Both the naming ceremony and the cultivation of the land antici-
pate the reperformance of these rituals by Brutus and his companions in Historia
regum Britanniae.51 In a deft move, the abortive genealogy of Albina, her sisters,
and their giant descendants becomes instead the fertile ground for a hybridized his-
toriography of the island. It is precisely the genealogical discontinuity Albina and
her sisters introduce that enables the construction of historiographical continuity
— a patina overlaying the oft-repeated cycle of conquest and assimilation.
Robert Mannyng’s Chronicle (c. 1338) doesn’t contain the story of Albina and
her sisters and instead begins its narrative with the account of Brutus found in His-
toria regum Britanniae. At the point in composite insular history where the transi-
tion must be made from Geoffrey’s legendary Britons to Bede’s English, Mannyng’s
Chronicle casts about for a way to smooth the awkward juncture of the two texts.
Attempting to authorize his text at a moment when there are no authorities upon
which to rely, Mannyng offers a flurry of ‘citations’, mentioning Gildas, Bede, and
Wace within seventy lines.52 In the midst of this rhetorical performance of relia-
bility, the Chronicle introduces additional eponymous figures, Engle the Briton and
his champion Skardyng. Appearing after Hengist and Gurmund have already
conquered the British, Mannyng inserts Engle as a function of the classic historio-
graphical trope of the lately discovered book: ‘Long after þis, writen I fond, | how
a Breton chalanged þis lond [. . .] On alle þe lond he [Engle] set chalange, | his
ancessours wild he venge | & tak vengeaunce of þe Englis | þat chaced þe Bretons
out of þis.’53 It is a bloodless reconquest, as the English so greatly fear the giant
Skardyng that, ‘For drede of Engle & Skardyng, | þei mad Engle chefe kyng; | for
50
See Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, trans. by Judith McClure and Roger
Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 9.
51
See Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britanniae, I. xvi. 249, ‘Agros incipiunt colere.
domos edificare [. . .] Denique brutus de nomine suo insulam brittanniam appellat’ (‘They began
to cultivate the fields and build houses [. . .] Brutus then called the island Britain from his own
name’: History of the Kings of Britain, trans. by Thorpe, p. 72).
52
Robert Mannyng of Brunne, The Chronicle, ed. by Idelle Sullens (Binghamton: Medieval and
Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1996), I, lines 14151–220. Mannyng also mentions the otherwise
unattested ‘Thomas of Kendale’ and ‘Master Edmund’. See also Joyce Coleman, ‘Strange Rhyme:
Prosody and Nationhood in Robert Mannyng’s Story of England’, Speculum, 78 (2003), 1214–38.
53
Mannyng, Chronicle, I, line 14179–82. In addition to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s ‘liber vetus-
tissimus’, note also Henry of Huntingdon’s ‘Letter to Warin’ in Historia Anglorum.
140 Matthew Fisher
þis Engle þe lond þus wan, | England cald it ilk a man’.54 Engle is, needless to say,
a rather confusing and seemingly superfluous eponymous figure — a Briton after
whom England is named, who reconquers the English, whose name implies a
connection with his enemies.55
The Chronicle’s turn to legendary genealogy to resolve the difficulties in nego-
tiating the transition from the Galfridian to the Bedan is not accidental. If, in
Edward I’s letter to Boniface, Arthur can become an English hero, Mannyng’s
Chronicle transforms the British Engle into a figure who at once avenges the En-
glish conquest of the Britons and simultaneously creates an ‘Engle-land’ in which
the English are a conquered people. As in Des Grantz Geanz, the renaming of the
island neither carries with it ethnic signification, nor does it underpin claims to
rightful political power. Instead, the Chronicle maps over the island’s previous
names whilst undermining their import. Moreover, Engle’s genealogical legacy, like
Albina’s, is abortive. His nine sons (or nineteen, depending upon manuscript
variants) divide the island into nineteen parts, a number that fits with no other
division of the island into kingdoms or bishoprics.56 Despite the civilizing imprint
of bureaucratic structure imposed upon the island, a common historiographical
trope found most notably in Henry of Huntingdon’s Heptarchy, Engle and his
nineteen sons leave no lasting legacy, disappearing from the narrative as abruptly
as they were introduced. In reshaping the origins of England, and removing the
ethnic component of the name of the island, Engle joins Albina in modifying the
textual genealogy of historiography. It is precisely the gaps in insular genealogy that
enable the construction of a political imagination encompassing the entire island,
extending across its history of conquest and failed royal lines.
Genealogy, inherently a narrative of continuity, contains within itself the possi-
bility for novel types of connections in order to construct that essential continuity,
including even moments of discontinuity. Edward I’s letter to Boniface VIII and
54
Mannyng, Chronicle, I, lines 14195–98. Engle grants Scarborough to Skardying, completing
the Galfridian pattern of subsidiary eponymic foundations established by Corineus/Cornwall,
Locrinus/Loegria, Kamber/Cambria, Albanactus/Albania (Scotland).
55
See R . M. Wilson, The Lost Literature of Medieval England (London: Methuen, 1952) for
an argument that Skardyng and his brother Flayn have Icelandic analogues. Note, too, that imme-
diately after this passage Mannyng introduces yet another eponymous figure, only to dismiss her
‘Bot of Inge sauh I neuer nouht | in boke writen ne wrouht; | bot lewed men þer of crie’, Mannyng,
Chronicle, I, lines 14215–17. Inge also appears in the version of the Short English Metrical
Chronicle found in the Auchinleck manuscript.
56
Mannyng, Chronicle, I, line 14206.
the wave of historiography that combines Galfridian and Bedan history do not
merely rewrite the past. These texts recontextualize the genealogical foundations
of the island, forcing a reinterpretation of the past. The legendary foundations of
Albina and Engle absorb those of Brutus and Hengist into their conceptual ambit,
establishing genealogical lines that necessarily come to an end. These figures not
only decouple ethnicity from the island’s foundational narratives, but revise his-
toriography’s model of providential history. If regnal continuity is no longer a
function of divine providence, then discontinuity is not evidence of divine con-
demnation. Legally, interrupted genealogies were resolved by simply legislating
their exclusion, establishing interruption as the legal ground for the loss of seisin
or a franchise. Insular historiography embraced and exploited those gaps both to
rewrite its own textual genealogy and to make new arguments for the present and
the future.
G ENEALOGY AND G ENTILITY:
S OCIAL S TATUS IN P ROVINCIAL E NGLAND
Jon Denton
W
riting about his estate at Nunwell on the Isle of Wight, Sir John
Oglander (1585–1655) advised his descendants that the family had
‘kept this spot of ground for five hundred years from father to son, and
I pray God thou beest not the last’.1 Oglander’s attitude was typical of his day;
lineage was understood as the conjunction of blood and land tenure. Moreover,
between 1530 and 1686 antiquity of family lineage was recognized as the official
measure of gentle status under the system of regulation operated by the heralds.2
Genealogy, as a proof of lineage, was integral to gentle discourse. The gentry them-
selves produced genealogical narratives in paper, stone, and glass as evidence of
illustrious descent, and the heralds ‘rubber stamped’ them in return for a fee.
The regulated social system of Oglander’s time emerged slowly from a diverse
practice and negotiation of status in the later Middle Ages. There was no sys-
tematic means of regulating gentle society until the crown began to address the
problem in the later years of Henry V’s reign; and even then the authority of the
1
Sir John Oglander’s ‘Advice to his descendants’ is contained in his commonplace book. See
A Royalist’s Notebook: The Commonplace Book of Sir John Oglander, trans. and ed. by Francis
Bamford (London: Constable, 1936), pp. 106–10. The above quote is also printed in Felicity Heal
and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales 1500–1700 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994),
pp. 20–21.
2
The system of heraldic visitation was at its height between the 1530s and the 1660s, and most
counties were visited once every forty years. The gentry began to lose interest in visitations after
1660 and they were finally abandoned by William III in 1686. See Heal and Holmes, Gentry in
England and Wales, pp. 20–47; and Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 65–71.
144 Jon Denton
heralds developed only slowly.3 At least partly as a consequence of this, the Boke of
St Albans, printed in 1486, recorded that paternal lineage was just one of nine rec-
ognized sources of gentility.4 Tensions between ancestry, lordship, and behaviour,
apparent since at least the twelfth century, remained unresolved. The late medieval
gentry, like their seventeenth-century successors, produced genealogies to establish,
reinforce, or augment their social status. Gentle genealogies survive in a range of
forms from written accounts inserted into a cartulary, psalter, or literary manu-
script to heraldic narratives in stone and glass. However, detailed genealogies are
comparatively rare before the sixteenth century. Written genealogies do not survive
in large numbers, and individual commemorative genealogies were often restricted
in scope; paternal lineage and its symbiotic companion genealogy had not yet be-
come the preoccupation of gentle discourse. Those genealogies that do survive
therefore raise questions. Why did some families invest in the production of
genealogical narratives while others did not feel it necessary? How, if at all, did
these genealogies reflect diverse medieval practice? And, finally, how did the ap-
parently well-regulated social system of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
develop? The discussion that follows will seek to address these questions.
The relative paucity of genealogical narratives amongst the late medieval gentry
should not be interpreted as disinterest. Testimony given to the Court of Chivalry
in the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries suggests that family history and
genealogy was part of the standard education of young gentlemen.5 Moreover,
surviving genealogies demonstrate that the gentry could call upon extensive genea-
logical knowledge when necessary.6 Family history was taught by fathers, ancestors,
3
For the development of heraldic regulation, see Sir Anthony Wagner, Heralds and Heraldry
in the Middle Ages: An Inquiry into the Growth of the Armorial Function of Heralds, 2nd edn (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 1956); and Maurice Keen, Origins of the English Gentleman (Stroud:
Tempus, 2002), pp. 81–86, 97–100.
4
See The Boke of St. Albans . . . printed . . . in 1486, reproduced in facsimile, with an introduc-
tion by William Blades (1881), unpaginated.
5
The Scrope and Grosvenor Controversy, ed. by Sir Nicholas Harris Nicholas (London, 1832),
pp. 94–322; Morley v. Montagu, ed. by M. H. Warner and M. Keen, in Camden Miscellany, vol.
th
XXXIV , Camden Society, 5 series, 10 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1997). For a discussion
of the evidence presented to these cases, see Keen, Origins of the English Gentleman, pp. 47–54;
Jonathan Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries: Religion and Secular Life in Late Medieval Yorkshire
(Woodbridge: Boydell, 1988), p. 23.
6
Nigel Saul has highlighted the sepulchral display of Sir Thomas Chaworth (d. 1458) at
Launde, Leicestershire, now lost, and Sir Thomas Greene (d. 1462) at Greens Norton, Northamp-
tonshire as examples of the genealogical knowledge available to the gentry. See ‘Bold as Brass:
GENEALOGY AND GENTILITY 145
and ‘old knights and esquires’, and this transmission of genealogical knowledge was
probably oral. Why then did some families choose to commit their genealogy to
paper, stone, or glass? The answer is not simply a matter of family culture. There
is little indication that the same families were producing genealogical narratives in
multiple generations. Therefore, those that survive were most likely a product of
particular family circumstances. In order to enquire what these circumstances were,
each genealogy needs to be ‘read’ against the particular family and context that pro-
duced them. The evidence presented here is drawn from a single region, the East
Midlands, but there is little reason to suppose that it is not broadly representative
of provincial England.7 In the South-East, however, the proximity of the heralds
and Royal Court may have caused regulation to develop more quickly, and in the
fifteenth century there may have been some discrepancy in practice between the
centre and periphery.8
During the 1460s the Nottinghamshire esquire Richard Willoughby oversaw the
construction of an elaborate tomb for himself and his wife in Wollaton parish
church.9 Both the tomb itself and the selective genealogy that adorned the facade
reflect his particular circumstances. Richard was the eldest son of Sir Hugh Wil-
loughby (d. 1448) and his first wife Isabel, daughter of Thomas Foljambe (d. 1417).
When Isabel died in 1417, Sir Hugh was remarried to the young Freville heiress,
Margaret. Under the terms of his will, Margaret and the progeny of this second
marriage received an overgenerous settlement at the expense of Richard, the
common-law heir. A bitter dispute ensued between Richard and his stepmother
Secular Display in English Medieval Brasses’, in Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval
England, ed. by Peter Coss and Maurice Keen (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002), pp. 169–94 (p. 188).
7
The East Midlands in the later Middle Ages covered the counties of Derbyshire, Leicester-
shire, and Nottinghamshire and extended south and west into parts of Warwickshire and North-
amptonshire. For a discussion of this regional delineation, see Jon Denton, ‘The East-Midland
Gentleman 1400–1530’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Keele University, 2006), Chapter 2.
8
Fragmentary evidence suggests that a visitation of London may have taken place during the
last quarter of the fifteenth century: see Keen, Origins of the English Gentleman, pp. 98–99.
9
The survival of a draft agreement for the brass element of the tomb dated 1466 indicates that
Richard was preparing his tomb at this time: see Nottingham University Library, Mi 5/168/34. For
a detailed discussion of this contract, see Nigel Saul, ‘The Contract for the Brass of Richard
Willoughby (d. 1471) at Wollaton (Notts.)’, Nottingham Mediaeval Studies, 50 (2006), 166–93.
146 Jon Denton
until ultimately, under the arbitration of Ralph Lord Cromwell, Richard was able
to recover the more important family estates.10 However, Sir Hugh’s actions had
created a rival branch of the Willoughby family: Robert, his eldest son by Margaret,
was heir to the extensive Freville estates as well as those manors that Richard had
been unable to reclaim. It was probably these circumstances that caused Richard to
turn his back on the family’s ancestral home and mausoleum at Willoughby-on-the-
Wolds and move his principal residence several miles north to Wollaton. Moreover,
by the 1460s it must have been clear to Richard that he would die without an heir
of his body, leaving his estranged half-brother Robert to succeed to his estates.
Richard, therefore, had good cause to fear the fate of his memory after death.
This anxiety is reflected in his tomb and the broader preparation that he made for
his death. The tomb, still extant, is a version of the ‘double-decker’ type: an elabo-
rate canopied recess houses a figure brass positioned above a naked cadaver. The
whole ensemble is set into the north wall of the chancel and probably served as the
parish Easter sepulchre. On the border above the recess are four heraldic shields
carved intermittently between angels carrying sheets for the soul. When ‘read’
together, these shields reveal a genealogy of Richard’s paternal descent. Failure in
the male line was a cause of great anxiety amongst the gentry. It not only threat-
ened family identity expressed through name, arms, and estates, but also the mem-
ory and souls of all those who had borne that insignia. For this reason, ‘last of the
line’ memorials could be particularly impressive and might encapsulate the honour
of the lineage as a whole. A ‘last of the line’ memorial could take the form of a
single monument of impressive scale and quality like the effigy to Richard Gyverny
at Limington, Somerset or that of John Marmion at West Tanfield, Yorkshire; or
alternatively it might constitute a series of family tombs commissioned retrospec-
tively at the point of failure like those of the FitzHerberts at Norbury, Derbyshire.
These memorials were often adorned with particularly impressive displays of
heraldry and/or detailed inscriptions. They were also frequently associated with
new chantry foundations.11 Richard Willoughby’s tomb fits this category; it is
more impressive than most memorials and occupies the place of honour in the
Wollaton church. In these respects, it was not untypical of other ‘last of the line’
memorials in the region. Both Ralph Woodford (d. 1498) and John Strelley
10
For full details of this dispute, see Simon Payling, Political Society in Lancastrian England:
The Greater Gentry of Nottinghamshire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 208–11.
11
The notion of ‘last of the line’ memorials is discussed in Brian Gittos and Moira Gittos,
‘Motivation and Choice: The Selection of Medieval Secular Effigies’, in Heraldry, Pageantry and
Social Display, ed. by Coss and Keen, pp. 143–67 (pp. 144–45, 163–66).
(d. 1502) similarly combined their tomb with the parish Easter sepulchre and dis-
played family imagery along the chamfered border above the recess.12 The resurrec-
tion imagery on all three tombs is striking: the extinguished family lies sleeping, but
not forgotten, until the Day of Judgement when it will reawaken. A key motivation
behind these tombs was fear of being abandoned in purgatory by the living. In
Richard Willoughby’s case, this notion is strengthened by his founding of a new
chantry, contemporary to the tomb, at the nearby high altar.13 The tomb itself
served as a perpetual reminder of the chaplain’s obligations, and its incorporation
within the Easter liturgy ensured that it would benefit from the attention of the
parish during Holy Week.14 In these ways, the monument safeguarded memory.
One of the ways in which a ‘last of the line’ memorial might honour an entire
lineage was through genealogy. Sir Thomas Chaworth’s impressive monument at
Launde in Leicestershire may be an excellent example of this. Sir Thomas was not
ultimately the last of his line, but his preparations for death were made at a time
when he still feared he might be.15 His mortuary chapel and brass memorial once
displayed the identities of more than ten families of whom Chaworth and his wife,
Isabelle née Aylesbury, were the ultimate heirs.16 This genealogy laid out the entire
accumulated honour of their respective families. However, ‘last of the line’
monuments did not consistently display genealogy; Ralph Woodford’s tomb, for
example, did not.17
12
For Ralph Woodford’s tomb at Ashby Folville in Leicestershire, see Jon Denton, ‘Image,
Identity and Gentility: The Woodford Experience’, in The Fifteenth Century, vol. V : Of Mice and
Men: Image, Belief and Regulation in Late Medieval England, ed. by Linda Clark (Woodbridge:
Boydell, 2005), pp. 1–17. For John Strelley’s tomb at Strelley in Nottinghamshire, see C. Kerry,
‘Notes to the Pedigree of the Strelleys of Strelley, Oakerthorpe and Hazelbach’, Journal of the
Derbyshire Archaeological Society, 14 (1892), 89–91.
13
The chantry of St Anthony was founded in 1470 and made provision for one chaplain and
three bedesmen: see Saul, ‘Contract for the Brass of Richard Willoughby’, pp. 183, 188.
14
Denton, ‘Image, Identity and Gentility’, pp. 3–7.
15
Testamenta Eboracensia, ed. by J. Raine and J. W. Clay, 6 vols (Surtees Society, 1836–1902),
II, 220–29.
16
For a description of Chaworth’s commemorative scheme, see John Nichols, History and
Antiquities of the County of Leicester, 4 vols in 8 (Leicester, 1795–1811), II, 328.
17
Conventionally, commemorative inscriptions simply recorded the names and obits of the
deceased. Moreover, in cases where inscriptions were more detailed, as with some ‘last of the line’
memorials, they were often motivated by pious rather than secular concerns. Ralph Woodford’s
tomb displays a number of pious inscriptions including the lines ‘Of erthe I am formed and maked
| To erthe I am turned all naked’. See Denton, ‘Image, Identity and Gentility’, pp. 3–7.
148 Jon Denton
The motivation behind Richard Willoughby’s genealogy at Wollaton was more

complex than his failure to produce an heir. The future of the Willoughby name,
arms, and heritage was not threatened by the prospect of Richard’s death; they
would continue to descend through Robert Willoughby and his heirs. However,
given the apparent antipathy between the rival branches of the Willoughby family,
Richard had cause to fear the obliteration of his own memory along with those of
his wife and mother. After his death, they would no longer occupy an integral place
in the family lineage and their memory would be expendable. It was this anxiety
that shaped the heraldic genealogy on Richard’s tomb. Beginning from the sinister
side, the first three shields display impalements signifying marriages. The first
displays the marriage of his grandparents, Edmund Willoughby and Anne, daugh-
ter of Sir Hugh Annesley; the second displays the marriage of his parents, and the
third displays Richard’s own marriage to Anne, daughter of Sir Simon Leek. The
fourth and final shield displays the Willoughby arms undifferentiated.18
This heraldry was selected and arranged to demonstrate Richard’s distinct iden-
tity as the last of the senior Willoughby line. The arms of his grandparents display
his descent from the historic, unified family, and the arms of his mother and father
together, crucially, distinguish his own senior line from the cadet branch of the
family that would succeed him. Richard’s seniority is reaffirmed by the use of the
Willoughby arms undifferentiated on the dexter shield. The Foljambe arms of
Richard’s mother are integral to the narrative and probably account for a whelk
shell badge, which is prominent in the imagery of the tomb. The brass element of
the composition is powdered with this heraldic device, and it is also carved into the
side chamfers of the recess. The whelk does not appear on any of the numerous
other Willoughby tombs that remain extant; therefore it was probably a device
personal to Richard. Given the importance of Richard’s mother to his identity, it
seems likely that the whelk shell badge was derived from the escallops of her
paternal arms. The identities of Richard, his wife, and his mother are central to the
ensemble as a whole, and these are the very memories that were potentially threat-
ened by the family feud. This interpretation is put beyond doubt by the list of
18
Beginning from the sinister side, shield one displays two bars gules charged with three water
bougets azure (Willoughby) impaling paly of six ar. and azure over all a bend (Annesley); shield two
displays two bars gules charged with three water bougets azure (Willoughby) impaling sable a bend
between six escallops or. (Foljambe); shield three displays two bars gules charged with three water
bougets azure (Willoughby) impaling ar. on a saltire engrailed sable nine annulets or. (Leek); and
shield four displays two bars gules charged with three water bougets azure (Willoughby) undifferen-
tiated.
beneficiaries selected for the associated chantry. Richard himself, his wife, and his
parents were the only members of the Willoughby family to receive prayers; the
memory of their more ancient ancestors was probably thought safe in the hands of
the living family.
It seems that family genealogy was likely to be committed to stone or brass
where the normal process of oral transmission was disrupted, whether this was
through feud, genetic failure, or some other reason. The principal motivation was
to ensure that memory of the family or its members was not lost. But were those
genealogies written in paper or parchment also products of this context?
Sometime around 1450 Sir Robert Woodford of Brentingby, Leicestershire,
had the history and genealogy of his lineage recorded on paper. His motivation, like
Willoughby’s, was probably a crisis, which threatened the survival of this heritage.
In the late 1440s Sir Robert faced the imminent break-up and dispersal of the
Woodford family estates. In this instance, the crisis was down to Woodford him-
self. His eldest son Thomas had died in vita patris, but he had left Sir Robert a
grandson and heir, Ralph. However, Sir Robert Woodford was in dispute with his
grandson over the latter’s marriage to the apparently low-born Elizabeth Villars.
In 1448 he took the extreme step of disinheriting Ralph in favour of his four sur-
viving sons who would each receive a portion of the family estates.19 The name and
arms of the family would survive under this settlement, but its collative heritage,
prestige, and local status would be lost. Despite his own role in these events, Sir
Robert’s anxiety about the break-up of his family is evident from the cartulary,
which he had produced between 1448 and his death in 1456.
A cartulary typically comprised a compilation of Latin deeds and charters relat-
ing to rights, privileges, property, and franchises.20 Its purpose was to amalgamate
important muniments for ease of reference.21 However, the Woodford cartulary
19
For the Woodford family, see Denton, ‘Image, Identity and Gentility’, pp. 1–17.
20
For a discussion of secular cartularies, see Calendar of the Cartularies of John Pyel and Adam
Fraunceys, ed. by S. J. O’Connor, Camden Society, 5th series, 2 (London: Royal Historical Society,
1993).
21
Sir Robert Woodford’s cartulary was one of several produced in his locality during the
fifteenth century, and the content of each one corresponds with this purpose. Thomas Wise, chap-
lain to Sir Henry Pierpoint and compiler of the Pierpoint cartulary, makes this purpose explicit in
his preface to the work. For Woodford’s cartulary, see London, British Library, MS Cotton
Claudius A XIII; for the Pierpoint cartulary, see London, British Library, MS Additional 70512;
for other East Midland cartularies, see Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Wood empt. 7 (Brooksby
family) and London, British Library, MS Harley 265: Registrum Chartarum Familiae Berkeley
(Berkeley Family).
150 Jon Denton
was not created as a tool of estate management. Sir Robert was in old age when it
was drawn up, and the muniments that it collated would be useless after the family
estates were dispersed. Moreover, in addition to the standard content of deeds and
charters, the cartulary also contains numerous unusual documents in English,
which record the family’s history, genealogy, and heritage. The volume is prefaced
by a narrative which describes the foundation and rise of the Woodford family in
Leicestershire; several genealogies have been inserted amongst the main body of
documents; and at the back is a list of the post-Conquest kings of England inter-
woven with Woodford history.22 Together with the cartulary’s deeds and charters,
these additional documents record the Woodford family’s claim to gentility, the
origins of their arms, their social and marital connections, their acquisition of
lands, rights, and privileges, and their military service and achievements. There is
also a copy of the fine by which Sir Robert had disinherited his grandson Ralph.
The cartulary as a whole is a memorial to the Woodford family created on the eve
of its destruction, just as a man might build himself a tomb on the eve of his death.
It charts the rise of the lineage, its accumulated worship, and finally, its fall.
Sir Robert Woodford may have been prepared to see his lineage divided and its
status thereby diluted, but he would not allow its former glory to be forgotten. In the
absence of a single heir, he may have intended the cartulary to serve as a source of
status and prestige that each new branch of the family could draw upon. However,
one can only speculate as Sir Robert’s plans never came to fruition. After his death
in 1456, his grandson Ralph reacted quickly to seize the Woodford estates and was
able to hold on to them against pressure from his uncles.23 The cartulary appears to
have descended with the estates, but it was not added to by Ralph or his successors.
Threats to the continuity of lineage might also come from outside of the family.
During the turbulent third quarter of the fifteenth century, political miscalcula-
tion could lead to attainder and ruin. In 1471 William Fielding of Lutterworth
took measures to preserve his family heritage before embarking to fight for the
Lancastrians at Tewkesbury. The Fielding family had already suffered a decade of
political isolation after siding with the Lancastrians during the 1450s, and William
22
The list of kings is of particular interest and records that ‘kyng henry the fyfte then reyned
kyng of yngland [. . .] and in the third yere of the reyne [. . .] on friday in the fest of saynt cryspyn
and crispynyam erly in the morning he dubbed s[ir] rob[er]t wodforde kynght and many oth[er]s
at that sege beying p[re]sent a c. thowsand of fenchemen at aging court and had the victory’; see BL,
MS Cotton Claudius A XIII, fols 277–78.
23
Ralph was involved in a long-running dispute with one uncle, Walter, over a portion of the
Woodford inheritance. See The National Archives (TNA), CI/33/10.
must have been aware that another failure of the Lancastrian cause could mean the
attainder of his lineage.24 According to a seventeenth-century copyist, before
departing for battle he placed a bill of remembrance in the safekeeping of Thomas
Cave, gentleman, ‘in case hee should not survive the danger [. . .] the honour of his
birth might not perish with him’. The bill survives as a seventeenth-century copy
and contains a genealogical history of the Fielding family.25 The Fieldings claimed
to be descended from the imperial house of Hapsburg, and the bill traces William
Fielding’s descent from a Geoffrey Hapsburg, who had purportedly come to
England during the reign of Henry III. This Hapsburg descent has been debunked,
but the tradition can be traced to the fourteenth century, suggesting that the bill
is genuine.26 In which case, Sir William Fielding committed his genealogical heri-
tage to parchment for the explicit reason of preserving it at a time when the normal
process of transmission was under threat.
Parvenu families did not generally have a worshipful lineage to record or trans-
mit. Consequently, their gentility could be open to attack, particularly if they had
risen from servile stock as the Pastons famously did.27 They faced their own crisis
of lineage and in response some began to fabricate pedigrees; the Pastons had a
spurious pedigree ratified by Edward IV in defence of their gentility.28 By the
24
William’s father John Fielding was killed fighting for the Lancastrians at Northampton in
1459. William was probably absent from Towton in 1461, and the family was therefore spared
attainder. However, he was evidently mistrusted by the Yorkists, and the family lost its place
amongst the office-holding elite of Leicestershire. See Eric Acheson, A Gentry Community:
Leicestershire in the Fifteenth Century c.1422–1485 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992), p. 230.
25
The bill and the circumstances of its creation are recorded in a history of the Fielding family
written by Nathanual Wanley, vicar of Coventry, at the command of Basil Fielding, earl of Den-
bigh, in 1670. See Warwick Record Office, CR2017/f102, fols 16–17.
26
The Hapsburg descent of the Fielding family has been convincingly debunked by J. H.
Round: see Studies in Peerage and Family History (Westminster: A. Constable, 1901). However,
on what appears to be an original title deed of 1380, a William Fielding styled himself ‘de
Hapsburg’, suggesting that the Hapsburg fiction was already well established in family culture: see
Warwick Record Office, CR 2017/f110/1/16. Christine Carpenter has taken this myth to be
medieval and the same is assumed here. See Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed
Society, 1401–99 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 258 n. 58.
27
The lineage of the Paston family came under attack during the later fifteenth century. See
Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, ed. by Norman Davis, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1971–76), I, pp. xli–xlii.
28
Paston Letters, ed. by Davis, II, no. 897.
152 Jon Denton
middle of the fifteenth century the heralds were active in the granting of new coats
of arms, seemingly in response to petitions supported by relevant evidence. A coat
of arms was a symbol of gentility, and an official grant of arms from a royal herald
signified royal acceptance of gentle status: this was often made explicit in the
wording of the grant.29 The heralds provided a system whereby rising families could
bolster their gentility in return for a fee. The surviving grants reveal an expectation
that the grantee would be a man of ancestry, and some grants even took the form
of a confirmation, implying that they were simply confirming the use of an ancient
but forgotten coat of arms. Therefore a written genealogy, as proof of ancestry,
might be a central piece of evidence in a petition to the heralds.
The Andrewes family of Charwelton, Northamptonshire had a detailed gene-
alogy invented as part of a dossier of documents submitted in support of an
armorial grant of 1476. According to this pedigree, the family was descended from
a mythical Thomas Andrew of Carlisle who died in the thirteenth century.30 The
dossier also included a spurious grant of arms purportedly issued to the family in
1334 indicating that the Andrewes family was reinventing its past.31 This petition
for arms needs to be understood in the broader context of the family’s circum-
stances and behaviour at this time. The Andrewes family were originally mer-
chants, probably from Coventry, but by 1496 they either owned or rented lands in
numerous villages across Warwickshire and Northamptonshire.32 From 1450 they
began assuming the trappings of gentility. At Sawbridge in Warwickshire, John
Andrewes built a new house comprising a hall flanked by two cross wings. This was
the conventional architecture of a manor house, and it was built adjacent to the site
of the manor with the purpose of social pretension.33
29
The earliest surviving grant of new arms by Garter King of Arms to an individual was made
in 1450 to Edmond Mylle. For a discussion of early grants of arms, see Keen, Origins of the English
Gentleman, pp. 78–79, 97–100.
30
By placing their fictional family origins in the far-off region, the Andrewes family made it
difficult for their East Midland neighbours to question them. The Woodfords employed a similar
trick in their cartulary by claiming to be descended from a ‘gentulman son be side salesbyr’. For the
history of the Woodford family, see BL, MS Cotton Claudius A XIII, fol. 3.
31
These documents survive together as copies amongst the College of Arms and all relate to
Thomas Andrewes (d. 1496) and his petition for a grant of arms in 1476: see London, College of
Arms, MS Vincent 88, fols 16–19 and MS Vincent 4, fols 25–28.
32
Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem Preserved in the Public Records Office, Henry VII, 3 vols
(London, 1898–1955), I, nos 45, 293.
33
For the importance of the hall as a symbol of status, see Michael Thompson, The Medieval
Hall: The Basis of Secular Domestic Life 600–1600 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995). For a detailed
However, the cultural transition from merchants to gentlemen is most clearly

observed in the collection of family brasses at Charwelton. Thomas Andrewes
(d. 1496), the first of the family to be buried there, is described as ‘Mercator Gene-
rosus’ and he is depicted wearing the gown and purse of a merchant. In contrast, his
son, another Thomas (d. 1530), is described only as a gentleman and is dressed in
armour: he was consciously subscribing to the martial culture which remained
firmly associated with gentility.34 Subsequent members of the family commem-
orated at Charwelton are similarly commemorated in armour. These cultural
symbols were the currency with which the Andrewes family could ‘buy’ acceptance
amongst the local landed elite. However, the process of acceptance may have been
slow as Thomas Andrewes (d. 1496) is interchangeably referred to as grassier and
husbandman and gentlemen in a number of documents.35 The genealogy produced
for him, like those of Woodford and Fielding, was therefore the product of a crisis
of lineage. Long-established families, whose arms and lineage were well known in
the locality, did not at this time seek confirmations from the heralds and therefore
had no need to produce written genealogies.
Written genealogies, like those created for Woodford, Fielding, and Andrewes,
are unusual amongst the East Midland gentry and are evidence of the particular
circumstances that faced these men. However, the clear motivation behind them
helps us to place the more numerous commemorative genealogies of Willoughby
and others in their full context. Family genealogy became physically manifest when
either the normal processes of cultural transmission were disrupted or a new family
history was invented: genealogies survive as a testament to crises of lineage. More-
over, different types of crisis tended to elicit different types of genealogy. A lineage
facing imminent failure was likely to create a genealogy in stone or brass, as tombs
were designed to be perpetual and serve as guardians of memory until the Day of
Judgement. By contrast, where living family remained, the more serviceable me-
dium of paper or parchment was preferred. However, all this is not to say that there
were no other circumstances beyond crisis in which a family might choose to create
description of the house at Sawbridge and its links to the Andrewes family, see N. W. Alcock and
C. T. P. Woodfield, ‘Social Pretensions in Architecture and Ancestry: Hall House, Sawbridge,
Warwickshire and the Andrewe Family’, Antiquaries Journal, 76 (1996), 51–72 (p. 65).
34
The gentry continued to collectively subscribe to a martial identity until the seventeenth
century, and this was manifest in their tombs: see Sally Badham, ‘Status and Salvation: The Design
of Medieval English Brasses and Incised Slabs’, Transactions of the Monumental Brass Society, 15,
part 5 (1996), 413–65 (p. 459); and Carpenter, Locality and Polity, pp. 39–50.
35
Carpenter, Locality and Polity, p. 136 n. 150.
154 Jon Denton
a genealogy; those families who were descended from the nobility might be
particularly keen to display their connections.36
II
Thus far, each of the genealogies considered has been the product of a single mind
at a single point in time, but genealogies were also created over multiple genera-
tions through the accumulation of tombs in a single place. These mausoleum gene-
alogies were more common and played a key role in social discourse, particularly
at a local level.37 However, gentry mausoleums were themselves the product of cir-
cumstance, and not every family had one. The wealthiest secular landowners began
commissioning high-status tombs adorned with heraldry during the last quarter of
the thirteenth century; this was one of the ways in which a new elitist conception
of knighthood was asserted.38 However, the practice did not fully proliferate
among an expanding gentry until late in the fifteenth century. In the later four-
teenth and early fifteenth centuries, the commissioning of tombs was probably a
matter of family culture. Moreover, there was the issue of place; monasteries still
competed with the parish church as a place of burial, and changes in the shape of
an estate or a feud could cause a family to relocate their residence and place of
burial.39 It seems likely that these circumstances served to limit the number of
families who built up large mausoleums like the one at Cobham. The mausoleums
that may once have existed within monastic foundations have now largely been
lost, but a number do survive in the parish churches of the East Midlands. Paro-
chial commemoration helped to establish an enduring link between family and
place, and for the gentry this often meant a link between lineage and manorial
lordship. Where family and manor had been conjoined since ‘time out of mind’ the
focus of mausoleum genealogy was generally paternal descent, like that of the Wil-
loughby family at Willoughby-on-Wolds in Nottinghamshire or the FitzHerberts
of Norbury in Derbyshire. However, where a manor had changed hands, a
36
This point has been made by Nigel Saul; see ‘Bold as Brass’, p. 188.
37
The most well-known mausoleum is that of the Cobham family described by Nigel Saul,
Death, Art and Memory: The Cobham Family and their Monuments 1300–1500 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001).
38
Peter Coss, ‘Knighthood, Heraldry and Social Exclusion in Edwardian England’, in Heraldry,
Pageantry and Social Display, ed. by Coss and Keen, pp. 39–69 (pp. 43–46).
39
Carpenter, Locality and Polity, pp. 196–244.
mausoleum genealogy might be read to reveal the descent of the manor. Perhaps
the best East Midlands example of this is the Stathum Mausoleum at Morley,
Derbyshire.
The Derbyshire Stathums were a collateral branch of a Cheshire family, who
acquired Morley through the marriage of Ralph de Stathum and Goditha, daughter
of Roger de Massy of Sale. They moved south to Derbyshire in the mid-fourteenth
century, and the Morley inheritance provided the basis of their landed position in
the county.40 At the parish church in Morley, a sequential series of memorials com-
memorates four successive lords of the manor covering the period 1454–85.41
Three of these lords were members of the Stathum family, and the fourth, John
Sacheverell (d. 1485), ultimately acquired Morley through his marriage to the
Stathum heiress, Joan. Each of the four monuments displays an individual narra-
tive; the deceased are represented by figures attired according to their degree (the
men in armour) and identified by heraldry and inscriptions. Collectively, the con-
sistency of medium, composition, and heraldry strongly suggest that all of the
deceased, including Sacheverell, saw themselves as belonging to a single family.
All four memorials are figure brasses and remarkably similar in composition,
despite originating in different workshops.42 Sir Thomas Stathum (d. 1470) left
detailed instructions for his own memorial, which closely match each of the surviv-
ing brasses.43 It was surely, therefore, the patrons who guided the hand of the
engraver. The earliest tomb, of John Stathaum (d. 1454), set the commemorative
context, and each subsequent addition engaged in dialogue with its predecessors.
Unfortunately the original positioning of the tombs is not known and therefore
an element of this dialogue has been lost. The theme that emerges from the memo-
rials themselves is continuity of lordship, even where the incumbent family
changed from Stathum to Sacheverell. The brass of John Sacheverell was commis-
sioned around 1525, forty years after the last Stathum lord had died, and yet it
closely mirrors the Stathum memorials. Past power validated present power, and
John’s tomb identified the newly arrived Sacheverells with the existing tradition
of lordship at Morley.
40
David Crook, ‘Central England and the Revolt of the Earls, January 1400’, Historical
Research, 64 (1991), 406–07.
41
The Stathum brasses and their imagery are described in William Lack, H. Martin Stuchfield,
and Philip Whittemore, The Monumental Brasses of Derbyshire (London: Monumental Brass
Society, 1999), pp. 146–55.
42
Lack, Stuchfield, and Whittemore, Monumental Brasses of Derbyshire, pp. 146–55.
43
TNA, PRO B 11/6, fol. 1; printed in Saul, Death, Art and Memory, pp. 229–30.
156 Jon Denton
The theme of continuity is also reflected in the heraldry, but the dominant
family identity that emerges is not Stathum, but Morley, the thirteenth-century
incumbents of the manor. The Morley coat of arms — argent, a lion rampant
double queued sable crowned or — is prominent on each of the tombs, displayed
quarterly with those of Stathum, gules, a pale fussily argent. Moreover, on the tomb
of Sir Thomas Stathum the quartering is reversed to give pre-eminence to Mor-
ley.44 As heirs to the Morleys, the Stathums held the right to display the Morley
arms, and doing so enabled them to identify themselves with the existing tradition
of lordship at the manor. However, the death of the last Morley lord and arrival of
the first Stathum was separated by nearly a century, and in the meantime the
manor had passed through two other families, latterly the Masseys of Sale. What
then was the particular importance of the Morley family? The Woodfords claimed
to have acquired their arms through the purchase of the manor of Brentingby
because the arms ‘long to the said maner’, and there are numerous other examples
of this type of relationship.45 It seems likely that there was a similar relationship
between the arms and manor of Morley. The Boke of St Albans recorded that
hereditary possession of a manorial lordship was a source of gentility symbolized
by the coat of arms belonging to it.46 The lordship of Morley was the basis of
Stathum’s territorial power; therefore the identity of the manor was particularly
important to the family’s own identity as gentlefolk.47
The mausoleum at Morley displays the genealogy of a single family, but that
family is defined by the descent of the manor rather than paternal lineage.48 The
44
Quartering was used to denote hereditary entitlement to more than one coat of arms, but
paternal arms were normally given pre-eminence in the first and fourth quarters. However,
armigerous families were sometimes prepared to reverse the quartering or abandon their paternal
arms altogether when an acquired coat offered greater social currency. See Peter G. Summers, How
to Read a Coat of Arms (New York: Harmony, 1987), pp. 5–6; Coss, ‘Knighthood, Heraldry and
Social Exclusion’, pp. 56–62.
45
For further discussion of the relationship between arms and lordship, see Keen, Origins of
the English Gentleman, pp. 38–39; Denton, ‘Image, Identity and Gentility’, pp. 7–14; Denton,
‘East-Midland Gentleman’, Chapter 4.
46
Boke of St. Albans, unpaginated.
47
Peter Coss and Christine Carpenter have both emphasized the importance of territoriality
and lordship in the formation of gentry identity. See Coss, The Origins of the English Gentry
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Carpenter, Locality and Polity, pp. 75–76.
48
Philip Morgan has noted that the genealogy in the Rushall Psalter similarly records the
descent of the manor of Rushall: see ‘A Prose Narrative of the Lords of Rushall in John Harpur’s
Psalter’, in Much Heaving and Shoving: Essays for Colin Richmond, ed. by M. Aston and Rosemary
Horrox ([Chipping]: Lavenham Press, 2005), pp. 24–34.
identity of the lordship, as a fount of status and authority, is given precedence over
blood. There are other good examples of this behaviour; at Nosley in Leicestershire
the alabaster slabs of the Heron and Hasilrigge families demonstrate a consistent
style and each one displays the arms of the extinct Martival family who had once
held the manor. Moreover, at Nosley the original positioning of the memorials can
be reconstructed and once displayed a chronological genealogy of the family.49
These examples demonstrate that even in the later decades of the fifteenth century,
genealogy had not yet become a slave to paternal lineage.
III
Gentry attitudes to genealogy evolved in response to social change in the period

