when they died. One of the best-documented cases is the early fifteenth-century Benedictine Thomas Arnold, of St. Augustine’s Canterbury, whose collection of French romances passed into the abbey library, but there are many others.132 One of their brothers also owned a copy of the chanson de geste Aspremont.133 Most tellingly of all, the Benedictines of Peterborough owned a book “de bello Vallis Runcie cum aliis in gallice” (of the Battle of Roncevaux and other matters, in French).134 The Augustinian canons were not the only English religious with some version of the Roland in their library.
But we can come a little closer still to the world of Digby 23 in the work of Thomas Wykes, the thirteenth-century chronicler of Oseney Abbey and a staunch royalist. Wykes thrills to the deeds of Prince Edward at the Battle of Evesham in 1265, which he celebrates both in the chronicle and in bellicose verses:
Concurrunt partes, quatiuntur tela, vigore
Militis Eduuardi madidantur rura cruore.
Occidt ense Comes, procerees mucrone necantur;
Sic vincunt victi, victores exsuperantur.135
The parties meet; weapons are clashed; the fields are moistened with blood by the vigor of the soldier Edward. The earl is slain by the sword; the barons are put to death by the sword’s edge. Thus the vanquished conquer and the conquerors are overcome.
No doubt the canons did occasionally have books dumped upon them or accept them as pledges or out of pure courtesy.136 But if they could write like this, surely they would also have enjoyed a chanson de geste.
Any effort to reconstruct medieval reading practice must be highly tentative, of course, but Digby 23 does suggest a coherent and plausible story of how the Roland might have been delivered. It suggests that the poem was never far from clerical hands, and it seems that by the end of the thirteenth century those were the hands of the Augustinian canons at Oseney. The book may have had something of the status of a saint’s life, serving as an inspirational moral poem to read aloud, or possibly even to chant, to the canons and their guests in the refectory. If, with Paul Zumthor, we hear the poem sung to a lost tune, the tune should be not a minstrel’s battle cry but a canon’s chanting. The Roland could, for example, have been sung after the fashion of a saint’s life, although quite how saints’ lives were sung is itself a tricky question.137 Jacques Chailley found evidence for such singing in the formula “Tu Autem,” which occurs, with its melody, in a French strophe in the St. Martial MS, a major liturgical collection made in Limoges at the very end of the twelfth century, now Paris Bibliothèque Nationale MS lat. 1139. Chailley suggested that the “Tu Autem” might provide the last strophe for a sung saint’s life or for a romance because the formula also occurs at the end of the long Anglo-Norman epic Horn.138 Joseph Duggan provides one example of what this might have sounded like in his performance of the Roland, delivering each line slowly and to the same basic tune, producing a hypnotic effect that to modern ears sounds more liturgical than jongleuresque.139 Chailley also suggests that saints’ lives might have been sung after the manner of troped epistles, in which short passages, often two lines, from a vernacular life were inserted into the chanted Latin epistle. If this were the model, the story might follow a more complex musical structure.140 In either case, liturgical chant provides the basic musical technique for the oral delivery of vernacular narrative. John Stevens takes us back once more into the world of the Augustinian canons when he notes that “the Tu autem formula was used at the end of mealtime readings in religious houses” and that “a very likely occasion for the recitation or chanting of a saint’s life would be when the monks were gathered in the refectory—in silence, be it remembered—for meals.”141
On the other hand, Digby 23 could equally well have been read by a solitary canon in his leisure hours. The canon might have borrowed it from the abbey library, or he might have regarded it as his own. The personal memorandum and the pen tests, the scraps of poetry, and the single sermon all tend to suggest that during its years at Oseney Digby 23 was frequently treated as a private book, both before and after it was officially noted in the abbey’s holdings. When Stengel examined Digby 23(2) in the 1870s, he even thought he saw grease stains in it, which suggests the book was being used familiarly, and its faded and rubbed quality tends to confirm this.142 We might then imagine Henry Langley’s friend retiring to his cell and dividing some of his leisure time between perusing first his copy of the Timaeus, then his copy of the Roland, and occasionally a copy of Juvenal.
As an Augustinian canon, this man would have been expected to negotiate between the life of the cloister and more public duties and would have participated in a community that valued both spirituality and intellectual accomplishment. The canons, while not monks in the strictest sense, followed a monastic rule and were regarded as “clerics with monastic characteristics,” aspiring to the monk’s stability.143 As the great Augustinian educational theorist, Hugh of Saint Victor, noted, “A quiet life is just as important [as humility] for discipline, whether the quiet be interior, so that the mind is not distracted with illicit desires, or exterior, so that leisure and opportunity are provided for credible and useful studies.”144 But the canons, living in cities, were also brought into daily contact with the world, and their rule provided for a civic function, including preaching and general education. According to the twelfth-century abbot Anselm of Havelburg, the Regular Canon “being generally sought out by rude people is chosen and accepted, and like a lantern lighting a dark place, teaching the world by word and example, is loved and honoured”145 In the case of the canons of Oseney, however, the people seeking them out were scarcely rude. Many of them were students. The canons played an important role as landlords of student digs, renting whole blocks of rooms that would eventually become student halls, and the abbey “apparently permitted scholars and students who were not of the house or order to use the facilities of the convent, principally the refectory and the cloisters.”146
The Augustinian order was known for its moderation, emphasizing learning, eschewing mortification, and deliberating rejecting the more austere practice of the Cistercians, which it considered ostentatious.147 Many Augustinian convents served meat three times a week, and the canons wore linen garments, as opposed to the rougher woolen habits of monks. Moderate conversation was sometimes tolerated in refectory. There was considerable flexibility within the order, both from one house to another and within a house. Dickinson, a warm advocate of the twelfth-century order, notes that “the rule of St. Augustine affronted a powerful section of religious opinion in refusing to insist on complete uniformity of treatment within the convent—victus et tegumentum non aequaliter omnibus quia non aequaliter valetis omnes sed potius unicuique sicut cuique opus fuerit” (Food and clothing should not be allotted equally to everybody, since not everyone has the same state of health, but rather to each according to his need).148 This moderation encouraged intellectual pursuits. More time was allotted to study than in other orders and the Augustinian rule stipulated that “manuscripts shall be sought at a fixed hour every day.”149
What the canon made of the Roland is another matter. He could have approached the Roland, as some preachers apparently did, as a tale of militant Christianity and as suitable material to read or even chant in the refectory or to use to flesh out a popular sermon. Of course he might have been a frivolous and worldly man, given to talking about “military matters, dogs, and hawks,” like the scandalous Bishop Gaudry, in which case the volume would have been a private dissipation and perhaps also an imaginative release of suppressed violence. Guibert derides Gaudry because once, coming across a peasant carrying a lance, he snatched it up and “couched it as if to strike an opponent.”150 Gaudry was playing at being a knight. A third possibility is that the canon read the text privately but seriously, bringing to it the glossator’s mentality that he applied to the Timaeus. This reading might have brought him close to some modern interpreters, who have pored over the text and extracted from it moral lessons that would have amazed Leon Gautier
