bone espee, nue,
Sun cheval brochet, si vait ferir Chernuble:
L’elme li freint u li carbuncle luisent
Trenchet le chef e la cheveleüre,
Si li trenchat les oilz e la faiture,
Le blac osberc dunt la maile est menue,
En tut le cors tresqu’en la furcheüre.
Enz en la sele, ki est a or batue,
El cheval est l’espee aresteüe:
Trenchet l’eschine, une n’i out quis [joi]nture,
Tut abat mort el préd sur l’erbe drue.
Après li dist: “Culvert, mar i moüstes!
| De Mahumet ja n’i avrez aiüde. | MS auerez? |
| Par tel glutun n’ert bataille oi vencue.” | (fol. 24V, lines 1320–37, see fig. 2) |
The battle was fierce, and all were engaged. Count Roland did not hold back. He struck with his spear as long as its shaft remained, but he broke it completely by the fifteenth blow. He drew out the naked blade of Durendal, his good sword, spurred on his horse, and struck Chernuble. He cut through his helmet, where the carbuncles shone, and through his head and his hair. Cut through his eyes and his face, his shining mail hauberk, and all his body, to the trunk, and then into his saddle, which was decorated with gold, and into his horse and through its spine, without looking for the joints. He left both dead in the thick grass. Then he said, “Wretch, you did wrong to come. You will never have aid from Mohammed. Battle will never be won by such a coward.”
It is much easier to imagine these lines being delivered by a minstrel or jongleur, who could supply appropriately histrionic gestures and perhaps even go so far as to twirl a sword (as Taillefer is said to have done in one account).71 As we shall see, however, there are grounds for serious doubt about whether minstrels or jongleurs ever had much opportunity to deliver more than short fragments, while there are lines written by clerics, and even by a canon at Oseney, that have something of this brutality. If we are trying to imagine the conditions under which the poem might have been delivered more or less in its entirety, we must think in terms of someone like the chaplain Gerold, however much this may clash with the clichés of medieval culture we have inherited.
So far, we have been considering how the poem might have been delivered during the period when it was copied. At least a century must pass, however, until we get evidence that allows us to link the manuscript to a specific owner. On an opening leaf of the Timaeus, folio [2]r, there is an inscription in what appears to be at least a late thirteenth-century, or more likely a fourteenth-century, hand informing us that one Master Henry of Langley bequeathed it to the Augustinian canons of St. Mary of Oseney (“liber ecckesie sancte marie de osenya ex le/gato magistri henrici de langelya”).72 Master Henry is in all probability the Henry Langley who was a canon and prebendary of the king’s free chapel in Bridgnorth Castle, Shropshire, and is last mentioned in a record of 1263.73 Admittedly, the lapse of time between the last reference to Henry and the probable date of the inscription is a little troubling. Abbeys were generally expected to keep track of donations. At Barnwell Priory, for example, which happens to be the one Augustinian house whose custumal survives, all the books were laid out at the beginning of every Lent so that the brothers might pray for the benefactors.74 At Oseney donations to the abbey were sometimes even noted in its chronicle or in its cartulary, and presumably the books were supposed to be inscribed at the same time, but one simply has to compare the chronicle to the Ker’s list of surviving books from the abbey to see that the record keeping was not perfect.75 If the owner of the Digby Timaeus was this Henry Langley, he was a lucky man. The prebends of Bridgnorth were worth in the neighborhood of twelve pounds a year and were often used for rewarding valued royal servants such as the king’s physician or the clerks of the Wardrobe, who held at least five of them during the mid-thirteenth century. This attractive sinecure was one that Henry would have acquired through the influence of his father, Geoffrey.76
While Henry remains largely a cipher, his father was notorious. Geoffrey Langley was chief justice of the King’s Forest, one of the king’s most trusted counsellors, an infamous purchaser of land, and at one point possibly the most hated man in England. According to Matthew Paris, he was stingy and “lessened as far as possible the bounty and accustomed generosity (dapsilitatem et consuetam curialitatem) of the royal table.”77 Geoffrey fought in the campaign in Gascony in 1242–43 and was promoted on his return, rising to chief justice of the forest in the year 1250. In this position he enforced the harsh forest laws with unusual vigor78 In 1254, as a senior member of the king’s council, he was put in charge of the English and Welsh lands of Prince Edward. His high-handed treatment of the Welsh has often been cited as one of the causes of the rebellion of 1256.79 It would have been Geoffrey’s influence that would have won his son the lucrative prebendary.
There is no direct connection between Geoffrey Langley and the Digby manuscript (and even his son probably owned only the Timaeus), but Geoffrey is an interesting figure in his own right, in part because he stands in such stark contrast to the recurring image of the medieval baron as a semiliterate noble savage. Geoffrey was skilled not just in political and legal machinations but also in the business of land speculation in an inflationary economy. He was one of those larger landholders who made a fortune by lending money to lesser knights who were living off fixed rents and then acquiring their lands through foreclosure, a practice that led to increased social tensions culminating in the Barons’ Revolt of 1263, when Langley’s lands were among the first to be pillaged.80 The money generated by this aggressive speculation was presumably part of what supported his son in his comfortable prebendary at Bridgnorth, where he could read of the celestial harmonies described in the Timaeus.
What do we know about the first half of this manuscript, Digby 23(1)? The first question to consider is where it came from. One might suppose, as J. H. Waszink did, that a text that at one point belonged to an Oxford scholar had originally been copied there, but O. Pacht and J. J. G. Alexander listed Digby 23(1) among French manuscripts on the basis of its decoration. Their account, however, is summary (“Good initials, diagrams”), and in their introduction they draw attention to the difficulty of distinguishing Norman from Anglo-Norman manuscripts.81 It would seem, then, that the manuscript could have been copied on either side of the Channel. More important is the intellectual milieu in which Digby 23(1) was first copied and read, particularly its relation to the School of Chartres. It is possible that some of the glossators had actually studied there, taking lessons from the great Bernard of Chartres himself (probably d. 1124) or from masters such as Gilbert of Poitiers (d. 1154) or Ivo of Chartres (d. 1165), although they might also have been from some other center, such as Orléans, or from one of the schools in Paris, which by the end of the century were beginning to coalesce into the university.82 At least one of the glossators draws heavily on the work of William of Conches (d. ca. 1154), who studied at Chartres and taught at Paris.83 Oxford, too, was flourishing as a university by the 1180s, and the manuscript could conceivably have been copied there or brought back to Oxford by a wandering scholar soon after it was copied.84
Pächt and Alexander date the core text to the first half of the twelfth century, an opinion seconded by Malcolm Parkes, but this may be a little early.85 The script resembles that found in some English documents from about 1140 to 1160, while Paul Dutton has suggested that it might date from the third quarter of the century.86 The entire text has been carefully glossed over many years. A full