1370–1550 and the associated changes in social regulation. Before the mid-
fifteenth century there was little formal regulation of gentle society; the Court of
Chivalry dealt with some issues of social precedence, but its purview was largely
military. Social regulation in the shires was informal and probably based on com-
mon repute. Monastic foundations, as the objects of gentle patronage and keepers
of chronicles, may also have performed an important local role as guardians of
aristocratic knowledge.50 Under this practice, gentle discourse was not preoccupied
with paternal ancestry; sources of gentility were diverse and where status was
grounded in service, genealogy might be redundant. Moreover, where social iden-
tity was based on ancestry, proof was rarely required, and where it was, the oral
testimony of local genereosi was normally sufficient.51 For the most part, gentry
families did not need to produce physical genealogies. Those that did either had an
illustrious descent and feared it might be lost or wished to invent one for reasons
of social insecurity.
49
When John Nichols visited the chapel at Nosely around 1800, he described the medieval
slabs in rows running from north to south chronologically along the floor of the chancel: see
Nichols, History and Antiquities of Leicester, II, 755. This is similar to the original scheme at
Cobham: see Saul, Death, Art and Memory, pp. 77–81.
50
Many of the witnesses that gave evidence to the Court of Chivalry were monks who
described tombs, windows, and chronicles with which they were familiar: see Keen, Origins of the
English Gentleman, pp. 43–71. Monastic chronicles were recognized as important evidence in dis-
putes over history: see Chris Given-Wilson, Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval
England (London: Hambledon and London, 2004).
51
Keen, Origins of the English Gentleman, p. 47.
158 Jon Denton
From the 1370s, the post-plague dissemination of wealth into non-gentle hands
began to blur the traditional boundaries of status.52 Moreover, rising literacy rates
and increasing legal and administrative opportunities, in both public and private
bureaucracies, provided widening avenues to advancement.53 Many amongst the
newly wealthy aspired to gentility and began assuming its trappings. A proclama-
tion of 1417 against the self-assumption of arms demonstrates royal unease at this
situation. The Crown responded to the threat through an ordinance of the same
date instructing the heralds to regulate and record the use of arms in their prov-
inces; crucially arms were not to be issued to those of ‘vile’ blood.54 However, the
heralds were at this time preoccupied in their wartime role as messengers and
diplomats, and no record of provincial regulation exists before the 1530s. As the
Hundred Years War drew to an end in the 1450s, grants and confirmations of arms
began to proliferate in response to petitions from parvenus.55 Written and visual
genealogies, as evidence of suitable blood, became part of this process. When the
system of visitation finally became established, all armigerous families had to justify
their right to arms in this way, and in extreme cases could have their claim to arms
and gentility refuted. At the same time, the release of monastic lands after 1540
had created a buoyant land market and an even greater social fluidity as new men
bought their way into landed society. The established gentry turned to longevity
of land tenure as a means of defending their social precedence and were happy to
subscribe to a system of social regulation based on genealogical descent. Parvenu
families responded as they had always done, by inventing social fictions that aped
their social superiors. The result was a gentle discourse preoccupied with paternal
ancestry and genealogy.
52
See F. R. H. Du Boulay, An Age of Ambition: English Society in the Late Middle Ages
(London: Nelson, 1970) and also Jim L. Bolton, ‘“The World Upside Down”: Plague as an Agent
of Economic Change’, in The Black Death in England, ed. by W. Mark Ormrod and Philip Lindley
(Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1996), pp. 17–78.
53
See Robin Storey, ‘Gentleman-Bureaucrats’, in Profession, Vocation and Culture in Later
Medieval England, ed. by Cecil H. Clough (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1982), pp.
90–129.
54
For a discussion of these documents, see Keen, Origins of the English Gentleman, pp. 81–86,
97–100, and Wagner, Heralds and Heraldry, pp. 136–37.
55
Keen, Origins of the English Gentleman, pp. 98–99.
T HE A NTIQUITY OF SCOTTISH C IVILIZATION :
K ING -LISTS AND G ENEALOGICAL C HRONICLES
Edward Donald Kennedy
A
s is apparent from earlier chapters in this volume, medieval genealogical
chronicles were important because they helped justify the legitimacy of
royal lines and thus provided security to ruling families. The longer the
genealogy, the more likely it was to garner prestige,1 and many genealogies, as
Gabrielle Spiegel points out in relation to French history, ‘took on the overtones
of a dynastic myth’ and were ‘expressions of social memory’.2 In the later Middle
Ages probably no people in Europe thought that they needed dynastic myth and
social memory more than in Scotland since from the late thirteenth century through
much of the sixteenth the Scots were fighting for survival against English claims to
hegemony over the country; lists of kings that functioned as genealogies by indicat-
ing the relationship of each king to his predecessor helped support the argument
that Scotland had long been independent and was ruled by its own kings in
contrast to its southern neighbour that had been ruled by Britons, Romans, Danes,
Anglo-Saxons, and Normans.3 Moroever, in response to the Britons and other peo-
ples of Europe who claimed descent from the Trojans, the Scots developed their
own mythic origins: they claimed descent from a Greek prince, Gaythelos (after
1
See R. Howard Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French
Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 80.
2
Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ‘Genealogy: Form and Function in Medieval Historical Narrative’,
History and Theory, 22 (1983), 43–53 (p. 43), reprinted as ‘Genealogy: Form and Function in
Medieval Historiography’ in her The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Historiography
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 99–110.
3
For distinctions between king-lists and genealogies, see David N. Dumville, ‘Kingship, Gene-
alogies and Regnal Lists’, in Early Medieval Kingship, ed. by P. H. Sawyer and I. N. Wood (Leeds:
School of History, University of Leeds, 1977), pp. 72–104 (pp. 96–102).
160 Edward Donald Kennedy
whom the Gaelic language was named) and an Egyptian princess, Scota, daughter
of the pharaoh drowned in the Red Sea in the days of Moses. This was far better
than descent from a defeated people like the Trojans: besides conquering Troy, the
Greeks had, under Alexander, conquered the world, and the Egyptians had saved
Christ from Herod’s slaughter of the innocents.4
Scottish king-lists were important even before Scotland’s troubles with Ed-
ward I began in the late thirteenth century, and many apparently had been passed
on from early medieval times through oral tradition. After John of Fordun wrote
his Cronica gentis Scotorum in the late fourteenth century, a number of other long
histories of Scotland were written, and although these often contained genealogies
within them, the descent of one king from another was, in these works, no longer
as clear as it had been in the simple king-lists. Judging from the dates of surviving
manuscripts, the lists continued to be written after Fordun, but some later writers
also attempted to adapt the longer chronicles to be certain that all could under-
stand the genealogy of the Scottish kings.
Most of the Scottish king-lists that survive are in manuscripts of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries. Only one — the tenth-century Chronicle of the Kings of Alba —
can be dated before 1198, and there are only a few from the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries.5 Alan O. Anderson lists thirteen versions of king-lists that have sur-
vived,6 and Dauvit Broun argues that much of the material in later chronicles must
have been derived from early king-lists, texts of some of which have been lost. 7
4
The legend has been discussed many times. See, for example, William Matthews, ‘The
Egyptians in Scotland: The Political History of a Myth’, Viator, 1 (1970), 289–306.
5
Dauvit Broun, The Irish Identity of the Kingdom of the Scots (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1999),
pp. 5–6, 133, 167; also Marjorie O. Anderson, Kings and Kingship in Early Scotland (1973; rev.
edn, Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1980), p. 43.
6
Alan O. Anderson, Early Sources of Scottish History, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd,
1922), I, pp. xlv–xlvii. Translations of the king-lists appear on pp. cxv–clviii, corresponding to the
original texts in William F. Skene, Chronicles of the Picts, Chronicles of the Scots and Other Early
Memorials of Scottish History (London, 1867), pp. 135–37, 6–8, 130–32, 29–30, 296–97, 18–22,
119, 148, 148–49, 133–34. Marjorie Anderson edited some of these in Kings and Kingship, pp.
261–92. She points out that Skene ‘distributed the lists throughout his volume in roughly the order
of the dates at which he believed them to have reached their present forms. This order has very little
to do with their origins or relations with one another, and the names, though convenient, are best
regarded as wholly arbitrary’ (p. 43). For this reason, Alan Anderson arranged the translations
differently from the way Skene did.
7
Broun, Irish Identity, esp. pp. 63–108.
THE ANTIQUITY OF SCOTTISH CIVILIZATION 161
Although later Scots chroniclers devoted considerable space to convincing

readers of the antiquity of civilization in Scotland, such claims to antiquity, Broun
points out, did not seem obvious from the tenth to the thirteenth century,8 and
early genealogies presented Scottish history as an offshoot of Irish history with the
coronation of Scottish kings until 1249 including oral recitations of the line’s
descent from ancient Irish kings.9 Broun observes that the first indication that a
Scottish historian thought that Scotland had an ancient history of its own was
during the reign of Alexander II (1214–49) when a Pictish list of sixty kings was
introduced alongside a list of Scots kings of Dál Riata. A late thirteenth-century
scholar took the two lists and treated them as if they ruled in succession: sixty
Pictish kings, followed by twenty-three kings of Dál Riata, followed by twenty-nine
kings from Kenneth I to John Balliol made a total of 112 kings of Scotland.
According to Broun, the earliest extant text that gave Scotland this quite ancient
history was prepared at the time of John Balliol’s inauguration on 30 November
1292: at that time it was claimed that Scotland had a history spanning 1976 years,
nine months, and eight days. However, none of the texts, Broun points out, that
show that Scottish historians thought of Scotland’s history as being so ancient and
distinct from Ireland’s can be securely dated before Balliol’s reign 1292–1304.10
The Anglo-Norman Scottish chronicle inserted into Thomas Gray’s mid-fourteenth-
century Scalacronica, for example, is primarily a king-list except for a brief introduc-
tory account of the Graeco/Egyptian ancestry of the Scots, and internal evidence
indicates it was compiled between 30 November 1292 and 9 February 1304.11
Similarly a king-list showing the antiquity of the Scottish race would have been a
source for the ‘Declaration of Arbroath’, which the Scottish earls and barons sent
to the Pope in 1320 in order to counter England’s claims that it had the right to
control Scotland. This declaration maintained that ‘one hundred and thirteen
kings [112 + Robert Bruce] of their own royal stock had reigned, the line unbroken
by a single foreigner’.12 Thus this emphasis on Scotland’s long line of kings,
8
Dauvit Broun, ‘The Birth of Scottish History’, Scottish Historical Review, 76 (1997), 4–22
(p. 5).
9
Broun, ‘Birth of Scottish History’, pp. 8–9.
10
Broun, ‘Birth of Scottish History’, pp. 14–15; also see Broun, Irish Identity, p. 95.
11
Thomas Gray, Scalacronica 1272–1363, ed. by Andy King, Surtees Society, 209 (Wood-
bridge: Boydell, 2005), pp. 19–35, esp. p. 35; Broun, Irish Identity, p. 95.
12
Broun, ‘Birth of Scottish History’, pp. 12–13. A. A. M. Duncan, The Nation of Scots and the
Declaration of Arbroath (1320) (London: Historical Association, 1970), pp. 34–35.
reaching back to antiquity, may have been invented as a result of the threat to
Scotland’s independence from Edward I.13
If the sense of Scotland’s having had a two-thousand-year history began in the
late thirteenth century, however, it became better known near the end of the four-
teenth when John of Fordun, sometime between 1371 and the mid-1380s, wrote
his Cronica gentis Scotorum, which covered Scottish history from its legendary be-
ginnings to the death of King David I in 1153 and which was based, to some
extent, upon earlier short Latin chronicles and king-lists. It claimed that ‘the Scots
continued, without any break, to hold these same islands [. . .] for a space of nearly
two thousand years’.14 Broun argues that much of the structure of Fordun’s
Cronica may have been in existence by the beginning of the fourteenth century
when the Scots were trying to respond to English claims about their right to
control the country.15 If so, texts with such breadth have disappeared, and what
seems to distinguish Fordun’s chronicle from that of his predecessors is its focus on
all of Scottish history beginning with the Scots’ Graeco/Egyptian origins.
Fordun adapted the Scots’ legendary history from earlier accounts similar to the
one found in Gray’s Scalacronica. References to the Egyptian Scota can be found
in documents dating from as early as the ninth century, and the legend was known
in Ireland by the eleventh century. Often in the early accounts her husband was
from Scythia rather than the more distinguished Greece,16 and as noted above, For-
dun was not the first to claim that Scotland had been in existence for two thousand
years. His Cronica, however, popularized both the legend of Scota and the fiction
that Scotland had had an ancient civilization, and by the end of the fourteenth
century there was a generally accepted chronology of events in Scottish history:
The ancestors of the Scots, Gathelos and Scota, left Egypt at about 1500 BC, and
after settling in Portugal, their descendants settled first in Ireland and then in Dál
Riata in Scotland at about 443 BC (a date close to the one mentioned in 1320 in
the ‘Declaration of Arbroath’).17 Fergus, son of Ferchard, founded the Dál Riatic
13
Broun, ‘Birth of Scottish History’, pp. 13–15; Broun, Irish Identity, p. 129.
14
John Fordun, Chronica gentis Scotorum, ed. by William F. Skene, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1871),
Bk 5, ch. 24; translation from John of Fordun, Chronicle of the Scottish Nation, trans. by Felix J. H.
Skene (Edinburgh, 1872; repr. in 2 vols, Lampeter: Llanarch, 1993), II, 214.
15
Broun, ‘Birth of Scottish History’, pp. 15–16, 21–22.
16
See Edward J. Cowan, ‘Myth and Identity in Early Medieval Scotland’, Scottish Historical
Review, 63 (1984), 111–35 (pp. 122–23).
17
According to the ‘Declaration of Arbroath’, ‘[O]ur own nation, namely of Scots, [. . .] jour-
neyed from Great Scythia by the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Pillars of Hercules, and dwelt for a long
line of Scottish kings at about 330 BC. This kingdom lasted almost seven hundred
years until it was conquered by the Romans in AD 360. Although Fordun gives the
names of only two kings from this period, he says that there were forty-five kings
who reigned prior to the Roman conquest of the Scots. Then after forty-three years
under Roman rule, a restoration of Scottish rule took place under a second Fergus,
son of Erc, and from AD 403 the royal line of Scottish kings continued until the
fourteenth century.18
Fordun hoped to give the Scots a sense of national identity and to show that
Scotland, with a past more distinguished than that of either the Britannic Celts or
the English, was historically independent and the English had no claim to it.
Fordun included in his text king-lists such as a genealogy of Simon Bricht, one of
the early Scots who supposedly settled Ireland, in Chapter 26 of Book I.19 He pre-
sents a genealogy of Kenneth MacAlpin in Book IV, Chapter 8 and then devotes
Chapters 10–12 of the same book to a catalogue of all of the kings of the Picts.20
In Chapters 50–52 of Book V he presents a genealogy of King David I, who died
in 1153, tracing his lineage from both his father and mother back to Japhet, and
from Noah back to Adam. He observes that David’s mother’s English lineage can
be traced back to Shem, son of Noah, and thus to Adam, but also traces her gene-
alogy back to the Germanic god Woden, who was so important that the English
named the fourth day of the week, Wednesday, after him.21 Thus genealogies were
important in Fordun’s history. However, such lists, now imbedded within a long
history, lacked the prominence they would have had when they stood alone as in-
dependent texts or when they would have been recited aloud at coronations.
span of time in Spain among the most savage peoples, but nowhere could it be subjugated by any
people, however barbarous. From there it came, twelve hundred years after the people of Israel
crossed the Red Sea, and, having first driven out the Britons and altogether destroyed the Picts, it
acquired, with many victories and untold efforts, the places which it now holds’ (Duncan, The
Nation of Scots and the Declaration of Arbroath, p. 34). Baldred Bisset, who prepared a response to
a letter Edward I had written to the Pope in 1301 about England’s right to hegemony over Scot-
land, claimed that Scota herself had been ruler of Scotland. See Broun, ‘Birth of Scottish History’,
pp. 13–14. For Bisset’s text and a translation, see Walter Bower, Scotichronicon, gen. ed. D. E. R.
Watt, vol. VI (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1991), pp. 169–89 (here p. 183). The nine
volumes of Watt’s edition were published 1987–98.
18
See J. B. Black, ‘Boece’s Scotorum Historiae’, in University of Aberdeen Quatercentenary of the
Death of Hector Boece (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1937), pp. 30–53 (p. 36).
19
Fordun, Chronicle of the Scottish Nation, I, 22–23.
20
Fordun, Chronicle of the Scottish Nation, I, 139–40, 141–44.
21
Fordun, Chronicle of the Scottish Nation, II, 244–48.
Between 1440 and 1447 Walter Bower, Abbot of Inchon, incorporated both
Fordun’s Cronica and the Gesta annalia, annals covering the years 1153–1385 of-
ten attributed to Fordun,22 into a much longer chronicle, the Scotichronicon, which
ended with the murder of James I in 1436/37.23 He incorporated into his work the
genealogies he found in Fordun. The Scotichronicon is not only longer because it
covered more years of history, but also longer because it is more digressive. Al-
though Fordun pays some attention to events on the Continent, Bower, probably
influenced by Higden’s English Polychronicon, was concerned not just with events
in Scotland and events in England relevant to Scottish history, but was also con-
cerned more than Fordun with events on the Continent. It is, in some chapters,
more of a universal history. Bower later wrote a revision known as the Book of
Cupar that he intended as an abridgement, but it was not much shorter than its
original.24 However, a true abridgement that omitted much of Bower’s European
history, the Liber Pluscardensis, was completed in 1461 and survives in six Latin
manuscripts and one in French.25 In the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries other
abridgments were written by Patrick Russell (a brother of the Carthusian monas-
tery in Perth), John Gibson (a canon of Glasgow), Richard Striveling, John Law,
and the anonymous compiler of the Extracta e variis cronicis Scocie. There were also
22
Scholars have generally assumed that Fordun wrote the Gesta annalia, at least to 1363, with
the years to 1385 probably compiled by others. He may have planned to develop the annals he
wrote into a chronicle but died before doing so. For this view, see Bower, Scotichronicon, gen. ed.
Watt, IX (1998), 226–27. Broun, however, believes that the Gesta annalia represents a source that
Fordun drew upon rather than one that he wrote. See Dauvit Broun, ‘A New Look at the Gesta
Annalia Attributed to John of Fordun’, in Church, Chronicle and Learning in Medieval and Early
Renaissance Scotland, ed. by Barbara E. Crawford (Edinburgh: Mercat, 1999), pp. 9–21 (p. 21).
One possible earlier writer of a general chronicle is the unknown ‘Veremundus’, who Hector Boece
claims wrote the source he used for previously unknown material. For a discussion of this, see, in
addition to the comments below, Nicola R . Royan, ‘The Scotorum Historia of Hector Boece: A
Study’ (unpublished DPhil thesis, Oxford University, 1996), pp. 197–215, cited by Broun, ‘Birth
of Scottish History’, p. 21; also see Royan, ‘Boece [Boethius], Hector’, in Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography (2004).
23
The Latin text and translation take up eight substantial volumes (with a ninth for additional
explanatory material) in Watt’s edition.
24
See Marjorie Drexler, ‘The Extant Abridgements of Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon’, Scottish
Historical Review, 61 (1982), 62–67 (p. 63).
25
Sally Mapstone, ‘The Scotichronicon’s First Readers’, in Church, Chronicle and Learning, ed.
by Crawford, pp. 31–55 (pp. 34–35, 39, and 48 n. 23, n. 25). Liber Pluscardensis was once attrib-
uted to a Maurice Buchanan but is now considered anonymous. Drexler still attributed it to
Buchanan (‘Extrant Abridgements’, pp. 63–64).
three abridgements of the Book of Cupar.26 However, even the abridgments of the
Scoticronicon were long works. The Liber Pluscardensis, for example, runs to about
four hundred pages in its nineteenth-century edition, and the editor omits the first
five books that duplicated Fordun’s Cronica.27
In the early fifteenth century Andrew of Wyntoun, apparently inspired by John
Barbour’s 13,684-line verse epic/chronicle about Robert Bruce, attempted to
follow Fordun’s lead and write a history of all of Scotland and to reach a wide
audience by writing in the English four-stress couplet’s Barbour had used. Andrew
produced the Original Chronicle of Scotland, which was about 30,000 lines long
and was ‘original’ because it began with the origins of the universe. It covered the
history of the world down to 1408, drawn from chronicles such as Orosius, Peter
Comestor, Martinus Polonus, and Vincent of Beauvais. Andrew may have drawn
some information from Fordun, but if he did, he does not mention him. He hoped
to provide readers with some conception of the importance of Scotland in that
universal history.28 Like Fordun and Bower, Andrew embedded genealogies within
his long chronicle.29
The tradition of writing long histories in both Latin and English continued
into the sixteenth century. John Major (Mair) wrote his Latin Historia Maioris
Britanniae (History of Greater Britain) (1521) in an attempt to eliminate earlier
legends about the founding of both Scotland and Britain. Like Polydore Vergil in
England, Major tried to destroy belief in the historical legends about the origins of
both Britain and Scotland and, in opposition to the pro-French policies of some
in government, hoped for better relations between Scotland and England.30
26
Drexler, ‘Extant Abridgements’, pp. 64–66; Mapstone, ‘Scotichronicon’s First Readers’, p. 35.
27
Liber Pluscardensis, ed. by Felix J. H. Skene, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1877–80). The second
volume is a translation.
28
For discussion of Andrew of Wyntoun and his sources, see my Chronicles and Other Histori-
cal Writing, vol. VIII of A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050–1500, gen. ed. Albert E.
Hartung (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1989), pp. 2686–90, 2905–13.
The most recent edition of the chronicle is The Original Cronicle of Andrew of Wyntoun, ed. by F. J.
Amours, Scottish Text Society, 50, 53, 54, 56, 57, 63 (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood & Sons,
1903–14), but still useful is the edition The Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland, ed. by David Laing, 3
vols, Historians of Scotland, 2, 3, 9 (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1872–79).
29
For discussion of Andrew of Wyntoun’s use of genealogies, see Broun, Irish Identity, pp. 105,
113–14, 134, 181–82.
30
See Gordon Donaldson, Scottish Kings (Edinburgh: Batsford, 1977), p. 157. For Major’s
chronicle, see John Major, A History of Greater Britain as well England as Scotland, trans. by
Archibald Constable (Edinburgh, 1892).
Hector Boece’s Latin chronicle, Scotorum Historia (1527) may have been
written in response to and as criticism of Major’s work.31 In any event, it presented
as valid the earlier accounts of Scotland’s ancient origins. It not only revived inter-
est in the legends that Major tried to dismiss and emphasized the classical Greek
and Egyptian culture upon which Scottish civilization was supposedly based, but
it also included accounts of the forty-five ancient Scottish kings that Fordun had
said ruled in the seven hundred years of history between the two Ferguses. Fordun
had named only two of them, and no one else seems to have known anything about
the others. Boece, in 119 folios of his Historia, presents what J. B. Black has called
‘an amazingly full and circumstantial account of the events’ of the reigns of these
kings. Boece, Black observes, placed the Scottish monarchy on an ‘apparently unas-
sailable foundation as the most ancient of the civilised world’ and presented Scots
of that period as ‘comparatively civilised’ with ‘a political system that would have
done credit to any nation many centuries later’. No one appears to have doubted
Boece’s account, and he became known as one of the greatest historians of his
time.32 He may, like Geoffrey of Monmouth, have been making it up, or he may
have been drawing upon a now-lost source, identified as the chronicle of Veremun-
dus, which he thought was genuine.33
Boece’s chronicle was influential. Published when James V was fourteen years
old, it was intended to teach the young king about Scottish history. Since it was
written in Latin, however, and since James may have been illiterate and unable to
read any language, in its original form it would have done the King little good.34
John Bellenden soon translated the chronicle for him (and supplemented it with
material from Fordun, Bower, and Major), first in a version written between 1530
and 1533 and later in a revised version printed between 1536 and 1540.35 In 1531,
31
See J. H. Burns, The True Law of Kingship: Concepts of Monarchy in Early-Modern Scotland
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 77.
32
Black, ‘Boece’s Scotorum Historiae’, p. 37.
33
Black, ‘Boece’s Scotorum Historiae’, pp. 48–53. Also see Royan’s studies of Boece ‘Scotorum
Historia of Hector Boece’ and ‘Boece [Boethius], Hector’. For a useful comparison of Major and
Boece, see Burns, True Law of Kingship, pp. 54–92.
34
David Edward Easson suggests that although English may have been difficult for him, he
could nevertheless have been educated in Latin (Gavin Dunbar, Chancellor of Scotland, Archbishop
of Glasgow (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1947), pp. 29–32).
35
See Nicola Royan, ‘The Relationship between the Scotorum Historia of Hector Boece and
John Bellenden’s Chronicles of Scotland’, in The Rose and the Thistle: Essays on the Culture of Late
Medieval and Renaissance Scotland, ed. by Sally Mapstone and Juliette Wood (East Linton,
not long after Bellenden began his prose version, William Stewart prepared
another translation for the King, this time in pentameter couplets, an unusual
medium for a historical work in the sixteenth century, but one that makes sense if
it were intended to entertain as well as instruct a possibly illiterate young king.36 It
is a long verse chronicle, published in three volumes in its nineteenth-century Rolls
Series edition.37 Boece’s chronicle was also translated not long after its publication
in 1527 into an anonymous prose account known as the Mar Lodge Translation.38
Boece’s influence continued into the later sixteenth century. George Buchanan’s
Rerum Scoticarum Historia (1582) is based to a considerable extent on Boece.39
John Leslie completed a vernacular continuation of Boece’s account in 1570 and
his later Latin history (1578) based on Boece was translated into Scots English by
James Dalrymple in 1596. Robert Lindesay of Pitscottie also completed a con-
tinuation of Bellenden’s English version sometime between 1576 and 1579 and
apparently considered Boece’s work a standard account of earlier Scottish history.40
Scotland: Tuckwell, 1998), pp. 136–57 (pp. 136–37); Mapstone, ‘Scotichronicon’s First Readers’,
p. 39. The first version was published in a modern edition as The Chronicles of Scotland, ed. by
R . W. Chambers, Edith C. Batho, and H. Winifred Husbands, Scottish Text Society, 3rd series,
10, 15 (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1938–41). A later revised version was published as The
Hystory and Croniklis of Scotland (Edinburgh, [1536–40?]). Although it includes a great deal of
prefatory material, translated from Boece’s Latin Historia and not in the Scottish Text Society
version, there is no modern edition.
36
See Thea Summerfield, ‘Teaching a Young King about History: William Stewart’s Metrical
Chronicle and King James V of Scotland’, in People and Texts: Relationships in Medieval Literature,
ed. by Thea Summerfield and Keith Busby (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 187–98.
37
The Buik of the Croniclis of Scotland; or, A Metrical Version of the History of Hector Boece, ed.
by William B. Turnbull, 3 vols, Rolls Series, 6 (London, 1858).
38
The Mar Lodge Translation of the History of Scotland, ed. by George Watson, Scottish Text
Society, 3rd series, 17 (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1946). This edition, which was to
consist of two volumes, was never completed. Volume I ends with the seventh book of the
translation of Boece’s Historia.
39
After early editions of 1582 and 1594, editions of Buchanan’s Latin Historia were published
in Edinburgh (1727) and Aberdeen (1762). In the eighteenth century a ‘Mr Bond’ translated it as
The History of Scotland, and it was published in at least seven editions between 1722 and 1799.
James Aikman also published a translation of it as The History of Scotland (Glasgow, 1827).
40
John Leslie, History of Scotland, ed. by T. Thomson, Bannatyne Club (Edinburgh, 1830) and
Historie of Scotland, trans. by James Dalrymple, ed. by E. G. Cody and William Murison, Scottish
Text Society, 5, 14, 19, 34 (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1888–95); and Robert Lindesay,
The Historie and Cronicles of Scotland, ed. by A. J. G. Mackay, 3 vols, Scottish Text Society, 42, 43,
60 (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1899–1911).
Boece and his translators, like Fordun, Bower, and Andrew of Wyntoun, hoped
to give readers a sense of Scotland’s distinguished past and its independence from
earliest times. They did that even though what they said was not true. However, in
all of these versions, the emphasis on genealogy that would have been so apparent
from the earlier king-lists was lost in their long narratives. Some authors tried to
rectify this by using the longer chronicles as the basis for genealogical chronicles.
Although these were not diagrammatic chronicles or pedigrees like many of the
others discussed in this volume, the purpose for which they were written was the
same: they offered, like diagrammatic chronicles, a series of short biographies indi-
cating hereditary succession that would be more elaborate than king-lists but that
would serve the same purpose.41
One evidence of this is found in a Latin chronicle, the Nomina omnium regum
Scotorum, that was copied into a miscellany of historical texts written in Latin and
Scots English that makes up the Dalhousie manuscript in Brechin castle.42 It is an
eleven-folio Latin summary of either the Scotichronicon or one of its abridgments
that covers the history of the Scots from the days of Gathelos and Scota until the
murder of James I in 1437. Chesnutt shows that it was written by at least the late
fifteenth century since it was used in annotating a Scotsman’s copy of Werner
Rolewinck’s Fasciculus Temporum at about 1491.43
Its purpose is suggested by its title, Nomina regum omnium: it is a type of king-
list with most paragraphs devoted to a king with a brief summary of the principal
events in his reign. Lacking, like the other chronicles before Boece, much informa-
tion about events between the reigns of Fergus I and Fergus II, its function as a
genealogy begins with Fergus II in the fifth century and continues until the murder
of James in 1437. Its entries about the earliest of these kings are brief:
41
For a definition of genealogical chronicles, see Marigold Anne Norbye, ‘Genealogies in
Medieval France’, in this volume, pp. 79–80.
42
This text is discussed by Michael Chesnutt, ‘The Dalhousie Manuscript of the Historia
Norvegiae’, Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana, 38 (1985), 54–94 (pp. 67, 76–79) and by Mapstone,
‘Scotichronicon’s First Readers’, p. 38. The manuscript is currently on deposit in Edinburgh at the
National Archives of Scotland: Dalhousie Muniments, GD 45/31/1–II. The Nomina was edited
in part in The Ballentine Miscellany, vol. III, ed. by David Laing (Edinburgh, 1855; repr., New York:
AMS Press, 1973), pp. 44–60. An edition of the full text with translation is in Short Scottish
Chronicles, ed. by Dan Embree, Edward Donald Kennedy, and Kathleen Daly (Woodbridge:
Boydell, forthcoming).
43
Chesnutt, ‘Dalhousie Manuscript’, pp. 78–79.
Anno domini cccc xix, Eugenius secundus filius predicti Fergusii successit patri in regnum
et regnavit xxxiiii annis. Habuit quoque multas victorias contra Britones et Romanos in
Britannia bis destruendo Grymys Dyke.
Circa annum domini cccc lii defuncto Eugenio successit Dongardus frater eius in
regnum Scotorum et regnavit quinque annis mirabiliter regnum defendens.
[In the year of the Lord 419, Eugenius II, son of the aforesaid Fergus succeeded his father
in the kingdom and reigned 34 years. He also had many victories against the Britons and
the Romans in Britain on two occasions destroying Grymys Dyke.
Around the year of the Lord 452, when Eugenius had died, his brother Dongardus
succeeded to the kingdom of the Scots and reigned 15 years, defending the kingdom
wonderfully.]44
With the reign of Kenneth MacAlpin beginning in 834, some of the paragraphs
become longer, but for the most part the format is to devote a paragraph to the
reign of each king until one reaches the struggles against Edward I in the late thir-
teenth and early fourteenth centuries; thereafter events are presented in more de-
tail. It is, nevertheless, a short history of Scotland. In presenting a concise account
of all of the known kings of Scotland from ancient times to the present, it was
making an argument for Scottish independence from England and functioned
much as did the earlier king-lists. Although written in part as anti-English propa-
ganda, particularly in its presentation of Edward I’s ruthless invasions of Scotland,
it does not completely gloss over the shortcomings of the Scots. It points out, for
example, that while Wallace and his followers were the only ones resisting the En-
glish, Bruce ‘the legitimate successor to the throne, was idling on the lands he had
in England, as if asleep’ (legittimo[sic] regni successore in terras quas in Anglia
habebat moram trahente et quasi dormiente) until a little later when he was ‘touched
and awakened by the divine spirit’ (paulo post spiritu divino ipsum tangente et evige-
lare faciente). It also points out that James I ‘having built castles, palaces, and many
other religious houses, with the inhabitants living in the greatest peace, was treach-
erously slain by his own men’ (edificatis castellis palaciis et multis aliis locis, incolis
in optima pace degentibus, proditiose interfectus est a suis).45 It makes the line of
Scottish succession clearer than a longer chronicle would have. It would have been
intended just for those who could read Latin, but there were other attempts to
make this genealogical information available to a broader group of readers.
44
Dalhousie Muniments, GD 45/31/1–II, fol. 26r, trans. by Dan Embree and Edward Donald
Kennedy, to appear in Short Scottish Chronicles.
45
Dalhousie Muniments, GD 45/31/1–II, fols 34r, 35v.
In the late fifteenth century and in the early years of the sixteenth some short
chronicles were written in Scots English for those who had neither the education
nor the time to read the Latin ones. The purpose of these short chronicles was to
instil a sense of pride in the Scottish nation by letting readers or listeners know of
its distinguished past, to alert them to the threat from England and to be certain
that they understood that the nation of the Scots had had a long line of kings.
One of these, the Brevis cronica (Scottis Cronikle), written in Scots English and
based upon a Latin source similar to the Nomina, appears, like the Nomina, to have
been written as a substitute for the king-lists. It survives in two sixteenth-century
manuscripts, one in Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates 19. 2. 4
(MS 163–84), as the concluding part of a manuscript of Andrew of Wyntoun’s
Original Chronicle; the other, in the Asloan manuscript (National Library of Scot-
land, MS 16500). The title Brevis cronica appears in the Advocates manuscript; the
Asloan version is entitled the Scottis Cronikle.46 It is not certain whether the Asloan
and Advocates versions were based on the same English exemplar or whether they
represent independent translations from Latin. Since both include details not
found in the Latin Nomina, they appear to have been based upon a Latin exemplar
somewhat different from the one in the Dalhousie manuscript.
This chronicle, like the Nomina, begins with the origin legend of Gathelos and
Scota in ‘þe tyme of Moyses the prophet’. It too insists on the antiquity of the Scot-
tish nation and points out that the Scots reigned in Scotland ‘Thre hundredth here
and threttene befor þe birth of crist’.47 As in the Nomina, virtually every paragraph
is devoted to the reign of a king, with the early sections reading like a genealogical
chronicle intended to show the long descent of Scottish kings from antiquity, and as
in the Latin version, the accounts become more detailed as the chronicle reaches the
later Middle Ages. Like the Nomina, much of it reads like anti-English propaganda.
46
The Brevis version was edited in Andrew of Wyntoun, Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland, ed.
by David Laing, vol. III (Edinburgh, 1879), pp. 321–38; the other, in The Asloan Manuscript, vol. I,
ed. by W. A. Craigie, Scottish Text Society, n.s., 14 (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1923), pp.
245–70. G. F. Warner and J. P. Gilson, who compiled the British Library’s catalogue of the Royal
manuscripts, incorrectly identified this chronicle with the Chronicle of the Scots (Short Chronicle of
1482), another short chronicle written in English but one not written as a genealogy. See British
Museum Catalogue of Western MSS in the Old Royal and King’s Collections, vol. II (London:
Trustees of the British Museum, 1921; repr., Munich: K. G. Saur, 1997), p. 257. This error was
repeated in R . L. Mackie, James IV of Scotland: A Brief Survey of his Life and Times (Edinburgh:
Oliver and Boyd, 1958), p. 13 n. 2. See my Chronicles and Other Historical Writing, pp. 2699–70,
for discussion of the Chronicle of the Scots (Short Chronicle of 1482).
47
Asloan Manuscript, ed. by Craigie, I, 245–46.
Of the two, Asloan represents an older text, and since the scribe, the Edinburgh
notary John Asloan, generally made few changes to the other works he had copied
in his manuscript, his version probably closely followed his exemplar. However,
someone, either Asloan or the scribe of his exemplar, added three brief paragraphs
to the conclusion of his version: although the Dalhousie Nomina ends, like Bower’s
Scoticronicon and the Liber Pluscardensis, with the death of James I, Asloan’s con-
cludes with three brief paragraphs concerned with James II, James III, and
James IV. The latter entry ends with James IV’s capture of Norham on 28 or 29
August 1513 and was thus presumably written before his defeat and death at
Flodden shortly thereafter. Thus either Asloan or the author of his exemplar
wanted this genealogical chronicle to be up-to-date.
The other surviving version of the Brevis cronica, the Advocates version,
includes most of the material found in Asloan except that it breaks off at the end
of Robert II’s reign in 1390. The Advocates version, however, differs considerably
from Asloan’s because its author has supplemented the material it shares with
Asloan with material derived from Bellenden’s adaptation of Boece’s Scotorum His-
toria. The Advocates version alerts the reader to its use of some material derived
from Bellenden by several references towards the end of the chronicle to book and
chapter divisions, such as ‘In þe xii buke, capitulo xvi, xvii’ or ‘in þe xiii buke i, ii,
iii’. As Mapstone points out in a discussion of the two versions of the chronicle,
Boece’s Latin text, while divided into books, did not have chapters,48 and the
references to chapters indicate that the author was referring to Bellenden’s trans-
lation, either the early version Bellenden produced between 1530 and 1533 or the
revision he published sometime between 1536 and 1540.49 The fact, however, that
neither Bellenden nor Boece is mentioned by name but that simply book and
chapter references are given suggests that the work would have been known to the
Brevis’s intended reader(s) and did not need further identification and that the
author may have been referring to the printed edition which would probably have
been more accessible than the manuscript versions. Thus he apparently thought of
this genealogical chronicle as a guide to the fuller account. The author derived
details from Bellenden throughout his chronicle, even noting early on that a dog
stolen from the Scots by the Picts was white, but the references to books and chapters
in Bellenden occur only in the latter half of the chronicle, beginning with the reign
of Macbeth in the year 1040. This suggests that the author thought that his readers
48
Mapstone, ‘Scotichronicon’s First Readers’, p. 38.
49
Mapstone, ‘Scotichronicon’s First Readers’, pp. 38, 50 n. 55. The sample quotations that
Mapstone checked are the same in both versions of Bellenden.
would be most interested in fuller accounts of more recent events of Scottish history.
However, the author of Brevis cronica does not refer the reader to the accounts of
the kings that reigned between the two Ferguses, most of whose stories had ap-
peared for the first time in Boece. This could suggest that the author was sceptical
about that part of Boece’s chronicle and that he considered Bower, or a work
derived from Bower, still the principal authority for the early history of Scotland.
Andrew of Wyntoun’s chronicle, which in the Advocates manuscript is 426
folios in length, immediately precedes the Brevis cronica. The compiler must have
wanted to append a condensation of Scottish history that would also be a history
that drew upon more recent authorities — Bower and Bellenden — than the ones
to which Wyntoun, whose chronicle ends in 1408, had access. It also suggests that
the compiler of the manuscript might have thought that a reader could get lost in
Andrew’s 30,000-line work and needed a supplement that would give a clearer idea
of the genealogy of Scottish kings.
Another abbreviated chronicle written as a genealogy and included in another
manuscript of Andrew of Wyntoun’s Original Chronicle is a 281-line fragment of
an English summary of part of Hector Boece’s Scotorum Historia found in the con-
cluding folios of the sixteenth-century St Andrews University Library, MS
DA775.A6 W9.50 David Laing describes the chronicle in his 1879 edition of
Wyntoun as ‘the prose chronicle beginning with Fergus the first king and ending
with Corane or Gorane Congal’,51 but it has since gone unnoticed until it was
rediscovered by Dan Embree.52 The summary consists of abbreviated accounts of
the reigns of kings after the first King Fergus until it breaks off with Eugenius,
kings that had been unknown until the publication of Boece’s chronicle. Like the
version of the Brevis cronica in the Advocates manuscript of Wyntoun’s chronicle,
it was probably added as a supplement to dated information in Wyntoun, but
unlike the scribe who added to his exemplar of the Brevis cronica allusions to
50
The short chronicle appears on fol. 449r (followed by a concluding page of Wyntoun’s
chronicle on fol. 449v) and then continues from fol. 450r until 452r where much of it is illegible.
The St Andrews manuscript of Wyntoun’s Original Chronicle has been dated 1500–25, but unless
this is a later addition to the manuscript, the manuscript must be somewhat later since Boece’s
Historia was first published in 1527.
51
Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland by Andrew of Wyntoun, ed. by Laing, II, p. xxi. Chesnutt is
incorrect in saying that Laing identified this as ‘a fragment of the Brevis Chronica’ (‘Dalhousie
Manuscript’, p. 77).
52
It will be published for the first time in Short Scottish Chronicles, ed. by Embree, Kennedy,
and Daly, and it will be entitled The St Andrews Chronicle.
Bellenden’s translation of Boece but omitted any reference to the previously

unknown kings, the author of the St Andrews chronicle wanted his readers to
know who these kings were.
The author of the St Andrews chronicle was possibly inspired by the list of
Scottish kings found at the beginning of the 1527 edition of Boece’s Historia.
Entitled ‘Scotorum Regum Catalogus’, it is a detailed king-list taking up several
folios (fols [viir–xvr]) at the front of the book beginning with the first king, Fergus:
Fergusius primus Scotorum rex filius Ferquhardi Regis Hiberniae in Albione insula regnare
incepit anno ante Christi seruatoris aduentum in carnem tricentesimo tricesimo [. . .] Folio
vii. Ver. I.
[Fergus, the first king of the Scots, son of Ferquhard, king of Ireland, began to reign in the
island of Albion in the 330th year before the coming of the saviour Christ [. . .] Folio vii,
line 1.]
It lists each of the kings of Scotland with a few details about each king’s reign. It
includes all of the missing kings whose names first appeared in Boece and ends with
the young James V for whom Boece had written his history. Thus it is a guide to
Boece’s history of the Scots, but it also makes apparent the relationships and
descent of one king after another and shows in several folios the uninterrupted line
of Scots kings from antiquity to the fifteenth century. Then further on in the
introduction (fols xxiv –xxiir), just before the narrative begins, there is another king-
list (again described as Catalogus regum Scotorum) that is a simple list of the names
of the kings from Fergus I to James V:
Fergusius Scotorum Scotorum Rex Primus
Feritharis rex secundus
Mainus rex tertius, etc.
Such a list served the same purpose as the long king-list prepared for the inaugura-
tion of John Balliol in the thirteenth century. Moreover, since Boece had the young
James V in mind when preparing this, it would have seemed like an effective way
to teach him, or, if the king were illiterate as some assume, have others teach him,
about his ancestry.
The first version of the translation of Boece’s chronicle that Bellenden prepared
for James V was written, as noted above, between 1530 and 1533, and a printed
edition was published sometime between 1536 and 1540. Unlike Boece’s Latin
account, Bellenden’s version is divided into books and short chapters, obviously for
ease of reference, and like many late medieval texts is provided with a table of con-
tents with a brief précis of the content of each chapter. Since new chapters often
began with the reign of a new king, the table of contents serves to some extent as
a king-list.53 Bellenden revised the chronicle for the printed edition, and he may
have thought that the chapter headings were an inadequate guide. The printed edi-
tion has a considerable amount of additional material translated from the 1527
edition of Boece’s Historia that does not appear in the Chambers/Batho edition.
The additions include, besides a lengthy description of Scotland, a short account
of the kings of Britain/England (fol. 20r–v ) that although praising Henry VIII
nevertheless reminds the reader of the various people that have inhabited England
(British, Saxons, Danes, Normans), followed by a long and detailed table of con-
tents (fols 21r–30v ). Altough it omits the detailed ‘Catalogus’ of the 1527 Latin
edition, it does include Boece’s second list of ‘the names of all Scottis kyngis’ (fols
31 r–32 v ), to which it adds the ‘buke chapitoure and leif’ in which information
about each king can be found. A simple list like this in both the Latin and
Bellenden versions is a throwback to the old king-lists that were recited at
coronations earlier in the Middle Ages.
Genealogies, whether represented by king-lists or somewhat fuller genealogical

chronicles, were important in Scotland. The survival of king-lists in manuscripts of
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is, as Marjorie Anderson and Dauvit Broun
have shown, indicative of their continued importance in the later Middle Ages, and
their appearance in the sixteenth-century printed editions of Boece and Bellenden
indicates that interest in them continued into the early modern period and also
probably received wider circulation than they would have in earlier times. After
Fordun’s Cronica appeared in the late fourteenth century, authors considered full
histories of Scotland important as well, but the efforts to offer abbreviated versions
of these suggest that some must have found the fully developed accounts inadequate
in themselves. They must have believed that the king-list, whether modified as a
genealogical chronicle with paragraphs devoted to each king or presented simply
as a list of kings, was also essential if Scots were to have easy and quick access to evi-
dence that they had been an independent nation for almost two thousand years.54
53
See the table of contents to Chronicles of Scotland, ed. by Chambers and Batho, I, 1–12. The
edition is based on New York, Pierpont Morgan, MS M.527, which appears to be the earliest
version found in the nine manuscripts available to the editors.
54
Another example of a short Latin chronicle written to present the genealogies of the Scottish
kings is the ‘Liber Extravagans (Supplementary Book)’, ed. by Dauvit Broun with A. B. Scott in
Walter Bower, Scotichronicon, gen. ed. Watt, IX , 54–127. Dauvit Broun pointed this out to me at
the Medieval Chronicle Conference in Belfast in July 2008 but it was too late to include discussion
of it in this essay.
G ENEALOGICAL N ARRATIVES AND K INGSHIP
IN M EDIEVAL W ALES
Nia M. W. Powell
A
late sixteenth-century account of the inhabitants of north Wales among
the papers of William Cecil noted that parishioners would congregate on
Sundays and holidays to listen to harpers and crowders singing to them
‘songs of the doeings of their Auncestors’, and that then they would recite their
own pedigrees at length, ‘howe eche of them is discended from those theire ould
princes’.1 Reciting pedigrees is presented here as contemporary popular entertain-
ment for the common man and, as an amusing diversion, it shared one feature with
modern investigation into ancestry, but it was also a far more serious affair. It was
an activity that bound together the parochial communitas by declaiming and em-
phasizing ties of kinship within it and reminding it of a shared past. For the English
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was a particularism that emphasized
the ‘otherness’ of Wales, so much so that the predilection for genealogy was a subject
for unrelenting satire, in word and image. The early modern Welsh were presented
by satirists in plays and cartoons as goats inhabiting a mountain bastion beyond the
realms of civility, with the rather dishevelled ‘shentleman of Wales’ regularly de-
picted as the bearer of a long and improbable genealogy going back beyond Noah’s
flood — or even beyond the creation of the earth.2 Even in such a negative context,
interest in genealogy was an oddity that provided early modern Wales with a par-
ticular identity that set it apart from contemporary English customs.
1
London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 111/4. An account of the inhabitants of North
Wales (n.d. but probably at the time of Elizabeth).
2
Peter Lord, Words and Pictures: Welsh Images and Images of Wales in the Popular Press,
1640–1740 (Aberystwyth: Planet, 1995), unpaginated colour plates, and pp. 33–74.
176 Nia M. W. Powell
This interest represented the continuation of a long tradition. During the medie-
val period lineage was central to the structure of society in Wales, and knowledge
of descent was thus all-important. Not only was it an integral issue relating to the
inheritance and proprietorship of land, and the method by which social relations and
personal interactions were governed, but it was of even greater significance in estab-
lishing and maintaining regal status and authority. It has been claimed, indeed, that
‘lineage was the most import [. . .] prerequisite in a claim to kingship’.3 The enduring
importance of descent as a legitimizing agent for authority is reflected in two exam-
ples from Powys where lineage has been recorded in writing, two instances that
bridge chronological termini. The earliest of these is the genealogy carved in stone
onto the Pillar of Eliseg near Llangollen, erected by the mid-ninth century, in which
the descent of Cyngen, king of Powys (d. 855), appears to be traced back to Vorti-
gern, and from him to Magnus Maximus.4 The pillar also relates how both Cyngen
and his great-grandfather Elisedd had won lands from ‘Anglian’5 hands and, by trac-
ing their lineage to the perceived roots of civil rule within a classical Roman context,
gave an apparent legitimacy in stone to their right to rule. The legitimizing agency
of lineage in this context continued to be a salient factor throughout the medieval
period in Wales and can be perceived even beyond the Edwardian settlement of
1284, when native rule in Wales is generally considered to have come to an end.
It is plainly enunciated in the second example, an ode written between 1385
and 1400 by the poet Iolo Goch to Owain Glyndŵr, composed specifically to relate
his genealogy.6 ‘Barwn mi a wn ei ach’ (He is a baron whose lineage I know), said
Iolo, ‘Anoberi un barwn | Eithr o’r rhyw yr henyw hwn’ (No baron is of any value
if he be not of the stock from which he originates).7 Iolo continues to relate his
lineage both patrilineally and matrilineally to show his descent from the three royal
houses of Powys, Deheubarth, and Gwynedd, the three kingdoms that dominated
the Pura Wallia of the thirteenth century, these links making him uniquely
3
R . R. Davies, Conquest, Coexistence and Change: Wales 1064–1415 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press; Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1987), p. 57.
4
P. C. Bartrum, Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1966),
pp. 1–3, 123–24, based on Edward Lhuyd’s 1690 transcript in London, British Library, MS Harley
3780, fols 95r –95v . See also P. Sims-Williams, ‘Historical Need and Literary Narrative: A Caveat
from Ninth-Century Wales’, Welsh History Review, 17 (1994–95), 1–40.
5
The ‘Angli’ on the stone would refer to Mercians.
6
Cywyddau Iolo Goch ac Eraill, ed. by Henry Lewis and others (Cardiff: University of Wales
Press, 1937), pp. 31–33.
7
Cywyddau Iolo Goch ac Eraill, ed. by Lewis and others, p. 32.
GENEALOGICAL NARRATIVES AND KINGSHIP IN MEDIEVAL WALES 177
qualified to rule the whole of Wales at the turn of the fourteenth century. What-
ever the political or economic compulsions that drove Owain ap Gruffudd of
Glyndyfrdwy to prominence in 1400 and to embark on a revolt against the crown,
or the military considerations that sanctioned his power in reality, it was his lineage
that gave the perceived legitimacy to his right to rule, as Prince of Wales, during the
first decade of the fifteenth century and made him worthy of the allegiance of
Welsh subjects. According to Iolo Goch, it was on account of his lineage that he
could claim to be the ‘Un pen ar Gymru wen wedd’ (One head of fair Wales).8
The Pillar of Eliseg is an early expression of the link between genealogy and the
legitimization of authority. Subsequent genealogical tracts that have survived
relating to royal dynasties in Wales underline this political aspect of genealogical
knowledge. They appear on first sight to have been created in order to secure the
memory of a long-standing past for ruling dynasties, sometimes consisting of
historical characters verifiable from other documentary sources, but at other times
of mythical or legendary figures which are not easy to distinguish from fact the
further back ancestry is traced. Giraldus Cambrensis expressed his own doubts
about the historical veracity of genealogies that he had heard declaimed during the
last decade of the twelfth century, genealogies that linked Welsh rulers lineally with
figures associated with classical mythology such as Aeneas or even further to Adam
and the biblical myth of origin. For this reason, he deliberately excluded such
material from his work, and the genealogy that he does provide in his Descriptio
Kambriae for Rhys ap Gruffudd, the Lord Rhys of Deheubarth (d. 1197), reaches
back only to the ninth generation, to Rhodri Mawr, whose existence is attested by
chronicle entries.9 It has been concluded, nevertheless, that in the case of the
genealogies of royal houses, although they may contain legendary material, those
composed before the end of the thirteenth century are reliable in the sense that
what they do contain represents accurately the oral traditions that had been
transmitted to that date.10 This chapter does not aim to assess the accuracy or
8
Cywyddau Iolo Goch ac Eraill, ed. by Lewis and others, p. 33.
9
Giraldus Cambrensis, Descriptio Kambriae, I, Chapter III, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, ed.
by J. J. Dimock, vol. VI (London, 1868), pp. 167–68: ‘De generatione principum Walliae. [. . .] Sed
quoniam tam longinqua, tam remotissima generis enarratio, multis trutanica potius quam historica
esse videretur, eam huic nostro compendio inserere ex industria supersedimus’ (On the descent of
the princes of Wales. [. . .] But because such distant, such very remote exposition of descent may
seem to many to be fictional rather than historical, we deliberately refrained from including it in
our summary; my translation).
10
This was the opinion of Bartrum in his Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts, pp. vii–viii, in con-
trast to later genealogies of uchelwyr and gentry that appeared from the end of the fifteenth century
otherwise of that genealogical material or the legendary and mythical elements in

