doubled Britain will prove pliable enough, richly ambivalent enough, to accommodate the desires not just of parvenu Anglo-Norman aristocrats anxious to take part in glorious sovereign fantasies, but of later English kings and conquerors. In the fifteenth century, Monmouth’s history, with its representation of a native, British glory, captivates the imagination of English kings who, in the wake of the Hundred Years War, wish to repudiate their dynastic ties to France (resisting their history as the heirs of Norman conquest). Through Arthur they claim an insular, native tradition, and a heritage more ancient than Norman invasion. For these English kings part of the useful doubleness of Geoffrey’s story is that it figures an insular wholeness, and a British identity, as both a loss to be mourned and as a rightful inheritance to be regained. Since the Britons “once occupied the land from sea to sea,” the category of “Britain” provides the imagination with a new insular hegemony as a very old heritage. Later sovereigns will deploy both native and classical traditions in imagining their sovereignty—English kings and aristocrats will wage war against Welsh, Scots, and Irish, building colonial outposts in the edges of the realm while encouraging court poets to tell of their classical roots. This doubleness will render insular hegemony a rightful legacy of a mystical Welsh past as well as domination forged through military, economic, and political policies.
The cultural doubleness legible in my reading of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia (and in the important work done by scholars of medieval Wales to whom my work is indebted) disappears from later notions of “Britain” and its empire. This disappearance means that William of Malmesbury’s denigration of Welsh “ravings” with which we began successfully located Welsh oppositional fantasies outside the realm of the “real.” The trivialization of these alternative versions of “Britain” suggests an interpretive history that favors one portion of Geoffrey’s readers. Alternative fantasies have nonetheless left their traces. Those traces remain legible today thanks in part to Monmouth’s careful ambiguity, and to his use of the traditions of a linguistic minority in the authoritative genre of a Latin history. In this instance, Latin becomes a vehicle for legitimizing (and rendering massively influential) a popular vernacular tradition.
These remarks again suggest some of the power medievalists can offer to postcolonial cultural studies. A consideration of the longue duree of British identity can offer readings of resistance that seem to have disappeared from later discussions of nation or Empire, perhaps precisely because Wales remains a colony of England today. This is not to suggest that the story of Welsh resistance told here replace (or displace) important contemporary efforts at analyzing the racist and imperialist aspects of contemporary British (or American) culture or politics. It does remind us, however, to watch for traces of a variety of resistances already obscured in authoritative accounts of history.
Furthermore, the condensation of resistance and conquering aggression told through Monmouth’s Historia, and repeated in the history of its reception and dissemination, might offer a useful qualification to recent debates within postcolonial cultural studies. Benita Parry critiques Homi Bhabha’s work as overly focused on texts produced in the colonizer’s locale. She argues that such an emphasis obscures the agency of the colonized, and she calls for “a cartography of imperialist ideology more extensive than its address in colonialist space, [and] a conception of the native as historical subject and agent of an oppositional discourse” (“Problems,” 44). Yet Parry’s formulation itself implies that “oppositional discourses” are never found in “colonialist space”; this implies that Europe’s conquerors were (ever) the only inhabitants of Europe, a fact that (with regard to the medieval colonial scene at least) overemphasizes the power of dominant cultures at the expense of the conquered. In so doing Parry inadvertently discounts the powerful intimacies of medieval borderlands, and the complicated minglings of medieval textualities. The divergent reception of the Historia instead suggests that both desire for and resistance to conquest can be read in a single text. My reading of the Historia offers the history of cultural contestation both passionately fraught and deeply intimate.
Colonial histories would, in subsequent centuries, continue to contest and disavow Welsh oppositional sovereign fantasies. They will, in fact, continue to disavow some versions of Arthur’s story as fable, fancy, or mad ravings. Such a complicated literary history should, however, give us pause before charges of truth or fable, charges that will recur throughout the Middle English corpus. Through such charges Arthurian traditions, widely known and widely used for centuries, became increasingly tied to the pleasures of Europe’s conquerors. Yet oppositional uses of Arthurian traditions will also persist for some time. The interpretive pleasures of Welsh separatists will face repetitive insistence that they are mad, utterly false, and thus unreal.
This history of disputes and contests over interpretive legitimacy, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, also structures what I am calling Arthur’s national fantasy. In later chapters of this study I will argue that this contentious narrative history renders Arthur a king for all Britons, and helps explain the diversity, the seeming contradictions, and the impressive expansiveness of the Middle English tradition. A Middle English tradition of political prophecy, propaganda, and genealogy built upon a textual futurism borrowed from Welsh poetry means that Welsh poetic practice becomes a way of encoding England’s doubled history as both conquered space and conquering sovereignty (see Chapter 2). Monmouth’s tale of Merlin and Arthur offers a set of differential readings of British destiny and how it might be legitimately fulfilled. In the late medieval period, and in a century marked at one end by the Glyn Dwr rebellion and at the other by Tudor succession, these versions of Arthur constitute a crucial—and crucially contested—account of British sovereignty.
CHAPTER TWO
Arthurian Futurism and British Destiny
The Cat, the Rat and Lovel our dog,
Rule all England under a hog
—Quoted by V. J. Scattergood, 211
IN 1484 this couplet, posted on the door to St. Paul’s Cathedral and aimed at deriding Richard III and his intimates, cost its author, William Collingbourne, his life. Collingbourne was executed for treason, “put to the most cruel deth at the Tower Hylle, where for hym were made a newe payer of gallowes” (Scattergood 21).1 In his analysis of fifteenth-century political poetry, V. J. Scattergood makes clear the political dangers of such poetic license, even when efforts were made (as in Collingbourne’s case) to keep the identity of the poet a secret. Political poetry borrowed the ambiguity of animal symbolism from prophetic texts; these kinds of prophetic traditions became, in the words of Rupert Taylor, a “potent factor in [late medieval] English affairs” (104). Political poetry that deployed prophetic metaphor would prove a dangerous medium.2
The English crown took Collingbourne’s resistant act of writing very seriously. The textual ambiguity that produced, in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s day, state-sanctioned political coalitions was, in the fifteenth century, disconcerting for the crown. The disciplinary prohibition evident in Collingbourne’s execution also obtained in the strained relations between England and Wales, especially in the years following the Glyn Dŵr rebellion. As early as 1402 Henry IV would decree against Welsh vaticinative poetry, arguing that Welsh bards were by “divinations and lies … the cause of the insurrection and rebellion in Wales” (Rotuli Parliamentorum, as cited by Taylor 105). English fears about Welsh vaticinatory poetry were long-standing, and linked to Welsh prophetic accounts of their recovery of rule over a British totam insulam, the prophecy known as the “Breton Hope.” The writer of the Vita Edwardi Secundi, for example, links Welsh rebellious “madness” with such prophecies. His rhetoric recalls Malmesbury’s castigation of the raving Welsh, focusing upon the power of prophecy for armed insurrection: “The Welsh habit of revolt against the English is a long-standing madness … And this is the reason. The Welsh formerly called the Britons, were once noble crowned over the whole realm of England; but they were expelled by the Saxons and lost