it, but rather to explore the uses made of genealogies from the ninth century and
the question of why some were recorded in writing.
Early written tracts include those that record links between Wales and Ireland.
One is an Irish genealogy tracing the origins of the Kings of Dyfed in south-west
Wales to legends associated with the Déisi who had migrated from Ireland to
Dyfed during the mid-fourth century.11 Links between Ireland and Wales are also
alluded to in the ‘De situ Brecheniauc’12 and ‘Cognatio Brychan’,13 which trace the
origins of Brychan, the eponymous king of Brycheiniog, followed by a telescopic
rendition of his numerous children, or descendants, that appear as political and
religious figures of later date in other genealogies. Brychan, according to these two
genealogies, was the son of an Irish king, to whom his mother, Marchell, had been
given in marriage by her own father, King of Brycheiniog. There is also an attempt
to link the ancestry of Brychan, through his mother, to a classical Roman past to
Antonius, ‘king of Greece’,14 and forging a link with classical antiquity is another
prominent topos of these genealogies where an antiquity is invoked to raise the
and contained a considerable element of more recently created fictitious material. See also David N.
Dumville, ‘Kingship, Genealogies and Regnal Lists’, in Early Medieval Kingship, ed. by P. H.
Sawyer and I. N. Wood (Leeds: School of History, University of Leeds, 1977), pp. 72–104;
Dumville, ‘Sub-Roman Britain: History and Legend’, History, 62 (1977), 173–92; D. E. Thornton,
Kings, Chronologies and Genealogies, Oxford Unit for Prosopographical Research, 10 (Oxford:
Oxford Unit for Prosopographical Research, 2003); Thornton, ‘Predatory Nomenclature and
Dynastic Expansion in Early Medieval Wales’, Medieval Prosopography, 20 (1999), 1–22; Thorn-
ton, ‘Kings, Chronicles and Genealogies: Reconstructing Medieval Celtic Dynasties’, in Family
Trees and the Roots of Politics: The Prosopography of Britain and France from the Tenth to the
Twelfth Century, ed. by K. S. B. Keats-Rohan (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1997), pp. 23–40.
11
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson B. 502, in Bartrum, Early Welsh Genealogical
Tracts, pp. 4, 124–25, where other later manuscript sources are noted.
12
c. 1200, London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian A XIV, fols 10v–11v in Bartrum,
Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts, pp. 14–16, 129–30.
13
London, British Library, MS Cotton Domitian i, fols 157 v–158v, copied during the sixteenth
century by John Price of Brecon (d. 1555) from a manuscript thought to have been of thirteenth-
century date, in Bartrum, Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts, pp. 17–19, 130–31.
14
‘Plant Brychan’ is also found in pedigrees from Oxford, Bodleian Library, Jesus College MS
20, fols 33r–34r compiled during the latter part of the fourteenth century, probably in south-east
Wales, but the text is corrupt. See Bartrum, Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts, pp. 41–44; an ex-
panded version is found in Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Llanstephan 28, compiled
by Gutun Owain c. 1475, from a manuscript estimated to be c. 1400 (Bartrum, Early Welsh
Genealogical Tracts, pp. 75–84). See ibid., pp. 77–78 for dating.
honour of an individual ruler. Other genealogies of this period that have been
recorded in writing encapsulate a more insular, British dimension to the lineage of
Welsh rulers, and these link them even more pointedly to a Roman imperial inheri-
tance.15 This is certainly apparent in Welsh genealogies from London, British
Library, MS Harley 3859, thought to have been compiled during the mid-tenth
century under the auspices of Owain ap Hywel Dda of Dyfed, who reigned
950–88. This includes a version of the Dyfed lineage that places its origins not in
Ireland, but in north Britain, with the Emperor Constantine named as one of its
progenitors.16 This desire to associate a lineage more directly with a Roman past
illustrates the association in memory between Roman order, and its associated
civility, and the prerequisites of authority at the end of the first millennium, and
may have represented an attempt to establish a claim of superiority by dynasties
that boasted British roots over younger Anglian or Saxon dynasties whose ances-
tors had not shared in the Romano-British inheritance. The inclusion of personal
names deriving from official positions within the Roman administrative schema,
such as Padarn Beisrudd (Padarn of the Red Tunic), or the epithet ‘Protector’
served to underline the imperial link.17 At the same time, the more recent Chris-
tian background of these families is also emphasized by noting, in the case of
Brychan in particular, the number of religious men and women that were de-
scended from him, and Christianity is also introduced in the context of putative
Roman progenitors, such as Constantine. All this emphasizes the moral parameters
under which these early rulers were expected to operate 18 and is, therefore, a far
richer statement than a mere list of names. It provided a historical and moral
context to the kingship of Welsh rulers at the turn of the first millennium.
15
See Dumville, ‘Sub-Roman Britain’, on the significance of claiming links with Roman
authority within a wider British context.
16
Dumville, ‘Sub-Roman Britain’, pp. 9–13, 125–29. BL, MS Harley 3859 itself is dated to
c. 1100, Bartrum, Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts, p. 5.
17
Patern Pesrut, BL, MS Harley 3859, fol. 193v , is the earliest reference. For later sources
noting Padarn Beisrudd as a progenitor, see Bartrum, Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts, p. 208.
These included the lives of three saints from the twelfth century in BL, M S Cotton Vespasian
A XIV: Cadog, fol. 37r, Crannog, fol. 94r, and David, fol. 70 v; Historia Gruffud vab Kenan, ed. by
D. Simon Evans (Cardiff: University of Wales Press for the University of Wales Board of Celtic
Studies, 1977), p. 1, from Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 17, p. 1, dated to
the mid-thirteenth century; and it was incorporated into the thirteenth-century ‘Ach Llywelyn ap
Iorwerth Drwyndwn’ copied by John Jones Gellilyfdy in 1640 (MS Cardiff 25). For ‘protector’,
see BL, MS Harley 3859, fol. 193v .
18
See below, BL, MS Harley 3859.
All this also dovetails into a historical tradition that was already expressed in
written form in a text compiled during the early ninth century (829/30), the Histo-
ria Brittonum, that professed to trace the origins of different people who inhabited
the British Isles by that time, and whose authorship is attributed, probably incor-
rectly, to Nennius.19 The narrative again emphasizes the roots of British rulers in
imperial Rome, linking their origins to the origins of Rome itself through Aeneas,
and through Aeneas to Adam. Whilst it is very much in the nature of a myth of
origin, it sought at the same time to tie the roots of British rulers to a common
European heritage in which Roman imperial authority had a prominent place. This
is the earliest written promulgation of the putative descent of Welsh rulers from
Aeneas, and indeed from Noah and Adam himself, through Brutus. Brutus, who
is said to have taken the reins of power in Britain, is introduced as a great-grandson
of Aeneas and the son of a Roman consul.20 Other genealogies are also incor-
porated in the Historia as if to support narratives of origin and are varied. They
include those not only of British rulers, but also of rulers of Saxon or Anglian
origin. Their roots, however, are traced to the god Woden who, it is emphasized,
was not the all-powerful biblical God from which British rulers derived, hence
underlining once again the perceived superior status of Britons.21 Genealogy, which
becomes increasingly unproven the further back it reaches, is used here as a factor
to uplift British rulers. The Historia Brittonum was compiled at a time when
British rule was restricted to what is now known as Wales, and the narrative in the
main part declaims the despair of successive loss of territory and power by the
19
The date of the earliest manuscript version is c. 900, from a primary version of c. 829/30. The
manuscript, Bibliothèque Municipale de Chartres, MS 98, was lost by an allied bombing raid in
1944 but survived in transcript. See The Historia Brittonum, vol. II: The ‘Chartres’ Recension, ed.
by D. N. Dumville (Cambridge: Brewer, 1988). Other early manuscripts include one of the early
eleventh century, now divided, the main parts of which are Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France,
MS latin 9768 and Vatican, Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Reginae, Latin 1964. These are
edited in The Historia Brittonum, vol. III: The ‘Vatican’ Recension, ed. by D. N. Dumville (Cam-
bridge: Brewer, 1985). Further reference in this chapter to Historia Brittonum, ed. by Dumville will
be to this edition of the ‘Vatican’ recension. An early eleventh-century version also appears in BL,
MS Harley 3859, with later twelfth-century versions in London, British Library, MSS Cotton
Vespasian D XXI and Caligula A VIII. See also Bartrum, Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts, pp. 5–6,
for dating and for genealogical material incorporated within the Historia Brittonum.
20
Historia Brittonum, ed. by Dumville, Chapters 7, 10, 17. See also Dumville, ‘Sub-Roman
Britain’, passim.
21
Historia Brittonum, ed. by Dumville, Chapters 57–58.
Britons to Anglian and Saxon dynasties.22 This expression of a sense of superior

status in origin acted as a compensation for that loss.
This myth of origin and descent from Aeneas, but based on the link through
Brutus, was expanded during the twelfth century and incorporated by Geoffrey of
Monmouth into a version of history that gained immense popularity throughout
medieval Europe. This general popularity of the account may explain why it became
a mainstay of Cambro-British honour and identity itself throughout the medieval
period and, indeed, well into the nineteenth century.23 Geoffrey, claiming to base
his work on an earlier written chronicle and oral traditions that he encountered,
used his own imagination to expand on the story of Brutus in order to trace the
‘History of the Kings of the Britons’ to him, emphasizing his Trojan rather than
his Roman roots. His Historia regum Britanniae (c. 1136) recounts again a loss of
political authority by kings of the Britons but introduced Arthur as descendant
and a hero and foretold that sovereignty would once more be regained by Britons
as descendants of Brutus.24 Written at a time of further uncertainty in Wales, when
Welsh rulers were recovering territories lost to the Normans since the late eleventh
century under constant Norman incursive pressure in the aftermath of 1066, it was
translated into Welsh.25 Conveying as it did a potent message of hope for the
future through prophecy and honour through descent from a Trojan race, it
encouraged later attempts to link ancestral lines to him.26 In the Description of
Britayne published by Caxton in 1480 and derived from part of John Trevisa’s
translation of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, the Welsh are described as ‘that noble
blood | Of Priamus blood [. . .]. They prayse fast troian blode | For thereof come all
22
Historia Brittonum, ed. by Dumville, Chapters 4, 48, 49, 56, 62.
23
D. Glyn Jones, Gwlad y Brutiau (Swansea: University College, Swansea Henry Lewis
Memorial Lecture, 1991).
24
Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britanniae, ed. by A. Griscom (New York:
Longmans, Green, 1929); Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. by
Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966; repr., London: Penguin, 2004).
25
J. Gillingham, ‘The Context and Purposes of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings
of Britain’, in his The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National Identity and Political
Values (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000), pp. 19–40. For a recent analysis, see also M. Aurell, ‘Geoffrey
of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance’, Haskins
Society Journal, 18 (2006), 1–18.
26
Brut y Brenhinedd: Llanstephan MS 1 Version, ed. by B. F. Roberts (Dublin: Dublin Institute
of Advanced Studies, 1971).
her brode’.27 Even when Geoffrey’s history was attacked by Renaissance historians
of the sixteenth century, including the Italian Polydore Vergil in 1534 and William
Camden in 1586, it was vigorously defended by Welsh scholars from John Price in
his Historia Brytannicae Defensio (London, 1573) to David Powel in his History of
Cambria now called Wales (London, 1584). Debunking the Trojan descent, it was
claimed, also undermined any sense of status and honour the Welsh had by the six-
teenth century, and the influence of Geoffrey’s twelfth-century work illustrates the
potent long-term effect of genealogy as a means of creating unity of identity.28
Returning to genealogies that are not subsumed within historical narratives,
those in the pre-Galfridian BL, MS Harley 3859 reflect changing political config-
urations and unity of identity in a more subtle way. They trace the lineages of rulers
of different regions of what is now recognized as Wales, illustrating a notion of
unity not so much within a British context as within a Welsh context that was
wider than the individual kingdoms to which the genealogies relate. Again, they
appear to mirror the political condition of Wales at the time it was compiled,29
reflecting an accommodation with political reality by that time which is not appar-
ent in the Historia Brittonum. It must be viewed in the context of periods between
the mid-ninth and tenth centuries when several kingdoms in Wales were united
under the single rule of figures such as Rhodri Mawr (d. 878) or, more recently,
Hywel Dda (d. 950). The lineages of rulers are given for territories including
Gwynedd, Dyfed, Rhos, Brycheiniog, Dunoding, Meirionnydd, Rhufoniog, Penllyn,
Powys, Ceredigion, Glywysing, and Gwent, comprising, indeed, the greater part of
Wales as it is known today. A perceived unity of origin is a feature of these pre-
Galfridian genealogies recorded in writing, with numerous Welsh rulers of the time
being linked to a small number of roots. As in the case of the Historia Brittonum,
myth and legend may form a significant element in accounts of some early
27
Description of Britayne (London, 1480), of the londe of Wales, Ca. xvj; Of the maner & rites
of the walsshmen, Ca. xix.
28
For a view on the importance of the British dimension, see P. Sims-Williams, ‘Some Func-
tions of Origin Stories in Early Medieval Wales’, in History and Heroic Tale: A Symposium, ed. by
T. Nyberg and others (Odense: Odense University Press, 1985), pp. 97–131. On the early modern
link between Brutus and honour through lineage, see Glanmor Williams, Recovery, Reorientation
and Reformation: Wales c.1415–1642 (Oxford: Clarendon Press; Cardiff: University of Wales
Press, 1987), pp. 97, 451–59, 465.
29
Estimated to have been compiled during the reign of Owain ap Hywel Dda, probably during
the early years in the 950s, the manuscript is dated c. 1100 (Bartrum, Early Welsh Genealogical
Tracts, pp. 5–6).
ancestors, such as tracing the ancestry of Hywel Dda to Anna, here described as a
cousin (consobrina) of the Virgin Mary, but descent from Anna is also a feature of
the ancestry given for Hywel Dda’s wife, Elen. Elen herself was a granddaughter of
Hyfaidd ap Bleddri, king of Dyfed, and as such, after his death in 893, the death of
her father, Llywarch, in 904, and the killing of her uncle, Rhydderch, in 905,
represented the native dynasty of Dyfed at the opening of the tenth century.30 This
would have added to the honour of Owain, her son, underpinning his claim to rule
Dyfed, a territory over which he had no dynastic claim through his father. Her
descent follows in part the Irish lineage given for the kings of Dyfed, but then
digresses and is traced in BL, MS Harley 3859 to the Emperor Constantine and
further to the link with the Virgin. This is an interesting illustration of a preference
by the tenth century for a direct imperial descent to accepting an Irish bloodline
and a concern with emphasizing Christian origins. It is, furthermore, an allusion
to a common, shared heritage within a Welsh arena.
It cannot be denied, however, that what is most apparent in the MS Harley 3859
series is the strong awareness of historical links between rulers of tenth-century
Wales and the older and wider British context. Lineages of Gwŷr y Gogledd (The
Men of the North), of Man, and of Strathclyde are thus taken ipso facto as per-
taining to the ancestry of rulers in Wales, including shared genealogy with Pictish
rulers. It emphasized the status of Welsh rulers as prime movers in the political
map of the whole of Britain during the first millennium, and a claim to authority
that went beyond that of their English rivals, despite the perceived loss of territory
and power noted earlier. This wider British link, and the continuing preoccupation
with the British issue is indeed emphasized in another, later genealogy that appears
to have been put into writing during the early fourteenth century in which ‘men
of the North’ appear as progenitors alongside names that are found in medieval
prose and poetry. In ‘Bonedd yr Arwyr’31 semi-mythical figures include Math ap
Mathonwy, the all-powerful magician of the Mabinogi cycle, and Llywarch Hen
whose name, and the names of whose children, appear in poetry. It is doubtful
30
Bartrum, Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts, pp. 9–10 from BL, MS Harley 3859, fol. 193 v ;
Brut y Tywysogyon or Chronicle of the Princes, Peniarth MS 20. Version, ed. and trans. by Thomas
Jones, University of Wales, Board of Celtic Studies’ History and Law Series, 11 (Cardiff:
University of Wales Press, 1952), pp. 5–6.
31
Bartrum, Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts, pp. 85–94. The earliest surviving manuscript in
which this material is found is Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, M S Peniarth 28, a copy
made by Gutun Owain c. 1475 of a fourteenth-century manuscript. For dating the manuscripts
and for sources, see Bartrum, Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts, pp. 74–80.
whether these were historical figures, but they are introduced side by side with
details of the Gwynedd dynasty.32 This tract thus associates ruling families and
kingship in Wales not only with a sense of antiquity that set store on martial hero-
ism, but also with names linked to more contemplative arts, to literature and
cognisance within the context of an older British culture and civility. Less apparent
a feature is that those lineages that were articulated in writing relate to ruling fam-
ilies where there was either an element of military conquest or intrusion from out-
side Welsh territory per se. History is invoked as an ideological support for the
assertion of authority. The Pillar of Eliseg, or more correctly Elisedd, for instance,
emphasizes that he gained by force from the ‘power of the Angli’, or the Mercians,
what was termed the ‘inheritance’ of Powys, although it is not stated whether Elisedd
himself was linked to any earlier British leaders of the area. His claim is legitimized
by linking him to a more distant higher authority in Britain, by tracing his lineage
to the fifth-century British high king, Vortigern.33 His claim to rule is thus
established whatever his links with Powys before he gained the land by force. This
is strengthened yet again by invoking links with the Roman past by noting that his
forefather was a son of Vortigern by Severa, daughter of Magnus Maximus. The
status of a female forbear is thus introduced here, as in the case of Owain ap Hywel
Dda in Deheubarth and Dyfed, as an additional factor in his claim to rule. Record-
ing in writing the descent of rulers of the greater part of Wales from lineages
tracing their origins to the north of Britain may represent equally an effort to
legitimize intrusion from outside, possibly by military conquest, from that region.
The Historia Brittonum presents yet another myth of origin concerning
Cunedda, a figure that originated in Manaw Gododdin,34 within the imperial
Roman world of northern Britain. Cunedda, who may have lived around the turn
of the third century, had come with his twelve sons to Wales to defend its
32
Sioned Davies, The Four Branches of the Mabinogi: Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi (Llandysul:
Gomer Press, 1993); Helen Fulton, ‘The Mabinogi and the Education of Princes in Medieval
Wales’, in Medieval Celtic Literature and Society, ed. by Helen Fulton (Dublin: Four Courts Press,
2005), pp. 230–47; Catherine McKenna, ‘Revising Math: Kingship in the Fourth Branch of the
Mabinogi’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, 46 (2003), 95–118; Canu Llywarch Hen: gyda
rhagymadrodd a nodiadau gan Ifor Williams, ed. by I. Williams (Cardiff: University of Wales Press,
1935); Bartrum, Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts, pp. 86, 90.
33
Vortigern may be translated directly to ‘Gor-deyrn’. Although rendered as a personal name,
it probably represents the title of ‘High King’. This descent is not explicit, however. See Sims-
Williams, ‘Historical Need and Literary Narrative’, p. 35 n. 20.
34
A kingdom located around present-day Edinburgh.
inhabitants from attack from the north and west and to expel the Irish who had
invaded north-west Wales. He had stayed, however, and gained the reins of
power.35 He and his sons, or followers, then appear clearly in written genealogies
as the founders of dynasties throughout Wales from the river Dee to the Tywi.
How these founders of later Welsh dynasties, particularly those of Gwynedd,
Dyfed, and Ceredigion, could have been transformed from a group aiding in
defence to be ruling dynasties in Wales remains unclear and is the subject of con-
siderable debate. It has been argued that the story of Cunedda and his sons is a
mere myth introduced at a later date to support the intrusion of Merfyn Frych of
‘Manaw’ as ruler of Gwynedd sometime after 817, and who married the daughter
of Gwynedd’s former king, Cynan. Chronological inconsistencies, and the chrono-
logical impossibility of all named sons being of the same father, have been pointed
out to underline the mythical element.36 The story has also been defended, how-
ever, as encapsulating in a telescopic form an intrusion into Gwynedd and other
parts of Wales of an external authority.37 Recent archaeological analysis of Rhos
and Rhufoniog in north Wales also supports the theory of intrusive settlement by
a people who shared in the material culture of northern Britain, into a zone previ-
ously influenced by a more thorough interaction with the Roman world.38 This is
an area, indeed, whose ruler is noted in BL, MS Harley 3859 as descending from
a north British origin through Cunedda. The genealogy may thus represent the
framework of intrusion and settlement rather than precise historical truth, and its
significance is underlined by preserving it in writing. Another example where
intrusion from outside is given ideological underpinning by genealogy is the
recording, along with the Irish element in the descent of the rulers of Dyfed and
Brycheiniog, of a strong association with a classical and imperial past, including
links through female ancestors. This is yet another instance of an attempt to under-
line the honour of rulers despite an intrusive element in their lineage. That
intrusion may not necessarily have been by military invasion or settlement. In the
35
Historia Brittonum, ed. by Dumville, Chapter 14.
36
See also D. N. Dumville, ‘The Historical Value of the Historia Brittonum’, Arthurian Litera-
ture, 6 (1986), 1–26; Sims-Williams, ‘Historical Need and Literary Narrative’, passim.
37
R . Geraint Gruffudd, ‘From Gododdin to Gwynedd: Reflections on the Story of Cunedda’,
Studia Celtica, 24–25 (1989–90), 1–14.
38
Arwel Lloyd Owen, ‘Archaeoleg Tirweddol yn Rhos a Rhufoniog rhwng diwedd y cyfnod
Rhufeinig a’r cyfnod canoloesol cynnar’ [Landscape archaeology in Rhos and Rhufoniog between
the end of the Roman perioed and the early medieval period], (BA dissertation, University of Wales
Bangor, 2005), passim.
case of Brycheiniog, the marriage of the daughter of a British king with an Irish
ruler is the dominant element.39
That legitimizing an intrusive element was an important factor in committing
genealogical information to writing is confirmed in later compilations. This is
illustrated by the inclusion of a detailed but imperfect genealogy of Gruffudd ap
Cynan at the beginning of his biography written very soon after his death in
1137.40 A mid-thirteenth-century translation of the biography was made into
Welsh, the ‘Historia hen Gruffud vab Kenan vab Yago’.41 Gruffudd had in 1075
invaded Gwynedd to gain the kingdom that his grandfather, Iago, had ruled briefly
from 1033 until he was assassinated in 1039. Gruffudd had been born in Dublin,
where his father Cynan had sought refuge after his father’s assassination, and his
mother, Ragnell, was of mixed Irish and Norse stock. Since neither his father nor
his uncle had been King of Gwynedd, he was not among the group that could be
considered potential kings for the region according to the tenets of Welsh law,42
so that when he gained a foothold in Gwynedd in 1075 with the aid of Hiberno-
Norse support and consolidated his position by the end of the 1080s, it was sanc-
tioned by dint of military prowess rather than by a formal claim by descent. Yet the
genealogy recites his descent on both his father’s and his mother’s side as a prelude
to outlining his claim to ‘tref y dat’ or patrimony.43 It emphasized in the ensuing
text that it is his descent that gave him a right of proprietorship and the right to the
loyalty of subjects in Gwynedd. He was their ‘arglwyd priodawr’, or rightful lord,
in contrast to lords who had intruded from elsewhere without such right;44
Gwynedd is described as a territory that he held ‘as of right as a patrimony’.45
39
See notes 13–14 above.
40
Vita Griffini Filii Conan: The Medieval Latin Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan, ed. and trans. by
Paul Russell (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005).
41
Historia Gruffud vab Kenan, I, ed. by Evans; Bartrum, Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts, pp.
35–37. On the errors, see ibid., pp. 134–36.
42
See below.
43
This section discusses the terms used in the Welsh version of the biography. See Historia
Gruffud vab Kenan, ed. by Evans, p. 7. See also p. 8, where Gwynedd is described as ‘y wir dref tat
ef’ (his true patrimony). Translations are my own.
44
Historia Gruffud vab Kenan, ed. by Evans, p. 7, ‘ampriodoryon argluydi dyuot o le arall’
(lords who had intruded from elsewhere without right of proprietorship); p. 9, ‘argluydi a doethoed
idi o le arall’ (lords who had come there from another place).
45
Historia Gruffud vab Kenan, ed. by Evans, p. 16, ‘yd ymchwelus y’u briodoler a thref y dat
e hun’ (he returned to his rightful territory and his own patrimony).
Kingship is also discussed in this text in the context of inheritance, and it is of sig-
nificance that this link had been instilled in Gruffudd by his mother who, it is said,
daily reminded him who his father was, the nature of his ‘patrimony’, and kingship.
Alien people, it was claimed, had usurped that ‘paternal kingdom’.46 In the Historia
we thus have a clear theoretical statement of the association between lineage and
the right to rule. His mother’s Irish background, where the link between descent
and claim to kingship was an integral part of royal inauguration ceremonies, may
have given him an even greater awareness of the importance of this.47 The patri-
lineal descent links him clearly with Rhodri Mawr, and then shows his descent
through Cunedda to Adam, on both Rhodri’s mother’s and father’s sides. The
patrilineal descent of Rhodri Mawr in particular emphasized links with imperial
Rome. More interestingly, however, Gruffudd’s lineage through his mother is also
given, both patrilineally and matrilineally, showing his descent from an array of
Irish and Norse rulers, including his maternal grandfather, Olaf, king of Dublin,
and more distantly, inter alia, Harald Fairhair of Norway, Tuathal of Leinster, and
Brian of Munster. Whereas this did not provide him with a link to territorial or
regal claims in Wales, it enhanced his status as a man of wider royal status. His
bilateral descent by blood emphasizing a position of royalty thus served to provide
further ideological support for his otherwise distant claim to rule Gwynedd,48 and
to mask the fact that he was as much an interloper as those ‘alien’ rulers he con-
demned. In these examples, therefore, an impetus to provide a justification over
and above military conquest may explain the prominence given to these particular
lineages in the genealogical information that was recorded in writing.49
46
Historia Gruffud vab Kenan, ed. by Evans, p. 4, ‘ymplith y chenedel [. . .] y managei y vamm
idav beunyd pwy a pha ryv wr oed y dat, a pha tref tat oed idav, a pha ryv vrenhinyaeth, [. . .] bod
estravn genhedloed en argluydi ar y dadaul deyrnas’ (among her own people [. . .] his mother told
him daily what kind of man his father was, and what was his patrimony, and the nature of his
kingship [. . .] that alien people were acting as lords over his paternal kingdom).
47
M. Dillon, ‘The Consecration of Irish Kings’, Celtica, 10 (1973), 1–8; F. J. Byrne, Irish Kings
and High-Kings (London: Batsford, 1973).
48
T. M. Charles-Edwards, Early Irish and Welsh Kinship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993),
pp. 220–24. See also D. Thornton, ‘The Genealogy of Gruffudd ap Cynan’, in Gruffudd ap Cynan:
A Collaborative Biography, ed. by K. L. Maund (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1996), pp. 79–108; K. L
Maund, ‘“Gruffudd, Grandson of Iago”: Historia Gruffudd vab Kenan and the Construction of
Legitimacy’, in ibid., pp. 109–16.
49
N. A. Jones, ‘Gruffud vab Kenan: The First Audience’, in Gruffudd ap Cynan, ed. by Maund,
pp. 149–56; M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, England 1066–1307, 2nd edn
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 87.
Genealogies of royal dynasties were not the only early ones to be preserved in
writing, and two strands have been identified within the genre in the past, separat-
ing genealogies of secular figures from those of saints or religious men and
women.50 Genealogies tracing the descent of individuals perceived to have been
associated with the establishment of churches in Wales are indeed a prominent
strand and include information in various ‘Lives of Saints’51 recorded in texts
dating from the end of the eleventh century and in manuscripts dating from the
twelfth century onwards. These include the genealogies of those who had extensive
cults in Wales, such as David, Illtud, and Beuno, with links between Wales and Ire-
land, Cornwall, Devon, and Brittany also being noted, emphasizing the antiquity
of a Christian network that predated Roman-Augustinian ecclesiastical institu-
tions. The ancestry noted is in many cases, however, shared with that of secular
rulers so that secular rule and religious authority are intertwined within the same
families. The link between the dynasty of Brycheiniog and religious men and
women has already been noted, and the ancestry of religious men of south Wales
is shown to be shared with the dynasties of Dyfed and the kingdom of Glywysing
in south-east Wales in particular.52 A notable example is the linking of the dynas-
ties of Brycheiniog and Ceredigion with Saint David, his grandmother noted as the
daughter of Brychan Brycheiniog, and his grandfather, Ceredig, the founder of the
Ceredigion dynasty and named as a son of Cunedda.53 Tracts known as ‘Bonedd
y Saint’ (Lineage of the Saints), compiled originally during the twelfth century, and
a later tract ‘Achau’r Saint’ (Genealogies of the Saints)54 again reveal contacts with
Ireland and Brittany but also emphasize a link with northern Britain and, signifi-
cantly, links with those that are known to have ruled as kings tracing their origins
50
Francis Jones, ‘An Approach to Welsh Genealogy’, Transactions of the Honourable Society
of Cymmrodorion (1948), 303–466 (pp. 309–10).
51
See ‘Lives of the Saints’, ‘Bonedd y Saint’, and ‘Achau’r Saint’, in Bartrum, Early Welsh Gene-
alogical Tracts, pp. 22–31, 51–67, and 67–71 and sources quoted therein. See, for example, the ‘Life
of Saint Samson’ recorded in Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, MS 17808 (c. 1000) and the ‘Life of
Cadog’ in BL, MS Cotton Vespasian A XIV, fols 17r, 28v, 37r–v .
52
Bartrum, Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts, pp. 22–31, 51–67, and 67–71.
53
Bartrum, Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts, pp. 15, 18, 20, 26, 43, 55. There are chronological
inconsistencies between different versions of his ancestry.
54
The earliest surviving manuscript for ‘Bonedd y Saint’ dates from the third quarter of the
thirteenth century. For ‘Achau’r Saint’, the earliest manuscript copy is that made in 1527 by Elis
Gruffydd, now MS Cardiff 5, pp. 117–20. Printed versions in Bartrum, Early Welsh Genealogical
Tracts, pp. 51–67, 68–71.
to Cunedda. Whereas putting such information in writing may have been influ-
enced in part by the fact that literacy was the preserve of religious men, recording
their dynastic link with secular ruling families during the eleventh and twelfth
centuries may also have been associated with political events, as Welsh religious
structures were challenged as much as secular structures in the aftermath of 1066.
Such recorded genealogies gave the legitimacy of antiquity to Welsh religious insti-
tutions and practice in the face of the establishment of Norman structures. Whilst
this was one impetus to the construction of a written record, it emphasized equally
the Christian heritage of secular rulers in Wales. And in the context of the period
in which these compilations appear to have been first put into writing, the act was
as much a political statement legitimizing and upholding secular authority as the
written genealogies of the secular rulers themselves.
Such information continued to be of political relevance during the thirteenth
century, and this is evidenced by the fact that written compilations of genealogical
material, based on the earlier manuscripts noted above, continued to be made with
additional information relating to those ruling during that century, particularly its
first half. The genealogy of Llywelyn ab Iorwerth of Gwynedd (d. 1240) is given
particular prominence in one thirteenth-century compilation, including features
that embellished the honour and antiquity of his perceived lineage.55 His descent
is traced to Cunedda, to Beli, and indeed to Adam, and his honour is traced through
both patrilineal and matrilineal lines, recalling the pattern in the genealogy of
Gruffudd ap Cynan given in his biography. Gruffudd’s genealogy is indeed repeated
in this thirteenth-century compilation. This again would have enhanced the honour
and kingly status of a ruler who had gained his position by the sword during the
closing years of the twelfth century after a heavily contested internecine struggle
for power in Gwynedd. It is significant, indeed, that in the genealogy Llywelyn’s
own father, Iorwerth, is the first of the children of Owain Gwynedd (d. 1170) to
be named, and hence accorded a particular precedence.56 Once again, the political
use of ancestry may be suggested, as Llywelyn himself sought to consolidate his
position. The genealogies of nine other native families follow, emphasizing their
varying degrees of consanguinity with Llywelyn and tracing their ancestry variously
to Cunedda, Magnus Maximus, and others. One highly significant addition is the
55
Bartrum, Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts, pp. 95–110. For manuscript sources, see ibid., pp.
75–80. Contemporary manuscripts have not survived, the earliest extant version being copied c.
1475 from a thirteenth-century source by Gutun Owain, Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales,
MS Peniarth 131, pp. 74, 79–92, 109–23.
56
Bartrum, Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts, pp. 96–97.
inclusion also of the genealogy of Ednyfed Fychan, Llywelyn’s seneschal, and this
relegates the lineages of individual rulers other than Llywelyn to a lesser status,57
poignantly emphasizing his own primacy not only in Gwynedd, but in Wales as a
whole. That genealogical knowledge was adopted and adapted to serve political
ends in other areas of Wales is also reflected in Jesus College MS 20, fols 33r–41r.58
This consists of a compilation of material much of which is contained in other
sources such as ‘The children of Brychan’, but it also contains information not
found elsewhere relating to dynasties of mid- and south Wales, including Glamorgan.
The text emphasizes the status of Rhys Gryg of Deheubarth (d. 1234) and his blood
ties with other royal dynasties, including those of Gwynedd and Powys, but extolling
Llywelyn ab Iorwerth to a far lesser extent than the material noted above preserved
in Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 131.59 An earlier example
associated with Deheubarth is the misleading genealogical material quoted by
Giraldus Cambrensis himself in his Descriptio Kambriae to underpin the undue
prominence he gives to the lineage of that territory in his version of its history.60
The link between historical narratives and genealogy has already been noticed.
Awareness of descent, kindred, and affinity is certainly present in the chronicles or
Brutiau that were put into their final form during the late thirteenth century.
These were annals that included an increasing amount of detail from the beginning
of the eleventh century,61 and kin relationships can be pieced together from refer-
ences to individuals. Sometimes a more detailed explanation of kin relationship is
given, such as the account of links between Owain ap Cadwgan of Powys and Nest,
57
Ednyfed Fychan’s genealogy is traced through his father to King Cole and his mother to Beli,
thus according him the honour of a shared lineage with Llywelyn, his master. See also D. E.
Thornton, ‘A Neglected Genealogy of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies,
23 (1992), 9–23.
58
Dated to c. 1340 from material compiled during the mid-thirteenth century. For its dating,
see Bartrum, Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts, pp. 41–42; for the genealogies, pp. 42–50.
59
The text of the genealogies in Jesus College MS 20 are noted in Bartrum, Early Welsh
Genealogical Tracts, p. 41, as being corrupt in many places.
60
Descriptio Kambriae, I, Chapters II and III, pp. 166–67.
61
Annales Cambriae, ed. by J. Williams ab Ithel, Rolls Series, 20 (London, 1860); Brut y
Tywysogyon, Peniarth MS 20., ed. and trans. by Jones; Brut y Tywysogyon, or the Chronicle of the
Princes, Red Book of Hergest Version, ed. and trans. by Thomas Jones, University of Wales, Board
of Celtic Studies’ History and Law Series, 16 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1955); ‘Cronica
de Wallia and Other Documents from the Exeter Library MS. 3514’, ed. by Thomas Jones, Bulletin
of the Board of Celtic Studies, 12 (1946–48), 27–44. See also Thomas Jones, ‘Historical Writing in
Medieval Welsh’, Scottish Studies, 12 (1968), 15–27.
daughter of Rhys ap Tewdwr sub 1109 in Brut y Tywysogion.62 The intricate under-
standing of the family links and associations displayed here reflects existing in-depth
knowledge of the genealogies. A deep knowledge is also shown, in the MS Peni-
arth 20 version of the Brut, of the lineage of Deheubarth.63 An awareness of lineage
and genealogy pervades the historical narratives, and this is indeed a reflection of
the emphasis on descent as a basis for a claim to rule and as an ideological justifica-
tion for authority. Only occasionally, however, as in the case of Owain ap Cadwgan
and Nest ferch Rhys ap Tewdwr, are full individual genealogies presented directly,
and in most instances the reader is left to piece together longer lineages. The
chronicles are, however, valuable in providing dates and chronological hooks that
are not present in more direct genealogical tracts and also provide a fuller context
to the nature of interaction between both rulers and kin.
As shown above, pre-1300 genealogical tracts vary considerably in their accu-
racy, and their presentational form makes verification almost impossible. They are
all narrative rather than tabular and have been classified into two forms,64 neither
of which contain elaborate or much incidental detail. This applies at times even if
genealogies are found embedded within a literary source such as the biography of
Gruffudd ap Cynan.65 Both forms consist of lists of names of individuals some-
times, but not always, associated with particular territories, but no dates are given.
Dating has to be inferred by association with other sources such as the various
historiae, annals, or chronicles, one of which would be the Annales Cambriae noted
above.66 Annals and genealogies occur consecutively in some manuscripts, such as
BL, MS Harley 3859, possibly indicating a functional link between the two texts.
It is, however, impossible to identify or date accurately individuals who appear as
mere names the further back a lineage is traced. Of the two forms, the catalogue
form is the barest, consisting of a mere list of names in a column, as found in
sections of BL, MS Harley 3859, whilst a ‘sentence list of ancestors’, consisting of
individual names connected by an ‘ap’ or ‘m’ for a son and ‘merch’ for daughter,
62
Brut y Tywysogyon, Peniarth MS 20., ed. by Jones, p. 28.
63
Brut y Tywysogyon, Peniarth MS 20., ed. by Jones, p. 39.
64
P. C. Bartrum, ‘Notes on the Welsh Genealogical Manuscripts’, Transactions of the
Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1968, pt. 1), 63–98, esp. pp. 65–67; Jones, ‘An Approach
to Welsh Genealogy’, pp. 310, 325.
65
Historia Gruffud vab Kenan, ed. by Evans, I, p. cciv.
66
Annales Cambriae, ed. by Williams ab Ithel; Annales Cambriae AD 682–954: Texts A-C in
Parallel, ed. and trans. by D. N. Dumville (Cambridge: Department of Anglo Saxon, Norse and
Celtic, University of Cambridge, 2002).
‘with an occasional item of interest added’, has been identified as another form.67
This second form is noted as the commonest, persisting for Welsh genealogies to
the end of the seventeenth century. Their form also varies in terms of whether they
ascend or descend. Most are in ascending order, so tracing back to an expanding
cohort of forbears, and concentrating in the main on male lines, though, as noted
above, matrilineal lines are also seen where that enhances status. Descending
genealogies are not as numerous, the prime early examples being those recording
the progeny of Brychan, including his daughters, whose involvement in Christian
endeavour underlined the Christian credentials of the secular lineages with which
they intermarried.68
The total amount of pre-1300 recorded genealogical narrative is relatively low
for Wales, however, in comparison with Ireland,69 and this is consistent with the
comment, ‘A notable feature of the distribution of genealogies and king-lists is that
the further west one goes the more there are’.70 It may well be, however, that gene-
alogies recorded in writing represent only a fraction of what was held in memory
and that, as noted above, it was only in extraordinary political circumstances that
they were committed to writing at all, with the unstated aim of providing ideo-
logical support for a claim to rule. Another possible explanation is that bare lists
may well have acted, indeed, as aides-mémoire for a fuller, oral enunciation of
pedigrees before an audience — as abbreviated formulae in treatises on musical
performance provided a framework for more elaborate detail in performance — so
that precise accuracy was not of the essence.71 The possibility of memory and oral
transmission predominating is suggested by internal evidence in the written
material itself. Omissions can certainly be identified, including some significant
figures such as Merfyn Frych, father of Rhodri Mawr, omitted from ‘Ach Llywelyn
ap Iorwerth Drwyndwn’ in MS Peniarth 131, but identified in the earlier BL, MS
67
Jones, ‘An Approach to Welsh Genealogy’, p. 325.
68
See above, pp. 178–79.
69
Charles-Edwards, Early Irish and Welsh Kinship: ‘The first thing that must impress anyone
inspecting early Irish collections of genealogies is their sheer bulk’ (p. 111).
70
Dumville, ‘Kingship, Genealogies and Regnal Lists’, p. 76.
71
Pekka Toivanen, ‘The Robert ap Huw Manuscript and the Dilemma of Transcription’,
Welsh Music History, 3 (2000), 97–113; Sally Harper, ‘The Robert ap Huw Manuscript and the
Canons of Sixteenth-Century Welsh Harp Music’, Welsh Music History, 3 (2000), 130–61; Peter
Greenhill, ‘Melodic Formulas in the Robert ap Hugh Manuscript’, Welsh Music History, 3 (2000),
217–36.
Harley 3589 and in Jesus College MS 20.72 The material in each genealogy relates
to the same individuals, but is not directly copied, and such omission suggests an
act of putting parallel oral information into writing at different times. Again, the
fact that greater detail is found in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscript
versions of older genealogies, including Bonedd Tywyssogion Kymrv in which the
genealogy of Llywelyn ab Iorwerth noted above takes a prominent place,73 or Jesus
College MS 20, also suggests that such information must have been available and
transmitted orally before the addition of detail at this point in time was possible,
unless deliberate invention occurred. The addition by a thirteenth-century
translator into Welsh of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae of
genealogical information associated with the tale of Lludd and Llefelys, material
that was not contained in the original, is another indication of the depth of gene-
alogical knowledge that existed within a native, oral, Welsh culture.74
The progress of the process of conversion from oral to written transmission of
genealogical material is not a simple matter of chronology, however. This is sug-
gested by Giraldus Cambrensis in his Descriptio Kambriae.75 Not only does he give
an indication of who was responsible for holding this information in memory at
the turn of the twelfth century, but he also raises the tantalizing possibility that
even in his time there existed versions written in Welsh of genealogies. ‘It should
be noted,’ wrote Giraldus, ‘that Welsh bards and declaimers, or reciters, have the
genealogy of the aforesaid princes in their ancient and authentic books, but written
nevertheless in Welsh.’ If there were such ‘books’, they appear not to have survived.
Another striking feature in the same passage, however, is the link made between
genealogical knowledge and bards, or poets. Bards, said Giraldus, ‘also retain them
in memory from Roderic the Great to the Holy Virgin; and from thence to Sylvius,
Ascanius and Aeneas; and from Aeneas to Adam they present the descent lineally’.
The role of bards in transmitting royal pedigrees, both orally and in writing, is thus
given specific comment. The function of bards as guardians of knowledge, or
72
BL, MS Harley 3859, fol. 193r ; Jesus College MS 20, fols 37r –38r ; MS Peniarth 131, p. 79.
73
See above, note 57.
74
B. F. Roberts, ‘Oral Tradition and Welsh Literature: A Description and Survey’, Oral Tradi-
tion, 3 (1988), 61–87, esp. p. 68. See also D. E. Thornton, ‘Orality, Literacy and Genealogy’, in
Literacy in Medieval Celtic Societies, ed. by Huw Pryce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988), pp. 83–98; and P. Sims-Williams, ‘The Uses of Writing in Early Medieval Wales’, in ibid.,
pp. 15–38.
75
Descriptio Kambriae, I, Chapter III, pp. 167–68.
cyfarwyddiaid,76 who were well versed in the customs and traditions of Welsh so-
ciety during the medieval period, has been identified in other sources as including
the transmission of ‘history, genealogies and origin narratives’.77 A Welsh bardic
triad, moreover, states that ‘knowledge of history’ was one of the three elements that
gave poets or bards breadth of mind, indicating that they also acted as the identi-
fied experts in this learning.78 A late medieval treatise expands on the knowledge
that a bard should hold, noting specifically that it should include genealogy as one
of the three ‘memories’ or Tri Chof.79 Furthermore, bearing in mind that bards
were included among office-holders of the king’s household in Welsh lawbooks,80
it is not surprising that genealogical knowledge was given a political edge, particularly
during the rapidly changing circumstances between the tenth century and 1300. The
formulation of an ‘official view’ by an elite group of sages, and their ownership of
narratives relating to this, is well attested in other cultures, ancient and modern.81
One feature identified as common to several cultures is the declamation of pedigrees
76
This translates as ‘those who are knowledgeable’.
77
Roberts, ‘Oral Tradition and Welsh Literature’, p. 62; Sims-Williams, ‘Some Functions of
Origin Stories in Early Medieval Wales’, p. 101.
78
R . Bromwich, ‘Traddodiad llafar y chwedlau’, in Y Traddodiad Rhyddiaith yn yr Oesau
Canol, ed. by Geraint Bowen (Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1974), pp. 146–75 (p. 152); G. J. Williams,
‘Tri Chof Ynys Brydain’, Llên Cymru, 3 (1954–55), 234–39. It has been suggested more recently
that the English treatise, appearing only in a seventeenth-century manuscript by John Jones of
Gellilyfdy, was compiled by John Jones himself; see J. E. C. Williams, ‘Gutun Owain’, in A Guide
to Welsh Literature 1282–c.1550, ed. by A. O. H. Jarman and G. R. Hughes, rev. by D. Johnston
(Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), pp. 240–55 (pp. 241–43). For a view on the use of
traditional motifs to underpin new political institutions, see D. C. Harvey and Rhys Jones,
‘Custom and Habit(us): The Meaning of Traditions and Legends in Early Medieval Western
Britain’, Geografiska Annaler, series B: Human Geography, 81 (1999), 223–33.
79
In a manuscript by John Jones, Gellilyfdy.
80
For the Venedotian version of the laws, Llyfr Iorwerth: A Critical Text of the Venedotian
Code of Medieval Welsh Law, ed. by A. Rh. Wiliam, University of Wales Board of Celtic Studies,
History and Law Series, 18 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1969), pp. 8–9; D. Jenkins, ‘Bardd
teulu and pencerdd’ in The Welsh King and his Court, ed. by T. M. Charles-Edwards, Morfydd E.
Owen, and Paul Russell (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), pp. 142–66.
81
P. I. Lynch, ‘Court Poetry, Power and Politics’, in Welsh King and his Court, ed. by Charles-
Edwards, Owen, and Russell, pp. 167–90. For the dynamics of this process with regard to
genealogies in twentieth-century Africa, see Jan Vansina, Oral Traditions as History (Wisconsin:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 37–39, 95–107. For comparison with classical Greece,
see Rosalind Thomas, Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1989), Chap. 3, pp. 155–95, esp. pp. 187–89.
by an elite on important occasions, such as ceremonies associated with succession.82

This is known to have happened in Scotland at the inauguration of Alexander III
as king in 1249 and it was, indeed, a poet that did so at that ceremony; it was also
a feature in the inauguration of Irish kings.83 In Wales, evidence relating to invest-
ing or inauguration ceremonies, such as that of Dafydd ap Llywelyn in 1238, is too
thin to say whether such a performance was carried out, but Giraldus’s testimony
points, if anything, to declamation and performance before a more general public
audience. He speaks, with regard to ‘princely genealogies’, of bards and declaimers
‘performing’ the descent lineally to a distant past, then, when describing a general
penchant among the Welsh for genealogy, relates how ‘anyone’ could freely re-
count his own descent from generation to generation ‘as above on the descent of
princes’, as if this, too, was a frequent occurrence. Genealogical information was
thus a genre expected to be transmitted orally, a memorized corpus of information
to be performed, not read. As such, and operating within a system to which the
general population was, according to Giraldus, accustomed, it was a potent vehicle
to reinforce a ruler’s claim to authority by appealing to his subjects in general. The
bard-declaimers could thus be described as an interface between ruler and subject.
In Ireland, poetry was certainly used as a vehicle to communicate royal gene-
alogy.84 In Wales, somewhat surprisingly, this was not the case, despite the fact that
experts in this knowledge were bards and poets. The Welsh law tractates name bards
as officials of the court, including a master poet (pencerdd) and household poet
(bardd teulu), and a master poet was enjoined to produce at court compositions to
honour the ruler in whose court he was. The performance would be a combined act
of extolling and entertaining.85 Poetry relating the ruler’s lineage should thus be
expected. Some 12,600 lines of poetic material composed by bards associated with
ruling dynasties in Wales 1100–1282/3, now collectively called the ‘Poets of the
Princes’, have survived and are now edited and published in a seven-volume series.86
82
Vansina, Oral Traditions as History, p. 95.
83
John Bannerman, ‘The King’s Poet and the Inauguration of Alexander III’, Scottish Historical
Review, 68 (1989), 120–49; Dillon, ‘Consecration of Irish Kings’, pp. 1–8; Byrne, Irish Kings and
High-Kings.
84
Bannerman, ‘The King’s Poet and the Inauguration of Alexander III’; Dillon, ‘Consecration
of Irish Kings’; Byrne, Irish Kings and High-Kings; and M. Dillon, ‘A Poem on the Kings of the
Eoganachta’, Celtica, 10 (1973), 9–14.
85
Llyfr Iorwerth, ed. by Wiliam, pp. 10, 40.
86
The series is entitled Beirdd y Tywysogion, under the general editorship of R. Geraint
Gruffudd, and all volumes published at Cardiff by University of Wales Press. These are, I: Gwaith
They contain nothing comparable, however, to the Irish genealogical poems,

although it has been suggested that their ritual and formulaic nature, and the
majestic if not bombastic awdl form in which many were composed, indicated
public performance on special occasions.87 The nearest to a rendition of genealogy
in poetry is an ode in praise of Owain Gwynedd (d. 1170) by Gwalchmai ap
Meilyr, which illustrates dynastic knowledge that matches the narrative lists of
names. Each section opens by naming one of Owain’s ancestors, and the last sec-
tion but one is indeed a list, in ascending order, of four generations of his forbears
from Maelgwn Gwynedd (d. 547) back to Einion Yrth.88 Such a full account is rare,
and the main elements in the praise extended to a patron ruler, be it in life or in
elegiac compositions, are strength, fortitude and military achievements, and gene-
rosity of spirit, emphasizing the practical necessity of such attributes in the art of
ruling. At the same time poets could also remind their patrons of ideals to be aimed
at and present cogent criticism.89 This is not to say, however, that lineage as a topos
is ignored. Gwalchmai may be singled out as a poet that put particular emphasis on
genealogy in his praise of Owain Gwynedd, and also Cynddelw in his praise to the
same ruler-patron, but reference to the political potentialities of blood relationship
is made in several compositions. Meilyr Brydydd, for instance, mentions the poten-
tial heirs of a ruler, as two sons of Gruffudd ap Cynan, Owain and Cadwaladr, are
Meilyr Brydydd a’i Ddisgynyddion, ed. by J. E. C. Williams and others (1994); II: Gwaith Llywelyn
Fardd I ac Eraill o Feirdd y Ddeuddegfed Ganrif, ed. by M. E. Owen and others (1994); III, IV :
Gwaith Cynddelw Brydydd Mawr, vols I and II, ed. by Nerys Ann Jones and others (1991–95); V :
Gwaith Llywarch ap Llywelyn, ‘Prydydd y Moch’, ed. by Elin M. Jones and others (1989); VI:
Gwaith Dafydd Benfras ac Eraill o Feirdd Hanner Cyntaf y Drydedd Ganrif ar Ddeg, ed. by N. G.
Costigan and others (1995); VII: Gwaith Bleddyn Fardd ac Eraill o Feirdd Ail Hanner y Drydedd
Ganrif ar Ddeg, ed. by Rhian Andrews and others (1996). Twenty-five poets or bards are identified
and were not attached exclusively to one ruler or one royal lineage. Prydydd y Moch, fl. mid-
thirteenth century, for instance, composed to members of the dynasties of Gwynedd, Powys, and
Deheubarth. Only three have no surviving composition to members of the Gwynedd family,
however, including Gwynfardd Brycheiniog, poet of the Lord Rhys of Deheubarth. See M. E.
Owen, ‘Noddwyr a beirdd’, in Beirdd a Thywysogion: Barddoniaeth Llys yng Nghymru, Iwerddon
a’r Alban, ed. by B. F. Roberts and M. E. Owen (Cardiff: University of Wales Press and the
National Library of Wales, 1996), pp. 75–107 (pp. 79, 81, 83).
87
Owen, ‘Noddwyr a beirdd’, pp. 76, 88–89.
88
Gwaith Meilyr Brydydd, ed. by Williams and others, poem 8. See Owen, ‘Noddwyr a beirdd’,
pp. 92–93.
89
J. B. Smith, ‘Gwlad ac arglwydd’, in Beirdd a Thywysgoion, ed. by Roberts and Owen, pp.
237–57 (pp. 240–41).
praised in his elegy to Gruffudd on his death in 1137.90 Poems also include
allusions to ancestors that are known from contemporary genealogical lists, and the
allusions are used as a measure to compare the abilities and achievements of the
present. This appears in the direct transposition of Llywelyn ab Iorwerth and his
ancestor, Maelgwn Gwynedd, as a means of comparison.91 The importance of
descent in a claim to authority is also recognized. That a ruler is a scion of a par-
ticular ‘hil’ is presented regularly, but only by reference to prominent individuals
from that bloodline, rather than by relating the whole lineage. Dafydd ab Owain,
son of Owain Gwynedd, is described as being of the stock of Beli — ‘o hil Beli’ —
by Prydydd y Moch,92 for instance, but all this assumes an existing knowledge of
ancestry and genealogy before the allusions could be understood by an audience.
This emphasizes, once again, that although poetic praise and keeping genealogical
information were both roles given to bards, the presentation of genealogical knowl-
edge relating to kingship belonged to a separate genre that was oral and may have
involved repetition before an audience that ensured memorization by a wider group,
as suggested by Giraldus, than a court audience before whom much of the poetry was
performed. It could thus be considered propaganda aimed at two different groups.
When elements of this information were transposed into written form, it was com-
mitted to prose narrative rather than poetry, sometimes embedded in historical
narrative but more frequently as mere lists with little incidental information.
Quite apart from the use of historic descent as a legitimizing factor for exer-
cising authority, knowledge of blood relationship was also an integral part of the
process of royal succession, and bards also appear to have had a role in this respect.
The customs that governed inheritance of authority in Wales were far more intri-
cate than the salic law that emerged in many European kingdoms by the twelfth
century by which authority descended to the eldest legitimate son of the former
ruler. It has been argued that in Wales the practice was for a ruler to select a desig-
nated heir to undivided political authority within his territory. The selection of
such an heir, called in Welsh edling or gwrthrychiad, would take place during the
life of a ruler from a group of blood relations beyond the descendants of his body,
a group called the membra regis or in Welsh, aelodau’r brenin.93 This practice of
90
Owen, ‘Noddwyr a beirdd’, p. 78.
91
Gwaith Dafydd Benfras ac Eraill, ed. by Costigan and others, poem 15.
92
Gwaith Llywarch ap Llywelyn, ‘Prydydd y Moch’, ed. by Jones and others, poem 2.
93
J. B. Smith, ‘Dynastic Succession in Medieval Wales’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies,
33 (1986), 199–232; Smith, ‘The Succession to Welsh Princely Inheritance: The Evidence
selection was embodied in Welsh law and as such appears as an integral part of the
laws of the court in law tractates. Membra regis were defined, for instance, as sons,
nephews, or cousins of the ruler in the Gwynedd or Venedotian version of the law
tractates and were narrowed down even further to someone who should be either
the son or nephew of the king.94 Selection from such a group would, in theory,
ensure the succession of the ablest ruler whilst retaining rule in the hands of the
same bloodline. It is unclear to what degree the rule was followed in practice,95 but
such a selection appears to have been made by Owain Gwynedd, king of Gwynedd
1137–1170, who elevated one of his sons, Hywel, as his designated heir, and in
Powys, with the selection by Madog ap Maredudd of Llywelyn, his son, as heir.
Those not selected to succeed to authority would then be given a landed inheri-
tance that excluded political authority, their status or braint thereafter being de-
fined according to their landholding, not in terms of potential political authority.
The legal tractate then defines the reciprocal duties and privileges of the designated
heir. Whilst the benefit of such a system should have been to ensure effective
leadership and rule so as to uphold the position and integrity of a territory or gwlad
and seemed to have worked relatively successfully in this respect until the twelfth
century, it also had within it the seeds of its own destruction. Jealousy and rivalry
over the selection of an heir could lead to internal fighting that caused weakness
and fragmentation among Welsh polities. This was particularly so when a ruler had
sons that he acknowledged by different women. Hywel ab Owain Gwynedd was
challenged, for instance, and killed in 1170, immediately after the death of his
father, by his half-brothers, Rhodri and Dafydd ab Owain.96 The infighting con-
tinued between Rhodri and Dafydd ab Owain and their nephews, Gruffudd and
Reconsidered’, in The British Isles 1100–1500: Comparisons, Contrasts and Connections, ed. by R. R.
Davies (Edinburgh: Donald, 1988), pp. 64–81; T. M. Charles-Edwards, ‘The Heir-Apparent in
Irish and Welsh Law’, Celtica, 9 (1971), 180–90; R . C. Stacey, ‘King, Queen and Edling in the
Laws of the Court’, in Welsh King and his Court, ed. by Charles-Edwards, Owen, and Russell, pp.
29–62. These arguments are distilled in Welsh by P. I. Lynch in ‘“Propaganda’r Prydydd”,
Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, Dafydd ap Llywelyn a’r Beirdd’, in Gweledigaethau: Cyfrol Deyrnged yrAthro
Gwyn Thomas, ed. by J. Walford Davies (Bangor: University of Bangor and Cyhoeddiadau
Barddas, 2007), pp. 79–120 (pp. 80–85).
94
Llyfr Iorwerth, ed. by Wiliam, pp. 2–3, membra regis are described in Welsh as ‘aylavt y’r
brenhyn’, and the process of designation is described as ‘y nep y rodho y brenhyn gobeyth a
gvrthrych ydav’ (the person on whom the king places his hope and objective). The two definitions
of membra regis introduce an element of ambiguity.
95
Davies, Conquest, Coexistence and Change, pp. 57–59.
96
Davies, Conquest, Coexistence and Change, pp. 71, 240.
Maredudd ap Cynan from 1170 until the late 1190s and was not resolved until the
emergence by martial prowess of yet another nephew, Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, as sin-
gle ruler of Gwynedd. The resolution of similar contests in Powys and Deheubarth,
on the other hand, followed a different line during the late twelfth century. The
murder of Llywelyn ap Madog of Powys in 1160, for instance, led to sharing of
power and permanent partitioning of the greater territory between a brother, three
other sons, and a nephew of Madog.97 Awareness that this weakened the power of
the rulers of individual portions, and strengthened the hand of those of undivided
gwledydd, is illustrated by the way in which Llywelyn ab Iorwerth of Gwynedd
presided over the division of Deheubarth in 1216.98 It was as powerful a weapon
as the sword in emasculating rivals. The crown itself was well aware of the value of
dividing authority as well as territory among those sharing common ancestry in its
treatment of Gwynedd itself after the death of its ruler, Dafydd ap Llywelyn, in
1246, and its division between two, and eventually four, of the sons of Dafydd’s
brother, Gruffudd, by the Treaty of Woodstock in 1247.99 Knowledge and aware-
ness of lineage — to the third degree of consanguinity — could therefore be both
the basis of a claim to authority and concurrently a weapon in the hand of a
stronger neighbour to divide and weaken the extent of regal power in medieval
Wales. This was yet another reason for an ambitious political operator like
Llywelyn ab Iorwerth to be aware not only of historical lineages, but also of current
bloodlines. These legal and practical issues may have been another reason for the
compilation of Achau Brenhinoedd a Thywysogion Cymru during Llywelyn’s time.
This may also have been a factor to explain the compilation of the contem-
poraneous Hen Lwythau Gwynedd a’r Mars, which traced the pedigrees of a differ-
ent cadre that was not necessarily of royal descent, consisting of leading families in
north Wales whose status was defined in terms of their landholding, and who were
considered uchelwyr.100 That it was recorded at all may provide a clue, however, to
who was responsible during the early thirteenth century for using genealogy in the
97
Davies, Conquest, Coexistence and Change, pp. 59–60.
98
J. B. Smith, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1986), pp. 17–25.
99
Smith, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, pp. 55–69.
100
P. C. Bartrum, ‘Hen Lwythau Gwynedd a’r Mars’, National Library of Wales Journal, 12
(1962), 201–35, esp. pp. 205–12; Bartrum, Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts, pp. 111–20, 154–58.
For dating the compilation to the thirteenth century, see pp. 74–80. The earliest surviving manu-
scripts containing this material appear to be Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth
131, pp. 84–85, 88–89, 91–92, 109–10, c. 1475 in the hand of Gutun Owain, and Aberystwyth,
National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 129, pp. 38–42, c. 1500.
formulation of political propaganda. Some of the uchelwyr noted were, like Ednyfed
Fychan, among the officials surrounding the royal house of Gwynedd, including
Meilyr, court poet of Gruffudd ap Cynan and Owain Gwynedd, noted in the gene-
alogy by the epithet ‘prydydd’.101 His son and grandson, Gwalchmai and Einion ap
Gwalchmai, were also court poets, and Einion is among the youngest generation
to be included in the compilation. No less than six of the twelve families repre-
sented in Hen Lwythau were connected by blood or marriage with Einion. Signifi-
cantly, although his lineal ancestry is traced back to Cunedda Wledig, signifying
his own high status, the cognitive genealogy traces the links back through nine
generations to a common ancestor and includes ties of blood and affinity. The
prominence given in the text to uchelwyr associated with his lineage may indeed be
an example of the kind of intricate genealogical knowledge held in memory by
Welsh families as described by Giraldus, but this time articulated as a written
record by descendants of Einion ap Gwalchmai. Einion was also a bard associated
with the court of Llywelyn Fawr of Gwynedd as his father, Gwalchmai, had been
poet to Owain Gwynedd. Owain had granted lands on privileged terms to
Gwalchmai during the twelfth century, similar to other grants made to prominent
court servants by the rulers of Gwynedd during this period. The family also served
Welsh rulers in other capacities: Meilyr, according to his own testimony, had been
engaged in diplomatic service,102 and Einion was also a lawyer prominent in the
service of Llywelyn ab Iorwerth said to have adjudged with royal justices at West-
minster in a dispute c. 1208–10 between Gwynedd and Powys.103 It has also been
suggested that Dafydd ab Einion, one of two who negotiated the Treaty of Mont-
gomery on behalf of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd in 1267 and who became seneschal to
Llywelyn, prince of Wales, in 1281, was a grandson of Einion ap Gwalchmai.104
This family more than any other, then, would have known and understood the
political aims of the rulers they served. Formulating a compilation of their own
101
Bartrum, Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts, p. 111.
102
A. D. Carr, Medieval Anglesey (Llangefni: Anglesey Antiquarian Society, 1982), pp. 50, 153;
Carr, ‘The Extent of Anglesey, 1352’, Transactions of the Anglesey Antiquarian Society (1971–72),
pp. 150–272 (pp. 161, 163, 171, 243); Owen, ‘Noddwyr a beirdd’, p. 79. On the role of his family
as diplomats, see ibid., pp. 84–85, quoting Meilyr Brydydd: ‘Eilweith ydd eithum yn negesawg |
Goleufer camawn, iawn dywysawg’.
103
D. Stephenson, The Governance of Gwynedd (Cardiff: University of Wales Press for the
University of Wales Board of Celtic Studies, 1984), p. 210.
104
Stephenson, Governance of Gwynedd, pp. 106–10 and sources quoted therein, pp. 206–07;
Smith, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, pp. 153–55, 217n., 226–27, 242n.
genealogy may be indicative of a similar process of compiling a genealogy of their

masters that gave particular primacy to Gwynedd, aimed to override traditions held
in memory. This may well be the work of Einion ap Gwalchmai himself or his de-
scendants who were equally important figures within Gwynedd’s political machine.
With the Edwardian military conquest of 1282, the question of regal claims and
succession in Wales came to an end. The compilation of genealogies and pedigrees
did not cease, but the focus shifted to families below royal status. That there was
a passionate interest in lineage on this level as well as for those with claims of
royalty had been commented on by Giraldus at the end of the twelfth century, stat-
ing that the Welsh desired good birth and nobility of descent above all else,
including luxury or material riches. All, declared Giraldus, could recall freely not
only back to great-great-grandparents, but even to the sixth or seventh degree and
beyond. ‘They prize descent [. . .] above all things.’105 For freemen in Wales, as
much as kings and rulers, knowledge of descent was vital in that free status itself
was defined in terms of kinship or belonging to a particular ‘stock’. This in turn
was based on various legal tenets, some of which were associated with the occupa-
tion, proprietorship, and devolution of free land in medieval Wales, and others
relating to a system of reparation for civil wrongs.106 It is on the tail of this that
royal genealogies were preserved, as honour was sought by association in attempts
to link family origins with legendary progenitors similar to kings, and this explains
the report to William Cecil quoted at the opening of the chapter. There is no
doubt, however, that until the demise of native royal houses lineage and descent
defined not only who was to rule but also the intellectual apparatus associated with
genealogical knowledge, which evolved to be a potent vehicle of propaganda to
underpin regality itself in Wales. By reference to past rulers — both heroes and
failures — moral and theoretical parameters were set for contemporary holders of
105
Descriptio Kambriae, I, Chapter XVII, p. 200: ‘De generositatis amore, et genealogia longe
retenta. Generositam vero, et generis nobilitatem, prae rebus omnibus magis appetunt. Unde et
generosa conjugia plus longe cupiunt, quam sumptuosa vel opima. Genealogiam quoque generis sui
etiam de populo quilibet observat; et non solum avos, atavos, et tritavos, sed usque ad sextam vel
septimam et ultra procul generationem, memoriter et prompte genus enarrat [. . .] Genus itaque
super omnia diligunt’ (On the love of noble birth and of preserving genealogy for a long time.
Indeed they covet good birth and nobility of descent above anything else. Whence they desire well-
born connections far more than luxuries or riches. Also, anyone whomsoever of the people
preserves the genealogy of his stock; and recites fluently and from memory not only grandparents,
great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents, but to the sixth or seventh generation and far
beyond that [. . .]. They prize descent, therefore, above all things; my translation).
106
Llyfr Iorwerth, ed. by Wiliam, pp. 53–60, Chapters 82–90.
power. Genealogy could also be the subject of subtle alteration according to chang-
ing political configuration, sometimes acting as a support to existing structures,
sometimes with the aim of being a weapon of change, as seen in thirteenth-century
Gwynedd. Whatever the inaccuracy and the mythical elements, it was also a feature
that crossed the interface between rulers and the ruled to enter collective, popular
belief, so much so that four centuries after the Edwardian conquest parishioners
in Gwynedd would still identify their roots with those of native rulers of the
thirteenth century. Genealogical narrative was far more than a list of names.107
107
For a full and detailed account of manuscript sources and scribes, see Jones, ‘An Approach
to Welsh Genealogy’; Bartrum, Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts; Bartrum, ‘Notes on Welsh
Genealogical Manuscripts’; Bartrum, ‘Further Notes on Welsh Genealogical Manuscripts’,
Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1976), 102–18; Bartrum, ‘Notes on the
Welsh Genealogical Manuscripts, Part 3’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion
(1988), 37–46; Bartrum, ‘Corrections to Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts’, Bulletin of the Board
of Celtic Studies, 40 (1993), 171–72; Bartrum, ‘Genealogical Sources Quoted by Gruffudd
Hiraethog’, National Library of Wales Journal, 26 (1989), 1–9; M. P. Siddons, ‘Welsh Pedigree
Rolls’, National Library of Wales Journal, 29 (1995), 1–16; Siddons, ‘Welsh Pedigree Rolls –
Additions and Corrections’, National Library of Wales Journal, 32 (2002), 433–44; D. Huws,
Medieval Welsh Manuscripts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press and the National Library of
Wales, 2000); Huws, ‘The Medieval Manuscript’, in A Nation and its Books: A History of the Book
in Wales, ed. by P. H. Jones and E. Rees (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 1998), pp.
25–39. For the post-fifteenth-century link between genealogy and heraldry, see M. P. Siddons, The
Development of Welsh Heraldry, 3 vols (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 1991–93).
Medieval lineages have been edited and compiled in tabular form in P. C. Bartrum, Welsh
Genealogies, AD 300–1400, 8 vols (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1974) and Bartrum, Welsh
Genealogies AD 1400–1500, 18 vols (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 1983).
Case Studies
N ARRATIVE, L INEAGE, AND S UCCESSION
IN THE A NGLO -N ORMAN P ROSE B RUT C HRONICLE
Julia Marvin
O
nly one of the surviving manuscripts of the Oldest Version of the Anglo-
Norman prose Brut chronicle offers any kind of general opening rubric,
and it seems notably dry: ‘E<n ce liuere est con>tenu . . . les <vies e> les
afferes des rois ke ount este en Engletere’ (in this book are contained the lives and
doings of the kings there have been in England).1 The chronicle runs from the fall
of Troy and the foundation of Britain by Aeneas’s descendant Brut to the death of
Henry III in 1272, and at first glance it does appear simply to be a chronological,
episodic narrative, a storehouse of information without any organizing principle
or argument beyond the retelling of the notable events that the writer has been able
to gather for each reign in turn.2 In its apparent comprehensiveness and
1
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 14640, quoted in The Oldest Anglo-Norman
Prose ‘Brut’ Chronicle: An Edition and Translation, ed. and trans. by Julia Marvin, Medieval Chron-
icles, 4 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), p. 347 (translation mine, hereafter Oldest). The rubric is
badly rubbed and the text in angle brackets is largely conjectural (the lacuna may have had some
form of the word tuz): it continues from here but has been mostly rubbed away, and the words sa
mere at its end suggest that the lost portion introduces the story of Brut. The two other Oldest
Version manuscripts with intact openings (London, British Library, MS Additional 35092, and
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Wood empt. 8) begin with rubrics about Brut (Oldest, pp. 73, 347).
The edition cited is based on MS Additional 35092.
2
By contrast, as noted by Gabrielle M. Spiegel, the beginning of the Grandes Chroniques voices
the explicit intention to dispel doubt over the lineage of the kings of France, and thus to demon-
strate ‘political continuity as established through genealogy’, and the work’s declared (but un-
achieved) organization is by lineage, with one book to be devoted to each of the three races of
French kings. ‘Political Utility in Medieval Historiography: A Sketch’, in The Past as Text: The
Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997),
206 Julia Marvin
untendentiousness, the prose Brut held enormous, long-lived appeal for a variety
of audiences. It saw expansion and continuation in Anglo-Norman versions
running to the 1330s (which followed the Oldest Version’s straightforward reign-
by-reign format), was translated twice into Middle English, and received a variety
of Middle English continuations into the fifteenth century. Latin translations were
made of both Anglo-Norman and Middle English prose Bruts. The Middle English
Brut was printed in thirteen editions by 1528, and in all there survive over 250
manuscripts of the different versions, ranging from lavish illuminated volumes to
cheap copies apparently made for personal use.3
Genealogy as such rarely appears as an overt concern of the Anglo-Norman
prose Brut. When its manuscripts do offer genealogical charts, they seem to come
in the form of additions: the Short Version manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library,
MS Rawlinson D. 329, for instance, contains in a separate signature a genealogical
table, with portraits and Latin verses, running from William the Conqueror to
Edward II.4 An annotator may be found trying to work out genealogical relations
on the basis of the text.5 But embedded in the Brut’s impersonal-seeming survey of
one king after another is a deeply genealogical impulse. The chronicle’s structure
unites narrative and lineage, representing them as not only coherent, but nearly
synonymous: continuous story and continuous succession.6
pp. 83–98 (p. 96 and n. 36), citing Les Grandes chroniques de France, ed. by J. Viard (Paris: Société
de l’Histoire de France, 1920–53), I, 1, 3–4.
3
For an overview of the different versions, see Oldest, pp. 47–51; and Lister M. Matheson, The
Prose ‘Brut’: The Development of a Middle English Chronicle (Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance
Texts and Studies, 1998), pp. 1–8, 30–49, with Latin and Middle English manuscripts listed on
pp. xx–xxxi. On the Middle English, see also Edward Donald Kennedy, Chronicles and Other His-
torical Writing, vol. VIII of A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050–1500, gen. ed.
Albert E. Hartung (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1989), pp. 2629–37,
2818–33. Anglo-Norman prose Brut manuscripts are catalogued in Ruth Dean, with the collabo-
ration of Maureen B. M. Boulton, Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts
(London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1999), nos 36, 42, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, pp. 24–27, 30–34.
4
Fols 1–7. This general observation is based on my examination of many, but not all, of the
fifty-one to fifty-five manuscripts of the Anglo-Norman prose Brut.
5
See, e.g., the bottom margin of Bodl. MS Wood empt. 8, fol. 40r, where there is an added
sketch of the descent of Henry II from Edmund Ironside. The corresponding moment in the text
of the chronicle is discussed below.
6
See Spiegel’s discussion of genealogy (conceived very broadly) as a foundation for both form
and meaning, as well as a linear but not calendrical sense of time, in thirteenth-century French
historical literature: in a number of ways, the prose Brut fits her model of genealogy deploying
NARRATIVE, LINEAGE, AND SUCCESSION 207
For one of the Oldest Version’s main, if unstated, goals is to give its readers a
sense of essentially unbroken lineage from the time of Brut straight through to that
of the Plantagenets in power when the chronicle was composed. The writer of the
prose Brut faces a substantial task, given the island’s long record of conquest and
displacement — a record emphasized in the chronicle’s sources such as the Historia
regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace’s Roman de Brut, Geoffrey
Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis, and the chronicle of the Praemonstratensian house of
Barlings.7 While manifesting awareness of the horrors and constant risk of dynastic
breakdown, and using the stories of vexed succession provided by his sources as
cautionary tales, he nevertheless provides an account of British history that offers
a reassuring and heroic sense of continuous heritage on a grand scale.
Over and over in the opening chapters of the prose Brut (closely based on the
plot of Geoffrey of Monmouth), families quarrel, the realm is divided, war results,
and unity is achieved again only at great cost, in a sequence leading up to the paired
stories of the brothers Ferrez and Porrez, who both die in the course of their strug-
gle for supremacy, and Brenne and Belin, who upon resolving their differences can
combine forces to conquer Rome itself.8 Ferrez and Porrez appear to represent a
worst-case scenario: civil and family war, one brother bringing an army of the French
against his own countrymen, and their mother killing her only surviving son in
grief and rage at the loss of the other. As the Oldest Version says, following Wace,
Qi oi vnqes mes de si felonesse mer, qe occist de sa maine demene son vn fiz pur lautre?
Longement apres fu la reprouaunce de ceste mere malure, qe pur lun fiz murdri lautre, e
pur lun perdi ambedeux.
‘history as a series of biographies linked by the principle of hereditary succession’. ‘Genealogy: Form
and Function in Medieval Historiography’, in Past as Text, pp. 99–110 (p. 106).
7
The editions cited here will be Historia regum Britannie, vol. I: Bern, Bürgerbibliothek, MS
568, ed. by Neil Wright (Cambridge: Brewer, 1984) (hereafter HrB); The History of the Kings of
Britain, trans. by Lewis Thorpe (New York: Penguin, 1966) (hereafter HKB); Wace’s ‘Roman de
Brut’: A History of the English, ed. and trans. by Judith Weiss (Exeter: University of Exeter Press,
1999) (hereafter RB), based on but adapted from, with line numbers identical to, Le Roman de Brut,
ed. by Ivor Arnold, 2 vols (Paris: Société des Anciens Textes Français, 1938–40); and L’Estoire des
Engleis, ed. by Alexander Bell, Anglo-Norman Text Society, 14–16 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960)
(hereafter EE). The surviving medieval manuscript of the Barlings chronicle, a very close analogue
to the prose Brut but not its immediate source, is Oxford, Magdalen College, MS lat. 199.
8
Oldest, pp. 94–100; cf. HrB, § 33–44, pp. 23–30; HKB, pp. 87–100. For the reading of Geof-
frey’s construction of history through exemplum that serves as the foundation for all subsequent
scholarly discussion, see Robert W. Hanning, The Vision of History in Early Britain: From Gildas
to Geoffrey of Monmouth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), esp. pp. 144–56.
208 Julia Marvin
[Who ever before heard of a mother so vicious that with her own hand she killed her one
son for the sake of the other? Long endured the infamy of this depraved mother, who for
the one son murdered the other, and for the one lost both.]9
But worse is to come, in the form of the anarchy that follows:

Quant ces deux freres furent issi mortz, il nauoit remis fiz ne fille ne autre del linage qe
poeit cele heritage auer. E pur ceo les riches hommes de la terre sentregerrerent, e les plus
forz enchacerent les plus febles e purpristrent lour terres, issint qil auoit par tut en chesqune
pais grant guere.
[When these two brothers had thus died, no son nor daughter nor anyone else of the
lineage remained who could have this inheritance. And therefore the rich men of the land
warred among themselves, and the stronger drove off the weaker and took over their lands,
so that everywhere in each region there was great war.]10
Division thus leads to more division, with four different men ruling England,
Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall. All suffer, and justice becomes the advantage of the
stronger: Cloten, ruler of Cornwall, ‘dust auer eu tut par resoun, qar homme ne
sauoit plus dreit heir. Mes ceux qe estoient plus fortz de li e plus de poer auoient la
terre e ne firent force de li’ (should by right have had all, for no one knew of a closer
heir. But those who were stronger and more powerful than he held the land and
did not concern themselves about him).11 The man who has the best claim to the
throne lacks the power to enforce that claim.
The situation is rectified only a generation later, when Cloten’s son Donebaud
reunites the realm by reuniting right, might, and worthiness:
Cesti Cloten auoit vn fiz qe auoit anoun Donebaud, qe apres la mort son per deuint si
beaus, si pruz, si hardifs, e si curtois qil passat tretuz les rois qe auoient este en Bretaine
tanqe a son temps, de value, de beaute, de largesce, e de proesce. E si tost come il estoit
chiualer, il pensa qe son per, tant come il vesqui, fu le plus dreit heir de tute la terre e la dust
auer eu par resoun, mes qe les autres qe furent plus fortz de li le deforcerent. E purchaca
graunt aide e grant poer, et [. . .] conquist tute la terre, e pus la meintenist en si bon pes qe
vnqes deuaunt ne fu si ben maintenue.
9
Oldest, pp. 96, 97. Cf. RB, lines 2175–80. The Oldest Version appears to draw both directly
on Geoffrey’s Historia and on Wace’s verse translation of Geoffrey: see Oldest, pp. 20–24.
10
Oldest, pp. 96, 97. Cf. RB, lines 2181–94, which the Oldest Version here follows closely;
HrB, § 33, p. 23; HKB, p. 88.
11
Oldest, pp. 96, 97. Cf. RB, lines 2207–10; as Weiss notes, Wace appears to add to Geoffrey’s
account the notion that Cloten has the best claim. Cloten is Geoffrey’s Clotenus, and Donebaud
his Dunuallo Molmutius.
[This Cloten had a son named Donebaud, who after his father’s death became so hand-
some, so worthy, so bold, and so courteous that he surpassed all the kings who had been in
Britain up to his time in worthiness, in looks, in generosity, and in prowess. And as soon
as he became a knight, he reflected on the fact that while he lived, his father had been the
closest heir to the whole land and should have had it by right, except that the others who
were stronger than he prevented him. And he secured much help and a great force, and
[. . .] he conquered the whole land, and then he kept it so peacefully that never before had
it been so well kept.]12
Donebaud reigns peacefully for forty years, but as soon as he dies trouble begins be-
tween his sons Brenne and Belin: in the prose Brut alone, Donebaud has made the
mistake of dividing the land between them.13 Once they are reconciled (through
the intervention of their mother, in another pointed contrast to the story of Ferrez
and Porrez), the succession continues smoothly from father to son for eight gene-
rations.14 Then four brothers rule in turn, with considerable contention; after the
most deserving (and only surviving) brother, Esidur, is returned to the throne for
the third time, thirty-three kings succeed him, so uneventfully that the chapter
concerning them is nothing more than a list of their names.15
Although the dramatic stories of Ferrez and Porrez and Brenne and Belin are
most vivid, the brief accounts of their aftermaths may be most telling: contested
and broken succession leading to a generation of misery, restoration achieved by
a deserving and rightful heir who seeks alliance with others, and the last-second
aversion of civil war leading to generation after generation of stability. Order is the
element that linear genealogy and smooth succession provide, and from which all
stand to benefit. Only when lineage and succession hold can the land remain
united and sound. And order is shown as something to be cultivated, not presumed
or undermined. The happiest history is that for which there is the least to report.
12
Oldest, pp. 96, 97. Cf. RB, lines 2211–82; HrB, § 34, pp. 23–24; HKB, pp. 88–89. The
Oldest Version notably omits Donebaud’s winning his last battle by trickery, as reported in Roman
de Brut and Historia regum Britanniae.
13
Oldest, p. 98. In the sources, Brenne holds his land from Belin. Cf. RB, lines 2316–26; HrB,
§ 35, p. 24; HKB, p. 90.
14
For a detailed examination of the Oldest Version’s editorial technique in relation to Wace
in the Brenne and Belin episode, see Alan MacColl, ‘Rhetoric, Narrative, and Conceptions of
History in the French Prose Brut’, Medium Ævum, 74 (2005), 288–310 (pp. 293–95). This essay,
with which my own findings are often in agreement, unfortunately appeared too late for considera-
tion in my edition of the Oldest Version.
15
Oldest, pp. 98–106. The Oldest Version’s list is drawn from the already brief accounts in
Geoffrey and Wace. Cf. RB, lines 2329–3738; HrB, § 35–52, pp. 24–34; HKB, pp. 90–106.
210 Julia Marvin
The stories of the early legendary kings of Britain provide both positive and
negative exempla — epitomized in the tale of restoration and loss provided by
Arthur, the greatest of British kings, left nevertheless with only a nephew by the
Roman name of Constantin to succeed him. Up to a point, the writer of the prose
Brut is working with extremely tractable materials, ones that show the full range
of possibilities but always bring back the rightful line. But the spectre of a Done-
baud who cannot gain his throne remains ever-present. In Geoffrey and Wace, this
possibility is realized in the person of Cadwallader, last king of the Britons. Their
texts conclude with the events surrounding what in received historical tradition
was treated as the ruin of the Britons, their irretrievable loss of land and power
when the Saxons overran and renamed England. This culmination makes the entire
history of the Britons a negative exemplum for readers, whether they identify more
with the British line or with conquerors who may themselves one day be dis-
placed.16 And this is the point at which the Oldest Version breaks most drastically
with its sources.
Starting in the time of Cadwalein (Cadwallader’s father in the Galfridian
version of events), the Oldest Version begins to rewrite its sources, making Cad-
walein’s loyal retainer Briens into a wicked fomenter of war between him and his
dear friend Edwin. Cadwalein is of course a Briton and Edwin a Saxon, but the text
has ceased to identify them as such — it moves away from nation, and towards
piety, as the factor directing the sympathies of the reader. After Edwin’s death,
Cadwalein drops out of the story, and attention turns to Cadwalein’s kinsman by
marriage, Peanda, a relentless and bloodthirsty man who first kills Edwin’s kins-
man Saint Oswald and is then killed in battle with Oswald’s brother Oswy, only
after he rejects Oswy’s offer of peace:
16
See Hanning, Vision of History, pp. 121–72. For a well-grounded and very dark reading of
Geoffrey, see Siân Echard, Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), pp. 31–67, esp. pp. 63–67. For a reading of the Historia as providing
‘lineageless’ Normans with a Trojan past that they could share with the Britons, making for the
‘propriety of the conquest as a return of the Trojans’, see Francis Ingledew, ‘The Book of Troy and
the Genealogical Construction of History: The Case of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum
Britanniae’, Speculum, 69 (1994), 665–704 (p. 687). Emmanuèle Baumgartner offers a sensitive
reading of Wace’s development of Geoffrey’s lineage-based narrative: she notes that in his closing
lines Wace makes the end of the ‘geste des Bretuns’ and of the ‘lignee des baruns | Ki del lignage
Bruti vindrent’ into one and the same thing. ‘Le Brut de Wace: préhistoire Arthurienne et écriture
de l’histoire’, in Maistre Wace: A Celebration, ed. by Glyn S. Burgess and Judith Weiss (St Helier:
Société Jersiaise, 2006), pp. 17–30 (p. 24, citing RB, lines 14859–61).
Oswy auoit en deu grant affiaunce e ferme esperaunce, e Peanda sen orguilla mult e se affia
durement en le grant poer qil auoit des genz. E sentreferirent irrousement, mes Peanda fu
tost desconfist e occis.
[Oswy had great trust and steadfast hope in God, and Peanda became very arrogant and
trusted greatly in the large force of men he had. And they attacked each other wrathfully,
but Peanda was soon defeated and killed.]17
Now, at the climax of Geoffrey and Wace’s accounts, the British loss of the island
to the Saxon scourge, the writer of the Oldest Version abandons his earlier sources,
omits Cadwalein’s son Cadwallader, and moves on to material drawn from
Gaimar, with the Heptarchy a given and the lineage of Saint Oswald providing a
link, in a bumpy but effective enough transition.18 Like Geoffrey and Wace, the
writer of the Oldest Version downplays the Roman occupation of Britain. Unlike
them, he follows that lead not only to minimize but even to eliminate the ruin of
the Britons.19
The changes in place names and language that are so powerfully meaningful for
Wace become little more than curiosities. After Wace describes Lud’s renaming of
New Troy, he catalogues the different names of London as a register of conquest:
remuemenz e [. . .] changes
Des languages as gens estranges,
Ki la terre unt sovent conquise,
Sovent perdue, sovent prise.
[alterations and changes by the languages of foreigners, who have often conquered, lost and
seized the land.]20
17
Oldest, pp. 194, 195.
18
Oldest, p. 194. Cf. RB, lines 13959–4866; HrB, § 190–207, pp. 136–47; HKB, pp. 267–84.
This transitional moment is discussed below.
19
See Oldest, pp. 321–23, for a detailed comparison of this section of the text with its sources.
On Rome, see Hanning, Vision of History, pp. 145–49, 163–70; and Caroline D. Eckhardt, ‘The
Presence of Rome in the Middle English Chronicles of the Fourteenth Century’, JEGP, 90 (1991),
187–207 (pp. 194–97). For further discussion of the omission of Cadwallader and the Oldest
Version’s move from Wace and Geoffrey to Gaimar, see William Marx, ‘Middle English Manu-
scripts of the Brut in the National Library of Wales’, National Library of Wales Journal, 27
(1991–92), 361–82 (pp. 377–80); and MacColl, ‘Rhetoric, Narrative, and Conceptions of
History’, pp. 297–301, 304–05.
20
RB, lines 3775–78, with Weiss’s translation. See also Baumgartner, ‘Le Brut de Wace’,
pp. 28–30.
212 Julia Marvin
At the equivalent moment, the prose Brut drains the changes of significance, blandly
noting, ‘le noun de Noue Troie fu lesse, e fu la cite donqe appele Ludesdane, mes
qe le noun est vn poi chaunge par variance des lettres e est appele Loundres’ (the
name of New Troy was abandoned, and the city was then called Ludesdane,
although the name has changed a little by the mutability of letters, and it is called
Loundres).21
Not all questions of succession are so easily muffled. One of the Oldest
Version’s few explicitly genealogical moments, revealing the writer’s concern to
demonstrate the current dynasty’s descent from pre-Conquest kings, is its account
of the descendants of Edmund Ironside. This comes at a particularly sticky point
in the history. Edmund Ironside, son of Aethelred the Unready, has been killed, his
sons have fled into exile, and Cnut the Dane is on the throne. After explaining that
Edmund’s son Edward, known as Edward the Exile, marries a Hungarian princess,
the text continues,
Cesti Edward engendra de la dame vn fiz qe fust appele Edgar Hetheling e vne fille qe auoit
anoun Margarete, qe pus fu reine Descoce par le roi de la terre, Maucolum, qe la espusa et
engendra de li vne fille qe auoit anoun Maude, qe pus feu reine de Engleterre par le Roi
Henri le primer, fiz le Conquerour, qe la espusa e engendra de li vne file qe auoit anoun
Maude, qe pus fut emperice. E de cesti Maude vint le roi Dengleterre qe est appele Henri
Fiz Lemperice. Vnquore auoit cesti Edward le Exile vne autre fille de sa femme, qe auoit
anoun Cristiane, e cele fu noneyne.
[This Edward fathered by the lady a son named Edgar Aetheling and a daughter named
Margaret, who afterwards was queen of Scotland through the king of the land, Malcolm,
who married her and fathered by her a daughter named Matilda, who afterwards was queen
of England through King Henry the First, son of the Conqueror, who married her and
fathered by her a daughter named Matilda, who afterwards was empress. And of this
Matilda came the king of England who is called Henry Fitzempress. This Edward the Exile
also had by his wife another daughter, who was named Christina, and she was a nun.]22
This is a most unusual moment in the prose Brut — one of very few digressions
from strict chronological order, and one of even fewer moments concerned with
the female line. The payoff, of course, is the demonstration that the lineage of both
William the Conqueror and Edmund Ironside is united in the person of Henry II,
great-grandfather of Edward I, king at the time of the chronicle’s composition.
This anxiety of lineage also informs the Brut’s treatment of the Norman Con-
quest. The chronicle is at pains to delegitimize Harold and legitimize William as
21
Oldest, pp. 106, 107.
22
Oldest, pp. 220, 221; see also p. 328.
much as possible. Some of the ways it does so are fairly predictable. It appears to
elaborate upon its sources in making careful note of William’s relationship to Ed-
ward the Confessor and his brother Alfred: ‘Alured estoit fiz Emme la reine, qe fu
soer Richard le duc de Normandie, son predecessour e son ael’ (Alfred was the son
of Queen Emma, who was the sister of Richard duke of Normandy, his predecessor
and his grandfather).23 It also emphasizes Harold’s unfitness, as a greedy and
prideful oathbreaker, to rule.24 But it also makes a subtler move, again in relation
to Edgar Aetheling.
Historically, Edgar Aetheling was quite young, about fourteen or fifteen, at the
time of the Conquest. He was proclaimed king ‘by Archbishop Aldred, the citizens
of London and earls Edwin and Morkere’ only after the battle of Hastings and had
already submitted to William by Christmas of 1066.25 The conflict between Edgar
and William is reported in the Barlings chronicle, the prose Brut’s closest analogue
here.26 It puts the writer of the Oldest Version into a predicament: to omit Edgar’s
claim to the throne would be to omit evidence of Henry Fitzempress’s heritage.
But to include William’s quashing of the claim would raise a number of uncom-
fortable issues. In the event, the writer handles the problem with an act of
displacement. He simply works Edgar’s story into the account of Harold’s
usurpation of the throne:
Quant Seint Edward estoit a deu ale e richement enterre come conuenoit au tel roi estre,
les barouns de la terre voleient auer eu Edgar Hethelyng, fiz Edward le Exile, qe fu fiz
Edmund Ireneside, pur ceo qil estoit de naturel sanc real. Mais Harald le fiz Godwyn le
counte, par aide e force de son per e des autres graunz seignurs de la terre, qe li furent
parenz e amis, [seysyt] tute Engleterre en sa main e fu roi.
[When Saint Edward had gone to God and been richly buried as befitted such a king, the
barons of the land wished to have Edgar Aetheling, son of Edward the Exile, who was son
of Edmund Ironside, because he was of rightful royal blood. But Harold son of Earl
Godwine, by the help and strength of his father and of other great lords of the land, who
were his kinsmen and friends, took all England into his hand and was king.]27
23
24
Oldest, pp. 236–38; see also p. 332.
25
Handbook of British Chronology, ed. by E. B. Fryde, D. E. Greenway, S. Porter, and I. Roy,
3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), q.v. Edgar II the Atheling.
26
The Barlings chronicle also describes William’s subjugation of the North, which is passed
over in the prose Brut (see Magdalen, MS lat. 199, fols 1r–3 r). See Oldest, pp. 332–33, for a more
detailed comparison of the Oldest Version and its analogues on the Conquest and William’s reign.
27
214 Julia Marvin
Thus, an episode that might otherwise call William’s claim into question is made
to serve as further evidence against Harold.
In its final portions, then, the Oldest Version of the Anglo-Norman prose Brut
is clearly concerned with demonstrating the genealogical credentials of one par-
ticular family, the house of Plantagenet. The account of Matilda and Henry’s war
against Stephen is presented in terms quite analogous to, though naturally far more
detailed than, the chronic civil conflict that characterizes the legendary beginnings
of the prose Brut. This tendency may account for one peculiar detail in the text’s
account of the end of the war:
Mes au darein il feurent acordez par Lerceuesqe Thebaud de Canterburi e par autres bones
genz de la terre en ceste forme: qil departiroient le roialme Dengleterre entre eux, issint qe
Henri Fiz Lemperice aueroit la moite par mi e par tute ala vie le Roi Esteuen, e apres sa
mort, enioieroit tut enterment le regne e la corone. E issint finist la guere entre eux, e pes
fu crie par mi tute la terre.
[But at last they were reconciled by Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury and by other
good men of the land on these terms: that they would divide the realm of England between
them, so that Henry Fitzempress would have fully half during the life of King Stephen, and
after his death, he would completely command the realm and the crown. And so the war
between them ended, and peace was proclaimed throughout the whole land.]28
The unwarranted notion of the literal division of the land (which drives Stephen
into his grave with grief) may stem from the similar divisions repeatedly described
earlier in the chronicle. It makes Henry’s ascent to the throne a reunification of the
land as well as a restoration of the proper royal line, just as with Donebaud and
Belin before him.29
Reminders of the chaos of divided rule occur several times in the earlier por-
tions of the text, in language reminiscent of the time of Cloten. After the invasion
of Gurmund and the reestablishment of the Heptarchy,
Auint issint qe les rois sentreguererent plusors foiz, e tuz iours le plus fort tolli terre au plus
feble e son regne. E issint demorerent longement, qil nauoient roi corone ne crestienite
tindrent, mes demorerent paeins lung temps, tanqe Seint Gregoire estoit apostoille de
[Rome].
[It so happened that the kings often warred against one another, and always the stronger
took land and dominion from the weaker. And so they remained a long while, so that they
28
Oldest, pp. 254, 255.
29
See Oldest, pp. 367–68.
had no crowned king and did not keep the Christian faith, but remained pagans for a long
time, until Saint Gregory was pope of Rome.]30
Here anarchy and paganism are made roughly analogous, and the reconversion of
England will set the land back on the long path to unity.
Similarly, just after the moment when the story of Cadwallader would appear,
and (as has been discussed above) the reader’s sympathy and identification have
been shifted away from the wicked Briton Peanda to the literally saintly Saxons
Oswald and Oswy, the woes of a divided realm are acknowledged again, in a passage
reworked from Gaimar:
Auint issint en cel temps qe tretuz les rois qe furent en la terre — come celi de Westsexe,
Merceneriche, Est Angle, de Kent, e de Sussexe, e de toutz les autres — chesqun guerra
autre, e le plus fort tolli terre e regne au plus feble [. . .] E si graunt fu la guere entre les rois
en chesqune pais, qe nul homme poeit sauer coment la terre alast.
[It so happened in that time that all the kings there were in the land — such as those of
Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia, Kent, Sussex, and all the others — warred on one another,
and the stronger took land and dominion from the weaker [. . .] And in every region there
was such great war among the kings that no one could know how the land fared.]31
This time, however, rescue comes in another form. The text continues:
Mes abbez, moines, chanoins escritrent les vies e les afferes des rois, pur mustrer la dreit foi
come ben chesqun roi regna, e en quele pais e coment il morust, e des euesqes ausi. E
fesoient vn grant liure si le appelerent les croniks. Le bon Roi Alured en son temps auoit
cel liure en son poer, e le fist mettre en Wincestre en la graunte eglise. E le fist attacher
ferme dun chene, qe nul homme nel poeit diloqe remuer ne emporter, mes qe chesqun
homme i put regarder e lire ceo qil voudroit. Qar iloqe est la dreit estorie e la vie e les gestes
de tuz les rois qe ount este en Engleterre.
[But abbots, monks, and canons wrote down the lives and conduct of kings, and of bishops
as well, in order to set out the proper truth of how long each king reigned and in what
country and how he died. And they made a great book and called it the chronicles. The
good King Alfred in his time had this book in his keeping, and he had it placed at
30
Oldest, pp. 186, 187.
31
Oldest, pp. 194, 195, following EE, lines 2277–2316; see Oldest, pp. 322–23. The anarchy
after the death of Lucy is also vividly presented, but in somewhat different terms (Oldest, p. 116).
Discussing this passage in isolation, MacColl argues that ‘the writer almost certainly took his
warring kings from the brief thirteenth-century prose history Li Rei de Engleterre’, which as he
shows, is quite close in language here. ‘Rhetoric’, p. 298, citing Brutus, Li rei de Engleterre, Le livere
de Reis de Engleterre, ed. by Christian Foltys (Berlin: Reuter, 1962), p. 63. But when the passage is
read against other analogous ones in the prose Brut itself, as well as in its known sources, the
similarity becomes less apparently distinctive.
216 Julia Marvin
Winchester in the great church. And he had it attached firmly with a chain, so that no man
could remove it from there or carry it away, but so that each man could look at it and read
whatever he wanted. For there is the correct history and the life and deeds of all the kings
who have been in England.]32
This celebration of what is now known as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is the closest
the writer of the prose Brut ever comes to celebrating his own book and acknowl-
edging, however slightly, human agency in the writing of history.33 The work of the
chronicler is represented as a matter of simply recording ‘la dreit foi’, emblematized
and stabilized in the form of the chained book that everyone can share and no one
can seize for himself. But the very reification of the common past in the form of a
book — a made object that must be protected — marks a quiet recognition of that
past as a construct: in judging what is true and putting it into narrative form, the
chronicler is not only preserving but creating order and stability.
In the case of the Oldest Version of the prose Brut, by imbuing history with
what aspires to seem self-evident meaning, the writer strives not only to generate
a past but to lay the groundwork for a future to which the past can provide both
encouragement and caution. It may be no fluke that what immediately follows his
silent elimination of Cadwallader and his comforting picture of the completeness
and stability of the chronicles of Winchester — the life and deeds of all the kings
of England — is one of the prose Brut’s few moments of acknowledged selectivity:
‘Ne mie pur ceo homme countera ici vn des rois qe donqe furent, par qi pecche e
surfet graunz damages e destrucciouns auindrent en ceste terre’ (here, however, will
be told of one of the kings who lived then, by whose sin and excess great damage
and destruction befell this land).34 (The king is Osbright, a rapist whose incon-
tinence and contempt for his baronage bring invasion and ruin on the land, and
who is a fairly clear analogue to John.)35 The writer goes on to select one king at a
time for representation, selecting and streamlining elements from Gaimar’s
32
Oldest, pp. 194, 195, following EE, lines 2317–36; see also Oldest, p. 323.
33
On the author’s efforts to present his work as unmediated, impersonal truth, see Oldest, pp.
6–7. The similarity of the rubric quoted at the beginning of this chapter may result from recollec-
tion of or allusion to this moment in particular, or simply from the scribe’s similar conception of
the work.
34
Oldest, pp. 194, 195. With an emphasis on exempla of governance and what he considers
Gaimar’s ‘symbolic association of the book and the kingdom itself’, MacColl offers a somewhat
different reading of this transitional section (‘Rhetoric, Narrative, and Conceptions of History’, pp.
299–301).
35
For Osbright, see Oldest, pp. 196–98; for the Oldest Version’s similar characterization of
John, see Oldest, p. 282.
complex account to generate a linear narrative and seemingly linear succession. He

must choose which stories are worth telling, and readers must choose what to make
of the stories they receive. The whole process is considerably more active than it
may first seem.
A shared narrative of history can, of course, not only present but become a
species of shared lineage, a common inheritance. In its enormous popularity and
longevity, the prose Brut chronicle seems to have come closer to being just that
than any other historical narrative of medieval England. At the same time, the
history of the prose Brut tradition is itself a reminder that the writer could not
chain up his own book. It lasted because it was both gratifying and adaptable, easily
subject to expansion, translation, continuation, and revision, as later readers and
writers sought to make it serve their own purposes.
The fifteenth-century genealogical roll Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS
98, provides a case in which a reader has attempted literally to fit the prose Brut into
an existing scheme. Into a table of lines and medallions that begins with Adam and
Eve and presents Aeneas in the eighth generation after Saturn, a writer has begun
to copy an Anglo-Norman prose Brut text. Matters begin to go awry at once — a
medallion for Ascanius is added, in the ink of the Brut text, between the existing
medallions for ‘Eneas’ and ‘Silueyn’, to make the two correspond. As the table and
its lineages grow ever more complex, they correspond less and less with, and provide
less and less room for, the prose Brut, and the extracts peter out. What presumably
began as an effort to supplement the roll with a supporting narrative ends up as a
map of the discrepancies among different versions of the history of Britain.36
By the sheer nature of things, the account that the original writer of the prose
Brut created was no less subject to revision than the accounts that he adapted.
Whoever added a version of the poem Des Grantz Geanz to the beginning of the
Short Version of the chronicle provided an alternate (and disturbing) foundation
story for the island, one that foregrounds rather than minimizes the killing and
displacement of one people by another, by telling of the murderous princess Albine
and her sisters, who give birth to the giants who are to be exterminated by Brut
when he comes.37 The reviser who created the Long Version of the Anglo-Norman
36
For further description of this roll, see Diana B. Tyson, ‘Les manuscrits du Brut en prose
française (MSS 50, 53, 98, 133, 469)’, in Les manuscrits français de la bibliothèque Parker: actes du
colloque 24–27 mars 1993, ed. by Nigel Wilkins (Cambridge: Parker Library Publications, 1993),
pp. 101–20 (pp. 102, 110–11).
37
See Des Grantz Geanz: An Anglo-Norman Poem, ed. by Georgine E. Brereton, Medium
Aevum Monographs, 2 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1937); Lesley Johnson, ‘Return to Albion’, Arthurian
218 Julia Marvin
Brut not only supplemented but overwrote some of what he received, providing a
new version of the Albine story and a new continuation from the beginning of the
reign of Edward II, and reinforcing the connection between Arthur and the kings
of his own time by supernatural means, with the introduction of prophecies of
Merlin.38 He also may have noticed the omission of the famous figure of Cad-
wallader and reinstated him by the simple expedient of replacing the name of
Cadwallader for that of the less well-known Cadwan (Cadwallader’s grandfather
in Geoffrey’s version), gaining the appearance of greater comprehensiveness with
no substantive revision required.39
Some of these changes cohere with the Oldest Version’s vision; some are in
tension with it. Perversely enough, what may have led to the undoing of the prose
Brut’s scheme of continuity was its very success in functioning as the kind of
repository for ‘la dreit foi’ that it itself idealizes. For eventually, the mere name of
Cadwallader was not enough to satisfy some reader of the Middle English transla-
tion who was familiar with the Galfridian version of events: he filled the gap back
in by introducing the Cadwallader episode at the appropriate spot, just after the
story of Peanda, Oswald, and Oswy.40 According to Elizabeth J. Bryan, this version
occurs in over half of the Middle English Brut texts catalogued by Lister M.
Matheson: the tradition itself becomes divided on this critical episode.41
By situating his linear genealogy in narrative, the author of the Oldest Version
of the prose Brut managed to promote a more thoroughly revisionist understand-
ing of British history than might have been possible by more schematic and thus
easily analysed means. When accurate, royal genealogies record, in a limited way,
Literature, 13 (1995), 19–40; Julia Marvin, ‘Albine and Isabelle: Regicidal Queens and the His-
torical Imagination of the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut Chronicles’, Arthurian Literature, 18 (2001),
143–91; and Lisa M. Ruch, ‘Albina und ihre Schwestern: Ein Mythos in der mittelalterlichen
Chronistik’, in Herrscher, Helden, Heilige, ed. by Ulrich Müller and Werner Wunderlich, Mittel-
altermythen, 1 (St Gall: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 1996), pp. 281–86.
38
See Marvin, ‘Albine and Isabelle’, pp. 153–64, 168–91; and Julia Marvin, ‘Arthur Autho-
rized: The Prophecies of the Prose Brut Chronicle’, Arthurian Literature, 22 (2005), 84–99.
39
See Oldest, pp. 8–9.
40
For discussion and a text of the Middle English Cadwallader episode, see Matheson, Prose
‘Brut’, pp. 57–61. See also Marx, ‘Middle English Manuscripts’, pp. 377–80.
41
Elizabeth J. Bryan, ‘The Afterlife of Armoriche’, in Lahamon: Contexts, Language, and
Interpretation, ed. by Rosamund Allen, Lucy Perry, and Jane Roberts (London: King’s College
Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 2002), pp. 118–55 (p. 152 n. 47). Bryan finds 112
instances of the Cadwallader episode: Matheson lists 181 manuscripts of what he identifies as the
Middle English prose Brut; these contain 203 texts of the chronicle. See his Prose ‘Brut’.
what did happen rather than what might have happened. Someone now looking
at a chart running from Henry II to Edward I may see only a clear, unbroken line:
father to son to brother to son to son. But the lived and recorded experience of the
times suggests lineage at the constant edge of fragmentation. The prose Brut
records in detail the wreck of the White Ship and the death of the only legitimate
son of Henry I, the event that laid the foundation for the calamities of the next
generation.42 It reports that Henry II, learning that all three of his sons had sought
his overthrow, ‘maudit le temps qe onqes engendra fiz’ (cursed the day that he had
ever fathered sons).43 It shows the barons rebelling against John, with ample cause,
‘issint qe par entre les genz le roi e les aliens dune parte, e les barons dautre parte,
tute la terre fu destrut e maumise’ (so that between the king’s men and the aliens
on the one hand, and the barons on the other, the whole land was ruined and
abused); John’s son Henry III comes to the throne as a child in the midst of an
invasion.44 It concludes with an account of the Barons’ War against Henry III, with
internal aggression at last concluded and redirected outward, as in the case of
Brenne and Belin, this time towards the Crusade.45 And its original audience
would see the first three legitimate sons of Edward I die in childhood. Continuity
of lineage was nothing that could be taken for granted for the future.
But it was something with which the prose Brut could endow the past, not only
for the Plantagenets, but for all of its English audience, which only grew wider over
time. The genealogy of the Oldest Version does not delineate the pedigree of an
entitled and distinctive few, separable from the rest by lines that connect them
while barring off others. Along with its single-file procession of kings, the chronicle
provides the people of England with essentially a single lineage, grounded in
antiquity, one that can incorporate British, Roman, Saxon, or Norman identity.
The prose Brut places far more emphasis on the duties of kings (and the rights of
barons) than on royal power or privilege, and in it royal lineage is made to serve the
interests of the audience as a whole rather than those of only a particular family or
group.46 All its insular readers are given grounds to consider themselves
42
Oldest, p. 248.
43
Oldest, pp. 258, 259.
44
Oldest, pp. 282–88, pp. 282, 283 quoted.
45
Oldest, pp. 292–94; see also pp. 345–46.
46
In this respect, the prose Brut’s genealogy is less politically driven, and less geared to the
reinforcement and perpetuation of hierarchy and patriarchy, than that imagined by Spiegel
(‘Genealogy: Form and Function’, pp. 108–09). Spiegel does note, however, that ‘genealogy, even
220 Julia Marvin
descendants of Brut. In a kind of inversion of the question ‘When Adam delved

and Eve span, who was then a gentleman?’ one could ask, what Englishman might
not consider himself a Trojan?47
Although his efforts did not go unnoticed or unemended by critical revisers or
ones with other purposes in mind, and the shape of his narrative became blurred
over the course of revision, continuation, and translation, the original composer
of the prose Brut seems to have succeeded in his more general aim of generating a
common heritage for his audience, by means of a book that itself became a founda-
tion for a common understanding of English history and used the lineage of kings
to undergird a broad sense of enduring English identity. The prose Brut could serve
as an inclusive genealogy for the many, all of whom could lay claim to heroic
ancestry and brotherhood, and so had a role to play in preventing the return of the
anarchy that could arise from fraternal strife, and the state of ruthless predation of
the strong upon the weak that the chronicle repeatedly represents as the worst of
all possible worlds.
when largely mythical, asserts the temporal durability of a people’, with ‘rulers as the expression of
social continuity’ (‘Political Utility’, p. 96).
47
Raluca Radulescu’s study of genealogical material appearing in Middle English prose Brut
manuscripts suggests that the gentry audience for the Middle English Brut may have taken a par-
ticularly active interest in genealogy as a way of situating itself within the history: she finds families
inserting their own lineage into the text, as well as genealogical marginalia and interpolations, and
separate genealogical works alongside the Brut in particular manuscripts. As she notes, ‘the medieval
English gentry’s interest in adding comments or their own family line to royal genealogies can be
seen as an example of their belief in contributing to the durability of their nation’. ‘Gentry Readers
of the Brut and Genealogical Material’, in Readers and Writers of the Prose Brut, ed. by William
Marx and Raluca Radulescu, special issue, Trivium, 36 (2006), 189–202 (p. 200). MacColl suggests
that the Brut’s promulgation of legendary history ‘must surely be connected with the fashion
among fifteenth-century kings for the construction of elaborate Welsh and “British” genealogies’
(‘Rhetoric, Narrative, and Conceptions of History’, p. 289).
G ENEALOGY AND W OMEN IN THE P ROSE B RUT ,
E SPECIALLY THE M IDDLE E NGLISH C OMMON V ERSION
AND ITS C ONTINUATIONS
Lister M. Matheson
T
he great number of surviving manuscripts and early printed editions sug-
gests that the prose Brut was important, especially in its English versions,
in the shaping of an increasingly nationalist historical and political con-
sciousness in late medieval and early modern England.1 At the same time, the work
was probably also influential in reaffirming and reinforcing the intellectual atti-
tudes, ideological assumptions, and social behaviours of its audience, operating on
one level as a kind of ‘Mirror for Princes / Princesses’ for the gentry and middle-
class readers, including women, who were usually the direct or indirect audience
of the work.
Genealogical principles and concerns per se may not have been primary, explicit
foci of the Brut narrative, but they must have been at least in the back of any
contemporary reader’s mind who was confronted with the tangled royal succession
that prevailed throughout most of the fifteenth century in England. Such princi-
ples, however, formed part of the conventional, middle-of-the-road intellectual
foundations that contributed to the work’s success as a — perhaps the — standard
1
See Lister M. Matheson, The Prose ‘Brut’: The Development of a Middle English Chronicle
(Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998), passim. Middle English texts from
a wide variety of versions are printed in The Brut or The Chronicles of England, ed. by Fried-
rich W. D. Brie, EETS OS, 131, 136 (London: Oxford University Press, 1906–08; repr. 1960,
1987). The Anglo-Norman text to 1272 is printed in The Oldest Anglo-Norman Prose ‘Brut’
Chronicle: An Edition and Translation, ed. and trans. by Julia Marvin, Medieval Chronicles, 4
(Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006) (hereafter Oldest).
222 Lister M. Matheson
account of British and English history for readers from the beginning of the four-
teenth century to the beginning of the seventeenth century. The close connection
between genealogy and the steady progression of history in the chronicle manifests
itself in various direct and indirect ways in the Brut manuscripts and in the Brut
text itself.
It is not uncommon with manuscript copies of the Middle English prose Brut
to encounter ancillary genealogical materials, often set out in the form of charts
composed of interlinked roundels. Thus Dublin, Trinity College, MS 505 prefaces
its Brut text with a wider, formal context of Latin genealogical chronicles from
Noah to Edward IV, Adam through Old Testament figures and Roman rulers, em-
perors and popes, and archbishops of Canterbury.2 Somewhat similar materials also
occur in London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 99 and London, British Library,
MS Cotton Julius B III (Latin Bruts).3 A genealogy from Adam is inserted near the
beginning of the Brut text (after the Albina prologue) in Cleveland, Public Library,
John G. White Collection, W q091.92-C468.4 As in Trinity College, MS 505, the
Lancastrian and Yorkist dynastic claims of the late fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries are again viewed in a particularly comprehensive context in London,
British Library, MS Harley 53, which begins with a genealogy from Adam to
Henry VI (fols 2r–11v ).5 On a less ambitious scale, New Haven, Yale University,
Beinecke Library, MS 323 contains, before its Brut text, a set of roundels that
support Edward IV’s royal claims against the usurping ‘Henricus Derby’ and his
successors, while London, British Library, MS Additional 70514 usefully prefaces
its account of the reign of Richard II with an incomplete genealogical narrative
with roundels of the descendants of Edward III down to around 1460.6
A slightly different approach appears in a group of five texts (Oxford, Bodleian
Library, MS Laud Misc. 550; London, College of Arms, MS Arundel 8; Dublin,
Trinity College, MS 506; London, British Library, MS Sloane 2027; central sec-
tion of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson Poetry 32) that add detailed
2
See Matheson, Prose ‘Brut’, pp. 285–87; John Scattergood, ‘“The Eyes of Memory”: The
Function of the Illustrations in Dublin, Trinity College Library MS 505’, in Readers and Writers
of the Prose Brut, ed. by William Marx and Raluca Radulescu, special issue, Trivium, 36 (2006),
203–26 (pp. 205–06).
3
See Matheson, Prose ‘Brut’, pp. 40, 41–42.
4
See Matheson, Prose ‘Brut’, pp. 259–60.
5
6
See Matheson, Prose ‘Brut’, pp. 110–11, 265–66.
GENEALOGY AND WOMEN IN THE PROSE BRUT 223
notes at the end of their reigns on the marriages and children of most kings after
William the Conqueror.7
Lydgate’s popular verses on the kings of England are included in several Brut
manuscripts (London, British Library, MS Stowe 69; London, British Library, MS
Cotton Galba E VIII; London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 306), and London,
College of Arms, MS Arundel 58 contains a similar, anonymous poem, ‘Kings of
England’, which includes portraits of the kings within roundels and further
roundels with their children’s names.8 Other Brut manuscripts contain documents
of general genealogical or dynastic relevance, such as a copy of the Battle Abbey
Roll (Wiltshire, Longleat House, 183A), a treatise on arms (Oxford, Bodleian
Library, MS Laud Misc. 733), and a copy of the 1460 accord between Henry VI
and Richard, duke of York (Dublin, Trinity College, MS 489).9
Trinity College, MS 505 (see above), once owned by the Welshman Lewys
Dwnn, a deputy herald, also contains informal annotations on the great Anglo-
Irish Chicester family, while Beinecke Library, MS 323 (see above) has a series of
marginal notes in different hands on members of the Clare family. (One may note
also, in passing, that a number of Brut manuscripts were owned or passed through
the hands of heralds.)
The reasons for and effects of writing or reading historical narratives are, of
course, complex. Indeed, they may not be fully understood by the writers them-
selves, and the authors of the various versions and continuations of the Brut do not
overtly recognize the genealogical stratum components of their narratives. The first
section of the Brut attempts twice, in simplistic fashion, to account for the incep-
tion and development of chronicle writing in Anglo-Saxon England, during a time
of tumultuous and confusing civil wars, and King Alfred’s role in promoting
chronicles. The first record is set in the time of King Ossa, who conquers all the
weaker kings of England and reigns over them:
And so grete was þe werr in euery contre bituene kyngus, þat no man myht wete how þe
lande went. But Abbotes, prioures, & men of religioun, writen þe lifes and dedes of kynges,
& how longe eueryche hade regnede, & in what contre; & in what maner eueryche kyng
deide, and of bisshoppis also, and þerof made grete bokes, & lete calle ham þe Cronicles;
and þe goode Kyng Alurede hade þat boke in his warde, and lete brynge hit to Wynchestre,
7
8
See Matheson, Prose ‘Brut’, pp. 105–06, 134–35, 315–16, 330–32, and Linne R . Mooney,
‘Lydgate’s “Kings of England” and Another Verse Chronicle of the Kings’, Viator, 20 (1989),
255–89.
9
See Matheson, Prose ‘Brut’, pp. 108, 266–67, 260–61.
& lete hit faste bene tackede to a piler, þat men myht hit nouht remeve ne bere þenns, so
þat euery man miht hit see and þereoppon loke, for þerin beþ þe lifes of alle þe Kynges þat
euer wer in Engeland.10
The second record again speaks to Alfred’s place in historiography and the func-
tion of books:
[Alfred] was a gode clerc, and lete mak menye bokes. & on boke he made of Englisshe, of
Auentures of kynges [AN des auentures e des leis] and of batailes þat hade bene done in þe
lande; and meny oþere bokes of gestes, he lete ham write, þat were of grete wisdome and
of gode lernyng, þrouht whiche bokes meny man may him amende [AN se poeit amender]
þat wille ham rede and oppon lok.11
We note here the moral function of historical writings: men — and perhaps
women? — may ‘amend’ themselves by reading such works. Robert Mannyng
makes the same point in the prologue to his chronicle:
And gude it is for many thynges
for to here þe dedis of kynges,
whilk were foles & whilk were wyse,
& whilk of þam couth mast quantyse,
and whilk did wrong & whilk ryght,
& whilk mayntend pes & fight.12
In large part thanks to Saint Paul, there is, of course, a wide streak of moral didac-
ticism throughout most, if not all, types and genres of medieval writing, and it is
not surprising to find it in the chronicles. The primary function of chronicles may
be informational, but writers of historical works, then as now, are, either con-
sciously or unconsciously, subject to other agendas — national, political, moral, or
genealogical, usually in combination. The writer’s choice of events to be recounted,
characters within the narrative, and the language used to describe them are all
prompted and determined by these interrelated agendas. As we shall see, both men
and women participate in genealogical enterprises and succession, but, in distinct
contrast to the male characters, there is a striking suspension of moral judgement
on women characters in both the original Anglo-Norman Brut and its later con-
tinuations in Anglo-Norman and Middle English.
10
The Brut, ed. by Brie, pp. 102–03.
11
The Brut, ed. by Brie, p. 111.
12
Robert Mannyng of Brunne, The Chronicle, ed. by Idelle Sullens (Binghamton: Medieval and
Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1996), Part 1, lines 15–20.
The primary intended and actual audience of all versions of the Brut was pre-
sumably male. Nevertheless, Julia Marvin has tentatively suggested that Margaret
Longespée, wife of Henry de Lacy, earl of Lincoln, might have been the patroness
behind the original composition of the Anglo-Norman Brut.13 Notes of ownership
and bequests in wills show that the early owners of the Anglo-Norman and Middle
English manuscripts belonged mainly to the land-owning baronial and gentry class
and to religious houses, to whom we can in the fifteenth century increasingly add
members of the merchant class.14 Most named owners are male, but a number of
women also owned copies, such as Esabel Alen, who, as a note records, was
bequeathed Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 571 by her uncle, William
Trouthe (or, perhaps, Crouche), vicar in the close of Salisbury; ‘Domina’ Alice
Brice, who owned Wiltshire, Longleat House, 183A; Ales Baxter, who explicitly
claims ownership of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson B. 205 (as do Henry
Sallwey and John Baxter); and Dorothy Helbarton, whose name has been scribbled
repeatedly in a series of marginal notes throughout San Marino, Huntington
Library, MS HM 136.15 Many other names, male and female, appear in the manu-
scripts, but whether they were owners or even readers of the books cannot be
determined with any certainty. It is true that purchase and/or ownership do not
necessarily correspond to readership, but the conditions are present that allow us
to assume some degree of female audience, reading privately, reading aloud, or
hearing the work read aloud within a family setting.
The vast majority of characters in the Brut are male, and in an unintended way
this serves to highlight female characters when they do appear. We may note that
the moral exemplars singled out above by the chronicler are explicitly ‘kings’, even
though there are in his narrative examples of powerful, independent women who
operate freely both within and outwith the typically male world of high politics.
Analysis of all the appearances of and references to women characters in the
Brut in its most important major textual tradition, from its original Anglo-Norman
form up to the English version printed in 1480 by William Caxton, produces
13
Oldest, pp. 44–47.
14
See Raluca Radulescu, ‘Gentry Readers of the Brut and Genealogical Material’, in Readers
and Writers of the Prose Brut, ed. by Marx and Radulescu, pp. 189–202, and Matheson, Prose ‘Brut’,
pp. 9–14.
15
For further discussion of these and other female names in the manuscripts, see Amy Noelle
Vines, ‘“Thys Ys Her Owne Boke”: Women Reading the Middle English Prose Brut Chronicle’,
in Readers and Writers of the Prose Brut, ed. by Marx and Radulescu, pp. 71–96; Vines’s reading
‘Crouche’ occurs on p. 75.
interesting results, especially when considered in light of its component sections

and continuations. The Appendix to this chapter lists all references to women
characters in Caxton’s type of text (except those in generic phrases and in female
saints’ days) and forms the evidence for most of what ensues in the present chapter.
The textual transmission of the Brut was very complex, and modern classifica-
tion of the texts is similarly intricate, so what follows will deal with only one strand
in the Anglo-Norman / Middle English tradition, albeit an important one that re-
mained the core of the work in various manifestations — the so-called Common
Version. This version incorporates the original Anglo-Norman text ending in 1272
and the continuation to 1333 added thereto; these were the basis for the main
textual family of the Middle English translation, which ended in 1333 but received
in its turn further English continuations, first to 1377, then to 1419, and finally to
1461.16 Many texts, including this Common Version ending in 1461, also include
a reinsertion into the historical narrative of the story of Cadwallader and the final
ruin and flight of the Britons and a eulogy on Edward III. The Common Version
of the Brut, ending in 1461, became the first printed history of England when it
was published in 1480 by William Caxton and was repeatedly printed thereafter.
The oldest Anglo-Norman version begins with Aeneas of Troy and quickly
progresses to the story of his great-grandson Brut, who is the eponymous founder
of Britain.17 This version ends with the death of Henry III in 1272, and its early
narrative is largely based on Wace’s Roman de Brut (up to King Oswy, with details
from the next), Geoffrey Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis (to around the Norman Con-
quest), and then a Latin work similar to a chronicle associated with the monastery
of Barlings in Lincolnshire. The writer supplemented these sources with material
and details taken from other monastic and secular sources.18
One is struck by the number of female characters who are both named and
given significant parts to play in the history of Britain, especially the early history
of the land. These parts generally fall into one or more of the following categories:
founders of nations; alliance-builders (through marriage or diplomacy); carriers of
16
There are also two other large families of texts — the Extended Version and the Abbreviated
Version — that end in 1419. All three main groups of texts contain many sub-groups, and there
are also a large number of Peculiar Texts and Versions.
17
See Julia Marvin, ‘Narrative, Lineage, and Succession in the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut
Chronicle’, in this volume, for fuller details.
18
The preceding paragraph is largely based on Oldest, pp. 20–40, and Julia Marvin, ‘Sources
and Analogues of the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut Chronicle: New Findings’, in Readers and Writers
of the Prose Brut, ed. by Marx and Radulescu, pp. 1–31.
the royal line (either as mothers or heiresses); caretaker rulers (while a son grows
up or in the absence of a husband and heir); participants in sex-driven events;
potential breeding-stock; and (occasionally) advisors to men. Except for the final
category, these roles all have a powerful genealogical function. Let us turn to some
salient examples and a few more complex instances.
The first woman to appear in the Anglo-Norman Oldest Version to 1272 is the
founder of a dynasty and an alliance-builder — Laviane (ME Lamane, through mis-
reading of minims, the classical Lavinia), daughter of the King of Lombardy, who
gives her in marriage, together with conquered lands, to Aeneas in gratitude for his
military aid. Later modifications to the original Anglo-Norman text (and thus to
the Middle English text translated from it at some point between c. 1380 and
1400) added, among other items, a prologue on Albina and her thirty-two sisters,
whose arrival in Britain predates that of Brutus (see further below). Laviane/Lamane
is replaced as the first woman mentioned in the narrative by Labana, the gentle,
wondrously fair cousin and wife of King Dyoclisian of Syria, whom she loves ‘as
reson wolde’.19 Her sole function is to mother Albina and her sisters, whose
extended story of pride, rebellion, murder, exile, foundation of England (Albion),
female lust, and Devil-spawned, gigantic offspring dominate the beginning of the
entire chronicle and inevitably colour future events. The basic type exemplified by
Laviane reappears regularly in the subsequent narrative, however, and includes
such characters as Brutus’s wife Gennogen, Armoger’s wife Gennen, King Oc-
touian’s unnamed daughter (married to Maximian of Rome), King Constantine’s
unnamed wife, King Adelbright’s wife Orewenne, and King Edred’s and later King
Cnut’s wife Emma.
Alliance-builders and carriers of the royal line are often one and the same. Thus
the twice-wed Emma was related to the Duke of Normandy and was also the
mother of four kings of England and elsewhere. Similarly, the children and grand-
children of the unnamed daughter of the King of Hungary, the wife of Edward the
Outlaw, become significant figures in subsequent English and European history.
Both women, even though one is unnamed, merit long, though confused, para-
graphs on their descendants.
That an heiress to the realm of England is actually named may be due to her
major role in a popular romance. Gildeburghe becomes the wife of Havelok the
Dane, and, by a confused duplication of the story, Argentill is married off to Curan,
a kitchen-knave who is Havelok’s son in the Brut, though not in the original
romance. Both men duly become kings of England through right of their wives.
19
Independently reigning queens appear only twice, in stories that seem to

contain a mixed moral message. Queen Guentolen, abandoned by her adulterous
husband Lotryn, defeats and kills him in battle, then drowns his mistress Estrilde
(originally a prize of war and now Queen) and daughter Abraham in cold blood;
nevertheless, Guentolen rules as Queen for fifteen years ‘well & wysely’ before
retiring in favour of her son.20 In the Lear story, Gonoril and Regan dominate their
husbands, but it is the King of France, Cordelia’s husband, who sends his army
with Lear to restore him to the throne for three further years. Cordelia is spe-
cifically said to have been widowed at some point during her subsequent five-year
reign, and she is captured and executed by two envious nephews. A mixed message,
perhaps: a vengeful, murderous Queen rules well and wisely for fifteen years before
enjoying a peaceful retirement, while a dutiful, generous one is murdered by mem-
bers of her own family.
As the Brut progresses towards 1272, and in its subsequent Anglo-Norman and
English continuations, the purely dynastic function of women increases markedly,
especially in its post-Conquest narrative. Women characters are often recorded
only momentarily in their capacities as royal wives and mothers, although they are
usually named if they hold such exalted rank and vital positions in the genealogical
succession. On the other hand, noblewomen and even royal daughters are almost
invariably unnamed, identified by their noble title, or simply identified as the
offspring of a named father. The tendency to leave women characters unnamed
seems to accelerate after the intrusive Cadwallader Episode, that is, after the sec-
tion of text that is ultimately dependent on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s narrative in
the Historia regum Britanniae.21
In some ways, Guentolen and Cordelia prefigure the most prominent indepen-
dent female actor in national politics found in the text to 1272 — Maud the
Empress. Maud (or Mathilda), daughter of Henry I, widow of the Holy Roman
Emperor Henry, then wife of Geoffrey, earl of Anjou, personally leads a civil war
against King Stephen on behalf of her son Henry, known as Henry Fitzempress. In
none of these cases does the Brut writer suggest that it is inappropriate for a woman
to participate in war.
The male writer of the Anglo-Norman Brut to 1272 (and later translators, con-
tinuators, and adapters) are well aware of the complexities and moral ambiguities
of sexual relationships, seen within the context of contemporary social attitudes
20
21
A representative text is printed in Matheson, Prose ‘Brut’, pp. 57–61.
and values, and describe a range of sexually charged situations and events. Any kind
of covert or illicit sex — unlicensed, unsanctioned, uncontrolled, unregulated —
presents a major threat to orderly genealogical principles of inheritance of property
and/or noble title based on legitimate primogeniture. When such activity is con-
sensual on the part of a wife, then it provides her with a potentially powerful
weapon against her husband and the conventional mores of succession, through
her ability to choose an extramarital father for a child born within wedlock. (Such
suspicions and accusations were to dog Richard II and Edward IV, as well as the
children of the latter king, and analogous situations earlier in history were probably
of interest to late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century readers of the Brut.) When the
sexual activity is forced, in cases of both individual and mass rape, it becomes a
means of showing contempt for the genealogical integrity of a family or a people.
The potential of sex and female sexuality to arouse male lustfulness and rash
behaviour underlies several extended narrative episodes, especially in the earlier
parts of the text to 1272, as in the cases of Lotryn and Estrilde (see above),
Ronewenne and King Vortiger, and the love triangle of Edgar, Edelwolde, and a
second Estrilde, all of which involve trickery and deception, and the last of which
is reminiscent of the story of Mark, Tristan, and Isolde.
The Saxon mercenary Engist orders that his daughter Ronewenne, ‘þe fairest
creature þat eny man myht see’, be brought over to England for the specific purpose
of seducing King Vortiger, and her beauty, combined, it is implied, with the wine
that she has meekly offered to Vortiger, kneeling before him, inflames the King
into asking Engist for his daughter’s hand.22 Engist, of course, consents — in
exchange for the county of Kent. From being a passive tool of an unscrupulous
father, Ronewenne changes into an active participant in murder and treachery
when she later arranges the poisoning of King Vortimer, Vortiger’s son (by a first
wife), and acts as an informant for her father.
The extended narrative that tells of the love (or lust) triangle of Edgar,
Edelwolde, and the second Estrilde, and its consequences, is reminiscent of that of
Mark, Tristan, and Isolde. King Edgar sends his knight Edelwolde to assess the
reputed beauty of Estrilde, with a view to marry her. Edelwolde wants her himself,
and Estrilde’s father Orgar agrees to the marriage. Edelwolde reports to Edgar that
‘she was faire ynow oppon to see, but of body she was wonder loþly’. In time,
Edelwolde tells his now wife Estrilde of his trickery: ‘and anone as she it wist, she
louede him neuermore afterwarde as she hade done bifore’. Edgar acts as godfather
22
to their child, which, Edelwolde thinks, will protect his wife from the King, ‘a Ioly
man and an Amerus’. However, Edgar later visits Estrilde, who flirts with him, and
the story of Ronewenne and Vortiger is invoked by references to the drinking
toasts of ‘Wassaile’ and ‘drynkhaile’.23 Edgar sends Edelwolde to the north, where
he is killed, and then marries Estrilde. Finding the pair in bed, Saint Dunstan
upbraids Edgar for marrying Estrilde, to whose child he has been godfather: ‘and
þe Quene for þat worde neuer after louede seynt Dunston; and noþeles þe gode
man warnede ham ofte-tymes þat folie to lete; but his warnyng availede litel, for þe
loue bituene ham was so miche’. After she has been widowed, Estrilde arranges the
death of Edward, Edgar’s son by a first marriage, in favour of her own son Eldred.
Saint Dunstan forgives the Queen of ‘her trespase’, having given her absolution and
penance, and henceforward she lives ‘chaste lif & clene’.24
The women characters in these episodes are either consensual or, at least, com-
plicit actors, and if there is an implied moral, then it is that both men and women
should beware and avoid intemperate lust, which leads to immoderate behaviour,
clouded judgement, and unforeseen political consequences, invariably ruinous.
Several women are subjected to unambiguous rape or the overwhelming power
of royal lechery. The original wording may be unclear whether Elyne, the niece of
Hoel of Brittany, who has been abducted by the giant Dinabus, dies of the act of rape
itself or of fear thereof — ‘he wanted to rape [AN purgesir] the maiden who was
so young and delicate, but she could not endure it, the giant is so great and huge’25
— but there is no doubt that her nurse, a widow, has been multiply violated. The
wording is clearly intended to be emotionally affective — ‘a widow, all bareheaded
[. . .] weeping’, ‘a young lady whom I nursed at my breast’, ‘so young and delicate’,
‘he has almost killed me, I suffer so when he rapes [AN purieust] me’.26
Similarly affecting is the conversation between Buerne Bocard and his
unnamed, ‘wonder faire’ wife,27 who is left weeping and sorrowful after her rape by
King Osbright of Northumbria:
‘Indeed, lord,’ she said, ‘I am disgraced, for the king has dishonored me against my will.’
And she told him the whole truth about how the king had raped [AN purieu; ME forleyn]
her by force, so that she would rather be dead than alive.
23
24
25
Oldest, p. 173.
26
Oldest, pp. 171–72.
27
‘My fair love,’ he said, ‘hush yourself. Against force weakness does not avail, and so you
will never be less dear to me, since you have told me the truth. But I will avenge you if God
lets me live.’28
Osbright’s ill-considered lust leads to Buern’s renunciation of his allegiance in

favour of the Danes (to whom the latter is closely related), the deposition and
death of Osbright, the deaths of Kings Elle of Northumbria and Edmund of East
Anglia, and Danish depredations until the reign of Alfred. Buern Bocard falls
almost incidentally at the bloody battle of Chippenham at the side of the Danish
leaders Hubba and Hungar. Considerably later in time, King John’s injuries done
to the Church and his promiscuous lechery and sexual appetite (‘he frequented
[AN haunta] the wife of his own brother, and [. . .] he raped [AN purieust; ME lay
by] many other wives and daughters of good family of the land — for he spared no
one whom he desired’)29 are given as the two reasons that lead directly to his
granting of Magna Carta.
The precise characterization of the sexual relationships between Adhan and the
mysterious ‘tresbeau bacheler’ who visits her often, despite barred doors, by whom
she conceives Merlin,30 and of Uter and Igerne, with whom the King has sex in the
guise of her husband, thus conceiving Arthur, are more ambiguously written.
Neither episode includes an Anglo-Norman (or Middle English) verb meaning ‘to
rape’, but Adhan’s words — ‘And he played the game of love with me, for I did not
have the strength or power against him to defend myself’31 — are reminiscent of
those of Buern Bocard’s wife, and, as Julia Marvin has pointed out, by secularizing
and rationalizing the story, the Brut version becomes more ‘suggestive of rape’.32
Again, by rationalizing the story and reducing the element of magic to almost
nothing the Brut writer makes morally problematic the events surrounding the
conception of Arthur. The original Anglo-Norman text records Uter’s sudden in-
fatuation with Igerne at a feast: ‘he looked at her intemperately, and he gave so
many sweet looks and intimate smiles that the earl saw that he was enamoured with
the lady his wife’.33 There is no indication here that Igerne responds positively or
encourages Uter, though a later version, reflected in the Middle English text, does
28
Oldest, p. 197.
29
Oldest, p. 283.
30
Oldest, p. 141.
31
Oldest, p. 141.
32
Oldest, p. 310.
33
Oldest, p. 153.
suggest this by the addition of a phrase, speaking of ‘þe priue lokyng and Laughing,
and þe loue bituene ham’.34 Nevertheless, from a legal standpoint, that Uter sleeps
with Igerne while pretending to be her husband constitutes rape, though the lan-
guage used in both the Anglo-Norman and Middle English texts is simply that
Uter ‘dede wiþ her al his wille’.35
The writer is similarly ambiguous as to whether Gunnovere, Arthur’s wife,
becomes the willing partner of Modred. After seizing the land, Modred ‘committed
great villainy, for against Christian law he took to his bed [AN prist a son lit; ME
toke, var. nome] the wife of his uncle, his lord, in traitorous fashion’.36 Her possible
complicity is perhaps hinted at when she flees to a nunnery: ‘She was bitterly afraid
and feared greatly [. . .] for she understood well that her lord would never have
mercy on her because of the great shame and offense she had done him.’37
The pious tale of Saint Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins (with whom should be
considered a second company of eight thousand virgins found in the oldest Anglo-
Norman text but dropped in later versions) is only superficially simple.38 It is sig-
nificant that the Brut writer has chosen to expand his source material from a
further, probably hagiographical source. Ursula and her companions are chosen
involuntarily (‘for noman derst wiþstande his [Dionotho’s, regent and Ursula’s
father] commandement’ as prospective brides for the new British male settlers of
Brittany, with Ursula, ‘þe faireste creature þat eny man wiste’ designated for
Conan, their king.39 When her company is shipwrecked at Cologne, Ursula, who
has made a secret vow of chastity, persuades her fellow virgins to resist successfully
the Huns, who want to rape them, whereupon they are martyred ‘for þe loue of
God’.40 It is not explained how Ursula would have viewed her vow had she arrived
safely in Brittany. An unforeseen consequence of this ill-fated breeding-stock expe-
dition is a massive invasion of Britain by the pagan Huns and their allies and the
near-extermination of Christians and Christianity in the land.
Women seen simply as advisors rarely appear. To the goddess Diana should be
given the credit of directing Brutus’s voyage to his new land. Saint Helena (‘Elyn’),
34
35
36
Oldest, p. 177.
37
Oldest, p. 179.
38
See Oldest, p. 122, for the second company.
39
40
daughter of King Coel, wife of Constance of Rome (as a reward), mother of the
Emperor Constantine, and finder of the Cross, is described as ‘boþe faire, wise, and
gode, and wel lettrede [AN tresben lettre]’, one of the very few references in the
Brut to good education, whether male or female.41 Her son brings her to Rome ‘for
þe michel wisdome þat she couþe’.42 Finally, when King Cnut asks his wife Emma
for advice what to do with Edmund Ironside’s young sons, Edward and Edwyn, she
replies realistically and pragmatically: ‘Lord [. . .] and if they live, they will make
great war on you. Have them sent very far away to some other land to some man
who can kill and do away with them.’43
The treatment of Ydoyne is exceptional: she slits her son Ferrez’s throat ‘wiþ
ij knyfes’ and cuts his body into small pieces because he has killed his brother
Porrex.44 But even though Ferrez had ‘a felounes hert [AN le quoer feloun]’45 and
had plotted to kill Porrex by treason, their mother’s deed sparks the only explicit,
indignant moral apostrophe, retained from Wace’s Roman de Brut, of the original
Anglo-Norman work: ‘Who ever before heard of a mother so vicious that with her
own hand she killed her one son for the sake of the other! Long endured the
infamy of this depraved mother, who for the one son murdered the other, and for
the one lost both.’46 The chapter heading in a later version (and thus in the Middle
English version) is pragmatic and direct: ‘How Gorbodian hade ij sones, & how þat
on slough þat oþere, forto haue þe heritage; & how Ydoyne her moder quellede þat
oþere, wherfore þe lande was destroiede.’47
However, with the exception of the Medea-like Ydoyne, the Brut writers very
seldom make any kind of moral comment on appropriate or inappropriate female
behaviour. This contrasts strongly with the simple but explicit assessments of male
characters: ‘a good man and a worthy’, ‘a man of good conditions and well beloved’,
‘hardy and courteous’, ‘reigned well and worthily’, or, ‘wicked and stern’, ‘so wicked
and so lecherous’, ‘stout men and proud’, ‘died for his wickedness, through
vengeance of God’, and so on. Similar evaluations of male characters are given
throughout later continuations to and versions of the work; women characters,
41
42
43
Oldest, p. 219.
44
45
46
Oldest, p. 97.
47
however, continue to be described and appraised far more neutrally and non-
judgementally.
The Anglo-Norman Long Version of the Brut, which ends in 1333 and formed
the basis for the Middle English translation, adds several notable women charac-
ters, in a long, new prologue and in its continuation from 1272 to 1333. In the new
prologue, we meet Albyne (or Albina), daughter of King Dioclisian of Syria, who
persuades her thirty-two sisters to join her in slitting their newly-wed husbands’
throats because the women do not consider them socially equal. The exiled sisters
become the first founders of the unpopulated isle of Albion (named after Albina).
Their extreme sexual frustration leads to the Devil impregnating them, and the
resulting brood of giants inhabits Albion till the arrival of Brut, who destroys them.
Tamar Drukker notes the lack of moral condemnation of the murders and suggests
that the episode introduces a central theme of the Brut, namely, ‘[t]he theme of
unjust subjugation and the struggle for freedom’.48
Proportionally fewer female characters appear in the continuation from 1272
to 1333 than in the basic narrative to 1272, yet their dynastic function as wives and
mothers continues to increase. Nevertheless, they usually remain marked by their
namelessness, unless they are royal wives (Edward I’s Eleanor and Margaret,
Edward II’s Isabella), and their lives and careers are similarly anonymous. The only
notable exception in this section of narrative is Isabella of France, wife of
Edward II, who plays an influential, extended role in national affairs. After she has
been sent to France ‘forto trete of pees bituene her lord and her broþer’, she is the
motivating force behind the invasion of England, ‘for þai [the rebels] truste al in
Godes grace’.49 She is sympathetically identified as ‘þe flour (e) of lif & of deþ’
against the Despenser ‘oweles’ (that is, ‘owls’) in the interpretation of Merlin’s
prophecy about Edward II.50 The blame for Edward’s murder is placed on Roger
Mortimer alone. It is only after her husband’s death that Isabella’s name becomes
linked with that of Mortimer, though there is no explicit mention of any sexual
liason between them; the closest suggestion is when the chronicler notes, rather late
on in their relationship, that Mortimer made himself ‘wonder priuee’ with the
Queen.51 The writer holds them jointly responsible, at length, for the loss of
48
Tamar Drukker, ‘Thirty-Three Murderous Sisters: A Pre-Trojan Foundation Myth in the
Middle English Prose Brut Chronicle’, Review of English Studies, n.s., 54 (2003), 449–63 (p. 457).
49
The Brut, ed. by Brie, pp. 232, 236.
50
51
English overlordship of Scotland. Together with Mortimer, Isabella is accused of

bad counsel to Edward III and of greed: ‘þo bigan þe communite of Engelande
forto hate Isabel þe Quene, þat so miche louede her when she come ahein forto
pursue the false traitoures þe Spensers fro Fraunce’.52 She persuades her son to have
his uncle, Edmund, earl of Kent, executed, and she is described several times as
acting and speaking out of anger. At a stroke, Mortimer’s downfall removes Isabella
from national affairs; her final appearance and words are at his capture, though her
name is mentioned a couple of times subsequently. But there is no explicit condem-
nation of Isabella’s character or actions, which are simply viewed dispassionately
and pragmatically.
The intrusive Cadwallader Episode, recounting the fate of the last king of the
Britons, may have been first added to the Middle English manuscript tradition in
a version that was extended from 1333 to 1377.53 It contains a tantalizingly brief
reference to a noble Germanic Queen Sexburga, a semi-foundation figure in the
tradition of Albine and Brutus, who repopulates the depleted land of Albion with
her own people. There is also a mention of the prophetess Sibille, whose prophecies
agree with those of Merlin and do not contradict the (literal) voice of God. Their
stories, however, remain undeveloped.
The trend towards female anonymity observable in the latter stages of the text
to 1272 and the continuation to 1333 persists in the Middle English continuations
from 1333 to 1377 and 1377 to 1419, which were both probably compiled in the
first and second quarters of the fifteenth century respectively. The wives of kings
of England are named (Edward III’s Philippa, the late Edward II’s Isabella (see also
above), Richard II’s Anne and Isabel, Henry IV’s Joan) as is the occasional English
royal daughter in the context of marriage ( Joan of the Tower, daughter of Edward
I; Phillipa, daughter of Henry IV), but the queens of foreign lands are either absent
from the narrative or are unnamed. English noblewomen are usually designated by
their titles alone, though Blaunche, duchess of Lancaster, is accorded her personal
name once in the 1333–77 continuation and once in the 1377–1419 continua-
tion. The only other noblewoman to be so designated in either continuation is
Dame Luce (sister of the Duke of Milan and wife of Edmund Holland, earl of
Kent), who was apparently a big hit with Henry IV (1377–1419 continuation).
Otherwise, the only woman to be named in these two continuations is Alice
52
53
See note 21.
Perrers.54 Alice’s exceptional notoriety in the political sphere, rather than her sim-
ple position as Edward III’s long-time mistress, no doubt justifies her naming. The
chroniclers’ interest, however, is limited only to her immediate political involve-
ment, and her fall from power and exile after Edward’s death are noted in neither
the 1333–77 nor the 1377–1419 continuations.
In general, similar considerations apply to the naming of women characters in
the final Common Version continuation from 1419 to 1461, though some excep-
tional instances — few but perhaps significant — are noted below. Thus Queens
of England are named (the late Henry IV’s Joan, Henry V’s Katherine, Henry VI’s
Margaret). But only one noblewoman is named by other than her title — Joan,
daughter of the Earl of Somerset and wife of James Stewart, king of Scots —
although a number of other women are so identified by their marriage connections.
Even a previously independent ruler, the resourceful Duchess of Holland, newly
married to the Duke of Gloucester, remains unnamed, despite her impressive
achievements in escaping from the Duke of Burgundy’s custody ‘in a mannes aray’
and then resisting and defeating militarily Burgundy’s forces.55 Joan of Arc, the
most formidable cross-dresser of all, is referred to only as ‘a maid, which they
named “la Pucelle de Dieu”’, who rode and was armed ‘like a man’, though she is
graciously acknowledged as ‘a valyant Capitayn’.56 The chronicler does not com-
ment on the justice of her judgement to death by burning while other French
captains are ransomed and ‘entreted as men of werre bene acustomed’.57 The
powerful Duchess of Burgundy, who is authorized by her husband to treat with
Henry VI, is also anonymous.
The continuation from 1419 to 1461 includes several episodes and anecdotes
that are of the celebrity-gone-bad or human-interest variety, and these occasionally
54
Her name appears in the 1377–1419 continuation. A second possible naming arises through
a minor confusion in some manuscripts of the same continuation whether ‘Galeys’ is the name of
the wife of Lionel, duke of Clarence, or whether her father, the Duke of Milan, is called ‘Galoys’.
For the confusion, see The Brut, ed. by Brie, p. 367/5–6 and textual note 7.
55
56
57
The Brut, ed. by Brie, p. 501. London chronicles and other versions of the Brut assess Joan
more harshly. The London chronicle in London, British Library, MS Cotton Cleopatra C IV, calls
her ‘a false witche’ who was viewed by the French as ‘a profetes ande a worthi goddesse’ (Chronicles
of London, ed. by Charles Lethbridge Kingsford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), p. 133), followed
closely by a version of the Brut ending in 1430, where she is designated ‘the wicche of Fraunce’ and
accused of sorcery (The Brut, ed. by Brie, p. 439).
merit the use of the protagonists’ names. Eleanor Cobham, duchess of Gloucester,
and Margery Iureman, the witch of Eye, are named in the account of their con-
spiracy against Henry VI, and a Dutch maiden is identified as Lydwith in the one-
sentence mention of her miraculous life without food. The canonization of Saint
Katherine of Siena is noted. On the other hand, the ‘gode wedow with-out Al-gate’
whose murder is grimly avenged by the women of her parish and the ‘comon
woman’ whose report of pillow talk with a French soldier foils a plot to capture
Calais are unnamed.58 Such ‘tabloid’ accounts have been carried over from the
chronicles of London that are the source for the Brut continuation, and their
inclusion indicates the growing importance of a middle-class, urban London
readership of the work.
The prose Brut operates, therefore, on several levels. Its top level is a historical
chronicle of British and English affairs, but its reliance on the individual reign as
the basic unit of organization and division serves to emphasize the conventional
genealogical principles on which the narrative is founded. Those unspoken and
unexamined principles are assumed to be those of the reader also, and thus the
work also operates on a lower level as a ‘Mirror for Princes’ that is applicable to less
exalted males. The women characters who appear throughout the narrative, though
more concentrated in the account of pre-Cadwallader days, suggest that the Brut
could function similarly as a ‘Mirror for Princesses’ that would have been pertinent
to women from the baronial, gentry, and mercantile families of medieval England.
Its stories sometimes involve using one’s knife (or knives) to slit one’s husband’s
(or sons’) throat, but in general they serve to buttress and, perhaps, inculcate the
genealogical principles of primogeniture, male inheritance, and orderly succession.
58
Appendix
Female Characters in the Common Version of the ME Prose Brut to AD

1461
Notes
1. General and generic phrases such as ‘men, women, and children’, ‘men and
women’, and the like have not been listed; references to female saints’ days are also
omitted. Minor spelling variations in a character’s name have been ignored and
only one form is given.
2. Quotations from the Anglo-Norman text are taken from the facing-page transla-
tion provided in The Oldest Anglo-Norman Prose ‘Brut’ Chronicle, ed. and trans.
by Julia Marvin, Medieval Chronicles, 4 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006). Quotations
from the Middle English texts have been modernized from the texts printed in The
Brut or The Chronicles of England, ed. by Friedrich W. D. Brie, EETS OS, 131, 136
(London: Oxford University Press, 1906–08; repr, 1960, 1987).
Appendix p. 1 Name / Designation / Function / Family / Children Description / Characterization / Context
Section (in italics)
‘ALBINA PROLOGUE’ (NOT IN ALL VERSIONS)
Labana wife of Dioclisian of Syria; mother of 33 marriage; ‘gentle’; beautiful; ‘loved him as reason would’
daughters
Albyne / Albina murderesses; founders of Albion; mothers (by beautiful; proud; scornful; self-willed (despite beatings);
her 32 sisters, unnamed Devil) of giants sexually frustrated
TEXT TO 1272 BEGINS
Lamane daughter of Latyme of Lumbardy; wife of Eneas marriage; reward of war; beautiful; happy married life
of Troy; mother of Asquanius
unnamed wife of Asquanius; mother of Sylveyn
unnamed cousin of Lamane; mother of Brut seduced by Asquanius; dies in childbirth
Gennogen daughter of Pandras of Greece; wife of Brut; prize of war
mother of Lotryn, Albanac, Kambyr
Diane the Goddess prophetess beautiful; directs Brutus to Britain
[Erneborowe] [Coryn’s paramour] [character and name added in Middle English Extended and
Abbreviated Versions; Brutus taunts Coryn with her to
encourage Coryn in fight against the giant Gogmagog]
GENEALOGY AND WOMEN IN THE PROSE BRUT
Estrilde Humbar’s daughter; mistress of Lotryn; mother spoils of war; beautiful; desired in marriage by Lotryn, thus
of (daughter) Abraham breaking covenant of marriage to Guentolen; persuades
Lotryn to marry Guentolen but remains his mistress; is made
queen; drowned by Guentolen
Guentolen Coryn’s daughter; wife of Lotryn; mother of secretly marries Lotryn; later abandoned by Lotryn in favour
Madhan of Estrilde; seizes Cornwall; defeats and kills Lotryn; drowns
Estrilde and Abraham; becomes queen; rules ‘well and wisely’
for 15 years; retires to Cornwall
Abraham daughter of Estrilde and Lotryn drowned by Guentolen; name is a Welsh alternate for River
Severn
unnamed wife of Menpris; mother of Ebrak abandoned by ‘wicked and . . . lecherous’ sodomite Menpris
(torn to pieces by wolves)
239
Name / Designation / Function / Family / Children Description / Characterization / Context
240
Appendix p. 2
‘diverse women’ mothers of Ebrak’s 20 sons and 23 daughters
(all named)
Elegyne, Ymmogen, Oghdas, daughters of Ebrak ‘the brothers became good knights’
Guenbran, Guardiche, Angarel,
Guentolde, Tangustel,
Gorghon, Michel, Medham,
Mailour, Ondur, Cambredan,
Rogan, Reuthely, Neest,
Cheghem, Scadud, Gladus,
Heberhyn, Abalaghe, Blandan
Sibille Queen of Sheba visits Solomon and confirms reports of his wisdom during
Leil’s reign
Gonorille (aka Corneil) daughter of Leir; wife of Mangles of Scotland hypocrite; wars on and despises father
Rigan daughter of Leir; wife of Hanemos, earl of hypocrite; wars on and despises father
Cornwall
Cordeile daughter of Leir; wife of Agampe of France; beautiful; ‘best of conditions’; honest; disinherited by father;
Queen of France Agampe wants ‘only her clothing and only her body’; aids
father; becomes Queen of England for 5 years; captured and
killed by nephews
Ydoyne [widow of Gorbodian]; mother of Ferrez and kills Ferrez for killing Porrex; ‘privily she came to her son
Porrex upon a night with two knives, and therewith cut his throat,
and the body also into small pieces. Who heard ever [of] such
a cursed mother, who killed with her own hands her own son!
and long time after lasted the reproof and shame to the
mother, who, for reason of the one son, murdered the other,
and so lost them both’
Samye daughter of Elsinges of Norway; unwillingly
betrothed to Brenne; lover, later wife, of
Lister M. Matheson
Gutlagh of Denmark
Gildeburghe wife of Havelok of Denmark and England ‘right heir of this land’ [the reference is to later events]
Cornewenne [wife of Donewal]; mother of Brenne and Belyn brings about peace between her two sons ‘with much pain’
unnamed daughter of Fewyn, duke of Burgundy; wife of
Brenne
Virgin Mary mother of Jesus Christ ‘our saviour’ ‘that sweet virgin’; Christ born during Kymbalyn’s reign
Gennen daughter of Claudius of Rome; wife of peace offering; Gloucester founded in her honour
Armoger; mother of Westmere
‘women’ from Ireland wives of Gascon captives resettled at Berwick- brought from Ireland since Britons will not give their
on-Tweed daughters to the new settlers; mutual incomprehensibility
induces them to speak together ‘as Scots’
Elyne daughter of Coel; heir to England; wife of reward for peace; ‘both fair, wise, and good, and well
Constance, prince of Rome and later king of lettered’; taken to Rome by Emperor Constantyn, her son,
England; mother of Constantyn; finder of ‘for the great wisdom that she knew’
Cross in the Holy Land; saint
Saint Kateryne martyr at hands of Maxence of Rome
unnamed, ‘a young child’ daughter of Octouian; married to Maximian of loved by father ‘as much as his life’; marriage arranged by the
Rome, later King of England and Emperor of lords of the land for political purposes
Rome, rather than to Conan Meriedok
(Octouian’s choice), later King of Little Britain
Vrsula and 11,000 maidens intended wives for Bretons, driven by storm to chosen nationally, 8,000 for the ‘mean’ people and 3,000 for
[a second company of 8,000 Cologne the greatest lords [two companies of 8,000 for the lesser folk
maidens in original AN text] and 11,000 for the gentlemen in original AN text] of newly
founded Little Britain, by Dionotho, ‘for no man dared
withstand his commandment’; Ursula, Dionotho’s daughter,
‘the fairest creature that any man knew’, intended for Conan;
Ursula has made secret vow of chastity; ‘Vrsula, that good
maid, counseled, prayed, warned, and taught them who were
her fellows, that they should defend themselves with all their
241
242
might, and rather suffer death than suffer their bodies to be
defouled’; martyred ‘for the love of God’ by Gowan
unnamed, ‘his wife’ wife of Constantyn of England; mother of Constantyn marries her ‘through counsel of the Britons’
Constaunce, Aurylambros, Vter
Ronewenne daughter of Engist of Saxony; wife of Vortiger beautiful; brought to England at father’s command; Vortiger
‘enamoured upon her’; ‘a woman of misbelief’; instigator of
Vortymer’s poisoning by subornment and bribery; spy for
father
unnamed Vortiger’s ‘first wife’; mother of Vortymer,
Catagren, and Passent
Adhan [unnamed in sources] ‘a great gentlewoman’ of Carmarthen; mother ‘full tender weeping’, claims ‘she had never company of man
of Merlin worldly’; despite barred doors, mysterious young man ‘with
me . . . did game of love, for I had neither might or power to
keep him from me’; visits her often
unnamed (but see Amya daughter of Vter, prophecied by Merlin; future also seven sons, all to be future kings
below) Queen of Ireland
Igerne wife of Gorlois, earl of Cornwall; later, wife of Vter ‘overtaken for the great love of Igerne’, ‘ravished for her
Vter; mother of Arthur and Amya beauty’, etc.; ‘privy looking and laughing, and the love
between them’; disguised Vter ‘did with her all his will’
Amya / Elyne / Eleyne (twice daughter of Vter and Igerne; wife / mother of the two named and two unnamed references to her are
unnamed) Aloth / Loth of Leones / Loegers confused
‘the flower of life’ [a metaphor] female; peacemaker [in Merlin’s Prophecies]
Gunnore cousin of Cador, earl of Cornwall; wife of ‘a fair lady and a gentle’; ‘never they had child together, and
Arthur nevertheless King Arthur loved her wonder well and dearly’;
left in care of regent Mordred, one of Arthur’s nephews;
‘taken’ by Mordred ‘against the law of Christianity’; ‘she was
sore adread and had great doubt [for] the great shame that
she to him had done’; retires to seclusion in ‘Kerlioun’
Lister M. Matheson
Elyne cousin / niece of Hoel of Brittany ‘fair Elyne’; abducted and killed by the giant Dinabus; ‘he
would have raped this maid who was so young and tender of
age, but she might not suffer it, so great and so huge the giant
is’
unnamed widow Elyne’s nurse head uncovered; weeping and mourning; multiply raped by
the giant
Orewenne sister of Edelf; wife of Adelbright; mother of given in marriage by Edelf to Adelbright ‘through great
Argentill friendship’
Argentill daughter of Adelbright Edelf’s ward; ‘fairest creature’; married off to Curan, a
kitchen-knave, son of Havelok; Curan wins back her land, ‘as
in another stead it tells more openly’
‘women’ pregnant women Adelbright of Kent founds in Rochester ‘a house in the
honour of God, wherein women should have children at the
bridge’s end, in which house women yet are delivered of
child’
sister of Adelbright of Kent, mother of Sicwith of Essex Sicwith is baptized by St Augustine
unnamed
INTRUSIVE ‘CADWALLADER EPISODE’, NOT IN MSS TO 1272 AND CERTAIN LATER TEXTS
unnamed sister of Peanda; widow of Cadwaleyn; mother
of Cadwaladre
Sexburga from Germany ‘the noble queen’; among other great companies from Ger-
many, brings innumerable people to Britain after Britons leave
Sibille a prophetess her and Merlin’s prophecies confirm correctness of
Cadwaladre’s going to Rome
unnamed sister of Cadwaladre; mother of Ynory Ynory sent to Britain to become a lord
END OF INTRUSIVE ‘CADWALLADER EPISODE’
unnamed wife of Buern Bocard a lady; ‘wonder fair’; welcomes Osbright of Northumberland
with honour and serves him worthily; he rapes her; ‘sore
weeping’; she tells husband the truth; ‘Fair love, be still . . . for
243
244
Appendix p. 6
against strength feebleness is little worth; and therefore of me
shall you never the less be loved, and namely for you have told
me the truth, and if Almighty God grant me life, I shall well
avenge you’; with Buern’s help, Danes invade; Osbright is killed
unnamed (first) wife of Edgar; mother of St Edward [the deceased
Martyr]
Estrilde daughter of Orgar, a baron of Devonshire; wife Edgar sends Edelwolde, a knight, to check out reputed beauty
of Edelwolde, later of Edgar; mother of Eldred; with a view to marry her; Edelwolde wants her himself; Orgar
instigator of martyrdom of Edward [the agrees; Edelwolde lies to Edgar; Edelwolde tells his now wife
Martyr] Estrilde: ‘and anon as she it knew, she loved him nevermore
afterward as she had done before’; Edgar is godfather to their
child; later, Estrilde flirts with Edgar, Edelwolde is killed, and
Edgar marries Estrilde; St Dunstan upbraids Edgar for marry-
ing Estrilde; ‘and the queen for that word never after loved St
Dunstan, and nonetheless the good man warned them often-
times to leave that folly, but his warning availed little, because
the love between them was so great’; widow Estrilde arranges
death of Edward [the Martyr] in favour of her son; Dunstan
forgives Queen of ‘her trespass’; afterwards, she lives ‘chaste
life and clean’; dies soon after births of Edmunde Irenside and
Edwynne
unnamed ‘Englishwoman’ wife of Eldred; mother of Edmunde Irenside
and Edwynne
Emme (unnamed at first) sister (later called ‘mother’) of Richard, duke of sends sons to her uncle for fear of their lives; marriage to
Normandy; cousin of Baldewynne, earl of Knoght ‘through consent of his baronage, for she was a fair
Flanders; wife of Eldred; mother of Alrud, woman, and was Eldred’s wife, and the duke of Normandy’s
Edward, and unnamed daughter (noted later); sister, and they lived together with much love, as reason
wife of Knoght; mother of Hardiknoght and would’; at Knoght’s request, offers him political counsel for
Harolde ‘Harefote’ overseas death for Edward and Edwyn; exiled by ‘wicked’ son
Lister M. Matheson
Harold, causing hatred between the two brothers; recalled by
son Hardeknoght ‘with much honour’
unnamed widowed wife of Edmunde; mother of Edward
[the Outlaw] and Edwyn
unnamed daughter of King of Hungary; wife of Edward Edward’s wife is genealogically / dynastically important —
Margaret [the Outlaw]; mother of Edgar ‘Helyng’, Mar- but unnamed!
Maud (see also below) garet (later Queen of Scotland; wife of Malcolm
Maud (see also below) of Scotland; mother of Maud (wife of Henry,
Cristian son of William the Conqueror; mother of
Maud, Empress of Almaign (mother of Henry
the Empress’s son))), and Cristian, a nun
unnamed daughter of Knoght by ‘his first wife’
(unnamed); wife of Earl Godwyn; mother of
Harolde
‘oure lady’ Virgin Mary venerated by St Edward
unnamed daughter of Godwyn; wife of St Edward married because St Edward loved Godwyn ‘so much’; chaste
marriage; ‘the queen . . . led holy life two years, and died’
unnamed daughter of Duke William of Normandy betrothed to Harold, who breaks his word
Maude wife of William the Conquerour; mother of death noted; ‘many fair children’
Maude (see also below) Robert Curthose, William le Rous, Richard,
four unnamed daughters Henry Beauclerc, Maude (wife of Earl of
Bleyns), and four other daughters
‘childbearing women’ (AN to whom King of France insultingly compares William of
text) England’s inactivity
Maude (see also above) daughter of Margaret of Scotland; wife of marriage
Maude (see also above and Henry Beauclerc [Henry I]; mother of William, marriage
below) Richard, and Maude (later Empress of Almayne;
wife of Henry, emperor of Almayn)
245
246
Appendix p. 8
Maude (see also above) wife of Earl of Bleynes; sister of Henry I since she is Henry I’s sister, Normans help Earl of Bleynes
against King Lowys of France
Countess of Perches, daughter of Henry I drowned with others (males named)
unnamed
Countess of Chester, niece of Henry I drowned with others (males named)
unnamed
Maude the Empress (see also daughter of Henry I; widow of Henry, emperor English swear oath of fealty and homage to her; wed to Earl of
above and below) of Almaign; wife of Gaufrey, earl of Angoy; Angoy ‘with much honour’; focus of civil war [multiple
mother of Henry the Empress’s Son [Henry II] appearances]; ‘debate between King Stephen and Maude the
Empress’; ‘this Maud the Empress anon was lady of England,
and all men held her for lady of the land’; death year recorded
(see below)
unnamed sister of Henry I; mother of Stephen
unnamed wife of Stephen focus of opposition to Maud
unnamed divorced Queen of France; wife of Henry II; she is ‘right heir of Gascony’; divorce from King of France,
[mother of Henry, Richard, Elianore, John, ‘sib and nigh of blood’; Henry is now Earl of Anjou, Duke of
Joan, Maude (later wife of Henry, duke of Normandy, and Duke of Gascony
Saxony; see below) (AN text differs slightly)]
unnamed (not in ME) daughter of King of France; wife of Henry, son marriage
of Henry II
Maude the Empress (see also death recorded
above)
Iohane [‘Joan’] daughter of Henry II birth recorded
Maude daughter of Henry II; wife of Henry, duke of marriage
Saxony; mother of Henry, Othus, and William
Elianore daughter of Henry II; wife of Dolfynes, king of marriage
Almaign
unnamed Queen of Jersusalem; widow of Baldwin; wife of rejects marriage with Earl of Trype, who becomes Saracen and
Lister M. Matheson
Sir Gy Perchez causes loss of Jerusalem

Iulyan widow of Richard I requests from John one third of England and Ireland; dies,
thus releasing John
unnamed wife of John’s brother John ‘held and haunted his own brother’s wife, and lay also by
unnamed daughters of great lords many other women, great lords’ daughters — for he spared no
woman that it pleased him to have’; loses support of lords, in
part leading to Great Charter
unnamed implied wife of John; implied mother of Henry, ‘John had fair children of his body begotten’
Richard, Isabell (later Empress of Rome),
Alienore (later Queen of Scotland)
Alienore daughter of Earl of Prouince; wife of Henry III; the ME text is confused in detail and in wording — ‘there was
mother of Edward (ME ‘Edmund, who was a sweet “sight” between them’ — corrected later in some MSS
next king after him’), Edmund (ME unnamed
brother [later named as Symond]), Margaret
(later Queen of Scotland), Beatrice (later
Countess of Brittany), Katherine (later died
‘maid in religion’)
‘the Countess’, unnamed mother of Simon de Montfort the younger flees with son into exile
END OF TEXT TO 1272
TEXT TO 1333 BEGINS
Alianore wife of Edward [later Edward I] begets daughter in Holy Land [in Prophecy of Merlin on
Henry III]
‘Iohne’ [Joan] of Acres daughter of Edward and Alianore conceived in Holy Land
unnamed daughter of Lewelyn, Prince of Wales; to be wed ‘Llewelyn did great wrong, for it was covenant that he should
to Simon de Montford the younger give his daughter to no manner man without counsel and
consent of King Edward’
three unnamed daughters daughters of David, Earl of Huntingdon; wives descent of Scottish throne through eldest blood
of John Balliol, Robert Bruce, and John
Hastings
247
248
Margaret sister of King Philip of France; wife of Edward I wedding arranged through court of Rome to create peace
between England and France; son Edward later noted but
not his birth; intercedes with husband to spare John, earl of
Atholl, ‘his drawing’ (but still hanged, beheaded, and body
burnt to ashes!)
unnamed sister of Robert Bruce; wife of King of Norway
Isabell (see also below) daughter of King of France; wife of Edward II Boulogne noted as place of marriage
maidens [of Scotland] mocking song by maidens of Scotland after Bannockburn
‘maidens of England, sore may
ye mourn’
three unnamed women three nieces of Edward II; sisters of Sir Gilbert the Clare inheritance!
of Clare; wives of Roger Damory, Hugh of
Audeley, and Hugh Despenser the younger
‘the Lady of Badlesmere’, holds Leeds Castle against Queen Isabell
unnamed
oblique reference [for context, ‘if the great lords of England had been only wedded to
see The Brut, ed. by Brie, English people, then should peace have been, and rest among
p. 220/17–26] them, without any envy’
unnamed (see also above) niece of Edward II; sister of Gilbert, earl of reason for sparing his execution
Gloucester; wife of Hugh Dauill
Isabell (see also above and Queen of England Edward II spares Thomas of Lancaster from hanging ‘for the
below) love of Queen Isabel [and] for cause and love of your lineage’
(still humiliated and beheaded!); sent to France ‘to treat of
peace between her lord and her brother’; joined by son Ed-
ward; both ‘wonder sorry and dread of the king’s menace and
of his wrath, and principally of the false traitors the Spensers’;
becomes ally of Lancaster’s party and the Earl of Henaud;
writer apostrophizes audience, ‘Now, fair sirs . . .’ (The Brut,
Lister M. Matheson
ed. by Brie, pp. 234/23–235/1); Isabel and her party ‘trusted
all in God’s grace’; invade England; her letter to London
inserted in some versions; sympathetically identified as ‘the
flower of life and death’ against the Despenser ‘owls’ in Mer-
lin’s prophecy about Edward II
Philippa (unnamed at first; see daughter of Earl of Henaud; wife of Edward III proposed marriage with Edward, son of Edward II, for help
also below) with invasion of England; later married ‘with much honour’
at York
Isabell (see also above and Queen of England treasures and lands ‘departed after the Queen Isabel’s ordi-
below) nance, and Sir Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, so that the king
had nothing thereof but at their will and their deliverance’;
enemies of Edward II ‘procured to make debate and strife
between him and his son, and Isabel his wife’; not implicated
in husband’s murder (Mortimer blamed thereof); with
Mortimer, assumes control of England: ‘and as they wished,
all things were done, both among high and low’; accused of
causing, with Mortimer (the names now linked), great harm

and loss to England and the crown; blamed for loss of
Scotland (see next); extended attack on disinheritance of
Edward III through counsel of Isabel, Bishop of Ely, and
Mortimer against ‘reason and law’; accused of greed; ‘then
began the commonalty of England to hate Isabel the Queen
that so much loved her when she came again to pursue the
false traitors the Spensers from France’; trouble between
‘noble’ / ‘good’ Henry, earl of Lancaster, and Isabel and Mor-
timer; Isabel ‘procured against her son the king’; ‘swore by
God and his names full angrily’ misleads Edward III; obtains
exile of supporters of Lancaster; prevents son’s homage to the
249
250
King of France; responsible, with Mortimer, for execution of
Edmund of Woodstock — ‘alas the time’; Mortimer makes
himself ‘wonder privy’ with Isabel; at Mortimer’s capture ‘she
made much sorrow in heart . . . “Now, fair sirs, I pray you that
you do no harm unto his body; a worthy knight, our well
beloved friend, and our dear cousin”’ [final words and appear-
ance, though mentioned a couple of times subsequently]
Iohne [‘Joan’] of the Toure sister of Edward II; wife of David, future King of marriage arranged through ‘cursed counsel . . . to great harm
(scornfully nicknamed ‘make Scots and impairing to all the king’s blood, whereof that gentle lady
peace’ by Scots) came, alas the time! for wonder greatly was that fair damsel
disparaged, since she was married without the common assent
of all the lords of England’
unnamed wife of Sir Henry Beaumond, former Earl of Beaumond was earl through right of his wife
Angus
Lady Vescy, unnamed [wife of Baron Thomas of Vescy, though not so hostess in Yorkshire of Edward Balliol, Beaumond’s
identified] candidate to be King of Scotland
unnamed ladies of Scotland with unnamed lords and gentles, do homage for their lands to
Edward Balliol
END OF TEXT TO 1333
TEXT TO 1377 BEGINS
Philippa (see also above and wife of Edward III bears unnamed child in Braban; left in Braban by husband;
below) harmed and shamed by Philip of Valois, king of France; later
relieved by letters and arrival of Edward III; returns to
England with husband and unnamed children
Isabel (see also above) Queen of England; mother of Edward III; sister Edward III’s claim to throne of France
german of Charles, king of France
Virgin Mary prayed to by Edward III
two unnamed queens spectators at tournament at Windsor
Lister M. Matheson
two unnamed countessses spectators at tournament at Windsor
English women in general outdid men in extravagant clothing, ‘the which disguisings
and pride peraventure afterward brought forth and caused
many mishaps and mischiefs in the realm of England’
Blaunche (see also Duchess of daughter of Henry, duke of Lancaster; cousin marriage by papal dispensation; John later becomes Duke of
Lancaster below) and wife of John of Richmond [Gaunt], son of Lancaster by right of his wife
Edward III, later duke of Lancaster
widows of plague victims ‘wives, like women out of governance, took husbonds, as well
strangers [foreigners?] as other lewd and simple people, the
which, forgetting their own worship and birth, coupled and
married themselves with them that were of low degree and
little reputation’
Countess of Kent, unnamed widow of Sir Thomas Holland; erstwhile, ‘separated and divorced previously from the earl of Salisbury
(see also below) divorced wife of the Earl of Salisbury; wife of because of the same knight [Holland]’; accompanies husband
Edward, Prince of Wales to Gascony with unnamed children (young son Edward dies
later; birth of Richard noted)
generic Christian woman to receive help from Prince Edward, Peter (Pedro), deposed
king of Spain, swears ‘that when he had taken a Christian
woman to wife, he should never come into no other woman’s
bed, nor no other man’s wife to defoul’
unnamed daughter of Galoys, Duke of Milan / ‘Galeys’, Lionel to have the lordship of Milan; some confusion in MSS
sister of the Duke of Milan; wife of Lionel, duke over her paternity / name
of Clarence, son of Edward III
Duchess of Lancaster (see death and burial in St Paul’s recorded
above)
Queen Philippa (see also death and burial in Westminster recorded; ‘a full noble and
above) good woman’; Edward attends to burial and tomb ‘with great
costs and royalties’
251
252
wife of Prince Edward (see returns with husband from Gascony
also above)
two unnamed daughters daughters of Peter, late King of Spain; wives of
Duke of Lancaster (elder daughter) and Earl of
Cambridge (younger daughter)
unspecified allusion Earl of Pembroke defeated and captured, which ‘was no great
wonder for this earl was a full evil liver, as an open lecher’ (also
against franchises of Holy Church)
Alys Perers longterm ‘lemman’ of Edward III complaints in parliament ‘for the great wrongs and evil gover-
nance that was done by her and by her counsel [council?] in
the realm. . . . Wherefore it was the less wonder though,
through the frailty of the woman’s exciting and her straying,
consented to her lewdness and evil counsel’; Piers de la Mare,
speaker, exposes her many wrongs, trusting in the support of
the Prince of Wales, after whose death Piers is condemned to
prison at the request of Alice
END OF TEXT TO 1377
DESCRIPTION OF EDWARD III (IN SOME MSS)
unspecified allusion a great king in youth and middle age, but ‘lechery and moving
of his flesh haunted him in his age, whereof the rather, as it
was to suppose, for immeasurable fulfilling of his lust, his life
shorted the sooner . . . when he drew into age, drawing
downward through lechery and other sins, little by little all
the joyfull and blessed things, good fortune, and prosperity
decreased and mishapped, and unfortunate things and
unprofitable harms, with many evils, began to spring, and, the
more harm is, continued long time after’
TEXT TO 1419 BEGINS
Lister M. Matheson
Queen Anne (see also below) daughter of Emperor of Almayne and King of accompanying party, reception in England and London,
Beeme; wife of Richard II wedding, and departure of guests described
24 unnamed ladies lead with chains of gold 24 unnamed lords of the Garter, all
in livery of the hart, on horseback from the Tower to
Smithfield, where feasting and jousts are held for 24 days
‘the Duchess’, unnamed (see wife of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster accompany Gaunt to Spain to discuss his title, through his
also above and below) wife, to the throne of Spain
three unnamed daughters
unnamed daughter of Gaunt and Blaunche; wife of King wed in exchange for huge treasure from Spain to Gaunt and
of Spain his Duchess, ‘the good lady’; Gaunt and Duchess return to
England, ‘but many a worthy man in that voyage died of the
flux’
unnamed daughter of Gaunt and Blaunche; wife of King wed ‘the same time’ as her sister
of Portugal
‘the Queen’, unnamed (see Queen Anne sorrowful, with the King, for accidental death of the Earl of
also above and below) Pembroke
Queen Anne (see also above intercedes on behalf of Londoners to regain King’s favour;
and below) participates in civic pageant

Queen Anne (see also above death at Shene and burial in Westminster recorded; ‘the good
and below) gracious Queen Anne . . . on whose soul Almighty God have
mercy and pity! amen!’
Isabell (see also below) daughter of King of France; wife of Richard II reception and wedding at Calais described at length; partici-
pates in civic reception in London; coronation; ‘that worthy
and gracious lady . . . a young creature of nine years of age’;
‘the worshipful lady’
‘a Duchess’, unnamed Richard II creates five dukes, a duchess, a marquis, and four
earls, all of whom are identified by name except the duchess
Blaunche (see also above) wife of John of Gaunt; daughter and heir of Gaunt dies and is buried beside her
Henry, duke of Lancaster
253
254
Queen Isabell (see also above) widow of Richard II sent back to France with dowry
unnamed daughters of Owen Glendower; one is wife of one married to Lord Gray, Owen’s enemy and prisoner
Lord Gray Rithyn
‘Iohane’ [‘Joan’], duchess of wife of Henry IV arrival in England, civic reception, marriage, and coronation
Brittany (see also below)
Dame Blaunche eldest daughter of Henry IV; wife of ‘the dukes journey to Cologne, wedding, and jousts; ‘a worthy lady’
son of Barrey’
Dame Luce sister of Duke of Milan; wife of Edmund arrival in England and wedding; given away by Henry IV;
Holland, earl of Kent personally escorted by Henry IV to feast; ‘this worthy lady’
Dame ‘Phelyp’ younger daughter of Henry IV; wife of King of journey to Denmark, accompanied by many ‘lords, knights
Denmark and squires, ladies and gentlewomen’, marriage, and
coronation; ‘a worthy King’s daughter’; ‘this worthy lady’
Countess of Somerset, wife of Thomas, son of Henry IV wedding noted
unnamed
Queen Anne (see also above) wife of Richard II Richard II reburied beside her in Westminster by Henry V
‘virgins’ in cast of London civic pageant to celebrate Henry V and
Agincourt
unspecified Frenchwomen, expelled after capture of Caen; Henry V commands ‘no man
‘more than 1500’ so hardy to defoul no woman, nor take no manner goods
from them, but let them pass in peace, upon [pain of] death’
unspecified at siege of Rouen, French captains ‘saw young children lie and
suck their mothers’ paps, that were dead’
END OF TEXT TO 1419
TEXT TO 1461 BEGINS
Queen ‘Iane’ [‘Joan’] (see also widow of Henry IV arrested, imprisoned at Leeds Castle, released
above and below)
Dame Katerine (see also daughter of King of France; wife of Henry V; marriage brought about by Duke of Burgundy; Henry, ‘with
below) mother of Henry his new wife’, goes to Paris; King and Queen return to
Lister M. Matheson
England and London; her coronation noted; birth of son
Henry noted; journeys to France; ‘worshipfully received’ by
Henry V and her father, King of France, and mother;
Henry V attends feast in Paris, ‘crowned, and the Queen also,
which had not been seen before’
Duchess of Holland, godmother to Henry, son of Henry V
unnamed (see also below)
unnamed, ‘her mother’ wife of King of France receives Katherine worshipfully
Queen Katerine (see also widow of Henry V funds effigy of Henry V
above and below)
unspecified nuns Henry V founded Brigittine house of Sion, ‘both of men and
women’
Dame Iane [‘Joan’] daughter of Earl of Somerset and Duchess of ‘Dame Joan, the Duchess daughter of Clarence of her first
Clarence; wife of James Stewart, king of Scots husband the earl of Somerset’ [wrongly punctuated in The
Brut, ed. by Brie, p. 497/17–18]
Duchess of Clarence, wife of Earl of Somerset; mother of Joan
unnamed
Duchess of Holland, unnamed wife of Duke of Gloucester after wedding, Gloucester goes to Henaud ‘to take possession
(see also above) of his wife’s inheritance’; becomes lord; returns to England,
leaving wife (and treasure) behind; she is given into custody of
Duke of Burgundy; escapes ‘in a man’s array’; repels a siege by
Duke of Burgundy, despite reinforcements from Gloucester
being defeated
‘the Duchess his wife’, wife of Duke of Bedford accompanies husband to Calais
unnamed
‘a good widow’, unnamed a widow ‘without Aldgate’ murdered and robbed by a Breton;
‘women of the same parish’ he takes sanctuary; while forsaking the land, women of the
widow’s parish kill him ‘with stones and “Canell” dung . . .
255
256

notwithstanding the constable and many other men being
present to keep him, for there were many women, and had no
pity’
‘a maid which they named “la [Joan of Arc] a successful French captain who ‘rode like a man and was a
Pucelle de Dieu”’ valiant captain . . . taken in the field, armed like a man’;
judged ‘by the law’ to be burned; falsely claims pregnancy;
burned in Rouen; other captains ransomed and ‘treated as
men of war are accustomed’
unnamed daughter of the Earl of St Pol; wife of Duke of marriage arranged by Bishop of ‘Terewyn’ [Turin];
Bedford accompanies husband to London
Lydwith ‘About this time was a holy maid in Holland, called Lydwith,
who lived only by miracle, not eating any meat’ (whole story)
‘a common woman’ sleeps with a French soldier who tells her of a plot to capture
Calais; tells English and thus foils plot
Queen Katerine (see also mother of Henry VI; widow of Henry V death and burial in Westminster reported
above and below)
Duchess of Burgundy, wife of Duke of Burgundy treats with English ‘having full power of her lord as regent
unnamed and lady of his lands’; truce made ‘in the name of the duchess,
and not of the duke’; Henry VI henceforward deals only with
Duchess
Queen Iane [‘Joan’] (see also widow of Henry IV death and burial at Canterbury beside husband reported
above)
unnamed daughter of Emperor Sigismond; wife of Albert, Albert becomes emperor by right of his wife
duke of Ostrych
Queen Katerine (see also widow of Henry V; wife of Owayn, by whom Owayn [Tudor], ‘a man of low degree’, imprisoned and
above) mother of three sons and a daughter released; had ‘secretly wedded’ Katerine; three sons become
unnamed daughter Earl of Richmond, Earl of Pembroke, a monk of Westminster
Lister M. Matheson
unnamed daughter of King of Portugal; wife of Emperor
Frederike
Elianour Cobham, duchess of arrested ‘for certain points of treason laid against her’;
Gloucester examined; made to do penance; imprisoned for life; one of
Margery Iureman, ‘the witch her chaplains arrested, with others, including Margery, for
of Eye’ ‘being of counsel’ with the Duchess; chaplain pardoned by
King; Margery burned at Smithfield
unnamed (see below) daughter of King of Cecil and Jerusalem Earl of Suffolk treats for her marriage to King of England, in
exchange for her father getting lands in France; following
year, escorted by Duke of Suffolk to England
unnamed, ‘his wife’ wife of Duke of Suffolk accompanies husband to escort daughter of King of Cecil
Queen Margaret (see also wife of Henry VI weds Henry VI; her reception, London civic ceremonies, and
above and below) jousts described
unnamed sister of Earl of Arminak rumours that Henry VI had been betrothed to her but
agreement was broken and he wedded Queen Margaret —
‘which was a dear marriage for the realm of England’
(followed by a long complaint about consequences of the

breaking of the king’s promise [see The Brut, ed. by Brie, pp.
511/17–512/12])
Holy Church ‘spouse of Christ’ in a pious asseveration
Queen Margaret (see also wife of Henry VI delivered of ‘a fair prince’, named Edward
above and below)
Queen (see also above and wife of Henry VI accompanies King to Coventry
below)
unnamed, ‘his wife’ wife of Earl of Warwick accompanies husband to Calais
Queen (see also above and wife of Henry VI accompanies King to London; participates in procession at
below) St Paul’s; her attorney killed in a fight in Fleet Street
the Queen’s ‘meyney’ Queen’s men capture two sons of Earl of Salisbury
257
258

Saint Katerine of Senys canonized by Pope Calixt Pius
Queen (see also above) wife of Henry VI Duke of York and Earls of Warwick and Salisbury realize that
realm is being governed by ‘the Queen and her Council’ and
assemble men; King sends out commissions for men; ‘it is here
to be noted that every lord in England at this time dared not
disobey the Queen, for she ruled peacibly all that was done
about the King, who was a good, simple, and innocent man’
Duchess of York, unnamed Henry VI places Duchess of York and her children in long-
(see also below) term custody of her sister, the Lady of Buckingham
the Lady of Buckingham,
unnamed
Countess of Salisbury, mother of Earl of Warwick brought by son to Calais
unnamed
Queen (see also above and wife of Henry VI in north with her son; ‘the lords of the Queen’s party’ win at
below) Wakefield; comes south; wins Second Battle of St Albans;
rescued Henry VI ‘went with the Queen and Prince his son’;
‘the Queen and her party’, ‘the Queen’s Council’; heads
north with the King and Prince.
Duchess of York, unnamed mother of George and Richard sends sons from London to Utrecht for safety
Queen (see also above) with King and Prince, leaves York towards Scotland
END OF TEXT TO 1461
Lister M. Matheson
G ENEALOGY AND JOHN H ARDYNG ’S
V ERSE C HRONICLE
Sarah L. Peverley
T
he two distinct versions of the Middle English verse Chronicle composed
by John Hardyng during the Wars of the Roses offer a privileged insight
into how genealogy was utilized within a historical narrative to negotiate
the politically unstable backdrop of the 1450s/60s and articulate a public desire for
unity and stability. At their most basic level, Hardyng’s texts engage with the
genealogy of contemporary sovereigns by charting the succession of British and
English monarchs from the first founding of Britain down to the late fifteenth
century.1 However, rather than settling into the familiar pattern of many other
Brut-orientated narratives, whereby the deeds of past kings are recorded and, for
the most part, passed over without explicit attention or comment from the author,
each of Hardyng’s texts has its own idiosyncratic method of connecting figures and
events from his sovereigns’ past with the politically volatile present.
Whilst the first version reprocesses history and genealogy in distinctly aesthetic
terms, regularly employing literary and thematic devices appropriated from Boethius,
1
The first version survives in London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 204; the second is extant
in twelve manuscripts, three fragments, and two printed editions. For a study of the two versions
see my PhD thesis, ‘John Hardyng’s Chronicle: A Study of the Two Versions and a Critical Edition
of Both for the Period 1327–1464’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Hull, 2004). I am
currently preparing new editions of both versions: the first with James Simpson for TEAMS Mid-
dle English Texts; the second for Boydell and Brewer’s Medieval Chronicle Series. The second ver-
sion was edited by Henry Ellis as The Chronicle of Iohn Hardyng (London, 1812), but since Ellis’s
text is derived from Richard Grafton’s two printed editions (1543), I have taken my quotations
from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden B. 10, one of the earliest and fullest manuscripts
of the second version; for the reader’s reference the relevant pages of Ellis’s edition are also given.
260 Sarah L. Peverley
Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate to enhance Hardyng’s self-referential interjections

on kingship and good governance, the second version adopts a more forthright
method of conveying the royal lineage of Hardyng’s patrons, which points to a shift
in the Chronicle’s purpose and audience. This recension still draws upon visual and
self-referential elements to invest additional meaning in the history, but omits the
majority of the non-chronicle materials found in the first version to implement a
new strategy by which author, text, and genealogy are explicitly aligned with
notions of transparency and truth.
This case study seeks to address the way in which Hardyng reshaped the later
version of his Chronicle to reflect and comment on the fractured political period
in which he lived.2 It will therefore focus on two key issues: first, how Hardyng pre-
sents himself and his work as truthful and authoritative; and, secondly, how he
utilizes his self-styled role as a truth-teller to offer a carefully constructed genealog-
ical history of his patron’s entitlement to the thrones of Britain, France, Portugal,
Spain, and Jerusalem at a time when the dissemination of the Yorkist claim to the
English throne was of paramount importance.3
Hardyng began compiling the second version of his Chronicle — dedicated to
Richard, duke of York, and his family, and rededicated to his son, Edward IV, after
York’s death — sometime between 1457 and 1460. Whether he started his revision
of the text immediately after presenting the first version to Henry VI in 1457 is
unclear, but since the prologue and several interjections in the early part of the
Chronicle address York as Henry VI’s legal heir, and refer to how he will ‘rule’ his
‘subgettes’, Hardyng must have been working on these sections between 8 November
2
Unfortunately a discussion of both versions is beyond the scope of this study. For the first
version, see my ‘Dynasty and Division: The Depiction of King and Kingdom in John Hardyng’s
Chronicle’, in The Medieval Chronicle III: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on the
Medieval Chronicle Doorn/Utrecht 12–17 July 2002, ed. by Erik Kooper (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2004), pp. 149–70, and ‘John Hardyng’s Chronicle’, pp. 140–95.
3
For Hardyng’s use of autobiographical details, see Peverley, ‘Dynasty and Division’ and ‘John
Hardyng’s Chronicle’, pp. 143–51. For early Yorkist propaganda, see Alison Allan, ‘Yorkist Prop-
aganda: Pedigree, Prophecy and the “British History” in the Reign of Edward IV’, in Patronage,
Pedigree and Power in Later Medieval England, ed. by Charles Ross (Gloucester: Sutton, 1979), pp.
171–92; Allan, ‘Political Propaganda Employed by the House of York in England in the Mid-
Fifteenth Century, 1450–1471’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Wales (Swansea),
1981); Allan, ‘Royal Propaganda and the Proclamations of Edward IV’, Bulletin of the Institute of
Historical Research, 59 (1986), 146–54; Colin Richmond, ‘Propaganda in the Wars of the Roses’,
History Today, 42 (1992), 12–18; and Charles Ross, ‘Rumour, Propaganda and Popular Opinion
during the Wars of the Roses’, in Patronage, the Crown and the Provinces in Later Medieval
England, ed. by Ralph A. Griffiths (Gloucester: Sutton, 1981), pp. 15–32.
GENEALOGY AND JOHN HARDYNG’S VERSE CHRONICLE 261
1460, when York’s title was officially recognized by parliament, and 31 December
1460, when he died at the battle of Wakefield.4
Unlike the opening four-stanza dedication to Henry VI in the first version, the
first stanzas of the second version are devoted to connecting Hardyng with previ-
ous writers and establishing his role in continuing the tradition of chronicle writ-
ing that began long ‘afore Crist did enclyne | In Mary, moder and maiden’.5 His
brief summary of the different languages and styles that his scholarly predecessors
elected to use is, in many respects, merely a routine example of the practice of trans-
latio studii et imperii, whereby medieval authors saw a ‘relationship between pres-
ent and past cultures’ and ‘the means by which cultural value and authority was
transmitted from one period to another’.6 Nevertheless, Hardyng’s decision to em-
ploy the translatio topos before he discusses the legitimacy of York’s ancestry and
status as future sovereign underscores a desire to establish his own authority as an
author first. By establishing his chronicle’s place in an ancient tradition of histori-
cal writings, and his ability to assimilate, inspect, and translate previous histories
for the Duke, Hardyng portrays himself as a knowledgeable and judicious individ-
ual. Yet at the same time he describes the rich heritage of chronicle writing he has
access to, he also acknowledges a potential problem: he does not have the skill to
write as eloquently as his predecessors and make his work as ‘glorious’ as theirs.7
4
Eight of the twelve extant manuscripts of the second version contain the prologue addressed
to York; of the other manuscripts, three are incomplete at the beginning of the Chronicle and one
manuscript — Princeton University, MS Garrett 142 — contains a revised prologue, which omits
all of the material relating to York and his titles. This manuscript is unique and appears to have been
compiled during Henry VI’s brief Readeption; see my ‘Adapting to Readeption in 1470–1471: The
Scribe as Editor in a Unique Copy of John Hardyng’s Chronicle of England (Garrett MS. 142)’,
Princeton University Library Chronicle, 66 (2004), 140–72. For direct addresses to York in the early
part of the Chronicle, see Bodl. MS Arch. Selden B. 10, fol. 24r (reign of Cloten), fols 38v –39r (reign
of Carause), fol. 67r (reign of Gurmonde), fols 78 r–79 v (reign of Cadwallader); and Ellis, pp. 93–94,
155–56, 179–82. York formally put forward his claim to the throne on 16 October 1460. On 24
October an Act of Settlement was drawn up detailing that York should inherit the English throne
upon Henry VI’s death, and he was proclaimed heir apparent on 8 November. For further details,
see P. A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York 1411–1460 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 212–18.
5
Bodl. MS Arch. Selden B. 10, fol. 5r; Ellis, p. 15. For commonplaces in medieval prologues,
see Antonia Gransden, ‘Prologues in the Historiography of Twelfth-Century England’, in Legends,
Traditions and History in Medieval England (London: Hambledon, 1992), pp. 125–51, and David
Lawton, ‘Dullness in the Fifteenth Century’, ELH, 54 (1987), 761–99.
6
Jocelyn Wogan-Brown and others, The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English
Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 7, 317.
7
Bodl. MS Arch. Selden B. 10, fol. 5r ; Ellis, p. 15.
In presenting himself as an aged, unskilled, ‘symple’ man, wishing to eschew sin

through his writing, Hardyng employs another rhetorical commonplace frequently
utilized by fifteenth-century writers to ally themselves with ‘political truth-telling’:
the humility topos. As David Lawton has pointed out, we are not to take late
medieval authors at face value when they profess to being ‘dull’ and devoid of
‘eloquence’ for this is
the favourite guise in which [fifteenth-century] poets present themselves: as ‘lewed’, ‘rude’,
lacking in ‘cunnyng’, innocent of rhetoric and social savoir-faire, bankrupt in pocket or
brain, too young or too old, feeble, foolish and fallen — in a word dull. This is a humility
topos of an intensely specific kind [and is employed] to reclaim access to the public world.8
In this instance, the world that Hardyng wants access to, and licence to speak about,
is the politically unstable world of late fifteenth-century England, in which the son
of Henry VI has been set aside as heir to the throne in favour of the Duke of York.
By commencing the Chronicle with a self-deprecating portrait and repeating his
claim to be ‘bare naked of eloquence’ just before he moves on to describe the
lineage of Brutus, first king of the Britons, Hardyng utilizes the topos to its full
potential and calls upon God for ‘help and spede, to bringe this booke to ende’.9
Rather than revealing his ignorance and simplicity as an author in comparison with
earlier writers, Hardyng’s espousal of humility instantly associates everything that
follows with theological truth: his Chronicle is not the product of an eloquent
rhetorician inspired by a classical muse, it is inspired and guided by God:
I shal reporte as God will deyne to lede
My simple goost with langauge it to fede.
For wele I wote withoute his supportacion
For to reporte his [Brutus’] genologie,
Howe he descent in al generacion
From Adam doun to Troian auncetrie,
Goten and borne certaine in Italie,
Ful herd it is, allethough I wold ful fayne,
So simple been my spirites and my brayne.10
The translatio and humility topoi enable Hardyng to begin shaping his audiences’
understanding of his role (honest negotiator of history) and that of his chronicle
(divinely sanctioned account of York’s ancestry), long before he attempts to engage
with York’s claim to the throne; they underscore his appreciation of the past and its
8
Lawton, ‘Dullness in the Fifteenth Century’, p. 762.
9
Bodl. MS Arch. Selden B. 10, fol. 11v ; Ellis, p. 31.
10
Bodl. MS Arch. Selden B. 10, fol. 12r; Ellis, p. 32.
usefulness to the present, and imply that God will furnish him with the ‘language’
to write a historical ‘mirror for princes’ to help York eschew sin and rule well. Pre-
senting himself as a conduit for theological and political truth, Hardyng places
himself in a position of unquestionable power from which he can comment on
contemporary affairs, particularly York’s election, through the stories of the past and,
most importantly, discuss York’s ancestral claim to the throne with conviction. As
we shall see later, this is precisely what he goes on to do in the rest of the prologue.
Whilst the preparatory framework of the prologue provides Hardyng with the
authority he needs to speak about the contemporary significance of York’s role as
heir apparent, there are numerous junctures throughout the Chronicle, usually
coinciding with references to fifteenth-century affairs, where Hardyng sees fit to
remind the audience of his discerning quest for truth. Of these, I would like to turn
momentarily to two instances, one at the start of the Chronicle and one towards the
end, where Hardyng addresses the problem of spurious chronicles and reiterates
the ideas associated with the aforementioned topoi.
Hardyng’s account of the first founding of the realm by the exiled pagan
princess Albyne is deliberately misleading, but brilliantly effective in illustrating the
importance of an honest and diligent author. He commences the narrative in a
similar manner to that in the first version, but radically reduces the first thirty-one
stanzas of his original to just four. The reason for this extreme treatment of the
story soon becomes apparent: Hardyng’s revised version is more interested in the
legitimacy of the tale he is imparting than the descriptive detail that gave the first
version its charm.11 Once the audience has been given enough of the story of Dio-
cletian’s daughter, Albyne, to settle them into the seemingly safe relationship
between narrator and reader/listener, Hardyng interrupts his account with the
revelation that the story the audience has just absorbed is not true:
But I dar sey this cronicle is nat trewe,
For that ilke tyme in Syrie was no kyng,
Ne afterward to the tyme that Saul grewe,
Ne no king was in Siry euer lyving
That had that name.12
Justifying his reason for this claim with supporting evidence, apparently gleaned from
his own sceptical inquiries into the names of kings ruling Syria at the time of the
alleged events, serves to disorientate the audience further, shattering the illusionary
11
For a detailed discussion of the Albyne story in the first version, see Peverley, ‘John Hardyng’s
Chronicle’, pp. 151–60.
12
world created over the last four stanzas: Hardyng will not finish this particular
version of the story because it is fiction, not historical fact, and, what is more, he
can prove it.13 Further evidence is offered in support of his claim in the form of a
Latin gloss noting biblical and classical sources, which allegedly corroborate the
erroneous nature of the tale.14 The switch from the vernacular to Latin in this re-
cension is fascinating as it relates to the issues of language, legitimacy, and authority
already raised in the prologue. Since the authority of Latin auctores was unequivo-
cally established earlier with the translatio topos, the language of this gloss alone
serves to add authority to Hardyng’s claims, regardless of the fact that the gloss
alludes, inaccurately, to the supreme source of written truth: the Bible. Most strik-
ing, perhaps, is the fact that a similar English gloss occurs in the first version, but
Hardyng refrains from drawing his own conclusions about the sources detailed in
it, leaving the audience to decide which version of the story is correct; only in the
revised Chronicle for York does he remove this choice and emphasize his personal
pursuit of the truth by telling us which version is more historically accurate.15 He
also fulfils the promise to ‘translate’ for us, made at the start of the Chronicle, be-
cause we do not need to be able to read the Latin gloss to understand why Hardyng
rejects the tale referring to Albyne’s father as Diocletian.
Proceeding in the spirit of the adage that ‘there is no smoke without fire’
Hardyng continues his explication of the gloss by suggesting that the story of King
Danaus and his fifty daughters — the myth of the Daniads — is far more likely to be
the source of the legend. He then furnishes us with further evidence of his diligence
13
A comparable case of rejecting false sources is discussed by Andrew Galloway, who believes
that the ‘gesture of excluding unreliable stories’ in vernacular chronicles ‘parallels that of many Latin
chroniclers after the Conquest’; see ‘Writing History in England’, in The Cambridge History of
Medieval English Literature, ed. by David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999), pp. 255–83 (p. 271).
14
The ‘Hebrew truth’ (‘Hebraicam veritatem’), the compilers of the Septuagint (‘LXX inter-
pretes’) and the enigmatic Roman chronicler, Hugh de Genesis (‘Hugo de Genesis nobilis cronica-
rius Romanus’) are amongst the authorities cited. For Hugh de Genesis, see Lisa M. Ruch, ‘A
Possible Identity for Hugh of Genesis in John Hardyng’s Chronicle’, Notes and Queries, 53 (2006),
150–51. For other scholarship on the pre-Trojan foundation myth in chronicles, see Tamar
Drukkers, ‘Thirty-Three Murderous Sisters: A Pre-Trojan Foundation Myth in the Middle
English Prose Brut Chronicle’, Review of English Studies, n.s., 54 (2003), 449–63, and Julia Marvin,
‘Albine and Isabelle: Regicidal Queens and the Historical Imagination of the Anglo-Norman Prose
Brut Chronicles’, Arthurian Literature, 18 (2001), 143–91.
15
See BL, MS Lansdowne 204, fol. 7r . This gloss cites the chronicles of ‘Martyne’ (Martinus
Polonus) and Trogus Pompeius in support of the story of King Danaus’s daughters, as opposed to
the Bible and Hugh de Genesis, but neither work makes reference to the legend.
by referring to other historical and biblical figures encountered during his research,
such as Samuel, Saul, and Alexander.16 More space is devoted to the pursuit of
truth behind the myth than to the story, and before providing a long list of
chronicles that attest to the existence of King Danaus, Hardyng warns against the
dangers of spurious texts:
By alle cronicle that I haue enquired.
That cronicle sholde nought be desired,
Sith that is nought true, ne autentike,
By no cronicle into the truthe ought like.17
His emphasis on the desiderium of authenticity and ‘truthe’ in historical writing

reminds the audience that they should not believe everything they are told without
questioning the validity of the source or employing a trustworthy author to inter-
cede for them and discover the truth. Since Hardyng shows that he cares about the
credibility of his sources and has seen works that the writer of the misleading tale
has not, it follows that the audience should allow him to guide them in all matters,
especially in relation to York’s royal lineage.18
Even after Hardyng takes up the story again, explaining how Britain received
its former name of ‘Albion’, it is not long before he returns to the subject of truth
and discusses the conflicting etymologies he has found:
But Bartholomew, De Proprietatibus Rerum,
Seith howe this ile of Albyon had name
Of the see bankes ful white allee or sum
That circuyte this ile [. . .].
But Maryan Scot, the truest croniclere,
Seith Dame Albyne was first þat name it so.
Bothe two might been togedre true and clere,
That shippes so salyng to and fro
And at hir come, þey called it bothe two,
So bothe þe wayes may ben right sure and true,
Fro whiche þere wille no croniclere remewe.19
16
Bodl. MS Arch. Selden B. 10, fols 9v –10r; Ellis, pp. 26–28.
17
18
For Hardyng’s criticism of the false chronicler’s reading habits, see Bodl. MS Arch. Selden
B. 10, fol. 10r; Ellis, p. 30.
19
Bodl. MS Arch. Selden B. 10, fol. 11r ; Ellis, p. 30. Like Higden, Hardyng cites Marianus
Scotus as a source when he appears to be using John of Worcester’s Chronica Chronicarum, a work
based on Scotus’s universal chronicle.
It is not surprising that he feels compelled to deal with this matter, since his Chron-
icle, like the Brut, is infused with etymological explanations of place names, and
readers appear to have taken great interest in them. His rather banal conclusion
that both ‘Maryan Scot’ and Bartholomeus Anglicanus ‘may ben right sure and
true’ helps to reassert the authority vested in chronicles, whilst wisely acknowl-
edging the accuracy of other renowned authors writing outside of this field and
showing Hardyng’s assiduous nature at work.
The problem of potentially spurious chronicles and contradictory sources also
arises at the end of the second version when Hardyng addresses the matter of the
forged chronicle circulated in the fourteenth century by John of Gaunt. Supple-
mentary prose passages in English describe the ‘grete erroure and controuersi’ that
arose due to ‘an vntrue cronicle, fayned in the tyme of Kinge Richard the seconde
by John of Gaunt, duke of Lancastre’, which recorded that ‘Edmond, erle of Lan-
castre, Laycestre, and of Derby, was, the eldire sonne of Kinge Henry the thirde,
crouchebakked, vnable to haue be kinge’.20
A comparable account of the ‘crouchback legend’ occurs in Adam of Usk’s
Chronicle, but Hardyng’s rendition contrasts the deceitful machinations of Gaunt
and Henry IV with the honest ‘erle of Northumbrelond and his brothir Sir
Thomas Percy’, who chose to refrain from any part in the deception, despite the
fact that they stood to benefit from the false chronicle ‘for cause they were descent
of the said Edmonde [son of Henry III] be a sister’.21 The sister in question, Mary,
daughter of Henry, earl of Lancaster, and granddaughter of Edmund of Lancaster,
provides Hardyng with an opportunity to show how an important female line can
20
Bodl. MS Arch. Selden B. 10, fols 189v –190r ; Ellis, pp. 353–54. This incident is also re-
counted in the body of the revised Chronicle (Bodl. MS Arch. Selden B. 10, fol. 128v ; Ellis, p. 279).
The passages attest to what scholars have known for some time, that chronicles from respectable
institutions like ‘Westminster and all oþer notable mynstres’ (fol. 190r) were used by medieval
authorities to ascertain the truth behind matters of historical importance, such as royal genealogies.
On the use of chronicles in this way, see M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England
1066–1307 (London: Arnold, 1979), pp. 116–47; Antonia Gransden, ‘Propaganda in English
Medieval Historiography’, Journal of Medieval History, 1 (1975), 363–81, and ‘The Chronicles of
Medieval England and Scotland’, in Legends, Traditions and History, pp. 219–22; and John Taylor,
English Historical Literature in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 58.
21
Bodl. MS Arch. Selden B. 10, fol. 190v ; Ellis, p. 354. For Usk’s version, see The Chronicle of
Adam Usk, ed. by Chris Given-Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 64–67. For the
crouchback legend, see also G. T. Lapsley, ‘The Parliamentary Title of Henry IV’, English Historical
Review, 49 (1934), 577–606, and Allan, ‘Political Propaganda’, pp. 193, 196–98, 269, who notes
a connection between the crouchback myth and the account in the Eulogium Continuation, which
details Richard II naming Mortimer as his heir.
be used or abused by descendants. He clarifies that the Percies could have gained
from supporting Gaunt, as they too were descended from a female ancestor of
Edmund, but that they chose to support the lawful King of England and take no
part in promoting the false chronicle.
Ironically, although Gaunt’s forgery was meant to oust the legitimate heirs,
Hardyng’s description of the conspiracy renders it powerless and reinforces the
legitimacy of York’s claim by showing that the Lancastrian dynasty was willing to
advocate the right of a female to pass on a claim before they came to power. Har-
dyng’s decision to mediate because so many ‘stond in grete erroure’ with regards to
what actually happened strengthens his earlier claim to record the truth. Time and
again, he proves that he has considered and rejected all counterfeit sources pertaining
to historical and genealogical matters that impact on the validity of York’s claim
to the throne; the regular emphasis on his own relationship to the Percies similarly
serves to add weight to his modified account of fifteenth-century history.22
The difficulties arising from ‘vntrue’ chronicles, then, as evidenced by the
account of the first founding of the realm and Gaunt’s manipulation of genealogy,
allow Hardyng to establish repeatedly the need for diligent authors and historical
accuracy. It is to how he exploits his assumed judiciousness to verify York’s royal
inheritance that I would like to turn.
Interestingly, the first of York’s royal titles to be taken up in the prologue does not
relate to the English throne, but to the throne of France. In the prologue Hardyng
justifies the Duke’s right by describing his descent from Edward III, whose mother
Isabella, ‘Sister and heire’ to Charles IV of France, initially gave the title to him.
For Charles died withoute any child,
The right descent vnto his [Edward III’s] moder mylde.
Why sholde þe Frenshe forbarre him of hir right,
Sith God of heuen in Libro Numeri
Gauf to Moyses this lawe that nowe is light,
In þe chapitre seuen and twenty
22
Hardyng also constructs his history, or interjects, to absolve the Percies from any blame in
the deposition of Richard II and redefine important rebellions in the fifteenth century as the
actions of loyal men hoping to restore the disinherited Mortimer heirs. The Epiphany rising of
1400, the battle of Shrewsbury (1403), Scrope’s rebellion in 1405, the battle of Bramham Moor
in 1408, Owain Glyn Dŵr’s revolt (1400–c. 1415), and the Southampton Plot of 1415 are all
explained as, or linked to, revolts in favour of ousting the usurping dynasty. Two of these events,
the battle of Shrewsbury and Scrope’s rebellion, are referred to in greater depth in the prose passages
at the end of the work, and the treatment of Scrope’s revolt in the main body of the Chronicle is
far more engaging than the account in BL, MS Lansdowne 204, where Hardyng states that he does
not know why the Archbishop rebelled (fol. 206).
By these wordes: ‘the doughters rightfully

Of Salphaat aske theire faders heritage,
Geue theym possessioun among theire cosynnage’?23
By citing the Old Testament precedent of the daughters of Zelophehad inheriting

their father’s possessions at God’s behest, Hardyng draws upon the same scriptural
evidence utilized by the English in propaganda relating to the Hundred Years
War.24 The clever deployment of this example at the beginning of the long list of
York’s entitlements is an effective way of preparing his audience for the delayed
reference to York’s more crucial claim to the English throne through the female
line. In addition to emphasizing the blood ties that York has to the French throne,
it also establishes a link between worldly sovereignty and biblical law, which calls
to mind the importance of having a divinely sanctioned right to royal supremacy,
and a modest author to record that claim.
Later the Chronicle repeats Edward III’s hereditary claim to France twice: once
in visual form by including a revised version of the more elaborate Pedigree of
France found in the first version; and once in the supplementary Latin prose
passages at the end of the Chronicle elucidating York’s ancestral claims to England,
France, Scotland, and Jerusalem. In both instances biblical precedents are cited to
bolster Edward’s claim. The stanzas introducing the Pedigree remind the reader
that ‘Crist was kinge bi his modir of Iude’, and one manuscript of the Chronicle
even reinforces God’s approval of York’s inheritance by depicting an angel holding
the title banner of the Pedigree.25 The Latin prose similarly reiterates the Old and
New Testament paradigms of female inheritance cited earlier in the prologue and
main text.26 In each of these examples, York’s divine right to France is shown to
descend through Queen Isabella’s bloodline, but both draw attention to the fact
that York can also claim the kingdom by means other than blood.
23
24
In the fourteenth century, Salic law in France ensured that the English claim to the throne
through the heir general (female) line was officially null and void, but this did not prevent the story
of Zelophehad’s daughters (Numbers 27. 1–11) being cited in support of it. See, for example,
Political Poems and Songs relating to English History, ed. by Thomas Wright, 2 vols, RS, 14
(London: Longmans, 1859–61), I, 145–47, 167.
25
Bodl. MS Arch. Selden B. 10, fol. 148v; Ellis, p. 336. Other manuscripts containing the Pedigree
include Cambridge MA, Harvard University Library, MS English 1054; London, British Library,
MS Egerton 1992 and MS Harley 661; New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS Bühler 5;
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 378; and Urbana-Champaign, University of Illinois, MS-83.
26
The next reference to France in the prologue and the prose passages relates to
‘Henry the fifte, the conqueroure | Of Normandie and mekel parte of Fraunce, |
That exelled bothe king and emperoure | In marcyal acte by his gouernaunce’.27 Al-
though Henry V features only briefly in the prologue, the Chronicle’s account of
his reign contains a long description of his French campaign, which is repeated and
supplemented in the prose passages by the inclusion of a Latin description of the
conflict adapted from the Gesta Henrici Quinti.28 In the prose sections especially,
Hardyng juxtaposes the French campaigns of Edward III and Henry V, inviting his
audience to see a connection between their conquests. The prologue also achieves
this by emphasizing Henry’s conquest of ‘Normandie and mekel parte of Fraunce’
shortly before describing the territories granted to Edward III by the Treaty of
Brétigny, a copy of which Hardyng claims to have delivered to Henry VI.29 As with
all medieval conquests, such victories are seen as providential, bestowed on the
champion as evidence of his ‘just war’. By mentioning England’s military triumphs
over France, Hardyng shows that York has a tripartite claim to France: first
through blood; second through conquest; third through treaty, or agreement. This
threefold structure is designed to leave one in no doubt of the validity of York’s
title and is a pattern that Hardyng repeats in his account of the other legacies to
which York is entitled. Just as the two aforementioned etymologies of the name
Albion are shown to have equal validity in Hardyng’s account of the first founding
of the realm, so too Hardyng’s investigation into York’s inheritance has produced
disparate but equally legitimate evidence in support of his claim.
Following the prologue’s initial discussion of York’s French inheritance through
Isabella, Hardyng uses Edward III’s oldest son and heir, Prince Edward, the Black
Prince, as a platform from which to launch his meticulous account of the English
succession. Charting the expiration of the Black Prince’s line through Richard II,
Hardyng turns to Edward III’s second son, Lionel, duke of Clarence, and his sole
heir, Philippa, whom, we are assured, ‘he loued as his life’.30 York’s line of descent
27
28
See Peverley, ‘John Hardyng’s Chronicle’, p. 645.
29
Bodl. MS Arch. Selden B. 10, fol. 7v; Ellis, p. 21. The treaty was signed following the Black
Prince’s victory at Poitiers.
30
Bodl. MS Arch. Selden B. 10, fol. 5v ; Ellis, p. 17. As there were no explicit laws in fifteenth-
century England regulating the descent of the monarchy, it could technically be inherited by either
an ‘heir male’ or an ‘heir general’. In practice, the inheritance of the crown followed the rules of
primogeniture governing the ‘heir male’ principle, ensuring that the titles and lands passed to the
oldest male. Until the later half of the 1450s, when the Yorkist genealogies began circulating with
the heir general line of descent, York had traced his heritage through, and bore the arms of,
from Philippa of Clarence via her son Roger, earl of March, and Anne Mortimer
(York’s mother) is then presented and fortified with the same biblical paradigm
used to justify Edward’s claim to France in the Chronicle’s visual Pedigree and
Latin passages:
Why sholde ye nought than be hir verray heire
Of alle hir lond, and eke of alle hir right?
Seth Ihesu Crist, of Iudee land so faire,
By very meen of his moder Mary light
To be þe kyng claymed title right
And so did name himsilf ‘Kyng of Iewes’:
So by youre moder the right to you accrewes.31
By citing Jesus’s inheritance of the title ‘King of the Jews’ through Mary and posing
a similar question to the one asked earlier in relation to the daughters of Zelophe-
had and Edward III’s French inheritance, Hardyng makes it clear that York’s claim
is sacrosanct. Consequently, those who accepted Edward III’s right to France via
his mother must also accept York’s claim to the English throne through the blood
of Lionel’s daughter, Philippa.32 Just as Hardyng’s aforementioned delay in reveal-
ing that the story of Albyne and Diocletian is untrue helps to stress his authority
as a reliable author, so the delay in revealing York’s entitlement to the English
throne until the well-known claim to France via a female line has been presented
adds weight to York’s legitimacy. The prologue attaches further substance to this
by alluding to York’s recent election as Henry VI’s successor and associating the
parliamentary legislation of his title with providence, scripture, and prophecy.
In his discussion of Lionel’s younger brother, John of Gaunt, Hardyng under-
scores the descent of the Lancastrian dynasty from Edward III’s third son by
observing that Henry IV ‘wrongfully’ deposed King Richard II and describing his
Edward III’s fourth surviving son, Edmund of Langley, but this genealogical line was a questionable
link as far as the English throne was concerned. The Lancastrian kings claimed descent through the
third son and heir male of Edward III, John of Gaunt, so in order to claim precedence over
Henry VI, York had to exploit his descent through the second son and heir general of Edward III,
Lionel, who passed on his claim through his daughter Philippa.
31
Bodl. MS Arch. Selden B. 10, fol. 6r ; Ellis, p. 17. Again this example was used in propaganda
during the Hundred Years War to justify the English claim to France. Biblical references to Jesus
as king of the Jews include Matthew 27. 11, Mark 15. 18, Luke 23. 38, and John 19. 3.
32
The prologue and text similarly draw attention to Lionel’s claim to the earldom of Ulster
through his first wife, Elizabeth de Burgh, and Hardyng’s (fictional) claim that he would have
become King of Italy through his second marriage to Violante Visconti, daughter of Galeazzo
Visconti, lord of Pavia, if he had lived longer.
acquisition of the monarchy as ‘euel gote goodes’.33 Like other pro-Yorkist pieces
produced in the wake of York’s election, the Chronicle does not endorse York’s
claim to the throne with a venomous rejection of all three Lancastrian kings, but
rather through a discreet commentary which casts an unfavourable light solely
upon Henry IV as a usurper and perjurer.34 To this end Hardyng makes use of a
popular prophecy recycled in this period, which attributes the downfall of the
Lancastrians to a divine promise that unlawful claims will not endure beyond the
third generation:35
Vt patet per scriptura commune de male quesitis vix gaudeat tercius heres.
For whan Henry the fourthe first was crowned
Many a wise man said than ful comonly
The thrid Henry sholde nat ioyse, but be vncrowned
And deposed of alle the regaly;
To this reason they did þeire wittes applye,
Of euel gote goodes the thrid heires shulde nought enioise,
As who seithe thus, who right hath shal reioyse.
How the maker of this saithe his aduise in brief for þe duc of Yorke.
O my good lord of York, God hath prouyde
In this for you, as men sey comonly,
Se that no sleuthe you from his grace deuyde ,
33
Bodl. MS Arch. Selden B. 10, fol. 6v . Ellis, p. 18.
34
Hardyng’s treatment of the Lancastrian kings in the prologue is comparable with that in the
contemporary poem ‘A Political Retrospect’ (c. 1462); see Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth
Centuries, ed. by Rossell Hope Robbins (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959). In this
Henry IV is criticized for his ‘fals periury’ and usurpation (pp. 222–26, lines 9–24), Henry V is
presented in favourable terms (p. 223, lines 27–30), and Henry VI is said to have returned the
country to a state of ‘huge langoure’ through his ‘gret foly’ (pp. 223–24, lines 31–40), a statement
which corresponds with Hardyng’s description of his ‘symplenesse’ (Bodl. MS Arch. Selden B. 10,
fol. 6r; Ellis, p. 18).
35
Bodl. MS Arch. Selden B. 10, fol. 6v; Ellis, pp. 18–19. This ‘prophecy’ occurs in many fif-
teenth-century chronicles; see, for example, Chronicle of Adam Usk, ed. by Given-Wilson, pp.
156–57, where it is cited in relation to the death of the Duke of Milan; Jean de Waurin Recueil des
Croniques et Anchiennes Istories de la Grant Bretaigne, ed. by W. Hardy and E. L. C. P. Hardy, 5 vols,
RS, 39 (London, 1864–91), II, 393–94; and Registrum Abbatiae Johannis Whethamstede, ed. by
Henry Thomas Riley, 2 vols, RS, 28 (London, 1872–73), I, 414. It is also found in ‘A Political Retro-
spect’ (Historical Poems, ed. by Robbins, p. 224, lines 43–45), which, like Hardyng, attributes the
prophecy to scripture; Robbins notes that the phrase derives from John Bonif, but is ‘almost pro-
verbial’ in nature (p. 383). The idea of divine punishment for sins was a major theme in the political
prophecies exploited in the interest of the house of York (see Allan, ‘Political Propaganda’, p. 351).
But take it as he hath it sent manly

And thenke wele nowe ye haue þe remedy.
But neuerthelesse lat eueriche man haue his right,
Bothe frende and fo, it may encrese youre might.
Quia dominus facit heredes et successores secundum doctores.
Trete wele Percy, of Marches lyne decended,
To help youre right with might and fortifie
By tendre meanes to make him wele contented,
Remembryng him by witty policye,
How, by processe of tyme and destanye,
Youre right might alle ben his, as nowe is youres,
Thorough Goddes might maketh [heirs] and successours.
By attributing the prophecy to ‘scriptura’ and alluding to divine intervention in

matters of succession in the accompanying Latin glosses, Hardyng emphasizes the
providential nature of York’s restoration to the throne, and even exploits the
alleged biblical prophecy in favour of the grandson of his former patron, Sir Henry
Percy, third Earl of Northumberland, by petitioning York to ‘trete’ him ‘wele’
because God could have bestowed York’s inheritance on him.36
The reference to Percy’s lineage is not meant to eclipse York’s status, but rather
acknowledge his family’s affiliation with the royal line of Mortimer, something the
Chronicle develops further in the reign of Henry IV, in the Latin prose passages
justifying the Percy and Scrope rebellions of 1403 and 1405,37 and in the afore-
mentioned prose describing the Percies’ refusal to acknowledge Gaunt’s ‘vntrue
cronicle’.38 In many respects Hardyng’s request for clemency on Percy’s behalf
mirrors his later suggestion that Edward IV should restore Henry VI to the duchy
of Lancaster in order to bring peace to the realm, which, although preposterous, is
doubtless meant to bolster Edward’s position by reiterating the natural hierarchical
order in which he is king and Henry subject.39 Hardyng’s appeal for reconciliation
36
This Henry Percy (1421–61) died fighting against York’s son, Edward IV, at Towton
(29 March 1461); however, it is highly probable that Henry Percy (c. 1449–89), fourth Earl of
Northumberland, commissioned Bodl. MS Arch. Selden B. 10 to demonstrate his allegiance to
Edward IV. See my ‘John Hardyng’ s Chronicle’, p. 131 for further details.
37
Bodl. MS Arch. Selden B. 10, fols 155 r , 193 r; Ellis, pp. 351–53. In these later sections
Hardyng describes how the hereditary claim of Edmund Mortimer was overlooked upon the
deposition of Richard II because of his age and because men feared Henry Bolingbroke.
38
Bodl. MS Arch. Selden B. 10, fols 189v –190r; Ellis, pp. 353–54. This incident is also
recounted in the main verse; see Arch. Selden B. 10, fol. 128v ; see Ellis, pp. 290–91.
39
between king and magnate is likewise inextricably bound up with the country’s
hopes for peace and reunification: once the civil divisions within England have
healed, the King can work with his magnates to reclaim Scotland and other terri-
tories pertaining to the British crown.40 Only by working with their magnates can
York and Edward IV achieve their full potential, for the realm has always been
governed ‘with helpe of baronage [. . .] Seth Brute it won in his prioritee’.41
The third royal title pertaining to York addressed in the prologue involves a
colourful, if not spurious, story concerning his right to the Iberian kingdoms
through his descent from Edmund of Langley and Isabella of Castile. Having pre-
viously glossed over how Richard II allegedly named Edmund of Langley, the
fourth surviving son of Edward III, ‘Kyng of Portyngale’ in ‘alle his writtes’ — an
allusion to his proposed marriage to the Portuguese king’s daughter in 1380 —
Hardyng returns to Edmund to discuss York’s claim to Castile and Leon. Begin-
ning with the Black Prince’s successful campaign to restore Pedro I of Castile to his
kingdom following his usurpation by his half-brother, Henry of Trastamara,
Hardyng informs us that Pedro gave the prince his two daughters as a reward:
This king Petro to geve him [Prince Edward] to his mede,
Hadde nothing els but doughtres two ful faire,
Whiche he betoke to that prince indeede
For his wages, because þey were his haire.
With whom he [Edward] did to Englond so repaire
And Constaunce wedde vnto his brother Iohn;
Edmond, his brother, the yonger had anon.42
This is a liberal interpretation of events to say the least, for Pedro’s daughters were
actually held in Prince Edward’s custody as security until their father could fulfil
the terms of the Treaty of Lisbourne and repay his debt to the Prince.43 However,
40
Like the Pedigree of France, Hardyng reasserts this point visually and in prose too. The map
of Scotland, adapted from the first version, provides visual evidence of the land that York and
Edward IV are entitled to, just as the Latin letter from Edward I to Pope Boniface appended to the
end of the Chronicle supports the claim by citing precedents of English suzerainty.
41
Bodl. MS Arch. Selden B. 10, fol. 8 v; Ellis, p. 23. The relationship between king, magnate,
and kingdom is discussed further in my ‘Dynasty and Division’.
42
43
The treaty, drawn up on 23 September 1366, stipulated that Pedro would pay back the
56,000 florins he had borrowed from Prince Edward and cover the costs of the campaign against
his usurping brother, Henry. Several years later, after Pedro’s assassination, a marriage was arranged
between his oldest surviving daughter, Constanza, and John of Gaunt to ensure that Castilian
by acknowledging Pedro’s obligation to the Prince, Hardyng once again allies the
notion of a ‘just’ war with inheritance: the Prince saves Pedro’s realm and is effec-
tively given it as a reward for his services, for Pedro’s daughters, the progenitors of
the next line of Castilian heirs, will accede to the kingdom after his death. The
themes of usurpation, civil war, and female heirs underlined in this story would
almost certainly have struck a chord with Hardyng’s audience, bringing to mind
the problems recently resolved by parliament’s recognition of York’s title.
For many contemporary propagandists York’s blood tie to Pedro’s youngest
daughter through her marriage to Edmund of Langley was sufficient evidence of
his entitlement to Castile and Leon, but Hardyng adds further weight to his claim
by elucidating a dubious ‘appointement’ allegedly made between John of Gaunt
and Edmund, which stated that the Castilian throne would pass to the first male
heir born between them.44 Although it is highly unlikely that such an agreement
was ever entertained by Gaunt, who began pressing his right to Castile upon
Pedro’s death, Hardyng’s claim to have been shown the ‘munyment’ by Edward,
duke of York (Edmund’s son), when he was in London with Sir Robert Umfraville
provides another nice example of the way in which he uses self-referential evidence
to promote York’s inheritance.45 Since, as we have already seen, Hardyng employs
a humility topos to associate his ‘symple witte’ with the revelation of theological
interests remained connected with England. The couple returned to England along with
Constanza’s younger sister, Isabella, who was married to Edmund in 1372. For further information,
see P. E. Russel, The English Intervention in Spain and Portugal in the Time of Edward III and
Richard II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), pp. 173–75; Anthony Goodman and David Morgan
‘The Yorkist Claim to the Throne of Castile’, Journal of Medieval History, 11 (1985), 61–69
(p. 63); and Clara Estow, Pedro the Cruel of Castile 1350–1369 (New York: E. J. Brill, 1995).
Hardyng is correct in stating that the first male heir born between the Castilian sisters was Edward
of Aumale, duke of York and earl of Rutland (1373–1415).
44
The inclusion of York’s Castilian inheritance is common in pro-Yorkist materials. See, for
example, Osbern Bokenham’s introduction to Mary Magdalane’s life written for York’s sister in
1445 (in Legendys of Hooly Wummen by Osbern Bokenham, ed. by Mary Serjeantson, EETS OS,
206 (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 137, lines 5004–19).
45
Bodl. MS Arch. Selden B. 10, fol. 7v ; Ellis, p. 20. If Hardyng is telling the truth, this event
must have occurred between c. 1403, when he entered the service of Robert Umfraville, and 1415,
when Edward of York died at the battle of Agincourt. It may have been before 1412, for by this
time Edward ‘tried to enlist the sympathy of the new king of Aragon, Fernando of Antequera, for
his claim’ asserting that ‘since neither of Pedro’s daughters Beatriz and Constanza had borne a son,
the legitimate right to the Castilian throne pertained to him as the elder son of Isabel’ (Goodman
and Morgan, ‘Yorkist Claim’, p. 63).
and political truth, it follows that the personal experiences he relates here are
meant to be accepted as authoritative insights into York’s claim.46
Given Hardyng’s penchant for ‘obtaining’ forged documents to support
England’s suzerainty over Scotland, it is possible that the muniment never existed;
however, to give him his due, it is also feasible that he is confusing — deliberately or
otherwise — the ‘writtes’ mentioned earlier in the prologue pertaining to Edward,
duke of York’s proposed marriage with a Portuguese princess and a document re-
lating to his marriage to Isabella.47 What is important is that, for Hardyng, the con-
sanguineous link provided by Isabella is only part of York’s threefold claim to the
Castilian throne: inheritance, again, does not come down to him solely by blood, but
by ‘couenaunt’ and ‘appointement’ — a verbal and written agreement — between
two brothers and the providential birth of his uncle as the siblings’ first-born male.
This links York’s Castilian title to the aforementioned French and English claims,
for each is dependent on a female ancestor and a contractual agreement, which
makes it doubly secure. The same is true for the remaining genealogical and anecdotal
material addressed in the prologue dealing with York’s entitlement to Jerusalem.
As with all of the previous legacies, Hardyng begins by establishing a link
between York and a female forebear, Mélisande, the daughter of Baldwin II, king
of Jerusalem:
To Ierusalem I sey ye haue grete right,
For Erle Geffray, that hight Plantagenet,
Of Anioye erle, a prince of passing might,
The eldest son to Fowke, and first begette,
Kyng of Ierusalem by his [Fulk’s] wife [Mélisande] duely sette.
Whos son, Geffray forsaid, gate on his wife [Matilda]
Henry þe second, that knowen was ful rife.48
46
47
See Bodl. MS Arch. Selden B. 10, fol. 6v ; Ellis, p. 19. Goodman and Morgan concur with this
theory, but appear to have misread Hardyng’s statement, concluding that his ‘wild assertion’ of
seeing a muniment with Umfraville referred to a copy of the Treaty of Bayonne obtained in 1444
by Richard, duke of York. In deciding that Hardyng is not ‘to be trusted’ on the grounds that
Umfraville died in 1437 and could not have been shown the muniment by Richard, duke of York,
they fail to recognize that, even if Hardyng’s personal interjection is fabricated, he is referring to
Edward, duke of York, not Richard, and to a date before Edward’s death in 1415; see Goodman
and Morgan, ‘Yorkist Claim’, pp. 64–65. For Hardyng’s Scottish documents and forgeries, see
Alfred Hiatt, The Making of Medieval Forgeries: False Documents in Fifteenth-Century England
(London: British Library, 2004).
48
Bodl. MS Arch. Selden B. 10, fol. 8r; Ellis, p. 22. In 1109 Fulk V (1092–1143), count of
Anjou (1109–29), king of Jerusalem (1131–43), married Eremburg of La Fléche (d. 1126), the
The syntax used here is confusing since Hardyng fails to mention that York’s an-
cestor Fulk V married twice, thus implying that Geoffrey Plantagenet, as the eldest
son of Fulk’s first marriage, had a claim to Jerusalem. This is not the case, for the
terms agreed by Baldwin II and Fulk before his marriage to Mélisande, his second
wife, stated that the throne of Jerusalem would descend through the issue of Fulk
and Mélisande only, not the issue of Fulk’s first marriage, as Hardyng suggests. To
enhance the potentially tenuous link to the throne through Mélisande, Hardyng
once again proceeds to assert York’s right with a second example, devoting three
stanzas to events from June 1184 when Baldwin IV sent an envoy from Jerusalem
in search of support against the Saracen raiders attempting to capture his city:
Yit haue ye more, for Baldewyn Paraliticus,
Kyng afterward, to þe same king Henry
The croun sent and his baner precious,
As verry heire of hole auncestry,
Discent of blode by title lynyally
From Godfray Boleyn and from Robert Curthose,
That kynges were therof elect and chose.
He sent him als the sepulcre keyes,
Resignyng hool vnto him al his right
For to defende the lond from Sarizenes,
For he was sike and had therto no might.
And alle the londe destroied was to sight
By the souldan, to grete lamentacion
Of Goddes people and alle Cristen nacion.
He sent him als the keyes of Dauid Toure
With Heraclio, that of Ierusalem
Was Patriarke and grettest of honoure,
And with Templers, whiche brought them to this ream,
Ful humbly axyng supportacion
For the citee and Crisþen consolacion.49
What Hardyng fails to mention is that before reaching England the party travelled
through Paris, symbolically offering King Philip II Augustus of France (1165–1223)
daughter and heir of Elias, count of Maine, and the couple had two sons, Geoffrey Plantagenet
(1113–51), count of Anjou (1129–51), and Elias, and a daughter, Sibyl. Three years after the death
of his first wife, Fulk married Mélisande; it was decided that upon the death of Baldwin II, Fulk
would became the joint ruler of Jerusalem with his second wife. After several years of assisting
Baldwin II with the running of the country, Fulk finally became king in 1131.
49
Bodl. MS Arch. Selden B. 10, fol. 8r ; Ellis, p. 22. Baldwin IV, king of Jerusalem (1175–85),
son of Amalric I, king of Jerusalem (1162–74), was the grandson of Fulk V and Mélisande.
the kingdom of Jerusalem in the form of the keys to the Holy Sepulchre and
David’s Tower in return for his assistance against the Saracens. When Philip de-
clined, the envoys crossed to England, where they stayed from January 1185 until
mid-April. It was only then that Heraclius, patriarch of Jerusalem, met with
Henry II and offered him the same keys and Jerusalem’s royal banner. Hardyng
likewise fails to indicate that Henry called a council of his barons to determine how
to address the envoy’s request, but refused to return to Jerusalem with Heraclius
or send any of his sons to champion the cause. The Patriarch left England admon-
ishing Henry, and in October 1187 Jerusalem fell to Saladin.
Whilst Henry II was indeed a blood relative of Baldwin IV, as Hardyng records
(both were grandsons of Fulk V), his failure to help Heraclius and the Holy City
meant that England had no claim to it. By being selective about the information
he recounts, Hardyng helps substantiate York’s tentative title to the Holy Land.
Once again, the main emphasis here is on the concept of obtaining one’s inheri-
tance through election as well as blood. Like Pedro I, Baldwin IV seeks assistance
from the English when he finds himself unable to protect his kingdom, and offers
his inheritance as a reward. For Hardyng, this is providence at work, as the first
stanza of the last quotation shows. In this he notes that York’s claim comes from
‘Discent of blode by title lynyally | From Godfray Boleyn and from Robert Cur-
those, | That kynges were therof elect and chose’. The bloodline only becomes
important after the initial Christian conquest of Jerusalem and the election of its
first Christian king, which the Chronicle discusses in more depth in the reign of
Henry I. The reference here, and later, to Robert Curthose, son of William the
Conqueror, is interesting because the first version does not discuss his election as
king.50 In the reign of Henry I, and in the Latin passages accompanying a visual
representation of York’s claim to Jerusalem that occurs at the end of the second
version, Curthose is the first elected king, but he rejects the honour because of his
‘couatice’ desire to inherit the English throne:51
he forsoke
The realme of alle the londe of Ierusalem
Whan he was chose therto, and nought hit toke
For couatice to haue this Englysche reem
50
In the reign of Henry II, the first version mentions the envoy sent by Baldwin IV and
Henry II’s entitlement to the realm through Geoffrey Plantagenet, but not Curthose’s election; see
BL, MS Lansdowne 204, fols 148r–149r.
51
The Pedigree of Jerusalem occurs in Bodl. MS Arch. Selden B. 10, BL, MS Harley 661, and
Harvard, MS English 1054. See Ellis, p. 260.
Agayne Goddis wille and his high ordynaunce,

For chosyn he was by alle Crysten creaunce.
For at wynnynge of Ierusaleem,
Whare prynces feel, kynges and dukes were,
He was the worthiest of any reme
And bare hym beste in knyghtely dede of were,
At alle assautes most knyghtelye ay hym bere,
The honoure alle and fame he had euermore
And chosyn was ther to be kynge therfore.
Men saide that God gauf hym suiche punyschement,
His brother to putt hym in grette myserye
Vnto his deth agayne his owne entente,
For he forsoke Cristis owne monarchie,
The Crysten feithe to maynteyne and encrese,
For couetice his brother to disencres.52
By detailing Curthose’s rejection of ‘Cristis owne monarchie’, Hardyng shows that

although God punished York’s Norman ancestor for declining the Holy Land, he
soon bestowed his favour on the Plantagenet dynasty by providing them with two
claims to Jerusalem: one through the ancestral line of Godfrey Bouillon, elected
King of Jerusalem after Robert; the other through Baldwin IV’s promise to
Henry II.53 The inspired inclusion of Curthose’s election in this version and the
52
53
Godfrey Bouillon (c. 1060–1100), duke of lower Lorraine, was elected the first Latin King
of Jerusalem on 22 July 1099 after the Holy Land was recaptured in the first crusade. According
to one version of the legend, the position was first offered to several of the noble lords who had
fought well in the crusade, all of whom declined the honour before it was bestowed on Godfrey.
Hardyng appears to be referring to one such version of the story by mentioning Robert Curthose
(c. 1054–1134) as an elected king. The earliest authority to detail Robert’s refusal of the kingdom
of Jerusalem is William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum, ed. and trans. by R . A. B. Mynors,
completed by R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom, 2 vols, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1998–99; repr., 2006), I, 703. Other later versions, apparently independent of
Malmesbury, include the Historia peregrinorum, Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum, Histo-
ria belli sacri, Wace’s Roman de Rou, and Geoffrey Gaimar’s L’estoire des Engleis. When Godfrey
Bouillon died without an heir, his will decreed that the kingdom should pass to Daimbert, patriarch
of Jerusalem and former archbishop of Pisa; however, his wishes were ignored by his Lorraine
vassals, who appointed Godfrey’s brother, Baldwin, as the next king. When Baldwin I realized that
he would also die without issue, he declared that his brother Eustace III, count of Bologne, should
succeed him and that if he declined the honour the vassal kings were to elect his kinsman, Baldwin
of Bourcq. Once again the vassals had their will and quickly elevated Baldwin of Bourcq to the
kingship before Eustace could be sent for. Although the succession was later considered to be
imaginary return of Jerusalem to its divinely appointed heirs allow Hardyng to em-
phasize the obligations of a divinely chosen king and parallel other episodes in the
Chronicle where kingdoms have been lost and recovered. God’s pleasure with a king
who accepts his lot and remains mindful of His ability to give and take away power
is implicit.
As we draw to the end of the genealogical prologue it becomes clear that
Hardyng has repeatedly shown that York’s composite royal entitlements revolve
primarily around God’s favour and female ancestors: women provide a consanguin-
eous link by which men can verify and assert their entitlements, whilst men provide
the verbal or written agreements which bolster or, in some cases, initiate the claim,
either by election, by treaty following conquest, or by reward for military action.
This persistent feminization of York’s genealogy in the prologue coincides with
an increased emphasis on women throughout the Chronicle, which is plentiful with
female patrons, intercessors, heirs, rulers, lawmakers, peacemakers, saints, and char-
acters not witnessed in the earlier version, such as Lady Godiva and Saint Ebba.
Arguably, as Sheila Delany has noted, these are merely the components of British
history abounding in many chronicles besides Hardyng’s, but in comparison with
the first version, the enhanced role of women in the version for York is undenia-
ble.54 It is similarly no coincidence that many of the stories and privileges associated
with the female characters in the later version are those that Hardyng is seen to
investigate most thoroughly, and which allow him to indulge in a literary self-
criticism whereby both he and his text are consistently associated with truth. This
literary alignment of author, femininity, and truth is undoubtedly a response to the
influx of materials promoting York’s descent from Philippa of Clarence in the late
1450s and early 1460s. Such items necessitated the correlation of York’s female
ancestors with legitimacy in a manner that convinced those reading and purchasing
genealogically orientated texts that York’s imminent accession was in the best
dubious because it neglected the rightful heir, Baldwin II went on to reign for the next thirteen
years. When Baldwin’s queen, Morphia, died without providing a male heir, the King decided to
settle the succession jointly in favour of his oldest daughter, Mélisande, and her future husband,
Fulk V. Upon Fulk’s death the couple’s oldest son became Baldwin III, who in turn was succeeded
by his brother Amalric I. Amalric was the father of Baldwin IV, mentioned here as ‘Baldewyn Para-
liticus’. Therefore, as grandsons of Fulk V, both Henry II and Baldwin IV could be said to be
related to the long line of Jerusalem’s elected kings, although not, as Hardyng suggests, by an
unbroken line of descent.
54
Sheila Delany, Impolitic Bodies: Poetry, Saints, and Society in Fifteenth-Century England: The
Work of Osbern Bokenham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 158.
interest of the country. Hardyng too seems to have been aware of this, as the
concluding stanzas of his prologue demonstrate.
Having expressed his hope ‘to please bothe God and man’ with his forthcoming
history, Hardyng accentuates York’s lineage alongside the status of his wife, Cecily,
as ‘elect’ lady of the land, and declares that his decision to write in English is for her
benefit, since she has ‘litle intellecte’ of Latin.55 The first implication of this is that
Cecily needs the guidance of a knowledgeable author, like Hardyng, to mediate and
translate for her, providing access to historical truths that would be hidden from
her in Latin. As elect lady of England she needs to know the history of her realm
in order to benefit from its exemplarity, just as York and his son need to know their
genealogical rights and how to govern well through the Chronicle’s historical
paradigms.56
The second implication of Cecily’s special affiliation with the English language
is that the native tongue of England’s future queen is the same as her future sub-
jects’.57 Presenting Cecily as an English speaker, under the ‘rule’ of York, ‘as sholde
femynitee’, allies her with all loyal, peace-loving, and submissive English subjects
who wish to learn about York’s ancestry and come under his ‘protection’ as Cecily
has. Hardyng not only empowers a real and imagined English-speaking audience
here, but also subtly invites criticism of Margaret of Anjou, Henry VI’s war-like
French queen, who at the time of writing was still at large in Scotland attempting
55
Bodl. MS Arch. Selden B. 10, fol. 8v ; Ellis, p. 23. Compare with York’s ‘gode inspection’ in
Latin a few lines later. A similar case is presented in the epilogue addressed to Edward IV and his
new queen, Elizabeth Woodville, in which Hardyng states that he has compiled the Chronicle to
satisfy the queen because: ‘women haue feminine condicion | To know all thinges longing to thaire
husband: | His high worship, and his disposicion, | His hertis counceil also, I vnderstond, | As at
weddinge to hir he made his bonde | And most of all his hertis priuetees’; see Bodl. MS Arch.
Selden B. 10, fol. 198r; Ellis, p. 421.
56
Again, the same can be said of Elizabeth in the epilogue, as Hardyng describes her as being
‘elect Souerayn lady [of England], ful worthili protect’ under Edward IV’s ‘rule and noble
gouernaunce’ (Bodl. MS Arch. Selden B. 10, fol. 197v ; Ellis, p. 421). The writing of historical works
for women seems to have been a regular practice in the Middle Ages. Andrew Galloway cites several
examples of noble women patronizing, or being presented with, historical works, including the
rhymed chronicle by Froissart presented to Philippa of Hainault (no longer extant) and Wace’s
Roman de Brut for Eleanor of Aquitaine; he notes: ‘These instances emphasize how important
noblewomen, especially members of the royal family, were for writing history in England’ (‘Writing
History’, pp. 261–62, 267).
57
This too is mirrored later in the epilogue by Hardyng’s emphasis on Elizabeth Woodville’s
ability to ‘rede vpon’, ‘se and knowe’ the Chronicle (Bodl. MS Arch. Selden B. 10, fol. 198r; Ellis,
p. 421).
to gather support for her husband’s cause.58 One of Hardyng’s anti-Scottish dia-
tribes actually advises Edward IV to bring Margaret and her son home, portraying
the Scots as the deceitful harbingers of the fugitive Lancastrians, desirous to join
forces with the French and exploit the political importance of their exiled guests:
His [Henry VI’s] wiffe and sone gete home bi ordinaunce [. . .]
For bettir were to haue hem surte,
Thanne lette hem bene with youre aduercite
With Scottes or Frenssh that wolde se your distresse,
And help to hit with all thaire bisinesse.59
This virulent attack on England’s traditional enemies coincides with Hardyng’s

aforementioned plea to Edward IV to use his power as king to bring peace to the
realm and restore Henry VI to ‘his owne lyuelode, | The duchie hool of Lancastre
his right’.60 In so doing he can begin to assert his sovereignty over other adversaries
and reclaim his French and Scottish rights.
Given the explicit connections Hardyng makes between Cecily, the English
people, and York’s inheritance, the Chronicle seems to point to a dependence on
the traditional association of women, or femininity, with peacemaking. Being newly
restored to his rightful ancestry and descended from the female line, York and his
son are the country’s best hope of peace. Other interjections in the Chronicle
support this notion, especially that occurring at the end of the reign of Cad-
wallader, where Hardyng repeats all of York’s titles, warns of the perils of civil
division, and suggests that York and Edward can bring prosperity to the realm once
again if they ‘þe pees euermore mayntene’.61 The positioning of this interjection is
loaded with connotations of loss and recovery, as Cadwallader, the last British king
and the ancestor from whom York preferred to trace his lineage, is juxtaposed with
58
John Vale’s book contains several items highlighting contemporary xenophobic attitudes at
the time; see Margaret Lucille Kekewich and others, The Politics of Fifteenth-Century England: John
Vale’s Book (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1995), pp. 136, 148–51, 166, 170–73; Allan discusses the
presence of patriotism and xenophobia in the 1460 manifesto issued by the Yorkists (‘Political
Propaganda’, pp. 60–70; see also Allan’s comments about Edward IV harnessing public dislike of
Margaret of Anjou on pp. 102, 341); and the Rolls of Parliament depict the Lancastrian exiles and
Margaret of Anjou as unpleasant (Rotuli Parliamentorum, ed. by John Strachey and others, 6 vols
(London, 1767–77), V , 476–78).
59
60
61
York, representing the newly restored British line.62 Hardyng implies that the loss,
division, and bad governance of Cadwallader’s reign (or more recently Henry VI’s)
can be offset with recovery (of titles), reconciliation, and good governance in
York’s reign.
Whilst the first version of the Chronicle appears to have been aimed at a small
network of readers associated with the King’s affinity, the second version takes
great care to appeal to a wider social spectrum.63 Hardyng’s emphasis on the impor-
tance of women, peace, and English as the language of the royal family, together
with his presentation of history in a more compact and articulate manner than the
first Chronicle, points to his adoption of an approach similar to that seen in the
popular genealogies that were ‘much sought after, particularly by the casual and less
scholarly audience to which the authors were primarily directing their pens’.64
In many respects the genealogical material Hardyng provides in relation to
York’s titles is similar to that found in the more succinct genealogical rolls, but the
people procuring these were also readers of the Brut, with a taste for Britain’s his-
tory, and it is undoubtedly Hardyng’s successful blend of genealogy with historical
narrative and topical commentary that made his Chronicle so attractive at a time
when history, not just genealogy, needed rewriting to accommodate and justify a
change in dynasty.65 Ultimately, the function of Hardyng’s revised text is not to
remind York and his immediate family of his illustrious pedigree, but to introduce
York’s extended family of future English subjects to their new sovereign and
consolidate the common ancestry of people and king.
62
For York’s use of Cadwallader, see Allan, ‘Political Propaganda’; Lesley A. Coote, Prophecy
and Public Affairs in Later Medieval England (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2000), pp.
195–234; and Jonathan Hughes, Arthurian Myths and Alchemy: The Kingship of Edward IV
(Stroud: Sutton, 2002), pp. 119–20, 130–36.
63
For further discussion of Hardyng’s probable audience, see Peverley, ‘John Hardyng’s
Chronicle’, pp. 156, 195, 204–05.
64
Allan, ‘Political Propaganda’, p. 260.
65
Allan believes that genealogies were read by ‘the nobles and gentry, and the commercial
classes; those who staffed government, led and made up armies, provided finance, granted taxation,
and maintained law and order in the localities’ (‘Political Propaganda’, p. 4). The extant manu-
scripts of the Chronicle appear to have been produced within a short space of time (c. 1470–80),
and the majority, if not all, were produced in the metropolis, a hotbed of Yorkist propaganda in the
late fifteenth century. All tastes and pockets are catered for by the surviving witnesses, from
unadorned paper copies to beautifully illuminated vellum volumes, and one copy, BL, MS Harley
661, is even decorated to make it look like a genealogical roll. For a detailed discussion of the
manuscripts, see Peverley, ‘John Hardyng’s Chronicle’, pp. 47–118.
INDEX
Abbreviatio figuralis historie 89 Andrewes family 152–3

Abbreviationes chronicorum 36 Angers 83
Abraham 2 Angevin dynasty 83
Abraham, daughter of Lotryn 228, 239 Anglia transmittet (prophecy) 34
Achau Brenhinoedd a Thywysogion Cymru 199 Anglo-Norman genealogies 4, 45–61, 63–77
Adalbero, bishop of Laon 1 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 58, 127, 216
Adam 163, 180, 187, 189, 193, 217 Anglo-Scottish wars 103–4
Adam Murimuth 105 Anjou 36, 37, 83
Adelbright, king of England 227 Anna, cousin (consobrina) of the Virgin Mary
Aeneas (Eneas) 180–1, 193, 205, 226 183
Æthelberht, king of Kent 111 Annales Cambriae 191
Æthelfled, Alfred’s daughter 50 Anne, wife of Richard II 235, 253–4
Æthelred 59, 212 Anonymous Short Metrical Chronicle (Liber
Ailred of Rievaulx 31–2, 35, 52, 53 Regum Anglie) 16
Albanactus 126 Anselm of Canterbury 120
Albina (Albyne, Albine) 217–18, 227, 234, Antonius, king of Greece 178
235, 263–6, 270 Arbor genealogie regum Francorum, see Gui,
Albion 46, 227, 234, 235, 265 Bernard
Alen, Esabel 225 Argentil 227
Alexander I, of Scotland 74 Armoger 227
Alexander II, of Scotland 69, 73, 160 Arthur, king of Britain 4, 10, 17, 21, 23, 35, 57,
Alexander III, of Scotland 56, 125, 195 110, 129, 181, 210, 231–2
Alexander the Great 160, 265 Ascanius 193
Alfred, brother of Edward the Confessor 213 Ashdown, battle of 59
Alfred, king of England 32, 50, 52, 58, 127, Asloan, John 171
130–1, 223–4 Athelwold 17–18
Alnwick Abbey, chronicle of 116 A tous nobles 87, 91, 93, 96, 97
Alphonse de Poitiers 93, 94, 95 Audite celi 95
Amadas et Ydoine 50 Augustine 9
Ambrose 2 Augustinians 66, 104, 105, 115
Amesbury Abbey 53 Avalon 110
Andrew of Wyntoun 165, 168, 170, 172
284 Index
Baldwin II, king of Jerusalem 275–6 Brien 210

Baldwin IV, king of Jerusalem 276–8 Bruce, Robert 161, 169
Balliol, John 161 Brut y Tywysogion 191
Bannockburn, battle of 125 Brutus (Brut) 9, 46, 55, 56, 60, 130, 181, 205,
Barbour, John 165 227, 232, 234, 235, 262
Barlings Abbey 64, 226 Brychan, king of Brycheiniog 178–9, 188, 190,
Bartholomeus Anglicanus 266 193
Bathsheba 10 Brycheiniog 178, 182, 185–6, 188
Battle Abbey, chronicle of 105 Buchanan, George 167
Battle Abbey Roll 16, 223 Buerne Bocard 230–1
Baxter, Ales 225 Burgundy, dukes of 86
Baxter, John 225 Burton, Thomas 106, 107, 108
Bede 9, 47, 53, 59, 127–9 Byland Abbey 108
Beli 189
Belin 207, 209, 214, 219 Cadwalein 210–11
Bellenden, John 166–7, 171, 172–4 Cadwallader 35, 44, 56, 196, 210–11, 215–16,
218, 226, 228, 235, 237, 281–2
Benedictines 50, 104, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110,
Cadwan 218
111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 121
Camber 126
Bermondsey 112–13
Capet, Hugues 55, 81, 82, 91, 92, 96, 97, 101
Bernard de Neufmarché 66
Capetians 81, 82, 83, 90, 94
Bernard of Clairvaux 108
Carmen ad Robertum Regem 1
Beuno, saint 188
Carolingians 81, 82, 83, 84, 90, 91, 96
Bevis of Hampton 13–14, 16 Carthusians 164
Bible 44 Cartularies 118–21
Blaunche, duchess of Lancaster 235, 251, 253 Catherine of Valois 41
Blitilde 81 Caxton, William 181, 225–6
Boccaccio 100 Cecil, William 175, 210
Boece, Hector 166–8, 171, 172–4 Cecily, wife of Richard of York 280–1
Boethius 259 Ceredig 188
Boke of St Albans 144, 156 Ceredigion 182, 185, 188
Boleyn, Godfray 266 Charité-sur-Loire 112
Bonedd Tywyssogion Kymrv 193 Charlemagne 54, 84, 85, 86, 88
‘Bonedd yr Arwyr’ 183 Charles I of England 32
Boniface VIII 124, 126, 133 Charles IV of France 267
Book of Cupar 164, 165 Charles VI of France 41, 88
Bors 23 Charles the Simple 84, 97
Bouillon, Godfrey of 278 Chaucer, Geoffrey 260
Bower, Walter 164, 165, 166, 168, 171, 172 Chaworth, Thomas 147
Brenne 207, 209, 219 Christ Church Priory, Canterbury 111
Brevis cronica (Scottis Cronikle) 170–2 Chronicle of the Kings of Alba 160
Brian of Munster 187 Chronique abrégée des rois de France 51, 89
Brice, Alice 225 Chronique Anonyme Universelle à la mort de
Bricht, Simon 163 Charles VII 87–8
Bridlington 103 Cistercians 50, 77, 104, 105, 106, 108, 114,
Bridlington Priory 41 120–1
Index 285
Clare family 117, 223 Des Grantz Geanz 124, 217

Clotaire I 81 Descriptio Cambriae, see Giraldus Cambrensis
Cloten, ruler of Cornwall 208, 214 Description of Britayne 181
Cluniacs 89, 112 Despenser family 117
Cluny 89, 113 Despenser, Hugh the younger 117
Cnut 18, 56, 57, 58, 212, 227, 233 Diana, goddess 232, 239
Cobham, Eleanor 237, 257 Dinabus the giant 230
Coel, British king 233 Diocletian, Roman emperor 112
Comester, Peter 85, 165 Diocletian, king of Syria 227, 234, 263–4, 270
Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi, see Doddo, duke of Mercia 117
Peter of Poitiers Dominicans 91
Compilatio librorum historialum totius biblie, Donebaud, son of Cloten 208–10, 214
see Giovanni da Udine Dore Abbey 120
Constance, husband of Saint Helena 233 Douet, Thodore 112
Constantine, emperor of Rome 55, 179, 183, Dugdale, William 69
233 Dunoding 182
Constantine, Arthur’s successor 17, 210 Dunstan, saint 230
Corane (Gorane Congal) 172 Durham Cathedral Priory 105, 111, 112
Cordelia 228, 240 Dwnn, Lewys 223
Court of Chivalry 144, 157 Dyfed 178–9, 182–5
Cronica gentis Scotorum, see John of Fordun
Crowland Abbey 70, 113, 114 Eadic Streona 58
Croxton Abbey 64 Ebba, saint 279
Cunedda 184–5, 187–9, 200 Edelwolde 12, 229–30
Curan 227 Edgar 12, 32, 56, 213, 229–30
Curthose, Robert 277–8 Edith, wife of Edward the Confessor 31
Cynan, king of Gwynedd 185 Edith, wife of Henry I, see Matilda (Edith)
Cyngen, king of Powys 176 Edmund Ironside 18, 54, 55, 58, 59, 212, 233
Edmund, earl of Kent 235
Dafydd ab Owain 197–8 Edmund, earl of Lancaster 266
Dafydd ap Llywelyn 195, 199 Edmund of Langley 273–4
Dál Riata 161, 162 Ednyfed Fychan 190, 200
Dalrymple, James 167 Edred (Eldred) 227, 244
Danaus, legendary king 264–5 Edward I 5, 54, 55, 60, 120, 123–5, 127–8,
Daniads 264 130–3, 160, 162, 169, 201, 212, 219, 234
David, king of Israel 2, 10, 58, 277 Edward II 12, 29, 49, 56, 104, 124, 218, 234,
David, saint 188 235
David I, of Scotland 73, 74, 162, 163 Edward III 29, 41–2, 64, 82, 94, 95, 222, 226,
Dda, Hywel 182–84, 184 235, 236, 267–70, 273
De Vescy family 116 Edward IV 5, 43–4, 49, 54, 150, 229, 260,
‘Declaration of Arbroath’ 161 272–3, 281
Deheubarth 176, 177, 184, 190–1 Edward, duke of York 275
Déisi 178 Edward, son of Edgar 230
Delapre Abbey 69 Edward, son of Henry IV of England 117
Delapre Chronicle 65, 69–75 Edward the Black Prince 41, 269, 273
286 Index
Edward the Confessor 31–2, 54, 55–6, 71, 73, Fitzherbert family 146, 154
213 Fitz Warin family 38
Edward the Confessor, lives of 31–2 Flete, John 112
Edward the Elder, son of Alfred 127, 130–1 Flodden, battle of 171
Edward the Exile (Edward Ætheling, son of Flores historiarum 48
Edmund Ironside) 212, 233 Fontevraud 53
Edward the Outlaw 227 Fordun, John, see John of Fordun
Edwin 56, 210, 213, 233 Fountains Abbey, 108
Egbert 52, 54, 58 Frankish kings of Jerusalem 88
Egyptians 160, 161, 162 French genealogical chronicles 79–101
Einion ap Gwalchmai 200–1 Fulk V 276
Einion Yrth 196 Fulk fitz Warin 13–14, 21, 38
Eldred, son of Estrilde 230 Fundationis et Fundatorum Historia (Wigmore
Eleanor de Briouze 68 Abbey) 115–16
Eleanor of Aquitaine 29, 36
Eleanor of Provence [Alienore], wife of Gaelic 160
Henry III, 53, 234, 246 Gaimar, Geoffrey 17, 58, 207, 211, 216–17
Elen, wife of Hywel Dda 183 226, 278 n. 53
Elisedd 176, 184 Galahad 21, 23
Elmham, Thomas 106 Gant family 64
Elyn, see Helena, saint Gaythelos 159, 162, 168, 170
Elyne, neice of Hoel of Brittany 230, 243 Genealogia regum Anglorum, see Ailred of
Emma, wife of Cnut and Edred (Eldred) 227, Rievaulx
233, 244 Genealogical diagrams 45–61, 79–101
Engist (Hengist) 229 ‘Genealogies of the Saints’ 188
English genealogical rolls 50 Genealogy of the Lords of Brecknock (Brecon)
Erghome, John 41 65–9
Esidur 209 Gennen, wife of Armoger 227
Estoire de Seint Aedward le Rei 53 Gennogen, wife of Brutus 227, 239
Estoire des Engleis, see Gaimar, Geoffrey Geoffrey of Anjou 33, 228
Estrilde 12, 228–30, 239, 244 Geoffrey of Monmouth 7–12, 21, 22, 31 n. 12,
Eudes 97 32, 35, 36, 37, 44, 48, 126, 128–9, 166, 193,
Eugenius, king of Scotland 172 207, 210–11, 218, 228
Eusebius 2 Gesta abbatum 109
Eve 217 Gesta annalia 164
Evesham, battle of 50 Gesta Henrici Quinti 269
Extracta e variis cronicis Scocie 164 Gesta pontificum 110
Gesta regum Francoroum, see Yves de Saint-
Fasciculus Temporum, see Rolewinck, Werner Denis
Fergus I (son of Ferchard), of Scotland 162, Gibson, John 164
168, 172 Gildas 9
Fergus II (son of Erc), of Scotland 163, 168 Gilles de Paris 84, 85, 93, 98
Ferrez 207, 209, 233 Giovanni da Udine ( Johannes de Utino) 86–7
Fielding family 150–1, 153 Giraldus Cambrensis 66–7, 69, 177, 190, 193,
Fitz Hamo, Robert 117 195, 197, 200–1
Index 287
Giraldus de Arvernia (de Antwerpia) 89 Henry II, king of England 21, 32, 33, 36, 55,
Glamorgan 190 74, 75, 133, 212, 218, 228, 277–8
Glastonbury Abbey 21, 110 Henry III, of England 45, 47, 53, 57, 73, 150,
Glywysing 182 205, 218, 226, 266
Godiva, Lady 279 Henry IV, of England 40, 116, 235, 236, 266,
Godrich 17–18 270–2
Godwin 31 Henry V, of England 41, 46, 143, 236, 269
Goldborw (Gildeburghe) 17–19, 227, 241 Henry VI 40, 41, 42, 43–4, 49, 223, 236, 237,
Gonoril 228, 240 260–2, 269, 272, 280–1
Gorane Congal, see Corane Henry, earl of Lancaster 266
Gorbodian (Gorboduc) 233 Henry, son of Eleanor of Aquitaine 36
Gorlois 11 Henry of Huntingdon 35, 53, 58, 71, 129, 278
Gower, John 260 n. 53
Grail 21, 23, 24 Henry of Trastamara 273
Grandes Chroniques de France 81, 89, 90 Henry the Young King 57
Gray, Thomas 30, 161, 162 Heptarchy, Anglo-Saxon 52, 60, 115, 211, 214
‘Great Cause’, Scotland’s 124 Heraclius, patriarch of Jerusalem 277
Greeks 160, 161, 162 Herefordshire 115
Gregory the Great 59 Herod 160
Grimsby 17 Heu Lwythau Gwunedd a’r Mars 199, 200
Gruffudd ap Cynan 186, 189, 191, 196–8, 200 Higden, Ranulf 48, 116, 164, 181
Gruffudd ap Llywelyn 199 Historia Anglorum, see Henry of Huntingdon
Guenevere (Gunnovere, Gunnore) 21, 232, 242 Historia belli sacri 278 n. 53
Guentolen 228, 239 Historia Brittonum 180, 182, 184, 187
Gui, Bernard 51, 91–3, 97, 98 Historia Brytannicae Defensio 182
Guillaume de Nangis 51, 89 Historia figuralis 89
Guy of Warwick 13–14, 16, 21 Historia maioris Britanniae, see Major, John
Gwalchmai ap Meilyr 196, 200 Historia majora ecclesiae Wintoniensis 109, 111
Gwent 182 Historia peregrinorum 278 n. 53
Gwynedd 176, 182, 184–7, 189–90, 198–202 Historia regum Britanniae, see Geoffrey of
Gwyr y Gogledd (Men of the North) 183 Monmouth
Gyverny, Richard 146 History of Cambria now called Wales 182
Holland, Edmund, earl of Kent 235
Hailes Abbey 49, 50 Holy Land 35, 59, 278
Halidon Hill, battle of 125 Holy Roman Emperors or Empire 35, 88
Hapsburgs 151 Holy Trinity, Aldgate 105, 119, 120
Harald Fairhair of Norway 187 Hopton, William 16
Hardyng, John 5, 21, 259–82 Horn 13–14
Harold, king of England 31, 76, 212–13 Horn Child and Maiden Rimnild 14–16
Havelok the Dane 4, 13–14, 17–20, 227 Hoton, John, abbot of Meaux 107
Helbarton, Dorothy 225 Hubba, Danish leader 231
Helena, saint 232–3, 241 Humphrey de Bohun VI 68
Hengist, see Engist Humphrey VII 68
Henry I, of England 32, 41, 52, 54, 67, 74, 119, Hundred Years War 94, 104, 158, 268
120, 133, 214, 218, 228, 277 Hungar, Danish leader 231
288 Index
Huntingdon, earls of 69 John of Caen 126

Husting 120 John of Fordun 160, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166,
Hyde, Benedictine monastery 105 168
Hyfaidd ap Bleddri 183 John of Gaunt 266–7, 270, 274
Hywel ab Owain Gwynedd 198 John of Wallingford 51
John of Worcester 58
Igerne 10–11, 231–2, 242 Joseph, husband of Mary 2
Illtud, saint 188 Joseph of Arimathea 4, 23, 110
Ine, king of Wessex 110
Ingulf, pseudo- 113, 114 Karolinus 84
Iolo Goch 176–7 Katherine, wife of Henry V 236, 254–6
Iorwerth 189 Katherine of Siena, saint 237, 241
Isabel (Isabella), wife of Edward II 12, 234–5, Kenneth I (Kenneth MacAlpin), king of Scot-
248–50, 267–8 land 161, 163, 169
Isabella, wife of Edward, duke of York 275 Kent, England 110, 111
Isabella of Castile 273 King Horn 14–16, 19
Isabelle, wife of Thomas Chaworth 147 King Pontus and Sidoine 14, 16
Isabelle of Hainault 81 King Who Will Find the Holy Cross 43
Isolde 229 Kirkstall [Abbey] 108
Itinerarium Kambriae 66
Iureman, Margery 237 Labana, wife of Diocletian, king of Syria 227,
239
James I, of Scotland 164, 168, 169, 171 Lacy, Henry de 225
James II, of Scotland 171 Lamane 239
James III, of Scotland 171 Lancastrians 41, 150, 267, 271
James IV, of Scotland 171 Lancelot 22–4
James V, of Scotland 166 Lanercost 103
Japhet 163 Lanthony Prima priory, Monmouthshire 66–7
Jean de Montreuil 95 Lanthony priory chronicles 66, 68
Jean Juvénal 95 Lanthony Secunda priory, Gloucestershire 66,
Jean Juvénal des Ursins 94, 95, 99 68
Jerome 2 Last Kings of the English 42
Jerusalem 88, 268, 275–8 Laviane (Lemane) 227
Jervaulx abbey 108 Law, John 164
Jesse, tree of 99 Layamon 22
Jesus Christ 1, 2, 86, 160, 270 Lear 228
Joan, wife of Henry IV 235, 236, 254, 256 Liber Pluscardensis 164, 165, 171
Joan Beaufort, wife of James I of Scotland 236, Lincolnshire 17
255 Lindesay, Robert of Pitscottie 167
Joan of Arc 236 Lindisfarne 111
Joan of the Tower, daughter of Edward I 235, Lionel, duke of Clarence 269–70
250 Lisbourne, treaty of 273
Jocelyn of Brakelond 105 ‘Lives of Saints’ 188
John, king of England 38, 56–8, 67 Llywarch 183
John le Scot 69 Llywelyn, prince of Wales 200
Index 289
Llywelyn ab Iorwerth of Gwynedd (Llywelyn Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 16:

Fawr) 68, 189–90, 197, 199, 200 51 n. 24
Llywelyn ap Gruffudd 200 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 26:
Llywelyn ap Madog of Powys 199 51 n. 24, 53 n. 27
Locrinus (Lotryn, Locrine) 126, 228, 229 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 55:
London chronicles 114 34 n. 19
Longespée, Margaret 225 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 80:
Louis, saint 41 24
Louis VIII 84, 85 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 98:
Louis IX 94, 95 65, 217
Lovelich, Henry 24 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS
Luce, wife of Edmund Holland 235, 254 138: 34 n. 19
Lucius, legendary king of Britain 109, 112 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 313
Lud 211 pt. II: 32 n. 16
Luttrell, Andrew 30 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS
Luttrell, Geoffrey 29–30 404: 34 n. 19
Luttrell Psalter 29 Cambridge, Emmanuel College, MS 232: 50
Lydgate, John 223, 260 Cambridge, Gonville and Caius, MS
249/277: 35 n. 21, 43 n. 49
Mabinogi cycle 183 Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O 1 17: 32
Macbeth 171 n. 16
Madog ap Maredudd 198–9 Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R 3 21: 43
Maelgwn Gwynedd 196–7 n. 49
Magna Carta 231 Cambridge, University Library, M S
Magnus Maximus 176, 184, 189 Dd III 58: 49
Mahel 66, 67 Cambridge, University Library, M S
Mahomet 43 Dd III 59: 52
Maid of Norway 125 Cambridge, University Library, M S
Major (Mair), John 165, 166 Dd XIV 2: 30 n. 10
Malcolm III, of Scotland 52 Cambridge, University Library, MS
Malcolm IV, of Scotland 74 Gg IV 25: 34 n. 19, 43 n. 49
Malory, Thomas 21–3 Cambridge, University Library, M S
Man 183 Oo VII 32: 53
Manaw Gododdin 184 Cambridge, MA, Harvard University
Mannyng, Robert 5, 17, 125, 130, 224 Library, MS English 1054: 268 n. 25
Manuscripts: Cleveland, Public Library, John G. White
Aberdeen, University Library, MS 123: 42 Collection, W q091.92-C468: 222
n. 43 Dublin, Trinity College, MS 172: 34 n. 19
Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Dublin, Trinity College, MS 489: 223
Peniarth MS 17: 179 n. 17 Dublin, Trinity College, MS 505: 222, 223
Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Dublin, Trinity College, MS 506: 222
Peniarth MS 20: 191 Dublin, Trinity College, MS 514: 33 n. 16
Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Dublin, Trinity College, MS 516: 34 n. 19,
Peniarth MS 131: 190, 192 43 n. 49
290 Index
Edinburgh, National Archives of Scotland, London, British Library, Harley Roll C. 10:
Dalhousie Muniments, GD 45/31/I-II: 49
168, 168 n. 42, 170 London, British Library, Lansdowne MS
Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, 204: 264 n. 15, 267 n. 22
Advocates MS 16500 (Asloan MS): 170 London, British Library, Lansdowne Roll 4:
Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, 126 n. 7
Advocates MS 19.2.1 (Auchinleck MS): London, British Library, MS Cotton
15–16 Claudius B VII: 34 n. 19
Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, London, British Library, MS Cotton
Advocates MS 19.2.4: 170 Claudius D VI: 52 n. 24, 53 n. 27
Lincoln, Cathedral Library, MS 91: 30 n. 10 London, British Library, MS Cotton
London, British Library, Additional MS Claudius E VIII: 37 n. 31
8101: 59 London, British Library, MS Cotton
London, British Library, Additional MS Cleopatra D III: 43 n. 49
12030: 20 London, British Library, MS Cotton
London, British Library, Additional MS Faustina B I: 64
29504: 49 London, British Library, MS Cotton Galba
London, British Library, Additional MS E VIII: 223
30079: 50 n. 20 London, British Library, MS Cotton Julius
London, British Library, Additional MS B III: 222
40007: 37 n. 31 London, British Library, MS Cotton Julius
London, British Library, Additional MS D VII: 52 n. 24
42130 (Luttrell Psalter): 29 London, British Library, MS Cotton Julius
London, British Library, Additional MS D X : 66
47170: 50, 50 n. 20 London, British Library, MS Cotton Otho
London, British Library, Additional MS D VII: 37 n. 31
70514: 222 London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius
London, British Library, Arundel MS 57: 34 A 9: 37 n. 31
n. 19 London, British Library, MS Cotton Titus
London, British Library, Arundel MS 66: 34 D VII: 34 n. 19
n. 19 London, British Library, MS Cotton Titus
London, British Library, Cotton Roll XV 7: D XIX : 34 n. 19
49 London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespa-
London, British Library, Egerton MS 1992: sian A VI: 94 n. 53
268 n. 25 London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespa-
London, British Library, Harley MS 53: 222 sian A XIV: 179 n. 17
London, British Library, Harley MS 661: London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespa-
268 n. 25 sian A XXII: 37 n. 31
London, British Library, Harley MS 1337: 43 London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespa-
n. 49 sian E VII: 34 n. 19, 43
London, British Library, Harley MS 2253: 38 London, British Library, Royal MS 13 E VI:
London, British Library, Harley MS 3859: 37 n. 31
179, 182–3, 185, 191–3 London, British Library, Royal MS 14 B VI:
London, British Library, Harley Roll C. 7: 52 53
Index 291
London, British Library, Sloane MS 2027: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc.
222 550: 222
London, British Library, Stowe MS 69: 223 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc.
London, College of Arms, MS 20/5: 59 571: 225
London, College of Arms, Arundel MS 8: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc.
222 733: 223
London, College of Arms, Arundel MS 29: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lyell 35: 30 n.
43 n. 49 10, 43 n. 49
London, College of Arms, Arundel MS 58: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson
223 B. 205: 225
London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 8: 37 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson
n. 31 D. 329: 123–4, 206
London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 99: 222 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson
London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 306: Poetry 32: 222
223 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Selden B.10:
London, Society of Antiquaries, MS 101: 30 259–82
n. 10 Oxford, Jesus College, MS 2: 33 n. 16
Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS 228: Oxford, Jesus College, MS 20: 190, 193
30 n. 10, 34 n. 19 Oxford, King’s College, MS 43: 41
New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Oxford, University College, MS XCVII: 43
Library, MS 323: 222, 223 n. 49
New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS Paris, Bibliothèque nationale Française, MS
Bühler 5: 268 n. 25 fr. 4961: 94 n. 53
Norwich, Norfolk Record Office, MS Paris, Bibliothèque nationale Française, MS
Bradfer-Lawrence Xa/15: 44 n. 50 fr. 4991: 97, 99
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley Roll 3: 46, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale Française, MS
50 n. 20 fr. 5038: 94 n. 54, 99
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 302: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale Française, MS
34 n. 19 fr. 5059: 96 n. 60
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Broxbourne Paris, Bibliothèque nationale Française, MS
1123: 49 fr. 5697: 99
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 185: 16 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale Française, MS
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 186: 34 fr. 5700: 94 n. 53
n. 19 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale Française, MS
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 196: 34 fr. 13565: 94 n. 53
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 378: fr. 13836: 96 n. 61
268 n. 25 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale Française, MS
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Dugdale 18: fr. 14371: 95 n. 56, n. 57
60–75 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale Française, MS
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 20: 34 fr. 17001: 86 n. 27, 87 n. 28, 100 n. 68
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 50: 24 lat. 4910: 89 n .35
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 56: 34 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale Française, MS
n. 19, 42 n. 44, 43 n. 49 lat. 4989: 92 n. 46
292 Index
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale Française, MS Meilyr Brydydd 196, 200

lat. 6191: 98 Meirionnydd 182
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale Française, MS Mélisande, daughter of Baldwin II 275–6
lat. 13836: 90 n. 38, n. 40, n. 41 Mercians 184
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale Française, MS Merfyn Frych 185, 192
nouvelle acquisition latine 1171: 92 n. 48, Merlin 10–11, 23, 218, 231, 235
97 n. 62 Merovingians 4, 81, 83
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale Française, MS Middle English genealogical rolls 50
nouvelle acquisition latine 2577: 86 n. 26 Miélot, Jean 86–7, 100
Princeton, University Art Museum, MS Miles of Gloucester 66, 67
y1932–32: 92 n. 50 Modred 232
Princeton, University Library, MS 56: 92 Mohun Chronicle 65, 73, 75–7
n. 50 Monastic chronicles, English 103–22
Princeton, University Library, MS 57: 52 Mort le Roi Artu 23
St Andrews, University Library, MS Morte Darthur, see Malory, Thomas
DA775.A6 W9: 172 Mortimer, Anne, mother of Richard of York
San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 270
136: 225 Mortimer, Roger 234–5
Tours, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 1039: Mortimer family 272
99 Morys of Powys 38
Urbana-Champaign, University of Illinois, Moses 160
MS 83: 268 n. 25
Wiltshire, Longleat House, MS 183A: 223, Nennius 180
225 Nest, daughter of Rhys ap Tewdwr 190–1
Maredudd ap Cynan 199 Nest, mother of Mahel, son of Bernard de
Margaret, wife of Edward I 234, 248 Neufmarché 66
Margaret, wife of Malcolm III 52, 56, 245 Neville, Alexander 108
Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI 236, Neville family 117
257–5, 280–1 New Testament 268
Mark, legendary king of Cornwall 229 New Troy 211–12
Marmion, John 146 Newenham Abbey 77
Martinus Polonus 165 Noah 163, 175, 180
Mary, daughter of Henry of Lancaster 266 Nomina omnium regum Scotorum 168–70
Mary, mother of Jesus 2, 120, 183, 241, 250, Nomina regum francorum 91
270 Norham, battle of 171
Maryan Scot 266 Norham, conference of 53
Math ap Mathonwy 183 Norman conquest 28, 39, 58, 64, 77
Matilda (Edith) (Maud), wife of Henry I of Nunwell 143
England 3, 32, 41, 52, 54, 74, 119, 245
Matilda (Maud), empress and mother of Octavian, king of Britain 227
Henry II, daughter of Henry I of England Oddo, legendary duke of Mercia 117
31–2, 35, 214, 228, 245, 246 Oglander, Sir John 143
Maud, daughter of Waltheof 73–4 Olaf, king of Dublin 187
Mausoleums 154–5 Old Testament 60, 86, 88, 268
Meaux Abbey 106, 107, 108 Opuscula, see Ralph de Diceto
Index 293
Orderic Vitalis 72 Philippe III 89

Original Chronicle of Scotland, see Andrew of Philippe IV 89, 90
Wyntoun Philippe V 89, 90
Orkneyinga-Saga 71 Pickering, Thomas 116
Orosius 9, 165 Picts 160, 171
Orwenne, wife of Adelbright 227 Pillar of Eliseg (Elisedd) 176–7, 184
Osbert de Clare 31 Pippin 81, 91
Osbright, king of Northumbria 216, 230–1 Plaiz, John 64
Ossa 223 Plantagenet, Geoffrey 276
Oswald, saint 210–11, 215, 218 Plantagenets 42, 54, 56, 58, 207, 214, 218, 278
Oswy 210–11, 215, 218 Polychronicon, see Higden, Ranulf
Owain ap Cadwgan 190–1 Porrex (Porrez) 207, 209, 233
Owain ap Gruffudd of Glyndyfrdwy 177 Post-Vulgate Roman du Graal 22
Owain ap Hywel Dda 179, 183–4 Powel, David 182
Owain Glyndwr 176 Powys 176, 182, 184, 190, 199
Owain Gwynedd 189, 196–7, 198, 200 Premonstratensians 115–16, 207
Price, John 182
Padern Beisrudd (Padern of the Red Tunic) Prophecia aquile (Prophecy of the Eagle) 32, 43
179 Propheciae Merlini (Prophecies of Merlin) 35,
Paris, Matthew 51, 52, 53, 109 36, 37, 39, 42, 43
Parliament 104 Prophecy of Bridlington 41
Paston family 5, 150 Prose Brut, Anglo-Norman 5, 12, 17–18, 21,
Paul, saint 224 48, 51, 61, 64, 65, 124, 205–20, 224, 225,
Paynel family 64 226, 227, 228, 230–4
Peanda 210, 215 Prose Brut, English 3, 5, 12, 16, 17, 20, 21, 42,
Peasants’ Revolt 104 48, 51, 105, 114, 206, 221–58, 265, 282
Pedigree of France 268 Prose Brut, Latin 206, 222
Pedro I of Castile 273–4 Prydydd y Moch 197
Pedwardine family 65 Pura Wallia 176
Penllyn 182
Percy, Henry, earl of Northumberland 116, 272 Quo Warranto, Statute of 132
Percy, Thomas 266
Percy family 40, 116, 266–7, 272 Ragnell, mother of Gruffudd ap Cynan 186
Perrers, Alice 235–6, 252 Ralph, Lord Cromwell 146
Peter of Blois 113, 114 Ralph de Diceto 35–7, 53
Peter of Langtoft (Piers Langtoft) 48, 130 Ralph of Hereford 72
Peter of Poitiers 2, 51, 85, 86, 88, 89 Ramsey Abbey 109
Peterborough Abbey 50 Rauf de Boun 17, 68
Petit Bruit 68 Regan (Rigan) 228, 240
Peverel family 39 Reges francorum 91–2
Philippa, daughter of Henry IV 235 Rei de Engletere 124
Philippa, daughter of Lionel, duke of Clarence Rerum Scoticarum historia, see Buchanan,
269–70, 279 George
Philippa, wife of Edward III 235, 249–51 Reynold de Mohun II 77
Philippe II Auguste 36, 81, 276 Rhodri ab Owain 198
294 Index
Rhodri Mawr 187, 192 Scota 160, 162, 168, 170

Rhufoniog 182 Scotichronicon, see Bower, Walter
Rhydderch 183 Scotorum historia, see Boece, Hector
Rhys ap Gruffudd 177 Scottis Cronikle, see Brevis cronica
Rhys ap Tewdwr 191 ‘Scottish Chronicle’ 124
Rhys Gryg 190 Scrope-Grosvenor case 30
Richard I, of England 36, 57, 132–3 Sebert 112
Richard II, of England 40, 104, 222, 229, 235, Severa 184
266, 269–70 Sexburga 235, 243
Richard III (Richard of Gloucester) 40 Sextus 35
Richard, Cantor of Nottingham 70 Shem 163
Richard, duke of York 42, 223, 260–3, 265, Sibille 235, 240, 243
267, 269–74, 278–82 Sigurð 71
Richard of Holderness 40 Silueyn 217
Robert II, of Scotland 171 Simon II 74
Robert of Avesbury 105 Simon III 74
Robert of Béthune, bishop of Hereford 66 Simon de Seintliz I 73–4
Robert of Gloucester 48, 130 Siward 70, 75
Robert the Pious, king of France 1 Solomon 10
Roderic the Great 193 Speculum Augustianum 110, 111
Roger, earl of March 270 Spenser, Edmund 25
Roger de Massy of Sale 155 Sprott, Thomas 110
Roger of Hereford 72 Stathum family 155–6
Roger of Wendover 53 Statute of Westminster 133
Rolewinck, Werner 168 Stephen, king of England 35, 133, 214, 228
Roman de Rou 76 Stewart, William 167
Roman emperors 88 Stigand, archbishop of Canterbury 31
Romance of Horn 14 Strathclyde 183
Ronwenne 229–30, 242 Strelley, John 146–7
Rudborne, Thomas 109, 110, 111 Striveling, Richard 164
Russell, Patrick 164 Sylvius 193
Syria, Sultan of 42
Sacheverell family 155
Saint-Aubin 83–4 Tange, Andrew 126
Saint-Denis 3, 81–2, 90 Tewkesbury Abbey 105, 117, 118
St Albans, Benedictine abbey 105–6, 108 Tewkesbury, battle of 150
St Andrews chronicle 172–3 Thomas de la Mare 109
St Augustine’s, Canterbury 106, 110, 111 Thomas of Axbridge 119–20
St Peter 88 Thomas of Canterbury 29
St Peter’s, Gloucester, Cistercian monastery 105 Thomas of Elmham 110
St Swithun’s 105, 109 Thomas of Lancaster 29
Saladin 277 Thorne, Thomas 110
Sallwey, Henry 225 Tosti, earl of Huntingdon 71
Saturn 217 Traité contre les Anglais 95
Scalacronica, see Gray, Thomas Trevet, Nicholas 48, 53
Index 295
Trevisa, John 181 Wars of the Roses 23, 104, 114, 259
Tri Chof 194 Welsh genealogical chronicles 175–202
Tristan 229 Wessington, John 111, 112
Trojans 4, 9, 46, 60, 88, 127, 159, 182, 205, 226 Westminster Abbey 105, 112
Trouthe (Crouthe), William 225 Wheathamstead, John 106
Tuathal of Leinster 187 Wheel of Fortune 23, 56
Whitby Abbey 116
Umfraville, Robert 274 Wigmore Abbey 115, 116
Uriah 10 William, son of Eleanor of Aquitaine 36
Ursula, saint 232, 241 William, son of Miles of Gloucester 67
Uther Pendragon (Uter) 10–11, 21, 23, 231–2 William de Briouze (Braose) III 67–8
William de Moion I 76
Vale Royal Abbey 105, 120 William de Vieuxpont 69
Vergil 9 William of Malmesbury 9, 31, 53, 110, 129,
Vergil, Polydore 165, 182 278 n. 53
‘Verses on the Kings of England’, see Lydgate, William of Scarborough 107
John William Rufus 56, 66, 73
‘Verses on the Kings of England’, anonymous William the Conqueror (William of Nor-
223 mandy) 31, 38, 39, 52, 56, 73, 76, 124, 206,
Vie et miracles de saint Denis 90 212–14, 223, 277
Villars, Elizabeth 149 William the Lion 74
Vincent of Beauvais 165 Willoughby family 145–8, 154
Vita et Passio Sancti Waldevi 70, 71, 72 Winchester 109
Vortiger (Vortigern) 184, 229 Winchester, chronicles of 216
Vortimer 229–30 Woden 163
Vulgate Cycle 22 Woodford family 146–7, 149, 153
Woodstock, treaty of 199
Wace 22, 76, 207, 210–11, 226, 233, 278 n. 53
Wakefield, battle of 261 Ydoyne 233, 240
Waldef 13–14 Ymagines historiarum 36
Wallace, William 169 Yorkists 41, 71, 260
Walsingham, Thomas 105, 109 Yves de Saint-Denis 51, 90, 91, 96
Waltheof 70, 72, 73
Warenne, earl 132 Zelophehad 268
M EDIEVAL T EXTS AND C ULTURES
OF N ORTHERN E UROPE
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Titles in Series
Drama and Community: People and Plays in Medieval Europe, ed. by Alan Hindley (1999)
Showing Status: Representations of Social Positions in the Late Middle Ages, ed. by Wim Blockmans
and Antheun Janse (1999)
Sandra Billington, Midsummer: A Cultural Sub-Text from Chrétien de Troyes to Jean Michel (2000)
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Broken Lines Genealogical Literature in Medieval Britain and France by Raluca L. Radulescu Edward Donald Kennedy

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BROKEN LINES

MEDIEVAL TEXTS AND CULTURES OF NORTHERN EUROPE

Editorial Board under the auspices of the

Wendy Scase, Chair, University of Birmingham

John H. Arnold, Birkbeck College, University of London

Andrew Ayton, University of Hull

Raluca L. Radulescu and Edward Donald Kennedy

© 2008, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

Printed in the E.U. on acid-free paper

Genealogy in Insular Romance 7

Prophecy, Genealogy, and History in Medieval English Political Discourse 27

A New Pattern for English History: 45

Genealogies of Noble Families in Anglo-Norman 63

Genealogies in Medieval France 79

Genealogy in Monastic Chronicles in England 103

Genealogy and Gentility: Social Status in Provincial England 143

The Antiquity of Scottish Civilization: 159

Genealogical Narratives and Kingship in Medieval Wales 175

Narrative, Lineage, and Succession 205

Genealogy and Women in the Prose Brut, 221

Genealogy and John Hardyng’s Verse Chronicle 259

Jon Denton completed his doctoral thesis, ‘The East-Midland Gentleman,

Lister M. Matheson is Professor of Medieval Studies at Michigan State University

margin of existence”? Upland Prosperity in Wales during the Early Modern

Raluca L. Radulescu and Edward Donald Kennedy

Historians as well as modern editors of medieval historical writing have pointed

Emilia Jamroziak discusses ways in which English monks used genealogical

Men hernep gestis for to here

Chronicle accounts of royal succession, and disrupted lineages in particular, also

Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae

Much recent work has focused on those particularities of Anglo-Norman chronicle

in succession and establish coherent lineages (continuities) from Anglo-Saxon to

In this light, the paradox of using genealogy as a backbone to otherwise rather

Genealogy in Insular Romances

It is generally agreed that romances reflect upper-class concerns; in Susan Crane’s

Unsurprisingly, the Auchinleck also contains romances focusing on three out of

Another hero whose story relates to genealogical concerns is Havelok; Havelok

British Library, MS Additional 12030 indicates an attentive reader’s interest in

English Arthurian Romance at the End of the Middle Ages

Arthurian romances written in England are similarly concerned with genealogy,

Although the history of Arthur’s place in insular debates over genealogical

lineages relevant to the shaping of a national as well as individual consciousness.

By extension, it is possible to suggest that what is represented in the Luttrell Psalter

This prophecy, which recurs frequently among prophetic texts in fifteenth-century

Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, completed by 1139 and

A New and Expanding Historical Literature

If one is interested in historical culture — and not only in historical writing — it

Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, and the Anglo-Norman and

An Innovative Design for a Short Guide to English History

An Ambiguous Representation of Kingship

Generally, royal genealogies aimed at strengthening dynastic consciousness and at

The Deepening of a Historical National Consciousness

that anyone could consider himself/herself as English as long as s/he acknowledged

The Genealogy of the Lords of Brecknock

Norman of a passage from Giraldus Cambrensis’s Itinerarium Kambriæ.12 Giraldus

The Delapre Chronicle

Another account of a noble family’s history written in Anglo-Norman is found in

There is no celebration of Waltheof’s death as a martyrdom here; it does not even

The Mohun Chronicle

family history.59 Unfortunately, the unique medieval manuscript of the chronicle

The Mohun Chronicle goes on to provide a list of fifty-seven names, including

Norman Conquest provided an ideal opportunity to glorify the family whose

Marigold Anne Norbye